The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  She said, "Yes sir, more or less," and kept walking along. She seemed to assume Briggs would pass by, go on with his business and let her go on with hers, which he might have done without an argument except she looked to be very close to the age of his daughter Devota. He said, "There's a telephone down at Eightmile at that store. Why don't I put you on this horse and we can go down there. Those folks can telephone for a doctor to see if your arm is broke, and the doctor can set it if it is."

  The girl looked over at the horse Briggs was riding, which was a gray gelding he called Teddy, but she kept walking and said, "Thank you, I'd just rather go on back home."

  "Where is that? Up at Shelby?"

  "Yes sir, near there."

  "Well that's a good three- or four-miles hike, is my guess, and pretty much every bit of it uphill. You come on now, and I'll take you down to that store at Eightmile. It ain't but a couple of miles, and you can ring your folks from there."

  "Thank you, I'd just rather go on home."

  He thought about Devota and what he might want if somebody came upon her walking up the road with a broken arm and a lame horse, and miles from home. "Well all right, then. But you're in no shape to walk home, and that horse of yours is in no shape to be ridden, and I'm heading up to Shelby myself." This last was a lie, but he figured she wouldn't give him any leeway if he told her the truth. "I'm not in no hurry and I'm wearing my broke-in boots and my arm ain't broke, and there's no reason for you to walk when you can ride. So why don't I get down off Teddy and let you be the one riding."

  She looked at him and at the horse, and from her look he expected her to give him an argument—to tell him it wasn't her foot that was broke or something along those lines—but what she said was "He's a nice-looking horse. His name's Teddy?"

  He had almost saddled a different horse for the ride up into the canyon, a skittery knothead named Adios, and it occurred to him to thank God for small favors. Teddy was the most tame beast he owned, and he had a smooth and level walk for carrying a girl with a broken arm. But he could see he had to get around her pride, so he grinned and said to her, every word of it a lie, "Well here's an idea. I bought this horse for my daughter who hasn't done much riding at all, and I was trying him out tonight to see how he'll do. It'd be a favor to me if you got up on him, because I guess if he's gentle enough for carrying a girl with a broken arm, he'll be gentle enough for a girl who ain't rode much."

  Martha looked at Briggs and began to smile, which even in the failing light he could make out the meaning of—his wife had been telling him for thirty-five years he was the world's worst liar and ought to give up trying. The girl said, "I appreciate it, but I'm all right walking, it's not my foot that's broke."

  Briggs had to laugh. "Well all right, but I'll just walk along with you for a ways, if you don't mind the company." He got down from the horse and fell into step with the girl.

  After a while she said, looking at Teddy with somewhat more attention, "He's got a bright look to his eye and I like the way he moves. I imagine he's a good horse."

  "He is," Briggs said, and then he took one last run at her: "He's the most imperturbable horse I ever met, and if you change your mind and decide to try him out, you will discover him to have a smooth and level walk."

  She gave the horse another close look, her face shadowed by her big hat so he couldn't quite see her expression, but Briggs wasn't surprised when she slipped his hook. She said, gesturing with the reins of her own horse, "This horse I was riding is still pretty green, but I think he'll turn out as good as any I ever met. He was tangled up in barb wire and he just stayed put, he didn't start jumping around and make it worse. His name is Big Brownie."

  Briggs had been watching the horse, how he brought his off front leg forward. "Looks like he's sprained his shoulder," he said.

  "Yes sir. But he'll be all right if I can get him fomented and give him some rest."

  "I guess that's right."

  Briggs went on talking to her about various things, not to distract the girl from her broken arm but to distract himself from the boredom of a long slow walk up a darkening road. He spoke of his wife, Oleta, and their four children, the youngest being Devota, who was just a bit younger than Martha, and he described to her the ranch he and his brother ran together, which they had got from their father and enlarged and improved upon. It was the first place you came to after the outfall of the canyon, he said, their land running west to east on the south side of the Whitehorns, with the broad lower reach of the Little Bird Woman River bisecting it near the midpoint. They had about a hundred acres of good bent grass for hay, he told her—two cuttings in a wet year—and plenty of grazing in the fall after the last cutting. There were still some decent patches of bunch grass on the slopes where they turned their cows and horses in the spring and winter, and timber higher up on the mountains for firewood and posts, and some good big logs for building sheds, and an allotment in the gorge for summer grazing. He allowed that some of Grant County wasn't too beautiful or too prosperous—a lot of rock and sagebrush and too dry for growing wheat—but he and his family had a beautiful and prosperous piece of it.

  Even in those days the Newton ranch was well along toward overgrazed, and in later years the brothers quarreled and then one of them died and the ranch got broken up and sold; and in the 1930s after Canyon City burned to the ground, the old Newton hay fields were used as dusty holding pens for a stockfeeding operation that shipped steers out in rail cars from John Day. But Martha had formed a picture of Briggs Newton's ranch as a paradise straight out of a Western romance, and she said on an impulse, "Maybe I'll come down to Grant County in the fall if you've got any horses need breaking to saddle." This offer sprang out of her old plan, the idea that once she got away from her parents' house she would live a footloose cowboy life, going all around the countryside looking for horses to break. It didn't much matter that in recent weeks she had been thinking she might want to stay a while longer in Elwha County, hire on with the Woodruffs or the Thiedes or the Blisses after the circle ride was finished. Briggs Newton didn't offer her any work, and from his silence Martha understood that breaking bones wasn't much of a credential for somebody who was breaking horses.

  When they topped out of the canyon, Walter Irwin's was the first farm they came to. Lights were still burning in his house and in the little house Hilda Birkmeier was staying in, and Martha told Briggs these were folks she knew and that Mr. Irwin had a telephone. Standing there at the turnoff to Irwin's farm, she thanked Briggs for keeping her company and he said, "Don't mention it. You take care of that arm and that there lame horse." After a moment he also said, purely out of politeness, "And you come see me when you get to Grant County, maybe I'll put you to work." She offered Briggs her unbroken hand, which he took gingerly but didn't pump, and then he climbed up on Teddy and turned him back down the road to hunt up his cow camp in the moonlight. Martha hadn't ever believed him when he said he was going all the way to Shelby, and by now they had both forgotten his telling her that.

  Hilda came to the door in pajamas with her hands full of sewing and an anxious look on her face—it wasn't usual for somebody to stop by the farm after dark—but she put down the sewing and pulled on a coat over her pajamas and stuck her feet in yard boots and came right outside when Martha told her she had a lame horse and a broken arm. Hilda knew how to keep a hot poultice on a sprain, she said to Martha's question, and she knew how to make liniment and how to clean a cut, so Martha left Brownie with her and walked up the hill to Irwin's to ask the use of his telephone.

  She was desperate to call the hospital in Bingham to inquire about Dorothy and the children, and then she intended to ring up the Blisses and beg a ride back to the ranch—she had the idea she might get by with tightly wrapping her arm and not seeing a doctor at all. But Irwin, alarmed at the sight of Martha arriving pale and filthy on his porch, forced her to sit in a chair while he made the telephone calls himself; he didn't take it seriously when she said she didn't want
her arm put in plaster. She had to wait, at the point of tears from tiredness and pain and nervous strain, while he called Shelby to locate a doctor, someone available at this hour to receive a girl with a broken arm, and then rang up the Blisses with the news about their injured broncobuster, and went back and forth with them until it was settled that Irwin himself would bring Martha into Shelby to the doctor's, and the Blisses would come for her after her arm was set. When Irwin finally called the hospital to ask about the Romers and then hung up the telephone and turned to tell her the children and their mother were still sick but evidently had stepped away from death's door, Martha was too far gone to hold back the crying. Irwin stood across the room from her without a single idea how he should handle the case of this crying girl in front of him, and in a few moments she was able to tighten her mouth and stop the tears.

  "I don't usually cry, Mr. Irwin," she said to him in embarrassment. "I'm just so glad they're still hanging on."

  Irwin, who had seen her come close to tears the day he had fired Alfred Logerwell, by now believed it was her usual habit to cry. He said generously, "Well, in these cases I suppose a girl ought to cry, and a man ought not to," and he smiled slightly to emphasize the point—that he himself was not the crying kind. The girls Martha knew, girls from farms and ranches, weren't much given to crying, or no more so than the men, and she might have told him so, except she had hardly taken in what he said. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back in the chair and immediately saw in the reddish darkness Reuben Romer's face as he turned toward her in the car, and her own hand grabbing hold of Big Brownie's coarse mane, and the blurred camelback trunk of the car sliding past her on the rock-ribbed road.

  After a few minutes she opened her eyes again and discovered Irwin still standing there, leaning forward watching her with an anxious expression, his hands thrust into his pockets. She didn't know how long he had been looking at her, and this startled and embarrassed her.

  "I ought to go down and see how Hilda is coming along with Brownie," she said without really wishing to, and that woke Mr. Irwin to the matter at hand. He had to crank up his auto-truck so he could take Martha into Shelby, he said, and while he was down there putting water in the radiator he'd find out from Hilda how that lame horse was doing. He put on his coat and hat and went out, and it was a great relief to Martha that for the next ten or fifteen minutes she was able to sit in the house alone without needing to move and without anybody studying her.

  Later on, after Dr. Padham had set the arm, and the Blisses had driven her back to the ranch, and Louise had made Martha go up to Miriam's unused bedroom to spend the night on a decent bed, Louise telephoned the Woodruff sisters to let them know what had happened to the girl, or as much of the story as they had been able to pry out of her, though of course the person who was meant to receive this information was Henry Frazer.

  On the Sunday following Will Wright's skating party, Henry had borrowed the Woodruff sleigh a second time and driven Martha up the narrowing valley of Blue Stem Creek into the foothills of the Clarks Range to see a pile of rocks some people claimed was an Indian grave or sacred site, and they walked around and found a few old arrowheads and had a picnic on the snow; and the next Sunday, with the snow gone and the sky clearing, they went on horseback to the two-lane bowling alley in Opportunity and shared a piece of pie afterward at a luncheonette and when they walked back to the stable to get their horses Henry asked if it would be all right if he held her hand, and she said it was.

  Then cows began calving in the fields near the ranch house and Henry was at work from daybreak until after dark without much of a break, and even though the sisters were taking the night shift, he had been getting up at midnight to see if they needed him to help out with anything and sometimes they did. With Henry busy all the time, Martha had gone back to riding the circle on Sundays and they had seen each other only a few times in the past couple of weeks, occasions when he happened to be at the barns or the corrals fooling around with an orphan calf as Martha rode up to change horses.

  Louise and the Woodruffs had been watching with great satisfaction this business between Henry and Martha—all of them tickled to death that Henry, after two or three near-misses, girls entirely the wrong sort for him, was finally courting a girl who suited him to a tee, and all of them amazed and gratified that Martha appeared willing to be courted. Louise had said on the telephone it wasn't a bad break, and ordinarily none of them would have considered a broken arm a matter of great concern; but at the breakfast table in the morning, after the sisters had passed on to Henry what they knew, they prevailed on him to go over to the Bliss ranch and bring back an eyewitness account of how badly Martha was stove up. They told him they could handle things, for heaven's sake, for the two or three hours he'd be gone.

  Henry didn't give the sisters much of an argument. He hadn't seen Martha at all in the past few days, and the calving had started to taper off, and he wanted to hear for himself exactly what had happened. Henry Frazer possessed a somewhat warm temper, and he was already thinking he might want to call on Reuben Romer and was already sorting out what he might want to say to him at that visit.

  Martha was sitting in the front room of the Bliss house drinking coffee and reading the newspaper when Henry showed up, and her face colored when she saw him. Louise had extracted from her a promise that she wouldn't lift a finger for a good twenty-four hours, so she was sitting there in Louise's borrowed kimono, which was embarrassing on several counts, not least because she didn't want Henry to think she was lazy or frail. But he laughed when he saw her lounging and said, "I heard you figured out how to get a few days off," and his teasing took some of the heat out of her embarrassment. Henry hadn't really been worried about Martha but now that he was with her and could see for himself that she was in good shape, his jaw loosened right up.

  Louise left the two of them alone in the front room—she busied herself making a certain amount of noise in the kitchen—so they were able to talk together quietly. Martha wouldn't tell him more than the bare story about the accident down in Lewis Pass and played down Reuben's part in it, and wouldn't blame Brownie either. She should have had a better seat, she told him stubbornly, and it was her fault she hadn't accustomed any of the horses to the sound of a car horn. She was more interested in praising Brownie for what he did right. "That horse just stood there so good, with his foot all tangled in the barb wire," she said. "I was so proud of him." And when Henry said, "He had a good teacher," she ducked her chin to try to hide her smile.

  It wasn't until late that day that Jeanne and Frank McWilliams, stopping by the Romer farm to offer their condolences over the death of baby Alice, discovered Reuben Romer dead in the house. He had come home and eaten the same canned string beans that had sickened his family, and had died alone without ever knowing what had happened to his wife and children, or that his youngest child had died the day before while he was drinking whiskey at the roadhouse at Eightmile Crossing.

  25

  LATE IN THE NIGHT near the end of February Ruth Kandel woke abruptly without memory of the dream that had set her heart racing. She sat up carefully in the bed and when Tom didn't stir she put on a sweater over her nightdress, went out to the front room, and pulled a chair close to the little bit of remaining heat in the stove and took her knitting into her lap. This was something she had begun doing—knitting or taking up embroidery for half an hour or so—to quiet her mind and body before trying again to sleep beside her husband now that both she and Tom had become such restless sleepers. She had turned the heel of the sock the night before and was knitting toward the toe, every stitch pulled tight against the next one, loop and pull, loop and pull, the khaki wool yarn hard and smooth in her hands. She counted stitches, and in the hypnotic rhythm of the counting was not able to think about much of anything consequential.

  What she had felt lately, watching over Tom, was a terrible kind of aloneness—not the feeling that her friends had abandoned her, but that she couldn't poss
ibly expect them to know what was happening to Tom, and to her, and to Fred, and could never expect to find the words to tell them. After that terrible night when she had had to send Fred for Dr. McDonough, the morphine Tom was getting or the progress of the cancer had made him by turns vacant or belligerent, inclined toward inexplicable behavior and repetitive restlessness. He hardly spoke to her at all now, was not able to follow a train of thought or a conversation, and he no longer slept for very long but stirred awake all through the day and night and then walked the house, or sat with his elbows on his knees, rocking and frowning, not answering when she spoke to him. He was so weak and unsteady on his feet that when he stood to urinate in the night jar or went out to the privy she was afraid he would fall and crack his head or break a bone. He swayed and repeatedly had to stop himself from buckling at the knees, but he was oddly prudish or stubborn about his body, obstinate and silent in refusing to let her steady him, help him with his toileting, help him dress, bathe, comb his hair. She could no longer leave him alone in the house for fear he might wander into trouble—take all the books off their shelves and scatter them in random piles on the floor, or stoke the stove until she worried the chimney would catch fire and burn the house down. When he woke in the night she had to get up with him now, had to tiredly cajole and persuade to keep him from heading out to the road in the freezing cold or in a downpour in his underwear. When he finally slept, his legs and arms twitched and jerked and shifted ceaselessly under the quilts and kept Ruth from sleeping herself; in any case she tried not to let herself fall into a deep sleep: if he got out of bed without waking her, she was afraid he might do himself some kind of harm.

  Dr. McDonough had lately been after her to put Tom into the hospital in Bingham but she was determined to keep him at home as long as possible. She didn't trust the hospital staff—quite a few of the trained nurses had gone off to war—and she didn't want Tom to die surrounded by strangers. The terrible truth was that Tom himself had become a stranger to her, which to her mind was almost the worst thing. Lavinia Horne, whose husband had frozen to death a year earlier hiking back from Owl Creek Canyon after going down there to buy himself some moonshine, had told Ruth to count her blessings: at least Tom's death wouldn't be a shock, she would know it was coming, could be prepared for it and able to say goodbye properly. But Ruth had been thunderstruck by Tom's sudden worsening—his mind going out of him before his soul—and she felt cheated of the chance to say goodbye, almost as much as if he'd dropped dead from apoplexy on the kitchen floor. She felt she hadn't told Tom what she ought to have told him—had been holding back on the important things, expecting to say them when the end drew near, and now there was no one to say them to. She had lost him already, weeks before she expected him to die.