The Untold Read Free Page A

the feeling was not like riding, it was like sinking and sinking was her fear. She fixed her back like a steel beam and faced the distance.
    There was so much distance.
    The mountains seemed farther away now than ever and as she tried to focus on the sharp edges of the cliffs where they cut into the sky, they shifted like an unsteady backdrop, one way, then another. The sun was full and bleaching and nothing was solid.
    She rode on.

    S HE HELD HERSELF UPRIGHT for as long as she could. But even her determination was not enough. Soon she fell against her horse’s back and dropped the reins completely.
    Houdini, a stallion, a Waler, moved easily from a gallop to a long-striding walk, and the weight of my mother across his back was enough to balance her. He turned east towards the thin arc ofriver and did not falter from his even step until he reached its bank. Then he shook her from his back and she fell onto the sand.
    Hitting the sand she came to. She did not know where she was. She could see Houdini drinking from a part of the river she did not recognize and edged her way to it, put her mouth against it and drank the water until it revived her. She had enough energy then to peel off her sand-encrusted trousers and turn them over to the shallows. Red clouds bloomed out.
    My mother was not one to say
oh dear
or
oh my.
She was one to say
fuck.
And often.
It was a word she had fine-tuned in prison. Half naked by the river, looking down between her legs, that is what she said:
Fuck, Houdini. I’ve gone and bled a trail.

    T HERE IS NEVER a good day to die. And you’ll see my mother is not the quitting kind. But there is courage in blood and she had lost so much of it. She did not have the strength to get back on her horse.
    To the north of her were the shifting cliffs and ridges of the mountains. Even if she could have ridden solidly, just to get to the base of the first rise of the mountain range was a whole day’s ride. Beside her was the river. If she rolled herself into it and floated down, it would deliver her directly back to where she had come from, the place to which she could not return. Above her was the clearest, bluest sky with no cloud or apparition and it seemed to be sinking down upon her. She covered her face against it.
    Fuck, Houdini
was the best assessment.

Y ou might like to think of your own mother knitting blankets expanding outwards in all colors while you were in her womb. Or at worst vomiting into buckets. On the eve of my birth, my mother concertinaed my father while I lay inside her. Six foot. Eight inches. She brought him down with the blunt side of an axe.
    I was still two moons off by her measure. Already I was large and awkward enough inside her that I was breaking her sleep a couple of times in the night with my knee or my elbow wedged into her bladder.
    Eve of my birth I was wide awake, listening to a thrumming sound that I knew was not the sound of her heart. I stretched out and woke her. Hearing the peculiar sound for herself, she lit a lantern and wound up the cloth wick to cast more light. There were two moths attached end to end and they were beating their wings like a fast-rolling drum and making dust on her pillow.
    She picked up the moths by the edge of their wings and cupped them both in her palm. She maneuvered a shawl around her shoulders with her spare hand and shifted us all out of bed. Tiptoeing past Fitz’s room she saw his door open and his empty bed and she relaxed, walked heavy on her heels.
    The moon was just a scrape in the sky and a fog rolled around the house so she could hardly see beyond it. She stood on the veranda and threw the moths into the air and she was surprised theydid not fly but just dropped to the ground, stuck together, their wings still beating.
    Even with the fog, the air was unseasonably warm with the turning season and she felt herself being drawn into it. She was barefoot but her feet were hardened and they were as warm in the dirt as