The Hearts of Horses (20 page)

They went along in silence for more than half the way. At one point a coyote ran across the snow ahead of them and both Henry and Martha pulled up their horses at the same time and sat watching until it trotted off into the deep shadow under a copse of trees, and they resumed riding after a minute, without either of them saying a word about it.

It wasn't long after that Henry said, as if the words were ones he'd been turning over in his head for quite a while, "It can weigh on your mind, if you think very hard about a horse's life."

He might have meant anything, but what came into her own head was Alfred Logerwell beating his horse with a pipe, and her dad's horses, and other horses she had known, horses who were gaunt, thirsty, lame, wounded, broken-winded, frightened, discouraged.

"There's a look I've seen in some horses," Henry Frazer said, still going along as if this was part of a long conversation he'd been having with himself, "like they're just reconciled to taking whatever comes. Like they've given up, and they don't have much expectation of anything good ever happening to them. You see it in their eye." He didn't look at Martha. "But some others never do get reconciled. I had a horse once so determined not to be broke that he bucked under me until his heart busted and he died." His face in the night was without expression.

She was startled beyond words, not by the story of a horse breaking its own heart—she had seen that sort of thing herself
—but by Henry Frazer telling it to her that way, quietly and at the end of a few words about pondering a horse's life. They rode on silently. It was cold, and the air held a bluish light. The horses' unshod feet moving through the snow made a dry, quiet, steady squeaking.

Finally she said, "I know a wrangler who joined up with the Canadian army, and he was telling me about the horses over there."

He didn't ask her where she meant; in those days people understood that "over there" meant the trenches of France and Belgium. He said, "They don't say much about it in the newspapers," and Martha said, frowning, "No they don't."

Martha had known Bud Small from working with him up in Umatilla County, where he was known to be a good hand with horses—better than most, in Martha's opinion. Bud had spent a year working at a Canadian remount depot in France and then had shipped home when a horse fell on him and broke both his legs. He had told her everything that she now began telling Henry—everything about the terrible plight of the horses over there—how they died on the transport ships from fear and trampling; how they pined with homesickness and consequently took cold or pneumonia and died at the remount depots before they ever got to the front; how they were often starved and thirsty to the point of eating harness or chewing their stablemate's blankets; how as many horses were invalided by war nerves as were killed in battle—their hearts and minds not able, any more than the men's, to bear the airplane bombs and grenades, falling fuses, the shrieks of wounded men and animals.

These were things that had been on Martha's mind for months, ever since she had gone to visit Bud at his sister's house, where he was laid up in heavy plaster. But she had not
talked about them to anyone before now, and saying them to Henry—in snatches, with silences between—her voice rose and rose until she became aware of it and fell silent in the middle of what she was saying, which was something terrible and distressing about horses being whipped and beaten for rearing back from the smell of blood.

Henry Frazer had listened to her without interrupting, and he glanced at her when she stopped talking, then waited to hear what else she might say; he let the silence spin out so long that finally Martha felt she couldn't keep from telling him one more thing. "I think if they would let horses stick together, the ones who come from the same farms and ranches, the ones who are acquainted with each other, if they let them stick together maybe they wouldn't get so homesick and they might hold up better." She said this to Henry as if he was the one able to do something about it. "Isn't that how it is with the men? They do better when they go over there with a pal or a brother."

Buyers had been coming through some parts of the country almost from the beginning of the European war, gathering up American horses and mules to ship to the British army. But Pendleton was in a far corner and there hadn't been much of a push to send local horses to the war effort until lately. Some horses well known to Martha had been among the first batch of two thousand shipped out in the autumn just past, and it was those horses she was thinking about now. Some of them had been raised together on the L Bar L since they were foals, and she knew they'd bear up better if they were kept together.

Henry said, after another short silence, "I guess you know Will Wright is planning to join up."

She looked over at him. She thought he might be making a point about the men, whose suffering ought to be more impor
tant to her than the horses. She wondered if Henry even believed her, that horses had their horse friends and that they might become homesick and lonesome among strangers.

Then he said, "I heard the other day Roger Newbry's planning to join up too. They've been friends since they were born, just about. So I guess they'll try to keep each other company and out of trouble." He didn't say this lightly, as if he was making a joke about boys going off to the fairgrounds in Pendleton; his look was solemn, humorless. Martha saw that the only point he had wanted to make was about friendship—friendship between men, just as between horses.

After several moments had passed, she said, "Two of my brothers went in together."

Henry looked over at her. He and his brother wouldn't have joined up together, he knew this—Jim had been hard set against the war. Although he hadn't thought it through exactly, he knew his brother's death was in some way the reason he planned to claim his farm worker's exemption and stay out of it if he ever was called up. But a brief, ridiculous pain sometimes still rose up in him, as if Jim's death had cheated them both out of the chance to go off to France and die together as heroes. Whenever he heard about brothers joining up he felt a momentary, inexplicable pining.

"Where are they now? Are they over there yet?"

"I guess they're still in Georgia, one of those forts where they're training soldiers." She hadn't thought she would tell him any more of it, but then found she was going ahead. "They got into some trouble, a fight I guess, and both of them are in the stockade. I heard Davey broke somebody's nose, a sergeant or a captain. So I don't know if they'll even get shipped out." She said this without looking at Henry and without seeming to offer an opinion about it.

They stopped at the fence line above the Bliss homeplace
and Henry held on to Boots while Martha got down to work the wire on the gate. Below them the lights in the house and the bunkhouse made a pale geometry behind drawn curtains. Someone had hung a lamp from the eave of the barn, and its light fell out on the trampled snow.

When they started down the hill, Henry Frazer said quietly, going on with something they'd left in the air, "I suppose whenever a horse gets traded to somebody new he must wonder. Will he get beaten? Will he get enough to eat? I hate to think what goes through a horse's mind when he's hauled off and set down in the middle of a war."

Martha looked toward Henry. He was riding with his shoulders hunched, his elbows held in close. The planes of his cheeks were rounded and soft, his once-broken nose wide and fleshy below that heavy brow bone. His eyes had a certain aspect, as if they were always peering into something interesting. He was looking out across the snowfield where the dark shapes of cows and horses stood against the blue-white snow, clumps of two or three of them standing together, as still as anchored boats on a millpond.

I
F DR. MCDONOUGH
had had his way, he wouldn't have told Tom Kandel the nature of his illness at all—he felt people shouldn't have to suffer that kind of knowledge—but Tom and Ruth had been stubbornly of a different mind, insistent and unrelenting in their demand to know, and finally he had been forced to tell them the mass in Tom's belly was a cancer.

In those days, a lot of what people thought they knew about cancer was wrong. Some people, even some doctors, hadn't let go of the idea it could be spread from one person to the next or that it might start from eating tomatoes or drinking water out of a trout stream. And of course for the most part the only treatment was surgery, which in just about every case wasn't resorted to until the cancer had manifested itself in some visible way on the body. Dr. McDonough didn't know the cause of Tom's cancer so he didn't offer the Kandels any opinion about it, and because the tumor was in Tom's liver he was careful not to mention surgery. The Kandels were both educated people; Tom was the son of a doctor. When Dr. McDonough told them where the cancer was located neither of them asked him
about a cure or regimen of treatment, nothing of that kind at all, which was a relief to him.

After Tom learned what he had—that his body was incubating cancer cells—he carried on the ordinary affairs of his life for a month or so out of the same sheer stubbornness that had made the doctor give way. But by the middle of January he had become too weak and tired to keep up his job feeding cows for Bill Varden, and Dr. McDonough began coming by the house every morning to give him a hypodermic of morphine. Tom and Ruth then passed through a brief, almost pleasant interlude in the course of his dying. Fred took over the job of feeding and caring for the chickens now that his father was too sick to do it, but otherwise carried on behaving as if Tom wasn't dying, and saved his parents from having to think very much about him. Friends came in and out of the house with gifts of food and sat down to talk with Tom for what they expected would be the last time, and then went home and left the two of them alone. A good part of every day Tom would sleep, leaving Ruth to do only the quiet things that would not disturb him: she spent the bulk of those hours reading, writing letters, embroidering, knitting, free of guilt for not keeping up with the hard housework. When Tom was awake she wanted to spend every moment with him. They clung to each other, held hands as they had not done since the early days of their marriage, and Tom sometimes teased her or joked with her—he came out into the front room one night wearing nothing but his winter underwear hooked up to striped suspenders. He talked a blue streak, as if by keeping silence at bay he could reassure himself that he was still alive. He even talked to her interestedly about his own funeral, smothering her refusals with his mild persistence and offering firm opinions about what hymns should be played and who the pallbearers ought to be, and making a list of poems he wanted read in addition to the Gospels the minis
ter would insist upon. He made a dark joke about the failure of his appetite—how it would lighten the load for his friends carrying the coffin—and when Ruth burst into tears he laughed, but then cried too, and held out his arms to her in a tender way.

At one time in his life Tom must have been a churchgoer, because it was well known he could sing any hymn you might name, and quote long verses from the New Testament. But during the years he lived in the Elwha Valley he was a famously shameless agnostic. Before he became ill, it had been his habit to walk with his wife and son to the Presbyterian church in Bingham every Sunday, then stroll on down to the riverbank and fish for an hour before going back to retrieve his family; cancer did not cause him to embrace God as some people had expected. When the Presbyterian minister visited him Tom listened, and then mildly and without pleasure pointed out the inconsistencies and defects in the man's reasoned arguments for heaven and a life after death.

Sometime during the middle part of January, Marcella Blantyre, who hardly knew Tom at all except to nod and smile, went over to the Kandel house to see him. She was a devout member of the Bingham Presbyterian church but she was not on a church mission to kneel down and pray with Tom and Ruth. Marcella imagined Tom was the sort of person who wouldn't ordinarily have given a woman like her any credit, but Ruth Kandel had asked her to come to the house, and Marcella didn't have to think twice before saying yes. She told Ruth truthfully that she didn't know if she could do Tom any good, but she would come by and see.

Marcella had a reputation in the Elwha Valley for healing people's illnesses merely by the laying on of hands. This wasn't something she advertised or made a boast of; in fact, Marcella was a garden-variety farm wife who lived with her husband on 160 acres of river-bottom land and devoted herself to raising
five children while her husband raised onions. But she'd been struck by lightning when she was about nineteen years old, a new bride expecting her first child; and after she recovered her senses, and after the baby was born perfectly formed and perfectly healthy, Marcella had begun quietly to work cures. The people in her church all knew at least one person who knew a person who had been healed of some ailment or affliction by her hands. After the Presbyterian minister's son was cured of stammering, the minister had preached in his Sunday sermon that miracles were still taking place in the world, two thousand years after God's son walked the earth. Marcella, sitting in a pew toward the rear of the church, had bent her head and looked at her shoes. She was entirely a sensible woman and she knew she might not have had anything to do with curing his son of stammering; she knew many of the sick people she'd laid hands on would doubtless have gotten better without her help. But some of them, yes, she felt sure she'd made them well simply by passing her hands over their bodies. She could sense when this happened: a shivering electrical vibration as if a spark had jumped the space between the tips of her fingers and the skin of the person she was treating. She didn't know what it was that had entered her body when she was struck by lightning, but she knew it to be a gift of some kind, a gift from God.

Tom had been dozing in a chair—he was sitting with a quilt spread over his lap, his legs stretched out so his slippered feet could rest on a leather stool—but as soon as Ruth opened the door to Marcella he stood up from the chair and began folding up the quilt and said cheerfully, "I imagine I've given you a real job of work today, Mrs. Blantyre," as if he had hired her to chop several cords of wood or paint the entire house from top to bottom. She understood from this that Ruth had told him she was coming and why, and this relieved her of her mild anxiety about the visit. She smiled and said, "Well, I can only do my
best, Mr. Kandel," which he seemed to find unexpected. He smiled slowly. "We can't ask for more than that," he said, and looked at Ruth, whose eyes immediately filled with tears. Ruth didn't believe in Marcella's gift—neither did Tom—but it was impossible for them both not to hope they were wrong.