The Hearts of Horses Read online

  The girl's showy rodeo costume had caused him to saddle the mules out of amused contrariness—he intended to surprise and upend her. But now that she had spoken well of the mules he was coming to a slightly different opinion of her, and he began looking for a way to feel out her knowledge. After he'd thought about it he said, "These mules come out of a mare, Tulip, that I wish I had a dozen more just like her. She was half-Shire, and her mule colts was good big work animals. People say it's the stud, but when it comes to mules my money's on the mare."

  Even farm girls in those days were modest and circumspect when it came to talking to men about the details and mechanics of stock breeding, so George didn't say anything further along those lines; but all the time they were riding he went on talking in the same indirect way about matters to do with horses, especially anything to do with their breaking. He was mildly trying to provoke an opinion out of Martha Lessen without ever directly asking her anything. "I guess you know a mule is just about nothing to break," he told her. "You can climb up on a mule and he'll raise his back once or twice and then settle down to work, that easy." And later on he said, "I don't know what the difference is, or why horses have got to be so hard about it."

  She had opinions and might have stated them; it was just from natural shyness and a failure to realize what he was fishing for that she didn't say much. But as he kept on with it, she finally figured out what George was after and began to speak up, and once she got going she had plenty to say. She told him, for instance, about her preference for a McClelland saddle when she was breaking a horse, because those old cavalry saddles were light in the stirrup leathers and she liked how they let her feel the horse, and the horse feel her. She told him she liked to use her own homemade basal hackamore as long as possible on a green colt and after that a snaffle bit; and that she didn't have much use for a spade bit. She told him when a horse misbehaved she figured it was for one of two reasons: either he didn't understand what you wanted or the bad behavior hadn't ever been corrected in the past. She said that in her experience horses weren't mean unless some man made them that way; but some horses, once they'd been made mean, just weren't worth the time it took to break them. "Like people," she said, glancing at George. "Some people just belong in prison and some horses just belong in the rodeo."

  They made a full swing along the timbered breaks of the foothills, passing through several small bunches of cows and steers, and three different bands of horses. In one bunch of fif teen or twenty mares, George pointed out a young buckskin stud horse he said was half-Arab that he'd bought to improve his herd. Martha said appreciatively, "He's got an awfully nice-looking head," and after watching him a moment—he was tossing his head, kicking and rearing and whinnying, showing off for George and Martha in front of his wives—she also said, "Those young horses sure like to make a big show," without saying what had come into her mind, which was a young stallion she knew of who'd been put into pasture all one summer with half a dozen experienced brood mares without producing a single foal. Those mares had just been disgusted by his adolescent male lordliness, and they hadn't ever let him cover them.

  He showed her maybe forty horses altogether, and among the last band the four-year-olds he wanted to have broken to saddle, a bay and a chestnut, both of them geldings. The chestnut, when he moved, had an odd action, a kind of conspicuous engagement of the hips, which Martha thought might make for a smooth trot. They were in their long winter coats and looked pretty rough, almost wild. She doubted they had much memory of being halter-broke, but if they'd been broken out in the usual way then not remembering was good news as far as she was concerned. She told George Bliss her opinion about the chestnut, the way he lifted his hips, and George gave the horse a close look in silence and then said, "Well, it do look different," without saying whether he thought she was right about the horse having a smooth gait.

  When they got back to the house it was late in the afternoon, the daylight already failing, and it had grown pretty cold. They put up the saddles and turned the mules loose in the stubble field by the road and stood watching them trot off to rejoin the other animals. The cows in that field were all of a type, short horns and short-coupled bodies and red-brown hides spotted rarely with white. "Those is Louise's cows," George said. "I hate those pure breeds, all that extra work trying to keep them separate, and all the paper filing and so forth. Her daddy give her two registered ones when we was married and she was just dumb enough to like it." Martha would have taken this at face value if it had been her own dad saying it. She didn't know how to take George Bliss, who sounded only cheerfully long-suffering.

  "Well, let's go eat," he said to her, and slapped his palms on the top rail of the fence. She had expected George Bliss to say yes or no while they were standing there looking over his animals, and he hadn't given her the word either way. She had a sleeping bag and tent with her and some sandwiches and cheese, and had more or less imagined that if she had trouble finding work she'd sleep in fields or sheds and make do with her own groceries. She didn't know if George Bliss's invitation to supper constituted an unspoken offer of employment. If she thought she was hired, she'd have wanted to put up her horses before going in to eat; but there was no way to know if Mr. Bliss had just forgotten about her animals standing saddled in his barn or if he hadn't yet made up his mind whether to hire her on.

  She followed him across the shadowy yard and around to the back door, onto the closed-in porch where they kept the wash basin and a towel. He let Martha have first turn at the water, which may have been a concession to her femaleness. She was used to elbowing a turn with her brothers and her dad, used to dirty towels and brown water, but sometimes when she'd worked on other ranches the men would put her at the head of the line. She didn't mind being singled out for such things but liked it better when the men seemed to forget she was a girl. Once some women relatives of the boss, women dressed in linen suits and delicate shoes, had come out to watch a branding crew where Martha was helping out, and some of the men had grum bled about it. "When there's women hanging around it sure takes your mind off what we're doing, don't it?" one of them had said to her seriously.

  She washed her hands and stepped into the kitchen, where George's wife was turning out sourdough biscuits from a pan. A man with a graying handlebar mustache was sitting at the table drinking coffee and he gave her a curious look. He was about forty, with a falling-away jaw and thinning brown hair and old pockmark scars on his cheeks. Martha nodded to him and took off her hat and stood holding it and waiting, without knowing whether she ought to help Louise Bliss bring the soup and biscuits to the table, which was something some ranches would have expected a hired girl to do, or whether to sit down with the hired man. When George Bliss came into the kitchen she saw he had hung his hat on a peg on the back porch and so she stepped back out and found a peg for her own hat there. The Blisses were both sitting by then, and she took one of the remaining chairs. She wished she had had sense enough to take off her chaps and leave them outside—the old-fashioned batwings took up a lot of room under the table—but it was too late to do anything about that now.

  "Dear Lord bless this food and the horses and cows and the other animals and our children and all the boys in France and all the little Flanders children who are hungry," Louise Bliss said with closed eyes while her husband and the hired man looked down into their laps with identical expressions of seriousness.

  "Amen," they said quietly when Louise had come to the end of her prayer.

  As the food began to be passed, George said to Martha, "This here is Ellery Bayard but don't never call him that, he goes by El. El, this here is Martha Lessen who is a broncobuster."

  El Bayard said, "Is that right?" matter-of-factly without seeming to be amused by the spectacle of a girl bronc rider; and this, together with his family name, immediately put him in a good light with Martha: Bayard was the name of a legendary horse she had read of who had outraced the army of Charlemagne while carrying four men on his back. El's right arm
was fixed or nearly fixed in a half-bent position as if it had been broken once and poorly set. He made deft use of it lifting and passing plates and bowls but it was a puzzle to Martha how he would ever manage to get a saddle onto a horse or shovel out a hole or tighten a fence wire. Martha was left-handed and had been made to feel self-conscious about it, especially when she was with new people, but El Bayard's frozen arm seemed in some way to mitigate her shyness as she spooned her soup with the wrong hand.

  They had eaten their dinner earlier in the day and supper was therefore pretty light. There was turnip and carrot in the soup and a chicken may have run through the pot on its way to somewhere else, or more likely this was one of the meatless days that had become patriotic in the last few months. Given that there wasn't much to eat, Martha minded her appetite, though the only food she had had all day was a breakfast of toast and buttermilk, and a sandwich eaten while in the saddle riding down from the Ipsoot Pass. When Louise Bliss encouraged her to eat up the last biscuit, she allowed herself to be persuaded.

  Talk at the supper table was devoted to the war. In the afternoon newspaper had come more news of the fighting around Passchendaele, finally taken by the Canadians after months of bloody battle. In the midst of something the men were saying about soldiers who had drowned in the deep mud of the trenches, Louise Bliss stood up from the table and said in a tired voice, "I just can't bear to think about it." As she clattered dishes and stepped back and forth from table to sink, her husband gave his hired man a silencing look. Then he pushed his chair back and said to Martha, "Let's go turn out those horses you brung with you. I guess I forgot entirely about that."

  They walked out to the barn in a damp cold. The yellow dog Pilot, who didn't ever like being left behind, scuttled out from his place under the porch and ran ahead of them. George brought along a lamp from the kitchen and stood by in the broad runway while Martha unloaded her gear and stripped the saddles from all three of her horses. She'd been riding Dolly on a good California stock saddle, and she'd put the old McClelland army saddle on'T.M.; Rory was carrying a saddle with a wide flat seat, which she'd borrowed from her brother Tim, in case she ran into a horse who was big in the barrel like Rory. Tim and one of her other brothers, Davey, had both gone into the army, which meant Tim wouldn't be needing the saddle for a while. When she had finished stripping the tack off her horses, George unwired and pushed back the gate that let into the stubble field and stood by while she waved the animals through. The Bliss mules and horses, clear out by the road, lifted their heads and spoke and came trotting over stiff-legged. Martha watched them become acquainted, a ritual of snorting and low nickering and mutual inspection of flanks. It appeared that a bright chestnut mare was the lead horse in that bunch and Martha watched her with Dolly to be sure there wouldn't be any trouble between them, though she didn't think there would be. Dolly was old enough and had been through enough troubles in her life that she liked to keep to herself, and other horses usually let her go her own way.

  "You can put up in the daughter's room is what I think," George Bliss said. "We don't keep the bed made up since she was married but I guess you can just shake out your blankets on the mattress."

  "I wasn't expecting to be put up in the house."

  He gave her a look. "Well, that's sure up to you. I guess there's the barn. My hired men are living in the bunkhouse so I expect Mrs. Bliss wouldn't listen to you sleeping out there."

  "I don't mind the barn," she said.

  "It'll be cold, I'll guarantee you that."

  "All right," she said.

  He laughed. "All right you'll take the barn? Or all right you'll come into the house?"

  "All right the barn."

  Her eyes were on the dark shapes of the animals moving off now toward the far side of the field. George Bliss looked out there too. "How did that sorrel mare of yours come to get scarred like that?" he asked her.

  "She was scorched in a fire."

  "Was she, now? That's a shame. I bet she was a good-looking horse before that."

  "I don't know. She was already scarred when I got her."

  "Are you breaking her for somebody?"

  "No sir, she's mine, I got her off a man who thought she was spoiled. She was only scorched, but he figured she was spoiled and he sold her to me awful cheap."

  George Bliss gave her a look.

  "She's an awful good horse," Martha told him.

  He nodded skeptically. "Well I guess it don't matter what a stock horse looks like if she's got good sense." He offered her the lamp. "As long as we're speaking of fire, my wife worries a lot more about kerosene than about anything else—her family was burnt out when she was young, and it was a kerosene lamp that did it—so there's candles and matches in the barn, I believe, and you go ahead and keep this here lamp with you for now but I'd appreciate it if you'd turn it out when you get good and settled and a candle lit and so forth. You can make yourself comfortable in the tack room and if you need another blanket you come over to the house and get one. My other hand has a girl he's spooning and that's why he wasn't at the table tonight but he'll be at breakfast, and you come on over to the house tomorrow too and have breakfast, come around to the back door and walk right in but don't come before daylight. We're getting old enough we don't like to roll out until the sun is up." He winked at her solemnly and walked off across the dark yard. The dog considered the question of who he ought to stay with and finally trotted off to get out in front of George. It occurred to Martha that the rancher still hadn't, strictly speaking, said she was hired.

  On one side of the barn runway six stalls were laid out on either side of a tack room. The other half of the barn had been left open to shelter machinery, and she made out a set of harrows, a cultivator, a stoneboat, pipe for irrigation, parts for a homemade buck rake. There was a haymow above, but she wouldn't have wanted to sleep up there on account of the dust, and anyway George had said to make herself comfortable in the tack room. It was small and crowded, half a dozen saddles on wall trees and twenty or more bridles and halters and hackamores, as well as collars and rope and harness pieces hanging on pegs or slung over the half-walls that divided the room from the stalls. There was barely space to turn around between the wooden boxes spilling over with tools and blacksmithing equipage. She lit a candle she found standing inside a sooty glass chimney on a shelf crowded with veterinary gear and turned out the kerosene lamp. She went back to where she'd left her things and carried her saddles in one at a time and slung them up onto the half-walls of the stalls, then carried the rest of her gear into the tack room and shifted some things around a bit so she could make her bed in the cramped space on the floor. After shucking her chaps and walking out in the darkness to use the privy, she came back and stripped down to her long underwear and crawled into the sleeping bag.

  On ranches she'd worked for, it was never expected she would sleep in the bunkhouse with the men, so when she was too far from home to sleep in her own bed she had often been put up in the ranch house, and she'd slept in some pretty poor conditions, one time for several weeks sharing with two children on a bed with no mattress, just a spring with gunnysacks filled with straw, and a couple of wooden fruit boxes under the spring so it wouldn't sag down to the floor. She had gotten in the habit of asking for the barn, which at least was likely to be quieter and more private. This year, before heading out on her own, she'd sewn together a sleeping bag made from a wool blanket and a piece of felt and an old fur rug. In the newspapers she had read that the British soldiers in France were sleeping in mud and had only a couple of thin blankets to keep them from pneumonia, so she didn't think she had any grounds for complaint.

  The candle cast a high shadow, but it was enough light to read by. She was making her slow way through Black Beauty, a page or two at a time, too tired most nights to read for very long. Tonight, coming to the part where Beauty meets his old friend Ginger, in terrible condition from bad treatment as a cab horse, she shut the book and blew out the candle and then went on
lying awake looking out into the darkness. Gradually the saddles and the other things took dim shape around her, and the smells of the fur rug and saddle soap, leather and hay, the warm, clean, fecund smell of horses, arose out of the cold darkness and were a comfort against a yearning that was not homesickness.

  2

  THE BLISSES' OTHER hired hand was Will Wright. That winter he was a lanky boy not yet filled out, with buck-teeth and a crop of pimples but a smile that came easily. When they were introduced he flashed Martha one of those easy smiles and then returned his attention to the breakfast on his plate; El Bayard, who gave her no more than a brief look, scooted his chair a couple of inches to one side to make room for her at the table. They behaved just as if she had been coming to meals in the house for years, and that served to put her at ease. It was a relief to see ample food on the platters and gallons of hot coffee; she sat quietly and tucked into her biscuits and sausage gravy.

  People were mostly silent over their breakfast. The men exchanged a few muttered words about the day's work—something about the fence above Dewey Creek, something about moving some heifers into the Ax Handle pasture—but otherwise there was little conversation. Louise Bliss passed silently from stove to table, refilling coffee cups and bringing fresh plates of biscuits, eating her own breakfast in brief spells of sit ting. Once she made an exasperated sound and went out through the back porch and came back a bit later with a wet jar of butter retrieved from the cellar under the house. Her face, thrown into relief by the slant of the early light, seemed to Martha somewhat aged and mournful, which would have surprised Louise had she known of it. There were plenty of women back then who thought they were old at fifty and women who made a practice of unhappiness, but Louise Bliss wasn't one of them.