The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Emil grinned and said, following a trail Irene had opened up, "I always had to relearn my times tables over again every year. Did you?"

  Irene looked over at him, laughing, and then said to Martha, "He still doesn't know them. He leaves all the book work for me to do."

  It was cold on the porch, and in a few minutes they would be driven inside again, but for a while the three of them stood along the railing looking out at the horses and autos in the street. Martha looked for Rory among the many brown horses and found him standing close to Duchess with his cheek resting affectionately against her golden red neck.

  "I guess I'd rather teach horses than girls and boys," Martha said, and Irene answered briefly, dreamily, "Oh, I would too."

  The T Bar comprised almost a thousand acres, a hundred cows, and they'd been short-handed even before October, when Emil's dad was hurt. Irene wouldn't have felt right saying it, but she'd been happier since then—since Old Karl was laid up and Emil needed his wife to ride out with him on horseback every day, just to keep up with all the work.

  13

  THERE WAS A LOT of rain early in December, followed by a hard freeze and then a thaw and another freeze. Sometime during the thaw a bunch of Split Rock mother cows discovered a desire to swim or wade over to Baby Island, a long narrow acre of land lying just beyond a U-turn in Blue Stem Creek. This would not have been trouble except they had pushed down a farmer's fence to get there, and the grass on the island was a little field of his winter rye just coming green after the rain, and they were still there when the temperature dropped and put a ledge of ice all around the island. After the cows finished up the rye and came to an understanding of their predicament, they began bawling to be rescued, which could be heard from half a mile off. The farmer rode over to see what the noise was and then rode over to the Split Rock Ranch and told the Woodruff sisters he was planning to shoot every damn one of those cows if they weren't off the island and off his property by the time he got back from seeing a lawyer about a lawsuit. He and the Woodruffs had enjoyed a long-standing dispute having to do with their range bulls covering his dairy cows.

  Henry Frazer saddled a big dun horse called Pardner and went to take a look at the problem. The ledge of ice around the island was four or five feet wide, thick and white at the brushy margins, thinning out to a brittle skin shuddering and transparent at the edge of the current. Henry called over to the cows, his lowing, wordless mother cow call, hoping they might be inspired to jump out on the ice and break it with the weight of their bodies and then swim across to him. They went on milling along the bank and bawling fretfully. It was late in the day and a little wet sleet was drizzling out of a low sky, and Henry, studying the trouble these cows had got themselves into, considered whether he ought to just let the farmer shoot them. Then he hunted up a short thick pole for breaking up the ice and put his horse into the water.

  The Blue Stem came straight off the Nelson Glacier far back in the Clarks Range and was numbing cold even in August; and in December, after a week or so of rain, it was deep enough to require a horse to swim. The whole adventure went against Pardner's better judgment. When the water climbed over his big haunches he decided to turn right around and climb back out, and Henry had to convince him pretty firmly to get back in and swim for the island. Henry wasn't happy about any of it either. He tucked his coat up to keep it out of the water but his boots flooded icy cold and then his overalls and long johns up to the hips.

  When the horse bumped up against the ice and found his feet on the gravel bar under the water, Henry shoved the pole out and beat at the ledge of ice and broke away enough so the horse could climb up, and it must have been the shattering of the ice and Pardner scrambling and splashing up from the water that spooked the cows. They had been asking him to come rescue them but now they went hightailing away from him to the upstream tip of the island. The lead cows walked or got pushed out onto the ice until it broke under them, and as soon as they went down in the water the other cows jumped in after them, bawling and rolling their eyes, and the whole bunch started swimming hard upstream, which made no sense, except a cow will get herself into trouble and take you with her if she can.

  Henry yelled and swore, which didn't help matters, and spurred the horse back into the water. The cows were swimming toward the hairpin curve on the Blue Stem where the bank had been sheared away in a high bluff, and afterward he would tell the sisters and anybody else who asked him about it that he'd been thinking they would pile up there at the oxbow and drown and that he meant to turn them back downstream. But the truth was, he wasn't thinking at all, he just went in after them. And he never did know what caused Pardner to go under, if it was a rock or a stump under the dark water, or the shock of the cold, or a seizure of some kind, but the horse lurched suddenly and then sank, and Henry kicked his boots loose of the stirrups and swam away from him. The horse didn't come up, and then he did, floating on his back. Henry was at the bank by then, climbing out on the slick frozen mud, and he stood there with his teeth chattering and the stream running off him, stood there looking at his horse floating down the high creek with his legs sticking out of the water.

  The cows upstream were already turning for the bank, finding their feet, beginning to lumber up into the farmer's frost-killed field of peas. If Henry had left the damn animals to their own devices he wouldn't have killed his horse was what he was thinking as he watched them. He started walking downstream after the horse and then he broke into a trot to keep his blood from freezing up on him. The saddle wasn't more than a year old and had cost him a pretty penny, and if the horse was dead he at least hoped to save the tack that was on him. He got ahead of the horse, and where the creek widened and creamed across a gravel bed he waded into the water and caught the reins. When the dun's back scraped on the pebbly shallows the horse suddenly righted himself, snorting and blowing, and stood up wild-eyed and wobbly and streaming water.

  Pardner was a big dark dun with zebra stripes down the spine and the shoulders—Henry never had thought he was much of a looker. But of course, when it comes to color a plain horse has his virtues. The fact is, a white-faced horse's eyes will weep. A horse with white feet is prone to split hooves. Palominos, claybanks, skewbalds, piebalds, some strawberry roans, have amber hooves that are brittle and prone to cracks. White hides will scald, chafe from sweat and heat. Some paint horses, the ones with mostly white on them, and blue eyes, are not right in the head. A pure black horse will sunburn in hot weather, fade out under the saddle and the harness. Left to go their own way, horses will pretty much always revert to bay, with black legs and hooves; or they'll fall back to grulla, with black feet, black zebra slashes above the knees and hocks and down the spine and shoulders of a dun-colored hide. They seem to know, most horses, the plain colors that will save them.

  "Hey, Pardner," Henry said in surprise, and put his wet glove on the horse's neck affectionately. He and the dun were both soaked through and shivering and he didn't have a damn thing to dry off with, so he set out leading the horse at a trot to get some heat going in both of them. It was near to a mile back to the Split Rock. He got into the yard just about the time the sleet quit, and went into the barn and took off the wet saddle and rubbed down the horse as well as he could with gunnysacks and then went over to the house and stuck his head into the kitchen.

  "Miss Woodruff, I've got to get back to those cows and bring them in, but there's a horse in the barn needs to be warmed up and looked after, he near drowned in the creek."

  Emma Adelaide took in Henry's sopping clothes and said, "Oh for goodness' sake," and she stood up and reached for her barn coat on the rack by the kitchen door. "You put on some dry clothes," she yelled after Henry as he went back out, and then he heard her calling Aileen's name.

  His wet boots were a slow chore to get out of, and the wet long johns, the goose flesh bright pink when he peeled them back. He stood by the box stove in the foreman's house for the little bit of leftover heat coming off it and dried himself wi
th a towel and rummaged around until he found dry clothes that weren't too muddy—he hadn't got around to doing laundry that week. He didn't have another winter coat to put on, so he put on his summer coat over a flannel shirt, and a raincoat over the top of that, and his barn boots caked with mud and manure.

  It was just about dusk by then. He took a coffee can of corn out to the pasture and shook it, and his red horse, Dick, came up. He was saddling him when Aileen brought over a steaming cup that turned out to be tomato soup, and he drank it down before he went ahead with tightening up the cinch. While he was standing there next to the horse, Aileen let herself through the pasture gate and chirped to the horses, and her paint horse called Paint came up to her and she led him over to the fence and went ahead with saddling him, even though Henry called to her, "Miss Woodruff, I don't need help bringing those cows home." The sisters were both stubborn that way. When he and Aileen rode out of the yard, there was a light on in the barn and through the half-open door he could see Emma Adelaide walking Pardner up and down the runway with a blanket over his back.

  The pea field the cows had climbed into was fenced on three sides with wire strung between posts and rockjacks, and on the fourth side by Blue Stem Creek. The cows were too spent to go to the trouble of pushing the wire over and they had had enough of the flooded creek, so they were standing in the near-darkness, bunched up together for comfort and heat, waiting for what would happen next. Henry got down and opened the gate in the fence and Aileen went through and began driving the cows toward the opening, clucking and chirping to them quietly. Her white hair and the white on the paint horse seemed lit-up and luminous against the darkening sky, the dark field, the dim glooming shapes of the cows.

  When Pardner sank under him in Blue Stem Creek, Henry had reached down for the horse, had tried to hold on to him, hold him up, a thousand pounds, which he had not remembered doing and now suddenly remembered.

  In April the year before, Henry's older brother, Jim, had been driving him and El Bayard back to the Bliss ranch from Bingham after seeing a moving picture. El's sister Pearl was in the car too, as she and Jim were engaged to marry. Jim had moved to Elwha County in 1914, persuaded by Henry's letters about the mountain air, the scenery, the prospects for growth in the valley, and now Jim had a law practice in Shelby and a brand-new Model T Ford car. At the curve where Cow Creek comes down and joins the Little Bird Woman River the car slid off the road and overturned. It had been a deep winter, but a Chinook wind had blown up warm the previous week and the roads had opened up, though most people hadn't taken their cars off the blocks yet. The four of them had been talking about Wilson's declaration of war, which had happened just the week before; they had been arguing about the need for it—Jim was adamantly against the war—and about the moving picture, which was Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. Henry never did know what caused the car to swerve, if it was ice or if a tire blew or if they hit a pothole and Jim lost his grip on the wheel, and he didn't know if their arguing had taken Jim's attention away from the road. The car went over on the driver's side and pinned Jim's head to the ground and he drowned in four inches of cold snowmelt at the flooded verge of Cow Creek.

  While he watched Aileen bring the cows through the gate he was thinking about that night on the Bingham-Shelby Road, the luminous whiteness of Julius Audet's bald-faced half-Shire horses coming toward them out of the darkness, and how Julius had unhooked his horses from his hay wagon and run a chain from the horses to the Ford and righted the car just that easy, releasing Pearl Bayard's pinned legs forty minutes after Jim was dead.

  14

  SOME OF THE FELLOWS homesteading up and down the valley in those years were such poor farmers they could hardly raise Cain. They would break up the fields of bunch grass to grow pinto beans or turnips and nothing would thrive but star thistle. If there was timber on the land—and it grew thickly in those years, yellow pine and spruce and fir up to four feet through—they'd log it off and pull out the stumps and be surprised to find scrub juniper and rabbit brush growing back instead of the grass they'd expected to pasture their dairy cows on. When they cleared the sage and willow from around a spring, sometimes the spring would silt up, and when they opened up a spring to make a farm pond, as often as not the water dried right up or got salty. Quite a few people who might have given a good account of themselves under other conditions were just taken in by rosy visions of "rain following the plow," which was the widespread, spurious claim of not a few commercial and government interests. In those years it seemed as if all you might need to grow wheat or alfalfa or field peas on the dry slopes of Elwha County was a stack of pamphlets and bulletins from the Department of Agriculture or a handbook put out by one or another of the companies making farm equipment.

  Tom Kandel had come into the county to homestead about 1910, with his wife, Ruth, and their young son, Fred. He was a college man, which made him different from most of the rest of his neighbors but not always in the ways you would expect. He was a thinking man with a curious mind, who if he happened upon a petrified bone or a fossil in weathered rock was not content until he found the book that could tell him what animal it had come from, and he took subscriptions to magazines and journals of a kind not seen in other houses and always had a book he was reading or quoting from—he had read every word of Ridpath's History of the World for instance—all of which might be exactly what you'd expect of him. But Tom had a healthy mistrust of anything a government bureaucrat might say about the scientific methods of dry-land farming and he had more common sense than most.

  The Kandels had filed their homestead claim on land that had once been winter range for a sheep outfit, and Tom was smart enough to plant his garden vegetables in the old sheep corrals on his claim. While his neighbors were breaking up grass to plant wheat and draining shallow lakes to grow corn or timothy hay, he set about growing chickens as a full-fledged enterprise.

  Every farm family raised chickens in those days as food for the table and sold a few eggs if there was a market for them, but Tom put into practice the most modern methods of incubation and scratch feed and found a thriving home market among the big crew at the McGee Creek Lumber Mill over on the slopes of the Whitehorn Mountains. "My blooded stock is in egg yolks," he would say, and laugh outright as if he found everything about it deeply amusing. It was never an easy thing in that part of the country to keep chickens alive—hawks, especially, would plan their visits according to the time of day you regularly went to the privy. But until he got sick Tom did as well as anybody could hope, and better than many of his friends and neighbors.

  He took cancer sometime in the fall of 1917. In November, when Martha Lessen came into the county offering to break horses, he bought a coming four-year-old blue roan gelding and left it at the Rocker V corral to be taken out in its turn with the horses Martha was breaking for Bill Varden. This struck some of his friends as a foolish distraction from the business of dying, and other friends as the necessary business of going on with your life. Tom didn't know which of those it was, really. He had wanted to buy the horse and have it broken, so he had seen to it. It was something he and Ruth had talked about before he'd become ill—they wanted to give their son a horse when he turned thirteen—and now he had become anxious to see it through. He wanted other things done as well, things they had talked about for months or years while lying in bed at night, things they had always said they would do when they had the money for it next year or the year after—a new rug for the front room, a new mohair cover for the old chair that had been Ruth's grandmother's.

  The Rocker V was one of the big old spreads, a cattle outfit, although Bill had sold off about half of his cows and broken up a lot of his grass to plant wheat in 1915 when he could see the way the war winds were blowing. He'd always had trouble keeping cowboys and foremen—Bill was a harsh old man and he worked people hard—so when he found himself with less need for skilled cowboys, he took to hiring local men, homesteaders for the most part, to dehorn his cattle in the fall and fee
d them out in the winter and haul ice from Lewis Lake to be laid up in sawdust in his root cellars and icehouses for the coming summer when, for a few weeks, he'd be feeding a big harvest crew.

  Tom Kandel had taken winter work with Bill just once, for a few months in 1915 when extraordinarily cold weather had frozen half his flock of White Leghorns. But in 1917, that last winter of his life, he went over to the Rocker V and signed on again to feed cows. On Sunday, late in the afternoon, he was working with a team and wagon laying out a racetrack of hay in one of the Rocker V fields. A cold fog had settled over the valley, and the trees on the surrounding slopes were soft gray shapes against a white remoteness; so when a horse and rider came off the hill, they seemed to take their form out of the ground, and only slowly became something he recognized. They were almost upon him before he realized it was Martha Lessen riding his son's blue roan horse.

  "Hello, Mr. Kandel."

  "Miss Lessen, you ought to be sitting down to Sunday dinner about now."

  She smiled, which had a way of transforming her face. She was a big, serious girl, but when she smiled her eyes widened and you saw how young she was, as green and unhandled as one of her horses. "We had fried oysters for breakfast, and Mrs. Bliss's sweet rolls, but I wouldn't know what to do if I sat inside all day, and anyway the horses need to be taken out every day so I went ahead and started the circle." She looked over at the cows coming up to the long oval of hay behind his wagon. "I guess cows have to be fed even on Sunday."