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

little while—I didn’t write this before—Nan had asked me, “Did you ever meet Ruth?”

I’d said no. And I’d said, “But I know she is the only one Mave ever loved.”

“What about you? She loves you.”

And I’d said nothing.

In the car, Mave said, “It’s early. We’ll get many skies today, undented by buildings or roofs. We’re in the plains now.” Long breath refill. “Or maybe unpunctured. I’m unsure how much give the sky has.”

“Good. Her drugs are working. I’m fucking hungry,” said Nan, mustering.

“Thank you for your thoughtful contribution, Gypsy.”

I pulled into the Arby’s drive-through with the clear if unarticulated idea that we didn’t want to waste time getting out.

Oklahoma started with oil rigs pumping like huge thirsty birds. There were more trees than I expected. The wind pushed hard at the car, I kept two hands on the wheel.

What I will tell you, Ruth, is that we were in the car about seven hours and they were bad hours. Stopping only for bathroom breaks, and there was no longer any pretense about shouldering Mave into the stall, walking her like the war wounded, as she’d walked my tender cousin Ron that day he stammered out his refusal to report to his post. I remember at one stop, near Oklahoma City, right before we passed the interchange to I-44, Nan and I were walking Mave to the restrooms at the back of a service station packed full of Western décor. Rodeo shirts and outlandish belt buckles and beaded medicine bags, turquoise everything. And Mave stopped us in front of a shelf of cow skulls, not bleached out like O’Keeffe’s but lacquered, the horns wrapped with tacky fake leather. “We’re getting close,” Mave said before we stumbled on to pee.

I counted nine pain pills left, all the other medication of course flushed before we’d started, and then a confession that made me livid when I asked Mave if she was ready to switch out tanks, said maybe that would help.

“I brought empties,” she said.

“Empty oxygen tanks? Are you nuts? Are you really crazy now?” My anger melded with panic. “We’re finding a hospital.”

“No hospital. Drive, Frankie.”

“Why? Why are we doing this? This is suicide.”

“Into the desert.”

“We will not make it.”

“We only need to make it far enough.”

“Where is that?”

What I will tell you is that Nan and I both begged her, finally, to go to a hospital, but Nan relented before I did. “I’m the one driving, I decide,” I said weakly, but somehow I kept heading west, on Interstate 40, as fast as I could, idiotically, blindly, the wind bullying us.

“That’s it, drive,” Mave rasped.

“Insane,” said Nan, but she said nothing more about stopping.

WE CROSSED THE TEXAS LINE, into the panhandle, a rusted blue bullet racing a couple of parallel trains. Mave said O’Keeffe’s spiritual home was always Texas, so maybe it would do. She stuck her hand out the window, as if to test the air. “The wind feels different, Frankie. It’s a dusty desert wind. You got me out of the bog. It will do.”

“Will do for what?” I said.

She said it wasn’t what we’d planned, but maybe it was even better. The red canyons churning, the sun on the rocks. “Little Gypsy, don’t paint the canyon. Paint what the canyon makes you feel.”

“What do you think you’re going to do, jump from a canyon ledge?” I still protested, though not with conviction. “You couldn’t even get up there. You’re too weak to get up there and kill yourself.”

“Would be a lot easier if you hadn’t tossed the gun.” She pulled her paper bag of nine pills from the door slot and held them toward the backseat. “Help me with these, Nan.”

“No you don’t,” I begged.

“Go,” said Mave. “Be like the bighorn sheep. Be like your desert mothers. They’re your mothers, not mine. I was born of a toad. They are your better mothers, I was a lousy mother.”

“Spare me.”

“I’ve always spared you.”

“You did your best.”

“I spoke to you as if to Ruth. I didn’t respect you were small and hurtable, with more years ahead than behind.” Big awful inhale.

“I’m not doing this,” I said.

“I tried to count on your years behind you catching you like an old mattress. But nothing pillowed your fall.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you fell,” she said.

A long quiet. I heard atlas pages, I heard snout nosing limb, I heard the mighty Texas wind, the barer country, you could call it windswept.

Then Mave said, “I remember going to one of your games and you didn’t know I was there. I was with Ruth then, wrapped up in her, home to see the twin boys when they were born. I didn’t stay long. Rex was sworn off me, but Miranda wanted me to see the boys. I drove down and drove right back, but I went to your goddamn game. You fell, you hurt your hip that time. It’s been like that with me and you.”

“I don’t remember that game.”

“I was there but I was never there.”

I shook my head, firm despite tears coming. “You were always there.”

It was not long in Texas—what, two hours maybe?—before we started to see the brown signs outside of Amarillo for Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

“Get off the goddamn interstate,” she said.

“No, it’s the quickest way.”

“To where? We don’t need it. Where I’m going, I can go on horseback. I want to check out a horse.”

“It’s not a library book.”

“Rent it. Rent me a horse. A palomino mare.”

Can you ever forgive me, Ruth, can I ever forgive myself for seeing also a blue square sign with an H and choosing not to exit for the hospital though Mave was there dying in the passenger seat, her pale cells fading, her wrong molecules gelling like fish eggs, the network of tubes now unfettering her face? “Palomino”—she loved the word and repeated it, the name, the word rooted in resemblance to a dove. Would you condemn me for following signs for Palo Duro, Palo Duro meaning hardwood? Because of the