The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  She inhaled sharply and said, "We had a good calf crop," as if he had disputed it, and as if that was the only point that mattered.

  Emil watched her another minute. "It's all right, honey," he said quietly. "Come on out and warm me up some supper." And then he came across the room and put his hands on her shoulders and waited until she could quit her crying.

  Neither of them said anything about Kurt Schweiger being stabbed. Neither of them knew if Millard Rankin's visit had anything to do with the fire at Stanley's Camp—the Home Guard feeling its oats—or if the Liberty Bond committee had just decided to squeeze a few more dollars out of some of the old-time ranchers. But they figured they knew which it was.

  29

  THE WAR HAD MADE cloth and buttons scarce and high-priced, so Louise Bliss and the women in her sewing group got together and made Martha's wedding trousseau from several cast-off dresses collected from their own closets. They picked out the stitches and resewed the bodices and sleeves to fit Martha and to resemble styles they had seen advertised in the Ladies Home Journal, and in two or three days put together the pieces that would make it possible for Martha to live as a married woman: a muslin nightgown trimmed with ribbon, a brown suit that would do for the wedding and the wedding trip, and two housedresses, one a blue-and-white check and one a pale green with a cream-colored bodice. Louise doubted Martha would wear either of the dresses, but felt she should have them anyway.

  Late in April, after the roundup and branding was finished on the ranches and after the cast had come off Martha Lessen's arm, Henry and Martha were married in the Woodruffs' big log living room. They spent their wedding night in the foreman's house on the Split Rock Ranch, and the next day Henry took her on the train over to Haines in the Baker Valley, where his mother and stepfather and his two sisters lived.

  Martha and Henry took the spur line up to Pendleton and changed trains there. They had a couple of hours between trains and the weather was soft, the way it can be in April, and not raining, and Martha wanted to see her brothers, the younger ones still at home, so they walked from the station out to her dad's place, which was a fair walk.

  Her dad when he came to the door looked pretty surprised to see her, and he shook Henry's hand and said, "Jesus Christ, I never figured this. I figured her for an old maid."

  Martha turned red, but Henry just said in a flat way, "You figured wrong."

  Martha's mother heard them talking and came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands. She said, "Hello, Martha," and after she heard that Henry and Martha were married she asked when, and they told her just the day before and that this was their wedding trip, and she said, "Well, all right," and nodded, but that was all, and then she went back into the kitchen.

  They didn't stay long—they had that long walk to get back to catch the train—and it turned out two of her brothers were away, digging irrigation ditches for a wheat ranch over in the Stanfield Project. But they went out to the barn where Mike, who was the youngest, was repairing an old drill. Martha and her brothers had grown up in a house where people didn't touch, so when Mike lifted his head and saw her there, they both just stood and looked at each other, smiling. He had grown about half a foot since she'd seen him, or it appeared that way to her.

  "Hey, Martha."

  "Hey, Mike." Her hand was inside the bend of Henry's elbow. "This is Henry."

  Henry went over and shook Mike's hand as if they were two men—well, Mike was almost a man, fourteen, nearly fifteen. He peered at Henry and seemed about to ask him something but then he looked at Martha and asked it. "Is he your husband?"

  Martha started to blush. "Yes," she said.

  They visited a few minutes, talking about horses more than anything else, and when they left, Mike walked with them as far as the lane. He said, "I sure wish Bert and Stevie were here. They're working over in Stanfield."

  "I know, Dad told me. When you see them, you tell them how much I miss you all." She couldn't stop from feeling teary. "Maybe you could all come down to see me in Elwha County. You could think about moving down there. There's plenty of work."

  "Oh yeah?" He ducked his head, casting a look back toward the house. "I don't know. Dad's pretty stove up." He touched the sleeve of Martha's suit and said, "I'm not used to seeing you in a skirt," and they didn't talk any more about the boys moving down to the valley.

  Haines was right on the Union Pacific line, a shipping point for grain and livestock grown in the south part of Union County; Ernest Bailey—that was Henry's stepfather's name—worked as a switchman for the railroad yard there. He was a short, wiry-built man who reminded Martha slightly of Orie's friend Ray Buford, except for being about sixty years old. Henry's mother was short too and very stout, her bosom a great shelf above a loosely tied corset. She had a ruddy face and a brow bone without much in the way of eyebrows, which was where Henry had come by that look. The two girls, Henry's sisters, had both been married quickly before their husbands shipped over to France, and they had come home to live until the war should end. They looked like their dad, who was Ernest Bailey: they were short and thin and had his sand-colored hair.

  They were all easy for Martha to like, although she was uncomfortable with how much Mrs. Bailey and the girls enjoyed hugging her, and kissing her on her forehead or cheeks. They hugged and kissed Henry too, but she didn't mind that so much; she liked watching them together, their easy affection with one another, which didn't make her feel like an outsider but like someone watching a moving picture and caught up in the story. Henry and Jim's father had died when the two boys were four and six, so Ernest Bailey was pretty much the only father Henry remembered. Sometimes Martha looked over and caught Mr. Bailey looking at his wife and his daughters and his stepson with a bemused, charmed smile, and tears standing in his eyes. The whole family was sentimental, every one of them. Henry hadn't been able to hold back a few tears when he spoke his vows at their wedding, and now Martha saw where that came from.

  On the fireplace mantelpiece was a large picture in an ornate cardboard frame, a picture that must have been taken several years back, the two girls and Henry and his brother, Jim, standing behind Mr. and Mrs. Bailey, who were sitting together on an upholstered bench. If she had met him in the street, a stranger, Martha felt she would have known Jim for Henry's brother, they were that much alike, and she had a sudden apprehension of his loss, and the family's loss. In the photograph, all their faces were shining with the seriousness of the moment.

  Jane moved her things into her sister Susan's bedroom so there would be a bed for Henry and Martha to sleep in, and sometime after midnight they all settled down to try to sleep. Martha thought Henry would turn his back to her while she undressed and got into the muslin gown—he had done that on their wedding night—but he sat down on the edge of the bed and began unbuttoning his shirt and didn't look away.

  "Your parents are just the other side of this wall," she whis pered to him, and he smiled and whispered back, "They can't see through the wall."

  He took off the rest of his outer clothes while Martha slowly undid some of her buttons, and he folded his clothes neatly and put them down in their suitcase, and then Martha looked away, blushing, while he stepped out of his knit cotton underdrawers and put on the nightshirt he had bought for the wedding trip. She thought he might get into the bed then and finally turn his back to her, but he sat again on the edge of the bed and waited, his eyes on her, while she went on undressing slowly. The light in the room was dim—they had brought in just a candle—but when she got down to her underthings she began to blush fiercely. From where he sat on the bed, Henry reached out his hand and caught one of her hands and drew her slowly to him. He made a long low sound like a deep sigh and slowly lifted up her undershirt and helped her out of it, and then her under-drawers. When she was entirely naked, her skin flaming, he stood up and put his hands at her waist and whispered into her ear, "I never have seen anything prettier." But he was as shy as Martha about anything his parents and his sisters might he
ar, all of them being so close by in the small house—he could hear them talking and moving about, squeaking the bedsprings, in the other rooms; he knew they would hear any sound he and Martha made. And he was afraid if he began touching his wife—his wife!—there wouldn't be any stopping. So he helped her on with the muslin gown and then blew out the candle and they lay down on the bed together in the darkness, their legs and arms enfolded; and after a while their hearts quit racing.

  There had been a moment, a bright sharp moment as they stood before the preacher in the Woodruffs' front room making their wedding promises, when Martha thought suddenly of Ruth and Tom Kandel—a flash of insight and of fear—that in marrying Henry she was throwing herself open to the very thing she had seen in Ruth's face that terrible morning when Tom was in so much pain, the morning they had waited together for the doctor to come. It was a glimpse of the hard truth that loving someone meant living every moment with the knowledge he might die—die in a horrible way—and leave you alone. But Martha was barely twenty years old and this was not something she could hold in her mind for very long. Lying in the darkness with the living heat and weight of her new husband clasped against her breast, she imagined they would go on being happy and young forever.

  30

  IN THAT SAME MONTH, April of 1918, the month Irene Thiede bought more bonds to keep the Home Guard from tarring and feathering Emil or setting fire to their house or their barn, another kind of fever was set to run through the country. Clyde Boyd, in a letter to his young son, Joe, and his father, W.G., wrote that an influenza was going through the camps in Kansas where he was teaching men to string telephone line; and Will Wright, in a letter to Lizzie, wrote that the flu was going through the men on the front lines, brought over with the last shipload of soldiers from the States.

  Over the next months and into the summer of that year, more than half a million people all over the country died of flu, and it killed some people in Elwha County: Alfred Logerwell was one, and also Pearl Bayard. But it fell out that most of the people Martha knew, people who were her friends and her family, made it through the flu epidemic and the war alive. Both of Henry's brothers-in-law and even Will Wright came home more or less unharmed, although more than a hundred thousand American boys died over there from battle and dis ease and one of them was Roger Newbry, the friend who had joined up with Will.

  Of the four million horses sent over to that war, a million died outright, and of the three million still alive when the end was reached, only a handful made it home alive, horses written up in the newspapers—this or that one brought home by a captain or a colonel whose life had been saved by his horse. After the armistice, with so many farms and fields racked by years of bombs and mustard gas, the three million horses who had survived were butchered for meat to feed all the hungry refugees, something the newspapers failed to mention. Martha wouldn't learn of it until she was a woman of fifty sitting in her living room reading Life magazine, dropping the magazine into her lap with a helpless cry.

  After the war the spirit of ruthless intolerance and repression that had caused so much trouble in those years carried right over into the peace. In the first months after the war ended, the Ku Klux Klan placed an advertisement in the Elwha Valley Times-Gazette calling for new members—"Patriots Who Hold This Country Dear"—to conceal their identities in robes and hoods and march from the Shelby meeting hall to the fairgrounds for a public initiation. Not a single Negro person was living in Elwha County in those days, and the Chinese were all in Grant County or Baker County working the mines, and the Indians were penned up in other parts of the state; but there was a Jewish family running a dry-goods store in Shelby and some Basques and Mexicans down in Owl Creek Canyon and plenty of Catholics of all stripes; and that was where the local Klan planned to focus its attention. That, and patriotic vigilance to keep the Negroes and Chinese and Indians and various undesirable immigrants from moving in and overrunning the valley.

  This was around the time the League of Nations was de-286 feated in the Senate, and Jack Bliss, sitting in his wheelchair at the kitchen table with the newspaper spread open on his lap, told George and Louise heatedly that America's reputation around the world as a peaceful and democratic nation, a country with a mission for good, was dead now, had died with that vote. Louise said in dismay, "Oh Jack, I hate to think so." When George looked over at Louise, he wasn't surprised to see her mouth looking drawn-down and thin. He and Louise both worried a good deal over Jack, who was in pain much of the time and suffered from night terrors, dreams his parents couldn't imagine and therefore never spoke of. George didn't feel he had room in his life just now for worrying about what the rest of the world thought of the United States of America.

  Not much more than a year after the war ended, Jack Bliss married one of the Glasser sisters and opened a business selling carpet sweepers and other household appliances; in the 1920s, George and Louise moved to town and gave over the running of the ranch to their son-in-law, Howard Hubertine. In those years just before the start of the Great Depression, a couple of money men from Pendleton bought Stanley's Camp and macadamized the road going up to the lake; on the ashes of the livery barn they built a two-lane bowling alley and a dance hall and a hotel, which for a few prosperous years brought crowds of townspeople from as far as Prineville and La Grande and Baker City for summer holidays. When things went downhill in the thirties, the government claimed the property and redrew the boundaries of the forest reserve to take in Stanley's Camp. And sometime in the late thirties a WPA crew built a dam at the outlet of the lake for power and to hold the spring runoff on the Little Bird Woman River, which served to irrigate a few farms in the upper valley and also quickly put an end to the fish runs. Stanley's cabins had been log-built with the bark left on, which made a sentimental picture, but they were run up from the bare ground without any sort of foundation, and the gaps between the logs stuffed with newspaper and pebble dash. After the hotel was built Stanley's little cabins were left vacant and went quickly to ruin, and by the time the dam went up, not much was left of those old cabins but crumbled heaps of litter in the bare outline of logs.

  In 1938, after George died, Miriam Hubertine persuaded her mother to write a history of Elwha County, from Indian days to the end of the Great War. Louise's thin little book was called The Wonderful Country and dedicated "To My Dear Family and Friends," and it was published by the Times-Gazette in celebration of the county's fiftieth anniversary of incorporation. By then, Emil Thiede had twice been elected to the Board of County Commissioners, and Louise's chapter about the war years—the way the Thiedes among others had been made to feel isolated and despised—struck most people as a quaint and improbable fiction. Within a couple of years there would be an internment camp in the county, and a few hundred Japanese Americans living in made-over livestock barns, but not many people saw this as having anything to do with Louise's story about that earlier war.

  In later years when Martha was an old woman—as old as the Woodruff sisters had been when Martha first came into Elwha County—one of her granddaughters pointed out to her that her life had overlapped with the lives of the famous Apache Indian Geronimo and the famous Western gunslinger John Wesley Hardin; that she had seen Buffalo Bill, in his fringed and beaded leathers and shock of white hair, when he came through Pendleton and set up his Wild West Show on the fairgrounds; and that when she was sixty years old and she and Henry were living on a ranch in northern Nevada she had stood out on her porch and watched that other show, the mushroom cloud from an A-bomb they were testing over there in the desert. And wasn't that just amazing to think about?

  Martha was taken aback. All her childhood dreams went flying through her mind in a moment. She remembered how, in her dreams, she had galloped bareback across fenceless prairies through grass as high as the horse's belly. She had dreamed of living like the Indians, intimate with animals, intimate with the earth. Sometimes in those dreams, just as in the Western romances, she had no name, no family. For a while she h
ad taken as her heroes the cowboys of those novels—lone horsemen, symbols of independence and freedom—who were not a bit like the cowboys she knew in her life, men whose only freedom was the right to quit at the drop of a hat and look for work on down the road.

  It occurred to her now that the West of her dreams was not—never could be—the testing ground for atomic bombs; and she wondered how it had happened. She said to her granddaughter, without planning to say it, "You know, honey, I guess we brought about the end of our cowboy dreams ourselves." It was a startling thing to hear herself say, but then she thought: Here I am in my old age and just at the beginning of figuring out what that means, or what to do about it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book grew slowly from a seed planted years ago by Teresa Jordan in her oral history Cowgirls: Women of the American West. It's been a long germination, but I would now like to thank Teresa, and to thank "the rancher's daughter" Marie Bell, whose words recorded by Teresa quietly took root in my mind. This is not Marie's story, of course, but I have borrowed Marie's seed words almost verbatim for the opening lines of the novel.

  I'm grateful to Soapstone and Fishtrap for residencies in support of this writing, and to the Harris family of Soda Springs, Idaho, for time spent on horseback and for stories around the supper table, especially McGee Harris's story about stranded cows and the horse that righted himself after drowning.

  And thanks to Russ Johnson of Georgetown, Idaho; Corine Elser of Crane, Oregon; Gigi Meyer of Alfalfa, Oregon; Linda and Martin Birnbaum of Summerville, Oregon; Stella and John Lillicrop of Mitchell, Oregon; Samantha Waltz of Portland, Oregon; Becky Sheridan of Lakeview, Oregon; and especially Lesley Neuman of Rescue, California: for schooling me in the art and the hearts of horses.