The Hearts of Horses (2 page)

He lifted his eyebrows. "Ten to get them started or will that get them finished?"

Since this was the first time she'd been asked to name a price, she was easily warned off. She'd been helping out her dad since she was old enough to sit her own horse, and she'd been about thirteen the first time anybody hired her to move cattle or gather horses off the open range or round up a runaway team. She'd been breaking horses since she was fifteen but it had always been something she'd done in her spare time while she was working summers on one ranch or another and not something she'd been paid separately for. "I expect I can get them close to finished for ten dollars," she said, looking down into her coffee. She knew the hard part wasn't climbing onto a horse for the first time and a decent working horse might take a year or two to truly finish, and she thought George Bliss must know this too. But she could get a horse pretty well along in a few weeks, and after that it would be a matter of the horse gaining experience. She waited and when nothing more was said, she added, "If you aren't happy with the way they turn out, you don't have to pay me."

Mr. Bliss looked at his wife, who had by now hung up the telephone and come back to the table. Martha wanted to know what sort of look Louise Bliss was giving back to him but she deliberately kept from acting interested: she turned the coffee cup in her two hands and looked down at her thumbs rubbing along the rolled rim of the china.

"That was the hardware store over in Bingham," Louise said, because George's questioning look had been about the telephone and not at all to do with Martha Lessen. "The nails and wire have come in, and after all this time, I should hope so." George knew whose nails and wire she meant, and merely
nodded at his coffee. Then Louise said suddenly, "Do you know? This girl sitting here is named Martha?" as if she expected the news to amaze him.

George said, "Is that so," with no more than mild interest. "Well Miss Martha, let's go out and take a look at them broncs and you tell me do you think you can make them into cow ponies." He winked at her without smiling and set his coffee down and went out through the back porch into the yard.

"Thanks for the coffee," she told Louise Bliss and followed the man outside.

His two white mules were standing there tied to the porch rails; George Bliss had saddled them before he had come inside the house. He climbed onto one of them and when she realized what was expected of her Martha got up on the other and they rode out to find the horses. The yellow dog ran to get ahead because it was his habit to take the lead, a habit that had resulted in his acquiring the name Pilot.

The war had encouraged George Bliss to plow up a big stretch of his deeded pastureland to plant wheat, so his wheat fields, fenced and cross-fenced and edged with irrigation ditches and diversion dams, took up most of the flattish ground to the east and the south near the homeplace. George led Martha the back way, north through a gate into the grass and bitter-brush foothills. After forty minutes or so they went up through another gate into the scattered timber of the Clarks Range. Those mountains had been part of Teddy Roosevelt's freshly minted Blue Mountain Forest Reserve back in '06, then were split off into their own reserve about 1912. The Taylor Grazing Act and all the rules and rigamarole of leasing from the government were a good fifteen years off at that point and George was still using the mountains as pasture for his livestock, was still wintering his horses and some of his cattle in the grassy
canyons inside the reserve. He and Martha began scouring the creek bottoms one after the other, looking for the horses he wanted to show her.

She had a cowboy's disregard for mules—a mule lacked the dignity and honorableness of a horse was one of the things she believed. But this belief wasn't in any way based on experience and it was a surprise to her to discover that the white mule had a nice swinging walk and a sure foot and a look in his eye that struck her as entirely dignified. When they had been riding in silence for a while, she finally worked up the nerve to say a few words to George Bliss about the mule's gait and his sure-footedness. He told her, "Well, a mule is no good for working cattle, I guess you know, but I've always been partial to them for packing or if I'm going up into broken ground. They never put their foot wrong is my experience. My daddy used to raise mules for the army, which is how I got interested in them. They've got a lot of good sense. A mule won't put up with a lopsided load; he'll walk right up to a tree and scrape it off. I guess if I was smart I ought to go to raising them again, with the war and all, and there being a lot of call for mules."

The girl's showy rodeo costume had caused him to saddle the mules out of amused contrariness—he intended to surprise and upend her. But now that she had spoken well of the mules he was coming to a slightly different opinion of her, and he began looking for a way to feel out her knowledge. After he'd thought about it he said, "These mules come out of a mare, Tulip, that I wish I had a dozen more just like her. She was half-Shire, and her mule colts was good big work animals. People say it's the stud, but when it comes to mules my money's on the mare."

Even farm girls in those days were modest and circumspect when it came to talking to men about the details and mechanics of stock breeding, so George didn't say anything further
along those lines; but all the time they were riding he went on talking in the same indirect way about matters to do with horses, especially anything to do with their breaking. He was mildly trying to provoke an opinion out of Martha Lessen without ever directly asking her anything. "I guess you know a mule is just about nothing to break," he told her. "You can climb up on a mule and he'll raise his back once or twice and then settle down to work, that easy." And later on he said, "I don't know what the difference is, or why horses have got to be so hard about it."

She had opinions and might have stated them; it was just from natural shyness and a failure to realize what he was fishing for that she didn't say much. But as he kept on with it, she finally figured out what George was after and began to speak up, and once she got going she had plenty to say. She told him, for instance, about her preference for a McClelland saddle when she was breaking a horse, because those old cavalry saddles were light in the stirrup leathers and she liked how they let her feel the horse, and the horse feel her. She told him she liked to use her own homemade basal hackamore as long as possible on a green colt and after that a snaffle bit; and that she didn't have much use for a spade bit. She told him when a horse misbehaved she figured it was for one of two reasons: either he didn't understand what you wanted or the bad behavior hadn't ever been corrected in the past. She said that in her experience horses weren't mean unless some man made them that way; but some horses, once they'd been made mean, just weren't worth the time it took to break them. "Like people," she said, glancing at George. "Some people just belong in prison and some horses just belong in the rodeo."

They made a full swing along the timbered breaks of the foothills, passing through several small bunches of cows and steers, and three different bands of horses. In one bunch of fif
teen or twenty mares, George pointed out a young buckskin stud horse he said was half-Arab that he'd bought to improve his herd. Martha said appreciatively, "He's got an awfully nice-looking head," and after watching him a moment—he was tossing his head, kicking and rearing and whinnying, showing off for George and Martha in front of his wives—she also said, "Those young horses sure like to make a big show," without saying what had come into her mind, which was a young stallion she knew of who'd been put into pasture all one summer with half a dozen experienced brood mares without producing a single foal. Those mares had just been disgusted by his adolescent male lordliness, and they hadn't ever let him cover them.

He showed her maybe forty horses altogether, and among the last band the four-year-olds he wanted to have broken to saddle, a bay and a chestnut, both of them geldings. The chestnut, when he moved, had an odd action, a kind of conspicuous engagement of the hips, which Martha thought might make for a smooth trot. They were in their long winter coats and looked pretty rough, almost wild. She doubted they had much memory of being halter-broke, but if they'd been broken out in the usual way then not remembering was good news as far as she was concerned. She told George Bliss her opinion about the chestnut, the way he lifted his hips, and George gave the horse a close look in silence and then said, "Well, it do look different," without saying whether he thought she was right about the horse having a smooth gait.

When they got back to the house it was late in the afternoon, the daylight already failing, and it had grown pretty cold. They put up the saddles and turned the mules loose in the stubble field by the road and stood watching them trot off to rejoin the other animals. The cows in that field were all of a type, short horns and short-coupled bodies and red-brown
hides spotted rarely with white. "Those is Louise's cows," George said. "I hate those pure breeds, all that extra work trying to keep them separate, and all the paper filing and so forth. Her daddy give her two registered ones when we was married and she was just dumb enough to like it." Martha would have taken this at face value if it had been her own dad saying it. She didn't know how to take George Bliss, who sounded only cheerfully long-suffering.

"Well, let's go eat," he said to her, and slapped his palms on the top rail of the fence. She had expected George Bliss to say yes or no while they were standing there looking over his animals, and he hadn't given her the word either way. She had a sleeping bag and tent with her and some sandwiches and cheese, and had more or less imagined that if she had trouble finding work she'd sleep in fields or sheds and make do with her own groceries. She didn't know if George Bliss's invitation to supper constituted an unspoken offer of employment. If she thought she was hired, she'd have wanted to put up her horses before going in to eat; but there was no way to know if Mr. Bliss had just forgotten about her animals standing saddled in his barn or if he hadn't yet made up his mind whether to hire her on.

She followed him across the shadowy yard and around to the back door, onto the closed-in porch where they kept the wash basin and a towel. He let Martha have first turn at the water, which may have been a concession to her femaleness. She was used to elbowing a turn with her brothers and her dad, used to dirty towels and brown water, but sometimes when she'd worked on other ranches the men would put her at the head of the line. She didn't mind being singled out for such things but liked it better when the men seemed to forget she was a girl. Once some women relatives of the boss, women dressed in linen suits and delicate shoes, had come out to watch a branding crew where Martha was helping out, and some of the men had grum
bled about it. "When there's women hanging around it sure takes your mind off what we're doing, don't it?" one of them had said to her seriously.

She washed her hands and stepped into the kitchen, where George's wife was turning out sourdough biscuits from a pan. A man with a graying handlebar mustache was sitting at the table drinking coffee and he gave her a curious look. He was about forty, with a falling-away jaw and thinning brown hair and old pockmark scars on his cheeks. Martha nodded to him and took off her hat and stood holding it and waiting, without knowing whether she ought to help Louise Bliss bring the soup and biscuits to the table, which was something some ranches would have expected a hired girl to do, or whether to sit down with the hired man. When George Bliss came into the kitchen she saw he had hung his hat on a peg on the back porch and so she stepped back out and found a peg for her own hat there. The Blisses were both sitting by then, and she took one of the remaining chairs. She wished she had had sense enough to take off her chaps and leave them outside—the old-fashioned batwings took up a lot of room under the table—but it was too late to do anything about that now.

"Dear Lord bless this food and the horses and cows and the other animals and our children and all the boys in France and all the little Flanders children who are hungry," Louise Bliss said with closed eyes while her husband and the hired man looked down into their laps with identical expressions of seriousness.

"Amen," they said quietly when Louise had come to the end of her prayer.

As the food began to be passed, George said to Martha, "This here is Ellery Bayard but don't never call him that, he goes by El. El, this here is Martha Lessen who is a broncobuster."

El Bayard said, "Is that right?" matter-of-factly without seeming to be amused by the spectacle of a girl bronc rider; and this, together with his family name, immediately put him in a good light with Martha: Bayard was the name of a legendary horse she had read of who had outraced the army of Charlemagne while carrying four men on his back. El's right arm was fixed or nearly fixed in a half-bent position as if it had been broken once and poorly set. He made deft use of it lifting and passing plates and bowls but it was a puzzle to Martha how he would ever manage to get a saddle onto a horse or shovel out a hole or tighten a fence wire. Martha was left-handed and had been made to feel self-conscious about it, especially when she was with new people, but El Bayard's frozen arm seemed in some way to mitigate her shyness as she spooned her soup with the wrong hand.

They had eaten their dinner earlier in the day and supper was therefore pretty light. There was turnip and carrot in the soup and a chicken may have run through the pot on its way to somewhere else, or more likely this was one of the meatless days that had become patriotic in the last few months. Given that there wasn't much to eat, Martha minded her appetite, though the only food she had had all day was a breakfast of toast and buttermilk, and a sandwich eaten while in the saddle riding down from the Ipsoot Pass. When Louise Bliss encouraged her to eat up the last biscuit, she allowed herself to be persuaded.

Talk at the supper table was devoted to the war. In the afternoon newspaper had come more news of the fighting around Passchendaele, finally taken by the Canadians after months of bloody battle. In the midst of something the men were saying about soldiers who had drowned in the deep mud of the trenches, Louise Bliss stood up from the table and said in a tired voice, "I just can't bear to think about it." As she clattered
dishes and stepped back and forth from table to sink, her husband gave his hired man a silencing look. Then he pushed his chair back and said to Martha, "Let's go turn out those horses you brung with you. I guess I forgot entirely about that."