by Jenna Blum
Joe, who had climbed up on the corral rails to watch her, said, "He wants to go out for a ride."
"Yes he does. He doesn't much care for standing around in a small corral all day." W.G. had seen early on that this was a good part of Martha's plan. The horses were bored and quickly learned to welcome being ridden out; they were usually happy to see her.
"Is he called Nickel because he's not worth a plugged nickel?" Joe knew the name of every horse Martha was riding around the circle.
"I don't know. He's sure worth more than a nickel, though, if you ask me."
Joe said with a huge grin, "I'd take all the nickel horses I could get," and Martha laughed. "I would too."
It was part of her ritual to always brush the dirt and mud off a horse before she saddled him, and to run her hands all over his body, especially his legs. While she was wiping down the chestnut horse with a burlap sack, Martha said quietly to W.G., "Mr. Boyd, did you hear about Tom Kandel having cancer?"
W.G.'s wife, Anne, had died of a cancer that had started in one of her breasts and then flared up in her spine. In the nearly eight years since Anne's death, he hadn't personally known anybody else taken by the disease. There was a way in which the very word cancer had seemed to belong to him and to Anne. He didn't think Martha Lessen knew any of this—folks might have told her he had lost his wife, but probably not anything about how she'd died.
He looked down at his hands and then over at his grandson, who was straddling the top rail of the corral looking down at Skip or watching Martha rub down the nickel horse, pretending not to overhear Martha and W.G. talk about a dying neighbor. "I did hear about it," W.G. told Martha. "How is Tom doing, do you know?"
Martha crouched down, and W.G. heard her say something quietly to the horse as she ran her hand down his hind leg. To W.G. she said, "Mrs. Kandel told me today that he might have to give up his job on the Rocker V. I didn't see him, she said he was inside the house resting, but I guess he was too sick today to go over there and feed cows." She met W.G.'s eyes briefly. "I've been taking him a lunch the past two or three weeks but I don't know if he's been eating it. He's awful thin."
They didn't say anything else about the Kandels but talked a little more about the weather as she saddled the chestnut and then put her boot in the stirrup and climbed up on the horse. She liked all the horses to know they weren't to move ahead until she gave them the say-so, and the chestnut stood quietly under her. She asked him to bring his head toward one of her knees and then the other, which she had told Joe was to keep him soft in the mouth, and then asked the horse to take a few steps back, his neck soft, before she let him know it was all right to move ahead.
Joe jumped down and swung the gate open to let them through, and then W.G. and Joe stood out of the way and watched her put Nickel through the quick turns and spins and whoas she always started with, there in the yard. The Boyd yard had been hard-packed earth but by now was pretty well broken up and cratered from horses' hooves digging in to turn and stop. When she had the horse good and warmed up—it always looked to W.G. like a sort of dance—she lifted her voice to carry over to where W.G. and Joe were watching. "I'd better go along before the snow gets here."
"Bye, Martha," Joe called to her.
"See you tomorrow, Joey," she called back to him, and rode off at a trot.
W.G. and his grandson went back into the shop to finish work on the knife. While he was guiding Joe's hands to hold the knife and the whetstone at proper angles to each other, W.G. said, "I guess you don't remember your grandmother."
Joe had been barely three years old when his grandmother died. His father and his grandfather spoke of her from time to time in some story they were telling about the past, but Joe didn't remember her. Sometimes a particular smell—the starched, boiled-water smell of freshly ironed clothes—put him in mind of her, and he had a brief recollection of floured hands on a rolling pin, which he thought were his grandmother's hands. He had been six when his mother was killed, and his secret fear was that his mother was becoming as vague to him as his grandmother, no more than two hands and the smell of clean clothes. He charmed himself to sleep sometimes by going over and over certain memories of his mother in order to keep them fixed in his mind, like the lines of a poem he might be expected to recite at any time. He didn't say any of this to his grandfather. He said, "No sir," and kept his eyes on the whetstone and the blade of the knife.
"Your grandmother had cancer, like Tom Kandel," W.G. said to him. "I wondered if you knew that."
He did know, although no one had ever told him directly. It wasn't entirely clear to him what kind of sickness cancer was, but the word spoken by his father or his grandfather had a certain terrible meaning associated with his dead grandmother, and he understood implicitly that if Mr. Kandel had cancer then he must be dying. None of this did he say to W.G. He said, "How did Mr. Kandel get it?"
"His cancer? I don't know. It just happens, I guess. But you know your mother never was sick. She wasn't sick at all. I didn't know if you were worried about that." This was what W.G. had been heading toward all along. He had seen something in the boy's face when he and Martha Lessen were talking about Tom Kandel, and he had guessed that it might have something to do with how the boy's mother had come to die.
"The train tipped over," Joe said. "That's what my dad said."
"Yes. It wasn't sickness." Then, as if they hadn't been talking about death at all, W.G. said, "Now you don't want to sharpen a knife any more than this. When it gets that little feathery edge, that burr, you know you've got it thin to the point of perfect." He held the knife up to the light and squinted along it as he gently rocked it back and forth. "What do you think?"
Joe squinted and looked. His grandfather had shown him how a dull edge reflected light and would show up as a shiny narrow surface, while a sharp edge would appear just about invisible. "It looks pretty good," he said. "I think this one is about done."
W.G. said, "I think you're right." They gathered up the hand and bench stones and the whetstone and washed them in a pan of water and then rubbed them with gasoline and put them away under cloth covers. The knife was one of a matched pair he was making for the Woodruff sisters. He folded it in a piece of oiled leather and left it on the workbench beside the second knife, which was barely started.
Later on, after they'd eaten supper and were sitting at the table playing dominoes, Joe said to his grandfather, "I was thinking, if cancer just happens, it could happen to anybody." He looked down at his unplayed tiles, touching and rearranging them.
W.G. frowned and played a tile and said, "Eighteen," and wrote his score down while he turned things over in his mind, puzzling out Joe's question and what it might mean. He had a pet cat he allowed to live in the house, a part-Angora who was crippled from being caught in a coyote trap. The cat was on his lap, and he put his hand down and stroked the thick ruff while Joe was looking over the pattern of the dominoes spread out on the table.
"Well, it doesn't happen very often, Joe," he said slowly.
The boy had learned about death at an early point in his life. He frequently worried about his father dying, or his grandfather, and sometimes late at night was visited by the knowledge that he, too, would someday die. He particularly worried about certain illnesses and accidents, the kind that occurred frequently among their neighbors—tuberculosis, food poisoning, typhus, runaway horses—and he wondered if cancer, which he had imagined to be exclusive to his grandmother, was something he should now add to his list of things to worry about.
None of this had he said to his grandfather, but he might as well have, because W.G. understood suddenly that it was this, and not confusion about the particular way his mother had died, that must have come into the boy's mind when he heard his grandfather and Martha Lessen talking about Tom Kandel.
By the last weeks of Anne Boyd's life a profusion of suppurating lesions had spread across her chest and back, and she was paralyzed by a tumor on her spine. Her left breast had grown nearly
to the size of a woman's head, and as hard. In Chicago or New York she might have been sent to a surgeon, but in Bingham that sort of radical treatment was not practiced. When W.G. could no longer lift and turn her on the bed without help, she was taken by wagon up to Pendleton, which at that time had the nearest hospital to Bingham. He thought afterward he should have fought against removing his wife from their home, but he had felt overridden, defeated by his own ignorance and tiredness.
It was the opinion of the hospital staff that W.G., who followed Anne to Pendleton, would be better served not to witness the agonies and indignities of her last days, and they strictly limited his visits to half an hour in the mornings and half an hour in the afternoons. In the hospital, they dressed her ulcerating skin and her bleeding nipples, applied caustic poultices and pastes that gave her excruciating pain, lifted her sobbing into a chair once a day while her bed was neatened and rearranged. When the morphine stopped her bowels, they began giving her daily enemas, and W.G. spent his visits, morning and afternoon, sponging his wife's limbs, her lean buttocks, the soiled valley of her privy parts. She was in a moaning, agitated semicoma for the last eight days before she died.
Since Anne's death, W.G. himself had had an irrational fear that he might someday have to watch someone else, someone he loved, die in that terrible way. Or that his son and grandson might have to watch him. He knew he should say to Joe—he wanted to say—You don't have to worry about cancer. It won't happen to you or to your dad or to anybody you love, but the words wouldn't come out of his mouth.
19
SNOW BEGAN TO FALL out of the darkness that night and fell straight down all the early hours of the morning, and by daybreak it stood about half a foot deep everywhere in the lower valley, though the sky then cleared off and a pale sun lit up the newborn world. The horses were excited by the snow, and just about every one of them wanted to frisk and jump, which wasn't quite the same thing as giving trouble but was trouble anyway, and slowed things down. It was already late afternoon, almost dark, when Martha left the Rocker V, and then she had to take the long way around to get to the Woodruff ranch because a flock of sheep had bedded down in the road between Bingham and Opportunity. Some Owl Creek sheepmen had taken delivery of over a thousand ewes and yearlings at the railhead in Shelby late in the day, and they had stopped for the night at the first place they came to with a stretch of wire fence along both sides of the road. Martha knew the trick: you used the fences on two sides to hold the flock, and that way you only had to post one nighthawk and a dog in the narrow lane at each end to keep them from drifting. There were so many sheep they were packed into that stretch of road for almost a mile, and it took her a good long while to get around them and back onto the ranch road that went up to the Woodruffs.
So she was a couple of hours past her usual time getting to the Split Rock Ranch, and she found Henry Frazer in the yard saddling a piebald horse. He didn't say he was about to come looking for her, but when she rode up he gave her a look that could have been relief; then he quit buckling the cinch and pulled the saddle off the horse again. Martha guessed that the sisters had been about to send him out in the cold dark to look for her. When she stood down from the Thiedes' sorrel mare, Henry said, "You'd better go in and say hello to the sisters, so they don't go on worrying and fretting about you like they have been. I'll change your saddle. Is it the bay horse you're taking out now?"
"There was a bunch of sheep in the road and I had to go way around," she told him in defense, so he wouldn't think she'd been bucked off somewhere along the line. She was tired and cold and just wanted to get back to the Bliss place and eat some warm soup if there was any waiting for her on the back of the stove, and go to bed. But she let Henry Frazer take the sorrel's reins and she said, "Yes, the bay, his name is Boots," and she went off to see the Woodruff sisters.
Emma Adelaide came to the kitchen door in a long beltless dress that was in great disrepair and at least fifteen years out of style, and when she called out, "Aileen, here she is," her sister came in from the front room in an identical dress. The Woodruffs weren't twins but looked much alike, large in the nose, built thin and straight, with skin the color and grain of a wooden ax handle from all those years working out of doors. Aileen's hair had gone entirely white while Emma Adelaide's had grayed in streaks, and this was the most significant difference between them in the way they looked. They never had gone so far against convention as to wear trousers or overalls—riding cross-saddle, they hitched their skirts over, and expected boots to do the work of concealing ankles—but it had been many years since either one of them had bothered to wear a corset.
They forced on Martha a hot supper: Emma Adelaide had already phoned the Bliss ranch and told Louise they would feed their broncobuster before sending her on. But it seemed clear to Martha that she had misread the extent of the sisters' worry. In fact, the Woodruffs had spent their lives on horseback and seemed to take for granted the idea of a girl riding alone through darkness and snow on an uneducated colt. They appeared entirely unperturbed by her late arrival.
The kitchen was so warm it made Martha's skin itch. She ate quickly, afraid of stiffening up or falling asleep if she sat too long. Emma Adelaide sat across the table from her, doing book work with a pencil and a mechanical adding machine, while Aileen stood at the sink washing up dishes from their own supper.
"How are the horses coming?" Emma Adelaide asked her.
"Good." She was shoveling in mounds of rice that had been fried up with bacon and onion. She swallowed what was in her mouth and gulped coffee, and said, "I like your palomino horse, and that other one, the one called Big Brownie."
Aileen laughed. "I bet you never met a horse you didn't like."
This was close to the truth, so Martha didn't bother to disagree. She said, "I guess there's a couple that are giving me trouble, one of those Rocker V horses is full of himself, and that one of Mr. Irwin's is pretty mad at the world."
"Irwin. Is that one of the homestead farmers?"
"Yes ma'am. He has that white house that sits up high on Lodge Butte, right before the road goes down into Lewis Pass. He has a hired man named Logerwell."
Emma Adelaide lifted her head. "Oh, I know which one Logerwell is. His wife raises pigs and sells them."
Martha kept from saying what she thought of Alfred Logerwell's wife. Every horse she rode out of the Irwin corral was ravenous—she'd begun to believe that Logerwell's wife was stealing oats and corn from the horses to fatten up her pigs.
Aileen clattered dishes in the sink. "That one? Then he's the one I saw that time beating his horse with a piece of pipe for refusing to go over the Graves Creek bridge. If he works for Irwin, I expect Irwin's horses are getting that same treatment." She was silent a moment. "Mad at the world, I should think so."
Martha grew flush and still. She was remembering the time she had lifted her arms above her head to stretch a kink out of her sore back before putting a boot in the stirrup, and how Irwin's roan gelding had screamed and reared away from her. She felt stupid, now, not to have guessed what that was all about. She had been all these weeks imagining Logerwell's temper had only to do with her.
The sisters were overly conscious of their responsibility to set an example for Martha Lessen: without ever speaking of it, they had both become aware that she took them as paragons. Aileen turned from the sink and gave Martha a look. "Now don't imagine that I just stood there and watched. I took that piece of pipe right out of his hand. I cussed him, too, and I believe I might have hit him with his own pipe if I hadn't been with Mrs. Stuart, who turned about the color of buttermilk when she heard what I said."
Emma Adelaide had been entering figures in her ledger but this made her stop and laugh, a mulish bray, which was another thing the sisters had in common. After a moment she became gravely serious. "Well, and don't think for a minute he's the only one who would beat a horse, Aileen. There's plenty of them would."
"Oh, I know that. Of course I know that, Emma Adelaide. B
ut they'd just better not do it in front of me, that's all I'm saying."
"Or not in front of Martha, I should imagine."
"Yes, I should imagine not."
Henry Frazer came in the back door with a burst of noise and cold and stood there shedding snow, peering into the kitchen. He was thick-set and looked more so in a sheep-lined jacket and a sweater. He had wound a wool scarf around his neck and it bulged out the collar of the coat. The whole of his broad face was lit up with color just now. "All saddled and ready to go," he said unnecessarily.
When Martha went out to the yard, Henry followed her, and she found that he had saddled his own horse again. "I might as well go along with you," he said when she gave him a look. "I'm headed over there to play cards with El."
She thought she saw in his face, in his unwillingness to meet her eyes, that this was a lie, and she was suddenly struck by the thought that it was Henry Frazer, and not the Woodruff sisters, who had been fretting over her late arrival, that his look of relief when he saw her had nothing to do with being saved from going out in bad weather. She said without looking at him, "I don't need any help, if you were thinking I did."
He didn't act surprised by what she said; he smiled and answered placidly, "I was just thinking we might keep each other company, riding over there."
She had risen into the saddle by that time, and the bay horse kinked up his back a couple of times just for the fun of it, which aggravated and embarrassed her. By the time she had him settled down into a trot she had forgotten what Henry Frazer had said to her that had made her go warm in the face; the keyed-up feeling, though, stayed with her.
The moon had risen and was three-quarters full, which was enough light to find the way. Martha was forced to keep a tight hold of the bay, who had a wish to run, while Henry Frazer ambling along on his piebald could be light on the horse's mouth, and this was a further embarrassment to her. Not a single thing came into her head to say to Henry, but she leaned into Boots's neck and murmured quietly, "I wish you'd give up your idea of running, because this is not the night for it."
