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

not fumbling, I supine, and he finished with a cry I did not recognize as his. I could not read his grief, it was written in a tongue different from mine. But I knew I owed it to him to try, as Clarissa had said, to translate and interpret.

“I’m moving band practice back here,” he said.

“Okay.”

“In the basement, so we’re not too loud.”

“Okay.”

He didn’t want to leave me or Lottie to the mercy of evenings. The Good News Boys would set up between the deep freeze and washer and dryer. I could barely remember the former time, when I would have quickened at Stew’s lanky body in the doorway.

Saturday, in the greening night-haze of June, they loaded in, the trucks in their usual tilted line at the road. Soon, the tsst tsst of the high hat. I sat at the kitchen table and put my ear to it, as if to a sea-shell to hear ocean. I could not lift my head. Ear suctioned to table, as if to a tomb wall for all the silence that drowned out the rhythm guitar. Tell me why, Dead Buried Ones in this tomb, I thought, with your arms crossed caging your heart, how have I slipped this far into my life and it is a stranger’s life?

The phone rang. Clay wouldn’t hear it and I would have to pick up. But I let it ring. Silence, then, a few minutes later, it rang again.

I knew before she started in that it was Belinda with her whiny injury voice turned on, the voice that says: Where have you been, why are you not witnessing my turned-upside-down life over here in Jack’s ranch house with my new son, and also you’re worrying me. I’d never told her about the baby that was and then wasn’t. It’s true I’d not seen her for a month, since her shower in the community center. She said last Sunday she and Jack picked up his great-aunt Virginia at Heartland Nursing Home in Monroeville to take her to church at the Crossing—they picked up new people each week, she said brightly. I knew Virginia from my childhood in the pews. Virginia was now their small powdery package to deliver, and Belinda said the aides had her nails painted red and her hair permed.

On the phone line, I heard the newborn’s cry, like a rifle report.

She chattered on, my head full of gauze. She said on the drive back to Heartland, Virginia wept when she saw her old trailer and put her hand up to the car window. I knew that trailer. It sat near an access road and a culvert over Heather Run—it looked like a demolition derby car.

I said, “You should’ve taken Route 9 back instead, it probably killed her to have to see her empty place.”

“That’s the long way,” Belinda said, “and Jack had golf on ESPN. Anyway, come see me. Come see Roger. I think he favors Daddy in the face.”

We hung up. Somewhere in my chest, the specter of Virginia lodged—she still wept her ineffectual tears as she situated herself on her strange narrow nursing home bed, frayed and bony as a hungry rabbit. The gauze tore in me then, somewhere within my brain, I could barely feel it, but I felt it. Virginia who’d had her nails done. Why take her out of there when she would only have to feel the shock of internment again? I laid my head back down on the tabletop tomb wall, I listened again for silence, but a hand pried me up, each of its fingernails Revlon Red. I felt a pulse of strength in places grown foreign, in my mouth, in my groin.

My husband rhymed Christ in the cement-floor basement. Tell me, Virginia—I said in my skull—if I pass my decrepit home on a drive back to my one-day rabbit hole, will I weep out of longing for it?

THE DAY CLARISSA’S DARRELL DIED, the Army came for my cousin Ron, one of Rex and Miranda’s twins. 1990. June. He’d quit the flagger job at the Division of Highways and enlisted, maybe because he was the slender, stuttering, brooding one, in the shadow of his brother Benji’s bright athletic build and aptitude. Ron’s duffle was packed, but when the recruiter pulled up, Ron locked himself in the bathroom. I was with Mave when Miranda called crying—Rex was not there, had left for Weston that morning for a load of fertilizer, having already said his goodbyes. Miranda had tried talking to Ron through the bathroom door. The recruiter was getting impatient.

“Fuckers,” Mave said. We drove my truck over. “Napalmers, goddamn babies with guns,” a string of pacifist froth. We pulled up as the recruiter took a stance on the porch as if he were commandeering the house, Ron’s duffle beside him, and Miranda beside the duffle, curved and slight in sweatpants and a long T-shirt.

Mave said nothing. She gave a mocking salute, tromped across the porch in her heavy boots, and went inside. I got out but stood beside the truck. We all stood waiting. The primrose alert, the paint peeling on the house that had aged like Miranda, the geraniums top- heavy in antique milk-pail planters. I felt time, like a presence, taking things from us.

Out came Mave, Ron’s arm around her shoulder as if wounded in war, feet draggy, all in army green and brown. Always a lean, unsure boy with feathered hair, now in a fresh buzz cut. They walked off the other side of the porch into the grass toward the pasture, toward the Guernseys all bearing stolid witness, soft strewn sentences from Mave’s lips I couldn’t hear. I felt a childish pang of jealousy. They disappeared before anybody spoke. The recruiter vouched for the caliber of his usual recruit, who had what it took. He left.

I didn’t know where Mave was taking my cousin so adamantly, so tenderly, a boy she hardly knew, really, since Rex had always kept her at a safe