Free Vandal Love by D. Y. Bechard

sit Isa in the sun while he worked. He saw that it was possible to be content in these quiet hills, mucking out stalls, watching evening long on the pastures and thinking, when he could, nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

Virginia

1970–1988
    His name was Jude again, Jude White. He dressed in work clothes much like those of his youth, and the manure he shovelled was no different. It amazed him how easy it was to be absorbed by the country. Occasionally he heard people mention Ali or Frazier, and he thought of all he might have had. He never spoke of boxing, never set foot again in a gym. He hid behind his beard and gave his attention to the horses and his daughter. About daughters he didn’t know much, but about horses he’d learned a fair amount from his grandfather.
    Though Isa had been born into an America in the throes of Vietnam, she sensed not war but the eclipsing presence of a strength that cast its shadow, like, she mused as a child with her dinosaur cards, a pterodactyl. As she grew, Jude became more a mystery with his blazing hair and eyebrows criss-crossed with scars, his twisted and swollen hand keeping him up on cold nights. He was mostly silent, speaking French and English distantly so that she learned to mumble, I’ve gone English in the head, or to say,
câlice, ciboire
and
tabernac
, words interchangeable with
fuck
and
shit
and
goddam
, all of which she later used working with horses.
    With time she came to sense her father’s moods, the way the sky exerted its weight and slowed the world, a storm beyond the horizon. He’d be sitting, brooding, then go to the woodpile, upend a piece and swing the splitter until the raw fissures of his old wound cracked, uneven chunks tipping, wobbling where he stood them, making the maul ineffective, jarring his grip, blood now streaming. Winter was the worst. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, couldn’t see his tears or the hand bleeding onto the frozen earth as he crouched among scattered pieces, wanting to disappear.
    Jude himself hardly understood his moods. He feared them and loved Isa fiercely. The first time she was sick, seeing her cough in bed he stood over her, trembling, trying not to yell. Glancing up, she saw this fear as anger, not just the part of it that was. He cranked the thermostat, brought a space heater and heaped her with blankets until after a day-long sweat she got better.Eventually she learned to make herself small, and this worried him—this girl with all the threats of weakness. Shying away, she didn’t understand what else he might want. But love lingered, a memory of something that wasn’t quite either of them, those city walks, the way she’d held on to his red hair, or these fields, the sun through the stall door when he put her in empty feed troughs as he worked, and the soft, fragrant muzzles of curious horses brushed against her.
    With time he left her to herself. He cooked a steak each night to ensure health—steak being among her first words. Steak, he said when he set it before her, a peppered, bloody chunk of meat. It had been a rough transition from formula, but she’d done all right. When things got complicated he deferred to the farm’s owner, Barbara, who did what she called precision work, grinding aspirin before mixing it with orange juice, removing ticks or splinters. A rawboned woman, she’d come to Virginia from Scotland as a girl and had taken the farm over from her father. She hadn’t married but seemed content and still spoke with a lilt. Isa had spied her in the house with men, more often with women, doing what she knew to resemble Breeding. When Isa asked why she’d never married, Barbara told her, I love horses—men would just get in the way.
    Once in the slatted light of a stall Barbara removed her shirt for Isa, revealing two flat breasts and on her back, when she turned, the print from a horse’s kick like the mark of a secret society, the skin there papery and strangely hollowed.
    It’s