Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  I sat down at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, working the numbers, looking for ways to cut expenses, but no matter what angle I came at it from, the bottom line was inescapable: We had more going out than coming in, and it was just a matter of time before we went broke. With the loans we’d taken out, that meant bankruptcy. I took the babies to the garage and helped out as much as I could, but I figured there must be something else we could do to bring in a little extra cash.

  One day Mr. Lee, the Ash Fork Chinaman, knocked on our door. Mr. Lee ran a chop-suey joint in a tent near the garage and made enough money from it to drive a Model A that Jim repaired. Mr. Lee was usually one happy, beaming Chinaman, but that day he was in a panic. Prohibition had ended a few years earlier, but a lot of people had gotten used to the easy money that came from selling bootleg liquor, and Mr. Lee was one of them, offering his customers shots of home brew to wash down their noodles. But he’d heard that the revenuers were onto him, and he was looking for a place to hide a few cases of booze.

  Mr. Lee and Jim had hit it off because Mr. Lee had been a soldier in Manchuria when Jim was seeing service in Siberia, and they’d lived through the same bitter winters, picking icicles out of their hair and gnawing on frozen meat. Mr. Lee trusted Jim. We agreed to take the booze and stashed the cases under Little Jim’s crib, where they were hidden by the skirt.

  That night I lay awake thinking about Mr. Lee’s hooch, and a plan occurred to me. I could bring in extra money by selling bootleg booze out the back door. Although Dad had been a staunch prohibitionist, his pa had sold booze from the store on the KC Ranch, so I had family tradition going for me. Also, I never saw anything wrong with an honest man taking a well-deserved drink. I even had one myself from time to time.

  When I proposed the idea to Jim at the breakfast table the next morning, he wasn’t so keen on it. Although he had stopped drinking years ago, after shooting up some Canadian town while on a bender, he didn’t have any problem with booze itself. He just didn’t want to see the mother of his two children wind up in jail for rum-running.

  It was because I was a mother with two kids, I said, as well as a respected former schoolteacher, that the revenuers would never suspect me. There was a definite market out there, since everyone was looking to save pennies wherever they could. It wasn’t like we’d be running a speakeasy, just a little retail operation with absolutely no overhead. And we’d even be striking a blow for the little guy, giving a hardworking cowboy a chance to have a drink without being forced to fork over a nickel to Uncle Sam every time he did so.

  I kept hammering away at Jim, pointing out that I couldn’t see any other way to keep us afloat, and because I would give him no peace on the matter, he reluctantly agreed. Since we’d done him a favor, Mr. Lee also agreed, promising to provide me two cases a month from his bootlegger if we split the profit.

  I was a good liquor lady. I discreetly put the word out, and soon local cowboys were knocking at the back door. I sold only to people I knew or those who came recommended. I kept things friendly but businesslike, inviting them in briefly but not allowing anyone to linger around or drink on the premises. I began to get regular customers, including the Catholic priest, who always blessed the babies on the way out. My regulars got a discount, but I never gave credit and I never sold to anyone I thought was drinking the rent money. After Mr. Lee got his cut, I made a quarter on each bottle I sold. Soon I was averaging three bottles a day, and that extra twenty dollars or so a month balanced the books.

  ONE DAY THAT SPRING, when Rosemary was three and Little Jim was starting to talk, the Camel brothers drove their huge flock of sheep past our house and into town toward the depot. The Camel brothers had bought a big ranch west of Ash Fork in Yavapai County with the idea of raising sheep for wool and mutton. They were from Scotland and knew a lot about sheep but precious little about conditions on the Arizona range. The Camel brothers had decided that the forage in Yavapai County was too dry for sheep, especially with the drought, and they’d made up their minds to sell off their flock, as well as the ranch, rather than watch their sheep grow gaunt and weak while more and more of them got picked off by wolves and hungry hobos.

  It was a dry, hot day, and the sheep filled the streets of Ash Fork, kicking up the dust so bad you had to cover your mouth with a bandana. The ewes were bleating and the lambs were mewing as the Camel brothers’ hands rode back and forth, driving the flock toward the shipping station, cracking whips at wandering strays.

  The Camel brothers weren’t there—they were back at the ranch, rounding up the remaining sheep—and when the flock reached the shipping pen, some numbskull hand got the brilliant idea of separating the lambs from their mothers. As soon as they’d accomplished that, bedlam broke loose. The lambs were still nursing and were hungry from the journey, so they started scrambling around, crying for their mothers. The ewes, for their part, were frantically calling out for their babies.

  The hands, realizing their mistake, opened the gate separating the ewes from the lambs, and the sheep all mingled together, mothers looking for babies and babies looking for mothers. That was when things got really bad. The more frantic the lambs became, the more energy they burned, which made them all the hungrier, but the flock was so big and so jumbled up that none of them could find their mothers. After a couple of hours of this, the lambs grew weak from hunger. They tried to nurse from any ewe they could, but the ewes wanted to save the milk for their own babies. They put their noses up to the lambs, and if the smell was unfamiliar, the ewes kicked them away and continued searching for their own.

  The hands, frantic themselves, were wading around in the flock, trying to force the ewes to let any lamb nurse, but the ewes weren’t cooperating. They were kicking and bawling and squirming, making a god-awful racket and filling the air with even more dust as the cowboys cursed and the townspeople who had gathered around stood there watching, some calling out advice, others chuckling, shaking their heads, and waiting to see how it was all going to play out.

  I was there with Little Jim and Rosemary, who was fascinated by the idea that a ewe could smell its own lamb and was running around shoving her nose into the lambs’ wool. “They all just smell like sheep to me,” she announced.

  The Camel brothers finally showed up, but they were at a loss about what to do, and the situation was getting desperate, with lambs starting to drop from heat and hunger.

  “You should talk to my husband,” I said. “He knows animals.”

  The Camel brothers sent for Jim, who was at the garage. When he arrived, the hands explained what had happened.

  “What we got to do,” Jim said, “is get those ewes to accept any lamb as her own for the time being. Then we can worry about straightening out the flock.”

  Jim sent me back to the house for an old bedsheet while he fetched two cans of kerosene from the garage. He had the Camel hands tear the sheet into rags, dip the rags in the kerosene, and wipe the ewes’ noses with them. That blocked their sense of smell, and they let whatever lamb was at hand nurse their milk.

  Once the lambs had been fed and the immediate crisis had passed, Jim had the hands separate the lambs and the ewes again. One by one they brought each lamb into the ewe pen and carried it around until its mother recognized it. The flock was so big that this took the better part of two days, with stops to douse the mothers’ noses again whenever the remaining lambs got hungry.

  Little Rosemary was riveted by the scene and terribly concerned that all the lambs find their mothers, and she stayed there watching the entire time. When it was finally done, there was one little lamb that no ewe had claimed. Its black eyes were frightened, its white wool thick with dust, and it ran around on its spindly legs, bleating mournfully.

  The Camel brothers told Jim to do whatever he thought best with the lamb. Jim scooped it up in his arms and carried it over to Rosemary. He knelt down and set the lamb in front of her. “All animals are meant for something,” he said. “Some to run wild, some for the bar
nyard, some for market. This little lamb was meant to be a pet.”

  ROSEMARY LOVED THAT CREATURE. She shared her ice cream cones with it, and it followed her everywhere. So we decided to name it Mei-Mei, which Mr. Lee told us was Chinese for “little sister.”

  A couple of weeks after Jim straightened out the flock, I heard the sound of a car pulling around the house and then a knock on the back door. A man was standing outside, smoking a cigarette. He’d left his car door open, and a girl and a young woman were sitting inside, watching us. He was a good-looking fellow with a lock of sandy hair falling across his forehead, and although his teeth were crooked and stained, he had the easy smile of a charmer. Even before he said anything, I could tell from the slightly off-balance way he was standing that he was a little potted.

  “I’m a friend of Rooster’s,” he said. “And I heard this is where a man could get his hands on a good bottle of shellac.”

  “Looks to me like you’re already pretty shellacked,” I said.

  “Well, I’m working on it.”

  His smile became even more charming, but I looked over at the woman and the girl, and they weren’t smiling at all.

  “I think you’ve had enough to drink as it is,” I said.

  His smile disappeared and he got all indignant, the way drunks do when you point out that they’re drunk. He started telling me his money was as good as anyone else’s, and who was I to go around deciding who had and hadn’t had too much to drink, I was just some two-bit moonshine madam. But I didn’t budge, and when he realized I wasn’t giving in and he’d be leaving empty-handed, he really lost it, telling me I was going to regret crossing him and calling me nothing but the sister of a whore who’d hanged herself.

  “Wait right there,” I said. Leaving the door open, I walked into the bedroom, got my pearl-handled revolver, walked back out, and pointed it at the man’s face. The end of the barrel was about six inches from his nose. “The only reason I don’t shoot you right now is because of those two women in that car,” I said. “But you get out of here and don’t ever come back.”

  That night I told Jim what had happened.

  He sighed and shook his head. “We probably haven’t seen the end of it,” he said.

  Sure enough, two days later, a car pulled around the house, and when I opened the door, two men in khaki uniforms and cowboy hats were standing there. They had badges on their shirt pockets, guns in their holsters, and handcuffs dangling from their belts. They tipped their hats. “Afternoon, ma’am,” one of them said. He hitched up his pants and stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Mind if we come in?” he asked.

  I didn’t see that I had much choice in the matter, so I led them into the living room. Little Jim was asleep in the crib, and under it, behind the white cotton skirt, were two cases of bootleg hooch.

  “Would you fellows like a nice cool glass of tap water?” I asked.

  “Thank you, ma’am, no,” the talker said. They were both glancing around, trying to suss the place out.

  “We received a report,” he went on, “that liquor is being illegally sold from these premises.”

  At that moment Rosemary came running into the room with Mei-Mei right behind. It must have been the sight of all that gleaming metal and shiny leather, but as soon as Rosemary saw the two lawmen, she gave out a shriek that could have woken the dead. Howling, she flung herself at my feet and grabbed my ankles. I tried to pick her up, but she’d become truly hysterical and was flailing her arms, screaming, and blubbering.

  Mei-Mei was bleating, and all the noise woke Little Jim, who stood up in the crib and started wailing.

  “Does this look like a speakeasy?” I asked. “I’m a schoolteacher! I’m a mother! I got my hands full here just taking care of these kids.”

  “I can see that,” he said. All the screaming was discombobulating the two of them. “We have to check these things out, but we’ll be on our way.”

  The lawmen were happy to be out of there, and as soon as they left, Rosemary stopped her howling. “You sure saved my chestnuts, little girl,” I said.

  When Jim came home, I told him about the visit from the law and how the chorus of howling youngsters had driven those deputies right out the door. It already seemed to me like a pretty funny story, and it got Jim laughing, too, but then he stopped and said, “Even so, they were putting us on warning. It’s time we get out of the bootleg business.”

  “But Jim,” I said, “we need the money.”

  “I’d rather see you in the poorhouse than behind bars.”

  Selling liquor had kept us afloat for a year. But we shut the operation down, and six months later, the bank foreclosed on us.

  FALL WAS USUALLY MY favorite time of year, when the air turned cool and the hills were green from the August rains. But I didn’t have much time to enjoy the September sunsets and the crisp, starry nights. Jim and I had decided to auction off everything—the furniture, his tools, the tires, the tire pump, the handle jack, and the gas pump with its pretty glass cylinder. Once we’d done that, we would strap our suitcases on the roof of the Flivver and join the stream of Okies heading to California for work.

  Mulling our prospects made us feel both ground down and wound up. One morning we were in the garage, tagging tools and arguing about what we should take with us, when Blackie Camel, the older of the two Camel brothers, stopped by. Blackie was a swag-bellied man with a bushy black beard who wore his embroidered vest everywhere. He was kind of a mathematical genius when it came to sheep, and he could glance at a flock and tell you not only how many animals were in it but also how many pounds of wool they were carrying.

  Ever since Jim had saved the lambs, Blackie had taken to dropping by the garage to shoot the breeze. The more he got to know Jim, the more he liked him. Jim, he was fond of telling people, knew not only sheep, he also knew cattle and horses and just about every creature with fur or feathers. Jim never bragged about himself, which Blackie also liked, and Blackie was particularly impressed with a story he’d heard from a local Hopi about how, when Jim was a young man, an eagle was going after a newborn calf and Jim actually lassoed the bird in midair.

  That morning, as we sat at the wobbly linoleum table Jim used as his desk, Blackie told us that he and his brother had sold their ranch to a group of investors in England who wanted to run cattle there. They had asked him and his brother to recommend someone to manage the ranch, and Blackie said that if Jim was so inclined, he and his brother would put Jim’s name forward.

  Jim reached under the table and squeezed my hand so hard that my knuckles cracked. We both knew the only jobs out in California were picking grapes and oranges, and the Okies were fighting over what little work existed, while the Daddy Warbucks owners kept cutting everyone’s wages. But there was no way we were going to acknowledge to Blackie Camel how desperate we were.

  “Sounds like something worth considering,” Jim said.

  BLACKIE SENT A TELEGRAM to London, and a few days later, he dropped by to tell Jim the job was his. We called off the auction, and Jim kept most of his tools, but we did sell the gasoline pump and tires to a mechanic from Sedona. Rooster brought a buckboard down from Red Lake, and we loaded our furniture onto it, put the kids and Mei-Mei in the back of the Flivver, and then, with Jim behind the wheel, Rooster on the wagon, and me bringing up the rear on Patches, we set out on our little procession for Seligman, the town nearest the ranch.

  That part of the journey was smooth and passed quickly because Route 66 was being paved for the first time with a layer of shiny black asphalt. Seligman wasn’t as big as Ash Fork, but it had everything a ranch town needed: a building that served as both the jail and post office, a hotel, a bar and café, and the Commercial Central, a general store where pairs of Levi’s were stacked four feet high on the wide-planked floor next to shovels, spools of rope and wire, water buckets, and tins of crackers.

  From Seligman we headed west for fifteen miles through rolling rangeland covered with rabbitweed, prairie grass, and junipe
r trees. The Peacock Mountains in the distance were dark green, and overhead the sky was iris blue. After fifteen miles, we turned off Route 66 and followed a narrow dirt road for another nine miles. It took a full day to get from Seligman to the ranch by wagon. Finally, late in the afternoon, we came to a gate where the road just ended.

  To the right and left of the gate, barbed-wire fencing, held up by neatly trimmed juniper saplings, stretched away into the distance. There was no sign on the gate, which was closed, but we were expected, so the gate was dummy locked—the chain that kept it shut was held together by a padlock that had been left unsnapped. Beyond the gate was a long driveway. We followed it another four miles and finally reached a fenced-in compound with a collection of unpainted wood buildings shaded by enormous cedar trees.

  The buildings were at the foot of a hill dotted with pinyon and scrub cedar. Facing east, you looked out over miles and miles of rolling rangeland that gradually sloped down toward a flat grassy basin known as the Colorado Plateau. It stretched out all the way to the Mogollon Rim, big blush-colored bluffs where the earth had shifted along a single fault line that ran all the way to New Mexico. From where we stood, you could see to forever, and there wasn’t a single other house, human being, or the slightest sign of civilization, only the huge sky, the endless grassy plain, and the distant mountains.

  The Camel brothers had let most of the hired help go, and the place was deserted except for one remaining hand, Old Jake, a grizzled, stogiechewing coot who came limping out of the barn to greet us. Old Jake had a lopsided walk because, to avoid serving in the Great War, he had put his foot on a railroad track and let a train run over his toes. “Won’t win any dancin’ contests,” he said, “but don’t need toes to ride—and it beats spittin’ up mustard gas.”

  Old Jake showed us around. There was a main house with a long porch, its unpainted wood siding a sun-bleached gray. The barn was huge, and next to it were four small log buildings: the grainery and the smithy; the meat house, where hides and sides of beef were cured; and the poison house, which had shelves full of bottles containing medicines, potions, spirits, and solvents, all with corks or rags stuffed in their tops. Old Jake kept pointing out various details—the bags of sulfur and jars of tar used for treating injured livestock, the knife sharpener in the smithy, the troughs that collected runoff rainwater from the roofs.