Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  He and Deets had worked together quite a bit, and they’d done plenty of bulldogging falls. I hadn’t known what the gag was called, but as soon as Epps laid it out I knew I had seen plenty of them on the movie screen—a furious chase on horseback and then one rider coming alongside the other and knocking him out of the saddle, both of them hitting the ground together. Deets and Epps had done so many they could almost have done the gag blindfolded, but just because something is routine doesn’t make it less dangerous, which they had learned the hard way. And of course I was dangerous on account of I didn’t know a damn thing. In the movies, as my dad liked to point out, you never saw anybody break any bones—both men always scrambled to their feet, fists swinging—but in the real world fellows were always being carted off to the hospital when something went wrong with the gag.

  Prince wasn’t any kind of horse to use for a bulldog—if his rider bailed off, he’d have kept right on running out of LA County—so Verle brought around a couple of horses who were trained for the gag, who knew to run at a steady gallop in a straight line. Deets’s horse was another one of those doubles for Wichita Carson’s good-looking white stallion, and Verle put me on a plain bay gelding like the one Gillis rode.

  We’d be racing along a dirt road with a grassy sloping shoulder, and I only had to make sure the bay ran close to the edge of the road so when I bailed off I could land on the grass and roll downhill. “When we’re in our run, look back once or twice like you’re worried about me catching up to you,” Deets said, “and then just lean forward like you’re urging the horse faster. But don’t spur him. Let him set the speed.” The bay knew to keep to a straight line—“He runs true,” is what Verle said—and I could count on him to keep to a regular pace. He knew he was supposed to let Steve’s horse catch up and pull almost alongside. He’d be at a gallop, but nowhere near the lickety-split I had seen in so many movies. As I’ve said, this was a movie trick: they cranked the camera at a slower speed while they were filming, and when they played it back at normal speed it made everything fly by faster than the real thing.

  Steve would be the one timing the fall for the camera. When I felt his hand on my shoulder or back—getting ready to grapple me out of the saddle—I was to kick loose of both stirrups and pick a landing spot, point my left shoulder at it, relax everything, and tuck into a somersault roll. “Don’t stick your arms out to break the fall or you’ll wind up breaking an arm.” And if I could manage it, I should roll to the right when I hit the ground, and Steve would try to roll left so as not to land on top of me.

  They went over the gag with me pretty fast because Cab was just about set up, and everybody knew that when he called for action he wanted you right there ready to ride. Then Steve and I jogged back along the road a few hundred yards and waited for the signal to start. The muscles in my shoulders and legs were tight and sore from the riding I’d already done, and by this point I was on edge about the whole thing. I could feel the horse under me picking up on my nerves. Maybe Deets picked it up too. He looked over at me and said, “You know you don’t got to jump to your feet afterward like they do in all the pictures. They put that in later with the real actors. I don’t know if you had that idea. You just keep rolling—it takes some of the bang out of it—and then you just lay there and get your breath, that’s what I do. These falls ain’t no cake and pie.”

  I had seen guys knocking each other off galloping horses, going sideways or ass over teakettle, in every oater I ever sat through, and they always jumped right up to fight. So I had ideas, for sure. Growing up on horseback, I had fallen plenty of times, been thrown from horses when they stumbled or fell, been rubbed off under trees and clotheslines, been bucked off when a horse was scared or feeling frisky. And I’d been falling off rodeo broncs for more than a year. I hadn’t ever deliberately jumped off a horse that was running full out, but I think I shrugged at Deets’s warning. I was nineteen years old, putting on an act like I was already an old hand.

  We didn’t have long to wait. From the bunch of people around the camera, I heard somebody with a bullhorn shout, “Quiet,” and then, a couple of ticks later, “Action!” I clapped my legs against the bay, and he took off running. The road was hard packed, and the booming of his hooves against the dirt drove everything else out of my head. When I finally remembered to look back at Steve, I could hardly see him through the cyclone of dust we were raising in the dry road. I turned back around and leaned over the bay’s neck and remembered not to spur him.

  “Pick a landing spot,” Lon had said to me, but a horse at a gallop covers a lot of ground in one stride, so how the hell was I supposed to pick a landing spot I couldn’t even see until I was running by it?

  Steve came up quickly on the off side—I could feel him there more than see him. But when his hand touched my back it sent a shock through me just as if I hadn’t been expecting it, and I must have twitched, which threw the bay off his rhythm. He shied toward the middle of the road, not much, but enough to cause trouble, and by then my boots were already out of the stirrups and I was half out of the saddle and I knew the stunt wouldn’t end well—I was headed for a landing on the hard road instead of the grassy shoulder. Steve must have seen it too, because he gave me a shove in the middle of my back while we were both still in the air.

  I don’t remember much of anything else except crashing into the ground, and the jarring that went all the way up my spine into my skull. They had coached me to fold my arms up against my chest and keep my body rolling, had warned me to shut my eyes and mouth tight against the dust and dry grass. I don’t know if I did any of that. I hit on the grass and rolled downhill a couple of times without remembering to roll to the right. All the breath went out of my lungs and my head rang with noise. I lay there a minute, as stunned as a roped and thrown steer. I couldn’t see much of anything through watering eyes, but shortly I heard Lon Epps say, “You okay, kid?” and I realized he was leaning over me, his face a dark blot in a field of sunlit dust.

  I staggered to my feet and stood there swaying. “Yeah. Sure.” My head felt loose on my neck.

  Steve Deets was on his feet, but standing like a hipshot horse with all his weight on one leg. He offhandedly brushed the dust off his costume and then reached down and massaged his knee. He said, “Pardner, that just about undone us both.” I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to his friend Epps.

  He had timed the stunt so that we bailed off the horses right where Cab told us to, not more than twenty feet from the camera. A bulldog stunt was run-of-the-mill, an everyday shot for the crew, so they were already hauling things to the next setup. Cab, though, stepped over to me to have a word. He was smiling as he clapped me on the shoulder, a light blow that rattled my wobbly neck and almost sat me on the ground again.

  “I figured you’d need an ambulance or a priest,” he said, “but you fooled me. You ready to go shoot another one?”

  I had been thinking the bulldog gag was a test to see how much I could do, but now it occurred to me that Cab might be trying to drive me right into the ground. Neither Deets nor Epps looked my way, but I could feel them waiting for the answer. I was so beat up and sore and weak in the legs I wasn’t sure I could climb onto a horse without help, but I was dead set on showing I could take whatever Cab dished out. I gave him a little nod and said, “Yeah, you bet.”

  He laughed. “I’m just joking with you. That’s it for today. Put your phone number on my clipboard, kid. I got more work coming up if you want it.”

  He started to saunter off, and I called after him, “Thanks, Mr. O’Brien.” He didn’t turn around—he seemed not to have heard me—but Lon Epps made a grunting sound I thought was a laugh.

  Steve Deets, still kneading his leg, looked over at Epps and smiled slightly. “Well, if nothing’s broke, it’s a good day’s work.”

  Epps glanced at him, then down at the ground and then up at me, and said, “Anything broke, kid?”

  I shook my head, which set off a shower of red sparks behind
my eyes. Epps grunted again, and that time I knew it wasn’t a laugh.

  The others in the posse were still lounging under the trees, so I walked over there and squatted down on my haunches to loosen up my hips and knees without being too obvious about it. It had been a long time since I’d ridden that hard or taken a hard fall, and they all must have seen me wobble a bit. One of them, a fellow named Wally Gilbert, fished a tube of liniment from his pocket and held it out. “Kid, if you’re like the rest of us you’ll be sore in the morning. This’ll do you better.”

  I shook my head and said, “I’m not hurting yet.”

  Wally didn’t quite smile. “You young bucks can take a licking, I guess.”

  After a bit, I said, “I just don’t care for that stuff, the stink of it.”

  That part, at least, was true. The smell of Absorbine could always throw me back to Arlo Gantz and the weeks we had spent scouring the mountains looking for Mary Claudine.

  FOUR

  ECHOL CREEK

  1926–1934

  WHEN BUD WAS A BABY, back in Elwha County, Henry had made a blanket-lined box with wire hangers to hook on the top rail of the corral so Martha could keep an eye on the baby and keep him out from underfoot while she worked with her horses. And when she was riding to help Henry at roundup or hauling salt to the pastures, she put the baby in a papoose contraption slung from the saddle horn; later she just rode Bud on the saddle in front of her, buttoned inside her coat. When the boy was old enough to listen and mind what he was told, they laid some logs on the ground in a big square near where they were haying or building fence, set him down inside the logs, and told him, “Don’t get out,” which worked pretty well. They gave him a stick for digging in the dirt and a bucket of water, and he spent his time making and destroying little rivers and dams and ponds.

  Mary Claudine, who was born on the Echol ranch, was a different sort of child, more given to mischief. Some of the methods they’d used with Bud worked for a while, and later they put him in charge of watching the baby—and then became more liberal in their definition of mischief.

  Most of the women Martha knew took a great deal of pride in their homes and their cooking, but she had never had much interest in either—she preferred working outside, which was all right with Henry; the Echol place wasn’t big enough to support a hired hand, but it was big enough that he needed her help getting everything done. Anyway, he had made her a promise before they were married—it was a famous story in their family—that she would always be able to work outside and he would always help with the housework and cooking.

  Martha learned the trick of giving the house a once-over so it looked presentable when a neighbor stopped by, and Henry was the sort of man who picked up his clothes and didn’t make more of a mess than he had to—he was careful not to come into the house with manure on his boots. From a young age, their children made the beds, washed the dishes, swept the floor.

  Martha always liked to say she couldn’t boil water without scorching it, but the truth was she could fry eggs and steak, and the Woodruff sisters had taught her to can meat. She could roast a chicken if she had the time. It was just that she would rather be working outside than standing over a stove. The only cooking she was particular about was coffee. She kept a big graniteware coffeepot on the stove almost all the time, and her children woke in the morning to the sound of their mother grinding coffee at a hand grinder on the wall. She mixed the grounds with a whole egg, shell and all, dropped this mess into the granite pot, poured boiling water over, let it settle, and then poured in a cup of cream—they didn’t have a milk cow, but bought milk and cream from one or another of their homestead neighbors. She taught both children to make coffee this way so that in the haying season they could bring gallons of it several times a day out to the fields where she and Henry were working.

  Henry, who had lived a bachelor life for twelve years before he and Martha were married, could make a proper stew and baking powder biscuits with red gravy, so in the first years of their marriage Henry did most of the cooking. They didn’t ever go hungry—there was plenty of food—it was just that it was plain and unvaried. And when Henry got to the end of a long day, he could wish for somebody else to put supper on the table.

  One day when Bud was maybe six or seven years old, he pulled up a chair and stood on it to help his dad make bread. Henry let him deliver the sourdough sponge in spoonfuls from the heavy crock into the bowl of bread makings. The sponge hissed slightly when he dug down into it with the wooden spoon.

  “That sponge is older than you are by a long shot,” Henry told him. “Your grandma is the one who taught me to grow it and use it. It’s got to be watched over, kept alive.”

  Bud watched his dad bearing down, beginning to stir the stiff dough. “It’s alive?”

  Henry pointed at the crock with his chin. “If it was dead it wouldn’t bubble and fizz like that. It’d go flat and gray.”

  It seemed a kind of magic to the boy, the way flour, salt, and milk could become bread, the loaves rising up golden and fragrant. After Henry taught his son to feed the sponge, keep it warm, not stir it too much, he learned to make pancakes, and then doughnuts firm enough for his mother to dunk in her coffee.

  His grandmother, when she heard that Bud had taken up this interest in cooking, gave him The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. He read through it but never relied on it much. The book called for too many things they didn’t have on hand, and anyway he had his own notions for how things should be done, and no sure idea what some of the terms in the book meant. What was “simmer” or “baste”?

  When Mary Claudine was four or five years old, she pulled up a chair and tried to help Bud roll out the biscuit dough. A good many of the people he knew, especially his friends, considered cooking the province of girls and women, but it didn’t occur to him until much later that he might have begun shifting this chore to his sister. He did teach her a few things, but he went on doing most of it himself. Mary Claudine was more a nuisance than a help to him, and he had seen his dad at the stove more often than his mother. He didn’t give his friends’ point of view much credit.

  Mary Claudine was a daredevil who liked to ride bareback at a flat-out gallop, liked to slide in a dishpan down steep, gravelly banks. She was a monkey when it came to tree climbing, light enough to crawl out on the thinnest branches, and she liked to taunt her brother, who couldn’t climb as high. Her favorite pastime, even on a windy day—especially on a windy day—was to scale a tree and sway in great arcs, singing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” at the top of her voice.

  She collected snake skins and the bony skulls of dead creatures. She liked to catch toads and softly stroke their bellies. She often kept a living field mouse in a lard tin lined with straw in the bedroom she shared with Bud. And she collected birds’ eggs; she had learned from The Book of Knowledge how to poke a hole and blow out the innards, then clean and mount the hollow shell with a neatly labeled card. She scrupulously gathered only one egg from each nest, because it was a scientist’s responsibility to conserve as well as to study.

  But she was afraid of black widow spiders, which liked to hide in the darkness under the toilet seat in the outhouse; she worried about being bitten on her fanny if she had to sit there very long.

  When she had to use the outhouse at night, she whispered to Bud without leaving her bed, “Bud, Bud, Bud,” until he made a waking sound, and then she told him desperately, “Bud, I have to use the toilet.”

  This was when she was a coming five-year-old and Bud ten. It pleased him that Mary Claudine, who in most ways was bold as brass, had a few things she was afraid of. Sometimes he made her ask him three or four times, “Bud, go with me. I’m scared. There’s spiders in the toilet. Bud, Bud.” But some nights he just sat up in the darkness and went out with her to the back porch. In silence they slipped their bare feet into barn boots and trudged across the dark yard, the loose laces on the boots slapping faintly.

  While Mary Claudine watched
him through the open door, Bud went into the outhouse and gave the seat boards three or four hard kicks. He didn’t think it made any difference to the spiders, and Mary Claudine could have kicked the boards herself. But she was afraid and he wasn’t.

  “Okay, they went way down,” he told her when he came out.

  “Are you sure?” They were both careful to speak quietly so as not to wake their parents—the night seemed to carry sound farther than the day. Neither of them ever thought about the booming sound his boot made, kicking the boards.

  For good measure he’d piddle into the hole. He told her, “I drowned a few and the rest legged it down to the bottom.” This wasn’t true, or anyway it was information he couldn’t have been sure of. The hole was pitch-black even when a full moon laid down a bar of light through the door. The time or two when he had shone a lantern down the hole to reassure Mary Claudine, they had been able to see the bottom of the pit, but not the first couple of inches along the underside of the seat.

  “Okay. But wait for me, Bud,” she said when she went in, and she left the door cracked open slightly in case she had to make a fast escape.

  She always had to screw up her courage before she sat down. Bud waited until he heard the faint sound of her pajama bottoms sliding down and then he scratched the wall of the outhouse with his thumbnail to scare her. This had worked a few times, but by now she was used to it. She said, “Quit it, Bud, I know it’s you.” So he walked off a couple of steps and stood there looking up at the stars.

  Whenever he was outside at night, Bud tried to pick out constellations he had memorized. They were easy to see on the star charts, with lines that connected the stars and made recognizable shapes, but the Milky Way was a vast blurred wash through the middle of the sky above the ranch, and there were so many stars and planets that it had been hard at first to single out any but Orion and the Plough.