Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  When she finished reading, I said, “I always figured you had your first cigarette that time we ran into each other in front of the hardware store. Before we started going to the movies together. Back before you went to work for Sunrise.”

  She laughed. “I wanted you to think I’d been smoking for years. I must not have faked it very well. I don’t remember how many cigarettes I’d had by then, but it wasn’t a whole pack.”

  “You looked about thirteen when you smoked. A little kid playing grownup.”

  “Did I?” She made a small amused sound. “Jesus, I thought I was up-to-the-minute.”

  At the time the Vanity Fair piece came out, Lily was half a year into treatment for cancer. She wrote that story about her first cigarette without making any mention of the cancer raging in her throat or of the surgery that in another year would take away her voice.

  TWO

  ECHOL CREEK

  1923–1925

  WHEN THEIR SON BUD WAS BORN, Henry and Martha Frazer were living in Elwha County, buckarooing cows and breaking horses for two old spinster sisters who had a big cattle ranch in the foothills of the Whitehorns. In 1923, when the sisters died six days apart without either of them leaving a will, their ranch went to a cousin living in Spokane, who sold it to a local fellow, who then sold off the cattle and logged off the trees and put most of the cleared land into wheat and sugar beets.

  The Frazers might have gone to work for some other rancher in the valley, but a friend of theirs, a woman named Louise, who was related in some way to Elbert Echol, pointed them toward Harney County. Elbert was sixty-five at the time, and his wife had died in the flu epidemic. The Echols had been childless, so he was looking for somebody to take the ranch off his hands, now that he had arthritis and a weak heart. Martha and Henry had been saving up money in a coffee can with the idea of one day buying a few cattle and some acres of their own. They thought it would be long years before they could do that, but Louise told them Elbert was looking for a way to support himself in retirement and he might just carry the paper for somebody he approved of.

  It was 140 miles from the Elwha Valley to Echol Creek on rough backcountry roads. The Frazers bought a spring wagon from a farm family moving back east, packed it with everything they owned, hitched it to a team, and drove six days to get there, camping each night by the side of the road. They mounted a chuck wagon on the tailgate and had their meals there. Henry drove the wagon, and Martha, with several horses in a pony string, rode ahead and kept a lookout for automobiles or wagons approaching. Their boy, named Ernest after Henry’s stepfather but always called Bud, was not quite three years old. He rode on the saddle in front of his mother. Most of the roads were no more than one lane. When she called a warning and nosed her horses over to the shoulder of the road, Henry pulled the wagon in behind her and waited until the other rig had passed. There wasn’t much traffic—a wagon every hour or so, a car two or three times a day.

  This whole adventure must have struck some of their friends as foolhardy. They went without knowing whether Elbert Echol would approve of them or whether they would even want his place after looking it over—they wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out to be one of those dryland spreads that couldn’t support a cow to fifty acres. But if the Echol place didn’t pan out, prospects for finding ranch work in Harney County were no worse than where they had come from, and they had both knocked around a bit before settling in Elwha County and weren’t opposed to doing it again. Martha, especially, had the idea they might like to roam the West as itinerant cowhands, along the lines of heroes in the romantic novels she had read. She didn’t think a three-year-old child would upend this idea so long as the child could sit a horse.

  The Echol ranch, they had been told, was north of Foy, a town that sat on the cross-state highway roughly twelve miles west of the county seat at Burns. Foy wasn’t much of a town even in its heyday, but it had a post office and a Grange hall, some buildings around an old rock quarry, and a store offering hardware goods and groceries, a refrigerated case for soda pop, and a gasoline pump for folks driving cars east and west on the highway. While Martha waited with the horses, Henry went into the store to ask the last part of the way to the Echol ranch and came out with an ice cream cone for his son. Then they went on as Henry had been told, north up the Bailey Creek Road five miles to where Elbert Echol’s rutted ranch lane veered off to the northwest.

  The greater part of Harney County is high desert, a flat basin four thousand feet high and running mostly to sagebrush and juniper, except for the marshland around the shallow basin sink that is Malheur Lake. But it’s a big county, sprawling all the way from the California border across the big dry middle of Oregon into the southernmost reach of the Ochoco Mountains. At that far north end of the county there’s a clear boundary between the sagebrush flats and the forested uplands, as if somebody has drawn a line as level and straight as a ruler, and most of Elbert Echol’s place lay on the high side of the line—foothills country, timbered and steeply cut by draws and canyons.

  Martha and Henry didn’t know any of this when they first went up there, and the flat sagebrush and scrubland around Foy and the lower part of the Bailey Creek Valley didn’t look at all promising to them. Then, after the road forked and they turned off along Echol Creek, the way quickly became nothing more than bad ruts climbing up through a narrow canyon between shelves and steps of basalt. The roadside was choked with dry scrub that hid the creek except at the five or six places where they had to ford. This was in early October, and it hadn’t rained, or anyway not to speak of, for more than three months. Dust rose up listlessly behind the tailgate and settled on the underbrush in thick, pale cloaks. They could hear the creek still faintly running, which was the only good sign.

  There were no cattle guards in those days, but post-and-wire fences crossed the road three or four times. At each one Martha climbed down and dragged the gate across, waited while Henry drove the wagon through, then brought her horses through and dragged the gate shut again. At the fords where the road crossed the creek, they could sometimes drive straight to the other side, but at other places they had to travel up or down the creek bed to find a low bank where they could drive out.

  They weren’t particularly aware of the road climbing, but after a mile or so they began to see pines and a few aspens clinging to the rock benches, and knew they must have gone above five thousand feet; gradually the canyon widened and flattened, and the creek came clear of the scrub and fanned out, branching and braiding back and forth in a lacework of shallow channels and sloughs. The road wound for half a mile alongside this watered marsh, through willow groves thick with birds, and then, at the far edge of the park where the land began to rise again toward a ridgetop of big pines and scattered white fir, they came to the last gate. Beyond it was the Echol home place: an old-fashioned log barn, three or four outbuildings, and a small one-story board-and-batten house, its porch rails made of deer and elk antlers.

  Elbert had title to just under thirteen hundred acres—not very large as ranches go—and it was remote and half-wild at a time when most parts of the country had been domesticated. The yard was full of discarded and broken equipment, and in recent years the old man had let a lot of things go. His fences and buildings were in need of repair—doors and some of the wall boards were missing on the barn, corral posts were leaning and wouldn’t hold an animal for very long. When Martha and Henry rode over the place with him, they saw how skittery and reclusive his mountain-bred cattle were, bolting off through the woods when anybody got close. His hay fields were small and oddly shaped, none of them more than two or three acres, strung out along the creek between steep ridges and scattered on the benches among stands of pine and skinny-legged aspen.

  But Elbert had spent years picking those small hay fields clean of rocks, and the water on the ranch was soft and clear and cold from springs and a hand-dug well barely ten feet deep. He had a rain gauge, and he’d been recording the measurements for years, as we
ll as the yields from his fields. If his records could be trusted, most of the ranch could count on twenty inches of rain a year, whereas neighbors down on the flats and along Bailey Creek—the sagebrush country Henry and Martha had driven through on the way up from Foy—were lucky to get eight or ten. In a typical season his small fields planted to wheatgrass or left in wild rye grass and blue joint grass made one heavy cutting of hay, which was enough to feed his cows through the three or four months of winter, and most years he got enough summer rain to regrow the fields for fall grazing or even a second cutting. Above his deeded land was the Ochoco Forest Reserve, where he grazed his cattle most of the summer. Elbert had the senior water rights on Echol Creek, its headwaters far up in the reserve, and the Frazers could see for themselves that this part of the creek was still alive even at the end of summer in a dry year. In the winter months, Elbert told them, there were redband trout and tui chub in the cold flood. And the annual spring overflow of melting snow off the Ochoco Mountains was the water source for all those acres of slough and parkland in the narrow valley below the house.

  Neither Henry nor Martha had ever lived as high up as the Echol place, but they were used to gathering cattle from the foothills of the Whitehorn Reserve, and those steep pine ridges behind the Echol home place were more familiar and agreeable to them than the sagebrush flats. Elbert’s place was more ranch than they had expected, which they both had known almost as soon as they came through the canyon and caught sight of the wetland park and the ranch buildings.

  And it was more ranch than they could expect to pay for. But the old man took a shine to Martha, at least that’s what Henry always claimed, and he let them have the place more or less on a handshake. Elbert and his wife, Etta, had built up the ranch together, buying neighbors’ farms and homesteads bit by bit, and when they surveyed their land, it was Etta who dragged the chain while he handled the compass—everything they did, they did equally. So it was true that Martha put him in mind of Etta, who had buckarooed cows until she was fifty years old. But also he just wanted the ranch to go to somebody who would take care of it. He could see for himself that these were the right people, and Louise, who was Etta’s sister, had told him as much before the Frazers ever showed up in his yard.

  In Elwha County they had been just three miles by road from Bingham, a town of a thousand people. The Echol ranch, by those lights, was remote and isolated: they were now three miles up a badly rutted ranch lane from their mailbox, eight miles from any kind of store, twenty miles from Burns, the only town of any size.

  They were not cut off from the world. A postman delivered mail all up and down Bailey Creek Road, and Henry or Martha or in later years one of the children rode horseback down the long ranch lane through the canyon to their mailbox two or three times a week to collect what was sometimes a heavy sackful. Henry took the weekly Burns Gazette to keep up with county news and stock prices, and Martha, who was a reader, took the monthly Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post and ordered books from the state library. There were always letters from Henry’s family in Baker City and from friends back in Elwha County, and once or twice a year a short note from one of Martha’s brothers up in Pendleton.

  Even in those first years before they acquired an auto-truck, they made the eight-mile trip to Foy almost every month to buy groceries and goods they couldn’t grow or make for themselves. And three or four times a year in dry weather they drove on from Foy to Burns, to take in the Harney County Fair or a livestock auction and to buy goods they weren’t able to get at Foy. Every so often on one of those trips they’d see a film at the Desert Theatre on Main Street. They ate popcorn, ice cream cones, hot dogs.

  They acquired a motor truck in 1926, shortly before Mary Claudine was born, and around that time Martha traded one of her horses for a two-cycle gasoline-powered washing machine. But for all that, compared to how people were living in most American cities and towns in the 1920s, their life was something out of a western romance, rough and primitive.

  A couple of prosperous neighbors—Arlo Gantz was one—had light plants to generate electricity, but power lines wouldn’t make it out to the remote corners of Harney County until the 1950s, so the Frazers and most of their neighbors had no electric lights. For the fourteen years they lived on Echol Creek, they relied on kerosene lanterns. Elbert had piped the creek to bring in running cold water to the kitchen sink and the water tank on the back of the stove, but they had an outdoor toilet and no refrigeration. They rented a frozen-food locker from the grocer at Foy, but sometimes in winter they would shovel snow up high on the north wall of the house and bury cream cans filled with meat and milk in the snowbank.

  The county graded and oiled the cross-state highway and plowed it after heavy snow in winter, and every so often a farmer or rancher in the valley would take his tractor out to the Bailey Creek Road and blade off a stretch of the ruts that ran north from Foy, but the three miles from the fork up the canyon to the Echol home place had been carved out back in the 1880s, when Elbert first settled there, and it was rough going even in a wagon. At the places where the road crossed the creek, they had to watch out for rocks that had shifted or come down during the last storm in the mountains. The ruts swung wide around the marsh where the canyon opened out, but in spring the lower road through the canyon was a running stream, a branch of the creek, and later in the season, when the creek drew back into its channel, there were washouts and water bars in the road, and certain places stayed muddy for weeks.

  Back in Elwha County, when they were first married, Henry had been the foreman for the old spinsters’ cattle ranch and Martha broke horses for people up and down the valley. After they moved to Harney County and onto the Echol Creek property, they divided up the ranch work more or less along those same lines.

  Henry handled the books—he had a better head for numbers—and since he was the cowman he bought the bulls and decided which of the yearling calves to sell and what price to go with. He particularly set out to make Echol’s wild cattle easier to handle: when he sold animals in the fall, he culled the renegade cows and the fighting bulls and kept back the gentler heifers. In his opinion a good cowboy on a good horse ought to be able to turn a cow or calf back without roping it, but he thought there must have been a lot of roping and choking at the old man’s gathers, which had made those cows leery of a man on horseback. Henry made it a point to ride through the herds every day so the cows would grow accustomed to him—he wanted to be able to slip through and get a good look at them without stirring them up, and if he saw a sick cow he wanted to be able to ease it out of the herd so it could be doctored without raising a big ruckus. At roundup and when he was making the rough cut to shape the herd for market, he left his rope on the saddle for the most part until he got the cattle penned. And over the years his cattle grew more manageable.

  Martha had a particular understanding and knowledge of horses. She’d always had a gift and a preference for breaking them to saddle and training them to work cattle, but the foothills of the Ochocos in the 1920s were thickly settled with homesteaders—farmers who didn’t have much use for a saddle horse but were still plowing, harvesting, and logging with horses and mules, using them to haul wood and pull wagons. So on the Echol ranch she gave up her cowboy bias, began training horses and mules to drive and harness, and in some years the sales of her animals amounted to half their income.

  The other job she took on was calving the heifers, because Henry didn’t have much patience for the young cows delivering their first calves: “It ought to be natural, but sometimes I think they’re just too stupid to do it right,” he liked to say, which she took more or less personally.

  “Well, if you had ever been through this, you would be more understanding,” she told him. She had labored for almost twenty hours to deliver their son, and she wondered if, in Henry’s opinion, she had moaned and complained more than was seemly.

  In the calving season she brought the heifers to the pasture close by the home place and
walked among them every couple of hours in the daytime and went out at least twice at night with a lantern. Most years they calved just twenty-five or thirty heifers, and Martha became acquainted with each one. She walked every corner of the field and looked under the brush, because some heifers would try to find a hiding spot to have their calf. She learned to look and look again and to watch especially for ones who seemed distraught or confused—this was something she was sympathetic to. When they were close to calving she brought them into the pen and talked them through it.

  She could pull the easy ones, but she called on Henry if she ran into trouble. He could usually figure out what to do if a calf was hung up, but every so often one would be stuck, too swollen to pass through, and then it was Henry who handled cutting it up and pulling it out in parts—which Martha could hardly bear to watch. She didn’t like to see any of them die. Whenever she lost one, she tried to think if there was anything she could have done to save it. She became better and better at the calving each year, and she grew adept at getting orphan calves to drink from a bucket of milk, but there were always some who died in spite of her best efforts. When she was tired from lack of sleep, the death of a cow or calf would sometimes cause her to sit down and cry. In the beginning, Henry tried to tease her out of it. “Your babies,” he called the heifers. But when he saw how it bothered her, he let her be. “That’s just how it is,” he told her every year. “You’re doing everything right, honey, but that’s just how it is.”

  The Echol Creek hay fields were too small and scattered to warrant machinery, so all the years they lived there they had a horse-drawn mower and rake pulled by a pair of half-Belgian mules. In August 1925, just after Bud turned five years old, Henry was getting a second cutting off one of the hay fields along the creek bottom when an owl flew up from the grass underneath the mules. The bird beat its wings right in the eyes of both animals, and they half-reared and then bolted. This was ordinarily a steady old team, and the mules might have slowed and calmed before going very far, but they ran the mower into a shallow ravine at the edge of the field and the wheels came up hard against the side of it, which threw Henry from the seat. He kept hold of the lines, which would have been the right thing to do if he hadn’t fallen in such a way that it yanked the mules, who were already upset, and this caused them to back up the mower in worry and confusion. Henry went to some trouble to keep away from the sickle bar, but one of the mower’s wheels went over his leg and one of the mules stepped on his shoulder. He let go of the lines finally, and when the mules found themselves free they took off straight for the house.