When Horses Had Wings

by Diana Estill

  FIVE

  Birthing a baby was a bit like celebrating Christmas; afterward, it was difficult for me to wind down from the mental overload. Alone, pain-free, and exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. Possibly I was too hyped-up on hormones. However, I suspected it was something more like maternal love. Lying in the dark, I marveled at the miracle that had taken place, the awesome, unyielding power of creation—of motherhood. I had gained a knowledge that couldn’t be taught and experienced emotions I hadn’t known existed. My life had changed in ways I couldn’t yet fathom. Had my mother and every other mother on the planet undergone this kind of transformation? All I knew was that if Momma had felt like this on the day I was born, from what I could tell, the spell hadn’t stayed with her very long. Or maybe Ricky’s arrival had broken it.

  A lighted bank sign pivoted outside my hospital window, inviting trade at an absurd hour. I focused on the red neon glow and thought about the coming day. When the sun rose, people would enter that bank. None of them would know that I had been there all night, steadily watching and eagerly waiting for them to arrive. I needed to see that sign to prove that I was still in Limestone County and to confirm that, despite my current state, the outer world and what kept it divided hadn’t changed.

  Inside the hospital muffled cries originating from the nursery filled my room. That’s my baby, I thought, hearing his distinct vocals. That one was mine. On the farm, I’d learned how an animal’s brain was imprinted by the first sight of its mother. In much the same way I’d been imprinted by my baby’s initial sounds. I needed no one to tell me which cries were his.

  What color were his eyes? I squinted and tried to remember. Blue? His hair? Did he have hair? His grapefruit-size head had felt dewy and warm against my chest. His miniscule fingers had clung to my gown. Instinctively, that small oval mouth had searched for me before the nurses had whisked him away. Why hadn’t they let me hold him a bit longer? Was something wrong? He’d been born three weeks early, and he’d weighed a scant five pounds. “A lightweight,” the doctor had said before giving one of the nurses a suggestive nod. What code had been hidden within that gesture? Like some kind of inside joke, the RNs had both seemed to understand. Whatever it was, they hadn’t let me in on it. Why was I, the mother, left out?

  My baby would be all right. He had to be. I’d accept nothing less. For him, I’d endured unspeakable punishments and put up with all manner of stupidity. If a reward was to be had, he was it. Thinking of him heated me through, filled me with rapturous feelings, and renewed my hopes. No longer did it matter that I was homely or uneducated or neglected, because I was that child’s mother. And that, alone, made me someone significant.

  ~

  Maybe folks without insurance recovered faster than those who had hospitalization coverage. That was all I could figure. Twelve hours after giving birth, I was released from Limestone County Memorial Hospital—without my baby.

  I’d named our son Sean in honor of his Irish heritage and a James Bond actor that I found particularly handsome. Sean looked as perfect as morning sunshine on a field of winter wheat. Though I’d suffered fears to the contrary, I’d produced an exquisite baby. If only he would eat. My nurse said it was a common condition in “preemies.” But I thought maybe Sean had enough of Kenny in him to make him want to go back to sleep and be left alone.

  Nothing about my pregnancy had gone the way it should have. Now our son had arrived too early, before we even had a crib for him to sleep in. However, as it turned out, it would be a while before I needed to worry over that.

  Neta Sue turned downright hostile after being left out of her first grandchild’s birth. But what had she expected me to do? Get up off of the delivery table, ask the doctor for a dime, and waddle to a pay phone?

  Instead of being angry with Kenny, she’d blasted me. “You’d think the least you could have done was call me when you checked in.” She didn’t say, “Hello. How are you feeling? What a beautiful boy!” or anything the least bit courteous. To boot, she’d entered my hospital room carrying a sawed-off milk carton stuffed with chicken wire and filled with artificial flowers. Her floral arrangement appeared even more bizarre than her behavior. How, I wondered, could anyone be so insensitive to a woman who had just given birth? And where in nature might anyone actually find blue roses?

  Neta Sue never liked much about anyone. Sometimes I wondered if Kenny’s father might not have run off at all. Possibly one day his femur bone would surface in Neta Sue’s flowerbed. As conniving as she was, I put nothing past her. To hear her tell it, she was superior to everybody, from pediatricians to the President. No one but her could do anything right. Nobody except maybe Kenny. So knowing Neta Sue, I expected she’d find some way to blame me for Sean’s extended hospital stay, a setback that guaranteed he’d be a bottle baby and we’d be indebted for years.

  Initially I’d planned to nurse Sean, not so much because Neta Sue had told me how much better this was for babies but because Kenny had stubbornly insisted upon it. He wasn’t about to get stuck buying baby formula. “That stuff’s more expensive than gold,” he’d declared. “I could buy a set of mags and a CB radio for what six months’ supply of formula costs!”

  Kenny knew I hadn’t been keen on nursing. My breasts had always been tender and sore, even when I wasn’t pregnant. The thought of having my delicate glands gobbled at by a hungry infant, someone who didn’t understand the word ouch, terrified me. Besides, I’d seen what all that pulling did for a cow’s udder, and I hadn’t found it too becoming. Now it looked as though my nipples had been saved, but those auto accessories Kenny had been eyeing had moved farther beyond his reach. And Kenny didn’t deal well with being told he couldn’t have something when he wanted it.

  “Wha’da ya mean?” he yelled the day Momma brought me home without Sean. She’d dropped me off at my front door and then hurriedly left so she could be home when Daddy came in from work. “How long is he going to be in that damn hospital?” Kenny asked.

  “I don’t know. They said maybe as long as two weeks.” I lacked the strength to offer any more of an explanation than what should have been apparent. His interrogation threatened to choke the life out of me. I’d grown numb. My insides felt empty and hollow. How would I survive being separated from my baby for so long?

  All of my hopes for a better life lay packaged inside a shoebox-sized bundle stored beyond my reach. I’d been separated from the one person who was supposed to love me no matter how grave my flaws. As I stood there arguing with Kenny, it seemed as if Sean might have been a hallucination. I pressed my hands to my swollen breasts and felt the wetness between my faded T-shirt and fingers. The faint smell of lactose and talcum powder reassured me it hadn’t been a dream.

  “Two weeks!” The whites of Kenny’s eyes grew crimson. “And how much goddamn money is that going to cost us?” His gaze shifted from me to the floor and then to the dish strainer where I’d set a case of baby formula. For no reason that I could see, the hospital staff had sent me home with a free supply of Similac and a grocery bag filled with four-ounce glass bottles. He’d spotted both.

  “I tode you— Tell’em you’re gonna nurse.”

  When Kenny was mad, some of his “L”s disappeared, leaving me, often at very inappropriate times, to think about an amphibious creature.

  “I did tell them. What do you expect me to do?” I cupped my hands to my breasts. “You want me to nurse a baby from twenty miles away?”

  “You did this deliberately. Whore.”

  Like some sort of psychomaniac, he darted from room to room in search of his car keys. Finding them, he raced out the door, shouting, “You damn sure better hope I calm down before I get back.”

  I heard Kenny rev the Fury’s engine several times before its tires gave a spin. Rock cinders flew and popped against the car’s metal chassis. That caused me to remember that Kenny still owed his momma fifty bucks for the retreads he’d just put on the vehicle. Now that we had to pay for Sean’s extra hospital bills, we’d
probably never have the money to repay her. But she wouldn’t care. She’d interpret our delinquent debt as proof that Kenny, unlike his father, still needed her.

  As the sounds of rage dwindled in the late afternoon air, I faced my emptiness, no more alone perhaps than I’d ever been. Abandoned. Confused. In need of a womb where I myself might crawl back inside and await better times—if ever there would be any.

  From my bed, I stared into our box window fan and watched the blades turn. Round and round the propeller spun, churning air, yet making no real advance.

  Mesmerized by the flickering fan motion, I let my thoughts wander. I envisioned Sean’s tiny head. Like some kind of perfect pearl, it seemed impossible that it could have ever formed inside of me. Sean was a beautiful baby, despite my being half-responsible for his looks. He had the complexion of a new peach, flawless and covered with soft blond fuzz. His eyebrows, two faint ivory lines, didn’t even resemble mine. Somehow, he’d been spared. He didn’t look like a puppy after all.

  Every time I thought of my baby, I felt as if I had a chicken egg lodged in my throat. I wanted him there with me, to hold, to caress, to rock in my arms, and to make him the kind of promises a mother diligently wishes to fulfill.

  I had to concentrate on something else to keep from choking to death, so I turned my thoughts opposite. What would Kenny do when he returned? Would he strike me with his fists, as he had threatened so many times before? Would he drag me by my hair, curse me, and tell me how hideous I was? Or would he insist on having sex while I was still sore and bleeding?

  Frightened, I telephoned Momma from the Hendersons’ residence. Granny eavesdropped the whole time, but she never said a word. She didn’t even come outside and sit with me on the front porch while I waited for Momma’s arrival.

  “What on Earth has gotten into him?” Momma asked right off. “He’s never been this way before.” That was what Momma thought, anyway. I hadn’t told her about the time Kenny had shoved me down, or the day he had mashed my mouth until my teeth had split both my lips, or about the assortment of degrading remarks he regularly spewed at me. Right then, I was too emotionally upset to mention the past. The present was disturbing enough.

  “I don’t know,” I croaked between sobs.

  We stepped toward Momma’s station wagon, and Ricky relinquished the front seat so I could have it. Hysteria had a way of unleashing Ricky’s charity.

  Momma drove in silence for most of the way to her house. But when she pulled her car into the driveway, she said, “Oh, I see your father’s home already.”

  “Uh, oh,” chimed Ricky from the back seat, where I’d all but forgotten he was sitting. “He’s gonna be mad.”

  But Ricky was wrong. Daddy didn’t say a word about his missing supper. In fact, I thought he took things pretty well as he listened to me rehash Kenny’s tantrum. That was, until he pushed his chair away from the table, stood, and left the room. I heard him walk down the hall and into his bedroom. It sounded like he opened something, maybe his chest of drawers, and then I heard the back door slam shut.

  “Where’s he going?” Momma asked in a way that suggested I should know. I had only the vaguest hunch that it had something to do with finding Kenny. I’d have never suspected that, along with him, he’d carried a loaded 22-caliber pistol.

  SIX

  No one ever knew what might set Daddy off. So it was easy to see why Momma spent the better part of her time steering clear of it. Ricky and I, though, weren’t as shrewd. One day while mowing the yard, we’d managed to cut a swath directly through the full range of Daddy’s wrath.

  It must have been a hundred degrees on that Saturday afternoon in early July, the summer before Kenny and I had married. I shooed away a hen from the utility stand inside our garage. When the menacing bird stood, I caught the moist bone-colored egg that wobbled out from underneath her. Chickens would do anything to avoid the sweltering heat, right down to laying their eggs on metal shelving. I lifted an already-opened oil can from the ledge that only minutes before had been occupied by poultry.

  I handed Ricky the container. “I’ve got to go get ready for a party, so you have to mow. Daddy said to be sure and add this before you crank the lawnmower.”

  “Daddy says you can’t go to the party if there’s going to be dancing,” Ricky warned.

  “I’ll decide where I’m going.”

  “He’s just trying to steer you in the right direction.”

  I glared at him. “I’m not a horse.”

  “Long as he’s driving that plow, you are.” He wiped his forehead with a greasy mechanic’s rag and gave me the stink eye. “It ain’t my turn to mow.”

  “Yes, it is. I did it last time. Remember?”

  “No, you didn’t.” He snatched away the oil can. “You don’t know. You weren’t even here when I did it.” Squatting next to the motorized contraption we both hated more than Momma’s burnt chocolate pudding, he let the greenish-black liquid flow. “You were off on one of your soldier drills.”

  That was Ricky’s way of making fun of my band practices. I hadn’t had one since early May, so I knew he was lying.

  Momma opened the door leading from the house to the garage where we were quarreling. Holding a tumbler filled with ice water, she stared at Ricky. “What’s that all over your face?”

  Ricky gave her a dumb look. “Sweat.”

  Momma wiped his forehead with the hem of her apron, then offered him the glass. “Here. I poured this up for you. It’s too hot to mow without water.”

  Ricky took a swig and pushed the tumbler back at her. “I can’t hold it while I’m working. Set it down over there.” He pointed to a case of antifreeze Daddy had found on sale four years earlier. We’d never had a reason to open it.

  Momma set the cloudy water on the cardboard box and returned to less hostile surroundings.

  “You do the front and side nearest the peas,” I said, helping myself to the remains of Momma’s hospitality. “And I’ll do the back and around the garage. How’s that?”

  Ricky positioned himself behind the mower. “If I can go first,” he said, like that made some major difference.

  “However you want to do it.” I cut my eyes at him and left.

  About the only time Ricky wasn’t first was when he’d been born. I’d beaten him to that one. And he’d spent his limited years searching for a way to overcome that. However, I had a secret phrase, one I used on him anytime he got too full of himself, one that quickly put him in his correct place—a distant second position that might just as well have been dead last.

  The high noon rays would soon cook Ricky’s fair skin to extra-crispy, and I knew that. But I didn’t have time to feel sorry for him. An important television program was about to begin. While I sat in what felt like a walk-in freezer by comparison, the sun, straight overhead, baked Ricky’s shoulders to the color of raw salmon.

  Soon Ricky returned indoors and fell into Daddy’s recliner, one leg draped over its harvest gold armrest. “I can’t do this no more!” He looked up at the ceiling. “It’s too…” He peeked to see where Momma might be, “Damn hot.”

  “Damn?” I laughed at his daring vocabulary. “How much did you get done, anyway?” I asked, still watching Dick Clark and mentally perfecting my dance moves.

  “Half.”

  Glimpsing sideways, I observed Ricky fanning his face with his hands.

  “Maybe less,” he admitted.

  Ricky chugged about a gallon of ice water before he lit up as though he’d suffered a brain freeze or a brainstorm. I wasn’t sure which. “What happens if you don’t add oil?” he asked. “What’d you say ‘bout that?”

  “Burns up the engine.” I shot him an irritated look. “How many times have I got to repeat it?”

  Ricky grinned. “If I dumped it all out, would you tell?”

  I thought about that for a second. If I didn’t see it happen, then I couldn’t be blamed. And if Ricky was successful, I’d be relieved of mowing duty. “Nope. I watc
hed you put oil in it. That’s all I saw, and that’s all I wanna know about.” I returned to studying something of higher importance than Ricky’s burnt up face: an Herbal Essence shampoo commercial.

  What happened after that, I wasn’t clear on. I presumed it had something to do with Ricky and an upside-down piece of landscape equipment.

  Daddy spent the next few nights in the garage working on that mower. He cleaned the carburetor and refilled the oil tank, talking first kindly and then hostilely to that resistant engine. It repaid him with an occasional start that sounded like a can full of marbles rattling. Then it blew white smoke in his face. Beyond the overwhelming smell of boiling petroleum, I detected Daddy’s smoldering temper.

  Angry and defeated, Daddy finally took the contraption in for repairs. It irked him to admit he wasn’t smart enough to fix that lawnmower himself, which made it all the more enjoyable when Ricky pulled the same prank again three weeks later.

  After the Johnson grass in our front yard sprang to knee-high proportion, Daddy brought the newly reconditioned lawn eater home. “Got ya’ll a present. Somethin’ll keep you occupied this weekend.”

  I prayed some half-wit farmhand had jack-rigged that mower, but it purred like a tiger on a full belly. You’d have thought it was brand new. Ricky wasn’t threatened, though. After he took his turn with the monster, I saw him zip past the living room window. A few moments later, the lawnmower sputtered and coughed. Out of gas, I hoped. Otherwise, even Daddy might get suspicious. It seemed inconceivable that Ricky would have been brave enough to empty the mower oil twice.

  But I underestimated Ricky’s hatred for lawn care.

  The choking carburetor sounds I’d heard had come from the back yard, so I moved from the TV room to the kitchen window to get a better look at Ricky. Sure enough, there he stood, one hand on his hip and the other animated, as he spoke to Daddy, who’d been standing outside inspecting cantaloupes.