Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

the fosters. She was high on whatever, probably forgot what time it was. Doped with Bernard on the floor. So here were the kids”—Mave gestured her hands in a V toward her plate of dry nutty pancakes—“wrapped in wool blankets and sitting there in the bus stop shelter like puppies ripped off the teat. Left to fend. They don’t fight the encroachment of the cold, Frankie. Instead, they fight the fireweed in their hearts, the brutal monkey vines that have claimed their mother and the word they name her with. Understand? I pried them out of the shelter and carried them around on the bus blasting the heat. The inside of a person—the inside of a word.” Mave studied the fridge, scanned my face for comprehension. What did my face show?

“A word is a living thing,” she said. Her whiskery lip so near me, leaning her face across the table, her head like a boulder set down. Then she stood, and I knew she was off to get drunk before noon, then sober by the afternoon bus run.

I said, “I know a word is a living thing.” But she didn’t seem to hear me. Out the front door. Alone, I went to my mother’s bedside table, to her Bible. The Living Word it said on the cover. The Living Translation it said inside. I opened it to the beginning and pictured Mother following along with the gospel radio reading. I felt her voice like a grater, shaving me down in slivers. I thought about the Chapel at Snyder’s Crossing and the pretty oak pews and my cousins still stocking them, Belinda missing me sitting beside her, me wearing a dress that would have been her castoff, too big in the chest. I turned up the heat and read cross-legged on Mother and Dad’s bed all the way up to the story of the maidservant Hagar in Genesis 16, then stopped. Something about Hagar’s story was personal—did you know this story, Ruth? She was a woman used up, made pregnant as a surrogate and then punished for it. I saw her wild hair swirl, I saw the bony donkey she rode out on and her dress straining at her belly. The ancient story hung in my parents’ bedroom like swamp air, despite the winter. The story had layers of green and moss and sedges, so many greens. I thought of your Osiris sketch in the margin of the Pyramid Texts, and I sketched Hagar’s unruly hair in the bottom corner of the page.

Hagar said she saw God and God saw her, at a spring in the desert that she named the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. The wind whipped up her hair; I drew the crazy strands. I could smell the red smoke and feel the rock. I saw her son, poor Ishmael, held by the web of veins inside her globe of belly. Her voice rang in my ear and my voice rang back into it, as if into a rock canyon. I scribbled in the margins the things left out, what God saw in Hagar’s tangled hair and the doves that came to her and brought twigs to make a tea, how one lay down and died for her. She roasted it on a spit. She lived. She said, Here I am below this sky. She said—like you, Ruth—I erupt. I knew her and I thought, Here I am too, erupting. Her words were still being written somehow. I sat on the musty quilt and understood that words were being written inside my own rock canyon and cave and black wilderness, my own teenaged skull. I heard the pen scratching.

The next morning Mave brought over a book about boreal bogs of North America. I’d slept in my clothes, not something she’d scold me for. I accepted the book, put it on the stack, and finished Genesis when she left. After her bus run, she found me belly down on the brick-patterned linoleum with a pen and the Living Word. She sat heavily at the table.

“I like parts of it,” she said. “The poetry. I like a good beheading. And there’s the seven-headed beast.”

“I know you don’t believe in God,” I said.

“No, I don’t. But you do. Margot shamed you with her gospel hour and Sunday school, but it’s more than that, you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well. You should read what you need to. You should be stubborn.” Something stuck in her teeth and she tongued it. “As long as you read Cicero too,” she said. “And finish Virginia Woolf.”

I mixed up the Bisquick and milk in the warm kitchen, poured us both coffee. She started in about boreal bogs.

IN THE EVENING, the gray of the half-empty kitchen steamed as though alive. Voices rose as the co-op assembled. My first co-op meeting as a married woman, that fall of 1989.

“I didn’t quite finish,” Hope said, “so I brought the stock pot.” Hope was one of the two women who worked in LaFaber’s foundry. Her voice like a mist, her body the width of my stove she commandeered. From behind I saw the length of ribbon added to each of her apron strings so they could meet in a knot. She planted her feet wide and explained the vegetable bouillon she’d brewed herself for the co-op trade—carrots, celery, onions, the cabbage in the crawl space, any old vegetable lying around, chop it all, cover with water and cook, then press it through a colander, boil again—garlic powder and cumin, poultry seasoning and so forth. Cook it down, pour it in little Gerber jars and freeze. When you want a little bouillon, she said, you just take a knife and cut out a chunk. I still had some of Hope’s homemade ketchup from the last co-op night.

“I cooked this down for sixteen hours but it wants to go a little longer.” She left to get the empty baby food jars from the car, I rolled up my