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

sleeve to stir, peered into the dense broth. I heard others pull up, slam car doors, embrace. My cousins Belinda and Tuffie entered the kitchen and set down quart jars and beer and a crate, all of it from Miranda, except the Budweiser. “Is that this year’s?” Hope asked someone on the porch.

“Living in the flesh,” Tuffie said to Belinda in my bare living room, plucking a can from the six-pack she’d slunk in with, “like it’s a bad thing—right, Frankie?” Her cocky voice thinner in the room with no rugs. The sound ricocheted. Though grown, they both still lived at home, Belinda with two toddlers and unmarried at the moment. Belinda was a replica of Aunt Miranda—all soft curves, a slouch in the spine, generous bust she hid but didn’t, voice like a purring hen about to lay. But she wore Miranda’s righteousness more easily as she answered Tuffie with something I couldn’t hear. The bouillon steam coated my face and worked into my hair at the scalp.

Rayletta, as large as Hope, unloaded seven quarts of sausage onto the counter, ’89 marked on the lid, so, yes, this year’s. She was the other woman in the foundry and the only Black woman at LaFaber in our mostly White town. “There’s the new bride,” she said and hugged me sideways so I could still stir, tucked up her yellow headscarf that had come loose, gold sheer against her dark skin. “I sneaked you a hambone,” she said and set the throwaway pillowcase with its bulge on top of the fridge.

Rayletta had been the first to respond to my sign on the break room wall: LaFaber Women’s Cooperative, bring your wares. It was an idea from Mave’s book—your book—on social movements in South America, and she’d flagged the chapter and, in a rare lucid and sober moment, had come to my porch all parental to say I was too solitary. I was twenty-six then; this was right after Dillon had left abruptly for pilot training. My body was young but turning to slate, and Mave, of all people, said I needed some fellowship. Perhaps she could see I was becoming her. Ray hadn’t known me, she’d looked me up with my industrial mop bucket in the elevator and said she’d be there. Told me she was from Cincinnati and had stepped down off the bus here by mistake but stayed and married a shy hog farmer.

The foreman’s wife Delores brought a basket of biscuits covered by a tea towel, set them beside Miranda’s pink apples, two jars of pickled eggs, and frosty Ziploc pints of frozen sweet corn, my own preserves, and the two quilted potholders Lottie had contributed though she’d stayed home. Delores was the secretary in the plant office, wore a pantsuit out of tune with my house and this crowd. She produced a rectangle of butter from her efficient dairy close to Monroeville, a boutique dairy she called it. She asked Hope if her grapes had yielded, said she’d put an ad in the Penny Saver for a bushel of grapes, as her vines hadn’t produced.

“Bud will produce,” Tuffie told Delores, and Delores took a can and laughed. Tuffie’s black eyeliner dramatic, black hair like mine but thinner, with a single lock bleached and dyed psychedelic blue. She was in her late twenties and still at the Citgo, had never worked at the plant, but she and Belinda always came anyway when the co-op met every few months. Ray’s golden headscarf like a moon rising beside them, Ray took a sip.

No Liza yet. No Mave.

Out the screen door, one more single headlight, and that would be Clarissa, her driver-side light out. Hope took over at the stove, I pushed open the door that faithfully scuffed the porch boards. I walked through the scrim where the kitchen air met the cool of September. My old friend, my long friend who loved me, though I was a woman of flint. I could dimly see her hair falling in pretty pieces about her face, pestering her eyes. I waved. She hoisted a cardboard box from the backseat of her and Darrell’s sorry car and bumped the door shut with her hip. The white ankle socks with loafers caught the porch light and made her look younger than we both were. Her curvy body always tentative, wary, her voice weighted by deference but face full and open.

“You made something new?” I asked.

“It’s nothing.” She hid a smile. I told her I put two butternuts back for her so she could trade for something else.

Inside, most of the goods heaped up on the living room floor on an outspread sheet: black-eyed Susans dug up to replant and rubber-banded in wet paper towels—I hadn’t seen those come in—my scrubbed squashes, the dwindling beer, the quarts of ground sausage like brain matter, a carton of Belinda’s Virginia Slims. Belinda was explaining the contribution.

“You are not.”

“Again? Damn, you’re a baby-making machine.”

“Aren’t the first ones fifteen months apart too? They have ways to prevent it, you know.”

Belinda reddened, said Jack was straightening up. They were getting married for sure. Her third child, and he would be her third husband. Still, Belinda, under her blond bangs curled with an iron and aerosol sprayed, beamed innocence at us. Ray gave her a sausage jar and opened the carton to pull out a pack.

They made way for Clarissa. She set down her box and took a padded stool, humbling her hands in her lap. Delores reached into the box and picked up one of the necklaces of waxed thread strung with a small slab of painted gourd, a tiny scene. Everyone ringed around. At LaFaber, Clarissa designed the bronze memorial plates: for headstones, for pews refinished In Loving Memory of. The necklace went from hand to hand and reached me. A tuft of lilies sprouting a tiny cabin with porch and chimney, big enough for a bean beetle. She’d used fingernail polish for color, she said, old eyeliner pencil for