The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  When Tom died a few days later Ruth was out of the room, had gone into the kitchen to reheat the pot of black coffee for the third time, and when she came in again and found he was gone she sat down at the edge of the bed. She felt a choking in her throat, a need to gasp, to catch her breath again and again as if his death had been unexpected. She picked up his hand and held it, stroked his forearm over and over, smoothing the fine hair flat with her palm. It was only just those few minutes I was gone! Couldn't you have waited? She was so very tired, it was hard to sort out what she felt; it was hard afterward to remember if she had even cried, and if she had, what the tears were about. Later she would realize that these were the first minutes of his unending absence and of her beginning to experience a kind of meaninglessness in the world, a nullity that she would be years overcoming, but she didn't realize that just yet.

  Before she went to wake up Fred, before she told him his father had died, she bathed Tom's body right there in their bed. She sluiced the washcloth, the warm soapy water, very gently over his bony ribs and shoulders, over his skin grown so thin and tender. She laved the water in slow strokes over his long, pale limbs, lifting one after the other his flaccid arms, his legs. He had lost so much weight she thought he would be easy to move, but his body was leaden, unwieldy. She turned him partway onto his side, propped against the pillows, in order to wash his back and his nether parts. Afterward she swabbed out his mouth, his ears, soaped and rinsed his lank and greasy hair and gave him a haircut with scissors; she cleaned and trimmed his fingernails, scraped the whiskers from his slack cheeks with a razor and soap. His eyes behind the half-closed lids did not watch her. He was still warm under her hands, his body as familiar to her, as intimately known, as her own.

  26

  MOST OF THE MEN in those days belonged to fraternal clubs. Every up-and-coming town had a Sons of the Pioneers, an Odd Fellows Lodge, a Knights of Pythias, or Woodmen of the World—two or three brotherhoods whose purpose was to give men a reason to get together. Women had their own secret societies and organized sisterhoods but in general didn't need to look for excuses to gather. In Elwha County groups of women were always coming together to finish a quilt for a family that had been burned out or to embroider a burial dress and coverlet for a poor dead baby whose mother was still sick in bed with eclampsia. And when the war came on, women found plenty of purpose and reason to congregate, knitting socks for soldiers and sailors or preparing comfort kits for the Red Cross to ship overseas.

  Before the war and during it, Louise Bliss was a member of several needlework circles, none of which was formal enough to require a name or a fixed meeting date. She wasn't the sort to belong to Eastern Star or that kind of sorority but she was a founding member of a study club of women who called themselves the Elwha Valley Literary Society, which met in the Shelby Grange Hall every first Thursday of the month with the stated purpose of keeping up with current events and the issues of the day and discussing the great works of literature. Louise had been a young woman with young children when the club first began to meet, and in those early years of the new century when almost everything seemed to be going well and people still had faith in themselves and in this country's right conduct, debate and discussion in the Literary Society had often given way to the staging of scenes from classic paintings or novels. Keeping up with current affairs had meant, at least for some women, having an opinion about the craze for a certain kind of hat or one of the new dances, and literary discussion more often than not involved the recitation and praise of various members' overwrought nature poetry.

  It was after the war broke out in Europe that the Literary Society became, for a few years, a serious discussion group. Members were reading daily about the starving children in Flanders, and some had sons or brothers who had gone to Canada to enlist in the Royal Navy; they argued and discussed whether newspaper reports of atrocities—INFANTS SPITTED ON GERMAN SWORDS!—ought to be taken at face value or whether, as some people said, this sort of thing was warmongering propaganda. Before long the society began mounting formal debates on the question of whether Americans ought to get involved in Europe's war; this led to formal and informal argument over other matters, for instance whether Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn ought to have been arrested for handing out birth control information and whether Jeannette Rankin over in Montana would cause a riot when she arrived in Washington D.C. as the first woman elected to Congress. In a women's club devoted to the topics of the day, there was no shortage of matters for discussion.

  That was all in the three years while war raged in Europe but before the United States of America joined the fighting. After that most people seemed to feel there was less reason or room for engaging in debate. If their government declared war, people felt their one duty was to help the country win it; to act otherwise would be treasonable. Women in the Elwha Valley Literary Society sat together knitting sweaters and socks while visiting speechmakers urged the virtues of wartime sacrifice. There weren't any debates about whether the Committee of Public Information was censoring the news and issuing propaganda; it was generally believed, if these things were happening, they were in the best interests of the war effort and "for the sake of the boys." In January, after the defeat of the national women's suffrage bill, it was not suffragism that came up for discussion but questions about the responsibilities of patriotism. Angry suffragists had marched in numbers on the Capitol and the White House, and some angry women in the Literary Society made it clear they thought protest marches at this particular time, with American boys beginning to die overseas, was out-and-out insurrection. When Bruno Walter was suspended as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra it was a widely held opinion in the study club that the symphony had done the right thing—Walter was German, after all, and hadn't bothered to apply for American citizenship.

  Louise Bliss, who had always disliked argument and discord, had kept out of the early debates about war and sedition, and after the start of the U.S. war her patriotism took the form of steadfast knitting and a Liberty Garden. While George pored over the war news out of a terrible compulsion, Louise avoided the newspapers: their son Jack was over there and she couldn't bear to read the details of battles or the names of the dead soldiers, who by January were dying at the rate of five or six every day, and by February sometimes as many as a dozen. Of course by June it would be twenty-five or thirty and, by October, two hundred a day, but all of that was still waiting offshore, like lightning over the water, and in February Louise was still of the opinion that ten or twelve was a great many.

  She was deeply distressed by the unpleasantness that the war had brought to the Elwha Valley Literary Society, rifts that had left some of the women not speaking to others. Sometime in the winter months Mary Remlinger and Jessie Klages, whose children were American-born but who were themselves Rhine-landers, had dropped out of the society, and Irene Thiede began staying away from any meetings billed as patriotic in subject matter. Louise had never warmed to Mary Remlinger but she liked Jessie Klages and was particularly fond of Irene Thiede and wished they hadn't been made to feel unwelcome.

  That was the winter Louise took it into her head that Shelby ought to have a library. After quizzing Martha about the lending library in Pendleton, she brought the idea to her study club. It was a difficult time for fundraising, what with everybody putting their savings into Liberty Bonds, but Louise argued that creating a library was more a matter of raising books than raising money and she swung the vote in favor of the project. She hadn't said so, but her unspoken hope was that this undertaking might distract the members from matters and arguments related to war.

  A Shelby Reading Room Committee was formed and promptly named Louise Bliss chairwoman; members of the committee began petitioning the owners of buildings in Shelby to donate space for the new library. In the meantime, books collected from members' own shelves and the closets and shelves of their importuned neighbors went to the Bliss ranch. Louise or George, or occasionally whichever hired hand ha
ppened to be there, carried the books upstairs to Miriam Bliss's old bedroom, where they stood in loose piles and stacks against the walls or in boxes set down on the bare mattress.

  "I don't know whether you know it," George said to Louise one day early in March after he had carried up three or four armloads of books, "but I'm getting too old to make that trip up the stairs more than forty or fifty times a day."

  He was standing on the back porch with his hands tucked into the bib of his overalls, and Louise was on her knees in the garden pulling up weeds around her rhubarb plants. She hadn't gone out there intending to start weeding but while she'd been standing in the yard chatting with Pauline Ashe—it was Pauline's books George was teasing her about—her eye had gone to a particularly flagrant burdock that had raised its coarse head above the rhubarb patch, and one thing had led to another. "George, I'm too tired to find that amusing," she said, and was more than half-serious about it. It had been a clear mild day, so springlike that she had dragged the carpets outside one by one and beaten them clean of their winter dirt. Her arms and her back ached; she didn't know why she was now out in the garden pulling up weeds.

  George watched her silently for a while and then took out his pouch of Bull Durham and made a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against one of the porch uprights. It had been an unusually open winter, and from that porch on a clear day you could see all the way across the valley to the Whitehorns, their jagged peaks rising dramatically from the valley floor without much in the way of preliminary foothills. This was late in the day and the sky didn't have a cloud in it, and a reddish light, streaked and veined, had climbed up the mountains so they seemed garishly painted against the blue. George was used to the sight and hardly took notice of it. "What did your library ladies decide to do about those German books?" he said.

  The library project, as it turned out, had brought on new problems without easing any of the old ones. A box of German-language books, left anonymously on the porch of the Grange Hall, had raised a terrible furor, as quite a few women thought the books had been left there by a Bohemian or Rhine-lander as a deliberate insult to the society. Anyone would know, went the argument, that such books were absolutely unwanted by this or any library in the nation. And there had been bitter disagreement over what to do with English translations of books by famous German writers—Goethe, for instance. Four or five women of a literary bent had been firm in their opinion that the books were innocent and ought to be accepted, but more than a few others wanted them carried straight out to the town dump; this arguing had caused two more women to stop coming to the meetings.

  "They're not my ladies," Louise said crossly, "and I'm just about at the point of quitting the whole thing." She had been suffering from a sour stomach for days, which she blamed on this business of the German books.

  George didn't know if she meant quitting the Elwha Valley Literary Society or quitting the Library Committee and he didn't think her tone allowed him to ask. He said cheerfully, "Well I'm just about at the point of buying myself an automobile plow." He hadn't planned to say this to Louise yet, but the tractor was what popped out of his mouth when he opened it. He'd been thinking about buying a Fordson for a while now and lining up arguments in favor of the idea, the boiled-down version being that the world needed more wheat, and banks had become generous about loaning money to the farmers growing it, and the new Ford tractors were small and surefooted. Up until three or four years before, the only plowing George ever did was turning over Louise's garden, but with a lot of his pasture grass now given over to growing wheat, plowing was a hateful chore that took up more and more of his time right when he ought to be getting ready to brand the calf crop. If he still had three or four men working for him he wouldn't worry so much about getting it all done, but Will Wright had gone off with the last batch of enlistees and now it was down to just himself and El Bayard. He didn't know how the two of them would ever get the wheat fields plowed and planted before it came roundup time.

  Louise said, "Who have you been talking to?" which sounded to George like an accusation of some kind. He knew she meant the various equipment salesmen who regularly visited the ranches, or their own son Orie, who had picked up from his friend Ray a belief in the future of gasoline power. It seemed to George an odd contradiction that fellows studying veterinary medicine, and whose future livelihood depended on the continued use of horses and mules for farm work, should tout the benefits of machinery, but neither Orie nor Ray seemed to see the rub.

  Louise's manner put George's back up a little. He had wanted to give her something new to stew about other than the German library books but now that he had riled her up he was feeling fairly riled up himself.

  "I've been talking to myself is who I've been talking to, and what I've been saying is that I might buy myself an automobile plow that won't need horses having to be harnessed up every morning and fed twice a day and given half of every damn day off to rest up."

  Louise said irritably, "Every gasoline engine you've got is always breaking down, I notice, or needing fooling with, and at least we can grow the feed for the horses whereas gasoline is steep. And anyway we didn't get much of a wheat crop the past two years so I don't know why you'd want to go into debt to grow more of it." She stood up from the rhubarb and brushed her dirty hands together and looked over at her husband. "But I imagine you've got your mind made up already and you're not asking my opinion."

  The truth was, she looked favorably on the progress of tech nology—it was Louise who had pressed her husband to buy an automobile. And it was also true that just about everybody she knew had been stepped on or kicked or thrown or run away with or had bones broken by horses. As if proof were needed, even Martha Lessen, who was clever as could be around horses, was wearing plaster on her arm right now. Louise had known neighbors killed by horses and one who'd been kicked in the head and afterward never had more than the mind of a child. If, as people were already saying, horses on all the farms and ranches would soon be replaced by machinery she wouldn't be sorry about it or silly enough for nostalgia.

  But she was in an argumentative mood or just irritated that George had brought up the matter of the German books when he ought to have known how it would upset her. Or it was the funerals weighing on her. They had been to a string of funerals in recent weeks, starting with the Romers, people they hardly knew except to nod to when they passed on the road, but for Martha's sake they had gone to the burial of that poor baby and the baby's father, the two of them laid to rest in the same grave. It had just about killed her to see the watchful, bewildered way Dorothy Romer's two older children clung to their mother and the stunned look in that woman's face. Then at the end of February there had been a service for the first Elwha County boy killed and buried over there in France. He had been the son of a Basque sheep rancher in Owl Creek Canyon, a stranger to the cattle ranchers living in the valley but nevertheless a local boy, and the whole county had taken the news hard. And the very next day Tom Kandel had died of cancer, which wasn't a shock but had saddened Louise beyond all reason. Tom was an exception among the newcomer homesteaders, someone with a practical mind and the follow-through to carry out a plan. She had often bought eggs from Tom when her own hens weren't laying enough to supply the table and had gone to him for a stock of new chicks after a coyote tore up her henhouse. Louise liked Tom, everybody did. Then Old Karl Thiede, who hadn't been out of bed since he broke his pelvis in the autumn, took pneumonia and died. Karl wasn't as old as all that—he might have been sixty or sixty-five—and the others who died had all been young. She wished George could realize how all this was weighing on her. At Tom Kandel's funeral, when poetry had been read in addition to Scripture, George had bent to her and asked irritably in a whisper what the hell part of the Bible those verses came from, which had distressed Louise. She wished George could understand how she had found herself deeply moved by the poems and by knowing that Tom, in his last days, had asked for them to be read at his funeral.

  "Since you'r
e not the one doing the plowing, I don't see exactly how your opinion comes into it," George said now, and he stepped down off the porch and headed for the bunkhouse. His dog came scrambling out from under the porch to follow him.

  Louise hadn't really thought she and George were arguing but when he walked off she realized they were. They didn't argue very often and neither of them liked it when they did. George was usually the one who walked away, and his habit was to spend an hour or so playing cards with his hired hands and then come back to the house whistling and cheerful, pretending he and Louise hadn't had a disagreement. Louise's habit was to go over and over the argument and rework it until she had all the words lined up in the order and manner she ought to have said them. In the first years of their marriage she used to wait tensely for George to come back to the house so she could tell him what she'd thought of to say; but then his relentless good humor would surprise and charm her and she wouldn't be able to find an opening to bring it up again. After all these years—they'd been married when Louise was barely sixteen—they were both set in these habits, and though Lou ise still liked to go over an argument in her mind, she knew she wouldn't say any of it to George, or not until he brought it up again himself. Lying in bed tonight, for instance, he might ask her whether she thought a Fordson automobile plow was a good idea, as if he hadn't ever mentioned it before; and after they talked about the tractor for a while she might begin to tell him her deepening worries about the Literary Society and how the recent funerals had brought her very low in her mind.