The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  Louise said, "Who have you been talking to?" which sounded to George like an accusation of some kind. He knew she meant the various equipment salesmen who regularly visited the ranches, or their own son Orie, who had picked up from his friend Ray a belief in the future of gasoline power. It seemed to George an odd contradiction that fellows studying veterinary medicine, and whose future livelihood depended on the continued use of horses and mules for farm work, should tout the benefits of machinery, but neither Orie nor Ray seemed to see the rub.

  Louise's manner put George's back up a little. He had wanted to give her something new to stew about other than the German library books but now that he had riled her up he was feeling fairly riled up himself.

  "I've been talking to myself is who I've been talking to, and what I've been saying is that I might buy myself an automobile plow that won't need horses having to be harnessed up every morning and fed twice a day and given half of every damn day off to rest up."

  Louise said irritably, "Every gasoline engine you've got is always breaking down, I notice, or needing fooling with, and at least we can grow the feed for the horses whereas gasoline is steep. And anyway we didn't get much of a wheat crop the past two years so I don't know why you'd want to go into debt to grow more of it." She stood up from the rhubarb and brushed her dirty hands together and looked over at her husband. "But I imagine you've got your mind made up already and you're not asking my opinion."

  The truth was, she looked favorably on the progress of technology—it was Louise who had pressed her husband to buy an automobile. And it was also true that just about everybody she knew had been stepped on or kicked or thrown or run away with or had bones broken by horses. As if proof were needed, even Martha Lessen, who was clever as could be around horses, was wearing plaster on her arm right now. Louise had known neighbors killed by horses and one who'd been kicked in the head and afterward never had more than the mind of a child. If, as people were already saying, horses on all the farms and ranches would soon be replaced by machinery she wouldn't be sorry about it or silly enough for nostalgia.

  But she was in an argumentative mood or just irritated that George had brought up the matter of the German books when he ought to have known how it would upset her. Or it was the funerals weighing on her. They had been to a string of funerals in recent weeks, starting with the Romers, people they hardly knew except to nod to when they passed on the road, but for Martha's sake they had gone to the burial of that poor baby and the baby's father, the two of them laid to rest in the same grave. It had just about killed her to see the watchful, bewildered way Dorothy Romer's two older children clung to their mother and the stunned look in that woman's face. Then at the end of February there had been a service for the first Elwha County boy killed and buried over there in France. He had been the son of a Basque sheep rancher in Owl Creek Canyon, a stranger to the cattle ranchers living in the valley but nevertheless a local boy, and the whole county had taken the news hard. And the very next day Tom Kandel had died of cancer, which wasn't a shock but had saddened Louise beyond all reason. Tom was an exception among the newcomer homesteaders, someone with a practical mind and the follow-through to carry out a plan. She had often bought eggs from Tom when her own hens weren't laying enough to supply the table and had gone to him for a stock of new chicks after a coyote tore up her henhouse. Louise liked Tom, everybody did. Then Old Karl Thiede, who hadn't been out of bed since he broke his pelvis in the autumn, took pneumonia and died. Karl wasn't as old as all that—he might have been sixty or sixty-five—and the others who died had all been young. She wished George could realize how all this was weighing on her. At Tom Kandel's funeral, when poetry had been read in addition to Scripture, George had bent to her and asked irritably in a whisper what the hell part of the Bible those verses came from, which had distressed Louise. She wished George could understand how she had found herself deeply moved by the poems and by knowing that Tom, in his last days, had asked for them to be read at his funeral.

  "Since you're not the one doing the plowing, I don't see exactly how your opinion comes into it," George said now, and he stepped down off the porch and headed for the bunkhouse. His dog came scrambling out from under the porch to follow him.

  Louise hadn't really thought she and George were arguing but when he walked off she realized they were. They didn't argue very often and neither of them liked it when they did. George was usually the one who walked away, and his habit was to spend an hour or so playing cards with his hired hands and then come back to the house whistling and cheerful, pretending he and Louise hadn't had a disagreement. Louise's habit was to go over and over the argument and rework it until she had all the words lined up in the order and manner she ought to have said them. In the first years of their marriage she used to wait tensely for George to come back to the house so she could tell him what she'd thought of to say; but then his relentless good humor would surprise and charm her and she wouldn't be able to find an opening to bring it up again. After all these years—they'd been married when Louise was barely sixteen—they were both set in these habits, and though Louise still liked to go over an argument in her mind, she knew she wouldn't say any of it to George, or not until he brought it up again himself. Lying in bed tonight, for instance, he might ask her whether she thought a Fordson automobile plow was a good idea, as if he hadn't ever mentioned it before; and after they talked about the tractor for a while she might begin to tell him her deepening worries about the Literary Society and how the recent funerals had brought her very low in her mind.

  Watching George cross the yard to the bunkhouse, Louise was suddenly sorry she'd been so cross. In recent months his shoulders had become stooped, or they had been stooped for a while and she had only just realized it, and he often walked around like a tired old man, his boots scuffing the dirt. He wasn't old yet, only fifty-one, but she knew his hips and knees hurt him most of the time and he'd begun to have trouble with his bowels. She hoped what she felt just now—a little stab of fear or foreboding—wasn't any sort of premonition. Her mother had always believed in such things, believed she had "second sight," and that a chill along her spine or the creeping of her flesh was a portent or warning of imminent suffering. Once when Louise was about twelve her mother standing at the sink had suddenly turned an ashen face to Louise and said, "It's Harry," in a horrified way. Harry was Louise's uncle, her mother's eldest brother. It was more than a year later that Harry drowned in the Columbia River coming back from a trip to The Dalles, but Louise's mother always believed she'd had a genuine forewarning of it that day a year earlier, standing in her kitchen.

  Louise left the weeds lying in a wilting pile in the garden and went into the house to start the supper, and sure enough when George and El came in for supper George was determinedly cheerful and he started right in telling Louise a doubtless corrupted version of the moving picture he had watched the last time he gave his Liberty Bond speech at the Shelby theater. Louise had stopped going with him to the movies on account of the newsreels of all the soldiers, their heartbreaking grins as they marched past the camera, but he knew she liked to hear about the picture show just so long as it wasn't anything to do with war. She poured coffee for him and for El sitting at the table, and then while she went on getting the supper ready she listened to the story George was telling her, a three-reel jungle story that involved lions and elephants and a heroine in breeches and sun helmet, and she made a point of interrupting him to question certain confusing parts of the plot so he would know she was listening. Just about the time he finished recounting the movie Martha came in tired and hungry from her circle ride and Louise brought the potato soup to the table.

  She had made an unsatisfactory Liberty Bread earlier in the day from oats and almost no wheat flour and felt she ought to apologize for it. "Evidently patriotism now requires a lot of chewing," she said sourly, and George, who had had to stand up to get the leverage to saw slabs off the loaf, winked across the table at her and said, "If we start compla
ining I guess you can feed it to the horses, but I don't hear any of us complaining." Of course there never were any complaints about the food she put on the table, which she knew had more to do with how hungry and hard-worked they all were than with the excellence of her cooking. Even their girl broncobuster, after breaking her arm and watching a child die of spoiled food, always ate up every bit of what was on her plate and could always be persuaded to finish off whatever was left on any platter. The cast on her arm the past couple of weeks just caused her to eat more slowly, as she had trouble carving bites of roast, trouble pressing down a knife or a fork with her left hand.

  Louise ate lightly—her stomach was bothering her—and began doing up the dishes while the others were still sitting around the table. They'd all been talking about the mild weather and this had led to George telling a story about the March weather several years earlier when he had lost fifty-three cows and their calves all at once, trapped by deep snow on the banks of Ax Handle Creek. They had calved out at the ranch and then he had moved them along the creek where there was good shelter and good pasture, but a late spring storm had dropped a couple of feet of snow, which the wind had blown into high drifts. Water in the Ax Handle rose and rose, and the cows and calves, trapped between the drifts and the flooded creek, were too cold and weak to swim out of trouble. Louise had heard this old story several times before—he had told it to her with tears standing in his eyes the night he came back from finding all those drowned and frozen animals—but El had only heard it once and Martha never had; they listened to the boss in grave silence, leaning over the table on their elbows.

  Louise was struck suddenly by the disconcerting likeness: El with his rigidly crooked arm from that old break and Martha, her wrist fixed straight in a plaster cast. The edge of it that showed below her shirt cuff was already filthy and chipped, and Louise almost opened her mouth to say something about it before deciding there wouldn't be any point. She had seen enough broken bones over the years so as not to be distressed unless a break was grievous; but no one had had a bit of luck trying to persuade the girl to give up her circle ride after that first day, and only the Lord knew what would happen if she was bucked off and landed on that arm. Dr. Padham wasn't the best doctor in the world and Martha hadn't let him run the plaster as far up and down the arm as he had wanted to—she needed to be able to use that arm, she said, and couldn't be budged from her stubborn stand. It would be a wonder if the girl didn't wind up like El Bayard, who could handle ranch work but could hardly comb his own hair or shave his whiskers on account of the poor job that had been done setting his bad break.

  As soon as Louise finished cleaning up the supper dishes she went upstairs and left the rest of them still talking. She heard the telephone ring a little while later, their own ring, which made her sour stomach clench: it would be somebody on the Reading Room Committee wanting to put in her two cents' worth about the German books. She could hear George's voice downstairs, a murmur of wordless sounds. Louise was already in her nightdress and in bed by then, which George would surely know, and she didn't expect him to come up the stairs to get her, just to listen to one more complaint about something to do with the library. But he did come up, making a slow climb of it, and stood in the dark doorway a moment, his silhouette black against the dim light leaking up from the kitchen, and then he came over and sat on the edge of the bed beside her and she knew what it was before he even got the words out.

  "Honey, don't cry now, he's not dead, but Jack's got hurt over there."

  She didn't cry, but a high surf arose loud in her ears and her throat almost closed shut, and it took her a while to get enough voice to ask him to tell her everything he knew, which wasn't much. Jack had lost a leg, that was what it came down to, although George tried hard not to say it in just those words. They both fell into silence. Finally George stood up and went downstairs and she heard him talking to Martha and El briefly and then heard the hands go out of the house. After a minute or two George turned down the lamps and came back upstairs and undressed in the darkness and climbed into bed next to her. He was lying on his back, and she turned onto her side and folded herself over him, one of her legs thrown across his haunches and her breasts crushed to his ribs. She put the flat of her hand on his chest, the heavy thumping of his heart. He was hairy front and back—for years she had teased him about shedding in the spring—and the feel of him under her hand, that animal's pelt, was familiar and warm. After a moment she closed her fingers in it.

  She was thinking Jack could still die. It was a terrible wound and there could be infection; they'd have to get him back across the Atlantic Ocean in a ship that could be blown to bits like the Lusitania by a German U-boat. But she didn't say this to George. She said, "Jack can still ranch. If he can drive horses, he can ranch. Bud Adey drove a twelve-horse freight wagon and trailer after he lost his leg."

  George didn't answer her. Louise's head was tucked under his chin and he could feel her words huffing warm against his breastbone. He reached over and put his hand on the back of her nightdress between the shoulder blades and pressed her against him but he didn't speak. Jack didn't lose his leg was what he was thinking; he had the damn thing blasted off. Later on he happened to think about the automobile plow, how in most respects it was nothing more than a big motorcar built heavy for towing and for running over soft ground, and how Bud Adey never had been able to drive a motorcar—he just couldn't manage the pedals with one leg.

  27

  IN THOSE YEARS the plots of movies weren't far removed from the dime novels that had been popular since the Civil War. There were stories about brave and true Mounties and Texas Rangers, frontiersmen in coonskin caps, heroes with swords and plumed hats, Kit Carson…style scouts; titillating stories of girls dressed up in breeches and pith helmets, cave girls in fur tunics, brown-skinned girls in grass or leather skirts, innocent girls in jeopardy from mustache-twirling villains. Quite a few movies made a point of the barbaric and the unusual—Eskimo people in the Far North, for instance, building their ice-block igloos. The movies brought a lot of people their first glimpse of a seaside bathing beach, a woman smoking, colored people in a jazz band, men in swallowtail tuxedos, a woman in a negligee. Charlie Chaplin was popular, and Buster Keaton, unlucky young men coping with the mysteries of modern life; it was from those picture shows that most people in the West had their first moving images of electric streetcars, ocean liners, airplanes. And in the war years there rained down a storm of movies about boys in uniform, boys who were the pride of their fathers and the envy of their younger brothers.

  It wasn't a war movie that Henry Frazer and Martha Lessen saw early in April but it was the next thing to it: a picture called Fear Has Said Its Prayers, in which a shallow, self-absorbed mother dissuades her son from joining the army and the boy goes downhill from there, stripped of his right to virile manhood, his right to give his life for his country.

  During the reel changes a Four Minute Man named John Johnson, who owned a stone quarry at the edge of Shelby, stood up and urged the audience to sign food pledge cards promising to eat less meat, sugar, wheat, and pork, and to buy Liberty Bonds as a way of "doing your bit" for the soldiers who were on their way to France to fight for a democratic world.

  "We here in America are not sleeping in mud tonight, eating crackers and cold bacon," Mr. Johnson said in a nervous high tenor. "We are not lying in caves with the murderous thunder and lightning above; not standing gun in hand with death lurking all around and above. Unlike those boys over there, we are not privileged to give our all for America, we are privileged only to do the best we can" and so forth, straight out of the pamphlet he held in his hand.

  Martha had not been to the movies since coming into Elwha County in November, and the last Four Minute Speech she'd heard was the one George Bliss had delivered at the dinner table on Christmas Day. But by this point in the war it was hard to walk down a street or open a newspaper without seeing or hearing about spies hiding in the ranks of your neighbors
, about the evils of extravagance and the virtues of wearing half-soled shoes and mended trousers, so the messages in John Johnson's speeches were familiar to her and to pretty much everybody in the theater. They had all signed food pledge cards and were wearing Liberty Buttons to confirm their patriotism. While the cameraman hurried to change the reels and John Johnson delivered his invocations—"Who'll help? Who'll speak to his neighbors about saving the waste of food? Who? Hands up! Hands up!"—more people chatted with their friends or walked up the aisles to stretch their legs than shouted affirmations to the Four Minute Man.

  Henry Frazer had ridden over to the Bliss ranch to collect Martha and El, and the three of them had ridden into Shelby on horseback and met the others in front of the movie theater—El's sister Pearl and two of her friends, and also Chuck McGee and his wife, Nancy. Henry and Chuck had known each other for years, they were both the sons of Scotsmen and had come into Elwha County around the same time and gone to work for neighboring ranches. Henry had come in 1904 as a seventeen-year-old wrangler for the railroad and stayed in the valley after delivering a carload of horses to George Bliss; Chuck had come a few months later from a farm in Kansas, a green boy looking for his chance to be a cowboy. After he was hired to drive dairy cows through the Ipsoot Pass to one of the first homestead farms in the valley, he found work on the Split Rock Ranch, where old man Woodruff in the last year of his life taught him how to be a cowboy; now Chuck was foreman on the Burnt Creek Company Ranch at the west end of the county. He and Nancy had driven to town in a Maxwell car that belonged to the company.