The Hearts of Horses (8 page)

Romer,
George had written on the map at what she judged to be the nearest place to the Blisses, maybe a mile or so south of Dewey Creek and a half mile or so west of the Graves Creek
road. These were evidently people Martha had talked to, but she couldn't connect any of the names on the map to the faces of people she had met after church on Sunday.

About the time she started to worry that she'd missed the turn, a faint track bent left off the road and she set the horse on it. She first saw the little brown pond where they'd evidently cleared willow and sage from around a spring and then the house, which was not much more than a milled-lumber cabin with small windows and a sheet-metal roof and a sketchy little front porch. There was a shed and a chicken house but no horses in sight and no proper barn.

In the past fifteen or so years a late homesteading boom had hit everywhere in the West, with more people trying to homestead in the new century than had tried it in the old. And the rush of latecomers grabbing the last pieces of free land happened to coincide, in Elwha County, with the railroad being put through, which meant that for a while just about every section of land in the valley was individually claimed and had a house sitting on it—benighted homesteaders who thought they could make a living from a piece of dry land and a scant twelve or fourteen inches of yearly rain.

The county never suffered the range wars between sheepmen and cattle ranchers written about in the six-shooter Western novels; the steep slopes along Owl Creek naturally lent themselves to sheep, and everybody back then was pretty satisfied with the division. But there was trouble of a sort between the longtime cattlemen and the newcomer farmers. The good farm land had all gone in 160-acre chunks twenty and thirty years before. The homestead acts passed in later days were giveaways of 320- and 640-acre parcels of the dry grassland that Elwha County had a lot of, land without much timber and without the means to irrigate—open range that the old-time ranchers had always been free to run their cattle on. The idea
was that the newcomers would take up ranching, but people figured out pretty quickly that you couldn't make a living off the cattle you could grow on 640 acres of dry grass, so of course the newcomers fenced it off and set out to plow and grow crops. In the valley of the Little Bird Woman River, it wasn't quite a war between the old-timers and the newcomers, but a good deal of resentment and squabbling went back and forth. Fences sagged, broke, got leaned on, and range bulls got into fields with dairy cows; every so often a range bull would turn up dead in mysterious circumstances. When a farmer dammed a creek to force the water into his garden and fields, sometimes that dam got knocked out by steers ranging loose and driving through.

This kind of thing didn't last long, because most of the settlers coming late to the game didn't have the cash or other means to get through a dry summer or a deep winter, and most were laying claim to land that couldn't be made to support a crop or pasture dairy cows unless the rain cooperated, which it seldom did. By the war years, a good many of those homesteaders had already given up and moved out, and by the end of the war only ten or fifteen of them would still be farming in the valley out of the nearly two hundred that had been there in 1910 when things were at the peak; the federal land banks and private mortgage companies that had been so free with money for stock, farm equipment, and houses during the boom years would be left holding title to land that was mostly barren through overtilling, land where nothing much would now grow but scrub juniper and weeds. By the 1920s most of the valley would be back to the way it had been before the century's turn: sheep ranging the canyons and lower gorge of Owl Creek at the western end of the county; cattle running over the eastern parts from Graves Creek clear across the valley bottom to
Burnt Creek; and a few wheat farms along the well-watered valley bottoms.

But as it happened, the war years were wetter than usual, wheat and cattle prices were high, and any of the dry-land homesteaders who hadn't already given up the fight took this as a sign they could make a living off their little claims, and they settled in for the duration. A couple of the people who hired Martha Lessen to break horses for them in November of 1917 were homesteaders holding tight to their dreams.

The woman who came over from the chicken house had a face Martha vaguely recalled. "Hello, are you Mrs. Romer?" she said.

The woman visited upon her a stern look of disappointment. "I'm not Dorothy Romer, I'm Jeanne McWilliams."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. McWilliams. I met so many people all at once, I've got everybody's names mixed up."

"Well that's all right. But my husband told you we don't have any horses needing breaking." Mrs. McWilliams's husband blamed George Bliss, whose ranch ran along one side of their property, for letting one of his range bulls break down a fence and claim their milk cow, Jozie, for his harem. If they had had a horse needing breaking, they wouldn't have given it to anybody who worked for Bliss, whom they called Old Mister High and Mighty.

Martha's face began to take up heat as Mrs. McWilliams's face went on being pale and wintry. Martha said, "I'm glad to meet you, anyhow—meet you
again.
I'm sorry I got your name wrong."

Mrs. McWilliams was holding an empty burlap sack in one hand but she put the other hand to her forehead to shade her eyes against the gray winter light. Her fingers were long and reddened. "Well it's all right," she said, without softening the
tone of her voice. "I don't remember what your name is, to tell the truth, so I guess I don't have room to complain."

"It's Martha Lessen."

"I'll try to remember it. If you're looking to find the Romer place you can take that little road there, just be sure you shut every gate when you go through." She pointed to a faint trace wandering off across the grass and bitterbrush hills, not a road so much as a path, the kind made by neighbors when they visited each other.

"Well, thanks. I'll just go on and see about that horse they wanted broke."

"You shut every gate."

"I will."

She turned T.M. onto the path the woman had set her on. When she got down at the first gate and undid the wire and walked the horse through, she looked back down the half mile or so of slope to the house and saw Mrs. McWilliams standing on the narrow front porch watching after her, and from this height she could see a man and a pair of horses in a field behind the house, pulling stumps out of the ground. The McWilliams claim had had quite a few good big pine trees on it to start with, but they had cut them all down in the first months of living there.

After Martha wired shut the gate, the woman on the porch turned and went inside.

The sky was gray but didn't look to have any rain in it; it was the kind of high overcast that can make the world resemble a moving picture the way they were in those days, all shades of gray colorlessness. Martha thought it was beautiful country, even grayed out, close to the kind of open, rolling rangeland spoken of in
Lone Star Ranger
and
The Virginian
and other Western romances Martha had read, the country horsemen rode through in novels on their way to trouble with Cayuse In
dians or crooked sheriffs. In another twenty years people would wake up to realize that the timber was gone and the native grasses plowed up or eaten right down to the roots, that cheat-grass and rabbit brush and water-hogging scrub juniper had taken over all the disturbed ground. But it was still possible for Martha Lessen to look around and imagine the country as it must have been—the way Nez Perce and Shoshone Indians must have seen it, riding across with their big herds of ponies before white men overran the land, the kind of country where every gully and gorge in the foothills holds a clear, pebble-bottom creek, where the mountain slopes are clothed in timber and the valley floor is a golden grassland with stands of trees in patches, good big timber in the creek bottoms and along the river, the kind of country that leads people to name towns Eden or Paradise or Opportunity.

Martha had read a little book about famous men and their horses: Alexander and Bucephalus, El Cid and Babieca, General Lee and Traveller, the knight Reynard and his charger Bayard, the horse that had outraced Charlemagne's army. She sometimes imagined herself one of them, or a famous woman, famous as Annie Oakley or Joan of Arc, on a famous horse. Riding over the low hills between the McWilliamses' and the Romers' she fell easily into thinking again that she was Mattie (this was how she'd be called, once she was famous), a horsewoman renowned all over the West, on her horse Meriwether Lewis, a tall black with a metal sheen to his coat and a fiery eye behind a long wavy forelock, a horse she had trained, like the Virginian's horse, to come straight to her at a certain four-note whistle and to carry no other rider but her. Always in these imaginings it was forty or fifty or sixty years ago, when she'd have been able to ride all over the valley of the Little Bird Woman River without seeing a fence and without getting down from her horse, not even once, to open and close a gate.

D
OROTHY ROMER'S HUSBAND
, Reuben, had taken up a claim south of Dewey Creek that was unsuited for crops. It was fairly well timbered, so he got most of his income from cutting wood for the Shelby school and for the town electric plant, but he was what these days would be called a binge drinker and he was off somewhere getting drunk and Dorothy Romer was splitting wood for the school so her children would be able to eat that week. Dorothy had set down the maul and the splitting wedge and was stretching her back and catching her breath when Martha Lessen rode into the yard. Martha didn't see Dorothy standing there by the woodshed; she pulled up her horse in the yard and Dorothy's middle child, Helen, who had been kept home from school to stand watch over the baby, cracked open the door and peered out. When Martha said hello to her she shut the door again. Ordinarily Helen wasn't a shy child but Martha Lessen was a strange and formidable presence sitting up on a big red horse.

Dorothy gathered up some of the disheveled hair that had fallen on her neck and repinned it and then she walked out from the corner of the woodshed. "Hello, Miss Lessen."

Reuben's horses were over in the field of corn stubble rummaging for edibles, and T.M.'s attention was fixed on them. When Martha turned in the saddle to say hello to Dorothy, her horse tried to walk out from under her, evidently to say hello to those other horses in the cornfield. She told him "whoa" in a low voice but he only shook his long head up and down irritably and took another step, so she pulled his head down toward a stirrup and jabbed her blunt spurs into his brisket and whirled him in a tight circle round and round for a whole minute before straightening out his head. After that he stood there well behaved and meek without so much as a glance toward those other horses.

It wasn't a very cold day but Martha's face was pink when she finally turned to say hello to Dorothy. "Are you Mrs. Romer? I've met so many people I can't keep the names straight."

"Yes, I'm Dorothy Romer. Did you come to see the horse we wanted broke? She's there in the cornfield." Dorothy walked over to the fence and Martha got down from her horse, dropped the reins, and followed her. T.M. stood there as if she'd nailed his hooves to the ground.

Reuben kept a gray gelding as a riding horse and he had four pulling horses he used in pairs so they could trade off the hard work of hauling logs; he had bought the unbroke chestnut mare for no good reason except she was a beautiful horse and he was drunk at the time. "She's that chestnut there, the one standing kind of alone," Dorothy said.

The chestnut shifted her weight just then and moved closer to the rest of the horses, and Martha said, "The one that just moved over? The pretty one?" and Dorothy nodded. Martha watched the mare for a few minutes quietly and then went to the little gate in the cornfield fence and opened it and went through and took off her hat and waved it, which set the horses to moving. She stood and watched the particular movement of
the chestnut as the horse bolted away from her, ears flattened, hind legs kicking out. Dorothy couldn't imagine what she was looking for or what she was learning by watching the horse. The mare was an intractable five-year-old that her husband was unfathomably fond of but had never been able to break. She imagined it was the horse's very wildness that her husband admired.

"Was she ever started?" the girl called to her.

"My husband tried to do it. I guess he can get her saddled and get her to take the bit but she always will buck, she won't ever calm down. I think she's just determined not to be rode. My husband off and on has talked about selling her for rodeo stock. If you don't think she can be broke, maybe he'll just go ahead and do that."

The girl walked back toward Dorothy. At church on Sunday Dorothy would have said she looked like anybody's rangy, over-tall farm daughter, dressed in a worn green jumper and worn yard boots, her thick brown hair pulled back behind her ears under an old-fashioned hat that had the velvet worn through. Now she wore a buckaroo getup, fringed buckskin chaps that flared out wide above high-heeled boots and spurs with blunt star rowels, the kind of outfit Dorothy hadn't seen outside of old photographs and rodeo shows. The girl's hair was tied back with a piece of string, and when she resettled her high-crowned hat on her head most of her hair disappeared under it and she looked a good deal like a beardless young cowboy.

"How long ago did your husband give up on her?"

"Oh, I don't know that he's ever given up but if you mean when's the last time he tried to ride her I guess it was a month ago or more." Dorothy remembered this because it was right after Mata Hari, that exotic dancer who had been spying for the Germans, was put to death. Reuben had been calling the
horse Mata Hari and joking about her being pure evil, and the day he read about the execution he had gone out to break the horse "for once and all" and he'd been thrown three or four times that day and he hadn't tried to ride her since.