Funerals for Horses (22 page)

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.

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.

He must not have wanted me to.

Headlights sweep across the kitchen and May’s eyes come up. Her head tilts slightly, reading the sound of the motor. “Everett is home,” she says.

We sit quietly for a minute, and the engine cuts off, the truck door slams, and Everett joins us in the kitchen. His mood feels heavy to me, dark, more than I wish to carry. And I am feeling things acutely now, as if my nerves were all exposed. I think this is what it feels like to be sane.

“May,” he says. “Ella.”

“Are you hungry?” May asks him.

He shakes his head. He sets one big hand on my shoulder. “Were you able to find your brother?”

“Yes and no. Were you able to help your son?”

“Yes and no. I’m going to get some sleep.”

When he has left the room May shakes her head, as if to clear the sadness away. “He’s never been anything but trouble.”

“Everett?”

“Our son.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“Everett thinks we raised him all wrong. But do you know anybody who raised their kids all right?”

“Not personally, no. May, why hasn’t Yozzy come back?”

She shakes her head. I’m not sure why I thought she would know.

In the morning Everett and I load into the pickup and drive to Sam Roanhorse’s.

Sam says Yozzy left for home almost two days ago, and my heart falls, and it’s held up so high, by such narrow lashings, I wonder how far it has to drop, and what will become of it now.

We ride the open countryside, off the road, toward home, and I kneel in the truck bed, my hands flat against the roof of the cab. I ask for guidance on where to look.

When I see her, I knock on Everett’s window and point.

We drive up close to her, and she lifts her head. She’s spread out on her side. She does not try to get up. I limp, hobble to her, and Everett follows close behind.

I hold her neck, and whisper to her, but her eyes are hollow, filmy, and she says only, thank you for coming, and goodbye.

“The trip was too much for her,” I say.

Everett says, “No, it was exactly enough. She’s done what you needed. She’s done.”

A minute later he’s back at my side carrying Simon’s rifle. I’m shocked to see it. I had no idea he’d brought it, but now, in a deep place, moving deeper all the time, like quicksand, I understand.

“You or me?” he asks.

“It should be her owner,” I say, in a voice that might not belong to me.

He hands me the rifle. I don’t ask why. I wait for him to explain.

“She has no owner. She belongs to herself. You gave her what I never could. You gave her something important to do.”

He leaves us alone.

I cry into her neck, and remember the pain of my own walking, and the coyotes who tried to take her, and how they’ll never have her now.

“Yozzy,” I say. “I think we found Simon after all. I don’t think we can help him, but I think we found him. I just wanted you to know that. Thank you. Goodbye now.”

I need her to know this before she goes, though I suspect I am the only one who needed to hear it again.

Her eyes say she understands this moment, and my role in it, and that she’s more than ready. I kiss her on the nose, and rise to my knees, and set the rifle to point into her ear.

I remember this from the deer on the Sacramento highway.

When I feel I’ve set the rifle properly, I remind her that I love her and I look to the sky not down. I ask my finger to do the unthinkable, and it must be wiser than the rest of me, because it does.

I hear, but I never see.

I keep my eyes closed, and as her soul leaves, a part of me leaves to follow, a horse part, something I loved dearly but no longer need.

I turn away without looking, limp back to the truck, and ask Everett to please check to see that I’ve done the job correctly.

When he returns he puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “Perfect.”

“What do you do with a dead horse in the Navajo tradition?” He only shrugs.

I thought there was a tradition for everything, every passage, but Everett says the traditions are ancient, from a time when there were no horses in America. He suggests we leave her where she is. He says even if we had a way to do so it’s a crime to bury a thousand pounds of food, sustenance, that the native animals could use.

“I don’t want the coyotes to have her.”

“They can’t, Ella, she’s gone. It’s just her body.”

“But I worked so hard to protect her.”

“Of course you did. You needed her. She needed herself. Let that change now.”

We drive home in silence.

Halfway home I see him up ahead of us, hobbling along by the side of the highway, moving in the same direction we are. He is wearing the overalls, one strap on his right shoulder holding the baggy things in place, the bib drooping on the left where I cut a strap away. For whatever reason, I assume that what I am seeing is not real.

“Everett, do you have mirages around here?”

“That man, you mean? Is that your brother Simon?”

“No. But I think he used to be.”

We pull up close, close enough to see his white hair flapping out behind him in the hot breeze. Everett slows the truck as we pull alongside him.

“Don’t stop,” I say. I’m thinking of Yozzy, thinking that this wild former Simon tried to shoot her. “He’s not my brother anymore.”

Everett crawls the truck along, a mile or two an hour, beside the man, who does not turn to look.

“But if he used to be, maybe he could be again.”

I roll my window all the way down. “Simon,” I say. He is not more than three feet from me. I could lean out and touch him, but I don’t. He turns his head slightly at the sound of his name. “Simon, where are you going?”

“Going home, Ella.”

“Good. That’s a good thing to do, Simon.” I wish he would turn and look at me. I want to see it in his eyes, the way I did in my dream. I know for certain now, because he called me by my name. But I want to see Simon in him. It doesn’t make sense inside me, how much he has changed. “Sarah misses you.”

“How is Sarah?” he says, and the voice is close to something now, riding on the edge of a voice I know.

“Worried sick about you.”

“I’ll go home, tell her I’m okay.”

“Good. That’s good, Simon.”

He continues to shuffle along the road beside us. He shifts his eyes over to look at me, indirectly, assessing in his periphery. I assume I am the source of his interest, but I’ve forgotten that I have his rifle between my knees, pointed straight up to the roof of the truck cab, both hands steady on the barrel.

“That’s mine, you know,” he says. Childlike and resentful.

“Yes, it is. You won’t need it in Sacramento, though. I thought maybe we’d leave it here with my friend Everett. Would that be okay?”

“I guess.”

“I have your wallet. Maybe you want it back now.”

He stops walking. Everett brakes a few feet beyond him, then shifts the truck into reverse and backs even with Simon in the middle of the road, which is otherwise empty. No car in sight in either direction.

I say, “Look at me, Simon,” and he does. And it’s Simon. “I’m going home, too, Simon. Maybe we could travel together. It would be almost like old times.”

He seems to think about this for a few moments. He looks down at the dirt under his bare feet. Up at the sky. Then he nods his head and climbs onto the truck bed, and we all head back to the Ankeahs’.