The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  While the reels were being changed, the three men in the party talked about the roundup and branding that was about to start and about the calving season just ended; the girls talked about people they knew in common, people Martha mostly didn't know—a girl who had come down with TB and another who had moved to Portland and was guarding a livestock yard two evenings a week. Sitting between Henry and one of Pearl's friends, Martha listened more to what the men said than to the women and sometimes chimed in when she could think of something to say. She had helped out with moving cattle and with branding since she was thirteen years old and had worked the calving season one year for a small ranch near Hermiston; but she had mostly worked on haying crews or with horses, so her practical knowledge of cows felt meager; she listened to the men to pick up bits of their know-how.

  From time to time she caught Henry stealing a look at her, and she thought he must be sizing up whether she was feeling lonesome or left out. She wasn't, particularly, and tried to let him know it by thinking of more to say. She wished the movie they were watching had been about the frozen North or the jungles of Africa, because she'd read The Call of the Wild recently and Tarzan of the Apes, and could have joined any talk that arose about wolves and sled dogs, or lions and alligators.

  Once she'd been to a movie palace in Pendleton where a nine-piece orchestra had accompanied the action in the moving picture, but in Shelby it was just a woman playing a piano. While Martha listened to the men talk about cattle she studied the piano player's hair, which was a short, straight curtain trimmed off just below her ears. At the third reel change Nancy, who had noticed what Martha was looking at, leaned across her husband and said to her, "Are you thinking of cutting your hair short? I was thinking of doing it but Chuck wants me to keep it long." Nancy had a thick mane of red hair bundled into a Psyche knot.

  Chuck put his arm across his wife's shoulders and grinned at her and said, "Honey, I married a girl, not a boy, and I want to keep it that way." Then one of Pearl's friends, an unmarried girl, jumped in warmly to say that a husband's opinion shouldn't come into it, and a loud and laughing discussion began that saved Martha from answering Nancy's question.

  She had been thinking of cutting her hair short ever since she broke her arm. It had become a hard and awkward business just getting a comb through her hair using only her right hand, hard and painful trying to wash her hair or tie it back now that her arm was in a plaster cast. And she liked the idea of being able to put on her hat in the morning without giving a moment's thought to her hair—as free as any man. She thought Pearl's friend Eula had only been teasing Chuck, not making a serious point, but she felt, herself, that a married woman should have as much right as a single girl to make her own decisions. What Henry's friend had said, about not wanting to be married to a boy, was enough to make her think twice, though. For this trip to the movies she had borrowed one of Louise's pin-tucked shirtwaists and had traded her cowboy hat for her grandmother's old velvet-trimmed hat and swapped her canvas coat for a light corduroy jacket that was another of Louise's hand-me-downs; but she had ridden into town tonight on horseback, dressed in pants and boots, while every one of the other girls was in a skirt. Any one of them could have cut her hair without being mistaken for a boy, but Martha had already marched out to the limits of decency by going around corset-less and wearing men's pegged trousers and boots when she was on horseback, which was most of the time. She didn't want Henry or anybody else to think she wanted to be a man or be taken for one.

  Henry grinned and kept still through all the lively talk about whether a married woman should let her husband decide on the length of her hair, but when the lights went down for the third reel he leaned close to Martha and said, "I wouldn't mind it." He had said almost the same thing once before, about her being tall, which she hadn't ever forgotten. This time he might have meant that he wouldn't mind short hair or that he wouldn't mind being a husband who made all the decisions; Martha didn't know for sure which it was, but either way her face grew warm.

  When they left the theater they walked in a crowd up the sidewalk, all of them dawdling along so Pearl on her canes could keep up, and they went into the Crystal Café and ordered a whole dried-peach pie and sat around it, dueling with their forks. They talked a little about Fear Has Said Its Prayers, getting into particular mothers they knew or had heard about, mothers dead set against their sons going to war but who weren't very much like the mother in the picture show; and then they went on to other war talk, the battle at the Somme River being fought just then. The newspapers had been saying the Germans were trying to end the war before too many American troops could arrive at the front, and things were going badly for the Allies.

  Nobody at the table knew if Will Wright was anywhere near the Somme. The Blisses had had three or four letters from him, which they'd made a practice of passing on to El and Martha at the supper table, but in those letters there had been only a good many descriptions of the weather and the countryside, jokes about army food, and sometimes a sentence about dead Heinies seen along a road or in a shell hole—nothing about any battles, and no names of particular towns or rivers, which the censors would have snipped out anyway.

  El Bayard and Will Wright had worked together at the Bliss ranch for almost two years without becoming particular friends, for the reason that Will was still a young kid who hadn't seen much of anything, and El was forty and had seen more than he wanted to; so El had been surprised, just a few days before, to get a letter from him. What Will had written was that the war wasn't any bit the Great Adventure he'd expected; that there were long stretches of unrelieved monotony and discomfort, and then short, terrifying bombardments or fusillades; that he had seen men die in gruesome ways; that most of his time was spent in dull boredom and misery, crouching in a trench or a dugout waiting to be killed.

  El hadn't shared the letter with anybody at the Bliss ranch but he had shown it to Pearl, whose fiancé, Jim, would have been a conscientious objector if he had lived long enough to be drafted. Conscientious objectors were being jailed and beaten all over the country, their houses and cars stoned. While the others at the table talked about the battle of the Somme, and about the great number of soldiers who had lately shipped east through Umatilla County and Pendleton—more than thirty thousand in a two-week stretch—El met Pearl's look and then studied his fork as he took a last stab at the pie. Pearl had told him that Lizzie Wright, Will's new bride, was expecting a child in the autumn.

  Earlier in the week a fire had burned the barn and livery out at Stanley's Camp and the talk around the table was soon on to that; then someone asked Martha about her horses and she told them the horses were mostly finished; they were as gentle and tame as could be, and they knew much of what they would need to know in their working lives. Pearl and her friends were town girls who couldn't be expected to be very interested in horses, so she didn't say more than that. But there were things she planned to say later to Henry, who she knew would be interested: things to do with ending the circle ride and parting company with certain horses she had grown fond of.

  She had taken Dandy, the Kandels' blue roan horse, over to the Kandel farm earlier in the day—it was Fred's thirteenth birthday, and Mrs. Kandel had asked Martha to wait until that day to deliver the horse to Fred. At Tom's funeral in February the boy had come up to Martha and told her fiercely, "I won't ever sell Dandy, I'll keep him no matter what," which Martha had thought must be part of something he and Mrs. Kandel had been talking, or arguing, about. She imagined it had to do with whether Ruth Kandel planned to keep the farm or sell it, now that she was a widow. At the time Martha hadn't heard either way, but just the other morning when she and Ruth were talking out by the fence and Martha asked how she was getting along, Ruth had smiled dryly, her chin puckering up, and said, "I'm afraid Tom was right. I'm as tough as one of these old hens," which Martha took to mean she intended to stay put.

  Fred was an inexperienced rider; he was quick to jerk at the reins, and he bumped the hor
se with his heels to get him moving even after Martha told him a light squeeze with the knees would do the job. But he was just a boy and she could see he loved the horse already by the way he put his face right up to the prickle of Dandy's whiskers and by the way he kissed the velvet skin at the corner of the horse's mouth when he thought no one was looking. He might get to be a good rider or anyway a decent one eventually—she had seen plenty of dull colts that turned out to be serviceable horses and thought it must be the same with boys. And Dandy was a patient sort.

  She had spent some of her circle wages to buy the horse called Mata Hari from Dorothy Romer before Dorothy and Helen and Clifford packed up and moved back to Wisconsin. Dorothy had said she wanted to sell all of Reuben's horses, and Martha had helped her find buyers for the others, the four heavy pulling horses and a gray gelding saddle horse that had a hard mouth and a habit of bolting his food; but she liked Mata Hari and was afraid if somebody else bought her and treated her the least bit rough, she'd go back to biting and bucking. It was interesting to Martha that when she put Mattie in with Dolly the two took to each other right away, and that it was Mattie who seemed to rule the roost, Dolly completely beguiled by the pretty little Dutch spy. Martha hadn't expected that. She was surprised, too, that Dorothy Romer seemed to be grieving for her worthless husband as much as for the baby, Alice. One morning Dorothy had gone on for half an hour about Reuben's many gifts and charms—had broken down and sobbed as she said she didn't know what she would do without him.

  W.G. Boyd's horse, Skip, who had been so afraid of everything, had calmed down a great deal but never had become entirely trustworthy. Martha hadn't been able to get him over his fear of things lying on the ground, things with a certain heft or shape, not only thick limbs of wood or fence posts but a bucket tipped on its side, a big stone, a calf curled up asleep. She knew W.G. had been planning to sell the horse, but she hated to see Skip passed on to someone who might not understand why he was afraid—somebody who might think the way to get him to behave was to beat the fear out of him. She had toyed with the idea of buying him herself, but she didn't have use for a horse that wasn't trustworthy; and she had four horses to feed now that she had Mata Hari. When she told W.G. what she was worried about, and what Skip was like, he didn't bat an eye. He said, well then, he'd just send the horse into retirement. His pasture didn't have much of anything on the ground that might scare the horse, he told Martha, and maybe Skip would enjoy the company of a donkey somebody had recently given him.

  As it happened, in later years Skip turned out to be entirely trustworthy. After the war was over, whenever Joe and his dad came down from Pendleton to visit W.G., Joe would climb onto Skip and ride him everywhere bareback and if Joe turned him loose to crop the grass while he went off to visit with some of his old schoolmates the horse would walk back on his own and wait for W.G. to let him into the pasture. It was the company of that old donkey that did it, or at least that's what Martha thought, just the steady company of a friend who wasn't afraid of a single thing in the world.

  When their crowd had finished off the pie, they sat talking for a while more, and then El walked back with Pearl and her friends to the apartment building where the girls all lived. He planned to stay over, to sleep on the floor in Pearl's place so he could go with her on the train the next morning to Pendleton and then on to Portland, where they were seeing a doctor who they hoped could do Pearl some good. If Pearl wound up having an operation, El might be leaving George Bliss short-handed for as much as a couple of months; but the calving was all finished and the branding not started yet, and since word had come to them about Jack being wounded, George had seemed to lose all interest in planting wheat. He had leased out the wheat fields to a corporation up in Umatilla County, and that outfit had brought in a big crew of what looked to be fifty-year-old tramps and a few normal-school girls, along with a hundred horses, and got the fields plowed and drilled in less than a week. Now that the calving was finished, the only ranch work comprised corralling the two-year-old steers to be sold and taking bulls and heifers up to summer pasture; there had been some talk that if Martha decided to stay on in the county she could help George move his cattle.

  After El and the girls left the café, Henry and Martha and the McGees stayed a few more minutes, drinking coffee to wash down the pie and talking about cows, of course, and horses, and about Emma Adelaide Woodruff, who had been stepped on by a cow and was hobbling around with a broken toe. When Chuck and Nancy drove off in the Maxwell, Henry and Martha walked up the street to get their horses from Bert Widner's stables.

  There were street lights on the main street of the town and on the crossroad that went up the valley to Bingham but the lights had been left off to conserve those hundreds of cords of wood for the war, and the sidewalks were mostly dark and empty. Henry took her right hand, the one that wasn't in a cast, and after a moment leaned over and kissed her quickly on the mouth. They hadn't stopped walking, and the motion caused his teeth to scrape across her bottom lip. When he thought he tasted blood on his tongue he said, "Did I cut your lip?" She ran her tongue over the scrape and said, "No, it's all right," and then touched her mouth with her finger. There was something endearing in that gesture, Henry thought, and he stopped her from walking and pulled her to him and kissed her again lightly, his tongue touching the place on her lip where she was cut.

  This wasn't the first time they had kissed, or the second, but there hadn't been enough times for Martha to grow casual about it. She had seen plenty of horses and cattle coupling, she had known about that rough urgency, that brute coming together, but not this other: his callused hand cupping the nape of her neck to bring her close to him, and the salty taste of him, the smell of him, his warm male breath, the stubble of his chin against her cheek. She was conscious of bright heat and a feeling like pins and needles inside the unfamiliar clothes she'd borrowed from Louise Bliss, her breasts in the shirtwaist seeming to yearn toward Henry's barrel chest. None of it, or almost none of it, was what she had imagined would happen between a man and a woman.

  He kissed her twice more slowly and then couldn't prevent himself from pulling her hair back and exploring the shell of her ear lightly with his lips and his tongue. Her breath caught and she bent her head back and he kissed her open throat and the ridgeline of her jaw and then down along her collarbone. He put his hands at her waist and held her hard against him and he kissed her over and over until they were both panting as if they'd been running, as if they were running from something and afraid to stop, and he was hardly aware when his hands moved down to stroke her hips. She was by then trembling under his touch, his mouth, and when he became aware of it—it was a little while—he made himself stop what he was doing, what his mouth and hands were doing, and he pulled away slightly and held her by the shoulders without kissing her, his cheek resting against the side of her hair, and both of them now shaking slightly.

  Henry had been close to engaged once, to a girl who worked at the Elwha County courthouse, a modern girl acquainted with rubber condoms—she had laughed, calling them "capotes, my little French darlings"—and she had shown Henry how they should be used. He had used them more than once or twice but not so often as to feel like a top horse. Martha wasn't anything like the girl from the courthouse and when he kissed her he tried to be aware of where his hands were, and was intensely aware of where he wanted them to be. The times with that other girl had been more than three years before, but now with Martha, when the heat flamed up in his body, his body knew exactly what should happen next. He had pulled back because he was afraid the power over what happened next was more his than hers and because she wasn't anything like the girl who worked at the courthouse.

  When some boys passed them on the sidewalk they stepped apart, looking at the ground in shamefaced embarrassment, and when the boys had gone by Martha reached for his hand again and they went on walking toward the stables. After a minute, Henry said hoarsely, "We could go for a walk before we head back. We could walk down
by the river." He wasn't inviting her to lie down with him on the ground—he hoped she knew that; it was just that he wasn't ready to quit walking with her in the soft night, the darkness.

  The weather had been wet the past couple of weeks, and Martha thought the ground by the river might still be muddy for walking—it didn't cross her mind that Henry might have been asking her to lie down with him—but she said, "All right," because she didn't want to head back yet either. They couldn't go on kissing if they were on horseback, and she wanted him to go on kissing her.

  They turned off the sidewalk and found the path that fishermen used, working their way up and down the riverbank. The water was black with bright coins of light scattered on it from a few houses lit up along the other bank. Henry held her hand and they walked slowly. The ground was soft but not as wet or muddy as all that, and they walked clear out to the farthest edge of town and stood there in the darkness looking out at the river.

  "I want to ask you something," Henry said after a few minutes. He had been worrying in recent weeks, as Martha's circle ride got closer to finished, that if he didn't say something soon she might just ride on out of the county like all the other itinerant wranglers he'd known—ride off looking for more horses to break. But he hadn't planned to say it just now, and he frowned out at the black weight of water moving without cease in front of them. The river was at spring flood already, and the low booming sound it made was like far-off continuous thunder.