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

distance from the kids. Miranda and I stood for a while in the strange wake of it, I by the truck and she on the porch, feeling in our bodies a helplessness. She sank to the porch steps. I joined her. She wasn’t aware of the miscarriage, or maybe she was. Maybe Mave had told her.

“I don’t know my boys anymore,” she said. “I don’t know why he ever enlisted. I’d expect Tuffie to enlist before him.”

“Tuff’s too wild for the military to handle.”

Miranda smiled, smoothed her sweatpants as she would her usual pressed housedress. Her hair had not been combed; it seemed the recruiter had ambushed them. She asked after Lottie.

“Slipping,” I answered. My hair felt heavy and I lifted it from my neck, and as naturally as anything, Miranda, shifting one step above mine, gathered my hair into her hands in a horse tail and kept gathering, which made me cry.

I asked, “Do you remember how Dillon wanted to enlist in the Air Force to fly jets but he didn’t have the eyesight?”

“I do.” She kept gathering—my hair so endlessly outspread and in need of gathering. Mave’s tenderness toward the boy, Miranda’s toward me, and Dillon’s toward whomever. “You still think about him, Frankie?”

Oh—I thought his thoughts, I heard his fingers through my hair with hers, I felt the taut skin of his belly as I lay my ear on it under the branches on the banks of Heather Run.

“I just wonder about him sometimes.”

Darrell died that evening in a deep gray dusk withholding rain.

His complaints of dizzy spells and blurred sight had turned out to be minor strokes preceding the final major one. He’d gone out to run the combine and hadn’t returned for dinner. Clarissa found him in the little pilot car of the mammoth machine, followed its final crooked swath where he’d gone off course, his head down on the control board as if napping.

CLARISSA HELD THE WAKE AT THE HOUSE, in the old way. The living room stuffed with flower arrangements, the kitchen laden with casseroles and potato salad. Our friend Liza and her mother assigned potluck dishes, Liza practiced in widowhood.

Tess came home from summer classes. She had somehow fastened her ropy hair in a stylish pile atop her head under a scarf like Rayletta wore. She hovered near her mother like an older sister and held her hand. I watched their hands, and the other hands holding Dixie paper cups or a fork, or an elbow, or a blinking toy. I stood with Clay, whose one hand carried our assigned cornbread and whose other hand pressed the small of my back where the dress waist bunched, as if to say, Don’t let me lose you in the crowd, people are being lost, people gone like pale streaks in the sky. I wore a mint- green dress. I carried a paint box that I’d found for Clarissa at Mave’s. It had been yours, of course, Ruth, tucked into a closet with books that hadn’t fit on her makeshift shelves, the font on each miniature paint bottle gold and antiquated, ochre, cobalt.

Mave was nowhere, perhaps still with Ron in his camouflage and Army-issued boots, bivouacked on the outskirts of town.

Would Clarissa design the plate of his headstone at LaFaber? She designed everyone else’s. I wondered, after all the hardness from him, what she truly felt in her supple body about his pale-streak goneness. I remembered all the times she had come to me after a beating, her hair always falling in pieces across her face. Eventually we came around her with a restraining order, he repented, he would change, and he did, the bruises slight after that, but his drawled dark voice—Tess told me—held an invisible hand at Clarissa’s throat. His demands swarmed her, pressed her, but she would not leave him. She made her tiny paintings on tiny dried gourd slabs in secret, she made toys from old beads, Tess gave her oil pastels and she closed her eyes and drew the contour of their alfalfa field under stormy sky, drew it blind, drew it by feel.

I watched Clarissa standing near his open casket, his hands folded on the chest of his light blue suit. Her womanhood was stark, her wifeliness. An insistent memory disrupted this vision of her: once, during a LaFaber League game, Clarissa had gone for a half-court shot right before the buzzer sounded. Too feminine to really feel the court and move with it, she always shot air balls, but that game I saw her wind up her whole body and spring load and heft the ball off the tips of her fingers with gruesome force. She missed wildly, but she actually overshot. The few seconds after, she stood disbelieving her own strength, still standing on the toes of her Hi Tops, her breasts springing lightly in the jersey and an O on her red lips.

Now a woman planted beside her dead husband, now the stream of faces and hands. Miranda, diminished but changed out of those sweats into a lavender dress, herded Belinda’s two, held the third, the newborn boy, Roger, as Belinda spoke to Clarissa and Tess. Tuffie was there, in all black, Rayletta and Hope from the co-op with their husbands, Jennie without Stew, the large extended Tide family, and the Snyder’s Crossing pastor, who was perhaps bothered that he had not been involved in the wake. I stood with Clay by the burgundy armchair and the lilies bursting from their vases on the floor like hands trying to grab a rope. I gradually moved away from him, into the receiving line, with the paint box.

You understand, Ruth, I was not quite myself. I was still hidden, in a way, still clawing out the gauze. Voices swelled mildly on the front porch, in greeting, someone not seen in a while. I couldn’t discern the welcoming voices, or the welcomed. Only footsteps scraping and a shuffle of bodies. I watched the front screen door open.

He ducked