The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  But she was always looking for ways that didn't involve so much waiting around, ways that didn't depend on a horse having an inordinate amount of curiosity about the human species, ways that would work for just about any horse that hadn't already been mistreated and ruined. By the time she took work breaking horses for George Bliss, her method was to come into the corral with a little buggy whip and brandish it—she almost never had to touch a horse with it, the noise of the thing whipping through the air and the flicking motion being enough to get him started, make him jump and run, racing around the pen looking for a way out. At the same time, Martha always acted as if there was nothing to get excited about, figuring the horse would eventually get the same idea; so she'd begin singing to him quietly or talking all the time she was making him run, and she'd keep up the quiet talking and the whip-snapping until she figured he was good and tired of running around or just tired of being scared of her, at which point she'd stop all that business with the whip and walk off into a corner as if she'd gotten tired of it herself.

  Sometimes at this point a horse would be so glad to quit running, so damned relieved and grateful for it, he'd walk right up to her to thank her—at least that was what she imagined was going on. And if he did, she'd turn to him quietly and talk to him, tell him what a good old horse he was; and now and then a horse might be ready for her to put out her hand and touch him. Even if he didn't walk up to her, he'd at least stand there facing her with his four legs planted and his sides heaving and he'd look at her as if to say, What's next? And as soon as he turned his head to her she'd put the whip under her arm and step toward him and go on talking to him in a steady, quiet way, acting as if a horse and a human getting acquainted was the most ordinary thing in the world. Usually it wouldn't take more than a few tries—making him run and then letting him stop—before he'd get to that thankful place, and he'd let her come up to him, or he'd come up to her himself and bump his head against her arm to get away from the whip. Or she might hold out the butt end of the switch and let him touch it, examine it with his muzzle, and after that she would start scratching his withers with it and shortening her grip on the thing until finally she'd be scratching him with her bare hand. And it wouldn't be long before the horse would let her scratch under his chin and high on his forehead and behind his withers and along his neck, which is where horses like to groom each other. As soon as he was all right with that, she would go on to touch his mane, his muzzle, and his poll. And after that it would be a simple thing to slide a halter onto him.

  And this was all in the first short while—an hour or two, generally.

  So after Martha Lessen had hazed the chestnut through the connecting gate into the other corral, she began working the bay gelding in this way. She had found it to be a surprisingly easy thing to break a three- or four-year-old range horse, a horse that had been living almost wild but among older horses who regularly took up with human beings as an ordinary part of life. Those young ones were afraid of humans in a general way but not deeply so, and they didn't lay back their ears and come at you like a horse that had been manhandled, badly treated and consequently made stubborn or vicious; and though it was different for each horse, it wasn't uncommon for her to be saddling and riding a horse by the second day, and some of the agreeable ones within a couple of hours of being introduced.

  The bay was pretty agreeable.

  When the Blisses' ranch hand Will Wright climbed up on the corral rails across the way, she was at the point of beginning to teach the bay what it might feel like to be ridden. She had brought him close to the fence where she could step onto the lower rail and boost herself up, and she was leaning part of her weight onto him just below the withers, with her left hand on his halter and her right hand on his back, and she was quietly telling him a story out of Black Beauty, the part about Beauty's life as a hired horse in a livery stable. The bay tossed his head and took a couple of nervous steps sideways when he saw the boy, but Martha said "Whoa" and went on leaning across his back and continuing to talk to him as if nothing untoward had occurred, and after a moment the horse believed her and went on with his business of learning what it felt like to have something up there that wasn't a big cat or a bear out to kill him. Will Wright watched her a minute and when Martha leaned back from the horse again he said, "I was sent to fetch you in to dinner before it gets cold on the table." He flashed her his big-toothed smile and dropped down from the fence.

  The men had ridden in while she was getting the bay used to being touched on the legs and under his belly and brisket. She had heard their horses first and then their low voices and laughter, and through the narrow gaps in the rails of the corral had seen them look over toward her, all three of them, though afterward they turned their horses into the barn lot and went into the house and none of them came out to watch her work, which was a relief to her. Now she spoke quietly to the bay and offered him a carrot, which he examined before taking it gingerly into his mouth, and she left him to seek counsel with the chestnut, who hadn't had a turn yet. She followed the hired boy to the house. Pilot came halfway across the yard to say hello and then went back to where he'd been lying by the house. She hadn't seen him all day and figured he must have gone out with the men and now was resting up from his morning's work.

  On the porch Will was washing his hands. Martha stood behind him and waited. Through the doorway she could see George Bliss sitting at the kitchen table leaning his chair on two hind legs and reading the afternoon newspaper, and Louise going back and forth between the stove and the table. When George looked up and saw her there on the porch he called out, "Have you got those horses ready for me to ride yet?" and Louise said, "George, for heaven's sake."

  "Well, I was just asking her," he said cheerfully.

  After dinner she went back out to work the bay a little more before starting the chestnut. She was scratching him along his withers, letting him get reacquainted with her before she put her weight on him again, and talking to him about what she'd had for dinner and the war news that people had talked about at the table, when George Bliss climbed partway up the high fence and rested his arms on the top rail. She whispered to the bay, "Don't be scared now, he's just the boss," and then began to hum softly "Hinky Dinky," which was a song everybody was singing that winter.

  After a minute, when it was clear that George Bliss had settled in to watch her, she went on with what she had planned to do. She hoisted herself across the bay's withers on her belly and slipped one leg across his back and lay straddled a moment with her head down along his shoulder, patting his neck and humming in his ear, before sliding off again; and she went on doing this over and over, staying a little longer each time and sitting up just a bit straighter. A horse knows that anything coming at him from above is something that could kill him, so she took her time acquainting him with glimpses of her body looming over his back, and whenever he tossed his head and half-reared, rolling his eyes to see what was up there, she would stop the whole business for a minute and spend a while just talking to him and leading him around the corral before starting again. She expected George Bliss to ask her a question or make a remark about the way she was going about things, but he watched her quietly, a cigarette dangling from his chapped lips. He didn't brag about how many horses he'd rode to a stop or broke in two, which is something plenty of men and one or two women had said to her while watching her work a horse. He didn't say anything at all to her, he just watched her a while and then lowered himself off the rail and walked away. He had shucked his chaps and spurs. In his overalls he looked like a farmer.

  She got both horses through the first day's work, or as much of it as they seemed able to tolerate after that long morning being driven down from the mountains. She didn't think the bay was in the mood to get acquainted with a saddle, and the chestnut was nowhere near as agreeable as that. She brought them each an armload of hay and left them to commiserate with each other through the gaps in the log pens. Then, because she didn't see anybody around and it ap
peared it wasn't time for supper yet, she went to the barn and got her book and perched in the chilly late afternoon sunlight on a rail of the pasture fence and read a few pages, looking out every little while to her horse standing with the Bliss animals investigating scraps of hay left from the morning feeding and the Whitehorns now lifting their saw-edge against the peacock blue sky.

  Louise Bliss startled her, walking up quietly and placing a hand on one of her boot heels. Martha didn't drop the book but she fumbled it a little.

  "Dear, I had to come out and see what you were reading."

  She climbed down from the fence and said, "It's just Black Beauty," putting it like that in case Louise might think Black Beauty was a child's book, or too sentimental toward horses.

  "Oh my goodness, I've read that three or four times," Louise said, "and I cry every time." She took the book in her own hands and opened it, smoothing the page with her palm. "I just can't stand it when Beauty is sold away from that taxi man, the one with the children, I forget his name." She went on looking down into the open page of the book, her eyes unfocused, seeing Beauty and the taxi driver, whose name Martha knew was Jerry though she didn't volunteer it.

  "I love to read, and now my children are grown I've got more time for it," Louise said. She looked at Martha and handed the book back to her with a laugh. "You'd better read now while you can. Once you're married and those babies come along you'll hardly have a moment's peace."

  It was Martha's intention never to marry or have children but she didn't say this to Louise Bliss. Other women, she had learned, took it as a personal affront and a challenge, and once they'd gotten over their dismay they always launched into arguments of persuasion. She had discovered there was never any point in trying to argue back, to say that she didn't want to give up her life working outdoors with horses. There was never any way to say My mother had six babies in six years and I don't know why anybody would want that kind of life. So she cast around for a topic of conversation that would get Louise Bliss away from marriage. "Whenever I'm not working I've got to have something to read, but I guess it's a bad habit. I guess too much reading is bad for your eyes." This was what her granddad had always complained of—that she'd go blind from too much reading, and moreover that reading was a goddamned waste of time. He had been old before she was born, a dour and unsparing and bitter old man hated by his only son. Martha guessed her dad had let her have books—had said little about the time she spent reading—purely as a way to spite his own father.

  "Oh, I think that's an exaggeration, people saying reading is bad for your eyes. You go ahead and read all you want is what I think." Until now the two women hadn't stood toe to toe. Louise was tall, taller than her husband, very nearly as tall as Martha, which unaccountably cheered Louise when she realized it. She put her hands in the pockets of her apron and looked out at the stubble field and the animals. "George said that horse of yours was burnt in a fire."

  Martha looked over at Dolly. "It was a barn fire, I guess. She didn't belong to me when it happened so I don't know the whole story."

  Louise went on looking out at the horses and cows and after a few moments she said, "I was in a fire when I was a girl. Well, I shouldn't have said I was in a fire. Our house burnt to the ground but none of us were in it at the time. It made an impression on me, though. Is your horse afraid of smoke and fires now? I mean, horses are afraid of fire as a rule but is she more leery than the usual?"

  "She doesn't like to come too close when people are burning up stumps or if they're burning their garbage. I try to keep her away from that kind of thing out of consideration of her feelings."

  Louise didn't say if she was leery of fire herself. She looked at Martha and smiled. Then she patted the girl on the arm. "I'll see what I've got that you might like to read. I always wanted my Miriam to be a reader but she never was, and I've been saving up books for years, waiting for somebody to give them to."

  When Martha went up to the house for supper Louise brought out nine or ten books and stood them on the kitchen table next to the girl's plate. Pendleton had had a little public reading room upstairs of the L. B. Hawkins Furniture Store, and later a Carnegie Library on Main Street, and Martha had usually borrowed her books from those places two or three at a time. The only book she owned—she had bought it for a dime from a farm family raising money to move back East—was Black Beauty. She was stunned to have so many books loaned to her all at once, which she tried to say, but Louise waved the words off. "I don't suppose any of them is as good as Black Beauty but you might like some of them. I liked them, anyway. They're all good books."

  Martha said, "I've always just read anything that came along. I guess I wouldn't know if a book was good to read or bad."

  "Oh, I don't either, I just know what I like."

  The hired men, waiting for Louise to bring supper to the table, were talking about a cow that had been killed by lightning and they were not taking any interest in the women's talk about books, but George Bliss must have been listening because now he stubbed out his cigarette and said, "I guess you've never met a government handbook then, or you'd know the difference between good and bad reading."

  Louise was pulling pans out of the oven and she didn't bother to give her husband a look, she just said, "George, you stay out of this," and George looked over at Martha and winked.

  When she carried the books out to the barn she right away opened the one called Horse Heaven Hills to look for mention of horses and was pleased to find a girl riding a palomino, though a romance seemed to be the central thing in it. She cleared a shelf in the tack room, crowding the veterinary goods into other boxes and onto other shelves to make room for the books. Their variously colored spines, arranged along the cleared shelf, made a small, distinct change in the room. She unrolled her sleeping bag and sat on it but it wasn't a minute more before she stood again and began neatening and rearranging all the tackle and equipage, clearing a little more space for herself, claiming more of the floor and one wall as hers. With a couple of bent nails, she pinned up a calendar page, a hand-tinted photograph of a chestnut or liver bay Morgan stud in a show pose. Buck was written in baroque lettering below the horse's feet. She'd had the picture a long time, and the corners were ratty with tack holes. She once had a horse she'd named Buck after the calendar Morgan, though he was a big-footed old thing with a coarse head in no way resembling a show horse. Her dad had sold him for glue the same winter her mother had miscarried for the third time in eighteen months, which was the same winter her mother had stopped talking to any of them except to complain or command.

  Martha got into the sleeping bag and read Black Beauty until her hands got too cold and then put out the candle and huddled deeper in the bag. She was only a few pages from the end, but it was her second time through the book so she was untroubled by any suspense and able to put off for another day the short, dreamlike happy ending. She was tired but too stirred up to sleep right away. She didn't know if the two horses she was breaking for George Bliss already had names but she guessed they didn't and, lying there in the dark, she began to make a list of some possibilities. Ollie was one she thought of, and Scout.

  4

  LOUISE BLISS WAS the eldest of six children. She had worked horseback when she was young—most girls her age living in that part of the world learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk—but when her two brothers, following five and eight years behind, were old enough to take over the range work she had been glad to move inside and learn housework from her mother. Now the garden and the kitchen were her realm and she didn't have a speck of envy for girls like Martha Lessen, girls who worked outside in all kinds of weather and slept in barns and sometimes out in fields under leaking canvas. She had known such girls to marry and become happy wives—Irene Theide was one she could think of—but others who had become eccentric and homely spinsters, like Aileen Woodruff and Emma Adelaide Woodruff. The Woodruffs were old women now, sisters who had spent their whole lives taking rough treatment
from the elements and from cantankerous cows and rambunctious horses and were still riding out with the men every spring and fall, declaring they "wouldn't know what to do" if made to stay indoors. Louise liked the Woodruff sisters and admired their fortitude, but considered them misplaced and odd—the unfortunate result when a girl failed to outgrow her tomboy disposition.

  "I don't know if that girl owns a dress," she said to George. They were lying in bed in the dark and George was smoking the day's last cigarette. She could see the tip of it brighten and dim every so often. "I haven't seen her in anything but a man's trousers, have you? And those fancy old leather chaps. She dresses like she's headed off to a rodeo." She said this as if they'd been in the middle of a long conversation, which wasn't true, and George was briefly tempted to pretend he didn't know which girl his wife was talking about.

  "Well, she's breaking horses, Louise."

  "You said yourself she isn't bucking them out. You said the horse just stood there and let her clamber all over him."

  "Well, I didn't see what come before. Maybe she give that horse a good whipping first and then bucked the tar out of him."

  She didn't let his joking distract her. "I've been thinking I might let her have one of mine. There's that shepherd's check, the blue, but it would have to be let out. She's big-boned."

  "You do whatever you think, but don't be too surprised if she don't appreciate it. You ought to know yourself, a raw bronc don't like a woman's skirts flapping around him. The wind picks up a skirt, and even a tame old Shetland pony gets the idea that he ought to go to bucking."

  Louise didn't intend to make an issue of it with George. She said, "Well, I won't say anything for now. It's all right with me if she goes on wearing her cowboy getup while she's doing her horse breaking, but if it turns out she's come away from home without even a dress she can wear to dances or to church, that will need to be remedied."