Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  She could finish the mowing herself, though it meant she’d have to put off breaking the horses. And without two of them to do the work, it would be a battle to get the hay put up and hauled down to the home place before the elk got into it. She could hire one of their homestead neighbors to split firewood if he would take a steer in payment. Arlo Gantz was their neighbor on the northeast side, and they had always traded help with the Gantz family at roundup. She hoped when Arlo got word of Henry’s broken leg he would show up with his boys to help her with the fall gather without expecting any of the Frazers to show up for theirs. But Henry wouldn’t want to sit by and watch them doing everything, and if there was early snow she knew he would be wanting to ride up into the Ochocos to look for any stray cows they might have missed.

  Her mind went to the hay field up at Lindsey Bench. It was so remote from the home place that Henry always left the stack right there. This meant feeding some cattle there as well, so he scattered salt on the ridges and in the side canyons all summer to keep cattle nearby, and when winter came on Martha brought some of her horses up there. Henry left a team and sled at the bench all winter, in a small corral with a three-sided shelter, and every day he rode a saddle horse up to the bench, harnessed the team, pitched a load of hay onto the sled, and then forked it in a loose oval. The cattle and horses spending the winter there would come up to feed when they heard the sled. Then he watered the team at a spring down in the draw, fed them, left them in the corral for the night, and rode his horse back home. Every day.

  Two months.

  She slipped out from under Bud, laid him down gently on the bench, and stood. She was dressed in men’s overalls and boots and a man’s work shirt that fit too closely across her belly, but the nun’s face did not register any bit of disapproval. “I don’t know what the bill is,” Martha said quietly to the woman, “but we came away from the house without a bank check.” She didn’t say that they would need to sell some calves in order to raise the money.

  The front of the nun’s habit was spattered with gobbets of plaster. Her white wimple, fixed close around her chin and cheeks, made her face look pinched. She said without inflection, “Come with me. We’ll tell Sister Louise at the desk that you will try to pay when you come in October.” She tucked her hands into the folds at the front of her costume and walked back down the corridor. Her shoes on the floorboards made no sound at all.

  Martha followed her, while Henry waited in the wheelchair beside his son asleep on the hard bench. When Martha finally reappeared, he got himself up from the chair and stood on one leg with a hand braced against the wall while she woke Bud. The boy wanted to be carried, but she stood him on his feet and then went over to Henry so he would have her shoulder to lean against. They shuffled a couple of steps, but then the nun who had cast his leg reappeared, walking swiftly toward them with a pair of crutches. She held the door for them as they went out.

  On the long drive home Martha kept the mules to a plodding walk. The night was clear and cold, the sky thickly peppered with stars, and a quarter-moon lit up the sagebrush on the hills. Henry and Bud slept in the back of the wagon, and Martha might have been able to doze on the seat—the mules would have been all right on that straight road—but she felt awake now, gone past the point of needing to sleep. She looked out at the dark land and turned a few things over in her head.

  The doctor who had delivered Bud was back in Elwha County, and now that they were living so far away from any town, she didn’t know how she would find a doctor near enough to help her when this one was ready to be born. She wasn’t mad at Henry for being hurt, but she wanted him to get over his fear of machinery and of learning to drive a motor.

  She had seen trucks that were nothing but a cabin and a cargo box cobbled onto an automobile chassis. If she could find a chassis and motor and get it running, she thought Henry might be able to build the rest. She wondered if he might be able to start on it even while his leg was still in a cast.

  THREE

  10

  IT WAS STILL DARK, must have been four or four-thirty, when Harold turned on the light in the bedroom that first morning. Hugh just rolled out of bed and put on his clothes in silence without asking who the hell was sleeping on the other bed, so I got dressed too and followed him out through the dark kitchen to the yard without either of us saying a word. Harold had already turned on a couple of floodlights mounted high up on the feed shed and on the house, and he was out there with a clipboard, looking over the horses. He didn’t say anything to me, so I followed Hugh and helped him pitch hay to all the animals. Hugh finally did say half a dozen words to me, but they were all about how much hay to toss and where to toss it. I thought his silence had to do with us not knowing each other, but it was just that he never had much to say in the morning until he’d had five or six cups of coffee. Well, I was used to that with my parents, so it wasn’t hard for me to leave him to his quiet.

  While we were feeding the horses, Jake showed up in his Chevrolet. He went right over to Harold, who handed him the clipboard, and then the two of them walked around the corrals eyeballing the horses and talking together quietly about which ones should go to which places. They had orders for three horses at one place and seven at another, which meant the Dodge would have to make double trips again; I guess they were also talking about where to send the new kid, which was me. When Hugh and I finished up with the hay, Harold called over to us, “Go on in and have something to eat. I’ll be there in a bit.” So we went into the house and ate a couple of slices of toast and bolted down two quick cups of coffee as we hunched over the filthy breadboard in the kitchen.

  Harold never did come in to eat, and when we went back out to the yard he said, “Hugh, go fetch me the leathers for Dewey and Betty, and while you’re at it show Bud the tack barn and get him acquainted with what’s where.”

  What Harold called the tack barn wasn’t strictly speaking a barn but a three-walled windowless shed with the most saddles in one place that I had ever seen. Wooden saddle trees were nailed three high along all the walls, and harness of every kind hung from knobs and hooks wherever there was space. Saddle pads and blankets were piled high on a stool in the corner. Most of the saddles were just trail saddles, nothing meant for roping or cutting out cows. There were little faded pencil notes written on the butt end of each tree naming the two or three horses a particular saddle would fit, and names written right on the wood walls next to the bridles. “Here’s Dewey’s saddle,” Hugh said, “but see here, the names are writ down so you know it’d fit on Lewis or Injun too. Harold finagles things so he’s not sending out two horses that need the same saddle.” He hoisted Dewey’s saddle and pointed at another. “Grab that one, it’s Betty’s. Get her bridle too, it’s hanging there somewhere. And a couple of saddle pads off that stack there.”

  The shed smelled strongly of dust and leather and pitchy wood and bat guano. There were dust webs everywhere, even on certain of the saddles, and white bird shit on the crosspieces of the rafters. In that respect it was like every barn I’d ever been in—you sure wouldn’t have known you were ten minutes by bus from Hollywood and Vine or the neon front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. That was how I always felt, living in Hollywood, working with horses: the strangeness of those two worlds occupying the same ground.

  Harold’s horses knew the routine: when he pointed to the one he wanted, any of us could walk into the corral and slip a bridle on him and lead him out, it was that easy. Mostly they were easy to load, too, but I would learn later that every so often it could get tricky. The big trailer had a wide ramp with no sides, and you’d start a horse up the ramp and then just toss the rope over his neck and he’d trot on inside to join the others. Most of them even knew to arrange themselves tail to head. But every so often you’d get one who was new to the whole business, or one who’d decide he just wasn’t in the mood to go in. Halfway up the ramp he’d make a sudden U-turn or jump off the side, and he could be right back on top of you before you had time to
move out of his way. That happened often enough to keep all of us looking out for it.

  Which was almost, but not quite, the trouble I got into that first morning.

  Harold rattled off the names of the horses he wanted Hugh and Jake to load into the big livestock trailer, and then he pointed to a gray horse named Guy and said I should put him in the two-horse rig. Well, I didn’t have much experience loading horses, which might have been the problem, or Guy had made up his mind he wasn’t going anywhere that day. I led him partway up the ramp and then he just planted his feet. The trailer was small, but it was an open-roofed contraption with side rails, so it wasn’t like I was leading him into a dark hole. I wrestled with him a while, pulling and coaxing until I just got tired of it. I waited until nobody was looking and then tied the shank of the lead to the front bar of the trailer, took a couple of steps down the ramp and swung my boot up in a short, sharp kick to Guy’s belly. It wasn’t how I’d been taught, but I had picked up some bad habits lately. Bad habits and a dark outlook. Animals might as well get used to hard times was more or less what I thought. Suffering went along with being alive.

  Guy squealed and lunged ahead into the trailer, and when I jumped out of his way my boot caught the edge of the ramp and I went down hard on the trailer floor with the horse over me, spooked and snorting. He was trying to keep from stepping on me, which I knew, but it amounted to a lot of dancing and banging around. Then he started backing himself out of the trailer and his left hind leg went over the edge of the ramp, which panicked him, and he began throwing his head up, fighting the tie and rearing off his front feet. I was underneath him, half on my back, trying to roll out of his way, but I couldn’t get any purchase, squeezed in there along the wall of the trailer, and I was still pretty banged up and stiff from the fight the day before. I had one time seen a bronc rider stomped almost to death when the saddle slipped loose and he went down in the chute, caught between the horse and the sideboards, and I guess that’s what went through my mind.

  Just about then Jake climbed over the side of the trailer and dropped down in front of Guy and began making a crooning noise, words that weren’t quite words, or maybe words in another language, and he cupped both hands around the horse’s muzzle, sort of cradling his big head with his knuckles, and Guy suddenly quieted. In fact, he put his jaw on Jake’s shoulder and closed his eyes. I had seen my mother work a kind of magic with unbroke horses, but I’d never seen anything like what Jake did, and it was then I decided a Jew could damn well make a cowboy.

  I crawled out of the way and stood up leaning against the side of the trailer, and Harold called out, “Everything all right over there?” and I yelled back, “Yeah.” I was trying to quit shaking, although that’s not how I would have put it at the time. Jake stood there a couple of minutes, holding Guy and talking to him in a low voice with his mouth right up against the blaze on the horse’s head, in that language I never had heard before, which now I’m thinking might have been Yiddish. Then he backed Guy out of the trailer, bent down to get a look at the horse’s hind leg where he’d scraped himself on the edge of the ramp, and finally raised up and looked over at me and said, “You okay?”

  I had a pretty good bruise where the horse had stepped on my thigh and a scraped-up elbow from hitting the side of the trailer—the same elbow I’d bloodied in the fight. But I had grown up ranching, and in that life you learn early that it’s not worth complaining unless you think you might need an ambulance or a surgeon. I was used to my dad asking, “Where does it hurt?” and then, no matter what I said, nodding like this was good news, and saying, “Lucky it’s a long way from your heart.”

  I told Jake, “Yeah, nothing broke.”

  He looked tired already, like we were at the end of the day instead of the start. “Well, good. I’m gonna bring up another horse to load. Guy’s had about all the excitement he can stand today.” He walked off toward the corrals with Guy leaning up against him, pressing his head into the bend of the man’s arm.

  I was only at Diamond about four months, and I never got to know Jake Reichl that well—we were usually working different locations, and he always headed down the hill to his family as soon as the horses were put up at night. But I remember him.

  He had grown up in Cleveland, I think it was, and his dad had a drayage that still used draft horses even into the twenties and early thirties, so he’d been around horses all his life. I guess that didn’t make him a cowboy, but Harold hadn’t been kidding about his touch with horses. He was the best goddamn one of us when it came to calming a kinky horse. He had been working for Harold better than five years and was unofficially the boss when Harold wasn’t around, but I never did know if he got paid more than Hugh and me. If he did, it couldn’t have been much. He and his wife had two little kids and lived in a bungalow apartment somewhere around Silver Lake—they must have always been worried about finding the money to pay the phone bill or the water bill. But you never heard Jake talk about money troubles or gripe about hard times. I think he was just grateful to be doing work he didn’t mind, for a boss who was easy to get along with.

  One thing I remember pretty well: when I’d been at Diamond six or seven weeks, he had all of us to his place for Sunday supper. He didn’t give a reason for it, except he said his wife was cooking a pot roast.

  Their apartment was at the end of a row of six, the other five places occupied by families like theirs, the men all grips or carpenters or electricians working in the movie business. The wives worked as extras and bit players when they could—they needed the walk-on money to make ends meet—but it meant listening for the phone every day in case Central Casting called with a part. The women kept an ear out for each other’s telephones if one of them had shopping to do or a doctor visit, and they watched each other’s children when they had a casting call.

  Leah must have been thirty years old, which I thought at the time was on the way to middle-aged, but she had a mane of curly dark hair and she teased me about being tall and handsome and having to fight off the girls, which embarrassed me some and made me fall in love with her the way boys fall in love with their pretty schoolteacher.

  Their kids, a boy named Noah and a girl, Miriam, whom they called Mimi, were around five and six years old. Jake was easy with his children, wrestling and playing with them, hugging and loving them up, unselfconscious about it, even with all of us sitting around the living room watching him. When I saw Jake with his kids, it brought up things I had just about forgotten: my dad holding me on his lap when I was maybe four years old, his work-rough hands and the hay-and-cow smell of his shirt, the feel of his stubble when he nuzzled his face into my hair, and a cold-weather memory of sitting on a horse in front of my mother, buttoned inside her coat, leaning against the warm pillows of her breasts and peering out through the gaps in the wool. Her arm coming around me when the horse stumbled.

  There was ease and kindness in our family, and tenderness that we all understood was love, but I don’t think I ever heard my parents tell each other “I love you,” and I know they never said it to their kids, at least not in our growing-up years. In our family, and all of the families I knew, you could pet and kiss puppies and kittens, foals and young children, but a child who was eight or nine was too old for that kind of open affection. When I watched Jake with his children, I remembered being ten, a big kid finished with cuddling, watching Mary Claudine, who was not quite five, snuggling into Dad’s lap. I remembered a longing I couldn’t then have articulated.

  Along about 1946, a year or so after I mustered out of the army, I got in touch with Harold to thank him for some things that had gone unsaid while I was working for him, and he told me Jake had died on Okinawa. He’d been dead a couple of years by that time, but I wrote to Leah anyway, a few clumsy lines about being sorry and not knowing what to say. I was living up at Vanport at the time, going to school on the GI Bill, and by then I had started to get serious about drawing. I sent her a little sketch I had made, of Jake holding his two child
ren in his lap and Leah sitting next to him. It wasn’t a good likeness—I only had memory to go on—but Leah wrote right back.

  She said good things about my drawing and nothing at all about the war or Jake’s death, but I guess my letter must have opened up a window. Maybe she didn’t have anybody else to talk to about Jake, because she wrote quite a bit about those years when Jake had worked for Harold. She told me he would leave the apartment at half past three every morning while she slept, and she always tried to wait up for him in the evening if the children hadn’t tired her out too much. When he came in, she heated up his supper and they sat at the kitchen table while she told him quietly whatever funny thing Noah or Mimi had said or what they’d been doing that day, and she’d ask about his work; then they’d pull down the wall bed in the living room to sleep—they let the children have the one bedroom so Jake wouldn’t wake them when he had to rise so early.

  He often saw his children only one day a week because Harold had us working the other six. I didn’t know back then that Jews went to synagogue on Saturday, but Harold had us working most Saturdays so if Jake was a religious Jew, he couldn’t have been much of one during the years he worked at Diamond. Leah said they both knew he was lucky to have steady work—a lot of men were out of work, there were camps of jobless men in the city parks, and families living in tents. And Harold always treated Jake with respect. But in Leah’s own childhood, her father had been a ghost in the house, going out in the early morning and coming in late at night—he had worked a grocer’s long hours—and Leah didn’t want that to be her children’s memory.