The Hearts of Horses Read online

  The whole of Elwha County, being well off the main wagon routes, had been a left-behind and isolated place during the first big westering push; people hadn't started moving in in any numbers until the late eighties and it was 1905 or 1906 before the OTN&T could be persuaded to run a rail line south from Pendleton through the Ipsoot Pass into the valley. There were three little towns in the valley, strung out along the Little Bird Woman River: Shelby and Bingham and Opportunity, in order from east to west, with Shelby being the largest and the county seat. Early talk about running the line west through the whole valley or south through Lewis Pass to Canyon City had never borne fruit, so Shelby was the end of the spur.

  The summer the spur line was put through, Martha's dad had taken work laying ties for the railroad, and the whole family had lived briefly in Shelby. There had been only four or five hundred people living there then, and that was the town Martha remembered—a scant block or two of scattered wooden stores with false fronts. Now she was surprised to find Main Street crowded with two-story brick and stone buildings and the slushy streets around the Federated Protestant church crowded with more automobiles than horses. There were sidewalks and street lights and telephone poles, and the county courthouse was a stone edifice sitting in the middle of its own block of snow-covered lawn.

  Martha had left home for reasons having to do with her family and left Pendleton because it had become very settled and overgrown in her view. If Elwha County wasn't much like the West she had read about in novels it was at least said to be cow and horse country in the old-timey way, which is why she'd headed down here. Seeing the town so changed, she worried that she might have heard wrong and maybe the valley had become peopled and modernized without the word getting out.

  The Federated Protestant minister, whose name Louise said was Theodore Feldson, was young and very tall—a couple of inches over six feet—and also very thin, his wrist bones knobby below the cuffs of his shirt. He had a pallid indoors complexion starred with moles and the stooped shoulders of someone who spent a good deal of time slumped in a chair. His voice rang out in the small church, and he spoke in dense sentences of the promise of the Christ Child in wartime, with the season of Advent soon upon them. Martha, trying to follow the line of his discourse, sat forward in the pew, frowning.

  When the last of the singing and praying was finished, Lou ise took Martha by the elbow and brought her along to greet the young reverend, who gave Martha a slightly startled or confused look when they were introduced, which she recognized, and knew had to do with her size—she outweighed him by quite a bit and could have looked him pretty nearly straight in the eye if she'd dared. She had been intimidated by his abstract preaching and his piety, but when he offered her his hand it was a brief soft clasp without squeezing, and when he welcomed her to "our little congregation" she thought his voice away from the lectern sounded reedy and boyish; all of this surprised and consoled her.

  Afterward George and Louise introduced her to more people than she'd ever before met at one time, a jumble of faces and names she couldn't keep straight or remember for more than a minute. What she remembered—would remember for the rest of her life, she felt—was George Bliss persuading his neighbors of her good horse work. "I expect she'll just about have them standing on their hind legs and talking American by spring," he told people over and over, every time provoking an appreciative laugh.

  Martha held back, blushing furiously, until she was gestured forward for introductions and handshakes. When people asked for the particulars of her methods she mentioned riding a circle, which almost everybody was acquainted with, and otherwise answered in vague terms so they wouldn't have a solid edge to disagree with. A couple of people made remarks that seemed to be about her size—that she sure looked strong enough for a man's work—but most people seemed uninterested in her methods so long as the horses were finished to their needs. It was clear that George's opinion of her was the only thing most people were taking into account.

  Martha rode back to the Bliss ranch in the back of the automobile in silence, looking out at the fog-shrouded Clarks Range. The Blisses only occasionally spoke to each other, leaning in close to make themselves heard. When the ranch buildings came in sight Martha leaned forward suddenly and shouted over the rough racket of the motor, "Mr. Bliss, thank you for saying those kind things about me." She had devoted the last many minutes to finding her tongue but the words that came out now were a disappointment to her—too few and too common.

  George, without taking his eyes off the rutted road, shouted back mildly, "I guess if you make a mess of things, I'll just have to pack up and move to another part of the country."

  When Louise said, "Oh for goodness' sake, George," Martha understood that he was teasing her again.

  7

  SHE HAD THOUGHT George Bliss might go with her on Monday morning when she rode out to take a look at the horses she'd been hired to break, as they were scattered across six other ranches and farms around the valley and she didn't know how to get to any of them. But what happened is that George sat down at the breakfast table and drew up a little pencil map and gave it to her.

  Any map of Elwha County would have to show the Whitehorn Mountains and the Clarks Range taking up the lion's share, with the Little Bird Woman River carving a valley through the middle roughly twenty miles long, seven or eight or nine miles wide, where most of the people had settled and where the towns had grown up. In those days there were just two roads through the valley, one that came up through Lewis Pass, turned to follow the river west through the three valley towns, and petered out in the steep gorge at the far west end—the Owl Creek Canyon, which was home to a few dozen families of sheep growers—and the one Martha Lessen had come in on, which more or less followed the rail spur through Ipsoot Pass from Pendleton and along Graves Creek to intersect the east-west road at Shelby. But dozens of rutted tracks forked off from the roads and wandered up to dozens of ranches and half a hundred little farm claims.

  George's map was not much to look at: just a few squiggles standing in for the bigger creeks and the river, straight thick lines for the two roads that bisected the county, and pointy triangles for the mountain ranges. He had printed the names of the six families who wanted horses broken at roughly the places where their properties lay, with an x to mark his guess as to where each farmhouse or ranch house stood, but he had not tried to draw in the ranch lanes or name any of the streams or mark distances.

  "You think you can find them places?" George said to her while he was putting on his chaps and hat, and she looked up from studying the map and said, "Yes sir, I'll find them," since there didn't seem to be any other answer she could make.

  She rode out on her own horse, the liver chestnut she called T.M., which meant Trouble Maker and which was his name because if Martha let him stand in pasture for very long he forgot every bit of his manners and what he'd learned about being a good horse and he got fractious and full of himself. She set him on the Graves Creek road, which in most places was not much more than a pair of beaten ruts running alongside the creek and the rail spur, veering out here and there around stands of bitterbrush or marshy swales. The little bit of snow that had fallen on Saturday night had melted right off by Sunday afternoon, and the road was muddy enough that there were no automobiles venturing out; Martha kept to the center of the road between the ruts, where the beaten-down weeds made less trouble for the horse to get through.

  Romer, George had written on the map at what she judged to be the nearest place to the Blisses, maybe a mile or so south of Dewey Creek and a half mile or so west of the Graves Creek road. These were evidently people Martha had talked to, but she couldn't connect any of the names on the map to the faces of people she had met after church on Sunday.

  About the time she started to worry that she'd missed the turn, a faint track bent left off the road and she set the horse on it. She first saw the little brown pond where they'd evidently cleared willow and sage from around a spring and then the hous
e, which was not much more than a milled-lumber cabin with small windows and a sheet-metal roof and a sketchy little front porch. There was a shed and a chicken house but no horses in sight and no proper barn.

  In the past fifteen or so years a late homesteading boom had hit everywhere in the West, with more people trying to homestead in the new century than had tried it in the old. And the rush of latecomers grabbing the last pieces of free land happened to coincide, in Elwha County, with the railroad being put through, which meant that for a while just about every section of land in the valley was individually claimed and had a house sitting on it—benighted homesteaders who thought they could make a living from a piece of dry land and a scant twelve or fourteen inches of yearly rain.

  The county never suffered the range wars between sheepmen and cattle ranchers written about in the six-shooter Western novels; the steep slopes along Owl Creek naturally lent themselves to sheep, and everybody back then was pretty satisfied with the division. But there was trouble of a sort between the longtime cattlemen and the newcomer farmers. The good farm land had all gone in 160-acre chunks twenty and thirty years before. The homestead acts passed in later days were giveaways of 320- and 640-acre parcels of the dry grassland that Elwha County had a lot of, land without much timber and without the means to irrigate—open range that the old-time ranchers had always been free to run their cattle on. The idea was that the newcomers would take up ranching, but people figured out pretty quickly that you couldn't make a living off the cattle you could grow on 640 acres of dry grass, so of course the newcomers fenced it off and set out to plow and grow crops. In the valley of the Little Bird Woman River, it wasn't quite a war between the old-timers and the newcomers, but a good deal of resentment and squabbling went back and forth. Fences sagged, broke, got leaned on, and range bulls got into fields with dairy cows; every so often a range bull would turn up dead in mysterious circumstances. When a farmer dammed a creek to force the water into his garden and fields, sometimes that dam got knocked out by steers ranging loose and driving through.

  This kind of thing didn't last long, because most of the settlers coming late to the game didn't have the cash or other means to get through a dry summer or a deep winter, and most were laying claim to land that couldn't be made to support a crop or pasture dairy cows unless the rain cooperated, which it seldom did. By the war years, a good many of those homesteaders had already given up and moved out, and by the end of the war only ten or fifteen of them would still be farming in the valley out of the nearly two hundred that had been there in 1910 when things were at the peak; the federal land banks and private mortgage companies that had been so free with money for stock, farm equipment, and houses during the boom years would be left holding title to land that was mostly barren through overtilling, land where nothing much would now grow but scrub juniper and weeds. By the 1920s most of the valley would be back to the way it had been before the century's turn: sheep ranging the canyons and lower gorge of Owl Creek at the western end of the county; cattle running over the eastern parts from Graves Creek clear across the valley bottom to Burnt Creek; and a few wheat farms along the well-watered valley bottoms.

  But as it happened, the war years were wetter than usual, wheat and cattle prices were high, and any of the dry-land homesteaders who hadn't already given up the fight took this as a sign they could make a living off their little claims, and they settled in for the duration. A couple of the people who hired Martha Lessen to break horses for them in November of 1917 were homesteaders holding tight to their dreams.

  The woman who came over from the chicken house had a face Martha vaguely recalled. "Hello, are you Mrs. Romer?" she said.

  The woman visited upon her a stern look of disappointment. "I'm not Dorothy Romer, I'm Jeanne McWilliams."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. McWilliams. I met so many people all at once, I've got everybody's names mixed up."

  "Well that's all right. But my husband told you we don't have any horses needing breaking." Mrs. McWilliams's husband blamed George Bliss, whose ranch ran along one side of their property, for letting one of his range bulls break down a fence and claim their milk cow, Jozie, for his harem. If they had had a horse needing breaking, they wouldn't have given it to anybody who worked for Bliss, whom they called Old Mister High and Mighty.

  Martha's face began to take up heat as Mrs. McWilliams's face went on being pale and wintry. Martha said, "I'm glad to meet you, anyhow—meet you again. I'm sorry I got your name wrong."

  Mrs. McWilliams was holding an empty burlap sack in one hand but she put the other hand to her forehead to shade her eyes against the gray winter light. Her fingers were long and reddened. "Well it's all right," she said, without softening the tone of her voice. "I don't remember what your name is, to tell the truth, so I guess I don't have room to complain."

  "It's Martha Lessen."

  "I'll try to remember it. If you're looking to find the Romer place you can take that little road there, just be sure you shut every gate when you go through." She pointed to a faint trace wandering off across the grass and bitterbrush hills, not a road so much as a path, the kind made by neighbors when they visited each other.

  "Well, thanks. I'll just go on and see about that horse they wanted broke."

  "You shut every gate."

  "I will."

  She turned T.M. onto the path the woman had set her on. When she got down at the first gate and undid the wire and walked the horse through, she looked back down the half mile or so of slope to the house and saw Mrs. McWilliams standing on the narrow front porch watching after her, and from this height she could see a man and a pair of horses in a field behind the house, pulling stumps out of the ground. The McWilliams claim had had quite a few good big pine trees on it to start with, but they had cut them all down in the first months of living there.

  After Martha wired shut the gate, the woman on the porch turned and went inside.

  The sky was gray but didn't look to have any rain in it; it was the kind of high overcast that can make the world resemble a moving picture the way they were in those days, all shades of gray colorlessness. Martha thought it was beautiful country, even grayed out, close to the kind of open, rolling rangeland spoken of in Lone Star Ranger and The Virginian and other Western romances Martha had read, the country horsemen rode through in novels on their way to trouble with Cayuse In dians or crooked sheriffs. In another twenty years people would wake up to realize that the timber was gone and the native grasses plowed up or eaten right down to the roots, that cheat-grass and rabbit brush and water-hogging scrub juniper had taken over all the disturbed ground. But it was still possible for Martha Lessen to look around and imagine the country as it must have been—the way Nez Perce and Shoshone Indians must have seen it, riding across with their big herds of ponies before white men overran the land, the kind of country where every gully and gorge in the foothills holds a clear, pebble-bottom creek, where the mountain slopes are clothed in timber and the valley floor is a golden grassland with stands of trees in patches, good big timber in the creek bottoms and along the river, the kind of country that leads people to name towns Eden or Paradise or Opportunity.

  Martha had read a little book about famous men and their horses: Alexander and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller, the knight Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced Charlemagne's army. She sometimes imagined herself one of them, or a famous woman, famous as Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc, on a famous horse. Riding over the low hills between the McWilliamses' and the Romers' she fell easily into thinking again that she was Mattie (this was how she'd be called, once she was famous), a horsewoman renowned all over the West, on her horse Meriwether Lewis, a tall black with a metal sheen to his coat and a fiery eye behind a long wavy forelock, a horse she had trained, like the Virginian's horse, to come straight to her at a certain four-note whistle and to carry no other rider but her. Always in these imaginings it was forty or fifty or sixty years ago, when she'd have been able to
ride all over the valley of the Little Bird Woman River without seeing a fence and without getting down from her horse, not even once, to open and close a gate.

  8

  DOROTHY ROMER'S HUSBAND, Reuben, had taken up a claim south of Dewey Creek that was unsuited for crops. It was fairly well timbered, so he got most of his income from cutting wood for the Shelby school and for the town electric plant, but he was what these days would be called a binge drinker and he was off somewhere getting drunk and Dorothy Romer was splitting wood for the school so her children would be able to eat that week. Dorothy had set down the maul and the splitting wedge and was stretching her back and catching her breath when Martha Lessen rode into the yard. Martha didn't see Dorothy standing there by the woodshed; she pulled up her horse in the yard and Dorothy's middle child, Helen, who had been kept home from school to stand watch over the baby, cracked open the door and peered out. When Martha said hello to her she shut the door again. Ordinarily Helen wasn't a shy child but Martha Lessen was a strange and formidable presence sitting up on a big red horse.

  Dorothy gathered up some of the disheveled hair that had fallen on her neck and repinned it and then she walked out from the corner of the woodshed. "Hello, Miss Lessen."

  Reuben's horses were over in the field of corn stubble rummaging for edibles, and T.M.'s attention was fixed on them. When Martha turned in the saddle to say hello to Dorothy, her horse tried to walk out from under her, evidently to say hello to those other horses in the cornfield. She told him "whoa" in a low voice but he only shook his long head up and down irritably and took another step, so she pulled his head down toward a stirrup and jabbed her blunt spurs into his brisket and whirled him in a tight circle round and round for a whole minute before straightening out his head. After that he stood there well behaved and meek without so much as a glance toward those other horses.