The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  So she says nothing until they reach Mr. Pfeffer's house, and then she says simply, Thank you, Felix.

  Mr. Pfeffer smiles at his house, its glass walls and gravity-defying angles, with sleepy satisfaction.

  It has been my pleasure, he says. I so enjoyed making your mother's acquaintance. or, I should say, making it a second time.

  Taking his suitjacket from the back of the seat, he drapes it over his arm and opens the door.

  I'll be in touch about finishing your interview, Trudy tells him as he climbs from the car.

  Hmmmm? says Mr. Pfeffer. Ah, yes. Please do.

  He walks away a few steps, then suddenly turns on his heel and comes back.

  With your permission, he says, ducking to look at Trudy through the window, I should like to visit your mother again.

  Trudy nods.

  I think she'd like that.

  Do you? says Mr. Pfeffer. Good. That was the impression I received as well. I will call on her next week.

  He winks at Trudy, the merest flicker of an eyelid. Then he pats the roof of the car in farewell and strides jauntily off across the lawn, whistling, his jacket slung over one shoulder.

  Trudy watches him disappear into the house. Then, with a last wistful glance at the lilac border, she reverses into the lane and drives back the way she has come.

  The winding tree-lined streets of Minnetonka give way to flat land and open sky once Trudy hits 394, and she cranks the window down to feel the breeze. It carries to her the smells of tar and cut grass, roses, cooking meat and charcoal from people's backyard barbecues. She can hear their lives, too, a mother calling, a dog barking, children shouting at play. A fragmented melody from a piano somewhere. The whistle of a train coming in from the prairie. The light is changing as the sun begins its descent, becoming sharp and pure, the shadows long and blue. All of this stirs in Trudy an exquisite melancholy that makes her throat ache. This evening, she thinks, she will go to her study and open the windows to the warm night, and then she may allow herself the luxury of calling Rainer. She wants to tell him all that has happened, that she better understands now how he must have felt when he first came to this country, stepping off the boat with land-shy legs and gazing about in fear and wonder, having left the freight of everything he thought he knew behind.

  But not right away. Not yet. At the moment, Trudy wants to extend this odd feeling as long as possible. To prolong this sad and peaceful vacuum between one part of life ending and another coming to take its place.

  So as the skyline appears before her, its simple buildingblock shapes refracting arrows of light into the car, Trudy passes the exit that would take her to her house. Then the next, which would bring her to Rainer's. Farther on, the turnoff that would lead her to Le P'tit, slumbering at this hour beneath its awnings while the waiters scramble to prepare dinner inside. Trudy turns onto the ring road and circles the city to the other side, emerging in the shade of the skyscrapers. The Mississippi flows beneath her to her left, its currents so slow and powerful that it doesn't appear to be moving at all. Across it is the university, its art gallery a blinding structure of crumpled tinfoil in the setting sun, the History Department behind it. At stoplights, Trudy inhales grease from fat fryers, exhaust, the heat rising from the sidewalks. People laughing, sitting at outdoor cafés with glasses of wine. Cars honking. The tinny beat-beat-beat of pop music from distant radios. All of this pushing, insistent life.

  Finally, when the sun is touching the horizon, Trudy turns back toward the river, her mood dissipating. She drives onto the Nicollet Island Bridge with a mingled sense of regret and relief. She is halfway across it when she suddenly swerves to the side and parks. Something about the view has struck her as extraor dinary. Something about the light. Trudy pops the hazards on and gets out, then walks to the railing to watch.

  A front is moving in, towering cumulus whose tops glow cream and gold and pink. Its underside is dark blue, its edge as straight as if drawn by a ruler except for the curtain of rain that is slowly swallowing the skyline. From this vantage point, the city is all tension wires and smokestacks and turrets, girders and railyard warehouses and drab industrial buildings. It looks much, Trudy thinks, like German cities once did: Heidelburg, Dresden, Berlin. Weimar. Perhaps they still do. The sun makes one last valiant effort to shine through the mist, and for a few seconds everything steams, yellow and gray. Then the rain sweeps in and it is gone.

  Acknowledgments

  ANY WRITER OF HISTORICAL FICTION OWES A GREAT DEBT to the non-fiction masterworks of others. Though I consulted dozens of invaluable sources while researching Those Who Save Us, I was particularly reliant upon The Buchenwald Report, translated by David A. Hackett; Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, by Alison Owings; and that bible of World War II material, William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

  I am also enormously indebted to the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, for placing trust in me as an interviewer and thus granting me access to Holocaust survivors. And to the survivors themselves, who demonstrated unparalleled courage and generosity in sharing their stories, I cannot express adequate gratitude in words: Perhaps it will suffice to say that you are living miracles and nothing you have said will ever be forgotten.

  On a personal front, there are a number of people who saved me during the writing of this novel. For three years they endured my ceaseless babbling about Nazis and understood when I didn't pick up the phone. The prospect of honoring them was one of my fondest fantasies; and I do so now, in roughly alphabetical order, with great joy. Thanks to: my family, Frances J. Blum, Lesley M. M. Blum, and Joseph R. Blum, for their lifelong belief and love; the B.U. CO 201 faculty for the cake and enthusiasm; Chris Castellani, master mentor; Jean and Adel Charbonneau for their innumerable readings and unflagging encouragement; Stephanie Ebbert Devlin, my goodiest editor, and her husband, Ted Devlin; Dan Ellingson, who always told me I Think I Can; Eric Grunwald for correcting my limping German and supplying the Backe Backe Kuchen rhyme; my Grub Street students, who taught me through allowing me to teach them; the Harcourt alchemists who have transformed this manuscript into a book; Phil Hey and Tricia Currans-Sheehan at the Briar Cliff Review, who gave the original story such a wonderful home; Julie Hirsch, my Puppet—she knows why; Ken Holmes; the Kenyon girls; Doug Loy for the inspiration; triumvirate of cheer Necee Regis, cool Ann Tracy, and Joanna Weiss; Sister Cecila; Dave Sandstedt for the sunflowers and champagne; Sarah Schweitzer, whose patient counsel helped me knock Trudy; Dr. Sherri Szeman, fellow laborer in the era of the Reich; and Steve Wilmsen, for listening and for taking me to Woodman's Clam Shack when I was blocked.

  Special thanks to Stéphanie Abou, fierce and lovely super-agent, and Ann Patty, incomparable Uber-editor, for believing in this book.

  It takes a village to raise a child, which is precisely what writing a novel is. If I have neglected to name anyone in this village, please know that it is not for lack of heartfelt appreciation: Dankeschoen.

  THE HEARTS OF HORSES

  Molly Gloss

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  2007

  Copyright © 2007 by Molly Gloss

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gloss, Molly.

  The hearts of horses / Molly Gloss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-79990-9

  ISBN-10: 0-618-79990-7

  1.Young women—Fiction. 2. Horses—Training—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.L65H43 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2007008521

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
3 2 1

  For Ed, this last gift

  1

  IN THOSE DAYS, even before the war had swept up all the young men from the ranches, there were girls who came through the country breaking horses. They traveled from ranch to ranch with two or three horses they were taking home to break or with horses they had picked up in trade for work they'd done. Of course most outfits had fifty or sixty horses back then so there was plenty of work, and when the war came on, no men to get it done. Those girls could break horses as well as any man but they had their own ways of doing it, not such a bucking Wild West show. They went about it so quiet and deliberate, children would get tired of watching and go off to do something else. They were usually alone, those girls, but it wasn't like in the moving pictures or the gunslinger novels, the female always in peril. If they were in peril it wasn't from outlaws or crooked sheriffs, it was from the usual things that can happen with ranch work—breaking bones, freezing your fingers off—the kinds of things that can happen whether you're a man or a woman.

  In November in that first winter of the war a girl named Martha Lessen rode down through the Ipsoot Pass into Elwha County looking for horses that needed breaking out. She was riding a badly scarred mare she called Dolly and she had a couple of other horses towing behind her, which she had brought along just because she didn't feel she could leave them behind. At the upper end of the valley where the road first drops down along Graves Creek she saw a man out in a big fenced stubble field feeding about thirty cows and half a dozen horses and a pair of white mules. She called to him from the road, "Hello," and he stopped what he was doing and looked over at her. "If you've got any horses need breaking to saddle, I'll break them for you," she told him.

  The daylight was thin, a cold and wintry light, and it pulled all the color out of the man's face. He stood up straight. The winter before, there had been a string of about a hundred days when the temperature never rose above freezing and some counties—Elwha, Umatilla, Grant—had piled up seven feet of snow. Deer had been driven down into the towns, and cougar had come into the pastures with the cattle. Starving horses had wandered into people's houses. But this particular winter, the winter of 1917 and 1918, would be an open one, and the day Martha Lessen rode down out of the Ipsoot Pass there wasn't any snow on the ground at all, although the stubble field the man was working in had been grazed off and the skimpy leavings were dark from frost-kill. He was feeding from a wagon drawn by a pair of black Percherons.

  "Maybe I do," he said. "There's a couple could use working." He looked her over. "I guess you ain't no Land Girl." This past summer a lot of men from the ranches had gone into the army and quite a few town and city girls had come out to the countryside to fill in where they were needed—"Land Girls" the newspapers had begun to call them. Some of them had come to Elwha County with the idea of being cowboys, though mostly the work that needed doing was getting in the hay crop and the wheat. Martha Lessen was the first girl he had seen advertising herself as a broncobuster.

  "No I'm not," she said. "I've been riding and doing ranch work since I could walk. I can break horses."

  He smiled and said, "I just bet you can," which was a remark about the way she was built, big and solid as a man and five-eleven in her boots. Or he meant something about her old-fashioned cowboy trappings, the fringed batwing chaps well scratched up and her showy big platter of a hat much stained along the high crown and the rolled edge of the brim. Then he said, not with serious misgiving but as if he had discovered something slightly amusing, "Breaking to saddle, so I guess that means you're not interested in breaking horses to harness."

  She could have found plenty of work around Pendleton, where she had come from, if she had wanted to break horses to drive, so she said stubbornly, "I'd just rather train a stock horse than a wagon horse if I'm able to choose."

  He considered this. "Well, go on up to the house and I'll be up shortly and we'll see about it." He went back to feeding hay.

  She followed a line of telephone poles from the road back to the ranch house, which was a paintless tall box with skinny windows set among a scattering of barns and sheds and bunk-houses built variously of lumber and pine logs. A yellow dog scrambled out from under the porch of the house and barked once and then walked up and smelled of the girl's boot. "Hey there," she said, which satisfied him, and he walked off and flopped down in the hard dirt at the edge of the porch steps.

  Elwha County was more than two-thirds taken up by the Clarks Range and the Whitehorn Mountains, with the towns and most of the ranches lying in the swale between. This house stood on the first moderately flat ground at the foot of the Clarks, its front windows facing south across the valley toward the Whitehorns. The girl wondered what sort of view could be seen from those windows, and she turned in the saddle to look. There had been a little cold rain earlier in the day and the clouds were moving southeast now, dragging low across the pointy tops of the lodgepole and yellow pine stands in the far distance; there was no telling whether the serrate line of the Whitehorns might show in better weather. By the time she turned back toward the house a woman had come out on the porch and was wiping her hands on her apron. She was just about exactly the age of the man who'd been feeding cows, which was fifty, and she stood there in black high-top shoes and a long dress and a sweater with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, stood there wiping her hands and squinting at the girl.

  Martha said, "I'm here to see about some work breaking horses. The man feeding cows in that field by the road said I ought to wait here till he came in to talk to me about it."

  "Well it's cold," the woman said. "You can put up those horses in the barn and then come in and have a cup of coffee. He'll be a while." She went back inside the house.

  Martha watered her horses and led them over to the barn but she didn't put them up. She left them standing saddled in the open runway, out of the wind, then walked back to the house. The dog met her again and smelled of her boots and her chaps up to the knees and she patted him on the head and went past him onto the porch. When she rapped lightly on the door the woman inside called out, "You'd better just come on in." She tucked her gloves into her belt, scraped her boots as well as she could on the porch boards and stepped inside. The dim front room ran the width of the house and was furnished more elaborately than Martha was used to, with upholstered chairs, carved end tables, Turkish rugs, kerosene lamps with elaborate glass shades. Thick draperies closed off the windows, which might have been to keep the heat inside; but Martha felt if there was any chance of seeing the mountains she'd have left the windows open to the view.

  She crossed the room and went through a doorway into the kitchen where the woman was pouring coffee into heavy china cups. This room was bare of the fussy furnishings at the front of the house. The long pine table and chairs and two kitchen cupboards were painted white, and the windows were tall and narrow and curtainless. The day's gray brightness flooding through those panes of glass made the room seem clean and cold. From this side of the house you could see some trees, but the house was too close to the Clarks to get a view of their snowy peaks. The girl took off her hat and held it in her hands.

  "What's your name, dear?" the woman said.

  "It's Martha Lessen."

  "Well my goodness, I have a sister and a cousin both named Martha, so that's a name that will come easy to my lips."

  She put the coffee cups and a pitcher of cream on the kitchen table and sat down in a chair.

  "If I was to pay you for it," the girl said to her, "I wonder if I could later on give my horses a little bit of your hay."

  The woman made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Oh heavens," she said, as if that was just the most outrageous idea. "You help yourself. A horse has got to have something to eat. Sit down now and drink your coffee." Martha sat in a kitchen chair and put her big hat in her lap and poured as much cream into her coffee as the cup would hold.

  "You talked to George, did you?"

  "I didn't get his name. He had on overall
s and a brown coat."

  This amused her. "Well of course every man in this part of the world is wearing overalls and an old brown coat," she said, "but I guess it was George Bliss who is my husband and I am Louise Bliss."

  She then started right in telling Martha how they were Old Oregonians, both she and her husband, children of first comers, and how this house they were sitting in had been built from trees cut and milled right here on the ranch by her husband's daddy right after the Indians were driven off, and how her own granddaddy had fought in the Civil War and then come up to Oregon with one of the first big trail drives out of Texas and bought half a dozen cows with his wages, and by the time he died owned almost two hundred head of cattle and eight hundred acres of Baker Valley pastureland. She spoke as if the girl had asked for every bit of their family history but it was just that she had immediately taken Martha Lessen for a certain kind of ranch girl, the kind that followed the seasonal work traipsing from ranch to ranch; and Louise had known such girls to be shy as the dickens and indisposed to talk. She felt it would be up to her to fill the silence, and Martha's old-time cowboy trappings seemed to make her a perfect audience for romantic pioneer stories.

  When George Bliss came in through the back porch he poured himself some coffee and stood there drinking it without sitting down at the kitchen table. His wife wasn't saying anything he didn't already know. She and George had brought four children into the world, she was telling Martha, and one had died shortly after being born but they had a boy who was now in Kansas preparing to fight in France and another who was at college up in Pullman, Washington, with the intent to learn veterinary medicine, and a girl, Miriam, who was married and living with her husband's family on a ranch up around Pilot Rock. George stood there drinking his coffee quietly and letting Louise go on talking without interrupting her, and it was the telephone that finally broke the thread of her story and made all three of them jump. It wasn't the Blisses' ring—theirs was two longs and a short, this was three long jangles—but Mrs. Bliss went to the telephone anyway. In those days there were seven ranches on the party line at that end of the valley and they listened in on each other's calls without a bit of apology.