by Jenna Blum
"You do whatever you think," he said again. He patted her hip under the quilts and flopped away from her onto his side.
"Did you put out that cigarette?"
He grunted. "I might switch to those Lucky Strike ready-mades," he said, just to provoke her. "What would you think of that?" She believed there was nothing uglier than an ashtray full of stubbed-out cigarettes and liked to complain that his smoking stank up her curtains and burnt holes in her carpets. She had been trying to get him to quit smoking for thirty years without getting anywhere.
"At this moment I'm just interested in knowing if you've put out the one you were smoking."
"Don't get on me now."
"I'm not on you, I just don't care to die in a burned-up house." Louise in fact was not a woman with a deep dread of fires, but fire was more common in those days than it is now, and people who had been burned out had a healthy wish to keep it from happening again.
George grunted, and in a minute he rocked the bed slightly and she heard the gritty sound of his cigarette rubbing across the bottom of the ashtray. He was asleep almost immediately and snoring like a train. He worked himself so hard he usually would drop right off as soon as he thought Louise was finished talking, or sometimes right in the middle of something she was saying. She was often the one who put out his cigarette. But she always liked to lie awake a little while in the darkness and go over things, anything hanging on from the day's business, before letting sleep claim her.
Tonight what she had been thinking about before bringing up Martha Lessen's dress was something the new young preacher at the Federated Protestant church had said the Sunday before. The Lord, he said, has a way of evening things out in the long run—giving luck and hardship in fairly equal measure over the whole of a person's life—or a nation's life—though you might have to look hard to see it. And he told the congregation, "Now that the war has finally come home to these United States, we must remember that a test can strengthen resolve." Everyone in the church knew what he meant: three American boys had died in the fighting in France just the week before, the first of what would doubtless be many. He had gone on to preach the story of Job's trials, which must have wound its way eventually to a message of hope and solace, although Louise stopped following the sermon after a certain point. She had lost her third-born child, a boy, within a few hours of bearing him, but in other respects had been blessed with luck—had been fortunate in her health and her marriage, had raised three children to be kind and honest adults, was comfortable in her own life and smart enough to know it. Sitting there in the pew beside George, with the Reverend Feldson going on about Job's misfortunes, she felt herself pierced by the knowledge that the first fifty years of her life had been extraordinarily free of travails, and she was due—overdue—for God to even things out.
Her son Jack had gone with the first wave of boys from Elwha County—there had been banquets and public prayer meetings and a parade to see them down the main street of Shelby to the railroad station, Jack with his friends in the back seat of an automobile and all of them grinning as if they were going off like tourists to see the Eiffel Tower. At this point he was still in Kansas learning to be a soldier but she thought he might be shipped out soon—the papers said that by the first of the year troop ships would be carrying fifty thousand young Americans to France every month.
There was never anything in Jack's letters to set her worrying, and in any case Louise was not ordinarily a person who worried. But whenever they had a letter from him—one had come today—her mind would keep going to her son in an agitated sort of way, just as a tongue will keep going to a canker in the mouth, and tonight she had tried to move away from that by turning her attention to the matter of Martha Lessen's dress. Now that George had gone off to sleep and she was left alone, she found she couldn't keep her mind from jumping back to the preacher's sermon, to the part that had stuck with her, the part having to do with the Lord giving and taking away in equal measure. This wasn't something she could talk to George about. She talked to God about it from time to time, her prayers taking somewhat the form of a negotiation.
5
WHEN A COUPLE OF DAYS of corral work and riding in the stubble field had gotten the worst roughness off the horses, Martha began riding them up into the foothills. She rode one and led the other and after an hour or so she switched off. She always used the McClelland saddle for this work because, as she had told George Bliss on that first day, it was almost as light as a jockey saddle and she liked the horses to be able to respond to the least pressure from her knees. She began teaching them words for what she wanted them to do, "giddup" and "whoa" being the principal things. She kept a short piece of rope snapped to each halter so they'd be easy to catch in the corral, and she always hobbled the horses when she saddled or unsaddled them, a bronc hobble she had made herself out of straps of rawhide lined with sheep's wool, a hobble shorter than a camp hobble because she didn't really want them to take a step while she was getting the saddle on or off. She always shortened up the near-side rein when she put her boot in the stirrup, so when the horse tried to walk out from under her he was forced into a tight turn that brought the stirrup right to her. She coaxed them to step over logs, and she got them used to things they didn't like by hanging tin cans from the saddle strings, or long silk stockings that would flutter in any kind of breeze. Those lessons had started on the second day in the corral and would go on for weeks, presenting them with every kind of thing that might distract or scare them: wiggling ropes, tin cans with rocks rattling inside, rain slickers, ragged pieces of flapping cardboard. She believed a spoiled horse, whether an outlaw or a pampered pet, was a nuisance and a menace, so when one of them bit or kicked she used her elbow or shoulder to cuff him without saying a word or looking him in the eye; she let the horse think it was an accident caused by his own carelessness. She used a low, harsh tone for scolding, which was what Dolly always did, keeping other horses in line, and she kept her voice soft and high for praising.
She made sure they were acquainted with cattle by deliberately riding into bunches of grazing steers and cows, and sometimes she started them loping after solitary cows. Scout, the bay horse, regularly took a cow's frosty breath for dragon fire and would break away with a wild frightened squeal whenever a cow blew air in his direction. Over and over she coaxed him straight up to the cow in question while telling him quietly that this big old mother animal wouldn't set him ablaze.
The chestnut, Ollie, was tractable but he would never make a good cutting horse, being too much on the meditative side; she didn't think he was serious, though, when he kinked up his back once or twice every time she stood on the stirrup. She added "quit" to the words she was teaching him. And as soon as she had both boots settled, she straightened him out and moved him ahead, figuring a horse that's walking forward has a hard time getting his head down to buck.
She liked both horses and liked the work and the clear weather that hung on into the week. She liked Louise Bliss well enough and felt pretty certain Louise returned the feeling, though she continued uncertain whether she had George Bliss's approval.
When she had been there four or five days, Louise asked her to stay on one night after supper so they might "have a visit between women," which was the sort of thing Martha shied away from if she could, but there didn't seem to be anyway to say no. She followed Louise into the front room and the two of them sat down in upholstered chairs near the Franklin furnace. Louise brought her knitting into her lap. She was making socks for the army, which was something just about every woman in the country was doing when they weren't rolling surgical dressings or preparing comfort kits for soldiers and sailors. Martha had always worked outside with her dad and her brothers and later for other people, and her mother's attempts to teach her to knit and drive a sewing machine had always come to nothing. Martha knew how to braid horsehair and leather ropes and bosals and she wondered if those might be needed by the army, but it didn't seem the kind of question she could ask Lou
ise Bliss. She kept her hands clasped in her lap.
In the afternoon newspaper the men had been reading about the battle at Cambrai—an attack by British tanks had finally broken through the Hindenburg Line—and they'd been arguing whether it would be better to be in one of those armored cars where you might be trapped and burned alive or to be an infantryman outside on the ground and unprotected when mortar shells fell. Louise never liked their war talk and as soon as she and Martha were sitting down she started out talking about her family, thorough details of some sort of disagreement her daughter had had with her new mother-in-law, and then one story after another about her son Orie in veterinary school, stories to do with people Martha didn't know and problems she expected never to have. She had grown up in a family of taciturn people and had developed a habit of silence—she murmured her slight agreement wherever it seemed agreement was expected, and she watched Louise's hands intently, though they moved too fast to reveal the secret of knitting.
Louise took Martha's quietness as a sign of a good listener and she rattled on for a while without particularly noticing that she was the only one talking. When she did become aware of it she let a small silence fall while she considered what might bring the girl out, and then she asked Martha which book she was reading. It was Lone Star Ranger, and Martha couldn't keep from telling a bit of the story as if Louise hadn't already read the book herself—how a fellow named Buck Duane kills a drunkard in a shootout in the street and is forced into being an outlaw. She didn't bring up the way the book had been robbing her of sleep: how there was a good deal in it about the wild blood Duane had inherited from his gunman father, and how Martha had been lying awake searching in herself for bad blood she might have inherited from her dad. Buck Duane had been secretly helping out the Texas Rangers, Martha told Louise, and she hoped that by the end he might get free of his outlaw reputation, that he might even be welcomed into the Rangers himself. Louise smiled at this without telling Martha anything about how the book ended.
They went on talking back and forth about the book and then about Zane Grey, who had written it and a dozen others like it. Louise had heard that Mr. Grey had a house somewhere in Oregon, maybe over on the Rogue River or the Umpqua, which for somewhat parochial reasons made them both think well of him. But when Louise asked if Martha thought Mr. Grey was a real horseman, Martha said, without answering directly, that Buck Duane didn't always treat his horses as well as he should, that he drove them pretty hard on very little feed. And then they talked about the pioneers and whether there were very many towns that had been beset by outlaws, as seemed to happen so often in Western romances. Louise was skeptical. She said in her own lifetime there had been but one bank robbery in the valley, two fellows who were caught by a posse of townsmen and constables and hung the same day. And from her mother she had heard only stories of harsh winters and death by illness or accident and hardly anything about guns and outlaws. Martha didn't say so, but she had the idea Umatilla County, where she was from, and Elwha County, where Louise lived, weren't part of the West she had heard and read about, the place people meant when they said "the Wild West." She imagined the West Zane Grey wrote about must be somewhere in Montana or Arizona or Texas, and she planned to get there and see those places herself, eventually.
After a while it occurred to Martha that Louise Bliss had deliberately shifted their talk to horses and Western romances, and her warm feeling toward Louise deepened to gratitude. In the middle of something she had been saying about fences—about how there were never any fences and nobody ever had to get down from a horse to open and shut a gate in the Western stories she had read—Martha stopped and said, "I've been wondering if the army might need hair ropes and bosals. That's something I could put my hands to in the evenings when I'm not reading a book."
Louise stilled her needles a moment to look over at Martha approvingly. "Why that's a wonderful idea. I'm sure they do need them."
Martha knew Louise wouldn't want to talk about the war directly but after a moment she said, "I read in the papers about mounted patrols at the munitions plants and other places where there's war work, and that it's girls who are doing it. Girls with their own horses. I don't know how far I'd have to go to find that kind of work—I guess it would be back East? I thought about doing it, but I wouldn't want to live back there."
Louise had resumed knitting but she began to smile, looking down at her hands as they twitched the yarn over and under. "I don't suppose your horses would like it there either."
They went on after that, Louise asking and Martha telling how she'd come by her three horses, and from there they turned to talk of the different kinds of hackamores and bridles preferred for different situations and Martha's opinions of various bits and reins.
George Bliss had been sitting in the kitchen polishing his good Sunday boots. If he'd heard the women talking about Western novels he had kept out of it. But now that the talk had turned to horses and their tack he came into the front room and sat down with his magazine, which was the Farm Journal. The war had made farmers out of a lot of ranchers, as thousands of acres of good bunch grass were being turned over in those days to grow wheat for the army—the "Great Plow-Up," people were calling it. The virtue of bunch grass is that it stays green in the fall when other grasses have dried out—horses and cows can winter on it—whereas plowed ground after a string of dry days will lift on the wind and float into space or out to sea in great dust clouds, and that topsoil will never be seen again. That may be why, when the Dust Bowl came along about ten years after the war, some people laid the blame on the Plow-Up. But hindsight is a marvelous thing and if you had asked people then, they would have answered that they were feeding all those hungry soldiers.
George unfolded his magazine and looked at it, then folded it again and said to Martha, "You've got those horses pretty well along, it looks like."
She thought about what she ought to say. "I've got them started, but they're quite a ways from finished. I'll have to keep repeating the lessons to get them solid. And I haven't got very far yet with setting their heads." George went on looking at her and seeming to wait for something more, so she added, "That chestnut has a good nature but he wants to think about everything before he does it, so he's not very quick. I guess I won't be able to make a very good stock horse out of him."
George raised his eyebrows and then winked at her in that solemn way he had. "Well, he must be smarter than you, seeing he's figured out a way to keep from being put to work."
She looked down at her hands. "You can still work him. He just won't ever be too good with cattle."
"Well I guess I could break him to harness but then that smooth trot of his wouldn't do me no good. Maybe I ought to take the son of a gun out and shoot him."
She threw him a flustered look. "He's a good sound horse," she said, and Louise lifted her head and said, "George, stop teasing the girl."
"Oh, she ought to be used to me by now," he said with a laugh.
There had never been any teasing in the house Martha grew up in, just cutting words that meant what they said. Outside the house, on haying crews and ranches where she'd worked and in school, she'd been teased for her size and for loving horses and for dressing outlandishly and for various other things; but it had always come from boys and girls her own age and from the men on the crews, not the boss. She didn't know what to make of George's wisecracks, how to take them. Heat climbed into her face, and she sat staring down into her hands.
"Well, here's an idea I've been thinking up," George said and slapped his magazine into his lap. He was still smiling, so Martha didn't know if she should take his next words seriously. "I was talking to Emil and W.G."—he said this as if he expected Martha to know who belonged to those names—"and they both got some horses need breaking and I told them we had Miss Lessen here, breaking them to beat the band. Which got me to thinking: I just bet there's rough stock all over the county and hardly a man with time to break them out. If you was to line up five or six
ranches and start up riding a circle, there might be enough horses for a winter's worth of work just about, and we'd have all our horses broke by spring. What do you think of that idea, Miss Lessen?"
Back then, almost every outfit kept a lot of saddle horses, and the ranches were generally smaller and closer together than they are now. A horse wrangler could line up work with half a dozen places all lying three or four or five miles apart, with maybe ten or fifteen unbroken horses among them, could get the roughness off the horses with a couple of days' work at each place and from then on be riding those ponies one after the other in a loop, beginning in the morning at one spread and heading for the next, running the first horse into the second corral, throwing the saddle on the next bronc and then heading down the line to the next place and the next until winding up back at the first place just about at evening, and repeating the whole thing every day after that. Depending on how many horses were in the circle and how far apart the stops were, each horse would get an hour's riding lesson every day or every other day, which was just about all he needed or could tolerate anyway, and a wrangler could manage to break quite a few horses that way in not very many weeks.
Martha had set out from Pendleton meaning to live a footloose cowboy life and see the places she'd read about in Western romances—she hadn't come down to Elwha County intending to stay. But a winter's worth of work would suit her about right. She had watched a few wranglers riding a circle and she knew the work was hard, riding half a dozen different horses every day, some of them considerably rougher than others and sometimes needing to change saddles or hackamores to fit their different shapes, and then another half-dozen the next day. You were in the saddle dawn to dark six or seven days a week, pretty much regardless of the weather. But she wasn't afraid of hard work; she was afraid of having to go back to Pendleton in January or February flat broke and defeated. "I would like to have as much work as I can get," she said to George Bliss, straight and definite, so he would know she was serious.
