Falling From Horses

by Molly Gloss

  We took the same highway going north as the bus had taken coming down. But what I noticed on the northbound ride sure wasn’t avenues of eucalyptus trees or mountains like ice cream cones or rafts of birds settling down on sloughs and rice fields. What I saw were the migrant labor camps and wrecking yards filled with scrapped farm machinery and crop-duster planes flying just a couple of yards off the ground, laying down a wet blanket of poison. In one town we passed through, dead Christmas trees were tied to all the street lamps, their shed orange needles in ragged circles on the pavement underneath each one. At a labor camp outside Lodi, a woman stood in front of one of the tents watching the traffic go by, her face all black and blue and a little child in a dirty smock hanging behind her skirts. The oak hills we drove through were dry and brown in the heat of day but at sunset turned the color of a livid bruise.

  Both nights we pulled off the highway after dark, and Gil staked out the horses on a strip of grass alongside the road. He slept in the bed of the truck on top of the loose hay while I tried to sleep on the cab seat. In those first weeks after the accident I was in so much pain that no position was comfortable. The only way I could sleep at all was flat on my back, but I was too tall to stretch out on the seat, so I had to prop myself against the door with my legs out in front of me and Lily’s pillow shoved behind my neck and shoulders. If I popped a few aspirin I could sometimes manage to doze off for a few minutes. Gil never asked me what I wanted, and when he took the truck bed for himself I didn’t feel I could say anything. And anyway, I might not have been able to climb up into it.

  The second night, while I was lying there half asleep, Mary Claudine lay down alongside me and slipped one arm under my back and the other across my hips. It had been a warm day, we had driven with both windows rolled down for the moving air, but by now it was cold in the cab of the truck. The light from a thin wedge of moon threw a yellow blanket across my shoulders, but the warmth I felt was my sister lying against me. She was only ten years old and small for her age, but she was holding me in her arms like I was the child, and this seemed to take off some of my pain. I said, “Thanks, Emsy.” She was named for our dad’s mother, and in our family we always called her by her whole name. It was her school friends who had called her Emsy, so I don’t know why I said it like that.

  “Bud, tell me about Hollywood.” She spoke drowsily, almost a whisper.

  I didn’t want to tell her about all the dead and maimed horses or about Steve Deets, none of that. I said, “I met Gene Autry the other day.” She liked the singing cowboys more than I did.

  “Did you see Champion? Is he pretty?”

  “Sure. He’s darker than I thought he’d be, he’s a really dark sorrel. They put some kind of white powder on his socks and his blaze to make the white stand out, but even if they didn’t, those white socks sure are bright against his color.”

  She hummed a little bit of an Autry song, the one about riding through a canyon, watching the sun go down.

  “Where did you hear that, Mary Claudine?” I was pretty sure she hadn’t lived long enough to see the picture that song had been in.

  She didn’t answer me, but went on humming. I couldn’t remember all the words, but I tried to sing the chorus with her. And then something came over me, a wave of melancholy. A lot of those cowboy songs have got such sadness in them. I wasn’t really crying, but tears leaked out and ran down the side of my jaw.

  She said, “It’s all right, Bud,” and stroked my head like you’d pet a dog or a horse.

  I wanted to tell her something else, something about Hollywood, but every thought that came into my mind was sad or terrible.

  I said finally, “Emsy, what happened to you?”

  She knew what I meant. “It wasn’t Goldy’s fault. You shouldn’t feel bad. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Bud.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  We weren’t a churchy family, but Mary Claudine had always been interested in God, and she asked questions my parents had trouble finding answers for. A neighbor on one of the homestead farms to the south of us was killed when his tractor went over on him, and one of Arlo Gantz’s granddaughters was born blue and died before she’d lived a week in this world. Mary Claudine wanted to know why God let those things happen. Why didn’t God make sure all the calves were born the right way? Why didn’t God put the baby bird back in the nest when it fell out? My parents’ answers didn’t satisfy her. Mary Claudine never said she blamed God, but she was always unhappy about the unanswered questions. Now, though, she sounded untroubled about her own death.

  She sighed. “I couldn’t find the Rim Creek bench, so I just rode around a long time looking for cows. Goldy fell going down the side of a steep hill, and she threw me up against the bank, and when she got to her feet she stepped on my chest and then her hoof hit my head.”

  “You said it wasn’t Goldy’s fault.”

  “I was trying to turn back a cow, and I rode down the ravine too fast. It was awful steep. Goldy did what I told her.”

  I had been in enough wrecks to know what Mary Claudine meant. Hell, I was lying there with a broken pelvis because a horse did what I told him.

  “I wish we could have found you sooner.”

  “It was all right, Bud. Goldy waited with me. She was worried and she didn’t know what else to do, so she just stood over me for the longest time.”

  I didn’t ask her if she suffered at all. I was afraid to hear the answer.

  Then she began humming again, her voice very soft, a song I had heard Ken Maynard sing in a movie I’d worked on. “He does all his own riding and falling,” I told her, and she didn’t ask me who I meant, she just said, “Does he?” and then went on with the song. I thought about telling her I had met Tim McCoy—I had always liked his movies better than Autry’s or Maynard’s—but after a while I drifted off to sleep.

  I don’t want you to think this was my sister’s ghost—I’m not somebody who puts much stock in ghosts. I’d been feverish off and on, and hazy from pain and needing to sleep, and I imagine that’s all it was.

  Maybe a year later I told my folks about it. This came up because my mother one morning at breakfast told us a dream she had had the night before, a sweet little dream of Mary Claudine, who had found a baby porcupine caught in a sticker bush. She didn’t have anything else handy, so she took off her underpants, gathered the porcupine into them, and carried it home that way. Which was exactly what my sister would have done.

  It was the first time my mother had volunteered anything like that, and there was something about the dream, or my mother’s telling it to my dad and me, that opened a door. I told them everything Mary Claudine had said to me that time when I was hurting and half asleep in the cab of Gil Newhart’s truck. When I got to the part about Goldy, about the horse standing over her, my mother took in a loud breath, which I knew was to stop herself from crying, and she said, “I always wanted to blame Goldy.”

  This brought me up short. In the first few weeks after Mary Claudine went missing, I had spent a lot of time blaming myself for sending her after those cattle alone, and I guess thinking my parents blamed me too. But after she was found and we heard what damage had been done to her—where the horse had stove in her ribs and clipped her head—I shifted the blame to Goldy. I hadn’t ever told my parents how I felt, how I used to think about walking out to Goldy in the pasture and just shooting her right through the eye. My mother had sold that horse soon after we buried my sister, and I had always thought it was to rid herself of a sad reminder. It was a shock to learn that her feelings toward Goldy hadn’t been far off from mine.

  My dad, as if this was an old argument, said quietly, “You know that horse was always good with the kids, a safe horse,” and my mother quickly said, “I know it. I know she was. But I wanted to blame her.” And she looked around the room, blinking to keep herself from tears.

  35

  AROUND DUSK ON THE THIRD DAY, we rolled through Red Bluff and out a dirt lane to the ranch where
Gil was to deliver the horses. My dad was already there. His truck, parked under a big old cottonwood, was nearly white under a blanket of shed fleece off that tree, so I guess he’d been there a while. This was a fancy big place with a lot of buildings and corrals and board fences, the ranch house bricked and everything else whitewashed or painted barn red, but at the moment my dad was the only person in sight. He was sitting on a flat stump they used for splitting wood, and he was looking off toward a big Hereford bull grazing in a field by the road. When we came up the lane, raising a boiling tail of dust, he stood up and squinted until we got near enough he could maybe make out that it was me. Then he put his hands in his pockets and turned and looked at the bull one more time, and after a minute he looked back toward Gil’s truck and walked out to meet us.

  He went around to the driver’s side first and shook hands with Gil and thanked him for bringing me, and then he came around to me and opened the door and leaned down to look in. That dirt road coming into the ranch had been rough on me, and I imagine I looked pretty sick. He said, “Buddy, did you find a way to get out of work for a while?” which was the joking thing we said in our family whenever one of us was laid up.

  I hadn’t seen him in over a year. “I can still cook,” I said, which was the other half of the joke, but I had to pull in my mouth and tighten it to get the words out without crying like a damn kid.

  He nodded, frowning, as if what he was about to say was a flat fact and a relief to him. “Well, good, I guess we don’t have to take you out and shoot you then.”

  We started north just as the sun went down, and we drove through the night. The truck didn’t have glass windows you could roll up, and there wasn’t a heater. You could feel some heat coming off the engine, drifting into the cab through the floorboards and through gaps in the dashboard. Whenever the road dipped into hollows where cold air had settled, a chill would come inside that same way. In the darkness I couldn’t see the country we were going through. The truck blew oil, but even so, I got a whiff of clover or pine or cow shit every so often, and I could guess what was out there in the dark. There wasn’t much traffic, but we weren’t the only rig on the road. Where the pavement was flat you would see the headlights of an oncoming car a mile or more away, growing from pinpricks. In hilly country you’d see the faint wash of light silhouetting the crown of the hill just before a rig topped over and rolled down toward you. Those headlights were always blinding after the long stretches of darkness, and my dad would slow way down until they passed us by. When the headlights swept through the cab I could see his face, skull-like, hollowed out by shadows.

  The truck liked to boil over on the steep grades, so we climbed slowly and then picked up speed on the downhill. Our tires on the road made a low rumble, like surf, or like wind pouring through a canyon. Most of the time that was the only sound, that and the tappets rattling a little bit. I didn’t sleep, but I drifted in and out.

  “Dolly died this past summer,” Dad said. He spoke so softly I wasn’t sure he had spoken at all. It seemed possible I had only imagined the words, or they’d simply floated from his mind into mine. I opened my eyes. There weren’t any dash lights in the truck and I could barely make out the shape of him, black against the black night. When he spoke again after a long silence, it seemed that the words didn’t come from him, that they must have come drifting up from the floorboards like the cold air or the heat off the motor. “She was old. Your mother had her for twenty-five years and she wasn’t young when your mother got her.”

  I had learned to ride on Dolly. My mother set me on her broad back when I was two years old, handed me the reins, and walked away to let the horse school me. I couldn’t remember any time when that horse had behaved badly. She’d been retired to pasture years earlier, and the last time I saw her, which would have been a few months before I went down to California, she was looking pretty sad. Flies clustered on her back out of reach of her tail, which was nothing but wispy remnants by then. Her old burn scars had formed a ridge of hard horn on her poll. She walked around stiffly on her ancient limbs, and she’d gone mostly blind. That last time I was home I had heard my parents talking, their voices whispering late at night, Mom saying that Dolly still knew her way around the pasture, even sightless; that there were always other horses with her, keeping her company. Shady, one of the mules, often stood near her and lashed his tail against the tormenting flies. And Dolly still enjoyed having my mother work over her shoulders lightly with the knuckles of her hands, a gentle massage that made her eyes glaze over, caused her to lick her lips and stretch her neck out with a soft groan of pleasure. “She’ll tell me when she’s ready to go,” my mother had said, and after a silence my father had answered, his words too low for me to make out. If it had been any other horse, I think my mother would have put her down, and at the time I was strongly of that opinion. But a few years later I had grown up enough to understand: she couldn’t have borne the idea of it so soon after losing Mary Claudine.

  My mother had written me three or four letters in recent months, and I had talked to both of my folks on the telephone a couple of times that summer. Neither had said anything about Dolly. Then again, I hadn’t asked. Now I said to my dad, “Did one of you have to put her down?” What had come into my mind was the men on the Valverde set walking back and forth across that field, shooting the injured horses one after the other.

  The answer was so long coming, I almost wondered if I had failed to speak out loud. But I think my dad was just off somewhere in his head and it took him a while to come back inside the truck and to hear me. “No. No, we didn’t. Your mom had been making it a practice to go out to the pasture every morning to check on her, and one morning she went out and Dolly was just lying on the ground. She’d passed in the night. I don’t think she suffered. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted her to suffer.” After a minute or so he said, “Things just happen and it’s nobody’s fault.” After another pause, he said, “You ranch long enough, you make peace with what you can’t help.”

  He went silent again. The headlights threw out two dim overlapping puddles of light that ran ahead of us, rippling over the pavement like water. Otherwise, the world inside and outside the truck was featureless darkness. The sky was so big that sometimes when we crested a hill it seemed as if we were driving right up into it, lifting slowly into the stars like a dirigible. I wonder if dying might feel like that, like letting go of the earth’s hold, just floating out into black nothingness.

  I don’t know how much time passed. In the silence, I fell into thinking I was alone, leaning back between the thwarts of an oarless boat, rocking on the swells. What took me out of it was a rough bumping that sent a bolt of pain through my groin. It took me a few seconds to come completely awake—I thought at first it was the boat breaking up against shore rocks—and by then my dad had steered off the road and come to a stop. He shut off the motor and the headlights, and for a minute or two we both went on sitting there, because in the sudden complete darkness you couldn’t see a damn thing. Black as the inside of a cow is what we used to say. When my eyes got used to it, I could make out the dark shapes of hills all around us, and a few black topknots of trees, and I thought I recognized that rolling country between Weed and Klamath Falls, the borderland between Oregon and California. I couldn’t see any moon, just a smoky swath of stars. It occurred to me that if there had been a moon we might have been able to see Shasta, and although I didn’t know for sure where we were, I imagined I could feel the physical presence of the mountain, its huge black bulk pushing up against the stars somewhere off to the east or south of us.

  When Dad had his night eyes back, he looked over at me and said, “I had two blowouts coming down. This one better be a puncture, because there’s no more tubes in the back.”

  We usually ran bruised or recapped tires on the truck, and on rough ranch roads you could count on blowouts and leaks at regular intervals, so we always carried a couple of extra inner tubes in the back, as well as a bunch of patch
kits and a hand pump. If this was another blowout, we’d be stranded by the side of the road until somebody happened along with a spare tube, or maybe I’d be waiting alone while my dad walked or hitched a ride to the nearest garage. If this was the road between Weed and Klamath Falls, we were likely twenty miles from any service station, and there wouldn’t be anybody to open up the shop and sell us a tube at this time of night.

  When he got out to see about the tire, Dad said, “You just sit still,” but I had been sitting still for more hours than was good for me, and I needed to move my legs a bit.

  I said, “I should stand up a while. I get pretty stiff if I sit for too long.”

  He hesitated. “You need my help?” At the Red Bluff ranch we had both been self-conscious. It somehow felt worse needing my dad’s help than needing Gil’s, so I had kept myself from asking him, and he had stood back, watching Gil do all the helping. We were still self-conscious, but I said, “Yeah, I could use a hand getting out of the truck.”

  When he came around to my door he said, “You’ve got to tell me what to take hold of, so I don’t hurt you worse.”

  There was no way for me to stand up without it hurting like hell, but I didn’t say so. I just held out an arm and said, “Take hold of me and pull, and then when I’m standing reach me those crutches out of the back.” After he had stood me up and handed over the crutches, he didn’t move off right away. I guess he was listening, waiting for me to get my breath back. In the darkness I couldn’t really see his face. His hair looked almost white. He was fifty-two years old and he’d been going gray for years. I said, “I just need to hobble around for a bit to loosen myself up,” and took a step away from him. Finally he turned from me and dug a flashlight out of the box and squatted down by the flat tire. I shuffled off a few feet, dragging my left leg, and I managed to pry open the buttons on my jeans so I could piss into the roadside weeds.