by Lynne Hugo
Jewel took a step forward, zeroing in for closer scrutiny. “You don’t look good, honey. How about I take you someplace. For medical care.”
“I don’t look good? And you just won the Mrs. America contest … Free hairstyling for finalists.” That one cracked Roland up. But Carley saw rather than heard him laughing. There was white noise in her head, like a fan or maybe cotton stuffed in her ears, making her own voice echo.
When her mother spoke, she used that tone like she was talking to a moron. It faded in and out, loud then faint. Wonk, wonk, wonk. “… help … medical care …”
“Right. Like Nadine got. Locked up with a bunch of loony tunes. Not sick, thanks anyway.” Carley thought she might puke on her mother’s feet. Standing up was not what she wanted to be doing.
Roland must have seen it. He looked at his watch. “So, Jewel, if there’s nothing else you want right now, we were just about to go out.”
“Carley …” Carley felt her mother’s eyes, knew she wanted something. That was the thing; her mother always wanted something.
“We’re going out, Mom.”
“Where?”
“Just to see some friends.”
“I brought you groceries. Can you help me carry them up from the car?”
Roland jumped in. “I’ll get ’em.” Jewel started to object, but he waved her off and kept going.
Carley’s mother took two steps forward and put her arms around Carley. “You know I love you. I want the best for you.” If she weakened and lay her head on her mother’s shoulder, sank into the soft embrace that would hold her up, her legs would give out, and she’d crumple. Carley locked her knees.
Jewel was stroking her hair when Roland struggled back through the door. He held two bags and shoved two more inside with the side of his foot. Cans spilled out of one. Carley felt a cross between disappointment and relief as her mother hurried over to start picking up the food.
“I’m glad to see you have electricity right now,” she said, “but none of this will spoil next week when you don’t.”
“We’re fine,” Carley said, afraid to move from where she stood. “I have a job interview on Wednesday.”
“Really …” Jewel said, and although it wasn’t exactly sarcastic, it wasn’t a question either, the way she drew it out. It was more like she was saying, Sure you do. “Where?”
“Lay off. She doesn’t want to jinx it by talking about it, right, baby?” Roland was standing to the side of Carley. She wondered if he realized she was about to keel over. “So, Jewel, we gotta get goin’. Our friends are expecting us and all.”
Jewel ignored him. “Honey …” Carley didn’t look at her mother, but she knew the exact look on her face; she could actually feel it, palpable as cloth, suffocating. “Do you need anything?” Her mother’s voice had lost its challenge and was soft and sad.
“Maybe a little cash for gas. So I can get to the interview.” Roland always wanted her to try to get cash.
“Give me your keys, and I’ll go put gas in it.”
“Never mind,” Carley said. She had to lie down. She couldn’t keep it together long enough for her mother to go and come back.
“You don’t have to stay here. He’s using you. I’ll get you help.”
“Hey, she’s a grown woman. Why don’t you back off? She’s just fine the way she is. Ya’wanna see something that needs fixing? Now that I can show you …” Roland said, loud, pointing at her mother’s head.
Nobody said anything else. Her mother turned to leave. As soon as the door shut behind Jewel, Roland hopped from the floor onto the mattress and jumped up and down, laughing. “Ding dong, the witch is dead. Did you see that hair? She’s round the bend and beheaded herself to hell. Get it? Headed, beheaded?”
Carley dodged his jumping feet and buckled onto the mattress. She felt like throwing up. So tired of feeling bad every time she saw her mother. So tired of it.
Roland came down on his knees next to her. “Hey, baby, you didn’t let her get to you, did you? ’Cause you’re perfect.”
Bloodlines
“JEWEL SWEARS SHE’LL QUIT coming, you know, the agency will have to get a whole new person to take care of us if we let Cal here,” Hack tried softly, Saturday night after they’d listened to the Lawrence Welk rerun on TV.
“She’ll be back, she’ll be back.” Louetta’s voice grated like a lawnmower running over rocks.
“What if you’re wrong? I don’t even know anyone I can hire to do the horses. Chris Hammer’s boy moved t’ the city.”
“Old man, it’s time you think about lettin’ go of them anyway. Time maybe I think about gettin’ rid of ’em.”
“Tell me something. You hated every person the agency sent. If Jewel quits, you gonna start likin’ them? Why we gotta let Cal stay here?”
“You crazy? Seven years since I’ve seen my son and you’re even thinking ’bout tellin’ him no?”
“Seven years there was a warrant for his arrest. Statute’s run out is all. How you know he’s not bringing trouble in his suitcase?”
“The law’s not after him now.” She was starting to raise her voice. If she were a horse, she’d have broken into a trot and be thinking about cantering.
“Hmmm. You know he wants something. Jewel’s good to us. We’re trading something good for a problem.” He was careful not to wheedle, tried to keep his voice calm and smooth as Moonie’s gaits, just make her see the logic of it. If only he could see her face, see how it was playing. To be sure, he’d also like to see if she was winding up to knock him flat. Used to, she’d narrow one eye when she was mad, like she was looking down the barrel of a gun. He imagined she still did. Now he had to listen for danger in her voice and hold very still to sense ominous movement.
“It’s her job.”
“She does more n’ that.”
“Yeah. The damn horses.”
“Not like you were happy with those other ones.” He meant the string of home health aides the county agency had sent before Jewel took the job. Louetta had thrown them out like spat-on crumpled napkins the first or second day they were in the house. But this was the trouble with trying to have a conversation with his wife: there was no sticking to the point. She veered him off every time, like a horse refusing to stick to the trail, just taking his head and going off wherever. It wore him out.
God how he missed running his own life. Once he’d been Hack Wheelock and free to love a good horse, good whiskey, and a good lay. Now he couldn’t get his hands on any of them. He couldn’t see to guide a mount anymore; being ponied behind Jewel was nearly as bad as not riding at all, not that he didn’t beg for the chance. Jewel wouldn’t bring him whiskey when she brought the groceries; she said he couldn’t look out for his wife if he was drunk. He begged to differ, but Jewel was queen of the house now. Just like Louetta was queen of whether or not he got laid, which he didn’t; she’d been too moody for years and was too arthritic now anyway. There was no point in asking Jewel to bring him a prostitute since she was so uppity about a little whiskey.
Come to think of it, Jewel was queen of the barn, too. His barn. He’d taught her everything she knew, and now he was unnecessary. Oh, he missed his life, he missed the old days when he’d turned his knack for horses into a living in every sense of the word. His father hadn’t had the touch for the mares himself and ended up selling racing and show tack that kept him in the horse world. But Hack—known then by his Baptist christened name, Benjamin Woody, had sponged up the obsession and lexicon as a boy from his father and even more from his grandfather, a breeder who put him on a horse as soon as he had the strength to grip with his thighs. It was apparent early that he had the gift his father lacked. As a teenager he’d ridden some rodeo in Indiana, but his mother’s death put an end to that: it wasn’t exactly a big money occupation, and his Dad needed him back home unless he could send money. Kentucky was a racing state, not rodeo, and Hack was a hair too tall and big-boned for a jockey, though he could make it as a trainer.
/>
By twenty-one, back living where he’d been raised on his grandfather’s failure of a farm east of Danville, he worked in the bourbon distillery by day but saved enough on the side to have bought and raised one chestnut Thoroughbred mare, bred her well, and saddle broke and trained her first colt brilliantly before he sold him at a handsome profit. Meanwhile, he had two more up and coming, both fillies, and horse people started to bring him young horses to train. (That first colt he sold had won his first two races out—small stakes to be sure, but it had the sort of out-of-nowhere miracle look that people think is as good as the Rapture.) Hack hired a few hands, redid the barn to state of the art, brought the fences back into repair, and fixed the paddocks. It took a decade, but the place looked like a real horse farm. He was off and galloping.
Along the way he’d married Louetta, mesmerized by the wide, blue-sky roundness of her eyes, the improbability of her perfect gold pageboy, and the way she found him irresistible. For their first date, she tied a short blue scarf around her neck, above a low cut blue top and the cleavage that disappeared into it like hills. He spent most of the evening, watching Spartacus at the Bijoux Theatre, trying to simultaneously sneak his arm around her shoulder and hide his erection. He’d considered The Apartment, over at the Avon Cinema fifteen minutes away, an obvious date movie, but hadn’t been able to resist the horses in the Spartacus ad, and Louetta had shone an engaging smile with mostly straight teeth—the front two like Chiclets—while she said either movie was just fine with her.
Louetta had been happy enough to move to the farm. It wasn’t that she was a horsewoman, which would have made things a lot easier over the years, but it was as good as any of her other choices, which were none. Not that Hack had realized that at the time; to his eye, she was pretty as mid-spring in the Bluegrass Region and could have crooked her finger to have any man she’d fancied. He was short, bandy-legged, and his cologne was Eau de Horse Pee. He couldn’t believe she’d gone out with him, let alone let him feel her up on the second date. They’d married in a hurry, and bang, out came Calvin, a baby who showed up two months before Louetta said he was due, miraculously weighing over eight-and-a-half pounds. That was the first time Hack went blind, before the glaucoma kicked in.
“I can’t say what ruined my life, but it wasn’t whiskey,” he said to Louetta years later, meaning, of course, it was you, an egregious insult because she’d had nothing to do with his glaucoma, which was what had stolen both his livelihood and his glory, being with his horses. This was unusual for Hack; he didn’t usually bite at Louetta’s bait that way. At the time, August heat had gotten to him. That summer had been a killer. Hack worried about whether the hired help was putting enough fly wipe on the horses’ faces. It was before Jewel had taken over. No fretting about such things with her in charge, though he’d a thousand times rather been able to do it himself, just for the love of running his hands over their good heads and talking to each in turn while he wiped them down, kept them damn flies from tormenting his beauties.
“That’s right. I made you go blind. Stubborn old fool too cheap and too stupid to go to a doctor,” Louetta had winged back. The oscillating fan blew across him and then away.
“Too broke to go to the doctor since you spend half your life there.” He knew better. Besides, silence was best because it drove her insane. He’d pulled his handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and neck.
“Oh, that’s right, I made up being crippled. It’s in my mind. I forgot about that.”
She’d had a lot to do with everything that went wrong because of her continual yammering. Whiskey might have been involved, too, but he didn’t blame himself for that. Having children hadn’t helped. They were just bewildering. Their boy sprouted wild hair on his ass before he got any on his chin. Cal was trouble from the word go but all handsome charm to talk his way out. According to Louetta, Jewel was one lie after another without the charm, making up complaints about Cal out of sheer jealousy, and, oh Lord, Hack had to agree that child’s looks were something sad: a pudgy giraffe (height from Louetta’s father; Cal got it, too) in glasses, hair almost short as a boy’s. Louetta gave Jewel chores to teach her responsibility—which worked out just fine for Louetta, Hack noticed. She said Cal was well-liked. And he was; anyone could see he had a following. But the way Louetta took Cal’s side on everything? Hack didn’t know what that was about.
Louetta said Cal and Jewel looked so different because Jewel took after his side of the family, Cal more after hers. As they grew, it seemed Cal had more knack for people and Jewel for horses, so he supposed she was right. He remembered one time the doctor told Louetta that Jewel seemed depressed, and they should get her some help. Louetta said, “I’ll help her all right,” and grounded Jewel for lying to the doctor. Cal got arrested three times that year. Underage drinking, driving without a license, pot and LSD. And after Jewel was gone and Nadine started with the pot in her early teens, well, he guessed maybe she and Cal must be cut from the same cloth. At that point, he didn’t know what Nadine looked like to compare their looks, not that he was much given to analyzing his children. Having lost his eyesight, what he thought about was ensuring he didn’t lose booze, too. One thing Hack could count on Cal for: a steady supply. All it took was cash. They understood each other that much.
But that was then, this was now. He might be a blind man, but he wasn’t blind, so to speak. Cal and Nadine were much as they had been as teenagers, but Jewel was a diamond. What would he do without her? How had his life—well, his and Louetta’s both, he guessed—turned out this way? It wasn’t something he could stand to think on, the unfairness of things. When Jewel said she’d quit if they let Cal come home, he had a bad feeling she might mean it. Cal was a ne’er-do-well, for sure, and Hack was willing to say no drugs, even no alcohol in the house, now that he’d been dry this long. Maybe that was it: Jewel figured Cal would get Hack himself back on the bottle. But if he tried to say Cal couldn’t come, Hack knew damn well that Louetta would start running over his feet with her wheelchair and hiding his cane, to say nothing of the relentless word assault that would make him long to overdose on anything. Except he couldn’t. Jewel had taken all the drugs and put them up; she counted them out into little paper cups for them each to take at the right times. His cups were plastic and Louetta’s were paper, so he never got confused again and took Louetta’s pills by accident, which he’d done once. Just one of his many mistakes, he supposed. He just never knew at the time when he was making one, that was the damn thing.
Both my arms have grocery bags in them, and I’m tilting like a loose saddle, trying to make it to the kitchen counter without spilling anything. Mama and Daddy haven’t said a word about Cal since last week when I said my piece as if I mean to act on it, which I do. The tension has been thick as the bean-and-potato soup Mama used to give us too many nights.
“Sorry I’m late.” The groceries thud, one bag tips, and celery and toilet paper roll onto the chipped yellow Formica.
“Shoulda made two trips,” Mama says. She’s in the kitchen playing inspector, as usual.
“You’re welcome.” With effort, I keep my voice light.
“It’s your job.”
“Doesn’t have to be,” I hit back.
“Lou. Quit.” Daddy’s voice cuts between us, a skinny referee separating heavyweights, from out in the living room. I wouldn’t have guessed that he was listening or paying attention. He goes right on before Mama has a chance to ignore him. “Jewel, what’s it like outside?”
“Hot, Daddy. Pretty, but hot.”
“I’d like to get out to see our beauties. You take me? Get up on Moonbeam, work her out a bit?”
“They’re pastured, Daddy, getting plenty of exercise on their own.”
“You know it’s not the same as being ridden.”
“I’ve got all the laundry to do, and—”
“It’s been a long time,” he says, and it’s the lack of self-pity in the way he says it that
makes it pitiful.
“Well, Daddy …”
“Don’t like to bother you.”
I’ve been half calling from the kitchen, not that it’s far, where I’m unloading the groceries, but now I actually walk into the living room where he’s sitting in his chair. He’s got his boots and jeans on in spite of the heat. Dressed to ride. Seeing that, I get a sick feeling of doom. I try anyway. “It’s really not a good day. And it’s going to get even hotter, too. Maybe we should wait till it’s cooler?”
“Already been waitin’,” he says. There’s no wheedling in his voice, but it’s soft and sad as the petals of the old roses, frowsy and fading now, along the board fence near the road.
When I got up this morning, Eddie started up with me about how we needed the money. I nursed my anger at him while I did the grocery shopping for Mama and Daddy, figuring I’d need it—armor, so to speak. I was right, but it’s not enough: I won’t be able to turn Daddy down. He won’t have to fake what it means to him. He’ll touch and call each horse by name without my telling him which is which. When he had his sight, he used to close his eyes as he worked his fingers down each leg, feeling for hot spots. His eyes will be perfectly open and at peace as he does it now. Each horse will lift every hoof in turn when Daddy caresses down a cannon and taps a fetlock, letting Daddy rest it on his thigh and use the hoof pick by feel and memory.
“Moonbeam, my Moonie,” he’ll croon in the leopard Appaloosa’s ear like a lover while he brushes her neck. “How’s my sweetheart?” Moonie’s coat is white, randomly dotted with many black spots, and her mane and tail stark black. Her nose is that mottled pink, characteristic of the breed, and she is a beauty. It kills Daddy that he can’t see her striped hooves anymore. The mare will nuzzle Daddy’s face, and he’ll feed her the sugar cubes that’ll be stuffed in his pockets until he starts working on me to tack her up so he can ride.