The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  The woman visited upon her a stern look of disappointment. "I'm not Dorothy Romer, I'm Jeanne McWilliams."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. McWilliams. I met so many people all at once, I've got everybody's names mixed up."

  "Well that's all right. But my husband told you we don't have any horses needing breaking." Mrs. McWilliams's husband blamed George Bliss, whose ranch ran along one side of their property, for letting one of his range bulls break down a fence and claim their milk cow, Jozie, for his harem. If they had had a horse needing breaking, they wouldn't have given it to anybody who worked for Bliss, whom they called Old Mister High and Mighty.

  Martha's face began to take up heat as Mrs. McWilliams's face went on being pale and wintry. Martha said, "I'm glad to meet you, anyhow—meet you again. I'm sorry I got your name wrong."

  Mrs. McWilliams was holding an empty burlap sack in one hand but she put the other hand to her forehead to shade her eyes against the gray winter light. Her fingers were long and reddened. "Well it's all right," she said, without softening the tone of her voice. "I don't remember what your name is, to tell the truth, so I guess I don't have room to complain."

  "It's Martha Lessen."

  "I'll try to remember it. If you're looking to find the Romer place you can take that little road there, just be sure you shut every gate when you go through." She pointed to a faint trace wandering off across the grass and bitterbrush hills, not a road so much as a path, the kind made by neighbors when they visited each other.

  "Well, thanks. I'll just go on and see about that horse they wanted broke."

  "You shut every gate."

  "I will."

  She turned T.M. onto the path the woman had set her on. When she got down at the first gate and undid the wire and walked the horse through, she looked back down the half mile or so of slope to the house and saw Mrs. McWilliams standing on the narrow front porch watching after her, and from this height she could see a man and a pair of horses in a field behind the house, pulling stumps out of the ground. The McWilliams claim had had quite a few good big pine trees on it to start with, but they had cut them all down in the first months of living there.

  After Martha wired shut the gate, the woman on the porch turned and went inside.

  The sky was gray but didn't look to have any rain in it; it was the kind of high overcast that can make the world resemble a moving picture the way they were in those days, all shades of gray colorlessness. Martha thought it was beautiful country, even grayed out, close to the kind of open, rolling rangeland spoken of in Lone Star Ranger and The Virginian and other Western romances Martha had read, the country horsemen rode through in novels on their way to trouble with Cayuse Indians or crooked sheriffs. In another twenty years people would wake up to realize that the timber was gone and the native grasses plowed up or eaten right down to the roots, that cheat-grass and rabbit brush and water-hogging scrub juniper had taken over all the disturbed ground. But it was still possible for Martha Lessen to look around and imagine the country as it must have been—the way Nez Perce and Shoshone Indians must have seen it, riding across with their big herds of ponies before white men overran the land, the kind of country where every gully and gorge in the foothills holds a clear, pebble-bottom creek, where the mountain slopes are clothed in timber and the valley floor is a golden grassland with stands of trees in patches, good big timber in the creek bottoms and along the river, the kind of country that leads people to name towns Eden or Paradise or Opportunity.

  Martha had read a little book about famous men and their horses: Alexander and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller, the knight Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced Charlemagne's army. She sometimes imagined herself one of them, or a famous woman, famous as Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc, on a famous horse. Riding over the low hills between the McWilliamses' and the Romers' she fell easily into thinking again that she was Mattie (this was how she'd be called, once she was famous), a horsewoman renowned all over the West, on her horse Meriwether Lewis, a tall black with a metal sheen to his coat and a fiery eye behind a long wavy forelock, a horse she had trained, like the Virginian's horse, to come straight to her at a certain four-note whistle and to carry no other rider but her. Always in these imaginings it was forty or fifty or sixty years ago, when she'd have been able to ride all over the valley of the Little Bird Woman River without seeing a fence and without getting down from her horse, not even once, to open and close a gate.

  8

  DOROTHY ROMER'S HUSBAND, Reuben, had taken up a claim south of Dewey Creek that was unsuited for crops. It was fairly well timbered, so he got most of his income from cutting wood for the Shelby school and for the town electric plant, but he was what these days would be called a binge drinker and he was off somewhere getting drunk and Dorothy Romer was splitting wood for the school so her children would be able to eat that week. Dorothy had set down the maul and the splitting wedge and was stretching her back and catching her breath when Martha Lessen rode into the yard. Martha didn't see Dorothy standing there by the woodshed; she pulled up her horse in the yard and Dorothy's middle child, Helen, who had been kept home from school to stand watch over the baby, cracked open the door and peered out. When Martha said hello to her she shut the door again. Ordinarily Helen wasn't a shy child but Martha Lessen was a strange and formidable presence sitting up on a big red horse.

  Dorothy gathered up some of the disheveled hair that had fallen on her neck and repinned it and then she walked out from the corner of the woodshed. "Hello, Miss Lessen."

  Reuben's horses were over in the field of corn stubble rummaging for edibles, and T.M.'s attention was fixed on them. When Martha turned in the saddle to say hello to Dorothy, her horse tried to walk out from under her, evidently to say hello to those other horses in the cornfield. She told him "whoa" in a low voice but he only shook his long head up and down irritably and took another step, so she pulled his head down toward a stirrup and jabbed her blunt spurs into his brisket and whirled him in a tight circle round and round for a whole minute before straightening out his head. After that he stood there well behaved and meek without so much as a glance toward those other horses.

  It wasn't a very cold day but Martha's face was pink when she finally turned to say hello to Dorothy. "Are you Mrs. Romer? I've met so many people I can't keep the names straight."

  "Yes, I'm Dorothy Romer. Did you come to see the horse we wanted broke? She's there in the cornfield." Dorothy walked over to the fence and Martha got down from her horse, dropped the reins, and followed her. T.M. stood there as if she'd nailed his hooves to the ground.

  Reuben kept a gray gelding as a riding horse and he had four pulling horses he used in pairs so they could trade off the hard work of hauling logs; he had bought the unbroke chestnut mare for no good reason except she was a beautiful horse and he was drunk at the time. "She's that chestnut there, the one standing kind of alone," Dorothy said.

  The chestnut shifted her weight just then and moved closer to the rest of the horses, and Martha said, "The one that just moved over? The pretty one?" and Dorothy nodded. Martha watched the mare for a few minutes quietly and then went to the little gate in the cornfield fence and opened it and went through and took off her hat and waved it, which set the horses to moving. She stood and watched the particular movement of the chestnut as the horse bolted away from her, ears flattened, hind legs kicking out. Dorothy couldn't imagine what she was looking for or what she was learning by watching the horse. The mare was an intractable five-year-old that her husband was unfathomably fond of but had never been able to break. She imagined it was the horse's very wildness that her husband admired.

  "Was she ever started?" the girl called to her.

  "My husband tried to do it. I guess he can get her saddled and get her to take the bit but she always will buck, she won't ever calm down. I think she's just determined not to be rode. My husband off and on has talked about selling her for rodeo stock. If you don't think she can
be broke, maybe he'll just go ahead and do that."

  The girl walked back toward Dorothy. At church on Sunday Dorothy would have said she looked like anybody's rangy, over-tall farm daughter, dressed in a worn green jumper and worn yard boots, her thick brown hair pulled back behind her ears under an old-fashioned hat that had the velvet worn through. Now she wore a buckaroo getup, fringed buckskin chaps that flared out wide above high-heeled boots and spurs with blunt star rowels, the kind of outfit Dorothy hadn't seen outside of old photographs and rodeo shows. The girl's hair was tied back with a piece of string, and when she resettled her high-crowned hat on her head most of her hair disappeared under it and she looked a good deal like a beardless young cowboy.

  "How long ago did your husband give up on her?"

  "Oh, I don't know that he's ever given up but if you mean when's the last time he tried to ride her I guess it was a month ago or more." Dorothy remembered this because it was right after Mata Hari, that exotic dancer who had been spying for the Germans, was put to death. Reuben had been calling the horse Mata Hari and joking about her being pure evil, and the day he read about the execution he had gone out to break the horse "for once and all" and he'd been thrown three or four times that day and he hadn't tried to ride her since.

  The girl looked down at her boots. "Well I'll see if I can break her for you, but sometimes when they've been tried and bucked like that they just get ruined and they never can be broke. If I can't get her gentled I won't charge you for trying."

  "All right. That sounds all right." On Sunday, when Reuben had told the girl broncobuster that she could try breaking his wild horse, he had walked back to Dorothy and laughed and said, "She'll be in for a bad surprise, won't she, when she tries to get up on that mean ol' Mata Hari," but he had looked nervous, and Dorothy knew he was of two minds about whether he wanted the horse tamed at all. And she also knew his pride was in danger if a young girl was able to accomplish what he'd failed at. So there was an odd sort of relief in hearing Martha Lessen speak doubtfully about the outcome.

  "I've got about thirteen or fourteen horses, I think, that I'll be breaking on a circle ride. I'm planning to start in the next day or two roughing them out, and I guess I'll start here because you're nearest to the Bliss place and I'm boarding over there. I should know right away whether I can break her or not."

  "I'll tell my husband," Dorothy said, though she didn't know where Reuben was and she didn't expect to see him until he had drunk up every penny of last week's wood money. "Would you come in and have some coffee?"

  The girl looked off across the countryside for just a moment and when she looked back at Dorothy her face had taken on a shy look. "I've got so many places to visit, I guess I'd better not."

  Dorothy had been starving for female company, for any company really, so long as it wasn't a child, but she didn't say so. She said, "Where are you headed to next? Do you need any help finding it?"

  Martha took George Bliss's creased map from her coat pocket and flattened it out and turned it until she could read what it said. "His name is Irwin, I think. Mr. Bliss drew me a map, but I'm still having trouble finding places. Is Irwin's the next one over to the north?"

  "The Birtwicks have the place next to ours and then is Irwin's. If you go back to the Graves Creek road and then turn west when you get to the river, you'll see his house setting right on top of a hill; it's painted white. You can't hardly miss it, it's a big house and right out in the open."

  "I'll find it. I don't know this country too well yet, but I guess I'll learn it."

  "We've been here two years and I still don't know it much. My husband drives me to church in the wagon, and into Shelby for the shopping, but I never learned to drive the horses and I've got to walk everywhere when Mr. Romer is busy. I've got children who get tired if I walk them very far, and that keeps me pretty close to home."

  "Was your husband hoping to tame that chestnut enough so you could ride him?"

  Dorothy said flatly, "I guess I don't know why Mr. Romer bought that unbroke horse except that he thought it was pretty. But I've never ridden much, and I don't think I'd want to learn on a horse as wild as that, and I don't want her anywhere near my children."

  Martha glanced back at the girl, Helen, who had by now come out on the porch and was watching everything from there, and then she said to Dorothy, "Well, no matter how pretty a horse is, if she's not well mannered she's not a horse you'd want to have around. But if I can break her for you, then she won't be wild anymore and you could sure ride her anywhere. You'd just have to keep schooling her, making sure she stayed tame, which are things I could show you how to do."

  Dorothy looked over at the chestnut skeptically. "He calls that horse Mata Hari, after the Dutch spy who made so much trouble for them over in France."

  Martha smiled suddenly. "After she's broke and not making trouble anymore, maybe you'll have to start calling her Mattie." She was a big girl and had a large mouth, but Dorothy thought she was pleasant enough to look at without quite being pretty. When she smiled it caused her eyes to widen as if she'd been happily surprised. Dorothy guessed Martha Lessen was around nineteen or twenty. Her wide young face, when it was lit up like that, gave Dorothy a terrible feeling of envy. She was only twenty-eight herself, but she felt old, and wise in the sorrows of the world.

  "You'll be back tomorrow, then?"

  "I think it'll be tomorrow. Anyway I hope I can get around to see everybody today, and if I can then I'll be here in the morning. It'll probably be a good couple of weeks before I start riding the circle, though."

  "I didn't say so before, Miss Lessen, but I don't know what you mean by a circle ride."

  "Oh, it's just called that because I'll be riding in a big circle every day, one horse after the other from one place to the next, every single day. You'll have somebody else's horse put up at your place most days, or I guess it'll be two horses, because I'll have to get the circle spread out even. I haven't figured out yet what to do about spreading the cost of the feed so you don't wind up feeding more horses than you own, but I'm still thinking about it and I'll get it worked out. Anyway, every morning I'll be riding a new horse in and riding another one out."

  Dorothy said, "Oh," as if she understood this, though it was still mostly unclear.

  "They need to get used to being ridden," the girl said, "and they need to learn reining and not to be afraid offers and all that, so you have to ride them over and over to get the lessons learned. First, though, you've got to get them all used to saddles and so forth, which is likely to take me two or three days at each place." She said this as if she knew Dorothy was having trouble with it, but not like a schoolteacher explaining something to a slow pupil. It seemed to Dorothy she was just quietly pleased to be able to talk about something she knew, something she was good at, and it struck her suddenly that the only things she herself was good at were housekeeping and rearing children, and these were not things other people would be anxious to hear about. Any chance she might have had to be a cowgirl and to go around the countryside breaking horses had passed her by a long time ago.

  9

  A COUPLE OF THINGS conspired to delay Martha, and it took her the better part of two days to make it around to all six places, talk to folks, and get a look at all the horses.

  She found the Irwin place easily enough. Walter Irwin was a bachelor homesteader who had come out from somewhere in New England with money but no knowledge of farming, and he had hired a man named Alfred Logerwell to help him, a man who was lazy and conceited and almost as ignorant as Walter himself. Irwin had an auto-truck and had been slow to discover that he might need mules to get his plowing done and a horse to get down the roads when they were too muddy for his auto. The horse he had bought was not yet broken out, which was an odd choice for somebody with an immediate need of one; but the horse had been bought on Logerwell's advice, it turned out, and from one of Logerwell's relatives. Martha didn't dislike Walter Irwin—he was mild seeming and decent—but he wasn't i
nterested in coming to any knowledge of horses. He sent her off to talk to his hired man about the roan gelding he wanted her to break, and Martha saw right away that Alfred Logerwell was the sort of person she would never have a use for. He made a false show of knowledge, talking as if the horse was a thousand-dollar prize, though it was a plain cayuse of the worst sort, heavy-jowled and long in the pasterns. Logerwell would have bucked out the horse himself, could have broken him in half an hour, he told Martha with a crooked smirk, if he hadn't strained his shoulder lifting sacks of cement. This was the kind of thing she was used to hearing from her own dad and hardly ever credited. Moreover, Logerwell liked the sound of his own voice, which was another thing he had in common with Charlie Lessen, and he kept Martha standing there a good hour while he told her every cock-and-bull story under the sun, stories proving how smart he was, and everybody else dumb as cows.

  So it was late morning, almost noon, by the time she got away from Irwin's and crossed over the Little Bird Woman River northwest of Shelby and went looking for the Thiede ranch, which was called the T Bar, tucked up against the foothills of the Whitehorn Range. She was pretty sure she had found the right place and was just riding up to the house when a woman on a dun horse popped over the hill and rode down into the ranch yard at a breathless lope. It was a shock to see a little child who couldn't have been more than two years old jouncing on the saddle in front of her, the child's round face wreathed in wool so only the dark eyes showed. The woman's own face was bright pink and her long-nosed horse was damp with sweat along his neck and flank. She rode him right up to T.M., who tossed his head and stepped sideways.

  "Miss Lessen," she said, as if they were acquainted with each other, and then at one stroke Martha remembered this was Irene Thiede, whose husband owned the T Bar, and their little boy, who was called Young Karl. "We lost the wagon, it tipped off the road by Little Creek," Irene said in a harried rush. "Emil's trying to get the horses out of harness but he needs somebody stronger than me. I was planning to phone up Gray Maklin, he's the closest, but since you're right here, can you help?"