The Hearts of Horses (16 page)

People in Elwha County considered the house an unfashionable museum piece—it had been a throwback to an earlier
time even when new—but Henry guessed Martha Lessen, with her old-fashioned cowboy trappings, might think well of it. The roof of the main room was supported by hand-peeled pine logs, and the walls and ceilings were faced with rough-cut lumber. Bear rugs were scattered on a floor of pine boards twelve inches wide, planed and fitted together as tight as a ship's deck. The fireplace would take four-foot logs. "Every bit of the wood came off this ranch," he told her. "The old man cut the logs and snaked them down off the mountain and then he built a sawmill and planed the boards himself. Those fireplace stones came from Short Creek and Blue Stem Creek and the Little Bird Woman. The windows and the nails, I guess those came from outside, but just about everything else he made with his own hands."

Martha had desperately loved the house from first seeing it. She turned her face up to the great wrought-iron chandelier suspended on a chain above the center of the room, its heavy wheel supporting six kerosene lamps, and adorned with horseshoes and small iron replicas of the Split Rock brand. "Do you think he made the hanger for the lamps?" She glanced hesitantly at Henry. "He might have made the nails for the house, too, if he was used to making his own horseshoes."

"He might have. I guess if you can make horseshoes you can make nails, and he sure did his own shoeing. Those old-timers knew a little bit of everything. I can shoe a horse if I have to but I try to keep from doing it if I can."

She warmed to this. "I never took it up either. Roy Barrow taught me to break horses and showed me how to shoe but I never really wanted to do much of it. I can trim hooves all right if the nippers are sharp, but I don't even like doing that if I don't have to."

He didn't know who Roy Barrow was but he said, "Every farrier I know of has got a hunched-over back and bad knees."

She gave him a quick look, smiling. "Roy couldn't stand up straight, and his legs were all bent out like broken fence rails. I guess that's why I never wanted to shoe."

"Well there you go." He thought of something else she might be interested in. "You ought to ask the sisters to tell you some of their stories, those pioneer days when old man Woodruff first came up here. I guess wild horses used to herd onto those alkali flats over by Teepee Hot Springs to lick the salt and take a bath and roll around in the grass and just have a time. I guess it was quite a sight, hundreds of them."

"I wish I had seen it." She had seen, plenty of times, big herds of horses gathered in one place. Combine crews making the rounds of wheat ranches in the summer would come through Pendleton with as many as a hundred and fifty horses, but those were coarse and heavy-footed pulling horses, kept bunched up together in corrals or herded close between wire fences. And at the railroad corrals in Pendleton horses were brought in by the carload; on weekends it was popular sport for folks to go down there and watch cowboys bucking out dozens of horses in a melee of dust and noise. But she hadn't ever seen more than four or five wild horses at one time—not range horses, but wild horses—and then just a glimpse before they spooked away. They'd been pretty well hunted down, shot, or rounded up, until the ones that were left were skittery and canny and quick as cats. When she was younger she had daydreamed about going up into the high parks of the Blue Mountains or the Wallowas or the Clarks and camping there quietly until the wild horses got over being afraid of her and came out of their hiding places, and in her daydream she rode them bareback without a bridle, guiding just with her knees and heels and her voice, and she never came down from the mountains.

After a brief silence he said carefully, "I guess you don't get thrown too much, breaking horses." She raised her chin and
gave him a quick look, her face as pink and shining as it had been at the Odd Fellows dance when he had said that stupid thing about her tallness. He spread his hands. "I was just thinking about the horseshoers, and how bronc stompers can get pretty broken down too."

She looked away from him. She had been bucked off in the corral that morning by one of his horses, or anyway a Split Rock horse, one of the brown ones she had been calling Big Brownie, but she didn't tell him so. "Well the horses don't hardly ever buck when I bring them along the way I do," she said, which was mostly true.

In the silence afterward, they became aware of the room clamorous with voices. The men standing around the punch bowl were arguing, and Emil Thiede made a loud, high declaration—"No, no, that sure ain't what I meant!" Irene was standing by the fireplace with several other women, holding Young Karl against her bosom. Henry and Martha both saw her look over at Emil with a worried frown. The old-time ranch families hadn't been shutting out the Thiedes, but everybody in the room knew: sometimes words were traded that didn't seem to be about the war or patriotism but had that meaning anyway.

Henry said to Martha quietly, looking down at his hands, "I guess you know the Thiedes are German."

She did know. Louise Bliss had told her, and in the same breath had vouched for them as one hundred percent Americans. But Alfred Logerwell had come up to her one day while she was changing saddles and said he had heard she was breaking horses for that damned Kraut spy Thiede. When she hadn't given him any answer, he had puffed himself up and said she must be a sauerkraut sympathizer herself. She and Logerwell had been on poor terms from the first time they met, but she didn't know where his hatred of the Thiedes came from—she
didn't think he had ever spoken to Emil and Irene. Later on the thought occurred to her that she'd better keep Logerwell from knowing which of her horses belonged to the Thiedes—that if he knew, he might take out his hatred on the horses.

She said to Henry, "They're Americans," just so he'd know where she stood on the question. She had heard he was friends with Emil.

He looked over at the men gathered around the punch bowl. "I guess Emil would have to join up and get killed over there, and I guess Irene would have to leave Young Karl in an orphanage and start driving a Red Cross ambulance for some folks to believe that family's on the right side in the war." His smile was grim.

After a moment they went back to talking about horse breaking. Martha told Henry that one year at the Round-Up she'd seen a showman named John Rarey offer to tame any horse in about an hour without a bit of bucking and that she had picked up some of her methods from watching how he did it. Henry had read in a magazine about how the queen of England's horses were trained without bucking them, and he told Martha what he could remember. Martha said she'd heard from Roy Barrow how some Indians liked to put their horses into deep water or a muddy marsh where they'd get tired of fighting in a hurry. Roy would have used this method himself if he'd been able to find any water deep enough; he was from Minnesota, which had its fair share of muddy marshes and deep-water lakes, and he liked to complain about the lack of them in Umatilla County.

When they began talking about the bells and so forth that Martha hung off the saddle to get the horses used to all kinds of noise and distraction, Henry said, "I guess there's nothing they'll be afraid of, once you get done with them."

Martha hesitated, but then she said, "Roy liked to bring out
his accordion and play it close to the horses until they quit being scared of the music. I guess my horses will have to go on being afraid of accordions, because I can't play a note." Henry laughed, and Martha gave him a pleased, sidelong look.

Just about the time the roasted pig was brought out, Henry looked into his hands and said to her, "I ought to have warned you about the liquor in the eggnog."

She frowned. "I don't usually drink. I wouldn't want you to think I did."

"I know that. You were lit up too quick for somebody that was used to it." She glanced at him, seeming to look into his face for whether this was true. She had a good, open face, and with her hair pulled back and tied with a red ribbon she looked to him painfully innocent and unguarded, a child. He was thirty himself, and his coffee-brown hair was already shot through with gray; nobody had ever mistaken him for handsome, and he knew he had more than the usual wear of weather around his mouth and eyes. He imagined Martha Lessen must think him old or a bachelor too set in his ways to ever be housebroken.

T
HE WEATHER TURNED COLDER
, the ground frozen so hard it rang under the horses' feet. The sky on Christmas Day was Chinese blue, brindled with long streaks of dry cloud. Martha pulled a silk stocking close over her head under her hat and rode the circle from the Bliss ranch to the Romers' farm, then Irwin's, the Thiedes', the Rocker V, old Mr. Boyd's, the Woodruff sisters', and back to the Blisses'. It was roughly fifteen miles around the circle—would have been only eight or ten as the crow flies, but she sometimes had to let the crow find its own way while she took a roundabout path skirting fences and getting through gates and going up- or downstream to cross the Little Bird Woman River on a bridge or find a place to ford where it was shallow. At each corral she stripped off saddle and bridle and turned the horse she had ridden up on into the corral, caught and tacked up the horse that was waiting there for her, and climbed once more onto the cold saddle. Certain of the horses had to be hobbled while she saddled and unsaddled them, and some others had to be hobbled whenever she got down to open a gate and then unhobbled after she mince-walked them through.

Before finally starting to ride the circle, she had been thinking she knew the peculiarities of each of the horses and what to expect from them—which ones were tractable and which ones mean-spirited or cold-jawed—but she became better acquainted in the first couple of rounds. By Christmas Day her back and neck and legs and arms were aching from the long jarring ride over frozen ground, the jerk and pull whenever a horse took sudden fear of a shivering blade of grass or made up its mind to try again to throw her off and reclaim its old unfettered life.

She carried lunch with her and ate it as she rode. People on the circle were astonished to see her riding through on Christmas Day, and some of them—the Thiedes, the Woodruffs—tried to get her to come inside the house and get warm, eat something hot from the stove. She stood by the corral and drank down hot coffee if they brought it out to her, but otherwise told them she was determined to get around the circle as quick as she could so as not to hold up the Blisses' Christmas dinner—Louise had announced that they wouldn't eat their beef Wellington until Martha was able to take her seat at the table.

It was well after dark when she rode into the Blisses' yard around five o'clock. There were two unknown cars, a black Ford and a dark green Willys Knight, standing alongside the Chalmers, and the house was lit up behind its draperies, people's voices sounding dimly through the walls.

Martha made a poor toilet for herself by carrying water from the pump to the tack room, stripping down to her underwear and running a cold wet rag over every bit of bare skin. The water in the pail turned murky—she'd been shouldered and knocked to the ground by Irwin's horse that day. She put on the corduroy jumper and the peony scarf, combed her hair, and retied it with a ribbon. Christmas had never been much
celebrated in her family, which had given her the notion she might like to celebrate it, but the corduroy dress went on cold and stiff over her shoulders, and her boot-sore feet didn't like the patent shoes, and her unwashed hair smelled of horse sweat; she was bone- and muscle-weary and she dreaded meeting the people who had driven over in the cars. If she could have gotten out of going to the house, she would have. What she wanted now was to eat a quiet supper and crawl into bed with a book.

The Ford car belonged to the Blisses' daughter, Miriam Bliss Hubertine, and her husband, who had driven down from Pilot Rock; and the Willys Knight to a friend of Orie Bliss, who had taken two days to drive Orie down from the university at Pullman, Washington, where they were both studying animal medicine; the Bliss car was in the yard because Ellery Bayard had borrowed it to bring his sister Pearl out from Shelby. All these people were gathered in the house when Martha let herself in through the back porch door, although the men were in the front room and the women in the kitchen, which at least relieved her from meeting everyone at once. Louise, who had been in the kitchen since before the break of day and was bent over the roast with her head half inside the open oven, merely said, "Well, there you are," when Martha came in, and left it to her daughter and Pearl Bayard to introduce themselves.

The young woman who had been employing a potato masher set it down and reached out with both damp hands. "I'm Miriam," she said with a light laugh. She was the very image of her mother, which should have put Martha at ease, but mother and daughter behind their aprons were both daintily dressed in dark red Christmas frocks, which made her heart fail her. Pearl Bayard too was finely dressed in a gown of blue watered silk still elegant despite being bleached out a bit and worn around
the seams. Pearl sat in a kitchen chair, her hands idle in her lap, and though she smiled slightly and said to Martha, "Hello, I am Pearl Bayard," she didn't stand up from the chair.

Louise, as she began to lift the roaster pan out of the oven, said, "Maisie, you had better—" and Miriam made a clucking sound of amused exasperation. "Mother, you haven't called me Maisie since the boys were little."

Louise straightened with a startled look and stood a moment holding up the heavy roaster in her towel-wrapped hands. "Oh my goodness, why did I do that."

Miriam said to Pearl and Martha, "Jack couldn't say 'Miriam' when he was a boy, so that was what they all called me when we were children. I had just about forgotten that."

Louise set the roast down on the kitchen table. "I wish they would have let Jack come home for Christmas, but there it is," she said, and smiled stiffly. She made quite a business of folding the towels.