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

simply dying. It was more intimate. It was like replacing the thing you love—your very life—with the palpable absence of it. I conjured Stew in the cab with the engine cut.

The nausea persisted, but I finally sliced a piece of pumpkin bread for Lottie, slathered it with apple butter. I took it to her hospital bed that had a rail—like a child’s crib—where she slept with the tip of her braid in her hands, haloed by the wide white doily upon her pillow. I set the plate on the TV tray and watched her milky eyelids. The industrial bed was discordant with her rust-gold room with the cherry dresser and nightstand. When she’d fallen on the stairs and broken her hip, we had made the quiet, damning modifications to the house: bed, shower chair, color-coded arsenal of medications to thin the blood, to ease the blood’s pressure, to thicken the blood in turn. Without discussion, my caregiving days opened out in front of me like a road draped with heavy branches. I quit my janitor job at LaFaber, I packed my coveralls with name patch in a trunk in the attic and watched my future self waver in the light, holographic. I saw my long black hair fade to white and shimmer.

The day I quit, I got drunk quietly on the back steps, the two- by-fours with gaps between to mind, facing the trailer ruins barely visible. Iridescent orange ribbon marked spindly trees to be cut that would not be cut, though the cinderblock corners that Clay had set in our first month of matrimony remained cemented there. Lottie would stay with us, and I’d keep my view of the woods from the kitchen window. I studied the ruins of a thing never built.

My heart was no caregiver’s heart. I remembered a section from the Book of Leviticus, read during my homeschooling years barely supervised by Mave, instructions for how to ready the she-goat. A sacrifice to atone for such things as black thoughts, charred self-pity, narrowness. The exacting sacrifices of the old temple were in place for when your heart didn’t meet the standards of contrition. I remembered scribbling in the margin—words like hands shaping mud, the shifting, sliding muck of extant text. I wrote the tending and the dishing out of sweet pellets and making of straw beds in the barn, all the stroking of the short hair on the head between the dull eyes that ever sought high ground or food or mischief. How the she-goat would butt up against me and leave a bruise. Was she really demanded of the faithful? Or was it the faithless she died for? I drew the marsh reed in flower, remembering from one of your letters that the reed meant an address, meant O, as in O Lord, forgive me.

O—and there was the shabby snow of fur falling, shaved from the neck before sacrifice. O Ruth, didn’t I hear a bleating?

In my eyelet dress now, in the house emptied of The Good News Boys, I left Lottie’s bedside for the bathroom where I leaned upon the sink and cooled. In place of her old porcelain and pearl, softness and peach highlights in the towel sets, there was now steel and plastic, all things firm. But I was glad for the new bar bolted in by the toilet as I braced myself to heave.

I knew when I’d conceived.

A few weeks before, in the waiting room of the Monroeville clinic where we took Lottie for her appointments, Paul Rose had been there, a retired Army colonel, with his son, and they were talking about practicing boxing in the front yard, and two women I didn’t know were talking about paint for their walls. One woman held up pink paint samples.

“You want Hibiscus?”

“No, I want Dreamland,” the other said, “just because of the name.”

The colonel made a comment to Clay about his capable son and Clay stuttered, which he never did. The men felt like a dense web, with the whole room turning Dreamland pink; I could see Clay shrink and I could see his seed in him, translucent and useless and humbled. I thought about how I guided his head for him in lovemaking, and how I pictured Dillon all the while with his dark wet hair and felt more relief than a trembling, and, if that fantasy did not work, I pictured Stew. Sex with Clay was all mechanics and gentleness, but that night I urged him to go at me hard, I coaxed him to it, I moaned something genuine and pictured no man but him, and the coming was bright—his, not mine, but I did not care, I knew he was getting his hurt out, his flaccid living. That’s when it had taken.

Some of the pumpkin bread was nibbled away, but Lottie dozed again with braid in hand like a branch clutched by a dove. How ill-equipped I was at the sickbed. From skeleton out to aura, I felt thinned and vague. What I most feared was the bitter milk I’d deliver, like a Guernsey’s laced with ingested wild onions.

Lottie roused, sat up, and spit out a morsel of bread.

“Lottie,” I said, “I thought you were sleeping. Why didn’t you swallow?” Strings of apple butter spit striped her nightgown.

“Good bread,” Lottie said, lying back down. I wondered whether she could sense my pregnancy as I dabbed her gown with a washcloth and put my hand to her damp forehead. “Good wife,” she said.

She soon slept again. The downstairs was still empty except for Ellis sprawled in his kitchen bed. I put on my work boots to walk. Stew’s place was a couple of miles away, so by the time I’d get there, the men would be gone. I would see him silhouetted by the shed light and leaning his head back under his horses, Jennie inside bulling in the cabinets. I should have changed from the eyelet dress.

It was dark. I felt, on my arms, the wet April air,