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

your head like buzzards in a bad picture, but might be eagles in another, herons mallards swans, little wrens or swallows. Usually they are swallows, flying around Uncle Rex’s cattle barn I know how to draw well, with a hayloft and a small loft window.

“Sit up straight, Frankie,” says Mother, “you look like Miranda.” Her voice scrapes. I unstoop myself, I take a drink of the iced tea made with Red Rose tea bags, it’s still warm from the boiled water mixed with cold, it’s too sweet. They drink hot coffee, and my mother says to Mave, “It’s so sad, and the little thing is an orphan.”

The hundred Red Rose tea bags hide tiny ceramic monkeys I love, pink-colored zebras, blue elephant figurines for the windowsill. One comes free with each box, and as a child I assume the tea leaves have grown them, as if from figurine-seed. I often draw the small hard animals, a monkey face looking up at the V-birds, and I draw my mother’s face, which is a face afraid and somehow emptied. I love what I don’t draw: her back, sitting at the edge of a bath she fills for herself. Coil of her hair knotted perfectly upon her head. The discolored white nightgown against which her morning body strains when I come downstairs and ask her questions she doesn’t answer, as if they confuse her. I do draw the blue elephant figurine, her favorite, on the sill.

She talks about a Lithuanian boy from gospel radio and her voice, for him, is tender as lamb’s ear.

“I said sit up straight.” A different voice for me.

“Margot,” says Mave, who winks at me. Mave is slow and clumsy at the bean work, she is here visiting, having come from the someplace else. The someplace else is in her voice and will never leave it now. She wears a big belt buckle with a blue stone in the middle and a shirt somehow soaked in men’s aftershave, her face and whole being strong and thick. She slits the tip of the bean easily enough, but struggles to catch the string and pull it the full length of the bean before it breaks. My mother, though, is expert, exact. I watch her thin, thin wrists at the end of her arms that come out of the capped sleeves of her top, and I want her to look at me.

“It’s the saddest thing” goes her sweet voice above my head, meaning it’s the most beautiful thing and not the saddest. “Cancer of the brain,” she says.

I am eye level with the V-bird newsprint that catches strings the way a beautician’s floor catches ringlets, and the V-birds tremble a little as my mother and Mave ease out their legs, as they maybe get closer to having to pee, which I suddenly need to do now, but I want to hear what my mother is saying about the boy with no family and the orphanage with no doctor. The Lithuanian boy who has cancer, he has made it across the airwaves onto money-raising gospel radio that she tunes into from seven to eight a.m. daily. He has no running water there, or decent bedding. “His village ruined by famine,” she says gently, “and they say the other children bring him their bread and sing him songs.” Her voice is a tendril, a petal, somehow rehearsed. Mave says nothing but watches me.

I’ve got to pee, as well as the other thing now, and my bean bowl lies still so my mother can tell. She says, “Go on, you’re squirming”—in the harrowing voice—but I want to hear the talk about the boy. I can’t hold it anymore. She says, “You come back quick to finish your beans,” in the tone of someone talking about a picture that’s indecent, that should never have been drawn.

I set aside my beans and rise and huff past Mave, who touches my arm and says, “There’s special soap for you,” in a supple voice even though Mave is neither supple nor soft. “It’s lavender from Ruth.” Ruth. The first time I hear the name. As I go inside, I hear Mother’s voice turn angry toward Mave; something has upset her, but I don’t stay to listen.

I find the soap wrapped in crinkled paper and sitting on the sink next to the bits of yellow Dial my mother saves to slivers on the saucer. I unwrap and hold the purple square of it after I finish and flush. I love this sweet-smelling thing that’s come into my world from someone named Ruth or someplace named Ruth—this is before the blue letters. I love it all the more so because of the boy in Lithuania, his small body a secret nursed inside my mother’s voice. He has never smelled something like this—and does his head hurt, and what in fact does he smell in his rough bed? Orphans in short, raggedy pants keep wary of him and give him their supper because of his throbbing head, his worried skull.

I switch off the bathroom light and close my eyes a minute. I am filled by the thing in my hands. I see myself in the bathroom dark and the Lithuanian boy in his bunk in a stone room. And I grow big, huge, with wanting. I want my mother, I want to live beyond her bony instructions, I want her voice to croon that I am beautiful, I want her to understand me like Mave does, I want the place Mave lives in and has come back from and will go back to in her man boots, her world as big and true as the name Ruth. I want the loveliest life. A span of pain, as if my skin were stretching, comes all over me—I balloon out and crowd the boy up against the hard wall till he cries, till he can’t breathe. Then I stop.

I wrap the lavender soap back in its paper and tuck it into my pocket. In