Falling From Horses (23 page)

Both Martha and Henry admired the old man. One spring, after they had been on the Echol Creek ranch three or four years, Martha sold a pair of twin calves she had bucket-fed and raised up from sickly orphans and spent the money on a red silk wild rag to knot around her neck and a handmade silverbelly hat with a stiff flat crown; the next year, with the money from another dogie calf, she bought the same hat for Henry and chaps that quit at his knees. She might have encouraged her husband to grow a mustache and wax it, except she didn't think she'd like the bristle against her face.

 

Even in the 1920s and '30s there were still some wild horses living up in the Ochoco Reserve. The Ochoco mustangs ran small, as a rule, but they were tough enough to keep well fleshed through the winter, when there might be snow on the ground for weeks at a time. They had good feet and, as Arlo Gantz liked to say, “good smarts.” It was Arlo's idea that his quarter horses could benefit from the mustangs' toughness, so one year he and his sons ran down and captured a young Ochoco stallion, a liver chestnut with a lot of black on him, no white markings at all, and turned him in with half a dozen of their Hancock brood mares. They sold the little stallion at auction later on that year because he was a troublemaker around their other horses, but before that he sired seven foals.

Arlo and his sons weaned the foals, gelded the colts, accustomed them to being handled, taught them to lead, and to pick up their feet for the shoer. Then, when they were coming four-year-olds, they brought the young horses over to Martha Frazer to start them under saddle.

The horses were small but agile and alert. Martha liked the way they moved, the bright look to their eyes, their good muscling, and good strong legs. They weren't the easiest horses to break, some of them headstrong and stubborn, but not one of them was lazy, and once they understood what was expected of them, they were willing and mostly reliable.

Mary Claudine, who was then seven, began begging for one of the young half-mustangs, a little dun gelding with a wavy black mane and forelock standing out against the gray-brown hide, and a black tail so long it dragged the ground. “He's just like a gypsy horse,” she told her mother, which was not from knowledge but from one of Bud's drawings, of a gypsy caravan pulled by a horse with a heavy forelock and a black tail that touched the ground.

Bud and Mary Claudine had both learned to ride on Martha's old mare, Dolly, but this was the year Martha had retired Dolly to pasture, and Mary Claudine lately had been riding a big bright chestnut named Tippy, a levelheaded horse that never bucked but had a fast lope and clumsy feet. The girl liked to ride bareback and play at being an Indian, galloping over ditches and windfalls, racing through creeks so the splash made a big noise and sent all the birds flying up from the willow brush. She wore a hat with latchstrings so that when she rode fast the hat would flutter behind her on its tethers. Martha had been a daring rider herself as a girl, but she had a different view now with respect to her own children and especially her fearless daughter. It always gave her a start to see Mary Claudine on Tippy, the girl so tiny and the clumsy-footed horse so huge underneath her.

She hadn't planned to keep any of Arlo's horses, as Henry thought they already had too many to feed through the winter. But all the half-mustangs were more sure-footed than just about any horses she had met, could pick their way through rocks and brush and badger holes, loose shale rock or steep bare places without stumbling. And the dun hadn't minded at all the first time Martha sat on his back; in fact he had reached around and nuzzled her foot. It had moved her almost to tears at the time. So when she brought the horses back to Arlo that fall she took the gypsy horse as part trade for the work she'd done that summer. Mary Claudine named him Sugarfoot.

 

When Bud was fourteen, he began trapping muskrat for the little bit of extra income. His trapline was in the upper reaches of Echol Creek, and on a Sunday in late October he went up there to check the sets. He was riding a dark sorrel with white hind legs, a horse he had named Tony.

It was a cold morning. There had been a thunderstorm overnight, but now the sky was as blue as a robin's egg, with just one big white cloud above the mountains to the north.

The first of his traps was at Cooks Bench, where the creek widened and wound itself in lazy curves through a field of bent grass. This was one of the hay fields where his mother grazed horses in the fall after rain greened the stubble, but the damp field that day was sunlit and empty. Bud's trap was at the upper end of the field where the creek went under the edge of the trees, and as he headed there a little breeze kicked up a smell of burnt hair, a smell he knew from years of calf branding. And then another smell he understood vaguely to be burnt meat and death.

Tony carried him a few more yards and then flared his nostrils. He didn't quite buck, but he took a spraddle-legged stance, his sides heaving. “All right,” Bud said to the horse. “You stay right here,” and he came off the saddle and dropped the reins and walked the rest of the way to what he could see now, a dark shape along the creek bank, in shadow under the trees.

Lightning wasn't overly common in their part of the world, but Bud was acquainted with it. He had several times seen a cow dead on the ground with scorch marks on its hide and had heard stories from Arlo Gantz about entire bunches of cattle or sheep killed by lightning. Sugarfoot was the first horse he had ever seen killed in this way.

He came up close enough to be sure it was Mary Claudine's horse lying dead, his hind legs in the creek, his long black tail floating out gently on the current. Then he went back to Tony. The horse had waited, but he was standing nervously, his ears flattened all the way back, and he gave Bud a baleful stare as if he thought the boy had done him a great disservice.

Bud mounted and turned back toward home, and after a minute he asked the horse for a jog-trot. When he came through the gate into the pasture, he saw his father digging out one of the old rotted posts along the east side of the fence. Bud had been going over and over in his mind the words to tell his sister what had happened, but now he headed for his dad.

Henry straightened up from his work and called to his son, “That was quick. You checked all those traps already?”

“No, I came back,” he said. “There's a dead horse up at Cooks Bench. It's Mary Claudine's.”

“You don't mean Sugarfoot.”

“It was him.”

Henry looked off toward the creek and then back toward Bud. “Could you see what killed him?”

“Lightning, I'm pretty sure. He had a burnt mark all down his back.”

“I think your mother turned some of her horses onto that grass a few days ago. Lightning didn't kill none of the others?” He was thinking it was a good thing she'd been keeping Dolly in the home pasture and not with the horses grazing on that bench.

“I think the lightning must have spooked the others off. There weren't any horses up there at all.”

Henry set aside the shovel he'd been using and wiped his hands on his bib overalls. “Well, your mother took the truck into Foy to pick up some staples for this fence, and Mary Claudine went along with her. They won't be back for a while.” He looked at his son. “Where's the horse at? I know you said Cooks Bench, but is he laying out in the middle of the hay field or where?”

“He's laying in the creek.”

“Well, we better pull him out of there before he poisons up that water. You go in the tool shed and rummage up some logging chain, and I guess I'll go harness up one of the mules.”

Bud dug a long, heavy piece of chain out of the box of chain goods and then helped his dad buckle the plow harness on Mike.

“Grab that can of kerosene there, too,” Henry said.

They rode up the creek trail single file. Bud rode Tony with the chain piece doubled up and draped across the horse's withers, and Henry, carrying the can of kerosene, rode Mike with his legs clamped around the plow harness. He was still wearing his overalls and his chore boots.

When they came near the place where Sugarfoot had died, the mule and the horse both got agitated, so they left them standing twenty yards off and walked on up to the carcass. Bud stayed back while Henry squatted down next to the horse and examined the wide streak where the hair had been burned off right down to the hide. The horse's eye was as pure white as the albumen of an egg. “I think it must have entered through his eye and traveled down his back,” he said over his shoulder to his son.

A horse might live to thirty or better if well cared for. Henry was thinking about something Martha had said to him once, that she had often thought of her life in terms of how many good horses she would love. He knew that Dolly was the first horse his wife had loved, and he was afraid that Sugarfoot had been his daughter's first. Mary Claudine was nine years old that year, her horse just about six.

He stood up. “Well, let's have that chain,” he said to Bud, “and then you might see if you can get that mule to come any closer.”

Bud handed him the chain and went off to see to the mule. Henry stepped out on the rocks so as not to get his feet wet in the creek; he looped an end of chain around the dun's hind fetlocks and then walked away from the creek bank, pulling the chain out to its full length, waiting while Bud talked to the mule and petted him. Bud didn't have his mother's gift for working with animals, but he was patient, and horses generally trusted him. Finally the mule agreed to come close enough to reach the end of the chain. Henry bent down and hooked the logging chain to the heel chain on the plow harness, and when he rose up again Bud said, “Okay?” and Henry nodded.

Bud walked the mule out until the chain pulled straight and tightened around the dead horse's fetlocks. Mike was a big half-Belgian; they had used him to drag dead cows and logs and stumps. Sugarfoot weighed maybe eight or nine hundred pounds, but some logs the mule had dragged must have weighed at least that. Bud chirped to him and asked him to put his hindquarters into it. He scrabbled and dug his hooves into the soft ground of the stream bank. The chain rattled and then tautened, and the mule moved ahead, his big muscles clenching, his neck bowed; the horse's body began moving by inches, trailing a mud smear. His long, coarse tail swept over the water and then over the mud like a bead curtain as the mule went on pulling.

When the carcass was fifty feet from the creek, Henry said, “That ought to do it.” He came up and unhooked the heel chain and then went back to unhook the drag chain from the horse. The links had bitten through the hair and hide, and the left cannon bone had broken, which he thought must have happened at the beginning when the carcass had twisted on the ground. The unnatural angle of the leg and the fractured white bone poking through the hide briefly sickened him, made him turn his head away.

He loosened the links from the fetlocks and gathered up the chain and carried it over to where Bud was waiting with the mule. “Go ahead and take him out of the way,” he said. “It'll be smoky.” He waited until Bud and the mule and the sorrel were well out in the open field, then picked up the kerosene can and went over to the carcass and poured out the kerosene and lit it afire and walked off a dozen yards before looking back. Then he walked the rest of the way to where his son was waiting.

They stood and watched the fire burn. Dark smoke rose up and smudged the sky above the edge of the field.

“Mary Claudine . . .” Henry said, but then wasn't sure what it was he had started to say.

“I wish it wasn't her horse that got struck,” Bud said.

Henry tried to think how to answer. “I don't imagine he felt it,” he said finally. “It probably didn't hurt him at all.”

It seemed to Bud that his dad didn't understand what he was getting at. “She'll feel awful about it, Dad.” His sister had a soft spot for runty barn cats and crippled birds, baby mice, toads with ill-formed legs. In the fall, when they weaned the calves she hid in the barn and wept to hear the bawling of the bereft babies and their mamas. She had always hated knowing that the young steers they sold every fall after roundup were doomed to be butchered and made meat.

“I know she will,” Henry said. “But that's just the way it is sometimes, Buddy. Things happen.” He looked tired and unhappy, watching the fire burn. After a moment, he said, “She'll just have to make peace with it.”

When the flames had died somewhat, they headed back down the hill. The blue sky had turned dark in the northwest, and soon a wind came up, thrashing the branches of the pine trees. It was the sort of wind that always signaled a change in the weather, and maybe a little rain. They heard thunder two or three times, a long way off, but never saw any lightning.

Henry watched the sky and finally said, “It's moving off southeast,” in case Bud might be worrying about it.

They were all the way down the hill, passing through the gate that let into the home place, before Bud remembered his trapline.

“Dad, I didn't ever finish checking my traps.”

Henry made a tired gesture. “Well, you might as well wait until after dinner now.”

The truck was parked in the yard. Henry and Bud went on across to the barn and were stripping the tack off Mike and Tony when Martha walked out from the house.

“I thought you were working on the fence,” she said to Henry.

“Well, something came up.”

She took in the thing unspoken underneath his words. She didn't ask Henry anything, just watched him pull the harness off Mike and hang it on the sawhorse. She waited through his silence until finally he turned to her and said, “There was a horse killed by lightning up at the bench. Now, honey, don't cry, but it was Mary Claudine's horse, it was Sugarfoot.”

Bud had seen his mother cry a few times—she was sentimental about her heifer calves—but
Now, honey, don't cry
was so unexpected that it brought a little heat to his ears and his cheeks, a feeling of shame, as if he had eavesdropped on his parents in an intimate moment.