The Hearts of Horses (18 page)

"Oh!" the girl said, and looked at Ruth in shock. "I'm sorry."

Ruth immediately regretted she had said it so bluntly. She didn't know why she had. The girl was very young and there was something in her manner, a kind of tenderness. She wouldn't know what it meant to lose a husband; she would imagine it was like losing a favorite horse or a dog.

"It's all right. But my husband shouldn't have bought the horse, I don't know why he did." She was strangled by sorrow suddenly, and couldn't go on with what she had meant to say, or even remember what it was.

Ruth Kandel had seemed to Martha to be an unhappy and unfriendly woman, distracted, restless, which Martha now thought was due to Tom's illness. And she hardly knew Tom Kandel—she knew his blue roan horse, the one she had been calling Dandy, better than she knew Tom. Now that Mrs. Kandel had told her Tom was dying, she thought of those few minutes when she had met up with him on the Sunday before Christmas, and how he had spoken of his son, Fred, with a look of soft affection in his face.

Martha said again, "I am just so sorry."

Ruth looked toward her briefly and nodded without answering. The sympathy of her friends and neighbors felt like nothing to her, was just a weightlessness in her arms. She accepted it because it wasn't their fault they had nothing else for her, nothing she could hold on to, nothing that was any help at all.

Martha, whose mother had suffered a string of miscarriages,
had often watched neighbors come through the door with casseroles, and with their arms full of the Lessens' clean, pressed laundry; she had learned early the kinds of things that were useful when people were sick. Now that she'd heard about Tom's cancer, she had already given up thinking about the Kandel farm as an extra stop. She said, "I'm going around the circle every day and coming right by here. If there's anything I can bring for you, or take out, it wouldn't be any trouble at all. I could bring your mail or the groceries. I'm already carrying mail around to some of the other people on the circle and I could just bring yours too." Thinking of Tom feeding cows over at the Rocker V, she said, "If you want to send him a lunch over there where he's working—if he's not walking home every day for it—I could pick it up and take it to him." She said all of this matter-of-factly, as if there was no reason at all for Ruth Kandel to refuse.

Ruth looked up at her and then said in quite a different voice, "Thank you. I do want him to have a hot lunch but it's too far to expect him to walk back and forth." She smiled slightly. "His appetite is gone but I keep trying to feed him." She had to hold back an impulse to tell the girl every damn thing that had been running through her mind these past few weeks. This had more to do with Martha's open face and the patience with which she sat and waited on that horse than with anything she had said.

They went on talking together for a few minutes more, working out the business of taking lunch to Mr. Kandel and getting mail from the Bingham post office, and then Martha rode off toward the Rocker V while Ruth stood at the fence a little longer. She was bundled in a thick coat and a worn felt hat—they had had a string of cold days—but her hands were bare, the knuckles red and chapped where they gripped the basket. She didn't watch the girl ride away but stood holding
the heavy splint basket and looking north toward the Clarks Range, or where the Clarks Range would be if you could see the mountains. Fog had been coming down to the valley floor in the mornings and then sometimes clearing out in the afternoons but today had only just lifted above the tops of the trees.

Ruth Kandel was not one of those women for whom husbands or fathers made all the decisions. She had been as eager as Tom to come West and try herself against the land and raise their son on a farm. The world out here was large and beautiful as nowhere else, and she loved it, every part of it, and their life in it. She was never tired of the view from her porch, the ground sloping off north across their neighbor's wheat fields to the river and the white mountains braced against the sky, had never felt as she did here, every day, a sense of herself alive in the world.

She had barely begun to think of all she would lose when Tom died.

W.
G. BOYD'S WIFE
had died in 1910 after an illness. Then in 1913, as if a terrible family inheritance had been passed down, his son, Clyde, lost his wife in a train derailment as she was returning home from a visit to her parents in Chicago. For the next few years, Clyde and his young son, Joe, went on living in a rented house in Pendleton, where Clyde worked as a telephone lineman, but when he was called to Kansas in the summer of 1917 to teach soldiers how to string telephone line, the boy came to live with his grandfather.

W.G. owned about ten acres of land at the edge of Bingham and got his living primarily from a small planer mill in the summer and from making butcher knives and pocket knives from old saw blades in the winter. He had another line of work as well, although it gave him little in the way of income. People up and down the valley of the Little Bird Woman River brought him sick or mistreated animals for rehabilitation—horses, milk cows, goats, dogs, rabbits, pigs, as well as wounded owls and orphaned fawns and once a coyote pup whose foot had been mauled in a leg-hold trap. Sometimes he was paid for
his veterinary work in cash or barter but more often people simply dropped off sick or dying animals, conferring not only ownership but the trouble of disposing of the carcass if the animal failed to thrive. W.G. never turned away an animal, and although he was unschooled he had a natural gift for seeing what was troubling these creatures; fairly often he was able to help them to a recovery. Two or three times a year he took to auction a few head of livestock he had seen through to health and in that way managed to recoup his costs for feed and assorted healing agents. Several dogs, including one with three legs, lived at the Boyd place, as well as numerous cats and an assortment of scarred and aged or otherwise unwanted livestock. It was a paradise, more or less, for a ten-year-old boy.

Among the animals W.G. was feeding that winter was the young black gelding, Skip, who had been left with him after being badly scared and hurt by dragging a loose pole behind him. W.G. was working in his shop on a cold day in the middle of January, showing his grandson how to whet the burr off a finished knife, when Martha rode Skip into the yard. They had shut the dogs into the cowshed to keep them from causing a ruckus if Martha rode in while they were working, and when they heard the dogs barking and scratching at the door Joe looked out and said, "Grandpa, she's got Skip."

There were fourteen horses on the circle, and seven stops, which meant the horses got ridden every other day, and it took a horse a couple of weeks to make it clear around to his home corral; the Boyds had seen Skip only one other time since Martha had started the horses. "Now don't run up at him," W.G. called after the boy, who had already wormed past the workbench and was out in the yard. But the boy knew how skittish the horse was—he hadn't needed W.G.'s warning—and when W.G. came out of the shop, Joe was walking up to Skip slowly from the side so the horse could see him coming and he was
crooning soft words of praise he'd picked up from listening to Martha Lessen, "Well my goodness, aren't you a good old horse, I sure think you are," and so forth. W.G. stopped where he was and watched them come together, the boy and the horse and the girl. Joe thought the world of Martha—there were children all over the valley who worshipped her—and it amused and charmed W.G. to see the shining look that came into the boy's face whenever he got near her.

Martha gave Joe a brief, approving look and stepped off the horse and held the headstall up close under the throat while Joe touched the horse along the shoulder and the neck. Skip stood patiently. W.G. could see that he'd come a long way in the last two weeks. Horses evidently thought the world of Martha Lessen too.

"Hello, child," W.G. said.

"Hello, Mr. Boyd. Skip is coming along pretty well."

"I can see he is. You'll have him steady as the Rock of Gibraltar before long."

She flashed a brief smile of satisfaction. "I don't know about that."

"Do you have time to come inside? I've got some coffee on the back of the stove that'll wake you right up. You can stand a fork up in it."

She laughed. "I'd better not. I'm starting to think we might get some snow tonight." She had gone on working as she talked to him, had already loose-hobbled Skip and was pulling off the saddle.

It had been a cold dry day—this winter seemed to have an excess of such days, parading methodically down the valley one after the other like solemn children going Indian file—but W.G. had been smelling something damp in the air all afternoon, a certain quality to the cold. "We might," he said, and
looked toward the northwest, where the gray overcast had grown dark along the crown of the Clarks Range. "All those farmers with winter wheat must be hoping for a real snowfall. We've had an awfully dry winter. But I guess that's not what you're hoping for."

"No. But it's all right. I won't mind as long as it doesn't get too drifted." She led Skip to the corral. Joe went ahead of her and swung open the gate and then shut it behind her. She said, "Thanks, Joey." He wouldn't stand for his grandfather to call him Joey anymore, but he let Martha Lessen get away with it. When she had stripped the horse of his bridle and hobble she stood a moment in front of him, scratching his neck. W.G. had noticed she never liked to let a horse walk away from her until she had walked away from him. Skip reached his head forward and rubbed her shoulder lightly with the side of his muzzle, as if they were two horses standing head to tail grooming each other. "Goodness, you're such a pretty old thing," she murmured to him, which made W.G. smile.

After a bit, she turned to the two other horses in the corral, one sandy brown and one chestnut. The big chestnut belonged to Bill Varden's Rocker V Ranch; he'd been in the Boyd corral a couple of days and was due to go out. She clucked to him and held the bridle out to the horse like a gift. He turned his head to look, and after thinking about it he walked right up to her. Even the sandy horse looked as if he might have liked to be invited.

Joe, who had climbed up on the corral rails to watch her, said, "He wants to go out for a ride."

"Yes he does. He doesn't much care for standing around in a small corral all day." W.G. had seen early on that this was a good part of Martha's plan. The horses were bored and quickly learned to welcome being ridden out; they were usually happy to see her.

"Is he called Nickel because he's not worth a plugged nickel?" Joe knew the name of every horse Martha was riding around the circle.

"I don't know. He's sure worth more than a nickel, though, if you ask me."

Joe said with a huge grin, "I'd take all the nickel horses I could get," and Martha laughed. "I would too."

It was part of her ritual to always brush the dirt and mud off a horse before she saddled him, and to run her hands all over his body, especially his legs. While she was wiping down the chestnut horse with a burlap sack, Martha said quietly to W.G., "Mr. Boyd, did you hear about Tom Kandel having cancer?"

W.G.'s wife, Anne, had died of a cancer that had started in one of her breasts and then flared up in her spine. In the nearly eight years since Anne's death, he hadn't personally known anybody else taken by the disease. There was a way in which the very word
cancer
had seemed to belong to him and to Anne. He didn't think Martha Lessen knew any of this—folks might have told her he had lost his wife, but probably not anything about how she'd died.

He looked down at his hands and then over at his grandson, who was straddling the top rail of the corral looking down at Skip or watching Martha rub down the nickel horse, pretending not to overhear Martha and W.G. talk about a dying neighbor. "I did hear about it," W.G. told Martha. "How is Tom doing, do you know?"

Martha crouched down, and W.G. heard her say something quietly to the horse as she ran her hand down his hind leg. To W.G. she said, "Mrs. Kandel told me today that he might have to give up his job on the Rocker V. I didn't see him, she said he was inside the house resting, but I guess he was too sick today to go over there and feed cows." She met W.G.'s eyes briefly.
"I've been taking him a lunch the past two or three weeks but I don't know if he's been eating it. He's awful thin."

They didn't say anything else about the Kandels but talked a little more about the weather as she saddled the chestnut and then put her boot in the stirrup and climbed up on the horse. She liked all the horses to know they weren't to move ahead until she gave them the say-so, and the chestnut stood quietly under her. She asked him to bring his head toward one of her knees and then the other, which she had told Joe was to keep him soft in the mouth, and then asked the horse to take a few steps back, his neck soft, before she let him know it was all right to move ahead.

Joe jumped down and swung the gate open to let them through, and then W.G. and Joe stood out of the way and watched her put Nickel through the quick turns and spins and
whoas
she always started with, there in the yard. The Boyd yard had been hard-packed earth but by now was pretty well broken up and cratered from horses' hooves digging in to turn and stop. When she had the horse good and warmed up—it always looked to W.G. like a sort of dance—she lifted her voice to carry over to where W.G. and Joe were watching. "I'd better go along before the snow gets here."

"Bye, Martha," Joe called to her.

"See you tomorrow, Joey," she called back to him, and rode off at a trot.

W.G. and his grandson went back into the shop to finish work on the knife. While he was guiding Joe's hands to hold the knife and the whetstone at proper angles to each other, W.G. said, "I guess you don't remember your grandmother."

Joe had been barely three years old when his grandmother died. His father and his grandfather spoke of her from time to time in some story they were telling about the past, but Joe didn't remember her. Sometimes a particular smell—the
starched, boiled-water smell of freshly ironed clothes—put him in mind of her, and he had a brief recollection of floured hands on a rolling pin, which he thought were his grandmother's hands. He had been six when his mother was killed, and his secret fear was that his mother was becoming as vague to him as his grandmother, no more than two hands and the smell of clean clothes. He charmed himself to sleep sometimes by going over and over certain memories of his mother in order to keep them fixed in his mind, like the lines of a poem he might be expected to recite at any time. He didn't say any of this to his grandfather. He said, "No sir," and kept his eyes on the whetstone and the blade of the knife.