by Jenna Blum
Dorothy went on splitting wood, looking over at this spectacle every little while. The day before, when she and Clifford had given up trying to separate the horses themselves, she had told her son they would just wait for Miss Lessen to do it, and that Miss Lessen was a cowgirl like the ones she and Reuben, Helen, and Clifford had seen when they went up to the Pendleton Round-Up the summer before the baby was born. Those men and girls roping cows and horses had seemed almost never to miss, and Dorothy didn't know why Martha didn't just shake out a loop in her rope and throw it onto Mata Hari's neck. Maybe this was what you had to expect from a girl who was not a rodeo cowboy, just somebody doing an ordinary job of work on foot in an open field, but it was a disappointment.
Just about the time Helen and Clifford were going out the door to school, Martha finally persuaded the Belgians to move over into the pasture. Then she shut the gate and stood in the middle of the cornfield stubble with a little whip and began snapping it around Mata Hari's hind feet, which made the mare dodge back and forth or circle, looking for a way out or a corner to hide in. The girl began singing quietly, a song Dorothy didn't recognize, something dirgeful about a cowboy who had died. Dorothy's children walked slowly backward down the road, swinging their lunch buckets, watching Martha Lessen and the horse every last moment until they went over the low rise at the edge of the pasture fence and lost their view.
Dorothy was as curious as Helen or Clifford. She went on with her housework but every little while she looked up to watch the girl in the field. She expected bucking and noise but none of that seemed to be happening. Early on, she saw that the horse had stopped racing around and was standing quietly letting the girl's hands rove up and down her neck and withers. Dorothy could hear Miss Lessen still singing—when she came to the end of her cowboy song, she just started at the beginning again—and from this distance it looked for all the world as if the chestnut horse was in thrall to the girl's low voice. When Dorothy looked out a few minutes later, Martha had a halter on the chestnut and a long lead rope and was following the horse around the field, letting her go wherever she wanted and keeping slack in the rope. It was a mystery to Dorothy what this had to do with teaching a horse to behave. Without dust or noise to keep her interested, she sometimes forgot there was anything going on out in the cornfield. Once, when she looked up from what she was doing, she saw the girl walking around the field and the horse seeming to follow her like a pet. But things progressed so quietly, it wasn't long before Dorothy was hardly watching at all.
She had been simmering a pot of beans and a ham hock on the stove ever since the breakfast dishes were washed, and she had been looking forward to having Miss Lessen to visit with at lunch. But late in the morning the girl came up to the house and said she was finished with the chestnut for now and was going on to the Irwin farm to start his gelding. Dorothy said, "Oh," in surprise and believed she'd hidden her disappointment, though she hadn't come anywhere near it.
Martha shifted her weight, which caused her spurs to jingle lightly. She had not given much thought to it, but imagined that a woman like Mrs. Romer, a woman with a husband and three children, wouldn't have any cause to feel lonely; now she remembered suddenly, seeing the look that came into Dorothy's face, there might be all kinds of reasons for a person to need the company of strangers. She herself had suffered from loneliness, living in a house crowded with five brothers and her parents and sometimes grandparents and a sickly aunt. She said shyly, looking away, "I might come back here this afternoon, if that's all right. It wouldn't hurt to spend some more time with your horse," and Dorothy's face lit up with something like relief.
All the rest of that morning Dorothy fitted in the woodsplitting when she could, between caring for the baby and her sick husband and washing clothes and sometimes sitting down to sew for a few minutes on outfits she intended for the children's Christmas. Reuben was able to keep down some soup, which Dorothy brought to him in the bedroom. His hands were shaking, so she spooned it into his mouth, and after a minute or so he began to weep quietly and she wept too and kissed his sweating forehead. He dropped his head down on her bosom. "Don't give up on me, Dorothy," he murmured, "just don't give up on me. I won't drink no more, I promise you." She had heard this promise three or four times a year for all the ten years of their marriage. She cried and said, "All right, Reuben, all right," and stroked his greasy hair. He was a good husband and father when he was sober, but he had lost jobs one after the other on account of his drinking, and they would lose this farm if the wood wasn't delivered to the school and the electric plant in a timely manner.
Martha Lessen rode back into the yard in midafternoon. Dorothy's children, who had just come walking up the farm lane from school, stayed out by the cornfield to watch her work with the chestnut horse even though the day had gone on cold and damp and they stood there shivering, their shoes muddy and their cold hands fisted around the handles of their lunch buckets. Dorothy didn't call them in until she had supper nearly on the table, and then she walked out in the drizzling rain to get the children and tell Miss Lessen that she hoped she would come in and eat too. She was startled to find Martha riding the saddled horse at a walk round and round in the stubble field.
Dorothy stood a moment at the railing with her silent, enraptured children, and then she called out quietly, "I hardly can believe it."
Miss Lessen kept her attention somewhere along the bobbing neck of the horse, as if something was written there and she was trying to make it out. "Well, she's not finished," she said, "but she will be, by spring."
"My husband will be so surprised." Dorothy looked over toward the house, the drawn curtain at the window of their bedroom. Then she swatted Helen lightly on her little behind. "Go on and feed the chickens and then you wash up for supper. Clifford, the cow is out in that pasture that has the hollow tree, you'd better run all the way if you want to make it back in time to eat." Her children scattered. She said to Martha Lessen, "Come in and have supper with us, will you? I made a big pot of beans and hocks."
It might have been a quiet meal if the children had gone on tongue-tied and if Reuben had stayed in bed; Dorothy had imagined the two women might have a chance to visit like adults. But the children suddenly discovered their voices and peppered the heroic Miss Lessen with every possible question about horses and cowboying and her life in the Wild West, and in the midst of it Reuben came out from the bedroom dressed but unshaven and smelling ripe.
"I've been getting over being sick," he said shakily to Martha Lessen, a kind of apology. In fact he looked thin and sallow, the tender skin around his eyes standing out bruise-dark. He sat at the table and took a little food onto his plate and cleared his throat and said, "I bet that horse is giving you lots of trouble."
The children's faces flashed bright with their news. "She's already broke," Clifford said, and Helen, tumbling her own words over her brother's, said, "She never even bucked one time."
Reuben drew back his head in surprise. Slowly, while his children went on chattering to him about the wonderful Miss Lessen, his face reddened and he lowered his eyes to his plate and began quietly to pick at his food with a fork. The children might ordinarily have gone on talking—they were irrepressible children, really—but they felt something come into the room, a strain or rigidity they recognized, and gradually they fell quiet and sat looking from one to another of the adults. Dorothy threw Martha Lessen a distressed glance, which the girl gathered the meaning of. Like the two Romer children, Martha was pretty well acquainted with men who drank themselves sick. In her experience they often spent their shame in the coin of anger and swagger. She said, intending to soft-soap him if she could, "Well, she's not broke yet, she's just somewhat started, and she took to the saddle so easy, I guess you must have been working with her and done most of it already."
Reuben looked at her and after a moment carried a forkful of beans up to his mouth and held it there while he pretended to consider the matter. He cleared his throat again. "I did think abo
ut going on breaking her myself, I had her that close. Only I don't have the time. I've got plenty to do without bothering over a stubborn horse." He chewed the beans deliberately and chased them down with milk. His hand holding the milk glass trembled slightly.
In a while Martha said, without looking up from her plate, "Mrs. Romer told me she's called Mata Hari, and I guess she must be named right, she tried to take a bite out of me when I had my back turned."
This finally seemed to please and mollify him. "You be careful, now. That horse would as soon kick you as look at you." He went on after that, talking about the execution of Mata Hari and the progress of the war, particularly this recent business of Lenin and his crowd overthrowing the czar and making peace with Germany. Reuben had signed up for the draft, he told Martha, and "wished to get a chance to kill Heinies." But he didn't expect to be called, given that he was a farmer and father to three children. It was true they were still calling up the unmarried men and the men without children ahead of the family men, but Dorothy doubted the draft board, if it came to it, would ever grant her husband a farmer's exemption. He had hardly managed to make anything grow on his claim, and after the last poor pea crop he had turned almost entirely to woodcutting for his income. From time to time she found herself daydreaming, in very nearly a hopeful way, about Reuben being shipped off to France while she packed up her children and returned to Wisconsin to live with her parents.
Her notion of a pleasant female conversation over the supper table had already been surrendered, so when the baby started to fuss, Dorothy left Reuben sitting at the table gravely delivering to Martha Lessen his opinions on the conduct of the war, and she put Clifford and Helen to clearing plates while she settled in a chair to nurse little Alice. Miss Lessen's eyes followed her with a shy-seeming glance and after a minute or two she stood and carried her own empty plate to the sink, murmuring a word of excuse to Reuben, who was still talking knowingly about the mistakes the British had made in their conduct of the war. Martha had taken off her big cowboy hat and canvas coat on coming into the house, but not the heavy leather chaps and spurs. When she crossed the room to retrieve her coat and hat, the scuff of her boots across the board floor and the jingling of her spurs made Dorothy's children stop and gaze after her in rapt worship, and even Reuben fell silent and stared.
"Are you going back to the Blisses' now?" Dorothy asked her.
"I've got a couple more things I want to do with your horse before I leave—I want to get her moved over into the corral, for one thing. But I'll be finishing pretty soon. I'll come back here tomorrow to rub a little more of the rough off her, but if you can make sure she's left alone until then"—she glanced pointedly at the children—"that'd be the best thing. She's awful tired from so much schooling. She's not used to it, and needs to be left to rest up overnight." She stood at the door a moment, settling her hat on her head and gazing out the front window at the dark afternoon. It had begun to rain harder, and Dorothy wondered if the girl was dreading going back out in it, the Bliss ranch a good three or four miles down a muddy road in the coming night.
She said to Martha, "You could stay over if you want. You'd have to sleep on the floor here in the front room but it's warm by the stove and we don't have a dog that would step on you."
Martha showed the quick white edge of a smile. "I wouldn't know what to do without a dog stepping on me." But she wouldn't stay: the Blisses were expecting her, she had horses of her own to see to, she didn't mind the rain so long as she was dressed for it, and so forth.
Then she turned and said to Reuben, "I hope you're feeling better, Mr. Romer," and Reuben, who by then was leaning forward with his elbows on the table and scrubbing his face with his palms, replied glumly that he had too much work to do to lie around in bed for long.
It occurred to Dorothy that Martha Lessen's words about letting the horse rest might have been meant for Reuben as much as the children. If he wasn't the worse for liquor, it would be like him to try to show his children and his wife and the half-tamed horse just who had the upper hand and how little need he had of a girl broncobuster.
But later, when Dorothy had helped him take a bath and shave his whiskers and they were lying in bed together, he murmured again how sorry he was and how he would try to do better, and then he told her piteously that he was a damn worthless hand with horses and he never should have bought that unbroke chestnut and if Miss Lessen could finish the horse, by damn, he would turn around and sell it just like that, to make up the money he'd lost while he'd been off on his drunk. He began to cry as he told her these things, which drove Dorothy to feel she had to argue with him, she had to tell him it wasn't true that he was worthless around horses, and she tried to think of times when he had acquitted himself well around a horse or a team, bringing up, for instance, the time he had stopped his brother's horse from bucking just by grabbing hold of its bridle—just by hanging on and talking firmly to it. She murmured these things with her lips touching his temple and her hands stroking his hair. Slowly he quieted in her arms. He was so childlike at times, she despaired of seeing him a man, and childlike too in his temper and his need to strut and boast. She was shot through suddenly with an understanding: if he ever was drafted and sent to France, he would not survive it. He'd be killed in the first minutes after stepping into the trenches, and he would die weeping for her like a child.
11
SOME OF THE PEOPLE Martha had contracted with gave her just one horse to break, and others three or four, which meant she had to go to some trouble to get the horses spread out evenly, two in each corral. It was something she did little by little, moving a horse late in the afternoon after working all day at saddle-breaking. The first week in December she went over to the Woodruff ranch intending to pick up one of their three uneducated horses and take it to the corral at W.G. Boyd's place. She'd been working at the Rocker V all day in a steady rain, and one of Bill Varden's horses had given her a rough time—he was a big gelding pretty well blinded by his own glory. She hadn't any expectation of getting back to the Bliss homeplace until well after dark, well after the others had eaten their supper, and her back hurt, her feet were cold and wet inside wet boots. She rode the six or seven miles from the Rocker V to the Split Rock in a discouraged temper, with her chin down and her shoulders hunched under a rubber poncho.
Somebody—one of the Woodruff sisters or their foreman—had corralled the three horses for her, which was a relief. When she climbed the rails the horses crowded together in a far corner of the fence and watched her warily, ears pricked. Two were seal brown—they were out of the same mare, not twins but born two years apart—and one a flashy palomino. Martha had known palominos to make a show, to strut around as if they knew they were beautiful; but this one had a somewhat shamefaced way of holding her head low to the ground as if she thought herself plain. There was just no rhyme or reason to such things; the Rocker V horse, the one so proud of himself, had a long, rangy body, a Roman nose, a ratty tail.
A man came out of the little house Martha thought must be the foreman's place and crossed the muddy yard to her, shrugging into his coat as he came. She had been told his name but couldn't remember it. He climbed up next to her and looked at the horses a minute in silence. It was still raining lightly; she could hear it ticking on her rubber slicker and the crown of her hat.
"None of them is broke to lead," the man said, as if he and Martha had already been introduced and were in the middle of a conversation.
Her mood being what it was, Martha took this for some kind of criticism. "I know it," she said.
She felt him glance in her direction, but then he turned back and watched the horses another minute. Finally he said, "You care which one gets moved?"
Most of the horses she was moving were entirely unbroken, they were horses she hadn't gotten around to yet, horses who didn't know a thing about being led. She'd been roping their necks up close to Dolly and bringing them along that way, so if the young horse gave trouble, pulling or trying to
rear up, it was trouble only in the first minute or two. Dolly wouldn't stand for any nonsense and educated them with stern schoolmarmish discipline. Martha had been studying these three, looking for the one easiest for Dolly to handle, one small enough it wouldn't pull Dolly off her feet. "I thought I'd take the one with the white snip on his nose," she told the foreman, and waited for him to find some objection to it.
After looking them over a bit longer, he said, "I'll get a rope and wrangle him out for you," which brought him into her better graces. She had been worrying somewhat that she might have to try to rope the horse with the foreman standing there watching her. He looked over at Dolly. "Were you thinking you'd pony him up to your horse there?" This was said matter-of-factly as if it was just exactly what he would do if it was up to him. Martha gave him a look. He had by now put himself in a good way with her.
"Yes sir. They usually follow her pretty good and if they don't she takes a bite out of them."
He made a low sound of amusement. "I'll bet. She doesn't look like she'd take any monkey business off a youngster." He was studying Dolly. "I heard you had a horse that was all scarred up from being burnt."
"Yes sir."
He turned and gave Martha a slight smile. "I wish you wouldn't go on calling me sir. I'm just the hired help."
