The Hearts of Horses (23 page)

The tent smelled strongly of coffee, which brought back in her a needful craving, and she found an empty cup and poured it full from the big dented pot on the edge of the stove, coffee very dark and oily and just under the boiling point. If there was cream anywhere in the tent she didn't see it. When the boy
handed her a plate of cakes, she found the huckleberry jam and smeared some over, and then went out and sat on the end of a log and bent her head to the food. She was glad she didn't have Dolly with her, who would have been alarmed by the size of the bonfire.

Half a dozen people were still eating their breakfast. She knew some of them—Roger Newbry and Mary Lee she remembered from the Odd Fellows Christmas party—but most she didn't recognize. She thought Will and Lizzie must be out skating on the flooded pond. There were probably twenty people altogether on the rink and around the fire, quite a few more than she'd been expecting. She was afraid even the ones she had met at the party might not remember her, or might be unfriendly. Every so often, she looked over toward Henry and El to see whether they were finished yet with unloading the boxes and turning out the horses, but otherwise kept her head down and plied her fork with frowning concentration, which gave people the idea she wasn't interested in friendship.

She would have gone back for more flapjacks if she had seen other girls doing it, but after her plate was wiped clean she went on sitting where she was, drinking down the bitter coffee slowly. She had thought Henry and El might sit with her to eat their flapjacks but when they came over from the livery they got swept up by their friends. She could hear Henry every little while, laughing or saying something that made other people laugh, but she kept from looking in his direction. It was a surprise, then, when he suddenly lowered himself on her log and handed over a cup of coffee whitened with cream and said, "I dumped in a bunch of sugar. You like things sweet, if I remember right."

"I don't have to have it," she said, which was meant to be a remark about sugar being in short supply. The words came out
stiff, which was from general embarrassment. She glanced at Henry. "Anyway, I didn't see that they had any sugar."

"I brought along a secret stash of that black beet sugar, and it doesn't seem to mind a bit, going into black coffee." His grin had a way of flattening the end of his nose, stretching the skin tight across the line of bone high up where his nose had been broken. He took a couple of swallows from his own cup, which was as milky as hers.

She said, "I didn't see the cream either."

"Well, I had to hunt for it, they're keeping it out of the hands of the unworthy." He was still smiling, looking down at his gloved thumbs where they fidgeted on either side of the coffee cup.

Martha drank down the sweet coffee gratefully.

"Have they got lakes up there around Pendleton?" Henry asked in a meditative sort of way but without notice or warning.

There weren't any lakes to speak of around Pendleton, just sinks and sloughs and watering holes and the canals and ditches dug by irrigation cooperatives, but she didn't want him to think she was a brush-popper who had never seen a body of water. She said, "We don't have a lake but we've got the Umatilla River that runs through the whole valley."

"I remember seeing that river. It's got quite a bit more water in it than the Little Bird Woman. Where's that river start from? Is it the Wallowas?"

"I don't know if it's the Wallowas or maybe the Blues." She was flustered, caught without solid knowledge of her own home territory.

"I've heard that's pretty country over there," he said, without making clear if he meant Pendleton or one of the mountain ranges. Martha thought Elwha County had Umatilla County beat all hollow in terms of scenery, but before she could say so,
Henry said, looking out at Lewis Lake in its cup of mountains, "But I guess I never have seen any place prettier than this. I wasn't but seventeen or so when I came here to Elwha County, and I never have wanted to leave."

In the front room of the Woodruff house was a painting she had admired, of a tree-lined canal in autumn and a pair of lovers holding hands, walking through dry leaves on a path beside the bank, and in the far back of the painting a stone bridge arching over the water. It was a scene outside anything in her own experience but she felt strongly that it was in France. She knew a boy in Pendleton who had gone into the army "to get out of the sticks and see that pretty French countryside," and when she had seen the Woodruffs' painting she had understood what he must have meant. She didn't know why Henry Frazer was staying put in Elwha County while so many other men had joined up and were on their way to see the Eiffel Tower and the French countryside, or if his remark about not leaving the valley had anything to do with that. She didn't know him well enough to ask. What popped into her head now was that the countryside in the Woodruffs' painting wasn't a scene a soldier was likely to see—not while the war was going on.

After a few minutes Henry said, squinting over toward the river, "I guess the Little Bird Woman is named for an Indian girl by that name who used to live around here. Indians used to come up here and spend the summer fishing and berry picking. I guess some of them would still be coming here but people complained, and the county passed a rule that keeps them out."

Martha tried to see the snowy meadow as it must have looked in those summers, in the days before Stanley Cambridge built his cabins: a cluster of tepees standing on long, golden grass at the edge of the lake. She didn't know why Elwha County had decided to keep the Indians out, if it might
have had to do with some reservation Indians driving off the government agents who tried to register them for the draft. But she wouldn't have minded if they were here right now. During the Round-Up, when Indians came over to Pendleton from the reservation and made a kind of encampment on the fairgrounds, she liked seeing their tepees. For those few days she almost felt like she was living in the old times before everything was so overrun with people, so settled and modern. She was thinking of saying something like that to Henry when he said, "There's some pictures they painted, up there on the rocks," and he made an incomplete gesture that seemed to take in the mountains all around them, "which've got to be pretty old, so I imagine Indians must have been coming up here every summer for a long time. Before any of us showed up—any white men, I mean."

She turned her head and peered at Henry. "What kinds of things did they draw?"

"Oh, horses and deer, things like that, and some that don't appear to be anything but lines and marks." He glanced at Martha. "It's a climb, but I could show you."

She straightened up slightly and said, "All right." She didn't mind having to walk in the snow, so she hoped he meant right now and not some indefinite time that might never happen. He didn't say which it was, but stood and took her plate and both cups from her and headed off with them to the cook tent, and she waited where she was because she still didn't know if he meant to show her the picture rocks now or later or if he had meant his remark only to be polite. As he was walking back up to her he looked at her feet and grinned and said, "Good thing we've both got our boots on," and then she knew.

He led her a short way up the edge of the lake along a path that had already been beaten through the snow and then he left the lake trail and began to break a way uphill into the trees, the
snow not even a foot deep in most places, so their boots took most of the wet and their trousers grew dark only around the turned-up cuffs. He and Martha both began huffing a bit as they climbed, and he looked back at her a couple of times but didn't slow down or say anything. The sounds of the skating party became thin and birdlike below them. She wanted to tell him she could take her turn breaking trail but since she didn't know where they were going she didn't say it. Every so often, with all the snowed-over rocks looking the same, he stopped to get his bearings in the timber and then he went on. Once he silently pointed out to her a row of small craters in the snow that could have been made by deer or elk or maybe sheep. The ground began to be cut with steep-walled ravines and narrow brushy draws where snowmelt would run in the spring. He zigzagged up the face of a sidehill until coming onto the high ridgeline, which they followed up, and after fifteen or twenty minutes they came out of the trees and were standing at the foot of a high, upthrust cliff. A line of smooth rock twelve or fifteen feet tall ran along the bottom beneath a jutting brow of basalt.

Henry turned to her, grinning, pleased as a child. "Well, I wasn't sure I remembered how to get up here, but here it is, like I knew what I was doing."

Martha got her breath and squinted her eyes to make out what he had brought her to see: small, dim figures chipped and carved into the dark stone, the details and outlines worn away smooth in places. She could make out a handful of riderless horses, some animals with branched racks—they might have been elk or some kind of deer—and stick-figure men in stiff poses holding sticks or bows, and several boxy or swirled shapes that looked like the meaningless things toddlers draw when you give them a pencil. None of the figures looked real to her, they were childishly simple, strung out across the rock in an
uneven line at eye level like a ragged single-file troop. She had been drawing horses as long as she could remember and almost never was happy with how her drawings came out, the proportions never exactly right, and these horses weren't drawn right either; but she felt, looking at them, exactly as she did when she saw the tepees at the Pendleton Round-Up: a dim thrill of yearning.

"Do you think it was one person who drew all of these pictures?" she said to Henry after they had stood looking for several minutes. A kind of nostalgia had taken hold of her, a regret for something she couldn't have named. She liked thinking the drawings had all been made by one person, someone who came up here year after year to carve a new horse or another deer, someone who had made up a secret language and then started writing down a story no one else could read. One person who kept this place secret, or only told the secret to one friend.

Henry said, studying the pictures, "It could have been. I don't know. Or it could have been the whole tribe taking turns and this was where they wrote down what happened every year. An almanac, something like that."

With a finger of his gloved hand he traced one of the shapes. "I always figured this one meant
summer.
" It wasn't a rayed circle, as she would have drawn the sun, but she could see what Henry meant: that the little boxy shape could have been someone's idea of what the sun looked like. He touched a spiral shape. "And this one,
winter.
"

She had wanted to say something to him earlier having to do with the Indians—that a vital, inexpressible meaning had gone out of the land when the Indians were driven off—but by now the words had become jumbled and wouldn't come out the way she wanted to say them. "I used to wish I was an Indian," she said.

He didn't smile. "Did you? Well, I guess I know what you
mean. I always wanted to be one of Lewis's men, old Lewis and Clark. I wanted to see what they saw back then, the way it was, all this country out here before any buildings got put up, and those big herds of antelope and wild horses and so on, like they saw." He dropped his chin and glanced over at Martha and suddenly broke into a smile. "If you were an Indian and I was with Lewis, maybe we'd have run into each other."

Her cheeks were hot. She tried to think of something clever to say, to keep up the imaginary story that had sprung into his mind and hers, but nothing came. What she hadn't said to him was that in her childhood daydreams she was always a boy, a noble Indian boy with long black braids streaming out behind her when she galloped bareback across the wild plain on a painted pony. She looked over at Henry and tried to guess what he was thinking, but when he looked back she lowered her eyes.

They stood a while longer without saying anything. Then, bending his head back to peer up at the rimrock, he said, "There's a ranger lookout cabin up there somewhere. They built it a couple of years ago. They man it in the summer to watch out for fire on the reserve. Or anyway they did before the war got going good. I don't know who they'll get to man it now, probably some old coot whose eyes are bad." He looked at her and smiled.

She didn't know if he was thinking they might go on up to the top and look for the lookout cabin. "How far is it?"

"I don't know. I haven't ever been up there. But I imagine it's a ways. I'd hate to be the one hauling groceries up to it, unless there's a trail where you could pack things in on a mule. Well, I guess there must be a trail, now I think about it, or how'd they get the wood and windows and stove up there to build the cabin."

"There must be a good view from there."

"I bet there is." He looked up at the mountain again. "We could try to find it if I knew where the trail was, but I sure don't. And I guess the others will start wondering where we are if we don't show up down at the lake pretty soon."

He had evidently gotten the idea that she wanted to go up, so she said, shifting her feet, "I wouldn't want to go up that high in the snow anyway. It's already about as high as our boots."

He looked at her and then away. "Well, if you're still working somewhere around here by next summer, we can go up there and look for it, when we've got a chance of finding it."

A slow heat filled her chest. "Yes," she said.

Going down, they followed their own broken tracks in the snow. Martha struck out ahead of Henry and then was sorry she'd taken the lead, suddenly conscious of being watched from behind and conscious of the way she must look hiking down the hill in men's trousers—not just unwomanly but mannish. When they got down to the lakeshore Henry came up and walked alongside her, and she ought to have felt better about that, but didn't.

"I guess Will and Lizzie must be out there skating," she said, and peered over toward the rink, which was in the low swale of the meadow. The sun was bright, glaring off the ice. People skated back and forth in little groups of two or three but it was impossible to make out their faces.