The Hearts of Horses (22 page)

On the third Sunday of January in that first winter of the Great War, Martha Lessen went up there with a big group of Will Wright's friends, including Henry Frazer and El Bayard. She had been riding the circle seven days a week for nearly two
months, and Louise Bliss wouldn't hear of her spending another Sunday on horseback. Martha thought this would lead to a morning at church with the Blisses and an afternoon playing pinochle with George, or sitting by the stove in the bunkhouse reading
The Last of the Mohicans
while El mended harness or knitted socks; but it turned out Will Wright's friends had planned a skating party at Stanley's Camp, a last revel before his upcoming wedding. Louise paid no attention at all when Martha tried to beg off. She had already telephoned the Woodruff sisters, she said, and borrowed a pair of skates for Martha. Henry Frazer would be around in the Woodruff sleigh at the earliest hour of Sunday morning to collect El and Martha, the Bliss sleigh having already been loaned to Will and Lizzie, who were going up on Saturday with several of their friends, the girls to stay in the cabins and the boys to camp on the snow in tents.

The Blisses kept a great oak-trimmed steel and enamel tub in its own small room off the kitchen, and at Louise's instigation the ranch hands had the regular use of it. Although the hot water had to be carried from the kitchen stove, the tub was a grand luxury for all concerned—it was the only fixed bathtub in the rural parts of Elwha County in those days—and especially well regarded by Martha, who was completely unaccustomed to the privacy of a separate bath room and had never before had the use of a tub deep and long enough for soaking and stretching out her legs. Ordinarily she had her bath every Thursday night, but with the skating party in the offing Louise shifted her to Saturday night, clear evidence of female favoritism but not remarked upon by any of the men nor objected to by Martha herself. On Saturday night she slid down in the water until it lapped the underside of her chin and soaked for a quarter of an hour.

She had been careful in the past to bring her own bar of lye soap and not make use of any of the Blisses' collection of ointments and toilet preparations, but this night after thinking twice about it she cautiously helped herself to a lavender-scented hair soap, worked it into her hair, and rinsed it out with particular care; and she took a hard little brush from the wash-stand and used it to scrub around her fingernails and toenails and then behind her ears until she wore the skin thin and bright pink; after brushing her teeth with baking soda, she made a paste of the Blisses' gritty tooth powder and scrupulously cleaned them again. By then the bath water was cool. The tub had a waste plug and drain that emptied into a barrel behind the house, which Louise used to irrigate her kitchen garden. While the water slowly emptied around her, Martha went on sitting in the tub grimly examining her body, which was a map of bruises and half-healed scrapes. Finally she stood on the rag rug and dried herself with a towel and applied Louise's almond lotion to her cracked heels and hands and worked her oily fingers through her hair in hope the lotion might act like a hair tonic and keep her hair from flying away once it dried. She couldn't have said why the skating party had become a matter of such concern and importance to her.

In the morning, Martha and El waited on the porch with the provisions and furnishings for the day's expedition piled around them in boxes, waiting in silence after eating in silence in the shadowy kitchen, a cold breakfast Louise had set out for them the night before. They'd been afraid even to boil a pot of coffee, since it would have meant rattling wood in the stove while George and Louise were still asleep upstairs. But if there was ever in the world a better sound than sleigh bells in the early morning Martha didn't know what it was, and her throat just about closed up when Henry Frazer drove over the hill in
the Woodruffs' sleigh, bright red and yellow with new paint, the pretty chestnut Belgians in their silver-chased harness, a high arch of Swedish bells over the hames.

Before the sleigh had come to a good stop Henry called out, "There's about half a foot of snow on the ground and not much wind," in a voice too loud for the time of morning, loud enough to rouse the Blisses out of sleep, which made Martha wonder why she had bothered to give up her morning coffee.

The floorboards at the back of the sleigh were already crowded with foodstuffs brought from the Woodruffs, and Henry was amused when he saw they were carrying more groceries. "I guess we won't starve," he said. His round face, caught between a scarf and a pulled-down hat, was pink with cold, and he looked even more barrel-chested than usual in layers of coats and sweaters.

They sat three in a row on the leather cushions, and Henry brought forward a wool army blanket and two quilts, which he spread across their knees. Then he spoke to the horses and they stepped out with their necks bowed, their breath smoking the air. Martha had earlier pulled her hair back in a damp knot—it had not quite dried overnight—and pinned it under a wool cap Louise had loaned her, which was not as warm as the silk stocking she wore when she was riding the circle but considerably prettier; she wore her warmest wool trousers and sheep-lined gloves and had twisted a scarf around her throat under the collar of her coat. Even so, waiting on the porch in the pale dawn she had been cold and shivery, and now the race of sharp air made her eyes water, her nose run. But she found, squeezed between the shoulders of the two men, that she wasn't cold at all and was suddenly wide awake—too nervous to feel dull from need of coffee.

Henry offered an opinion about the recent weather, how this snow was a good thing for the wheat but they would still have
to hope for more of it, or a wet spring, to make any kind of wheat crop. He asked after George and Louise's health, and he said to Martha that he had been painting York's cheek with carbolic as she had asked him to and that the mark on the horse's face looked to be healing up all right. At one point when they were passing close by the rail yard in Shelby, Henry said, "I guess it was last year when we had all that snow pile up, there was a hobo jumped off the train when he saw the lights of town, and then he must've got cold and wet. Anyway, they found him dead the next day, just in that field between the rail yard and the river." Since this didn't seem to be in reference to anything, neither Martha nor El gave him much in the way of response.

Martha, for her part, had made up her mind not to always rattle on about horses, which meant that every minute she became more self-conscious and tongue-tied. And El was never a talker in any circumstance. Henry spent a few minutes working uphill against the untalkativeness of the other two and then gradually fell silent himself, which was not an uncomfortable state of affairs as far as Martha was concerned. The jangling of the bells and the rhythmic stride of the horses and the slight squeaking of the sleigh runners over the snow made her entirely happy. Her dad had never seen the need of a sleigh, so in snowy weather they kept close to home or drove a heavy democrat wagon behind laboring horses, which may have been why she was uncommonly fond of sleigh rides and glad for half a foot of snow, which was barely enough to warrant one.

They were the better part of two hours getting across the twelve or fifteen miles to the lake. Henry let the horses follow the roads quite a while, but once they were west of Bingham they left the road and headed southwest across the countryside. El got down and opened gates a time or two, but the foothills came down close to the river at the west end of the county and
the timbered slopes hadn't been taken over by wheat fields or little homestead farms; when they finally crossed the boundary into the Whitehorn Forest Reserve they left all the fences behind and began climbing through an open country of pine and spruce and white fir and crossing shallow creeks one after the other, the sleigh runners cutting neatly through ice that ledged the stream banks. It had been foggy along the valley bottom but now the sun broke white and glittery in a dark blue sky. The snow here was deeper, and the limbs of the trees sagged under heavy cloaks. They rode in and out of tree shadow and bright sun.

Right after they struck the road going up to Stanley's Camp they overtook a man riding a well-built stock horse and towing behind him a burdened pack horse and three worn-out-looking horses who were making a slow job of it, going uphill in the icy tracks of sleighs. He pulled all his horses off to the side to let their sleigh go by, but when Henry saw who it was he stopped the sleigh alongside him and leaned around Martha and said, "Orville, I guess you're working, but you ought to come up to Stanley's for the skating."

The man's chapped face was wreathed round by a knitted wool scarf tied under his chin. He peered out from the thick muffler and said, "Hey Henry, hey El," and touched his gloved fingers to his forehead and said, "Miss Lessen," as if they had met, though she didn't remember it. "I'm going up to the divide," he said, "but I'd sure rather be at Stanley's. You fellows keep a good thought for me. I'll be eating out of the government nosebag for the next few days, and I imagine you'll be eating peach pie and pork chops."

Martha remembered him then, and she looked again at the horses he was towing behind him, their muzzles hanging close to the ground, the heavy fog of their breath stirring the dry snow. They were bone-thin, those horses; she guessed they
would have been sold for glue if they weren't here with Orville Tippett, who was the Biological Survey man and who spent his winters trapping coyotes and all kinds of cats—bobcats, cougars, lynx—and any wolves that might be left in the county, anything that might be expected to sneak down from the mountains to take a calf or a lamb. Sheepmen and some of the ranchers supplied him with old horses he took up into the mountains and shot for bait. Martha had met him at church with the Blisses or at the Woodruffs' party, she couldn't recall which, and people had told her what he did for a living.

Henry said cheerfully, "We will eat up your share, Orville, you can count on it," and he kissed to the sleigh horses to go ahead. The clay-colored horse Orville Tippett was riding turned yellow eyes toward them and made a deep throaty mare sound, which encouraged one of the Belgians to nicker and shift hindquarters toward her as they were stepping out. When they were a ways down the road, Henry said, "Orville works out of the Portland office, I guess, but he spends pretty much of the winter up here in the reserve, doing away with varmints."

This seemed meant for Martha so she said, "I heard that was what he did." After a minute or two, she said, "Did you think one of those bait horses had a little Belgian in him, judging from the feathering on his legs?"

"He looked like it to me," Henry said, and El Bayard looked at both of them and said, "They was plugs," in a tone of disgusted astonishment, and which they didn't argue with.

When they were still a couple of miles away from the lake, a column of smoke began to show itself, rising straight up above the crowns of the trees. Henry shook his head and said, "I guess they've got a bonfire going," and El made a slight sound that might have been amusement and said, "It's a good thing they're not hiding out from the law," which was only about the second thing he had said all day. El had a dry sense of humor
that not everybody appreciated, but Henry laughed, which was a bit of a surprise to Martha. There was something between El and Henry, she had noticed, a guardedness that left them often silent in each other's company. She had taken this for coolness, an unresolved argument, but in truth, it had all to do with the car wreck that had crippled Pearl and killed Henry's brother—each of them overcareful and shy about saying anything that might bring up that old shared sorrow in the other man's mind.

As soon as they cleared the trees north of the lake Henry pulled up the team, which he said was to breathe the horses but it may have been to let everybody, including the horses, take in the view. It was the kind of view that could make your heart turn over, the long lake nestled in a bowl with the craggy peaks of the Whitehorn Range rising steeply all around. An old glacial moraine, rocky under the snow, bound the shore in a hairpin ridge along the south and west, and a spur of the Whitehorns, dense with trees, came steeply down on the east side. The lake glittered in the sun, an immense sheet of platinum mottled with thin floats of pure white ice. At the outlet the Little Bird Woman River spilled out across a wide plain of rocks and, almost full-grown, shot off through the trees to the northeast.

Stanley had put up his livery and corrals on a small hook of land that jutted out into the lake, and built the cabins at the prettiest point in the meadow east of the river. Will's friends had laid down floorboards and put up two walled tents, one to house their kitchen and one to house the men, just north of the lodging cabins. The snow had been shoveled out and trampled down around the tents and the cabins, and a maze of beaten paths crossed each other going down to the lakeshore and across the meadow to the skating rink and off into the trees where several sleighs were parked on the snow. Eight or ten
horses stood nosing through trampled hay in a corral beside the livery.

Some of Will's party were out on the skating rink but the rest were at the camp, going in through the pinned-back door of the cook tent and carrying out tin plates, or they were already sitting on stones or logs upwind from the smoke of the big bonfire and balancing plates on their knees. When Henry veered the Belgians toward the livery somebody from the crowd around the bonfire shouted out, "There's still some flapjacks left but you'd better get over here at the double or they'll be gone!" which brought general laughter.

At the livery, before he had even stepped down from the sleigh, Henry turned to Martha and said, "I don't know if they were joking or not but you ought to get yourself some coffee and cakes before they eat everything up. El and me will get some help with the horses and the unpacking."

To head off and eat before the horses were put away wasn't something she ever did when she was a hired hand; but she had made up her mind to behave like the other girls today. Two young men she didn't know were already walking over to the sleigh, their jaws still working on a last bite of breakfast, and all the girls were sitting, eating their flapjacks. So Martha crossed the beaten-down snow to the cook tent and found a boy inside cooking on a cast-iron griddle on the lid of a sheepherder's stove. She didn't know if he was one of Will's friends or someone who worked for Stanley Cambridge; he was pink-faced and distracted and he barely glanced at her.