Yannick Murphy - The Call

WHAT THE HOUSE SAID:I have let the mice come in for the winter to live in the walls, for if I don’t they will be cold and hungry and I am not that kind of house to shut them out.

CALL:A man with an old Appaloosa he wants to put down. (See, I told the wife, how now there are so many of these calls.)

ACTION:Drove to farm. Tranqued the horse so the owner could walk him calmly alongside the hole that had been dug with a backhoe.

WHAT THE OWNER SAID:I want him in the hole facing east.

WHAT I SAID:East?

WHAT THE OWNER SAID:Yes, east.

RESULT:The owner turned the horse facing east and held on to the horse’s halter. Did the horse love the mountains facing east, did he go for trail rides there his entire life? I wondered. Or was it something Asian, something feng shui I had never heard of before that the owner believed in. I thought how if I hadn’t myself seen an object with bright lights floating in the sky, I would have thought feng shui was bunk, but now feng shui quite possibly contained a kernel of truth. I felt ready to accept feng shui, and maybe even the yeti. I looked behind my shoulder, into the woods, but there wasn’t anything nine feet tall crashing through them. What was crashing down, more dangerously, was the horse. After I gave the series of shots, the horse started to fall, he was going down, but the owner was standing too close to the horse. The owner was going to fall in the hole with his horse because he forgot to let go of the horse’s halter. The owner was old. He had white hair and gray stubble. I did what I had to do. I pushed the owner back with a swing of my arm. The horse then turned his backside, he swung his hips so that instead of facing east, he was now facing west. He was going in the hole the opposite way. After he fell in, I turned to the owner. He was on the ground. He was just looking up. His name was Jack. Did Jack know the man who shot my son? I looked around. What clues were there to tell me that he did know? It did not seem the old man hunted, himself. It did not seem the old man could even see so well. It did not seem the old man had the strength to even raise a shotgun in the air. Jack, I said, I am going to give you a hand up. I held out my hand to Jack, but he still looked up. I looked up, too, thinking there was something other than the sky to see. I grabbed on to Jack’s arm and pulled. When Jack was standing he took his cap off his head and put it on again. Then he looked down into the hole. He nodded when he saw his horse, as if to say even in your moment of death you have done what was contrary to what I wanted you to do. And I thought on these mountains facing east, on these trails his horse so often rode, was Jack the one who had to yank his horse’s reins hard, get him going where he wanted him to go? Was Jack’s horse that kind of stubborn mule?

THOUGHTS ON RIDE HOME:If my levels get too high, if they talk too much, then put me out of my misery and burn me on a pyre, that’s how I want to go. Don’t bother with a backhoe to try and dig the hole. Take down the trees to build the pyre off our land. Let the Newfoundlands have my bones. Let them walk the property drooling with my femur between their massive jaws. I am renewable energy.

WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER:Meat loaf with sweet pickle.

WHAT SARAH AND MIA SAID:We love sweet pickle.

WHAT THE WIFE SAID:Sweet pickle is so sweet I might as well put candy in your meat loaf instead.

WHAT THE HOUSE SAID AT NIGHT WHILE WE LAY IN BED:I am just made of wood. I can break.

WHAT SARAH SAID THAT WE COULD HEAR HER SAY FROM HER BED WHILE WE LAY IN OURS:Mom, Pop, the house is coming apart.

WHAT THE WIFE SAID:Is it true, can the house break apart?

WHAT I FELT:That it was my heart that was breaking in two. I turned over, switching sides.

WHAT I SAID:The house will be the last thing to go, I said, now facing the wall.

WHO IS NICER THAN THE DAY NURSE:The night nurse. The night nurse brings Sarah and Mia extra blankets and lets them create a very dark fort without having to use Sam’s blankets. The night nurse sees the stack of papers and magazines on the floor and admits that that’s what her house looks like and she is always afraid to throw them away for fear she has missed reading an article in them, an article that will save her life maybe. A recall on her brake pedal, a recall on ground meat, a recall on a faulty crib railing, even though she doesn’t have a baby. The night nurse has glasses with pink rims the color of the eyes of an albino pet mouse I had as a child. I would let the mouse run up and down my arms, liking the way he tickled my skin.

CALL:A prepurchase exam on a horse.

ACTION:Drove to farm. Owner’s daughter held the horse while I took X-rays of the horse.

RESULT:Horse, thankfully, stood very still. The X-rays came out clear. The daughter was a young woman. She talked about snow-boarding. She talked about competing as a snowboarder. I told her about surfing, how she should really try it. I told her how I had lived by the ocean out west and surfed the waves and when there weren’t waves to surf, I still went out on my board, lying flat and eyeing orange garibaldi in the clear water. I told her how waves are not like mountains, and how every wave is different and every ride is different and the ocean always changes. I told her that surfing is learning to spot where the wave out on the horizon will be coming from. She laughed, she threw her head back, mountains are like that, too, she said. The conditions are never exactly the same. Her mother brought me out a scone to eat while I X-rayed the horse, a small Morgan with his winter coat beginning to grow in woolly so that he looked more like some Mongolian pony. The scone was delicious. Bits of orange were grated into the batter. Fresh cranberries and bits of apple were mixed in. I asked the owner for the recipe and after I X-rayed the horse, she invited me into her house. Her husband was a carpenter and had carved the doors between the rooms, and he had carved the moldings and the cupboard doors. He had carved the shapes of trees into the wood, not trees you’d expect to find here, but trees, maybe, from the likes of Indonesia. Their canopies were spread wide and their branches thin and delicate and numerous below the canopies, leading down to trunks that were not smooth but ropy in appearance, as if the trunks were twisted strands. Your house is beautiful, I said, and I feasted on the details, wishing everyone’s house I entered could be so distinct and interesting to walk around in. The owner folded up the paper she had written the recipe on and she handed me a check and I put them in my coat pocket. I wanted to ask her if she had heard about Sam, but I knew she had, everyone had heard by now. When she handed me the recipe, she folded it up right after she wrote it, so I could not see the letters. I hoped walking back to my truck that what she had written was the name of the man who had shot my son.

WHAT I DID DRIVING HOME:Unfurled the recipe. There was no name in it, even though I studied the words “grated orange peel” thinking it was some kind of anagram for a man’s name, but what could it be? I came up with “Pete Darlan George” and reminded myself when I got home to look up the name in the phone book.

THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING HOME:This is a good feeling, a check and a good scone recipe in my coat pocket. What more could a man ask for? Then I answered the question myself, alone in my truck. “For my son to be awake,” I said and as I said the words I passed by a man jogging down the road and he must have seen my mouth moving and he must have thought I was talking to him, because he waved and he smiled as I drove on by.