The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  So Martha wrapped up her corduroy jumper and the loaned things in a bundle tied behind the saddle and rode over to Bingham with Will Wright. She took one of her own horses, the brown gelding named Rory, and Will Wright rode one of the Bliss horses, a pretty little blond sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail, whose name was Duchess. Rory was plain colored next to the sorrel, and as she was saddling him she whispered in his ear that he shouldn't have any reason to feel bad about himself; that even though Duchess was a beauty and also well mannered, with a sweet look and lots of width between the eyes, Rory was every bit as good a horse. He had been given to her in payment for last summer's work on the L Bar L, and he had nicely sprung ribs and plenty of depth through the heart, good shoulders, a reasonably long neck well cut up under the throat. He was heavy-barreled but easygoing, imperturbable, a horse she could trust without loving very much; the truth was, Martha would have traded him for Duchess without a minute's thought.

  The day before, the papers had been full of news about a munitions ship and a troop ship colliding in Halifax Harbor, thousands of people killed, square miles of the city flattened, and there had been a lot of talk at the supper table about whether it was an act of Hun sabotage. While they rode over to the Odd Fellows Hall, Will Wright launched right in, repeating to Martha his opinions about Halifax; but then, without stumbling over the switch, going on to tell her he was in love with Elizabeth—Lizzie—the daughter of the county road supervisor, and when he was eighteen—in a little less than two months—they would marry, and after that he expected to enlist. Of course by then they might have extended the draft to men younger than twenty-one and it wouldn't be necessary to enlist, but in any case he expected, by late winter or early spring, to be shipped off to France to kill Huns. Like Rory, Will Wright was easygoing and imperturbable, and the idea of going off to war as a new bridegroom seemed not to perturb him anymore than anything else.

  He asked Martha about the horses she was breaking, and she told him about the three that belonged to Bill Varden's Rocker V Ranch, one of them a narrow-headed Roman-nosed horse with a little pig eye, a horse that was always on the lookout for a chance to act up or get away or give her trouble of some kind. Will laughed and passed her an admiring look. "I never seen a horse get the better of you yet," he said, which wasn't completely true but near enough that it made her blush. Will had good balance in the saddle but he was sometimes a little heavy on the horse's mouth. Tonight, though, he had loosened his hands and Duchess was stepping along lightly.

  He told her, "It's not the Round-Up, but we got a rodeo going on somewhere in the valley just about every Saturday in the summer, and if you're still here you ought to get into one. The one in Shelby has got two chutes and a bronc stall for saddling, but the one at Opportunity hasn't got no fences, they just snub the bronc and ear him down in the open while they get the saddle on." He looked over at her and grinned. "Some of those broncs are pretty mean, but I bet if you walked up to one of them and give him the eye and climbed on, he wouldn't buck at all, and wouldn't that be something for people to see."

  By summer she planned to have moved on to some other part of the country, and anyway she knew it wouldn't be that easy to just walk up to a bronc and climb on, but she laughed and said she'd like to try it. She had been to the Pendleton Round-Up plenty of times, had even worked the chutes when they'd let her. There had been times she'd thought about becoming a rodeo broncobuster herself—those girls got to wear outfits that nobody teased them about. She had sometimes thought the saddle broncs mostly didn't mind the life: they liked bucking people off and got to do it pretty regularly. But the bronc riders raked the horses bloody with sharp-rowel spurs, and every so often a horse would go down in the chute or out in the arena and have to be shot; plus, bucking out a horse wasn't horsemanship, and she didn't think she'd like doing it every day even with crowds of people admiring how she did it.

  Bingham lay about five or six miles west of Shelby along the Little Bird Woman River. They crossed the river on the plank bridge at the edge of Shelby but then skirted the town and followed the River Road west. The weather was cold and dry. Un der a fair moon and a sky dense with stars, they met several other young people riding over to the dance. Will introduced Martha as "our bronco-girl," and they laughed and seemed to understand who she was. Word of her had spread to most of the ranches by then, which she had no objection to; when the circle ride was finished she thought she might head down to Canyon City, and she hoped her reputation for good horse work would make it down there ahead of her. But the ease of Will's friends with each other, and their laughter, gave her a quick, helpless feeling of being a misfit and an outsider, a feeling she was familiar with. She let Rory fall behind the other horses.

  The street in front of the Bingham Odd Fellows Hall was crowded with horses and automobiles, and the long porch crowded with people. Martha followed the other girls into a small meeting room off the main hall and stood alone with her back to the others as they chattered in their underwear. She was the last to change her clothes and go out, having stood for minutes alone in the room fussing over the best way to tie Louise Bliss's scarf around her jumper.

  The hall was beautifully dressed, the doorways and windows wound round with garlands of pine boughs, mistletoe, and strings of cranberries, and charmingly lit by dozens and dozens of bayberry candles on the tables and hanging in wire chandeliers from the center roof beam, their flames jumping and fluttering when the doors opened or shut. A three-piece band—autoharp, fiddle, and accordion—had begun warming up in one corner, but so many people were crowded inside the room that the air shuddered with their voices and the only instrument anyone could hear was the accordion.

  Martha's furious hope was to go unnoticed and be left alone, but as soon as Will Wright spotted her he brought her straight over to a group of his friends, some of them the ones she had met on the ride in. The boys were all as young as Will or younger. Oliver was a ranch hand, Roger worked in his father's sawmill, and Herman drove an auto stage on the Lewis Pass road between Canyon City and Shelby. If the girls came from ranch families, they didn't say so: Mary Lee was a teacher, Jane was a normal-school girl who had come home for the Christmas holiday, and Will's girl, Elizabeth, who wished to be called Lizzie, was working at a candy store in Shelby until she and Will could marry. Their talk was all of friends who had gone off to join the army, and girls they knew who had taken up nursing in hopes of being allowed to drive an ambulance in France. Martha stood at the edge of their crowd in an agony of loneliness.

  There were half again as many women as men in the hall, and the men were mostly very young, like Will and his friends, or they wore the burnt and leathery look of farmers and ranchers who must stay at home and raise wheat and cattle to feed all those soldiers—half the barns in the county had been painted with the slogan FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR. Martha knew some of the people from her horse-breaking circuit and others she had met through the Blisses or at church. The young minister, Theo Feldson, stood in a group of admiring girls, his stooped shoulders and bowed head rising above the girls' tortoiseshell combs and feathers. She recognized Henry Frazer, the Woodruff sisters' foreman, who was standing with some of the other ranch men, holding his cup of punch and idly watching the musicians get themselves organized. He looked over at her, smiled, and nodded.

  Once the musicians began to play in earnest, people crowded to the sides of the hall and left the center of the floor for dancing. Martha was called on to dance with Will Wright and each of his friends and then with other men and boys in the room, although more often she danced with one of the girls—the few boys at the dance were obliged to have a turn with as many girls as possible. Mary Lee was as pretty as Duchess and barely five feet tall in her shoes, her arms and cheeks plump and soft, which made Martha, dancing with her, conscious of herself as a dangerously mannish giant. She was taller than any of the girls, taller than many of the men and boys in the room, which she was used to but still never happy about.

  She h
ad been to a fair number of dances in her life, from a wish not to be thought entirely eccentric. She knew the two-step and the polka, the march and the waltz, but when Theo Feldson, the tall young minister, tried to teach her a dance called the bunny hug, she had trouble keeping the steps straight, and shortly he switched back to the two-step. He held her with moist hands and after a long stiff silence began to talk to her about prospects for Prohibition.

  Later Henry Frazer, as he was moving her around the dance floor, suddenly said, "You're good and tall," as if he hadn't noticed it before. She was about an inch taller than him. She didn't know what sort of answer that needed, or if it needed any at all. "How tall would you be without those shoes?" he said to her, looking down at her feet.

  She realized he might be teasing her, and she thought to say, "I'd still be tall. When I'm not wearing these shoes I'm wearing my boots."

  He smiled slowly, which crinkled his slanty eyes more than usual; the edge of his broken tooth showed below his lip. "I've seen you in your boots. You seem taller in party shoes. But I guess we weren't dancing whenever you've been over to the Split Rock."

  It was hot in the hall—the press of so many bodies, and the stove stoked with pine logs—and Martha's face was flushed and shining. She said, looking past his shoulder, "I can't help if I'm tall."

  He said nothing for a few turns and then he said, "I don't mind it."

  They said nothing more to each other until the dance was finished and then Henry Frazer said, "I guess next time we see each other we'll both be in boots," and he smiled briefly. Martha watched him walk off. He had an odd, rocking stride, seeming to kick his feet out to the side with each step. His boots were worn down at the heel but the creased leather was shiny with saddle soap or boot wax.

  She didn't dance with Walter Irwin. He was tall and was known to be a bachelor of means, so he was a popular partner; but when he finally worked his way around the room to Martha she told him she had promised to meet Irene and Emil Thiede out on the porch, which wasn't true—she had only just that minute seen the Thiedes cross the dance floor and go out to the porch. In point of fact, it wasn't Irwin she disliked but his hired man, Alfred Logerwell. The week before, watching her work, Logerwell had called out to her, "I can tell you right now, if you mollycoddle a horse he'll turn out spoilt, and I've had to unspoil plenty of horses that've been girl-broke. You ought to take a stick and beat some sense into that one." He wasn't the first man to ridicule her for the way she broke horses, the first man she'd met who believed in brute force, but he was the only one she knew of here in the Odd Fellows Hall. She had made a private promise not to dance with him; but by now Logerwell had danced with every woman and girl in the room and was starting around a second time without asking Martha, and she had begun to suffer from the unexpected feeling that she was being shown up or snubbed. Which was a roundabout and irrational reason for refusing to dance with Mr. Irwin, but there it was.

  Irwin went away with a surprised look, but unperturbed. "Well, all right," he said, and strolled off to select another girl.

  When she went out on the porch she found Emil Thiede smoking a cigarette and leaning on the porch rail, talking quietly to Irene, whose eyes were fixed past him on the low moon above the roof of the hardware store across the street. What they were talking about was Old Karl's broken pelvis, a subject that ran through their minds and through their conversation daily, but Emil stopped and raised his chin when he saw Martha Lessen, and Irene turned to see who he was looking at and they both smiled and came to her as if the story she'd given Walter Irwin had been true and the Thiedes had just been waiting for her to come onto the porch.

  In those first months of the war there was a lot of foolish flag-waving. Orchestras banned the playing of Mendelssohn and Beethoven, people insisted sauerkraut was "liberty cabbage," vigilante committees in some places back East tarred and feathered people who spoke the German language. The Thiedes might have been entirely shut out by their neighbors, except the old ranch families in the valley had known Emil all his life—Old Karl and Hilda had come over right after the Franco-Prussian war, Emil had been born in the valley—and in any event Irene was English through and through, her family among the first to settle along the Little Bird Woman River. And with Old Karl laid up in bed, the worst of people's patriotism may have been forestalled. But Irene and Emil had been frozen out by quite a few of the townsfolk and homesteaders in the crowded hall—"Heinies" and "Krauts" had followed them in low whispers—and they were both glad to see Martha Lessen, who had evidently made up her mind that people who treated horses decently must be decent people.

  Martha hadn't yet started riding the circle, so Irene said, meaning to tease her, "We've got a couple of horses just dying for Miss Lessen to come and give them a ride."

  Martha didn't quite take this for criticism but she said in ex asperation, "I'll be riding in and out every day once I get them all started, but I've still got two more to get to." She had just finished the rough work on W.G. Boyd's black gelding and still had two of the Woodruff sisters' horses to saddle-break before starting the circle ride. She worried about how long it was taking her to get around to them all.

  Emil smiled. "Well, I guess pretty soon we'll be seeing too much of you then."

  Irene, who had picked up on Martha's tender feelings, pushed him lightly. "Quit it, Emil." She fingered Martha's scarf. "This is so pretty."

  Martha had tied the borrowed scarf at the waist of the jumper and then had stood in the changing room, turning the scarf one way and another trying to find the right place for the fringed points to hang down. Louise had told her the scarf would spruce up any dress, which Martha had understood to mean it might partly hide the shabby condition of her jumper. "Louise Bliss lent it to me," she said, not to mince matters.

  This didn't lessen Irene's admiration of it. "It looks so nice. And the color is right for you. If I had your hair I'd wear red all the time. There's nothing prettier than a red ribbon in chestnut hair." Martha never had thought of her brown hair as chestnut, and she realized with something like dissatisfaction that she didn't own a single piece of red clothing, not even a ribbon.

  She looked down at her feet, wriggling the toes. "These are borrowed, too. I've got sore feet from wearing them."

  "They're pretty, though. Every woman should own a pair of patent shoes."

  Martha kept looking down at her feet. "I never have."

  Irene laughed. "I never have either." When she put one arm around Martha's waist, the last of the girl's unhappiness went out of her, and the two of them leaned together.

  Irene had taken warmly to Martha from that first day in Lit tle Creek Canyon when Emil's wagon had gone off the road. She had grown up in a family where horse sense was considered a heroic point of character, had heard repeated all her life the particulars of her grandfather's story—how he'd come West alone and penniless and worked as a cowboy and horse wrangler before managing to build up a decent ranch of his own from a small donation land claim and half a dozen cow and calf pairs. Irene had always been a good hand with horses, better than her brothers, every bit as good as her granddad, but she'd been a schoolteacher before marrying Emil. Martha represented to her some part of her old childhood notion of becoming a cowgirl.

  After a moment, Martha thought to ask Irene, "Where is Young Karl?" Old Karl, even with his broken pelvis, stubbornly took care of his own needs so long as Irene left a sandwich and a pot beside his bed, but the two-year-old couldn't be left with his invalided grandfather.

  "He's in that little room we all changed clothes in. Some of the younger girls are watching the babies and small children so we mothers can dance." She met Emil's look and flushed.

  Emil said to her, "You're not dancing, though, are you?" He winked at Martha. "She'd rather stand here and fret. Her and the baby don't like to be in separate rooms, ever."

  Irene looked away from her husband, frowning around the crowded porch without seeming to see anyone. "He's attached to me is all. He doe
sn't like to be held by strangers."

  Emil took her hand and played with the short, blunt fingers without saying anything else about Young Karl. He said to Martha, "So I guess you'll be starting around the circle pretty soon. When? In a week or so?"

  "It might be sooner than that. It might be Wednesday. Those horses have been standing around quite a while, some of them. I want to start as soon as I can."

  Irene, who was remembering the start of school every autumn and how the children always had to relearn their lessons, smiled and said, "If those horses are anything like children, they'll have forgotten every bit of what you taught them by the time you get them back in the schoolroom."

  This was fairly close to the case. Martha had tried to get back to the first of the horses every couple of days while also going on with the rough work on those remaining, and she'd ridden some of them a short way, getting them spread out evenly around the circle, two horses at each stop. But by now they were restive and tending toward wild again. She knew she'd have to remind some of them who she was and what a saddle was for and what was expected of them.