The Hearts of Horses (12 page)

Somebody—one of the Woodruff sisters or their foreman—had corralled the three horses for her, which was a relief. When she climbed the rails the horses crowded together in a
far corner of the fence and watched her warily, ears pricked. Two were seal brown—they were out of the same mare, not twins but born two years apart—and one a flashy palomino. Martha had known palominos to make a show, to strut around as if they knew they were beautiful; but this one had a somewhat shamefaced way of holding her head low to the ground as if she thought herself plain. There was just no rhyme or reason to such things; the Rocker V horse, the one so proud of himself, had a long, rangy body, a Roman nose, a ratty tail.

A man came out of the little house Martha thought must be the foreman's place and crossed the muddy yard to her, shrugging into his coat as he came. She had been told his name but couldn't remember it. He climbed up next to her and looked at the horses a minute in silence. It was still raining lightly; she could hear it ticking on her rubber slicker and the crown of her hat.

"None of them is broke to lead," the man said, as if he and Martha had already been introduced and were in the middle of a conversation.

Her mood being what it was, Martha took this for some kind of criticism. "I know it," she said.

She felt him glance in her direction, but then he turned back and watched the horses another minute. Finally he said, "You care which one gets moved?"

Most of the horses she was moving were entirely unbroken, they were horses she hadn't gotten around to yet, horses who didn't know a thing about being led. She'd been roping their necks up close to Dolly and bringing them along that way, so if the young horse gave trouble, pulling or trying to rear up, it was trouble only in the first minute or two. Dolly wouldn't stand for any nonsense and educated them with stern schoolmarmish discipline. Martha had been studying these three, looking for the one easiest for Dolly to handle, one small enough it wouldn't
pull Dolly off her feet. "I thought I'd take the one with the white snip on his nose," she told the foreman, and waited for him to find some objection to it.

After looking them over a bit longer, he said, "I'll get a rope and wrangle him out for you," which brought him into her better graces. She had been worrying somewhat that she might have to try to rope the horse with the foreman standing there watching her. He looked over at Dolly. "Were you thinking you'd pony him up to your horse there?" This was said matter-of-factly as if it was just exactly what he would do if it was up to him. Martha gave him a look. He had by now put himself in a good way with her.

"Yes sir. They usually follow her pretty good and if they don't she takes a bite out of them."

He made a low sound of amusement. "I'll bet. She doesn't look like she'd take any monkey business off a youngster." He was studying Dolly. "I heard you had a horse that was all scarred up from being burnt."

"Yes sir."

He turned and gave Martha a slight smile. "I wish you wouldn't go on calling me sir. I'm just the hired help."

She glanced at him. "I don't know your name."

"It's Henry Frazer. And I've been presuming you're Martha Lessen, but if you're not then I guess I'm helping a horse thief get off with one of our horses." His smile widened good-humoredly. He had a round, clean-shaven face that was a long way from handsome: a large fleshy nose running up to a heavy brow bone almost bare of eyebrows. His nose had been broken once, and a front tooth chipped off at a slant, which Martha thought must have come from adventures with bulls or mother cows or horses, though what had happened was more complicated than that, and involved an automobile on an icy road.

"If I was to steal one of them, I'd steal that one there, the palomino," she said.

"Is that right? You like her color, do you?"

"I like thinking about ways to coax her out of her shyness. She's a pretty horse, pretty as anything, but she doesn't know it yet. I like thinking about ways I could get her to hold up her head."

This evidently surprised him. He studied the horses a minute and then said seriously, "I hope you don't have a favorite aunt named Maude because I want to say that's just about the homeliest name in the book, and that's what the sisters have been calling that horse, and maybe she's just ashamed of her name. I bet you could get her to bring her head up if you just started calling her Ginger. Or Babe. Or Dolly."

Martha hid a smile. "I've already got a horse named Dolly," she said.

"Is that right? Is she that one there, the one you rode in on? Well, she's holding her head right up, so I guess that proves my case." He didn't try to hide his own smile, in fact he seemed pretty pleased with himself for his little joke.

He stood down from the fence and went into the barn and came out with a coiled catch rope. While he stood building his loop he asked her, "You want to get a hackamore on him before you neck him up close to Dolly?"

"If he's got a hackamore on him he'll be easier to handle, but I don't always do it. It's a lot of trouble when it's just me."

"Well, there's two of us," he said, glancing up at her.

Martha went over to Dolly and opened up the corral gate just wide enough to lead her inside and then Henry stepped in too and Martha shut the gate. She had spent maybe a hundred hours of practice over the years trying to get better at roping without making much improvement. Henry Frazer shook out a
loop and neatly forefooted the horse Martha had said she wanted. The horse hit the ground with a heavy thump, mud splashing everywhere, the other horses leaping wide, squealing, and Henry in nothing flat had his knee on the horse's neck and the head twisted up against his chest like a rodeo bulldogger before that horse had any idea what had happened. It wasn't how Martha would have gone about it—she never liked to throw a horse, which maybe was part of the reason she had never been able to get very good at roping—but she knew she'd have been half or three-quarters of an hour getting the damn horse ready to leave the corral if she'd been left to manage it alone. In the rain, at the tail end of a long day, she hadn't energy left to concern herself very much with the horse's fear, and she wasn't sorry at all to have him in a hackamore and snubbed up to Dolly in five minutes flat.

When Martha climbed onto Dolly again it caused a brief flurry—the brown horse squealing, trying to buck and shy away, Dolly baring her teeth, Henry Frazer jumping back to keep from getting kicked or stepped on—but Martha didn't have any trouble keeping her seat and in a moment, after everybody settled down, Henry came up again to Dolly's shoulder and rested a gloved hand on her and peered up at Martha. He had odd, downturned eyes that gave people the idea he was always squinting. Boys in those days always tagged each other according to some part of how they looked—every gang of kids had one called Slim and another called Red—and when he'd been a boy Henry Frazer had been called, even by his friends, Chink, or Chow Mein, for those screwed-down eyes of his. He said, "You all set?" and Martha answered, "I guess we are. Thanks." He nodded and peered across Dolly's withers to the brown colt. "That one's not very happy."

She could feel the horse where he touched against her lower leg, his wet heat, his pulse racing almost as quick as a rabbit's,
and she could smell the fear rising off him. He was licking his muzzle over and over and eyeing Dolly sideways, the whites of his eyes showing. "He's wondering how this happened and what's going to happen next."

Henry looked up at her briefly. "Well, he doesn't have much cause to worry, I imagine." He patted Dolly once and stepped back. "You take it easy." His overalls and coat were badly muddied, and there was a clump of mud on his chin and mud in a long streak across the crown of his hat.

When she was out of earshot of the ranch Martha began to talk to the brown horse in a low steady voice, telling him everything they would be doing together in the next days and weeks, and she told him she was sorry he'd been thrown and bull-dogged but he shouldn't take it as a sign of what to expect, and she told him she thought Henry Frazer was someone who wouldn't hurt a horse unnecessarily. The rain had pretty much come to an end by then, and they rode in a cold gray dusk, the horse's ears flicking sideward to catch every word she said.

T
HERE WAS AN OFFICIAL
call in those first months of the war for folks to "pray hard, work hard, sleep hard, play hard, and do it all courageously and cheerfully." Of course not many people in Elwha County needed this direction from the War Office, for they had always been hard-worked without ever complaining much, and most of them lived in isolated circumstances without feeling particularly put-upon. They would travel ten miles for a pie social or a basket supper or an evening of cards or dominoes and not think a thing of it, even in the winter months when the roads might be troublesome and the ten miles to be covered on horseback. Such pastimes went on only slightly abated after war was declared, and in fact Liberty Bond drives and gatherings of women knitting socks for the army had to be squeezed onto the calendar.

Martha Lessen was drawn into this intense sociability almost as soon as she came into the county, though at first she had to be persuaded. Late in the first week of December, in the middle of saddle-breaking the fourteen horses in her circle, Louise Bliss pressed her to go to a Christmas dance at the Bingham Odd Fellows Hall. Will Wright, the young hired
hand, told her he was riding over there himself on Saturday night and she might follow him up. Even in Pendleton, where she had lived most of her life, a town already pretty settled and gentrified, all the girls from the farms and ranches would ride to a dance with their dresses and shoes and stockings tied behind their saddles and would change when they got there; so she wouldn't feel odd in that respect. But she had come down to Elwha County intending to spend the winter breaking horses and sleeping in barns. She'd packed only the one dress in case someone pressed the point about the impropriety of a woman wearing trousers, and she had not brought any but barn shoes and boots with her. She tried to say this without saying it, but Louise Bliss would have none of it. She brought out a pair of shoes, patent leather with an opera toe, which she said had become too narrow for her feet now that she had bunions. The Cuban heels were worn down at the corners, and the patent was creased across the instep, but someone had polished the leather recently and they were better shoes than Martha had ever owned. Louise urged on her also a large silk scarf figured with red and pink and cream peonies and fringed in red, which she said could be worn tied at the waist or around the shoulders and would make any dress in the world presentable for a dance.

So Martha wrapped up her corduroy jumper and the loaned things in a bundle tied behind the saddle and rode over to Bingham with Will Wright. She took one of her own horses, the brown gelding named Rory, and Will Wright rode one of the Bliss horses, a pretty little blond sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail, whose name was Duchess. Rory was plain colored next to the sorrel, and as she was saddling him she whispered in his ear that he shouldn't have any reason to feel bad about himself; that even though Duchess was a beauty and also well mannered, with a sweet look and lots of width between the eyes, Rory was every bit as good a horse. He had been given to
her in payment for last summer's work on the L Bar L, and he had nicely sprung ribs and plenty of depth through the heart, good shoulders, a reasonably long neck well cut up under the throat. He was heavy-barreled but easygoing, imperturbable, a horse she could trust without loving very much; the truth was, Martha would have traded him for Duchess without a minute's thought.

The day before, the papers had been full of news about a munitions ship and a troop ship colliding in Halifax Harbor, thousands of people killed, square miles of the city flattened, and there had been a lot of talk at the supper table about whether it was an act of Hun sabotage. While they rode over to the Odd Fellows Hall, Will Wright launched right in, repeating to Martha his opinions about Halifax; but then, without stumbling over the switch, going on to tell her he was in love with Elizabeth—Lizzie—the daughter of the county road supervisor, and when he was eighteen—in a little less than two months—they would marry, and after that he expected to enlist. Of course by then they might have extended the draft to men younger than twenty-one and it wouldn't be necessary to enlist, but in any case he expected, by late winter or early spring, to be shipped off to France to kill Huns. Like Rory, Will Wright was easygoing and imperturbable, and the idea of going off to war as a new bridegroom seemed not to perturb him anymore than anything else.

He asked Martha about the horses she was breaking, and she told him about the three that belonged to Bill Varden's Rocker V Ranch, one of them a narrow-headed Roman-nosed horse with a little pig eye, a horse that was always on the lookout for a chance to act up or get away or give her trouble of some kind. Will laughed and passed her an admiring look. "I never seen a horse get the better of you yet," he said, which wasn't completely true but near enough that it made her blush.
Will had good balance in the saddle but he was sometimes a little heavy on the horse's mouth. Tonight, though, he had loosened his hands and Duchess was stepping along lightly.

He told her, "It's not the Round-Up, but we got a rodeo going on somewhere in the valley just about every Saturday in the summer, and if you're still here you ought to get into one. The one in Shelby has got two chutes and a bronc stall for saddling, but the one at Opportunity hasn't got no fences, they just snub the bronc and ear him down in the open while they get the saddle on." He looked over at her and grinned. "Some of those broncs are pretty mean, but I bet if you walked up to one of them and give him the eye and climbed on, he wouldn't buck at all, and wouldn't that be something for people to see."

By summer she planned to have moved on to some other part of the country, and anyway she knew it wouldn't be that easy to just walk up to a bronc and climb on, but she laughed and said she'd like to try it. She had been to the Pendleton Round-Up plenty of times, had even worked the chutes when they'd let her. There had been times she'd thought about becoming a rodeo broncobuster herself—those girls got to wear outfits that nobody teased them about. She had sometimes thought the saddle broncs mostly didn't mind the life: they liked bucking people off and got to do it pretty regularly. But the bronc riders raked the horses bloody with sharp-rowel spurs, and every so often a horse would go down in the chute or out in the arena and have to be shot; plus, bucking out a horse wasn't horsemanship, and she didn't think she'd like doing it every day even with crowds of people admiring how she did it.