Father Brother Keeper: Stories by Nathan Poole

Author:Nathan Poole [Poole, Nathan; Pearlman, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941411001
Publisher: Sarabande Books

What happened when she was fourteen was in many ways inevitable. She had been so long an object of curiosity—a kind of unconsummated desire—and the rumors had been in composition from the very beginning, waiting for their turn in the wings, jealous and impatient like understudies: “I bet she has a forked tongue.” “I bet she howls at night.”

After church that morning her mother stayed and talked while Lorrie wandered outside to wait on the warm steps. From there she saw a horse standing across the street in the shade of a tremendous live oak. It was tied by the bosal to an ornamental iron fence capped with sharp hand-hammered finials. The fence had been there for a hundred years and it lifted and sunk where the roots of the oak pressed up beneath it, causing sections of finials to aim inward in concave depressions and others to fan out lethally like the rays of the sun on old celestial maps.

She was moved toward the horse by a restless feeling the church service put inside her. Like the residue a flash bulb leaves hanging in the air—an exposure that turns with you when you turn and stays out in front of you when you close your eyes—the long stillness of the hour had made the world distant and unreal and the horse was a part of the dream. She wanted to touch the tight tendons of the leg, wanted to run her hand over the muscles and across the steep hill of the flank.

As her hand neared the front shoulder it seemed a spark left her fingertips, and if not a spark, something like it, something inside her, something she carried that leapt. An invisible surface was breached. The animal spooked and reared and she fell back and watched as the horse grew tall and then taller again, impossibly tall. It came down near her, the hooves clattering on stone. A taste of iron in her mouth, a notch in the tip of her tongue, a smell like fear. The horse went up again and she watched as it tried to clear the old iron fence. She watched as the mecate caught and the historic finials disappeared into the smooth barrel of the horse’s underbelly.

The sound it made was significant, married to its meaning. A song somewhere inside the sound drew men toward it. From the far end of the road, and from around the corner, and from across the street, they hustled toward the sound of the horse, animal in hysteric pain. But the noise Lorrie heard had not come from the horse but from somewhere inside her. The sound was the sound of her mind when she saw the horse descend, it was the sound of a sawmill clutch before the belt gains, the sound of resistance, of wishing it could all be turned back, the sound of a loud blister in her palm after a day of raking leaves, the long wooden pews creaking, the organ growl, the doxology, pedal tones that are felt before they can be heard.

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