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

dress with tiny circles of skin visible. Clay dug into his new song about the suffering of God. It’s true he did not ask much of me. And he was, really, gentle as a leaf. Danny and Billy set up, and in the kitchen I crossed my legs and studied the circles of skin beneath the white material, the embroidery rounding up the circles’ tiny rims. Clay thought his guitar riff was new. I considered taking a slice of the warm bread to Lottie as I ought but I sat waiting for Stew, picturing his squared jaw, the lines etched around his eyes.

Framed in the living room archway, Clay scribbled on his pad with his boy-tongue in his teeth. His butt at the edge of the easy chair, he shuffled his Bible concordance and paraphrased out loud, maybe to Danny affixing the wide cymbal, Hebrews 2:9: “We see Jesus, made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor, that he, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.” Glad for some easy rhymes and leaning into taste and crowned. Out on the town, but he for you crowned. Taste death, waste breath.

I pictured myself led down a path in darkness. I would see nothing, not my feet not my hand, only taste the darkness. Taste being the most intimate thing, more intimate than understanding.

Billy and Danny thickened the living room, started tooling around with rhythm, with tuning, with simple chords. When present, Stew was lean like a piece of leather, like a body wrung to dryness, and his clothes folded smoke into themselves. Clay had never lost his baby face. I surveyed the kitchen, the sauce pans hanging on hooks, the fragrant nutmeg almost a visible specter over the cooling pumpkin bread, the ever-present blue chairs, one of which held me, and I placed my hands there—right there—upon my lower belly and fought some nausea. What would death taste like?

The phone rang. I rose from the blue chair, muting my childish desire to cry or to vomit.

“Frankie, it’s Jennie.” Stew’s wife. She asked for Clay but I said, “Where is he?” more adamantly than I should have.

She was quiet. Then, hoarsely, “Sitting in his truck.”

“What?”

“Give me to Clay.”

“Is it running?”

“Not anymore it isn’t. It’s his third DUI.” She said they towed him from the ditch to the front yard, booted the truck, and took his license and let him sleep it off. “He hasn’t dismounted,” Jennie said, “just sits in there. He’s so stupid, he’s locked himself in, he won’t come eat.”

“How long?”

“Could they come over?” She was pissed and justified—I could see her full body bracing for some kind of retribution, as one braces for bad weather; I could hear the hurt dragged behind her voice, the way Clay dragged his dissatisfaction now, his song’s limitation and haltedness, as he came into the kitchen—I held out the receiver, “It’s Jennie”—and I watched him try to leave his feelings wadded in the corner in Ellis’s empty bed.

We all knew Stew loved nothing more than that red truck. The feel of the cab, the six horses he had painted on the underside of the cab roof running in full slant. Clay and the others left in a righteous line of vehicles. They would try to pull him out, but he’d take his flask from the glove box, anchored. He would sit there into the night, a backslider backlit into silhouette by the shed’s dusk-to-dawn, sitting behind the wheel, looking upward, as if in prayer to the horses kicking up the dust.

I had sat in Stew’s cab once, secretly, during band practice when they’d crowded in the basement. The Good News Boys were rehearsing for the next morning’s concert at Monroeville’s Heartland nursing home, where the old people would tap along out of sync. The tire tread looked good and uncaked; the truck was beautiful as ever, with its flames up the hood. I climbed in and stretched out on my back across the bench seat, pulling the door shut.

It was magnificent. Why paint a cab roof, why paint up there unless you’re going to lie down and look up forever? A stampede, musky, the manes and tails blowing back, almost glowing in the dark. I thought how Stew must drive faster knowing half a dozen horses were in full gallop above him. I lifted up my blouse and put my hands on my belly; it subtly filled my hands but was taut. Looking down, the horses saw my black hair fan out as if in water as a body sinks, my face half whitened by the porch light.

The drums carried, and I listened for the final trailing off of sound, when Clay would climb the stairs and seek out sweet tea and walk into the kitchen, saying my name, but I did not detect the silence when it came. I felt the bob of the pickup bed under something heavy, likely an amp, and I heard Danny’s voice and Billy’s more faintly, then Stew’s, close to the cab window. I didn’t sit up. I pulled my shirt down, the glow-in-the-dark horse manes like wicked little lashings—what would I say? But Clay hollered something that took Stew back inside, something he’d forgotten to pack up, or a final detail of the show for the old ones who would touch their own filmy sweet skin through the plodding choruses, and who would fall back to watch some fleeting self painted on the inside of their skulls, always there, running forward at a slant. When Stew opened the cab door, I was already gone, having spilled out, making sure I missed the other two. I’d sneaked to the back porch where there was no light on to show me to Clay or anyone.

Now, with the men gone, Clay’s new song drifted around the silent house and into my head, and I thought about the taste of death and how it must mean more than