Читать книгу HOME IS ELSEWHERE: An Anthology - The Reader Berlin - Страница 7

Alissa Jones Nelson

The black stallion reared up on my bedside table sometime between my last night of twenty-nine and my first morning of thirty, twenty years to the day after he’d melted into a plastic puddle in a heating vent at Nana’s. I heard the pale ochre whinnying before I saw him. It was that human hive, honeyed kind of city dark that never really falls. I rolled over to face a spot of perfect blackness in the gloom, as if the dark itself had solidified into a tiny spindle-legged horse, balanced on his hind legs, his tail creatively useful as a prop. I knew then, without believing.

I leaned out my window into a shock of icy air to search the top of the airshaft for Orion. Instead of a deep distance of stars, the night held an immediate iridescence of snowflakes.

Summer was Elsewhere.

*

“Vegans can’t be choosers.”

Nana thunked this hard little nugget of wisdom down on her barn door of a table every time my adult self came to visit. Worried smooth after so much use, it rolled back across the listing oak toward her own plate. She trapped it between her thick calloused fingers and spattered it down in the spreading pool of thinned-out blood under the roast beef. She said it and laughed. Served it up with potatoes belly-up in butter, soft-boiled carrots, green lettuce ripped from her garden, hand-cranked rosemary ice cream. I smiled, plastic-eyed, slurped my limp carrots, masticated my dry salad. Made myself the spitting image of what was once the cow whose rump had sat medium-well on her white serving platter.

Nana was raised on the reservation. A half-breed, she called herself cheerfully. No one else ever dared to. She married my grandfather and immediately took up his peculiar no-no-don’t Methodism. No booze, no gambling, don’t even think about dancing. Her inky hair and her swirling cotton dresses were long. She marked her Bible with rainbows of paper, one color for each shade of heathen. When they came wading up to her door through the summer air, shiny new Mormons on a mission in all their white short-sleeved button-down earnestness, she’d invite them in for a sweating glass of her bitter iced tea. She’d open that doorstop of a Bible to whatever passage matched their particular sins, and fling the words into the freshly ironed air as the boys let go of their crisp outlines and melted. Then she’d pour more tea and stare them down while they sweated through her questions as penance. One firefly spangled night, I asked why they kept sending new recruits all the way out to her. “Training,” she told me, with her silver coyote grin.

Her house was a summer sauna and a winter igloo. It had corners. Spider-webbed nooks and crannies, shadowy window seats. Drawers crammed with mysterious bits of iron and porcelain, treasure chests of buttons, a shiny sugar maple clothes-press full of sweet straw hats and stiff white gloves and secret lacy things to wear under clothes.

The nearest town was Elsewhere, Oklahoma. Used to be called the Cherokee Strip before it was Elsewhere, OK. Between town and Nana’s house the two-lane blacktop time-traveled back to rutted gravel and packed dust. The gardens in Elsewhere were orderly rows of roses and irises, hollyhocks and snapdragons, tomatoes caged in chicken wire. Nana’s riot of earth blazed with useful plants. Wild Bergamot, Beebalm, Horsemint. Lavender breathing with bumble bees, Prickly Pear for her cactus jelly. Mysterious twists dried and labelled in amber medicine bottles. Compassplant, Spiderwort, Selfheal, Sassafras. Larkspur, Shooting Star, Black Samson, Firewheel. Chickasaw and Mexican Plum, Blood Sage and Indian Fire. A poetry of plants on her pantry shelves.

Blooming on the prairie beyond her borders were bittersweet Butterfly Weed and plumy Juneberry, carpets of Bluestars and Wild Columbine in crimson and white, Indian Paintbrush staining the billowing grasses orange. Amethyst Ironweed, tender Buffalo Grass waving, waiting for long-gone buffalo. Outsize sage the perfect stage set for a Clint Eastwood finger-gun scene. Stands of River Birch where there were no rivers, Loblolly pine in the folds of low rolling hills like the rolls above Nana’s knees. Black Hickory singing with purple martins. Slippery Elm for climbing just to challenge the name, every kind of ash tree sifting the sunlight. Burr Oak, Blackjack, Chinkapin. Names to ignite imagination, to tie a little girl to earth.

*

Nana was brimful of stories. Trails of tears, land runs. Talking coyotes playing tricks. Cannibal women with hearts of unmeltable ice. Young girls swinging on lariat ropes hung from the stars, all of them dreamlike, disappearing with the dawn. As the years circled and closed in around her, she went quiet. She stopped writing letters when the palsy shook her hands. I’d call on weekends and she’d listen down the long-distance line. Every three minutes she’d squawk, “Well, this is costing you a fortune. Better say goodbye.” I was the one who couldn’t let her go.

Nana used to greet the stars by name from her porch swing on liquid summer evenings, crickets singing backup. But her favorite constellation only rose above the horizon in winter. We were first introduced on a Christmas visit. The ebony net of sky brimming with snared stars, the crunchy snow beneath our boots so bright it made me squint. Orion, the hunter.

“We came from there,” she told me, pointing to the brightest star in the middle of his belt. Alnilam. A name like a magic spell. “Our people. And one day we’ll return.”

Jericho. Nana’s name for the shoebox apartment where I spent the schoolyears of my childhood. Whenever my parents threatened to shout down the walls, I’d tell myself my real people were made of stardust, and one day they’d come for me Those deep winter nights I’d kneel on my bed with my face pressed to the icy breath-fogged window, keeping watch, prey to the hunter, until the last stars stepped back into the dawn greying sky.

Granddad died before I was born. Tractor, tornado. They found the tractor two counties over, sitting upright like a lost dog waiting for its master. They never found Granddad. Nana drove his tractor to the funeral. After they lowered the empty casket into the dry earth, Nana puttered straight out and sold that tractor, walked the eight miles home. The Nana I knew did everything for herself, always wondered why everyone else couldn’t manage to do the same.

“So leave him there. Come on out here.”

Her voice is the natural finale to the symphony of my father tire screeching home after dawn, snare drumming his key in the lock, buzzsaw snoring on the arm of the sofa. I sat ten feet away with a bowl of cereal I’d poured myself. Our cereal came off the bottom shelf at the supermarket, generic see-through bags all the way down below the bright boxes with fairytale frogs, talking tigers, leaping leprechauns. My small fingers and a spineless, unruly plastic bag, stray Honey-Os on the counter, in the sink, on the floor. My mother, the phone wedged between her jaw and her shoulder, sighed a tornado sigh and swept them all up, put them back in the bag. Iceberg jugs of milk flooded our thin bowls. My mother, next to me at the table, about to brim over herself. The phone pressed to her ear, her chin changed into a walnut, a thin hand over her eyes. I stared hard at the line of spittle dropped down into the lake of saliva under my father’s cheek, the thin thread of it connecting him to the threadbare sofa, to the tiny living room, to us. Nana’s voice conducted down the line, clear as Elsewhere.

“Well, if you can’t, then what are you calling me for?”

*

The winter my father juiced our maroon station wagon through the front wall of the neighbor’s living room was the first Christmas I spent alone with Nana. “Why a stallion?” Nana demanded. “Are they anatomically correct?”

I turned him on his back to check, saw the smooth, perfectly uncomplicated plastic. Shook my head.

“Little girls and their stallions.” Nana muttering for me to overhear. “What’s wrong with a nice strong mare?”

The set had come wrapped up in red paper printed with white snowflakes, a stiff stick-on bow like a frozen firework. The only thing under Nana’s Christmas tree that wasn’t hand-knitted or educational. A beige plastic stagecoach with six little plastic horses in different stages: standing, walking, running, rearing. Hooked two at a time into the rigid harness. Five were brown, but the most majestic was black. No plastic adults to steer this wild west world, only a mustang in the lead.

The dingy leaden heating vents framing the floors of every room in Nana’s house were trapdoor treacherous. A moment of careless distraction let that wide toothy grin of a vent claim its prize. When he fell, I heard the clatter of black hooves all the way down. I wept and gnashed my teeth. Nana took her time coming to check, took in the sight of my tear-dripping face, my knees straddling the vent, all five fingers worked through the grate like a prisoner. Shook her head. That night I went to sleep with the sound of his whinnying reaching up into my dormer room every time the heat kicked on, a distant squeal echoing over her cold pine floors. I couldn’t tell whether it was pain or pleasure.

Years later, I realized how easy it would have been to lift the cover and reach into the vent. To try. Asked her why she hadn’t. She shot a hole through me with her obsidian eyes, said, “What would have been the sense in that?”

*

Nana’s sleepless nights lengthened as time ran his sharp fingernails over her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth. The doctor in Elsewhere gave her a complicated cocktail of pills. She refused to take them, refused to take my calls. I had to get on a plane.

“If I take them, I’ll forget,” she told me over the whole trout laid out for his wake, staring up at the dining room ceiling. “Then what use will it all have been?”

Nana’s nearest neighbors – across the dry creek bed and six minutes southeast toward Elsewhere at a dead run – had real horses. The kind of steady beasts you could turn loose in the morning and trust to come home for dinner. Trigger, Arrow, Catapult. Names given in their wild youth, names that belied the placid adults they’d grown into. The summer after the stallion disappeared, I learned to ride in return for my puny help hauling water and shit. Nana turned me loose in the morning with sleep-furred teeth, my hair pillow wild. I spent all day surrounded by snug horseflesh, ran home as the sun sank behind the ash trees, hair decorated with accidental alfalfa and daisies on purpose, heavy with the scent of manure, horsehair and sweat.

Nana believed in real food. Peanut butter you had to stir for hours in ten-year-old time before you could spread it. Bread she made herself. I spent most of those gift-wrapped summers with a crosshatched section of gooey peanut butter and honey on thick crumbly brown bread wedged into one or another of my pockets.

Every night was some newly dead animal stretched out on her dinner table. Occasionally something she’d shot herself. Jackrabbits in her garden. She’d climb up on the roof with the shotgun and wait. Her huge lopsided table was the bench where I learned to judge the origins of what I ate.

“What are you sinking about?” she’d tease across the table when I’d lost myself in the map of furrows on my own forehead.

“The horses,” I always told her. She’d level her Beethoven look and shove another chicken wing or leg of lamb down the slope of the table in my direction.

Even then, Nana had nightmares. Paced up and down the starlight. Her bare feet were silent, but the warped old floorboards creaked in the rhythm of a heartbeat, the particular onetwo, onetwo, onetwo, onetwo of a majestic stallion’s walk. That was the summer he first appeared to me, the matched ebony curves of his neck and tail bobbing through the full-moon shadows of my dormer room. When I gathered my courage to tell Nana, spaghetti arms crossed against explanation, she flashed. “Well of course. They never leave us.”

*

In my junior year of high school, I got clobbered upside the head with a letter, a reply pressed in dingy black on pure white, telling me I wasn’t eligible for the scholarships, the tuition waivers. I wasn’t enrolled in the tribe. Nana had never enrolled any of us. I called from my mother’s one-bedroom in Denver, listened to Nana sigh down the line from Elsewhere.

“Well, what’d you expect? You’re not Native.”

I bit off the black licorice anger pushing against my eye teeth. “Partly,” I tried.

Thick molasses silence. “But so?” I steadied my butterfly voice. “What’s the problem with taking money from the white man?”

“Honey, you are the white man.”

So I went 60 miles north to study equine medicine at Colorado State. Had to pay my own way, flattened under an anvil of loans. Nana and I didn’t talk for months. Or that’s how I’d tell it. She’d say we communicated plenty, just not with words.

I could always hear the onetwo onetwo creak of her steps across my floor at night.

*

“You moved to Chicago to work with horses? There any horses in that city?”

She had a point.

“I’m not actually working on horses, Nana. I mean I am, but in a lab. Research. Making new medicines.”

“Research on horses with no horses?”

“They’re there, we’re here. We get samples.”

Her snuffling down the line.

“That how vegans do it these days, is it?”

She always had a point.

One summer came the plague of crickets, right out of Nana’s worn Old Testament. They rose out of the black soil in waves, crunched underfoot with every step. Chirped a never-ending alarm. I had nightmares about them mowing the grass to dust, turning the sea-waving prairie into desert, baring the skeletons of trees and horses. But they were mostly interested in eating each other. Killing one brought ten more little cannibals to the scene of the crime. The whole world smelled like rotten meat.

That was when I stopped. Started eating just the bright vegetables around the rim of her dinner plates.

First night: “You sick?”

Second night: “You must be sick.”

Third night: “You are not getting up until you eat every last bite.”

Told her I couldn’t. Told her the smell of dead crickets turned my stomach.

She pointed her knife. “That animal made a sacrifice for you. Leaving it lying there is disrespect.”

“Oh yeah? Is that in your Bible?”

Had to bite the tongue that let those words loose, squint to keep my eyes from widening.

She pressed her lips together until they disappeared, left the table on silent feet. Left the dishes flat, the limp liver cooling and congealing in its bile. It was the first time in my life I had to clean up someone else’s mess.

That night Nana was quiet. I split myself a headache straining to hear her footfalls through the sleepwalking house. When the moon rose to frankenstein the whorled shadow of my wrought iron headboard across the floor, I crept down, two feet on each stair. I had to use both hands and all my yellow pencil muscle to lift the huge Bible from its place on the shaky coffee table. Laid it out on the floor, started at the beginning. Slid across the pine to catch the pooled light of the moon waving through the window glass.

In the morning, I presented her my prize. A shaky cursive sentence copied onto the back of a spangle of red paper I’d taken from between the pages. Red for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nana took in the bowl I’d set on the table for her, the paper pooled like blood in the bottom. Read it once, eyes flying, then again:

“And God also told them, ‘Look! I have given you every plant that grows on the earth, and every tree that bears fruit. They will be your food.’”

Hard proof of biblical vegetarianism. She gazed at me while I balanced on my stool and chanted my magic spell for bravery: Blackjack Chinkapin Sassafras. Blackjack Chinkapin Sassafras. Then she lit up. A real, adult smile.

For the rest of that summer, she never set meat on my plate.

*

I sit on the geriatric porch swing, the wail of its rusted chains filling the silent night. I wait for it to pull loose from the ceiling and crash to the rotted floorboards. Too weak now to bear the weight. Wrapped up to my ears in an old blue and white horsehair blanket, the January air reaching in and yanking my lungs up against my collarbone. The house behind me is dark and empty. It is finished. It is only beginning.

I close my eyes. Blackjack Chinkapin Sassafras. Blackjack Chinkapin Sassafras.

They never leave us.

When I open my eyes, she’s sitting on the swing across from me in a wreath of starlight. Asks if I want to come with her. I don’t ask where. She steps back into her smile. When I open my eyes again the world is a blue marble beneath me. Orion aims his arrow over my shoulder, the starbuckle of his belt close enough to touch. Alnilam. I can see the waving prairie, a silvered sea of whitecaps. A black stallion cutting a hole through the buffalo grass as he runs. Her laughter is the last thing I hear.