Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  Shortly after I arrived, the county superintendent, Mr. MacIntosh, rode up from Flagstaff to explain the situation. Mr. MacIntosh was a slight man with a head so narrow he reminded me of a fish. He wore a fedora and a stiff white paper collar. Because of the war, he explained, men were joining the army and women were leaving the countryside to take the high-paying factory jobs the men had left behind. But even with the shortage of teachers in rural areas, the board wanted the certified teachers to have at least an eighth-grade education, which I didn’t have. So I was to teach in Red Lake until they could hire a more qualified person, and then I’d be sent somewhere else.

  “Don’t worry,” Superintendent MacIntosh said. “We’ll always find a place for you.”

  Red Lake had a one-room schoolhouse with an oil stove in a corner, a desk for the teacher, a row of benches for the kids, and a slate blackboard that made me especially happy, as a lot of schools lacked them. On the other hand, a lot of one-room schools had a teacherage attached, where the teacher lived, but the one in Red Lake didn’t, so I slept on the floor of the school in my bedroll.

  Still, I loved my job. Superintendent MacIntosh hardly ever came around, and I got to teach exactly what I wanted to teach, in the way I wanted. I had fifteen students of all ages and abilities, and I didn’t have to round them up because their parents, eager for them to learn, brought them to the school on the first day and made sure they kept coming back.

  Most of the kids were born back east, though some came from as far away as Norway. The girls wore faded floor-length gingham dresses, the boys had chopped-up haircuts, and they all went barefoot in warm weather. Some of those kids were poorer than poor. One day I stopped by the house of one of my Walapai students, and they were cooking up beef with little bugs crawling in it.

  “Careful,” I said, “that meat is full of maggots.”

  “Yes,” the mother said, “but the maggots are full of meat.”

  We had no textbooks, so the kids brought whatever they had from home—family Bibles, almanacs, letters, seed catalogs—and we read from those. When winter came, one of the fathers gave me a fur coat he’d made from coyotes he’d trapped, and I wore it in the schoolroom during the day, since my desk was far from the oil stove, which the kids were all huddled around. Mothers made a point of bringing me stews and pies and inviting me to Sunday dinner, when they’d even set out a white tablecloth as a sign of respect. And at the end of every month I picked up my paycheck from the town clerk.

  Halfway through the year, Superintendent MacIntosh found a certified teacher for Red Lake, and I was sent on to another little town called Cow Springs. For the next three years, that’s how Patches and I lived, moving from one town to another—Leupp, Happy Jack, Greasewood, Wide Ruin—after a stay of a few months, never putting down roots, and never getting too close to anyone. Still, all those little rascals I was teaching learned to obey me or got their knuckles rapped, and I was teaching them things they needed to know, which made me feel like I was making a difference in their lives. I never met a kid I couldn’t teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day.

  Then the war ended. One day not long after I’d turned eighteen, Superintendent MacIntosh caught up with me to explain that, with the men all returning home, women were being laid off at the factories in favor of the veterans. Many of those women were certified teachers who were looking to get back their old jobs. Some of the boys coming back from overseas were teachers, too. Superintendent MacIntosh said he’d heard glowing things about my work, but I hadn’t even finished eighth grade, much less earned a high school diploma, and besides, the state of Arizona needed to give priority in hiring to those who’d fought for their country.

  “So I’m getting the boot?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately, your services are no longer needed.”

  I stared at the fish-faced superintendent. I’d figured this day might come sooner or later, but I still felt like the floor had fallen out from under me. I knew I was a good teacher. I loved it and even loved traveling to all these remote places where no one else wanted to teach. I understood what Mr. MacIntosh was saying about needing to help out the returning troops. At the same time, I’d busted my behind teaching all those wild and illiterate kids, and I couldn’t help feeling a little burned about being told by Fish Face that I was now unqualified to do something I’d spent the last four years doing.

  Superintendent MacIntosh seemed to know what I was thinking. “You’re young and strong, and you got pretty eyes,” he said. “You just find yourself a husband—one of these soldier boys—and you’ll be fine.”

  THE RIDE BACK TO the KC seemed to take about half as long as that first journey out to Red Lake, but that’s the way it always is when you’re heading home through familiar territory. The only adventure occurred when a rattler parked itself under my saddle one night, but it reared back and zipped off, doing those wildfire wriggles, before I could get out my gun. And then there was the airplane. Patches and I were heading east near the Homolovi Ruins, some fallen-down pueblos where the Hopis’ ancestors had once lived, when we heard the putt-putt of an engine in the sky behind us. I looked back, and a red biplane—the first I’d ever seen—was following the road east a few hundred feet above the ground.

  Patches started to scutch about at the strange noise, but I held her in, and as the plane approached, I took off my hat and waved. The pilot dipped the plane’s wings in response, and as it passed us, he leaned out and waved back. I kicked up Patches and we galloped after the plane, me flapping my hat and shouting, though I was so excited that I had no idea what I was trying to say.

  Never in my life had I ever seen anything like that airplane. It was amazing that it didn’t just fall out of the sky, but for the first time it dawned on me—Eureka!—what the word “airplane” meant. That was what it did. It stayed aloft because it was planing the air.

  I only wished I had some students to explain all this to.

  ALL THAT TIME I was teaching, I had never gone home, since the trip took so long. People say that when you return to the place where you grew up, it always seems smaller than you remember. That was the case with me when I finally reached the ranch, but I don’t know if it was because I had built it up in my memories or I had gotten bigger. Maybe both.

  While I was away, I did write the family once a week and in return received long letters from Dad waxing eloquent and purple about his latest political convictions yet providing few details about how they were faring, and I wondered if the family had managed to keep it all together. But the place looked well run, the fences in repair, the outbuildings freshly whitewashed, a new clapboard wing on the main house, a big supply of split firewood neatly stacked under the porch roof, even a bed of hollyhocks and sunflowers.

  Lupe was out front scouring a pot when I rode up. She gave a shriek, everyone came running from the house and barn, and there was a whole lot of hugging and happy tears. Dad kept saying, “You left a girl and you come back a woman.” He and Mom both had strands of gray in their hair, Buster had filled out and grown a mustache, and Helen had become a willowy sixteen-year-old beauty.

  Buster and Dorothy had gotten married the year before. They lived in the new wing of the house, and it soon became clear to me that Dorothy was more or less running the place. She oversaw the kitchen, bossing Lupe around something fierce, and handed out the daily work assignments for Buster, Apache, and even Mom, Dad, and Helen. Mom complained that Dorothy had gotten a tad high-handed, but I could tell they were secretly glad to have someone doing what I used to do.

  Mom’s biggest concern was Helen. She had reached marrying age, but pretty as she was, that girl just lacked get-up-and-go. Mom worried that Helen might be suffering from neurasthenia, a vague ailment wealthy women got that made them want to lie in a room all day with a wet cloth over their
eyes. Helen was happy to sew and bake pies, but she hated any kind of work that made her break into a sweat or gave her hands calluses, and most of the Rio Hondo ranchers looking for wives wanted a woman who could not only cook and clean house but also help out with branding calves and drive the chuck wagon during roundup. Mom’s plan was to send Helen to the Sisters of Loretto—hoping that with a little polish, she’d attract a citified man in Santa Fe—but Dorothy argued that all the earnings from the ranch needed to be reinvested in machinery to raise crop yields. Helen herself was talking about how she’d like to move to Los Angeles and become an actress in the movies.

  The morning after I returned, we were eating breakfast in the kitchen, Mom passing the teapot around. I’d developed a taste for coffee in Arizona, but Dad still allowed nothing stronger than tea on the ranch.

  After cleaning up, Dad and I walked out onto the porch. “You ready to get back in the corral?” he asked. “I got a couple of new saddlebred fillies that I know you can work wonders with.”

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “What do you mean? You’re a horsewoman.”

  “With Dorothy in charge, I’m not sure there’s a place for me here anymore.”

  “Don’t go talking nonsense. You’re blood. She’s just an in-law. You belong here.”

  But the truth was, I didn’t feel I did. And even if there was a place for me, it was not the life I wanted. That plane that had flown overhead at the Homolovi Ruins had got me to thinking. Also, I’d seen a number of automobiles in my years in Arizona, and they gave me a sinking feeling about the future prospects for carriages—and carriage horses.

  “You ever think of getting yourself one of those automobiles, Dad?” I asked.

  “Consarned contraptions,” Dad said. “No one’ll ever look as smart in one of those fume belchers as they do in a carriage.”

  That got him going about how President Taft had taken this country in the wrong direction by getting rid of the White House stables and replacing them with a garage. “Teddy Roosevelt, now, there was a man, the last president who truly knew how to sit a horse. We’ll never see his like again.”

  As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I’d been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

  Another thing that airplane made me realize was that there was a whole world out there beyond ranchland that I’d never seen, a place where I might finally get that darned diploma. And maybe I’d even learn to fly an airplane.

  So the way I saw it, I had two choices: stay on the ranch or strike out on my own. Staying on the ranch meant either finding a man to marry or becoming the spinster aunt to the passel of children that Dorothy and Buster talked about having. No man had proposed to me yet, and if I sat around waiting for one, I could well end up as that potato-peeling spinster in the corner of the kitchen. Striking out on my own meant going someplace where a young unmarried woman could find work. Santa Fe and Tucson weren’t much more than gussied-up cattle towns, and the opportunities there were limited. I wanted to go where the opportunities were the greatest, where the future was unfolding right before your eyes. I wanted to go to the biggest, most boomingest city I could find.

  A month later, I was on the train to Chicago.

  THE RAILROAD RAN NORTHEAST through the rolling prairie to Kansas City, then on across the Mississippi and into the farmland of Illinois, with its green fields of closely planted corn, tall silos, and pretty white-frame houses with big front porches. It was my first train trip, and I spent much of it with the window down, sticking my face out into the onrushing wind.

  We traveled through the night, and even with stops for refueling and to pick up and let off passengers, the trip lasted only four days, whereas it had taken Patches, packer though she was, an entire month to go less than half that distance.

  When the train pulled into Chicago, I took down my little suitcase and walked through the station into the street. I’d been in crowds before—county fairs, livestock auctions—but I’d never seen such a mass of people, all moving together like a herd, jostling and elbowing, nor had my ears been assaulted by such a ferocious din, with cars honking, trolleys clanging, and hydraulic jackhammers blasting away.

  I walked around, gawking at the skyscrapers going up everywhere, then I made my way over to the lake—deep blue, flat, and as endless as the range, only it was water, fresh and flowing and cold even in the summer. Coming from a place where people measured water by the pailful, where they fought and sometimes killed each other over water, it was hard to imagine, even though I was looking at it, that billions of gallons of fresh water—I figured it had to be billions or even trillions—could be sitting there undrunk, unused, and uncontested.

  After gazing at the lake for a long while, soaking up the sight of it, I followed my plan: I found a Catholic church and asked a priest to recommend a respectable boardinghouse for women. I rented a bed— four to a room—then I bought the newspapers and looked at the help-wanted ads, circling possibilities with a pencil.

  * * *

  The next day I started searching for a job. As I walked the streets, I found myself staring at people’s faces, thinking, So this is what city folk look like. It wasn’t so much their features that were different, it was their expressions. Their faces were shut off. Everyone made a point of ignoring everyone else. I was used to nodding when I caught a stranger’s eye, but here in Chicago they looked right through you, as if you weren’t there at all.

  Finding work was considerably harder than I had expected. I had hoped to get a position as a governess or a tutor, but when I admitted that I didn’t even have an eighth-grade education, people looked at me like they were wondering why I was wasting their time, even after I told them about my teaching experience. “That may be fine for sod busters,” one woman said, “but it won’t do in Chicago.”

  The sales jobs at department stores all required experience, and mine was limited to my penny-an-egg deals with Mr. Clutterbuck. Businesses were advertising for clerks, but even as I stood in the long lines to fill out the forms, I knew I wasn’t going to get the job. With all the soldiers returning home and all the girls like me pouring in from the countryside, there was too much competition. My money started running low, and I had to face the fact that my options were pretty much limited to factory work or becoming a maid.

  Sitting in front of a sewing machine for twelve hours a day didn’t strike me as much of a way to get ahead, whereas if I worked as a maid, I’d get to know people with money, and if I showed enough initiative, I might be able to parlay that position into something better.

  I found a job pretty quickly working for a commodities trader and his wife, Mim, on the North Side. They lived in a big modern house with radiator heat, a clothes-washing machine, and a bathroom with a sunken tub surrounded by mosaic tiles and faucets for hot water, cold water, and icy drinking water. I got there before dawn to make their coffee by the time they woke, spent the day scrubbing, polishing, and dusting, and left after I’d cleaned the dinner dishes.

  I didn’t mind the hard work. What bothered me was the way that Mim, a long-faced blond woman only a few years older than me, treated me as if I didn’t exist, looking off into the distance when she gave me the day’s orders. While Mim seemed very impressed with herself, acting terribly grand, ringing a little silver bell for me to bring in the tea when she had visitors, she wasn’t that bright.

  In fact, I wondered if anyone could really be such a dodo. Once a French woman with a toy poodle came for lunch, and when the dog started barking, the woman spoke to it in French. “That’s a smart dog,” Mim said. “I didn’t know dogs could speak French.”

  Mim also did crossword puzzles, constantly asking her husband the answers to s
imple clues, and when I made the mistake of answering one, she shot me a short, sharp look.

  After I’d been there two weeks, she called me into the kitchen. “This isn’t working out,” she said.

  I was stunned. I was never late, and I’d kept Mim’s house spotless. “Why?” I asked.

  “Your attitude.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Nothing. But I don’t like the way you look at me. You don’t seem to know your place. A maid should keep her head down.”

  I got another job as a maid pretty quickly, and although it was against my nature, I made a point of keeping my mouth shut and my head down. In the evenings, meanwhile, I went to school to get my diploma. There was no shame in doing hard work, but polishing silver for rich dunderheads was not my Purpose.

  Busy as I was, and pretty exhausted most of the time, I loved Chicago. It was bold and bawdy and very modern, though bitterly cold in the winter, with a wicked north wind that blew in off the lake. Women were marching for the right to vote, and I attended a couple of rallies with one of my roommates, Minnie Hanagan, a spunky Irish girl with green eyes and luxurious black hair who worked in a beer-bottling plant. Minnie never met a topic she didn’t have an opinion on or heard a comment she couldn’t interrupt. After working all day as a zip-lipped maid, keeping my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the ground, it was great to unwind with Minnie by arguing about politics, religion, and everything else under the sun. We double-dated a couple of times, factory boys squiring us around to the cheaper speakeasies, but they were usually either tonguetied or loutish. I had more fun talking to Minnie than I did to any of those fellows, and sometimes the two of us went off and danced by ourselves. Minnie Hanagan was the closest thing I’d ever had to a genuine friend.