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

shrubs and trees fighting to live in such a place—the yucca, mesquite, and juniper, cottonwood, willow, and salt cedar. All these were fighting upward through the rock.

The turns were few: just a hair to the south, on the outskirts of the town of Canyon where I knew O’Keeffe, young and heedless, had rented a room with many windows, as much sun as she could stand.

“Do you read the prophets, Nannette?” said Mave.

Nan was at a loss.

“Me neither. Except that place where the prophet says the desert will break into crocuses. All the way out here, the whole point is desertscape, and I think, yeah, I do want the crocuses goddamn Miranda planted for me in the yard without asking my permission.” Her face unto the road showing lines of pain, sweat at her temples, on her whiskery lip. She was soaking wet. “Not just the desperate yellow rose of the prickly pear, either, that bulges like a boil with pus. The black bear eats the prickly pear, and when the bear finds the crocusàvoil——the wet cup for bees, he eats it and tastes a memory of being in a fertile place, of when he was under seawater in darkness. The only place a crocus matters is where it ought not to be.”

Her mouth tender and harsh, her mothering of me a coaxing, a crocus, a strange set of smoke signals speaking from her house to mine through a break in the fence.

“Stop here,” Mave said.

“No,” I said.

“Now you’re the one who doesn’t want to stop.”

“I’m not stopping.” I shook my head wildly.

But I stopped, the sand and gravel crunching under our tires. Old West Stables stenciled in yellow on the sign. A small dusty office and a set of paddocks, one holding a dozen or so horses. I turned off the ignition, we sat like fools in our blue steel vessel. We were a mile or so from Palo Duro, the rocks cropped up in the distance, the carved claystone we’d driven all the way out here to see. “The ancient life is buzzing,” said Mave. “You hear that buzzing? Is it my tinnitus?”

She did not get out of the car. About this time, I was weeping like a rock cracked open for thirsty wayward people.

She looked at me, held out the pills. “Help me, Frankie. I’m ready. I want to ride a palomino horse down into the canyon. I wish to be small atop a large beast that knows how to take care of everything.”

It was Nan that got out, letting Ellis take off to be alarmed by the horses stirred up. She opened Mave’s door. I didn’t move, no way. Nan squatted down, took the bag from Mave’s hand, and emptied the white pills into her palm and clasped them. She asked me gently for the cola cup in my door’s cup holder. I gave it to her and she helped Mave take the pills two at a time, with deep swallows. Then she hefted Mave at the arm, but Mave softly shrugged her off, struggled alone to her feet and walked on, almost bowlegged, to be funny or simply aching through her lower body. Her head glared.

Nan stood there solid and able, not a waify, hungry thing, though she wore the same apricot dress she’d showed up in. I saw her somehow bleached clean by the Texas sun, her acceptance of Mave’s choice, of the limits of the body, much braver than my obstinacy. I knew she would be able to paint the skeletons heaped up by desert drought, stare them down and expose what the skulls made her feel.

What on earth did Mave tell the man inside the stable office, with her bald head and scant air and whitened wet face, that convinced him to let her emerge from the building wearing his cowboy hat with a feather in it, and off he went to saddle something. What kind of man would take one look at her and not call an ambulance?

He was tall. He escorted her to a fence post which she leaned all her weight on, about to fall. Nan and I were both out of the car now.

“What did you say to him?” I reached to touch the hat brim.

“I promised him a night with you, Gypsy,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”

“Fuck off,” whispered Nan, tenderly.

The man brought out a horse saddled, bridled, deep brown with a black mane. It put its nose to Mave’s shoulder. “Steady, boy, whoa, Nellie,” said Mave. “I think his name is Spirit.”

“Leroy,” the man said.

“Okay, Leroy.”

The man didn’t really smile, but he had a knowing kind of hand, handing her the reins and helping her walk alongside Leroy’s baleful, living bulk, each of his heaving breaths taking one of Mave’s away as the excess of drug moved through her stomach lining and out into her coursing blood. Her breaths almost countable now. Can you feel this happening, Ruth? Can you feel my heart breaking? The heart that has doubted love as a thing I’m fit for, but I see, of course I see now, it is the only option. Can you picture the tall dream-like man setting out the stepstool for Mave, then hoisting her, like a windless sack with legs, to sit astride the horse, where she looked like a little girl, her hat, his, cocked until she righted it, wiping her face as though thinking the tubes were still netting her? He took the reins, he walked big Leroy toward a ring enclosed with fence where Ellis had his front paws up on a bottom rung, taut barrel body panting.

“Is it a palomino?” Nan asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. All things blurred.

“They’re lighter colored than that maybe,” she said.

He led Mave on Leroy around the red-dusty circle, a little girl on a show horse, and she was as tall as she could be in her ever-present flannel, like a semaphore flag she’d spoken with, saying: I’m here. Learn to canter, learn to be boss,