Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  What I focused on then was the skull. Because, for me, that was why the desert, Ruth. The best paintings are the skulls. The faces of the other two fugitives watched the early evening interstate—median and tree line, respectively. I had this feeling we should have strapped the doe’s horrible body onto the roof and carried it on.

  This trip was for Mave, but I wanted to see Abiquiú too, where Georgia O’Keeffe had once had a roofless room to let light in so she could paint the longhorn skulls, souvenirs of death. And Mave had looked pale as death as we’d watched an O’Keeffe special on PBS, and I’d found a book of prints afterward on her shelves of your hundreds of books and flipped to Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue.The skull more like a tattered shirt than solid bone. My fingertips made their way down to where there would have been jowl-heat, where its nostrils would have heaved wet, now turned ratty bone. Womb-shaped head, I thought, complete with horns, shredded womb. I assumed that was what I looked like inside. That hostile and ungiving.

  On the next page, Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses. Big white plastic flowers on the has-been head. One rose at the wide brow, one stubbing out the frayed snout below. The roses were fake, the ones that had modeled for her still life, like the ones decorating the Snyder’s Crossing Cemetery on Memorial Day or the ones beside porch steps in Caudell, speared into the ground with the Fourth of July pinwheels moving slack year-round. O’Keeffe saw drought take the animals down, skeletons everywhere. Graves on top of the blasted earth and nothing to exhume. Death bald-faced.

  “Let’s go there,” Mave had said, thinking, I knew, about your vaster desert sojourns. This would be as close as she would ever get.

  And I said okay because she and I both needed to go but felt ourselves aimless. I said okay because it seemed to me the desert is where you go when you’ve got nowhere else to go. Skin to leather by the sun, stick to witch for water, mind to clarify, more silence than not. We would have space to figure it all out. But it was not supposed to be the end.

  I studied Mave’s profile in glimpses, then back to the road. Her body—what did it mean? How could it ever not be beside mine?

  She was thinking of you, you like the deepest itch, perhaps telling you the plan, what she would do under the desert night sky outside some motel when Nan and I would go out for Chinese at a Double Dragon.

  SINCE I DID NOT SMOKE IN LOTTIE’S HOUSE, I SMOKED IN MY OWN. The morning of the September LaFaber co-op meeting, I sat at the empty rough-lumber table to smoke and think. I had invited Liza, widowed and now moved in with her mother. The scrubbed half-dozen butternuts waited in a five-gallon bucket on the floor. It’s possible, I think, to be held by a house. The cheap paneling, the brick- patterned linoleum, the hushed repository of the upstairs bedrooms.

  Outside, at Mave’s, a high-pitched idling pealed out. A belt of some sort went bad and snapped, then a potent explosion of car engine followed by her froth of swearing. I looked out the kitchen window to find her ancient brown Pontiac belching smoke in the middle of her driveway. She had spilled a feed sack of black walnuts gathered from her tree into the driveway ruts for the car to run over and crush, to expedite the shelling process. She did this every fall, crushed the black walnuts sheathed in their bruised green hulls and pungent, but she never finished the tedious project. Mave pounded the hood, crumpled the empty feed sack, marched up the driveway to her school bus parked on a tilt and kicked the tires.

  I stepped out to the porch to witness Mave’s fit through our path that needed clearing. She batted smoke from her face and disappeared into the house and came back with a can of primer and a brush. She painted Farm Use across the passenger door and fender. Drunk early. I tried not to laugh, yelling, “Let me call Rex.”

  She ranted on, now about both the shitbox car and Rex.

  If she could crush the walnuts she could shell a jarful to have something to trade with the other co-op women. Last meeting, she’d brought key chains from the service station and a grommeted banner with pilgrims on it to hang at Thanksgiving, and the women had been reluctant to trade a pound of newly dug red potatoes for a trinket. Mave got the hood up, and I lost her head and denim garb to the smoke.

  I didn’t call Rex; I’d forgotten the phone was disconnected. I went down to the cellar, left the light off so there was only the moted sun coming through the thin windows at the house’s foundation, windows through which one could watch the world in secret. I still had three-quarters of a self stowed in this house, and three-quarters of my preserves. The cellar was walled in but not finished—the door without a knob or latch I kept shut with a brick at its base, only one side of shelving installed. The potato bin in the corner had never been enclosed, and its mustiness gritted the cellar air. I listened in the dark for Ellis padding after me with claws ticking on the floor, needing to be trimmed, but he was at the other home, the other life. It felt good to naturally miss his barrel body and his eyes like woman’s eyes.

  I pulled the light bulb’s cord to survey the jars of unbright peaches, beans, Romas. They had taken in the summer sun and settled it down to a muted mature color for winter’s duration. I chose a quart of half-runner beans for the co-op crate, a quart of peaches, some pickles, one pint of beets I could part with, and two pints of kraut, Liza’s favorite. I hoped Liza would come—on the phone she had said she would bring some of her mother’s raw honeycomb, voice hoarse and quiet and black. She had been back for a few months, but I’d hardly seen her, she always made excuses. I propped the full crate onto my hipbone and left the cellar dark, nudged the brick jam back into place with my foot.

  I thought about Liza’s industrious hands; it was she and her mother who had taught me to can with a boil-bath canner. Miranda had helped, too, on scattered brief afternoons when the twin boys peeled from her. Until I could grow my own garden, Rex and Miranda kept me in food. They feared I’d starve with Mave, who survived on oatmeal, Campbell’s soups, sardines, oyster crackers, and Jameson. They watched our two houses—mine and hers—as though watching the onset of catastrophe. I did not tell anyone that I often dreamed I fed Mave my curled-caterpillar body and sometimes it looked like a dream-snake eating its tail and sometimes like hands holding. But Mave took care of me, in her way. She paid the bills, paid off my house with your inherited Northampton money.

  And she guarded my mind. She kept it stoked, banked like a fire. A month after my parents died, she sent me back to school, but I cared for nothing except the new biology teacher, Doreen Betts. Ms. Betts, with her large horse teeth and wild eyes, came into class and unfolded a napkin of vitamins, like precious metals she’d mined—holding them out in two palms like that—all colors and sizes and shapes. No one knew what they were. This was 1970. Vitamins are the future, she said. She’d worked in embryonic research in Oklahoma, she said, and it had led her to capsules and candy-coated pills. She didn’t teach from a book; she stood squat and solid in front of the class, eyes searing and bright, and told us about her experiments, about the hearts of unborn babies ticking like tiny bombs. She was fired within a few weeks, which set Mave livid, and Mr. Dolan took over biology but was more versed in geology so we moved to intact stone with no ticking heart about to blow my world apart.

  “I quit,” I told Mave.

  “Good call,” Mave said. “I’ll teach you my goddamn self.” She ignored Miranda’s fits and the phone ringing off the hook.

  I had only two years left, and maybe it was a shame to quit because they started a girls’ team for the school the next year. Mave put up a basketball hoop for me, over a dirt patch lousy for dribbling. Dillon stayed in for two more years. He came over some evenings and fed me balls for jump shots; he’d let his hair grow to his chin and watched me through a dark shag, a silent body leaning into my own silence. I got the job as janitor at LaFaber, only half time, working from one p.m. until supper. I liked the scrubbing, I liked what happened to my hands at the mercy of the chemicals, I liked that I had the early hours to read whatever Mave dropped off in the morning dark before her sc
hool bus run. Fiction and poetry, biographies, semiotics books and Egyptology books from those chaotic shelves, the library all yours, with R.S. initialed inside the covers, with your annotations written in the hand I knew from the blue-paper letters. How thickly you were with us, though Mave hardly ever spoke your name. Often I read nothing but your annotations, which built small, crude rooms in the margins. In a translation of the Pyramid Texts, next to the line You are born for Osiris, you’d scribbled a list in pencil: sugar, rubbed sage, masking tape, baguette, clothespins. A shopping list, I guessed. Further down: no, no, no, your disagreement with the translation. And then a sketch of a boy with big hair and an elegant nose, perhaps Osiris himself. Beneath the sketch, these lines:

  I kissed him on the forehead once, for falling from a limb.

  I washed him and set him in new towels and talcum, lavender scent, even though he is a grown man.

  Because he is a grown man.

  In a book on meteors, I found inked in the margin: Some bodies are see-through, are honeycomb. And I erupt. I understood almost nothing except that there are layers and inner rooms in books; there are so many thickets.

  None of my learning was straightforward. I knew little about what Mave had studied in graduate school, but it seemed to me her accumulated knowledge was a stack of papers and someone had opened a window—perhaps at your death—and the loose pages scattered in the wind. Every so often, she snatched a page midair and read it aloud to me. That’s what her homeschooling felt like. When I learned the word entropy, I realized that’s what was happening, the books entropic, my mind getting sucked out of windows and into others, everything being blown apart like I’d wanted when listening to Ms. Betts detail her godless experiments. I was grieving and isolated, but I was writing in a notebook and, in the midst of chaos, feeling myself form.

  Mave’s direct tutorials were enigmatic.

  “Sadness or anger,” she said once. “Which is the wiser sister?”

  Or, pulling a pressed brittle leaf from a book: “Look at this leaf. Don’t screw up your face to study, open your pores. Eat it. Tell me what it is. That’s how you read. Understand?”

  Once, she drove up in her emptied bus, I made us pancakes with Bisquick and she found peanut butter for them. It was winter, I was layered in sweaters over long johns.

  “Needs syrup,” Mave said. She squinted at something indecipherable in the paneling and pursed her mouth. “There’s a whole wilderness in a thing called a mother,” she said. “What does that word mean, inside out? There’s a wilderness in it.” She let that sit, took a bite. She told me about the Ellafritzes, though I already knew about them. The Ellafritzes fostered only for the money and sometimes adopted. Mave had checked her route around six that morning, to see if she would need chains to the make the hill. Off Randolph Road, she saw a tiny light in the bus stop—could have been a lighter, that small. Six a.m., single digits out.

  “I came upon two of my bus kids, a girl and her little brother wrapped in blankets, two hours early for the bus, holding a flashlight. They were Sandy Ellafritz’s two natural kids, not the fosters. She was high on whatever, probably forgot what time it was. Doped with Bernard on the floor. So here were the kids”—Mave gestured her hands in a V toward her plate of dry nutty pancakes—“wrapped in wool blankets and sitting there in the bus stop shelter like puppies ripped off the teat. Left to fend. They don’t fight the encroachment of the cold, Frankie. Instead, they fight the fireweed in their hearts, the brutal monkey vines that have claimed their mother and the word they name her with. Understand? I pried them out of the shelter and carried them around on the bus blasting the heat. The inside of a person—the inside of a word.” Mave studied the fridge, scanned my face for comprehension. What did my face show?

  “A word is a living thing,” she said. Her whiskery lip so near me, leaning her face across the table, her head like a boulder set down. Then she stood, and I knew she was off to get drunk before noon, then sober by the afternoon bus run.

  I said, “I know a word is a living thing.” But she didn’t seem to hear me. Out the front door. Alone, I went to my mother’s bedside table, to her Bible. The Living Word it said on the cover. The Living Translation it said inside. I opened it to the beginning and pictured Mother following along with the gospel radio reading. I felt her voice like a grater, shaving me down in slivers. I thought about the Chapel at Snyder’s Crossing and the pretty oak pews and my cousins still stocking them, Belinda missing me sitting beside her, me wearing a dress that would have been her castoff, too big in the chest. I turned up the heat and read cross-legged on Mother and Dad’s bed all the way up to the story of the maidservant Hagar in Genesis 16, then stopped. Something about Hagar’s story was personal—did you know this story, Ruth? She was a woman used up, made pregnant as a surrogate and then punished for it. I saw her wild hair swirl, I saw the bony donkey she rode out on and her dress straining at her belly. The ancient story hung in my parents’ bedroom like swamp air, despite the winter. The story had layers of green and moss and sedges, so many greens. I thought of your Osiris sketch in the margin of the Pyramid Texts, and I sketched Hagar’s unruly hair in the bottom corner of the page.

  Hagar said she saw God and God saw her, at a spring in the desert that she named the Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. The wind whipped up her hair; I drew the crazy strands. I could smell the red smoke and feel the rock. I saw her son, poor Ishmael, held by the web of veins inside her globe of belly. Her voice rang in my ear and my voice rang back into it, as if into a rock canyon. I scribbled in the margins the things left out, what God saw in Hagar’s tangled hair and the doves that came to her and brought twigs to make a tea, how one lay down and died for her. She roasted it on a spit. She lived. She said, Here I am below this sky. She said—like you, Ruth—I erupt. I knew her and I thought, Here I am too, erupting. Her words were still being written somehow. I sat on the musty quilt and understood that words were being written inside my own rock canyon and cave and black wilderness, my own teenaged skull. I heard the pen scratching.

  The next morning Mave brought over a book about boreal bogs of North America. I’d slept in my clothes, not something she’d scold me for. I accepted the book, put it on the stack, and finished Genesis when she left. After her bus run, she found me belly down on the brick-patterned linoleum with a pen and the Living Word. She sat heavily at the table.

  “I like parts of it,” she said. “The poetry. I like a good beheading. And there’s the seven-headed beast.”

  “I know you don’t believe in God,” I said.

  “No, I don’t. But you do. Margot shamed you with her gospel hour and Sunday school, but it’s more than that, you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well. You should read what you need to. You should be stubborn.” Something stuck in her teeth and she tongued it. “As long as you read Cicero too,” she said. “And finish Virginia Woolf.”

  I mixed up the Bisquick and milk in the warm kitchen, poured us both coffee. She started in about boreal bogs.

  IN THE EVENING, the gray of the half-empty kitchen steamed as though alive. Voices rose as the co-op assembled. My first co-op meeting as a married woman, that fall of 1989.

  “I didn’t quite finish,” Hope said, “so I brought the stock pot.” Hope was one of the two women who worked in LaFaber’s foundry. Her voice like a mist, her body the width of my stove she commandeered. From behind I saw the length of ribbon added to each of her apron strings so they could meet in a knot. She planted her feet wide and explained the vegetable bouillon she’d brewed herself for the co-op trade—carrots, celery, onions, the cabbage in the crawl space, any old vegetable lying around, chop it all, cover with water and cook, then press it through a colander, boil again—garlic powder and cumin, poultry seasoning and so forth. Cook it down, pour it in little Gerber jars and freeze. When you want a little bouillon, she said, you just take a knife and cut out a chunk. I still had some of Hope’s homemade ketchup from the last
co-op night.

  “I cooked this down for sixteen hours but it wants to go a little longer.” She left to get the empty baby food jars from the car, I rolled up my sleeve to stir, peered into the dense broth. I heard others pull up, slam car doors, embrace. My cousins Belinda and Tuffie entered the kitchen and set down quart jars and beer and a crate, all of it from Miranda, except the Budweiser. “Is that this year’s?” Hope asked someone on the porch.

  “Living in the flesh,” Tuffie said to Belinda in my bare living room, plucking a can from the six-pack she’d slunk in with, “like it’s a bad thing—right, Frankie?” Her cocky voice thinner in the room with no rugs. The sound ricocheted. Though grown, they both still lived at home, Belinda with two toddlers and unmarried at the moment. Belinda was a replica of Aunt Miranda—all soft curves, a slouch in the spine, generous bust she hid but didn’t, voice like a purring hen about to lay. But she wore Miranda’s righteousness more easily as she answered Tuffie with something I couldn’t hear. The bouillon steam coated my face and worked into my hair at the scalp.

  Rayletta, as large as Hope, unloaded seven quarts of sausage onto the counter, ’89 marked on the lid, so, yes, this year’s. She was the other woman in the foundry and the only Black woman at LaFaber in our mostly White town. “There’s the new bride,” she said and hugged me sideways so I could still stir, tucked up her yellow headscarf that had come loose, gold sheer against her dark skin. “I sneaked you a hambone,” she said and set the throwaway pillowcase with its bulge on top of the fridge.

  Rayletta had been the first to respond to my sign on the break room wall: LaFaber Women’s Cooperative, bring your wares. It was an idea from Mave’s book—your book—on social movements in South America, and she’d flagged the chapter and, in a rare lucid and sober moment, had come to my porch all parental to say I was too solitary. I was twenty-six then; this was right after Dillon had left abruptly for pilot training. My body was young but turning to slate, and Mave, of all people, said I needed some fellowship. Perhaps she could see I was becoming her. Ray hadn’t known me, she’d looked me up with my industrial mop bucket in the elevator and said she’d be there. Told me she was from Cincinnati and had stepped down off the bus here by mistake but stayed and married a shy hog farmer.