Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “Gouache.” I said the word quietly, but Clarissa heard me. She said nothing. A speechless widow in her best jumper.

  “I want to talk about my body of work,” Tess said. All faces in the room rearranged themselves in her direction. A man in a dark jacket, older, probably her teacher, put a hand on her back as though he were going to first introduce her, but she stood and gave him her stool and she started speaking from the oak of herself, discussing each method and medium, needing no introduction to the world except the one she got when she slipped out of Clarissa. I want to talk about my body of work, she said, and she did. It was a body you could handle and bathe and sniff up and down, in its creases, a body to nurse and nurse from, a body you soap up and take a bed pan out from under and hurt and heal and salvage and raise up. I could make out other bodies then, in the strokes of gouache—could summon Lottie, could summon you, Ruth, the limpidness of Clay, the shock of Dillon, could summon the living and the never-got-to-live. She said all this without saying it that way. The man in the jacket, all the women and men, nodded and admired. I was in awe of her.

  Clarissa’s face so hot and so unbruised and so seen. Tess crossed the gallery and kissed her.

  After an hour or so, when we left to drive back across the Ohio, with the dash lit like the city at night, it started to rain. We would get home late. I thought how, despite the time of night, I would pour new Murphy Oil and new hot water and do the boards tongued and grooved in my own house. I wanted to do that and nothing else, to arch over those boards and think about the bone-lace evocation of my friend’s body and all bodies. And I knew, too, that, newly alone and afloat in her house, Clarissa would get out the paint box I’d given her, the ochre and the horsehair brushes, and clear the dining room table because at last she could take up all the space she wanted. I pictured her in the New Mexico light in O’Keeffe’s roofless room, the box of parsley, the still life skulls and hollyhock, the vision of feeling coming out in oils. The rain dousing the canvas so the colors clarified.

  As if seeing what I saw, knowing what I knew, she said, “I think I do my best work when it rains.”

  IN THE MORNING, I brought Mave a bud in a vase and a sprig of sumac. I told her about the art show.

  “You smell like the janitor you used to be.” She studied the vase I’d set on the TV tray. Bathrobe over a dirty white V-neck, unlaced boots. She said, “A bud cannot be forced but will give, in time, and will be the color you did not expect.”

  “I’ve befriended the paper bag again.”

  “I heard who showed up for Darrell’s wake.”

  “Miranda tell you?”

  “Is it reasonable to mourn yourself before you’re dead?”

  “It’s not even ten,” I said. “How much have you had?”

  “How much is left, you mean. Enough for a quarter pint each.” Mave touched the sumac as if it were poisonous. “You pour.”

  “No.”

  “Then light up so I can get a whiff,” she said.

  “Miranda told me Dillon’s dropping gypsy moth spray around here. I didn’t even see the webbing in the trees, but if you look around.”

  Mave carefully moved a few books that were open to black-and-white photos of ornate buildings onto a book pile already started on the floor and gestured that I sit in the chair covered in peeling contact paper.

  “Miranda said he’s married,” I said. I did not sit. “They’re staying at his grandmother’s. It’s been so many years. He could have written. Or called.”

  We both stood among the ruins of her dining room until she went to the kitchen for what beer was left. She would drink the half pint herself.

  THEN LOTTIE. Only a couple of months later, in late August, she was part of what became our thick fog of funerals. Right after Tess’s art show, I had handled Lottie with greater care and focus, absorbing myself with her, partly hiding from Dillon, but that wasn’t all of it. I felt her lean against me when I helped her walk. She would lay her head on me when I escorted her to the toilet, press into my neck just above my shoulder joint. I somehow pictured clearly the joint free of skin tissue and cartilage, saw both of us as bones, brief and calm, until I’d lower her to the commode and hold up her nightgown for her and we’d both fully flesh out again at the sound of her peeing.

  She died when I wasn’t there, only a few minutes before I walked into the house. The kitchen was still, sealed, one of the blue chairs overturned. I righted the chair and pulled old bananas from the freezer to thaw for bread. I saw Ellis stretched into a heap near his bowl full of uneaten food. Then I went to her room. The aide shuttered Lottie’s eyes as I entered, and Clay, sitting bedside, held his hand out and up on the bed, a hand useless and unencumbered. Since Lottie had needed twenty-four-hour care, Clay had hired Home Health to help us at the end.

  I felt intensely in that room that I did not belong, not without Lottie’s presence. Not without the wifeliness and tenderness that she enabled in me toward him. But I went to Clay and took his aimless hand and he cried. I held his back, strong and soft. Lottie’s long gray braid did not lie across her chest but out to the right, shooting off like a horse tail when a horse runs. I did not remember where I’d been before entering the house, perhaps just outside to get some air. A numbness spread to my body so that I held Clay more tightly.

  “Thank you, Anne,” he said as I held him. The aide named Anne continued her ministrations, crisscrossed Lottie’s hands on her chest with a kindness that must be innate to those who routinely handle the dying and the dead.

  “Thank you,” I echoed. I longed to be as kind as she was.

  Clay wept silently, trembling, making one coarse noise at an intake of breath. He turned his face into my standing body and wept into my belly, pressing in. Anne’s seahorse scrubs were simple and her clean ponytail made me look feral, my hair unwashed and unfastened and my clothes not clean but smelling of cleaning chemical, but he breathed in whatever scent I had on me. “It’s okay,” I said. Anne left the room. Clay reached his hands under my shirt and placed them on either side of my bare stomach, the way you make a tent for your eyes looking into a window, but his face stayed outside the jersey fabric. My T-shirt dampened.

  Time unfixed itself. I watched Lottie’s familiar head become a skull. I wanted to rewrite our story from the beginning as something different, something dense with love, and it seemed to me terrifying and also liberating, the idea of making it up from scratch on an unlined tablet. I pulled my hair back from my face then let it fall toward him. My neck lowered, and I held his head.

  AT THE FUNERAL, which Clay wanted to be at the Crossing, within its nondescript white-paneled walls and with all its window light washing out the storied pictures of Christ, I fixated on the possibility of kindness in me, like someone witching for water. Aquifer beneath the shale. Clay and the Good News Boys played beautiful old hymns. Dillon did not come and I had not seen him, so I both hoped and dreaded that maybe he had loaded all his emptied canisters of killing spray and taken his rumored wife and gone.

  After the service, Ray touched my arm. Could we have a co-op gathering the next week, at the start of September, she asked, would that help? Yes, I said, and touched my high-neck dress, my long-sleeved dress, a dress that did not fit. I had bush beans and a good carrot crop I could trade, I told her. She said she would host but I said no, I wanted to prepare my old cavernous house to have something to do. Ray didn’t protest. She understood that I was now an untethered caregiver.

  I stood near Lottie’s casket. Clay was no longer singing hymns, and I didn’t know where he was. I saw she wore blue as Darrell had worn blue, as the irises near the tub where I’d bled out had been blue—and my bronchial chamber, so often restricted, rent itself, like a pressure valve opening and stuttering steam, or like a deep, simple breath. I took a deep breath. I very naturally reached behind me seeking Clay’s hand and found it. My eyes were wet, my mind softened. It was no drilled well to an aquifer, but it was something.

  MAVE SAID SHE’D BRING
JAMESON and some decoy ducks she’d mail- ordered. But when cars drove up to my house at six, Mave didn’t show and her lights were off and I knew she wasn’t coming. What I didn’t know was that pains in her chest had put her in bed early and convinced her she’d be there long enough to need a stack of books and her TV unplugged and moved, with great effort, to her bedroom. Neither of us knew, in this confluence of deaths and eruptions, what pale-headed cells had long been forming in the secret of her lungs.

  Gathered goods were plentiful in early September. Belinda brought her new son to suck under a nursing shield with smiling starfish printed on it. Liza and Clarissa and Hope were there, Delores and Tuffie came late—Tuffie was more often than not high on something those days, looking haggard. Rayletta with buns and pulled pork in a crock pot. Clarissa wore a green scarf, pretty at her neck. The room had a color of life and warmth.

  Ray took a beer from Tuffie’s usual offering and brought up Jesus. She said some African women saw Christ as the good mother, with his hands in the sick bed. “God was a mother like them,” she said. “Jesus fluttered like an old granny. And cried out like one, and maybe he’d carried water jugs like one. Would you all believe in a woman God?”

  “I think it makes sense,” said Hope, “but you’ll never get it passed.”

  “What—like a bill in the Senate?”

  “I just mean it’s too dangerous an idea.”

  “For who?”

  Belinda said, “Too weird.” Rearranged her baby under his stars.

  “For men,” said Liza.

  “Maybe Mave would take to a woman God,” Ray said to me, and I laughed and said I planned to propose it the next morning. I would take her sobering coffee and revel with her in blasphemy.

  The forward-looking thought, the hopeful idea of the next morning walking under the black walnut trees, through the overgrown break in the fence, took me in hand, a great big holding hand. It held up my accumulated years of life next to the life I lived in the present, as though I might be able, now, to continue. I could make this work with Clay. I could start again. Up through the fog that had settled on me for how long now, how many weeks or months, a pulse sounded, or a foghorn even. I laughed with real lightness. So brief.

  Then—the irreversible moment when the meat turns and the maggots hatch and the bone snaps in two.

  Headlights traveled the bare mantel through the window, then extinguished. Everyone was already present, except Mave, but she wouldn’t drive over, she’d walk, or stumble, in her unlaced steel toes. I stood and handed the strung-out Tuffie my half-empty Coors; I threaded back my hair so I could see into the kitchen, through the screen door to the black gravel dark beyond it. A figure formed itself on the porch. I’d forgotten to turn on the porch light, so it formed from the subtler light of the kitchen. A woman with huge hair stood with a hand at her belly.

  “Is this the get-together?” the woman called into the kitchen, and in she came, her dress straining with its freight. Her Army jacket too big. Onto the table she spilled the beet crop that I’d worried was a dead baby.

  “My god,” I said at her dress.

  “Thought maybe I could join you all?” she said. “I have these to trade.” She told me her name. That looseness in her stance, in her legs, in her joints, so sultry. The combination of her radiating sexy youth and the beet stains on her hands and up her arms immediately called to mind the paintings I’d seen that day of Darrell’s wake. I somehow knew she had painted the walls of the Train Cave, which I’d told no one about. The bright violent orgy of lines, bodies, rivers I had thought stunning. How? How could that be? “I heard there was a get-together.” And I knew, of course, though she did not tell me, that she was Dillon’s wife. “Looks like you got beer?”

  Belinda and her nursing boy appeared beside me, Clarissa in the lovely scarf. They didn’t know who Nan was, and Clarissa said, “Sure, come on in. Those beets are huge, gosh. I’m Clarissa, this is Belinda and little Roger, and this is Frankie.”

  Nan locked her gaze on me, drank me in, my heavy hanging hair, my old jeans, my mouth shut tight hiding a black-coated throat. That brief, fragile lightness I’d felt all dissipated as this woman sucked me back down. How had she heard of the co-op, from whom had she stolen the beets, how had her hands painted the limestone so beautifully and strangely? I said nothing as Clarissa and Belinda reentered the living room and Nan took steps to follow. I looked at her as though in her dress she had in fact hauled in a dead thing. She came close, a couple of feet from me; she smelled of paint thinner or diesel or something aerosol.

  “So you’re Frankie,” she said quietly. “You’re the one.” Her gaze was open, and that starved look marked her even then as she measured me against any and all of the stories Dillon had told her. And what had he said? Who had he told her I was? His second self? His shadow?

  In my thick jealousy, I dismissed her hunger pangs, and the question of her, and simply watched her snake-body walk into the living room with the others, where God was a woman keening and healing the sick, drawing up water from the well to carry, the deepest water, the deepest well.

  “WHAT’S THE WORST THING YOU EVER DID?” Nan remained enamored with truth-telling in the car. She had erected a boundary of bag and floormat between her and Ellis. “And what’s the best thing?”

  “Nannette,” said Mave, “you are a veritable font. Sometimes quiet is welcome.” She looked tired from the lake detour and the over-spilling of truth, and, by her voice, I could tell she’d taken some codeine.

  “And what if it’s the same thing?” said Nan. “Like someone says, who do you hate the most and who do you love the most, and often it’s the same person. I think that’s often true.”

  “Are we sure this radio doesn’t work?” Mave twisted the knobs.

  “For me it’s one and the same. The worst and the best. Have you ever been in an abortion clinic? There’s no windows. And there’s a machine sucking sound you don’t get out of your head.” Her voice was steady and intent on its mission to get everything out. Looking at her young face in the rearview, I even admired her for taking on this mantle. Mave moved her hands over the radio in hocus pocus, willing it fixed.

  “They suck you clean. But if I hadn’t? What then? I had no way to feed myself. My kid would have ended up like me.” Up came Nan’s head between the seats facing Mave. “Scared to live.” Nan receded like ocean. “I did it out of love, but it was the worst thing I ever did.” She was quiet and then there was only road hum, since neither Mave nor I responded in kind. The discount store tractor trailer we passed treaded out its brief roar. “She knows it was love,” Nan said. “Or he. Wherever my kid is.”

  In a few miles, at a gas station outside of Memphis, Mave needed the bathroom. Nan and I stayed in the car as Mave assembled her network and got out. She looked at me through the window rolled halfway down, said, “I was just thinking, you should make sure everything is dated in the book. People will wonder who said what when. And with what inflection—inflection is everything. That will be the hard part. I need to take a shit so don’t worry if I’m in there awhile. You can leave that out of the book. Up to you though.” She headed for the station glow.

  “What book is she talking about?” said Nan. “Are you really writing a book?”

  “It’s just our joke. There’s no book.”

  Some silence then, and Nan forgot the quarantine and I heard her scratch Ellis’s ears and his groan of gladness. Then she said, “I bet you could write one. You’re smart, you’re always thinking. You’re lucky to have a crazy aunt like her, just to push your mind.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Push me to the brink.”

  “We were World Wide Church of God growing up. My mom died when I was fourteen, not sure what from, probably appendicitis. I lived on with my dad and my sister for a while in Virginia. He didn’t let Mom go to the hospital. And he had a fear of snow. He was a wacko—the bad kind. Wouldn’t let us drive or cut our hair, never let me date. Never raised his voice, but mea
n. He abandoned us once because Mom borrowed money for a car she couldn’t drive but wanted anyway, and borrowing was unbiblical. But he came back. He was into vitamin therapies, natural food, making your own yogurt. I didn’t leave till I was seventeen. My sister took after him. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. Maybe leaving home was my worst thing. Or could have been my best. Weird, right? How you can’t tell sometimes?”

  “I don’t think my worst is my best.” I thought about marrying Clay, my gray slate of heart. “You never heard from him? Your dad?”

  “No. I sent him a postcard once, around his birthday. But he didn’t celebrate birthdays.”

  “Where did you learn to draw and paint like you do?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing really. Fooling around.”

  “No, I’ve seen it, Nan. Some of the sketches you hide. And remember the painting you did in the cave in the summer, when you first came to Caudell? We always called it the Train Cave.”

  She wrinkled her brow, touched her hair. “I never knew you saw that.”

  “I never told anyone. I thought it was beautiful. I remember the full colors and the sure strokes of thick paint forming the bodies. You’d left your lantern there.”

  “I never knew you saw that,” she repeated, shaking her head in disbelief.

  “That cave was the first place Dillon and I made love. In our twenties.” Then quiet again, both of us too exposed now.

  After a while, Nan said, “Sometimes it felt like you were the one he still wanted.”

  Too much for me, too slippery, that notion. I could not find purchase on it.

  “I’m sorry he’s...” The words wouldn’t leave my throat. I gestured to her eye, the skin clearing. “He wasn’t always like that. I wish you’d known him as a boy.” The talkative Nan only looked out at the Shell sign. “Want to see something?”