by Jenna Blum
She glanced at him. "I don't know your name."
"It's Henry Frazer. And I've been presuming you're Martha Lessen, but if you're not then I guess I'm helping a horse thief get off with one of our horses." His smile widened good-humoredly. He had a round, clean-shaven face that was a long way from handsome: a large fleshy nose running up to a heavy brow bone almost bare of eyebrows. His nose had been broken once, and a front tooth chipped off at a slant, which Martha thought must have come from adventures with bulls or mother cows or horses, though what had happened was more complicated than that, and involved an automobile on an icy road.
"If I was to steal one of them, I'd steal that one there, the palomino," she said.
"Is that right? You like her color, do you?"
"I like thinking about ways to coax her out of her shyness. She's a pretty horse, pretty as anything, but she doesn't know it yet. I like thinking about ways I could get her to hold up her head."
This evidently surprised him. He studied the horses a minute and then said seriously, "I hope you don't have a favorite aunt named Maude because I want to say that's just about the homeliest name in the book, and that's what the sisters have been calling that horse, and maybe she's just ashamed of her name. I bet you could get her to bring her head up if you just started calling her Ginger. Or Babe. Or Dolly."
Martha hid a smile. "I've already got a horse named Dolly," she said.
"Is that right? Is she that one there, the one you rode in on? Well, she's holding her head right up, so I guess that proves my case." He didn't try to hide his own smile, in fact he seemed pretty pleased with himself for his little joke.
He stood down from the fence and went into the barn and came out with a coiled catch rope. While he stood building his loop he asked her, "You want to get a hackamore on him before you neck him up close to Dolly?"
"If he's got a hackamore on him he'll be easier to handle, but I don't always do it. It's a lot of trouble when it's just me."
"Well, there's two of us," he said, glancing up at her.
Martha went over to Dolly and opened up the corral gate just wide enough to lead her inside and then Henry stepped in too and Martha shut the gate. She had spent maybe a hundred hours of practice over the years trying to get better at roping without making much improvement. Henry Frazer shook out a loop and neatly forefooted the horse Martha had said she wanted. The horse hit the ground with a heavy thump, mud splashing everywhere, the other horses leaping wide, squealing, and Henry in nothing flat had his knee on the horse's neck and the head twisted up against his chest like a rodeo bulldogger before that horse had any idea what had happened. It wasn't how Martha would have gone about it—she never liked to throw a horse, which maybe was part of the reason she had never been able to get very good at roping—but she knew she'd have been half or three-quarters of an hour getting the damn horse ready to leave the corral if she'd been left to manage it alone. In the rain, at the tail end of a long day, she hadn't energy left to concern herself very much with the horse's fear, and she wasn't sorry at all to have him in a hackamore and snubbed up to Dolly in five minutes flat.
When Martha climbed onto Dolly again it caused a brief flurry—the brown horse squealing, trying to buck and shy away, Dolly baring her teeth, Henry Frazer jumping back to keep from getting kicked or stepped on—but Martha didn't have any trouble keeping her seat and in a moment, after everybody settled down, Henry came up again to Dolly's shoulder and rested a gloved hand on her and peered up at Martha. He had odd, downturned eyes that gave people the idea he was always squinting. Boys in those days always tagged each other according to some part of how they looked—every gang of kids had one called Slim and another called Red—and when he'd been a boy Henry Frazer had been called, even by his friends, Chink, or Chow Mein, for those screwed-down eyes of his. He said, "You all set?" and Martha answered, "I guess we are. Thanks." He nodded and peered across Dolly's withers to the brown colt. "That one's not very happy."
She could feel the horse where he touched against her lower leg, his wet heat, his pulse racing almost as quick as a rabbit's, and she could smell the fear rising off him. He was licking his muzzle over and over and eyeing Dolly sideways, the whites of his eyes showing. "He's wondering how this happened and what's going to happen next."
Henry looked up at her briefly. "Well, he doesn't have much cause to worry, I imagine." He patted Dolly once and stepped back. "You take it easy." His overalls and coat were badly muddied, and there was a clump of mud on his chin and mud in a long streak across the crown of his hat.
When she was out of earshot of the ranch Martha began to talk to the brown horse in a low steady voice, telling him everything they would be doing together in the next days and weeks, and she told him she was sorry he'd been thrown and bull-dogged but he shouldn't take it as a sign of what to expect, and she told him she thought Henry Frazer was someone who wouldn't hurt a horse unnecessarily. The rain had pretty much come to an end by then, and they rode in a cold gray dusk, the horse's ears flicking sideward to catch every word she said.
12
THERE WAS AN OFFICIAL call in those first months of the war for folks to "pray hard, work hard, sleep hard, play hard, and do it all courageously and cheerfully." Of course not many people in Elwha County needed this direction from the War Office, for they had always been hard-worked without ever complaining much, and most of them lived in isolated circumstances without feeling particularly put-upon. They would travel ten miles for a pie social or a basket supper or an evening of cards or dominoes and not think a thing of it, even in the winter months when the roads might be troublesome and the ten miles to be covered on horseback. Such pastimes went on only slightly abated after war was declared, and in fact Liberty Bond drives and gatherings of women knitting socks for the army had to be squeezed onto the calendar.
Martha Lessen was drawn into this intense sociability almost as soon as she came into the county, though at first she had to be persuaded. Late in the first week of December, in the middle of saddle-breaking the fourteen horses in her circle, Louise Bliss pressed her to go to a Christmas dance at the Bingham Odd Fellows Hall. Will Wright, the young hired hand, told her he was riding over there himself on Saturday night and she might follow him up. Even in Pendleton, where she had lived most of her life, a town already pretty settled and gentrified, all the girls from the farms and ranches would ride to a dance with their dresses and shoes and stockings tied behind their saddles and would change when they got there; so she wouldn't feel odd in that respect. But she had come down to Elwha County intending to spend the winter breaking horses and sleeping in barns. She'd packed only the one dress in case someone pressed the point about the impropriety of a woman wearing trousers, and she had not brought any but barn shoes and boots with her. She tried to say this without saying it, but Louise Bliss would have none of it. She brought out a pair of shoes, patent leather with an opera toe, which she said had become too narrow for her feet now that she had bunions. The Cuban heels were worn down at the corners, and the patent was creased across the instep, but someone had polished the leather recently and they were better shoes than Martha had ever owned. Louise urged on her also a large silk scarf figured with red and pink and cream peonies and fringed in red, which she said could be worn tied at the waist or around the shoulders and would make any dress in the world presentable for a dance.
So Martha wrapped up her corduroy jumper and the loaned things in a bundle tied behind the saddle and rode over to Bingham with Will Wright. She took one of her own horses, the brown gelding named Rory, and Will Wright rode one of the Bliss horses, a pretty little blond sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail, whose name was Duchess. Rory was plain colored next to the sorrel, and as she was saddling him she whispered in his ear that he shouldn't have any reason to feel bad about himself; that even though Duchess was a beauty and also well mannered, with a sweet look and lots of width between the eyes, Rory was every bit as good a horse. He had been given to her in payment for last
summer's work on the L Bar L, and he had nicely sprung ribs and plenty of depth through the heart, good shoulders, a reasonably long neck well cut up under the throat. He was heavy-barreled but easygoing, imperturbable, a horse she could trust without loving very much; the truth was, Martha would have traded him for Duchess without a minute's thought.
The day before, the papers had been full of news about a munitions ship and a troop ship colliding in Halifax Harbor, thousands of people killed, square miles of the city flattened, and there had been a lot of talk at the supper table about whether it was an act of Hun sabotage. While they rode over to the Odd Fellows Hall, Will Wright launched right in, repeating to Martha his opinions about Halifax; but then, without stumbling over the switch, going on to tell her he was in love with Elizabeth—Lizzie—the daughter of the county road supervisor, and when he was eighteen—in a little less than two months—they would marry, and after that he expected to enlist. Of course by then they might have extended the draft to men younger than twenty-one and it wouldn't be necessary to enlist, but in any case he expected, by late winter or early spring, to be shipped off to France to kill Huns. Like Rory, Will Wright was easygoing and imperturbable, and the idea of going off to war as a new bridegroom seemed not to perturb him anymore than anything else.
He asked Martha about the horses she was breaking, and she told him about the three that belonged to Bill Varden's Rocker V Ranch, one of them a narrow-headed Roman-nosed horse with a little pig eye, a horse that was always on the lookout for a chance to act up or get away or give her trouble of some kind. Will laughed and passed her an admiring look. "I never seen a horse get the better of you yet," he said, which wasn't completely true but near enough that it made her blush. Will had good balance in the saddle but he was sometimes a little heavy on the horse's mouth. Tonight, though, he had loosened his hands and Duchess was stepping along lightly.
He told her, "It's not the Round-Up, but we got a rodeo going on somewhere in the valley just about every Saturday in the summer, and if you're still here you ought to get into one. The one in Shelby has got two chutes and a bronc stall for saddling, but the one at Opportunity hasn't got no fences, they just snub the bronc and ear him down in the open while they get the saddle on." He looked over at her and grinned. "Some of those broncs are pretty mean, but I bet if you walked up to one of them and give him the eye and climbed on, he wouldn't buck at all, and wouldn't that be something for people to see."
By summer she planned to have moved on to some other part of the country, and anyway she knew it wouldn't be that easy to just walk up to a bronc and climb on, but she laughed and said she'd like to try it. She had been to the Pendleton Round-Up plenty of times, had even worked the chutes when they'd let her. There had been times she'd thought about becoming a rodeo broncobuster herself—those girls got to wear outfits that nobody teased them about. She had sometimes thought the saddle broncs mostly didn't mind the life: they liked bucking people off and got to do it pretty regularly. But the bronc riders raked the horses bloody with sharp-rowel spurs, and every so often a horse would go down in the chute or out in the arena and have to be shot; plus, bucking out a horse wasn't horsemanship, and she didn't think she'd like doing it every day even with crowds of people admiring how she did it.
Bingham lay about five or six miles west of Shelby along the Little Bird Woman River. They crossed the river on the plank bridge at the edge of Shelby but then skirted the town and followed the River Road west. The weather was cold and dry. Under a fair moon and a sky dense with stars, they met several other young people riding over to the dance. Will introduced Martha as "our bronco-girl," and they laughed and seemed to understand who she was. Word of her had spread to most of the ranches by then, which she had no objection to; when the circle ride was finished she thought she might head down to Canyon City, and she hoped her reputation for good horse work would make it down there ahead of her. But the ease of Will's friends with each other, and their laughter, gave her a quick, helpless feeling of being a misfit and an outsider, a feeling she was familiar with. She let Rory fall behind the other horses.
The street in front of the Bingham Odd Fellows Hall was crowded with horses and automobiles, and the long porch crowded with people. Martha followed the other girls into a small meeting room off the main hall and stood alone with her back to the others as they chattered in their underwear. She was the last to change her clothes and go out, having stood for minutes alone in the room fussing over the best way to tie Louise Bliss's scarf around her jumper.
The hall was beautifully dressed, the doorways and windows wound round with garlands of pine boughs, mistletoe, and strings of cranberries, and charmingly lit by dozens and dozens of bayberry candles on the tables and hanging in wire chandeliers from the center roof beam, their flames jumping and fluttering when the doors opened or shut. A three-piece band—autoharp, fiddle, and accordion—had begun warming up in one corner, but so many people were crowded inside the room that the air shuddered with their voices and the only instrument anyone could hear was the accordion.
Martha's furious hope was to go unnoticed and be left alone, but as soon as Will Wright spotted her he brought her straight over to a group of his friends, some of them the ones she had met on the ride in. The boys were all as young as Will or younger. Oliver was a ranch hand, Roger worked in his father's sawmill, and Herman drove an auto stage on the Lewis Pass road between Canyon City and Shelby. If the girls came from ranch families, they didn't say so: Mary Lee was a teacher, Jane was a normal-school girl who had come home for the Christmas holiday, and Will's girl, Elizabeth, who wished to be called Lizzie, was working at a candy store in Shelby until she and Will could marry. Their talk was all of friends who had gone off to join the army, and girls they knew who had taken up nursing in hopes of being allowed to drive an ambulance in France. Martha stood at the edge of their crowd in an agony of loneliness.
There were half again as many women as men in the hall, and the men were mostly very young, like Will and his friends, or they wore the burnt and leathery look of farmers and ranchers who must stay at home and raise wheat and cattle to feed all those soldiers—half the barns in the county had been painted with the slogan FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR. Martha knew some of the people from her horse-breaking circuit and others she had met through the Blisses or at church. The young minister, Theo Feldson, stood in a group of admiring girls, his stooped shoulders and bowed head rising above the girls' tortoiseshell combs and feathers. She recognized Henry Frazer, the Woodruff sisters' foreman, who was standing with some of the other ranch men, holding his cup of punch and idly watching the musicians get themselves organized. He looked over at her, smiled, and nodded.
Once the musicians began to play in earnest, people crowded to the sides of the hall and left the center of the floor for dancing. Martha was called on to dance with Will Wright and each of his friends and then with other men and boys in the room, although more often she danced with one of the girls—the few boys at the dance were obliged to have a turn with as many girls as possible. Mary Lee was as pretty as Duchess and barely five feet tall in her shoes, her arms and cheeks plump and soft, which made Martha, dancing with her, conscious of herself as a dangerously mannish giant. She was taller than any of the girls, taller than many of the men and boys in the room, which she was used to but still never happy about.
She had been to a fair number of dances in her life, from a wish not to be thought entirely eccentric. She knew the two-step and the polka, the march and the waltz, but when Theo Feldson, the tall young minister, tried to teach her a dance called the bunny hug, she had trouble keeping the steps straight, and shortly he switched back to the two-step. He held her with moist hands and after a long stiff silence began to talk to her about prospects for Prohibition.
Later Henry Frazer, as he was moving her around the dance floor, suddenly said, "You're good and tall," as if he hadn't noticed it before. She was about an inch taller than him. She didn't know what sort of answer that needed,
or if it needed any at all. "How tall would you be without those shoes?" he said to her, looking down at her feet.
She realized he might be teasing her, and she thought to say, "I'd still be tall. When I'm not wearing these shoes I'm wearing my boots."
He smiled slowly, which crinkled his slanty eyes more than usual; the edge of his broken tooth showed below his lip. "I've seen you in your boots. You seem taller in party shoes. But I guess we weren't dancing whenever you've been over to the Split Rock."
It was hot in the hall—the press of so many bodies, and the stove stoked with pine logs—and Martha's face was flushed and shining. She said, looking past his shoulder, "I can't help if I'm tall."
He said nothing for a few turns and then he said, "I don't mind it."
They said nothing more to each other until the dance was finished and then Henry Frazer said, "I guess next time we see each other we'll both be in boots," and he smiled briefly. Martha watched him walk off. He had an odd, rocking stride, seeming to kick his feet out to the side with each step. His boots were worn down at the heel but the creased leather was shiny with saddle soap or boot wax.
She didn't dance with Walter Irwin. He was tall and was known to be a bachelor of means, so he was a popular partner; but when he finally worked his way around the room to Martha she told him she had promised to meet Irene and Emil Thiede out on the porch, which wasn't true—she had only just that minute seen the Thiedes cross the dance floor and go out to the porch. In point of fact, it wasn't Irwin she disliked but his hired man, Alfred Logerwell. The week before, watching her work, Logerwell had called out to her, "I can tell you right now, if you mollycoddle a horse he'll turn out spoilt, and I've had to unspoil plenty of horses that've been girl-broke. You ought to take a stick and beat some sense into that one." He wasn't the first man to ridicule her for the way she broke horses, the first man she'd met who believed in brute force, but he was the only one she knew of here in the Odd Fellows Hall. She had made a private promise not to dance with him; but by now Logerwell had danced with every woman and girl in the room and was starting around a second time without asking Martha, and she had begun to suffer from the unexpected feeling that she was being shown up or snubbed. Which was a roundabout and irrational reason for refusing to dance with Mr. Irwin, but there it was.