The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  When George had finished mopping the last bit of gravy from his plate, he sat back and fished out his Bull Durham and made a cigarette and smoked it and squinted out the window into the pink sky. "You figure you can find those horses again, do you?" This was evidently directed at Martha, although he never looked toward her. "I expect you'll want to bring them down here to use some of these pens. You need help getting that done?"

  She divined from this question that she was hired. "No sir, I don't need any help, but when I go up there I wonder if it would be all right if I left the gate open, the one along the section line between your place and the reserve?" When she brought the horses down, they would naturally be looking for a way to stay ahead of her, and when they found the hole in the fence she hoped they'd go through to the ranch.

  George seemed to know this was what she meant. He nodded and said, "Just close it, after them broncs go through."

  "And if it doesn't matter to you," she said after a moment, "I think I'd want to use those old pens you've got, the ones over back of the bunkhouse."

  He winked at her, which wasn't the first time, and which she had already begun to realize had no meaning beyond a mild sort of amusement. "I thought you might. My daddy built those corrals when he first come here in the eighties. They ain't been kept up as well as they should and those gates are sagging pretty good but I guess you saw one of them has a snubbing pole. When he was raising mules Daddy used those corrals for breaking them out. That's mostly still what we use them for—broncobusting. They're too small for branding."

  She had never made much use of snubbing poles—she had seen more than one horse wind his rope around the post until he strangled—but she didn't tell George Bliss that. She said, "I don't mind if they're small, but I like that they're kind of out of the way of things and they're good and high so a horse can't climb over, and the rails are near-solid so a horse can't be looking around at other interesting things when I'm working with him."

  He didn't wink again but he might as well have, his expression saying clearly he was amused. "I'll leave you to it, then," he said. He shoved back his chair and stood, and as he moved away he gave his wife's shoulder a light pat. She reached up absently and touched his hand as it trailed from her. El Bayard and Will Wright followed the boss. They made considerable noise of it, standing on the back porch buckling on chaps and spurs, slapping the dry mud off their hats, dragging boot heels across the board floor. When they had gone out, a sudden quiet struck the whole house. Martha didn't know Louise Bliss at all yet and was leery of getting caught up in conversation with her. She put away the last of her breakfast quickly, stood, and went to the porch for her coat and hat. Then she stuck her head back into the kitchen. "Would I find a crimper and a hammer out in the barn, in case those pens need shoring up?" She had seen hammer and nails and a couple of crimpers in a box in the tack room, so she was roundabout asking permission to take them, which she'd meant to ask of George Bliss but the words had found her too late. She had already seen yesterday that the gates to the old pens were sagging and needful of repair.

  Louise was gathering up the dishes. "Oh heavens, you take whatever you need," she said without once looking up.

  The corrals Martha had in mind were a pair built kissing each other along one side with a connecting gate in that wall and a short gap left in the lower rails so a big sheet-metal washtub standing on the ground there could water stock in both corrals. They were made from heavy pine logs, the kind you hardly saw anymore, all the posts and rails from old trees a good foot through. Put up in the eighties without the bark skinned off, they'd spent the last thirty years and more shedding their coats in long brown scabs that littered the ground. The rails were stacked eight feet high and so close together a thick daub of caulk might have been enough to turn them into walls.

  Martha tightened up the sagging gates and stood the gate open on the pen that didn't have the snubbing pole. She wedged the uprights until they were tight and toenailed the loose rails. She walked around and picked up all the stones and limbs and pieces of bark and kicked at the ruts in the dirt until the ground inside both corrals was more or less level and then she spent half an hour carrying water over from the pump, filling the big washtub to its brim.

  It was a cold morning but yesterday's rain had blown off to the southeast and the sky was clearing. When she called Dolly in from the field the mare waded to her through plumes of ground mist. She leaned against the horse's shoulder in order to tie on her big chaps, which were awkward to get in and out of. Dolly wouldn't stand for spurs so she left them off. Then she tacked up the horse and rode off in the direction she had taken the day before with George Bliss, north and west into the grass and bitterbrush of the foothills and then up into the timber on the Clarks Reserve. The sky was beginning to lighten toward blue by then, striate with white silk thread. The leaves and empty seed cases on the alder trees shivered slightly, though the air felt still.

  She was a couple of hours hunting down the right band, which had gone higher up into one of the narrow draws and was spread out along a little creek that ran through there. She drove the horses gently ahead of her down the draw. In the mouth of the canyon at the edge of a stand of yellow pine and spruce there was a big old corral with a chute trailing from it, which George Bliss's father, and now George, had used for branding and roundup of cattle. These horses were familiar with the place without being afraid of it, and some of them wandered into the corral and snuffled around and then fell to grazing the high clumps of grass that had sprung up along the edges of the fence. If Martha could have figured out a way to get the bay and the chestnut to go in there, she might have been able to shut the gate and save herself a lot of trouble; but as soon as she singled them out they understood what she was about and they broke from the rest of the band and dodged back through the trees, cracking through low dead branches and jumping fallen wood and brush with grunts and low squeals.

  A horse hates to be separated from his fellows, and any grazing animal dislikes being moved off his familiar range. Martha and Dolly had to work hard to get those two ponies loose of the trees and headed downhill, but the horses had each other, which consoled them, and whenever they tried to circle back to the band Martha kept them turning and turning until they wound up moving downhill again. She mostly gave them a lot of room—those horses hardly knew they were being driven—but at every little creek they crossed she pressed them hard and wouldn't let them stand to water. They struck the section-line fence about a quarter of a mile above the open gate and turned downhill along the fence and then went neatly through the opening as if they had asked Martha what she wanted them to do.

  When the Bliss buildings came in sight Martha and Dolly hung back and gave the horses plenty of room to make up their minds. They were familiar with the place, having been driven down here with the Bliss herd at least twice a year since they were colts, and they were tired enough and thirsty enough she hoped they wouldn't make a real run for it. If the horses wouldn't go into the corral on their own she'd have to shake out a loop in her catch rope and try to lasso them. She was a terrible hand with a lariat. Once she and Dolly had chased a sick cow for more than an hour, dodging back and forth through brush and trees, and she had made half a dozen miscasts, dragging in her empty loop over and over until she and Dolly and the cow had all worked themselves into an exhausted lather. Dolly had been disgusted with her, the ragged stubs of her burned ears twitching irritably. "Don't give me that look," Martha had said to the horse in despair. "If you could throw a rope, I'd let you do it."

  But now, as the bay and chestnut circled once and then came toward the buildings a second time, the chestnut went right through the open gate and drank water from the washtub. It looked as if the bay horse was veering off but then at the last minute he went in too, not liking the idea of being separated from the other horse.

  Martha rode up at a slow walk so as not to startle them into bolting, and she leaned down from the saddle to close the gate on the pen and
then climbed up on a rail where she could look down at the horses. It was by now late morning and the day had warmed enough she could open her coat. The horses had been drinking, but when they saw her they pushed away from her as far as they could get. Those horses figured she was a species of bear or mountain lion, or they were remembering which creature it was that had castrated and branded them. After a while she walked off to the outhouse and while she was sitting in it relieving herself she heard the horses come up to the water again.

  3

  IN THOSE DAYS a lot of cowboys figured a horse wasn't broken until he'd had the spirit entirely beaten out of him. It wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for six or seven men to throw ropes at a horse from all directions with a view to lassoing him, which the horse would understand as men trying to kill him. He might pull three or four men over on the ground before they could bring him down and wrestle a saddle onto him, after which one of them would climb on and spur him until he quit bucking or until he was crippled or dead from ramming into a fence or throwing himself over backward.

  Some girls must have done it that way too, just to show off they had the same gumption as the men; and Martha Lessen was big and strong enough she might have turned out a bronco twister like any man except she didn't have the nature for it. She'd learned what not to do by watching her dad, who liked to break a horse by trussing him up in a Scotch hobble, pulling the hind leg clear up to the brisket and tying off the end of the rope to a post so the horse couldn't lie down or ease off the pain in the hip joint. He'd leave him standing that way, trembling on three legs, and come back hours later when the horse was half in shock, dripping under a blanket of sweat, foaming around the gums. Once, when Martha freed a horse from the hobble—she was nine or ten years old and the horse had been left to stand under a blistering sun for half a day—her dad beat her with a belt and then tied the horse up again and walked off and left him standing overnight. In the morning the horse was dead on the ground, strangled in his hobble. "I guess he won't never try that again," was all her dad said, and which was meant for Martha.

  When she was fourteen she began working summers for the L Bar L, and the boss put her with Roy Barrow, who was their old wrangler and horseshoer. Of course this was in the days before all the whispering got started, but Roy had come up crippled with arthritis after breaking his hip and had figured out how to outsmart his horses instead of bucking them to a standstill. It was Roy who showed Martha that a Scotch hobble wouldn't harm a horse if it was used right, the hind leg never drawn clear up to the belly but raised just barely off the ground and the horse given his foot as soon as he quit raising a lot of dust. Another thing Roy liked to do was send Martha out on a good quiet strong horse, with a raw horse tied to the saddle horn: after traveling ten miles like that without enough halter rope to get his head down to buck, that unbroke horse would usually be halfway to tame.

  Martha had an inborn horse sense, which Roy had seen right away, and he let her work out her own methods of making a horse less scared of the whole thing and more agreeable to be ridden. One of the things she tried was to walk out in the middle of a corral and just stand there with her head down and her hands in her pockets, blowing air out through her nose, making kind of a low snort as if she was a horse, which was the way horses investigated each other when they were first getting acquainted. Sometimes she wouldn't have to stand there very long before the horse would edge up to her and smell the air she was blowing and then blow his own air into her nose, and before long they'd be getting along fine.

  But she was always looking for ways that didn't involve so much waiting around, ways that didn't depend on a horse having an inordinate amount of curiosity about the human species, ways that would work for just about any horse that hadn't already been mistreated and ruined. By the time she took work breaking horses for George Bliss, her method was to come into the corral with a little buggy whip and brandish it—she almost never had to touch a horse with it, the noise of the thing whipping through the air and the flicking motion being enough to get him started, make him jump and run, racing around the pen looking for a way out. At the same time, Martha always acted as if there was nothing to get excited about, figuring the horse would eventually get the same idea; so she'd begin singing to him quietly or talking all the time she was making him run, and she'd keep up the quiet talking and the whip-snapping until she figured he was good and tired of running around or just tired of being scared of her, at which point she'd stop all that business with the whip and walk off into a corner as if she'd gotten tired of it herself.

  Sometimes at this point a horse would be so glad to quit running, so damned relieved and grateful for it, he'd walk right up to her to thank her—at least that was what she imagined was going on. And if he did, she'd turn to him quietly and talk to him, tell him what a good old horse he was; and now and then a horse might be ready for her to put out her hand and touch him. Even if he didn't walk up to her, he'd at least stand there facing her with his four legs planted and his sides heaving and he'd look at her as if to say, What's next? And as soon as he turned his head to her she'd put the whip under her arm and step toward him and go on talking to him in a steady, quiet way, acting as if a horse and a human getting acquainted was the most ordinary thing in the world. Usually it wouldn't take more than a few tries—making him run and then letting him stop—before he'd get to that thankful place, and he'd let her come up to him, or he'd come up to her himself and bump his head against her arm to get away from the whip. Or she might hold out the butt end of the switch and let him touch it, examine it with his muzzle, and after that she would start scratching his withers with it and shortening her grip on the thing until finally she'd be scratching him with her bare hand. And it wouldn't be long before the horse would let her scratch under his chin and high on his forehead and behind his withers and along his neck, which is where horses like to groom each other. As soon as he was all right with that, she would go on to touch his mane, his muzzle, and his poll. And after that it would be a simple thing to slide a halter onto him.

  And this was all in the first short while—an hour or two, generally.

  So after Martha Lessen had hazed the chestnut through the connecting gate into the other corral, she began working the bay gelding in this way. She had found it to be a surprisingly easy thing to break a three- or four-year-old range horse, a horse that had been living almost wild but among older horses who regularly took up with human beings as an ordinary part of life. Those young ones were afraid of humans in a general way but not deeply so, and they didn't lay back their ears and come at you like a horse that had been manhandled, badly treated and consequently made stubborn or vicious; and though it was different for each horse, it wasn't uncommon for her to be saddling and riding a horse by the second day, and some of the agreeable ones within a couple of hours of being introduced.

  The bay was pretty agreeable.

  When the Blisses' ranch hand Will Wright climbed up on the corral rails across the way, she was at the point of beginning to teach the bay what it might feel like to be ridden. She had brought him close to the fence where she could step onto the lower rail and boost herself up, and she was leaning part of her weight onto him just below the withers, with her left hand on his halter and her right hand on his back, and she was quietly telling him a story out of Black Beauty, the part about Beauty's life as a hired horse in a livery stable. The bay tossed his head and took a couple of nervous steps sideways when he saw the boy, but Martha said "Whoa" and went on leaning across his back and continuing to talk to him as if nothing untoward had occurred, and after a moment the horse believed her and went on with his business of learning what it felt like to have something up there that wasn't a big cat or a bear out to kill him. Will Wright watched her a minute and when Martha leaned back from the horse again he said, "I was sent to fetch you in to dinner before it gets cold on the table." He flashed her his big-toothed smile and dropped down from the fence.

  The men had ridden in whi
le she was getting the bay used to being touched on the legs and under his belly and brisket. She had heard their horses first and then their low voices and laughter, and through the narrow gaps in the rails of the corral had seen them look over toward her, all three of them, though afterward they turned their horses into the barn lot and went into the house and none of them came out to watch her work, which was a relief to her. Now she spoke quietly to the bay and offered him a carrot, which he examined before taking it gingerly into his mouth, and she left him to seek counsel with the chestnut, who hadn't had a turn yet. She followed the hired boy to the house. Pilot came halfway across the yard to say hello and then went back to where he'd been lying by the house. She hadn't seen him all day and figured he must have gone out with the men and now was resting up from his morning's work.

  On the porch Will was washing his hands. Martha stood behind him and waited. Through the doorway she could see George Bliss sitting at the kitchen table leaning his chair on two hind legs and reading the afternoon newspaper, and Louise going back and forth between the stove and the table. When George looked up and saw her there on the porch he called out, "Have you got those horses ready for me to ride yet?" and Louise said, "George, for heaven's sake."

  "Well, I was just asking her," he said cheerfully.

  After dinner she went back out to work the bay a little more before starting the chestnut. She was scratching him along his withers, letting him get reacquainted with her before she put her weight on him again, and talking to him about what she'd had for dinner and the war news that people had talked about at the table, when George Bliss climbed partway up the high fence and rested his arms on the top rail. She whispered to the bay, "Don't be scared now, he's just the boss," and then began to hum softly "Hinky Dinky," which was a song everybody was singing that winter.