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

on the right and one on the left. The front porch opened into a laundry room with an exposed water heater and furnace and deep freezer which should have been stowed elsewhere. Then the kitchen with deep sinks and the rough-lumber table Mave had built when the Formica table bowed; then steps to the small cellar and a curve to the living room with the fireplace and to my bedroom, once my parents’ bedroom, tucked behind the stairs. The floors scrubbed clean, the smell of the piney oil, a hint of bleach.

I rummaged in the bureau for the deed. Mave had paid off the mortgage for me with your money after Mother and Dad died and put only my name on the paper—Frances Donne. I studied the small print to discern how I could keep it in my name. There, the paneling and drywall to which the deed referred, the light yellow of the kitchen, as though the legal claim brought things into being—the floor lamp, the framed picture of my parents and the smaller framed reproduction of a Klimt painting, a page torn from Mave’s book which had been your book. There, the beets in the kitchen and the graduated cast iron stacked on the counter, one lifted out and rounded with cornbread half gone and foiled over. I would tell Clay I needed to keep the place for the bronze plant co-op meetings. Which was true.

It was noon. I stepped out on the porch for Saturday’s mail, scanned Mave’s house through the fence break, looking for signs of life. Two stories junked up and about to implode, always the lingering scent of grime and mold, tar paper patching the roof.

I had a letter in the box from my old friend, Liza. Between the Shop ’n Save circular and an offer from Discount Tire, her married name and Streetsboro, Ohio. Five pages front and back in barely legible cursive that blew forward like a sandstorm. Sorry I haven’t written since last year, she started—the business had kept her busy, a husband-and-wife team mowing yards and shoveling truckloads of mulch. She gave a full page to the day she ran over a white-faced hornet nest in the ground, sucked up their rage into her mower that spit it out the clippings chute, and she was swollen for two weeks. And once she ran over a sleeping baby blacksnake and cut it in pieces. At least she still had her horses, she wrote, and a Presbyterian church she liked for the way it followed the same order each week. She’d always had horses here, two or three ponies, to pet and ride, nothing to show. She’d always liked order. Sometimes joy is a sacrifice, she wrote. My husband Gary died last week, she wrote—the line buried in the sand on page four, as though she had needed to build up courage to write it. But she still heard herself tell people she’s on a husband-and-wife mowing team—isn’t that strange? Out from between the fourth and fifth pages slipped a photocopied Caudell Journal newspaper clipping with a photo of our old basketball team. LaFaber Bronze Girls League, sponsored by the plant Clarissa and I both eventually went to work for. Liza had found the clipping in a drawer while packing to move back home to stay with her mother. She had copied it for each of us, Clarissa and me.

There I was, stringy and already fighting curvature in my shoulders. There was our Liza. Her eyes bugged, her curls gelled in a neat arrangement, her stance tidy. And there the gentle Clarissa. I would have to call her. Liza was moving back. I pictured Liza stung by hornets, stingers stuck under hems she would have carefully sewn herself, the chaos of it harder on her than the poison’s pain. And now the chaos of grief. I held up the pages, translucent, to the kitchen light. All the words of the letter grit and blown.

I smelled of bacon. Was it selfish to want to take back the morning hours before I’d climbed Clay and Lottie’s porch and entered that house that lay under the hill, nearer town than mine? The hours when I’d still been noncommittal up here, and proud and cold and alone, on the higher hillside that breathed—I did not like to be down under, I would not like that about Clay’s house. The Bible still lay open by the foiled cornbread, which was probably about to turn and I should have put it in the fridge. An aged, burdensome heft, my mother’s Bible with black faux-leather binding and silver letters at the bottom, Margot Augusta Donne. A sheafed-out tumor that wouldn’t go away.

“We too must write Bibles,” said Mave to me once over hotdogs. “So sayeth Emerson.” Scooting away her sister’s Bible, as if it were an animal skull.

And like a skull, it drew me. The Word, the world of my mother—how could it not? It was a kind of original, rough ground.

In those morning hours, I had looked for the I Am in Revelation—the one affixed to Clay’s guitar case—the one who is and who was and who is to come, a girth stretched across eternity. Yet isn’t the I Am a moment, a morsel of time, or maybe a pocket? I’d crossed out a few words and scribbled a few of my own in the thin rustling margin. Blackberry thicket. Once, I had cleared a dome for a doe in the young, soft briers. Here—gnaw on that, bed down in it, I said to the doe. Time itself was the brier room, a brief enclave in eternity that made you itch with confusion, but at least it was shelter.

Under the bacon I could almost smell my musty girl odor and taste the after-game sweat on my upper lip. A portal opened between the Caudell Journal girl—Number 25, a basketball held to her belly—and my thirty-five-year-old self engaged to be married and learning of Liza’s fresh widowhood. The morning