The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  El hadn't shared the letter with anybody at the Bliss ranch but he had shown it to Pearl, whose fiancé, Jim, would have been a conscientious objector if he had lived long enough to be drafted. Conscientious objectors were being jailed and beaten all over the country, their houses and cars stoned. While the others at the table talked about the battle of the Somme, and about the great number of soldiers who had lately shipped east through Umatilla County and Pendleton—more than thirty thousand in a two-week stretch—El met Pearl's look and then studied his fork as he took a last stab at the pie. Pearl had told him that Lizzie Wright, Will's new bride, was expecting a child in the autumn.

  Earlier in the week a fire had burned the barn and livery out at Stanley's Camp and the talk around the table was soon on to that; then someone asked Martha about her horses and she told them the horses were mostly finished; they were as gentle and tame as could be, and they knew much of what they would need to know in their working lives. Pearl and her friends were town girls who couldn't be expected to be very interested in horses, so she didn't say more than that. But there were things she planned to say later to Henry, who she knew would be interested: things to do with ending the circle ride and parting company with certain horses she had grown fond of.

  She had taken Dandy, the Kandels' blue roan horse, over to the Kandel farm earlier in the day—it was Fred's thirteenth birthday, and Mrs. Kandel had asked Martha to wait until that day to deliver the horse to Fred. At Tom's funeral in February the boy had come up to Martha and told her fiercely, "I won't ever sell Dandy, I'll keep him no matter what," which Martha had thought must be part of something he and Mrs. Kandel had been talking, or arguing, about. She imagined it had to do with whether Ruth Kandel planned to keep the farm or sell it, now that she was a widow. At the time Martha hadn't heard ei ther way, but just the other morning when she and Ruth were talking out by the fence and Martha asked how she was getting along, Ruth had smiled dryly, her chin puckering up, and said, "I'm afraid Tom was right. I'm as tough as one of these old hens," which Martha took to mean she intended to stay put.

  Fred was an inexperienced rider; he was quick to jerk at the reins, and he bumped the horse with his heels to get him moving even after Martha told him a light squeeze with the knees would do the job. But he was just a boy and she could see he loved the horse already by the way he put his face right up to the prickle of Dandy's whiskers and by the way he kissed the velvet skin at the corner of the horse's mouth when he thought no one was looking. He might get to be a good rider or anyway a decent one eventually—she had seen plenty of dull colts that turned out to be serviceable horses and thought it must be the same with boys. And Dandy was a patient sort.

  She had spent some of her circle wages to buy the horse called Mata Hari from Dorothy Romer before Dorothy and Helen and Clifford packed up and moved back to Wisconsin. Dorothy had said she wanted to sell all of Reuben's horses, and Martha had helped her find buyers for the others, the four heavy pulling horses and a gray gelding saddle horse that had a hard mouth and a habit of bolting his food; but she liked Mata Hari and was afraid if somebody else bought her and treated her the least bit rough, she'd go back to biting and bucking. It was interesting to Martha that when she put Mattie in with Dolly the two took to each other right away, and that it was Mattie who seemed to rule the roost, Dolly completely beguiled by the pretty little Dutch spy. Martha hadn't expected that. She was surprised, too, that Dorothy Romer seemed to be grieving for her worthless husband as much as for the baby, Alice. One morning Dorothy had gone on for half an hour about Reuben's many gifts and charms—had broken down and sobbed as she said she didn't know what she would do without him.

  W.G. Boyd's horse, Skip, who had been so afraid of everything, had calmed down a great deal but never had become entirely trustworthy. Martha hadn't been able to get him over his fear of things lying on the ground, things with a certain heft or shape, not only thick limbs of wood or fence posts but a bucket tipped on its side, a big stone, a calf curled up asleep. She knew W.G. had been planning to sell the horse, but she hated to see Skip passed on to someone who might not understand why he was afraid—somebody who might think the way to get him to behave was to beat the fear out of him. She had toyed with the idea of buying him herself, but she didn't have use for a horse that wasn't trustworthy; and she had four horses to feed now that she had Mata Hari. When she told W.G. what she was worried about, and what Skip was like, he didn't bat an eye. He said, well then, he'd just send the horse into retirement. His pasture didn't have much of anything on the ground that might scare the horse, he told Martha, and maybe Skip would enjoy the company of a donkey somebody had recently given him.

  As it happened, in later years Skip turned out to be entirely trustworthy. After the war was over, whenever Joe and his dad came down from Pendleton to visit W.G., Joe would climb onto Skip and ride him everywhere bareback and if Joe turned him loose to crop the grass while he went off to visit with some of his old schoolmates the horse would walk back on his own and wait for W.G. to let him into the pasture. It was the company of that old donkey that did it, or at least that's what Martha thought, just the steady company of a friend who wasn't afraid of a single thing in the world.

  When their crowd had finished off the pie, they sat talking for a while more, and then El walked back with Pearl and her friends to the apartment building where the girls all lived. He planned to stay over, to sleep on the floor in Pearl's place so he could go with her on the train the next morning to Pendleton and then on to Portland, where they were seeing a doctor who they hoped could do Pearl some good. If Pearl wound up having an operation, El might be leaving George Bliss short-handed for as much as a couple of months; but the calving was all finished and the branding not started yet, and since word had come to them about Jack being wounded, George had seemed to lose all interest in planting wheat. He had leased out the wheat fields to a corporation up in Umatilla County, and that outfit had brought in a big crew of what looked to be fifty-year-old tramps and a few normal-school girls, along with a hundred horses, and got the fields plowed and drilled in less than a week. Now that the calving was finished, the only ranch work comprised corralling the two-year-old steers to be sold and taking bulls and heifers up to summer pasture; there had been some talk that if Martha decided to stay on in the county she could help George move his cattle.

  After El and the girls left the café, Henry and Martha and the McGees stayed a few more minutes, drinking coffee to wash down the pie and talking about cows, of course, and horses, and about Emma Adelaide Woodruff, who had been stepped on by a cow and was hobbling around with a broken toe. When Chuck and Nancy drove off in the Maxwell, Henry and Martha walked up the street to get their horses from Bert Widner's stables.

  There were street lights on the main street of the town and on the crossroad that went up the valley to Bingham but the lights had been left off to conserve those hundreds of cords of wood for the war, and the sidewalks were mostly dark and empty. Henry took her right hand, the one that wasn't in a cast, and after a moment leaned over and kissed her quickly on the mouth. They hadn't stopped walking, and the motion caused his teeth to scrape across her bottom lip. When he thought he tasted blood on his tongue he said, "Did I cut your lip?" She ran her tongue over the scrape and said, "No, it's all right," and then touched her mouth with her finger. There was something endearing in that gesture, Henry thought, and he stopped her from walking and pulled her to him and kissed her again lightly, his tongue touching the place on her lip where she was cut.

  This wasn't the first time they had kissed, or the second, but there hadn't been enough times for Martha to grow casual about it. She had seen plenty of horses and cattle coupling, she had known about that rough urgency, that brute coming together, but not this other: his callused hand cupping the nape of her neck to bring her close to him, and the salty taste of him, the smell of him, his warm male breath, the stubble of his chin against her cheek. She was conscious of bright heat and a feeling like
pins and needles inside the unfamiliar clothes she'd borrowed from Louise Bliss, her breasts in the shirtwaist seeming to yearn toward Henry's barrel chest. None of it, or almost none of it, was what she had imagined would happen between a man and a woman.

  He kissed her twice more slowly and then couldn't prevent himself from pulling her hair back and exploring the shell of her ear lightly with his lips and his tongue. Her breath caught and she bent her head back and he kissed her open throat and the ridgeline of her jaw and then down along her collarbone. He put his hands at her waist and held her hard against him and he kissed her over and over until they were both panting as if they'd been running, as if they were running from something and afraid to stop, and he was hardly aware when his hands moved down to stroke her hips. She was by then trembling under his touch, his mouth, and when he became aware of it—it was a little while—he made himself stop what he was doing, what his mouth and hands were doing, and he pulled away slightly and held her by the shoulders without kissing her, his cheek resting against the side of her hair, and both of them now shaking slightly.

  Henry had been close to engaged once, to a girl who worked at the Elwha County courthouse, a modern girl acquainted with rubber condoms—she had laughed, calling them "capotes, my little French darlings"—and she had shown Henry how they should be used. He had used them more than once or twice but not so often as to feel like a top horse. Martha wasn't anything like the girl from the courthouse and when he kissed her he tried to be aware of where his hands were, and was intensely aware of where he wanted them to be. The times with that other girl had been more than three years before, but now with Martha, when the heat flamed up in his body, his body knew exactly what should happen next. He had pulled back because he was afraid the power over what happened next was more his than hers and because she wasn't anything like the girl who worked at the courthouse.

  When some boys passed them on the sidewalk they stepped apart, looking at the ground in shamefaced embarrassment, and when the boys had gone by Martha reached for his hand again and they went on walking toward the stables. After a minute, Henry said hoarsely, "We could go for a walk before we head back. We could walk down by the river." He wasn't inviting her to lie down with him on the ground—he hoped she knew that; it was just that he wasn't ready to quit walking with her in the soft night, the darkness.

  The weather had been wet the past couple of weeks, and Martha thought the ground by the river might still be muddy for walking—it didn't cross her mind that Henry might have been asking her to lie down with him—but she said, "All right," because she didn't want to head back yet either. They couldn't go on kissing if they were on horseback, and she wanted him to go on kissing her.

  They turned off the sidewalk and found the path that fishermen used, working their way up and down the riverbank. The water was black with bright coins of light scattered on it from a few houses lit up along the other bank. Henry held her hand and they walked slowly. The ground was soft but not as wet or muddy as all that, and they walked clear out to the farthest edge of town and stood there in the darkness looking out at the river.

  "I want to ask you something," Henry said after a few minutes. He had been worrying in recent weeks, as Martha's circle ride got closer to finished, that if he didn't say something soon she might just ride on out of the county like all the other itinerant wranglers he'd known—ride off looking for more horses to break. But he hadn't planned to say it just now, and he frowned out at the black weight of water moving without cease in front of them. The river was at spring flood already, and the low booming sound it made was like far-off continuous thunder.

  Martha said, "What?" almost dreamily, caught up in something, and when she turned toward him, the bare shape of her face in the night took on the look of a girl about twelve years old, a child so innocent and absolutely devoid of guile that he thought suddenly she was too young to even know what he was asking of her, what he meant to ask of her, and that he ought to let her grow up first, without a man's hands, his hands, despoiling her. But then she smiled and said, "What?" again, and leaned into him and kissed him on the mouth. The child had gone out of her face, and she was Martha whom he loved, and he would have taken her down on the ground right then if it had been possible to do it and still go on living with himself.

  He said huskily, "I want to ask you if you'd think about marrying me."

  So there it was. Her eyes widened but she wasn't surprised. She had expected that Henry might want to marry her, and for weeks had gone over and over her answer in her mind. She said slowly, gravely, "I would think about it," which he might have taken as a good start except she had begun to frown, looking at him, and he thought he knew what was coming next, and his heart started beating loudly in his ears. But it was just that she had made up her mind to say several things if Henry proposed, and her own heart was thudding so loudly it took her a minute, standing there frowning, to get them lined up so she could remember and say them all.

  "I'd want you to know, first, that I would still want to go on breaking horses and working outside," she said. She raised her eyebrows, half-questioning him, but then went on with the rest quickly before he could begin to answer. "So I guess I'd want somebody else hired in to do the housework and the cooking, or else I guess you would have to get used to living with things being dirty, and eating sandwiches. And when I'm not working with horses I'd want to help you and work with the cows; that's something I could learn to do, and I'd want to. And when there are children, they'd have to get used to riding on the front of the saddle like Young Karl, because I wouldn't want to stay in the house like women usually do." Then, because the last thing was the hardest for her to say, she began to blush, which she thought he couldn't see in the darkness, and the only reason she didn't drop her eyes from him was because he was almost invisible to her against the black river. She said, her voice beginning to shake, "And I wouldn't want to have as many babies as my mother had, six children in six years." She was twenty years old. She didn't have any idea how to keep from having a child every year except by leaving her husband alone in his bed, and she thought that was what she was saying to him. She took a breath, to give herself a moment more to think. Her big mouth pursed slightly. "I don't know if you would mind having a wife like that," she said, and just for a moment she was a child again, her voice catching on the last words.

  He couldn't have been more astonished. He stared at her and had to think what to say. There wasn't any way in the world he could talk to her about condoms. Finally he said, "You know I'm just a hired hand and I don't know as I'll ever be able to have a house or land that's mine, or afford my own hired help." He tried to smile. "I don't know if you'd mind having a husband like that."

  She seemed not to know what he was getting at and went on looking at him and frowning. They were standing a little apart, not touching—she had dropped his hand when he first asked her about marriage—and she was standing on the high ground, taller even than usual, and looking down on him a bit. He thought some more and finally he said, "I guess if we can't afford to hire help there's other ways around it. I'm already used to doing for myself, washing and cleaning. I can make eggs and pancakes, so I guess we wouldn't always have to eat sandwiches."

  Then she understood what he was saying and she tried to hide a smile, as if she was twelve again and shy, but when he reached for her hand she came up to him and pressed herself to him and wanted him to kiss her, and he did.

  In those days it wasn't legal to ship condoms across state lines, and Henry didn't know if it was legal to buy and sell them in Elwha County. He didn't know where that girl at the courthouse had gotten her French darlings. He wondered if Chuck might know, or Emil Thiede.

  28

  PATRIOTISM RAN WILD in those days, like a plague of fever. People clamored for war protesters to be kicked out of the country, and laws aimed at German spies were used to send conscientious objectors to jail, and pacifist ministers, journalists who wrote antiwar editorials, soldiers who c
omplained of bad conditions in the army, teachers who spoke out in favor of German literature.

  Elwha County had a Home Guard without much to guard, so after the barn at Stanley's Camp burned down, members of the Guard went around to three or four German settlers in that part of the valley and turned over their furniture looking for a reason to say they'd set the fire. One thing led to another and one of the farmhouses got burned down and a man named Kurt Schweiger was stabbed with a guardsman's sword, which didn't kill him, but after he came out of the hospital he and his family packed up and moved out of the valley.

  Early in April, about a week after Kurt Schweiger was stabbed, Millard Rankin, the chairman of the Liberty Bond committee and also a volunteer with the Home Guard, stopped by the Thiede place with a Kodak box camera and walked around the yard taking pictures of the house and the barns and the horses standing in the pasture. Irene watched him for a few minutes from the kitchen window and then went out and asked him what he was doing and he gave her a high-handed explanation—that he planned to use the pictures at the next patriotic meeting to show folks how preposterous it was that the well-off Thiedes had purchased only two hundred dollars in Liberty Bonds. She gave Millard a check for two hundred more, which she knew was giving in to extortion, and when Emil got home he said in a fury that he would go to the bank in the morning and stop the check; then he stormed out to the barn without touching his supper.

  Irene put Young Karl to bed and went into the room that had been Old Karl's, which she now used for sewing, and she sewed a while, piecing the quilt she had begun from scraps of her father-in-law's shirts, the ones too worn out to be worth mending for her husband to wear. Quite a bit later Emil came into the house, came back to the bedroom where she was sewing and stood in the doorway behind her. She didn't think she would be able to stop herself from crying if she turned to look at him, so she went on sewing, and finally he said, "It won't kill us to have four hundred dollars in bonds."