The Hearts of Horses Page 4

  After a minute, when it was clear that George Bliss had settled in to watch her, she went on with what she had planned to do. She hoisted herself across the bay's withers on her belly and slipped one leg across his back and lay straddled a moment with her head down along his shoulder, patting his neck and humming in his ear, before sliding off again; and she went on doing this over and over, staying a little longer each time and sitting up just a bit straighter. A horse knows that anything coming at him from above is something that could kill him, so she took her time acquainting him with glimpses of her body looming over his back, and whenever he tossed his head and half-reared, rolling his eyes to see what was up there, she would stop the whole business for a minute and spend a while just talking to him and leading him around the corral before starting again. She expected George Bliss to ask her a question or make a remark about the way she was going about things, but he watched her quietly, a cigarette dangling from his chapped lips. He didn't brag about how many horses he'd rode to a stop or broke in two, which is something plenty of men and one or two women had said to her while watching her work a horse. He didn't say anything at all to her, he just watched her a while and then lowered himself off the rail and walked away. He had shucked his chaps and spurs. In his overalls he looked like a farmer.

  She got both horses through the first day's work, or as much of it as they seemed able to tolerate after that long morning being driven down from the mountains. She didn't think the bay was in the mood to get acquainted with a saddle, and the chestnut was nowhere near as agreeable as that. She brought them each an armload of hay and left them to commiserate with each other through the gaps in the log pens. Then, because she didn't see anybody around and it appeared it wasn't time for supper yet, she went to the barn and got her book and perched in the chilly late afternoon sunlight on a rail of the pasture fence and read a few pages, looking out every little while to her horse standing with the Bliss animals investigating scraps of hay left from the morning feeding and the Whitehorns now lifting their saw-edge against the peacock blue sky.

  Louise Bliss startled her, walking up quietly and placing a hand on one of her boot heels. Martha didn't drop the book but she fumbled it a little.

  "Dear, I had to come out and see what you were reading."

  She climbed down from the fence and said, "It's just Black Beauty," putting it like that in case Louise might think Black Beauty was a child's book, or too sentimental toward horses.

  "Oh my goodness, I've read that three or four times," Louise said, "and I cry every time." She took the book in her own hands and opened it, smoothing the page with her palm. "I just can't stand it when Beauty is sold away from that taxi man, the one with the children, I forget his name." She went on looking down into the open page of the book, her eyes unfocused, seeing Beauty and the taxi driver, whose name Martha knew was Jerry though she didn't volunteer it.

  "I love to read, and now my children are grown I've got more time for it," Louise said. She looked at Martha and handed the book back to her with a laugh. "You'd better read now while you can. Once you're married and those babies come along you'll hardly have a moment's peace."

  It was Martha's intention never to marry or have children but she didn't say this to Louise Bliss. Other women, she had learned, took it as a personal affront and a challenge, and once they'd gotten over their dismay they always launched into arguments of persuasion. She had discovered there was never any point in trying to argue back, to say that she didn't want to give up her life working outdoors with horses. There was never any way to say My mother had six babies in six years and I don't know why anybody would want that kind of life. So she cast around for a topic of conversation that would get Louise Bliss away from marriage. "Whenever I'm not working I've got to have something to read, but I guess it's a bad habit. I guess too much reading is bad for your eyes." This was what her granddad had always complained of—that she'd go blind from too much reading, and moreover that reading was a goddamned waste of time. He had been old before she was born, a dour and unsparing and bitter old man hated by his only son. Martha guessed her dad had let her have books—had said little about the time she spent reading—purely as a way to spite his own father.

  "Oh, I think that's an exaggeration, people saying reading is bad for your eyes. You go ahead and read all you want is what I think." Until now the two women hadn't stood toe to toe. Louise was tall, taller than her husband, very nearly as tall as Martha, which unaccountably cheered Louise when she realized it. She put her hands in the pockets of her apron and looked out at the stubble field and the animals. "George said that horse of yours was burnt in a fire."

  Martha looked over at Dolly. "It was a barn fire, I guess. She didn't belong to me when it happened so I don't know the whole story."

  Louise went on looking out at the horses and cows and after a few moments she said, "I was in a fire when I was a girl. Well, I shouldn't have said I was in a fire. Our house burnt to the ground but none of us were in it at the time. It made an impression on me, though. Is your horse afraid of smoke and fires now? I mean, horses are afraid of fire as a rule but is she more leery than the usual?"

  "She doesn't like to come too close when people are burning up stumps or if they're burning their garbage. I try to keep her away from that kind of thing out of consideration of her feelings."

  Louise didn't say if she was leery of fire herself. She looked at Martha and smiled. Then she patted the girl on the arm. "I'll see what I've got that you might like to read. I always wanted my Miriam to be a reader but she never was, and I've been saving up books for years, waiting for somebody to give them to."

  When Martha went up to the house for supper Louise brought out nine or ten books and stood them on the kitchen table next to the girl's plate. Pendleton had had a little public reading room upstairs of the L. B. Hawkins Furniture Store, and later a Carnegie Library on Main Street, and Martha had usually borrowed her books from those places two or three at a time. The only book she owned—she had bought it for a dime from a farm family raising money to move back East—was Black Beauty. She was stunned to have so many books loaned to her all at once, which she tried to say, but Louise waved the words off. "I don't suppose any of them is as good as Black Beauty but you might like some of them. I liked them, anyway. They're all good books."

  Martha said, "I've always just read anything that came along. I guess I wouldn't know if a book was good to read or bad."

  "Oh, I don't either, I just know what I like."

  The hired men, waiting for Louise to bring supper to the table, were talking about a cow that had been killed by lightning and they were not taking any interest in the women's talk about books, but George Bliss must have been listening because now he stubbed out his cigarette and said, "I guess you've never met a government handbook then, or you'd know the difference between good and bad reading."

  Louise was pulling pans out of the oven and she didn't bother to give her husband a look, she just said, "George, you stay out of this," and George looked over at Martha and winked.

  When she carried the books out to the barn she right away opened the one called Horse Heaven Hills to look for mention of horses and was pleased to find a girl riding a palomino, though a romance seemed to be the central thing in it. She cleared a shelf in the tack room, crowding the veterinary goods into other boxes and onto other shelves to make room for the books. Their variously colored spines, arranged along the cleared shelf, made a small, distinct change in the room. She unrolled her sleeping bag and sat on it but it wasn't a minute more before she stood again and began neatening and rearranging all the tackle and equipage, clearing a little more space for herself, claiming more of the floor and one wall as hers. With a couple of bent nails, she pinned up a calendar page, a hand-tinted photograph of a chestnut or liver bay Morgan stud in a show pose. Buck was written in baroque lettering below the horse's feet. She'd had the picture a long time, and the corners were ratty with tack holes. She once had a horse she'd name
d Buck after the calendar Morgan, though he was a big-footed old thing with a coarse head in no way resembling a show horse. Her dad had sold him for glue the same winter her mother had miscarried for the third time in eighteen months, which was the same winter her mother had stopped talking to any of them except to complain or command.

  Martha got into the sleeping bag and read Black Beauty until her hands got too cold and then put out the candle and huddled deeper in the bag. She was only a few pages from the end, but it was her second time through the book so she was untroubled by any suspense and able to put off for another day the short, dreamlike happy ending. She was tired but too stirred up to sleep right away. She didn't know if the two horses she was breaking for George Bliss already had names but she guessed they didn't and, lying there in the dark, she began to make a list of some possibilities. Ollie was one she thought of, and Scout.

  4

  LOUISE BLISS WAS the eldest of six children. She had worked horseback when she was young—most girls her age living in that part of the world learned to ride almost as soon as they could walk—but when her two brothers, following five and eight years behind, were old enough to take over the range work she had been glad to move inside and learn housework from her mother. Now the garden and the kitchen were her realm and she didn't have a speck of envy for girls like Martha Lessen, girls who worked outside in all kinds of weather and slept in barns and sometimes out in fields under leaking canvas. She had known such girls to marry and become happy wives—Irene Theide was one she could think of—but others who had become eccentric and homely spinsters, like Aileen Woodruff and Emma Adelaide Woodruff. The Woodruffs were old women now, sisters who had spent their whole lives taking rough treatment from the elements and from cantankerous cows and rambunctious horses and were still riding out with the men every spring and fall, declaring they "wouldn't know what to do" if made to stay indoors. Louise liked the Woodruff sisters and admired their fortitude, but considered them mis placed and odd—the unfortunate result when a girl failed to outgrow her tomboy disposition.

  "I don't know if that girl owns a dress," she said to George. They were lying in bed in the dark and George was smoking the day's last cigarette. She could see the tip of it brighten and dim every so often. "I haven't seen her in anything but a man's trousers, have you? And those fancy old leather chaps. She dresses like she's headed off to a rodeo." She said this as if they'd been in the middle of a long conversation, which wasn't true, and George was briefly tempted to pretend he didn't know which girl his wife was talking about.

  "Well, she's breaking horses, Louise."

  "You said yourself she isn't bucking them out. You said the horse just stood there and let her clamber all over him."

  "Well, I didn't see what come before. Maybe she give that horse a good whipping first and then bucked the tar out of him."

  She didn't let his joking distract her. "I've been thinking I might let her have one of mine. There's that shepherd's check, the blue, but it would have to be let out. She's big-boned."

  "You do whatever you think, but don't be too surprised if she don't appreciate it. You ought to know yourself, a raw bronc don't like a woman's skirts flapping around him. The wind picks up a skirt, and even a tame old Shetland pony gets the idea that he ought to go to bucking."

  Louise didn't intend to make an issue of it with George. She said, "Well, I won't say anything for now. It's all right with me if she goes on wearing her cowboy getup while she's doing her horse breaking, but if it turns out she's come away from home without even a dress she can wear to dances or to church, that will need to be remedied."

  "You do whatever you think," he said again. He patted her hip under the quilts and flopped away from her onto his side.

  "Did you put out that cigarette?"

  He grunted. "I might switch to those Lucky Strike ready-mades," he said, just to provoke her. "What would you think of that?" She believed there was nothing uglier than an ashtray full of stubbed-out cigarettes and liked to complain that his smoking stank up her curtains and burnt holes in her carpets. She had been trying to get him to quit smoking for thirty years without getting anywhere.

  "At this moment I'm just interested in knowing if you've put out the one you were smoking."

  "Don't get on me now."

  "I'm not on you, I just don't care to die in a burned-up house." Louise in fact was not a woman with a deep dread of fires, but fire was more common in those days than it is now, and people who had been burned out had a healthy wish to keep it from happening again.

  George grunted, and in a minute he rocked the bed slightly and she heard the gritty sound of his cigarette rubbing across the bottom of the ashtray. He was asleep almost immediately and snoring like a train. He worked himself so hard he usually would drop right off as soon as he thought Louise was finished talking, or sometimes right in the middle of something she was saying. She was often the one who put out his cigarette. But she always liked to lie awake a little while in the darkness and go over things, anything hanging on from the day's business, before letting sleep claim her.

  Tonight what she had been thinking about before bringing up Martha Lessen's dress was something the new young preacher at the Federated Protestant church had said the Sunday before. The Lord, he said, has a way of evening things out in the long run—giving luck and hardship in fairly equal measure over the whole of a person's life—or a nation's life—though you might have to look hard to see it. And he told the congre gation, "Now that the war has finally come home to these United States, we must remember that a test can strengthen resolve." Everyone in the church knew what he meant: three American boys had died in the fighting in France just the week before, the first of what would doubtless be many. He had gone on to preach the story of Job's trials, which must have wound its way eventually to a message of hope and solace, although Louise stopped following the sermon after a certain point. She had lost her third-born child, a boy, within a few hours of bearing him, but in other respects had been blessed with luck—had been fortunate in her health and her marriage, had raised three children to be kind and honest adults, was comfortable in her own life and smart enough to know it. Sitting there in the pew beside George, with the Reverend Feldson going on about Job's misfortunes, she felt herself pierced by the knowledge that the first fifty years of her life had been extraordinarily free of travails, and she was due—overdue—for God to even things out.

  Her son Jack had gone with the first wave of boys from Elwha County—there had been banquets and public prayer meetings and a parade to see them down the main street of Shelby to the railroad station, Jack with his friends in the back seat of an automobile and all of them grinning as if they were going off like tourists to see the Eiffel Tower. At this point he was still in Kansas learning to be a soldier but she thought he might be shipped out soon—the papers said that by the first of the year troop ships would be carrying fifty thousand young Americans to France every month.

  There was never anything in Jack's letters to set her worrying, and in any case Louise was not ordinarily a person who worried. But whenever they had a letter from him—one had come today—her mind would keep going to her son in an agitated sort of way, just as a tongue will keep going to a canker in the mouth, and tonight she had tried to move away from that by turning her attention to the matter of Martha Lessen's dress. Now that George had gone off to sleep and she was left alone, she found she couldn't keep her mind from jumping back to the preacher's sermon, to the part that had stuck with her, the part having to do with the Lord giving and taking away in equal measure. This wasn't something she could talk to George about. She talked to God about it from time to time, her prayers taking somewhat the form of a negotiation.

  5

  WHEN A COUPLE OF DAYS of corral work and riding in the stubble field had gotten the worst roughness off the horses, Martha began riding them up into the foothills. She rode one and led the other and after an hour or so she switched off. She always used the McClelland sad
dle for this work because, as she had told George Bliss on that first day, it was almost as light as a jockey saddle and she liked the horses to be able to respond to the least pressure from her knees. She began teaching them words for what she wanted them to do, "giddup" and "whoa" being the principal things. She kept a short piece of rope snapped to each halter so they'd be easy to catch in the corral, and she always hobbled the horses when she saddled or unsaddled them, a bronc hobble she had made herself out of straps of rawhide lined with sheep's wool, a hobble shorter than a camp hobble because she didn't really want them to take a step while she was getting the saddle on or off. She always shortened up the near-side rein when she put her boot in the stirrup, so when the horse tried to walk out from under her he was forced into a tight turn that brought the stirrup right to her. She coaxed them to step over logs, and she got them used to things they didn't like by hanging tin cans from the saddle strings, or long silk stockings that would flutter in any kind of breeze. Those lessons had started on the second day in the corral and would go on for weeks, presenting them with every kind of thing that might distract or scare them: wiggling ropes, tin cans with rocks rattling inside, rain slickers, ragged pieces of flapping cardboard. She believed a spoiled horse, whether an outlaw or a pampered pet, was a nuisance and a menace, so when one of them bit or kicked she used her elbow or shoulder to cuff him without saying a word or looking him in the eye; she let the horse think it was an accident caused by his own carelessness. She used a low, harsh tone for scolding, which was what Dolly always did, keeping other horses in line, and she kept her voice soft and high for praising.

  She made sure they were acquainted with cattle by deliberately riding into bunches of grazing steers and cows, and sometimes she started them loping after solitary cows. Scout, the bay horse, regularly took a cow's frosty breath for dragon fire and would break away with a wild frightened squeal whenever a cow blew air in his direction. Over and over she coaxed him straight up to the cow in question while telling him quietly that this big old mother animal wouldn't set him ablaze.