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

I wanted to die. We went back to our houses in Caudell. The humid swamp air filled my room and folded me in, like a raisin in sweet bread. I suffocated all summer. I listened to records, I found Miranda’s compact and put rouge on my cheeks in private, I read about marine life and mariners and Morocco. I saw Evie some but I couldn’t tell her.”

“You couldn’t tell her you loved her.” Nan’s whisper.

“I remember our last day at the beach we looked for shells, but we could find only those dried-out horseshoe crabs with the spiky tails filed thin by stones. I wrapped one in a towel to keep. It stank up my room at home with dead seaweed smell. I would press the spike to my lips till it hurt.”

“Did you know about Evie, Frankie?” Nan touched my shoulder, as if pressing a stamp on a letter.

“I never knew, no. She never told me that before.” What could I do but give myself to it, Ruth? Hear the waves and smell the sea. I had been so small in the shelter of her, and now—now I knew her as small, and wanting. And what did I want right then? I wanted Mave’s steel toes kicked off so she could put her feet in. I wanted to start everything over from the beginning.

“I could have kissed her and died,” said Mave.

“I get that,” said Nan. “Oh yeah.” Nan’s face dreamy and absorbed and sad.

Mave coughed, not harshly, adjusted the nostril fixture of the tubes of air. I heard the air—no, it was the interstate wind. She needed to replenish the air evacuated by talk. “This right here is a closed economy,” she said to the tubing and put her head back. “I’m not going back, Frankie. You know that.”

Mave shut her eyes. I drove. The weight of sorrow was delayed, it hovered then hit. Her gray cropped hair matted at her hot temple. This present, squarish body tall beside me all my life in men’s shirts. Bootstep, bootstep. But it was a young girl’s hand I reached for.

For the first time in our lives, I held Mave’s hand.

THE ROTOTILLER, THE HOE, THE SMOOTH RED BEAN SEED. I bent from the waist for the bush bean hills and sweet corn. I squatted with minor pain to sew the carrots, like ashes, and the zinnias at the perimeter. My body held its miscarriage ache for two weeks, my groin throbbing. I had bled black for a few days, skin pallid. I slept in the afternoons in Clay’s bed—Lottie and me, invalids in the afternoons. But before dawn, I put on the same cutoffs daily, with the folded painting print I never took out of the back pocket, and Clay’s flannel, and drove to my house. Dark and dew burned off to white sky then the deep blue of late spring, the colors strong. There was Mave’s house through the fencerow bushed up with wild rose, as if time had gone backward: she in her house, I in mine, linear time exposed as mere illusion. I lost hours in the garden, I bent, I squatted, until I got tired. Soon, the corn would shoot up, and I’d thin five stalks to three to give room for the stoutest. I’d stake the tomatoes and pull the suckers. The rest of May, all of June. Each dawn.

I lifted the five-gallon bucket to water pepper plants, the plastic handle worn down to its cutting wire. I pulled on leather work gloves and remembered when Mave had gloved me to keep me from scratching out my eyes. I didn’t feel the wire, I felt the inner glove, my fingers feeling around like moles in burrows feeling with their faces. How it might have felt inside an udder dried of milk, each slack but toughened teat.

The blood browned and sometimes overflowed the pads. I went in for onion sets at Matlick Feed and saw the Ellafritz girls who nursed each other’s boys, though the boys were nearly weaned now. Girls who moved like each other’s shadows. Faces always made up, in clothes of teen boys or men, just like me, oversized T-shirts and their belts with a foot of surplus tongue. One of them was going with the towheaded clerk, I guessed. They swung a son up to their hip in a stream of motherspeak—hands off that, like I told you, come ere, come on, slap mama’s leg one more time and I’ll, stop that, come ere. Out in the truck, I saw a spot of blood on my seat. I lifted my flannel to see it blooming down the cutoffs’ inseam.

Clay, for his part, mourned our child by turning mother. He took time off work. Each day, when I came back late morning covered in garden muck and sweat and stink, he had grilled cheese or fried bologna sandwiches waiting for me. He tended Lottie morning and afternoon without complaint. Conversation was beyond us both, but he started reading to me aloud at the table from the Caudell Journal, stories at random, and I would grow sleepy. Before climbing the stairs to nap unshowered, I could hear in my kitchen chair what he was saying between the lines of the county news. He was saying, I wanted it to be a girl who looked like you but who would be easy to know and understand and love.

ONE MORNING CLARISSA BROUGHT ME EXTRA FOIL PIE PANS to string up around the garden at my house. She helped me punch the holes and string the baler’s twine, then we sat in the grass and drank thermos coffee.

“How many days have you worn that flannel?” she said.

“All of them,” I said.

She told me Tess was taking summer courses in Cleveland and her drawing class had a nude model, a man. Clarissa slid out a drawing from a large envelope. Tess had drawn him hairy, frontal, loose sacks hidden in fur. He was thin, or she’d