The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  14

  SOME OF THE FELLOWS homesteading up and down the valley in those years were such poor farmers they could hardly raise Cain. They would break up the fields of bunch grass to grow pinto beans or turnips and nothing would thrive but star thistle. If there was timber on the land—and it grew thickly in those years, yellow pine and spruce and fir up to four feet through—they'd log it off and pull out the stumps and be surprised to find scrub juniper and rabbit brush growing back instead of the grass they'd expected to pasture their dairy cows on. When they cleared the sage and willow from around a spring, sometimes the spring would silt up, and when they opened up a spring to make a farm pond, as often as not the water dried right up or got salty. Quite a few people who might have given a good account of themselves under other conditions were just taken in by rosy visions of "rain following the plow," which was the widespread, spurious claim of not a few commercial and government interests. In those years it seemed as if all you might need to grow wheat or alfalfa or field peas on the dry slopes of Elwha County was a stack of pamphlets and bulletins from the Department of Agriculture or a handbook put out by one or another of the companies making farm equipment.

  Tom Kandel had come into the county to homestead about 1910, with his wife, Ruth, and their young son, Fred. He was a college man, which made him different from most of the rest of his neighbors but not always in the ways you would expect. He was a thinking man with a curious mind, who if he happened upon a petrified bone or a fossil in weathered rock was not content until he found the book that could tell him what animal it had come from, and he took subscriptions to magazines and journals of a kind not seen in other houses and always had a book he was reading or quoting from—he had read every word of Ridpath's History of the World for instance—all of which might be exactly what you'd expect of him. But Tom had a healthy mistrust of anything a government bureaucrat might say about the scientific methods of dry-land farming and he had more common sense than most.

  The Kandels had filed their homestead claim on land that had once been winter range for a sheep outfit, and Tom was smart enough to plant his garden vegetables in the old sheep corrals on his claim. While his neighbors were breaking up grass to plant wheat and draining shallow lakes to grow corn or timothy hay, he set about growing chickens as a full-fledged enterprise.

  Every farm family raised chickens in those days as food for the table and sold a few eggs if there was a market for them, but Tom put into practice the most modern methods of incubation and scratch feed and found a thriving home market among the big crew at the McGee Creek Lumber Mill over on the slopes of the Whitehorn Mountains. "My blooded stock is in egg yolks," he would say, and laugh outright as if he found everything about it deeply amusing. It was never an easy thing in that part of the country to keep chickens alive—hawks, especially, would plan their visits according to the time of day you regularly went to the privy. But until he got sick Tom did as well as anybody could hope, and better than many of his friends and neighbors.

  He took cancer sometime in the fall of 1917. In November, when Martha Lessen came into the county offering to break horses, he bought a coming four-year-old blue roan gelding and left it at the Rocker V corral to be taken out in its turn with the horses Martha was breaking for Bill Varden. This struck some of his friends as a foolish distraction from the business of dying, and other friends as the necessary business of going on with your life. Tom didn't know which of those it was, really. He had wanted to buy the horse and have it broken, so he had seen to it. It was something he and Ruth had talked about before he'd become ill—they wanted to give their son a horse when he turned thirteen—and now he had become anxious to see it through. He wanted other things done as well, things they had talked about for months or years while lying in bed at night, things they had always said they would do when they had the money for it next year or the year after—a new rug for the front room, a new mohair cover for the old chair that had been Ruth's grandmother's.

  The Rocker V was one of the big old spreads, a cattle outfit, although Bill had sold off about half of his cows and broken up a lot of his grass to plant wheat in 1915 when he could see the way the war winds were blowing. He'd always had trouble keeping cowboys and foremen—Bill was a harsh old man and he worked people hard—so when he found himself with less need for skilled cowboys, he took to hiring local men, homesteaders for the most part, to dehorn his cattle in the fall and feed them out in the winter and haul ice from Lewis Lake to be laid up in sawdust in his root cellars and icehouses for the coming summer when, for a few weeks, he'd be feeding a big harvest crew.

  Tom Kandel had taken winter work with Bill just once, for a few months in 1915 when extraordinarily cold weather had frozen half his flock of White Leghorns. But in 1917, that last winter of his life, he went over to the Rocker V and signed on again to feed cows. On Sunday, late in the afternoon, he was working with a team and wagon laying out a racetrack of hay in one of the Rocker V fields. A cold fog had settled over the valley, and the trees on the surrounding slopes were soft gray shapes against a white remoteness; so when a horse and rider came off the hill, they seemed to take their form out of the ground, and only slowly became something he recognized. They were almost upon him before he realized it was Martha Lessen riding his son's blue roan horse.

  "Hello, Mr. Kandel."

  "Miss Lessen, you ought to be sitting down to Sunday dinner about now."

  She smiled, which had a way of transforming her face. She was a big, serious girl, but when she smiled her eyes widened and you saw how young she was, as green and unhandled as one of her horses. "We had fried oysters for breakfast, and Mrs. Bliss's sweet rolls, but I wouldn't know what to do if I sat inside all day, and anyway the horses need to be taken out every day so I went ahead and started the circle." She looked over at the cows coming up to the long oval of hay behind his wagon. "I guess cows have to be fed even on Sunday."

  Ruth was holding off roasting their usual Sunday hen until Tom finished with his work, but she hadn't been happy about it. They had quarreled over it the night before, and then she had cried and told him she didn't care about getting a new carpet. "I wish you would quit working for Bill Varden and stay home with me and with Fred every day," she had said to him, and he had finished the sentence in his head, until you die.

  He nodded and looked back at the cows and then over at the girl. "That's my horse you're riding."

  "I know it is. I don't know if he has a name but I've been calling him Dandy because he's coming along so good." She put her gloved hand along the horse's neck affectionately and he bent his ears back to her. Miss Lessen was devoted to the trappings of old-time cowboys, and Tom looked at her buckskin chaps and loose starred spurs with an odd pang of yearning.

  "Dandy," he said, as if he was trying it out. "He'll be my son's horse so I imagine we'll let Fred name him. I'll tell Fred you've been calling him that." He smiled.

  No one had told Martha that Tom Kandel was sick. He had lost a good deal of weight over the past few months but she hadn't known him long enough to notice it. He had a thick shock of brown hair that hung down over his forehead, and in the cold whitish daylight he was slightly flushed with one of the fevers he'd been running off and on for days. If you didn't know, you'd have thought he was bright with health. He was forty years old and in a little over two months he would be dead.

  "I guess we'd better both go on if we want to be in time for dinner," she said to him, and began to move the horse along.

  He found that he didn't want the girl to leave, that the idea of being alone again in the center of a shapeless, shadowless vagueness was suddenly terrible to him. He said, "Ruth's roasting a hen. I imagine it will be stuffed full of onions." He didn't know how he expected this news to keep the girl from riding off, and already she was half gone, the fog eddying around her. She called back to him, "I saw a horned owl this morning, I hope he didn't get any of your chickens," and she threw him a last look, one of her childlike smiles. He stood at t
he back of the wagon with his hands on the handle of the pitchfork, and watched the shape of the girl on the horse soften and whiten and sink down again into the formless ground and leave no trace. He sat on the tailgate of the wagon and took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and drew cold air into his chest and let it out again and after a minute he was all right, able to go on as he had been, feeding cows in the late December afternoon without noticing the fog too much and without thinking too much about anything except the work.

  He always made sure the weaker cows got their share. They would come late to the first dump of hay, after it was already trampled on by the fat, healthy cows, and while the fat ones would follow the wagon around the oval, those weak cows would stand where they were and make do with muddied feed. So he always went all the way around again and dumped fresh hay for them at the beginning place. Today when he had finished his work he sat a while on the tailgate of the wagon and watched them feeding, their dark shapes softened by the fog, before he drove the team back to the Rocker V. The windows in the ranch house were mostly unlit, although he could see Bill's housekeeper, a tobacco-voiced woman named Ella, moving through the dimness attending to her weekly chore of cleaning the lamp chimneys and trimming the wicks. Bill Varden was a divorced man and he drove himself as hard as his hired help. Tom thought he was probably not in the house at all on a Sunday afternoon but was somewhere out on the ranch, maybe hauling wood off the mountain for fence poles or going up into the canyons to set traps for coyotes and mountain lions.

  Martha Lessen had already changed horses and ridden off toward the next place on her circle ride. The blue roan and another horse, a chestnut, were standing in the corral, both of them looking morose and slighted, staring yearningly toward the other horses in the fenced pasture on the east side of the barn. Tom unhitched his team and turned the big Percherons out and stood along the rails of the fence watching them drift off into the whiteness, their breath gusting out and stirring the frosty air. The cancer was in his liver. His side ached with it and with the effort of getting the horses out of their harness. He leaned on the fence and when he was feeling better he walked home slowly along the hard ruts of the ranch lane.

  The windows of his own house were brightly lit in the darkening fog, and he could see Ruth moving about in the single room that was both their kitchen and their parlor. He had built a wooden sink for her with a pitcher pump that drew from a well drilled under the house. That well had never yet dried up on them, though most of his neighbors were hauling water in barrels from the Little Bird Woman River in the dry months of the year, their hand-dug wells sucking mud by then. He stood outside in the cold, watching his wife work the pump and carry a pan of water to the stove. His flock of chickens had already gone in to roost, and the yard was quiet—chickens will begin to announce themselves hours before sunrise as if they can't wait for the day to get started but they are equally interested in an early bedtime. Tom had grown used to sleeping through their early-morning summons, all his family had, but in the last few weeks he'd been waking as soon as he heard the first hens peep, before even the roosters took up their reveille. The sounds they made in those first dark moments of the day had begun to seem to him as soft and devotional as an Angelus bell. And he had begun to dread the evenings—to wish, like the chickens, to climb into bed and close his eyes as soon as shadows lengthened and light began to seep out of the sky.

  He let himself into the woodshed and sat down on a pile of stacked wood and rested his elbows on his knees and rocked himself back and forth. His body felt swollen with something inexpressible, and he thought if he could just weep he'd begin to feel better. He sat and rocked and eventually began to cry, which relieved nothing, but then he began to be racked with great coughing sobs that went on until whatever it was that had built up inside him had been slightly released. When his breathing eased, he went on sitting there rocking back and forth quite a while, looking at his boots, which were caked with manure and bits of hay. Then he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and went into the house and sat down to dinner with his wife and son.

  15

  ON THE SATURDAY before Christmas the Woodruff sisters invited their friends and neighbors—not the newcomer farm families, but all the old-time ranch families and their hired hands—to the house for a holiday dinner. Emma Adelaide took on responsibility for roasting the pig, and Aileen for baking the cakes, and they asked Henry Frazer to see to the eggnog. Elwha was a dry county, but several moonshiners living down in Owl Creek Canyon regularly brought whiskey up to the valley, packed under loads of tomatoes or inside bales of sheep's wool, and the Woodruffs expected Henry to see that the punch was sufficiently stiff.

  It was not a lack of liquor that kept most people from making eggnog that winter, it was the sugar. But for years the Woodruff sisters had been experimenting in their garden with various plants their neighbors said wouldn't grow in the valley, and they had grown a crop of sugar beets in the summer of 1917. Now that the country was on a wartime footing the Woodruffs had sugar while others were going without. There was no easy way to separate the molasses from the sugar crystals though, so the Woodruffs' sugar was black. Aileen's chocolate cakes took to it easily, but Henry Frazer's eggnog, floating in a silver punch bowl with a grating of orange nutmeg, was the color of snuff, and people had to be persuaded to drink it. Henry, ladling cups of dark froth, took the chiding and ridicule with a smile. He had ridden over to Tom Kandel's and bought up several dozen eggs, pretty much all Tom had now that the days were short and his hens reluctant to lay; and cream from the Bowman Dairy, all the cream Timmy Bowman could give him now that his cows were reluctant to lactate; had whipped up the egg yolks and the cream with the dark sugar and then folded in the beaten egg whites and the whiskey bought from a sheepherder who kept a still down in the canyon. It was as stiff and rich an eggnog as he could make, and after the first round people stopped teasing him and began wandering back to the silver bowl on their own.

  Martha Lessen let Henry fill her cup twice before the liquor took effect, and he was watching her when she looked around the room in dismay and then found a chair and sat in it. Other women must have had an eye on the girl too; Henry saw Irene Thiede and Louise Bliss exchange a telling look and then Louise came straight over to Martha and sat down in the next chair and leaned toward the girl and said something Henry couldn't make out. Martha looked down at her stockinged ankles or her patent shoes and made some sort of reply and then the two of them went on talking over there in the corner while Henry stood with his cup in his hand, listening only now and again to the men standing around the punch bowl going over the past season, grass and cattle and horses and wheat, and the war news, which had to do with electric signs in the towns and cities staying dark twice a week, and how that didn't have a thing to do with any of them or anybody they knew, since electricity hadn't yet made it out of the towns into the countryside. Of course nobody in those days would have guessed: it would be 1946—on the other side of another great war—before electric wires were strung to all the farms and ranches in Elwha County.

  When finally Mrs. Bliss stood and went off toward the kitchen, Henry left the men and sat down in the chair Louise had surrendered. The flush of liquor had almost gone out of Martha Lessen's face by then but Henry went ahead with what he had planned to say. "The sisters wouldn't stand for eggnog without liquor in it," he told her, which he meant her to know was an apology.

  When Henry had seen the girl the first time, riding up to him on a scarred and earless mare, she had looked gravely sure of herself, even vain, outfitted in showy fringed chaps and a big vaquero hat as if she was headed for a rodeo and her mare was the famous Justin Morgan. But it hadn't taken him long to realize she knew her horses and was bashful and skittish away from them. She gave him a wild sort of look that he took for embarrassment. "I told Mrs. Bliss I have a terrible sweet tooth."

  He turned her words over until he got her meaning: the eggnog was sweet, and she'd gulped it down for the sugar. He
grinned and said, "Aileen made three cakes and I never saw her put any liquor in them, but I imagine she won't bring those out until we've ate up the pig."

  She silently twisted her fingers in the scarf tied at her waist—her hands were pink from hard scrubbing, and still there was a thin rime of black around each nail—and looked out at the two dozen or so people standing around the room. After the girl's silence had gone on a while, Henry looked up into the dusty realms of the roof beams and said, "Old man Woodruff built this house himself."

  People in Elwha County considered the house an unfashionable museum piece—it had been a throwback to an earlier time even when new—but Henry guessed Martha Lessen, with her old-fashioned cowboy trappings, might think well of it. The roof of the main room was supported by hand-peeled pine logs, and the walls and ceilings were faced with rough-cut lumber. Bear rugs were scattered on a floor of pine boards twelve inches wide, planed and fitted together as tight as a ship's deck. The fireplace would take four-foot logs. "Every bit of the wood came off this ranch," he told her. "The old man cut the logs and snaked them down off the mountain and then he built a sawmill and planed the boards himself. Those fireplace stones came from Short Creek and Blue Stem Creek and the Little Bird Woman. The windows and the nails, I guess those came from outside, but just about everything else he made with his own hands."

  Martha had desperately loved the house from first seeing it. She turned her face up to the great wrought-iron chandelier suspended on a chain above the center of the room, its heavy wheel supporting six kerosene lamps, and adorned with horseshoes and small iron replicas of the Split Rock brand. "Do you think he made the hanger for the lamps?" She glanced hesitantly at Henry. "He might have made the nails for the house, too, if he was used to making his own horseshoes."