Falling From Horses (10 page)

“He seemed only slightly surprised that a girl he'd never seen before had asked him for a cigarette. He straightened up and fished one from his shirt pocket and offered it to me. He struck a match and cupped it in his hands and waited for me to lean in for the light. I touched the cigarette to my lips but didn't quite put it in my mouth. ‘I'm just starting to smoke. Am I supposed to puff on it as you're lighting it?' This, too, I meant as a sign of self-confidence. A woman who was bashful or meek wouldn't just boldly say,
Show me how to do this.

“He made a slight sound of surprise. ‘Here,' he said, ‘I'll get it lit.' He took the cigarette back and put it in his own mouth, lit it, and exhaled a thick stream of smoke through his nose. When he handed it back to me, I took it between my thumb and forefinger as I'd seen men do.

“I didn't really want to put the cigarette in my mouth after it had been in his, but this was necessary. I took a brief puff. The smoke in my mouth was warm and tasted a little like raw almonds. When I took a deeper breath, the hot air went down into my chest and I had to suppress a cough.

“I was aware that the man was examining my figure or looking over my clothes. I hadn't changed out of what I'd worn on the bus, and I knew there were sweat fans under my arms, deep folds across my lap, a map of wrinkles where the bodice fit loosely under my slight breasts; the collar of the dress had darkened along the neck edge from the oils in my skin. I was aware, too, that my hair was oily and unkempt, bent in odd directions around my ears and at the back of my head. If I had cared about any of this, I might have explained to him that I'd only just arrived in town after three days and nights on a bus—then he might have held me to a looser standard. But really, I didn't care what he thought.

“From an early age I had known that I was smart rather than pretty, and although for a while I hoped that intelligence would make up in some way for not being attractive and popular, by the time I was thirteen I knew that it mostly did not. Intelligence added an extra dash to a girl who was pretty, but by itself wasn't enough to interest most people, especially men. At fifteen I decided that no man would ever wish to marry me, and I laid out a plan for my life that included that fact. I saw no reason to wear makeup or wave my hair. I kept myself tidy when it was convenient or necessary for employment and didn't worry about it otherwise. Now that I was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, I didn't really care if a stranger looking me over thought I was not much to look at, as the phrase goes.

“The man said, ‘You're new?' He thumbed back his hat in a calculated gesture, an imitation of the boyish cowboy heroes in movies. The front of his hair showing beneath the brim of the hat had been cut very straight across with scissors. He was about forty and had a soft belly above his shiny leather belt.

“I knew what he meant: new to Hollywood, new in town. ‘No, I've been here a while,' I said. The lie came easily to me. Hollywood bubbled with newcomers, it was a city where their yearnings were almost palpable in the air. I hadn't minded being one of the hopefuls when I was riding on the bus, but I had seen and read enough melodramas to know that even a homely girl could be seduced if she landed in town wearing innocence and gullibility on her face.

“I took another little puff of the cigarette, blew out the smoke, and walked away casually, the way Joan Crawford would have, or Marlene Dietrich.”

When she finished reading, I said, “I always figured you had your first cigarette that time we ran into each other in front of the hardware store. Before we started going to the movies together. Back before you went to work for Sunrise.”

She laughed. “I wanted you to think I'd been smoking for years. I must not have faked it very well. I don't remember how many cigarettes I'd had by then, but it wasn't a whole pack.”

“You looked about thirteen when you smoked. A little kid playing grownup.”

“Did I?” She made a small amused sound. “Jesus, I thought I was up-to-the-minute.”

At the time the
Vanity Fair
piece came out, Lily was half a year into treatment for cancer. She wrote that story about her first cigarette without making any mention of the cancer raging in her throat or of the surgery that in another year would take away her voice.

 

 

 

 

1923–1925

 

 

 

 

WHEN THEIR SON BUD WAS BORN
, Henry and Martha Frazer were living in Elwha County, buckarooing cows and breaking horses for two old spinster sisters who had a big cattle ranch in the foothills of the Whitehorns. In 1923, when the sisters died six days apart without either of them leaving a will, their ranch went to a cousin living in Spokane, who sold it to a local fellow, who then sold off the cattle and logged off the trees and put most of the cleared land into wheat and sugar beets.

The Frazers might have gone to work for some other rancher in the valley, but a friend of theirs, a woman named Louise, who was related in some way to Elbert Echol, pointed them toward Harney County. Elbert was sixty-five at the time, and his wife had died in the flu epidemic. The Echols had been childless, so he was looking for somebody to take the ranch off his hands, now that he had arthritis and a weak heart. Martha and Henry had been saving up money in a coffee can with the idea of one day buying a few cattle and some acres of their own. They thought it would be long years before they could do that, but Louise told them Elbert was looking for a way to support himself in retirement and he might just carry the paper for somebody he approved of.

It was 140 miles from the Elwha Valley to Echol Creek on rough backcountry roads. The Frazers bought a spring wagon from a farm family moving back east, packed it with everything they owned, hitched it to a team, and drove six days to get there, camping each night by the side of the road. They mounted a chuck wagon on the tailgate and had their meals there. Henry drove the wagon, and Martha, with several horses in a pony string, rode ahead and kept a lookout for automobiles or wagons approaching. Their boy, named Ernest after Henry's stepfather but always called Bud, was not quite three years old. He rode on the saddle in front of his mother. Most of the roads were no more than one lane. When she called a warning and nosed her horses over to the shoulder of the road, Henry pulled the wagon in behind her and waited until the other rig had passed. There wasn't much traffic—a wagon every hour or so, a car two or three times a day.

This whole adventure must have struck some of their friends as foolhardy. They went without knowing whether Elbert Echol would approve of them or whether they would even want his place after looking it over—they wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out to be one of those dryland spreads that couldn't support a cow to fifty acres. But if the Echol place didn't pan out, prospects for finding ranch work in Harney County were no worse than where they had come from, and they had both knocked around a bit before settling in Elwha County and weren't opposed to doing it again. Martha, especially, had the idea they might like to roam the West as itinerant cowhands, along the lines of heroes in the romantic novels she had read. She didn't think a three-year-old child would upend this idea so long as the child could sit a horse.

 

The Echol ranch, they had been told, was north of Foy, a town that sat on the cross-state highway roughly twelve miles west of the county seat at Burns. Foy wasn't much of a town even in its heyday, but it had a post office and a Grange hall, some buildings around an old rock quarry, and a store offering hardware goods and groceries, a refrigerated case for soda pop, and a gasoline pump for folks driving cars east and west on the highway. While Martha waited with the horses, Henry went into the store to ask the last part of the way to the Echol ranch and came out with an ice cream cone for his son. Then they went on as Henry had been told, north up the Bailey Creek Road five miles to where Elbert Echol's rutted ranch lane veered off to the northwest.

The greater part of Harney County is high desert, a flat basin four thousand feet high and running mostly to sagebrush and juniper, except for the marshland around the shallow basin sink that is Malheur Lake. But it's a big county, sprawling all the way from the California border across the big dry middle of Oregon into the southernmost reach of the Ochoco Mountains. At that far north end of the county there's a clear boundary between the sagebrush flats and the forested uplands, as if somebody has drawn a line as level and straight as a ruler, and most of Elbert Echol's place lay on the high side of the line—foothills country, timbered and steeply cut by draws and canyons.

Martha and Henry didn't know any of this when they first went up there, and the flat sagebrush and scrubland around Foy and the lower part of the Bailey Creek Valley didn't look at all promising to them. Then, after the road forked and they turned off along Echol Creek, the way quickly became nothing more than bad ruts climbing up through a narrow canyon between shelves and steps of basalt. The roadside was choked with dry scrub that hid the creek except at the five or six places where they had to ford. This was in early October, and it hadn't rained, or anyway not to speak of, for more than three months. Dust rose up listlessly behind the tailgate and settled on the underbrush in thick, pale cloaks. They could hear the creek still faintly running, which was the only good sign.

There were no cattle guards in those days, but post-and-wire fences crossed the road three or four times. At each one Martha climbed down and dragged the gate across, waited while Henry drove the wagon through, then brought her horses through and dragged the gate shut again. At the fords where the road crossed the creek, they could sometimes drive straight to the other side, but at other places they had to travel up or down the creek bed to find a low bank where they could drive out.

They weren't particularly aware of the road climbing, but after a mile or so they began to see pines and a few aspens clinging to the rock benches, and knew they must have gone above five thousand feet; gradually the canyon widened and flattened, and the creek came clear of the scrub and fanned out, branching and braiding back and forth in a lacework of shallow channels and sloughs. The road wound for half a mile alongside this watered marsh, through willow groves thick with birds, and then, at the far edge of the park where the land began to rise again toward a ridgetop of big pines and scattered white fir, they came to the last gate. Beyond it was the Echol home place: an old-fashioned log barn, three or four outbuildings, and a small one-story board-and-batten house, its porch rails made of deer and elk antlers.

 

Elbert had title to just under thirteen hundred acres—not very large as ranches go—and it was remote and half-wild at a time when most parts of the country had been domesticated. The yard was full of discarded and broken equipment, and in recent years the old man had let a lot of things go. His fences and buildings were in need of repair—doors and some of the wall boards were missing on the barn, corral posts were leaning and wouldn't hold an animal for very long. When Martha and Henry rode over the place with him, they saw how skittery and reclusive his mountain-bred cattle were, bolting off through the woods when anybody got close. His hay fields were small and oddly shaped, none of them more than two or three acres, strung out along the creek between steep ridges and scattered on the benches among stands of pine and skinny-legged aspen.

But Elbert had spent years picking those small hay fields clean of rocks, and the water on the ranch was soft and clear and cold from springs and a hand-dug well barely ten feet deep. He had a rain gauge, and he'd been recording the measurements for years, as well as the yields from his fields. If his records could be trusted, most of the ranch could count on twenty inches of rain a year, whereas neighbors down on the flats and along Bailey Creek—the sagebrush country Henry and Martha had driven through on the way up from Foy—were lucky to get eight or ten. In a typical season his small fields planted to wheatgrass or left in wild rye grass and blue joint grass made one heavy cutting of hay, which was enough to feed his cows through the three or four months of winter, and most years he got enough summer rain to regrow the fields for fall grazing or even a second cutting. Above his deeded land was the Ochoco Forest Reserve, where he grazed his cattle most of the summer. Elbert had the senior water rights on Echol Creek, its headwaters far up in the reserve, and the Frazers could see for themselves that this part of the creek was still alive even at the end of summer in a dry year. In the winter months, Elbert told them, there were redband trout and tui chub in the cold flood. And the annual spring overflow of melting snow off the Ochoco Mountains was the water source for all those acres of slough and parkland in the narrow valley below the house.