The Hearts of Horses (21 page)

It turned out to be a strange contradiction in Tom, that he was more willing to entertain the idea of a magical healer than of a Benevolent Creator and a life after death. They sat down, the three of them, and while Marcella quietly told him the story of what had happened to her and what she had seen during the moments she'd lain dead in her garden—
a bright white light and then colors I've never seen in life, and a figure in white coming toward me through the rainbow, and his hand when it touched my shoulder just going right down into my heart to shake it awake
—Tom leaned forward in his chair and listened with terrible attention and yearning. He asked her interestedly about the time when she first became aware of her gift, and asked her to tell him about some of the people she had cured. When Marcella said to him that she hadn't ever healed anyone of cancer—hadn't ever been asked to—Tom said quietly, "I guess you're not expecting this to be one of your cures," but lifting the last words so he appeared to be asking her something.

"I don't know, Tom. Only God knows," she said, which made him smile slightly.

"Well, God holds his cards pretty close to the vest, which is one of the things I intend to complain about if it turns out there's anyone to complain to." He looked at Ruth, but she had become very still and shuttered and was looking out the window at the cold afternoon dusk.

They carried on talking a little while longer. Marcella told him she would, in a moment, ask him to lie down quietly on the sofa with his eyes closed while she touched him, but that in fact she wouldn't actually be touching him, just passing her
hands close to his body, and that he might feel the force of her hands as an electrical spark, a warmth on his skin; then after a short silence she told him she was ready to start. He looked quickly at Ruth, a naked look of need and fear, and Ruth turned her face to him and pursed her mouth to stop something equally desperate from showing there. Then she crossed the room and bent down to pull off her husband's slippers as if he were a child. He touched her hair, and she reached tremblingly for his hand, a moment so intimate Marcella felt she should look away. He stretched out on the sofa and Ruth stood over him a moment, straightening his clothes, not meeting his eyes, then she kissed him lightly and smiled and went back to her chair. Tom's eyes followed her. He took a breath that could be clearly heard in the room, and then another quieter one and closed his eyes. Marcella went to the sofa and let herself down on her knees beside it. She prayed silently a few moments to clear her mind of all the scraps and candle-ends of the day, and then she began passing the flat palms of both her hands over his body slowly, long sweeping strokes downward from the top of his head as if brushing the cancer out through the soles of his feet.

He was pale and thin, but so absolutely endowed with the force of life, even lying flat and still on the sofa with his eyes drawn closed, that it was almost impossible to believe his death might be only days or weeks away. Marcella had watched over the deaths of, now, seven people, people who had been beyond her help for reasons known only to God, and she knew the suddenness with which the animating soul of a person could fly out of the body and leave behind a meaningless clay corpse. If she hadn't believed so strongly in God the Comforter, death would have seemed to her almost a parlor trick, an unfathomable disappearing act.

She closed her eyes and emptied her mind as well as she was
able, of this and other distractions. She let her cold hands rove above Tom in slow, rhythmic strokes. There was no sound in the room except a ticking clock and the breaths of three people. Tom, through his closed eyes, felt a slight sense of the shadow of Marcella's hands when they passed over his face, a slight sense of her body leaning above him as she plied her mysterious art. His skin, seeking some feeling of heat, of electricity, yearned toward her helplessly.

I
N THOSE DAYS
, plenty of men thought nothing of being rough with horses. A horse had to have his spirit entirely broken was what a lot of men thought, had to be beaten into abject submission. Martha didn't know Walter Irwin very well, didn't know his feeling about horses, but she knew if he held the usual opinions it wouldn't do a bit of good to tell him his hired man was beating horses and shortchanging their feed. And she knew there wasn't a damn thing she could say to Logerwell himself that would change his mind or improve the situation for the horses. In her experience, anything she said to him would be sure to make things worse.

At Irwin's corral she began to grain the horses herself while she was changing saddles and mounts, which was time she could hardly spare, but it took care of the problem of Logerwell's wife shortchanging the horses on their feed. Through the next few days she went on undecided whether to speak to Irwin about the other part of it. She seldom saw Logerwell but kept an eye out for him warily and watched all the horses for any sign they were being casually mistreated. And she thought back to every mark of injury a horse had suffered, trying to re
member if it had happened while the horse was standing in Irwin's corral. On a Sunday morning, after a week of watching, a black gelding named York, which belonged to the Thiedes and had spent the past couple of nights at Irwin's, showed up with a long red weal across his cheek. It could have come from scraping himself nervously against a fence rail or from another horse—stablemates didn't always get along and would sometimes chew on each other—or it might have come from somebody slashing him with a whip or a stick. Martha felt pretty sure she knew which one of those it was. She stood there holding the McClelland saddle against her chest, looking at that stripe across the long plane of York's face, those beads of scabbing blood, and then slung the saddle over a corral rail and started on foot up the muddy track to the farmhouse.

Irwin's family money set him apart from most of his homesteader neighbors. His house was a white clapboard two-story built high up on a logged-off rise above the north bank of the Little Bird Woman River. He had built his barn and corrals a fair hike down the hill from his house, which was meant to keep the smell of the animals out of his kitchen but also meant he couldn't keep much of an eye on what was going on down there. In addition, the house was poorly situated in terms of the practicalities of snowdrift and wind, and he'd had to drill his well a long way down to reach water; but sitting up high like that, the house could be seen by pretty nearly everybody living at the eastern end of the valley, which his neighbors thought was his reason for putting it there, and which he would have been surprised to hear. He had built on that rise almost entirely for its aerie view across the river to the Whitehorns.

The property was a relinquishment he had bought from the railroad when another homesteader gave up on it, and the Logerwells now occupied a small house the first nester had built in the lee of the hill, about halfway up from the barn.
When Martha went past that house the windows were dark and there wasn't any sign of Logerwell or his wife. Several hogs were sprawled in a deeply muddy pen across the runway from the house. One of them, a black and white sow, lifted her head and blinked her small pink eyes at Martha before lowering her cheek into the mud. A black dog, underfed and every bit as muddy as the pigs, lay in the yard tied to a post by a short piece of rope. He watched Martha without moving.

She went on up to Irwin's porch and knocked at the door and tightened the throat-catch of her hat against the wind and when he came to the door she said quickly and forcefully, "Mr. Irwin, your hired man has been whipping some of the horses I'm working with and not feeding them the grain they need."

He looked at her in bewilderment. "Logerwell?" he said, as if he had more than one hired hand and was sorting out which one she meant to indict.

Walking up the hill, she had become just about as sore as a boil—at the edge of blazing up if Irwin gave her the least reason for it. She said more loudly than was needed, "If you're planning to keep on letting him work for you, I'll have to take your horse out of the circle."

His brain gradually took in what she had said. "He's been beating on your horses," he said, without questioning it.

"Yes sir, and yours too, and their feed's been going to his wife's pigs, I'm pretty sure."

He stood stiffly in the entry of his house with a book held down in one hand and the other hand resting on the doorknob. He was dressed in his Sunday suit with a plan to attend church, but the book he was holding, marking the page with his thumb, was not the Bible but a history of the French monarchy. "Is he down there right now?" he said, and stepped out on the porch to look down the slope toward the barn and the hired man's small house. The wind caught the front of his hair and lifted it
in a cockscomb, caught the pages of his book and flapped them against the back of his hand.

"No sir, I don't think he is."

With the recent change of weather, the mountains across the way were dressed in snow clear down to the valley floor. Irwin turned his head toward them and studied the view for a long minute and then tightened up his mouth and said, with a glance toward Martha, "All right, then. I'll take care of it." He started back into the house.

She couldn't let it stand that way. She said again, "If you're planning to keep him on, I've got to take your horse off the circle." She would hate to leave Irwin's roan horse behind, hate leaving him in Logerwell's custody, but she would do it to protect the rest of them.

Walter said to Martha in a slight tone of umbrage, "I'll make it clear to him, he's to quit mistreating the animals." He had had trouble from the first day getting his hired man to do much of anything he asked, but he believed his own words: he would make his point with Logerwell this time and get control of the situation. He had seen the man cruel to his own wife's pigs and to his dog for no good cause; he wasn't much surprised by what the girl had told him.

"He'll go on doing it," she said fiercely. "He'll find ways to do it without you knowing." It was her belief—her experience—that when Logerwell heard it was Martha who'd brought the complaint he would start looking for ways to take out his grievance on her horses.

In truth, Walter Irwin wouldn't have been sorry to see the man go. But he had no experience with firing anyone and little hope of finding somebody else to work for him now that the war had taken so many men off to the army. He said to Martha in exasperation, "If I turn him out, I don't know where I'll get another hand."

Martha flared up. "I don't know either, but if you let him go on working here he'll go on hurting the horses until he kills one, which I won't let happen." Her voice shook from deep feeling, and she cleared her throat a couple of times to try to hide it. She put her hands inside her coat pockets and fisted them.

Walter stared at her, taken aback, startled to see tears standing briefly in her eyes. He hardly knew the girl, but on the evidence of her dress and the masculine work she'd chosen for herself he had formed an opinion of her as hard and leathery, not very much different from the ranch men who were his neighbors, men he believed to be without an ounce of soft feeling or the capacity for sentiment. Martha went on looking at him heatedly, with her chin squared and her fists working inside her coat. Her silence and her stubborn stare made him feel put upon, provoked into taking some kind of action. He turned from her again and looked out at the mountain range without seeing it, and in a moment found the gumption to put himself on the right side of the question.

On Monday morning when she rode up the lane to Irwin's corral, Martha passed Mrs. Logerwell headed downhill toward the River Road pushing a handcart loaded with their household goods, and Mr. Logerwell behind her driving their half-dozen pigs and leading the ribby black dog on a short length of rope. Mrs. Logerwell's face turned pink when she saw Martha, and as they passed each other she said, "If you's the one got him booted out—" in a hoarse, threatful wheeze that was more self-righteous injury than promise of harm. When Martha came even with the first of the pigs, Logerwell began jabbing the hindmost ones viciously with the homemade prod he was carrying—a stick of wood fitted with a metal hook—and the pigs squealed and broke into a frantic trot, which evidently was meant to unseat Martha from her horse. She was riding the
Woodruffs' palomino mare, the one named Maude, and when Martha said "Whoa," Maude planted her feet and held still until the stampede of pigs had gone by; the horse hadn't liked any of it, but she'd long since come to trust Martha Lessen in these matters.

Logerwell's look was white-lipped with venom, and as he came on down the middle of the lane he slung the stick back and forth alongside his leg, the metal hook making a thin whistle through the air. Martha shifted her weight onto her toes resting in the stirrups in case she needed to ask Maude to move quickly, and she brought the horse over close to the fence at the side of the lane: she had seen that look on her dad, and even once or twice on her oldest brother, Davey. But when the man came alongside her he only let out a wordless sound of loathing and yanked on the dog's rope hard enough to make him yelp. He didn't look at Martha or say anything to her, just went on whipping his stick back and forth as he followed the pigs and his wife down the hill.

S
TANLEY CAMBRIDGE HAD A
320-acre timber claim along the north side of Lewis Lake bordering the outlet of the Little Bird Woman River, and sometime around 1910 he cut a road through from the lower valley to the lake, a narrow double-track negotiable by wagon or sleigh. He built four little lodging cabins and a livery barn on his property and advertised the place as a mountain encampment. Elwha County families would come up by wagon or car in the summer, rent a cabin or put up a tent for a week or two at a stretch, take Stanley's little excursion boat up the lake for picnicking and sightseeing, or spread nets for the spawning sockeye salmon and salt away fish in ten-gallon kegs for winter use or sale to the mines down in Canyon City. And in the winter Stanley would flood a low pasture to make a skating rink and rent out toboggans and sleds, which brought people up to the lake by horseback or sleigh to spend the day skating and sledding.