by Jenna Blum
The evening went on quite long. When the women had washed and put away every last plate and spoon from dinner, they joined the men in the front room, and the lamps were turned down so the candles on the tree could be lit in a great show of romance. Martha, who had spent the late hours of Christmas Eve helping Louise string cranberries and popcorn, was by that point almost too worn out to take pleasure in the sight, and when they began to sing carols she was agonizingly conscious of being the only person in the room who knew none of the words to the songs. She had thought that if gifts were traded they would be traded only among the Bliss family members, but of course was surprised in that as well and made to accept popcorn balls and then open a little package from Louise and George, which turned out to be a pencil box and six pencils. Pearl and El Bayard and Ray Buford, she was relieved to see, were given the same things; but Ray afterward brought out what he said were "little tokens"—hair combs decorated with feathers for Louise and a nickel-plated watch fob engraved with a stag's head for George. Even Pearl and El had come with an offering of fudge candy and taffy that Pearl had cooked and pulled herself, which left Martha the only one who had not brought a gift for anyone.
All the guests were staying over. At the end of the night Miriam and Howard went up the stairs to Miriam's old bedroom, and Pearl, who couldn't climb the stairs with her canes, was settled on a fold-out cot in the front room. Orie, who might have slept in the unoccupied bedroom he and Jack had grown up in, trooped out to the bunkhouse with Ray and El. It was a long time, though, before the place settled into quiet, as one by one people stepped out in the moonlit darkness to call upon the privy.
Martha was entirely used up from the long day of work and the long night of nervous strain, but nevertheless she waited until all the others were finished before taking her own turn. Standing in her coat and her underwear just inside the cold barn, she could hear people murmuring to one another as they passed in the yard, and she expected eventually to hear Pearl Bayard struggling across that great distance on her canes; what she heard, finally, was Pearl saying softly, "I'm all finished, El," and through a gap in the barn wall watched El Bayard carry his sister from the privy back across the yard to the house. Martha had been thinking Pearl was crippled from polio—a plague of it had gone around the country the summer before—but now, seeing El's shadow in the darkness, his elbow jutting out stiffly, it occurred to her that the Bayards might both have been crippled in the same mishap.
Very much later—it was after midnight—Will Wright, who had spent the evening with Lizzie's family, got back to the homeplace and blindly crawled on top of Ray Buford, who was asleep on Will's bed. Martha didn't hear about that until morning. The shouting and the laughter weren't enough to wake her.
17
DOROTHY ROMER HAD HEARD from Jeanne McWilliams shortly before Christmas that Tom Kandel had a cancer and that Dr. McDonough had told Tom there wasn't a thing that could be done about his tumor. She had been trying to get over to Tom and Ruth's since first hearing Tom was sick, but the days had gone by. Finally in the first week of the new year she gave up trying; she walked out to the corral where Martha Lessen was changing horses and asked if Martha would mind dropping something off at the Kandels' on her way around the circle. Dorothy had put several jars of homemade jelly and applesauce and a small jar of orange marmalade in a splint basket with a note tucked under the jars: I am so sorry to hear you're sick, Tom. I'm praying for you every day. If there's anything I can do for you or Ruth or Fred I hope you'll let me know. She knew they wouldn't think of asking her for help. They would know she had three young children and that she didn't have any way to get around on the roads except walking; and they would have heard the gossip about Reuben's drinking—like news of Tom's illness, it would surely have gone around to all the homesteaders in the county by now—and they would know that Dorothy was sometimes called on to split and haul wood while still keeping up with her housework. They would know she hadn't any time left at the end of the day to help Tom with his dying, and they would excuse her. She was distressed by her willingness to be excused, but she'd finally grown tired of arguing with herself about it. She liked Tom, and she felt deeply sorry for him and for Ruth and for their boy, but she was afraid of being around anybody who had cancer—she had heard it might be a disease you could catch, like influenza or a chest cold. In any case, she couldn't imagine what she would find to say to them—a man who was dying and his wife, who might be expected to burst into tears at any moment in the conversation. Without being able to put words to the feeling, she was also afraid being around Tom would remind her, in the most potent and stark way, of the inevitability of every person's—of her own—death.
Martha rode away from the Romers' with the splint basket carried across her lap. The Kandels' farm wasn't on Martha's circle—their blue roan horse had been corralled at the Rocker V next door—and since Dorothy hadn't said anything to her about Tom Kandel's illness, Martha was slightly put out about making the extra stop. The Woodruff horse she was riding was entirely placid but she changed horses again at the Thiedes' and then she was riding a bright bay gelding that had given her a fair amount of trouble in the past. She had tied a string of tin cans to the back of her saddle that morning, and riding over to Tom and Ruth Kandel's place she had to worry about the basket of jellies in case she suddenly needed both hands to control the bay. As it happened, the horse tolerated the rattle of the cans well enough and the basket didn't suffer any mishaps. She didn't trust the horse with the chickens, though, and sat outside the gate to the Kandels' yard thinking about the best way to get to the porch through that white sea of hens. She was about to climb down and hobble the horse when Ruth Kandel must have seen her there. She came out of the house and waded toward Martha, knee-deep in chickens. Their flurry and scattering made the bay nervous and he tried to rear off his front end and scoot back from the fence, and Mrs. Kandel, startled by the commotion, stopped where she was, which allowed the chickens to gradually smooth their feathers and wander off on their own affairs, which was more help to Martha than anything else, though the whole thing never came near the point of disaster. She spoke firmly to the horse and settled him, and then she said, "Dorothy Romer asked me to bring this by," and she coaxed the horse up to the fence and handed down the basket.
Ruth took it by the handles and said with a very brief smile, "Thank you. How is Dorothy? How is their baby? Well, she must not be a baby anymore, I guess she's got to be more than a year old by now. It's awful, the way time gets away from me." A moment later she heard her own words, which suddenly had a different meaning than they might have had a few weeks before. She looked past Martha without expression.
Martha said, because it was the only thing she could think to say, "Your horse is coming along well. He's a good horse."
"He's not my horse. I guess he'll be Fred's, but it was my husband's idea." She had been against Tom spending their money on an unbroken colt. If she and Fred had to give up the farm and move back East after Tom died, the horse would just have to be sold again: that was what had occurred to her. But there never had been a way to say it to Tom.
Martha looked down, having heard something she thought was aggravation or resentment and knowing only that it had to do with the horse and therefore with her. She had met Ruth Kandel just one other time, coming by their farm to talk to Tom about the blue roan.
Tom had been amazingly forthcoming to all his friends about the cancer that would kill him, and in the past month, as word had gone around, people had been coming by to say hello to Tom and to offer their sympathy without mentioning his illness. Ruth hadn't ever needed to speak the words, even once, that she now said to Martha Lessen. "My husband has a cancer and is dying."
"Oh!" the girl said, and looked at Ruth in shock. "I'm sorry."
Ruth immediately regretted she had said it so bluntly. She didn't know why she had. The girl was very young and there was something in her manner, a kind of tenderness. She wouldn't know what it meant to lose a h
usband; she would imagine it was like losing a favorite horse or a dog.
"It's all right. But my husband shouldn't have bought the horse, I don't know why he did." She was strangled by sorrow suddenly, and couldn't go on with what she had meant to say, or even remember what it was.
Ruth Kandel had seemed to Martha to be an unhappy and unfriendly woman, distracted, restless, which Martha now thought was due to Tom's illness. And she hardly knew Tom Kandel—she knew his blue roan horse, the one she had been calling Dandy, better than she knew Tom. Now that Mrs. Kandel had told her Tom was dying, she thought of those few minutes when she had met up with him on the Sunday before Christmas, and how he had spoken of his son, Fred, with a look of soft affection in his face.
Martha said again, "I am just so sorry."
Ruth looked toward her briefly and nodded without answering. The sympathy of her friends and neighbors felt like nothing to her, was just a weightlessness in her arms. She accepted it because it wasn't their fault they had nothing else for her, nothing she could hold on to, nothing that was any help at all.
Martha, whose mother had suffered a string of miscarriages, had often watched neighbors come through the door with casseroles, and with their arms full of the Lessens' clean, pressed laundry; she had learned early the kinds of things that were useful when people were sick. Now that she'd heard about Tom's cancer, she had already given up thinking about the Kandel farm as an extra stop. She said, "I'm going around the circle every day and coming right by here. If there's anything I can bring for you, or take out, it wouldn't be any trouble at all. I could bring your mail or the groceries. I'm already carrying mail around to some of the other people on the circle and I could just bring yours too." Thinking of Tom feeding cows over at the Rocker V, she said, "If you want to send him a lunch over there where he's working—if he's not walking home every day for it—I could pick it up and take it to him." She said all of this matter-of-factly, as if there was no reason at all for Ruth Kandel to refuse.
Ruth looked up at her and then said in quite a different voice, "Thank you. I do want him to have a hot lunch but it's too far to expect him to walk back and forth." She smiled slightly. "His appetite is gone but I keep trying to feed him." She had to hold back an impulse to tell the girl every damn thing that had been running through her mind these past few weeks. This had more to do with Martha's open face and the patience with which she sat and waited on that horse than with anything she had said.
They went on talking together for a few minutes more, working out the business of taking lunch to Mr. Kandel and getting mail from the Bingham post office, and then Martha rode off toward the Rocker V while Ruth stood at the fence a little longer. She was bundled in a thick coat and a worn felt hat—they had had a string of cold days—but her hands were bare, the knuckles red and chapped where they gripped the basket. She didn't watch the girl ride away but stood holding the heavy splint basket and looking north toward the Clarks Range, or where the Clarks Range would be if you could see the mountains. Fog had been coming down to the valley floor in the mornings and then sometimes clearing out in the afternoons but today had only just lifted above the tops of the trees.
Ruth Kandel was not one of those women for whom husbands or fathers made all the decisions. She had been as eager as Tom to come West and try herself against the land and raise their son on a farm. The world out here was large and beautiful as nowhere else, and she loved it, every part of it, and their life in it. She was never tired of the view from her porch, the ground sloping off north across their neighbor's wheat fields to the river and the white mountains braced against the sky, had never felt as she did here, every day, a sense of herself alive in the world.
She had barely begun to think of all she would lose when Tom died.
18
W.G. BOYD'S WIFE had died in 1910 after an illness. Then in 1913, as if a terrible family inheritance had been passed down, his son, Clyde, lost his wife in a train derailment as she was returning home from a visit to her parents in Chicago. For the next few years, Clyde and his young son, Joe, went on living in a rented house in Pendleton, where Clyde worked as a telephone lineman, but when he was called to Kansas in the summer of 1917 to teach soldiers how to string telephone line, the boy came to live with his grandfather.
W.G. owned about ten acres of land at the edge of Bingham and got his living primarily from a small planer mill in the summer and from making butcher knives and pocket knives from old saw blades in the winter. He had another line of work as well, although it gave him little in the way of income. People up and down the valley of the Little Bird Woman River brought him sick or mistreated animals for rehabilitation—horses, milk cows, goats, dogs, rabbits, pigs, as well as wounded owls and orphaned fawns and once a coyote pup whose foot had been mauled in a leg-hold trap. Sometimes he was paid for his veterinary work in cash or barter but more often people simply dropped off sick or dying animals, conferring not only ownership but the trouble of disposing of the carcass if the animal failed to thrive. W.G. never turned away an animal, and although he was unschooled he had a natural gift for seeing what was troubling these creatures; fairly often he was able to help them to a recovery. Two or three times a year he took to auction a few head of livestock he had seen through to health and in that way managed to recoup his costs for feed and assorted healing agents. Several dogs, including one with three legs, lived at the Boyd place, as well as numerous cats and an assortment of scarred and aged or otherwise unwanted livestock. It was a paradise, more or less, for a ten-year-old boy.
Among the animals W.G. was feeding that winter was the young black gelding, Skip, who had been left with him after being badly scared and hurt by dragging a loose pole behind him. W.G. was working in his shop on a cold day in the middle of January, showing his grandson how to whet the burr off a finished knife, when Martha rode Skip into the yard. They had shut the dogs into the cowshed to keep them from causing a ruckus if Martha rode in while they were working, and when they heard the dogs barking and scratching at the door Joe looked out and said, "Grandpa, she's got Skip."
There were fourteen horses on the circle, and seven stops, which meant the horses got ridden every other day, and it took a horse a couple of weeks to make it clear around to his home corral; the Boyds had seen Skip only one other time since Martha had started the horses. "Now don't run up at him," W.G. called after the boy, who had already wormed past the workbench and was out in the yard. But the boy knew how skittish the horse was—he hadn't needed W.G.'s warning—and when W.G. came out of the shop, Joe was walking up to Skip slowly from the side so the horse could see him coming and he was crooning soft words of praise he'd picked up from listening to Martha Lessen, "Well my goodness, aren't you a good old horse, I sure think you are," and so forth. W.G. stopped where he was and watched them come together, the boy and the horse and the girl. Joe thought the world of Martha—there were children all over the valley who worshipped her—and it amused and charmed W.G. to see the shining look that came into the boy's face whenever he got near her.
Martha gave Joe a brief, approving look and stepped off the horse and held the headstall up close under the throat while Joe touched the horse along the shoulder and the neck. Skip stood patiently. W.G. could see that he'd come a long way in the last two weeks. Horses evidently thought the world of Martha Lessen too.
"Hello, child," W.G. said.
"Hello, Mr. Boyd. Skip is coming along pretty well."
"I can see he is. You'll have him steady as the Rock of Gibraltar before long."
She flashed a brief smile of satisfaction. "I don't know about that."
"Do you have time to come inside? I've got some coffee on the back of the stove that'll wake you right up. You can stand a fork up in it."
She laughed. "I'd better not. I'm starting to think we might get some snow tonight." She had gone on working as she talked to him, had already loose-hobbled Skip and was pulling off the saddle.
It had been a cold dry day—this winter s
eemed to have an excess of such days, parading methodically down the valley one after the other like solemn children going Indian file—but W.G. had been smelling something damp in the air all afternoon, a certain quality to the cold. "We might," he said, and looked toward the northwest, where the gray overcast had grown dark along the crown of the Clarks Range. "All those farmers with winter wheat must be hoping for a real snowfall. We've had an awfully dry winter. But I guess that's not what you're hoping for."
"No. But it's all right. I won't mind as long as it doesn't get too drifted." She led Skip to the corral. Joe went ahead of her and swung open the gate and then shut it behind her. She said, "Thanks, Joey." He wouldn't stand for his grandfather to call him Joey anymore, but he let Martha Lessen get away with it. When she had stripped the horse of his bridle and hobble she stood a moment in front of him, scratching his neck. W.G. had noticed she never liked to let a horse walk away from her until she had walked away from him. Skip reached his head forward and rubbed her shoulder lightly with the side of his muzzle, as if they were two horses standing head to tail grooming each other. "Goodness, you're such a pretty old thing," she murmured to him, which made W.G. smile.
After a bit, she turned to the two other horses in the corral, one sandy brown and one chestnut. The big chestnut belonged to Bill Varden's Rocker V Ranch; he'd been in the Boyd corral a couple of days and was due to go out. She clucked to him and held the bridle out to the horse like a gift. He turned his head to look, and after thinking about it he walked right up to her. Even the sandy horse looked as if he might have liked to be invited.