Funerals for Horses (12 page)

“Why did they take the moon away?” I said, maybe a few times, wondering why she didn’t answer, until I realized I couldn’t hear myself say it. She brought me a warm mug, but I had to feel for it, and I warmed my hands on it, blowing into it to send steam into my face. I took a big burning gulp but it didn’t help. The world stayed black and silent. I felt Willie’s hand on my shoulder. No other input from the world outside my head. What a place to be stuck.

“I just realized,” I said, or I think I said, “that I came out of her body. And now I think I can save myself by keeping away from her. Don’t you see how much too late it is?”

I couldn’t tell how loud I was talking, or even if I made a sound at all, but my throat came up strained.

I asked Willie to take me outside into the grass, and she walked with me until I felt it under my shoes, and I fell into it, squeezing tufts between my fingers, knowing it was green from memory.

I rolled around on my back, kicked my legs up in the air, trying to get the feel of it, trying to pretend my neck wasn’t too short, and two of my legs weren’t arms. I swung back to my feet but it was no use. It didn’t balance. It was put together all wrong. I could never be what I was meant to be, because the body was all wrong. Useless.

Useless!

I slammed up against the unyielding stucco of Willie’s house, as if I could shatter the worthless shell part of me. As if its obvious defects would run through it like a flaw, causing it to break apart on impact. But for something put together all wrong, it stood surprisingly strong. Willie grabbed me and held me and I knew then, in a sickening flash in my human gut, that I couldn’t please them and keep them at the same time, and so would have to disappoint them both.

Everett’s wife is a coal-haired woman named May. She smiles a lot, talks hardly at all.

She serves cornmeal cakes and beans, and canned peaches. After dinner Everett and I sit out in the dirt in front of his new house, Everett smoking and taking notice of constellations.

I thank him for his hospitality. I want to explain the void it fills in me, how the smallest scrap of hospitality grows to cover vast needs, but it’s so much more than Everett would say. Some things, he teaches me with his silence, we must trust others to know.

“How can you walk to the mesa? It’s almost fifty miles.”

“I’ve already walked twice that far.”

“And your feet and your spirit are still bruised from that. You should wait until you’re stronger.”

“I can’t, Everett. I have to move on. I have to find Sam Roanhorse.”

“Then you should let me drive you.”

“Well, that just defeats the whole purpose then, Everett. I mean, drive me where? I don’t know where my brother Simon is. It’s when I get out there. When I just happen to cross a place he’s been. It’s something I figure out as I go. I can’t explain it, but it got me this far, right?”

“Then all the more reason to wait. You need all your resources, not just your feet. You need to travel strong.”

“I have to go.”

I feel his disappointment, though he says nothing. I have turned away from spirit. Spirit says I should wait. Everything that knows and is right says I must wait. But I have put my brother Simon above this in my prioritizing, and, even as I am satisfied with that decision, I cannot answer the question of how it is right to place anything before the universe, or how it will benefit me. Or how it will benefit Simon, if there is a Simon.

We sit quiet, and I mark the moment I must rise to go, but my legs seem to take exception to my thinking.

In time we hear the hum of an engine and the crunch of wheels on Everett’s rocky dirt road.

An old man with a face like a dried-apple doll jumps down from a one-ton flatbed truck. He walks to where we sit.

Everett says to me, “Your big job has just become easier.”

“Everett, I heard the news. Jake says you took your five best pigeons to be bred to the champions in Fort Defiance. Why don’t you ever tell me these things yourself? I’m never sure if you’re on my side or not.”

“Because your birds are faster than mine already.” Everett offers the old man a hand-rolled cigarette. “Sam Roanhorse, Ella Ginsberg. Ella Ginsberg, Sam Roanhorse. Ella is wanting to speak with you.”

Sam holds the picture for a cautious length of time, away from himself, into the light cast from Everett’s new home.

“I can’t say this is the man I saw. But I can’t say for sure it’s not. His hair was yellow, like this, but longer. More tangled. And this man is soft and padded. The man I saw was gaunt, and had not only a mustache but a full beard, untrimmed. Still, if he had traveled far, these changes could happen. But how can I recognize for sure how a man might look in the face of so much change?”

“Mr. Roanhorse, you say he walked north, toward the mesa?”

“Yes, I watched him go. I wondered, does he feel the pain from those blisters of sunburn? What must his feet feel like? Due north to the mesa, without stopping, until he was out of sight.”

“Did he say why he wanted the rifle?”

Sam trades a look with Everett, and I know I have asked an unenlightened thing.

“A man who sells rifles asks only if a buyer carries cash. Too many questions are bad for business.”

“And he bought ammunition?”

“Yes, a lot of it. A lot to carry. And a big knife. So, what are you going to do now? Will you go look for your brother at the mesa? It’s a long walk. In tourist season, when white people drive the roads to Monument Valley and to Canyon de Chelly, you could hitch a ride. Until then, it’s quiet. Maybe a Navajo will stop for you, but who knows? You could ride with me back to my store. It’s almost twenty miles of the distance.”

I glance at Everett, who catches my glance neatly, and I shake my head.

“I appreciate the offer, Mr. Roanhorse, but my host has asked me to stay until I’m stronger. The battle will be better run a few days down the road. And on foot.”

“I understand completely,” he says, “and good luck to you.” He strikes up a long conversation with Everett in Navajo, the upshot of which is that Everett gives him one of the bred pigeons to take back with him. He does not seriously begrudge Sam a piece of his good fortune. At least, this is what I hope I gather.

Everett invites me to sleep in his house, but I say I am happy in my sleeping bag under the stars. I have seen my mistake, and I will pay better attention to the moon and the stars from now on.

He wishes me a good sleep.

THEN:

I knew by the feel of things that I wasn’t home. The physical feel, but there was more. The energy of the people around me. Strangers.

Here and there Simon. I knew him across the room, who knows how. Smell, maybe. If Grandma Ginsberg had been there she would have said the extra sense provided by the caul. Thank god she wasn’t, though.

Sometimes Willie. I could smell her perfume. She’d sit on the edge of my bed with me, my head dropped back against her, her arm around my shoulder, brushing hair off my face. She’d bring me an apple or a carrot, which I’d eat only while she sat with me. I suppose she’d been told I refused all other food.

Then, after a few days, something terrible happened. It all began to come back. Slowly at first, shadows, whispers. But it grew with time.

It was a bit of a catch-22, I suppose, that the relief of being completely shut down would bring such ease as to open up the door again. Unready to go back, unsure how to cope, I left my eyes unfocused, showed no response to sounds. I heard few sounds, as the other bed in my room remained empty, and no one bothered to talk in my presence, the only exception being Willie.

She would run a monologue the whole time we sat together, metered words with spaces between, which she did not expect me to fill.

“Really not my idea of a good plan, all this, but sometimes, what can you do? The better you get, though, the faster we can get you home. Any sign that you could hear me. It would all help. Any kind of cooperation. Even if you stayed pretty shaky, if you could see and hear, you’d be an outpatient again. Tomorrow. Simon sure wants you home.”

I wondered how much she talked to Simon, and what they shared. I wondered if she was testing to see if I could hear her, or just talking to herself. In retrospect I think she tried to support me in some subliminal way, like a person who reads spiritual literature to a coma victim.

I felt sorely tempted, sometimes, to answer her, but I liked her too much. Same with Simon. When someone means too much to me, I want to please them. If I can’t, it’s hard to be around them at all.

Simon came in one day carrying a cardboard sign, with words on it that he’d made from twigs and glued down. He gave me a hug, then set it on my lap and placed my hands on the letters.

I could see the words, though a bit narrow and shaded, and I could see Simon, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to give it all up yet. So I ran my hand over each letter, one slow step at a time, but I knew what it said.

It said, We’ll stay together, even when you’re well.

“What about your wife, Simon?”

He jumped at the sound, maybe because it was unexpected, or maybe it was too loud. Everything still sounded like my ears were plugged and ringing, and I couldn’t tell if I used too much volume.

“Can you hear me, Ella?”

“A little bit.”

“Have you been able to hear all along?”

“No, just the last couple of days.”

“Lots of married couples have parents who live with them, and most of them have children, so why not a sister?”

“Are you going to have children, Simon?”

“No. Hell no. Not me. Are you kidding? You wouldn’t have kids, would you, Ella?”

“I’m not even going to have a husband.”

“Now, don’t say that. You don’t know.”

“No kids.”

“It’s a pact, then,” he said. “No kids.”

“DeeDee was a pact, too.”

“Oh, now, Ella, don’t start. It seemed okay at the time, but I think it’s part of what’s keeping you sick. Not every—” But the door snapped shut again. I couldn’t see or hear him, or tell when he’d given up and gone.

On the day I was released, Willie told me I’d been in the hospital for sixteen days. I was surprised. I’d lost all landmarks of time, and those sixteen days seemed to fill a whole era, like the time it would take to live out a failed relationship or attend high school.

That was the day the shaking started. I never told anyone about it. Not even Willie. It was a deep sort of a tremble, all the way down in my gut. It wasn’t a scared kind of shaking, or the shiver you get from cold. It was fatigue. Strain. Like the time I helped my father strip all the linoleum off the kitchen floor, and then when I sat down to dinner my hands were so tired I couldn’t hold my fork still.

At first I shook almost all the time, except in Willie’s room at County Mental Health, where we met five days a week, and in bed at night.

Later I only felt it when I had to be around real people, and it was important not to be myself, or when Simon saw me acting strange and I had to try to do better.

A month or so after I left the hospital, Willie and I made a pact. I had more confidence in her, because she hadn’t broken one yet.

The deal was that she would never give me a hard time about DeeDee, or harp at me that she’s gone, or ask me to give her up, if I would simply accept what was real about her and what wasn’t. I could talk to her and listen to her, but every time I did, I had to understand that she was not really there, even if she seemed to be.

At first I had to admit that I didn’t know what was real about DeeDee and what wasn’t, but Willie said no problem, I could just act as if I did, and maybe it would get to be a habit.

“Just practice,” she said.

After that, every time DeeDee said something to me, or every time I moved over to leave room for her, I’d say, in the privacy of my head: You’re not real.

It went fine for a while, then I realized she wasn’t arguing with me.

And my sister DeeDee, if she was real and I said she wasn’t, would have me for breakfast. I’d be just so much dead meat at that point. But day after day I called her unreal and survived. My life got heavier then, and I spent more time in bed. Even dressing and brushing my teeth caused me to tremble from exertion, because I knew it meant I had to go outside, which meant I had to go see Willie, because that’s the only time I ever went out. I didn’t mind going to see Willie, but I minded going out onto the street, and I minded riding the bus. It made my heart pound and my insides feel like a building about to collapse in an earthquake.

My initial solution came in the form of night rovings, like an owl or a coyote. I had been stagnating in the house too long, and some glowing ball of spirit in me threatened to fade to nothing, and I feared it might be like fire—you need fire to make fire, and you must never let the last of it die.

I found Griffith Park, at three a.m., a safe environment. It was closed, of course, which meant I almost never ran into anyone, except an occasional pair of lovers, but only occasional. Most lovers preferred ground they didn’t have to reach on foot. Only the animals seemed to move and breathe with me, and although the city lived in lights beneath the hills where I perched, it always looked manageable from the distance.

Most important was my communion with the moon. As damaged merchandise we had a lot in common. But the moon taught me something, one of those pivotal somethings you tell your poor bored grandchildren when you’ve told them already, except that I’d never have any.

The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I’d made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn’t go back, I might as well go forward.

I tried to pay attention in my sessions with Willie, to see if this revelation brought change. I might have even thrown out a few experimental wanderings, just to see if I was feeling any braver.

“I’ve been noticing something about my brother Simon. I’ve been staring at him a lot. I think it makes him nervous, but he won’t say so.”