Falling From Horses (33 page)

She hadn't needed to rush—the waiting went on. The sun broke over the ridge finally and warmed the bottom of the canyon. When she grew hungry she drank from her jar of milky coffee. It seemed to her that the sun hung overhead without moving. She began to ride Goldy a hundred yards up the narrow canyon and back again, just to keep them both from falling asleep in the sunlight. And she sang to herself, one of the songs she'd heard Gene Autry sing the last time she had gone with Bud to the movies in Burns.

She had been counting on the bawling of cows to warn her when somebody was coming down, but Bud rode in unannounced from the outlet of Crow Canyon and caught her unprepared—she was singing loudly and pretending to strum a guitar. She was mortified, but Bud didn't even notice. He was riding Tony that day, and he came on at a slow walk, with Dean behind him on Pumpkin. It took Mary Claudine a minute to realize that Bud had Pumpkin on a lead and that Dean, pale as milk, was hunched in the saddle, seeming to hug himself.

She called out, “What happened? Did he fall off?”

It was Dean who answered her. “I didn't fall off. A damn cow butted the damn horse and he went over on me. I busted my arm.”

Mary Claudine knew he wouldn't have used swearwords if her parents had been there; he might not even have said “busted.” And he sounded proud of himself. She hadn't ever broken a bone—she was the only one of her family who hadn't. She sometimes took this as proof of her superior horsemanship and sometimes as evidence that she hadn't yet proven herself. She gave Dean a look that was partly envy, but then, just to let him know where he stood, she said righteously, “I hope you didn't get Pumpkin hurt.”

Bud said irritably, “We wouldn't be riding him if he was hurt.” He was in a bad mood about the way things had gone, upset that he hadn't been able to keep his friend from getting into trouble, upset that his dad would be short-handed now and the roundup made to drag on longer than it should.

“I've got to take Dean down the hill. Tell Dad and Mom I'm driving him to town in the truck.”

“Did you find any cows? Should I go bring them down?”

He was abreast of her by then, and as he rode past her he looked over and frowned. “We had half a dozen we brought in to the bench around Rim Springs, they might still be there. You know where that is?”

Her excitement was bright in her face. “I'll find them.” She jigged Goldy and trotted off.

Bud called after her, “If they're not there, don't go looking for them. Just come on back.”

She flung back over her shoulder, “Okay,” and went out of sight up the Crow Canyon trail.

 

They found Mary Claudine's horse on the third day, in among a band of wild horses at the far northern edge of the reserve. The saddle was still cinched up, the mare's hide rubbed raw under the girth and along her back, her mouth raw from the bit. The reins were broken off short—they'd been stepped on or torn from some entanglement. It looked as if the horse had been on her own, roaming the mountain, since the first day Mary Claudine went missing. The broken jar rattling around in the saddlebag had spilt its coffee on the book she'd had with her. The pages were soaked and swollen, the illustrations almost indecipherable under a scrim of brown stains. The saddle was badly scratched, but there was no blood on it, which Martha and Henry both took as a good sign. They would find their daughter lying up with a broken leg, they felt, or limping out of the mountains on sore feet.

But then, after the horse was found, there was no further sign.

In the first days after the girl went missing, fifteen or twenty neighbors pitched in to help them search, but this was roundup, and most of them couldn't go on neglecting their own places after it became clear that Mary Claudine wouldn't easily be found. Arlo Gantz, though, was in his seventies and he had three sons who had taken over the work on his ranch. He had time on his hands and a desire to feel useful. Before sunrise day after day for weeks, Arlo drove up in his blue Oldsmobile, dragging a pale rooster tail of dust. Every day Martha was out in the yard saddling horses, and he would nod as he stepped out of the car and say a few words to her before going into the house.

A hardened old-timer like Arlo might cry a few tears at weddings and christenings but never at a funeral, and perhaps for that reason, or some other one, he never said a word of sympathy to any of the Frazers, and he never speculated about what could have happened to Mary Claudine. Most mornings he called out, “Lucky it wasn't cold overnight,” or, if it had been cold, “Lucky it didn't rain,” which he meant to carry an unspoken solace. And then he went on into the house, where Bud was packing the lunches—sandwiches and doughnuts, maybe big squares of cake from pans their neighbors had brought—and he sat down with Henry at the kitchen table so the two of them could go over the map. They had started the search at Rim Springs and widened out from there, but the Ochoco Reserve was hundreds of square miles of rough land. The network of penciled crosshatchings marking off the places they had searched never seemed to be more than a small island in a great sea.

They put in long days—ten or twelve hours on horseback. The woodland up in the reserve was mostly open, and they stayed in sight of one another but spread out to cover as much ground as they could, closing the distance only when there were windfalls or clumps of brush—places where a child could be lying out of sight and unable to call out to them. They got down and walked in the steep draws and wherever the horses couldn't get through. Quinn was always with them, sticking close to Martha or Henry and seeming confused when they ignored the cows and calves they came across. He wasn't any help with the search—they knew this—but when he got down low on his belly and pushed into a thicket, investigating whatever was in there, one of them would dismount and pick up a stick and feel around, just to be sure. The first time Martha found a dead animal that way—it was a calf that had been gnawed on by coyotes and buzzards—her head filled suddenly with white noise; later, when she lay down on the bed, so tired she thought she might not be able to pull off her socks before falling asleep, her mind went right to the dead animal she had poked with her stick. And then to her daughter, a wheel of images, most of them unbearable.

They didn't noon up but ate lunch in the saddle. They went back to the house after dark and heated the soup or stew Mrs. Stanich or one of the other neighbors had brought by and left on the porch in a dishpan. Arlo often went on to his own place to eat supper with his wife, but every so often he stayed to eat with the Frazers, and while the supper was warming he stripped his shirt off and sat on the front porch rubbing Absorbine into his shoulders and arms, the pungent smell of it overtaking whatever was heating on the stove. Arlo didn't have an ounce of fat on him, and you could still see the lean muscle in his upper arms and back, though age had loosened the skin from his bones so it hung in slack folds around his nipples and above his elbows.

Some of the neighbors who had helped out with the early search tried to finish the Frazers' fall roundup, or as much as they had time for. But they got around to it late, and a good many of the ravines and canyons in the allotment were lightly combed or not combed at all. Anyway, by then a lot of cows and calves had moved off the range, looking for feed, drifting north or west, away from the Echol ranch. The Gantz boys weaned the calves, but they didn't know how many of the heifers Henry wanted sold. All over the country the drought had driven ranchers to sell off more stock than usual, earlier than usual, and this had pushed down the prices. But if you held back, hoping for a better return in the spring, you might not have enough hay to see the herd through the winter. When Chuck Gantz, Arlo's oldest son, took Henry aside and tried to talk to him about shaping up the herd for market, Henry said, “Do whatever's easiest,” and walked off. So they made a rough cut, turning back onto pasture just about half the heifers and driving the rest to the sale lot, along with a few of the long yearlings and old bulls. It wasn't a big payday, and fall sales were their income for the year.

Arlo Gantz had heard of children lost in the mountains and never found, or the bones stumbled on by accident a year later, two years, ten. By the end of September it was clear to him that Mary Claudine was such a child—that she wouldn't be found, or anyway not by one of them—and it was his opinion that Henry needed to get back to the business of running his ranch. This was something he couldn't say to the man except roundabout. What he finally said was just “I think it's best if I get back to my own place, Henry. We been at this a while and I been letting a lot of things slide.”

Henry knew what the old man was getting at, but it didn't make any difference to him. He shook Arlo's hand and thanked him for helping, but then he and Martha and Bud went on doggedly looking for Mary Claudine right into October. Of course by then they were looking for her body, her bones, although none of them said so.

 

One afternoon when Henry rode down into the yard, Mr. Dickerson's big gray Cadillac was parked next to the barn under a heavy blanket of dust. Dean and his father were waiting on the porch. Henry lifted a hand briefly in greeting, but he rode on across the yard to the pasture fence and unsaddled the horse there and turned him out, then he caught up another horse and saddled him.

By the time Henry finished this business with the horses and walked to the house, Mr. Dickerson had changed his mind about what he had planned to say. He had not seen any of the Frazers since the whole thing started, and though he had pictured them grief-stricken, distraught—he had prepared himself for that—Henry seemed to him only drawn down with exhaustion. His face was deeply burnt, his cheeks and lips cracked into deep, scabbed-over furrows that had bled and healed and broken open to heal again. But there wasn't a trace of the sorrow that Mr. Dickerson had been expecting. He had thought he might speak to Henry about his son's broken arm, even apologize for the small part this had played in what happened, but when they shook hands he only said a few words about how sorry he was “for what happened to your daughter.”

Henry nodded but didn't reply. He glanced briefly at Dean, who had been looking down at the ground while his dad spoke.

It wasn't how Mr. Dickerson had imagined things would go. Not for the first time, he wondered if Henry blamed Dean for getting hurt. He wondered if Henry understood how much pain the boy had been in, and how hard it had been for Dean to carry on his life with his good arm in a plaster cast.

“Well, you know it's the boys' last year in high school,” he said. “And school has already started up.” He smiled regretfully, as if this might be something Henry had overlooked. “So we came to see if maybe we could bring Bud back with us to Hart.”

The truth was, Henry had forgotten about the start of school. Martha was ordinarily strong in her feeling about her children's education, but she hadn't said a word about it. “I guess we lost track of it,” Henry said. He didn't have any idea what Bud would say about going back to Hart to finish school. He himself didn't have an opinion about it. In the first days after Mary Claudine had gone missing, his brain and heart had raced along, but by now he was hollowed out, body and soul, too tired to give his attention to anything but the map and the search.

He took off his hat and scratched the dry scalp. “I don't know how long you've been here waiting for Bud,” he said, “but I imagine he won't be in until after dark. It was just luck that I come in early; I had to swap out a horse with a bruised foot. Anyway, I'll talk to him about it and if that's what he wants I'll bring him over to school myself in a day or two.”

Mr. Dickerson nodded. “Well, all right, you talk to Bud. He's a smart boy, he ought to get a high school education. He hasn't missed but three weeks so far. He'll catch right up.”

They shook hands again, and Henry walked with them to the car. Both Dean and his dad wore shoes meant for hardwood floors and sidewalks. The cuffs of their trousers were colorless with dust from walking across the dry yard.

Dean hadn't said a single word. Before they drove off, Henry reached in through the open window and briefly cupped a hand to the boy's shoulder. “You take care,” he said. Dean flashed him a look that Henry couldn't read. He didn't blame the kid for wanting to make a cowboy. He blamed himself for letting him try.

 

There had been so many grass fires in the valley that summer and on into the fall, well past the usual fire season, that whenever the wind came up in the long afternoons of their search they could smell smoke and ash, taste it on their tongues. For many years afterward, whenever any of them smelled wood smoke or burning grass they would fall back suddenly into a memory of those fruitless long days on horseback looking for Mary Claudine.

But the weather finally rounded a corner in the first week of November, days of rain and then a wet, heavy snow. They should have welcomed it after the long drought, but the wet weather turned the steep slopes in the reserve muddy and slick. When Bud's horse slid and rolled off the side of a ravine, it scared Martha and Henry both. He wasn't hurt, but he might have been—might have been killed, which they didn't speak of.

They kept on a little longer, riding wet and cold through the shortening days, but one morning, a week after Bud's fall, Martha left off saddling the horses and went back to the house. She had come inside to tell Henry something that was still unformed in her mind, something about how tired she was. Or something else, something about Mary Claudine. She found him standing in the front room staring out the window at the rain. He didn't turn around, but he must have heard her, because he said, as if she had asked him about it, “I haven't been down to pick up the mail in a while. I'm thinking I ought to go do that before the creek floods the road.”