The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  "Well I thought you might," he said, giving her a look she took to be amused and self-satisfied. "Sunday, you come on out to church with us, why don't you, and we'll introduce you around and see if we can't line you up some horses." He shook his magazine and turned his attention back to it.

  Louise Bliss seemed to think more of the idea of taking Martha to church than of lining up horses for her to break. Without looking away from her knitting she said, "There's not a single Lutheran church in the county, I'm afraid, though there used to be one over in Bingham until that minister left for Africa. We've been going to the Federated Protestant church in Shelby, which is a mongrel church in every way, but we have got a new young minister who is smart as a whip. I do love to hear him give a sermon, and the preacher they have at the Methodist church is—" she pulled her mouth into a tight purse—"a bit more on the hellfire side of things than we're used to. There's a Catholic church in Opportunity, because so many of the sheep ranchers at the west end of the valley are Spanish and Bohemian and that sort. You're not Catholic are you, dear?"

  She said, "No, I'm not," without offering to say what she was, which was a person entirely without a religious upbringing. Martha's father had come from a long line of nonchurchgoers and had pressed his disregard for religion onto his Lutheran wife. Martha and her brothers had grown up knowing next to nothing of the Bible.

  "Did you come away from home without a dress for church?" Louise asked her then and looked up from her knitting to collect the reply.

  Martha told her, "I did bring one. It's just an old jumper, though, and a middy blouse," which didn't seem to discourage Louise—in fact she perked up a little, just from hearing there was a dress of any kind in Martha Lessen's dunnage.

  After a while, she threw the girl a look that was conspiratorial. "Our young minister," she said, "is quite tall," which Martha took to be a comment about the difficulties of a tall woman finding a tall man to marry.

  6

  THE WEATHER SUDDENLY worsened on Saturday afternoon, a brief cold rain that turned to snow while Martha was still coming down from the eastern edge of the Bliss property, riding Ollie and leading Scout, with long peacock feathers tied into both horses' manes jerking and fluttering in the wind. She had left the ranch in the morning before the cold had moved up over the front of the Whitehorns and into the valley; she hadn't had a warning that the weather might change or she might have thought to put on a sweater under her coat and wear two pair of socks. She might have snugged a silk stocking around her head under the hat, which was how she kept her ears warm in cold weather. As it was, she was caught out in it, and she ducked her cold chin into her coat collar and rode at a swinging trot all the way down to the ranch buildings, stopping to change mounts once but otherwise not working the horses except to encourage their straight-ahead intention.

  By Sunday morning there were two or three inches of snow on the ground. When Martha crossed to the house for breakfast George Bliss and El Bayard were out in the field feeding the animals off the back of a wagon. Martha had put on the womanly clothes she had with her, an old-fashioned green corduroy jumper that had had the seams let out a couple of times and a yellow cotton middy blouse with a wide collar. The hat she wore had belonged to her grandmother, a woman's braided hat with the front brim held back by a crushed rosette of worn blue velvet. The men looked over at her, but if the sight of their girl broncobuster in a skirt was a shock to them they didn't give any sign. They went on intently pitching loose hay into a long oval. El Bayard's crippled arm didn't seem to limit him in any way. His sharp-cornered elbow swung out and back in a smooth arc as he worked the pitchfork, and he managed to get every bit as much hay on the ground as George Bliss.

  Although it had stopped snowing, the sky was low and slaty and the air was snapping cold. Martha wondered if the weather would keep them from churchgoing, but when she went into the house she found Will Wright already done up in a wool suit and necktie, and when Mr. Bliss and Ellery Bayard came in from feeding, George changed into a suit too. El, who wasn't a churchgoer, evidently planned to spend the morning mending his socks; Will Wright, who had a regular habit of attending church and sitting down to Sunday dinner with the family of the girl he was courting, said he would head off on horseback as soon as he finished with breakfast. While they were all still sitting around the table, George announced to Louise that he thought they should take the automobile to church, as the mud on the road was good and hard but not icy and there wasn't near enough snow for a sleigh.

  Martha at first had imagined the Blisses were either cash-poor or backward-looking, which were the usual reasons for not having a car, but it had turned out they kept a Chalmers in one of their sheds and brought it out only for town trips and certain summer picnics and dances. Usually by this time in November the car would have been jacked up on wooden blocks and set aside for the winter, but the fall had been mild and they'd put off storing their automobile until the weather gave them reason.

  George carried water out to the car and filled the radiator and cranked the engine over; then he brought it around, and Mrs. Bliss climbed into the front seat, Martha Lessen into the rear. Martha's family had never owned an automobile but she had ridden in cars more than a few times. She hated their noise and stink but couldn't help liking the feeling of going very fast. The Blisses shouted back and forth to each other, things to do with people and church business Martha knew nothing about. She leaned out from the car with her hand holding down her grandmother's hat and let the cold, ringing air race into her ears; she watched the white fields going by, the cattle and horses standing in them, and turned her head to keep certain horses in sight a little longer before turning forward again to watch for the next ones. Graves Creek rolled like hammered metal between the road and the rail spur, rummaging and rattling through the bare willow thickets on both its banks. Right after the creek emptied into the Little Bird Woman River the road crossed over the river on a wooden bridge, the car's hard rubber tires riding thunderous and rough across the bare planks, and then up into the streets of Shelby.

  The whole of Elwha County, being well off the main wagon routes, had been a left-behind and isolated place during the first big westering push; people hadn't started moving in in any numbers until the late eighties and it was 1905 or 1906 before the OTN&T could be persuaded to run a rail line south from Pendleton through the Ipsoot Pass into the valley. There were three little towns in the valley, strung out along the Little Bird Woman River: Shelby and Bingham and Opportunity, in order from east to west, with Shelby being the largest and the county seat. Early talk about running the line west through the whole valley or south through Lewis Pass to Canyon City had never borne fruit, so Shelby was the end of the spur.

  The summer the spur line was put through, Martha's dad had taken work laying ties for the railroad, and the whole family had lived briefly in Shelby. There had been only four or five hundred people living there then, and that was the town Martha remembered—a scant block or two of scattered wooden stores with false fronts. Now she was surprised to find Main Street crowded with two-story brick and stone buildings and the slushy streets around the Federated Protestant church crowded with more automobiles than horses. There were sidewalks and street lights and telephone poles, and the county courthouse was a stone edifice sitting in the middle of its own block of snow-covered lawn.

  Martha had left home for reasons having to do with her family and left Pendleton because it had become very settled and overgrown in her view. If Elwha County wasn't much like the West she had read about in novels it was at least said to be cow and horse country in the old-timey way, which is why she'd headed down here. Seeing the town so changed, she worried that she might have heard wrong and maybe the valley had become peopled and modernized without the word getting out.

  The Federated Protestant minister, whose name Louise said was Theodore Feldson, was young and very tall—a couple of inches over six feet—and also very thin, his wrist bones knobby below the cuffs of his sh
irt. He had a pallid indoors complexion starred with moles and the stooped shoulders of someone who spent a good deal of time slumped in a chair. His voice rang out in the small church, and he spoke in dense sentences of the promise of the Christ Child in wartime, with the season of Advent soon upon them. Martha, trying to follow the line of his discourse, sat forward in the pew, frowning.

  When the last of the singing and praying was finished, Louise took Martha by the elbow and brought her along to greet the young reverend, who gave Martha a slightly startled or confused look when they were introduced, which she recognized, and knew had to do with her size—she outweighed him by quite a bit and could have looked him pretty nearly straight in the eye if she'd dared. She had been intimidated by his abstract preaching and his piety, but when he offered her his hand it was a brief soft clasp without squeezing, and when he welcomed her to "our little congregation" she thought his voice away from the lectern sounded reedy and boyish; all of this surprised and consoled her.

  Afterward George and Louise introduced her to more people than she'd ever before met at one time, a jumble of faces and names she couldn't keep straight or remember for more than a minute. What she remembered—would remember for the rest of her life, she felt—was George Bliss persuading his neighbors of her good horse work. "I expect she'll just about have them standing on their hind legs and talking American by spring," he told people over and over, every time provoking an appreciative laugh.

  Martha held back, blushing furiously, until she was gestured forward for introductions and handshakes. When people asked for the particulars of her methods she mentioned riding a circle, which almost everybody was acquainted with, and otherwise answered in vague terms so they wouldn't have a solid edge to disagree with. A couple of people made remarks that seemed to be about her size—that she sure looked strong enough for a man's work—but most people seemed uninterested in her methods so long as the horses were finished to their needs. It was clear that George's opinion of her was the only thing most people were taking into account.

  Martha rode back to the Bliss ranch in the back of the automobile in silence, looking out at the fog-shrouded Clarks Range. The Blisses only occasionally spoke to each other, leaning in close to make themselves heard. When the ranch buildings came in sight Martha leaned forward suddenly and shouted over the rough racket of the motor, "Mr. Bliss, thank you for saying those kind things about me." She had devoted the last many minutes to finding her tongue but the words that came out now were a disappointment to her—too few and too common.

  George, without taking his eyes off the rutted road, shouted back mildly, "I guess if you make a mess of things, I'll just have to pack up and move to another part of the country."

  When Louise said, "Oh for goodness' sake, George," Martha understood that he was teasing her again.

  7

  SHE HAD THOUGHT George Bliss might go with her on Monday morning when she rode out to take a look at the horses she'd been hired to break, as they were scattered across six other ranches and farms around the valley and she didn't know how to get to any of them. But what happened is that George sat down at the breakfast table and drew up a little pencil map and gave it to her.

  Any map of Elwha County would have to show the Whitehorn Mountains and the Clarks Range taking up the lion's share, with the Little Bird Woman River carving a valley through the middle roughly twenty miles long, seven or eight or nine miles wide, where most of the people had settled and where the towns had grown up. In those days there were just two roads through the valley, one that came up through Lewis Pass, turned to follow the river west through the three valley towns, and petered out in the steep gorge at the far west end—the Owl Creek Canyon, which was home to a few dozen families of sheep growers—and the one Martha Lessen had come in on, which more or less followed the rail spur through Ipsoot Pass from Pendleton and along Graves Creek to intersect the east-west road at Shelby. But dozens of rutted tracks forked off from the roads and wandered up to dozens of ranches and half a hundred little farm claims.

  George's map was not much to look at: just a few squiggles standing in for the bigger creeks and the river, straight thick lines for the two roads that bisected the county, and pointy triangles for the mountain ranges. He had printed the names of the six families who wanted horses broken at roughly the places where their properties lay, with an x to mark his guess as to where each farmhouse or ranch house stood, but he had not tried to draw in the ranch lanes or name any of the streams or mark distances.

  "You think you can find them places?" George said to her while he was putting on his chaps and hat, and she looked up from studying the map and said, "Yes sir, I'll find them," since there didn't seem to be any other answer she could make.

  She rode out on her own horse, the liver chestnut she called T.M., which meant Trouble Maker and which was his name because if Martha let him stand in pasture for very long he forgot every bit of his manners and what he'd learned about being a good horse and he got fractious and full of himself. She set him on the Graves Creek road, which in most places was not much more than a pair of beaten ruts running alongside the creek and the rail spur, veering out here and there around stands of bitterbrush or marshy swales. The little bit of snow that had fallen on Saturday night had melted right off by Sunday afternoon, and the road was muddy enough that there were no automobiles venturing out; Martha kept to the center of the road between the ruts, where the beaten-down weeds made less trouble for the horse to get through.

  Romer, George had written on the map at what she judged to be the nearest place to the Blisses, maybe a mile or so south of Dewey Creek and a half mile or so west of the Graves Creek road. These were evidently people Martha had talked to, but she couldn't connect any of the names on the map to the faces of people she had met after church on Sunday.

  About the time she started to worry that she'd missed the turn, a faint track bent left off the road and she set the horse on it. She first saw the little brown pond where they'd evidently cleared willow and sage from around a spring and then the house, which was not much more than a milled-lumber cabin with small windows and a sheet-metal roof and a sketchy little front porch. There was a shed and a chicken house but no horses in sight and no proper barn.

  In the past fifteen or so years a late homesteading boom had hit everywhere in the West, with more people trying to homestead in the new century than had tried it in the old. And the rush of latecomers grabbing the last pieces of free land happened to coincide, in Elwha County, with the railroad being put through, which meant that for a while just about every section of land in the valley was individually claimed and had a house sitting on it—benighted homesteaders who thought they could make a living from a piece of dry land and a scant twelve or fourteen inches of yearly rain.

  The county never suffered the range wars between sheepmen and cattle ranchers written about in the six-shooter Western novels; the steep slopes along Owl Creek naturally lent themselves to sheep, and everybody back then was pretty satisfied with the division. But there was trouble of a sort between the longtime cattlemen and the newcomer farmers. The good farm land had all gone in 160-acre chunks twenty and thirty years before. The homestead acts passed in later days were giveaways of 320- and 640-acre parcels of the dry grassland that Elwha County had a lot of, land without much timber and without the means to irrigate—open range that the old-time ranchers had always been free to run their cattle on. The idea was that the newcomers would take up ranching, but people figured out pretty quickly that you couldn't make a living off the cattle you could grow on 640 acres of dry grass, so of course the newcomers fenced it off and set out to plow and grow crops. In the valley of the Little Bird Woman River, it wasn't quite a war between the old-timers and the newcomers, but a good deal of resentment and squabbling went back and forth. Fences sagged, broke, got leaned on, and range bulls got into fields with dairy cows; every so often a range bull would turn up dead in mysterious circumstances. When a farmer dammed a creek to for
ce the water into his garden and fields, sometimes that dam got knocked out by steers ranging loose and driving through.

  This kind of thing didn't last long, because most of the settlers coming late to the game didn't have the cash or other means to get through a dry summer or a deep winter, and most were laying claim to land that couldn't be made to support a crop or pasture dairy cows unless the rain cooperated, which it seldom did. By the war years, a good many of those homesteaders had already given up and moved out, and by the end of the war only ten or fifteen of them would still be farming in the valley out of the nearly two hundred that had been there in 1910 when things were at the peak; the federal land banks and private mortgage companies that had been so free with money for stock, farm equipment, and houses during the boom years would be left holding title to land that was mostly barren through overtilling, land where nothing much would now grow but scrub juniper and weeds. By the 1920s most of the valley would be back to the way it had been before the century's turn: sheep ranging the canyons and lower gorge of Owl Creek at the western end of the county; cattle running over the eastern parts from Graves Creek clear across the valley bottom to Burnt Creek; and a few wheat farms along the well-watered valley bottoms.

  But as it happened, the war years were wetter than usual, wheat and cattle prices were high, and any of the dry-land homesteaders who hadn't already given up the fight took this as a sign they could make a living off their little claims, and they settled in for the duration. A couple of the people who hired Martha Lessen to break horses for them in November of 1917 were homesteaders holding tight to their dreams.

  The woman who came over from the chicken house had a face Martha vaguely recalled. "Hello, are you Mrs. Romer?" she said.