by Lynne Hugo
“Dad, you know I’ve got to pony you,” I’ll say.
“No need for a lead, Jewel. We’ll be fine.” His hand will be linked, easy, relaxed, on her halter, and her head will be still because it’s him.
“No way, Daddy. Not safe.”
“How about I just give her her head? She knows the way.”
He knows perfectly well that any horse can shy and bolt, even a horse as steady and reliable as Moonie: a snake on the trail, a shiny piece of trail trash raised on a breeze, a deer startled from its daybed at just the wrong time, and he could be thrown. He’ll argue for what I can’t say yes to, so I can’t say no to his riding at all. Sometimes I want to kill him for loving horseflesh more than his own flesh and blood. But then there’s this: I get it. Sometimes I do, too.
Actually, we could just skip the whole heartbreaking trip to the corral and the ride that will leave him with tears in his blind eyes as I bring him back to the house afterward. I already feel love leaching my will from me. I won’t be able to stay away, deny both of us access to the horses, cut from the same cloth as we are, as he knows. He and I know every detail of their bodies, their lives, as well as I know Carley’s. In the end, Eddie will get his way; Mama and Daddy will get their way; Cal will get his way, and I’ll get a truckload of anger and sorrow. There’s something powerfully wrong with this picture. I should have finished my haircut.
“I’ve gotta put these groceries away, Daddy, and make your lunch first.”
“That’s fine. That’s good. That way we can stay out the afternoon,” he says. Like I couldn’t possibly have any plans of my own.
Lean On Me
ONCE I GOT TO wondering if the good a person does counts when it’s motivated by guilt, and then I tried to calculate how much of what I do is purely from love. The figuring wore me out.
Then I backed up and tried it this way: who or what would I throw myself in front of a train to save without a blink of hesitation? Carley. So that’s love, canyon deep and rock solid. Whatever I do for her counts as love, not guilt, even if I am wearing saddlebags of it at the time. I can’t truly say that I feel that way about anyone else. Once I did for Eddie but not anymore. He didn’t even understand the question when I asked, stupidly hoping the answer would be, “You, Jewel. I’d throw myself in front of a train for you,” and that something essential would come back into focus right then and there for us. And I confess, I wouldn’t for my stepchildren. Nor my parents nor my sister. A big heap of guilt there. What I do for them, while there’s love mixed in, is born of obligation and never reaches what I call the Train Standard.
It helped me to get that clear, but it hasn’t erased how easily I feel guilty about Carley. This morning I sent her over to work at Mama and Daddy’s. I think it gives her some dignity to earn what I do for her once in a while. But at the same time, I know that’s not why I did it. Since he came, ten days ago, I’ve avoided Cal as much as I can, going to the farm early in the morning, before he’s up, to organize my parents’ daily care and keeping my evening visits to the sweet safety of the horses. Today, by having Carley do the Saturday cleaning, I save myself from Cal exposure. Carley and Cal have no relationship; she only knows I don’t get along with him. He’ll just be a stranger in the house that she has to vacuum and dust around.
I end up with something I crave and don’t know how to use: free time.
I make iced tea, take it out to the patio, and try to sit in the lounge chair to start a novel Tina at work loaned me two months ago, but I keep looking up and seeing the weeds, how they are strangling the begonias like too many people in the space of a life, no room to breathe. I have to get up and pull them.
The weeds pulled, I go into the house, put in a load of laundry, and come back out to try to read again. The sun has slid southwest like a yolk on a crooked blue plate, and I move my chair out of the shade cast by the wide arms of the white oak. Restless, I fuss that I’m letting this small miracle slip from me. Eddie’s gone to see about moving Rocky in with us and taken Chassie with him; Copper and I have the house to ourselves.
I run a lavender bubble bath and get in with a glass of white wine, and Music To Relax By on the CD player in the family room. Eddie, a good ol’ boy, says he cannot abide that wussy stuff. He plays country music and AM talk radio.
I catch the guilt that runs over and through me like a wily wildcat with sharp claws, stuff it into a box, and tape it shut. I put it out of the bathroom, lie back, and luxuriate. Even through the closed door, I hear it squalling, fighting to get out. Still, I leave it there for a half hour before I get out and dry myself. Dressed again, I pick up the box and my car keys. The box can go in the trunk of the car for now. I have more time before Carley should be finished with cleaning and laundry at Mama’s. I’ll go later to help her clean up after their dinner and check to make sure everything is done right. Afterward I’ll take her to the Stop N’ Shop, load her trunk with groceries, and gas up her car. I worry less when I know she has food. Meanwhile, I’ll get away from the house, where I can’t stop working, and take Copper for a walk. Eddie says I’m addicted to work and don’t know how to stop. He says, “Hey siddown, will ya? relax, your mother doesn’t live here.” It rolls off his tongue like a marble, all one phrase. Of course, Eddie’s the one who keeps bringing more kids into the house, too.
The park has trails through woods, and their deep cool makes me long to be on Spice. Copper, a true beagle quite unfazed by his early obedience training, bays at every wildlife scent and hurls himself to the limit of the leash to track it. Reining him in is constant and tiring, and I remind myself that Copper is always like this in the woods. I brought him because he loves it. I know this by the furious back and forth of his tail, the way his twenty-five-foot extension leash stretches taut, and, yes, I know in advance that it’ll be caught in underbrush again and again, each time requiring that I untangle him. I do it to make Copper happy. If he’s happy, I’m okay.
I blame Eddie, but I repeat my life with my parents. Everywhere.
There’s not a lot of gravel left on the driveway for my tires to bite. It and the dirt beneath are as indistinguishable from one another as an old married couple. I pull up next to Carley’s dented, rusted-out heap. When I come in the front door and stick my head into the living room, Mama looks surprised to see me.
“Thought you weren’t comin’,” she says. “Carley’s here.”
“I heard her car,” Daddy says.
“You hear what nobody else alive hears,” Mama retorts. “Coulda told me. She scared me, showin’ up like some kinda ghost.”
“I know Carley’s here, Mama. I sent her, remember?” Mama looks hot, some of her wispy hair sticking to her forehead like extra veins, although the dusky six o’clock shadows are stretched out on a lovely breeze. She and Daddy both have too much clothing on, Daddy in his tan-and-green plaid long-sleeved fall shirt, completely out of season. They were still in their nightclothes when I was here this morning. Carley should have had them change to lighter shirts. I cross the living room and start opening windows much wider than the inch they’re cracked. “Good grief, why aren’t these open? Carley?” I throw my voice to the bedroom where I assume she must be.
“She’s out in the barn.” Daddy says.
“What’s she doing there?”
“Cal’s out in the barn working on the watering system. I sent Carley out to give him a hand. Hard to fool with the lines and reach for the tools at the same time. You know.”
I breathe in to keep hysteria out of my voice. “Does he have booze or pot? Or anything?”
Mama says, “We told him no drugs, no liquor. Already told you that.”
“You know Carley has a problem. I sent her to work in the house because you’d be right there to see that she didn’t use anything.” As I speak, I head toward the back door, the one closest to the barn.
“Wanna get that system fixed ’fore the horses need it,” I hear Daddy call after me, on defense. “Cal knows that stuff better n’ you
. Knew you wouldn’t give him a hand.”
How long has she been out in the barn with Cal? On my way through the kitchen I see their lunch dishes still on the table. Carley hasn’t cleaned the kitchen, which means they haven’t been given their dinner yet. I fixed it early this morning; all she had to do was heat it up and make them salad. Did she even do the cleaning and laundry? I’m angry enough to pause and shout before I let the screen door bang behind me. “What were you thinking? You didn’t need to send Carley out. What were you thinking?”
But I know what my father was thinking. What he’s always thinking: about what he loves and would save above all.
I break into a run crossing the yard, and my first instinct is to scream Carley’s name over and over all the way like a tornado siren, but I don’t. I want to catch them smoking pot or snorting crack or shooting up whatever poison they’re putting in their bodies, because I know that’s what’s going on. There’s no way my brother is actually fixing the watering system with Carley handing him tools. I know him.
The air conditioner in the tack room is running, so I head for that door rather than the main barn doors, which, had he been working, should have been open to let in better light. I approach the tack room door sideways, then duck underneath the window so that I can get to the doorknob without anyone inside seeing me. Not that I think they won’t be too wasted to fake being sober; I’m hoping to confiscate what they’re using. I don’t want either one of them to have a chance to bury it in the barn like Copper sneaking off with the spoils of a forbidden hunt.
As I flatten my body against the barn siding to slide in with as little warning as possible, a cold bolt of fear enters me. It’s not enough to neutralize the heat of my anger, though. Nothing could be that cold. I open the door and press through, careful to close it soundlessly behind me.
The old air conditioner turned on high combines its noise with the floor fan, which is angled into the barn. Still in the tack room, I work my way over to the open door into the barn and wait a moment, straining to hear voices over the rattly duet. Nothing.
I tiptoe into the main part of the barn. The toolbox is on the floor, open, broken pieces of straw and crushed beer cans around it. I crouch down, give my eyes time to adjust to the charcoal light. Maybe they’ve gone? But no, Carley’s car is here. The barn is cooler than the house, dark and ominous as a cave.
Then I notice: more random pieces of straw on the floor near Moonbeam’s stall. I swing my eyes over to where the leftover bales are stored. One stack is several bales short. I didn’t leave it that way, and I cleaned the whole barn floor when I pastured the horses.
In my mind, a complete picture appears. They are in Moonie’s stall sitting on bales of straw, shooting up. I turn around and here’s my intention, as God be my witness: to get one of the guns out of the tack room from the locked closet and use it to force Cal to turn over his stash. He’ll remember the rifle and pistol are kept loaded; on a farm you want to be ready if a snake or coyote is threatening your horses. Cal knows I’m a good shot, he knows I hate him, and, if he hasn’t fried his last brain cell, he remembers why. I can shoot to wound. It ought to be enough to scare him.
I hear a grunting sound, like they have some of the animals in there with them. The sweetish smell of pot sorts itself through the summer barn air. Then a laugh and the sound of a slap, flesh on flesh, Cal’s voice saying, “Come on, baby,” and her laughter. Outrage thuds in my chest. One more step and I’m looking over the stall door.
I’m looking at Cal, naked and scarred, riding my beauty, Carley, who’s on her back, just as naked, just as scarred. Legs in the air, her hands are on his rear while he thrusts himself up and into her over and over. Some saddle blankets from the tack room—how could I not have noticed them missing?—are underneath them. They don’t even know I’m there until I say, “Carla, get out from under that pile of horseshit,” my voice molten with rage. I let them hear me flip the safety off the pistol and I point it dead steady at what no man wants shot off, which is exposed like a bull’s-eye when Cal pulls away. “Just had to go for it again, Cal? Wasn’t enough to go after your sister?”
Carley rolls on her side, toward me. She looks at my face, she looks at the pistol, and in the slow motion of someone drunk or stoned or high, she looks back at the pistol then at the trajectory. Then she looks at Cal’s dick, which is retreating like a scared puppy. “Not so big and brave as thirty seconds ago, huh, Cal? Doesn’t matter how tiny it gets, I can still blow it off.” Cal starts to cover himself with one hand, and I say, “Oh no, not one muscle. Don’t you move a muscle, Calvin. You get up, Carley. Get your clothes on.”
Carley still has only shifted to her hip and floundered between her elbow and her hands as if her body has been dipped in cement and is too heavy for her to lift. My peripheral vision takes in the straw-bale table arrangement behind Cal, the glass tube there, torn-up steel wool, more beer cans, the ridiculous innocence of pretzels.
“Get out, Carley. Get out now.”
She finally manages to get a knee underneath her, two hands and one foot down, then she uses the stall wall for support and makes it to her feet. As she moves, Spice’s saddle blanket, a brilliant red, catches my eye and sickens me; I bought it new for him a few months ago, knowing the pure scarlet would be beautiful against the black sheen of his coat. Carley knows it’s his. Now though, what’s far worse: in the dim light, my daughter’s upright naked body gleams a sickly grayish white, her ribs countable, hip bones jutting like fins. The piercings that line her ears are largely hidden by the hair that’s fallen free of her ponytail, but everything her clothes have let me miss, I see too clearly. The blackish color at the ends of her fingers is not dried blood, I know that. She hasn’t bitten Cal. But the rest of what I see is not mistakable, not even to a mother who delivers weekly casseroles of hope and denial.
“Carla!” I have to repeat her name to get her to look away from the pistol up to my face. “Carla. Put your clothes on.” It sounds almost gentle as it comes out, but it’s actually a hybrid gurgle of fury and heartbreak.
Glued down, she looks at the flurry of clothing tossed on the plank floor as if it were a nest of snakes. Cal’s things are mingled with hers. I take a couple of steps sideways, crouch down while keeping my aim true, and fish out Carley’s clothes. Hot-pink underpants, black shorts, a black tube top that could pass for a headband. I toss them to her one at a time, and she makes feeble, ineffective attempts to catch them, dropping two out of three. With my eyes and head, I tell her again to put them on, and she begins, clumsily, because she won’t look at what she’s doing, still fixating on the pistol.
“Je …” Cal says, starting my name. He’s on his knees.
My chest and head are swollen with suppressed tears. The pressure explodes. It would be cheap to say I don’t know what happens next or it happens too fast or any of the things they say in courtroom scenes on TV. In a way it’s the truth, but what I really mean is that I stop thinking. “Shut up,” I say, and my voice surprises me again, coming out like an animal snap this time, the syllables grating over my teeth. “Shut up, shut up,” and as I’m shouting now, I pull the trigger, even though, yes, I see Carley stick out her hand, hear her scream, “Mom, no.”
The kick of the pistol stuns me. I can’t remember when I’ve last shot; perhaps it was five or six summers ago when I killed a cottonmouth on a brilliant day at the larger spring-fed pond where the horses drink. It wasn’t like this, here, in the darkness of the barn, this amazement of flash and noise and jolt mixing with Carley’s scream. Stupid and leaden, I first look at the gun—for what I don’t know—then look up to see Carley wobbling at the knees and falling over Cal. There’s blood on her, blood on him, and in the eternity before I drop the gun and run forward, I have no idea where the blood began or where it will end.
“What the hell is this?” Eddie demands through the dog’s cacophony as I half carry, half drag Carley through the door into the kitchen, supporting her with one arm around h
er waist, cradling her, as she gingerly holds the hand that’s wrapped in a third of a roll of paper toweling from the tack room and two purple towels from Mama and Daddy’s house. The towels were blue until Carley’s blood seeped through.
“She shot me,” Carley sobs, stumbling out of my grasp.
Eddie gapes at me and turns on the kitchen light, a sudden glare. “Shut up, Copper,” he shouts, and then, to Carley, “What? What the hell?”
Her face is a smeared red tulip of tears and mascara. She crumples to the floor, supporting her back against the cabinets. Being the mother I wanted for myself, I am pulling clean dish towels from the drawer to take care of her.
“Eddie, listen to me. I need help.”
Carley huddles, moaning, crying, protesting, accusing when she has enough breath for words, then lapsing back into pained gasping noise.
“It was an accident,” I say.
“Not!”
“Oh my God, Carley, I’ve said it and said it. I would never, never hurt you. It was an accident. Eddie,” I look up from where I am crouched over Carley, her wrapped hand in my own while I put more clean towels around it. I don’t dare remove the paper towels, though they’re soaked. Eddie’s face has gone pale in the glare of the overhead light. His eyes are wide with alarm, and when they shift to me, they say, what kind of monster are you?
“Eddie! Please, for God’s sake. Help me. It was an accident. I need you to call Summer Milliner.”
Eddie wipes his face with a big working hand. He used to bite his nails when he was a kid, but he’s stopped that. Still, they are rough and nicked from work, and the right hand he presses on his forehead is cigarette-stained. “Dr. Milliner?” he says.
“Her number is on the list by the phone.”
He doesn’t move, only turns his head a few degrees to look at me sideways. I’m putting pressure on Carley’s wound. “Eddie, just call and ask her to come. She’s a friend. Tell her it’s an emergency.”