Falling From Horses (11 page)

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.

Martha was working with a young colt in a pen behind the barn, and Bud was riding up and down the roadway on his mother's old mare, Dolly. He was pretending that certain rocks and clumps of trees were cows and trying to get Dolly to pretend to herd them. When the mower and team clattered into the yard, he turned Dolly to head them off, just for practice, but when Martha shouted at him to get down from the horse he slid right off and stood there waiting while his mother came quickly out of the pen and across the yard to him. He was afraid he had done something wrong—she was particular about Dolly, in consideration of the mare's age and old injuries.

She hardly looked at Bud, though; she went straight to the mower and bent over the sickle teeth looking for blood. Then she straightened and said, “Bring the team into the barn, Bud, water them, and then go in the house and stay there.” He was too little to unhook the mules from the mower and she didn't have the time to do it herself, but she didn't want the mules to have to stand there in the hot sun in the yard. She didn't know how long she'd be gone.

She took the reins from him and walked Dolly to the big stump her son used as a mounting block. The saddle he was riding wasn't child-size, but the stirrups had been shortened way up; she had to hoist herself onto the horse from the mounting block and then let her legs hang down stirrupless. She was five months pregnant. Henry didn't like her to ride when she was carrying a child so she hadn't been on a horse for more than two months. Her belly rested uncomfortably against the swells and horn of the saddle.

“Go on now, Bud, take care of Mike and Prince. I'll be back in a little while.” She put Dolly into a trot up the creek trail to the hay fields, but then right away she had to slow to a walk—the baby inside her just couldn't stand the jouncing.

It wasn't a long way, no more than half a mile, and when she came through the willow brush at the edge of the half-mown field she could see Henry standing on one leg, leaning hard on a stick he must have picked up off the ground. From the way the grass was roughed up, she knew he had managed to hobble only a couple of yards from where the mower had thrown him off.

“I wish you wouldn't ride,” he called to her before she had quite reached him.

“I wouldn't have to ride if you'd managed to keep your seat on the mower,” she called back. His face was dirty and a bruise had started on his chin, and the frown he was wearing was one he brought out only for broken bones and serious money worries, but he was upright and all his limbs were still attached. There wasn't any blood, but the lower half of his pant leg was dirtied and torn. She said, “I hope you didn't break your leg.”

“I guess I might have. Damn mower ran me over. And one of the mules stepped on this here shoulder.”

She swung a leg awkwardly over the saddle and slid off the horse. “Can you get up on Dolly?”

“I could if those stirrups was let down.”

He stood on one leg, leaning against the horse, while she worked the stiff leather straps. Henry had punched extra holes with an awl so the stirrups could be shortened enough for a four-year-old boy, but those holes were so tight they gave her trouble. When she finally got both sides down, she said, “Can you get yourself up now?” She was a strong woman and tall as a man, but Henry wouldn't have wanted her to boost him onto the horse. He wasn't the sort of husband who ruled his wife, but he stood his ground on a few things, and he was adamant that she wasn't to do any heavy lifting—nothing heavier than a saddle—now that she was five months pregnant.

He couldn't put his weight on his bad leg, so he had to lean into Dolly and lever with his arms until his chest was resting halfway onto the horse's back, with both legs dangling off the ground, before he could toe the stirrup with his good foot and lift himself onto the saddle. It was a hell of a job, and all that wrestling around wasn't good for his shoulder. A swearword Martha's dad had been partial to, a word she had never heard from her husband, popped out of his mouth in the middle of a string of more familiar curses. When he finally got his bad leg over and settled himself onto the saddle, he was pale and sweating. “Well, hell. Now that I'm up here I don't know if this is the best thing. That leg is gonna bang against the horse when she steps out.”