The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Ruth was holding off roasting their usual Sunday hen until Tom finished with his work, but she hadn't been happy about it. They had quarreled over it the night before, and then she had cried and told him she didn't care about getting a new carpet. "I wish you would quit working for Bill Varden and stay home with me and with Fred every day," she had said to him, and he had finished the sentence in his head, until you die.

  He nodded and looked back at the cows and then over at the girl. "That's my horse you're riding."

  "I know it is. I don't know if he has a name but I've been calling him Dandy because he's coming along so good." She put her gloved hand along the horse's neck affectionately and he bent his ears back to her. Miss Lessen was devoted to the trappings of old-time cowboys, and Tom looked at her buckskin chaps and loose starred spurs with an odd pang of yearning.

  "Dandy," he said, as if he was trying it out. "He'll be my son's horse so I imagine we'll let Fred name him. I'll tell Fred you've been calling him that." He smiled.

  No one had told Martha that Tom Kandel was sick. He had lost a good deal of weight over the past few months but she hadn't known him long enough to notice it. He had a thick shock of brown hair that hung down over his forehead, and in the cold whitish daylight he was slightly flushed with one of the fevers he'd been running off and on for days. If you didn't know, you'd have thought he was bright with health. He was forty years old and in a little over two months he would be dead.

  "I guess we'd better both go on if we want to be in time for dinner," she said to him, and began to move the horse along.

  He found that he didn't want the girl to leave, that the idea of being alone again in the center of a shapeless, shadowless vagueness was suddenly terrible to him. He said, "Ruth's roasting a hen. I imagine it will be stuffed full of onions." He didn't know how he expected this news to keep the girl from riding off, and already she was half gone, the fog eddying around her. She called back to him, "I saw a horned owl this morning, I hope he didn't get any of your chickens," and she threw him a last look, one of her childlike smiles. He stood at the back of the wagon with his hands on the handle of the pitchfork, and watched the shape of the girl on the horse soften and whiten and sink down again into the formless ground and leave no trace. He sat on the tailgate of the wagon and took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead and drew cold air into his chest and let it out again and after a minute he was all right, able to go on as he had been, feeding cows in the late December afternoon without noticing the fog too much and without thinking too much about anything except the work.

  He always made sure the weaker cows got their share. They would come late to the first dump of hay, after it was already trampled on by the fat, healthy cows, and while the fat ones would follow the wagon around the oval, those weak cows would stand where they were and make do with muddied feed. So he always went all the way around again and dumped fresh hay for them at the beginning place. Today when he had finished his work he sat a while on the tailgate of the wagon and watched them feeding, their dark shapes softened by the fog, before he drove the team back to the Rocker V. The windows in the ranch house were mostly unlit, although he could see Bill's housekeeper, a tobacco-voiced woman named Ella, moving through the dimness attending to her weekly chore of cleaning the lamp chimneys and trimming the wicks. Bill Varden was a divorced man and he drove himself as hard as his hired help. Tom thought he was probably not in the house at all on a Sunday afternoon but was somewhere out on the ranch, maybe hauling wood off the mountain for fence poles or going up into the canyons to set traps for coyotes and mountain lions.

  Martha Lessen had already changed horses and ridden off toward the next place on her circle ride. The blue roan and another horse, a chestnut, were standing in the corral, both of them looking morose and slighted, staring yearningly toward the other horses in the fenced pasture on the east side of the barn. Tom unhitched his team and turned the big Percherons out and stood along the rails of the fence watching them drift off into the whiteness, their breath gusting out and stirring the frosty air. The cancer was in his liver. His side ached with it and with the effort of getting the horses out of their harness. He leaned on the fence and when he was feeling better he walked home slowly along the hard ruts of the ranch lane.

  The windows of his own house were brightly lit in the darkening fog, and he could see Ruth moving about in the single room that was both their kitchen and their parlor. He had built a wooden sink for her with a pitcher pump that drew from a well drilled under the house. That well had never yet dried up on them, though most of his neighbors were hauling water in barrels from the Little Bird Woman River in the dry months of the year, their hand-dug wells sucking mud by then. He stood outside in the cold, watching his wife work the pump and carry a pan of water to the stove. His flock of chickens had already gone in to roost, and the yard was quiet—chickens will begin to announce themselves hours before sunrise as if they can't wait for the day to get started but they are equally interested in an early bedtime. Tom had grown used to sleeping through their early-morning summons, all his family had, but in the last few weeks he'd been waking as soon as he heard the first hens peep, before even the roosters took up their reveille. The sounds they made in those first dark moments of the day had begun to seem to him as soft and devotional as an Angelus bell. And he had begun to dread the evenings—to wish, like the chickens, to climb into bed and close his eyes as soon as shadows lengthened and light began to seep out of the sky.

  He let himself into the woodshed and sat down on a pile of stacked wood and rested his elbows on his knees and rocked himself back and forth. His body felt swollen with something inexpressible, and he thought if he could just weep he'd begin to feel better. He sat and rocked and eventually began to cry, which relieved nothing, but then he began to be racked with great coughing sobs that went on until whatever it was that had built up inside him had been slightly released. When his breathing eased, he went on sitting there rocking back and forth quite a while, looking at his boots, which were caked with manure and bits of hay. Then he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and went into the house and sat down to dinner with his wife and son.

  15

  ON THE SATURDAY before Christmas the Woodruff sisters invited their friends and neighbors—not the newcomer farm families, but all the old-time ranch families and their hired hands—to the house for a holiday dinner. Emma Adelaide took on responsibility for roasting the pig, and Aileen for baking the cakes, and they asked Henry Frazer to see to the eggnog. Elwha was a dry county, but several moonshiners living down in Owl Creek Canyon regularly brought whiskey up to the valley, packed under loads of tomatoes or inside bales of sheep's wool, and the Woodruffs expected Henry to see that the punch was sufficiently stiff.

  It was not a lack of liquor that kept most people from making eggnog that winter, it was the sugar. But for years the Woodruff sisters had been experimenting in their garden with various plants their neighbors said wouldn't grow in the valley, and they had grown a crop of sugar beets in the summer of 1917. Now that the country was on a wartime footing the Woodruffs had sugar while others were going without. There was no easy way to separate the molasses from the sugar crystals though, so the Woodruffs' sugar was black. Aileen's choco late cakes took to it easily, but Henry Frazer's eggnog, floating in a silver punch bowl with a grating of orange nutmeg, was the color of snuff, and people had to be persuaded to drink it. Henry, ladling cups of dark froth, took the chiding and ridicule with a smile. He had ridden over to Tom Kandel's and bought up several dozen eggs, pretty much all Tom had now that the days were short and his hens reluctant to lay; and cream from the Bowman Dairy, all the cream Timmy Bowman could give him now that his cows were reluctant to lactate; had whipped up the egg yolks and the cream with the dark sugar and then folded in the beaten egg whites and the whiskey bought from a sheepherder who kept a still down in the canyon. It was as stiff and rich an eggnog as he could make, and after the first round people stopped teasing him and b
egan wandering back to the silver bowl on their own.

  Martha Lessen let Henry fill her cup twice before the liquor took effect, and he was watching her when she looked around the room in dismay and then found a chair and sat in it. Other women must have had an eye on the girl too; Henry saw Irene Thiede and Louise Bliss exchange a telling look and then Louise came straight over to Martha and sat down in the next chair and leaned toward the girl and said something Henry couldn't make out. Martha looked down at her stockinged ankles or her patent shoes and made some sort of reply and then the two of them went on talking over there in the corner while Henry stood with his cup in his hand, listening only now and again to the men standing around the punch bowl going over the past season, grass and cattle and horses and wheat, and the war news, which had to do with electric signs in the towns and cities staying dark twice a week, and how that didn't have a thing to do with any of them or anybody they knew, since electricity hadn't yet made it out of the towns into the countryside. Of course nobody in those days would have guessed: it would be 1946—on the other side of another great war—before electric wires were strung to all the farms and ranches in Elwha County.

  When finally Mrs. Bliss stood and went off toward the kitchen, Henry left the men and sat down in the chair Louise had surrendered. The flush of liquor had almost gone out of Martha Lessen's face by then but Henry went ahead with what he had planned to say. "The sisters wouldn't stand for eggnog without liquor in it," he told her, which he meant her to know was an apology.

  When Henry had seen the girl the first time, riding up to him on a scarred and earless mare, she had looked gravely sure of herself, even vain, outfitted in showy fringed chaps and a big vaquero hat as if she was headed for a rodeo and her mare was the famous Justin Morgan. But it hadn't taken him long to realize she knew her horses and was bashful and skittish away from them. She gave him a wild sort of look that he took for embarrassment. "I told Mrs. Bliss I have a terrible sweet tooth."

  He turned her words over until he got her meaning: the eggnog was sweet, and she'd gulped it down for the sugar. He grinned and said, "Aileen made three cakes and I never saw her put any liquor in them, but I imagine she won't bring those out until we've ate up the pig."

  She silently twisted her fingers in the scarf tied at her waist—her hands were pink from hard scrubbing, and still there was a thin rime of black around each nail—and looked out at the two dozen or so people standing around the room. After the girl's silence had gone on a while, Henry looked up into the dusty realms of the roof beams and said, "Old man Woodruff built this house himself."

  People in Elwha County considered the house an unfashionable museum piece—it had been a throwback to an earlier time even when new—but Henry guessed Martha Lessen, with her old-fashioned cowboy trappings, might think well of it. The roof of the main room was supported by hand-peeled pine logs, and the walls and ceilings were faced with rough-cut lumber. Bear rugs were scattered on a floor of pine boards twelve inches wide, planed and fitted together as tight as a ship's deck. The fireplace would take four-foot logs. "Every bit of the wood came off this ranch," he told her. "The old man cut the logs and snaked them down off the mountain and then he built a sawmill and planed the boards himself. Those fireplace stones came from Short Creek and Blue Stem Creek and the Little Bird Woman. The windows and the nails, I guess those came from outside, but just about everything else he made with his own hands."

  Martha had desperately loved the house from first seeing it. She turned her face up to the great wrought-iron chandelier suspended on a chain above the center of the room, its heavy wheel supporting six kerosene lamps, and adorned with horseshoes and small iron replicas of the Split Rock brand. "Do you think he made the hanger for the lamps?" She glanced hesitantly at Henry. "He might have made the nails for the house, too, if he was used to making his own horseshoes."

  "He might have. I guess if you can make horseshoes you can make nails, and he sure did his own shoeing. Those old-timers knew a little bit of everything. I can shoe a horse if I have to but I try to keep from doing it if I can."

  She warmed to this. "I never took it up either. Roy Barrow taught me to break horses and showed me how to shoe but I never really wanted to do much of it. I can trim hooves all right if the nippers are sharp, but I don't even like doing that if I don't have to."

  He didn't know who Roy Barrow was but he said, "Every farrier I know of has got a hunched-over back and bad knees."

  She gave him a quick look, smiling. "Roy couldn't stand up straight, and his legs were all bent out like broken fence rails. I guess that's why I never wanted to shoe."

  "Well there you go." He thought of something else she might be interested in. "You ought to ask the sisters to tell you some of their stories, those pioneer days when old man Woodruff first came up here. I guess wild horses used to herd onto those alkali flats over by Teepee Hot Springs to lick the salt and take a bath and roll around in the grass and just have a time. I guess it was quite a sight, hundreds of them."

  "I wish I had seen it." She had seen, plenty of times, big herds of horses gathered in one place. Combine crews making the rounds of wheat ranches in the summer would come through Pendleton with as many as a hundred and fifty horses, but those were coarse and heavy-footed pulling horses, kept bunched up together in corrals or herded close between wire fences. And at the railroad corrals in Pendleton horses were brought in by the carload; on weekends it was popular sport for folks to go down there and watch cowboys bucking out dozens of horses in a melee of dust and noise. But she hadn't ever seen more than four or five wild horses at one time—not range horses, but wild horses—and then just a glimpse before they spooked away. They'd been pretty well hunted down, shot, or rounded up, until the ones that were left were skittery and canny and quick as cats. When she was younger she had daydreamed about going up into the high parks of the Blue Mountains or the Wallowas or the Clarks and camping there quietly until the wild horses got over being afraid of her and came out of their hiding places, and in her daydream she rode them bareback without a bridle, guiding just with her knees and heels and her voice, and she never came down from the mountains.

  After a brief silence he said carefully, "I guess you don't get thrown too much, breaking horses." She raised her chin and gave him a quick look, her face as pink and shining as it had been at the Odd Fellows dance when he had said that stupid thing about her tallness. He spread his hands. "I was just thinking about the horseshoers, and how bronc stompers can get pretty broken down too."

  She looked away from him. She had been bucked off in the corral that morning by one of his horses, or anyway a Split Rock horse, one of the brown ones she had been calling Big Brownie, but she didn't tell him so. "Well the horses don't hardly ever buck when I bring them along the way I do," she said, which was mostly true.

  In the silence afterward, they became aware of the room clamorous with voices. The men standing around the punch bowl were arguing, and Emil Thiede made a loud, high declaration—"No, no, that sure ain't what I meant!" Irene was standing by the fireplace with several other women, holding Young Karl against her bosom. Henry and Martha both saw her look over at Emil with a worried frown. The old-time ranch families hadn't been shutting out the Thiedes, but everybody in the room knew: sometimes words were traded that didn't seem to be about the war or patriotism but had that meaning anyway.

  Henry said to Martha quietly, looking down at his hands, "I guess you know the Thiedes are German."

  She did know. Louise Bliss had told her, and in the same breath had vouched for them as one hundred percent Americans. But Alfred Logerwell had come up to her one day while she was changing saddles and said he had heard she was breaking horses for that damned Kraut spy Thiede. When she hadn't given him any answer, he had puffed himself up and said she must be a sauerkraut sympathizer herself. She and Logerwell had been on poor terms from the first time they met, but she didn't know where his hatred of the Thiedes came from—she didn't think he had ever spoke
n to Emil and Irene. Later on the thought occurred to her that she'd better keep Logerwell from knowing which of her horses belonged to the Thiedes—that if he knew, he might take out his hatred on the horses.

  She said to Henry, "They're Americans," just so he'd know where she stood on the question. She had heard he was friends with Emil.

  He looked over at the men gathered around the punch bowl. "I guess Emil would have to join up and get killed over there, and I guess Irene would have to leave Young Karl in an orphanage and start driving a Red Cross ambulance for some folks to believe that family's on the right side in the war." His smile was grim.

  After a moment they went back to talking about horse breaking. Martha told Henry that one year at the Round-Up she'd seen a showman named John Rarey offer to tame any horse in about an hour without a bit of bucking and that she had picked up some of her methods from watching how he did it. Henry had read in a magazine about how the queen of England's horses were trained without bucking them, and he told Martha what he could remember. Martha said she'd heard from Roy Barrow how some Indians liked to put their horses into deep water or a muddy marsh where they'd get tired of fighting in a hurry. Roy would have used this method himself if he'd been able to find any water deep enough; he was from Minnesota, which had its fair share of muddy marshes and deep-water lakes, and he liked to complain about the lack of them in Umatilla County.

  When they began talking about the bells and so forth that Martha hung off the saddle to get the horses used to all kinds of noise and distraction, Henry said, "I guess there's nothing they'll be afraid of, once you get done with them."

  Martha hesitated, but then she said, "Roy liked to bring out his accordion and play it close to the horses until they quit being scared of the music. I guess my horses will have to go on being afraid of accordions, because I can't play a note." Henry laughed, and Martha gave him a pleased, sidelong look.