by Lynne Hugo
“Oh damn. Oh, Mama.” She’s crying. I lean over and gather her in my arms.
“Who did this to you?” she says, struggling to get her hands up to the sides of my head. I twist my neck to avoid the contact.
“Nobody, Mama. I did it myself.”
“I don’t believe you.” She’s sniffling, face pressed on my chest like an oversized peony. I’m bent at an awkward angle, and my back hurts, but I keep squatting and holding her while she cries. “You’re protecting somebody. Eddie didn’t do this. He loves your hair. Wasn’t Carley, was it?”
“Mama, I’m always protecting somebody. Except this time.” I smooth her hair back from her forehead.
She uses the rare moment that I feel tender for her. “Your brother’s coming home t’ see us. It’ll be—”
I jerk away, and Mama’s head bounces.
“No. No way. No way Cal is coming in this house. Not while I’m doing the work here. No.” I say as I unfold, and then I’m fully upright, towering over her. I’m not shouting, but my voice is loud. I’m five-nine barefoot, over five-ten in my boots, and willing to put every inch and decibel on the line right now to stop this.
“What’s going on in there?” Daddy calls, turning his head toward us. I can see him through the hallway that leads into the scrubby living room.
“Nothing,” Mama calls back. “Just talking ’bout her hair, that’s all.”
“Daddy! Do you know about this? About Cal coming back here?”
He doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
“Daddy? … Daddy!”
No answer.
Too stung, I don’t go in to challenge him. Instead, I aim at Mama. “I moved in to take care of you after he got in trouble—again. He ran off—again. What has he done for you?” I feel my face reddening in anger. Cal used to tease me without mercy about it.
“Oh here she goes,” Mama says, switching from pitiful to disdainful. “Seems to me you moved back out when it suited you. What’s the difference? Cal’s got his life to live.”
“That’s the point. I haven’t gotten to live mine. I’ve been taking care of people, including the two of you. Or haven’t you noticed I’m here twice a day?” I start to go on but feel tears coming up behind my eyes and harden my face against them. “I’m going to the barn now.”
“Daddy’s hungry,” Mama says to my back.
“Guess you should have waited to mention Cal till after your faces were fed then.” From the refrigerator, I take four big carrots, their long green graduation tassels flopping, stuff my shirt pocket with sugar lumps, and let the screen door slap shut behind me. Daddy can find cold cereal to tide him over. Mama is likely talking about herself. They’re both wanting the hot breakfast I cook them on weekend mornings: pancakes and sausage or bacon and eggs and hot muffins. Those nights I cook a full dinner, too, everything they like from the old times. Tonight they’d been going to get chicken and dumplings.
Once I am outdoors in the rinsed-off sunlight, I stand and breathe in, breathe out, trying to slow my heart. My father won’t stand up for me, but for him I regularly give up the time I might have for myself to put him on Moonbeam. I ride Spice and use a lead rope to pony them down an easy trail over the creek crossing and back, talking all the way, telling Daddy exactly where we are on his own land and what it looks like. Lately he wants to hear about the soft magenta bloom of the henbit and the school-bus yellow of the black mustard in the pasture before he asks me, what about the nettle, and I have to say, yes, it’s been as purple as ever this spring, yes, the color of that awful Easter hat Mama had back in ’71, and he laughs the way he always does and reminds me that’s why he really went blind. He listens for the bluebirds and chuck-will’s-widow’s mating calls, then nods as hoof sounds change from bluegrass pasture to soft dirt to clanging on stones. He discerns the amount of water in the wide creek by its rush or trickle, how his horse moves through it. There is light in his eyes, almost as if he can see the cattailed ponds and open sky of our pastures, the stippled forest trail, the great blue heron we startle up over the singing little river. I could trot, canter, let Spice gallop the open pasture like the Arab he is, instead of staying in a slow walk, but for my father I try to forget how perfectly I can make my body move in concert with my horse. I even give up paying attention to the feel of the reins, the smell of neat’s-foot oil lingering on the saddle, to focus completely on him. In the saddle my father recognizes himself, and, yes, now that he needs me, he thanks me out loud. But he won’t do what would count: he won’t stand up for me.
The tack room is at the very end of the barn; it used to be the barn’s business office, too, when I was a kid. I open the outside door and, without entering, pull a hoof pick and a curry brush off the tool shelf, and one halter from a hook, then go through the corral and front pasture gate and start walking. Good, loyal friends, all four horses are already over the rise. Charyzma, as usual, is a few steps in the lead. She’s Daddy’s tall bay Thoroughbred mare, a beautiful jumper although Daddy had hoped for more speed back when she was his last best hope as a breeder. When I see them, I can’t hold tears in.
“Hey, my boy. Hey, good girl. I’m sorry. No grain today. I’ve got carrots, though. Here you go, baby,” I say, feeding each of them. Spice wants Moonbeam’s. Moonie is Daddy’s sweetheart. I think the black spots dappling her white coat were one of the last things he could distinguish. Or wanted to. “Hey, back off, you had yours,” I whisper, nuzzling my face against Spice’s. Not that he holds his head still for long; they rarely do. Instead he searches my shirt pocket for sugar. Charyzma shows more patience than I’d ever expect of a Thoroughbred. She lowers her long neck for the last carrot. She has a soft mouth. I think of how Daddy never used anything but a rubber D-ring snaffle bit on her, but that was his favorite anyway because rubber is softer than metal, and the joint in the center keeps pressure off the horse’s tongue. Daddy never believed in pain or fear as the way to train a horse. His time and kindness were what they got from him, no matter how much rearing or bucking a skittish colt did at first. Of course I was jealous.
Now I slide the halter on Red, a smart, bombproof red roan Quarter Horse, a sixteen-hand gelding with a white blaze and socks. I brush him thoroughly—which I’ll do to all the horses as a way of checking them over and loving their whole selves—then lift the first hoof by running my hand down Red’s cannon and tapping his fetlock lightly and saying, “Give me your foot.” Old images come to me as if a tumbler of time has been upended. I balance each of Red’s hooves on my thigh in turn. Use the pick to clean around the shoe to the bars, sole, and frog, get out whatever he’s got stuck in there. Packed manure, glass, a stone: any of it can make a horse go lame. I cry over what’s stuck in me for which there is no pick. If you look up trouble in my dictionary, it will say, “Cause of misery. Synonym: Calvin.”
From the time we were growing up, Cal has had Mama bamboozled. I can’t remember a time he didn’t light her face with his handsome smile and lie so convincingly that Jesus would have taken down his every word as gospel. Then out the door he’d go with his pals while Mama would plop herself in front of the TV and complain. “Jewel, I’m so tired. You see to the kitchen and get the laundry put up.” Or she’d head to the bar after Daddy and drag his butt home but not before she’d had herself a couple. Not that she ever drank the way he did and not that it kept her from complaining about how he put it away.
It was no secret Cal was her favorite child. Daddy didn’t play favorites, though that was possibly because he didn’t pay attention enough to have one.
“Okay, boy, okay. Wait your turn,” I say, scrubbing Spice’s forehead where he likes to be scratched. He’s a bit over fifteen hands, a registered half Arab (the other half is Quarter Horse), a gelding, all black. He has the calm gentleness of a Quarter Horse, yet the short back conformation and dished nose of an Arab. And the big eyes. A quick study, what makes him unique and beloved to my heart is how hard he works to please me; he’s all mine and he knows i
t. I always slip him something extra. But he’s a horse, not a child, and I truly love the others, too.
The older we got, the worse it got. I worked with Daddy in the barn as much as I could, because he’d occasionally say something to Cal like Oh lay off the girl, you’re giving me a headache before he turned his mind back to the horses, and then Cal would flick me with a finger but quiet down. Cal’s friends wore their hair in ducktails and rolled cigarettes into their T-shirt sleeves. They got girls to go to second and third base. Home runs gave them bragging rights all over school. This took each girl by outraged surprise since the boys swore faithfulness and secrecy. I was all height and knees, with the fashion sense and budget of a land snail, so I didn’t worry much about being their target. I’d found a way to be happy: the horses. We had six back then. They were the horses I learned with—how to saddle break even terrified green colts like a horse whisperer—with kindness. Daddy taught me, and those days I felt like I had a real parent. He saw I had the gift; it was my one claim to his pride and signs of affection. I drank coffee with him in the tack room through summer mornings. There was always a pot going there: strong, bitter, burned-tasting. He kept the radio on a country station, and we both wore Western hats and boots around the barn. An aging professionally painted sign over the tack room door read:
HACK’S STABLE
Thoroughbred Breeding, Training
Lessons, Guided Trail Rides
English and Western Pleasure
Daddy saw a way for me to bring money into the family, so he bought a couple of school horses. He wanted me to give lessons to children. Then, when Daddy turned the most of the business over to me, I was the one to take customers out on guided trail rides. That meant more income to the stable. I guess that by then it had started occurring to Daddy that his dream of really making it as a Thoroughbred trainer was headed for an early death. Or it didn’t. He never said, but by then there were rarely more than one or two horses he was training for other people at our farm—just enough that he could teach me what he knew. He knew everything but how to stop. I got pretty good at covering for him, but Daddy’s drinking likely messed with his reputation.
By the time I was slowly taking over, our Thoroughbred breeding was down to what came out of one mare, Hannah’s Fine Ride. Hannah was by Fritz ’n’ Thunder, who’d missed taking the Preakness by a nose; Charyzma was her foal, born after I got married the first time. Daddy kept Charyzma, convinced she could produce champions down the road, that’s how perfect she was. Maybe she’s a little nervous, but Thoroughbreds are like that. She was lamb-gentle, just easily spooked, like her mother. Daddy had only been able to get Hannah because she’d been injured during training for the Derby as a three-year-old and was unfit to race.
Cal was supposed to muck the stalls, but he’d have left the horses in shit up to their chests and found a way to get away with it. I did it, and spent hours braiding their manes and tails, an excuse to stay with them longer. Right now I braid Spice’s tail, slowly, combing and dividing the sections over and over as if they were past, present, and future and I could weave them together in some coherent way.
I had reason to dislike Cal. Even hate him. I kept clear of him, enough that I didn’t know he was messing with drugs. If I’d paid attention, I could have figured it out. The truth is, I did everything I could to avoid him.
Until he came into my room when I was asleep. He was drunk and he was high. He’d closed the door to keep the darkness in; my shades were down. He said nothing. I fought, first to consciousness, then to make my arms and legs thrash, as if terror were water and I was drowning. Swim, swim, fight, breathe, scream. I opened my mouth, sucked in air to scream. The weight of his hand moved from where it was squeezing my breast and clamped over my mouth. His other hand was pulling my nightgown up. His knee forced my legs apart amid a chaotic tangle of sheet and struggle.
Spice twists his head as I comb his mane. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Good boy, good boy,” I say, even though I know he’s just getting impatient with being fussed over. But I’m remembering how I twisted my head, and though Cal clamped down, his hand slipped, and I had a chance. I jerked up enough to bite down with all my strength on the web of his thumb. And I didn’t let go. He yelled, and it was then that I knew it was Cal. I still didn’t let go. I tasted his blood. Cal was the one who lost that time. He was just over seventeen. I was sixteen. Nadine would have been eight.
“If you don’t want anybody in your room, lock your door. Don’t blame Cal if he has a couple and gets confused where he is. Grow up, girl,” Mama interrupted me when I told her he’d been high and came into my room. “You stay here and watch Nadine. I’m goin’ up to fetch your father b’fore he can’t find his way home.” I argued back, trying to tell her the rest. Suddenly she shut her eyes, tears leaking out from under the lids, and, like a child, she stuck her fingers in her ears.
“Cal’s a good boy, Jewel. He’s a good boy, a good boy.” It was nearly a chant. She was begging me. The knowledge would either destroy her or she’d make it my fault and destroy me. How could I go on? I stopped.
When I come back in the house, the happiness the horses give me doesn’t last this time. I scarcely speak to Mama and Daddy while I cook their breakfast, vacuum, change the bed linens, and start the laundry. Yet I’ve calmed myself with the horses’ sheer great being, which is a presence difficult to explain. I talk to them, and they pay complete attention at the same time they pay none at all, if that makes any sense, which I don’t suppose it does. It’s as I imagine God. They look at me the same way whether I’ve been a fine human being or petty and angry that day. Nothing interferes with being accepted into the purity and stillness that hovers around them. There’s a great comfort in it.
“I’ll be back to fix dinner,” I say as I get ready to leave. There’s no cheer in my voice, but I’m not surly either. Daddy’s back in his chair, where he’ll be until Mama gets out the lunch I’ve arranged for them on the center shelf of the refrigerator where it’s easy for her to reach. Balogna and lettuce sandwiches wrapped in plastic, chips already on the table, plates and napkins laid out. Daddy can reach the ice with Mama directing him, and she can open their Cokes. During the day, Mama gets herself on the toilet with the help of the handrails installed on the walls of the bathroom. She claims their functioning is due to help from her collection of angels arranged all around the living room, including the top of the television, which is always on. I want to smash them, those guardian angels, fakes, every last one of them.
“We need lightbulbs,” Daddy says.
“Says the blind man,” I mutter under my breath. “Otherwise you might not be able to see where you left the car keys. Or have trouble finding the door to let Cal in.” Aloud I say, “Okay, I’ll put lightbulbs on the list. Anything else … Mama?”
“Don’t need lightbulbs. Gettin’ low on deodorant,” she says.
“Okay.”
This is no traditional Kentucky farmhouse. It’s an old undistinguished ranch-style house. The furnishings are getting threadbare, the decor was tacky to begin with, and now it practically shouts its age: where there’s carpet, it’s olive shag; where there’s flooring, it’s tan linoleum, cracked and sad. I’m standing at the door looking back into the living room at Daddy who is staring at the television, and I’m thinking how senseless and stupid it all is: a blind man ordering lightbulbs and watching television. I’m thinking about how Cal can just decide to show up after all these years, and Mama will wheel right on over to make room for him. I close my eyes a moment. Then I walk into the living room, turn off the television, and plant myself in front of it. Daddy objects, and Mama swings around to see what’s going on. Before either can get going, I say, softly, “Listen, both of you. Consider this business with Cal, because I mean it. If you let him stay here, I’ll quit. I may not have finished cutting my hair, but I will finish this.”
Then I turn the television back on and go out the front door into the noon sun, my car keys
jangling from my hand like they’re my every nerve.
Eddie and I are sitting outside on our patio after I’ve cooked dinner for Mama and Daddy over there and again here for us. Eddie’s probably thinking I should be grateful because he grilled the meat and carried dishes. Big deal. Right now, he should be grateful I am unarmed.
“Jewel, what has come over you?” he says after I tell him about Cal coming back and my threat to quit. “First the hair and now this. Maybe we should get you to a doctor, honey. I mean, maybe you need some of that medicine they give people when their mind sort of goes south. You know—a breakdown.”
“Eddie, I am not having a breakdown.” I lean my forehead into my two hands, feeling the burn of tears coming on and not wanting to give him evidence he can use to have me committed. “I asked for your support,” I say, looking back up at him.
“I am being supportive.” He lifts his big hands palms up, like a shrug, a gesture he makes often for emphasis, though other people use it to express doubt. It’s one of the things I once found intriguing and original that irritates me now. He’s a bearlike man, not fat but tall and square, nothing subtle about his face or body. Of course, being gangly as I am, I thought I needed a big man. Or maybe I didn’t think at all. Somehow the choices in my life just made themselves, dragging me along behind them. I look the dragged-along part now, that’s for sure. I was pretty once. Why didn’t I realize that before it was too late and gone? Eddie looks like what he is: a factory supervisor, promoted from the floor, still in his baseball cap, T-shirt, and jeans. Buzzed brown hair graying around the edges, dark-eyed, thick-browed, thick-necked, working on a paunch but not there yet.
Eddie’s a man who tries, but his trying only goes as far as he can see, and he needs glasses in the worst way.
“This is Cal coming. Cal.” I stare at him through the twilight, which is leaching the color from the yard. “Before we got married, you said if you ever met him, you’d beat the shit out of him for what he tried to do. And for getting Nadine hooked, too. Remember?”