The Hearts of Horses (26 page)

Ruth and Martha were sitting at the kitchen table when he came back into the house, and they turned their faces to him in perfect synchrony, which he might have found amusing under other circumstances. He said, not unkindly, "Ruth, how are you holding up?"

Ruth turned from him to the window, seeming to lean slightly toward the sky above the edge of the near hills; her mouth, in the image he glimpsed on the wavery window glass, began to twist until it became an unattractive rictus of grief. "There was nothing I could think to do. He wouldn't let me help him."

"You did the only thing you could do, which was sending the boy."

She put her hands to her face and began rubbing her finger-216
tips up and down the sides of her nose and across her mouth and chin, which was a way of hiding nervousness. "He hasn't been right," she said, the words muffled behind her hands. He knew what she meant. Over the last couple of days he had seen a marked change in Tom—slurring of words, dullness, a vacant expression.
Not right in his mind,
was what she meant.
Not himself, not Tom.
She looked at him sidelong, almost a shy look. "Is that from the morphine?"

"Well, it could be the morphine. He's been getting a lot of it, and it does work a change on the brain. Or the disease could be doing it. I've read it affects the mind in some manner, or at least in some cases."

She looked away from him again. "Will he be like this?" she asked him hoarsely.
From now on,
she meant.
Until he dies.

He said bluntly, "Yes, I expect he will." In fact, he knew it would be worse before the end, quite a bit worse, so perhaps the kindness was in not saying so.

She began to sob tiredly, hiding her face behind her hands. Martha, who had been watching all this with a worried frown, immediately teared up too, and put a hand on Ruth's arm. Dr. McDonough didn't know Martha Lessen and had not, until this minute, taken in that the girl was dressed like a man, which he found curious and a provocation. He watched the two of them a moment and then began to pack up his instruments and bottles. By the time he was ready to leave, Ruth Kandel had more or less finished with her crying. She sat with her chin propped on her two hands, the long fingers pressed into her flushed cheeks, and looked out the window. Sunlight glaring off the snow made of the glass an opaque square of brightness. The girl sitting with Ruth had pulled her own hands into her lap and now stared down into them with a look of distress.

Dr. McDonough said, lifting the handles of his bag, "I
imagine he'll sleep quite a while now. I'll come back later today and give him another hypodermic. From now on, he'll need two or three every day. I'll have to show you how to do it yourself. I don't know that I'll always be able to be here when he needs it." Ruth's mouth began to twist with the effort not to resume crying, but she said nothing. The doctor picked up his hat and his bag.

Martha didn't want to go on sitting there with Ruth Kandel—she was desperate to get out of the house and helpless to know how to manage it—and maybe Ruth already knew this. Before the doctor had crossed the porch to his motor, she turned her tired face to the girl and said, "Miss Lessen, I don't know where Fred has gone off to, so I wonder if you'd open the gate for the doctor's car before you go on with your circle ride." Martha gave her a look almost the twin to Fred's—wild with guilty relief.

While the doctor waited for Martha to open the gate and let him out of the yard, he looked at his watch—just past eleven. In earlier days he used to fall asleep behind a team of horses, would wrap the reins around the whip post and then around his wrist so if he dropped the reins they would slide down the post and jerk his wrist and wake him. Now that he had the Hudson he was able to get over the roads more quickly, but he had lost the benefit of sleeping as he drove. Eleven o'clock. The day stretched ahead of him, patients waiting to be seen. It would be hours yet before he could expect to climb into bed.

A
NOTHER TRICK
the old wrangler Roy Barrow had taught Martha Lessen was to put a half-hobble on a front foot, tie a loop in the rope and throw the rope over the horse's back, then draw it up through the loop to pull the front foot up. The horse would generally buck like crazy at that point but shortly he'd get tired and stand still and Martha would tell him what a good horse he was and give him a carrot or a piece of an apple. When he'd been done this way enough times, he wouldn't care if his foot was lifted up and he'd learn to stop whatever he was doing and just stand still when he felt pressure on his legs, so later if he stepped into wire hidden in brush or grass he'd naturally stop before he got tangled. And of course that also took care of any shoeing problems, because a horse done that way would lift his foot and stand for the shoer.

When Martha began to feel she had a little time to spare—the horses giving her less and less trouble—she started in with this foot work. She went after one horse at a time, repeating the lesson four or five days in a row at whatever corral the horse was in, until he got the idea. Some of the horses, having been brought along so far, hardly objected when she lifted their foot,
and as soon as she knew they wouldn't give a farrier any inconvenience, she went on to another horse.

In the late part of February she left the Bliss place early in the morning riding Chuck, one of the Varden horses, and when she got to the Romers' she put a half-hobble on him and pulled his foot up. It was the third time he'd been done that way, and when he turned his head toward her and heaved a sigh she said to him, "I guess you've got it figured out," and she lowered his foot again and gave him a carrot. Maude and Big Brownie, both of them the Woodruffs' horses, watched this business with great interest, their heads up and ears pricked. "You'll get a turn," Martha said to them, though she knew they might have been interested only in the carrot.

She was tacking up Maude when Dorothy Romer came down from the house, her face pale and her hair unpinned. When Martha saw the state she was in, she first guessed Mr. Romer had gone into whiskey again and then thought it must be Dorothy who was drunk, her eyelids drooping, her voice slurred as she called in a weak way, "Helen and Clifford are both sick."

Martha said without stopping what she was doing, "I'm sorry to hear it."

Dorothy touched her forehead with trembly fingers and sat down suddenly in the mud, which didn't surprise or alarm Martha, who had experience of serious drinkers. But after a moment of considering, she left the palomino standing in the corral with the cinch not yet tightened, and she went unhurriedly through the rails and over to the woman and squatted down next to her. "Mrs. Romer, are you sick? Do you want me to go for the doctor?" She didn't smell anything on Dorothy's breath except a sickly sourness. She took hold of one of her hands.

"I'm afraid it's the ptomaine poisoning," Dorothy said, and 220
started in with a kind of dry weeping. Her cold hand lay weakly in Martha's. "I don't know where Reuben is. Will you take us to the hospital?"

Martha's heart began to beat loudly in her ears. She said, "I'll have to go and get the wagon." Dorothy swallowed slowly and put her hands down in the mud and pushed to get up; Martha helped her stand again and would have helped her back to the house except Dorothy pulled away and said, "Go on," and made an impatient fluttery gesture toward the pasture where Reuben kept his horses.

She brought in the horses by calling and whistling and holding out a piece of apple, and she harnessed the two who looked to be the most cooperative and hitched them to the Romers' wagon and drove around to the front porch of the house. Dorothy was sitting on the porch steps leaning against an upright, the baby, Alice, lying across her haunches. "I don't know where Reuben is," she said again, with the same tired, tearless, terrible sobbing. Martha was afraid to look too closely at Alice, lying still and pale in the lap of Dorothy's dress.

She went into the house and found Helen and Clifford in a single bed, their limbs flaccid on the tangled sheets. Their eyes followed Martha with a desperate, half-lidded concentration but they didn't lift their hands up to her or speak to her. They were breathing shallowly through open mouths. She carried them out one at a time and laid them down in the back of the wagon, wrapped in the blankets she had stripped from the bed. Then she helped Dorothy climb into the back and lie down with her children. She found a tarp and put it over them all like a tent in case it began to rain, and she drove out of the yard and down the rutted farm lane. At the outskirts of Shelby she stopped a man to ask where the hospital was and he told her there was just one hospital in the valley and it was in Bingham, so she drove on the five more miles. She drove carefully, not to
bump their heads on the floorboards. It began to rain lightly, ticking against the tarp and against her hat.

She passed W.G. Boyd's little place at the edge of town and shortly after that she came on his grandson, Joey, on his way home from town. Joey had lately been spending his afternoons and Saturdays ranging the hills collecting the shed antlers of bull elk and buck deer, which brought a few cents a pound from Graham Ellis at the hardware store, and he was walking back from the store and jingling the money in his pocket when Martha saw him. He ran up to the wagon and ran alongside, grinning and splashing his galoshes in the puddles, and he called to her, "Hey, Martha, whose wagon are you driving?"

"Joey, where is the hospital?" she said, and at once he became grave and frightened and told her where it was and then stopped and stood in the road, watching the wagon go away from him.

The Bingham Hospital occupied a brick building that had been the Bingham High School before a bigger school was built closer to the center of town. It was a private hospital owned by Dr. McDonough and Dr. Kelly and an investor who also owned an automobile parts and supply store. The staff kept cows and chickens in a field behind the hospital and had to interrupt their nursing duties to go into the basement and stoke the furnace, but ptomaine poisoning from poorly canned food was a serious matter they were familiar with, and the man Martha had asked for directions in Shelby had telephoned ahead; several hospital people came out and down the wet stone steps as soon as she pulled up in front, and they carried the Romer children inside and walked Dorothy up the steps between two minders, and no one paid a bit of attention to Martha.

It was unclear to her what she ought to do next. She got down and led the horses out of the driveway and unhitched them from the wagon. They had not even broken a sweat but
she hunted up a gunnysack and wiped them down thoroughly and walked them back and forth as if they had run hell-for-leather every mile of the way from the Romers' to Bingham. Then she turned them out on the weeds and grass of the vacant lot next door and sat down on the tailgate of the wagon and waited. The rain quit and then started again and then quit.

She was glad to see W.G. Boyd walking up the hill from town. W.G., from the first she met him, had reminded her of Roy Barrow, the L Bar L wrangler who had got her started with breaking horses; it was not only his arthritic limp but the touch he had with animals, which was a natural gift but also a learned kindness. Martha held W.G. very dear and envied Joey his childhood in company with the old man.

She walked down to meet him, and he called up to her, "What's happened, child?" Walking to the hospital, he had prepared himself to hear that it was Tom Kandel, dead of cancer—that Martha had been a witness to Tom's terrible last suffering.

"It might be ptomaine poisoning," she said, and fought not to begin crying. W.G. frowned and shook his head without understanding what she had said, and then she realized she had not said who was sick. "It's Mrs. Romer and her children."

He didn't know them, which was a relief to him. He took Martha by the hand and said, "Joe was pretty worried," and they walked back up the hill and sat down together on the tailgate. She swung her boots nervously, which set her stiff leather chaps creaking.

"Have you been breaking one of their horses?" he asked her.

"Yes sir. It's the one called Mata Hari."

He nodded as if this cleared up matters for him. After a few minutes, he said, "I'll just go inside and ask how things are going," and she gave him a grateful look.

He was gone half an hour or better. When he came out
again he patted Martha's arm and said, "I'm afraid the baby is gone."

"Oh!" Tears sprang in her eyes. She turned her head from him.

"It might be a good long while," he said, without saying a good long while to what. "Why don't you come on home with me and have a bite to eat. There isn't anything you can do anyway."

She had by now remembered Maude standing in the corral and she shook her head. "I'd better get back. I left Maude standing there half dressed." W.G. lifted his eyebrows in surprise, and after a moment she caught on to what she'd said. "Maude's a horse," she said, frowning, and W.G. made a slight dry sound of enlightenment.

"I should look for Mr. Romer, too," Martha said while she was hitching up the horses again. "He should know about his family."

She drove the eight or nine miles back to the Romer place, every inch of it remembering why she didn't like driving a big old farm wagon, and trying not to think about Dorothy and her children, and trying not to think she might find Maude with her hind foot caught in a loose cinch or down on her knees in the mud, tangled in trailing reins. But the mare was standing indignantly in the corral, her head lifted high to keep from stepping on the reins, and the loose McClelland saddle askew on her back so the cantle hung off her shoulder; she whinnied a shrill complaint when Martha drove into the yard. Martha unharnessed the Romers' draft horses and turned them into the pasture and she stripped the tack off Maude and gave her a carrot and a ration of grain and then she saddled Big Brownie, who hadn't had to stand rooted to his reins all day, and rode back to Shelby.

Elwha was a dry county, so she didn't know where Reuben
would have gone to find his liquor or how to go about finding him. She stopped in at the power and light office because she knew he had a contract with them to supply wood, and then she just went along the street inquiring at likely shops and stores if they knew Reuben Romer or where he might be, and she told them his family was sick and needed him. When she'd been at this for quite a while, a man in a barbershop studied her in the mirror and said, "You might try that store down there at Eightmile Crossing." This was a place she had never been to, a roadhouse and store eight miles down Lewis Pass on the road to Canyon City and just over the Grant County line. She knew she might spend the rest of the day riding down there and back without finding him, but no one else had given her any idea where to look.