Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  Women out riding together, blessedly, did not talk coffee-klatsch chat, did not talk of recipes or carpet cleaners or diaper service or any of the usual church-supper topics. They conversed more deeply, about husbands, children, horses, husbands, rides past, things seen, things felt. And guilts, joys, childhoods (their own), adolescence, maturity and hope. And husbands. And men in general. Men were fair game, for horses were the domain of women bold and crazy enough to claim it. Some of the boarders at Shirley’s stable were vacuous teenage girls, but none were men or boys. Gigi knew what men were for. Men provided the peripherals—photos, tack boxes, admiration—and the support services—horseshoeing, vetting, oats and hay and money.

  “Did Homer take much convincing?” Cally had asked, kicking at her plodding Dove, while Gigi floated ahead on Snake Oil’s airy trot.

  “Nope.”

  “The man must be a saint,” said Cally.

  “Not hardly,” Gigi shot back. “If I didn’t have cancer I wouldn’t have no five-thousand-dollar horse. But I do. I’ve got six kinds of cancer, and I can have anything I want.”

  Shirley and Elspeth, riding beside her, turned widened eyes and did not speak. Cally, who was more accustomed to death and talk of death than they were (though reticent about sex), whispered, “Cancer?”

  “There’s nothing like it for getting your own way. AIDS don’t work, because it’s your own dirty fault, the way you get it. But with cancer you’re just a poor soul.” Gigi glanced around at three stunned faces and bowed her mouth in a droll inverse smile. “My word, women! No need to faint. I been dying since I was born.”

  Cally gave her a startled glance. “You’ve been reading Dylan Thomas?”

  But the blunt, hard-bodied woman was simply stating the truth as she saw it. She had been born with malignant tumors on her infant body. Doctors had cut them off, and then some few years later had attempted to improve her yet further by removing a large, bright-red birthmark from her arm. They had put radium on it—this was in the time when medical science had used wonderful new treatments for the skin, such as X-rays for acne—Gladys still remembered the grip of her well-meaning parents restraining her during the painful radium applications. Some of them had burned, leaving her arm with white marks and scar tissue she still carried. And of course her body cells still carried the potential of her own destruction. Every time she saw the boy with the dreadful birthmark on his face, Berry Beal, she thought of telling him how lucky he was that he had not been cured to death.

  She had told Cally, “I believe I got more parts missing than left.”

  Like a tough old tree, lopsided, hollow, rotting inside, half the branches dead and falling, but still the roots deep and stubborn, still that touch of green at the top. And still rough of bark and hard as iron.

  She had said, “Every time I went in that damn hospital and the doctors took another piece off me, I promised myself something to make up for it. And then I wouldn’t take no for an answer. One good thing about cancer is, makes everybody around you feel guilty for not having it. And that’s how I got my first horse, and that’s how I sold him and got Snake Oil.”

  The appaloosa was beautiful in body but not in color. Snake Oil was the mottled, nondescript roan of a dirt road in midsummer, tan with dust and speckled gravel-white. It did not matter. Gigi adored the gelding. He had cost Homer a great deal of money.

  And that is the way things are. Gigi thought, facing Homer across the late supper in the little house on Railroad Street, Hoadley, where they had lived since they were married. Things are the way they are, and the way things are right now is peculiar.

  She said, “Homer, the cicadas are out. But they shouldn’t be.”

  Homer merely grunted over macaroni and cheese. He sure would have liked some good homemade macaroni and cheese once, not this damn stuff out of a box. All his life he had worked hard in the steel mill, double and sometimes triple shifts to put three kids through college, and all he’d ever wanted of his wife was that she’d mind the house and kids and fix him good meals. She was trained a practical nurse, because that’s what her parents had made her do, but he knew she hated it, and he’d never made her work at it. Now he’d finally got to retirement—and he’d only just reached retirement age before the mills were closed for good—and there he was, like the laid-off, unemployed younger men, hanging around the house with nothing to do but go fishing, could have spent some time with her, and she had him playing second fiddle to a goddamn horse. It had choked him up once to think he might lose her—the first few times she had gone in hospital, it had about killed him—but it sure didn’t choke him up any more. And he sure didn’t want to hear her news from the stable.

  “And Shirley said something strange happened to her. She bought herself one of those barn signs, thought it was a distelfink, and when she got it home here it had turned into a blasted locust. And now it’s turned back again. She says she feels like she’s losing her mind.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me none,” Homer grumbled. Even though he had never met her, he had a low opinion of Shirley. Gigi ignored him.

  “And she said Cally came in from riding looking like she’d seen a ghost. And then there’s that woman just rode down Main Street—”

  Homer interrupted. He had already heard enough and far too much about the woman who had ridden through Hoadley. “I guess a person can dress up like Robin Hood and ride a horse down Main Street if they want to,” he complained. Homer played the role of civil libertarian only if he didn’t want to hear any more about someone.

  “It wasn’t like Robin Hood. She wore a gown. And that’s not the point, Homer. The thing is, nobody knows who she is. I know all the horse people for miles, and I can’t imagine who she is.”

  “Last I heard, there were still people in the world you didn’t know.”

  “And what would any of them want in Hoadley?”

  That silenced him. Alone in its pocket of the Pennsylvania Appalachians, Hoadley could hardly have been more isolated or forgotten. The coal barons had raped it and passed on, leaving behind them only black-lung death and the heaps of slag the miners called bony piles. The steel mills were turning to rusting skeletons. The land lay poisoned. The streams ran orange. But the community lived on, feeding on government largesse and, cannibalistically, on itself. For most of those who lived there—they had lived there all their lives, often in the same house all their lives, with the same friends, the same enemies, the same annoying bonds of kinship and religion—for Hoadley people, the town stood still at the hub of time and space, while just beyond the mountains the world spun on its way all around, faster and faster toward the close of the millennium.

  Gigi pressed her advantage. “You know as well as I do, nobody comes here.”

  Homer snorted. “It’s probably some sort of promo. Some new product they’re pushing.”

  “Who would start something like that here? There’s no money here. Homer Wildasin, you know better.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Something very strange is going on,” said Gigi softly.

  Homer pushed himself back from the table; though he did not consider he had had enough to eat, he could see there was not going to be any more. He went off to look at a gun catalog until bedtime. Homer Wildasin had the skewed pride of a martyr. He would not speak his mind when he could suffer in noble silence—especially when a woman was neglecting him, and especially when a woman was showing her stupidity.

  Ma Wilmore’s house, though not as extreme an example as Oona’s, typified Hoadley taste: there was a cactus in the window wearing a crocheted hat Ma had made especially for it. The cactus’s name was Fred. Flanking Fred stood a silver-wattled Avon bottle in the shape of an amber-glass turkey, and a ceramic horse head with plastic roses sprouting between its ears. Ma Wilmore herself, meeting Cally and the kids at the door—unsurprised, for she phoned her son the funeral director several times a day—Ma Wilmore herself wore a crocheted hat much like the cactus’s, for her neuralgia. She wore
it winter and summer, indoors and out. But her name was not Fred. It was Ma. Cally knew her by no other name. Perhaps she had no other.

  “Did you see that girl on a horse, Cally? Wasn’t she pretty?”

  Only Ma Wilmore or some other Hoadley woman of the older generation, Cally reflected sourly, would have called the apparition a “girl” or “pretty.” Ma would have called a bougainvillea in full, heady, incredible bloom a “posy bush,” just as she did the hydrangeas by her basement door, papery flowers which changed color, like litmus, depending on how the dog pee struck their roots.

  “Can you ride as good as her?” Ma Wilmore never waited for an answer, giving the impression that her questions were mostly rhetorical, intended to inspire thought in the listener. They generally succeeded in Cally. Ma Wilmore would not have believed how she inspired her daughter-in-law’s thoughts.

  Inside, the TV was on with no one watching it, as usual. Cally glanced at the Smurf rerun on the screen, then away again, remembering wistfully how exciting television had seemed to her as a child, before censorship. Ever since the fundamentalists took over there had been nothing good on TV or in the newspapers, either. Oddly, considering her liberal beliefs, she found the censorship of her TV watching more annoying than censorship of news and ideas, though less frightening than the loss of civil liberties.

  Ma Wilmore knew nothing of freedom of choice. Cally had never asked—Cally had been taught early in life not to rock the familial boat—but she felt reasonably certain that her mother-in-law approved of the anti-abortion law.

  Ma served dinner without turning off the TV. Over the cartoon clamor she insisted, “That girl on the white horse, Cally, do you know who she was?”

  She worked the same vein throughout supper. As she chattered, Pa Wilmore smiled across the table at Cally and teased the kids with his hand, with which he could convincingly portray a werewolf, a bat, and other diabolical beasts; he had lost most of his fingers in a corn-picker accident as a boy, and apparently had loosened some joints as well, for he could manipulate the stubs in a most ungodly manner. Tammy and Owen never failed to squeal for him.

  “Elmo, stop that,” commanded Ma Wilmore without heat. Her husband’s wing-shaped eyebrows showed him to be a puckish character, and she had known it when she had married him. “Cally, have something to eat. I worry about you. One of these days you’re going to starve yourself into nothing and blow away.”

  Dinner was meat loaf and mashed potatoes and gravy, none of which Cally was eating. She saw the children gulping the food and knew it was tasty; Ma Wilmore’s cooking was always good. She felt the pinching of her empty stomach and her smothered anger. The pain rewarded her more than food would have. She was Cally the Master of her Self, superior to all this. She would never be like these bovine Hoadley women. She would never be fleshy and complacent and gossipy like them. She knew how Mark detested his mother. He would never detest her the same way. She would be thin, a princess, and he would love her.

  Family was family, and from that there seemed to be no escape. But her body was her own. And the more Ma Wilmore urged her to eat, the more politely she refused.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Shirley stood at the fence, waiting—not at all the usual pastime for her, not when she could have been doing something. But there was a waiting feeling in the yellow air over Hoadley.

  She leaned against the house fence: her show-them fence, not an ordinary pasture fence. She had built it out of posts and chicken wire, and the wire served no purpose to keep anyone or anything in or out, least of all chickens—Shirley might as well have put up the posts alone and had it done with, because on the posts were the soul of the structure. Atop each one she had placed a horse: molded plastic horses with their cowboy saddles and studded bridles as much a part of them as their serrated manes and knife-edge tails. Dun, dapple, pinto; wide-eyed, savage-toothed, head-tossing, wildly galloping horses salvaged out of junkyards and attics and weedy back yards all the way from California. Tiny, pudgy, fierce-looking horses little lads had once whooped and bounced on. Shirley had carefully patched the holes in their shoulders and flanks where the springs or the rockers had gone. Elspeth, complaining, had repainted them for her with an expert airbrush. Now they surrounded the farmhouse, five feet in the air, each with a post set in its stretched, flying belly. Beautiful.

  Shirley had gotten the idea from a place she had seen somewhere out west, a shack with cows’ skulls set on each of its fenceposts, alternately school-bus yellow and Rustoleum black. To Shirley the sight had seemed somehow ominous, depressing, tipping the balance of things in the world toward the dark side, and instinctively she had set herself to provide a counterweight. The yellow and black cow skulls had been ugly. Her horses were beautiful. She had placed herself in the line of battle. In her mind, it was that simple.

  She leaned, shoulders against a fiercely galloping little palomino, and watched Elspeth riding her tall red bay mare around and around the training ring.

  Having Elspeth around the place was like having an exotic pet, a jaguarundi. Elspeth wasn’t good for much except to watch. Shirley mostly on her own had built the place up out of sumac and blackberry and scrub cedar, had strung the electric pasture fences and built the ring out of scrap pipe and black rubber mining belts, had scrounged old bathtubs for watering troughs, had dug drainage ditches and hauled hay, while Elspeth sat cross-legged atop her castle and sketched, looking down to where Shirley was working. And all of this was all right with Shirley. She liked to be out in the wind and sun, working, and the harder and heavier the work the better. And she liked having her jaguarundi around, keeping her talented pet who painted in watercolors and acrylics and oils. Docile, adoring, she lived somewhat in awe of Elspeth, wary of her claws.

  She watched the artist ride with somewhat more than ordinary love in her eyes; yet her wide mouth twisted in amusement. Elspeth had got hold of another kooky outfit somewhere. She was wearing some sort of tatterdemalion tunic too big for her, and reddish tights, and soft brown leather boots that came up over her knees to nearly meet the hem of her Robin-Hood top. She hitched at the belt of the oversized thing, trying to keep it under control, while the mare snatched the reins from her other hand, getting out of control in her turn. Elspeth swore like a truck driver, and Shirley’s smile faded as she observed, hoping Elspeth wouldn’t lose her temper with the horse. Elspeth had plenty of patience for her painting, but she didn’t have much for people and animals.

  With a spurt of dust and a clatter of gravel, Cally Wilmore pulled down the lane and parked near the barn. Shirley bestirred herself from her unaccustomed lassitude and headed in that direction. Self-conscious as always in Cally’s presence, Elspeth quieted in mid-curse. A moment later, Gigi Wildasin blew in like an autumn storm in her big car.

  Weekdays, if their schedules worked out, all the women got to ride together without having to put up with the giggling teenagers. Shirley went to catch and groom Shady Lady, her rawboned gray thoroughbred mare.

  From her seat behind the leather-covered steering wheel, Gigi watched Cally walk into the stable and smiled, setting her teeth edge to edge. She knew exactly what Cally was thinking about as she strode along in those pipestem boots. Every time she, Gladys the Happy Bottom, pulled on her skin-tight, buff-colored riding breeches and tall black boots, she felt her own sagging backside ever so slightly begin to swing, her stride lengthen a few arrogant, seductive inches. Gigi knew how Cally walked past her husband Mark on her way to go riding, hoping he would notice. She did the same to Homer, and she could have told Cally it was no use. Men shriveled up to life and love before a woman got well started. But that didn’t stop her from swinging her ass, and she knew it wasn’t likely to stop Cally either. Hers with hardly any meat left on it. Not much bigger than two coffee grains sitting on a yardstick. Little fool, starving herself that way, thinking it would make her man love her. Gigi could have told her the score as far as men were concerned.

  Gigi liked Cally in her callous way. She
thought no more of Homer than she did of his simple-minded hunting hounds, but she liked Cally and Shirley. She was just old-fashioned enough that she would not allow herself to swear hard or to like a man other than Homer, since she was married. But she was allowed to like women. The way people of her generation thought, there was no unfaithfulness in a woman’s liking other women. She wasn’t an innocent like Cally; she understood what Shirley was, and didn’t mind as long as Shirley kept it between her and Elspeth. It was natural enough. Gigi didn’t care what the preachers said; she had watched the horses in the pastures and the dogs in the yards, and she knew it was as natural as the other way. Free thinking, she was, so much so that she had no friends of her own age. So she liked the women she rode horseback with (except for Elspeth; she didn’t think much of a jig who wouldn’t be honest and be a jig); she liked Shirley and Cally.

  And she loved her horse. Only people who have stopped loving their mates and children loved their pets the way she loved that horse. She knew Homer loved his dogs the same way. And she could tell Cally still loved Mark, because Cally didn’t love that sweet little dun mare of hers, Dove. She just rode it. But Gigi could understand that. Gigi didn’t mind using animals, or people.

  She had loved Homer, she recalled, up to a point. Maybe as recently as ten years ago she had still loved him. But like all the men she knew, Homer thought of nothing but his job and his hunting and his beer, and wanted her to take care of the rest. And she despised housework. Lord Almighty, but she detested it, just as her mother had hated it before her, the hatred making a shrew out of Mom when she might have been a sweet woman otherwise.… Gigi would have been glad to take a job. She wouldn’t do nursing; her parents had forced that on her, nursing school, and then turned around and forbade her to take the position in Baltimore because it would have meant leaving Hoadley. Wouldn’t let her leave home—and she had wanted to go to Baltimore, and see some of the world, see the ocean, see the capital. But they had kept her tied to the apron strings. So she had married Homer, and refused the job in the local hospital, and to hell with them.