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

of the Sacred Heart in Platina, Brazil. They said when her statue cried tears of honey or drops of oil she could heal people. But if the pope says hoax, it’s hoax. Catholics are mystifying. Like the pope was even there to see it—he doesn’t exactly live local to Brazil. I started dreaming about a blue Mary bawling her eyes out and me trying to catch her tears from across the world, in a kind of urn. Fucking wild. Her skin and hair and everything—blue like a Smurf.”

I laughed a small laugh.

She said, “I dreamed my shitbox car turned into a blue Mercedes.”

I stood to go.

“You watch those bugs rising up out of the alfalfa. They love salt, they’ll feed on your sweat.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.

“I’m serious about that book.”

“I didn’t even finish high school. I’m a goddamn janitor at the bronze plant.”

“And I’ve got a master’s degree in linguistics and drive a school bus. So what? You’re bright. When you were little, you said, Mave, read my book, and you showed me that kitten diary that locked. Remember that? You’d copied out the entire Book of Revelation from Margot’s Bible, and I thought, My god, you’re misled but, you know, you’ll come into your own. She thought it too.”

And there you were, Ruth—she referred to you, not my mother Margot. Oblique reference.

“Do I marry Clay or not?”

“And you pulled your red wagon across town and people said, What are you hauling in there? And you said, God’s body. As if that were obvious cargo, like a stuffed panda.”

“You don’t believe in God.” I stood near her thickness and gray head. I bent down toward her, my hair outspread and inky. She had been my guardian, my teacher when I’d dropped out of school, my cumbersome fellowship. She had filled me full of the table scraps from her graduate studies after washing up back here, bereft.

“It doesn’t matter if you get married. Men and women come. Their bodies list over to the left then topple. You know that.”

“I still have to say yes or no.”

“Write a damn book. Look for more, Frankie.” She waved her hand in a hocus-pocus motion over the yellowed encyclopedia stack as though to transform it into that more.

A tip of a rabbit ear antenna snagged my shirt as I turned to go.

She said, “I read this line from Rukeyser today, in her Collected.‘Do I move toward form? Do I use all my fears?’ That’s a good line. You have to use all of it, everything.”

Some other sound flanked us, maybe the clucking of a whitetail, and then the shuffling of grass. It was night in earnest. I looked back at her profile, her face that had always radiated for me a godlessness and nerve, a sadness, a sickly humor, a mystification. And something close to love but not quite. She went skeletal on the side hidden from light, a little caved in, a face for the night bugs to feed on.

I studied the three ruined TVs she had burned up trying to stay alive. I thought, yes, wash up, throw on jeans, can your beets, and write your book. These are my instructions. Become part of the world and move out into it.

These were our ragged selves in that almost-summer, Ruth. Buzzed and on edge, pressed between a First and a Last.

“You going to be okay tonight?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I PULLED NAN’S OLDSMOBILE INTO THE EXXON LOT, as if steering a sailboat. This was the last turnoff before the on-ramp to 79 southbound. Almost noon and I would go grim after noon, lose the morning’s sharp edges. I thought maybe I’d lose my nerve. The plan had been to leave before dawn so we could watch the sky pink up, but there’d been the vehicle complication, then the Nan complication. Nan who, in my rearview mirror, was now trying to French twist her hair with only a few bobby pins.

“Even I know that can’t work,” said Mave, turned around to watch.

“I can’t go in there looking like this,” said Nan.

“Piss on the seat then. It’s your leather.” Mave opened the car door and collected the portable oxygen tank, like a sack lunch. She’d grown used to it, and I didn’t like that. “You’re in self-serve,” she told me. “I’ll give them a twenty inside.” She hoisted her dense-barrel torso up and out of the car. I saw her take one breath through blades and halt.

“Just hang on, and I’ll help you,” I said.

She slammed the ton-heavy door.

Nan rolled down the back window. “Will you get me some pork rinds?”

“No, I will not.” Mave didn’t turn. “We’re bound for the desert, little hussy. Prepare to eat your wild honey and locusts.”

“What?”

“Don’t touch my pain pills.”

Nan unfettered her hair and sulked. Left alone with her, I needed to do something with my hands, pump the gas, check the oil. I double-checked for a paper bag stowed in the glove box in case my nerves hit and I hyperventilated, but then I remembered this was not my pickup. Breath constricted just slightly in my asthmatic chest and I was out the door.

Seeking the fuel tank, I took in the heft of the car, probably a decade old. Pale blue, a rim of rust, boxy windows, long nose. An Oldsmobile Royale, the once-bright silver Royale stamped near the tank. I lifted the nozzle, selected the grade. I was all narrowness—I was often thus. I willed myself to look upon the waify woman in the backseat as though she were a benign fern. My eyes scanned, scanned, then followed the price ticking upward, steadily, and my chest widened back out. I could picture an entity inside me, elbowing for room. I begged like Saint Augustine—Come, God, insinuate your spaciousness into my narrow channel. Make me all lake and expansive alfalfa field. Make me all desert sky.

Nan abandoned her hair project and slunk off to the service station. I