The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  "Gordon is pretty hard on animals himself, so I guess the two of them'll get along all right," Henry said, and he smiled dryly.

  Martha thought he could be saying something else—you can see how much good it did you to get him fired—and she wanted him to know she never had thought, not even for a minute, that she could protect all the horses in the countryside from men who would beat them. She said stiffly, repeating something she had heard the Woodruff sisters say, "Well, there are plenty of men who will beat a horse. But they'd just better not do it in front of me is all." The bright color in her face wasn't all from the cold and the exercise. She turned her head clear away from Henry, toward the livery barn and the horses standing inside the log rails of the corral. He wasn't sure what he had said to set her off.

  "I heard Irwin—is that his name?—hired Ralph Birkmeier's oldest girl to work for him," he said. "I don't know what she knows about farming, but I imagine she won't be beating up the horses, at least."

  Martha had met Hilda Birkmeier the day before at the Irwin corral, a girl built like a Shetland pony, short and solid with large callused hands. She wore old overalls she had fixed up herself, sewn double in the knees and the seat, which made Martha think well of her—that and the pony build. Ralph and Mildred Birkmeier lived with their twelve children crowded into a three-room house at the east edge of Opportunity, and since Mrs. Birkmeier often had a baby at the breast, another one weaning, and a third clinging to her skirts, the strain and work of the household had frequently passed down to Hilda. The girl was happy to get away from that, to work outside, and to have a whole house of her own to live in. She had already taken some of Irwin's barn cats to live with her in the cabin that had been Logerwell's.

  "When I saw her, she was marking off some holes to set trees into when the ground thaws," Martha said to Henry. "I guess Mr. Irwin bought some orchard stock from a traveling salesman, and he plans to grow fruit."

  Henry had a generally poor opinion of all the late-arriving farmers who had been plowing up the dry slopes of Elwha County the past few years. There were just too many of them for the land to support, and they came in with great excitement and plans for growing sunflowers or soybeans or tobacco, but their excitement usually dried up with the dry summers. Where the ridgetops and uplands and sidehills near the homesteads were shorn of grass and tilled, the creeks ran brown with mud every spring, and there were dust devils all over the hills later on in the summer. The bunch-grass pasture was best left to cattle and horses was his belief. He said, "He'd better have a plan for irrigating. I know the sisters never could get apples to grow unless they kept up their watering all summer."

  Martha didn't know if Walter Irwin had a plan for watering his trees. She said, "Hilda's not afraid of hard work," which she knew wasn't anywhere near Henry's point—he hadn't said anything against Hilda Birkmeier—but she felt called on at that moment to state her opinion.

  "I guess he's lucky to get her then," Henry said. And he told her, "They're a German family," to let her know why a hardworking girl like Hilda Birkmeier hadn't already been snapped up by somebody else.

  Martha didn't think she needed to reply to that, but after a moment she said, "They're Americans more than German, I guess. She told me two of her brothers have gone into the army and they're learning to be soldiers."

  He smiled at Martha and didn't weigh whether he ought to say what came into his mind—it just popped out. "Well, I hope they can keep from getting into fights like your two brothers and breaking the sergeant's nose before they get over there." She returned him a look that was partly just surprise, but she saw he was teasing her and she crooked her mouth slightly to hide her own smile.

  They took a few more turns around the ice, and then she said, "My dad whipped us kids pretty hard," as if this was what they'd been discussing. When Henry glanced at her, she said, "So I guess that's where my brothers get it from." He waited to see if she would say more, now that she had started to tell him something deeper. She looked over toward the lake, which from here had the color of sheet metal against the darkness of the evergreens. "But he's hard on animals, too. He likes to beat horses just about more than anything else."

  He listened and then he said, "Is that right? Well, I guess the apple fell a long way from the tree, then."

  She turned back to him with another surprised look, a half-laugh. "I guess it did." She dipped her chin slightly to study the toes of her own skates and Henry's skates moving together across the ice, the slow, deliberate, harsh-sounding strokes not quite synchronous.

  "He has the arthritis and he got pretty crippled just about the time I got big enough and strong enough I could stop him beating the little kids. And I'd get between him and a horse. But he'd just wait and do it when I wasn't there. He beat a horse of mine this fall, for no good reason except I wasn't there to stop him, beat him so bad he died." She looked at Henry as if she couldn't believe it herself, that her dad would kill a horse for no reason but that. Then she turned her head and looked toward the horses standing in the livery corral. "So I took my other ones, Dolly and T.M. and Rory, and I left there and came down here." She said this last bit with an edge on it, a hard edge, which at first made Henry think she was expecting an argument out of him or was ready to fight him over something; but after he'd let it sink in, he knew she wasn't arguing with him at all—that he wasn't the one she was ready to fight.

  After a minute Henry said, "My dad got sick and died early, but my stepdad is a pretty good hand with horses. I learned some from him, and then I went out and learned about cows from George Bliss. I guess I must have been about seventeen when I went to work for Bliss."

  She glanced at him and said, "Why did you go over to the Woodruff sisters, then, after being with Mr. Bliss for so long? I know they needed help, but why didn't El go, or somebody else?"

  "Oh, I've always liked the sisters. And they're still growing cows, whereas half of Bliss's pastures are in wheat now. And I guess Bliss and me are too much like a dad and his son." He began to smile. "After his two boys left home, he began calling me his foreman, but I don't think he'll ever get over thinking I'm seventeen. The sisters, they let me do what needs doing without telling me how to do it." He waited a bit and then he said, "I had a brother who died last year, and I guess I kind of wanted to get away from Mrs. Bliss, too, who seemed to think I needed her to feel sorry for me."

  Martha had five brothers who were all living; she had never had to get over the death of anybody she cared about, except some horses. She'd never had anybody feeling sorry for her in the way Henry meant, so she didn't know for sure if she would want that or not. But she thought she understood what he was saying. She hesitated and then said, "I know it's not the same thing, but whenever I've been bunged up from a fall off a horse I've mostly just wanted to be left alone, not have anybody make a fuss over it, which just makes things hurt worse than otherwise."

  He nodded. "Well, it's pretty much the same thing." After a short silence he began to smile. "Anyway, I've got that foreman's house all to myself over at the Split Rock, and I had to listen to El snoring like a freight train when I was working for Bliss."

  Martha dipped her chin, smiling too. "I guess I won't ever be a foreman with a house to myself but at least in the barn I don't have to listen to anybody but horses." Henry wondered if she was making a point about wanting to always live alone but then she laughed lightly and said, glancing at him, "I've had horses that snored worse than anybody but they've never kept me awake," and he took these last words as an encouragement.

  23

  TOWARD THE END of January Tom Kandel began having trouble sleeping at night. He would sit up in the darkness, his legs hanging over the side of the bed, and restlessly rock back and forth above his knees for hours at a time. Ruth at first sat up with him too; she asked him over and over if he was hurting, and she stroked his arm or his forehead as she tried to persuade him to lie down again. But she began gradually to understand or to believe that his restlessness had more t
o do with fear of dying in the night than with pain, and when nothing she said or did seemed of any use to him she gave up trying to coax him back to sleep. When he sat up in the night she went on lying on the bed pretending he hadn't wakened her, only shifting her body to press an arm or a leg against the small of his back so he would know he was not entirely alone in the darkness.

  One day in the last week of the month, just before dawn, he sat up in bed not in the way she had grown used to, but in terrible agony, and began to pace back and forth beside the bed, moaning as an animal moans, a low heavy thrumming from deep in his belly. Ruth sat up in alarm and spoke to him but he hardly seemed to hear her, and when she got out of bed and touched his shoulder he twisted away from her and went out to the front room and began to stalk a path between the dim shapes of the kitchen table and the sofa. Ruth followed him but before long gave up trying to get him to settle or even speak to her, and she went into Fred's little bedroom.

  In recent weeks Fred had been staying away from his father as much as he could. The war had caused the price of furs to rise, and the boy had set out a trapline that caught mostly river rats but once in a while a slough muskrat that brought two dollars from Meryl Briggs at the drugstore. After school and on Saturdays he walked the trapline and took care of the chickens and came into the house late in the evenings. Ruth and Tom both understood: it wasn't his father he was staying away from but his father's dying, and they said little about it, wanting to spare their son as much worry as possible. But now Ruth scarcely had the energy to feel concern for the boy—the shine of his eyes wide open in the early-morning twilight, the stiffness of his body lying on the bed. She told him bleakly, "Fred, I want you to go over to the Rocker V and borrow a horse from Mr. Varden and ride into Bingham for the doctor." He began immediately to pull on his clothes as she stood over him. Both of them could hear Tom's low, terrible purr from the dark front room of the house. "Don't kill the horse or yourself from riding too hard," she said after a moment, and briefly rested her hand on her son's thin arm. He went on lacing up his boots in silence.

  The fire in the stove had gone out long since, and the house was very cold. Ruth went into their bedroom and lit a lamp and put on a wrapper over her nightgown and found her slippers and Tom's slippers and then she took the lamp and one of Tom's flannel shirts and went to where he was standing in his underwear swaying and groaning in the front room. She in tended to make him put on the slippers and the shirt—she was afraid he might take a chill—but when she brought the lamp close to him she could see he was sweating and flushed, the cancer a roaring furnace in his body. She said, "Oh Tom!" and broke into tears. He hardly seemed to see or hear her. His brows were drawn down to the edges of his eyes in a wild, frowning grimace.

  In the next hour, as darkness thinned along the edge of the mountains to the southeast, Ruth did little but follow Tom from the bedroom to the front room and back. She tried to persuade him to drink a glass of water or submit to a cool washrag on his face, but he shrugged away from her with a bare and impatient motion and did not answer her at all. Sometimes, briefly, he would sit down—on the edge of the bed, the edge of the sofa, a kitchen chair—and rested his elbows on his knees, hands clenching and unclenching, his head hanging between his shoulders; but if she laid her palm on his undershirt between the jutting wing bones of his back he flinched and groaned and stood again and returned to his agonized prowling. After a while she stopped trying to talk to him, stopped trying to comfort him. She sat in a kitchen chair and watched him pace the house and waited for Fred to bring the doctor. It occurred to her that the chickens hadn't been fed or watered and were still cooped up in their shed, but she could hardly think about that now or do a thing about it. She wasn't willing to leave Tom alone in the house. Waiting with him and watching him stalk through the rooms was all she could do.

  In the first days after learning Tom would die she had cried and cried and everything she thought of was painful. But she had not cried in recent days, had slipped into an unfeeling state of mind, removed and closed up. She had been dreading what lay ahead, the unimaginable details of Tom's slow dying, almost more than she dreaded being left alone, and lately she had found her mind skipping over the next few weeks and lighting on the details of rearranging her life once Tom was gone, with the same unemotional attention she might have given to spring housecleaning. She had hoped—had even prayed—that if Tom was dying it could happen soon and be over with. When Tom whispered to her one night that he wished he had the courage to take a gun and shoot himself—If I'm dying, I might as well get it over with—she had been startled but had said almost nothing in reply. It was something she herself had thought of, had even wished for, in moments of cold consideration. She was grimly aware this made her a heartless, soulless, unloving wife.

  But now that Tom was suddenly sicker—now that she was sitting in a kitchen chair watching him circle and circle the house in feverish agony—that thin, unemotional husk fell easily away, and behind her breastbone was such fear and pain that she had to gasp for breath in harsh, repeated sighs. She was terrified he might be dying—that this was his last death agony—and she wished madly that he should go on living as long as possible, even if it meant going on suffering as he was this morning. The incredibleness of what was happening, the inevitability of it, the finality of it, came flooding into her body in a physical way, and all the meaning she had found in the world, the shape she had cast on it, began to wash away in the undertow.

  Every little while she looked out through the kitchen window for Dr. McDonough. The sky had begun to clear—Ruth could make out the dust of a few dim stars against the darkness in the west—and she glimpsed against the wolf-gray light a colorless image that was her own reflection in the glass, though at first she took it for Tom's face, thin brows drawn down to the edges of her eyes in a wild grimace.

  The morning went on brightening and lengthening without bringing any sign of Fred or the doctor. Dr. McDonough had always come to the house in a car and Ruth wondered if the snow was too deep for his automobile to get through—if he might have slid off the road into a ditch. It crossed her mind that Fred might have fallen or been bucked off the borrowed horse and might be lying dead in the snow right now, which was an idea too huge and absurd to hold on to. When sometime in the late morning she heard a horse jangling its harness and blowing air right outside the front door, her heart leaped with relief. She went quickly out to the front porch but found it wasn't Fred or the doctor but Martha Lessen. The girl usually would wait at the fence for Ruth to come out and take the mail and the groceries from her, but today Martha had been so startled and alarmed to find the yard bare of chickens that she'd ridden right up to the house, her face stiff with dread. And when Ruth saw who it was, the look that came into her own face was desperate disappointment. She said, "I thought you might be Fred, bringing the doctor," and immediately turned back to the house.

  Martha had been afraid to hear her say, Mr. Kandel has passed away, but there was nothing in Ruth's words to cheer about. She called to her, "Mrs. Kandel, what can I do to help out?" Ruth stopped a moment and leaned her forehead tiredly on the frame of the door. Then she said, "The chickens, I guess," before stepping inside.

  Martha stood down in the slushy snow and led the horse outside the fenced chicken yard and dropped the reins and went back into the yard and across to the chicken house. She opened the coops to let the daylight in, and she found the scratch feed and scattered it on the snow and on the ground inside the coop. The roosters began to make their cautious way out into the cold, and then the hens, though they were all uncannily silent.

  When she'd finished, Martha went up to the house again and knocked and said, "Mrs. Kandel?" and after a moment, not hearing anything from inside, she made up her mind to just open the door and step in without waiting to be asked. The house was cold and dim. Ruth Kandel sat in a kitchen chair with her arms stretched out on the table in front of her. The sleeves of her wrapper were ruched up almost to the elb
ows, and her forearms lying on the table had a greenish pale cast, the skin stippled with cold. She was staring out the kitchen window but her body seemed pitched toward the sound coming from the bedroom, which was a terrible low grunting, something like the groan a horse makes when it's down on the ground with colic.

  Martha's heart quickened. She didn't want to go on standing there by the door, so she said, "Should I stir up a fire in the stove?" and made a move toward the wood.

  Ruth looked over at her and said, her voice rough and cracking from tiredness or strain, "He's burning hot, I don't want to heat up the house, I'm afraid it'll make him worse." Her eyes drifted past Martha and fixed on the shelf of books hanging on the wall behind her. She said, "He's in terrible pain," and tightened her mouth in a bad likeness of a smile. Her hair had been done up in a night braid but by now was straggling loose from it. She turned back to the window and after a moment opened her mouth and took in a loud, labored breath, a sigh.

  Martha came immediately to the edge of tears. She said, "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Kandel," which she knew was no comfort at all and she wasn't surprised when Ruth went on looking out the window without bothering to answer.

  It wasn't clear to Martha how she could be any help to the Kandels, either of them, but she didn't feel it would be right to leave. She stood a moment trying to think what else she could offer to do, and when her mind failed her she said, "I'll just sit down with you, if that's all right, until the doctor gets here." She didn't wait for Ruth to tell her if it was all right or not, but went over and sat down on a kitchen chair; she took off her hat and placed it carefully on the floor next to her. There wasn't a single thing she could think of to say, and Ruth went on staring out the window in silence, which wasn't silence, not with that low animal moaning carrying on in the bedroom. After a while, Martha became aware that some of the Kandels' roosters had begun to crow, probably had been crowing for minutes. She began to think about the horse she'd left ground-tied outside the fence, a black horse named Sherman that belonged to the Rocker V, and to wonder whether he'd still be standing where she'd left him when she took up the circle again. Cows had begun calving in the past week and she had been riding through snow littered with silvery discarded placentas; she didn't know why she thought of that now, and of the dead mother cow she had come upon earlier in the morning, undelivered of its crosswise calf.