by Molly Gloss
"Where are they now? Are they over there yet?"
"I guess they're still in Georgia, one of those forts where they're training soldiers." She hadn't thought she would tell him any more of it, but then found she was going ahead. "They got into some trouble, a fight I guess, and both of them are in the stockade. I heard Davey broke somebody's nose, a sergeant or a captain. So I don't know if they'll even get shipped out." She said this without looking at Henry and without seeming to offer an opinion about it.
They stopped at the fence line above the Bliss homeplace and Henry held on to Boots while Martha got down to work the wire on the gate. Below them the lights in the house and the bunkhouse made a pale geometry behind drawn curtains. Someone had hung a lamp from the eave of the barn, and its light fell out on the trampled snow.
When they started down the hill, Henry Frazer said quietly, going on with something they'd left in the air, "I suppose whenever a horse gets traded to somebody new he must wonder. Will he get beaten? Will he get enough to eat? I hate to think what goes through a horse's mind when he's hauled off and set down in the middle of a war."
Martha looked toward Henry. He was riding with his shoulders hunched, his elbows held in close. The planes of his cheeks were rounded and soft, his once-broken nose wide and fleshy below that heavy brow bone. His eyes had a certain aspect, as if they were always peering into something interesting. He was looking out across the snowfield where the dark shapes of cows and horses stood against the blue-white snow, clumps of two or three of them standing together, as still as anchored boats on a millpond.
20
IF DR. MCDONOUGH had had his way, he wouldn't have told Tom Kandel the nature of his illness at all—he felt people shouldn't have to suffer that kind of knowledge—but Tom and Ruth had been stubbornly of a different mind, insistent and unrelenting in their demand to know, and finally he had been forced to tell them the mass in Tom's belly was a cancer.
In those days, a lot of what people thought they knew about cancer was wrong. Some people, even some doctors, hadn't let go of the idea it could be spread from one person to the next or that it might start from eating tomatoes or drinking water out of a trout stream. And of course for the most part the only treatment was surgery, which in just about every case wasn't resorted to until the cancer had manifested itself in some visible way on the body. Dr. McDonough didn't know the cause of Tom's cancer so he didn't offer the Kandels any opinion about it, and because the tumor was in Tom's liver he was careful not to mention surgery. The Kandels were both educated people; Tom was the son of a doctor. When Dr. McDonough told them where the cancer was located neither of them asked him about a cure or regimen of treatment, nothing of that kind at all, which was a relief to him.
After Tom learned what he had—that his body was incubating cancer cells—he carried on the ordinary affairs of his life for a month or so out of the same sheer stubbornness that had made the doctor give way. But by the middle of January he had become too weak and tired to keep up his job feeding cows for Bill Varden, and Dr. McDonough began coming by the house every morning to give him a hypodermic of morphine. Tom and Ruth then passed through a brief, almost pleasant interlude in the course of his dying. Fred took over the job of feeding and caring for the chickens now that his father was too sick to do it, but otherwise carried on behaving as if Tom wasn't dying, and saved his parents from having to think very much about him. Friends came in and out of the house with gifts of food and sat down to talk with Tom for what they expected would be the last time, and then went home and left the two of them alone. A good part of every day Tom would sleep, leaving Ruth to do only the quiet things that would not disturb him: she spent the bulk of those hours reading, writing letters, embroidering, knitting, free of guilt for not keeping up with the hard housework. When Tom was awake she wanted to spend every moment with him. They clung to each other, held hands as they had not done since the early days of their marriage, and Tom sometimes teased her or joked with her—he came out into the front room one night wearing nothing but his winter underwear hooked up to striped suspenders. He talked a blue streak, as if by keeping silence at bay he could reassure himself that he was still alive. He even talked to her interestedly about his own funeral, smothering her refusals with his mild persistence and offering firm opinions about what hymns should be played and who the pallbearers ought to be, and making a list of poems he wanted read in addition to the Gospels the minis ter would insist upon. He made a dark joke about the failure of his appetite—how it would lighten the load for his friends carrying the coffin—and when Ruth burst into tears he laughed, but then cried too, and held out his arms to her in a tender way.
At one time in his life Tom must have been a churchgoer, because it was well known he could sing any hymn you might name, and quote long verses from the New Testament. But during the years he lived in the Elwha Valley he was a famously shameless agnostic. Before he became ill, it had been his habit to walk with his wife and son to the Presbyterian church in Bingham every Sunday, then stroll on down to the riverbank and fish for an hour before going back to retrieve his family; cancer did not cause him to embrace God as some people had expected. When the Presbyterian minister visited him Tom listened, and then mildly and without pleasure pointed out the inconsistencies and defects in the man's reasoned arguments for heaven and a life after death.
Sometime during the middle part of January, Marcella Blantyre, who hardly knew Tom at all except to nod and smile, went over to the Kandel house to see him. She was a devout member of the Bingham Presbyterian church but she was not on a church mission to kneel down and pray with Tom and Ruth. Marcella imagined Tom was the sort of person who wouldn't ordinarily have given a woman like her any credit, but Ruth Kandel had asked her to come to the house, and Marcella didn't have to think twice before saying yes. She told Ruth truthfully that she didn't know if she could do Tom any good, but she would come by and see.
Marcella had a reputation in the Elwha Valley for healing people's illnesses merely by the laying on of hands. This wasn't something she advertised or made a boast of; in fact, Marcella was a garden-variety farm wife who lived with her husband on 160 acres of river-bottom land and devoted herself to raising five children while her husband raised onions. But she'd been struck by lightning when she was about nineteen years old, a new bride expecting her first child; and after she recovered her senses, and after the baby was born perfectly formed and perfectly healthy, Marcella had begun quietly to work cures. The people in her church all knew at least one person who knew a person who had been healed of some ailment or affliction by her hands. After the Presbyterian minister's son was cured of stammering, the minister had preached in his Sunday sermon that miracles were still taking place in the world, two thousand years after God's son walked the earth. Marcella, sitting in a pew toward the rear of the church, had bent her head and looked at her shoes. She was entirely a sensible woman and she knew she might not have had anything to do with curing his son of stammering; she knew many of the sick people she'd laid hands on would doubtless have gotten better without her help. But some of them, yes, she felt sure she'd made them well simply by passing her hands over their bodies. She could sense when this happened: a shivering electrical vibration as if a spark had jumped the space between the tips of her fingers and the skin of the person she was treating. She didn't know what it was that had entered her body when she was struck by lightning, but she knew it to be a gift of some kind, a gift from God.
Tom had been dozing in a chair—he was sitting with a quilt spread over his lap, his legs stretched out so his slippered feet could rest on a leather stool—but as soon as Ruth opened the door to Marcella he stood up from the chair and began folding up the quilt and said cheerfully, "I imagine I've given you a real job of work today, Mrs. Blantyre," as if he had hired her to chop several cords of wood or paint the entire house from top to bottom. She understood from this that Ruth had told him she was coming and why, and this relieved her of her mild anxiety ab
out the visit. She smiled and said, "Well, I can only do my best, Mr. Kandel," which he seemed to find unexpected. He smiled slowly. "We can't ask for more than that," he said, and looked at Ruth, whose eyes immediately filled with tears. Ruth didn't believe in Marcella's gift—neither did Tom—but it was impossible for them both not to hope they were wrong.
It turned out to be a strange contradiction in Tom, that he was more willing to entertain the idea of a magical healer than of a Benevolent Creator and a life after death. They sat down, the three of them, and while Marcella quietly told him the story of what had happened to her and what she had seen during the moments she'd lain dead in her garden—a bright white light and then colors I've never seen in life, and a figure in white coming toward me through the rainbow, and his hand when it touched my shoulder just going right down into my heart to shake it awake—Tom leaned forward in his chair and listened with terrible attention and yearning. He asked her interestedly about the time when she first became aware of her gift, and asked her to tell him about some of the people she had cured. When Marcella said to him that she hadn't ever healed anyone of cancer—hadn't ever been asked to—Tom said quietly, "I guess you're not expecting this to be one of your cures," but lifting the last words so he appeared to be asking her something.
"I don't know, Tom. Only God knows," she said, which made him smile slightly.
"Well, God holds his cards pretty close to the vest, which is one of the things I intend to complain about if it turns out there's anyone to complain to." He looked at Ruth, but she had become very still and shuttered and was looking out the window at the cold afternoon dusk.
They carried on talking a little while longer. Marcella told him she would, in a moment, ask him to lie down quietly on the sofa with his eyes closed while she touched him, but that in fact she wouldn't actually be touching him, just passing her hands close to his body, and that he might feel the force of her hands as an electrical spark, a warmth on his skin; then after a short silence she told him she was ready to start. He looked quickly at Ruth, a naked look of need and fear, and Ruth turned her face to him and pursed her mouth to stop something equally desperate from showing there. Then she crossed the room and bent down to pull off her husband's slippers as if he were a child. He touched her hair, and she reached tremblingly for his hand, a moment so intimate Marcella felt she should look away. He stretched out on the sofa and Ruth stood over him a moment, straightening his clothes, not meeting his eyes, then she kissed him lightly and smiled and went back to her chair. Tom's eyes followed her. He took a breath that could be clearly heard in the room, and then another quieter one and closed his eyes. Marcella went to the sofa and let herself down on her knees beside it. She prayed silently a few moments to clear her mind of all the scraps and candle-ends of the day, and then she began passing the flat palms of both her hands over his body slowly, long sweeping strokes downward from the top of his head as if brushing the cancer out through the soles of his feet.
He was pale and thin, but so absolutely endowed with the force of life, even lying flat and still on the sofa with his eyes drawn closed, that it was almost impossible to believe his death might be only days or weeks away. Marcella had watched over the deaths of, now, seven people, people who had been beyond her help for reasons known only to God, and she knew the suddenness with which the animating soul of a person could fly out of the body and leave behind a meaningless clay corpse. If she hadn't believed so strongly in God the Comforter, death would have seemed to her almost a parlor trick, an unfathomable disappearing act.
She closed her eyes and emptied her mind as well as she was able, of this and other distractions. She let her cold hands rove above Tom in slow, rhythmic strokes. There was no sound in the room except a ticking clock and the breaths of three people. Tom, through his closed eyes, felt a slight sense of the shadow of Marcella's hands when they passed over his face, a slight sense of her body leaning above him as she plied her mysterious art. His skin, seeking some feeling of heat, of electricity, yearned toward her helplessly.
21
IN THOSE DAYS, plenty of men thought nothing of being rough with horses. A horse had to have his spirit entirely broken was what a lot of men thought, had to be beaten into abject submission. Martha didn't know Walter Irwin very well, didn't know his feeling about horses, but she knew if he held the usual opinions it wouldn't do a bit of good to tell him his hired man was beating horses and shortchanging their feed. And she knew there wasn't a damn thing she could say to Logerwell himself that would change his mind or improve the situation for the horses. In her experience, anything she said to him would be sure to make things worse.
At Irwin's corral she began to grain the horses herself while she was changing saddles and mounts, which was time she could hardly spare, but it took care of the problem of Logerwell's wife shortchanging the horses on their feed. Through the next few days she went on undecided whether to speak to Irwin about the other part of it. She seldom saw Logerwell but kept an eye out for him warily and watched all the horses for any sign they were being casually mistreated. And she thought back to every mark of injury a horse had suffered, trying to re member if it had happened while the horse was standing in Irwin's corral. On a Sunday morning, after a week of watching, a black gelding named York, which belonged to the Thiedes and had spent the past couple of nights at Irwin's, showed up with a long red weal across his cheek. It could have come from scraping himself nervously against a fence rail or from another horse—stablemates didn't always get along and would sometimes chew on each other—or it might have come from somebody slashing him with a whip or a stick. Martha felt pretty sure she knew which one of those it was. She stood there holding the McClelland saddle against her chest, looking at that stripe across the long plane of York's face, those beads of scabbing blood, and then slung the saddle over a corral rail and started on foot up the muddy track to the farmhouse.
Irwin's family money set him apart from most of his homesteader neighbors. His house was a white clapboard two-story built high up on a logged-off rise above the north bank of the Little Bird Woman River. He had built his barn and corrals a fair hike down the hill from his house, which was meant to keep the smell of the animals out of his kitchen but also meant he couldn't keep much of an eye on what was going on down there. In addition, the house was poorly situated in terms of the practicalities of snowdrift and wind, and he'd had to drill his well a long way down to reach water; but sitting up high like that, the house could be seen by pretty nearly everybody living at the eastern end of the valley, which his neighbors thought was his reason for putting it there, and which he would have been surprised to hear. He had built on that rise almost entirely for its aerie view across the river to the Whitehorns.
The property was a relinquishment he had bought from the railroad when another homesteader gave up on it, and the Logerwells now occupied a small house the first nester had built in the lee of the hill, about halfway up from the barn. When Martha went past that house the windows were dark and there wasn't any sign of Logerwell or his wife. Several hogs were sprawled in a deeply muddy pen across the runway from the house. One of them, a black and white sow, lifted her head and blinked her small pink eyes at Martha before lowering her cheek into the mud. A black dog, underfed and every bit as muddy as the pigs, lay in the yard tied to a post by a short piece of rope. He watched Martha without moving.
She went on up to Irwin's porch and knocked at the door and tightened the throat-catch of her hat against the wind and when he came to the door she said quickly and forcefully, "Mr. Irwin, your hired man has been whipping some of the horses I'm working with and not feeding them the grain they need."
He looked at her in bewilderment. "Logerwell?" he said, as if he had more than one hired hand and was sorting out which one she meant to indict.
Walking up the hill, she had become just about as sore as a boil—at the edge of blazing up if Irwin gave her the least reason for it. She said more loudly than was needed, "If you're plann
ing to keep on letting him work for you, I'll have to take your horse out of the circle."
His brain gradually took in what she had said. "He's been beating on your horses," he said, without questioning it.
"Yes sir, and yours too, and their feed's been going to his wife's pigs, I'm pretty sure."
He stood stiffly in the entry of his house with a book held down in one hand and the other hand resting on the doorknob. He was dressed in his Sunday suit with a plan to attend church, but the book he was holding, marking the page with his thumb, was not the Bible but a history of the French monarchy. "Is he down there right now?" he said, and stepped out on the porch to look down the slope toward the barn and the hired man's small house. The wind caught the front of his hair and lifted it in a cockscomb, caught the pages of his book and flapped them against the back of his hand.
"No sir, I don't think he is."
With the recent change of weather, the mountains across the way were dressed in snow clear down to the valley floor. Irwin turned his head toward them and studied the view for a long minute and then tightened up his mouth and said, with a glance toward Martha, "All right, then. I'll take care of it." He started back into the house.
She couldn't let it stand that way. She said again, "If you're planning to keep him on, I've got to take your horse off the circle." She would hate to leave Irwin's roan horse behind, hate leaving him in Logerwell's custody, but she would do it to protect the rest of them.
Walter said to Martha in a slight tone of umbrage, "I'll make it clear to him, he's to quit mistreating the animals." He had had trouble from the first day getting his hired man to do much of anything he asked, but he believed his own words: he would make his point with Logerwell this time and get control of the situation. He had seen the man cruel to his own wife's pigs and to his dog for no good cause; he wasn't much surprised by what the girl had told him.
