by Molly Gloss
"My husband will be so surprised." Dorothy looked over toward the house, the drawn curtain at the window of their bedroom. Then she swatted Helen lightly on her little behind. "Go on and feed the chickens and then you wash up for supper. Clifford, the cow is out in that pasture that has the hollow tree, you'd better run all the way if you want to make it back in time to eat." Her children scattered. She said to Martha Lessen, "Come in and have supper with us, will you? I made a big pot of beans and hocks."
It might have been a quiet meal if the children had gone on tongue-tied and if Reuben had stayed in bed; Dorothy had imagined the two women might have a chance to visit like adults. But the children suddenly discovered their voices and peppered the heroic Miss Lessen with every possible question about horses and cowboying and her life in the Wild West, and in the midst of it Reuben came out from the bedroom dressed but unshaven and smelling ripe.
"I've been getting over being sick," he said shakily to Martha Lessen, a kind of apology. In fact he looked thin and sallow, the tender skin around his eyes standing out bruise-dark. He sat at the table and took a little food onto his plate and cleared his throat and said, "I bet that horse is giving you lots of trouble."
The children's faces flashed bright with their news. "She's already broke," Clifford said, and Helen, tumbling her own words over her brother's, said, "She never even bucked one time."
Reuben drew back his head in surprise. Slowly, while his children went on chattering to him about the wonderful Miss Lessen, his face reddened and he lowered his eyes to his plate and began quietly to pick at his food with a fork. The children might ordinarily have gone on talking—they were irrepressible children, really—but they felt something come into the room, a strain or rigidity they recognized, and gradually they fell quiet and sat looking from one to another of the adults. Dorothy threw Martha Lessen a distressed glance, which the girl gathered the meaning of. Like the two Romer children, Martha was pretty well acquainted with men who drank themselves sick. In her experience they often spent their shame in the coin of anger and swagger. She said, intending to soft-soap him if she could, "Well, she's not broke yet, she's just somewhat started, and she took to the saddle so easy, I guess you must have been working with her and done most of it already."
Reuben looked at her and after a moment carried a forkful of beans up to his mouth and held it there while he pretended to consider the matter. He cleared his throat again. "I did think about going on breaking her myself, I had her that close. Only I don't have the time. I've got plenty to do without bothering over a stubborn horse." He chewed the beans deliberately and chased them down with milk. His hand holding the milk glass trembled slightly.
In a while Martha said, without looking up from her plate, "Mrs. Romer told me she's called Mata Hari, and I guess she must be named right, she tried to take a bite out of me when I had my back turned."
This finally seemed to please and mollify him. "You be careful, now. That horse would as soon kick you as look at you." He went on after that, talking about the execution of Mata Hari and the progress of the war, particularly this recent business of Lenin and his crowd overthrowing the czar and making peace with Germany. Reuben had signed up for the draft, he told Martha, and "wished to get a chance to kill Heinies." But he didn't expect to be called, given that he was a farmer and father to three children. It was true they were still calling up the unmarried men and the men without children ahead of the family men, but Dorothy doubted the draft board, if it came to it, would ever grant her husband a farmer's exemption. He had hardly managed to make anything grow on his claim, and after the last poor pea crop he had turned almost entirely to woodcutting for his income. From time to time she found herself daydreaming, in very nearly a hopeful way, about Reuben being shipped off to France while she packed up her children and returned to Wisconsin to live with her parents.
Her notion of a pleasant female conversation over the supper table had already been surrendered, so when the baby started to fuss, Dorothy left Reuben sitting at the table gravely delivering to Martha Lessen his opinions on the conduct of the war, and she put Clifford and Helen to clearing plates while she settled in a chair to nurse little Alice. Miss Lessen's eyes followed her with a shy-seeming glance and after a minute or two she stood and carried her own empty plate to the sink, murmuring a word of excuse to Reuben, who was still talking knowingly about the mistakes the British had made in their conduct of the war. Martha had taken off her big cowboy hat and canvas coat on coming into the house, but not the heavy leather chaps and spurs. When she crossed the room to retrieve her coat and hat, the scuff of her boots across the board floor and the jingling of her spurs made Dorothy's children stop and gaze after her in rapt worship, and even Reuben fell silent and stared.
"Are you going back to the Blisses' now?" Dorothy asked her.
"I've got a couple more things I want to do with your horse before I leave—I want to get her moved over into the corral, for one thing. But I'll be finishing pretty soon. I'll come back here tomorrow to rub a little more of the rough off her, but if you can make sure she's left alone until then"—she glanced pointedly at the children—"that'd be the best thing. She's awful tired from so much schooling. She's not used to it, and needs to be left to rest up overnight." She stood at the door a moment, settling her hat on her head and gazing out the front window at the dark afternoon. It had begun to rain harder, and Dorothy wondered if the girl was dreading going back out in it, the Bliss ranch a good three or four miles down a muddy road in the coming night.
She said to Martha, "You could stay over if you want. You'd have to sleep on the floor here in the front room but it's warm by the stove and we don't have a dog that would step on you."
Martha showed the quick white edge of a smile. "I wouldn't know what to do without a dog stepping on me." But she wouldn't stay: the Blisses were expecting her, she had horses of her own to see to, she didn't mind the rain so long as she was dressed for it, and so forth.
Then she turned and said to Reuben, "I hope you're feeling better, Mr. Romer," and Reuben, who by then was leaning forward with his elbows on the table and scrubbing his face with his palms, replied glumly that he had too much work to do to lie around in bed for long.
It occurred to Dorothy that Martha Lessen's words about letting the horse rest might have been meant for Reuben as much as the children. If he wasn't the worse for liquor, it would be like him to try to show his children and his wife and the half-tamed horse just who had the upper hand and how little need he had of a girl broncobuster.
But later, when Dorothy had helped him take a bath and shave his whiskers and they were lying in bed together, he murmured again how sorry he was and how he would try to do better, and then he told her piteously that he was a damn worthless hand with horses and he never should have bought that unbroke chestnut and if Miss Lessen could finish the horse, by damn, he would turn around and sell it just like that, to make up the money he'd lost while he'd been off on his drunk. He began to cry as he told her these things, which drove Dorothy to feel she had to argue with him, she had to tell him it wasn't true that he was worthless around horses, and she tried to think of times when he had acquitted himself well around a horse or a team, bringing up, for instance, the time he had stopped his brother's horse from bucking just by grabbing hold of its bridle—just by hanging on and talking firmly to it. She murmured these things with her lips touching his temple and her hands stroking his hair. Slowly he quieted in her arms. He was so childlike at times, she despaired of seeing him a man, and childlike too in his temper and his need to strut and boast. She was shot through suddenly with an understanding: if he ever was drafted and sent to France, he would not survive it. He'd be killed in the first minutes after stepping into the trenches, and he would die weeping for her like a child.
11
SOME OF THE PEOPLE Martha had contracted with gave her just one horse to break, and others three or four, which meant she had to go to some trouble to get the horses spread o
ut evenly, two in each corral. It was something she did little by little, moving a horse late in the afternoon after working all day at saddle-breaking. The first week in December she went over to the Woodruff ranch intending to pick up one of their three uneducated horses and take it to the corral at W.G. Boyd's place. She'd been working at the Rocker V all day in a steady rain, and one of Bill Varden's horses had given her a rough time—he was a big gelding pretty well blinded by his own glory. She hadn't any expectation of getting back to the Bliss homeplace until well after dark, well after the others had eaten their supper, and her back hurt, her feet were cold and wet inside wet boots. She rode the six or seven miles from the Rocker V to the Split Rock in a discouraged temper, with her chin down and her shoulders hunched under a rubber poncho.
Somebody—one of the Woodruff sisters or their foreman—had corralled the three horses for her, which was a relief. When she climbed the rails the horses crowded together in a far corner of the fence and watched her warily, ears pricked. Two were seal brown—they were out of the same mare, not twins but born two years apart—and one a flashy palomino. Martha had known palominos to make a show, to strut around as if they knew they were beautiful; but this one had a somewhat shamefaced way of holding her head low to the ground as if she thought herself plain. There was just no rhyme or reason to such things; the Rocker V horse, the one so proud of himself, had a long, rangy body, a Roman nose, a ratty tail.
A man came out of the little house Martha thought must be the foreman's place and crossed the muddy yard to her, shrugging into his coat as he came. She had been told his name but couldn't remember it. He climbed up next to her and looked at the horses a minute in silence. It was still raining lightly; she could hear it ticking on her rubber slicker and the crown of her hat.
"None of them is broke to lead," the man said, as if he and Martha had already been introduced and were in the middle of a conversation.
Her mood being what it was, Martha took this for some kind of criticism. "I know it," she said.
She felt him glance in her direction, but then he turned back and watched the horses another minute. Finally he said, "You care which one gets moved?"
Most of the horses she was moving were entirely unbroken, they were horses she hadn't gotten around to yet, horses who didn't know a thing about being led. She'd been roping their necks up close to Dolly and bringing them along that way, so if the young horse gave trouble, pulling or trying to rear up, it was trouble only in the first minute or two. Dolly wouldn't stand for any nonsense and educated them with stern schoolmarmish discipline. Martha had been studying these three, looking for the one easiest for Dolly to handle, one small enough it wouldn't pull Dolly off her feet. "I thought I'd take the one with the white snip on his nose," she told the foreman, and waited for him to find some objection to it.
After looking them over a bit longer, he said, "I'll get a rope and wrangle him out for you," which brought him into her better graces. She had been worrying somewhat that she might have to try to rope the horse with the foreman standing there watching her. He looked over at Dolly. "Were you thinking you'd pony him up to your horse there?" This was said matter-of-factly as if it was just exactly what he would do if it was up to him. Martha gave him a look. He had by now put himself in a good way with her.
"Yes sir. They usually follow her pretty good and if they don't she takes a bite out of them."
He made a low sound of amusement. "I'll bet. She doesn't look like she'd take any monkey business off a youngster." He was studying Dolly. "I heard you had a horse that was all scarred up from being burnt."
"Yes sir."
He turned and gave Martha a slight smile. "I wish you wouldn't go on calling me sir. I'm just the hired help."
She glanced at him. "I don't know your name."
"It's Henry Frazer. And I've been presuming you're Martha Lessen, but if you're not then I guess I'm helping a horse thief get off with one of our horses." His smile widened good-humoredly. He had a round, clean-shaven face that was a long way from handsome: a large fleshy nose running up to a heavy brow bone almost bare of eyebrows. His nose had been broken once, and a front tooth chipped off at a slant, which Martha thought must have come from adventures with bulls or mother cows or horses, though what had happened was more complicated than that, and involved an automobile on an icy road.
"If I was to steal one of them, I'd steal that one there, the palomino," she said.
"Is that right? You like her color, do you?"
"I like thinking about ways to coax her out of her shyness. She's a pretty horse, pretty as anything, but she doesn't know it yet. I like thinking about ways I could get her to hold up her head."
This evidently surprised him. He studied the horses a minute and then said seriously, "I hope you don't have a favorite aunt named Maude because I want to say that's just about the homeliest name in the book, and that's what the sisters have been calling that horse, and maybe she's just ashamed of her name. I bet you could get her to bring her head up if you just started calling her Ginger. Or Babe. Or Dolly."
Martha hid a smile. "I've already got a horse named Dolly," she said.
"Is that right? Is she that one there, the one you rode in on? Well, she's holding her head right up, so I guess that proves my case." He didn't try to hide his own smile, in fact he seemed pretty pleased with himself for his little joke.
He stood down from the fence and went into the barn and came out with a coiled catch rope. While he stood building his loop he asked her, "You want to get a hackamore on him before you neck him up close to Dolly?"
"If he's got a hackamore on him he'll be easier to handle, but I don't always do it. It's a lot of trouble when it's just me."
"Well, there's two of us," he said, glancing up at her.
Martha went over to Dolly and opened up the corral gate just wide enough to lead her inside and then Henry stepped in too and Martha shut the gate. She had spent maybe a hundred hours of practice over the years trying to get better at roping without making much improvement. Henry Frazer shook out a loop and neatly forefooted the horse Martha had said she wanted. The horse hit the ground with a heavy thump, mud splashing everywhere, the other horses leaping wide, squealing, and Henry in nothing flat had his knee on the horse's neck and the head twisted up against his chest like a rodeo bulldogger before that horse had any idea what had happened. It wasn't how Martha would have gone about it—she never liked to throw a horse, which maybe was part of the reason she had never been able to get very good at roping—but she knew she'd have been half or three-quarters of an hour getting the damn horse ready to leave the corral if she'd been left to manage it alone. In the rain, at the tail end of a long day, she hadn't energy left to concern herself very much with the horse's fear, and she wasn't sorry at all to have him in a hackamore and snubbed up to Dolly in five minutes flat.
When Martha climbed onto Dolly again it caused a brief flurry—the brown horse squealing, trying to buck and shy away, Dolly baring her teeth, Henry Frazer jumping back to keep from getting kicked or stepped on—but Martha didn't have any trouble keeping her seat and in a moment, after everybody settled down, Henry came up again to Dolly's shoulder and rested a gloved hand on her and peered up at Martha. He had odd, downturned eyes that gave people the idea he was always squinting. Boys in those days always tagged each other according to some part of how they looked—every gang of kids had one called Slim and another called Red—and when he'd been a boy Henry Frazer had been called, even by his friends, Chink, or Chow Mein, for those screwed-down eyes of his. He said, "You all set?" and Martha answered, "I guess we are. Thanks." He nodded and peered across Dolly's withers to the brown colt. "That one's not very happy."
She could feel the horse where he touched against her lower leg, his wet heat, his pulse racing almost as quick as a rabbit's, and she could smell the fear rising off him. He was licking his muzzle over and over and eyeing Dolly sideways, the whites of his eyes showing. "He's wondering how this happened and
what's going to happen next."
Henry looked up at her briefly. "Well, he doesn't have much cause to worry, I imagine." He patted Dolly once and stepped back. "You take it easy." His overalls and coat were badly muddied, and there was a clump of mud on his chin and mud in a long streak across the crown of his hat.
When she was out of earshot of the ranch Martha began to talk to the brown horse in a low steady voice, telling him everything they would be doing together in the next days and weeks, and she told him she was sorry he'd been thrown and bull-dogged but he shouldn't take it as a sign of what to expect, and she told him she thought Henry Frazer was someone who wouldn't hurt a horse unnecessarily. The rain had pretty much come to an end by then, and they rode in a cold gray dusk, the horse's ears flicking sideward to catch every word she said.
12
THERE WAS AN OFFICIAL call in those first months of the war for folks to "pray hard, work hard, sleep hard, play hard, and do it all courageously and cheerfully." Of course not many people in Elwha County needed this direction from the War Office, for they had always been hard-worked without ever complaining much, and most of them lived in isolated circumstances without feeling particularly put-upon. They would travel ten miles for a pie social or a basket supper or an evening of cards or dominoes and not think a thing of it, even in the winter months when the roads might be troublesome and the ten miles to be covered on horseback. Such pastimes went on only slightly abated after war was declared, and in fact Liberty Bond drives and gatherings of women knitting socks for the army had to be squeezed onto the calendar.
Martha Lessen was drawn into this intense sociability almost as soon as she came into the county, though at first she had to be persuaded. Late in the first week of December, in the middle of saddle-breaking the fourteen horses in her circle, Louise Bliss pressed her to go to a Christmas dance at the Bingham Odd Fellows Hall. Will Wright, the young hired hand, told her he was riding over there himself on Saturday night and she might follow him up. Even in Pendleton, where she had lived most of her life, a town already pretty settled and gentrified, all the girls from the farms and ranches would ride to a dance with their dresses and shoes and stockings tied behind their saddles and would change when they got there; so she wouldn't feel odd in that respect. But she had come down to Elwha County intending to spend the winter breaking horses and sleeping in barns. She'd packed only the one dress in case someone pressed the point about the impropriety of a woman wearing trousers, and she had not brought any but barn shoes and boots with her. She tried to say this without saying it, but Louise Bliss would have none of it. She brought out a pair of shoes, patent leather with an opera toe, which she said had become too narrow for her feet now that she had bunions. The Cuban heels were worn down at the corners, and the patent was creased across the instep, but someone had polished the leather recently and they were better shoes than Martha had ever owned. Louise urged on her also a large silk scarf figured with red and pink and cream peonies and fringed in red, which she said could be worn tied at the waist or around the shoulders and would make any dress in the world presentable for a dance.
