Funerals for Horses (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I glance at Everett, who catches my glance neatly, and I shake my head.

  “I appreciate the offer, Mr. Roanhorse, but my host has asked me to stay until I’m stronger. The battle will be better run a few days down the road. And on foot.”

  “I understand completely,” he says, “and good luck to you.” He strikes up a long conversation with Everett in Navajo, the upshot of which is that Everett gives him one of the bred pigeons to take back with him. He does not seriously begrudge Sam a piece of his good fortune. At least, this is what I hope I gather.

  Everett invites me to sleep in his house, but I say I am happy in my sleeping bag under the stars. I have seen my mistake, and I will pay better attention to the moon and the stars from now on.

  He wishes me a good sleep.

  THEN:

  I knew by the feel of things that I wasn’t home. The physical feel, but there was more. The energy of the people around me. Strangers.

  Here and there Simon. I knew him across the room, who knows how. Smell, maybe. If Grandma Ginsberg had been there she would have said the extra sense provided by the caul. Thank god she wasn’t, though.

  Sometimes Willie. I could smell her perfume. She’d sit on the edge of my bed with me, my head dropped back against her, her arm around my shoulder, brushing hair off my face. She’d bring me an apple or a carrot, which I’d eat only while she sat with me. I suppose she’d been told I refused all other food.

  Then, after a few days, something terrible happened. It all began to come back. Slowly at first, shadows, whispers. But it grew with time.

  It was a bit of a catch-22, I suppose, that the relief of being completely shut down would bring such ease as to open up the door again. Unready to go back, unsure how to cope, I left my eyes unfocused, showed no response to sounds. I heard few sounds, as the other bed in my room remained empty, and no one bothered to talk in my presence, the only exception being Willie.

  She would run a monologue the whole time we sat together, metered words with spaces between, which she did not expect me to fill.

  “Really not my idea of a good plan, all this, but sometimes, what can you do? The better you get, though, the faster we can get you home. Any sign that you could hear me. It would all help. Any kind of cooperation. Even if you stayed pretty shaky, if you could see and hear, you’d be an outpatient again. Tomorrow. Simon sure wants you home.”

  I wondered how much she talked to Simon, and what they shared. I wondered if she was testing to see if I could hear her, or just talking to herself. In retrospect I think she tried to support me in some subliminal way, like a person who reads spiritual literature to a coma victim.

  I felt sorely tempted, sometimes, to answer her, but I liked her too much. Same with Simon. When someone means too much to me, I want to please them. If I can’t, it’s hard to be around them at all.

  Simon came in one day carrying a cardboard sign, with words on it that he’d made from twigs and glued down. He gave me a hug, then set it on my lap and placed my hands on the letters.

  I could see the words, though a bit narrow and shaded, and I could see Simon, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to give it all up yet. So I ran my hand over each letter, one slow step at a time, but I knew what it said.

  It said, We’ll stay together, even when you’re well.

  “What about your wife, Simon?”

  He jumped at the sound, maybe because it was unexpected, or maybe it was too loud. Everything still sounded like my ears were plugged and ringing, and I couldn’t tell if I used too much volume.

  “Can you hear me, Ella?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Have you been able to hear all along?”

  “No, just the last couple of days.”

  “Lots of married couples have parents who live with them, and most of them have children, so why not a sister?”

  “Are you going to have children, Simon?”

  “No. Hell no. Not me. Are you kidding? You wouldn’t have kids, would you, Ella?”

  “I’m not even going to have a husband.”

  “Now, don’t say that. You don’t know.”

  “No kids.”

  “It’s a pact, then,” he said. “No kids.”

  “DeeDee was a pact, too.”

  “Oh, now, Ella, don’t start. It seemed okay at the time, but I think it’s part of what’s keeping you sick. Not every—” But the door snapped shut again. I couldn’t see or hear him, or tell when he’d given up and gone.

  On the day I was released, Willie told me I’d been in the hospital for sixteen days. I was surprised. I’d lost all landmarks of time, and those sixteen days seemed to fill a whole era, like the time it would take to live out a failed relationship or attend high school.

  That was the day the shaking started. I never told anyone about it. Not even Willie. It was a deep sort of a tremble, all the way down in my gut. It wasn’t a scared kind of shaking, or the shiver you get from cold. It was fatigue. Strain. Like the time I helped my father strip all the linoleum off the kitchen floor, and then when I sat down to dinner my hands were so tired I couldn’t hold my fork still.

  At first I shook almost all the time, except in Willie’s room at County Mental Health, where we met five days a week, and in bed at night.

  Later I only felt it when I had to be around real people, and it was important not to be myself, or when Simon saw me acting strange and I had to try to do better.

  A month or so after I left the hospital, Willie and I made a pact. I had more confidence in her, because she hadn’t broken one yet.

  The deal was that she would never give me a hard time about DeeDee, or harp at me that she’s gone, or ask me to give her up, if I would simply accept what was real about her and what wasn’t. I could talk to her and listen to her, but every time I did, I had to understand that she was not really there, even if she seemed to be.

  At first I had to admit that I didn’t know what was real about DeeDee and what wasn’t, but Willie said no problem, I could just act as if I did, and maybe it would get to be a habit.

  “Just practice,” she said.

  After that, every time DeeDee said something to me, or every time I moved over to leave room for her, I’d say, in the privacy of my head: You’re not real.

  It went fine for a while, then I realized she wasn’t arguing with me.

  And my sister DeeDee, if she was real and I said she wasn’t, would have me for breakfast. I’d be just so much dead meat at that point. But day after day I called her unreal and survived. My life got heavier then, and I spent more time in bed. Even dressing and brushing my teeth caused me to tremble from exertion, because I knew it meant I had to go outside, which meant I had to go see Willie, because that’s the only time I ever went out. I didn’t mind going to see Willie, but I minded going out onto the street, and I minded riding the bus. It made my heart pound and my insides feel like a building about to collapse in an earthquake.

  My initial solution came in the form of night rovings, like an owl or a coyote. I had been stagnating in the house too long, and some glowing ball of spirit in me threatened to fade to nothing, and I feared it might be like fire—you need fire to make fire, and you must never let the last of it die.

  I found Griffith Park, at three a.m., a safe environment. It was closed, of course, which meant I almost never ran into anyone, except an occasional pair of lovers, but only occasional. Most lovers preferred ground they didn’t have to reach on foot. Only the animals seemed to move and breathe with me, and although the city lived in lights beneath the hills where I perched, it always looked manageable from the distance.

  Most important was my communion with the moon. As damaged merchandise we had a lot in common. But the moon taught me something, one of those pivotal somethings you tell your poor bored grandchildren when you’ve told them already, except that I’d never have any.

  The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I’d made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never
really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn’t go back, I might as well go forward.

  I tried to pay attention in my sessions with Willie, to see if this revelation brought change. I might have even thrown out a few experimental wanderings, just to see if I was feeling any braver.

  “I’ve been noticing something about my brother Simon. I’ve been staring at him a lot. I think it makes him nervous, but he won’t say so.”

  I stared at Willie, but it didn’t bother her. She wore a pink blouse that day, with a gray jacket over it, and where the pink showed through it looked smooth, like satin. I noticed she seemed relaxed around me, as if talking to an adult. Her eyes eased all the way into calm.

  “What do you notice about him?”

  That was the moment I would have to find words for it, which seemed tricky.

  “You know how if you ask a kid to write a story, the people they create are always missing something? They only do and say exactly what’s necessary for the story. They never scratch their ears with a pencil eraser, or whistle stupid songs, or snap their gum. They never have beer bottle collections or facial tics.”

  “They’re not three-dimensional. Is that what you mean?”

  I sat back and sighed, glancing over her gray shoulder to the horses. Help me out, guys. My brain is handicapped with too many thoughts. I’m too human to say what I mean.

  “I’m not sure who Simon is. I keep watching him, waiting for him to do something that’s pure Simon, and nobody else.”

  “What do you make of that, Ella?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it. That’s why I brought it up. But I worry about him. Mrs. Hurley used to worry about Simon. Did I ever tell you that?”

  Willie raised her eyebrows just the tiniest bit. If I wasn’t staring and assessing, I might never have noticed. I realized later that she could have said, no, you never told me anything about Mrs. Hurley. Not one word. You didn’t even know who she was or what became of her. But Willie was smart.

  She said, “I don’t think so.”

  “The last thing she said to me before she died is that she always worries about the ones who say everything is okay. Don’t you think that’s kind of an interesting thing to say?”

  A little tremor started in my belly, and I set off in another direction, and she let me go.

  She didn’t repeat what I’d said, or rub my nose in it.

  After a few minutes of discussion about my brother Simon, we agreed that I had enough to worry about with me.

  Willie and Simon put their heads together in the fall, and enrolled me in night school. All the other students were grown men and women. Most seemed humbled by the experiences of a high school freshman, and nobody gave me a hard time. In fact, I became something of a mascot with fellow students and teachers, the thirteen-year-old kid who acted and talked forty.

  If they knew that my emotional problems had sent me into their midst, it was never mentioned.

  HAWKS AND RABBITS

  In the morning the air is cool, the ground hard. The sun peers over the horizon with no spoken threats.

  Then, as if looking into a mirror, the old mare comes to bump my face with her muzzle. She’s a battered white paint, short bristly mane, prominent ribs, chocolate patches on her neck and withers. She knows she is at home here, and questions me only slightly.

  I wish her a good morning and run my fingers up her face, into her forelock.

  Everett Ankeah comes out to wish me the same, bringing hot soup and half a wheel of fry bread.

  “So, I see you and Yozzy are acquainted, and I needn’t make introductions.”

  I thank him for the breakfast, and sit up to take the hot soup. I look around me and ask what keeps Yozzy close to home. “I don’t see any fences.”

  “That’s because there are no fences. I don’t fence my wife in, but she stays with me. And if she didn’t, what could I do? All down this road you’ll see signs: Watch for animals. The sheep and horses range free. They know their homes.”

  He sits with me while I finish my breakfast, though there seems nothing more to say. I’m glad for his company, but I trust him to know that.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Everett, that would mean as much as this food means to me?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of work to be done in the diner.”

  I nod my assent without further comment. I’m learning.

  I help Everett throw an old car seat on the back of his truck, with some other trash to take to the dump, and he pulls a knife from his belt, slashes through the naugahyde, and cuts two thick pieces of foam rubber, which we duct-tape to the knees of my jeans.

  “I’ll take the high road,” he says, and we work together on the kitchen area, even as I stay off my healing feet.

  I clean grease off the back of the deep-fat fryer, years of grime from the inside bottom of the refrigerator cases.

  “I see what you mean about the old owner,” I say, and he grunts his disgust.

  We work like this day after day, breaking when May brings food and drink, and at noon for a two-hour nap. We talk little, as little needs to be said.

  On the fourth day, Everett Ankeah says this:

  “I had a strange dream last night. I saw your brother Simon’s camp—a makeshift tent near the mesa. The tent looked like it was made from skin. Like mule deer skin. He had a fire burning in front.”

  I wait to see if he’ll continue, but he doesn’t.

  “Thank you for telling me that, Everett, but it could be symbolic, too. Don’t you agree? Dreams so often are. The skin might be a symbol for the passageway between this world and the next.”

  It surprises me to hear myself say this, but I do it because I don’t dare believe. It’s an old habit, to refuse to hope for the best.

  “Yes, that’s possible. Maybe I’m only wasting your time in telling you.”

  I say nothing. We clean in silence for another hour.

  “One more thing,” he says, “that I learned from this dream. Your guide is not the hawk. Your guide is the rabbit.”

  I laugh when he says this, not at him, or the idea, but at myself, because I should have known.

  “The hawk threw me off,” I say. “By being too helpful.”

  “Maybe you needed something closer to your own ideas.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but I don’t have to ask because he sees the question in my face. “Just as no one likes to think he was a common laborer in a past life, no one wants to take the advice of a lowly rabbit.”

  “I’m all ears,” I say, and he laughs, as though I meant it as a pun, which I didn’t.

  That night, as I tuck into my sleeping bag, Everett squats smoking by the porch and Yozzy sleeps on her feet close by, ears laid back along her narrow neck.

  I face north, and stare through black night at Simon’s mesa. My feet are only the slightest bit better than when I arrived at Everett’s, barely able to take my weight. My goal feels suddenly impossible. Fifty miles might just as well be a thousand.

  Above the mesa, I see the knowing face of the man in the moon, and he makes me cry, because he tells the truth this time, of what he knows. The trip is beyond me.

  Everett must hear me cry, because he comes to squat beside me.

  “You need to leave now,” he says.

  “I can’t walk that far.”

  “I know. I can’t let you take my truck—I need it.”

  “I never meant that you should. And you know I couldn’t find what I’m looking for in a truck.” If I thought I could, I would have kept my own.

  “But I will let you take my horse. She’ll stay with you. She respects you. She’s very old, but if you can find enough water, she’ll take you there. If you survive, and she survives, bring her back to me. If not I’ll say a prayer for you both.”

  When I wake in the morning, Yozz
y wears a leather hackamore with rope reins, and a woven blanket.

  She nudges me insistently, as if anxious to leave.

  THEN:

  I graduated from high school after three years, an example of the reapplication of self. I learned some interesting things there. For example, I learned that restless middle-aged married men will always be drawn to me, almost against their will, like ants drawn to a scoop of ice cream when it’s wasted on the pavement. Grandma Ginsberg’s true flesh and blood, I pulled those strings, received their attention, and gave nothing back, unless my acknowledgment of their attention was all they really needed.

  It seemed an odd lesson in visibility, a subject I knew little about. The more boring the class, the more likely I might turn to catch a man staring at me. I courted attention like fire, fascinated and afraid. I hated it, lured it, played with it, tossed it back. It created a hypervigilance slow to wear away. I was most comfortable when least seen.

  During my three years of night school, I worked days for Lois and Herbie Greenblatt, owners of Greenblatt’s Delicatessen in Hollywood. My job was easy and normally stress-free. Trot to work in jeans, a white T-shirt and a white cap, both displaying ads for my employer. Pick up a paper bag, with a bill stapled on. Or two bags, or three. Stuff them with napkins, extra for the office on Hollywood and Bronson. Run these bags to their destinations, return to find more.

  The Greenblatts liked me, and paid a dollar thirty-five an hour, which I doubled with tips. The customers were friendly because they were hungry, and I learned to run fast.

  On the rare occasions someone gave me a hard time, I became invisible, or sicced Lois Greenblatt on them, or both.

  The time that stands out, a man named Larry in a camera store on Hollywood Boulevard decided I had brought him the wrong sandwich. Four people from his store had ordered all at once; everybody’s order came up fine except his. He said he ordered ham, not corned beef. I shouldn’t have laughed out loud, but if he’d called Greenblatt’s and ordered ham, Lois would have called him a few choice names in Yiddish and hung up the phone. Anybody knows that.