Robert James Russell

I am going away forever

From our ancient country and carrying away its heart.

                            —Rubén Darío, “To the Country”

More than 30 horses have been mutilated or killed in violent attacks across France since February, with cases rising in recent weeks. French authorities are no closer to finding a motive behind the attacks, but have warned the public not to take matters into their own hands.

            —News report on horse mutilations in France, 2020 

1.

The horses are dead.

            Celine replays the conversation from earlier with the deputies on their front steps, how Maggie, shell-shocked by the news, folded down where she was standing, and stayed there for nearly three hours. They weren’t a touchy family, but Celine offered her hand anyway to her mother’s shoulder. It felt odd, placing it there, and she became aware of their cells commingling, electrons orbiting each other times infinity, their shared DNA, how X and Y can create Z, a series of logic puzzles she’d found helpful during her recovery at Pine Hope, the rehab center near the Pennsylvania and Ohio border—not near any specific pine forests, no, but a vast field of brown rye grass that never greened, never changed. Just an endless sea of waving grain.

            Maggie’d found them, out to feed and water them early in the morning. Her shrieks woke Celine up from a deep, dreamless sleep. She ran outside panicked in only her underwear and a plain white tee-shirt, cheeks pinked from the October frost, finding her mother staggering out of the horse barn with blood smeared on her flannel, eyes bugged out. 

            “Don’t go in there,” she’d said. “Don’t…go…call the police. Call…”

            But Celine did, of course, go in there, and saw their bodies, the blood, the gore, then ran outside and puked for a minute straight. The two of them cradled cooling cups of coffee when the police arrived, handmade blankets draped around their shoulders.

            “There’s been more than ten cases in our county alone since last month,” one of the deputies said.

            “How can this be?” Maggie asked, flummoxed. “I…we didn’t hear anything?”

            The other deputy stepped forward, a hulking, square lump of clay with small black eyes. “There’s a lot going on in the country,” he said. “A lot of noise. People just haven’t picked up on this yet. Or they don’t care.”

            “That’s awful,” Maggie said, hand splayed across her chest. “Did you hear that, Celine?”

            Celine hated the way she said her name, all the syllables properly sounded out and rounded. Everyone called her Silly, or Cel, mostly, but her mother, with no French ancestry to speak of, insisted on the name, the pronunciation, its aura.

            “We’ll send someone out for a necropsy soon as we can,” the first deputy said, “but we are stretched thin.” Behind them, a weasley-looking veterinarian wandered out of the horse barn with a twelve-month old buckskin foal named Beatrice. She was limping, and there was a circle pattern of stitches on her rump. When Celine saw them, she stood and bolted over, ran her hands across her snout, over her ears. She then felt queasy, sick, violent flashes of the others’ eyes gouged out, ears and genitals removed, the disemboweling. 

            “Why is she still alive?” Celine asked.

            “Couldn’t tell you,” the first deputy said. “But I don’t blame you for missing her. There was…” he waits, adjusts his glasses. “There was a lot of blood and she was, I’m sure, pretty frightened and trying to hide away.”

            She led the horse to the porch while the officers eyed the scar, its pattern. “A ritual,” one said. “Maybe.”

            “Satanic?” Maggie said.

            “Maybe,” the officer repeated. “Maybe they got spooked, had to flee before they could finish. Don’t really know yet.”

            “At any rate,” the other officer stepped forward. “We can take her with us somewhere secure, if you want. It won’t be until morning that we can get someone out here to take care of the others’ remains.”

            “No,” Maggie said. She was still seated, could hardly make eye contact, brittle fingers still gripping the coffee cup, but her voice was resolute: “We’ll keep an eye on her tonight.”

            The deputies exchanged looks. One said, “We can’t be sure they won’t come back.”

            “And, again, we’re stretched thin out here,” said the other. “We can’t leave a unit with you.” He waited, shifted his stance. “Can stop by to check on you here and there, I reckon, but no promises when that’ll be.”

            “We’ll manage,” Maggie said, looking then into the foal’s dark eyes. “We always have.”

2.

A violent dusk.

“You never ask me about Pine Hope,” Celine said. 

Maggie was on the recliner across the room with her reading glasses perched on the end of her angular nose. Her cheeks were flushed from crying. She’d been researching the horse murders and mutilations for hours, watching twenty-second clips from local news outlets and picking apart key sentences to read aloud dramatically. She set her phone on her lap and peeled her glasses off and set them on the arm of the recliner. 

“What’s there to ask,” Maggie said. “It seems to have helped. I’m glad you’re better.”

“The end,” Celine said.

“Mhm.”

“A long line of don’t-ask-abouts.”

Maggie, with her glasses halfway back up to her nose, stopped, sighed. “What?”

“More things you won’t talk about. Just, you know, mentally adding it to the list.”

“List?

            “Dad, your feelings, me dropping out of school. Blah blah blah.”

“Don’t,” Maggie said. “Don’t you dare. Not here, not like this. Not after today.”

Celine, on a floral-print couch, leaned her head backwards and looked out the window to the side yard. Everything was upside down from her angle. They had dragged on like they were in quicksand. Outside, she could see Denny, Maggie’s second cousin, patrolling the yard and keeping an eye on the garage. That’s where they’d decided to put Beatrice, with some chicken wire around the front to keep her in. At least for now. At least until something could be done with the mess in the barn.

One of her therapists at Pine Hope, the one she liked that had left after the first three months, had taught her when she felt especially mad or annoyed or overwhelmed to think of words as a calming mechanism. Objects around Celine she could see, things to help ground her where she was at any moment.

Celine lifted her head up, looked around the room while Maggie had gone back to her phone: porcelain animal figurines collected from boxes of Red Rose Tea, photographs from a road trip her parents had taken in the Seventies, the two of them along the side of the road, landscape photography books Celine had bought Maggie for years that went mostly unread, cigarette burns on the carpet from when Celine was at her worst, some on accident but most intentional.

Celine shook her head, blew a raspberry. “Remember Sensei Jeff?” she asked.

“Sure,” Maggie said. 

“My sensei.”

“Yep.”

Celine laid longwise on the couch and put one leg straight up in the air, then the other, alternating like she was doing a series of kicks. “I remember him telling us once about the origins of Shotokan karate.” She waited. “That’s the style we learned.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and Shotokan meant the movement of pine needles when the wind blows through them.” She waited. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

Maggie sighed, looked up again. “Isn’t what what?”

“I took a type of karate named after pine trees, and I spent the better part of last year at a facility called Pine Hope.”

“Your point?”

“Just that, you know, kismet, or something.”

“I wouldn’t go around bragging about your time there, Celine.”

“I’m not bragging, mom.”

“Good, because it’s going to be hard enough explaining away the gap in your education and work experience. If anyone, anyone at all, thinks you’re being flippant about being there…”

Celine sat up. “I’m not flippant. I’m…fixed. Healed. Well, I’ll always be in a form of healing, but I feel good, Mom. I’m allowed to feel good.”

“You’re thin,” Maggie said. “There’s that, at least.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m not blind. You have something yet to offer them.”

“Them?”

“Lord,” Maggie said, throwing her hands up, exasperated. “Boys, men. You still have a chance.”

“No shit,” Celine said. “I’m not dead. I had a problem, and I went to get help.”

“You were told to.”

“Either way.” She waited. “I know you’re upset about the horses. I’m fucking sickened

by it.”

“Language.”

“But are you mad at me for some reason? I’m picking up on some vibes.”

“Vibes?” She pulls her glasses down again. “No. Why do you ask?”

“You seem perpetually annoyed by everything I do.”

“I like having you here.”

“But.”

“But you move things around, Celine. You question how I do things. Yes, I have a stack of bills in the fruit bowl on the table, but that’s how I know I need to pay those still. Yes, I buy a cheap brand of shampoo and conditioner in one but it’s the stuff I like. And I’ve been doing it this way since before you were born.”

Celine felt her head spin. Couch, ivory rug, small storage bench by the front door where she sits to pull on the too-big boots that belonged to her dad she promised she’d never get rid of. She breathed out. She thought of her roommate, Kelly, still back at Pine Hope. She taught Celine how to plait braid her hair, how to do space buns like Princess Leia. She was from Michigan and had gone to school in Toledo. She felt like the sister neither of them had. Kelly had a brother but he’d died in the pool in their backyard when she was younger and her parents never recovered. They bonded over stalled-out mothers, made jokes about what it must be like when they saw other girls get visited by their families and act as if they were best friends.

Now Celine felt venomous, wanted to stir something up. “Why didn’t you ever get remarried?”

“Excuse me?” Maggie was aghast, both hands along her chest.

“Dad died when I was nine.”

“That’s not how love works.”

“So you’re saying all the people in the world who have been remarried are liars?”

“I’m saying you make a commitment before God.”

“Not everyone does.”

“You do, whether you realize it or not.”

“Mom, not everyone becomes a widow. You get married when you’re twenty…that doesn’t mean the two of you are the same people at forty. That’s okay, you know. It’s okay to move on.”

“For better or for worse.”

“Ugh,” Celine said. “That is such an antiquated view of the world. That there’s only one way forward.” She waited. “I have nothing but good memories of Dad,” she said. “Even at the end, when he couldn’t get out of bed on his own. He will never not be incredible to me. But you’re here in this house rotting, just you and some hobby horses. For what reason?”

“My reasons,” Maggie said. “And this was his dream, too. And you need to know, missy, that your dad was everything to me and how can you replace everything?”

“You don’t need to replace him.”

“Yes, well,” Maggie waved her off. “There’s no use talking to you about this. How would you even know?”

“Mom, I’m not dumb. I’ve been through a lot.” Celine got quiet. She thought of her complications, as someone once called them at Pine Hope. Complications with complications. She’d tried to suss out the inception, the root cause of her addiction. She never quite could. She was jealous of her friends in rehab who could point to X and say That’s it, right there. All there was for Celine, from as early as she could tell, was some feeling of being trapped. The land here locked her in, the sky pressed wildly down on her. Her addiction became a way to escape. Sure, she tried college, took road trips, lived life, but it was never enough. There was always some horizon she’d never see, some sunrise she’d never know. This hollow loneliness with no bottom was the closest thing to X she could muster. And her Dad, she understood now, represented escape more than her Mom ever could. The stories he’d tell her, how he’d lift her up to see better, farther, point out birds and trees and teach her their origins and how they lived—losing him felt like the walls closing in on her even more. The world was big, overwhelmingly so, but maybe it could be ready for her, yet. 

Maggie stood, holding her glasses and phone now. She wiped her hand across her eyes, her face. “You need to start thinking about your life. What happens next. I’m not paying for you to go back to that place. I appreciate you had some troubles, but you need to find a way to move forward.”

“Troubles,” Celine said, smirking. That was the way Maggie had explained it to family, on Facebook, to the old ladies at her church. That she had troubles and went to talk to some folks to get sorted out. It sounded like some Shakespearean comedy, a chorus of angels putting this young ingénue back on her rightful path. Celine sat up and cross-legged on the couch. “You’re telling me to move forward but this place is like a museum to things that no longer exist. You know that, don’t you?”

Maggie hovered there in the space between the living room and the dining room. Everything was so ornate, exposed ceiling beams, dark-stained wood recesses with elegant China that she collected when Celine was a baby. “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Maggie said. She motioned toward Celine, then slowly shuffled ahead. “I barely recognize you anymore.”

3.

It was after sundown, cool and purple outside. Denny had come and gone, had somewhere to be that night, and no one else could come over. They’d rigged up the garage so the door was mostly shut but a crack, and they’d brought in hay and feed and water, all that Beatrice would need. For a while, that had been enough. But the winds picked up, and Maggie was on edge, saw something devious in every shadow that passed by the window and in every creak of their old house. 

At about midnight, she came into Celine’s room and woke her from a deep sleep by rocking on her shoulders. Maggie was dressed in flannel and knee-high rubber boots. She quickly went over the plan: they were going to bring hay into the living room for the night, and they’d both sleep there with Beatrice together, keeping an eye on her.

            Celine was too tired to argue, so she got dressed in a hurry and followed her mom outside. It took them thirty minutes taking trips to the barn—always together, never looking in the direction of the tarps laid down over the bodies, a needed comfort in one another—and to move the furniture out of the living room so it wouldn’t get ruined. Afterwards, they coaxed Beatrice up the front porch steps and through the front door with apples and carrots.

By 3:00 AM Beatrice had finally gone down, lying awkwardly in the hay between Celine and Maggie’s sleeping bags, positioned so Celine could look right at her haunches, the scar that was puffy and leaking between the stitches. It looked like the start of a spiral, like someone was trying to draw a perfect circle but some tremors in their hands, or maybe some interruption, prevented the last third from connecting the line together. It just trailed off, down and jagged. The vet said it wasn’t deep, which made the whole thing even more confusing.

“Are you up?” Maggie asked.

Celine waited a moment and thought about playing dead. No way Maggie could see her eyes darting from floor to ceiling, from front door to horse. She’d been playing scenarios in her head, scary ones, like what if they came back and barged into the house. She’d snuck a kitchen knife into her sleeping bag, a small but serrated one, and she wondered if she’d be able to do much damage with it. She was pretty sure it was just a bread knife. 

Bored one night at Pine Hope, she and Kelly smuggled a plastic knife into their room and stayed up all night trying to come up with some sort of magic trick where one would saw the finger off of the other, and then, after some words were spoken, it’d be reattached like nothing had happened. Sadly, neither of them knew how magic worked, nothing about sleight-of-hand, but neither cared. That night they’d forgotten about what lay on the other side of the door, therapy the next day, medicine, trauma, grief—they were just two girls on their own with the whole world ready and waiting.

“Yep,” Celine said softly.

            “I want to tell you something,” Maggie said. “And I want you to listen.”

            The wind was howling fiercely outside. Celine had thought she’d heard rain pelts earlier, but now it was just wind. They’d drawn the curtains in the living room but she could still see the fuzzy yellow lamps that lined their driveway down to the road. She remembered when her dad had changed the bulbs once, saying that he couldn’t do it without Celine’s help, not at all, that she was the missing piece to making it all right. She loved that, and now most of them were either out or on their way out and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to fix them on her own, or that she even wanted to try.

            “When I was a girl,” Maggie said, “my mother had this book on folk magic. She’d read it to me, especially when my father was out of town and it was just the two of us.”

“Grandma had a book on magic?” Celine shifted. She didn’t know her grandmother well, but knew she was a resolute Catholic woman who hit Maggie a lot when she was young. 

“Pow-wowing, it was called around here,” Maggie said. She was twirling her grayed hair in her fingers like she was a child, like this was some sleepover. “Things to cure jinxes and hexes, heal bruises. Farm wives had a copy of this one book all over, way back when.” She hesitated, sounded distant. “Not even sure if it’s in print anymore.” She sighed. “I donated it with some things before you were born.”

“I still don’t quite get it,” Celine said. “Wasn’t grandma like the most religious person you knew?”

“She was, but this was that sort of nebulous area of Catholicism. Trinkets and charms and, if you’re lucky, God’s will on your side.”

“Fucking-a,” Celine said, then quickly: “Sorry, didn’t mean to swear. Just hard to believe, but I guess they pray to saints and have rituals and all that. Why not a book of spells.”

“We do.”

“Right,” Celine corrected herself. “We.”

“It’s funny,” Maggie said. “I remember parts of it. I’d sneak peaks, and she’d go around saying this and that here and there.” Maggie sat up. “Did I tell you that my granddaddy stole cream during the Depression?”

Celine laughed, sat up on her elbows. She knew almost nothing about her great grandparents. Beatrice stirred and Celine cupped a hand over her mouth. Then, quietly, she said, “You most certainly did not.”

Maggie chuckled. “My grandparents, my mother’s parents, had a small dairy farm, but had to sell off the cows in about 1936 or so. My granddaddy, his name was Ernest and he was from Austria, actually. Changed it from Ernst when he arrived in America. Anyway, things were bad and there was a big dairy farm a couple of properties over from theirs, so he’d sneak in the night and all he’d do was skim cream from the top of the milk pails that were still sitting out in the barns. Then he’d go into town and sell the cream to bakeries.” She waited. “There was hardly any cream for anything then, you know, so that was like pure gold.”

            “Oh my god,” Celine said. “That’s incredible.”

“Never got caught, and took the cream to a bunch of nearby towns. He was smart like that. But then he just stopped.”

“Why?”

“My grandmother was the one that had the book on magic, gave it to my mother. My grandmother would egg my granddaddy on but then chastise him the next morning. There was a line in the book.” She waited, lay back down while she was thinking. Quietly she said, “Ye thieves, I bind you with the same bonds with which Jesus our Lord has bound hell, and thus ye shall be bound.”

“So basically she wanted him to make money then gave him a lecture when he did?”

Maggie laughed. “Exactly that. But she said it so frequently to Ernest that my mother picked up on it, and it was a sort of…”

“A mantra?”

“Sure,” Maggie said. “Said it so much that I picked up on it, too, via my mom.” She chuckled again, distantly. “An inherited mantra. So much so I can still remember it all this time later.”

Celine slowly touched a single finger to Beatrice’s croup, then stroked it with her hand down to her tail. Beatrice flicked her ears and looked up and then laid back down. Exhaustion, Maggie had said earlier. She knew she was safe here.

“Your father was a sick man,” Maggie said suddenly.

“I know.”

“No, when we first met.” She waited. “Suicidal.”

“What?”

“There were a few attempts, but he got better.”

Celine’s head raced. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“For what purpose?”

“Shit like this is genetic, mom. And you never thought…”

“That was his story to tell, Celine. Not mine.”

“So what’s your story, then?”

“What?”

“You married a man who was sick. He got better…because of you? And he was so saintly you agreed to never marry anyone ever again after he died?”

“Celine.”

“You don’t have any hobbies. You collect a few things, but just sit here living in the past.

Couch, old rug. Pills, straight razor, gasping breaths. “What kind of life is that?”

“Mine,” Maggie said. “And not yours.”

“I’m glad,” Celine said. “I’m so fucking glad.” She laid back down. She was fuming and the words now, the repetition, gave no comfort. “What the hell are we doing with this horse tomorrow?”

Maggie didn’t say anything.

“We can’t keep guarding it in the house like a bunch of minutemen.” She sat up and showed off the knife from the kitchen. “Look, I even…what was I even going to do with this?” She was laughing now, maniacally. “Slice and dice ‘em as they come for our horse?”

Maggie sat up and held out her palm. “Give it to me,” she said. “Now.”

Celine complied then sulked with her knees up to her chest.

“I want you out looking for jobs once we deal with things here,” Maggie said coldly. She laid back down and rolled away from Celine and Beatrice toward the wall with the photos on it.

Celine wondered which one she looked to first. She didn’t understand how someone could be so stunted, how this could be enough. “I love you, but you’re going to have to be on your own,” she said. “I know the doctor said you need time, and I’ve been patient, but I need my space. You do, too.”

Celine chuckled. “The last thing I need is space.” She thought of Kelly again, wondered if she could come visit, if her parents would care. They’d lost one child, maybe they’d take her in as some kind of replacement. And the two of them could keep an eye on each other and they could go on adventures and maybe get an apartment together in some city like Detroit and they could work at the same company and go on double dates and it would be exactly like she thought it should be. Or, it could be just enough.

4.

Just after sunrise Celine slowly stood and put on her dad’s oversized boots. She roused Beatrice who flitted and snorted but otherwise made no noise. At the front door, Celine waited and looked back at Maggie who was curled in a ball in her sleeping bag. She looked older, sadder, Celine thought. 

            Outside the grass was frosted over and the sky was blue like the rows of Hydrangeas outside of Pine Hope. Her breath curled in front of her face and up past her head. She was wearing an old baggy army coat she’d gotten at Goodwill in high school that she still quite liked. She put Beatrice’s lead under her arms and the two of them stood there while Celine rubbed her hands together. She touched Beatrice’s forehead, then stroked her shoulders and withers and then ran her fingers through her mane. Some early morning birds flitted around the roof of the house behind them.

While Beatrice stomped at the ground Celine quickly took three strands of hair and made a quick braid that fell to the side of her thick neck. She then led her down the drive. Her hooves crunched on the gravel. At the end they stopped and Celine looked both ways down the road. Across from them an empty, fenced-in pasture. Killdeer whooped and hollered kill-deer along the fence posts where they’d set up their nests.

Maggie would be up soon. Celine wondered how much gas it would take to get to Michigan, how much money she’d need for food. She put her arms around Beatrice’s neck and then swatted her twice on the rump and as if she understood she took off down the road. Her feet sounded like drums along the rough pavement. From where Celine stood still at the end of the drive, she could see Beatrice’s breath hot and fast and steaming up around her head like she was some kind of holy icon. Celine pulled her coat closed and crossed her arms.

“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” she said under her breath in some sort of emulation of her mother’s voice. The killdeer were getting louder, the sky brighter. Somewhere, the sound of traffic or thunder or a woman catching a mutilation in the act, a gasp, a tremor, a question whose answer she couldn’t bear to comprehend. Celine breathed out, and turned back toward the house slowly starting up the drive. “Yes, well.”

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