The Hearts of Horses (24 page)

Henry looked at her and smiled. "I thought I might get you good and tired out and not have to do any skating, but you don't look a bit of it. And I guess that's what we came up here for. I'll get the skates." He cut across the snow to where the sleigh was parked and he came back carrying two pairs of skates.

While they sat at the edge of the ice lacing them up, he said, "Those you're putting on are Emma Adelaide's. Or Aileen's." The skates had been sharpened and oiled and the laces mended.

"They fit me all right," she said. She liked thinking she wore the same boot size as the sisters.

"Mine are pretty old." He held one up to show her or just to admire it. "They belonged to the old man, old Mr. Woodruff, their dad." He had the other skate on, but didn't say if it fit him or not. His unshod foot in a wool sock looked broad and blunt across the toes.

Will and Lizzie went flying past them, their faces flushed with cold or with general happiness, their arms crossed in front and clasped exactly as Martha had seen in book illustrations. Will grinned as they went by and called, "Hey!" over the loud scrape of their skates on the ice. Lizzie's thick wool skirt belled out gracefully around her ankles when they made the curve at the edge of the rink.

Martha had learned to skate from her mother's mother, whose family had come originally from Sweden or Norway—one of those cold northern countries. Gramma Andresen had been a child in Minnesota where there were half a dozen frozen ponds to skate on within a mile of her house; when she settled in Umatilla County and discovered the lack of lakes, she took to carrying water out to a low spot in the pasture as soon as the ground froze every winter. She had two pairs of old skates and all her grandkids took turns sharing them. When it wasn't their turn to wear the skates, they glided around the rink on the flat soles of their worn-out shoes. Skating was one of those things Martha had been cut off from years before when a squabble between her dad and her grandmother flared into outright war.

Martha went out on the ice ahead of Henry and wobbled a bit, then got her balance and began to skate slowly and deliber
ately along the edge of the rink, staying out of the path of other people skating faster around the long irregular oval. When Henry didn't catch up with her—he skated cautiously, had told her he'd been skating only a handful of times in his life—she made a careful turn and went back to him, grinning. He windmilled his arms once and didn't fall, but he laughed and said, "You'd better hold me up," and she let him take her hand because they were both steadier skating together.

When Will and Lizzie went past them again, Henry said, "We could try that," and Martha thought he meant tearing along over the ice, breakneck, nimble-footed, but then he fumbled to take her outside hand in his inside hand, and she did the same, and they glided along slowly in silence, arms crossed and gloved hands clasped. Other couples skated past them, and Martha again became aware of herself as a big coarse girl wearing a man's loose wool trousers, and she imagined the picture she made skating with Henry wasn't anything close to a photograph or drawing in a novel.

"I heard you had something to do with getting Al Logerwell fired," Henry said to her.

She said flatly, lifting her chin, "He was beating my horses."

They weren't her horses but he knew what she meant and didn't call her on it. He said, "I guess I'm not surprised. I guess that's his whip mark on York?"

"Yes it is."

He staggered suddenly, the toe of his skate catching the ice, and he tightened his hands on hers and she braced against him and they didn't fall, either of them. They concentrated on their feet and the surface of the ice and the rhythm of their steady skating. Around them the skate blades cutting the ice made a boisterous clashing noise under the chatter and laughter of other skaters. After a while Henry said, "I heard Logerwell got himself hired by Gordon Allen, up at the JD Ranch."

She shouldn't have been surprised to hear Logerwell had landed work so quickly, but she felt this news as a rebuke of her judgment.

"Gordon is pretty hard on animals himself, so I guess the two of them'll get along all right," Henry said, and he smiled dryly.

Martha thought he could be saying something else—
you can see how much good it did you to get him fired
—and she wanted him to know she never had thought, not even for a minute, that she could protect all the horses in the countryside from men who would beat them. She said stiffly, repeating something she had heard the Woodruff sisters say, "Well, there are plenty of men who will beat a horse. But they'd just better not do it in front of me is all." The bright color in her face wasn't all from the cold and the exercise. She turned her head clear away from Henry, toward the livery barn and the horses standing inside the log rails of the corral. He wasn't sure what he had said to set her off.

"I heard Irwin—is that his name?—hired Ralph Birkmeier's oldest girl to work for him," he said. "I don't know what she knows about farming, but I imagine she won't be beating up the horses, at least."

Martha had met Hilda Birkmeier the day before at the Irwin corral, a girl built like a Shetland pony, short and solid with large callused hands. She wore old overalls she had fixed up herself, sewn double in the knees and the seat, which made Martha think well of her—that and the pony build. Ralph and Mildred Birkmeier lived with their twelve children crowded into a three-room house at the east edge of Opportunity, and since Mrs. Birkmeier often had a baby at the breast, another one weaning, and a third clinging to her skirts, the strain and work of the household had frequently passed down to Hilda. The girl was happy to get away from that, to work outside, and
to have a whole house of her own to live in. She had already taken some of Irwin's barn cats to live with her in the cabin that had been Logerwell's.

"When I saw her, she was marking off some holes to set trees into when the ground thaws," Martha said to Henry. "I guess Mr. Irwin bought some orchard stock from a traveling salesman, and he plans to grow fruit."

Henry had a generally poor opinion of all the late-arriving farmers who had been plowing up the dry slopes of Elwha County the past few years. There were just too many of them for the land to support, and they came in with great excitement and plans for growing sunflowers or soybeans or tobacco, but their excitement usually dried up with the dry summers. Where the ridgetops and uplands and sidehills near the homesteads were shorn of grass and tilled, the creeks ran brown with mud every spring, and there were dust devils all over the hills later on in the summer. The bunch-grass pasture was best left to cattle and horses was his belief. He said, "He'd better have a plan for irrigating. I know the sisters never could get apples to grow unless they kept up their watering all summer."

Martha didn't know if Walter Irwin had a plan for watering his trees. She said, "Hilda's not afraid of hard work," which she knew wasn't anywhere near Henry's point—he hadn't said anything against Hilda Birkmeier—but she felt called on at that moment to state her opinion.

"I guess he's lucky to get her then," Henry said. And he told her, "They're a German family," to let her know why a hardworking girl like Hilda Birkmeier hadn't already been snapped up by somebody else.

Martha didn't think she needed to reply to that, but after a moment she said, "They're Americans more than German, I guess. She told me two of her brothers have gone into the army and they're learning to be soldiers."

He smiled at Martha and didn't weigh whether he ought to say what came into his mind—it just popped out. "Well, I hope they can keep from getting into fights like your two brothers and breaking the sergeant's nose before they get over there." She returned him a look that was partly just surprise, but she saw he was teasing her and she crooked her mouth slightly to hide her own smile.

They took a few more turns around the ice, and then she said, "My dad whipped us kids pretty hard," as if this was what they'd been discussing. When Henry glanced at her, she said, "So I guess that's where my brothers get it from." He waited to see if she would say more, now that she had started to tell him something deeper. She looked over toward the lake, which from here had the color of sheet metal against the darkness of the evergreens. "But he's hard on animals, too. He likes to beat horses just about more than anything else."

He listened and then he said, "Is that right? Well, I guess the apple fell a long way from the tree, then."

She turned back to him with another surprised look, a half-laugh. "I guess it did." She dipped her chin slightly to study the toes of her own skates and Henry's skates moving together across the ice, the slow, deliberate, harsh-sounding strokes not quite synchronous.

"He has the arthritis and he got pretty crippled just about the time I got big enough and strong enough I could stop him beating the little kids. And I'd get between him and a horse. But he'd just wait and do it when I wasn't there. He beat a horse of mine this fall, for no good reason except I wasn't there to stop him, beat him so bad he died." She looked at Henry as if she couldn't believe it herself, that her dad would kill a horse for no reason but that. Then she turned her head and looked toward the horses standing in the livery corral. "So I took my
other ones, Dolly and T.M. and Rory, and I left there and came down here." She said this last bit with an edge on it, a hard edge, which at first made Henry think she was expecting an argument out of him or was ready to fight him over something; but after he'd let it sink in, he knew she wasn't arguing with him at all—that he wasn't the one she was ready to fight.

After a minute Henry said, "My dad got sick and died early, but my stepdad is a pretty good hand with horses. I learned some from him, and then I went out and learned about cows from George Bliss. I guess I must have been about seventeen when I went to work for Bliss."

She glanced at him and said, "Why did you go over to the Woodruff sisters, then, after being with Mr. Bliss for so long? I know they needed help, but why didn't El go, or somebody else?"

"Oh, I've always liked the sisters. And they're still growing cows, whereas half of Bliss's pastures are in wheat now. And I guess Bliss and me are too much like a dad and his son." He began to smile. "After his two boys left home, he began calling me his foreman, but I don't think he'll ever get over thinking I'm seventeen. The sisters, they let me do what needs doing without telling me how to do it." He waited a bit and then he said, "I had a brother who died last year, and I guess I kind of wanted to get away from Mrs. Bliss, too, who seemed to think I needed her to feel sorry for me."

Martha had five brothers who were all living; she had never had to get over the death of anybody she cared about, except some horses. She'd never had anybody feeling sorry for her in the way Henry meant, so she didn't know for sure if she would want that or not. But she thought she understood what he was saying. She hesitated and then said, "I know it's not the same thing, but whenever I've been bunged up from a fall off a horse
I've mostly just wanted to be left alone, not have anybody make a fuss over it, which just makes things hurt worse than otherwise."

He nodded. "Well, it's pretty much the same thing." After a short silence he began to smile. "Anyway, I've got that foreman's house all to myself over at the Split Rock, and I had to listen to El snoring like a freight train when I was working for Bliss."

Martha dipped her chin, smiling too. "I guess I won't ever be a foreman with a house to myself but at least in the barn I don't have to listen to anybody but horses." Henry wondered if she was making a point about wanting to always live alone but then she laughed lightly and said, glancing at him, "I've had horses that snored worse than anybody but they've never kept me awake," and he took these last words as an encouragement.

T
OWARD THE END
of January Tom Kandel began having trouble sleeping at night. He would sit up in the darkness, his legs hanging over the side of the bed, and restlessly rock back and forth above his knees for hours at a time. Ruth at first sat up with him too; she asked him over and over if he was hurting, and she stroked his arm or his forehead as she tried to persuade him to lie down again. But she began gradually to understand or to believe that his restlessness had more to do with fear of dying in the night than with pain, and when nothing she said or did seemed of any use to him she gave up trying to coax him back to sleep. When he sat up in the night she went on lying on the bed pretending he hadn't wakened her, only shifting her body to press an arm or a leg against the small of his back so he would know he was not entirely alone in the darkness.

One day in the last week of the month, just before dawn, he sat up in bed not in the way she had grown used to, but in terrible agony, and began to pace back and forth beside the bed, moaning as an animal moans, a low heavy thrumming from deep in his belly. Ruth sat up in alarm and spoke to him but he
hardly seemed to hear her, and when she got out of bed and touched his shoulder he twisted away from her and went out to the front room and began to stalk a path between the dim shapes of the kitchen table and the sofa. Ruth followed him but before long gave up trying to get him to settle or even speak to her, and she went into Fred's little bedroom.

In recent weeks Fred had been staying away from his father as much as he could. The war had caused the price of furs to rise, and the boy had set out a trapline that caught mostly river rats but once in a while a slough muskrat that brought two dollars from Meryl Briggs at the drugstore. After school and on Saturdays he walked the trapline and took care of the chickens and came into the house late in the evenings. Ruth and Tom both understood: it wasn't his father he was staying away from but his father's dying, and they said little about it, wanting to spare their son as much worry as possible. But now Ruth scarcely had the energy to feel concern for the boy—the shine of his eyes wide open in the early-morning twilight, the stiffness of his body lying on the bed. She told him bleakly, "Fred, I want you to go over to the Rocker V and borrow a horse from Mr. Varden and ride into Bingham for the doctor." He began immediately to pull on his clothes as she stood over him. Both of them could hear Tom's low, terrible purr from the dark front room of the house. "Don't kill the horse or yourself from riding too hard," she said after a moment, and briefly rested her hand on her son's thin arm. He went on lacing up his boots in silence.