The Hearts of Horses

by Molly Gloss

  It wasn't a very cold day but Martha's face was pink when she finally turned to say hello to Dorothy. "Are you Mrs. Romer? I've met so many people I can't keep the names straight."

  "Yes, I'm Dorothy Romer. Did you come to see the horse we wanted broke? She's there in the cornfield." Dorothy walked over to the fence and Martha got down from her horse, dropped the reins, and followed her. T.M. stood there as if she'd nailed his hooves to the ground.

  Reuben kept a gray gelding as a riding horse and he had four pulling horses he used in pairs so they could trade off the hard work of hauling logs; he had bought the unbroke chestnut mare for no good reason except she was a beautiful horse and he was drunk at the time. "She's that chestnut there, the one standing kind of alone," Dorothy said.

  The chestnut shifted her weight just then and moved closer to the rest of the horses, and Martha said, "The one that just moved over? The pretty one?" and Dorothy nodded. Martha watched the mare for a few minutes quietly and then went to the little gate in the cornfield fence and opened it and went through and took off her hat and waved it, which set the horses to moving. She stood and watched the particular movement of the chestnut as the horse bolted away from her, ears flattened, hind legs kicking out. Dorothy couldn't imagine what she was looking for or what she was learning by watching the horse. The mare was an intractable five-year-old that her husband was unfathomably fond of but had never been able to break. She imagined it was the horse's very wildness that her husband admired.

  "Was she ever started?" the girl called to her.

  "My husband tried to do it. I guess he can get her saddled and get her to take the bit but she always will buck, she won't ever calm down. I think she's just determined not to be rode. My husband off and on has talked about selling her for rodeo stock. If you don't think she can be broke, maybe he'll just go ahead and do that."

  The girl walked back toward Dorothy. At church on Sunday Dorothy would have said she looked like anybody's rangy, over-tall farm daughter, dressed in a worn green jumper and worn yard boots, her thick brown hair pulled back behind her ears under an old-fashioned hat that had the velvet worn through. Now she wore a buckaroo getup, fringed buckskin chaps that flared out wide above high-heeled boots and spurs with blunt star rowels, the kind of outfit Dorothy hadn't seen outside of old photographs and rodeo shows. The girl's hair was tied back with a piece of string, and when she resettled her high-crowned hat on her head most of her hair disappeared under it and she looked a good deal like a beardless young cowboy.

  "How long ago did your husband give up on her?"

  "Oh, I don't know that he's ever given up but if you mean when's the last time he tried to ride her I guess it was a month ago or more." Dorothy remembered this because it was right after Mata Hari, that exotic dancer who had been spying for the Germans, was put to death. Reuben had been calling the horse Mata Hari and joking about her being pure evil, and the day he read about the execution he had gone out to break the horse "for once and all" and he'd been thrown three or four times that day and he hadn't tried to ride her since.

  The girl looked down at her boots. "Well I'll see if I can break her for you, but sometimes when they've been tried and bucked like that they just get ruined and they never can be broke. If I can't get her gentled I won't charge you for trying."

  "All right. That sounds all right." On Sunday, when Reuben had told the girl broncobuster that she could try breaking his wild horse, he had walked back to Dorothy and laughed and said, "She'll be in for a bad surprise, won't she, when she tries to get up on that mean ol' Mata Hari," but he had looked nervous, and Dorothy knew he was of two minds about whether he wanted the horse tamed at all. And she also knew his pride was in danger if a young girl was able to accomplish what he'd failed at. So there was an odd sort of relief in hearing Martha Lessen speak doubtfully about the outcome.

  "I've got about thirteen or fourteen horses, I think, that I'll be breaking on a circle ride. I'm planning to start in the next day or two roughing them out, and I guess I'll start here because you're nearest to the Bliss place and I'm boarding over there. I should know right away whether I can break her or not."

  "I'll tell my husband," Dorothy said, though she didn't know where Reuben was and she didn't expect to see him until he had drunk up every penny of last week's wood money. "Would you come in and have some coffee?"

  The girl looked off across the countryside for just a moment and when she looked back at Dorothy her face had taken on a shy look. "I've got so many places to visit, I guess I'd better not."

  Dorothy had been starving for female company, for any company really, so long as it wasn't a child, but she didn't say so. She said, "Where are you headed to next? Do you need any help finding it?"

  Martha took George Bliss's creased map from her coat pocket and flattened it out and turned it until she could read what it said. "His name is Irwin, I think. Mr. Bliss drew me a map, but I'm still having trouble finding places. Is Irwin's the next one over to the north?"

  "The Birtwicks have the place next to ours and then is Irwin's. If you go back to the Graves Creek road and then turn west when you get to the river, you'll see his house setting right on top of a hill; it's painted white. You can't hardly miss it, it's a big house and right out in the open."

  "I'll find it. I don't know this country too well yet, but I guess I'll learn it."

  "We've been here two years and I still don't know it much. My husband drives me to church in the wagon, and into Shelby for the shopping, but I never learned to drive the horses and I've got to walk everywhere when Mr. Romer is busy. I've got children who get tired if I walk them very far, and that keeps me pretty close to home."

  "Was your husband hoping to tame that chestnut enough so you could ride him?"

  Dorothy said flatly, "I guess I don't know why Mr. Romer bought that unbroke horse except that he thought it was pretty. But I've never ridden much, and I don't think I'd want to learn on a horse as wild as that, and I don't want her anywhere near my children."

  Martha glanced back at the girl, Helen, who had by now come out on the porch and was watching everything from there, and then she said to Dorothy, "Well, no matter how pretty a horse is, if she's not well mannered she's not a horse you'd want to have around. But if I can break her for you, then she won't be wild anymore and you could sure ride her anywhere. You'd just have to keep schooling her, making sure she stayed tame, which are things I could show you how to do."

  Dorothy looked over at the chestnut skeptically. "He calls that horse Mata Hari, after the Dutch spy who made so much trouble for them over in France."

  Martha smiled suddenly. "After she's broke and not making trouble anymore, maybe you'll have to start calling her Mattie." She was a big girl and had a large mouth, but Dorothy thought she was pleasant enough to look at without quite being pretty. When she smiled it caused her eyes to widen as if she'd been happily surprised. Dorothy guessed Martha Lessen was around nineteen or twenty. Her wide young face, when it was lit up like that, gave Dorothy a terrible feeling of envy. She was only twenty-eight herself, but she felt old, and wise in the sorrows of the world.

  "You'll be back tomorrow, then?"

  "I think it'll be tomorrow. Anyway I hope I can get around to see everybody today, and if I can then I'll be here in the morning. It'll probably be a good couple of weeks before I start riding the circle, though."

  "I didn't say so before, Miss Lessen, but I don't know what you mean by a circle ride."

  "Oh, it's just called that because I'll be riding in a big circle every day, one horse after the other from one place to the next, every single day. You'll have somebody else's horse put up at your place most days, or I guess it'll be two horses, because I'll have to get the circle spread out even. I haven't figured out yet what to do about spreading the cost of the feed so you don't wind up feeding more horses than you own, but I'm still thinking about it and I'll get it worked out. Anyway, every morning I'll be riding a new horse in and riding another one out."<
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  Dorothy said, "Oh," as if she understood this, though it was still mostly unclear.

  "They need to get used to being ridden," the girl said, "and they need to learn reining and not to be afraid offers and all that, so you have to ride them over and over to get the lessons learned. First, though, you've got to get them all used to saddles and so forth, which is likely to take me two or three days at each place." She said this as if she knew Dorothy was having trouble with it, but not like a schoolteacher explaining something to a slow pupil. It seemed to Dorothy she was just quietly pleased to be able to talk about something she knew, something she was good at, and it struck her suddenly that the only things she herself was good at were housekeeping and rearing children, and these were not things other people would be anxious to hear about. Any chance she might have had to be a cowgirl and to go around the countryside breaking horses had passed her by a long time ago.

  9

  A COUPLE OF THINGS conspired to delay Martha, and it took her the better part of two days to make it around to all six places, talk to folks, and get a look at all the horses.

  She found the Irwin place easily enough. Walter Irwin was a bachelor homesteader who had come out from somewhere in New England with money but no knowledge of farming, and he had hired a man named Alfred Logerwell to help him, a man who was lazy and conceited and almost as ignorant as Walter himself. Irwin had an auto-truck and had been slow to discover that he might need mules to get his plowing done and a horse to get down the roads when they were too muddy for his auto. The horse he had bought was not yet broken out, which was an odd choice for somebody with an immediate need of one; but the horse had been bought on Logerwell's advice, it turned out, and from one of Logerwell's relatives. Martha didn't dislike Walter Irwin—he was mild seeming and decent—but he wasn't interested in coming to any knowledge of horses. He sent her off to talk to his hired man about the roan gelding he wanted her to break, and Martha saw right away that Alfred Logerwell was the sort of person she would never have a use for. He made a false show of knowledge, talking as if the horse was a thousand-dollar prize, though it was a plain cayuse of the worst sort, heavy-jowled and long in the pasterns. Logerwell would have bucked out the horse himself, could have broken him in half an hour, he told Martha with a crooked smirk, if he hadn't strained his shoulder lifting sacks of cement. This was the kind of thing she was used to hearing from her own dad and hardly ever credited. Moreover, Logerwell liked the sound of his own voice, which was another thing he had in common with Charlie Lessen, and he kept Martha standing there a good hour while he told her every cock-and-bull story under the sun, stories proving how smart he was, and everybody else dumb as cows.

  So it was late morning, almost noon, by the time she got away from Irwin's and crossed over the Little Bird Woman River northwest of Shelby and went looking for the Thiede ranch, which was called the T Bar, tucked up against the foothills of the Whitehorn Range. She was pretty sure she had found the right place and was just riding up to the house when a woman on a dun horse popped over the hill and rode down into the ranch yard at a breathless lope. It was a shock to see a little child who couldn't have been more than two years old jouncing on the saddle in front of her, the child's round face wreathed in wool so only the dark eyes showed. The woman's own face was bright pink and her long-nosed horse was damp with sweat along his neck and flank. She rode him right up to T.M., who tossed his head and stepped sideways.

  "Miss Lessen," she said, as if they were acquainted with each other, and then at one stroke Martha remembered this was Irene Thiede, whose husband owned the T Bar, and their little boy, who was called Young Karl. "We lost the wagon, it tipped off the road by Little Creek," Irene said in a harried rush. "Emil's trying to get the horses out of harness but he needs somebody stronger than me. I was planning to phone up Gray Maklin, he's the closest, but since you're right here, can you help?"

  What Irene didn't say was that her husband, Emil, was German—his father, Old Karl, spoke barely construable English even after twenty-five years of practice—and that Gray Maklin was a Dutchman who appeared to hold the Thiedes to blame for everything the German army had done in the past four years. Irene thought it was very likely that Gray Maklin would turn his back on her and she would have to ride all the way over to Bill Varden's—Bill didn't have a telephone—or phone over to Bud Harper, whose ranch was a good eight miles away. There were homesteaders living closer than that but she hardly knew any of them, and wasn't on good enough terms to ask them for help.

  Martha Lessen, who didn't know a thing about any of this, just said, "All right," and they went at a gallop back up the ranch lane and then along a rutted wagon trail that twisted uphill between rising walls that narrowed, following a rock-bedded creek. Mixed stands of yellow pine and spruce stood clumped on shelves and benches along the upper slopes and shadowing the creek. The T Bar Ranch ran cattle clear into the northern slopes of the Whitehorns, and with the open fall some of their wilder cows had decided to stay up in the forest and not come down to be fed at the homeplace. Emil had been up to check on the cows and to bring down a load of firewood and maybe shoot at game if he saw any, and Irene had been riding with him to help keep an eye on the bad places in the road and then help him cut and load the wood. It was her fault, she told Martha wildly, all her fault the wagon had tipped over along the rock margins of the creek—she'd been the one riding ahead to scout the potholes, make sure the mud wasn't too deep, see that the wheels had room on that narrow road. Emil's two Belgian horses had been pulled over with the wagon, not badly hurt but terribly frightened, and when they gained their feet they'd made a tangled mess of the harness. They were in a bad place—the wood had spilled out—and Emil was afraid to cut them loose from the lines without somebody to hold their heads and keep them still until he could come around and lead them back up onto the road. "He didn't think I could hold them," Irene said in a tight voice.

  As soon as they came in sight of the wagon Martha saw what kind of trouble the horses were in. The wagon had tipped and slid eight or ten feet down the steep, crumbly embankment at the edge of the road and then come to rest on its side against the gnarled boles of trees that clung by stubbornness to the cutaway bank of the creek. The creek made a hard bend just there, running loud and white around the curve, and the roots of the trees sprawled out over a sheer twenty-foot drop to the water. If the Belgians tried to go down instead of up, or if they pitched around and lost footing on that narrow, gravelly shelf, they'd go to ruin.

  Emil was on the slope at the front of the rig, standing with the Belgians and leaning into their big bowed necks. His face when he turned it up to the women was scratched and streaked with blood and mud but if he was disappointed to see Martha instead of Gray Maklin it didn't show on him. "Can you climb down here, Miss Lessen? Can you hold them while I get the lines cut loose?" He said it quietly, not to frighten the horses.

  She gave T.M.'s reins to Irene. "You'll have to watch him, he's an ornery horse and a troublemaker."

  Irene said, "I'll hold him," and smiled whitely. Martha had already seen that Irene Thiede sat a horse as well as anybody she knew. And Young Karl sat in front of her with his mittened hands not gripping the horn but resting on the fenders of the saddle, as if sitting a horse was the most natural thing in the world. His dark eyes looked out at Martha seriously.

  She went over the embankment, scrambling down behind the wagon so if she started rocks rolling they wouldn't roll down into the horses. The firewood had spilled in a jumbled jackstraw pile, half in the creek, and some logs had wound up tangled with the whiffletree and the traces. She climbed cautiously onto the spilled wood and squeezed past the upturned wheels and undercarriage of the wagon and spoke softly to the Belgians before coming up on their flank.

  "They've calmed down some," Emil told her. "Maybe Irene could have held them but I was a little worried they'd go over into the creek." It was the only thing he had said to Irene—that he didn't want to lose the horses—and not a wo
rd about how he would have to get in between the span to get them loose from the whiffletree, and how the big horses, if they reared up or bolted, might crush or trample him or take him over the bank with them.

  "Hey, hey," Martha said softly, and breathed against the near horse's muzzle as she took his cheek strap.

  Emil stood away and let her take both horses. "You got them? You think you can hold them?"

  "I'm pretty sure I can." This wasn't true. Their heads were up, pitching just a little bit, and she could see the white all around their eyes. They had had a bad scare and didn't like where they were standing. She told them what good horses they were, speaking quietly against their warm faces.

  Emil sidled around behind them, keeping one hand on the near horse's flank. He was talking to them too, a steady low note, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Then he said to Martha softly, "Hold them now, can you?" and he stepped around the whiffletree, which stood up on its end in the tumble of firewood logs and half broken through. The wagon tongue had split too, and the shattered ends dangled from the hip straps of the breeching. He crouched down between the big haunches and hocks of his horses. Martha heard the sawing of his limbing knife against the thick tangle of leather as she held the Belgians' heads tightly, bracing her body against their great muscled chests. They leaned into her, wanting consolation, and she told them steadily how brave they were. She could feel her own heart thudding against the hearts of the horses.

  "Can you back them up a step, and then ahead?" Emil said. "Just a step, not much."

  She clucked to the team and pushed their heads back and they shifted their weight reluctantly. Emil made an inarticulate sound and then he said, "Okay," and she let them step forward. She heard the sound of brush breaking above her, which was T.M. acting up, and Irene speaking evenly to him, something about a bird, hadn't he ever seen a bird before? and it was just then the whiffletree decided to finish breaking all the way through, and part of it slid sideways and struck the ground with a muffled clashing, which Emil would have prevented if he could—it wasn't much racket, but enough to unnerve the Belgians. Martha's heart flew up in her throat and she shifted and clasped an arm around the neck of each horse and let her weight hang from them, which wasn't meant to be force, she couldn't have stopped them with force, but was the kind of reassurance you give a child when you hold him tight, I've got you, I'll hold you, it's all right, and they came ahead no more than three or four steps and then stopped, huffing their hot, fragrant breath into the chill air.