The Hearts of Horses (3 page)

They walked out to the barn in a damp cold. The yellow dog Pilot, who didn't ever like being left behind, scuttled out from his place under the porch and ran ahead of them. George brought along a lamp from the kitchen and stood by in the broad runway while Martha unloaded her gear and stripped the saddles from all three of her horses. She'd been riding Dolly on a good California stock saddle, and she'd put the old McClelland army saddle on'T.M.; Rory was carrying a saddle with a wide flat seat, which she'd borrowed from her brother Tim, in case she ran into a horse who was big in the barrel like Rory. Tim and one of her other brothers, Davey, had both gone into the army, which meant Tim wouldn't be needing the saddle for a while. When she had finished stripping the tack off her horses, George unwired and pushed back the gate that let into the stubble field and stood by while she waved the animals through. The Bliss mules and horses, clear out by the road, lifted their heads and spoke and came trotting over stiff-legged. Martha watched them become acquainted, a ritual of snorting and low nickering and mutual inspection of flanks. It appeared that a bright chestnut mare was the lead horse in that bunch and Martha watched her with Dolly to be sure there wouldn't be any trouble between them, though she didn't think there would be. Dolly was old enough and had been through enough troubles in her life that she liked to keep to herself, and other horses usually let her go her own way.

"You can put up in the daughter's room is what I think," George Bliss said. "We don't keep the bed made up since she was married but I guess you can just shake out your blankets on the mattress."

"I wasn't expecting to be put up in the house."

He gave her a look. "Well, that's sure up to you. I guess there's the barn. My hired men are living in the bunkhouse so I expect Mrs. Bliss wouldn't listen to you sleeping out there."

"I don't mind the barn," she said.

"It'll be cold, I'll guarantee you that."

"All right," she said.

He laughed. "All right you'll take the barn? Or all right you'll come into the house?"

"All right the barn."

Her eyes were on the dark shapes of the animals moving off now toward the far side of the field. George Bliss looked out there too. "How did that sorrel mare of yours come to get scarred like that?" he asked her.

"She was scorched in a fire."

"Was she, now? That's a shame. I bet she was a good-looking horse before that."

"I don't know. She was already scarred when I got her."

"Are you breaking her for somebody?"

"No sir, she's mine, I got her off a man who thought she was spoiled. She was only scorched, but he figured she was spoiled and he sold her to me awful cheap."

George Bliss gave her a look.

"She's an awful good horse," Martha told him.

He nodded skeptically. "Well I guess it don't matter what a stock horse looks like if she's got good sense." He offered her the lamp. "As long as we're speaking of fire, my wife worries a lot more about kerosene than about anything else—her family was burnt out when she was young, and it was a kerosene lamp that did it—so there's candles and matches in the barn, I believe, and you go ahead and keep this here lamp with you for now but I'd appreciate it if you'd turn it out when you get good and settled and a candle lit and so forth. You can make yourself
comfortable in the tack room and if you need another blanket you come over to the house and get one. My other hand has a girl he's spooning and that's why he wasn't at the table tonight but he'll be at breakfast, and you come on over to the house tomorrow too and have breakfast, come around to the back door and walk right in but don't come before daylight. We're getting old enough we don't like to roll out until the sun is up." He winked at her solemnly and walked off across the dark yard. The dog considered the question of who he ought to stay with and finally trotted off to get out in front of George. It occurred to Martha that the rancher still hadn't, strictly speaking, said she was hired.

On one side of the barn runway six stalls were laid out on either side of a tack room. The other half of the barn had been left open to shelter machinery, and she made out a set of harrows, a cultivator, a stoneboat, pipe for irrigation, parts for a homemade buck rake. There was a haymow above, but she wouldn't have wanted to sleep up there on account of the dust, and anyway George had said to make herself comfortable in the tack room. It was small and crowded, half a dozen saddles on wall trees and twenty or more bridles and halters and hackamores, as well as collars and rope and harness pieces hanging on pegs or slung over the half-walls that divided the room from the stalls. There was barely space to turn around between the wooden boxes spilling over with tools and blacksmithing equipage. She lit a candle she found standing inside a sooty glass chimney on a shelf crowded with veterinary gear and turned out the kerosene lamp. She went back to where she'd left her things and carried her saddles in one at a time and slung them up onto the half-walls of the stalls, then carried the rest of her gear into the tack room and shifted some things around a bit so she could make her bed in the cramped space on the floor. After shucking her chaps and walking out in the darkness to use
the privy, she came back and stripped down to her long underwear and crawled into the sleeping bag.

On ranches she'd worked for, it was never expected she would sleep in the bunkhouse with the men, so when she was too far from home to sleep in her own bed she had often been put up in the ranch house, and she'd slept in some pretty poor conditions, one time for several weeks sharing with two children on a bed with no mattress, just a spring with gunnysacks filled with straw, and a couple of wooden fruit boxes under the spring so it wouldn't sag down to the floor. She had gotten in the habit of asking for the barn, which at least was likely to be quieter and more private. This year, before heading out on her own, she'd sewn together a sleeping bag made from a wool blanket and a piece of felt and an old fur rug. In the newspapers she had read that the British soldiers in France were sleeping in mud and had only a couple of thin blankets to keep them from pneumonia, so she didn't think she had any grounds for complaint.

The candle cast a high shadow, but it was enough light to read by. She was making her slow way through
Black Beauty,
a page or two at a time, too tired most nights to read for very long. Tonight, coming to the part where Beauty meets his old friend Ginger, in terrible condition from bad treatment as a cab horse, she shut the book and blew out the candle and then went on lying awake looking out into the darkness. Gradually the saddles and the other things took dim shape around her, and the smells of the fur rug and saddle soap, leather and hay, the warm, clean, fecund smell of horses, arose out of the cold darkness and were a comfort against a yearning that was not homesickness.

T
HE BLISSES' OTHER
hired hand was Will Wright. That winter he was a lanky boy not yet filled out, with buck-teeth and a crop of pimples but a smile that came easily. When they were introduced he flashed Martha one of those easy smiles and then returned his attention to the breakfast on his plate; El Bayard, who gave her no more than a brief look, scooted his chair a couple of inches to one side to make room for her at the table. They behaved just as if she had been coming to meals in the house for years, and that served to put her at ease. It was a relief to see ample food on the platters and gallons of hot coffee; she sat quietly and tucked into her biscuits and sausage gravy.

People were mostly silent over their breakfast. The men exchanged a few muttered words about the day's work—something about the fence above Dewey Creek, something about moving some heifers into the Ax Handle pasture—but otherwise there was little conversation. Louise Bliss passed silently from stove to table, refilling coffee cups and bringing fresh plates of biscuits, eating her own breakfast in brief spells of sit
ting. Once she made an exasperated sound and went out through the back porch and came back a bit later with a wet jar of butter retrieved from the cellar under the house. Her face, thrown into relief by the slant of the early light, seemed to Martha somewhat aged and mournful, which would have surprised Louise had she known of it. There were plenty of women back then who thought they were old at fifty and women who made a practice of unhappiness, but Louise Bliss wasn't one of them.

When George had finished mopping the last bit of gravy from his plate, he sat back and fished out his Bull Durham and made a cigarette and smoked it and squinted out the window into the pink sky. "You figure you can find those horses again, do you?" This was evidently directed at Martha, although he never looked toward her. "I expect you'll want to bring them down here to use some of these pens. You need help getting that done?"

She divined from this question that she was hired. "No sir, I don't need any help, but when I go up there I wonder if it would be all right if I left the gate open, the one along the section line between your place and the reserve?" When she brought the horses down, they would naturally be looking for a way to stay ahead of her, and when they found the hole in the fence she hoped they'd go through to the ranch.

George seemed to know this was what she meant. He nodded and said, "Just close it, after them broncs go through."

"And if it doesn't matter to you," she said after a moment, "I think I'd want to use those old pens you've got, the ones over back of the bunkhouse."

He winked at her, which wasn't the first time, and which she had already begun to realize had no meaning beyond a mild sort of amusement. "I thought you might. My daddy built
those corrals when he first come here in the eighties. They ain't been kept up as well as they should and those gates are sagging pretty good but I guess you saw one of them has a snubbing pole. When he was raising mules Daddy used those corrals for breaking them out. That's mostly still what we use them for—broncobusting. They're too small for branding."

She had never made much use of snubbing poles—she had seen more than one horse wind his rope around the post until he strangled—but she didn't tell George Bliss that. She said, "I don't mind if they're small, but I like that they're kind of out of the way of things and they're good and high so a horse can't climb over, and the rails are near-solid so a horse can't be looking around at other interesting things when I'm working with him."

He didn't wink again but he might as well have, his expression saying clearly he was amused. "I'll leave you to it, then," he said. He shoved back his chair and stood, and as he moved away he gave his wife's shoulder a light pat. She reached up absently and touched his hand as it trailed from her. El Bayard and Will Wright followed the boss. They made considerable noise of it, standing on the back porch buckling on chaps and spurs, slapping the dry mud off their hats, dragging boot heels across the board floor. When they had gone out, a sudden quiet struck the whole house. Martha didn't know Louise Bliss at all yet and was leery of getting caught up in conversation with her. She put away the last of her breakfast quickly, stood, and went to the porch for her coat and hat. Then she stuck her head back into the kitchen. "Would I find a crimper and a hammer out in the barn, in case those pens need shoring up?" She had seen hammer and nails and a couple of crimpers in a box in the tack room, so she was roundabout asking permission to take them, which she'd meant to ask of George Bliss but the words had
found her too late. She had already seen yesterday that the gates to the old pens were sagging and needful of repair.

Louise was gathering up the dishes. "Oh heavens, you take whatever you need," she said without once looking up.

The corrals Martha had in mind were a pair built kissing each other along one side with a connecting gate in that wall and a short gap left in the lower rails so a big sheet-metal washtub standing on the ground there could water stock in both corrals. They were made from heavy pine logs, the kind you hardly saw anymore, all the posts and rails from old trees a good foot through. Put up in the eighties without the bark skinned off, they'd spent the last thirty years and more shedding their coats in long brown scabs that littered the ground. The rails were stacked eight feet high and so close together a thick daub of caulk might have been enough to turn them into walls.

Martha tightened up the sagging gates and stood the gate open on the pen that didn't have the snubbing pole. She wedged the uprights until they were tight and toenailed the loose rails. She walked around and picked up all the stones and limbs and pieces of bark and kicked at the ruts in the dirt until the ground inside both corrals was more or less level and then she spent half an hour carrying water over from the pump, filling the big washtub to its brim.

It was a cold morning but yesterday's rain had blown off to the southeast and the sky was clearing. When she called Dolly in from the field the mare waded to her through plumes of ground mist. She leaned against the horse's shoulder in order to tie on her big chaps, which were awkward to get in and out of. Dolly wouldn't stand for spurs so she left them off. Then she tacked up the horse and rode off in the direction she had taken the day before with George Bliss, north and west into the
grass and bitterbrush of the foothills and then up into the timber on the Clarks Reserve. The sky was beginning to lighten toward blue by then, striate with white silk thread. The leaves and empty seed cases on the alder trees shivered slightly, though the air felt still.

She was a couple of hours hunting down the right band, which had gone higher up into one of the narrow draws and was spread out along a little creek that ran through there. She drove the horses gently ahead of her down the draw. In the mouth of the canyon at the edge of a stand of yellow pine and spruce there was a big old corral with a chute trailing from it, which George Bliss's father, and now George, had used for branding and roundup of cattle. These horses were familiar with the place without being afraid of it, and some of them wandered into the corral and snuffled around and then fell to grazing the high clumps of grass that had sprung up along the edges of the fence. If Martha could have figured out a way to get the bay and the chestnut to go in there, she might have been able to shut the gate and save herself a lot of trouble; but as soon as she singled them out they understood what she was about and they broke from the rest of the band and dodged back through the trees, cracking through low dead branches and jumping fallen wood and brush with grunts and low squeals.