Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  I hook one arm under the wild man’s throat, applying the kind of pressure that rage and fear evoke in someone who would not normally possess great physical strength. Suddenly I’m on my back in the wash, my advantage lost, waiting to die. Waiting for his hands around my throat, waiting for him to pick up the rifle and aim it at my face. But he doesn’t pick up the rifle. He doesn’t take advantage of my moment of helplessness.

  He runs away.

  I look to Yozzy, who is watching me with her neck straight, her head held high. In her moment of attention she looks younger and more beautiful. She is alive and, as far as I can see, unhit.

  I pick the rifle up from a patch of tangled grass growing out of the water, wondering in a distant, disconnected way how wet it might be, whether it’s safe to fire a wet rifle, knowing that I am about to learn my answer the hard way.

  I stand with the shallow water flowing over my wet socks and aim the rifle at the retreating figure, the running man who killed my brother, who tried to kill my horse. I steady the rifle at my shoulder, squeeze my eye tightly against the scope. The crosshairs rest right between his shoulder blades. I squeeze off a shot.

  For some reason the dry click surprises me. I’m not sure why it should. I know the rifle now, I’ve used it to save Yozzy from coyotes; I know it must be reloaded between shots. Yet somehow I expected the rifle to concuss against my shoulder, the metallic ringing to linger in my head, to hamper my hearing; I expected the wild man to fall.

  I watch the running figure disappear over a distant rise.

  I turn back to Yozzy and lower the rifle. She picks her way back to me. I examine her carefully, run my hands along her neck, across her sides, down her legs. As if she could be hurt and I wouldn’t know, wouldn’t see. As if I can’t trust my eyes to tell me. She is unharmed. We are all unharmed.

  And if I had shot the wild man? I think about that as I settle again under the tree, as I pull a wet cartridge from my pocket and reload, just in case. How would I have explained that to the world, to those whose job it is to inquire? He tried to kill my horse, so I shot him. In the back, at several hundred paces, as he was running away.

  And yet part of me wishes I had. Part of me wishes the wild man had left me a double-barreled shotgun. One chance to make things right. But maybe I would have missed anyway. I’m not a cowboy. I’m not a crack shot. So far I’ve only practiced on coyotes. I’m not sure if I could shoot a man at this distance with only a rifle and the sheer will to do so.

  We wait out the day’s heat in this place, but of course I no longer enjoy the luxury of sleep.

  THEN:

  Here’s something I remember about Simon. Almost a real something, in retrospect.

  I was four years old, DeeDee six, Simon ten, about to become the man of the family.

  Our mother used to read to us at bedtime. She’d sit at the edge of DeeDee’s bed; Simon would come in from his room, in his robe and slippers, and sit on the end of mine. On the night in question, she read another installment of our ongoing trip through The Wind in the Willows.

  She and my father had been fighting. We could hear him scream at her, as we brushed our teeth, as we changed into our pajamas, systematically avoiding each other’s eyes.

  When she came in to read, at the usual time, her eyes looked puffy and red, her breathing sounded uneven, but she offered a forced smile and began that night’s chapter, and we all fell silently into our family pact. Why is this night no different from all other nights?

  There is a line from The Wind in the Willows that burned itself on me like a mental tattoo: “Up popped Ratty.”

  As my mother read this, we heard my father’s car start in the driveway. She threw the book on the floor.

  “No,” she said, in a hushed tone, as if we wouldn’t hear, wouldn’t notice. She ran to the window, threw it open, screamed his name out into the night. “Gabe!”

  Looking out from my post in bed, looking past her out the window, I saw lights switch on in neighboring houses.

  Our mother ran out of the room. Simon picked up the book, and sat in her spot, on the end of DeeDee’s bed.

  “Up popped Ratty,” he said, as if we’d all enjoyed the line so much the first time, we might care to hear it again. I suppose he was only being a letter-perfect reader, assuring himself that we all remembered just where we had left off. Behind and underneath his voice, we heard them shout at each other in the driveway, heard the squeal of tires, our mother’s curses, in a volume to follow him through the night. Simon finished reading us the book over the next twelve nights. Our mother never read to us again.

  With that one simple stroke, Simon appointed himself torchbearer, seeing to it that every story had an ending.

  Trouble is, I never heard another word of The Wind in the Willows. The last words I can remember are up popped Ratty.

  DARK FOREST

  We ride away into dusk. If we ride all night, maybe we could make it to Sam Roanhorse’s by daybreak. Or could we? What has it cost us to travel along the wash? I am guessing it runs east, farther away from Everett’s all the time, or he would have suggested it. How many miles have we sacrificed? Five or six at the top of our journey—how many more when we cut west again? Has the thirty-mile walk to Sam’s house become fifty?

  And when we turn from the wash, water bottles full, will I be able to walk that far, or at all?

  We ride through blackness, under a dome of stars. The empty plastic bottles bump against my knees.

  The stars are all around us. I wonder if they would remind Simon of anything, if Simon were here.

  We make a final stop at the wash. Yozzy drinks. I slide down and open my sleeping bag, and pack all my belongings at the bottom—which I had not thought of earlier—and throw it double across her back to cushion her against the weight of full bottles. I suggest we stop to rest, but she does not stop. We turn west and walk.

  Before I hoist the bottles onto her back again, I apologize to her. For the difficulty of the journey, all hers. For the danger. For the miles. For the load.

  Nonsense, she says. We came here to do just this, and we are doing it.

  We walk off into the night, away from the wash. Away from our best shot at survival. I don’t know where Sam’s house is, I don’t know where I am, but I trust Yozzy, even as a part of me tightens, worries for our future.

  The moon glows yellow over the horizon, casting shadows of rock formations and stands of scrub, like ghosts or demons, like the netherworlds and dark forests of the fantasy tale that is my real life. I know now I fear this land.

  When sunrise comes at last, we are nowhere. We are not near anything. We have no shade. I hope Yozzy knows where we are. We bake in the sun all day. I open out the sleeping bag, drape it over parts of us for shade, but it is never enough.

  When night comes we are out of water. So at least I can ride.

  I ride through blackness, under stars, beyond hunger pangs, beyond exhaustion, but dizzy from fasting, from lack of sleep. Yozzy lays her ears back now and then, and I whip my head around to see what she hears. To see if he is back there, stalking us. Once I think I see a moonshadow move in the dark, but it could have been the sudden motion of my eyes. It could have been an illusion or an animal.

  I remind myself that he is unarmed, as far as I know.

  I tie my shirttail through the trigger guard of the rifle, lean onto Yozzy’s neck and surrender to sleep.

  I wake up on the ground. I have landed on the rifle, its barrel bruising my ribs. I jump up to see Yozzy on her knees, struggling to rise. I wait with her until she finds her feet again. I do not try to mount.

  We walk side by side, and I shiver with a deep cold, running into the center of my sleepiest place, but the walking brings my temperature up. I feel the cold but don’t mind it so much.

  I walk until my feet beg not to touch the ground, but I force them to. I try to make myself lighter, but the lightest step brings pain. I walk until I can’t walk, but I can’t stop, and there’s no carpet
of madness, nowhere to sweep the pain; it’s mine, I have only to live with it.

  I walk until I see a house, just a dot on the horizon, with a thin trail of smoke, suggesting life. I walk until I know I can’t walk to this house. I walk until Yozzy goes down again, striking her knees on the hard, unforgiving ground.

  She throws her weight forward as if to rise, sinks to her knees again. I wait. She tries again, and this time finds her feet.

  Her left knee bleeds a little, and I tear a long strip of my shirttail, and tie it around, not too tightly, mostly so she won’t grind dirt into it when she falls again.

  I hold her with my arms around her neck, and I talk into her warm coat, but I don’t know what I say, or if it is important.

  We set off, the two of us, on foot, side by side toward the house I pray is Sam’s. Failing that, any house will do.

  I walk with my unrolled sleeping bag around my shoulders for warmth.

  I walk until I would rather die than walk. I feel my palm on the cool barrel of the killer’s rifle, and I know what I would do if I was out here alone. I would hold the barrel in my mouth, like some thin, wordless Hemingway, and write my own ending to all this pain.

  But I am not out here alone. I will not give up with Yozzy watching, or rather, watching myself through her eyes.

  I walk some more.

  In time I fall to my knees, like Yozzy intermittently does, and I cannot get up. I sit for a moment, and she waits for me, stares silently, blinks and waits.

  When I’m ready to move on, I rise only to my knees. I will crawl to Sam’s house. I watch it grow large in the distance, and I am more convinced that it is Sam’s house. After all, Yozzy leads me to it. Doesn’t that say enough?

  I crawl until my knees ache, and the heels of my hands are raw, and I straighten onto my knees, upright, and try to breathe, and try not to breathe, but I have to. It’s my job.

  Such a short distance left to go, my eyes say. As I kneel in the dirt, watching Sam’s house in the distance, Yozzy lowers her great weight gently, to curl by my side.

  I don’t know how long we stay that way. I don’t know how or even if we cover that last mile.

  I just remember us, looking off in the direction of Sam Roanhorse’s house together, watching another day break to the east.

  THEN:

  When I was a baby, my brother Simon used to pick me up and hold me. Whether he thought I’d serve as a teddy bear, or whether he knew I would soon need one, I don’t know.

  I know I’m not supposed to remember back so far. I’ve grown tired of being told that no such thing is possible, and as a result, I rarely admit early memories out loud.

  In fact, I remember being born with the caul, and by this I don’t mean that I remember hearing about it. I remember the caul, and then the sudden absence of it.

  DeeDee stared into my crib when I was a baby, as though weighing me with her eyes. I knew, in some wordless way, that I was destined to love her more than she loved me. These lines are drawn early, and we only pretend we’ll cross or transcend them. Or so I believe.

  Simon held on.

  I cried if he handed me back to my mother. My mother, I sensed, held me through some prearranged debt of duty, one she might retract, if such a thing were possible. When she grew tired of the squalling, she’d hand me back to Simon.

  Simon could have hated me, this baby girl born to steal his attention in the midst of his crisis of supply. But he chose to hold on.

  When the caul was removed, which I realize I am not supposed to remember, I felt my first pain. In my eyes, and my head, from the searing brightness of a world I’d never invited.

  I thought it was my last defense, my last covering.

  But there would be others.

  And then, later, there wouldn’t be.

  FUNERAL FOR HORSES

  On Sam Ranhorse’s couch, I wake from a long sleep, my feet bare and swollen, a thin wool blanket thrown over me, which I push away.

  Sam sits at his table, watching.

  “Don’t you have to open the store?” I say.

  “I open the store when I please. It’s not like there’s another gun shop just down the road. Besides,” he says, “it’s Sunday.”

  I’m stunned by the revelation. Imagine, the days of the week continuing in order while we were away. As if nothing at all had happened, or changed.

  Then, as if plucked late from a dream, I say, “I didn’t find my brother. I don’t think there is a Simon anymore.”

  Sam smiles. “Then good thing for you that there is an Ella.”

  I rest, and eat, and drink water, and adjust to this Simonless world in the peace of Sam Roanhorse’s home.

  The following morning I hobble out to Sam’s truck, and Sam says Yozzy will rest, and eat, and drink water, and in a day or two she will find her way home. She knows the way.

  I ask to say goodbye to her, and Sam leads her to the passenger side of the truck, with a brown hand on her jaw, and she pushes her face through the open window and I thank her. I tell her we’ll see each other in just a matter of days. I do not say any of this out loud. She offers no reaction to this at all, as though she hasn’t decided, or won’t share her decision at this time, just puffs warm breath into my face, and I lay my cheek against her jaw, then kiss the soft pink skin of her upper lip.

  As Sam starts the truck’s engine, she picks her way back to the shade. She hurts. I feel it.

  We ride in a comforting silence to Everett’s house; May smiles widely to see us. Everett is gone. Driven to the city to try to help his son, who is in trouble again.

  The diner looks clean, nearly ready to open. Usable. Though I know it won’t open until the season brings change. Cars. I can’t imagine so much was done in just a handful of days, or that it has only been that long, and that the world went on without us, not knowing.

  May dishes up a steaming bowl of mutton stew.

  “How was your trip?” she asks. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I didn’t find what I thought I was looking for,” I say. “But I found something I didn’t know was missing.”

  “Even better,” she says. “Eat now.”

  I sleep well, in my sleeping bag under the stars, and I stay three days, during which Yozzy does not come back.

  On the third night I have a bad dream. I dream I’m sitting atop the wild man, the killer, with my knife to his throat. And he speaks to me in plain English, his voice startlingly familiar.

  He says, “I’m sorry, Ella.”

  I drop the knife and sit down hard beside him. He doesn’t reach for it. He rolls onto his belly and cries into his hands, and for a minute or two I just watch him, unable to answer any questions of myself, or to ask any.

  I take hold of his blanket, and pull hard, until he turns to face me, and I hold a handful of his soft, tangled white hair, as if in anger, though I feel none.

  I look at his red, strained eyes again. “Simon?” He doesn’t say yes or no, but the renewal of his tears reveals the place I’ve touched in him. “How could you be? How could you be Simon? You don’t even look like him.”

  But I keep looking, as I tell him these things, and the goosebumps wash through me again, and, like the stroke of an ax, his eyes break through to the center. I have seen Simon’s eyes.

  “My god, Simon, do you know what I’ve gone through to find you?”

  But his eyes, which are the eyes of the wild man again, know nothing of me, or of my struggles. Nor do they care.

  I open my eyes and see the stars above the Ankeah home, and I lie on my back under them, and I don’t go back to sleep, nor do I want to. For a moment I hear a rustling in the brush and I jump to my feet and call for Yozzy, but it’s only some small animal burrowing into cover.

  The light is on in the Ankeah kitchen. I knock softly, and May calls me in. She’s at the wooden table, drinking a cup of tea. She motions for me to sit with her.

  “I had a bad dream,” I say. Just for this moment my voice
sounds like the voice of a child. All children have bad dreams. When I had them, I used to run to Simon.

  May gets up to put the kettle back on. She seems plumper in her nightshirt, and she looks sad. “I had one, too,” she says.

  My stomach goes cold, and I think it’s going to happen again. One of those dreams that get around. “About a wild man?”

  She shakes her head and squeezes out one sad little smile. “About my son.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I thought maybe our dream was the same.”

  “Maybe our hurt is the same,” she says, and comes back to sit with me. “What did you dream?”

  “I saw that man. The man I thought killed Simon. But he was Simon. I knew that, May. I knew it at the time. I wouldn’t let myself know it.”

  “Well,” she says, “you just saw that he was not your brother. But now you can see that he is the man who used to be.”

  “I tried to shoot him, May. I tried to kill my own brother. I told myself I was shooting at Simon’s killer. But part of me knew.”

  The kettle sings. May gets up to make me a cup of tea. She pours the boiling water through a strainer into my cup. She doesn’t speak for a time, and I’m glad. I don’t want her to rush to absolve me. I only want whatever absolution she is genuinely able to locate, whatever truly belongs to me.

  She sits across the table, looks into my face, slides the cup over to me, and the warm steam rises to meet me. “You shot at the man who took your brother Simon away from you.”

  “What happened to him, May?”

  “Since he was your brother, probably much the same thing that happened to you. He probably tried for too long to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  I take a long, hot sip of tea. “I always thought you were the one who didn’t say much.”

  She smiles, a little underdone smile. “Depends on what there is to say. You can’t save him.”

  “He saved me.”

  “Then you must have wanted him to.”

  Now she has hit at the center of my disappointment. Simon saw me. He must have known it was me. He must have known I’d come all that way to save him.