The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Later on, after they'd eaten supper and were sitting at the table playing dominoes, Joe said to his grandfather, "I was thinking, if cancer just happens, it could happen to anybody." He looked down at his unplayed tiles, touching and rearranging them.

  W.G. frowned and played a tile and said, "Eighteen," and wrote his score down while he turned things over in his mind, puzzling out Joe's question and what it might mean. He had a pet cat he allowed to live in the house, a part-Angora who was crippled from being caught in a coyote trap. The cat was on his lap, and he put his hand down and stroked the thick ruff while Joe was looking over the pattern of the dominoes spread out on the table.

  "Well, it doesn't happen very often, Joe," he said slowly.

  The boy had learned about death at an early point in his life. He frequently worried about his father dying, or his grandfather, and sometimes late at night was visited by the knowledge that he, too, would someday die. He particularly worried about certain illnesses and accidents, the kind that occurred frequently among their neighbors—tuberculosis, food poisoning, typhus, runaway horses—and he wondered if cancer, which he had imagined to be exclusive to his grandmother, was something he should now add to his list of things to worry about.

  None of this had he said to his grandfather, but he might as well have, because W.G. understood suddenly that it was this, and not confusion about the particular way his mother had died, that must have come into the boy's mind when he heard his grandfather and Martha Lessen talking about Tom Kandel.

  By the last weeks of Anne Boyd's life a profusion of suppurating lesions had spread across her chest and back, and she was paralyzed by a tumor on her spine. Her left breast had grown nearly to the size of a woman's head, and as hard. In Chicago or New York she might have been sent to a surgeon, but in Bingham that sort of radical treatment was not practiced. When W.G. could no longer lift and turn her on the bed without help, she was taken by wagon up to Pendleton, which at that time had the nearest hospital to Bingham. He thought afterward he should have fought against removing his wife from their home, but he had felt overridden, defeated by his own ignorance and tiredness.

  It was the opinion of the hospital staff that W.G., who followed Anne to Pendleton, would be better served not to witness the agonies and indignities of her last days, and they strictly limited his visits to half an hour in the mornings and half an hour in the afternoons. In the hospital, they dressed her ulcerating skin and her bleeding nipples, applied caustic poultices and pastes that gave her excruciating pain, lifted her sobbing into a chair once a day while her bed was neatened and rearranged. When the morphine stopped her bowels, they began giving her daily enemas, and W.G. spent his visits, morning and afternoon, sponging his wife's limbs, her lean buttocks, the soiled valley of her privy parts. She was in a moaning, agitated semicoma for the last eight days before she died.

  Since Anne's death, W.G. himself had had an irrational fear that he might someday have to watch someone else, someone he loved, die in that terrible way. Or that his son and grandson might have to watch him. He knew he should say to Joe—he wanted to say—You don't have to worry about cancer. It won't happen to you or to your dad or to anybody you love, but the words wouldn't come out of his mouth.

  19

  SNOW BEGAN TO FALL out of the darkness that night and fell straight down all the early hours of the morning, and by daybreak it stood about half a foot deep everywhere in the lower valley, though the sky then cleared off and a pale sun lit up the newborn world. The horses were excited by the snow, and just about every one of them wanted to frisk and jump, which wasn't quite the same thing as giving trouble but was trouble anyway, and slowed things down. It was already late afternoon, almost dark, when Martha left the Rocker V, and then she had to take the long way around to get to the Woodruff ranch because a flock of sheep had bedded down in the road between Bingham and Opportunity. Some Owl Creek sheepmen had taken delivery of over a thousand ewes and yearlings at the railhead in Shelby late in the day, and they had stopped for the night at the first place they came to with a stretch of wire fence along both sides of the road. Martha knew the trick: you used the fences on two sides to hold the flock, and that way you only had to post one nighthawk and a dog in the narrow lane at each end to keep them from drifting. There were so many sheep they were packed into that stretch of road for al most a mile, and it took her a good long while to get around them and back onto the ranch road that went up to the Woodruffs.

  So she was a couple of hours past her usual time getting to the Split Rock Ranch, and she found Henry Frazer in the yard saddling a piebald horse. He didn't say he was about to come looking for her, but when she rode up he gave her a look that could have been relief; then he quit buckling the cinch and pulled the saddle off the horse again. Martha guessed that the sisters had been about to send him out in the cold dark to look for her. When she stood down from the Thiedes' sorrel mare, Henry said, "You'd better go in and say hello to the sisters, so they don't go on worrying and fretting about you like they have been. I'll change your saddle. Is it the bay horse you're taking out now?"

  "There was a bunch of sheep in the road and I had to go way around," she told him in defense, so he wouldn't think she'd been bucked off somewhere along the line. She was tired and cold and just wanted to get back to the Bliss place and eat some warm soup if there was any waiting for her on the back of the stove, and go to bed. But she let Henry Frazer take the sorrel's reins and she said, "Yes, the bay, his name is Boots," and she went off to see the Woodruff sisters.

  Emma Adelaide came to the kitchen door in a long beltless dress that was in great disrepair and at least fifteen years out of style, and when she called out, "Aileen, here she is," her sister came in from the front room in an identical dress. The Woodruffs weren't twins but looked much alike, large in the nose, built thin and straight, with skin the color and grain of a wooden ax handle from all those years working out of doors. Aileen's hair had gone entirely white while Emma Adelaide's had grayed in streaks, and this was the most significant difference between them in the way they looked. They never had gone so far against convention as to wear trousers or overalls—riding cross-saddle, they hitched their skirts over, and expected boots to do the work of concealing ankles—but it had been many years since either one of them had bothered to wear a corset.

  They forced on Martha a hot supper: Emma Adelaide had already phoned the Bliss ranch and told Louise they would feed their broncobuster before sending her on. But it seemed clear to Martha that she had misread the extent of the sisters' worry. In fact, the Woodruffs had spent their lives on horseback and seemed to take for granted the idea of a girl riding alone through darkness and snow on an uneducated colt. They appeared entirely unperturbed by her late arrival.

  The kitchen was so warm it made Martha's skin itch. She ate quickly, afraid of stiffening up or falling asleep if she sat too long. Emma Adelaide sat across the table from her, doing book work with a pencil and a mechanical adding machine, while Aileen stood at the sink washing up dishes from their own supper.

  "How are the horses coming?" Emma Adelaide asked her.

  "Good." She was shoveling in mounds of rice that had been fried up with bacon and onion. She swallowed what was in her mouth and gulped coffee, and said, "I like your palomino horse, and that other one, the one called Big Brownie."

  Aileen laughed. "I bet you never met a horse you didn't like."

  This was close to the truth, so Martha didn't bother to disagree. She said, "I guess there's a couple that are giving me trouble, one of those Rocker V horses is full of himself, and that one of Mr. Irwin's is pretty mad at the world."

  "Irwin. Is that one of the homestead farmers?"

  "Yes ma'am. He has that white house that sits up high on Lodge Butte, right before the road goes down into Lewis Pass. He has a hired man named Logerwell."

  Emma Adelaide lifted her head. "Oh, I know which one Logerwell is. His wife raises pigs and sells them."

  Martha kept from s
aying what she thought of Alfred Logerwell's wife. Every horse she rode out of the Irwin corral was ravenous—she'd begun to believe that Logerwell's wife was stealing oats and corn from the horses to fatten up her pigs.

  Aileen clattered dishes in the sink. "That one? Then he's the one I saw that time beating his horse with a piece of pipe for refusing to go over the Graves Creek bridge. If he works for Irwin, I expect Irwin's horses are getting that same treatment." She was silent a moment. "Mad at the world, I should think so."

  Martha grew flush and still. She was remembering the time she had lifted her arms above her head to stretch a kink out of her sore back before putting a boot in the stirrup, and how Irwin's roan gelding had screamed and reared away from her. She felt stupid, now, not to have guessed what that was all about. She had been all these weeks imagining Logerwell's temper had only to do with her.

  The sisters were overly conscious of their responsibility to set an example for Martha Lessen: without ever speaking of it, they had both become aware that she took them as paragons. Aileen turned from the sink and gave Martha a look. "Now don't imagine that I just stood there and watched. I took that piece of pipe right out of his hand. I cussed him, too, and I believe I might have hit him with his own pipe if I hadn't been with Mrs. Stuart, who turned about the color of buttermilk when she heard what I said."

  Emma Adelaide had been entering figures in her ledger but this made her stop and laugh, a mulish bray, which was another thing the sisters had in common. After a moment she became gravely serious. "Well, and don't think for a minute he's the only one who would beat a horse, Aileen. There's plenty of them would."

  "Oh, I know that. Of course I know that, Emma Adelaide. But they'd just better not do it in front of me, that's all I'm saying."

  "Or not in front of Martha, I should imagine."

  "Yes, I should imagine not."

  Henry Frazer came in the back door with a burst of noise and cold and stood there shedding snow, peering into the kitchen. He was thick-set and looked more so in a sheep-lined jacket and a sweater. He had wound a wool scarf around his neck and it bulged out the collar of the coat. The whole of his broad face was lit up with color just now. "All saddled and ready to go," he said unnecessarily.

  When Martha went out to the yard, Henry followed her, and she found that he had saddled his own horse again. "I might as well go along with you," he said when she gave him a look. "I'm headed over there to play cards with El."

  She thought she saw in his face, in his unwillingness to meet her eyes, that this was a lie, and she was suddenly struck by the thought that it was Henry Frazer, and not the Woodruff sisters, who had been fretting over her late arrival, that his look of relief when he saw her had nothing to do with being saved from going out in bad weather. She said without looking at him, "I don't need any help, if you were thinking I did."

  He didn't act surprised by what she said; he smiled and answered placidly, "I was just thinking we might keep each other company, riding over there."

  She had risen into the saddle by that time, and the bay horse kinked up his back a couple of times just for the fun of it, which aggravated and embarrassed her. By the time she had him settled down into a trot she had forgotten what Henry Frazer had said to her that had made her go warm in the face; the keyed-up feeling, though, stayed with her.

  The moon had risen and was three-quarters full, which was enough light to find the way. Martha was forced to keep a tight hold of the bay, who had a wish to run, while Henry Frazer ambling along on his piebald could be light on the horse's mouth, and this was a further embarrassment to her. Not a single thing came into her head to say to Henry, but she leaned into Boots's neck and murmured quietly, "I wish you'd give up your idea of running, because this is not the night for it."

  They went along in silence for more than half the way. At one point a coyote ran across the snow ahead of them and both Henry and Martha pulled up their horses at the same time and sat watching until it trotted off into the deep shadow under a copse of trees, and they resumed riding after a minute, without either of them saying a word about it.

  It wasn't long after that Henry said, as if the words were ones he'd been turning over in his head for quite a while, "It can weigh on your mind, if you think very hard about a horse's life."

  He might have meant anything, but what came into her own head was Alfred Logerwell beating his horse with a pipe, and her dad's horses, and other horses she had known, horses who were gaunt, thirsty, lame, wounded, broken-winded, frightened, discouraged.

  "There's a look I've seen in some horses," Henry Frazer said, still going along as if this was part of a long conversation he'd been having with himself, "like they're just reconciled to taking whatever comes. Like they've given up, and they don't have much expectation of anything good ever happening to them. You see it in their eye." He didn't look at Martha. "But some others never do get reconciled. I had a horse once so determined not to be broke that he bucked under me until his heart busted and he died." His face in the night was without expression.

  She was startled beyond words, not by the story of a horse breaking its own heart—she had seen that sort of thing herself —but by Henry Frazer telling it to her that way, quietly and at the end of a few words about pondering a horse's life. They rode on silently. It was cold, and the air held a bluish light. The horses' unshod feet moving through the snow made a dry, quiet, steady squeaking.

  Finally she said, "I know a wrangler who joined up with the Canadian army, and he was telling me about the horses over there."

  He didn't ask her where she meant; in those days people understood that "over there" meant the trenches of France and Belgium. He said, "They don't say much about it in the newspapers," and Martha said, frowning, "No they don't."

  Martha had known Bud Small from working with him up in Umatilla County, where he was known to be a good hand with horses—better than most, in Martha's opinion. Bud had spent a year working at a Canadian remount depot in France and then had shipped home when a horse fell on him and broke both his legs. He had told her everything that she now began telling Henry—everything about the terrible plight of the horses over there—how they died on the transport ships from fear and trampling; how they pined with homesickness and consequently took cold or pneumonia and died at the remount depots before they ever got to the front; how they were often starved and thirsty to the point of eating harness or chewing their stablemate's blankets; how as many horses were invalided by war nerves as were killed in battle—their hearts and minds not able, any more than the men's, to bear the airplane bombs and grenades, falling fuses, the shrieks of wounded men and animals.

  These were things that had been on Martha's mind for months, ever since she had gone to visit Bud at his sister's house, where he was laid up in heavy plaster. But she had not talked about them to anyone before now, and saying them to Henry—in snatches, with silences between—her voice rose and rose until she became aware of it and fell silent in the middle of what she was saying, which was something terrible and distressing about horses being whipped and beaten for rearing back from the smell of blood.

  Henry Frazer had listened to her without interrupting, and he glanced at her when she stopped talking, then waited to hear what else she might say; he let the silence spin out so long that finally Martha felt she couldn't keep from telling him one more thing. "I think if they would let horses stick together, the ones who come from the same farms and ranches, the ones who are acquainted with each other, if they let them stick together maybe they wouldn't get so homesick and they might hold up better." She said this to Henry as if he was the one able to do something about it. "Isn't that how it is with the men? They do better when they go over there with a pal or a brother."

  Buyers had been coming through some parts of the country almost from the beginning of the European war, gathering up American horses and mules to ship to the British army. But Pendleton was in a far corner and there hadn't been much of a push to send local horses to
the war effort until lately. Some horses well known to Martha had been among the first batch of two thousand shipped out in the autumn just past, and it was those horses she was thinking about now. Some of them had been raised together on the L Bar L since they were foals, and she knew they'd bear up better if they were kept together.

  Henry said, after another short silence, "I guess you know Will Wright is planning to join up."

  She looked over at him. She thought he might be making a point about the men, whose suffering ought to be more impor tant to her than the horses. She wondered if Henry even believed her, that horses had their horse friends and that they might become homesick and lonesome among strangers.

  Then he said, "I heard the other day Roger Newbry's planning to join up too. They've been friends since they were born, just about. So I guess they'll try to keep each other company and out of trouble." He didn't say this lightly, as if he was making a joke about boys going off to the fairgrounds in Pendleton; his look was solemn, humorless. Martha saw that the only point he had wanted to make was about friendship—friendship between men, just as between horses.

  After several moments had passed, she said, "Two of my brothers went in together."

  Henry looked over at her. He and his brother wouldn't have joined up together, he knew this—Jim had been hard set against the war. Although he hadn't thought it through exactly, he knew his brother's death was in some way the reason he planned to claim his farm worker's exemption and stay out of it if he ever was called up. But a brief, ridiculous pain sometimes still rose up in him, as if Jim's death had cheated them both out of the chance to go off to France and die together as heroes. Whenever he heard about brothers joining up he felt a momentary, inexplicable pining.