Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  Tony carried him a few more yards and then flared his nostrils. He didn’t quite buck, but he took a spraddle-legged stance, his sides heaving. “All right,” Bud said to the horse. “You stay right here,” and he came off the saddle and dropped the reins and walked the rest of the way to what he could see now, a dark shape along the creek bank, in shadow under the trees.

  Lightning wasn’t overly common in their part of the world, but Bud was acquainted with it. He had several times seen a cow dead on the ground with scorch marks on its hide and had heard stories from Arlo Gantz about entire bunches of cattle or sheep killed by lightning. Sugarfoot was the first horse he had ever seen killed in this way.

  He came up close enough to be sure it was Mary Claudine’s horse lying dead, his hind legs in the creek, his long black tail floating out gently on the current. Then he went back to Tony. The horse had waited, but he was standing nervously, his ears flattened all the way back, and he gave Bud a baleful stare as if he thought the boy had done him a great disservice.

  Bud mounted and turned back toward home, and after a minute he asked the horse for a jog-trot. When he came through the gate into the pasture, he saw his father digging out one of the old rotted posts along the east side of the fence. Bud had been going over and over in his mind the words to tell his sister what had happened, but now he headed for his dad.

  Henry straightened up from his work and called to his son, “That was quick. You checked all those traps already?”

  “No, I came back,” he said. “There’s a dead horse up at Cooks Bench. It’s Mary Claudine’s.”

  “You don’t mean Sugarfoot.”

  “It was him.”

  Henry looked off toward the creek and then back toward Bud. “Could you see what killed him?”

  “Lightning, I’m pretty sure. He had a burnt mark all down his back.”

  “I think your mother turned some of her horses onto that grass a few days ago. Lightning didn’t kill none of the others?” He was thinking it was a good thing she’d been keeping Dolly in the home pasture and not with the horses grazing on that bench.

  “I think the lightning must have spooked the others off. There weren’t any horses up there at all.”

  Henry set aside the shovel he’d been using and wiped his hands on his bib overalls. “Well, your mother took the truck into Foy to pick up some staples for this fence, and Mary Claudine went along with her. They won’t be back for a while.” He looked at his son. “Where’s the horse at? I know you said Cooks Bench, but is he laying out in the middle of the hay field or where?”

  “He’s laying in the creek.”

  “Well, we better pull him out of there before he poisons up that water. You go in the tool shed and rummage up some logging chain, and I guess I’ll go harness up one of the mules.”

  Bud dug a long, heavy piece of chain out of the box of chain goods and then helped his dad buckle the plow harness on Mike.

  “Grab that can of kerosene there, too,” Henry said.

  They rode up the creek trail single file. Bud rode Tony with the chain piece doubled up and draped across the horse’s withers, and Henry, carrying the can of kerosene, rode Mike with his legs clamped around the plow harness. He was still wearing his overalls and his chore boots.

  When they came near the place where Sugarfoot had died, the mule and the horse both got agitated, so they left them standing twenty yards off and walked on up to the carcass. Bud stayed back while Henry squatted down next to the horse and examined the wide streak where the hair had been burned off right down to the hide. The horse’s eye was as pure white as the albumen of an egg. “I think it must have entered through his eye and traveled down his back,” he said over his shoulder to his son.

  A horse might live to thirty or better if well cared for. Henry was thinking about something Martha had said to him once, that she had often thought of her life in terms of how many good horses she would love. He knew that Dolly was the first horse his wife had loved, and he was afraid that Sugarfoot had been his daughter’s first. Mary Claudine was nine years old that year, her horse just about six.

  He stood up. “Well, let’s have that chain,” he said to Bud, “and then you might see if you can get that mule to come any closer.”

  Bud handed him the chain and went off to see to the mule. Henry stepped out on the rocks so as not to get his feet wet in the creek; he looped an end of chain around the dun’s hind fetlocks and then walked away from the creek bank, pulling the chain out to its full length, waiting while Bud talked to the mule and petted him. Bud didn’t have his mother’s gift for working with animals, but he was patient, and horses generally trusted him. Finally the mule agreed to come close enough to reach the end of the chain. Henry bent down and hooked the logging chain to the heel chain on the plow harness, and when he rose up again Bud said, “Okay?” and Henry nodded.

  Bud walked the mule out until the chain pulled straight and tightened around the dead horse’s fetlocks. Mike was a big half-Belgian; they had used him to drag dead cows and logs and stumps. Sugarfoot weighed maybe eight or nine hundred pounds, but some logs the mule had dragged must have weighed at least that. Bud chirped to him and asked him to put his hindquarters into it. He scrabbled and dug his hooves into the soft ground of the stream bank. The chain rattled and then tautened, and the mule moved ahead, his big muscles clenching, his neck bowed; the horse’s body began moving by inches, trailing a mud smear. His long, coarse tail swept over the water and then over the mud like a bead curtain as the mule went on pulling.

  When the carcass was fifty feet from the creek, Henry said, “That ought to do it.” He came up and unhooked the heel chain and then went back to unhook the drag chain from the horse. The links had bitten through the hair and hide, and the left cannon bone had broken, which he thought must have happened at the beginning when the carcass had twisted on the ground. The unnatural angle of the leg and the fractured white bone poking through the hide briefly sickened him, made him turn his head away.

  He loosened the links from the fetlocks and gathered up the chain and carried it over to where Bud was waiting with the mule. “Go ahead and take him out of the way,” he said. “It’ll be smoky.” He waited until Bud and the mule and the sorrel were well out in the open field, then picked up the kerosene can and went over to the carcass and poured out the kerosene and lit it afire and walked off a dozen yards before looking back. Then he walked the rest of the way to where his son was waiting.

  They stood and watched the fire burn. Dark smoke rose up and smudged the sky above the edge of the field.

  “Mary Claudine . . .” Henry said, but then wasn’t sure what it was he had started to say.

  “I wish it wasn’t her horse that got struck,” Bud said.

  Henry tried to think how to answer. “I don’t imagine he felt it,” he said finally. “It probably didn’t hurt him at all.”

  It seemed to Bud that his dad didn’t understand what he was getting at. “She’ll feel awful about it, Dad.” His sister had a soft spot for runty barn cats and crippled birds, baby mice, toads with ill-formed legs. In the fall, when they weaned the calves she hid in the barn and wept to hear the bawling of the bereft babies and their mamas. She had always hated knowing that the young steers they sold every fall after roundup were doomed to be butchered and made meat.

  “I know she will,” Henry said. “But that’s just the way it is sometimes, Buddy. Things happen.” He looked tired and unhappy, watching the fire burn. After a moment, he said, “She’ll just have to make peace with it.”

  When the flames had died somewhat, they headed back down the hill. The blue sky had turned dark in the northwest, and soon a wind came up, thrashing the branches of the pine trees. It was the sort of wind that always signaled a change in the weather, and maybe a little rain. They heard thunder two or three times, a long way off, but never saw any lightning.

  Henry watched the sky and finally said, “It’s moving off southeast,” in case Bud might be worrying a
bout it.

  They were all the way down the hill, passing through the gate that let into the home place, before Bud remembered his trapline.

  “Dad, I didn’t ever finish checking my traps.”

  Henry made a tired gesture. “Well, you might as well wait until after dinner now.”

  The truck was parked in the yard. Henry and Bud went on across to the barn and were stripping the tack off Mike and Tony when Martha walked out from the house.

  “I thought you were working on the fence,” she said to Henry.

  “Well, something came up.”

  She took in the thing unspoken underneath his words. She didn’t ask Henry anything, just watched him pull the harness off Mike and hang it on the sawhorse. She waited through his silence until finally he turned to her and said, “There was a horse killed by lightning up at the bench. Now, honey, don’t cry, but it was Mary Claudine’s horse, it was Sugarfoot.”

  Bud had seen his mother cry a few times—she was sentimental about her heifer calves—but Now, honey, don’t cry was so unexpected that it brought a little heat to his ears and his cheeks, a feeling of shame, as if he had eavesdropped on his parents in an intimate moment.

  She didn’t cry. She looked at Henry without speaking, then turned from him and looked off toward Dolly and the other horses in the home pasture. What occurred to her, standing there, was how many times she had called Mary Claudine to the window when lightning flashed, just to say, Isn’t it beautiful?

  “I’ve seen lightning enough times,” she said. “I don’t know why I never thought to worry about it killing a horse.”

  Henry was silent for a while, and then he said, “Worrying about it wouldn’t have changed anything. There wasn’t anything you could have done to keep it from happening.”

  Martha looked over at Bud. “Was it you who found him, Bud?”

  “He was up at Cooks Bench where I set one of my traps.”

  “There were some other horses up on that grass. Was Sugarfoot the only one struck?”

  “The others must have took off. We might have to go looking for them.”

  Henry said, “Where’s Mary Claudine?”

  “She’s in the house with her nose in a book. We stopped by the Forbeses’ place and Evelyn gave her a book about birds. She was reading from it all the way back.”

  “Well, when I get this mule here turned out, I guess I’d better go in and tell her about the horse.”

  Martha reached out to touch Mike on the neck, and the mule leaned, pressing himself into her hand. “We’ll both go,” she said, looking over at Henry. Then she looked at Bud again. “After dinner maybe you could help me find those horses. If they went uphill they probably got stopped at the fence line above the old Troxle cabin.”

  He didn’t say anything about checking his trapline. He said, “All right,” and then he said to his dad, “I can take Mike,” and he led the two animals out to the pasture fence. He watched them trot out to join their friends, and he watched as his horse rolled around on the ground and then stood up and shook himself off. He was still standing there looking out at the animals when he heard his parents cross the porch and go into the house.

  FIVE

  19

  AFTER I RAN INTO LILY in front of the hardware store, and after we sat through that double feature at the Marcal, we started going to the picture show every Sunday. I’d meet her at the Studio Club and we’d walk to the Iris or the Victory or the Marcal, see a double feature, then go back to her dormitory and play a few hands of cards in the living room, gin rummy usually, or pinochle, hunched over the cards, smoking and talking. What we mostly talked about was movies.

  Now that I had some understanding of how the cheap cowboy pictures were made, I had become scornful of them. I told Lily they were cranked out in a week without anybody even knowing what the title was; I was especially bitter about the short ends they spliced in to save money on action scenes.

  Well, she had read and studied about the movie business, but Lily had never been on a movie set, never seen a movie camera turning. Her magazines carried plenty of photographs of movie stars lounging on the set or chatting with directors but none of actual moviemaking. So it didn’t matter to her that I was only working on Poverty Row pictures. What mattered was that I was watching movies being made every day.

  She would pump me to tell her the details of everything I’d seen that week. If I had been near enough to hear what the director told his camera operator, or what the gaffer told the electrician, she wanted every word of it. She wanted a description of the big klieg lights on telescoping stands, how many there were and where they were placed in relation to the camera and the actors. Why did some of the lights have metal earflaps but others didn’t? Did I know why the grips built a tall platform and mounted the camera on it for this scene but not for that one? What about the shiny boards and umbrellas that kept shadows off the scene, and the white butterfly nets that softened the daylight, where were those? And where was the director standing when he said “Action”?

  She was always pressing me for a better account. I didn’t have answers to most of her questions, and I wasn’t much good at the meticulous descriptions she wanted. She would have loaned me her little folding Kodak camera, but all the studios had rules against picture taking.

  So one day I filched some paper and a stub of pencil from somebody on the film crew, and I drew what they were shooting at the time, which was a cowboy star and a pretty girl standing next to the cowboy’s tall horse. I put in the boom mike overhead, and the camera with as much detail as I could capture, and the little crowd of people standing behind it, watching the actors deliver their lines. Once I’d started, I made another quick sketch, a cowboy actor taking a nap on the grass, with his high-crowned hat over his face and his fancy boots crossed at the ankles, and a jumble of light standards and grips’ boxes in the background. I didn’t have an eraser, so I just moved the pencil in fine scribbles where I wanted to reshape part of the drawing. To my eye the blurred line could seem intended—an impression of the horse restlessly shifting his weight or wind lifting the fringe on the star’s fancy shirt.

  When I gave Lily the drawings, she studied them quite a while, her dark brows pulled down to her nose, and then looked up at me. “You never said you could draw, Bud. These are really, really good.”

  I wasn’t exactly embarrassed. I had always liked to draw, and all my life I had been praised for my drawing. But I should probably make it clear right here that becoming an artist was not a notion that had yet taken hold. Back then it was obvious to me that art wasn’t related to real work—work you could earn a living at. I had grown up believing that I would make my living on horseback. I was just killing time and helping Lily out, is what I thought when I made those first sketches.

  I said, “Well, there’s a lot of waiting around on the set. I had the time, and I figured it might be easier to sketch what was going on than tell you about it afterward.”

  She pointed at the drawing of the actors being filmed, the tip of her finger not quite touching the paper. “Who is this woman sitting with a big notebook in her lap? Is she the screenwriter?”

  “That’s the script girl. I don’t know what a script girl does, exactly, but she’s usually on a stool right there next to the camera. She makes a lot of notes. I’m pretty sure she didn’t write the story.”

  She frowned again—I imagine she had been hoping to see actual proof that a woman could be a screenwriter—then went back to studying the drawing. Two men were standing by the camera, and she pointed to the one who had his hand lifted as if he was supporting its weight. “Who’s this?”

  “That’s the focus puller. I guess he’s kind of holding the camera steady or something.”

  She went on frowning. “No, no, I know what a focus puller is, he helps the cameraman keep the picture sharp when the actor moves around. He’s turning the lens with his hand, I bet.”

  It went back and forth like that, until she had learned everything
I could tell her about the people and equipment in both drawings. She didn’t compliment me again, which I was glad of, but she said, “This is better than a Kodak picture.”

  Mostly, as a little kid, all I had to draw on were the margins of the Saturday Evening Post or the backs of old ballots from the last election; for Christmas I always asked for a brand-new tablet of drawing paper. My folks bought me tablets now and then when they could afford it, but it wasn’t until high school that one of my teachers made sure I had all the paper, pencils, and paint I could want. The last couple of years, working on ranches and hanging out at rodeos, I was stone broke most of the time, and if I had any spare coin I spent it on beer, not paper and pencils. And I guess after Mary Claudine died I lost some of my inclination to draw.

  But after I gave those first sketches to Lily I bought a box of soft lead pencils and a couple of pads of paper, and whenever I was waiting around on the set, I sat down on the ground or in a folding chair close to the picket line and sketched whatever was going on in front of me: the actors, the equipment, the horses lounging about. I bought an eraser too, but I didn’t use it much. And then on Sunday I’d hand the drawings to Lily. And after we had talked over what was in them, we would head for the theater to see a double feature and walk out afterward, arguing over what we’d seen.

  Before I met Lily, it had seemed to me that movies were fixed, unchangeable, they just existed in the world. I didn’t much care for the singing-cowboy pictures, the silliness of the damn things, with a full orchestra suddenly backing up a guy on horseback strumming a guitar, but I hadn’t realized that a series of decisions had made it that way, that the movie would have turned out differently if somebody else had been making those decisions.