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

“Of course,” I said. Lottie’s body had started to fail.

I did as he’d asked, and I attended each practice.

Stew always arrived to practice last and plugged in his bass with no preamble. I watched him like a cat from the kitchen for the first few measures, then looked in on Lottie asleep and retreated to the back steps to wait for him to smoke with me. Sometimes he did. Sometimes I set a kitchen chair beside Clay strumming and singing—he sang well—and I held a plate of sweet breads.

I remembered once showing up at the fish fry, about fifteen years old, in Belinda’s indigo taffeta pageant dress. I arrived before my mother and dad, and the Easter snow lingered like icing in eddies of shade. I had no sweater, only a sheer organdy overlay down to the capped sleeves that were pure flutter. Belinda had won Miss Fireworks in the July Fourth pageant, and she of course had boobs, so I balled up socks to pad my training bra. There stood everyone, wearing jeans and flannels, as I knew they would. They ate the battered fish and set their punch and paper plates on the big white oak tree stump, and here I came in my cousin’s borrowed eveningwear.

Dillon was there, part of a half circle of boys much older. He watched me with some amusement and allowed me, as always, my privacy. There were no amps then, only an acoustic. The guitar started and Aunt Miranda’s waify voice began the Good Friday hymn—Were you there when they crucified my Lord? I knew the refrain and waited for it—Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. I shook. The hymn so old and heavy, and how gloriously sad, the Lord’s body coming down into the good, dark Friday night.

I knew the older boys, finished eating, would take off for the Matlick Feed parking lot in their fathers’ trucks, and the girls would clump up at the Dairy Delite for shakes and would watch the boys from across the street, one or two bold enough to cross over and slip into a truck cab and let things be unbuttoned. I cried listening to Miranda, her voice stronger than her stooped body. I felt my own body skinned, so keen to the cold air. The earth itself seemed like God’s huge body, crocuses coming up all over God’s chest and face and into the thick hair of rye pasture, creating new wounds each time. My yearning was real but scattershot. The smell of Belinda’s lilac body spritz I’d stolen mixed with the Wesson-oiled air, and my stomach churned. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Miranda finished, all somber and bent.

“Frankie, you want your trout on paper or fine china?” asked one of the boys, and people laughed.

I boiled, gangly in the big dress. My nausea swelled. I looked at the big fryers and the closed cooler holding hostage the fish yet to fry, the channel catfish and crappie—I pictured their living selves and tiny O mouths—the flashes of their faces burbled in me and sent me toward the outhouse behind the chapel, head down, watching the dress’s ruffle darken with wet grass. I rounded the white-painted lattice that hid the outhouse door, uprighted the door latch, stepped into the darkness, and vomited.

Pee and vomit go far down in an outhouse, Ruth. You hear the earth swallow it and can imagine the limestone underworld, the stalactites in the throat that catch the excrement. I wiped the mucus strings with toilet paper, shut the lid, and sat. I no longer smelled the fish, only fake lilac and the fake berry of the air freshener. I hooked the door’s hook into its eye. I could see, in the dusky light coming through the high air vent, the friendly small spiders stirring in the pyramid stack of toilet paper rolls. Someone had stowed, in the corner, a blue cross eraser with He Lives at the center, where the haggard body would have hung.

Dillon knocked on the door and said my name, but I didn’t answer and he left me alone. I was cold and wanted his Army jacket to wear. The dress gapped forward, and through the gauzy deep-blue organdy I could see my small breasts and my hard chest bone, and I thought about how one is supposed to receive the Lord who lives into the heart, right in that space, with the balled knee socks. My desire was crocus blue, a vague intensity, as before, but I became aware inside the outhouse that whatever I was yearning for was something I could not have. I longed to have a Belinda-like body and the normal sweetness of the Dairy Delite girls. But more so, oddly, I had a great want for the clean smell of grass after the Easter snow, which falls so lightly you can mistake it for heavy dew, and this was of course right outside the door, beyond the outhouse lattice, and still I knew I somehow could not have it.

I smoothed the taffeta, my ordinary adolescent cravings swelled and sobered by Good Friday. I had this idea that everyone in the churchyard was opening up into larger selves as they flipped fish and poured punch by the big stump—as natural as breathing, this largeness—but I couldn’t find a way to meet them in it. Why not?

In the middle of everything, my longing reared its head just like a spear of crocus, up through ice and snow, and I mashed it back down. To save it. Or to deny it.

ONE SATURDAY NIGHT, STEW DIDN’T SHOW FOR PRACTICE. The other men tilted their trucks off the road, half in the yard like always, and Billy lugged in his rhythm guitar as though it were heavy, Danny the new high hat for the drum set. But no bass guitar. No Stew.

I’d baked the pumpkin bread Stew liked. I wore a fitted eyelet