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

daily indentations probably never left the skin. Her mannish body filling the oversized cotton tee.

Mave’s aloneness was a bleached bone tended and preserved and shining. My own was a bone beginning to whiten. We didn’t speak of it. And about you, Ruth—we never spoke of you. She hoarded privacy. Had she not raised me up to be the same? You raised yourself up, she’d say, defensive. I grew up strange and thin, independent but tucked into her body, somehow curved to it, adopting her seclusion. Once, I asked her to make me look pretty. She braided my hair at night, while it was wet. In the morning it looked like it had gotten caught in a machine. We cracked up.

On a few occasions, when she was almost blackout drunk, she did talk about you, still cryptically, but I could piece together a scene or a moment. I knew some kind of accident had left your leg unusable, a thing you dragged, such that your travel to the Sinai to study ancient texts was already a memory when you met Mave. But you loved to dance in private. I gathered this from one of her tirades that had her waltzing in her dining room, kicking trash left and right, chip bags and cellophane casings, singing scraps of Billie Holiday off-key. There was a tall empty room in your house on Aldrich Street with only a tapestry tacked to one wall with red elephants and trees on it. Apparently, you kept a record player on the floor and danced only when Mave was not there, but once, she found you dancing, awkwardly with your bum leg, making and unmaking an invisible bowl with your arms, as if dancing in ceremony around a fire, and at the door she startled you so badly you pulled into the tapestry and wrapped yourself up. She laughed; you hid like a child. I loved picturing you like that, hearing the record play, encountering a Mave unwrecked.

On the concrete porch I toed the XYZ encyclopedia at the bottom of the stack, leaned into one of the three cedar posts holding up the porch roof. I twisted my thick black hair into a tail, careful with the cigarette. I’d canned beets that morning, from the Route 9 Market, just to smell them, though it was not their season, my seeds barely in the ground. These were Mexican beets. The smell of beets canning is hot, a bitter-dirt smell you taste—you might not know that smell, as you surely do not know my chemical janitorial odor, my clapboard house, my circumscribed Caudell life so opposite your New England life as I’ve always imagined it, infused with a vast foreign air.

I’ll describe this place for you since you never came here, this place that grew your Mave, like a tuber. Two stoplights, a Shop ’n Save and Dairy Delite and Citgo and a primary school that was once the high school—now kids are bussed to Monroeville for the county’s consolidated high school. A motel and feed store on the end of town near the Route 9 Market where, besides beets, you can get bagged corn nuts and boxes of Skoal in bulk. There’s a bank, a community center, there’s the complex of steel and concrete and loading docks that makes up LaFaber Bronze, where most people still work. The churches are scattered satellites, also the homes, hunkered between small fields of alfalfa or timothy or weeds and outlined in a black mold from the swamp that edges Caudell and destabilizes the soil for building out any farther. Then the woods, the limestone caves—one as tall as a train—the creek Heather Run, its banks lined with small sycamores and laurel. The places I could walk blind.

My hands still glowed faintly beet pink in the porch light, darker at the cuticles. My question about Clay’s proposal was really: How rabid was I for life? And what had love to do with that? And would I become a gray bird of a thing like Lottie in that kitchen with muslin curtains, or would I dance in some private ceremony to a record player and cocoon myself in a tapestry to be unwound and unwound? The front of my body, in denim shirt and work jeans, felt open and closed at once, all my inner folds restless.

“The sex will taste like Dimetapp,” I said.

“God, Frankie. Do it or don’t. It’s inconsequential.” Gruff, her gray head electric, in that shirt and sweater. As if she’d walked out of a psych ward.

Aunt Miranda had said a few hours earlier what no one else would say: that Stew, who ran a body shop at his house and played in Clay’s band and who, she could see, drew me magnetically, already had a wife. And that Dillon—my first love, my only love, from my youth—was not coming back. At that, I’d recoiled my not-young head and looked away from Miranda’s stooped body. I’d left her a pint of beets without another word.

Now, I admitted it to myself, speaking toward the alfalfa grass that bordered Mave’s lot on the other side, a wide field of it. “Dillon’s been gone years.”

Next to the defunct churn, a mud dauber stirred heavily around its pan-flute nest of mud long molded by the female mouths. “Go to sleep, you lazy bastard,” Mave said to it.

Stew and I had always been nothing—simply a flash of heat—and Dillon a blur across ten years, though I could conjure the water’s edge, of course. Always. Lilies and saplings of spruce, the wetlands people fear for their blurred boundary, the shallow waters lapping, and skin everywhere. The tall Train Cave and the small fire we built and our fiercely moving then slowing shadows. And our silence, our deeper chests keeping distance.

“I’m serious,” Mave said, “everything’s blue. Put that in your book.”

“There is no book.”

“PBS aired a special on your Holy Mary, on weeping Mary statues across the world. Our Lady of Lima, Our Lady of Sicily and Syracuse,