The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Martha said without stopping what she was doing, "I'm sorry to hear it."

  Dorothy touched her forehead with trembly fingers and sat down suddenly in the mud, which didn't surprise or alarm Martha, who had experience of serious drinkers. But after a moment of considering, she left the palomino standing in the corral with the cinch not yet tightened, and she went unhurriedly through the rails and over to the woman and squatted down next to her. "Mrs. Romer, are you sick? Do you want me to go for the doctor?" She didn't smell anything on Dorothy's breath except a sickly sourness. She took hold of one of her hands.

  "I'm afraid it's the ptomaine poisoning," Dorothy said, and 220 started in with a kind of dry weeping. Her cold hand lay weakly in Martha's. "I don't know where Reuben is. Will you take us to the hospital?"

  Martha's heart began to beat loudly in her ears. She said, "I'll have to go and get the wagon." Dorothy swallowed slowly and put her hands down in the mud and pushed to get up; Martha helped her stand again and would have helped her back to the house except Dorothy pulled away and said, "Go on," and made an impatient fluttery gesture toward the pasture where Reuben kept his horses.

  She brought in the horses by calling and whistling and holding out a piece of apple, and she harnessed the two who looked to be the most cooperative and hitched them to the Romers' wagon and drove around to the front porch of the house. Dorothy was sitting on the porch steps leaning against an upright, the baby, Alice, lying across her haunches. "I don't know where Reuben is," she said again, with the same tired, tearless, terrible sobbing. Martha was afraid to look too closely at Alice, lying still and pale in the lap of Dorothy's dress.

  She went into the house and found Helen and Clifford in a single bed, their limbs flaccid on the tangled sheets. Their eyes followed Martha with a desperate, half-lidded concentration but they didn't lift their hands up to her or speak to her. They were breathing shallowly through open mouths. She carried them out one at a time and laid them down in the back of the wagon, wrapped in the blankets she had stripped from the bed. Then she helped Dorothy climb into the back and lie down with her children. She found a tarp and put it over them all like a tent in case it began to rain, and she drove out of the yard and down the rutted farm lane. At the outskirts of Shelby she stopped a man to ask where the hospital was and he told her there was just one hospital in the valley and it was in Bingham, so she drove on the five more miles. She drove carefully, not to bump their heads on the floorboards. It began to rain lightly, ticking against the tarp and against her hat.

  She passed W.G. Boyd's little place at the edge of town and shortly after that she came on his grandson, Joey, on his way home from town. Joey had lately been spending his afternoons and Saturdays ranging the hills collecting the shed antlers of bull elk and buck deer, which brought a few cents a pound from Graham Ellis at the hardware store, and he was walking back from the store and jingling the money in his pocket when Martha saw him. He ran up to the wagon and ran alongside, grinning and splashing his galoshes in the puddles, and he called to her, "Hey, Martha, whose wagon are you driving?"

  "Joey, where is the hospital?" she said, and at once he became grave and frightened and told her where it was and then stopped and stood in the road, watching the wagon go away from him.

  The Bingham Hospital occupied a brick building that had been the Bingham High School before a bigger school was built closer to the center of town. It was a private hospital owned by Dr. McDonough and Dr. Kelly and an investor who also owned an automobile parts and supply store. The staff kept cows and chickens in a field behind the hospital and had to interrupt their nursing duties to go into the basement and stoke the furnace, but ptomaine poisoning from poorly canned food was a serious matter they were familiar with, and the man Martha had asked for directions in Shelby had telephoned ahead; several hospital people came out and down the wet stone steps as soon as she pulled up in front, and they carried the Romer children inside and walked Dorothy up the steps between two minders, and no one paid a bit of attention to Martha.

  It was unclear to her what she ought to do next. She got down and led the horses out of the driveway and unhitched them from the wagon. They had not even broken a sweat but she hunted up a gunnysack and wiped them down thoroughly and walked them back and forth as if they had run hell-for-leather every mile of the way from the Romers' to Bingham. Then she turned them out on the weeds and grass of the vacant lot next door and sat down on the tailgate of the wagon and waited. The rain quit and then started again and then quit.

  She was glad to see W.G. Boyd walking up the hill from town. W.G., from the first she met him, had reminded her of Roy Barrow, the L Bar L wrangler who had got her started with breaking horses; it was not only his arthritic limp but the touch he had with animals, which was a natural gift but also a learned kindness. Martha held W.G. very dear and envied Joey his childhood in company with the old man.

  She walked down to meet him, and he called up to her, "What's happened, child?" Walking to the hospital, he had prepared himself to hear that it was Tom Kandel, dead of cancer—that Martha had been a witness to Tom's terrible last suffering.

  "It might be ptomaine poisoning," she said, and fought not to begin crying. W.G. frowned and shook his head without understanding what she had said, and then she realized she had not said who was sick. "It's Mrs. Romer and her children."

  He didn't know them, which was a relief to him. He took Martha by the hand and said, "Joe was pretty worried," and they walked back up the hill and sat down together on the tailgate. She swung her boots nervously, which set her stiff leather chaps creaking.

  "Have you been breaking one of their horses?" he asked her.

  "Yes sir. It's the one called Mata Hari."

  He nodded as if this cleared up matters for him. After a few minutes, he said, "I'll just go inside and ask how things are going," and she gave him a grateful look.

  He was gone half an hour or better. When he came out again he patted Martha's arm and said, "I'm afraid the baby is gone."

  "Oh!" Tears sprang in her eyes. She turned her head from him.

  "It might be a good long while," he said, without saying a good long while to what. "Why don't you come on home with me and have a bite to eat. There isn't anything you can do anyway."

  She had by now remembered Maude standing in the corral and she shook her head. "I'd better get back. I left Maude standing there half dressed." W.G. lifted his eyebrows in surprise, and after a moment she caught on to what she'd said. "Maude's a horse," she said, frowning, and W.G. made a slight dry sound of enlightenment.

  "I should look for Mr. Romer, too," Martha said while she was hitching up the horses again. "He should know about his family."

  She drove the eight or nine miles back to the Romer place, every inch of it remembering why she didn't like driving a big old farm wagon, and trying not to think about Dorothy and her children, and trying not to think she might find Maude with her hind foot caught in a loose cinch or down on her knees in the mud, tangled in trailing reins. But the mare was standing indignantly in the corral, her head lifted high to keep from stepping on the reins, and the loose McClelland saddle askew on her back so the cantle hung off her shoulder; she whinnied a shrill complaint when Martha drove into the yard. Martha unharnessed the Romers' draft horses and turned them into the pasture and she stripped the tack off Maude and gave her a carrot and a ration of grain and then she saddled Big Brownie, who hadn't had to stand rooted to his reins all day, and rode back to Shelby.

  Elwha was a dry county, so she didn't know where Reuben would have gone to find his liquor or how to go about finding him. She stopped in at the power and light office because she knew he had a contract with them to supply wood, and then she just went along the street inquiring at likely shops and stores if they knew Reuben Romer or where he might be, and she told them his family was sick and needed him. When she'd been at this for quite a while, a man in a barbershop studied her in the mirror and said, "You might try that store down there
at Eightmile Crossing." This was a place she had never been to, a roadhouse and store eight miles down Lewis Pass on the road to Canyon City and just over the Grant County line. She knew she might spend the rest of the day riding down there and back without finding him, but no one else had given her any idea where to look.

  The Little Bird Woman River sauntered across the valley floor between the Whitehorns and the Clarks Range at an agile but dignified clip, and then at the east end of the valley picked up speed and made a dash downhill, cutting a steep gorge through cliffs and terraces and talus slopes of dark basalt blotched and streaked with red iron oxide, which was the Lewis Pass. The road had been put through in the heyday when the canyon had been settled end to end by the farms of people coming late to the game, claiming homesteads in that marginal land along the river where they could graze a few head of stock on the small handkerchiefs of grass at the bottom and plant alfalfa hay on the patches of flat benchland. In those early days the road had carried a lot of wagon traffic, but the farms had quickly starved out and now the canyon was owned, by and large, by the mule deer and the whitebark pines; the grassland benches were summer range for a few ranches whose winter headquarters were down around Long Creek.

  The road, twisting along the bottom of the river gorge, crossed the river and crossed it again—six bridges in fifteen miles—and never out of range of the ringing, boisterous cannon-racket of water pouring downhill between stone walls. The road was almost entirely built on bald scabs of rock so in rainy weather it was a puddled track but muddy only where springs or small creeks brought dirt down from the brushy draws.

  The two cars that passed Martha, bumping and jarring over the rough, ridged rock, weren't having any trouble getting through the stream wash. A hardware salesman headed up from Canyon City to his customers in Elwha County stopped his car and shouted over the rattle of the engine, no, he hadn't stopped at Eightmile Crossing, didn't know if a Mr. Romer was in the roadhouse there. In the second car a young couple fully decked out in dusters and goggles and gloves smiled and waved jauntily as they went by, but did not slow to talk. Martha turned Big Brownie to the side of the road each time, and spoke to the horse approvingly as he tolerated the noise of the passing cars, their rattle and throb briefly outshouting the noise of the river.

  About the time Martha reached the third bridge the sun broke clear, which threw all the west side of the gorge into shadow and flooded the east side with bright, straw-colored light. She was carrying in her coat pocket a lunch that Louise Bliss had packed in the morning, and she finally gave in to hunger and sat on a rock at the edge of the sunlight and ate her sandwiches while the horse cropped the skimpy grass that sloped down from the road to the river, and then she went on.

  At five miles into the canyon, on the steep downgrade between the third and fourth bridge, Martha came around a hairpin curve in the road and found a car whining toward her backward, which wasn't a surprise, as in those days quite a few automobiles would back up the steep hills in reverse to keep the gas running into the carburetor. There was hardly room for her to move over at that particular place, the road caught between a dark wall of basalt and a steep talus slope that dropped down to the river, but she moved Brownie close to the wall and put her hand along his neck to console him while they waited for the car to get by. There were two men in the car, the driver peering back over his shoulder and steering with one hand while his mouth steadily moved in discourse with his passenger, words she couldn't hear over the noise of the river and the high howl of the reverse gear. When he saw Martha he gave her a startled look and must have said something that caused the other man in the car to turn and look, and she saw that this second man was Reuben Romer.

  His left eye was droopy and watering—he had spent the day far gone in drink, which was no more than Martha expected—and he was a bit late to recognize her, but then he gave her a lazy, lit-up smile. She raised herself in the stirrups to shout to him, but by then he was turning from her, leaning across the other man to press a horn button bolted to the side of the steering column, a Klaxon horn that blared out suddenly, cutting across the rumbling of the river, and Big Brownie flung his head back in startled fear and backed his rump into the wall and then lunged forward. If she'd been deeper in her seat it wouldn't have unbalanced her, but she half-fell across his shoulder and lost the left stirrup, and when Reuben blew the horn again the horse seemed to just rise up in the air. Martha twisted her fist in his mane to keep aboard without being able to stop him or turn him, and he cleared the road, cleared the car, and hurled himself right off the edge of the road, right out into the sunlight, and she let go her grip without realizing she'd decided to, landed hard in a shower of gravel and rock dust, and in the stunned moment afterward heard the car going on up the road, the horn bellowing twice more to approve the entertainment, and then the whine of the motor swallowed by the curve of rock wall.

  She didn't sit up but went on lying where she was, waiting for the sky to settle and come into focus; and then she turned her head to look down the steep, shingly drop to the river, the gravel still sliding and rattling down to where Brownie was gaining his feet, moaning with fear, his hide muddy and scraped, his reins caught up in the dense thickets along the riverbank. She was amazed he wasn't dead. She sat, and her left arm flared in startlingly bright pain, a pain she recognized—she had broken bones three or four times before—and she began to sob, not only from pain but from despair: the horses she was breaking weren't all the way finished yet and she was afraid she might not be able to finish them with her arm in plaster.

  She waited until she felt able to stop crying and then she lifted the broken arm carefully with her right hand and guided it into the pocket of her coat and clamped her left elbow against her ribs and waited until she could breathe and then she looked down at Brownie again, considering grimly all the difficulties of getting him out of that steep gorge without breaking more bones—her own or the horse's. The gravelly bank was loose and slippery and damn near standing on its end. If she managed to get down to him from here, she didn't see how she could lead him back up the same way, even if it turned out he wasn't knee-sprung or torn up.

  After a while she got carefully onto her feet and recovered her hat from where it was lying in the weeds and she walked down the road a couple of hundred yards until the dropoff flattened somewhat and became a shelving bench, and she stepped down carefully through the rocks and brush to the river and spent the better part of half an hour getting back upstream, picking her way through shrubwood, wading carefully out into the rocky river margins, to reach the place where the horse was stranded.

  Brownie was trembling from fear and shock, his hide covered with lather and sweat plastered over with rock dust. His head hung almost to his knees and a yellow froth had dried around his mouth. His off front foot was tangled in a coil of rusted barbed wire some farmer had tossed down into the ravine and blood ran down his leg onto the ground. The saddle was muddy and scraped and one stirrup had torn partway off. Martha said quietly to the horse, "Hey there, Big Brownie," and took her time easing up to him, but when she could she rubbed her face tenderly against his cheek and breathed into his nostrils, and he breathed into hers. She sobbed two or three times. "I'm sorry," she said, which could have been meant for just about anybody but was meant for the horse.

  She untangled his reins from the thicket and ran her right hand carefully over his trembling hide and said to him, "I don't discover any broken bones," to encourage them both. Then she found a flat rock and put it under a likely place in the barbed wire and picked up another rock and began carefully and slowly to pound and grind the wire between the two, and when the wire broke she bent the ends back out of the way—all of this done awkwardly with her right hand—and then picked another place in the wire to work on. It was a slow process one-handed, and her right hand not the one she would have liked to be using. She had to cut through the coil at four places before Brownie could step free. Then she spent a slow hour coaxing him back through
the brush downstream to the place where they could climb up to the road, which was empty of traffic and likely to remain so, and she started out leading the horse uphill toward Shelby. Brownie was favoring his off shoulder, bringing his leg forward with a peculiar dragging motion; but he set the foot down all right, so she didn't think the damage was to his leg. The foreleg that had been caught in wire had stopped bleeding and she didn't think it was a crippling cut.

  A few cow camps were scattered in the breaks of the canyon, used as overnight stops by cowboys trailing cattle between winter and summer ranges. Briggs Newton, who came upon Martha Lessen and her horse an hour or so after they started walking back up the hill, had been headed up to one of the camps. It was late February but the weather had been mild and the recent rains had greened the timbered uplands—some penstemon and wild iris were already blooming in sheltered places on the slopes of the canyon—and he was riding up to take a look at the grassland benches and make up his mind if it might be all right to move some of his cattle. He was deeply astonished and alarmed to see a young girl dressed like Calamity Jane limping up the middle of the road, cradling an arm he guessed to be broken and leading a big lame horse that was all scraped up and muddied, with his mane full of burrs and broken-off twigs.

  The river made a hell of a noise going through that canyon and he didn't want to scare her, coming up behind her, so he coughed a couple of times in a loud way and when she half-turned toward him he called out, "Evening," because by then the light was beginning to go out of the canyon. The girl was pale and suffering, he could see, resting her arm gingerly in the pocket of her coat, but she just forced a smile and then turned back around and went on walking along the road.

  When he had come up alongside her he said, "You got throwed did you?" which he intended merely as a way into conversation, but thought afterward was a stupid thing to ask.