The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  21

  IN THOSE DAYS, plenty of men thought nothing of being rough with horses. A horse had to have his spirit entirely broken was what a lot of men thought, had to be beaten into abject submission. Martha didn't know Walter Irwin very well, didn't know his feeling about horses, but she knew if he held the usual opinions it wouldn't do a bit of good to tell him his hired man was beating horses and shortchanging their feed. And she knew there wasn't a damn thing she could say to Logerwell himself that would change his mind or improve the situation for the horses. In her experience, anything she said to him would be sure to make things worse.

  At Irwin's corral she began to grain the horses herself while she was changing saddles and mounts, which was time she could hardly spare, but it took care of the problem of Logerwell's wife shortchanging the horses on their feed. Through the next few days she went on undecided whether to speak to Irwin about the other part of it. She seldom saw Logerwell but kept an eye out for him warily and watched all the horses for any sign they were being casually mistreated. And she thought back to every mark of injury a horse had suffered, trying to remember if it had happened while the horse was standing in Irwin's corral. On a Sunday morning, after a week of watching, a black gelding named York, which belonged to the Thiedes and had spent the past couple of nights at Irwin's, showed up with a long red weal across his cheek. It could have come from scraping himself nervously against a fence rail or from another horse—stablemates didn't always get along and would sometimes chew on each other—or it might have come from somebody slashing him with a whip or a stick. Martha felt pretty sure she knew which one of those it was. She stood there holding the McClelland saddle against her chest, looking at that stripe across the long plane of York's face, those beads of scabbing blood, and then slung the saddle over a corral rail and started on foot up the muddy track to the farmhouse.

  Irwin's family money set him apart from most of his homesteader neighbors. His house was a white clapboard two-story built high up on a logged-off rise above the north bank of the Little Bird Woman River. He had built his barn and corrals a fair hike down the hill from his house, which was meant to keep the smell of the animals out of his kitchen but also meant he couldn't keep much of an eye on what was going on down there. In addition, the house was poorly situated in terms of the practicalities of snowdrift and wind, and he'd had to drill his well a long way down to reach water; but sitting up high like that, the house could be seen by pretty nearly everybody living at the eastern end of the valley, which his neighbors thought was his reason for putting it there, and which he would have been surprised to hear. He had built on that rise almost entirely for its aerie view across the river to the Whitehorns.

  The property was a relinquishment he had bought from the railroad when another homesteader gave up on it, and the Logerwells now occupied a small house the first nester had built in the lee of the hill, about halfway up from the barn. When Martha went past that house the windows were dark and there wasn't any sign of Logerwell or his wife. Several hogs were sprawled in a deeply muddy pen across the runway from the house. One of them, a black and white sow, lifted her head and blinked her small pink eyes at Martha before lowering her cheek into the mud. A black dog, underfed and every bit as muddy as the pigs, lay in the yard tied to a post by a short piece of rope. He watched Martha without moving.

  She went on up to Irwin's porch and knocked at the door and tightened the throat-catch of her hat against the wind and when he came to the door she said quickly and forcefully, "Mr. Irwin, your hired man has been whipping some of the horses I'm working with and not feeding them the grain they need."

  He looked at her in bewilderment. "Logerwell?" he said, as if he had more than one hired hand and was sorting out which one she meant to indict.

  Walking up the hill, she had become just about as sore as a boil—at the edge of blazing up if Irwin gave her the least reason for it. She said more loudly than was needed, "If you're planning to keep on letting him work for you, I'll have to take your horse out of the circle."

  His brain gradually took in what she had said. "He's been beating on your horses," he said, without questioning it.

  "Yes sir, and yours too, and their feed's been going to his wife's pigs, I'm pretty sure."

  He stood stiffly in the entry of his house with a book held down in one hand and the other hand resting on the doorknob. He was dressed in his Sunday suit with a plan to attend church, but the book he was holding, marking the page with his thumb, was not the Bible but a history of the French monarchy. "Is he down there right now?" he said, and stepped out on the porch to look down the slope toward the barn and the hired man's small house. The wind caught the front of his hair and lifted it in a cockscomb, caught the pages of his book and flapped them against the back of his hand.

  "No sir, I don't think he is."

  With the recent change of weather, the mountains across the way were dressed in snow clear down to the valley floor. Irwin turned his head toward them and studied the view for a long minute and then tightened up his mouth and said, with a glance toward Martha, "All right, then. I'll take care of it." He started back into the house.

  She couldn't let it stand that way. She said again, "If you're planning to keep him on, I've got to take your horse off the circle." She would hate to leave Irwin's roan horse behind, hate leaving him in Logerwell's custody, but she would do it to protect the rest of them.

  Walter said to Martha in a slight tone of umbrage, "I'll make it clear to him, he's to quit mistreating the animals." He had had trouble from the first day getting his hired man to do much of anything he asked, but he believed his own words: he would make his point with Logerwell this time and get control of the situation. He had seen the man cruel to his own wife's pigs and to his dog for no good cause; he wasn't much surprised by what the girl had told him.

  "He'll go on doing it," she said fiercely. "He'll find ways to do it without you knowing." It was her belief—her experience—that when Logerwell heard it was Martha who'd brought the complaint he would start looking for ways to take out his grievance on her horses.

  In truth, Walter Irwin wouldn't have been sorry to see the man go. But he had no experience with firing anyone and little hope of finding somebody else to work for him now that the war had taken so many men off to the army. He said to Martha in exasperation, "If I turn him out, I don't know where I'll get another hand."

  Martha flared up. "I don't know either, but if you let him go on working here he'll go on hurting the horses until he kills one, which I won't let happen." Her voice shook from deep feeling, and she cleared her throat a couple of times to try to hide it. She put her hands inside her coat pockets and fisted them.

  Walter stared at her, taken aback, startled to see tears standing briefly in her eyes. He hardly knew the girl, but on the evidence of her dress and the masculine work she'd chosen for herself he had formed an opinion of her as hard and leathery, not very much different from the ranch men who were his neighbors, men he believed to be without an ounce of soft feeling or the capacity for sentiment. Martha went on looking at him heatedly, with her chin squared and her fists working inside her coat. Her silence and her stubborn stare made him feel put upon, provoked into taking some kind of action. He turned from her again and looked out at the mountain range without seeing it, and in a moment found the gumption to put himself on the right side of the question.

  On Monday morning when she rode up the lane to Irwin's corral, Martha passed Mrs. Logerwell headed downhill toward the River Road pushing a handcart loaded with their household goods, and Mr. Logerwell behind her driving their half-dozen pigs and leading the ribby black dog on a short length of rope. Mrs. Logerwell's face turned pink when she saw Martha, and as they passed each other she said, "If you's the one got him booted out—" in a hoarse, threatful wheeze that was more self-righteous injury than promise of harm. When Martha came even with the first of the pigs, Logerwell began jabbing the hindmost ones viciously with the homemade prod he w
as carrying—a stick of wood fitted with a metal hook—and the pigs squealed and broke into a frantic trot, which evidently was meant to unseat Martha from her horse. She was riding the Woodruffs' palomino mare, the one named Maude, and when Martha said "Whoa," Maude planted her feet and held still until the stampede of pigs had gone by; the horse hadn't liked any of it, but she'd long since come to trust Martha Lessen in these matters.

  Logerwell's look was white-lipped with venom, and as he came on down the middle of the lane he slung the stick back and forth alongside his leg, the metal hook making a thin whistle through the air. Martha shifted her weight onto her toes resting in the stirrups in case she needed to ask Maude to move quickly, and she brought the horse over close to the fence at the side of the lane: she had seen that look on her dad, and even once or twice on her oldest brother, Davey. But when the man came alongside her he only let out a wordless sound of loathing and yanked on the dog's rope hard enough to make him yelp. He didn't look at Martha or say anything to her, just went on whipping his stick back and forth as he followed the pigs and his wife down the hill.

  22

  STANLEY CAMBRIDGE HAD A 320-acre timber claim along the north side of Lewis Lake bordering the outlet of the Little Bird Woman River, and sometime around 1910 he cut a road through from the lower valley to the lake, a narrow double-track negotiable by wagon or sleigh. He built four little lodging cabins and a livery barn on his property and advertised the place as a mountain encampment. Elwha County families would come up by wagon or car in the summer, rent a cabin or put up a tent for a week or two at a stretch, take Stanley's little excursion boat up the lake for picnicking and sightseeing, or spread nets for the spawning sockeye salmon and salt away fish in ten-gallon kegs for winter use or sale to the mines down in Canyon City. And in the winter Stanley would flood a low pasture to make a skating rink and rent out toboggans and sleds, which brought people up to the lake by horseback or sleigh to spend the day skating and sledding.

  On the third Sunday of January in that first winter of the Great War, Martha Lessen went up there with a big group of Will Wright's friends, including Henry Frazer and El Bayard. She had been riding the circle seven days a week for nearly two months, and Louise Bliss wouldn't hear of her spending another Sunday on horseback. Martha thought this would lead to a morning at church with the Blisses and an afternoon playing pinochle with George, or sitting by the stove in the bunkhouse reading The Last of the Mohicans while El mended harness or knitted socks; but it turned out Will Wright's friends had planned a skating party at Stanley's Camp, a last revel before his upcoming wedding. Louise paid no attention at all when Martha tried to beg off. She had already telephoned the Woodruff sisters, she said, and borrowed a pair of skates for Martha. Henry Frazer would be around in the Woodruff sleigh at the earliest hour of Sunday morning to collect El and Martha, the Bliss sleigh having already been loaned to Will and Lizzie, who were going up on Saturday with several of their friends, the girls to stay in the cabins and the boys to camp on the snow in tents.

  The Blisses kept a great oak-trimmed steel and enamel tub in its own small room off the kitchen, and at Louise's instigation the ranch hands had the regular use of it. Although the hot water had to be carried from the kitchen stove, the tub was a grand luxury for all concerned—it was the only fixed bathtub in the rural parts of Elwha County in those days—and especially well regarded by Martha, who was completely unaccustomed to the privacy of a separate bath room and had never before had the use of a tub deep and long enough for soaking and stretching out her legs. Ordinarily she had her bath every Thursday night, but with the skating party in the offing Louise shifted her to Saturday night, clear evidence of female favoritism but not remarked upon by any of the men nor objected to by Martha herself. On Saturday night she slid down in the water until it lapped the underside of her chin and soaked for a quarter of an hour.

  She had been careful in the past to bring her own bar of lye soap and not make use of any of the Blisses' collection of ointments and toilet preparations, but this night after thinking twice about it she cautiously helped herself to a lavender-scented hair soap, worked it into her hair, and rinsed it out with particular care; and she took a hard little brush from the wash-stand and used it to scrub around her fingernails and toenails and then behind her ears until she wore the skin thin and bright pink; after brushing her teeth with baking soda, she made a paste of the Blisses' gritty tooth powder and scrupulously cleaned them again. By then the bath water was cool. The tub had a waste plug and drain that emptied into a barrel behind the house, which Louise used to irrigate her kitchen garden. While the water slowly emptied around her, Martha went on sitting in the tub grimly examining her body, which was a map of bruises and half-healed scrapes. Finally she stood on the rag rug and dried herself with a towel and applied Louise's almond lotion to her cracked heels and hands and worked her oily fingers through her hair in hope the lotion might act like a hair tonic and keep her hair from flying away once it dried. She couldn't have said why the skating party had become a matter of such concern and importance to her.

  In the morning, Martha and El waited on the porch with the provisions and furnishings for the day's expedition piled around them in boxes, waiting in silence after eating in silence in the shadowy kitchen, a cold breakfast Louise had set out for them the night before. They'd been afraid even to boil a pot of coffee, since it would have meant rattling wood in the stove while George and Louise were still asleep upstairs. But if there was ever in the world a better sound than sleigh bells in the early morning Martha didn't know what it was, and her throat just about closed up when Henry Frazer drove over the hill in the Woodruffs' sleigh, bright red and yellow with new paint, the pretty chestnut Belgians in their silver-chased harness, a high arch of Swedish bells over the hames.

  Before the sleigh had come to a good stop Henry called out, "There's about half a foot of snow on the ground and not much wind," in a voice too loud for the time of morning, loud enough to rouse the Blisses out of sleep, which made Martha wonder why she had bothered to give up her morning coffee.

  The floorboards at the back of the sleigh were already crowded with foodstuffs brought from the Woodruffs, and Henry was amused when he saw they were carrying more groceries. "I guess we won't starve," he said. His round face, caught between a scarf and a pulled-down hat, was pink with cold, and he looked even more barrel-chested than usual in layers of coats and sweaters.

  They sat three in a row on the leather cushions, and Henry brought forward a wool army blanket and two quilts, which he spread across their knees. Then he spoke to the horses and they stepped out with their necks bowed, their breath smoking the air. Martha had earlier pulled her hair back in a damp knot—it had not quite dried overnight—and pinned it under a wool cap Louise had loaned her, which was not as warm as the silk stocking she wore when she was riding the circle but considerably prettier; she wore her warmest wool trousers and sheep-lined gloves and had twisted a scarf around her throat under the collar of her coat. Even so, waiting on the porch in the pale dawn she had been cold and shivery, and now the race of sharp air made her eyes water, her nose run. But she found, squeezed between the shoulders of the two men, that she wasn't cold at all and was suddenly wide awake—too nervous to feel dull from need of coffee.

  Henry offered an opinion about the recent weather, how this snow was a good thing for the wheat but they would still have to hope for more of it, or a wet spring, to make any kind of wheat crop. He asked after George and Louise's health, and he said to Martha that he had been painting York's cheek with carbolic as she had asked him to and that the mark on the horse's face looked to be healing up all right. At one point when they were passing close by the rail yard in Shelby, Henry said, "I guess it was last year when we had all that snow pile up, there was a hobo jumped off the train when he saw the lights of town, and then he must've got cold and wet. Anyway, they found him dead the next day, just in that field between the rail yard and the river." Since this didn't s
eem to be in reference to anything, neither Martha nor El gave him much in the way of response.

  Martha, for her part, had made up her mind not to always rattle on about horses, which meant that every minute she became more self-conscious and tongue-tied. And El was never a talker in any circumstance. Henry spent a few minutes working uphill against the untalkativeness of the other two and then gradually fell silent himself, which was not an uncomfortable state of affairs as far as Martha was concerned. The jangling of the bells and the rhythmic stride of the horses and the slight squeaking of the sleigh runners over the snow made her entirely happy. Her dad had never seen the need of a sleigh, so in snowy weather they kept close to home or drove a heavy democrat wagon behind laboring horses, which may have been why she was uncommonly fond of sleigh rides and glad for half a foot of snow, which was barely enough to warrant one.

  They were the better part of two hours getting across the twelve or fifteen miles to the lake. Henry let the horses follow the roads quite a while, but once they were west of Bingham they left the road and headed southwest across the countryside. El got down and opened gates a time or two, but the foothills came down close to the river at the west end of the county and the timbered slopes hadn't been taken over by wheat fields or little homestead farms; when they finally crossed the boundary into the Whitehorn Forest Reserve they left all the fences behind and began climbing through an open country of pine and spruce and white fir and crossing shallow creeks one after the other, the sleigh runners cutting neatly through ice that ledged the stream banks. It had been foggy along the valley bottom but now the sun broke white and glittery in a dark blue sky. The snow here was deeper, and the limbs of the trees sagged under heavy cloaks. They rode in and out of tree shadow and bright sun.