Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Martha was working with a young colt in a pen behind the barn, and Bud was riding up and down the roadway on his mother’s old mare, Dolly. He was pretending that certain rocks and clumps of trees were cows and trying to get Dolly to pretend to herd them. When the mower and team clattered into the yard, he turned Dolly to head them off, just for practice, but when Martha shouted at him to get down from the horse he slid right off and stood there waiting while his mother came quickly out of the pen and across the yard to him. He was afraid he had done something wrong—she was particular about Dolly, in consideration of the mare’s age and old injuries.

  She hardly looked at Bud, though; she went straight to the mower and bent over the sickle teeth looking for blood. Then she straightened and said, “Bring the team into the barn, Bud, water them, and then go in the house and stay there.” He was too little to unhook the mules from the mower and she didn’t have the time to do it herself, but she didn’t want the mules to have to stand there in the hot sun in the yard. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone.

  She took the reins from him and walked Dolly to the big stump her son used as a mounting block. The saddle he was riding wasn’t child-size, but the stirrups had been shortened way up; she had to hoist herself onto the horse from the mounting block and then let her legs hang down stirrupless. She was five months pregnant. Henry didn’t like her to ride when she was carrying a child so she hadn’t been on a horse for more than two months. Her belly rested uncomfortably against the swells and horn of the saddle.

  “Go on now, Bud, take care of Mike and Prince. I’ll be back in a little while.” She put Dolly into a trot up the creek trail to the hay fields, but then right away she had to slow to a walk—the baby inside her just couldn’t stand the jouncing.

  It wasn’t a long way, no more than half a mile, and when she came through the willow brush at the edge of the half-mown field she could see Henry standing on one leg, leaning hard on a stick he must have picked up off the ground. From the way the grass was roughed up, she knew he had managed to hobble only a couple of yards from where the mower had thrown him off.

  “I wish you wouldn’t ride,” he called to her before she had quite reached him.

  “I wouldn’t have to ride if you’d managed to keep your seat on the mower,” she called back. His face was dirty and a bruise had started on his chin, and the frown he was wearing was one he brought out only for broken bones and serious money worries, but he was upright and all his limbs were still attached. There wasn’t any blood, but the lower half of his pant leg was dirtied and torn. She said, “I hope you didn’t break your leg.”

  “I guess I might have. Damn mower ran me over. And one of the mules stepped on this here shoulder.”

  She swung a leg awkwardly over the saddle and slid off the horse. “Can you get up on Dolly?”

  “I could if those stirrups was let down.”

  He stood on one leg, leaning against the horse, while she worked the stiff leather straps. Henry had punched extra holes with an awl so the stirrups could be shortened enough for a four-year-old boy, but those holes were so tight they gave her trouble. When she finally got both sides down, she said, “Can you get yourself up now?” She was a strong woman and tall as a man, but Henry wouldn’t have wanted her to boost him onto the horse. He wasn’t the sort of husband who ruled his wife, but he stood his ground on a few things, and he was adamant that she wasn’t to do any heavy lifting—nothing heavier than a saddle—now that she was five months pregnant.

  He couldn’t put his weight on his bad leg, so he had to lean into Dolly and lever with his arms until his chest was resting halfway onto the horse’s back, with both legs dangling off the ground, before he could toe the stirrup with his good foot and lift himself onto the saddle. It was a hell of a job, and all that wrestling around wasn’t good for his shoulder. A swearword Martha’s dad had been partial to, a word she had never heard from her husband, popped out of his mouth in the middle of a string of more familiar curses. When he finally got his bad leg over and settled himself onto the saddle, he was pale and sweating. “Well, hell. Now that I’m up here I don’t know if this is the best thing. That leg is gonna bang against the horse when she steps out.”

  Martha went around to that side of Dolly and took hold of Henry’s pant leg near the hem and lifted gently until his leg was held in a kind of hammock well away from the horse. “I’ll walk along like this,” she said.

  It wasn’t a perfect arrangement. Henry sat crooked on the saddle, hunched over and grimacing every time Dolly took a step. He could feel the broken bone in his lower leg wriggling loosely, which made him slightly sick to his stomach.

  At one point Martha said, “I wish we had a truck. We’ll have to go to town to get your leg set, and it’ll take all day and half the night in the wagon.”

  Martha had been advocating for an auto-truck almost from the day they moved onto the ranch. It was nearly twenty miles to the nearest doctor and the hospital in Burns, and a motor would shorten the trip by half. But sometime before she and Henry met, Henry had been riding with his brother in his brother’s brand-new Model T Ford when the car overturned on an icy road and Jim was killed. Now, a dozen times a year, Henry found a reason to say that horses always started right up and they never ran out of gas and you didn’t get greasy fooling around with them. It had come as a surprise to him, and in some way an affront, that his wife didn’t mind getting greasy and didn’t mind fooling around with machines. She always had had a gift for working with animals, and it seemed to him that her interest in machinery stood at variance with that.

  “Well, I won’t be much use to you with a broke leg, so maybe you ought to just shoot me and save yourself the long trip to town.”

  He was peeved at himself, which she knew. She said, “I would, but I guess you can still stand at the stove even if your leg is in plaster, and I like your cooking better than mine.” After a moment she reached up and cupped her hand around the fist he was holding against his thigh. He opened his hand and squeezed her fingers briefly. Then he let go, and made a loose, unhappy gesture in the air.

  “Owl flew up right under them. Scared the hell out of me too. What the hell! An owl in broad daylight, sleeping on the ground.” It wasn’t a question.

  When they got back to the yard, Bud pushed open the screen door and came out of the house, but when he saw his father’s face he stayed on the porch, shy of coming nearer. He had one time seen his mother thrown from a horse so hard she turned white and her eyes rolled back in her head, and he’d seen his father bleeding from a deep cut in the meat of his hand. In coming years he would see his parents hurt often enough to grow almost accustomed to it. But at this point in his life he was still badly scared by any such thing.

  “Bud, go in the house and get the quilts and blankets off our bed and the pillows and bring them out to the porch and then you go make some sandwiches and bring those out too. Make three. Do you know how many three is?”

  “One for me and one for you and one for Dad.”

  “That’s right. Now go on. Don’t cut yourself, slicing the meat.”

  She walked Dolly close to the porch so that when Henry got down from the horse he would be able to sit right down on the steps. He swung his good leg over and came off on the mare’s wrong side and rested his weight briefly on Martha’s shoulders to steady himself before he sat.

  “You’d better help me get this boot off,” he said, “before the foot swells up and we have to cut it off.”

  There wasn’t any way to do it without hurting him. He gripped his leg at the knee and she squatted down in front of him and took hold of his boot in both hands and eased it off slowly. He didn’t yell, but he hissed through his teeth, and his knuckles turned white from squeezing around his leg. When she finally had the boot off, he leaned back against a porch post with a glazed look and she watched him for a minute to be sure he didn’t pass out. Then she stripped the tack off Dolly and turned her out to the pasture, went into the barn and un
hooked the mules from the mower, hitched them to the spring wagon, and led the team up to the house. She gathered up the blankets Bud had piled on the porch and spread them on the floorboards behind the wagon seat.

  By the time Bud came out again, carrying the sandwiches in a lard tin, Henry had managed to get himself into the back of the wagon. He sat crosswise with his leg propped on the pillows and his back against the sidewall, which was how Bud himself often rode. The ordinariness of it reassured the boy somewhat.

  Martha took the lard tin from him and helped him climb to the high seat, and then she climbed up beside him. “Can I drive?” he asked, because he had recently driven the team for the first time, going into Foy for groceries. She didn’t answer him except to shake her head. She took the reins and clucked to the mules, and Bud twisted around to look at his father, who smiled slightly and said, “Hey there, Buddy,” but nothing about letting him drive the wagon, nothing about the reason they were heading off to town at this time of day, late in the afternoon and near suppertime.

  The ranch lane in the month of August was hardened ruts, a rough ride, and Martha drove the three miles at a deliberate walk, but when they got onto the Bailey Creek Road she coaxed the mules a bit faster, quick-stepping so the wagon rumbled and bumped. Henry held on to the sideboards and gritted his teeth. At Foy, Martha pulled over and went into the store and phoned ahead to the hospital. It would be after dark, maybe as late as ten o’clock, she told the woman who answered, but could a doctor wait there to set Henry’s leg? Then they turned east onto the highway.

  She had accustomed the mules to the roar of car engines and the honking of horns, but she didn’t trust drivers to give up the middle of the road, so she slowed and pulled to the side whenever a car came up behind them or passed them going west. A broken shinbone wasn’t a matter of life or death, but she didn’t want the doctor to get tired of waiting and go on home, so when the road was clear of cars she asked Mike and Prince for a jog-trot. When she could, she kept this up for a mile or so, then walked them three or four, then trotted them again. The mules were in good shape and had good feet, and they would have been able to go on trotting longer, but the old wagon made so much racket, even on the graded road, that she worried a wheel might come off. And there was Henry in the back, who wouldn’t have said so but couldn’t stand the jarring for very long. And for that matter the baby inside her, forcing a sour bile behind her breastbone whenever she trotted the team.

  When Bud said he was hungry, Martha didn’t stop the wagon but let him bring out the lard tin and pass around the sandwiches, which were thick, uneven slices of roast beef between thick slices of biscuit smeared with too much butter. The biscuits were stale—Henry had made them two or three days earlier—and Martha knew the sandwiches would have gone down easier if she had thought to bring cider or milk or a jar of spring water.

  Henry didn’t eat much of his, and when he offered half to his son, Martha looked over her shoulder and studied her husband. It was dusk already, and in the failing daylight he looked about as white as skimmed milk. “Are you feeling sick to your stomach?”

  “I just don’t have an appetite.”

  “If you want me to slow down, I will.”

  “It’s all right.” He winked at her. “But if you’d’ve let me buy a truck like I wanted to, we’d already be there.”

  She tightened her mouth. “You think you’re joking, but if you were dying instead of just stubborn we would never get to a doctor in time in this damn wagon.”

  She turned back around, and for several minutes neither of them said anything. She had been tired and cranky almost from the beginning of this pregnancy, and Henry thought she was mad at him for being hurt. This wasn’t true, although she was dreading the long night ahead without any sleep. She wasn’t in any mood for his joking.

  “Bud, if you’re about to fall asleep I want you to climb in back with your dad and get under the blankets.”

  “I’m not,” he said, but he didn’t straighten up from leaning into Martha’s side.

  “Come down here with me, Buddy.” Henry patted the rag quilt spread across his lap.

  Martha nudged the boy away from her, and he made a glum sound and climbed over the seat and down to the floorboards. He had forgotten all about his father’s leg by this time, and when he started to climb into Henry’s lap, Henry made a sharp hissing sound and pushed him off. “Damn it, Bud, watch out.”

  The boy scrambled back and made himself small in a corner of the wagon bed, his thin arms wrapped around his knees.

  Martha turned and looked at them both. Her son hadn’t been yelled at very often. He wasn’t crying, but his mouth was puckered, holding it in. She thought of reaching a hand down to stroke the top of his head but made up her mind not to. Henry was hunched over, rocking slightly, and she could hear his breath, the shallow panting effort as he waited for the pain to ebb. After a minute she said, “Bud, be careful around your dad. He got hurt when the mower ran over him,” and she turned back around and gave her attention to driving.

  In another few minutes, after Henry’s breathing had slowed and quieted, he said, “Bud, come over here now, I need you to reach one of these blankets up to your mother. She’ll be cold when the sun gets all the way down.” The boy looked sidelong at his dad without lifting his head, and then he stood and loosely bunched the gray wool blanket and pushed it up to his mother. When he sat again, Henry held out the edge of the rag quilt to make room for the boy next to him. He had to wait a minute, but finally Bud scooted in.

  The streets coming into Burns were entirely empty and dark, but several windows at the front of the hospital were still lit and some of the Catholic nuns were working inside even at half past nine. No doctor was waiting, but the nuns behaved as if these proceedings were commonplace. They brought Henry inside in a wheelchair, and one of them took an x-ray of his leg and of his shoulder where Prince had stepped on it, and a different nun then set his leg in plaster. Afterward, when she pushed the heavy sleeves of her robe above her elbows and washed the wet white plaster from her hands, Henry saw that her forearms were ropy with muscle, and it crossed his mind to wonder what the life of a nun was like.

  She then explored the lurid bruise on his chest to satisfy herself that the x-ray had not missed a crack in the clavicle. He sat meekly, half-naked in his underwear, as she ran her cold, wet hands across his chest and back. He was suffering too much to be embarrassed. She was very strong, and she pushed her fingers so hard into the sore places that he couldn’t hold back grunts of pain.

  Finally she stood away from him and rolled down her sleeves. “I think it must be pointless to say so, but you shouldn’t sit on a horse until the cast comes off your leg, and you ought to do no lifting or pulling with that shoulder for six weeks.” She was accustomed to men who did ranch work, men who hardly waited for the plaster to dry before climbing back in the saddle. Of course she knew there might not be anyone else to get the work done—she had grown up in a family like that herself.

  While all this was going on, Martha waited in the lobby with Bud, who rested his head in her lap and fell asleep. A man was also waiting there with two small girls who might have been twins. The man’s face was drawn down with tiredness, and the girls too were heavy-eyed. Their father tried to coax them to lie down on the bench and sleep “like that little boy over there,” but they squirmed and whined restlessly. Finally the man took hold of both girls, gripping each by a shoulder, and shook them roughly and bent close to them and said something Martha couldn’t hear, and after that they sat on either side of him on the bench and stared dully down at the floor and were quiet. Martha leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes, but she wasn’t able to get comfortable enough to doze off.

  Around midnight one of the nuns came out and spoke softly to the man, and he nodded his head with an expression of relief and then herded the girls out the door into the night.

  It was after two o’clock before a nun rolled Henry into the lobby in a wheelc
hair. They had cast his leg from the ankle to just below the knee. His bare foot was bruised-looking and swollen, childishly vulnerable. His pant leg had been opened up to make room for the cast, but Martha saw that someone had been careful to pick out the stitching along the inside seam so the pants could be sewn back up afterward and the pants not ruined. The heavy denim was torn where the mower had caught him, but not so much it couldn’t be patched.

  The woman pushing the chair said, “Here is your husband, Mrs. Frazer. You will need to bring him back to have the cast off in two months. And keep him from hard work until then if you can.”

  Martha thought Henry might make a joking remark about leaving the hard work to his wife, but he only looked at her, apologetic and miserable, and shook his head. Two months.

  Martha had been sitting there worrying about the four horses she was breaking for Arlo Gantz, none of them finished yet, and the haying only half done, and the fall roundup not even started, and only half as much stove wood cut and split as they would need to see them through the winter. She would keep Henry off a horse as long as she could, but that would mean finding chores to occupy his time. She hadn’t really been joking when she said she’d put him to work cooking supper, and if he could stand and hobble around a little, she thought he could wash the dishes. As soon as he could limp out to the sheds, she’d make him a chore list: sharpening sickle teeth for the mower, feeding the chickens, sorting bolts, washers, nuts, and whatnot into coffee cans, fixing broken harness, finishing up some minor carpentry that had gone undone for months or years.