The Hearts of Horses (10 page)

Emil sidled around behind them, keeping one hand on the near horse's flank. He was talking to them too, a steady low note, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Then he said to Martha softly, "Hold them now, can you?" and he stepped around the whiffletree, which stood up on its end in the tumble of firewood logs
and half broken through. The wagon tongue had split too, and the shattered ends dangled from the hip straps of the breeching. He crouched down between the big haunches and hocks of his horses. Martha heard the sawing of his limbing knife against the thick tangle of leather as she held the Belgians' heads tightly, bracing her body against their great muscled chests. They leaned into her, wanting consolation, and she told them steadily how brave they were. She could feel her own heart thudding against the hearts of the horses.

"Can you back them up a step, and then ahead?" Emil said. "Just a step, not much."

She clucked to the team and pushed their heads back and they shifted their weight reluctantly. Emil made an inarticulate sound and then he said, "Okay," and she let them step forward. She heard the sound of brush breaking above her, which was T.M. acting up, and Irene speaking evenly to him, something about a bird, hadn't he ever seen a bird before? and it was just then the whiffletree decided to finish breaking all the way through, and part of it slid sideways and struck the ground with a muffled clashing, which Emil would have prevented if he could—it wasn't much racket, but enough to unnerve the Belgians. Martha's heart flew up in her throat and she shifted and clasped an arm around the neck of each horse and let her weight hang from them, which wasn't meant to be force, she couldn't have stopped them with force, but was the kind of reassurance you give a child when you hold him tight,
I've got you, I'll hold you, it's all right,
and they came ahead no more than three or four steps and then stopped, huffing their hot, fragrant breath into the chill air.

"Emil?" Irene called down, and he said, "It's all right, we're all right," and he came around where Martha was holding the horses and got in front of them and helped her coax them back from the edge of the bank. "Well, that wasn't too bad," he said.
Martha was thinking that Mrs. Thiede maybe could have held them. The Belgians hadn't really given that much trouble.

Emil stepped between the horses and took the right-hand one by the headstall. "You take that other one there?" he said to Martha.

They gained the road, one and then the other, scrambling up those few feet of loose dirt and rock without much effort, and then she followed Emil down the road, walking the horses out and back to see if they were bruised or lamed. When they were a hundred feet down the road from Irene, Emil said, glancing at Martha, "Irene maybe could have held them, but she'd have had to leave the baby to come down there and help me."

When she looked at him she saw in his face what he must have meant: that he'd been afraid of what could happen, afraid that if the horses bolted he and Irene might be leaving their son standing orphaned in the road a dozen miles from anyplace.

They turned back toward Irene, who was still sitting on the dun, holding T.M., who had stopped acting up as soon as he discovered Irene wouldn't put up with it. When Young Karl saw his daddy returning he bounced his heels along the dun's shoulders in a restless way, which made the horse think he should move ahead. Irene touched her son on the leg and touched the reins softly and both the boy and the horse settled and became still.

When Emil got to where he could see the tipped-over wagon again he stood with his hand on the Belgian's neck and looked down at it. Irene said in a distraught way, "I thought there was room, Emil," and her husband just said, "There was plenty of room, honey, it was just that the road give way," and he looked over at her and shook his head and that was the last either of them said about it.

They left the wagon where it was—"I'll get Bill or Mike to help me chain it out of there when there's time," Emil said—
and he climbed up on one of the Belgians and they all trailed back to the T Bar homeplace. They wouldn't hear of Martha leaving the ranch without sitting down to dinner, and Martha, who would have liked to get a look at the horses they wanted her to break and then be on her way, gradually understood she had to sit and eat to offset their feeling of indebtedness. While Irene went in to heat up the ham roast, Emil took her out to the corrals.

He had a longtime practice of tying his young horses behind the sled when he was feeding out his cattle in winter, or behind the wagon when he was feeding salt in summer, which was a light and easy way to start them; so the two horses he had in mind for her to work with, a black gelding and a bay mare, had already been broken to lead. Up to this point no one had yet told Martha the Thiedes were German, but in any case her judgment of people was always pretty well formed by their treatment of horses. She took warmly to the two T Bar horses right off the bat, could see they were well cared for and that they wouldn't give her a bit of trouble; and this, among other things, caused her to feel well disposed toward Emil and Irene.

While they were sitting at the dinner table they all heard something heavy hit the floor in a room at the back of the house, and the Thiedes exchanged a look. Emil put down his fork and excused himself and went quickly down the hall, and then Irene told Martha that Emil's father, Old Karl, had broken his pelvis falling off a haystack in early October and was laid up in bed. She glanced at Young Karl and then lowered her voice and said they just didn't know if the old man would ever walk again.

By the time Martha got away from the Thiedes it was two o'clock. Then it was a slow five miles or so from the T Bar to the Rocker V, a dozen fences to pass through and a lot of wheat to skirt around. The Rocker V was a big old spread with a gin
gerbread house, a log barn bigger than a Ringling Brothers tent, and nearly a dozen buildings scattered around the homeplace. Martha imagined Bill Varden must once have run a crew of twenty or thirty cowboys to keep track of his cattle, but he had broken up a lot of his pasture to grow all that wheat, and he wasn't even carrying a foreman that winter. It was Bill himself who took her around to the corrals to see the horses. She had known old-time ranchers like Bill Varden all her life: tough-minded to the point of meanness, unsparing of himself and his cowhands. He was old-fashioned too, in not owning an automobile or a telephone, but he told Martha he had learned the hard way that bucking out a horse was a money-losing proposition—too many horses and men breaking bones or going sour or getting arthritis from a lifetime of bucking the kinks out every damn morning. He hadn't cared about such things when horses were cheap and cowboys a dime a dozen, but now that men and horses were both worth more, he was ready to try a different way, which put him at odds with most of the other old-time ranchers who were his neighbors, men who wished to go on doing things as they always had. He had four horses waiting for her in the corral, although he said the blue roan didn't belong to him but to Tom Kandel, who had the little chicken farm next door. The Kandels didn't have a corral, and the Rocker V had plenty of them, so Tom had brought his horse over to be taken out in turn with the Varden horses.

By the time Martha quit the Rocker V there wasn't much daylight left and she didn't want to get lost trying to find the rest of her customers in the dark. So she rode the eight or nine miles back to the Blisses in a gathering dusk, and the next morning, Tuesday, went out to see the last of the contracted horses. W.G. Boyd lived on a small acreage at the edge of Bingham with his ten-year-old grandson and a black gelding named Skip, which had been given to him because he had a
reputation for healing up sick animals. Before coming to the Boyd place, Skip had been tied to a rail on the nailed side of the fence, something most people with good sense will keep from doing, for if the horse is startled and rears back, you run the risk the damn rail will pull loose. Which was exactly what had happened with Skip. He had run about half a mile with a pine pole bounding loosely behind and beneath him, fastened tight to his rein. The pole had beaten his hocks and shanks bloody, and bruised both his cannon bones. W.G. Boyd had gradually brought Skip back from lameness, had done what he could to gentle and reassure him; but although Skip had been tame before he was hurt, he now was wild and frightened of everything under the sun. W.G. was sixty-five years old that year and had arthritis in his hips and hadn't been on a saddle in almost a decade.

Martha listened to this whole story and then told W.G. she would do what she could, but a horse who had been as badly frightened and hurt as Skip might never get over it. She said it wouldn't take much to reaccustom him to being ridden, but his fear might keep him from ever being reliable again. She didn't want W.G. to think he was being cheated if Skip didn't turn out meek as milk.

When she left the Boyd place she crossed the river again at the edge of Bingham and went south along a ranch road that wound and curled through the canyon of Blue Stem Creek for more than three miles before opening up to a pretty little valley where the Woodruff sisters had their Split Rock Ranch. Their land was right up against the mountains without much bottomland for growing wheat, so they were still more or less strictly a cattle outfit. Martha had been told that the Woodruffs' foreman, Henry Frazer, had worked for the Blisses up until June. Then the sisters had lost the last of their hired men
to war fever, and Henry had left Louise and George and gone over to the Split Rock Ranch to help out.

The sisters were in the midst of weekly laundry out on the wide front porch when they met Martha; one of them was stirring the boiling pot with a long wooden stick and the other was feeding clothes one at a time through the wringer. They weren't surprised to see her but surprised she hadn't been met by Henry Frazer. "Oh, for goodness' sake, Henry must be taking care of that business with the bull," Emma Adelaide said after a moment, without saying what that business was. Aileen dried her hands on her apron. "Well, you'd better get your barn coat on, Emma Adelaide, and we'll show this girl the horses."

The Woodruff sisters were two maiden ladies who had grown up on their father's ranch and gone on ranching after his death, unconcerned by convention, riding cross-saddle along with their cowboys even now when they were becoming too old to keep up. They were exactly the sort of women Martha admired and intended to take as a model.

B
Y THE TIME
Martha Lessen got back to the Romers' on Wednesday morning a neighbor had carried Reuben home in a wagon and he was lying liquor-sick and pale in the darkened bedroom. Dorothy had milked the cow before daylight and set the milk in the separator and walked the cow out to their farthest pasture and come back alone just as the sky was lightening. She was splitting wood in a cold gray drizzle when the girl came up the road, riding a different horse from the one she'd been on the other day. Dorothy heard her coming from a long way off, on account of the jangling of a string of little bells she'd tied to the saddle strings. The girl waved a hand and then stood down from the horse in a careful way and stroked his neck and talked quietly into his ear, words Dorothy couldn't make out.

"My husband is sick, Miss Lessen, so he couldn't get that horse into the corral." Martha had told Dorothy on her first visit that the cornfield wasn't a particularly good place to work with an unbroken horse. The girl had asked that Reuben's unbroken chestnut be moved over to their small corral and that they turn the other horses out into the pasture that adjoined
the cornfield. Dorothy and her oldest child, Clifford, had tried to do it, but the other horses had refused to leave the corn, and she and Clifford were afraid of the untamed horse; they had given up after she bared her teeth and charged them.

The girl looked over at the chestnut, hiding behind a pair of Reuben's heavy-footed half-Belgians. "That's all right," she said. "I guess if I can get the other horses over into the pasture I can work with her there in the cornfield." But she was thinking she would have brought Dolly along to help her haze the horses if she'd known. She wasn't exactly scared of Mata Hari, but wary. The year before, while she'd been working with a horse that had been bucked out rough like this one, she'd wound up with a dislocated shoulder and unable to remember afterward how it had happened; now she was a little afraid of getting hurt, was cautious around horses likely to give trouble, horses that flattened their ears or lifted a hind leg to kick or swung their head around to try to bite her.

She didn't want Scout standing around tied to a post all morning so she led him inside the pasture fence, got a loose camp hobble from behind the saddle, and buckled it around his front pasterns. Then she loosened the cinch and stripped his bridle, which he was wearing over a soft hackamore. He stood where he was a minute, studying his situation. He knew what a hobble was, but this wasn't the kind he was used to, and he hadn't been turned out in an open field in nearly two weeks. Then he took a couple of pussyfooting steps and lowered his head to lip the cropped-short grass.

Martha took her coiled rope and went over to a wide gate in the pasture fence that let into the back side of the cornfield. She opened it slightly and stood by it and made a kissing noise with her mouth. This was a language some of the horses understood, and two of the draft horses immediately trotted through into the pasture. Then she walked out into the corn stubble
and waved the rope, which got the others dodging around, and after some minutes kissing and waving the coiled rope and feinting with her body she got the gray saddle horse to veer out of the cornfield and into the pasture. But the chestnut was leery of her and kept hiding behind the other two draft horses, and those two seemed determined not to be driven out of the corn—they circled and circled, dancing past her. It wasn't a big field but big enough so the horses and Martha gradually got sweaty, even though it was a cold morning.

Dorothy went on splitting wood, looking over at this spectacle every little while. The day before, when she and Clifford had given up trying to separate the horses themselves, she had told her son they would just wait for Miss Lessen to do it, and that Miss Lessen was a cowgirl like the ones she and Reuben, Helen, and Clifford had seen when they went up to the Pendleton Round-Up the summer before the baby was born. Those men and girls roping cows and horses had seemed almost never to miss, and Dorothy didn't know why Martha didn't just shake out a loop in her rope and throw it onto Mata Hari's neck. Maybe this was what you had to expect from a girl who was not a rodeo cowboy, just somebody doing an ordinary job of work on foot in an open field, but it was a disappointment.