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

Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot by a sniper from a window across the street. A new Civil Rights Museum had just broken ground and the sign said it would open next year, so we sat mournful in the car, gazing up at the closed pale green door. Then we looked for Sun Studio but couldn’t find it. Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Rosco Gordon, all the people Sam Phillips pioneered. Records she’d pulled out at home even though she had no record player and had, I guess, decided not to take the one from Aldrich Street on which she’d played Sarah Vaughan and danced with you as you were disappearing.

“We can stay till something opens,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter, it’s a tourist attraction now anyway. Shadow of its heyday.” Mave took a long suck of cola. “Let’s go. I’m done with Tennessee. What I want is the wide plains and the New Mexico sky.”

Maybe it was never Memphis but the Mississippi River that we’d wanted to mark. Before we crossed the Mississippi, I pulled over and we got out to look at it. None of us had ever crossed it, had ever gone this far west. It would be new territory hereafter. We carelessly left Ellis off leash, but he sat somber, gnawing a secret piece of trash. I poured some water into his Country Crock water bowl.

“God, it looks like the ocean,” Nan whispered.

“Not really,” said Mave. She watched a barge a long way out, scanned the vast river up and down. “But jump in, you’ll end up in the bayou.”

“Bye-you. I like that word.” Nan kept at a reverent whisper.

So now? Now we would head to points further west, into Arkansas, into Oklahoma. We could have turned back. This could have been far enough.

Mave sat down cross-legged on the grass, as if to say, Yeah, far enough. Unwound her tubing and looked at the great river barefaced. A few trucks passed on the freeway and blew our hair around. I sat too, couldn’t help but breathe deeply when I heard her shallow breaths. It was a reflex I felt guilty for. I hugged my knees and tried to constrict my airways. I knew the asthmatic constriction well, but I tried to feel her brand of it. I tightened my chest. She would think this stupid. She had said razors scraped within her chest, she had said it was like tar spreading, she had said lungs could turn hateful.

I let out a gasp and inhaled after several long seconds.

“Jump in, you can feel everybody’s pain,” said Mave. “People throw it in there with their old boots and rubbers.” As if she knew I was outside her pain trying to get in. And as if she knew pain was the old story and everybody would get their chapter, some long, some short. Nan was over there thinking of her crackpot father, her dead babies, her mother with the split side, her Dillon gone bad, her faceless paintings seeking a face. The wide river bore its mud along and I conjured my own mother’s dying, my father’s, my and Clay’s child all tissue and cells, my version of Dillon on the night he left—a version I knew was long gone, replaced by a man I did not long for.

Once, Mave had said she understood what it felt like, when Dillon left. She had lost you, Ruth—she drew on the loss of you. Stood in the doorway aloof but near, trying her best, shifting her gaze around.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It feels like when Rex is having a lambing.”

“Feels like that on the inside,” I said.

“Positioned backwards with the legs all tucked.” She stayed in the doorway, obligated. “That’s how they come out breech. Hurts like hell.”

THE URGENT IDEA OF STEEL WOOL got me out of bed at four a.m. Tank top, underwear, the house a dark meat locker. This was a few mornings after Nan had crashed the September co-op and had pulled me back underground. I took steel wool to all Lottie’s copper-bottom pots and pans. It was cool but I didn’t fully dress. Clay still slept. He slept in on Saturdays. A lingering scent of skunk infused the dew. Out the kitchen window, I knew the poplar leaves were starting to yellow, and I imagined shivering birds in need of stouter plumage for the coming months. I scrubbed my hands into a heat.

It must have been around seven when my cousin Tuffie knocked on the kitchen’s screen door frame and stared at me.

“You forget to get dressed? It’s chilly, you know. It’s like autumn.”

“Are you strung out, Tuff?”

“A little. I’m on an errand for Mom. She sent me with a half bushel of Romney peaches and some wine saps for you to can.”

“You look like death with that eyeliner.”

“You look like hell too. Mom’s got her hands full with Belinda.”

“What’s wrong with Belinda?”

“She says Dillon’s new wife was flirting with Jack at the Shop ’n Save yesterday.”

“Nan? Does Dillon know?”

“How should I know? But I’m guessing it’s not the first time. Come help me carry.”

I entered Lottie’s old room, where the clothes hamper overflowed. The metal rail on the bed useless and bright. I pulled dirty jeans from the hamper and a so-so long john shirt. I walked with Tuffie to her landfill car. I carried the crate of peaches and Tuffie hefted the apples on her bony hip. She was eight years younger than I, still no chest at twenty-eight, a filthy mouth, black lipstick, black clothes, stringy hair dyed black, always on some kind of drug now. I itched everywhere, did not scratch. Something in my head muted sound. Her gossip had planted in me the sudden desire to stop hiding and just go see Dillon.

But when Tuffie left, I lingered in the familiar grooves of work. I scalded the peels off the peaches, and the kitchen walls began to sweat. I halved them and lay the halves down into Ball jars, cupping them tightly to