The Hearts of Horses Read online

  The chestnut, Ollie, was tractable but he would never make a good cutting horse, being too much on the meditative side; she didn't think he was serious, though, when he kinked up his back once or twice every time she stood on the stirrup. She added "quit" to the words she was teaching him. And as soon as she had both boots settled, she straightened him out and moved him ahead, figuring a horse that's walking forward has a hard time getting his head down to buck.

  She liked both horses and liked the work and the clear weather that hung on into the week. She liked Louise Bliss well enough and felt pretty certain Louise returned the feel ing, though she continued uncertain whether she had George Bliss's approval.

  When she had been there four or five days, Louise asked her to stay on one night after supper so they might "have a visit between women," which was the sort of thing Martha shied away from if she could, but there didn't seem to be anyway to say no. She followed Louise into the front room and the two of them sat down in upholstered chairs near the Franklin furnace. Louise brought her knitting into her lap. She was making socks for the army, which was something just about every woman in the country was doing when they weren't rolling surgical dressings or preparing comfort kits for soldiers and sailors. Martha had always worked outside with her dad and her brothers and later for other people, and her mother's attempts to teach her to knit and drive a sewing machine had always come to nothing. Martha knew how to braid horsehair and leather ropes and bosals and she wondered if those might be needed by the army, but it didn't seem the kind of question she could ask Louise Bliss. She kept her hands clasped in her lap.

  In the afternoon newspaper the men had been reading about the battle at Cambrai—an attack by British tanks had finally broken through the Hindenburg Line—and they'd been arguing whether it would be better to be in one of those armored cars where you might be trapped and burned alive or to be an infantryman outside on the ground and unprotected when mortar shells fell. Louise never liked their war talk and as soon as she and Martha were sitting down she started out talking about her family, thorough details of some sort of disagreement her daughter had had with her new mother-in-law, and then one story after another about her son Orie in veterinary school, stories to do with people Martha didn't know and problems she expected never to have. She had grown up in a family of taciturn people and had developed a habit of silence—she mur mured her slight agreement wherever it seemed agreement was expected, and she watched Louise's hands intently, though they moved too fast to reveal the secret of knitting.

  Louise took Martha's quietness as a sign of a good listener and she rattled on for a while without particularly noticing that she was the only one talking. When she did become aware of it she let a small silence fall while she considered what might bring the girl out, and then she asked Martha which book she was reading. It was Lone Star Ranger, and Martha couldn't keep from telling a bit of the story as if Louise hadn't already read the book herself—how a fellow named Buck Duane kills a drunkard in a shootout in the street and is forced into being an outlaw. She didn't bring up the way the book had been robbing her of sleep: how there was a good deal in it about the wild blood Duane had inherited from his gunman father, and how Martha had been lying awake searching in herself for bad blood she might have inherited from her dad. Buck Duane had been secretly helping out the Texas Rangers, Martha told Louise, and she hoped that by the end he might get free of his outlaw reputation, that he might even be welcomed into the Rangers himself. Louise smiled at this without telling Martha anything about how the book ended.

  They went on talking back and forth about the book and then about Zane Grey, who had written it and a dozen others like it. Louise had heard that Mr. Grey had a house somewhere in Oregon, maybe over on the Rogue River or the Umpqua, which for somewhat parochial reasons made them both think well of him. But when Louise asked if Martha thought Mr. Grey was a real horseman, Martha said, without answering directly, that Buck Duane didn't always treat his horses as well as he should, that he drove them pretty hard on very little feed. And then they talked about the pioneers and whether there were very many towns that had been beset by outlaws, as seemed to happen so often in Western romances. Louise was skeptical. She said in her own lifetime there had been but one bank robbery in the valley, two fellows who were caught by a posse of townsmen and constables and hung the same day. And from her mother she had heard only stories of harsh winters and death by illness or accident and hardly anything about guns and outlaws. Martha didn't say so, but she had the idea Umatilla County, where she was from, and Elwha County, where Louise lived, weren't part of the West she had heard and read about, the place people meant when they said "the Wild West." She imagined the West Zane Grey wrote about must be somewhere in Montana or Arizona or Texas, and she planned to get there and see those places herself, eventually.

  After a while it occurred to Martha that Louise Bliss had deliberately shifted their talk to horses and Western romances, and her warm feeling toward Louise deepened to gratitude. In the middle of something she had been saying about fences—about how there were never any fences and nobody ever had to get down from a horse to open and shut a gate in the Western stories she had read—Martha stopped and said, "I've been wondering if the army might need hair ropes and bosals. That's something I could put my hands to in the evenings when I'm not reading a book."

  Louise stilled her needles a moment to look over at Martha approvingly. "Why that's a wonderful idea. I'm sure they do need them."

  Martha knew Louise wouldn't want to talk about the war directly but after a moment she said, "I read in the papers about mounted patrols at the munitions plants and other places where there's war work, and that it's girls who are doing it. Girls with their own horses. I don't know how far I'd have to go to find that kind of work—I guess it would be back East? I thought about doing it, but I wouldn't want to live back there."

  Louise had resumed knitting but she began to smile, looking down at her hands as they twitched the yarn over and under. "I don't suppose your horses would like it there either."

  They went on after that, Louise asking and Martha telling how she'd come by her three horses, and from there they turned to talk of the different kinds of hackamores and bridles preferred for different situations and Martha's opinions of various bits and reins.

  George Bliss had been sitting in the kitchen polishing his good Sunday boots. If he'd heard the women talking about Western novels he had kept out of it. But now that the talk had turned to horses and their tack he came into the front room and sat down with his magazine, which was the Farm Journal. The war had made farmers out of a lot of ranchers, as thousands of acres of good bunch grass were being turned over in those days to grow wheat for the army—the "Great Plow-Up," people were calling it. The virtue of bunch grass is that it stays green in the fall when other grasses have dried out—horses and cows can winter on it—whereas plowed ground after a string of dry days will lift on the wind and float into space or out to sea in great dust clouds, and that topsoil will never be seen again. That may be why, when the Dust Bowl came along about ten years after the war, some people laid the blame on the Plow-Up. But hindsight is a marvelous thing and if you had asked people then, they would have answered that they were feeding all those hungry soldiers.

  George unfolded his magazine and looked at it, then folded it again and said to Martha, "You've got those horses pretty well along, it looks like."

  She thought about what she ought to say. "I've got them started, but they're quite a ways from finished. I'll have to keep repeating the lessons to get them solid. And I haven't got very far yet with setting their heads." George went on looking at her and seeming to wait for something more, so she added, "That chestnut has a good nature but he wants to think about everything before he does it, so he's not very quick. I guess I won't be able to make a very good stock horse out of him."

  George raised his eyebrows and then winked at her in that solemn way he had. "Well, he must be smarter than you,
seeing he's figured out a way to keep from being put to work."

  She looked down at her hands. "You can still work him. He just won't ever be too good with cattle."

  "Well I guess I could break him to harness but then that smooth trot of his wouldn't do me no good. Maybe I ought to take the son of a gun out and shoot him."

  She threw him a flustered look. "He's a good sound horse," she said, and Louise lifted her head and said, "George, stop teasing the girl."

  "Oh, she ought to be used to me by now," he said with a laugh.

  There had never been any teasing in the house Martha grew up in, just cutting words that meant what they said. Outside the house, on haying crews and ranches where she'd worked and in school, she'd been teased for her size and for loving horses and for dressing outlandishly and for various other things; but it had always come from boys and girls her own age and from the men on the crews, not the boss. She didn't know what to make of George's wisecracks, how to take them. Heat climbed into her face, and she sat staring down into her hands.

  "Well, here's an idea I've been thinking up," George said and slapped his magazine into his lap. He was still smiling, so Martha didn't know if she should take his next words seriously. "I was talking to Emil and W.G."—he said this as if he expected Martha to know who belonged to those names—"and they both got some horses need breaking and I told them we had Miss Lessen here, breaking them to beat the band. Which got me to thinking: I just bet there's rough stock all over the county and hardly a man with time to break them out. If you was to line up five or six ranches and start up riding a circle, there might be enough horses for a winter's worth of work just about, and we'd have all our horses broke by spring. What do you think of that idea, Miss Lessen?"

  Back then, almost every outfit kept a lot of saddle horses, and the ranches were generally smaller and closer together than they are now. A horse wrangler could line up work with half a dozen places all lying three or four or five miles apart, with maybe ten or fifteen unbroken horses among them, could get the roughness off the horses with a couple of days' work at each place and from then on be riding those ponies one after the other in a loop, beginning in the morning at one spread and heading for the next, running the first horse into the second corral, throwing the saddle on the next bronc and then heading down the line to the next place and the next until winding up back at the first place just about at evening, and repeating the whole thing every day after that. Depending on how many horses were in the circle and how far apart the stops were, each horse would get an hour's riding lesson every day or every other day, which was just about all he needed or could tolerate anyway, and a wrangler could manage to break quite a few horses that way in not very many weeks.

  Martha had set out from Pendleton meaning to live a footloose cowboy life and see the places she'd read about in Western romances—she hadn't come down to Elwha County intending to stay. But a winter's worth of work would suit her about right. She had watched a few wranglers riding a circle and she knew the work was hard, riding half a dozen different horses every day, some of them considerably rougher than others and sometimes needing to change saddles or hackamores to fit their different shapes, and then another half-dozen the next day. You were in the saddle dawn to dark six or seven days a week, pretty much regardless of the weather. But she wasn't afraid of hard work; she was afraid of having to go back to Pendleton in January or February flat broke and defeated. "I would like to have as much work as I can get," she said to George Bliss, straight and definite, so he would know she was serious.

  "Well I thought you might," he said, giving her a look she took to be amused and self-satisfied. "Sunday, you come on out to church with us, why don't you, and we'll introduce you around and see if we can't line you up some horses." He shook his magazine and turned his attention back to it.

  Louise Bliss seemed to think more of the idea of taking Martha to church than of lining up horses for her to break. Without looking away from her knitting she said, "There's not a single Lutheran church in the county, I'm afraid, though there used to be one over in Bingham until that minister left for Africa. We've been going to the Federated Protestant church in Shelby, which is a mongrel church in every way, but we have got a new young minister who is smart as a whip. I do love to hear him give a sermon, and the preacher they have at the Methodist church is—" she pulled her mouth into a tight purse—"a bit more on the hellfire side of things than we're used to. There's a Catholic church in Opportunity, because so many of the sheep ranchers at the west end of the valley are Spanish and Bohemian and that sort. You're not Catholic are you, dear?"

  She said, "No, I'm not," without offering to say what she was, which was a person entirely without a religious upbringing. Martha's father had come from a long line of nonchurchgoers and had pressed his disregard for religion onto his Lutheran wife. Martha and her brothers had grown up knowing next to nothing of the Bible.

  "Did you come away from home without a dress for church?" Louise asked her then and looked up from her knitting to collect the reply.

  Martha told her, "I did bring one. It's just an old jumper, though, and a middy blouse," which didn't seem to discourage Louise—in fact she perked up a little, just from hearing there was a dress of any kind in Martha Lessen's dunnage.

  After a while, she threw the girl a look that was conspiratorial. "Our young minister," she said, "is quite tall," which Martha took to be a comment about the difficulties of a tall woman finding a tall man to marry.

  6

  THE WEATHER SUDDENLY worsened on Saturday afternoon, a brief cold rain that turned to snow while Martha was still coming down from the eastern edge of the Bliss property, riding Ollie and leading Scout, with long peacock feathers tied into both horses' manes jerking and fluttering in the wind. She had left the ranch in the morning before the cold had moved up over the front of the Whitehorns and into the valley; she hadn't had a warning that the weather might change or she might have thought to put on a sweater under her coat and wear two pair of socks. She might have snugged a silk stocking around her head under the hat, which was how she kept her ears warm in cold weather. As it was, she was caught out in it, and she ducked her cold chin into her coat collar and rode at a swinging trot all the way down to the ranch buildings, stopping to change mounts once but otherwise not working the horses except to encourage their straight-ahead intention.

  By Sunday morning there were two or three inches of snow on the ground. When Martha crossed to the house for breakfast George Bliss and El Bayard were out in the field feeding the animals off the back of a wagon. Martha had put on the womanly clothes she had with her, an old-fashioned green corduroy jumper that had had the seams let out a couple of times and a yellow cotton middy blouse with a wide collar. The hat she wore had belonged to her grandmother, a woman's braided hat with the front brim held back by a crushed rosette of worn blue velvet. The men looked over at her, but if the sight of their girl broncobuster in a skirt was a shock to them they didn't give any sign. They went on intently pitching loose hay into a long oval. El Bayard's crippled arm didn't seem to limit him in any way. His sharp-cornered elbow swung out and back in a smooth arc as he worked the pitchfork, and he managed to get every bit as much hay on the ground as George Bliss.

  Although it had stopped snowing, the sky was low and slaty and the air was snapping cold. Martha wondered if the weather would keep them from churchgoing, but when she went into the house she found Will Wright already done up in a wool suit and necktie, and when Mr. Bliss and Ellery Bayard came in from feeding, George changed into a suit too. El, who wasn't a churchgoer, evidently planned to spend the morning mending his socks; Will Wright, who had a regular habit of attending church and sitting down to Sunday dinner with the family of the girl he was courting, said he would head off on horseback as soon as he finished with breakfast. While they were all still sitting around the table, George announced to Louise that he thought they should take the automobile to church, as the mud on the road was good and har
d but not icy and there wasn't near enough snow for a sleigh.

  Martha at first had imagined the Blisses were either cash-poor or backward-looking, which were the usual reasons for not having a car, but it had turned out they kept a Chalmers in one of their sheds and brought it out only for town trips and certain summer picnics and dances. Usually by this time in November the car would have been jacked up on wooden blocks and set aside for the winter, but the fall had been mild and they'd put off storing their automobile until the weather gave them reason.

  George carried water out to the car and filled the radiator and cranked the engine over; then he brought it around, and Mrs. Bliss climbed into the front seat, Martha Lessen into the rear. Martha's family had never owned an automobile but she had ridden in cars more than a few times. She hated their noise and stink but couldn't help liking the feeling of going very fast. The Blisses shouted back and forth to each other, things to do with people and church business Martha knew nothing about. She leaned out from the car with her hand holding down her grandmother's hat and let the cold, ringing air race into her ears; she watched the white fields going by, the cattle and horses standing in them, and turned her head to keep certain horses in sight a little longer before turning forward again to watch for the next ones. Graves Creek rolled like hammered metal between the road and the rail spur, rummaging and rattling through the bare willow thickets on both its banks. Right after the creek emptied into the Little Bird Woman River the road crossed over the river on a wooden bridge, the car's hard rubber tires riding thunderous and rough across the bare planks, and then up into the streets of Shelby.