The Hearts of Horses (30 page)

"I don't know whether you know it," George said to Louise one day early in March after he had carried up three or four armloads of books, "but I'm getting too old to make that trip up the stairs more than forty or fifty times a day."

He was standing on the back porch with his hands tucked into the bib of his overalls, and Louise was on her knees in the garden pulling up weeds around her rhubarb plants. She hadn't gone out there intending to start weeding but while she'd been standing in the yard chatting with Pauline Ashe—it was Pauline's books George was teasing her about—her eye had gone to a particularly flagrant burdock that had raised its coarse head above the rhubarb patch, and one thing had led to another. "George, I'm too tired to find that amusing," she said, and was more than half-serious about it. It had been a clear mild day, so springlike that she had dragged the carpets outside one by one and beaten them clean of their winter dirt. Her arms and her back ached; she didn't know why she was now out in the garden pulling up weeds.

George watched her silently for a while and then took out his pouch of Bull Durham and made a cigarette and smoked it, leaning against one of the porch uprights. It had been an unusually open winter, and from that porch on a clear day you could see all the way across the valley to the Whitehorns, their jagged peaks rising dramatically from the valley floor without much in the way of preliminary foothills. This was late in the day and the sky didn't have a cloud in it, and a reddish light, streaked and veined, had climbed up the mountains so they seemed garishly painted against the blue. George was used to the sight and hardly took notice of it. "What did your library ladies decide to do about those German books?" he said.

The library project, as it turned out, had brought on new problems without easing any of the old ones. A box of German-language books, left anonymously on the porch of the
Grange Hall, had raised a terrible furor, as quite a few women thought the books had been left there by a Bohemian or Rhine-lander as a deliberate insult to the society. Anyone would know, went the argument, that such books were absolutely unwanted by this or any library in the nation. And there had been bitter disagreement over what to do with English translations of books by famous German writers—Goethe, for instance. Four or five women of a literary bent had been firm in their opinion that the books were innocent and ought to be accepted, but more than a few others wanted them carried straight out to the town dump; this arguing had caused two more women to stop coming to the meetings.

"They're not my ladies," Louise said crossly, "and I'm just about at the point of quitting the whole thing." She had been suffering from a sour stomach for days, which she blamed on this business of the German books.

George didn't know if she meant quitting the Elwha Valley Literary Society or quitting the Library Committee and he didn't think her tone allowed him to ask. He said cheerfully, "Well I'm just about at the point of buying myself an automobile plow." He hadn't planned to say this to Louise yet, but the tractor was what popped out of his mouth when he opened it. He'd been thinking about buying a Fordson for a while now and lining up arguments in favor of the idea, the boiled-down version being that the world needed more wheat, and banks had become generous about loaning money to the farmers growing it, and the new Ford tractors were small and surefooted. Up until three or four years before, the only plowing George ever did was turning over Louise's garden, but with a lot of his pasture grass now given over to growing wheat, plowing was a hateful chore that took up more and more of his time right when he ought to be getting ready to brand the calf crop. If he still had three or four men working for him he wouldn't
worry so much about getting it all done, but Will Wright had gone off with the last batch of enlistees and now it was down to just himself and El Bayard. He didn't know how the two of them would ever get the wheat fields plowed and planted before it came roundup time.

Louise said, "Who have you been talking to?" which sounded to George like an accusation of some kind. He knew she meant the various equipment salesmen who regularly visited the ranches, or their own son Orie, who had picked up from his friend Ray a belief in the future of gasoline power. It seemed to George an odd contradiction that fellows studying veterinary medicine, and whose future livelihood depended on the continued use of horses and mules for farm work, should tout the benefits of machinery, but neither Orie nor Ray seemed to see the rub.

Louise's manner put George's back up a little. He had wanted to give her something new to stew about other than the German library books but now that he had riled her up he was feeling fairly riled up himself.

"I've been talking to myself is who I've been talking to, and what I've been saying is that I might buy myself an automobile plow that won't need horses having to be harnessed up every morning and fed twice a day and given half of every damn day off to rest up."

Louise said irritably, "Every gasoline engine you've got is always breaking down, I notice, or needing fooling with, and at least we can grow the feed for the horses whereas gasoline is steep. And anyway we didn't get much of a wheat crop the past two years so I don't know why you'd want to go into debt to grow more of it." She stood up from the rhubarb and brushed her dirty hands together and looked over at her husband. "But I imagine you've got your mind made up already and you're not asking my opinion."

The truth was, she looked favorably on the progress of tech
nology—it was Louise who had pressed her husband to buy an automobile. And it was also true that just about everybody she knew had been stepped on or kicked or thrown or run away with or had bones broken by horses. As if proof were needed, even Martha Lessen, who was clever as could be around horses, was wearing plaster on her arm right now. Louise had known neighbors killed by horses and one who'd been kicked in the head and afterward never had more than the mind of a child. If, as people were already saying, horses on all the farms and ranches would soon be replaced by machinery she wouldn't be sorry about it or silly enough for nostalgia.

But she was in an argumentative mood or just irritated that George had brought up the matter of the German books when he ought to have known how it would upset her. Or it was the funerals weighing on her. They had been to a string of funerals in recent weeks, starting with the Romers, people they hardly knew except to nod to when they passed on the road, but for Martha's sake they had gone to the burial of that poor baby and the baby's father, the two of them laid to rest in the same grave. It had just about killed her to see the watchful, bewildered way Dorothy Romer's two older children clung to their mother and the stunned look in that woman's face. Then at the end of February there had been a service for the first Elwha County boy killed and buried over there in France. He had been the son of a Basque sheep rancher in Owl Creek Canyon, a stranger to the cattle ranchers living in the valley but nevertheless a local boy, and the whole county had taken the news hard. And the very next day Tom Kandel had died of cancer, which wasn't a shock but had saddened Louise beyond all reason. Tom was an exception among the newcomer homesteaders, someone with a practical mind and the follow-through to carry out a plan. She had often bought eggs from Tom when her own hens weren't laying enough to supply the table and had gone to him for a
stock of new chicks after a coyote tore up her henhouse. Louise liked Tom, everybody did. Then Old Karl Thiede, who hadn't been out of bed since he broke his pelvis in the autumn, took pneumonia and died. Karl wasn't as old as all that—he might have been sixty or sixty-five—and the others who died had all been young. She wished George could realize how all this was weighing on her. At Tom Kandel's funeral, when poetry had been read in addition to Scripture, George had bent to her and asked irritably in a whisper what the hell part of the Bible those verses came from, which had distressed Louise. She wished George could understand how she had found herself deeply moved by the poems and by knowing that Tom, in his last days, had asked for them to be read at his funeral.

"Since you're not the one doing the plowing, I don't see exactly how your opinion comes into it," George said now, and he stepped down off the porch and headed for the bunkhouse. His dog came scrambling out from under the porch to follow him.

Louise hadn't really thought she and George were arguing but when he walked off she realized they were. They didn't argue very often and neither of them liked it when they did. George was usually the one who walked away, and his habit was to spend an hour or so playing cards with his hired hands and then come back to the house whistling and cheerful, pretending he and Louise hadn't had a disagreement. Louise's habit was to go over and over the argument and rework it until she had all the words lined up in the order and manner she ought to have said them. In the first years of their marriage she used to wait tensely for George to come back to the house so she could tell him what she'd thought of to say; but then his relentless good humor would surprise and charm her and she wouldn't be able to find an opening to bring it up again. After all these years—they'd been married when Louise was barely sixteen—they were both set in these habits, and though Lou
ise still liked to go over an argument in her mind, she knew she wouldn't say any of it to George, or not until he brought it up again himself. Lying in bed tonight, for instance, he might ask her whether she thought a Fordson automobile plow was a good idea, as if he hadn't ever mentioned it before; and after they talked about the tractor for a while she might begin to tell him her deepening worries about the Literary Society and how the recent funerals had brought her very low in her mind.

Watching George cross the yard to the bunkhouse, Louise was suddenly sorry she'd been so cross. In recent months his shoulders had become stooped, or they had been stooped for a while and she had only just realized it, and he often walked around like a tired old man, his boots scuffing the dirt. He wasn't old yet, only fifty-one, but she knew his hips and knees hurt him most of the time and he'd begun to have trouble with his bowels. She hoped what she felt just now—a little stab of fear or foreboding—wasn't any sort of premonition. Her mother had always believed in such things, believed she had "second sight," and that a chill along her spine or the creeping of her flesh was a portent or warning of imminent suffering. Once when Louise was about twelve her mother standing at the sink had suddenly turned an ashen face to Louise and said, "It's Harry," in a horrified way. Harry was Louise's uncle, her mother's eldest brother. It was more than a year later that Harry drowned in the Columbia River coming back from a trip to The Dalles, but Louise's mother always believed she'd had a genuine forewarning of it that day a year earlier, standing in her kitchen.

Louise left the weeds lying in a wilting pile in the garden and went into the house to start the supper, and sure enough when George and El came in for supper George was determinedly cheerful and he started right in telling Louise a doubtless corrupted version of the moving picture he had watched
the last time he gave his Liberty Bond speech at the Shelby theater. Louise had stopped going with him to the movies on account of the newsreels of all the soldiers, their heartbreaking grins as they marched past the camera, but he knew she liked to hear about the picture show just so long as it wasn't anything to do with war. She poured coffee for him and for El sitting at the table, and then while she went on getting the supper ready she listened to the story George was telling her, a three-reel jungle story that involved lions and elephants and a heroine in breeches and sun helmet, and she made a point of interrupting him to question certain confusing parts of the plot so he would know she was listening. Just about the time he finished recounting the movie Martha came in tired and hungry from her circle ride and Louise brought the potato soup to the table.

She had made an unsatisfactory Liberty Bread earlier in the day from oats and almost no wheat flour and felt she ought to apologize for it. "Evidently patriotism now requires a lot of chewing," she said sourly, and George, who had had to stand up to get the leverage to saw slabs off the loaf, winked across the table at her and said, "If we start complaining I guess you can feed it to the horses, but I don't hear any of us complaining." Of course there never were any complaints about the food she put on the table, which she knew had more to do with how hungry and hard-worked they all were than with the excellence of her cooking. Even their girl broncobuster, after breaking her arm and watching a child die of spoiled food, always ate up every bit of what was on her plate and could always be persuaded to finish off whatever was left on any platter. The cast on her arm the past couple of weeks just caused her to eat more slowly, as she had trouble carving bites of roast, trouble pressing down a knife or a fork with her left hand.

Louise ate lightly—her stomach was bothering her—and began doing up the dishes while the others were still sitting
around the table. They'd all been talking about the mild weather and this had led to George telling a story about the March weather several years earlier when he had lost fifty-three cows and their calves all at once, trapped by deep snow on the banks of Ax Handle Creek. They had calved out at the ranch and then he had moved them along the creek where there was good shelter and good pasture, but a late spring storm had dropped a couple of feet of snow, which the wind had blown into high drifts. Water in the Ax Handle rose and rose, and the cows and calves, trapped between the drifts and the flooded creek, were too cold and weak to swim out of trouble. Louise had heard this old story several times before—he had told it to her with tears standing in his eyes the night he came back from finding all those drowned and frozen animals—but El had only heard it once and Martha never had; they listened to the boss in grave silence, leaning over the table on their elbows.

Louise was struck suddenly by the disconcerting likeness: El with his rigidly crooked arm from that old break and Martha, her wrist fixed straight in a plaster cast. The edge of it that showed below her shirt cuff was already filthy and chipped, and Louise almost opened her mouth to say something about it before deciding there wouldn't be any point. She had seen enough broken bones over the years so as not to be distressed unless a break was grievous; but no one had had a bit of luck trying to persuade the girl to give up her circle ride after that first day, and only the Lord knew what would happen if she was bucked off and landed on that arm. Dr. Padham wasn't the best doctor in the world and Martha hadn't let him run the plaster as far up and down the arm as he had wanted to—she needed to be able to use that arm, she said, and couldn't be budged from her stubborn stand. It would be a wonder if the girl didn't wind up like El Bayard, who could handle ranch work but could hardly
comb his own hair or shave his whiskers on account of the poor job that had been done setting his bad break.