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

loved and I was not sure how I would have answered since I was not sure I was capable of love. I was sure only of thirst. I was sure that I always reached for the notepad and for the pens that engrave more than write, their cheap ink drying up. Maybe I was sure then, behind the wheel of the blue Olds, that I would eventually write all this to you who would never read it and, in that act, is there possibly some form of love?

Nan said, “I do like to draw sexy pictures too.” Big smile and a purse of lips.

“I know you do, Little Gypsy,” said Mave. She consulted the atlas for which exit to take off I-65 for the Opry, but the signs on the roadside took over the job.

“It won’t be open,” I said. “It’s Sunday morning.”

“I just want to feel Saturday night’s leftovers.” Mave rolled her window down all the way and the wind roared. “Catch a few of Patsy’s refrains.”

The lot was huge and built for buses, and the building imposing. This wasn’t the old downtown Ryman Auditorium I knew from posters. We could see the unlit horrible chandeliers through the full front windows, the unlit sign. Gaudy in the daylight, but I could imagine the excitement that took over at night, how things would be transformed. I stayed in the car, they got out, and Ellis took his opportunity to sniff and piss on a paper cup. Nan and Mave stood side by side, with this new flow between them, and I felt my separateness in relief.

“We better move on,” I said from the car. I was crisp.

“It looks like a casino,” said Nan.

“But you can hear some clips, can’t you? Sing it, Patsy. Hank Senior, Ernest Tubb. There’s the Texan drawl.”

Nan nodded. “Sure can, Crazy.”

WE TRIED TO FIND NASHVILLE’S BROADWAY where the honkytonks were, and the places to buy boots, though we knew they’d be closed too. The streets almost vacant, the shutters locked down over windows from which, on other days, crooning would pour out to the street. I wished for more for Mave, real music, some life in the city. Someone walked his dog and Ellis put paws to the car window and whined. I took rights and lefts following the will of the one-ways.

“Better look for interstate signs,” I finally said. “Time to get moving.”

Mave’s window was still down, and I heard singing then. It was a hymn, gospel. The next right I took put us in front of a Holiday Inn with a lot so I parked and said, “Turn to the Nashville insert in the atlas.” But Mave’s nose went out the window. The singing swelled, coming from the hotel. Or from just outside it. The hymn I’d heard faintly now grew louder and soon bowled into the car, many voices like one big voice with spokes or avenues—Let the redeemed, let the redeemed, let the redeemed of the Lord say so. The three of us gazed at the hotel pool with its low white fence perimeter, at the crowd singing and becoming one body of sound. Maybe thirty people, many dark-skinned people, several white faces, many were children, some of the women wore white dresses, gloves, some wore jeans. A small boy stood separate in a white undershirt and white flood pants, his thin dark brown legs and arms jittery, as if he had to pee. A tall man in a white button-up shirt stood in the pool, the shallow end, and the pool water deepened the gray of his trousers. He raised a large inviting hand to the boy in the white tee at the edge of the pool, and the boy settled and looked up and took the man’s hand.

The voices softened though still sang. The poolside hotel bar was closed and a row of young boys and one girl climbed up on the bar, jockeying to see. Two other kids stood beside the boy holding the man’s hand, and a woman in a formal blue dress printed with white lilies gave a towel to each kid, and each held the towel like a ring bearer his pillow, with both arms out, as if the Holiday Inn towels were sacred.

The man spoke but I couldn’t hear him. I turned off the idling engine; still he was too gentle to hear. He spoke to the boy whose hand he held, and the kid nodded, then opened his mouth to speak when the lily-dress woman, I assumed his mother, touched his shoulder as if to say, Don’t just nod now, speak it out loud. The kaleidoscope of faces was still but in motion at the same time, eyes on the boy. I noticed his chest was so tiny, his hand like a brown moth in the man’s huge darker hand, and the boy put his other hand on the railing and started down the underwater steps that were there to ease in his body. His eyes widened and teeth clenched, so cold, but he moved steadily down into the pool toward the man, close enough for embrace, face to torso.

“Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” whispered Nan from the back seat.

The man palmed the boy’s back and leaned him down into the blue water, as if giving him a swimming lesson, teaching him the back float, except the boy held his nose and disappeared for two seconds, except there was a mist of voices that began to intensify again, blooming out into the chlorinated air. When the boy burst up, the woman in lilies wept. He smiled and wiped his eyes and jumped a little, put his arms out to his sides, ready to play Marco Polo or dive for coins with his friends whom he looked at now, their arms bearing towels. He climbed the steps, almost princely, and the two were shy for this split second after the rite. He was cold—he took one of the cheap little hotel towels that hardly wrap