The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Just about the time the roasted pig was brought out, Henry looked into his hands and said to her, "I ought to have warned you about the liquor in the eggnog."

  She frowned. "I don't usually drink. I wouldn't want you to think I did."

  "I know that. You were lit up too quick for somebody that was used to it." She glanced at him, seeming to look into his face for whether this was true. She had a good, open face, and with her hair pulled back and tied with a red ribbon she looked to him painfully innocent and unguarded, a child. He was thirty himself, and his coffee-brown hair was already shot through with gray; nobody had ever mistaken him for handsome, and he knew he had more than the usual wear of weather around his mouth and eyes. He imagined Martha Lessen must think him old or a bachelor too set in his ways to ever be housebroken.

  16

  THE WEATHER TURNED COLDER, the ground frozen so hard it rang under the horses' feet. The sky on Christmas Day was Chinese blue, brindled with long streaks of dry cloud. Martha pulled a silk stocking close over her head under her hat and rode the circle from the Bliss ranch to the Romers' farm, then Irwin's, the Thiedes', the Rocker V, old Mr. Boyd's, the Woodruff sisters', and back to the Blisses'. It was roughly fifteen miles around the circle—would have been only eight or ten as the crow flies, but she sometimes had to let the crow find its own way while she took a roundabout path skirting fences and getting through gates and going up- or downstream to cross the Little Bird Woman River on a bridge or find a place to ford where it was shallow. At each corral she stripped off saddle and bridle and turned the horse she had ridden up on into the corral, caught and tacked up the horse that was waiting there for her, and climbed once more onto the cold saddle. Certain of the horses had to be hobbled while she saddled and unsaddled them, and some others had to be hobbled whenever she got down to open a gate and then unhobbled after she mince-walked them through.

  Before finally starting to ride the circle, she had been thinking she knew the peculiarities of each of the horses and what to expect from them—which ones were tractable and which ones mean-spirited or cold-jawed—but she became better acquainted in the first couple of rounds. By Christmas Day her back and neck and legs and arms were aching from the long jarring ride over frozen ground, the jerk and pull whenever a horse took sudden fear of a shivering blade of grass or made up its mind to try again to throw her off and reclaim its old unfettered life.

  She carried lunch with her and ate it as she rode. People on the circle were astonished to see her riding through on Christmas Day, and some of them—the Thiedes, the Woodruffs—tried to get her to come inside the house and get warm, eat something hot from the stove. She stood by the corral and drank down hot coffee if they brought it out to her, but otherwise told them she was determined to get around the circle as quick as she could so as not to hold up the Blisses' Christmas dinner—Louise had announced that they wouldn't eat their beef Wellington until Martha was able to take her seat at the table.

  It was well after dark when she rode into the Blisses' yard around five o'clock. There were two unknown cars, a black Ford and a dark green Willys Knight, standing alongside the Chalmers, and the house was lit up behind its draperies, people's voices sounding dimly through the walls.

  Martha made a poor toilet for herself by carrying water from the pump to the tack room, stripping down to her underwear and running a cold wet rag over every bit of bare skin. The water in the pail turned murky—she'd been shouldered and knocked to the ground by Irwin's horse that day. She put on the corduroy jumper and the peony scarf, combed her hair, and retied it with a ribbon. Christmas had never been much celebrated in her family, which had given her the notion she might like to celebrate it, but the corduroy dress went on cold and stiff over her shoulders, and her boot-sore feet didn't like the patent shoes, and her unwashed hair smelled of horse sweat; she was bone- and muscle-weary and she dreaded meeting the people who had driven over in the cars. If she could have gotten out of going to the house, she would have. What she wanted now was to eat a quiet supper and crawl into bed with a book.

  The Ford car belonged to the Blisses' daughter, Miriam Bliss Hubertine, and her husband, who had driven down from Pilot Rock; and the Willys Knight to a friend of Orie Bliss, who had taken two days to drive Orie down from the university at Pullman, Washington, where they were both studying animal medicine; the Bliss car was in the yard because Ellery Bayard had borrowed it to bring his sister Pearl out from Shelby. All these people were gathered in the house when Martha let herself in through the back porch door, although the men were in the front room and the women in the kitchen, which at least relieved her from meeting everyone at once. Louise, who had been in the kitchen since before the break of day and was bent over the roast with her head half inside the open oven, merely said, "Well, there you are," when Martha came in, and left it to her daughter and Pearl Bayard to introduce themselves.

  The young woman who had been employing a potato masher set it down and reached out with both damp hands. "I'm Miriam," she said with a light laugh. She was the very image of her mother, which should have put Martha at ease, but mother and daughter behind their aprons were both daintily dressed in dark red Christmas frocks, which made her heart fail her. Pearl Bayard too was finely dressed in a gown of blue watered silk still elegant despite being bleached out a bit and worn around the seams. Pearl sat in a kitchen chair, her hands idle in her lap, and though she smiled slightly and said to Martha, "Hello, I am Pearl Bayard," she didn't stand up from the chair.

  Louise, as she began to lift the roaster pan out of the oven, said, "Maisie, you had better—" and Miriam made a clucking sound of amused exasperation. "Mother, you haven't called me Maisie since the boys were little."

  Louise straightened with a startled look and stood a moment holding up the heavy roaster in her towel-wrapped hands. "Oh my goodness, why did I do that."

  Miriam said to Pearl and Martha, "Jack couldn't say 'Miriam' when he was a boy, so that was what they all called me when we were children. I had just about forgotten that."

  Louise set the roast down on the kitchen table. "I wish they would have let Jack come home for Christmas, but there it is," she said, and smiled stiffly. She made quite a business of folding the towels.

  Miriam Hubertine had by now gone back to mashing potatoes, leaning over the handle of the masher and turning the bowl rhythmically with her left hand. She said matter-of-factly, "He might telephone. But even if he doesn't, you know he's sitting down to roast goose or something. We read about it in the papers, how they're feasting all the soldiers." Of course she knew this wasn't what was on her mother's mind. Jack had written just this week that he expected to ship out right after the first of the year.

  Louise puckered her mouth once and said again, as if making a particular point, "Well, there it is." She frowned and bent over the roast, which was entirely wrapped in a golden blanket of pastry decorated with bits of dough in the shapes of flowers and leaves. Martha had never seen such a fancy thing in her life.

  Shortly afterward, Louise put Martha to work ferrying things to the dining room, which was a room she had not seen in six weeks of coming and going in that house. It was larger even than the front room and more formal, its corners occupied by tall parlor palms and the walls dressed with oak paneling, graceful kerosene fixtures with figured shades, and large photographs in gilt oval frames of people Martha had never met, posed stiffly in full dress suits. The table had been laid with an ivory lace tablecloth, and lamplight gleamed upon fine china and silverware. The pickles and the salt were in cut-glass bowls, the cream in a delicate pitcher embossed with ceramic roses. Martha had known the Blisses to be well-off compared to her own family—most every rancher she had worked for in Pendleton had been better off than the Lessens; this was something she was used to—but the sight of a table set with so much finery gave her a shock of dismay.

  When she went back through the door into the kitchen, she had another shock: Pearl Bayard coming toward her supported on a pair of
canes. Her locomotion, swinging her slippered feet through, then stabbing one cane and the other, was the action of a child staggering along on stilts. Martha, who had been feeling snubbed by Pearl, flushed and dropped her eyes to the floor and tried to move aside.

  Pearl's face was pink, her eyes fixed on Martha. "I wonder if you'd hold the door for me," she said with a faint smile. Martha afterward could not remember if she replied at all or just fumbled backward with one hand to catch the swinging door and hold it; she worried that she may have stared down in silence while Pearl passed through to the dining room.

  The men had been called to the table, and in a flurry of formality Mr. Bliss and the others began pulling out chairs for the women. Martha guessed it was Orie Bliss who seated her—he resembled his father, and he had George's dry, joking manner. "I bet Ray two bits that you're Martha," he said to her as he took hold of the back of her chair. She flushed, which had nothing to do with Orie's mild joke but with not knowing whether to let her weight rest on the seat as he pushed the chair in or to lift up her behind and let him slide the seat under her. Clumsily, she tried to do a little of both.

  She was introduced around the table to the men she had not met. Howard Hubertine, Miriam's husband, was older than his wife by quite a bit, his sandy hair already balding at the forehead, his red whiskers streaked with gray. He talked in a slow drawl and didn't say too much. His silence was made up for by Orie Bliss and his friend Ray Buford, who talked and laughed easily and had to be stopped from describing, at the Christmas dinner table, the intimate details of surgeries on horses struck by automobiles. Ray Buford was small and sinewy-looking and wore glasses in wire frames. His large family was all in Pittsburgh, where his father managed a steel mill.

  Martha's hands trembled as she took the dishes passed to her. In her world, the world of horses and working out of doors, everything was natural to her and came easy; but in this world she was, as old Roy Barrow used to say, a fish wearing clothes. The others at the table, even El Bayard, seemed at ease with the elegant food, the dainty dishware, seemed familiar with the rules of good manners. Martha was in an agony that she might spill gravy on the lace tablecloth or break a plate by pressing down too hard with her knife. She was acutely conscious of being the only left-handed person at the table and was embarrassed by the horsy smell of her hair and the way it had become stubbornly bent around her ears from being confined under a silk stocking all day. George and Louise made a point of talking her up, of saying to the others how glad they were to have her teaching manners to their horses, and how clever she was in the way she went about it, but this only made her hot with self-consciousness.

  There was a good deal of war talk around the table, espe cially the question whether the draft would be extended: it had been rumored in the papers that men as young as eighteen and as old as forty or forty-five might soon be on the call-up list. It came out that George had been asked to serve on the Elwha County draft board and that he'd turned it down. When Ray Buford mildly chided him for it, he said stubbornly that he didn't want to be hated by his neighbors—they'd all been hearing about charges of favoritism and unequal treatment flung at draft boards elsewhere in the country. He didn't say his deeper fear, which was that he might, in fact, be tempted to favor young men he had known all their lives and the children of his friends over the sons of homesteaders and Basques and Mexicans, and he didn't want to have any sort of hand in choosing which men were sent off to their deaths.

  He had said yes to being a Four Minute Man, though, and expected to start in soon delivering Liberty Bond speeches during reel changes at the moving picture shows in Shelby. George had a streak of the evangelist in him, which wouldn't have surprised anyone at the table except perhaps George himself, and after the dinner plates were removed and the desserts brought in he didn't need more than a wisp of persuasion to stand over the pies and cakes and the frosted yule log and deliver, with broad gestures of a cake knife, his practiced four-minute sales pitch for Liberty Bonds in a voice Martha thought must carry clear out to the pastures and the barn.

  The evening went on quite long. When the women had washed and put away every last plate and spoon from dinner, they joined the men in the front room, and the lamps were turned down so the candles on the tree could be lit in a great show of romance. Martha, who had spent the late hours of Christmas Eve helping Louise string cranberries and popcorn, was by that point almost too worn out to take pleasure in the sight, and when they began to sing carols she was agonizingly conscious of being the only person in the room who knew none of the words to the songs. She had thought that if gifts were traded they would be traded only among the Bliss family members, but of course was surprised in that as well and made to accept popcorn balls and then open a little package from Louise and George, which turned out to be a pencil box and six pencils. Pearl and El Bayard and Ray Buford, she was relieved to see, were given the same things; but Ray afterward brought out what he said were "little tokens"—hair combs decorated with feathers for Louise and a nickel-plated watch fob engraved with a stag's head for George. Even Pearl and El had come with an offering of fudge candy and taffy that Pearl had cooked and pulled herself, which left Martha the only one who had not brought a gift for anyone.

  All the guests were staying over. At the end of the night Miriam and Howard went up the stairs to Miriam's old bedroom, and Pearl, who couldn't climb the stairs with her canes, was settled on a fold-out cot in the front room. Orie, who might have slept in the unoccupied bedroom he and Jack had grown up in, trooped out to the bunkhouse with Ray and El. It was a long time, though, before the place settled into quiet, as one by one people stepped out in the moonlit darkness to call upon the privy.

  Martha was entirely used up from the long day of work and the long night of nervous strain, but nevertheless she waited until all the others were finished before taking her own turn. Standing in her coat and her underwear just inside the cold barn, she could hear people murmuring to one another as they passed in the yard, and she expected eventually to hear Pearl Bayard struggling across that great distance on her canes; what she heard, finally, was Pearl saying softly, "I'm all finished, El," and through a gap in the barn wall watched El Bayard carry his sister from the privy back across the yard to the house. Martha had been thinking Pearl was crippled from polio—a plague of it had gone around the country the summer before—but now, seeing El's shadow in the darkness, his elbow jutting out stiffly, it occurred to her that the Bayards might both have been crippled in the same mishap.

  Very much later—it was after midnight—Will Wright, who had spent the evening with Lizzie's family, got back to the homeplace and blindly crawled on top of Ray Buford, who was asleep on Will's bed. Martha didn't hear about that until morning. The shouting and the laughter weren't enough to wake her.

  17

  DOROTHY ROMER HAD HEARD from Jeanne McWilliams shortly before Christmas that Tom Kandel had a cancer and that Dr. McDonough had told Tom there wasn't a thing that could be done about his tumor. She had been trying to get over to Tom and Ruth's since first hearing Tom was sick, but the days had gone by. Finally in the first week of the new year she gave up trying; she walked out to the corral where Martha Lessen was changing horses and asked if Martha would mind dropping something off at the Kandels' on her way around the circle. Dorothy had put several jars of homemade jelly and applesauce and a small jar of orange marmalade in a splint basket with a note tucked under the jars: I am so sorry to hear you're sick, Tom. I'm praying for you every day. If there's anything I can do for you or Ruth or Fred I hope you'll let me know. She knew they wouldn't think of asking her for help. They would know she had three young children and that she didn't have any way to get around on the roads except walking; and they would have heard the gossip about Reuben's drinking—like news of Tom's illness, it would surely have gone around to all the homesteaders in the county by now—and they would know that Dorothy was sometimes called on to split and haul wood while still keeping up with her housework. They
would know she hadn't any time left at the end of the day to help Tom with his dying, and they would excuse her. She was distressed by her willingness to be excused, but she'd finally grown tired of arguing with herself about it. She liked Tom, and she felt deeply sorry for him and for Ruth and for their boy, but she was afraid of being around anybody who had cancer—she had heard it might be a disease you could catch, like influenza or a chest cold. In any case, she couldn't imagine what she would find to say to them—a man who was dying and his wife, who might be expected to burst into tears at any moment in the conversation. Without being able to put words to the feeling, she was also afraid being around Tom would remind her, in the most potent and stark way, of the inevitability of every person's—of her own—death.

  Martha rode away from the Romers' with the splint basket carried across her lap. The Kandels' farm wasn't on Martha's circle—their blue roan horse had been corralled at the Rocker V next door—and since Dorothy hadn't said anything to her about Tom Kandel's illness, Martha was slightly put out about making the extra stop. The Woodruff horse she was riding was entirely placid but she changed horses again at the Thiedes' and then she was riding a bright bay gelding that had given her a fair amount of trouble in the past. She had tied a string of tin cans to the back of her saddle that morning, and riding over to Tom and Ruth Kandel's place she had to worry about the basket of jellies in case she suddenly needed both hands to control the bay. As it happened, the horse tolerated the rattle of the cans well enough and the basket didn't suffer any mishaps. She didn't trust the horse with the chickens, though, and sat outside the gate to the Kandels' yard thinking about the best way to get to the porch through that white sea of hens. She was about to climb down and hobble the horse when Ruth Kandel must have seen her there. She came out of the house and waded toward Martha, knee-deep in chickens. Their flurry and scattering made the bay nervous and he tried to rear off his front end and scoot back from the fence, and Mrs. Kandel, startled by the commotion, stopped where she was, which allowed the chickens to gradually smooth their feathers and wander off on their own affairs, which was more help to Martha than anything else, though the whole thing never came near the point of disaster. She spoke firmly to the horse and settled him, and then she said, "Dorothy Romer asked me to bring this by," and she coaxed the horse up to the fence and handed down the basket.