Horse

by Talley English

  New

  I want a completely different horse. One that is a different color. One that has a new name. (What would be the point of naming the new one the name of the dead one?) One that is chestnut or dappled; one that is eating an apple, happily dripping apple-scented slobber from its living, chomping, big flat teeth. This one reminds me of the past one, though. No, it isn’t different. Here is the same horse, again, as if alive; he looks the same and moves the same and he smells like dark, like the black moonless heat his living body gave to the skin around my eyes.

  Conversation

  “You loved it?”

  I thought that the artist was talking about Ian, but she meant riding, in general.

  “I loved him.”

  The artist looked confused.

  I said, “He was a horse I loved.”

  Artist

  Anything in particular, the artist asked. The artist wore a brightly colored scarf and I wasn’t too happy with her but liked her price. The artist was chewing gum. It wasn’t bubble gum but she made a squelching sound when I tried to answer. Particular? About his appearance, she said. He had large, round eyes. Most horses do, she said. His personality, then. Every animal has a personality, she explained, as if I would deny it. Did he do anything unique? What was his posture? How did he greet you when you went to ride him? He didn’t like to be caught, I said. He would dribble a line of sweet feed onto the lip of the stall wall along the iron barred window and after he’d finished what was in the bucket he’d nibble his leftovers. Really? the artist said. I nodded. The artist said, Well, I can’t draw that.

  Particular

  Can you describe anything particular? That the horse was from my father.

  Portrait

  The artist’s result was typical. The horse looked too delicate to be strong, and yet too bulky to be balanced. It also did not seem to love me.

  Grief

  Grief is a dead horse.

  The body must be buried where it lies. Who can move the weight?

  Memorial

  And we are standing at the edge of red clay, freshly mounded, and I believe that a once beautiful horse is lying, bloated and disfigured, underneath. Joan begins a song about horses and hounds (and how does she know such a song), and I’ve never heard the tune, but I suppose I’m supposed to connect the march to the death of my animal, his kind eulogized in cavalry songs. The dirt is damp, and the clotted-dust smell familiar. The shining dirt is so fresh that the light seems to bake it, and before it hardens in the keening of voices, I think I might reach slowly down (no one will notice) and push the dirt away with one finger, dig down and touch the rim of his nostril, it must be just an inch or two away, and touch the soft skin, and prick of wire hairs that sprout from the water-soft side of the nose.

  Offering

  The shiny green apple was smooth against my mouth. I took a bite and chewed the tangy flesh, then placed the bitten fruit on the wet, orange dirt (an orange ocean, a green boat, one bite a passenger).

  Jim told me, “The next morning the apple was gone.” His expression asked, How could it? My expression replied, Ian ate the apple.

  Letter

  Dear Grace,

  Death is no longer a secret.

  It was a letter I let slide into the wire trash bin. I didn’t finish it, and I didn’t send it. My friend already understood me. She and I went for walks and didn’t talk much, like we were horses, constantly in motion, because to stop moving means to begin to fail, spirit then body.

  Me, Ian, Robert

  I had a quiet day, and Grace called. By the time we hung up, the light outside the window was darkening. A pile of paper on the floor caught my eye. It was the stack of cards I’d saved. The card from my father lay on top. I flipped it open and read it, then stuck all the cards on the bookshelf between two books. I briefly thought of work and putting in laundry, but then pulled my father’s card from the shelf and looked at it as if it were a photograph.

  I imagined myself and Ian and my father. Ian was a horse who had to do what he was told. He accepted a saddle and cinch of girth, a rider and a metal bit, which rested in the back of his mouth, where he naturally had no teeth. It is as though a horse evolved to fit a bit. Robert was the father that he was.

  Mammoth Cave

  The surface of Mammoth Cave National Park encompasses about eighty square miles.

  Kentucky. I always wanted to take a road trip with my dad. I hoped he’d suggest one. Let me pretend that Dad bought the groceries and I made some mix tapes. We packed spicy beef jerky, turkey sandwiches with mustard, and Frescas for the drive. He drove the interstate. We looked at the scenery. He took Cave City exit. Dad chose the Historic Tour.

  We considered walking the River Styx Spring Trail. I looked around for something I could pretend were coins. (On the path I would have to explain the joke.) Under the earth, in the cave, the ranger who was the tour guide stopped in Booth’s Amphitheater, where Edwin Booth, brother of assassin John Wilkes, had once recited Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. (Edwin is such a better name.)

  “What’s the line about angels?” I asked Dad. He didn’t know what I was talking about.

  We saw an eyeless, colorless cave shrimp and a cave cricket. At the campground, Dad grilled hot dogs and I opened a bag of potato chips and put out the ketchup and mustard and the relish. We ate and talked about what it was like to be in the cave, and the history of what had happened there. I read a poem to my dad and he was interested. None of this actually happened, but the poem was “The Man-Moth,” by Elizabeth Bishop. The original title was misprinted. It was supposed to be titled “Mammoth.” Let me pretend that my dad saw the connection. Whatever it was supposed to be called, I said, I like the line “He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.”

  Spirit

  When I woke, I remembered that my dream had included my father. We were at the barn. My father had brought an apple for Ian, but he didn’t understand that Ian had died. My father seemed embarrassed that he had brought an apple for a dead horse. Charlie, my mother, and I walked to the field. My father couldn’t come with us.

  “Everything looks old,” Charlie said. He said this because all of the colors were sepia tone.

  I pointed to a horse across the field.

  “Look, there’s Ian,” I said.

  He was a spirit. I understood that I couldn’t ride him, but I was glad he was there.

  Tree

  My dream had been about a tree. In the dream, it was an old, tall, and sentient father, a beech with leaves that shone green in sunlight, making a watery yellow patterned canopy that looked good enough to swim in. All of the slim silver trunks near the old tree were its seedlings. I realized it was an intelligent tree and it could speak to me. I was walking toward it, and I was eager to hear the voice of the tree.

  “You can speak?” I asked it, just to be sure.

  It didn’t say anything, but I felt it listened. Nothing else happened, so I kept walking.

  Woods

  I wanted to see the big old beech tree that had seeded the forest with little beech saplings. I walked up the trail my father had bush hogged. It was already growing in. The path was rockier than the others, which was why I liked it. Chunky pieces of white quartz seemed to bubble up through the red clay, as though foam from a receding ocean wave were pinned in place. I remembered that beyond the second bend in the trail the quartz pieces would be bigger. The largest rocks were near the roots of the big silver beech. I was always curious about digging them out, but I never tried.

  I left Barker and Max at the house, which now felt like an unfair thing to do, but I’d wanted to walk by myself. A strong late afternoon sun shone, and I stopped to look around. Beech seedlings were everywhere, some only the thickness of a dowel but several feet tall, bearing their tenuous infancies in competition with one another. The effect of sunlight through so much new green was like b
eing underwater in a swimming pool, I thought, like opening my eyes in clear water.

  I reached the big tree and said aloud, “There you are.” I didn’t feel how I’d expected to feel. The tree was so familiar that seeing it again felt ordinary. It was dull silvered, tall and lovely. I spent a few moments looking up at the branches and the leaves, until I started to lose my sense of place and I had to look down at the ground. It was time to head back. I went down the trail I had just come up.

  Them

  The telephone rang. Susanna answered it. Teagan knew that something was wrong. Then Teagan knew that something bad had happened. Then she knew that her mother was having a hard time telling her. Susanna was standing in front of her. Teagan hesitated, then asked her mother, “What is it?”

  Susanna reached out to her daughter.

  “What is it?” Teagan said again.

  Susanna simply held her arms out and started to cry.

  Teagan took her mother’s hands, closing her arms. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I am so sorry for you.”

  “What is it?” Teagan asked. She felt terrified, but she still didn’t know why.

  Susanna looked at Teagan, her face stricken, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Mom,” Teagan insisted.

  Susanna tried to hold her daughter. Teagan pushed against her. “Mom, please tell me what’s happened?”

  “Teagan, Ian has died.”

  After a moment Teagan said, “Ian?”

  “Joan says he got into the feed room, and he got into the grain bin. He overate and it killed him.”

  “It killed him?” Teagan repeated.

  “He ate so much that he had a heart attack or a stroke. He ate from a new fifty-pound bag. He didn’t stop eating. Sometimes horses don’t stop. They’ll just keep eating.”

  Teagan turned away.

  “Teagan. Honey.”

  Teagan stared out of the window. She could see the roof of the barn. She hadn’t been back to see Ian. She had left him, and he had died. She felt that she wanted to scream, so she kept her mouth shut.

  Both

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Teagan.”

  “Charlie?”

  There was a silence. Charlie didn’t say anything.

  “Charlie, what’s up?”

  There was more silence from the other end.

  “Do you want to talk to Mom?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s Dad,” Charlie said.

  “Dad. You said Dad?” Teagan said. She didn’t want to talk about her father.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dad’s at the hospital,” Charlie said.

  Teagan studied a single square of glass in the window to see what it framed. “What happened?”

  “He’s dead. He died.”

  They were both silent, then Teagan yelled into the phone, “Our father?”

  Charlie said, “Yes.”

  Teagan sat down. “Our father is dead?”

  Charlie said, “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “I want to go to him,” Teagan said.

  “He’s at the hospital,” Charlie said.

  “Let’s go, now. I want to go now,” Teagan said.

  “I’ll come get you,” Charlie said.

  Teagan saw her mother standing in the doorway.

  Epilogue One: Cowboy Party

  I’m sitting on the porch, waiting for Grace to wake up. When I’ve had too much to drink, I wake after a few hours of fitful rest and that’s it. It was the cowboys. The skinny, dusty men who smelled of leather and earth.

  Before driving here, I didn’t know anything about Arkansas. Not the flatness of it, the black soil, or the beauty. Where we are is a plain green valley between two canyon walls. A low stream cuts it in half. I had no idea Arkansas did this, that it canyoned and it valleyed. Grace told me about the canyon, but I was not prepared for how the rock would simply meet the ground, like someone plopped it there.

  Grace mentioned cowboys. I did not picture real ones who herd horses and ride fences and wear the same pair of jeans every day and wear white embroidered roses on the chest of a black western shirt. I did not form in my mind worn cotton, oiled leather, dust from the coats of horses, dust from the grass of fields, and what I did not imagine caught me off guard.

  We arrived late in the day and walked to the lodge to find the office and pick up keys to a cabin. Inside was a dining hall. Grace found the stairs. Downstairs was a game room. A door so plain it might have been to a closet opened. A cowboy walked out. He wore embroidered brown leather boots, and a western shirt with silver snaps; he nodded to us and went up the stairs.

  Grace and I looked at each other. She reached for the doorknob. Behind the door was an office, as narrow as a hallway. Inside were the slim bodies of cowboys, seated in chairs lining the walls. They looked at us. They each seemed to wear a beautiful shirt, and their light-colored jeans were brown with dust along long thighs, and their boots, which I mostly examined because I was too overcome to look at faces, were lovely, stitched in patterns with white thread, or black and decorated with roses.

  I wanted to visit each face, to look into eyes that looked over the Arkansas ground from horseback each day. I wanted to run my fingers over callused palms of hands. They practically encircled us. I tried to keep away from a knee that was nearly touching my leg, in case I caressed it. Grace was between my shoulder and the wall, as if she was using me as a shield. I also wanted to get out of the room, away from cowboys, before I told them all how beautiful they were.

  Grace had said we needed to ask for Jim, but Jim was obvious. He wore a cotton polo with HORSESHOE CANYON embroidered over the pocket. He was obviously used to interacting with guests. He chatted with us and lifted keys off a board, but when I handed over my credit card, he couldn’t get the machine to run, and then the receipt printed as a streak of pink. I started silently counting, a habit I have to overcome nervousness. I thought about what I was wearing, exercise tights and an old windbreaker. I felt as if I was wearing a space suit in front of some self-possessed race of decorated beings. Jim asked if we were going rock climbing. I said yes. Grace said yes.

  Then, to a cowboy shirt, I suggested, “I think it’s supposed to rain.”

  “It’s gonna clear up,” a voice said.

  “I heard it was going to rain,” I said again.

  I don’t know why I disagreed. The cowboys probably always knew the forecast from looking at the sky, or from the National Weather Service. Jim couldn’t get the cartridge to fit, so I said, “Don’t worry about it,” and Grace and I left the office. The game room felt cool. I let out a breath.

  As we were leaving the lodge, a cowboy held the door for us. Before he walked away, he turned and said, “There’s a party tonight. Y’all should come.”

  Grace and I walked on the gravel path in the gray afternoon. I turned to Grace but then couldn’t think of the thing to say.

  “Cowboys,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  We climbed the pine porch steps of the cabin.

  “So we got invited to a party?” I said.

  “We don’t have to go,” she said.

  I said, “Let’s go.”

  Our first order of business was to make coffee, then to lie on the quilted bed, paging through magazines. After the sun set, I stretched and pulled on sneakers and jacket. We walked the gravel road. Through the windows of the lodge I could see families eating in the dining hall, and I caught the smell of beef stew. Grace pointed out lights in the woods. We walked and found an A-frame house fully lit up. From it drifted the garbled noise of conversations happening over rock music. A circle of jacket
s stood around a big fire pit in the yard.