The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Watching George cross the yard to the bunkhouse, Louise was suddenly sorry she'd been so cross. In recent months his shoulders had become stooped, or they had been stooped for a while and she had only just realized it, and he often walked around like a tired old man, his boots scuffing the dirt. He wasn't old yet, only fifty-one, but she knew his hips and knees hurt him most of the time and he'd begun to have trouble with his bowels. She hoped what she felt just now—a little stab of fear or foreboding—wasn't any sort of premonition. Her mother had always believed in such things, believed she had "second sight," and that a chill along her spine or the creeping of her flesh was a portent or warning of imminent suffering. Once when Louise was about twelve her mother standing at the sink had suddenly turned an ashen face to Louise and said, "It's Harry," in a horrified way. Harry was Louise's uncle, her mother's eldest brother. It was more than a year later that Harry drowned in the Columbia River coming back from a trip to The Dalles, but Louise's mother always believed she'd had a genuine forewarning of it that day a year earlier, standing in her kitchen.

  Louise left the weeds lying in a wilting pile in the garden and went into the house to start the supper, and sure enough when George and El came in for supper George was determinedly cheerful and he started right in telling Louise a doubtless corrupted version of the moving picture he had watched the last time he gave his Liberty Bond speech at the Shelby theater. Louise had stopped going with him to the movies on account of the newsreels of all the soldiers, their heartbreaking grins as they marched past the camera, but he knew she liked to hear about the picture show just so long as it wasn't anything to do with war. She poured coffee for him and for El sitting at the table, and then while she went on getting the supper ready she listened to the story George was telling her, a three-reel jungle story that involved lions and elephants and a heroine in breeches and sun helmet, and she made a point of interrupting him to question certain confusing parts of the plot so he would know she was listening. Just about the time he finished recounting the movie Martha came in tired and hungry from her circle ride and Louise brought the potato soup to the table.

  She had made an unsatisfactory Liberty Bread earlier in the day from oats and almost no wheat flour and felt she ought to apologize for it. "Evidently patriotism now requires a lot of chewing," she said sourly, and George, who had had to stand up to get the leverage to saw slabs off the loaf, winked across the table at her and said, "If we start complaining I guess you can feed it to the horses, but I don't hear any of us complaining." Of course there never were any complaints about the food she put on the table, which she knew had more to do with how hungry and hard-worked they all were than with the excellence of her cooking. Even their girl broncobuster, after breaking her arm and watching a child die of spoiled food, always ate up every bit of what was on her plate and could always be persuaded to finish off whatever was left on any platter. The cast on her arm the past couple of weeks just caused her to eat more slowly, as she had trouble carving bites of roast, trouble pressing down a knife or a fork with her left hand.

  Louise ate lightly—her stomach was bothering her—and began doing up the dishes while the others were still sitting around the table. They'd all been talking about the mild weather and this had led to George telling a story about the March weather several years earlier when he had lost fifty-three cows and their calves all at once, trapped by deep snow on the banks of Ax Handle Creek. They had calved out at the ranch and then he had moved them along the creek where there was good shelter and good pasture, but a late spring storm had dropped a couple of feet of snow, which the wind had blown into high drifts. Water in the Ax Handle rose and rose, and the cows and calves, trapped between the drifts and the flooded creek, were too cold and weak to swim out of trouble. Louise had heard this old story several times before—he had told it to her with tears standing in his eyes the night he came back from finding all those drowned and frozen animals—but El had only heard it once and Martha never had; they listened to the boss in grave silence, leaning over the table on their elbows.

  Louise was struck suddenly by the disconcerting likeness: El with his rigidly crooked arm from that old break and Martha, her wrist fixed straight in a plaster cast. The edge of it that showed below her shirt cuff was already filthy and chipped, and Louise almost opened her mouth to say something about it before deciding there wouldn't be any point. She had seen enough broken bones over the years so as not to be distressed unless a break was grievous; but no one had had a bit of luck trying to persuade the girl to give up her circle ride after that first day, and only the Lord knew what would happen if she was bucked off and landed on that arm. Dr. Padham wasn't the best doctor in the world and Martha hadn't let him run the plaster as far up and down the arm as he had wanted to—she needed to be able to use that arm, she said, and couldn't be budged from her stubborn stand. It would be a wonder if the girl didn't wind up like El Bayard, who could handle ranch work but could hardly comb his own hair or shave his whiskers on account of the poor job that had been done setting his bad break.

  As soon as Louise finished cleaning up the supper dishes she went upstairs and left the rest of them still talking. She heard the telephone ring a little while later, their own ring, which made her sour stomach clench: it would be somebody on the Reading Room Committee wanting to put in her two cents' worth about the German books. She could hear George's voice downstairs, a murmur of wordless sounds. Louise was already in her nightdress and in bed by then, which George would surely know, and she didn't expect him to come up the stairs to get her, just to listen to one more complaint about something to do with the library. But he did come up, making a slow climb of it, and stood in the dark doorway a moment, his silhouette black against the dim light leaking up from the kitchen, and then he came over and sat on the edge of the bed beside her and she knew what it was before he even got the words out.

  "Honey, don't cry now, he's not dead, but Jack's got hurt over there."

  She didn't cry, but a high surf arose loud in her ears and her throat almost closed shut, and it took her a while to get enough voice to ask him to tell her everything he knew, which wasn't much. Jack had lost a leg, that was what it came down to, although George tried hard not to say it in just those words. They both fell into silence. Finally George stood up and went downstairs and she heard him talking to Martha and El briefly and then heard the hands go out of the house. After a minute or two George turned down the lamps and came back upstairs and undressed in the darkness and climbed into bed next to her. He was lying on his back, and she turned onto her side and folded herself over him, one of her legs thrown across his haunches and her breasts crushed to his ribs. She put the flat of her hand on his chest, the heavy thumping of his heart. He was hairy front and back—for years she had teased him about shedding in the spring—and the feel of him under her hand, that animal's pelt, was familiar and warm. After a moment she closed her fingers in it.

  She was thinking Jack could still die. It was a terrible wound and there could be infection; they'd have to get him back across the Atlantic Ocean in a ship that could be blown to bits like the Lusitania by a German U-boat. But she didn't say this to George. She said, "Jack can still ranch. If he can drive horses, he can ranch. Bud Adey drove a twelve-horse freight wagon and trailer after he lost his leg."

  George didn't answer her. Louise's head was tucked under his chin and he could feel her words huffing warm against his breastbone. He reached over and put his hand on the back of her nightdress between the shoulder blades and pressed her against him but he didn't speak. Jack didn't lose his leg was what he was thinking; he had the damn thing blasted off. Later on he happened to think about the automobile plow, how in most respects it was nothing more than a big motorcar built heavy for towing and for running over soft ground, and how Bud Adey never had been able to drive a motorcar—he just couldn't manage the pedals with one leg.

  27

  IN THOSE YEARS the plots of movies weren't far removed from the dime n
ovels that had been popular since the Civil War. There were stories about brave and true Mounties and Texas Rangers, frontiersmen in coonskin caps, heroes with swords and plumed hats, Kit Carson–style scouts; titillating stories of girls dressed up in breeches and pith helmets, cave girls in fur tunics, brown-skinned girls in grass or leather skirts, innocent girls in jeopardy from mustache-twirling villains. Quite a few movies made a point of the barbaric and the unusual—Eskimo people in the Far North, for instance, building their ice-block igloos. The movies brought a lot of people their first glimpse of a seaside bathing beach, a woman smoking, colored people in a jazz band, men in swallowtail tuxedos, a woman in a negligee. Charlie Chaplin was popular, and Buster Keaton, unlucky young men coping with the mysteries of modern life; it was from those picture shows that most people in the West had their first moving images of electric streetcars, ocean liners, airplanes. And in the war years there rained down a storm of movies about boys in uniform, boys who were the pride of their fathers and the envy of their younger brothers.

  It wasn't a war movie that Henry Frazer and Martha Lessen saw early in April but it was the next thing to it: a picture called Fear Has Said Its Prayers, in which a shallow, self-absorbed mother dissuades her son from joining the army and the boy goes downhill from there, stripped of his right to virile manhood, his right to give his life for his country.

  During the reel changes a Four Minute Man named John Johnson, who owned a stone quarry at the edge of Shelby, stood up and urged the audience to sign food pledge cards promising to eat less meat, sugar, wheat, and pork, and to buy Liberty Bonds as a way of "doing your bit" for the soldiers who were on their way to France to fight for a democratic world.

  "We here in America are not sleeping in mud tonight, eating crackers and cold bacon," Mr. Johnson said in a nervous high tenor. "We are not lying in caves with the murderous thunder and lightning above; not standing gun in hand with death lurking all around and above. Unlike those boys over there, we are not privileged to give our all for America, we are privileged only to do the best we can" and so forth, straight out of the pamphlet he held in his hand.

  Martha had not been to the movies since coming into Elwha County in November, and the last Four Minute Speech she'd heard was the one George Bliss had delivered at the dinner table on Christmas Day. But by this point in the war it was hard to walk down a street or open a newspaper without seeing or hearing about spies hiding in the ranks of your neighbors, about the evils of extravagance and the virtues of wearing half-soled shoes and mended trousers, so the messages in John Johnson's speeches were familiar to her and to pretty much everybody in the theater. They had all signed food pledge cards and were wearing Liberty Buttons to confirm their patriotism. While the cameraman hurried to change the reels and John Johnson delivered his invocations—"Who'll help? Who'll speak to his neighbors about saving the waste of food? Who? Hands up! Hands up!"—more people chatted with their friends or walked up the aisles to stretch their legs than shouted affirmations to the Four Minute Man.

  Henry Frazer had ridden over to the Bliss ranch to collect Martha and El, and the three of them had ridden into Shelby on horseback and met the others in front of the movie theater—El's sister Pearl and two of her friends, and also Chuck McGee and his wife, Nancy. Henry and Chuck had known each other for years, they were both the sons of Scotsmen and had come into Elwha County around the same time and gone to work for neighboring ranches. Henry had come in 1904 as a seventeen-year-old wrangler for the railroad and stayed in the valley after delivering a carload of horses to George Bliss; Chuck had come a few months later from a farm in Kansas, a green boy looking for his chance to be a cowboy. After he was hired to drive dairy cows through the Ipsoot Pass to one of the first homestead farms in the valley, he found work on the Split Rock Ranch, where old man Woodruff in the last year of his life taught him how to be a cowboy; now Chuck was foreman on the Burnt Creek Company Ranch at the west end of the county. He and Nancy had driven to town in a Maxwell car that belonged to the company.

  While the reels were being changed, the three men in the party talked about the roundup and branding that was about to start and about the calving season just ended; the girls talked about people they knew in common, people Martha mostly didn't know—a girl who had come down with TB and another who had moved to Portland and was guarding a livestock yard two evenings a week. Sitting between Henry and one of Pearl's friends, Martha listened more to what the men said than to the women and sometimes chimed in when she could think of something to say. She had helped out with moving cattle and with branding since she was thirteen years old and had worked the calving season one year for a small ranch near Hermiston; but she had mostly worked on haying crews or with horses, so her practical knowledge of cows felt meager; she listened to the men to pick up bits of their know-how.

  From time to time she caught Henry stealing a look at her, and she thought he must be sizing up whether she was feeling lonesome or left out. She wasn't, particularly, and tried to let him know it by thinking of more to say. She wished the movie they were watching had been about the frozen North or the jungles of Africa, because she'd read The Call of the Wild recently and Tarzan of the Apes, and could have joined any talk that arose about wolves and sled dogs, or lions and alligators.

  Once she'd been to a movie palace in Pendleton where a nine-piece orchestra had accompanied the action in the moving picture, but in Shelby it was just a woman playing a piano. While Martha listened to the men talk about cattle she studied the piano player's hair, which was a short, straight curtain trimmed off just below her ears. At the third reel change Nancy, who had noticed what Martha was looking at, leaned across her husband and said to her, "Are you thinking of cutting your hair short? I was thinking of doing it but Chuck wants me to keep it long." Nancy had a thick mane of red hair bundled into a Psyche knot.

  Chuck put his arm across his wife's shoulders and grinned at her and said, "Honey, I married a girl, not a boy, and I want to keep it that way." Then one of Pearl's friends, an unmarried girl, jumped in warmly to say that a husband's opinion shouldn't come into it, and a loud and laughing discussion began that saved Martha from answering Nancy's question.

  She had been thinking of cutting her hair short ever since she broke her arm. It had become a hard and awkward business just getting a comb through her hair using only her right hand, hard and painful trying to wash her hair or tie it back now that her arm was in a plaster cast. And she liked the idea of being able to put on her hat in the morning without giving a moment's thought to her hair—as free as any man. She thought Pearl's friend Eula had only been teasing Chuck, not making a serious point, but she felt, herself, that a married woman should have as much right as a single girl to make her own decisions. What Henry's friend had said, about not wanting to be married to a boy, was enough to make her think twice, though. For this trip to the movies she had borrowed one of Louise's pin-tucked shirtwaists and had traded her cowboy hat for her grandmother's old velvet-trimmed hat and swapped her canvas coat for a light corduroy jacket that was another of Louise's hand-me-downs; but she had ridden into town tonight on horseback, dressed in pants and boots, while every one of the other girls was in a skirt. Any one of them could have cut her hair without being mistaken for a boy, but Martha had already marched out to the limits of decency by going around corset-less and wearing men's pegged trousers and boots when she was on horseback, which was most of the time. She didn't want Henry or anybody else to think she wanted to be a man or be taken for one.

  Henry grinned and kept still through all the lively talk about whether a married woman should let her husband decide on the length of her hair, but when the lights went down for the third reel he leaned close to Martha and said, "I wouldn't mind it." He had said almost the same thing once before, about her being tall, which she hadn't ever forgotten. This time he might have meant that he wouldn't mind short hair or that he wouldn't mind being a husband who made all the decisions; Martha didn't know for sure which it was
, but either way her face grew warm.

  When they left the theater they walked in a crowd up the sidewalk, all of them dawdling along so Pearl on her canes could keep up, and they went into the Crystal Café and ordered a whole dried-peach pie and sat around it, dueling with their forks. They talked a little about Fear Has Said Its Prayers, getting into particular mothers they knew or had heard about, mothers dead set against their sons going to war but who weren't very much like the mother in the picture show; and then they went on to other war talk, the battle at the Somme River being fought just then. The newspapers had been saying the Germans were trying to end the war before too many American troops could arrive at the front, and things were going badly for the Allies.

  Nobody at the table knew if Will Wright was anywhere near the Somme. The Blisses had had three or four letters from him, which they'd made a practice of passing on to El and Martha at the supper table, but in those letters there had been only a good many descriptions of the weather and the countryside, jokes about army food, and sometimes a sentence about dead Heinies seen along a road or in a shell hole—nothing about any battles, and no names of particular towns or rivers, which the censors would have snipped out anyway.

  El Bayard and Will Wright had worked together at the Bliss ranch for almost two years without becoming particular friends, for the reason that Will was still a young kid who hadn't seen much of anything, and El was forty and had seen more than he wanted to; so El had been surprised, just a few days before, to get a letter from him. What Will had written was that the war wasn't any bit the Great Adventure he'd expected; that there were long stretches of unrelieved monotony and discomfort, and then short, terrifying bombardments or fusillades; that he had seen men die in gruesome ways; that most of his time was spent in dull boredom and misery, crouching in a trench or a dugout waiting to be killed.