Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  He had recently made a cardboard planisphere, and when he held it over his head and lined it up with the night sky he could sometimes find the dimmer constellations, but he had forgotten, this time, to bring it with him when Mary Claudine woke him for her trip to the toilet.

  “Which one is the Bear?” she asked when she came from the outhouse. She craned her head back in imitation of her brother.

  “Find the Plough first,” he said, pointing. “Then see? Those three pairs of stars are the big bear’s paws. The paws are up high right now, like he’s walking upside down. Or rolling on his back, like a horse does.”

  She was silent, frowning as she peered up. He had shown her the Great Bear and the Little Bear a few times, but she was never sure if she really saw them. She liked the idea of bears roaming around the night sky, but she wasn’t as patient or as interested in the constellations as Bud was. She wished the Bears really looked like bears.

  “I’m cold,” she said suddenly, and ran for the house, clomping in her loose boots.

  Bud went on standing there a while longer, looking for Hercules. It was a big constellation but hard to find because the stars weren’t bright. “Look between Draco and Ophiuchus,” the book said, but he couldn’t always find Ophiuchus either.

  When he went back into the house and got under the blankets, Mary Claudine whispered to him, “Bud, I wish we were Indians.”

  This was a recent obsession of hers. She had been studying pictures of Iroquois houses in The Book of Knowledge, and their mother had read to them Strongheart of the Prairie and another story about two boys who lived as Indians. She had declared her wish to be not only an Indian but a boy and to live in a longhouse with her clan totem—a bear—painted above the door.

  “We’re not,” Bud said matter-of-factly. “Anyway, the Indians are a vanishing people.” He had heard this in school and read it besides. He longed, himself, to be a cowboy, though it seemed possible that cowboys had had something to do with vanishing the Indians.

  “If we were Indians we wouldn’t have an outhouse, we could just go in the woods.”

  “There’s spiders in the woods. And snakes. You’d still be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid of snakes.” She considered, for a moment, whether black widow spiders, who lived in dark holes in the woodpile and in outhouses and cellars, might also like to live underground, and whether they might come out to bite someone who was squatting to piddle. But she didn’t want to argue with Bud about spiders, she wanted to think about being an Indian. “If we were Indians we could ride bareback and wear moccasins and put feathers in our hair.”

  “You can already ride bareback. Anyway, I’d rather have a saddle.” He wanted a saddle heavy with silver ornament like the one Tom Mix had, and a bridle and breast collar studded with silver conchos, but he was old enough now to know the impossibility of such a thing. He hoped for silver conchos on his hat someday. And a horse like Tony, a good-looking dark sorrel with white stockings on his hind legs, who had saved Tom Mix’s life more than once. Bud’s mother was always buying and selling horses, and if she ever took in a horse that looked like Tony, Bud planned to claim it for himself.

  “If you were Indian, you’d have to scalp people,” he told his sister.

  “Strongheart never scalped anybody.”

  “He did. They just didn’t write about it in the story.” He said this just to throw her for a loop.

  She was silent a short while. “Well, then I would scalp people,” she said, “but only the bad ones.”

  When Elbert Echol had first settled there, the scrubland to the northwest was all open range, and the few ranchers and wheat growers living at the north end of the county sent their children eight or ten miles down Bailey Creek Road to the schoolhouse at Foy. But by the time Henry and Martha moved onto the place the hillsides were crowded with homesteaders, and a two-room grade school had been built at the upper end of Bailey Creek Valley for the children of all those farmers. It would have been four miles on bad roads from the Echol ranch to the schoolhouse, but it was less than half that on a trail over the ridge, so from the time he was six years old Bud rode horseback to the Bailey Creek Grade School, and when Mary Claudine was six she followed behind him. They carried their lunches in lard pails—a hunk of roast beef, a handful of dried apples, a jar of milk. In winter the milk would just about freeze, and they’d eat it with a spoon like ice cream.

  The school had two teachers and as many as thirty students in the first years Bud was there, but by the time Mary Claudine started first grade the school was down to one teacher and twelve or fifteen students. The second classroom standing empty was a testament to failure: most of the homesteaders who had come into the countryside in the 1910s and 1920s had been trying to make a living from seed crops on 160 acres of poor soil and less than ten inches of rain a year. By 1930, even before the Depression made itself felt, a great many of them had gone bust and walked away from their farms, and the number of schoolchildren had dwindled.

  The upper valley was always remote, even in its heyday, and over the years a string of teachers came and went, dismayed by the solitude and discomforts of the place; Bud and Mary Claudine’s education was erratic at best.

  In Mary Claudine’s first year at school, the teacher for a short time was a woman who was deeply educated, with a degree in biology from Stanford. There were, of course, no job prospects or research fellowships for women in the sciences, so Miss Goodell had taken up rural school teaching because it gave her opportunities for unfunded field research. To her way of thinking, the Bailey Creek School, situated at the edge of the Ochoco Forest Reserve, was very nearly at the center of the natural world. She kept a horse in pasture behind the school and rode it into the hills on the weekends in all sorts of weather. At school Miss Goodell wore shapeless brown dresses with a watch pinned to her bosom, but for her weekend excursions she wore lace-up boots and knee-high breeches, a man’s shirt, and a floppy khaki hat with feathers and fishhooks stuck in the band. She said to the girls in her class, “Who would want to play with dull old dolls stuffed with sawdust when you could keep a snake as a pet and catch live toads and collect birds’ nests?” Mary Claudine was smitten from that moment.

  Even by the lights of the remote Bailey Creek Valley, Miss Goodell’s behavior was bold and strange, verging on disreputable. Allowances were made for ranch women like Martha Frazer, who wore men’s clothes and worked out of doors in all weathers, laboring alongside their husbands; Martha herself was known to be a gifted broncobuster, which was an acceptable if not respectable reason for a woman to don trousers. But schoolteachers were held to a different standard. There were seven men on the school board, including Henry. Miss Goodell was let go halfway through the school year, by a vote of six to one.

  The woman who replaced her was Miss Ruedy, who had been teaching domestic economy and rules of decorum for young women in the city of Medford, and might have gone on doing it if the Depression had not cut such a big hole in the Jackson County budget. In Miss Ruedy’s view, the Bailey Creek School was at the end of the earth, its students an alarming band of oafs and ruffians. Mary Claudine, in particular, was at odds with her teacher from the first weeks of Miss Ruedy’s tenure, and in mid-March Miss Ruedy sent a letter home to the girl’s parents.

  At six Mary Claudine was as small as some four-year-olds, too little to saddle and unsaddle a horse herself, so her mother was doing this for her, lifting the saddle off and setting it on the rack. Mary Claudine was in her school dress, her long wool stockings dusty with horse hair and scabbed with dry mud. She unfolded the letter from the pocket of her coat and reached it out to her mother with her fingers curled around the damp edge of the envelope. Bud was stripping the saddle from his own horse. He shrugged slightly when his sister threw him a beseeching look.

  It was a letter cataloging what Miss Ruedy saw as the girl’s peculiarities and wildness: Mary Claudine had captured a litter of baby mice living under the schoolhouse and made pets of them in t
he pockets of her jacket; had antagonized a porcupine with a flat board and captured its quills to make darts from the hollow stilettos; and every day at recess flopped down on her back in the dirt of the schoolhouse yard, worked up a lot of spit in her mouth, and whistled through the spit—practicing, she said, a screech owl’s call. “These are interests and behaviors that I consider more rightly the province of rough farm boys,” Miss Ruedy wrote, “and I should like you to speak seriously to her about the proper conduct of a young lady.”

  Martha folded the letter and put it in her own pocket. “Mary Claudine, go on in the house and set the table for supper. Bud will be in after a minute.”

  Mary Claudine threw her brother another quick glance and made a beeline for the house. Martha looked toward Bud too. He was making a show of picking up his horse’s foot, studying it as if there might be a stone lodged in the shoe. Martha waited until she heard the screen door slam, then said to her son, “I don’t know what sort of teacher Miss Ruedy is.”

  Bud understood that this was a question.

  He had recently turned twelve; by now he was used to teachers of strict expectation and vicious discipline, teachers who rapped children’s hands with stove wood or wooden rulers. He had learned the trick of staying out of their way. Miss Ruedy on her first day at the school had upbraided the boys for their dirty shoes, and Bud had not gotten over his feeling of humiliation; plus she had gone on calling him Ernest even after he had told her to call him Bud. But it was Mary Claudine who was always in trouble, who had taken to hiding her bruised hands from their parents. It was vaguely unsettling to him that his sister, who was just about fearless, was on her way to being afraid of Miss Ruedy. He didn’t know what to make of that, and he didn’t know if it was anything he should say to his mother.

  Still bent over studying the hoof, he said, “She doesn’t like it when any of the kids come to school with dirty fingernails.”

  Bud raised up from the horse and glanced at his mother. Color had come into her face. After a moment she said, “Well, I have known teachers like that.” She petted Bud’s horse briefly and then walked off toward the house.

  She had grown up in a house without running water, a house where you walked out to the pump in the yard in all weathers, and she had a thorough acquaintance with teachers who humiliated the children from farms and ranches, children who came to school with dirty shoes, dirty fingernails.

  She didn’t show Miss Ruedy’s letter to Henry but considered her reply carefully and then wrote it out in small, neat print on a lined sheet of paper from the pad that Henry used for keeping track of hay yields. “I have spoken to Mary Claudine about her proper conduct, which is to stop hiding her swolled hands from me which I know are swolled on account of being hit with a stick of firewood. I spoke to her seriously that she should not think the wrong was hers. I am only a rough farm girl myself and never hardly wore a dress until I was married but have not thought that a teacher hitting a child with a wood stick is proper conduct for a grown lady. If you say I am mistaken I will come there and hear it right from you. Sincerely yours, Mrs. Henry (Martha) Frazer.”

  Martha’s native shyness could rise up when she was in the presence of one of her children’s teachers—she felt sure that whatever she said would point up her own lack of an education—but Miss Ruedy was a special case. Martha had a world of patience, more so than Henry. But she had been the one teaching Mary Claudine to imitate a screech owl’s call, and she could be roused to fury by cruelty.

  Arlo Gantz had one of the bigger ranches in that part of Harney County. Arlo had grown up in the buckaroo tradition—his grandfather had been Basque, and his father had been part of the vaquero crowd that came north from California with Pete French. Arlo had a toothbrush mustache and a flat-top hat with a stiff brim, and he usually wore a tight wool vest and a silk square around his neck that he called a wild rag, and chaps that quit at the knee that he called chinks. A lot of buckaroos liked to sport silver conchos on their hatbands and on their saddles and bridles, but Arlo never took the fashion that far. He liked to say, “I don’t think my cows would be unusually impressed by all that silver, and they’re the ones would mainly see it, the cows and maybe the sagebrush.” But he had big fancy tapaderos on his stirrups and great big silver rowels on his spurs, and he wore leather cuffs on his wrists to save himself from rope burns. He liked the old silent movies because William S. Hart wore a Mexican sash around his hips, which Arlo did too, for tying up the hooves of a steer after roping him. Such things had gone out of style by then, but Arlo kept to the tradition.

  Henry could throw a good rope himself, but Arlo was a master rawhide worker—he could lasso pretty much anything on the first throw, either hand. And he was famous for knowing his stock. He kept all of their histories in his head, could tell stories about each of his cows, which everybody who knew him liked to test. When Henry helped Arlo brand his calves, he would point to a cow and say, “What about that one?” and Arlo never had to consider. He’d say, “Well, she lost a calf last year and then didn’t breed back, and I thought I might ought to sell her. But I give her another chance, and now she’s got that nice heifer calf—see it there? The one with a white patch on its left shoulder? Good healthy calf—and she’s a real good mama.” And he could do that for every one of them.

  Both Martha and Henry admired the old man. One spring, after they had been on the Echol Creek ranch three or four years, Martha sold a pair of twin calves she had bucket-fed and raised up from sickly orphans and spent the money on a red silk wild rag to knot around her neck and a handmade silverbelly hat with a stiff flat crown; the next year, with the money from another dogie calf, she bought the same hat for Henry and chaps that quit at his knees. She might have encouraged her husband to grow a mustache and wax it, except she didn’t think she’d like the bristle against her face.

  Even in the 1920s and ’30s there were still some wild horses living up in the Ochoco Reserve. The Ochoco mustangs ran small, as a rule, but they were tough enough to keep well fleshed through the winter, when there might be snow on the ground for weeks at a time. They had good feet and, as Arlo Gantz liked to say, “good smarts.” It was Arlo’s idea that his quarter horses could benefit from the mustangs’ toughness, so one year he and his sons ran down and captured a young Ochoco stallion, a liver chestnut with a lot of black on him, no white markings at all, and turned him in with half a dozen of their Hancock brood mares. They sold the little stallion at auction later on that year because he was a troublemaker around their other horses, but before that he sired seven foals.

  Arlo and his sons weaned the foals, gelded the colts, accustomed them to being handled, taught them to lead, and to pick up their feet for the shoer. Then, when they were coming four-year-olds, they brought the young horses over to Martha Frazer to start them under saddle.

  The horses were small but agile and alert. Martha liked the way they moved, the bright look to their eyes, their good muscling, and good strong legs. They weren’t the easiest horses to break, some of them headstrong and stubborn, but not one of them was lazy, and once they understood what was expected of them, they were willing and mostly reliable.

  Mary Claudine, who was then seven, began begging for one of the young half-mustangs, a little dun gelding with a wavy black mane and forelock standing out against the gray-brown hide, and a black tail so long it dragged the ground. “He’s just like a gypsy horse,” she told her mother, which was not from knowledge but from one of Bud’s drawings, of a gypsy caravan pulled by a horse with a heavy forelock and a black tail that touched the ground.

  Bud and Mary Claudine had both learned to ride on Martha’s old mare, Dolly, but this was the year Martha had retired Dolly to pasture, and Mary Claudine lately had been riding a big bright chestnut named Tippy, a levelheaded horse that never bucked but had a fast lope and clumsy feet. The girl liked to ride bareback and play at being an Indian, galloping over ditches and windfalls, racing through creeks so the splash made a big noise and sent all
the birds flying up from the willow brush. She wore a hat with latchstrings so that when she rode fast the hat would flutter behind her on its tethers. Martha had been a daring rider herself as a girl, but she had a different view now with respect to her own children and especially her fearless daughter. It always gave her a start to see Mary Claudine on Tippy, the girl so tiny and the clumsy-footed horse so huge underneath her.

  She hadn’t planned to keep any of Arlo’s horses, as Henry thought they already had too many to feed through the winter. But all the half-mustangs were more sure-footed than just about any horses she had met, could pick their way through rocks and brush and badger holes, loose shale rock or steep bare places without stumbling. And the dun hadn’t minded at all the first time Martha sat on his back; in fact he had reached around and nuzzled her foot. It had moved her almost to tears at the time. So when she brought the horses back to Arlo that fall she took the gypsy horse as part trade for the work she’d done that summer. Mary Claudine named him Sugarfoot.

  When Bud was fourteen, he began trapping muskrat for the little bit of extra income. His trapline was in the upper reaches of Echol Creek, and on a Sunday in late October he went up there to check the sets. He was riding a dark sorrel with white hind legs, a horse he had named Tony.

  It was a cold morning. There had been a thunderstorm overnight, but now the sky was as blue as a robin’s egg, with just one big white cloud above the mountains to the north.

  The first of his traps was at Cooks Bench, where the creek widened and wound itself in lazy curves through a field of bent grass. This was one of the hay fields where his mother grazed horses in the fall after rain greened the stubble, but the damp field that day was sunlit and empty. Bud’s trap was at the upper end of the field where the creek went under the edge of the trees, and as he headed there a little breeze kicked up a smell of burnt hair, a smell he knew from years of calf branding. And then another smell he understood vaguely to be burnt meat and death.