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

to thaw for bread. I saw Ellis stretched into a heap near his bowl full of uneaten food. Then I went to her room. The aide shuttered Lottie’s eyes as I entered, and Clay, sitting bedside, held his hand out and up on the bed, a hand useless and unencumbered. Since Lottie had needed twenty-four-hour care, Clay had hired Home Health to help us at the end.

I felt intensely in that room that I did not belong, not without Lottie’s presence. Not without the wifeliness and tenderness that she enabled in me toward him. But I went to Clay and took his aimless hand and he cried. I held his back, strong and soft. Lottie’s long gray braid did not lie across her chest but out to the right, shooting off like a horse tail when a horse runs. I did not remember where I’d been before entering the house, perhaps just outside to get some air. A numbness spread to my body so that I held Clay more tightly.

“Thank you, Anne,” he said as I held him. The aide named Anne continued her ministrations, crisscrossed Lottie’s hands on her chest with a kindness that must be innate to those who routinely handle the dying and the dead.

“Thank you,” I echoed. I longed to be as kind as she was.

Clay wept silently, trembling, making one coarse noise at an intake of breath. He turned his face into my standing body and wept into my belly, pressing in. Anne’s seahorse scrubs were simple and her clean ponytail made me look feral, my hair unwashed and unfastened and my clothes not clean but smelling of cleaning chemical, but he breathed in whatever scent I had on me. “It’s okay,” I said. Anne left the room. Clay reached his hands under my shirt and placed them on either side of my bare stomach, the way you make a tent for your eyes looking into a window, but his face stayed outside the jersey fabric. My T-shirt dampened.

Time unfixed itself. I watched Lottie’s familiar head become a skull. I wanted to rewrite our story from the beginning as something different, something dense with love, and it seemed to me terrifying and also liberating, the idea of making it up from scratch on an unlined tablet. I pulled my hair back from my face then let it fall toward him. My neck lowered, and I held his head.

AT THE FUNERAL, which Clay wanted to be at the Crossing, within its nondescript white-paneled walls and with all its window light washing out the storied pictures of Christ, I fixated on the possibility of kindness in me, like someone witching for water. Aquifer beneath the shale. Clay and the Good News Boys played beautiful old hymns. Dillon did not come and I had not seen him, so I both hoped and dreaded that maybe he had loaded all his emptied canisters of killing spray and taken his rumored wife and gone.

After the service, Ray touched my arm. Could we have a co-op gathering the next week, at the start of September, she asked, would that help? Yes, I said, and touched my high-neck dress, my long-sleeved dress, a dress that did not fit. I had bush beans and a good carrot crop I could trade, I told her. She said she would host but I said no, I wanted to prepare my old cavernous house to have something to do. Ray didn’t protest. She understood that I was now an untethered caregiver.

I stood near Lottie’s casket. Clay was no longer singing hymns, and I didn’t know where he was. I saw she wore blue as Darrell had worn blue, as the irises near the tub where I’d bled out had been blue—and my bronchial chamber, so often restricted, rent itself, like a pressure valve opening and stuttering steam, or like a deep, simple breath. I took a deep breath. I very naturally reached behind me seeking Clay’s hand and found it. My eyes were wet, my mind softened. It was no drilled well to an aquifer, but it was something.

MAVE SAID SHE’D BRING JAMESON and some decoy ducks she’d mail- ordered. But when cars drove up to my house at six, Mave didn’t show and her lights were off and I knew she wasn’t coming. What I didn’t know was that pains in her chest had put her in bed early and convinced her she’d be there long enough to need a stack of books and her TV unplugged and moved, with great effort, to her bedroom. Neither of us knew, in this confluence of deaths and eruptions, what pale-headed cells had long been forming in the secret of her lungs.

Gathered goods were plentiful in early September. Belinda brought her new son to suck under a nursing shield with smiling starfish printed on it. Liza and Clarissa and Hope were there, Delores and Tuffie came late—Tuffie was more often than not high on something those days, looking haggard. Rayletta with buns and pulled pork in a crock pot. Clarissa wore a green scarf, pretty at her neck. The room had a color of life and warmth.

Ray took a beer from Tuffie’s usual offering and brought up Jesus. She said some African women saw Christ as the good mother, with his hands in the sick bed. “God was a mother like them,” she said. “Jesus fluttered like an old granny. And cried out like one, and maybe he’d carried water jugs like one. Would you all believe in a woman God?”

“I think it makes sense,” said Hope, “but you’ll never get it passed.”

“What—like a bill in the Senate?”

“I just mean it’s too dangerous an idea.”

“For who?”

Belinda said, “Too weird.” Rearranged her baby under his stars.

“For men,” said Liza.

“Maybe Mave would take to a woman God,” Ray said to me, and I laughed and said I planned to propose it the next morning. I would take her sobering coffee and revel with her in blasphemy.

The forward-looking thought,