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

drawn him thin, feminine in the face and tilt of head. Clarissa blushed with secretive awe. We squinted at the cock from the sun hitting the pans.

“Never saw one that beautiful,” I said, and she laughed.

“Life drawing,” she said, her fingertips padding the womanish face on the paper. “Darrell is sick,” she said. “He’s being a baby about it, I can’t stay long.”

“Did he see this?”

“What do you think?”

“Hey.” I caught her hand. Some bruises at the wrist.

“It’s fine.”

“I thought that was over.”

“It is over. He’s sick, been having dizzy spells and it makes him mad at the world. He just made a mistake.” Small hands always in her lap like small birds, they held the naked man gently in their beaks. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“And Clay?”

“This is as far as I can get,” waving my dirty palm in front of my face, as if in front of someone in a trance. “Right here, up close, and here in the garden. I don’t much stray beyond the immediate.” Stale metal-coffee taste. “My hands move on their own. Clay’s been kind, taking care of things. Grieving in his own way, I guess.”

“Try with him, Frankie. You’re lucky he tries.” Her hair pieced into her eye. She brushed it back, another bruise on that wrist, very blue.

I nudged up my body enough to pull the folded painting from my back pocket. I unfolded it. A page torn from your book of Georgia O’Keeffe prints. I showed her the cattle skull.

Clarissa understood. “Mave’s sympathy card?”

It was Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory. Obliterated nose bone but strong, sinuous horns intact. That morning glory floating like a star. I’d stared at it when Mave had brought it at night. A skull once draped with hide and studded with humanlike eyes. Neither Mave nor I had cried.

But the next night she came again to Clay’s, a vagabond at the kitchen door, and found me in my nightgown at the stove. I wore one of Lottie’s diapers then. She gave me another torn-out page. A photograph of O’Keeffe, her sun-browned hands holding a cow skull as if it were a baby.

“Did she even bleach it?” Mave asked. “All the maggots. Look how one finger slips into the jagged nether space of tooth.”

No, not like a newborn, but like a lover’s head. As if she could drink from it, drink all its fluids into the body, if there had been any to drink.

Mave said, “Everything she painted was dream and object at once. That is really the skull. That is really the bone mouth, but it’s also something else. Later on, when she advanced and her abstract work got twisted by the interpreters who were supposed to be so well versed in paint, her message got garbled, she didn’t like what they had to say. So, she stuck to the cow skull. Uninterpreted.” Mave had rarely been in that neat kitchen. It made her look extra ragged and out of place.

I nodded, I bled, I sat at the table in the hard blue chair, but she kept standing, about to go.

“You, with the big life in you,” she said, another attempt. I didn’t know whether she was talking to the skull or the painter or me—or you, it seemed always she really addressed you—whether she was voicing O’Keefe or her own graying, unraveling self. She nodded, I nodded. It was two days after I’d miscarried and Clarissa had stayed with me in the hospital and Mave had lurked in the waiting room. Wouldn’t sit down, Clarissa said.

That page with the photo I handed back to Mave. “You keep it,” I said. “So we both have one.”

I WROTE ON LOOSE LEAF IN THE EVENINGS. I wrote every feeling and flick of ear and bird purchase, blade of grass, blade of anything, and then, empty, kept writing nonsense, words like dry heaving. They might have been letters, to a dead you or to my dead former self or to my dead mother. Probably to you but it was babble, and I threw pages away as I wrote them. Over time, when I was able to sleep less, I spent the afternoons with Lottie. Clay went back to work part time, swapped hours so he could be with her all the mornings I was gone. Noon, I came in earthy, but I cleaned up and clocked in as caregiver as he clocked out and headed to the day’s paving site. I wiped her mouth and sometimes sponge-bathed her, baked something, lotioned her purple feet. My favorite part was unfurling her hair as I’d always wanted to. It was thinned to cobwebs, so fine but still long. I brushed and rebraided it. She was in a place of gray whispering, difficult to hear. I took Murphy Oil Soap to every wood surface so the astringent clarifying fumes kept us both in this world. She held her braid and whispered. Ellis was offended by the fumes but trailed me anyway, always underfoot. When I remembered the baby bird he’d chomped that once, helpless in the grip of instinct, I shoved him away with my foot, not hard, his eyes watery in bafflement. It’s okay, I said to him, but I needed a radius of air to cushion from his big mouth and wet nose and aliveness.

The doctor said it was Lottie’s heart, but it was mostly the mysterious ailment of old age. I entered the kitchen with a cutting of the late leaf lettuce one day in early June, and Clay was flustered, said she didn’t know him for a minute. Her face and eyes had gone blank. That night, he wanted to try again. Please. I said okay because his mother was dying, because he’d been so kind. My breasts were struck dumb but he gently worked them, like dough, and I vaguely realized that he had grown more experienced with me, less mechanical. The oak headboard was a stubborn thing I pressed my hands to, his fingers thick but