“L-look,” stuttered Ron. “No, no, no,” he whispered with no stammer, for he did not stammer when he whispered, and he knifed his bare knees into the furrow to gather each mouse into his bag, his brother Benji grubbing Kennebecs without a word, always blanching at Ron’s tenderness.
Over in the wet, the seepage and the spring, all that green and softness, the bathtub cattle trough still sputtered with overflow, though thick with algae. It watered the Guernseys that stood still as a painting, watching me. Only their great stomachs moved, so slightly, with breath. One flittered an ear at a fly. I crossed in a diagonal to the edge of the clawfoot trough. I loved its cool variegated greens. I culled the algae from the other weed. I remembered the blade dragged, the earth smell, the balls of mice rolling out of the dirt, some still wriggling in the palm of my boy cousin. Some that Ron missed would be prey for hawks, or covered again to break down to whispers of bones bearing witness to the hurt we don’t intend.
“WHAT’S WITH THE FAKE FLOWERS?” Mave asked.
“They’re dahlias.”
“They’re too yellow, god.” She set them on a TV tray far across her living room.
“What do you think you’ll wear on my big day?” I was glad to see her dressed and cognizant and limber. I watched her move the offensive flowers further out to the hallway. She wore her steel toe boots untied. Her buttocks were square under her jeans and flat as if she’d sat on a slab of wood for too long. I wondered so often, Ruth, whether you had found her beautiful.
“This.” She flayed out the front ends of her unbuttoned denim shirt, white V-neck underneath. Gravel eyes, upper lip fur, face stony and rarified. “So he said okay? Wonder if he’ll ask me for your hand.”
“He spoke to Rex apparently.”
“Wonder what I would have said.”
We settled onto the plastic pads of the kitchen chairs turned living room chairs. At one time she’d contained the spilling-out padding with strips of contact paper with signs printed all over it, for a joke: Home Sweet Home, Backdoor Friends Are Best, Laugh Often. She’d wrapped the chair backs too and the sticky paper was peeling free. The old adhesive snagged my hair when I shifted my elbows down to my knees as if sitting the bench during a game. I studied the huge dahlias from a distance. They did look fake.
She said the only one people look at is the one in white.
“I’ll wear yellow, I think.”
“Renegade.”
One of the papered-over chairs held a stack of your books on Modernist art and a moldy Shop ’n Save circular. I told her Rex and Miranda already had peas up and seed corn in, the first errant hungry crow shot and hung as example.
“You want to watch Ancient Worlds at nine?”
“No, I’ll go.”
“Miranda called and said he announced it at church.”
“Yeah. I got to go.” My eyes itched.
“You don’t want to know what else she said?”
I was thirsty, but we drank nothing.
“She thinks you’ll be happy in time. I’m pretty sure my sister’s never spent a day of her life alone.” Mave scruffed her short hair. “You on the other hand. And me.” She looked in the direction of my house as though she could see, through the wall, the gap in the fence I’d traversed nearly every day of my life. “Some varieties of unrest are too potent for something like marriage to resolve. There’ll be wild onions in the cake. You writing?”
“I have nothing in me to write.”
“Sure you do. Just inhabit your former life, all your lives, including this one here in my shitbox house, on behalf of us all.”
My life, former and present and yet to come—was it not decidedly small? I left, walked into night air warm enough to dampen my T-shirt’s underarms. I crossed back toward my house and surveyed my garden, a couple of weeks behind Rex’s. At the periphery, the moonlight hit the pie pans strung there to say to the deer, Don’t hound us, don’t mess with the seedlings. I liked the way they dangled from the baler’s twine and rustled. Probably were superstitious, but pie pans had been Mother’s method.
I thought how Mave had raised me to be inward and pensive, but how I’d already been born heir to my mother’s haggard hunger for solitude. Seven to eight a.m. daily she listened to gospel radio preaching, soaked in it, glowed in it, grew caustic with it. I could feel it when I touched her, like a static shock. She listened in the kitchen alone for a hallowed hour. I could hear the show from the front room, where I’d sit by the hot water tank and watch her private soaking and understand her life to be sealed off from me.
I never understood how some people moved through time cover to cover, as if through evenly dispersed sections in the Sears Roebuck catalog—jeans, dresses, jackets, appliances—not rushing, not deviating, with portioned-out segments for school, work, love, marriage, children, grandchildren. It always seemed to me that time spiraled, taking you first one way then another so your thirty-five-year-old self might brush past your self as a teen, then as a prepubescent pulling a red wagon.
The foil pans skirmished with the breeze, and I was almost cold. I could easily be sixteen again in winter, and there was Mave coming over to my house without a coat to tell me a truck had hit black ice and killed my mother and father instantly. My teen self stood in the doorway, turned her young body all of a piece, as a bronze statue might be turned. Mave grabbed me so that when I fell I did not fall as hard. There was a constriction in my asthmatic throat like a net I could not disentangle—though I tried to do so with my fingernails, clearing the webbing, but it was my hair and face I was scraping, like a feral cat. She tried to restrain me, but I scraped at her too. Somewhere she found a paper bag for me to breathe into, then she found leather work gloves and put them on me, then I could only bat her and myself with worn leather and I sank to her, into her solid structure and squared bones. The weight of the gloves, which had formed to my dad’s large hands, finally made me go limp. My hands huge, oversized, throbbing, still.
I grew a distrust of time’s gracious linear movement then. Weeks afterward, my body responded with a kind of arrest. I stopped bleeding monthly, stopped speaking, I breathed shallowly. I grew a cyst on my wrist, a hard calcium deposit with all my uncertainty and bitterness concentrated there. I did not eat, or more truly, I ate but did not remember that I had eaten.
And of course what I told no one—not Mave, not Dillon or Clarissa who tried their best to accompany me—was that I knew I had caused it. The slight but fiery filament that ran through me had pulsed with that inherited longing for aloneness, like a prayer waiting to be answered.
That night I wore the gloves to bed. Mave lay on couch cushions on my upstairs bedroom floor, sharing my grief’s epicenter. She’d lost her sister, of course. So you don’t scratch out your eyes, she’d said. The gloves chapped my nose and eyelids when I wiped; they dulled my contact with the wall paneling, though I still reached out as if feeling around for a trapdoor that would open into some other part of time, but I was not able to detect the slight misalignment of the boards that signaled escape.
I could not remember the funeral, but I sharply remembered Rex’s fight with Mave about what to do with me. Both stood sentry on her porch, glaring and hurting. I watched, cold, through her screen door.
“Miranda’s got her hands full, but there’s room,” he said. I thought of Belinda and Tuffie, teens then, the lingering pleurisy, and the way the twins, even as older boys, glommed onto Miranda like bottom feeders.
“Frankie can stay where she is,” Mave said.
“Miranda and Margot—” Rex worked his thought slowly, like a seed from between his teeth. His shirt flecked with hay from feeding cattle, the debris of chores, his speech slow and uneasy, unfinished. There were things always felt toward Mave but not spoken. “They understood each other,” he said.
“The kid can stay in her house. I’ll look after her.” Mave’s hip to the porch post to brace herself. He nudged a broken lamp with his boot, scanned the hoarded litter. “She’s already rai
sed,” Mave said. “She’s sixteen. She should stay in her own house, and I’ll sleep there until she can be on her own. And I’ll pay it off.”
“Not with that woman’s money,” he said sharply. There it was. There you were, Ruth. Invoked. Barred.
“Get off my goddamn porch,” she said.
“You’re unfit, Mave.” He did not look at her but out at the black trees.
“Get off my porch.”
“You’re a drunk. Child welfare will come. She can stay with us till she’s of age, then she can decide. She can’t stay here alone.”
“She’s not alone.” Mave kicked the busted shade of the lamp he’d been toeing around. Then her bristly lip was firm and inches from his face, his years of judgment crosshatching his skin like woven wire. “Let Frankie decide now,” she said and looked at me like a wild animal in a trap.
How could I not stay with her? How could I ever betray her?
So Mave became my legal guardian and watched over me from one house over, and when Rex refused to keep the wild grape and multiflora rose brush-hogged from the break in the fence as my dad had done, Mave paid someone to do it. To clear the artery so her blood could flow to me. The deal was that I’d keep going to Snyder’s Crossing with Rex and Miranda, but I quit soon enough, leaving Mave to fend off Miranda’s pleas.
At first, for about a month, Mave left me only for her school bus run and slept in my parents’ bed. When I could hear the bus she kept parked by her house shift into gear before dawn, I felt held by the pocket of solitude she’d somehow sewn around me. She let me stay home from school at first. In the morning, seven to eight a.m., I rose and slipped into Mother’s skin, during her gospel radio hour. I would not turn on the radio, but I held her Bible with The Living Word on its cover. At eight, I slipped out of it, hanging up her skin as if it were an apron on a hook, and waited for Mave to cook me oats.
You can surmise, Ruth, that she was not affectionate with me. But she was watchful. She was less mother and more loyal stray dog. She sent up signs of assurance in her own way, as if in semaphore. Once, in a warm spell that winter, she pulled up in her long cavernous school bus, emptied of kids, parked, and looked over to me through the fence break and waved. This was our new world. It felt like an old world. I held the Bible shut in my lap on the front porch steps, since it was not yet eight. She went into her house, and I watched her front door flanked with porch rubble. I regretted then not going with Rex, or not asking my friend Liza if her mother would let me stay in their clean attic room. The lattice crisscrossed my porch floor with shadows like prison bars.
After a while, Mave came back outside with a wicker basket of wet laundry hefted onto her hip and walked toward her single green clothesline wire she never used, in the stilted way you walk when you carry real weight. She hung her manshirts by the tails, or by the shoulders, indiscriminate, her jeans by the waist with their pockets pulled out like tongues. The nylon line sagged between its eyehooks screwed to walnut tree and shed wall, with the weight of socks, linen towel, T-shirt. I am here, she was saying, in the best way she could.
Plenty of times she came over and held up my life like a cedar beam. Plenty of times she dragged me into her cluttered living room for PBS. But that day she had hung her laundry for a sign. And I understood.
OUR WEDDING WAS IN AUGUST OF 1989. It fell when the early corn was already in pint Ziplocs in the freezer and the late corn in tassel. I’d started the sauerkraut on its six months of fermentation in the crock in the basement of my house, now semi-barren but still in my name. The musk melons were close, the onions hung, the August prematurely cool. I made my own bouquet, wrapped a hair ribbon around the woody stems of three bluing hydrangeas.
Yellow dress, hair braided back in a way I never wore it, my body in its boyish, lean obstinacy. Since Mave would know where to find me at eleven, I left two hours early and parked my Ford Ranger in the place Rex had ribboned off for everyone, having diverted his herd. I walked past the garden now fully hedged with zinnias, magenta and orange and red, and thick with the smell of ripe tomatoes and their powerful vines, all the spines of the pole beans so loaded. No heartbeat in the electric fence disconnected from the battery. I could not help but miss the gentle Guernseys and I could tell from some distance away that the bathtub trough was spotless now, that someone, probably Aunt Miranda, had bleached it for me, and the thousand shades of green were now a singular metal white.
The milkhouse I loved sat hushed in its uselessness. I lifted the latch and descended two levels of bowed stairs to the cement slabs still cooled by the natural spring. It could still have kept jugs of milk for a day or two. Bare boards dangled from chains hooked to the ceiling beams where someone, prefiguring Miranda, had kept preserves.
Back up the stairs one level was the small workbench Rex hadn’t used in years. To the underside of the upper shelf he had nailed canning jar lids and rings and screwed on jars filled with bolts, nuts, staples, seeds, the teeth of some mechanical thing, all of it now rusted out. The light from the high windows hit the jars. I realized I’d left the hydrangeas on the cab’s bench seat. I fingered my braid. I would maybe stay in the milkhouse and skip the whole thing.
The workbench presented a desk, sandpaper scraps lying coarse side down, and on the smooth side, between the stamps of the brand name, I could have written a little series of letters to you—just a few lines each—but I had no pen. In the corner sat a shapely stone jar. Terracotta, a tiny cistern perhaps, shaped by a people who knew how to work the mud. It was plain, and if I’d had a brush, or nail polish, I’d have tried to paint it with birds and bats and stars and real dahlias. I no longer remembered the few hieroglyphs you’d taught me. Since I could not sit anywhere without dirtying the dress, I stood stiffly waiting.
I touched my hair again and thought briefly of my mother. Her exacting hands braiding my young-girl hair, pulling tight at my temples, her belittling gaze which, I knew, was truly a look of bafflement. After a while, up at ground level: distant sounds of vehicles parking. I pictured the bodies sitting down on folding chairs, each row set off by a single downturned gladiola, Clarissa’s touch.
Clarissa in a blue dress with capped sleeves and her honey bangs curled with a curling iron by her twenty-year-old daughter Tess, and Clarissa’s Darrell begrudging the interruption to the alfalfa’s final cutting, possessive arm stretched atop her chair back. Miranda in sage-green cotton matching Rex’s short-sleeved button-up, both sitting up front breathing a righteous air, or an air of relief at my life locking into a notch they finally understood. The twins there, still boys to me but not really boys, Ron slight with feathery hair and Benji arms crossed and face set square like Rex’s. Beside them, cousin Tuffie, preferring black rayon blouse and face powdered pale, and the oldest one my age, my almost-sister, Belinda, her two toddlers left with a sitter. Belinda bursting from her silk dress’s neckline, her tapered waist, her hair in a blond-brown pile of pinned ringlets that made her everywhere soft. No bridesmaids or groomsmen to flank us, only the reluctant Baptist preacher. Lottie would be a spare bundle of gray dress and crocheted shawl on Clay’s arm. A gathering of bodies with hearts beating in the crabgrass, a man and wife up front almost gauzy, somehow resisting witness.
I could remember what you’d written me, Ruth, about the heartbeat of the world. You’d once gone three weeks to the Sinai Desert and had never been that alone in your life, you wrote, and something made you hear the heartbeat—what was it? Was it the ardent, clarifying work of aloneness? I heard voices up above and the tuning gospel band, Stew’s bass guitar easing into sound, Stew with his chiseled, unreadable face. And underneath that, I heard the low tremor of the generator for the amp.
Mave opened the milkhouse door and called my name.
HOW BREAKABLE AND SOFT THE BODY. The inner ankle, the earlobe, the abdomen that one palms in the early morning before rising. I watched Nan’s bruised arms in the mirror, ever raised in hair management attempts. Twigs anyone could snap.
We start
ed looking for food when we crossed into Kentucky on 64. Ellis had gotten the last of the bologna sandwiches. The Indian Summer air of mid-October stayed thick, and since the Olds had no air conditioning, we ignored Nan’s protests and kept the windows down. So when we pulled into the place with a nondescript Restaurant sign, Nan strewed together an impressive collection of expletives, ordered me to pop the goddamn trunk, and rooted around back there, presumably for her hairbrush. She huffed toward the brick restaurant and left the trunk open.
“Why did you dump your pills?” I asked Mave. Nan addressed her calamity’s reflection in the building’s window, starting at the frightful tips.
“Let’s just leave her here,” said Mave, “let her hitchhike.”
“We could,” I said. Nan held her lipstick tube in her teeth.
“It’s like being naked in a burlap sack.”
“What is?”
“Living inside time.” Mave patted the paper bag in the door. “I didn’t dump the good ones.”
“If anything makes you feel out of it, it’s the codeine.”
“Keeps me lucid.”
“Keeps you numb. You took too many.”
“There’s less chafing.”
“Let me see your eyes.”
“End of discussion. Back to Little Gypsy Moth—since you won’t desert her, you might try talking to her. The silent treatment puts all the pressure on me, and my pipes are bad.” She watched Nan flit into the restaurant.
“What do you think she wants?” I said.
“I doubt she knows.”
“You feel sorry for her?”
“Me? Hell no. The only one I feel sorry for is the ransomed dog. Come on, boy—” She got out, air tank in hand, opened the door to the backseat and hooked his leash and Ellis fumbled forward. “—he’s got no idea where he even is. Look, Dog.” Mave pointed up to the sign she led him towards. “Don’t you love that? Just call the thing the thing—Restaurant.” She floated on the pills and he hobbled to keep up.
Call It Horses Page 5