“I’ll be there,” she said, articulating each word, he thought, as if they individually constituted a triumph. He hung up and tested his nose. The moment he lowered his head enough to see in front of him a clot broke loose and the divot above his lip was freshly flooded.
In ten minutes, Fran made her entrance. The tracks of the big floor-to-ceiling rolling door were stopped up with ice, but Fran, with a kick of her toe and a hard pull, threw it open with such force that it hit the stops and wobbled. With the sun spilling from behind her and her arm still flung out with the force of the pull, the gesture seemed meant to cast obliterating light on the hidden and unseemly. “What happened to Huey?!” She demanded so broadly that it seemed she was asking not only him but the horses, cats, and weevils. “Huey?” He drew a blank and then remembered: the horse’s name. The idea that the carcass—gruesome bane of his day and threat to his mother—should be referred to as “Huey”! A macabre humor must be at play, he thought, though any name connected to the thing would jar. “It—he—was like that when I looked out the window this morning.”
For a moment Fran was quiet. In her dirty Carharts with the lumpy gray-streaked braid down her back, she hardly cut an imperious figure, but she began to subtly draw herself up. She angled her chin up and away and drew in a studied breath: she was the barn’s nobility, the decreed conduit to the highest authority. “Your mother,” she said, “would want an autopsy.” Her hands were lightly folded in front of her, the fuzz on her upper lip still and serene, her tightly lined pucker of a face clenched and certain. “The vet could come and do it right in the pasture.” Ah yes, there would be nothing more comforting, no better harbinger of his mother’s future, than for her to step out of the car and set her eyes on a split and spilled horse carcass and a vet holding up an organ to the winter sun to check for irregularities. He felt a hot slick on his upper lip and tried to blot it with the back of his hand.
“I don’t think so, Fran. The horse is dead, and I don’t see any need for the expense and bother of an autopsy. I want the body out of here by the time Mom gets home. That’s why I called.” As he spoke, Fran moved away and began fussing with a frozen latch on one of the stall doors. She then smacked her pants and walked away without a word, placing her feet down with such exaggerated heel-toe precision that it was clearly the middle-aged-woman version of stomping.
“If you leave, don’t bother coming back, Fran.” She turned so fast that her thick, ugly braid swung around like a creature’s tail wielded in defense. “I’m going to take care of the horse. If you want to move him this afternoon, it’s time to get going. Moving a horse isn’t a small job.” She set out for the pasture and he followed her out but from a distance. They walked out to the dead horse in a perfect line, Bill stepping into Fran’s boot steps, the two of them separated by three thousand flakes that fell in the space between them. The dead horse was now white with snow. Its dark eye seemed to generate the only heat, and flakes slid over it, melting on the way down.
It turned out that his mother, prudent horse keeper that she was, always dug a trench just in case a horse died in winter, when the ground was too frozen to dig. All Fran had to do was borrow the Halbright’s backhoe, easily done since the Halbrights already owed her and his mother one for taking care of their cows when they were stranded two states away. The idea that his mother had preemptively dug a grave was, given her present condition, inherently troubling, and it was even more so when he actually saw it. The hole was several car-lengths long, narrow, and deeper than seemed necessary—a huge black gap demanding to be filled, like the mouth of a baby bird who gapes so wide it threatens to consume itself backwards. It was so thorough a preparation for the unexpected that it might as well have been an invitation.
Fran soon returned, navigating the machine over the pitted winter pasture. He could see the teal spot of her head wrap and her upright posture in the seat—the bearing of a woman grimly certain of her good works. He drew his hands into his coat sleeves, walked over, and unlocked the gate for her. She maneuvered around, working the gear-shift, snaking backward, making a pointless show of her mastery with the machine before dropping the bucket and lifting the dead horse. The head rolled, the icy mane hung straight down in a heavy fringe, and the eyes bobbled in the sockets, like the mugging signal of a silent comic on the cusp of mischief. The dead horse’s undignified flopping was blunted by its bigness into a kind of joke, with Fran’s hyperseriousness at the controls making her a dour and pitch-perfect straight man.
The bucket tipped. The horse’s hooves traced an arc in the winter air as it rolled out. He shut his eyes and waited to hear the deep bass finality of the carcass hitting bottom. Now it’s just a matter of sending her home, he thought, relieved to have the problem of the horse exchanged for the problem of Fran. But when he opened his eyes, the horse was still there, still frozen in its horizontal gallop-stride, somehow spread flat on the surface of the hole. Fran had jumped down from the machine and was fluttering around the horse, poking and peering. He became more and more impatient, figuring Fran was stalling so she’d still be around when his mother got home.
Finally he walked over and saw the problem. The horse seemed to be stuck on something, but he couldn’t clearly see what. He passed his hands between the horse and the edge of the hole. There was nothing. He walked around and did the same with the other side. Nothing—there was no branch or outcropping holding the thing up. Finally, to put an end to this business, he lay on his back in the snow, scooted towards the rim, and hung his head down backwards to see what the horse was snagged on. Since the legs of the dead horse were canted sideways, he could see under the entire body, could see the snow lightly swirling around, could see the unbroken air beneath, could see how the horse’s body hung down rounded and full, as if suspended on something yielding. Nothing held it up. For a moment he thought that perhaps this was the way a dead horse behaved during burial; that there was always a little lag before the thing sunk down, a consequence of rigor mortis or the gasses in the earth adjusting for it or something—he glanced at Fran on the far side of the hole and she too seemed to be waiting through a typical stage, her face impassive and expert under her head wrap. She had certainly seen this before.
His immediate reaction was to push down on the horse with his foot. Given the icy conditions, and given that the horse was far enough from the edge that he had to strain a bit to reach it, he very nearly fell when he bounced his foot against the horse and felt nothing, no shift. He then leaned over and pressed the horse downward with his hands. The hide seemed to have bristled up in defense; a few hairs pricked the skin under his fingernails. He had to will himself to really push—the dead horse reminded him of both the fragility and noxious potential of a puffball mushroom; he didn’t want to find out what the horse would release if broken through. Still he pushed, with his head turned away and his eyes squinted, and under his hands he felt nothing but the kind of unforced and certain resistance of the ground beneath his feet. The horse hung like the earth itself, held up by stratum upon stratum, tucked in its tight spot of space, orbiting on its track, scaffolded by the universe.
“Get back. That’s not how it’s done.” Fran pushed him aside with as much fervor as if he was standing in the path of danger and his left leg slid out from under him so he was nearly forced into the splits. She bent down and began to massage the horse downwards with the heel of her hands while he looked down at her, at the ratty braid and the tense sure twitching of her back muscles under her winter wear. How could she say that he was doing it wrong? Is there really a right way to deal with something like this? What precedence, what protocol? Fran continued to pulse her hands along the parts of the dead horse she could reach with an obvious methodology; she radiated her touches outward then inward with increasing speed. Maybe she knew what she was doing. She must.
But the horse did not move. How typical of Fran, how typical of his mother and Fran, to make something as straightforward as dropping a dead horse into a hole int
o an ordeal of multiple steps and complications. He had noticed whenever he’d visited and ventured into the barn that the two women would make something simple—say, feeding the horses—into a complex choreography that lasted half the night. His mother would man the wheelbarrow full of grains, powders, and potions, and Fran would hold a plastic bucket while his mother doled out each horse’s custom blend—a cup of grain here, a dash of powder there, a squirt of corn oil from a repurposed dish-soap bottle. Then Fran would scuttle off with the bounty and pour it into a stall bucket, scuttle back, and report to his mother the horse’s reaction to the concoction, be it ravenous or nibbling, then his mother would nod as if that’s what she expected to hear and continue pouring and mixing, often dripping the oil from way high up, like a theatrical bartender, while Fran held the bucket, eyes upturned, as if waiting to be anointed.
There was no need for him to tolerate this hocus-pocus now. “Out of my way.” He squatted down next to Fran—who continued to knead the horse like a kitten looking to bed down—and threw his arm in front of her. He heard her sputter as she flew backwards. He had no idea what to do, but he felt a sudden need to show Fran his decisiveness, his fitness for the problem at hand. With a great violent motion he plunged his right elbow into the carcass with his left hand pushing behind it; it was a motion of a ninja, a professional fighter, or at least it felt like it to him. But when he made contact the horse was so unyielding that his elbow stung, the pain vibrating up as if his bones were tuning forks; he felt it in his teeth.
“Huey never did like to be forced into anything,” Fran said, her voice edged with an edifying aggression. “Your mother spent three hours once trying to convince him to cross a stream. Once she gave up he leapt across.” She smiled faintly as if the horse’s levitation was a charmingly typical disobedience, further proof that her read on the horse had all along been correct. She moved past him and resumed her work on the horse with a slick and unconscious certainty, like a pianist experienced enough to let her mind wander. Her deep composure in the face of something so bizarre and unprecedented suddenly so offended him that he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and demand to know how the carcass, stubborn though it may be, managed to upturn all natural law and hang there. It was an insult to both normality and to the miraculous to act as if no line had been crossed, to behave as if nothing amazing was underway.
“You can’t rush a horse. She always said a horse knows no clock. There are no clocks in the barn and you’d catch holy hell if you mounted a horse with a watch on. She took a watch off me once and threw it under a horse so I could see what they think of time. I was picking cogs and whatnot from that horse’s hooves all afternoon …” She spoke as if the watch’s destruction was a spiritual turning point.
“Well I for one don’t want to wait for a dead horse to decide its time to fall in a hole. It’s freezing. What are you trying to do, anyway?”
“It’s a special massage your mother created for the horses. You do bodywork on the horse from head to toe. Eventually the horse will relax enough to accept what he is asked. See, you start with the crest of the neck …” Fran reached across the empty space and wiggled the highest point of the arch in the horse’s neck. Snow shook off and floated to the hole’s bottom as if the dead horse was a lower cloud in a staggered atmosphere. She went on to explain the various pressure points, the way this or that spot was connected up with this or that nerve and therefore emotion, and it was clear his mother’s teachings were a beacon in even the bleakest most bizarre moments. In fact, Fran seemed to be glad to get to draw upon his mother in this most extreme of cases; it was the same small thrill an emergency physician might feel as a particularly broken patient slides through the doors, a chance to apply an education to the fullest.
He listened to her absurd spiel without a word, watched her work on the horse for a few more moments, then walked over and squatted next to her like a patronizing waiter, false-familiar. “Are you sure you’re working his shoulder correctly? I wonder if you’re making contact with the right nerve.” He wanted nothing more than to break Fran of her nonsensical ideas, her adulation of his mother and her every passing thought, her quiet and steady certainty about things of which no one could be sure. He was being forced to take on the full mystery, terror, intellectual and practical burden of the dead horse, while Fran checked out into a world of New Age horse homeopathy and, of course, his mother. Isn’t that just the way it is, he thought, you’re stuck with someone who doesn’t get it. The last time he vacationed with his mother, at the beginning of the horses, he had noticed that a rock right in front of them lined up perfectly with a mountain, its contours perfectly mirroring the peak in the distance. See, he had said, see? But she hadn’t seen, even after he took her gently by the shoulders and moved her around to the best vantage, even after he had pointed and explained, even during the sunset when both mountain and rock were most crisply defined. I don’t see, she said, which sounded to him like a personal philosophy, and her inability to see made the sight itself—that sublime visual joke—a burden to him every moment it went unshared.
“That thing you’re doing, that … massage is never going to work. Why not just push it down with the backhoe?”
A panicked calculus went on behind her eyes. Her mouth opened and shut, and the low sun bounced off her gold crowns so her mouth winked shut a small sun each time she thought better of speaking. The thumb on her right hand tapped the other four fingers over and over as if she was counting in groups of fours. That, that, was his mother’s definitive tic, and it so invoked her that he could not make sense of the image. It was like flipping on a favorite sitcom and seeing another actor in the key role, speaking and doing everything like the original but with a different body, a different voice, the rest of the cast behaving as if nothing had changed. Fran was not his mother, not at all, but the motion of her hand was; it was a small part of his mother evoked through a tiny gesture, it was a piece of her settled on Fran, stunning proof she had blown apart and scattered wide.
Finally, she spoke. “Marie would want me to try her way before … resorting to force.” In Fran’s halting tone there was nothing of her businesslike bravado. She was afraid of trying the backhoe. Afraid it wouldn’t work—because if the full force of the machine bore down on the carcass and nothing happened, the floating horse would have moved into a more certain plane of paranormal. Afraid it would work—and his mother and her massage would have been bypassed, overthrown, disregarded, unneeded, unheeded—it would be, for Fran, a death of a god. No, the backhoe would not do. The dead horse was no doubt a mystery, no doubt a problem, but there were many mysteries and many problems, and if you had to forsake something to solve each one you’d have nothing left for your trouble. “Nothing left to do but finish the massage.” Fran summed up, her voice stronger now.
Bill did not agree. He would give anything to see the damn thing drop, to feel the ground shake as it took on its weight, to hear the hooves crumple and hit the ground with the reflective, dangerous sound of two like weights striking—hoof and ice equally matched, hitting like the heads of two hammers. The dead horse was a mystery, to be sure, but it was a mystery that had overstayed its welcome. There had been mysteries and inexplicable things throughout his life—strange forms in the trees on summer camp nights, flashes of light in the dark, lost things, such as keys, turning up after years of hiding, things lost (things you just saw) and never found, his mother’s late love for horses, his mother now. One could learn to live with these mysteries, but a floating dead horse, in all its corporeal fact, could not be endured. Once the horse fell, he was sure he could find an explanation, some liberal reading of science or physics that would diffuse the mystery just enough so the edges blurred and the dead horse, like the other mysteries, would recede into a kind of fog, a harmless atmospheric, which, strange as it was, he could still walk through.
Fran had begun to whistle as she worked, and it was this ludicrous sound that finally drove him to it. He sprinted toward the b
ackhoe and jumped up into the cab and tried to put the thing in gear. He had never used any heavy machinery, and the dashboard, if it could be called that, confused him. He moved a lever up and down, the machine ran roughly, and the bucket, which had frozen to the ground, rose up with a high, shattering crackle, like a prehistoric mastodon waking from a fossilized slumber, shaking its tusks free first. The response of the machine frightened him; he had no idea how to control or direct what was happening, but he was beyond turning back. The backhoe began to rumble and swerve forward, the wheels jerking right and left, Bill hunched over the controls as if he’d just taken a sudden blow to the gut. The tires spun and threw up snow and ice; out of the corner of his eye he saw Fran approaching with her hand in front of her face, trying to block the spray. He gave it more gas, tried to move the bucket down toward the horse, but it raised to its fullest height, like a hand lifted in heavenly praise or wound up to strike. He heard Fran’s shouts, saw her leaping at the cab like some desperate mutt, and the bucket came partly down but he could see it would not reach the horse, not yet. He accelerated yet again, and this time the machine found purchase and lurched forward and before he could react it was over the edge.
The front tires hung over and spun. The bucket rested on the horse, which had rotated under the pressure so now its back legs hung down straight like a cat twisting in midair to land on its feet. He threw the machine in reverse, and every time he laid off the gas even for a moment, the backhoe rocked forward and threatened to tip. The back wheels dug deeper into the icy sub-layer of the winter pasture and began to lose ground. He rose up off the seat, turned backward as if the machine might follow, and stood on the accelerator with both feet. He could see his mother’s house and stable in the distance, could see the clear empty sky and the slight winter breeze shaking up a few frozen branches so they rattled like wet bone. Nothing he saw admitted of the chaos of which he was part. Even the rev of the engine and tires was a thick insulating lull, nothing sharp or panicked, except for a higher whine, a building screech. He spun back around—was the engine burning up? Then he saw Fran standing immediately below him, her head wrap popped off her wide-strung ears. She was yelling at him. He saw her mouth move. At first he did not hear her, but the repeated rhythm of her cry finally got through: Turn it off, turn it off! He couldn’t run the thing hard in reverse forever, so he turned it off and readied himself to leap off as it fell. But the backhoe simply swayed a bit as it quieted, and the rush of adrenalin abandoned him so he sat, stunned and stupid, while Fran called his name.
Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 4