Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “Why did you come back,” I whispered, “and not stay in the house on Aldrich Street? Wasn’t it a beautiful house? And so full of her?” I had no pictures of your house, but still I saw the oak bookshelves, the tall windows with green drapes, the hung hieroglyphs on parchment and reed. It was as if Mave’s face were a scrim lit from behind by your beautiful life.

  Mave didn’t answer. After a while, toward the flaky ash in the grate, she said, “You keep writing. Write a book. She believed you could.”

  I remember in one letter, Ruth, you told me to cut flowers daily. You said, They don’t have to be yours. Ownership is illusion. Make a vase by hand, change them out when they wilt the least bit, the prolific peonies, the daisies, but they don’t even have to be blooming. They can be stems. They can be twigs. They don’t even have to be real. They can be scribbled down.

  When Mave came home widowed, it was late winter, too early for anything to bloom, but buds were out. On her dining room table, I cleared the already-collecting debris of bread crusts and loose mail and candy wrappers and set out a jar of green wood branches I’d twisted off a tree. They stuck out, helpless, in all directions. Some days after that I brought a clutch of fragrant waking-up alfalfa grass. Later on, a wild lily or a primrose I’d steal from Miranda. Later on, dandelions half gone to seed.

  Dear Ruth.

  I HAD A DREAM, THE NIGHT AFTER MY FIRST SEX WITH DlLLON ON THE WET FLOOR OF THE TRAIN CAVE. Since I was twenty-five with his twenty-three-year-old body now folded into mine but already wresting itself free, I felt uncontainable by my childhood room. I lay on the kitchen floor alone, still dressed in filthy jeans smelling of sulfur and duckweed. From my vantage point, lying on my back, the hanging tea towel billowed from another world. I felt my shoulder blades resist the linoleum and I studied my hands in the dark, lit by my animal light and etched by the Clorox and Murphy Oil that always leached through my surgical gloves at LaFaber. Then I slept.

  I dreamed Miranda took me to a revival meeting at Snyder’s Crossing. The evangelist like a tree trunk, his Bible held intact with black electrical tape. He opened to the story of the demon-possessed man who lived naked in the tombs and caves. I was younger in the dream, in a sheer blouse, with no bra, with two rose-eyes seeking Dillon among the congregants, but he wasn’t there. Only a blur of faithful faces. The preacher took up most of the space, as if hogging a camera frame, and read me the story. Jesus sailed to the country of the Gadarenes, across from Galilee, and the naked crazy man housed nightly in cold stone ran to him and said with the voice of the spirits, What do we have to do with you, do not torment us. The revival preacher grew loud—It was Legion speaking, he said, it was a host of demons that seized up the man, made him cut his arms and break his chains and stay outside in sun and rain. Legion begged Jesus, Don’t send us into darkness, send us instead into that herd of swine. So Jesus cast them into the two thousand swine nearby and they whinnied, terrified, and flung themselves one by one off the cliff into the sea and drowned.

  The preacher steamed and swaggered. He said the possessed man came into his right mind, his eyes became a new blue, and Jesus boarded the boat and left. What did it feel like for the man now free? the preacher asked me directly. My girl self said I didn’t know, then the evangelist shape-shifted into the man shed of demons. He had scarred arms, years of ratty hair full of dead things, blinking his eyes at all the colors now too bright. He was a lonely loon watching Jesus become a dot on the far water, and he said to me, I do not want a real bed. I do not want what I am supposed to want.

  And the swine? Squealing, barreling their thick wire-hide bodies off the cliff—what did it feel like when the demons slipped into their fatty tissue and bones? Like a tongue, slithery, sensual? Like a tongue. The radiant lonely man loomed in hazy dream-light, in his neat house with a roof and ordered days. The swine with haggard flat faces were gone in a wild morbid parade.

  I strayed into the man’s former caves that were tall enough for a train, the tombs fogged in moonlight. I chose the tombs, in the dream. I chose the terrified swine. I woke up soaked on the kitchen floor, groping in the dark for the tea towel.

  EVEN AFTER CLAY AND I HAD BEEN MARRIED A MONTH, the house still felt like Lottie’s. She cooked, I scrounged up a side as if bringing a dish to a potluck. Clay had positioned the cinderblocks at the four corners of the trailer lot behind the house but had gotten no further.

  I woke early at the start of the second month and sat on the back steps in two flannel shirts, smoking furtively in the September chill—I rarely smoked around Clay. It’s not that he forbade it in or near the house, but it filmed my skin with a grime noticeable to me next to his clarified flesh. He seemed to me wholly rinsed in body and mind.

  “Frankie,” he said once, on a walk toward town while I smoked, “do you like the house? Would you like a porcelain sink to replace Mom’s stainless steel?” And though I reeked always of astringent cleaners, it was his phrases, not mine, that were ruddy and scrubbed kind. I did not answer the first; to the second, I said the steel was fine and there was no use wasting a fine sink. We turned around at Matlick Feed and the motel that sat derelict. “We could paint the stairwell,” he said.

  “But it’s fine,” I told him, “really,” tossed my cigarette to the feed store pavement, maybe trying to reduce the differences between us.

  On the back steps, I studied the blocks that propped up nothing. I liked the semi-darkness of morning in which no one shuffled around—Clay had left already at five thirty, in State Road clothes that smelled of fuel and sun, and Lottie still slept in her recliner, which she migrated to in the middle of each night. Her head lay back against the spray of lace doily, and she held her long braid across her front by habit. Sometimes I now wonder whether you slept this way, Ruth—and how long your braid. Ellis formed a heap on the kitchen floor. When I started the truck, the hound appeared in alert silhouette at the window behind the couch, backlit by the lamp I’d left on.

  I drove to my sparse house to harvest the butternut squash. Backed the Ford Ranger up to the garden with buckets loaded in the bed. The foil pans along the perimeter had worked up an artful patina in the weather, rustling in the scant breeze like a string of spirit charms. A dozen butternuts were ready on the vine—two for Mave, two for Clarissa, two for Lottie’s kitchen, and a half dozen for the LaFaber co-op trade. My house stood by, a dark gray witness. The taste of the coffee in the thermos I’d brought was different, the proportions for Lottie’s pot never quite right.

  I drove back and chose the two most shapely squashes. In the kitchen, Ellis ambled over and flopped his ears back and forth in a fury as if to shake loose a bad thought. “Hey, Hound,” I said, “hey, Flop,” sensing the warmth of the house and stripping off the flannels down to my long-underwear layer. I held out a squash to him, and he put a thick paw on it. I scratched his ear and spoke the doggerel that came from the easy soft place, unpinched, and I labored with a dull peeler on the two squashes in the sink. Ellis yawned and watched and smelled—I imagined that, in one sniff, he could smell everything on my body I had tried to wash off, nicotine grime, urine not wiped clean from the hair, my sweat, the sandy soil. I scooped out the seeds for a baking sheet, oiled them, sorted out the viscous strings, and he sniffed all that too, then pressed into my dropped hand chalked with resin.

  I’d trained myself on the whereabouts of spoons and knives. I chopped the squash in coarse pieces and set them to cook down later in a little water, found the brown sugar neatly labeled in Tupperware by the same hand that had written the wilted lettuce recipe card. I salted the seeds that would roast bronze in the oven, then slid to the floor by the hound’s head, which he put in my lap.

  That first month, Clay and I had lain down each night on sheets that somehow still smelled of their plastic packaging. We had skipped the honeymoon, felt too old. His every movement was slight and gentle. Mostly I thought about how I’d fouled out each game as a girl, elbowing, egregiously forceful. Mostly I slept on my back, feeling t
hat I should not sleep in my usual fetal clutch, as if that posture were selfish. He’d reached for me, tentatively, only a handful of times.

  IT SEEMS IMPORTANT NOW, RUTH, to say more about Dillon, to try to understand what became of us. He’d just barely missed Vietnam, too young, but all he had ever really wanted was to fly fighter jets for the US Air Force. He didn’t have the eyes and wouldn’t wear glasses since he thought he could get back to twenty-twenty. All I wanted was to breathe inside his body, like a baby newt, breathing him through my skin. We were restless and rough; he matched me in roughness.

  He was wearied by the years of foundry work at LaFaber, firing the bronze trophies, grave markers, nameplates. I was wearied by nothing, body on edge. I sensed continually the nightshades past prime, their juice seeking us like something homing in, and him pulsing like a varied thrush, with a black ring bib around his gold- orange neck I could bite, a nectarine, both of our bodies flinty and thin and drinking in the other. But at the core, he preserved a loneliness, like something kept out of reach on a shelf. He always wore his uncle’s Army jacket; he always squinted and looked past me, to see things in the distance, to read billboards, make out the model of a far-off car to convince himself of his improving sight. I took him to Rex’s barn crammed with square bales, with nothing to see in the dusky air but me, my body, hair, mouth. I hardly slept during those months; I rarely spoke to Mave or Clarissa. My bond with Dillon was not a generous kind. I could have choked on my greed for him.

  That summer the gypsy moth got bad in the trees around Caudell. You could see the webbing everywhere, around the thousand-egg masses that had wintered over to hatch out when the oaks and sweetgum would go into bud. We could stand in the heart of the summer hardwoods at the perimeter of the swamp and hear the sound of worms chewing and frass dropping like a light rain, the moth slowly stripping the trees from the crown. Dillon got part-time work, after foundry hours, setting pheromone traps and loading the canisters of Bt onto the planes. Near the end of the summer, he took me up on the ridge to watch the plane drop, the spray drifting down like fallout and paralyzing the larvae so they’d stop feeding and starve. We lay on our stomachs, propped on our forearms. Turning from the dissipating cloud, we rolled to our backs. My hair fell into my mouth, he pulled it out and played with it, facing me.

  “Pretty cruel to the moth if you think about it,” he said. Cheeks and forehead tanned dark with a crescent of pale beneath his eyes, humidity curling the black hair at his temple which I touched.

  “I can read your thoughts,” I said, circling my fingertip there.

  “That right? Well, what am I thinking, Frankie?”

  “Things that would make some women blush,” I said.

  He smiled but pulled his head back slightly, looked again to the distant fog of poison in the treetops. “Might be my chance,” he said. “To fly.” He squinted after a rising bird, a turkey vulture. “My buddy told me the Forest Service has a school in Virginia to train pilots for the pesticide planes.”

  I watched the vulture dive and duck out of sight. “You should do it,” I said, though my breathing thinned.

  “I mean, it would be a lot of travel, on assignment and everything. A lot through the South, I think.”

  I watched him seek the buzzard, or maybe the plane and its pilot.

  “But it would just be seasonal,” he said. “I’d always come back.”

  But he didn’t go at all, not at first—it was August, September, and he stayed and brooded. Slowly, Dillon talked less and less, then quit altogether, a kind of fade-out. In time, he seemed unable to speak, his mouth plastered shut. His body itched somewhere deep.

  One night we walked, and a ranging dog padded alongside us, hopeful and mangy, and Dillon kicked it hard in the ribs. I saw, as through gauze, my old revival dream, of the possessed crazy man by the sea, and I thought of the other gospel story about a boy possessed by a mute spirit. The dog slunk off to the woods and Dillon buried his fists in his pockets, squinting ahead, his face in profile, and I saw the gospel’s mute boy, like someone seized up before a sneeze. Unvoiced words transmuted to a black blood I could see gathering in the boy’s ears, his cheek quivering from the clench of jawbone, as though there were some secret he could not loose but badly wanted to.

  In the story, the demon threw the boy onto hot coals, into water, into dirt. A person’s head, discomfited by its own ideas and sealed-in secrets, will knock out its own lights on the concrete floor, will crack its skull—or someone else’s—for release. Dillon scared me because he was so soon stoppered, he cricked his neck, got red-faced. He punched walls.

  Clarissa had long been dating Darrell Tide by that time and they were planning to marry, and Darrell was stoppered the same and I did not warn her. Maybe because I did not want to believe in our dangers. The two men seemed forged in the same furnace of disillusionment, since Darrell had always been expected to take over his father’s farm and had no out.

  In the gospel, Christ cast out the mute spirit and the boy foamed at the mouth, convulsed, and nearly died. Then color returned to his rigid lips, and I pictured the kid opening his mouth and speaking, stunned by the ring of his own voice. But the near-death and the quickening did not come for Dillon.

  He disappeared in late fall. To flight school, I found out later. I put my face and most of my body into Heather Run, supposing I would stay there among the bluegill and pondweed and drown. I surfaced wheezing and of course showed up on Mave’s porch a stricken fish, my wet jeans cement. She cleared a dismantled radio and orphaned shingles and plastic flatware so I could sit on a porch chair. She did not hold me. She went inside and brought out a notebook, said, “Write something down. Anything.” She said, “Cultivate the ground, Frankie,” then receded into her half-gone bottle.

  Who was she to tell me to write to stay alive? To maintain some kind of faith in the inner life that words can stoke and preserve? She who had no working pens in the house, only a blanching television, only a drink and a temple made of your books and bowed plywood.

  THE ROASTED BUTTERNUT SEEDS LAY BRITTLE AND GOLDEN, cooling on the baking sheet on the stovetop. Early afternoon kitchen so warm and humid, and somehow it had become slightly more my own, mine and Ellis’s. Ellis darted to the door like a pup at the crush of gravel as Clay pulled up the drive. He got out whistling a simple tune, then a truck pulled in behind him, beautiful and red with intricate flames detailed up its hood. Stew’s truck. I felt the sweat-damp of my thermal shirt in the cave of my underarms, at the base of my neck. I rarely saw Stew anymore. I went to Mave’s during their Saturday band practices.

  The two men were framed by the storm door window as they walked up. They removed their ball caps with deference. Stew’s hair black as mine, his chiseled handsome face always and ever opaque. I trained my eyes on Clay’s snug work jeans tailored by time and squats and kneeling to pavement on the job so the denim was thinned white at the knees. The sweet humid air softened their faces as they entered, Clay still encountering me in his own kitchen with some surprise, or embarrassment, and uncertainty. Stew nodded and kept his lanky form near the door like a stray unused to interiors. I wanted to smoke with him out front. He wouldn’t have minded, he minded nothing; the world came at him and he took it all easily. He’d taken, without a fuss, a wife named Jennie, the raising of three kids, his dad’s body shop where he banged out dents and sanded rust.

  I knew Jennie disliked me because I’d lingered at the body shop when I’d taken in my truck with rust on the fenders a few years before. Stew seemed to take long with the job. I would watch him work before going in to LaFaber to clean in the afternoon. We smoked, I liked his permanently greased hands, his angular face and his calm, his leanness. He rarely spoke but when he did it was about the Fords and Chevys and Pontiacs strewn in the yard outside, the parts ordered, the way one of the Ellafritzes had dented up the hood. And he always looked out and up, squinting, so he reminded me of Dillon in that way, but not wound so tight. It was as if he squinted at his
feeling out there in the distance, silently watching it approach, knowing it would beget another and another and he wanted to know the genealogy of the feelings before he let himself feel them. He took in my company in this unique ease. He, at times, studied my body when he thought I wasn’t looking; he’d touch my shoulder, my arm, as I handed him a glass of water. But nothing ever happened. He had seen the feeling coming and chose to head it off. One day I got there and the fenders were done, painted with new black. As if to say, that was it.

  “There’s supposed to be an early frost,” Clay said, “so we should take advantage. I was thinking we could go for that load of wood.” Voice hopeful and high and gentle.

  “Those downed trees on Rex’s?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I was thinking that. Rex is okay with it.”

  My own house had baseboard heat, but his and Lottie’s had a wood-and-coal boiler and the woodstove in the kitchen. I said I’d be glad to, and I meant it. There was the smell of the seeds and the heated-up and browned promise of work for my hands, one of which, right then, brushed some debris from the shoulder of Clay’s work jacket. In my periphery, Stew shifted his weight.