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

“It is?” I said.

We looked at the empty Radio Flyer wagon I had not yet stocked with cargo and I supposed it was true. There was God’s poor body, there were the sores between the God-toes, there God’s sleeping head.

“Now me,” she said and crawled in atop God, folding up her skirts and holding onto the edges, knees up so I saw her pretty blue panties. “Haul me to the Train Cave.” And I took off down the gravel drive.

“Slow it down!” she yelled.

I ran faster, flinging rocks. The wind whipped.

“Slow it down, there’s potholes!” Her voice rattled. I took her off-road, into the rye grass along the fencerow, down the right-of- way that crossed the Heather Run culvert.

I stopped, panting, the old T-shirt of Mave’s hanging mid-thigh, my boy boots a good fit. I bent down and squinted into sweet Belinda’s face, her hair blown back as if aerosol sprayed. She had an inkling, I knew, about everything; she had a vast heart with new living birds in it, vaster than mine would ever be, and eyes that could see even though she’d turn to look the other way, always and ever, my cousin, like a sister, same age as me. Our futures would bear out as they willed, without asking us.

“You smell like a cow barn,” she said.

I pulled her pretty hair. I took off toward the cave before she could hold on, but she held on, wailing.

IN MID-MAY, I WAS FIVE WEEKS PREGNANT, and Miranda and the Snyder’s Crossing women held Belinda’s combined bridal and baby shower in the community center. This was the spring of 1990. Belinda was waddling into her eighth month. They’d hinged the basketball backboards up to the ceiling and set out tiny white cakes sprinkled with edible snow glitter, marshmallow snowmen for favors, mints and salty peanuts. All decorations had been held over from the shower planned for December, when Jack had gotten cold feet. Then he’d come back poking around and the wedding was on again.

Belinda sat in the metal chair up front by the table of presents, boobs and belly straining her dress, giddy like someone who wasn’t on her third marriage and third child. Our pale Tuffie took the seat beside her to feed her gifts. At twenty-eight, Tuffie had a plank for a chest and was snide and protective and stricken.

I sat at Miranda’s table feeling like my soul had grown a goiter. The smells from the LaFaber League concessions booth lingered—popcorn, hotdogs, fritters. On the far side of the court, my adolescent self went for a layup, pounded the ball in a graceless dribble. And did that phantom girl not always summon the ghostly Dillon, watching her every move? And what would Dillon think of Clay’s child growing in me like a tiny bat hung upside down?

“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” said Belinda. An ornament with B & J in puff paint, First Christmas; a black nightgown miscalculating her bust; a pretty wooden rattle.

Jack’s was a family of churchgoers. The women in his family were all there, and Stew’s wife Jennie, my old friend Liza thinning down and closing up, dangerously, and Liza’s careful mother, and Clarissa and her daughter Tess, on break from art school, who was starting to wear her hair piled up on her head in ropes. Mave was reluctantly present and accounted for. Rayletta and Hope were on shift, but Hope had made a clothespin bag of calico, in the shape of a baby’s dress hanging on a clothes hanger, and had sent it with me on behalf of the co-op.

I watched Miranda across the table from me. I resembled her despite her fair coloring and hair. In profile, her shoulders were mine and I stretched mine back. Her nose was mine, her gesture too: left arm crossing the stomach and propping the elbow of the right as her right hand cupped her cheek, held her own face, as if, when it came to tenderness, she had to see to it herself.

My own palm to cheek, I watched Belinda strip plain brown paper from a box and lift out something sizeable. She looked at it for a few quiet seconds then held it out for us to see. A two-foot house-like shape, edged in metal, a mosaic of tiles all over the front. There were four small wooden doors, or shutters, asymmetrical. Tuffie reached over and pulled open a door gingerly to reveal a piece of patterned cloth behind. She pressed the door shut and opened another, different cloth. It brought to mind an old Advent calendar, it abstractly evoked a doll house.

“It’s mixed media,” Tess said. “For the baby’s room.” It was a disturbance of style among the muted pastels of burp cloths and Christmas ornaments. I could tell Belinda was moved and confused, I could sense her secret self, her knowingness, her inkling, lodged inside. Then she turned babyish, in-turned her feet, pressed together her knees.

“Thank you, Tess,” she said. Tuffie took the art piece and peeked into the other two doors privately.

Clarissa glowed, Tess just finishing her second year of art school in Cleveland, Tess whom she had gotten away from the violent moods of Darrell Tide. Tess wore a long scoop-neck sweater and camouflage leggings, her hair in that messy pile, boots that looked like Mave’s steel toes but blacker. She sat close to her mother, like a sister.

I felt my face, thumb at my jaw. Belinda oohed over tulip placemats, but her heart had shot out a sliver of its raw self, had come up for air before sinking back down.

That morning a bird had kamikazed Lottie’s picture window and I’d found it nearly dead in the leaves. I’d ringed it slowly with my whole hand, slid its feathers and wings down, put it in a box with no holes punched in it. The comfort of the dark, or the terror, had