Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  FUNERALS FOR HORSES

  BY CATHERINE RYAN HYDE

  Ella Ginsberg’s brother Simon seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. His clothing, shoes and watch were found abandoned near a freight line track in Central California. His jockey shorts and wallet were never found. The police have no clue, and Simon’s wife Sarah had no warning that any trouble was brewing.

  Ella, the member of the family with the most severe mental health issues, takes off on foot across much of California and Arizona, thinking she can find Simon using nothing but her knowledge of the way he might think. Her search leads her to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, where she is helped and befriended by three Native Americans and an aged paint horse named Yozzie.

  Chapters of her travels in the present are interspersed with chapters of her past with Simon, who raised her, and who is still the most important person in her shaky world. Only maybe it’s not as unstable as it looks from the outside. Maybe inside Ella a core of unexpected strength is emerging. Maybe Ella is even stronger than the brother who held their lives together for so long.

  "Equine funerals help frame this brutally lyrical first novel, a tale of sibling loyalty, madness, pain and redemption. In this restrained but compelling narrative, Hyde movingly conveys the toll of years of emotional damage."

  —Publisher's Weekly

  "A rich blend of metaphors and genuine characters that will touch the hearts of readers. Highly recommended for all collections."

  —Library Journal

  "[A]true work of art.... Enchanting."

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  "Brilliantly wrought, finely plotted.... Every scene is sketched with beautiful brevity..... Every vista takes your breath away."

  —Small Press

  "Haunting."

  —The Washington Post Book World

  QED stands for Quality, Excellence and Design. The QED seal of approval shown here verifies that this eBook has passed a rigorous quality assurance process and will render well in most eBook reading platforms.

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  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  The God of Growing Up

  Edge of the Earth

  Do Not Cross

  The Eve of Setting Off

  Walking Through Walls

  The Naked Man

  The Moon Doesn’t Say

  The Surface of the Moon

  Simon’s Mesa

  What Else But Spirit

  The Face of So Much Change

  Hawks and Rabbits

  Until and Unless

  Owners of the Dream

  Dancing Horse

  Simon’s House

  Eyes of the Wild Man

  Breaking Bread

  Walking Back Alone

  Dark Forest

  Funeral for Horses

  Always Chloe

  Author’s Note:

  Funerals for Horses was my first published novel. Not the first I wrote. Just the first to be published. The first novel I ever wrote was Walter’s Purple Heart. And, at a big writer’s conference, I managed to catch the eye of a real agent, who asked me to send Walter for her consideration.

  Four weeks later (which in this business beats lightning to the ground) she got back to me with a yes. A yes! She took on Walter! My struggles were over! My life as an author could start in earnest.

  As I’m fond of saying about this quirky business, “What could possibly go wrong?”

  I went on to send her three more novels. This one, another called Swimming Upside Down that remains in the drawer, and Pay It Forward. She never liked another one enough to take it on. Including Pay It Forward.

  Meanwhile I was contacted by a much newer, much hungrier young agent, who hoped I was seeking representation. She’d read one of my short stories in a literary magazine, and wrote to me through the magazine’s editor. She asked if I had an unrepresented novel.

  I had not yet written Pay It Forward when she contacted me. But I did have an unrepresented novel: Funerals for Horses. I’d submitted it to the agent I already had, to no avail. Technically that meant I could go elsewhere with it. What it meant in the real world remained to be seen.

  For a while—and with full disclosure on both ends—I had two agents. One new, hungry one who had never sold anybody’s first fiction. One well established one who sold lots of fiction for lots of money, none of it mine. And who had accepted only one of my novels. Out of what would eventually be four.

  When my well-established agent didn’t like anything about Pay It Forward and wanted me to take it apart and put it back together (I never did—I showed her essentially the same version you can read today) I asked her frankly if she was still enthusiastic about representing Walter. She said, “Well. It has been an awful lot of places.” I asked her to send both home to me.

  I gave them to my new, hungry agent, who sold my first five books and got me three movie deals, one of which actually made it to the screen.

  Granted, we started small.

  One day she told me that the editor of tiny startup publisher Russian Hill Press would be calling me. He loved Funerals for Horses, and wanted to publish it the following spring. This was August of 1996, so spring of 1997 was mighty fast. Thing is, he wanted a change. And it was a big change. And he felt it was a deal-breaker. That’s why he was calling me. If I would agree to this huge change, I would a published author at last. I would break through. If not, we were back to the proverbial drawing board.

  I waited nervously for his call. And waited. And waited. And nibbled my fingernails dangerously low.

  When he finally called, and told me the change, my heart fell. It was a change I would never make. He wanted me to change my ending... so that there would be no ending. So that people would follow the story to see what would happen... and nothing ever would. At that point, I would have done almost anything for a published book. Almost anything. But not literally anything. Because I would not have done that.

  I was all ready to hang up and get back to that aforementioned drawing board. But we kept talking. He explained why he wanted the change. Because, the way the manuscript stood, the tension dropped off beyond a certain point. Which was probably a valid observation, but...

  We talked some more. And, as we talked, I began to come up with alternative suggestions. Right there in that conversation, I thought of a way to solve his problem, yet still preserve—even improve—the ending.

  He invited me to write it that way.

  I did.

  It came out the following spring.

  I learned a valuable lesson from that editorial experience, and it’s served me well in just about every dealing I’ve had with editors since. If they say there’s a problem, they’re probably right. Believe them. If they say they know exactly how to fix said problem, they’re probably wrong. Don’t believe them. Most editors are not authors, and the ones who are authors are still not the author of the book in question. Great editors point out what needs rewriting and why, and let the author fix it in keeping with the original creative style.

  But then, I’m an author. Editors are entitled to disagree.

  Waiting for your first novel to show up in the world is a stressful bit of business. At least, it was for me. My greatest fear was not so much that everyone would hate it. I think that was second on the list. It was that no one would notice—that my tiny novel from its tiny startup press would make not the tiniest ripple in the vast literary world.

  But the reviewers noticed it, and they were kind. Glowingly kind.

  Good reviews are a great help moving forward, and my two critically successful Russian Hill Press titles helped me jump the gap to a
major New York publishing house.

  Well... that and a big Hollywood film. It’s a tough business.

  As the title suggests, Funerals for Horses may be a darker read than my more recent novels might lead you to expect. It also wins the prize for the most adult material in any of my novels. I say this neither with pride nor shame, but to put it in perspective alongside my other works. Many of my novels are suitable for young teens. This is not one of them.

  When the novel first came out, I ran into a lot of people in the supermarket who wanted to know if things were... better. For me. You know. Mental-health-wise. I took it as a compliment (albeit a very odd one). I guess I made Ella’s madness feel real. But it was not from personal experience, except to this extent: I took what I feel, what I think many of us feel, and turned up the volume until I got Ella.

  Ella is the “identified patient” in her family. Most dysfunctional families have one. There tends to be one family member who acts out, though perhaps they are acting out what the whole family is feeling. But it’s easy to pretend that’s not the case. By identifying this person as sick, everyone else can feel well. So that’s Ella. She’s the one everybody worries about.

  Except I had an experience in my life that caused me to wonder if the identified patient might not be saner than everybody else. Because maybe, just maybe, this person has a head start on sanity. Because Ella knew what was wrong, all along. And Simon’s job was to be fine. To hold the line at fine. To keep maintaining—hell, to keep proving—that everything was fine. Until he couldn’t anymore. Which seemed to me to give Ella the advantage. Because you can’t even begin to heal until it strikes you that something needs healing.

  So I guess the theme of this novel is, “Look for strength in unexpected places.” Not only might you find it there, but it might be more beautiful and more hopeful than strength found anywhere else.

  Here’s to strength and healing.

  Hope you enjoy,

  Catherine

  THE GOD OF GROWING UP

  My brother Simon was forty-two years old. I pray he still is. I shame and cajole his family into believing with me, but their wicks have burned down, their flames left to flicker, like the light they pretend to leave on in the window for Simon, like their own dwindling lives.

  He has been gone two months and four days.

  I pray that somehow, somewhere, in presence or absence of pain and fear, he will turn forty-three tomorrow. But it’s hard to reconcile myself to prayer.

  As a young girl I decided, in light of prevailing evidence, that a child does not fall under god’s jurisdiction until age eighteen. No one taught me this theory. It was my own carefully researched conclusion. After all, one can’t vote, or fight a war, until that age, and to assume god washes his hands of our affairs until then settled a number of otherwise troubling questions.

  In need of a sort of interim god, I adopted Simon, and forgot or similarly refused to switch over, until long past eighteen, until age thirty-six, until the calls came. First from Sarah, his wife, asking if I’d seen him, as he does tend to take off on short notice to visit me. Then the call three days later. They’d found his clothes, all of them. His suit, complete with checkbook, vest, shoes, tie, the whole nine yards. All strewn around a wooded area just below a freight line track in Central California. His jockey shorts and wallet were never found.

  Until then I held my life together carefully, if not seamlessly, maintaining a greater degree of sanity than seems my birthright. This is my brother Simon’s doing, and none of my own.

  Now, who knows?

  Now even Raphael seems concerned about me, and, as Raphael is preparing to die of AIDS, as are all my lovers, his concern troubles me.

  If not for other reasons, the deal is that I am to be concerned about him—them—and I dislike role reversals even more than other types of change. It forms a basis of excuse for me to shut Raphael out of my life, if a bit gradually, though we all knew I would when the sickness set in. I never promise them otherwise. I never pretend.

  I stay awake until midnight. Now it is Simon’s birthday. Now I have held still too long.

  I write a note to my employer, who refused me a leave of absence, though not in so many words. He recited a speech suggesting that a hallmark of maturity is the strength to function in crisis.

  I had listened carefully, then continued as if I hadn’t heard, a purposeful validation of his assumptions about me. I am not as unstable as people tend to think, but I allow them their margin for error because it allows me mine.

  Now I write seven notes, one to each of my lovers, to use a loosely applicable term. I have never had what one what might call a run-of-the-mill sexual encounter with any one of them, due to their exposure to the virus. But sex is what you make it, and we have always made do. To assume sex must take place within touching distance seems, to me, limited thinking.

  I slip the notes into envelopes and label each with a name. Raphael. David. Mark. Carey. Ed. Jonathan. Jamey.

  Raphael will find them first, I’ve no doubt, and he might be surprised. Each knows he is not the only one, but perhaps not that he is one of seven. Not that it matters now. This is not promiscuity on my part, not at its roots; more that so few women will make concessions to the HIV-positive male that I am forced to do far more than my share.

  Raphael will come by in the morning, I think, and I will be gone. Now that he wears blotches on his forearms, and the rasp clings from his last bout with PCC pneumonia, he diligently insinuates himself into my life. It is a breach of agreement, albeit a silent agreement, and I suppose he feels he must force me to draw his line. He will not bow out with grace as others have done in the past. He will continue to knock, wearing his splotches offset against black jeans and shirt, dark circles, dark haze of beard, dark hair falling into his eyes. Even debilitated, Raphael maintains a Bohemian grace, an odd handsomeness.

  His visits will continue until I refuse him or until I am gone, which is to say, there will be one more visit, to no avail. No, I am not hardhearted. I will miss Raphael. More than any of them.

  Reverently, I dismantle the shrine-like arrangement of my brother Simon’s photos, a forty-year-old blond child in a business suit.

  I picture Raphael watching over my shoulder. If he were here, he’d say, a healthy move, Ella.

  I would not tell him I only disturbed the photos because I’ll need them with me on the road, both for solace and as exhibit A.

  As I pack, he would say, you’ll never find him.

  I would scream at him for that. I would forbid him to ever say I cannot find Simon. I hear the screaming in my head. It sounds like my sister DeeDee, telling me I must never again suggest that Andy is not a real horse. Her hands locked around my throat when she screamed this in real life. I still miss DeeDee.

  I am glad Raphael is not here.

  In the morning I stick the notes on my door with push pins, a different color for each sweet, doomed man, whichever color I feel suits him best.

  I clean out my bank accounts on the way out of town.

  THEN:

  I was born with the caul. According to Grandma Ginsberg, this signified great things. But it proved a disappointment. Yes, I was the smartest child in all of my classes, the most morbidly mature that any of my teachers had seen, save my sister DeeDee. Yes, I was spiritually advanced, but in my family this was nothing special.

  I owe any additional senses, I believe, not to the caul but to the genes of my father, Gabriel Ginsberg, a man with an intimidating I.Q.

  We only lived together as a family until I was four, but I hold vivid early memories. Mostly I remember my mother rousing us out of bed in the middle of the night, bundling us in blankets and packing us down to the police station to post my father’s bail. This same scene played out on at least a half dozen separate occasions.

  He always looked contrite, though still in good humor. He would try to kiss my mother on the cheek, but she would pull away.

  She adored the man, needed
him, and always assured the police she would keep him on a tighter leash. This was the only time their roles shifted, the only time he needed her, which I now suspect is why she never shortened his leash.

  At the trials my mother pleaded with the judge not to jail him, claiming the family would starve. Despite the recurring nature of his offenses, the judge would always let him off with a fine, though a higher fine each time, and threaten prison the next time my father appeared before his bench.

  I know all this because, although Simon was in school, my mother would pack DeeDee and me to court for lack of a babysitter. Grandma Ginsberg claimed failing health, especially in the wake of one of my father’s arrests. I overheard her tell my mother that it didn’t matter anyway, because we were entirely too young to understand a term like indecent exposure. She didn’t realize that children file away such words, awaiting definition.

  I’d sit enthralled on the car ride home, loving the back of my father’s head. The thinning hair on top created a wild effect that no amount of Brylcreem could tame. It seemed to match the rest of the man: big, rangy, loosely strung and indistinct.

  Until my father left, he took us every Sunday to visit Grandma Ginsberg, the one who put such stock in my caul.

  She always watched Picka Polka on Sundays. I was keenly aware of missing Deputy Dawg, but had no authority to change channels.

  Grandma Ginsberg pinched cheeks.

  If there is something good I can say for the woman, and no doubt I am scratching, it’s that she loved her family. Still, it was a draining, disturbing sort of love, a leeching of our life force. I tried to stand away as much as possible, which prompted the often-repeated invitation to shame, “You don’t love your old grandma.”

  Once, my father chastised me in the car on the way home because he said I didn’t act like I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to be there. Nobody had warned me that I was supposed to act.

  When my father left home, Grandma Ginsberg went down and never got up. She broke her hip within twenty-four hours of the news. My mother bundled us into the car and met the ambulance at City General, where I listened to Grandma’s keening shrieks of pain and her self-aggrandizement, and stared at her translucent gray face in wide-eyed silence.