Thank goodness there's a Southern Methodist University Press around to keep publishing books by people like Mitch Wieland. God's Dogs: A Novel in Stories is just that, a novel in stories. Fully developed, stand-alone stories, but when put together can also be considered a novel.
"The Mistress of the Horse God" is the third of these stories that cover years of Ferrell Swan's later years. He's 60 years old and wandering his property - acres and acres of Idaho land - with his ex-wife, who has been "visiting" for nearly eight months now.
At the bottom of the ridge rests the complete skeleton of a wild mustang, the wildness still there though the bones don't move. Ferrell discovered the skeleton when he first hiked his land, astonished at the bright white skull and its dark eerie sockets, at the curved hoopwork of ribs, the long leg shafts tucked as if the animal still might rise. He knows the place possesses a sacredness that never diminishes over time.
To his surprise, Rilla kneels before the bones. She rolls the enormous skull over, and the lower jaw falls free, leaving in one piece the cranium with hits long snout and toothy upper jaw. Ferrell can see the underside of the cranium is broken. Rilla lifts the partial skull from its resting place and holds the thing in front of her. From where Ferrell stands, she seems to slip the skull over her head, her fingers gripping the snout.
Ferrell grows loose in the knees for the second time that morning: a horse skull atop the body of a naked woman, some ancient creature from folklore, some monster from dreams born of desire and fear. He stares into the skull's shadowy sockets.
"I am the mistress of the horse god," she says, her words in the voice of someone else.
"Lucky god," Ferrell says, more unsettled than he wants to be. He feels his reality too altered right now, feels they've changed from who they were when they left the cabin an hour before.
"You dare to mock the horse god?" Rilla says. "You dare to look upon his mistress with lustful eyes?"
Ferrell stands sweating beneath the hot sun. He doesn't know why the moment has turned so creepy so fast. He wants to say he's spooked, but can't utter a word. He suspects that soon she may be gone, headed back to that red brick house from their past. He pictures his cabin without her, the small rooms again just rooms and nothing more. He thinks to tell her something important about their lives, something that will make her spring into his arms, but he knows each insight is lost when spoken aloud. To his relief, Rilla lowers the skull before he can answer.
"You lost your chance there, Ferrell. I hear horse women can make a man beg."
"Or worse," Ferrell says and smiles to hide his fears.
A great deal of the above captures Mitch Wieland - his characters long. Long to not be alone, to feel that there is a place for them, to believe there is a reason they're here. There's an almost mythological presence the expansive west has and Wieland expands on that with the mustang skull.
There are no pyrotechnics to Wieland's writing, no monstrous plots or action sequences. He simply writes with the best of them, capturing human emotions and fears and loves and all that goes with them. That he does so with a quiet determination, and not smoke and fireworks, is that much more impressive.
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