Call It Horses Jessie Eerden (top ten books of all time txt) 📖

Army jacket; he always squinted and looked past me, to see things in the distance, to read billboards, make out the model of a far-off car to convince himself of his improving sight. I took him to Rex’s barn crammed with square bales, with nothing to see in the dusky air but me, my body, hair, mouth. I hardly slept during those months; I rarely spoke to Mave or Clarissa. My bond with Dillon was not a generous kind. I could have choked on my greed for him.

That summer the gypsy moth got bad in the trees around Caudell. You could see the webbing everywhere, around the thousand-egg masses that had wintered over to hatch out when the oaks and sweetgum would go into bud. We could stand in the heart of the summer hardwoods at the perimeter of the swamp and hear the sound of worms chewing and frass dropping like a light rain, the moth slowly stripping the trees from the crown. Dillon got part-time work, after foundry hours, setting pheromone traps and loading the canisters of Bt onto the planes. Near the end of the summer, he took me up on the ridge to watch the plane drop, the spray drifting down like fallout and paralyzing the larvae so they’d stop feeding and starve. We lay on our stomachs, propped on our forearms. Turning from the dissipating cloud, we rolled to our backs. My hair fell into my mouth, he pulled it out and played with it, facing me.

“Pretty cruel to the moth if you think about it,” he said. Cheeks and forehead tanned dark with a crescent of pale beneath his eyes, humidity curling the black hair at his temple which I touched.

“I can read your thoughts,” I said, circling my fingertip there.

“That right? Well, what am I thinking, Frankie?”

“Things that would make some women blush,” I said.

He smiled but pulled his head back slightly, looked again to the distant fog of poison in the treetops. “Might be my chance,” he said. “To fly.” He squinted after a rising bird, a turkey vulture. “My buddy told me the Forest Service has a school in Virginia to train pilots for the pesticide planes.”

I watched the vulture dive and duck out of sight. “You should do it,” I said, though my breathing thinned.

“I mean, it would be a lot of travel, on assignment and everything. A lot through the South, I think.”

I watched him seek the buzzard, or maybe the plane and its pilot.

“But it would just be seasonal,” he said. “I’d always come back.”

But he didn’t go at all, not at first—it was August, September, and he stayed and brooded. Slowly, Dillon talked less and less, then quit altogether, a kind of fade-out. In time, he seemed unable to speak, his mouth plastered shut. His body itched somewhere deep.

One night we walked, and a ranging dog padded alongside us, hopeful and mangy, and Dillon kicked it hard in the ribs. I saw, as through gauze, my old revival dream, of the possessed crazy man by the sea, and I thought of the other gospel story about a boy possessed by a mute spirit. The dog slunk off to the woods and Dillon buried his fists in his pockets, squinting ahead, his face in profile, and I saw the gospel’s mute boy, like someone seized up before a sneeze. Unvoiced words transmuted to a black blood I could see gathering in the boy’s ears, his cheek quivering from the clench of jawbone, as though there were some secret he could not loose but badly wanted to.

In the story, the demon threw the boy onto hot coals, into water, into dirt. A person’s head, discomfited by its own ideas and sealed-in secrets, will knock out its own lights on the concrete floor, will crack its skull—or someone else’s—for release. Dillon scared me because he was so soon stoppered, he cricked his neck, got red-faced. He punched walls.

Clarissa had long been dating Darrell Tide by that time and they were planning to marry, and Darrell was stoppered the same and I did not warn her. Maybe because I did not want to believe in our dangers. The two men seemed forged in the same furnace of disillusionment, since Darrell had always been expected to take over his father’s farm and had no out.

In the gospel, Christ cast out the mute spirit and the boy foamed at the mouth, convulsed, and nearly died. Then color returned to his rigid lips, and I pictured the kid opening his mouth and speaking, stunned by the ring of his own voice. But the near-death and the quickening did not come for Dillon.

He disappeared in late fall. To flight school, I found out later. I put my face and most of my body into Heather Run, supposing I would stay there among the bluegill and pondweed and drown. I surfaced wheezing and of course showed up on Mave’s porch a stricken fish, my wet jeans cement. She cleared a dismantled radio and orphaned shingles and plastic flatware so I could sit on a porch chair. She did not hold me. She went inside and brought out a notebook, said, “Write something down. Anything.” She said, “Cultivate the ground, Frankie,” then receded into her half-gone bottle.

Who was she to tell me to write to stay alive? To maintain some kind of faith in the inner life that words can stoke and preserve? She who had no working pens in the house, only a blanching television, only a drink and a temple made of your books and bowed plywood.

THE ROASTED BUTTERNUT SEEDS LAY BRITTLE AND GOLDEN, cooling on the baking sheet on the stovetop. Early afternoon kitchen so warm and humid, and somehow it had become slightly more my own, mine and Ellis’s. Ellis darted to the door like a pup at the crush of gravel as Clay pulled up the drive. He got out whistling a simple tune, then a truck pulled in behind him,