"Horse Graves" by Zachary Slingsby
Photo Credit: Philippe Oursel, obtained and licensed through Unsplash
Horse Graves
“They put those little white markers out to show where the graves are.”
“I thought they slaughtered horses.”
“They bury some. The great ones, I guess.”
Marty hadn’t liked a lot of what Cynthia had to say that day, but when they drove through the farm-park and she pointed to those graves, he paid attention. It wasn’t something he’d known about, or maybe it was, but it hadn’t crossed his mind really, that horses would get all that special care after they were dead. Like house dogs or grandpas.
Marty thought a horse getting shot in the head was the saddest thing in the world.
“I’d like to walk home from here,” said Cynthia.
They had parked in front of a broken fence post. It was an hour from dusk.
“You’re two miles away, I’ll drive you.”
“We’ve talked all day, Marty. I’ll walk, save us another interminable ten minutes.”
He shut the engine off. “Maybe that was when things wound down for us. You ever think of that? When you started using words like interminable?”
She laughed without meaning it. “Could’ve been,” she said. “Me saying interminable, you fucking a pharmacist. Potato, potàto.”
Marty’s grandfather would drive their dead horses out into the woods and tell the kids it was good for the other animals to have a turn at their meat, the cycle of life and all that. When Marty went out to where they’d been dumped, sure enough all that remained were the skulls and scattered bones.
He popped the middle console and took out a cigar, slicing it and lighting it, saying, “Walk if you want.”
She got out and took off towards the main road.
*
There were laws about where you could actually bury your horse. It wasn’t like you could just pick a spot out in a field somewhere. Otherwise, Marty figured, more people would do that. Instead, folks around there sent them to landfills. Not every landfill would take your dead horse, but some would.
Marty’s grandfather would drive their dead horses out into the woods and tell the kids it was good for the other animals to have a turn at their meat, the cycle of life and all that. When Marty went out to where they’d been dumped, sure enough all that remained were the skulls and scattered bones. Wild things had devoured the flesh.
Today it was barbaric to drop dead animals off in the woods.
He didn’t own any animals himself, but if he had some, he’d like to think he’d bury them in a place as nice as this farm-park. And he’d come back and visit around this time of day, the sun still flirting with the grass, everything orange and purple, the world smelling so old it was new for a minute.
Cynthia used to be able to understand him when he talked like that, about smells and sounds and things he might’ve done in some other life but didn’t do in this one. Then one day she seemed to stop being interested in the things he said about some other nonexistent life and not relevant to the lives they actually had.
He would talk about fishing and why people do it and the kind of peace he thought you might get from it, if you did it every day. And she would ask if he paid that electric bill or if they were going to his mother’s house that weekend or if he’d finished applying for night class.
Marty was a country singer, but Cynthia told people he helped renovate kitchens. It was true that he renovated more kitchens than he sang or wrote country songs, but that was only because everyone walks a long path to get somewhere far away. That didn’t mean he was a kitchen renovator.
What you do, Marty thought, shouldn’t be all mixed up with who you are. What he did had to do with kitchens; who he was was a country singer. Cynthia understood that for a long time. But then caught onto words like interminable and asked questions about night classes, and next thing he knew she told anyone who asked that he was a man who worked with his hands, not his voice.
He didn’t mind it, really. The best men in his family had worked with their hands and some of the best men he knew made their living that way now. He just hated hearing her not knowing him over and over again.
Then he met the pharmacist. It was midnight at a honky-tonk bar.
Cynthia didn’t have to find out about it, he told her. He said it plainly the next morning over eggs. Although he supposed he didn’t have to tell her, since she seemed to already know. She was always already knowing what he had to tell her and he was always telling her anyway. And he figured no great country songs were going to come from being all the way known or from saying things so obvious they barely needed saying.
He looked at some of the little white markers on the field as he smoked his cigar.
*
Cynthia had wanted to be a musician for a while, too. She had wanted to be a lot of things when she was seven, and none of them were an x-ray technician. But life has a funny way of presenting questions that are multiple choice instead of free response.
In that way, her life was her own and she was in charge of her future—and even an ugly painting gives you some pride when all you’ve ever created before then were stick figures.
In her twenties, this depressed her. In her thirties, she started to take to it, the strictures one endured and tradeoffs one made to get by. She could go to the beach that summer, but only if they skipped a flight home at Christmas. They could go out to dinner that Saturday, but only if they ate leftovers for lunch every day that week. She could get a nursing degree, but it would take twice as long as it took some other people and she’d have to live with that. Multiple choices, none of them great. But if she threw herself into one of them, there was a kind of dull satisfaction in the suffering that came next. This wasn’t a thrill by any means, but it beat the other kind of suffering, which was the suffering of aimless falling and had no satisfaction in it, dull or otherwise.
In her tradeoffs and compromises, her small sacrifices and slight gains, the aches of every day were the aches that she chose to inflict on herself. In that way, her life was her own and she was in charge of her future—and even an ugly painting gives you some pride when all you’ve ever created before then were stick figures.
Marty, on the other hand, glued a popsicle stick to a Coors can and called it a Rembrandt.
He’d noticed that she changed but didn’t notice how and didn’t seem to wonder why. She used to like to order oily takeout and watch awful movies. Then she started having light dinners and reading books in the den. She used to go for a run only when she was stressed. Then she started doing it every morning at sunrise. They once had all kinds of sex. Then she’d have one or two kinds, and only on weekends.
It wasn’t that she lost respect for Marty. She respected everyone she loved and loved him to his bones. It was that once she began trying to make things happen, she had nothing in common with a man who let things happen.
When he told her about the pharmacist, it was a Thursday and she was running late to meet a new mentor at the medical center. She used all the hideous words she knew she was supposed to use and even broke a few cereal bowls. But through the whole episode, she kept an eye on the clock. She really wanted to make that meeting.
It was a few months later, this farm-park day. They hadn’t seen each other but once or twice in the meantime, and he called and asked would she come see his mother because he hadn’t gotten around to telling her they’d split and she was desperate to say hi to Cynthia. All his family loved Cynthia. She said no, then called back and agreed.
They visited for a few hours and he drove them to the park after. That was when she started talking about horses. She had never owned a horse, never ridden one, never loved one, nor had she really known anyone who’d owned, ridden, or loved one. But it seemed like the most important thing she had to tell him all day. More so than that she was seeing someone else, a PT named Anthony, or that she’d aced her RN exam or bought a new used car. There were graves in that field. And there were beautiful animals in them. Marty perked up at that.
That got Marty listening.
*
Cynthia was a half-mile from home when his truck pulled up alongside her and he hung his arm out the window and flicked some cigar embers at the gravel.
“I was planning to get a milkshake. Would you like to come with me to get a milkshake?”
She stopped walking. She’d worked up a sweat. It sounded pretty good right then, but she’d lost fifteen pounds, mostly due to not eating sweets on weeknights. “I don’t know what else we have to say, Marty.”
“Don’t plan on saying much. Just thought it’d be nice is all. Have a shake, maybe tell you a joke. I got a bunch of new ones since you last seen me. Even someone like you might crack at some of these. I’ve worked on the delivery and all.”
“Someone like me. Someone who can’t laugh, is that it?”
Marty laughed himself. “Someone who goes and says something like that when I say something as nice as Hey, how bout a shake and a joke?”
She stood there while gnats taunted her eyelashes. The hum of his truck was the only noise. Eventually, he knew he’d got her and she looked at her shoes while she laughed. He threw in a “Come on!” and she crossed the street and got in the passenger side, holding in as much of the laugh as she could, but letting some of it go.
They went to a café known for grilled cheeses and crazy milkshakes. He got one called Smores Delight. She got the Oreo Special. Halfway through her stomach hurt. He finished his in four sips, let out a burp and didn’t excuse himself.
“This guy for real? The PT?” he said.
She wiped her lips. “How’s your music going?”
“Come on, is he for real?”
“Too soon to tell,” she said. “How’s your music?”
“If I say I won a Grammy, would you come home with me?”
“Boy, do you know me,” said Cynthia, and didn’t look at him for a while after that.
A kid brought a check. He reached for it, studied it, and paid in a clump of singles.
She moved to the end of her booth and he said, “We don’t have to run out, I just wanted to take care of it.”
She sat back.
There weren’t many other people in the café and if Marty tried he could hear exactly what each of them was talking about. He focused for a second and listened in on a guy telling his friend a deal he got on a piece of property on the outskirts of town and how it would be something in a few years, three or five at most, and it would be the missing piece in his retirement package, send him to Miami or the Bahamas and let him get started on the life he was meant for.
Marty put his elbows on the table and leaned his chin on his knuckles. “I want to write a song about a chair.”
Cynthia nodded. “What about a chair, Marty?”
“Well, a lot of people look at a chair and say there’s a chair. All it does is it sits there and sooner or later gets old and creaky. But if that’s all they get looking at it, that’s because they don’t see reality at all. They think eveything’s gotta have five or six things it’s good for. And they don’t get that the chair simply being there, not too broken or weathered, but bearing the daily grind and pain is a-ok. Without that chair maybe there could be no table or desk or office or home. The chair has a job and the chair does the job. And if all it’s ever good at is being a chair, then that’s a beautiful thing if that’s all it ever gets to be.”
His voice got shaky in the middle but firm by the end. His hands twitched a little under his chin. Cynthia was looking in his eyes now.
“That sounds like it could be a wonderful song, Marty.” She took his hands. “I mean this with the best will in the world: Why not go home and write it—right now? Before you forget it? Don’t overthink it, just get it down. Get all this wonder and truth out of your head and into something real.”
He snatched his hands back. “You’re a hammer now, woman. All you ever see in the souls of human beings is nails.” He jumped out of his booth and ran outside.
The guy scheming on his retirement shot Cynthia a look like he understood the whole situation top to bottom.
*
Ancient Chinese warlords threw ceremonies when they buried their horses. It was a great big deal filled with honor and grief, and the steeds went to ground having fulfilled a sacred purpose. Archaeologists were still uncovering tombs of chariots sixteen or seventeen centuries old. Their graves were massive. Sometimes they were found mixed in among human remains: tribesmen who wouldn’t dare be separated from their loyal companions in the afterlife.
What would Marty the Mongolian warrior talk like at night after battle? What energy would he bring to their marriage bed? What posture would he have at breakfast? What would his hands smell like after he rinsed them of dirt and enemy flesh? What would he do for his horse when it fell in war?
When you think of ancient horses, you probably think of battles. Horses in modern times were not ridden by killers. It made sense then, not commemorating them quite the same. But it was possible we lost something too. In our civilizing, our domesticities, our default expectations of peace… Since we didn’t rely on animals the way we once did, as comrades in war, it made a sad kind of sense that we no longer revered them as heroes in death.
Cynthia wondered once what Marty may have been like in some other century. If he had considerably less authority over the course of his life. If, like anyone of a certain time, he was dropped into a blood-feud. What would Marty the Mongolian warrior talk like at night after battle? What energy would he bring to their marriage bed? What posture would he have at breakfast? What would his hands smell like after he rinsed them of dirt and enemy flesh? What would he do for his horse when it fell in war?
She caught up to him outside the convenience store down the street. He was coming out, holding a twelve-pack, as she strode into the lot. He dropped it in his truck bed and asked what else she wanted to know, like had he been to the dentist lately or what his insurance premiums were up to now.
She pointed across the highway to the edge of the farm-park.
“They haven’t gated it for the night yet,” she said. “You want to walk with me around there?”
“You were right to be going home, Cyn. I’m gonna go home myself.”
“Long walks to nowhere,” she said, a voice lighter than he’d heard her use all day, “used to be the one thing we could both agree on.” He didn’t say anything and she nodded at the trunk bed. “Bring the beer.”
*
There weren’t many stars out. It was warm and the bugs had fled or died.
Cynthia had on the same white sweater from that afternoon. Marty liked her better in her glasses, but she’d gotten contacts sometime since he’d moved out. Marty wore the same jacket he always wore, no matter the temperature or season, blue at the sleeves, brown at the back and lapels. It was a light jacket, but not perfect for any season, so he was cold in winter and a little stuffy on an evening like this, when the sun had heated that field all day, scorched all the gravel and soil, ivy and thistle.
He popped beer cans for both of them and left the case in the truck bed. They walked along the white ranch fence and took sips at the same time.
He thought of teasing her, saying in his high voice, “Think of the calories!” But he kept it in. He slowed his pace and she followed, then they were kind of strolling.
She was right. They had never disagreed about doing this. They always looked forward to walks. The simple joy of it hadn’t faded, it seemed, for either of them. Marty thought that was nice.
“What’s funny is you get up earlier than I do most days,” she said, talking about who knew what.
Marty said, “Well, I got the kitchens. When I catch a job they start early. So I get up. Damn well hate it, but I do it.”
“Exactly.” She smiled. “It’s strange, it took so long for me to adjust to waking up early, like really early, so I could get more out of a day. But now I love it. And you, you just did it whenever you had to, no matter how much you drank the last night or whatever. But you never loved it. You dreaded it every day. It made you miserable.”
“Well,” he nodded, “I’m trying to see how that’s strange. It made me miserable while I was doing it, then I guess I got over it later that day. And when I was there on the job, I had a lot of fun with the other boys. Talkin’ trash or mixing it up. I never stay miserable.”
“But why not just commit to the life you have? Make it work for you? Why fight every day, Marty? How exhausting.”
“I don’t feel exhausted. Sometimes I do, but then I get some sleep. And when I get up, it’s gone away.” He took a long sip. “As to fighting every day, I guess I figure we all do that. I fight getting up on time and going to bed early. But you fight more than that. Hell, Cin, you seem to be fighting every second you’re alive. Just looking at you... All your muscles are squeezed tight, even when you’re sitting down to dinner. I’d rather not go off trying to change simple things about myself that aren’t perfect but that I don’t mind too much to go ruining the things about me I do like.”
They came to some flowers. She gave them a look.
The new guy, that PT named Anthony, he wasn’t much for walks, Cynthia thought. He liked to run, though. He ran miles a day, owned a new Honda Accord, was on a first-name basis with all the guys at the deli outside their clinic and always took her out for cocktails on their dates before wherever they were going for dinner or meeting whoever they were going to meet. He often wore clean purple dress shirts. But he’d never suggested a walk.
Cynthia didn’t tell Anthony about meeting Marty today. She wasn’t sure she would go through with it, but for that she always liked his mother and Marty had told Cynthia they’d gotten “bad news” from the doctor lately and she’d sure appreciate a visit. It wasn’t until near the end of the lunch she found out the bad news was tendinitis. She felt conned for a few minutes, then watched Marty eating his sandwich, not saying much to either of them, just being quiet between them, smiling sometimes.
“It got me fascinated with touching a horse, but when I finally got to, all I could think about was the smell. They smell awful, racehorses. They eat all kinds of everything. They’re pigs.”
Now they came to a beaten-down house, two stories, all the wood panels charred, windows busted. Marty went right up the porch and looked in the front door.
“Looks like once it was a doc’s office,” he said. “Probably a vet for the horses.” He came down the creaky steps. “You think of yourself as an animal lover?”
“Would you think of me that way?”
He looked back at the broken house. “No.”
“My sisters have dogs. My father used to bet horses. He never respected anything like he did a racehorse. They let him into the stables once after he won big. He came home and talked about how soft they were when he got to touch them. He said their necks were softer than his daughters’ newborn bellies. It got me fascinated with touching a horse, but when I finally got to, all I could think about was the smell. They smell awful, racehorses. They eat all kinds of everything. They’re pigs.”
Marty was listening but looking up the hill towards where they parked. He saw that the gate to the entrance had been locked for the night. He’d have to leave his car here. He looked at Cynthia. “Why don’t we go in this old vet’s office, throw a blanket on the cold-stone floor and do something we’ll never forget?”
She snorted. “You’re officially out of pick-up lines, Marty.”
He started laughing. He looked down at his beer can and finished it in another sip, then kept laughing. Beer came out of his nose. Cynthia laughed with him. They kept walking. They went towards the creek. It was dark now.
*
The beauty of the word equestrian was a defense against common insults like Cynthia’s. How could horses be filthy and foul if such an elegant, gorgeous word as that was used to describe their ways?
When they got down to the creek, she wondered if they were going to make love. She was interested in doing it. She hadn’t planned to be, but they’d taken this walk and laughed and she’d held his mother’s hand, those bones ridden with tendinitis, and she’d even believe it was all party of Marty’s plan if she could believe he ever made a plan about anything.
He took his shoes and socks off and rolled his jeans up and stood in the creek. “It’s warm,” said Marty.
She took her sneakers off and joined him. The current broke around their ankles. She watched it tug on the squiggly hairs around his calves. They were a few feet apart. They heard the songs of the wild things in the trees.
She was waiting for him to touch her.
Anthony would’ve touched her by now. They would’ve had the longest, most wonderful and dreamy conversation about all the things they were going to achieve in life, and at the end he would’ve grabbed her waist and kissed her, and that moment would’ve been alive with the million kinds of futures they might enjoy, any one of them a magical improvement over today.
She thought of the way Anthony would have kissed her for so long that by the time Marty did she wasn’t able to kiss him back very well. She put her finger to his lips. She apologized. She got out of the creek.
*
They went back to the open field. He climbed through the white ranch fence. There was enough moonlight to make out the little markers of the horse graves. He sat in front of one. Cynthia followed him and rubbed his hair. “I am going to walk back,” she said. “Sorry your car is locked in.”
Marty took his jacket off and scrunched it up under his head, spreading out to look at the sky, six feet above some pony legend. Some Seabiscuit. Some Secretariat. Some beautiful thing someone had loved and shot.
He shrugged. “I’ll be alright.”
“It was good to see you, Marty.”
He ripped up a clump of grass and let it slide through his fingers. “Why do you think kids love horses so much?” he said.
She took a breath. She sat down beside him. “Do they?”
“Every kid alive loves horses,” he said. “Kids think they’re fairylike.”
“Hm. I guess you’re right.”
Marty took his jacket off and scrunched it up under his head, spreading out to look at the sky, six feet above some pony legend. Some Seabiscuit. Some Secretariat. Some beautiful thing someone had loved and shot.
Cynthia got back up. She was exhausted. It wasn’t worth all the exhaustion, she realized, these trips down memory lane. Sad people live in the past. She didn’t care about his mistake with the honky-tonk pharmacist. She wanted Marty to write his songs, but she couldn’t force him. No one could. “I don’t know why kids love them, Marty. It’s a good question. I’ll leave you to think about it.”
She left.
And Marty said, alone, “Horses kill a lot of people, don’t forget.”
Zachary Slingsby is a literary writer and filmmaker. His fiction has appeared in several publications including JuxtaProse, Glimmertrain, Into the Void, Brooklyn Rail and more. He is also the founder of Human Factor Media, an award-winning creative production company based in New York and Nashville, where he lives with his wife and countless daughters.