Life for early 20th century Oregon farmers was gritty
Published Feb 14, 2008Beneath the very mannish hat, the buckskin chaps and the loose-starred spurs, 19-year-old horse whisperer Martha Lessen is a romantic at heart. After a labor-driven day doing work most of her male colleagues would call “bronco busting” horses in eastern Oregon during World War I, she retreats to a makeshift bunk house and escapes by the light of a kerosene lamp into books such as “Black Beauty.” Her technique of breaking wild, untamed horses so that they can be used effectively by the farmers and ranchers is one that builds on trust while taking a strong upper hand with a mix of confidence and gentleness. “It was part of her ritual to brush the dirt and mud off a horse before she saddled him.”
Using Martha as the lead rider, author Molly Gloss canters down a literary trail along the valley of the Little Bird Woman River in Elwha County, encountering families and individuals who face the gritty reality of life in 1917 that is both raw and often deeply painful. Like a sepia photograph with its edges frayed and faded, she shoots candid glimpses that burn a lasting image on the minds of readers who sit down with “The Hearts of Horses.”
Silhouetted against the vastness of wheat fields and white mountains, the author writes of backbreaking hard work on the part of recent homesteaders mixed with longtime residents, some existing in “shapeless, shadowless vagueness.” Using broken grammar where it fits the character, the language carefully crafted by Gloss is plain and straightforward and fitting for the stark environment. For example, “The daylight was thin, a cold and wintry light, and it pulled all the color out of the man’s face;” Old-maid sisters Emma and Adelaide had “… skin the color and grain of a wooden ax handle.” Still the author orchestrates the writing from a strident dreariness to a lyrical pitch at some turns: “The lake glittered in the sun, an immense sheet of platinum mottled with thin floats of pure white ice.”
Universal themes emerge throughout the novel that cross time and place—bigotry, loneliness, alcoholism, abuse, cruelty to animals, coping with sickness and dying—and lend both shivering cold and burning warmth to the story. A noteworthy high point in the tale is the breathtakingly beautiful yet hauntingly sad chronicling of the final night with one farm family as the father succumbs to cancer. Tom Kandel tells his wife Ruth and son Fred, “When you hear the floor creak at night, it will be me looking in on you.”
All along, the protagonist Martha—who left home a victim of physical abuse at the hands of her father, a horse beater—is the entrée for the reader into the homes and lives of the many characters on the journey. As she travels “the circle”—15 miles around the county training horses for eight different clients—she is unwittingly welcomed into their “inner circles.”
An admirable sense of duty and responsibility and a profound appreciation for life at all levels asserts itself over and over in this book. There is nothing objectionable about “The Hearts of Horses;” it would make an excellent gift for teens or seniors, animal lovers or not, who are ready and willing to get involved with a compelling story.
“The Hearts of Horses”
By Molly Gloss
Houghton Mifflin Co. (New York 2007) 289 pp., $ 24.
E-mail
|
Print
|