Sister Golden Calf by Colleen Burner

INVENTORY: one beautiful baby mutant calf preserved by the miracle of taxidermy, sans placards, sans glass case, sans roadside museum. A light mass covered in tawny hairs and full of a crumbling, dusty substance, possibly the product of animal becoming vegetable matter. The sweetest bulging brown eyes, which, objectively speaking, are crooked as hell and crusted with glue all the way around, yet they are naive and pleading without being pained. An outlaw, an outcast, qualified to live among the dead. This is my golden calf and I have no qualms. She practically glows. She smells like victory, like heaps of gold coins, salty sweat, and the quickest draw. Champion of bounties. Her presence feels almost too real to bear.

Gloria, the narrator of Colleen Burner's Sister Golden Calf, sets off with her sister to explore the back highways of New Mexico. Their car is filled with innumerable glass jars, one of which contains the ashes of their recently deceased mother Bonnie, who wishes to be dispersed to the landscape. The rest contain invisible, intangible things that the sisters have collected, as their mother taught them: emotions, moments, experiences, with labels like TARANTULA ACTION, DEAD LIGHT, BEGINNER'S LUCK, SOUL OF A JACKRABBIT. They trade these jars for a little gas money, to keep Bonnie's ashes on the wind, and their journey going. Gloria becomes obsessed with the taxidermied remains of a six-legged, two-headed calf, seen in a small town museum. She splits from her sister, who takes the car, while Gloria sets out to hitch--or walk--her way back to her beloved calf.

Sister Golden Calf is filled with holes. The jars are the prototype: receptacles which seem empty, but which contain something more than mere air, something ineffable. Another is the miraculous hole that Gloria's sister Kit sets off to find, the one in the church that heals people with its dirt, and which re-fills mysteriously each night. (I recognized this as a version of the sanctuary at Chimayo, which I visited over the summer--as far as I know the hole doesn't magically refill, but the description of crutches left behind by the lame, stacked up in their hundreds by the cured, rang true.) Another are the empty cavities of the horse Day-Mare, whose blindness killed the daughter of a woman who offers Gloria food and shelter. Day-Mare has lost her eyes, but Gloria holds a jar up to her face and bottles, as she believes, the final memory of the horse's sight.

All this sounds a little twee, maybe. It sounds like someone who's read a lot of Joy Williams--that six-legged calf sounds right out of the Joy playbook. But it works: the richness of the labels on the jars, and the dreamy logic that leads Gloria on through the desert, struck me as frequently lovely, and more importantly, entirely sincere. Sister Golden Calf is one of my SHORT KING FEBRUARY books, and it would probably wear out its welcome at any more than its 100-ish pages; it has the brevity and persuasiveness of a rich dream. In the calf, Burner offers a symbol of captive strangeness; who knows why Gloria is drawn to it, exactly, except that it seems to need to be freed. It seems as strangely present and tangible symbol, when the rest of the book is built so profoundly out of absences and invisibilities. Or perhaps the calf itself is a kind of jar, a vessel in which the real--a memory, a desire--is trapped. When, at the end, the reunited sisters burn the calf, releasing it and transforming the remains to ash, the analogy to their mother's ashes is difficult to ignore. Later, they open all their bottles, no longer clinging to their mysteries. Then they go home.