by Jenna Blum
Irwin went away with a surprised look, but unperturbed. "Well, all right," he said, and strolled off to select another girl.
When she went out on the porch she found Emil Thiede smoking a cigarette and leaning on the porch rail, talking quietly to Irene, whose eyes were fixed past him on the low moon above the roof of the hardware store across the street. What they were talking about was Old Karl's broken pelvis, a subject that ran through their minds and through their conversation daily, but Emil stopped and raised his chin when he saw Martha Lessen, and Irene turned to see who he was looking at and they both smiled and came to her as if the story she'd given Walter Irwin had been true and the Thiedes had just been waiting for her to come onto the porch.
In those first months of the war there was a lot of foolish flag-waving. Orchestras banned the playing of Mendelssohn and Beethoven, people insisted sauerkraut was "liberty cabbage," vigilante committees in some places back East tarred and feathered people who spoke the German language. The Thiedes might have been entirely shut out by their neighbors, except the old ranch families in the valley had known Emil all his life—Old Karl and Hilda had come over right after the Franco-Prussian war, Emil had been born in the valley—and in any event Irene was English through and through, her family among the first to settle along the Little Bird Woman River. And with Old Karl laid up in bed, the worst of people's patriotism may have been forestalled. But Irene and Emil had been frozen out by quite a few of the townsfolk and homesteaders in the crowded hall—"Heinies" and "Krauts" had followed them in low whispers—and they were both glad to see Martha Lessen, who had evidently made up her mind that people who treated horses decently must be decent people.
Martha hadn't yet started riding the circle, so Irene said, meaning to tease her, "We've got a couple of horses just dying for Miss Lessen to come and give them a ride."
Martha didn't quite take this for criticism but she said in exasperation, "I'll be riding in and out every day once I get them all started, but I've still got two more to get to." She had just finished the rough work on W.G. Boyd's black gelding and still had two of the Woodruff sisters' horses to saddle-break before starting the circle ride. She worried about how long it was taking her to get around to them all.
Emil smiled. "Well, I guess pretty soon we'll be seeing too much of you then."
Irene, who had picked up on Martha's tender feelings, pushed him lightly. "Quit it, Emil." She fingered Martha's scarf. "This is so pretty."
Martha had tied the borrowed scarf at the waist of the jumper and then had stood in the changing room, turning the scarf one way and another trying to find the right place for the fringed points to hang down. Louise had told her the scarf would spruce up any dress, which Martha had understood to mean it might partly hide the shabby condition of her jumper. "Louise Bliss lent it to me," she said, not to mince matters.
This didn't lessen Irene's admiration of it. "It looks so nice. And the color is right for you. If I had your hair I'd wear red all the time. There's nothing prettier than a red ribbon in chestnut hair." Martha never had thought of her brown hair as chestnut, and she realized with something like dissatisfaction that she didn't own a single piece of red clothing, not even a ribbon.
She looked down at her feet, wriggling the toes. "These are borrowed, too. I've got sore feet from wearing them."
"They're pretty, though. Every woman should own a pair of patent shoes."
Martha kept looking down at her feet. "I never have."
Irene laughed. "I never have either." When she put one arm around Martha's waist, the last of the girl's unhappiness went out of her, and the two of them leaned together.
Irene had taken warmly to Martha from that first day in Little Creek Canyon when Emil's wagon had gone off the road. She had grown up in a family where horse sense was considered a heroic point of character, had heard repeated all her life the particulars of her grandfather's story—how he'd come West alone and penniless and worked as a cowboy and horse wrangler before managing to build up a decent ranch of his own from a small donation land claim and half a dozen cow and calf pairs. Irene had always been a good hand with horses, better than her brothers, every bit as good as her granddad, but she'd been a schoolteacher before marrying Emil. Martha represented to her some part of her old childhood notion of becoming a cowgirl.
After a moment, Martha thought to ask Irene, "Where is Young Karl?" Old Karl, even with his broken pelvis, stubbornly took care of his own needs so long as Irene left a sandwich and a pot beside his bed, but the two-year-old couldn't be left with his invalided grandfather.
"He's in that little room we all changed clothes in. Some of the younger girls are watching the babies and small children so we mothers can dance." She met Emil's look and flushed.
Emil said to her, "You're not dancing, though, are you?" He winked at Martha. "She'd rather stand here and fret. Her and the baby don't like to be in separate rooms, ever."
Irene looked away from her husband, frowning around the crowded porch without seeming to see anyone. "He's attached to me is all. He doesn't like to be held by strangers."
Emil took her hand and played with the short, blunt fingers without saying anything else about Young Karl. He said to Martha, "So I guess you'll be starting around the circle pretty soon. When? In a week or so?"
"It might be sooner than that. It might be Wednesday. Those horses have been standing around quite a while, some of them. I want to start as soon as I can."
Irene, who was remembering the start of school every autumn and how the children always had to relearn their lessons, smiled and said, "If those horses are anything like children, they'll have forgotten every bit of what you taught them by the time you get them back in the schoolroom."
This was fairly close to the case. Martha had tried to get back to the first of the horses every couple of days while also going on with the rough work on those remaining, and she'd ridden some of them a short way, getting them spread out evenly around the circle, two horses at each stop. But by now they were restive and tending toward wild again. She knew she'd have to remind some of them who she was and what a saddle was for and what was expected of them.
Emil grinned and said, following a trail Irene had opened up, "I always had to relearn my times tables over again every year. Did you?"
Irene looked over at him, laughing, and then said to Martha, "He still doesn't know them. He leaves all the book work for me to do."
It was cold on the porch, and in a few minutes they would be driven inside again, but for a while the three of them stood along the railing looking out at the horses and autos in the street. Martha looked for Rory among the many brown horses and found him standing close to Duchess with his cheek resting affectionately against her golden red neck.
"I guess I'd rather teach horses than girls and boys," Martha said, and Irene answered briefly, dreamily, "Oh, I would too."
The T Bar comprised almost a thousand acres, a hundred cows, and they'd been short-handed even before October, when Emil's dad was hurt. Irene wouldn't have felt right saying it, but she'd been happier since then—since Old Karl was laid up and Emil needed his wife to ride out with him on horseback every day, just to keep up with all the work.
13
THERE WAS A LOT of rain early in December, followed by a hard freeze and then a thaw and another freeze. Sometime during the thaw a bunch of Split Rock mother cows discovered a desire to swim or wade over to Baby Island, a long narrow acre of land lying just beyond a U-turn in Blue Stem Creek. This would not have been trouble except they had pushed down a farmer's fence to get there, and the grass on the island was a little field of his winter rye just coming green after the rain, and they were still there when the temperature dropped and put a ledge of ice all around the island. After the cows finished up the rye and came to an understanding of their predicament, they began bawling to be rescued, which could be heard from half a mile off. The farmer rode over to see what the noise was and then rode over to the Split Rock Ranch a
nd told the Woodruff sisters he was planning to shoot every damn one of those cows if they weren't off the island and off his property by the time he got back from seeing a lawyer about a lawsuit. He and the Woodruffs had enjoyed a long-standing dispute having to do with their range bulls covering his dairy cows.
Henry Frazer saddled a big dun horse called Pardner and went to take a look at the problem. The ledge of ice around the island was four or five feet wide, thick and white at the brushy margins, thinning out to a brittle skin shuddering and transparent at the edge of the current. Henry called over to the cows, his lowing, wordless mother cow call, hoping they might be inspired to jump out on the ice and break it with the weight of their bodies and then swim across to him. They went on milling along the bank and bawling fretfully. It was late in the day and a little wet sleet was drizzling out of a low sky, and Henry, studying the trouble these cows had got themselves into, considered whether he ought to just let the farmer shoot them. Then he hunted up a short thick pole for breaking up the ice and put his horse into the water.
The Blue Stem came straight off the Nelson Glacier far back in the Clarks Range and was numbing cold even in August; and in December, after a week or so of rain, it was deep enough to require a horse to swim. The whole adventure went against Pardner's better judgment. When the water climbed over his big haunches he decided to turn right around and climb back out, and Henry had to convince him pretty firmly to get back in and swim for the island. Henry wasn't happy about any of it either. He tucked his coat up to keep it out of the water but his boots flooded icy cold and then his overalls and long johns up to the hips.
When the horse bumped up against the ice and found his feet on the gravel bar under the water, Henry shoved the pole out and beat at the ledge of ice and broke away enough so the horse could climb up, and it must have been the shattering of the ice and Pardner scrambling and splashing up from the water that spooked the cows. They had been asking him to come rescue them but now they went hightailing away from him to the upstream tip of the island. The lead cows walked or got pushed out onto the ice until it broke under them, and as soon as they went down in the water the other cows jumped in after them, bawling and rolling their eyes, and the whole bunch started swimming hard upstream, which made no sense, except a cow will get herself into trouble and take you with her if she can.
Henry yelled and swore, which didn't help matters, and spurred the horse back into the water. The cows were swimming toward the hairpin curve on the Blue Stem where the bank had been sheared away in a high bluff, and afterward he would tell the sisters and anybody else who asked him about it that he'd been thinking they would pile up there at the oxbow and drown and that he meant to turn them back downstream. But the truth was, he wasn't thinking at all, he just went in after them. And he never did know what caused Pardner to go under, if it was a rock or a stump under the dark water, or the shock of the cold, or a seizure of some kind, but the horse lurched suddenly and then sank, and Henry kicked his boots loose of the stirrups and swam away from him. The horse didn't come up, and then he did, floating on his back. Henry was at the bank by then, climbing out on the slick frozen mud, and he stood there with his teeth chattering and the stream running off him, stood there looking at his horse floating down the high creek with his legs sticking out of the water.
The cows upstream were already turning for the bank, finding their feet, beginning to lumber up into the farmer's frost-killed field of peas. If Henry had left the damn animals to their own devices he wouldn't have killed his horse was what he was thinking as he watched them. He started walking downstream after the horse and then he broke into a trot to keep his blood from freezing up on him. The saddle wasn't more than a year old and had cost him a pretty penny, and if the horse was dead he at least hoped to save the tack that was on him. He got ahead of the horse, and where the creek widened and creamed across a gravel bed he waded into the water and caught the reins. When the dun's back scraped on the pebbly shallows the horse suddenly righted himself, snorting and blowing, and stood up wild-eyed and wobbly and streaming water.
Pardner was a big dark dun with zebra stripes down the spine and the shoulders—Henry never had thought he was much of a looker. But of course, when it comes to color a plain horse has his virtues. The fact is, a white-faced horse's eyes will weep. A horse with white feet is prone to split hooves. Palominos, claybanks, skewbalds, piebalds, some strawberry roans, have amber hooves that are brittle and prone to cracks. White hides will scald, chafe from sweat and heat. Some paint horses, the ones with mostly white on them, and blue eyes, are not right in the head. A pure black horse will sunburn in hot weather, fade out under the saddle and the harness. Left to go their own way, horses will pretty much always revert to bay, with black legs and hooves; or they'll fall back to grulla, with black feet, black zebra slashes above the knees and hocks and down the spine and shoulders of a dun-colored hide. They seem to know, most horses, the plain colors that will save them.
"Hey, Pardner," Henry said in surprise, and put his wet glove on the horse's neck affectionately. He and the dun were both soaked through and shivering and he didn't have a damn thing to dry off with, so he set out leading the horse at a trot to get some heat going in both of them. It was near to a mile back to the Split Rock. He got into the yard just about the time the sleet quit, and went into the barn and took off the wet saddle and rubbed down the horse as well as he could with gunnysacks and then went over to the house and stuck his head into the kitchen.
"Miss Woodruff, I've got to get back to those cows and bring them in, but there's a horse in the barn needs to be warmed up and looked after, he near drowned in the creek."
Emma Adelaide took in Henry's sopping clothes and said, "Oh for goodness' sake," and she stood up and reached for her barn coat on the rack by the kitchen door. "You put on some dry clothes," she yelled after Henry as he went back out, and then he heard her calling Aileen's name.
His wet boots were a slow chore to get out of, and the wet long johns, the goose flesh bright pink when he peeled them back. He stood by the box stove in the foreman's house for the little bit of leftover heat coming off it and dried himself with a towel and rummaged around until he found dry clothes that weren't too muddy—he hadn't got around to doing laundry that week. He didn't have another winter coat to put on, so he put on his summer coat over a flannel shirt, and a raincoat over the top of that, and his barn boots caked with mud and manure.
It was just about dusk by then. He took a coffee can of corn out to the pasture and shook it, and his red horse, Dick, came up. He was saddling him when Aileen brought over a steaming cup that turned out to be tomato soup, and he drank it down before he went ahead with tightening up the cinch. While he was standing there next to the horse, Aileen let herself through the pasture gate and chirped to the horses, and her paint horse called Paint came up to her and she led him over to the fence and went ahead with saddling him, even though Henry called to her, "Miss Woodruff, I don't need help bringing those cows home." The sisters were both stubborn that way. When he and Aileen rode out of the yard, there was a light on in the barn and through the half-open door he could see Emma Adelaide walking Pardner up and down the runway with a blanket over his back.
The pea field the cows had climbed into was fenced on three sides with wire strung between posts and rockjacks, and on the fourth side by Blue Stem Creek. The cows were too spent to go to the trouble of pushing the wire over and they had had enough of the flooded creek, so they were standing in the near-darkness, bunched up together for comfort and heat, waiting for what would happen next. Henry got down and opened the gate in the fence and Aileen went through and began driving the cows toward the opening, clucking and chirping to them quietly. Her white hair and the white on the paint horse seemed lit-up and luminous against the darkening sky, the dark field, the dim glooming shapes of the cows.
When Pardner sank under him in Blue Stem Creek, Henry had reached down for the horse, had tried to hold on to him, hold him up,
a thousand pounds, which he had not remembered doing and now suddenly remembered.
In April the year before, Henry's older brother, Jim, had been driving him and El Bayard back to the Bliss ranch from Bingham after seeing a moving picture. El's sister Pearl was in the car too, as she and Jim were engaged to marry. Jim had moved to Elwha County in 1914, persuaded by Henry's letters about the mountain air, the scenery, the prospects for growth in the valley, and now Jim had a law practice in Shelby and a brand-new Model T Ford car. At the curve where Cow Creek comes down and joins the Little Bird Woman River the car slid off the road and overturned. It had been a deep winter, but a Chinook wind had blown up warm the previous week and the roads had opened up, though most people hadn't taken their cars off the blocks yet. The four of them had been talking about Wilson's declaration of war, which had happened just the week before; they had been arguing about the need for it—Jim was adamantly against the war—and about the moving picture, which was Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. Henry never did know what caused the car to swerve, if it was ice or if a tire blew or if they hit a pothole and Jim lost his grip on the wheel, and he didn't know if their arguing had taken Jim's attention away from the road. The car went over on the driver's side and pinned Jim's head to the ground and he drowned in four inches of cold snowmelt at the flooded verge of Cow Creek.
While he watched Aileen bring the cows through the gate he was thinking about that night on the Bingham-Shelby Road, the luminous whiteness of Julius Audet's bald-faced half-Shire horses coming toward them out of the darkness, and how Julius had unhooked his horses from his hay wagon and run a chain from the horses to the Ford and righted the car just that easy, releasing Pearl Bayard's pinned legs forty minutes after Jim was dead.
