Free Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Page A

“You get into a quarrel with somebody recently?” and he made a slight gesture with one knuckle toward my beat-up face.
    I didn’t feel like going into the whole damn story, and there wasn’t any part of it that I could brag about, but I said, “A couple of bums tried to rob me.”
    He didn’t say anything to that, didn’t even nod. A while later he asked me, “Where you from, son?”
    I might have told him Klamath Falls, inasmuch as I’d ridden the Greyhound from there, or I guess I could have said Bly, since that was where my folks were living at the time, but what popped out was somewhat closer to the truth. “I grew up in Harney County,” I said, “which is up in Oregon.”
    â€œI know where Harney County is. That’s where Pete French built that big round barn so he could break out his horses in the winter out from under the weather.”
    That round barn was pretty famous where I came from, but I was surprised anybody in Hollywood had heard of it. I said, “Our place was quite a bit north of there, we had a couple of sections on Echol Creek and a government lease up in the Ochocos.”
    He said, “I heard of the Ochocos, matter of fact I went bear hunting up there once upon a time. There’s a Nicoll Creek runs around up there if I remember, which is where we were hunting, but you didn’t say Nicoll, did you? I sold some horses once to an outfit on Nickel Creek, up in Grass Valley. They used to pan gold up that way.” He made a slight sound of amusement. “I guess somebody must’ve panned a nickel’s worth of nuggets out of that there creek.” I knew Nicoll Creek, which was maybe ten miles west of our place. It didn’t have a thing to do with nickels, it was named for the family that settled there in the early days, but I didn’t see any reason to set him straight. Then he turned to me and said, “I’m Harold Capsen,” and stuck out his hand. We shook, and I told him my name, and he said, “Well, come on into the house, Bud. I wasn’t kidding about you getting those boots off, and I guess you’re looking for work, but we can talk that over while you’re soaking your feet in Epsom salts.”
    When I was in high school over in Hart, I’d lived in the school dormitory during the week and spent Friday and Saturday quartered with Dean Dickerson’s family. Dean’s father was a banker, and they lived in a big stone house on C Street behind the Hotel Regent, a house with a sawdust furnace in the cellar and two bathrooms and oriental rugs in the living room. They had a corner lot with a big elm tree and a lawn edged with flowers, and when we sat down to dinner Dean’s mother set the table with plates that matched. But I had never seen a house like the one Harold Capsen took me into.
    It was a low, Mission-style stucco that, judging from the spread of the bougainvillea growing up the posts of the veranda, looked to have been there since sometime before the Great War. It was cool and dim inside, behind wide shaded porches and thick walls. The living room must have been twenty feet long, with a big plastered fireplace in one corner, its heavy cypress mantelpiece carved with a phrase I thought at the time was Spanish, but I now know was Latin:
Bene qui latuit bene vixit.
The actress who had built the house was a famous recluse, and “To live well is to live unnoticed” was evidently her personal motto.
    The rooms were floored with big reddish tiles, the lines of grout almost black, and the deep windowsills were tiled also. There were heavy wooden lintels over every doorway and window. The living room was filled with oak and leather furniture, floor lamps with mica shades, heavy mesquite-wood or oak tables, and woven Navajo rugs. Mexican landscape paintings in heavy oak frames hung on all the walls.
    It was an elegant house, but a bunch of uncivilized men had been living in