Painted Horses (16 page)

By dawn he had a hand on her withers. He felt her flesh coil like a spring, but she allowed it. He breathed into the soft cups of her nostrils. At sunup he had a hackamore over her head. He led her to the gate and loosely tied her. He reached into his pocket for a flask.

He drew ocher pigment into the wing-bone cylinder, drew it in with his breath and held it. A burst of color contained. He placed his left hand with his fingers wide against the top plank of the gate. A push from his lungs and the ocher hit the air. He lifted his hand away. The cylinder dangled from his lips.

He led the horse through the sage, toward the bluff where he’d stowed his things. Later the mustangers would find in place of their would-be saddle horse an open gate bearing the negative imprint of fingers and palm. They’d scratch their heads and swear.

Now with six years passed he rode the mare as though the mare were born to nothing else, as though neither could conceive of another way to exist.

He rested at noon in the yard of a rickety trapper’s cabin up a draw where the mountains met the plains. A creek cut through aspen and stone into meadow like a riband unfurling, off-color with snowmelt and no larger than a roadside ditch. Someone had devised a rough cistern out of creek stones at the head of the meadow near the tilting cabin and a pool had formed. John H pulled the saddle and let the mare drink, then hobbled her in the grass and watched her graze. Up in the rocks at the edge of the meadow he caught motion with his eye and when he looked he saw marmots, darting in the shade and standing quickly erect to stare back.

He caught a tinge of sulfur from the draw and looked again at the water, felt the low throb in his knee. He took his rifle and walked upstream into the corridor of trees. At the upper edge of the aspens he saw the half-regenerated remains of a lightning strike and at the head of the burn wet muddy earth churned and pocked with the watery tracks of moose and elk. A mineral lick. He slogged around the edge of the lick and saw steam rising from the grass.

The spring issued as a curtain of water from a rock face in the trees, running steadily across slick moss and corroded stones to dump into a second cistern. From the looks of the moss he doubted anyone had used the spring since the cabin was abandoned.

He considered his knee again, its interminable throb. Considered the rising steam. He shucked his boots and stripped naked and lowered into the pool. He stuck his head into the hot flow.

He moved after a moment to cooler water, the rocks against his skin like bricks from an oven. He leaned back and yawned and thought he could die here happy.

An hour later with his hair wet he curried the mare in the meadow and cinched the saddle to her back. He rode back onto the plains.

By nightfall at a crossing on the Tongue River he’d become practically lightheaded with hunger and when a pair of sage grouse got up from the bank with their lumbering flush, John H watched the birds glide across the water in a short flight and marked them down. He rode through the river and hitched the mare along the bank. He took his rifle and looped a hasty sling and set out on a direct line through the sage. He stopped every few feet and looked and moved again and hoped the light would hold.

Finally two avian heads, above the broom grass. Mere silhouettes though the male the larger. John H thumbed the safety and put the rifle to his shoulder in the same motion. The bullet clipped the cock’s neck like a stroke of surgery. The hen flushed again.

He skewered the breast over a fire, dense purple meat that dripped and sizzled and that he devoured barely seared on the outside. Stabbing flavors of spring hormones and sage. He’d sleep like a tuckered child. The mare cropped forage nearby.

In the morning he rode upriver and made the ranch kitchen before the noon bell. He grained the mare and turned her into an empty pasture north of the barn and then shaved with water his friend’s wife heated on the stove. He sat and coaxed her to talk while she fixed the meal and waited for her husband and his hirelings to come in from the sheds. Her children shouted in the yard. She missed shellfish, and hake. She missed cod.

When the men arrived she lay spring lamb and pickled beets and potato laced with garlic and oozing butter on a checked cloth on the outdoor table. The men had names like Marco and Justo and Marie-Pierre. None of them were young. They had followed the shearing circuit from Nevada. In a day or two they would sharpen clippers, get to work here.

In the evening John H sat on the porch with his friend in the lamplight and drank Canadian whiskey over shards of ice. His friend brought out boxes of bullets shipped from Abercrombie & Fitch in Manhattan, a roll of raw canvases and tubes of oil paste from New York Central. Several new vinyl phonographs as well. John H could hear the mare huffing and snorting, alone in a pen near the house.

“She misses you. Truer than a wife.”

John H laughed. “I wish I knew.”

“Ha. It might happen yet. My wife has designs for you, rubio. She has friends. Beautiful Basque girls.”

John H nearly let this pass but the whiskey seemed to ignite in his brain. “Already had one. Once upon a time.”

Now his friend let something pass.

In the morning they looked over the green horses, eleven of them, Morgans with dainty skulls, the marks of the branding iron scabrous on their gaskins. He watched them awhile and the horses looked back with the inquisitiveness common to their breed. They seemed to sense what was coming.

He worked the horses for four days. He moved the body of them from the pasture into the corral by the barn, took each singly into the arena and introduced bridle, saddle, and rider. These horses were not skittish like wildings but merely fiery the way unschooled two-year-olds should be. The horses in the corral watched the proceedings in the arena like actors at a stage call and as the number of untested horses dwindled the process became easier.

By the end of the second day all eleven had been ridden in the arena once. Only one, a young bay stallion, made any show of bucking. John H grabbed the bridle along the horse’s cheek and wrenched its head back and around. The bay turned twice like a corkscrew and quit.

He saddled and rode each horse in the pasture on the third day and on the fourth he took six of them one by one out into the low hills east of the ranch, to the landscape where they would spend their working lives. He rode around boulders and across ditches, through thickets where rabbits and deer might flush.

He finished on the bay stallion. When he came in for the evening he pulled the saddle in the corral and worked a curry comb while the horse chewed down molasses and oats. He absently listened to his own mare nicker and snort from a stall in the barn.

He’d just worked the comb down the stallion’s left flank when the horse’s head jerked out of the grain like a bass exploding from a pond. The stallion neighed once, loudly and inquisitively, and the mare answered back. The stallion strained against halter and rope and John H saw the corral post flex with the animal’s weight. The horse stamped around and neighed again, a sound like the blare of a trumpet but with the unmistakable primal treble of frustration and possession and lust.

John H pulled the slipknot and led the horse on a short lead out through the corral and around to the open door of the barn. The mare sensed his presence without seeing him. She put up a clatter in the darkened stall, a muscular shuffle and bump against floorboards and walls, the sound of a hoof thumping. She blew through her lips.

John H gripped the halter beneath the bay’s head in his fist and used his own weight to manage the horse. He brought him forward to the half door of the stall and let him see the mare. She turned a gush of urine loose on the floor. The bay pushed forward mightily and John H had to pull like a horse himself to get the stallion turned and steered outside again. He heard the generator kick on, the dirty bulb lights surging in the barn.

The mare neighed out one last time and the stallion tried to wheel back to her. John H spoke sharply and plodded forward. He got the horse to the pasture and turned him loose. The horse ran down the fence line, head up and mane and tail flying. His eyes never left the barn.

John H returned to the stall and saddled the mare. He rode to the house and his friend came out from the dinner table to stand on the porch.

“I need you to get my rifle and my saddlebags and a plate of food. Also need to settle. Your Morgans are what you might consider green broke.”

“You’re leaving? At night? You’ve been horseback the last three days.”

“Mare just came into cycle.”

“You aim to breed her?”

“Not exactly.”

“I give up trying to understand you, rubio.”

He could hear the hum of the generator, see the glow of light through the kitchen window. He said, “You wouldn’t be the first.”

3

As a girl right into her teens Catherine was forbidden to say the word pregnant. She wasn’t the only one. Her last year of summer camp following the eighth grade she and two other well-bred young ladies began to pepper their private conversation with a torrent of swear words. Up-and-coming sophisticates with their own secret ceremony, hell and damn and bitch, but every one of them agreed—pregnant was the mother of them all, a word to invite dish soap and beatings.

Catherine looked back on those daring weeks and thought how plain it all seemed now, how she’d entered a rite of passage and never even knew it. Not trying to be bad so much as trying to be bigger.

But pregnant. She flinched even now to say it in front of her mother.

Miriam on the other hand had an iconoclastic streak. She seemed to take a majestic delight in impolite language. She rambled on about bodily function and gruesome or indecorous animal behavior, a predilection not minimized by her mare’s relentless flatulence their first day out.

“This nag you’ve got me on has the green farts,” she announced. “I swear. What is she, pregnant or something?”

Allen was ahead of her, riding a leggy and undeniably magnificent dappled gray. He looked back over his shoulder. “The hell you talking about?”

“It happens, you know. It’s a pregnancy symptom? Excessive farting?”

“Sounds like you know a good bit about it. Been pregnant yourself?”

“Not that I know of. Have you?”

“Keep it up, missy.”

“You keep it up. If you can.”

He shook his head. “Quite a little lady. Wouldn’t you say so, Miss Lemay?”

At the moment Catherine found herself in small position to say much of anything. After two hours downhill riding the fingers of both hands felt permanently frozen to the saddle horn. The meat of her bottom ached from the slippery angle of the seat. To make things worse her horse wanted constantly to crowd the tail of Miriam’s horse, a horse she could attest indeed to have a boisterous fundament.

“For what it’s worth, no, she ain’t pregnant,” said Allen. “But she is what you get on five minutes’ notice.”

Miriam looked around at Catherine and grinned triumphantly. Catherine tried to smile back. She managed a wince. Ten years ago her riding instructor had described her in a written evaluation to her parents as “ambitious, aggressive, and anxious to please.” What a difference a decade made.

They leveled out when the trail dipped into a wash. Catherine found her voice. “Could we stop? Please?”

Jack Allen spoke sideways over his shoulder. “We’ll be to the bottom in half an hour.”

“She has to pee but she’s too polite to say so,” said Miriam. “Get with the program, chief.”

Jack Allen wheeled his horse and reined to a halt. Miriam stopped abreast of him. He looked out over the landscape. “You’ll wind up yet with a sock in that mouth of yours.”

Miriam had already dismounted. She stuck her tongue out at him, then handed him her reins. She took Catherine’s horse by the bridle. Catherine half pried, half wrenched her fingers loose from the horn. She climbed stiffly down and looked around.

The wash bisected an open expanse of raw stone and empty slanted earth, the granulated soil layered in folds like the overbaked and crumbling crust of a pie. Here and there a green shock of bunchgrass pushed through the stony soil. She wished for real vegetation, even a screen of saplings or a bush to hide behind, but nothing sprouted. Miles across the canyon she could see the shapes of trees, evergreens, splashed like cuneiform across the face of a rising cliff, no more useful to her now than a code she couldn’t decipher.

She looked up the wash. A tumble of boulders jutted, some precariously balanced. She couldn’t see any another choice. She fished a wad of tissue from her bag and began to climb.

“Don’t get snakebit,” said Allen.

Catherine paused. Everything out of his mouth seemed on some level a veiled threat, so she had no idea what the actual threat might be. Perhaps he was toying with her. Perhaps he was so annoyed at her weak little bladder he wanted her to squat and wet the earth right in the open. She had half a mind to drop her pants where she stood just to prove she wasn’t some shrinking little violet, but then perhaps he already knew her greatest fear was simply the fear of looking stupid. He didn’t strike her as particularly smart. Neither did he seem at all the fool. More a creature of unerring instinct.

Unreconstructed, Mr. Caldwell had called him. She looked at Jack Allen and thought of something else—the stupidest thing might be to ignore him. “What if I see one?”