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

will be the hard part. I need to take a shit so don’t worry if I’m in there awhile. You can leave that out of the book. Up to you though.” She headed for the station glow.

“What book is she talking about?” said Nan. “Are you really writing a book?”

“It’s just our joke. There’s no book.”

Some silence then, and Nan forgot the quarantine and I heard her scratch Ellis’s ears and his groan of gladness. Then she said, “I bet you could write one. You’re smart, you’re always thinking. You’re lucky to have a crazy aunt like her, just to push your mind.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Push me to the brink.”

“We were World Wide Church of God growing up. My mom died when I was fourteen, not sure what from, probably appendicitis. I lived on with my dad and my sister for a while in Virginia. He didn’t let Mom go to the hospital. And he had a fear of snow. He was a wacko—the bad kind. Wouldn’t let us drive or cut our hair, never let me date. Never raised his voice, but mean. He abandoned us once because Mom borrowed money for a car she couldn’t drive but wanted anyway, and borrowing was unbiblical. But he came back. He was into vitamin therapies, natural food, making your own yogurt. I didn’t leave till I was seventeen. My sister took after him. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. Maybe leaving home was my worst thing. Or could have been my best. Weird, right? How you can’t tell sometimes?”

“I don’t think my worst is my best.” I thought about marrying Clay, my gray slate of heart. “You never heard from him? Your dad?”

“No. I sent him a postcard once, around his birthday. But he didn’t celebrate birthdays.”

“Where did you learn to draw and paint like you do?”

“Oh, it’s nothing really. Fooling around.”

“No, I’ve seen it, Nan. Some of the sketches you hide. And remember the painting you did in the cave in the summer, when you first came to Caudell? We always called it the Train Cave.”

She wrinkled her brow, touched her hair. “I never knew you saw that.”

“I never told anyone. I thought it was beautiful. I remember the full colors and the sure strokes of thick paint forming the bodies. You’d left your lantern there.”

“I never knew you saw that,” she repeated, shaking her head in disbelief.

“That cave was the first place Dillon and I made love. In our twenties.” Then quiet again, both of us too exposed now.

After a while, Nan said, “Sometimes it felt like you were the one he still wanted.”

Too much for me, too slippery, that notion. I could not find purchase on it.

“I’m sorry he’s...” The words wouldn’t leave my throat. I gestured to her eye, the skin clearing. “He wasn’t always like that. I wish you’d known him as a boy.” The talkative Nan only looked out at the Shell sign. “Want to see something?”

She said sure. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the Georgia O’Keeffe I still had, after all this time, the page folded in fourths, the ram skull with morning glory torn from your book and handed to me in condolence, the way someone would tear from a loaf of bread and give it out.

Nan looked at it awhile. It was tattered from riding so long in a back pocket. “O’Keeffe,” she said. “So horrifying and beautiful at the same time.”

I told her how O’Keeffe came to love the desert, how she met it first in the panhandle of Texas when she would hop a hay wagon to get to Palo Duro Canyon and paint the light on the red rocks, or paint the feeling the light pulled out of her chest. My voice sounded like Mave’s.

“Where is that canyon?” Nan asked. “We go through the top bit of Texas, I think.” She flipped the road atlas pages.

“Near Amarillo.”

She found it with the index. “Yeah, we go through Amarillo on the way to New Mexico. Forty runs right through it. We should go there, to Palo Duro.”

“Mave probably can’t.”

“Mave would want to.” She leaned up closer to my seat, propping her head on the back of the empty passenger side. Looking at me as if to say, You’re going to have to be honest with yourself about what Mave wants.

“It feels strange, doesn’t it?” I said. “Just driving west.”

“But it feels good.” She smiled. Her lovely young face. Her bared woundedness.

When Mave had talked about heading to the desert, after the first and last round of chemo, she’d said we would make mats and baskets from bear grass, or stick dolls from cholla cactus, and sell them for food. I’d said we’d visit the chapel at Chimayó where there’s a hole of healing dirt. We could reach into the hole where the reputed crucifix had been found in the desert sand. I’d heard there was a whole room of canes abandoned by the healed. She said, “Sure—mix it as a mud salve on my chest like Vicks VapoRub. Voilà.”

I told Nan, there in the Shell parking lot, “It feels like we’re fugitives running from our own lives.”

“She would like Palo Duro,” Nan said.

I’d wanted to bring the dying Mave out to the desert, but then what, Ruth? On the paths studded with claret cup cactus, the prickly pear the bears can eat with their tough tongues and rough mouths, what then?

I did want to take her to the canyon. But we were in Memphis. Or just east of it.

Mave headed back toward us carrying a large obnoxious soda and more pork rinds, mini powdered donuts already snowing up her mouth.

IN LATE AFTERNOON ON SUNDAY, the famous Beale Street was of course dead, signs gaudy and blank. Not much traffic, no one walking around. The building fçpades were sad.

“I’ve been looking forward to Memphis,” was all Mave said.

We found the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry, saw the white wreath on the door of the room where