BEFORE WE CAN make forgetful shapes with our mouths, Meredith is off, galloping toward her dad’s back pasture. He’s burning brush back there. Clearing land. A backhoe and several pickups full of Mexican day workers are parked nearby. Her dad speaks abruptly to them in Spanish. He’s paid these men to dig a fire perimeter along both fence lines, water down the stable roof and outbuildings. Maybe they respect him, maybe they don’t. There’s a county burn ban because of the dry conditions, thirty-mph wind gusts, but her dad is adamant. Today’s the day. The land already surveyed and sold to a wealthy high-tech couple who will perch their house high on the creek bluff. Her dad still has her sister to put through college, legal bills from land deals gone sour. But today is our anniversary (isn’t it always?) and his mind is smoldering with Meredith. He squints into the morning cold. The sun flares off the metal roof of an outbuilding. The burning cedar sends sparks and smoke above the tree line. A hawk circles overhead. In the air around her dad, atoms vibrate. He knows these are all loose affiliations, but thinks maybe there’s something to them. Signs. The horses, grazing in the neighbor’s pasture, look back at him as if to confirm it. Most things perplex him these days. A world in which things just happen is beyond hurt somehow, beyond redemption.
Meredith’s breathing is the horse’s breathing, her rising and falling his. She imagines a fist-size space between her and the saddle and keeps her center of gravity just there, poised over an imaginary point, a point whose center is everywhere, bounded by nothing.
We feel slippage, our hairstyles regress, teeth grow crooked and gapped, chests flatten. Horsey girl, come back to us, we say.
Her dad, as always, conjures up Meredith riding alone through the blue stem grass, working her way down to the creek, where the air grows thick and damp below the limestone bluffs. Hooves clatter and slip on wet stone. There’s slippage in him, too, and he hears the grinding sound that has kept him up nights and makes him worry about his sanity. It rises from everywhere at once and he thinks for some reason of the earth’s tectonic plates moving against each other. He often smokes a joint and paces on the back porch in the middle of the night to rid his head of it. They can make a real ruckus, can’t they? our horsey girl says to him. But her face is dusky, indistinct.
He realizes it’s the horses. They’re anxious, grinding their teeth. Maybe someone has cinched their girths too tight, he thinks. He looks over at the horses along the fence line chewing on some half-eaten apples the workers have given them. Unsaddled, unbridled. He feels a distance growing in himself, a permanent horizon that he walks toward but never reaches. A standing wave in a vast sea of tall grass. He turns around in the back pasture and for a few seconds has no idea where he is. The tree line is to the west, he tells himself. He notes this detail in blue ink on his palm.
In a copy of the handwritten autopsy report, which Meredith’s dad forced himself to read, the medical examiner made note of the crescent-shaped scar on Meredith’s abdomen, where she’d had surgery after the mare kicked her. One of her kidneys lost. The examiner listed the scar’s measurements. The examiner described and measured, with a discreet tenderness, bruises, abrasions, bullet wounds, burns. There was a kind of reverence, her dad thought, even in the description of the ligature and bindings. Here and there, the examiner’s pen had seemed to hesitate on the paper, cross through ill-considered thoughts, as if he was lost in the miniature detail of cotton fibers, fingernail clippings, and hair follicles that made up the whole.
Ligature (underwear) shows signs of wear; partly bitten through. Matching synthetic fibers found between left bottom incisor and canine teeth. Long coarse hair found twined in wrist bindings (brassiere). Ginger colored. Likely from the tail or mane of a horse.