Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  We knew we didn’t have much time, and Jim and I were both cussing like sailors while Rosemary, her hair plastered, scrambling back onto the seat every time she was knocked off, did her best to read Jim’s gestures and shouts and relay them to me. Finally, I figured out that by engaging the clutch, easing up on it ever so slightly, then reengaging it, I could send the truck forward just a few inches at a time, and that was how we got the job done, digging four furrows off the sides of the wash that drained the rising water away from the dam.

  It was still raining furiously. Jim heaved the plow into the pickup bed and climbed in beside me. He was as wet as if he’d fallen into a horse trough. Water sloshed in his boots and dripped from his hat and sopping horsehide coat, pooling on the seat.

  “We did a good job—good as we could,” he said. “If she breaks, she breaks.”

  SHE DIDN’T BREAK.

  While our place was spared, not everyone fared as well. The rains washed away a few bridges and several miles of railroad track. Ranchers lost cattle and outbuildings. Seligman was flooded, several houses were swept off, and the rest had mud lines five feet high, which was so astounding that no one wanted to paint over them. For years afterward, folks who’d lived through the storm pointed out those mud lines in a combination of disbelief and pride. “Water come clean up to there,” they’d say, shaking their head.

  But a few hours after the rain stopped, the plateau turned bright green, and the next day the ranch was covered with the most spectacular display of flowers I had ever seen. There were crimson Indian paintbrushes and orange California poppies, white mariposa poppies with their magenta throats, goldenrod and blue lupines and pink and purple sweet peas. It was like a rainbow you could touch and smell. All that water must have churned up seeds that had been buried for decades.

  Rosemary, who was ecstatic over it, spent days collecting flowers. “If we had this much water all the time,” I told her, “we might have to break down and give this ranch some greenhorn name like Paradise Plateau.”

  VI

  TEACHER LADY

  Lily Casey Smith before a flying lesson

  THE WATER WE BOUGHT during the drought cost a fortune, but the Poms knew that ranching was a long-term proposition only for people with wallets fat enough to tough out the bad times and then make a killing in the good. They actually saw the drought, and all the bankruptcies it was causing, as a buying opportunity. So did Jim. As much land as we had, he realized that if the ranch was going to make it through the next drought, we needed even more land—land with its own water. He convinced the investors to buy the neighboring ranch, called Hackberry. It had some hilly terrain with a year-round spring, and out on the flat range, there was a deep well with a windmill that pumped water up to the cattle troughs.

  Jim’s plan was to move the herd back and forth between the two ranches, keeping the cattle in Hackberry during the winter and bringing them back to the high plateau around Big Jim in the summer. When the two ranches were combined, they totaled 180,000 acres. It was a big spread—one of the biggest in Arizona—and in good years, we could bring some ten thousand head of cattle to market. When the Poms saw those numbers, they were more than happy to pony up for Hackberry.

  The first time we rode out to Hackberry, I flat-out fell in love with the place. It was down off the plateau, between the Peacock and the Walapai mountains, the range dotted by chaparral. Runoff from the mountains fed the plain, and there was also that spring in the granite foothills. The house, nestled in a hollow, was a former dance hall that had been taken apart, moved to the spot, and reassembled, with a swank linoleum floor and the walls painted with signs saying NO ROUGH STUFF and TAKE THE FIGHT OUTSIDE.

  The first time I saw the windmill, I took a drink of its well water, which came from deep beneath us and had been there for tens of thousands of years waiting for me to taste it. That well water tasted sweeter than the finest French liqueur. Some folks, when they struck it rich, liked to say that they were in the money, and that was how I felt—rich—only we were in the water. Our days of busting our humps hauling fuel drums over dirt roads were gone for good.

  After the Poms bought Hackberry, one of the first things Jim did was to drive all the way to Los Angeles in the Chevy and return with a truck-load of half-inch lead pipe. It was a mile from the spring to the house, and we laid pipe the entire length, running strips of inner tube between the interconnecting pipe ends and tying it up with bailing wire. It wasn’t indoor plumbing—and it wasn’t exactly pretty—but it brought a constant supply of spring water to our back door, spurting forth clear and fresh when you opened the spigot.

  Next to the spigot, we kept a metal cup, and few things were finer than coming back from a hot, dusty ride and filling that cup with a cold, wet drink, then pouring what was left over your head.

  We moved the herd over to Hackberry in the fall and stayed there until the spring. I always loved bright colors, and at Hackberry, I decided to really go to town. I painted each room a different color—pink, blue, and yellow—put Navajo rugs on the floors, and got some red velvet curtains for the windows, using several books of S&H green stamps that I’d saved over the years.

  Rosemary loved the colors even more than I did. She was already showing some artistic talent, tossing off perfect little line drawings without once lifting the pencil from the paper. Both kids were crazy about Hackberry, its green mountains, the lilacs, the birds of paradise, the tamarack trees around the chicken coop. There were several deep canyons running down out of the mountains, and after it rained, I’d rush with the kids up to the lip of one of them and we’d watch and cheer as the flash floods came thundering down the dry creek beds, shaking the ground beneath us.

  Rosemary and Little Jim were also fascinated by the story of Hack-berry’s ghosts. Years earlier, a fire had broken out in the house when two children were inside. The mother rushed in and saved the boy, then returned to get her baby girl, but they both died in the flames and the little boy standing outside could hear their anguished cries. A few months later, the boy was on his swing, and he started going higher and higher, pumping his legs, trying to get up to heaven to be with his mother and sister, but he swung so high that he fell off and died as well.

  All three of them supposedly haunted the ranch, and Rosemary, instead of being frightened, couldn’t stop looking for them. She’d wander around at night, calling out their names, and whenever she heard a sudden noise—a distant bobcat, a rustling in the tamarack trees, oil drums expanding with a bang in the heat—she’d get excited thinking maybe it was the ghosts. She was particularly intrigued by the little boy ghost, and she wanted to explain to him that since he was with his mother and sister, everything was in fact okay, and they were all free to go to heaven.

  Ever since moving to the ranch, Jim and I had talked on and off about buying it, or at least buying a place of our own one day, but we’d had our hands full getting the ranch up and running, and buying had seemed a distant dream. Now that I’d spent time at Hackberry—a beautiful spread with good water—I wanted it and was determined to turn my dream into a plan.

  We needed cash. We were never going to go into debt again, I swore, we were not going to lose this place the way we’d lost the house and the filling station in Ash Fork. I worked up the figures and decided we might be able to swing it in ten years if I started bringing in money and we scrimped and saved, pinching every penny till old Abe Lincoln yelped.

  We’d always been frugal—Jim made the Poms a lot of money, but he made it a nickel at a time, reusing nails, saving old barbed wire, building fences with juniper saplings rather than milled posts. We never threw away anything. We saved bits of wood in case we needed shims. When our old shirts finally frayed to pieces, we cut off the buttons and put them in the button box; the shirts we either used as rags or gave to a seamstress in Seligman who turned them into patchwork quilts.

  But now I came up with additional ways to save money. We made the children chairs out of orange crates. Rosemary d
rew on used paper bags—both sides—and painted on old boards. We drank from coffee cans with wire tied around them for handles. Whenever possible, I drove behind trucks so their slipstream pulled me along and I saved on gas.

  I also came up with all sorts of moneymaking schemes, some more successful than others. I sold encyclopedias door-to-door, but that didn’t go over so well, seeing as how there were not a lot of bookish ranch hands in Yavapai County. I did a lot better visiting neighbors to solicit orders for Montgomery Ward, and I didn’t even have to resort to tricks like throwing dirt on the floor the way my crumb-bum first husband did. I also stayed up late writing short stories about cowboys and gunslingers for pulp magazines—using the nom de plume Legs LeRoy because I figured those pulp editors wouldn’t buy western tales from a lady—but I got no takers. I collected scrap metal in the Chevy and sold it by the pound. I also started playing poker with the hands, but Jim put a stop to that after I cleaned a couple of them out. “We don’t pay them enough as it is,” he said. “We can’t go taking what little they get.”

  On weekends, I drove down Highway 66 with the kids, sending them out to pick up bottles that people had thrown out their car windows. Rosemary would take one side of the road, Little Jim the other, each of them dragging a burlap bag. The deposit was two cents for Coke bottles, five cents for cream bottles, ten cents for milk bottles, and a quarter for gallon jugs. One day we collected thirty dollars’ worth of bottles.

  Sometimes other drivers would stop to see if we were okay. “You folks need any help there?” they’d call out.

  “We’re just dandy,” I’d say. “Got any empties?”

  Rosemary loved our scavenging expeditions. One day all four of us were over paying a call on our neighbors, the Hutters. After dinner, we were heading back to the Chevy, parked near their barn, when Rosemary spotted a bottle in the fuel drum that they used to hold trash. She ran to fetch it.

  “Lily, this is getting a little out of hand,” Jim said. “We’re not so darned broke that we need to have our daughter digging around in someone’s garbage for a two-cent bottle.”

  Rosemary held up the bottle. “It’s not a two-center, Dad,” she said. “It’s a ten-center.”

  “Good girl,” I said, and turned to Jim. “Ten cents adds up. And anyway, I’m teaching them resourcefulness.”

  BY THEN I WAS closing in on my thirty-ninth birthday, and there was still one thing I’d never done and had always wanted to do. One summer day Jim and the kids and I had driven the Flivver over to Mohave County to look at a breeding bull Jim was interested in buying when we passed a ranch with a small plane parked near the gate. A hand-painted sign in the windshield read: FLYING LESSONS: $5.

  “That’s for me,” I said.

  I had Jim pull into the driveway, and we stopped to look at the plane. It was a two-seater, one behind the other, with an open cockpit, a faded green paint job, rust rings around the rivets, and a rudder that creaked in the wind.

  I remembered the first time I’d seen an airplane, when I was riding Patches through the desert back from Red Lake. I loved Patches, but that had been one long, rump-numbing journey. On an airplane, it wouldn’t have been much more than a little hop.

  A fellow came out of a shack behind the plane and sauntered up to the Flivver. He had a windburned face, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a pair of aviator goggles pushed up on his forehead. He rested his elbows on Jim’s open window and said, “Looking to learn her?”

  I leaned across the gearbox. “Not him,” I said. “Me.”

  “Whoa,” Goggles said. “Ain’t never taught a woman before.” He looked at Jim. “Think the little lady’s up to it?”

  “Don’t you ’little lady’ me,” I said. “I break horses. I brand steers. I run a ranch with a couple dozen crazy cowboys on it, and I can beat them all in poker. I’ll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell me that I don’t have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.”

  Goggles stared at me for a moment, then Jim patted him on the arm. “No one’s ever won betting against her,” Jim said.

  “That don’t surprise me,” Goggles said. He pulled out a fresh cigarette and lit it with the old one. “Ma’am, I like your spirit. Let’s take ’er up.”

  Goggles brought out a flight suit for me, along with a leather aviation helmet and a set of goggles. As I pulled them on, he walked me around the plane, checking the struts, pointing out the ailerons, explaining basics such as lift and tailwind, and showing me how to operate the copilot’s stick. But Goggles wasn’t much for theory, and soon he was climbing aboard and having me climb in behind him. As I did, I realized that the fuselage wasn’t made of metal after all, but canvas. That airplane was a right spindly contraption.

  Then we were taxiing down the driveway, bumping along, gathering speed. The bumping stopped, but at first I wasn’t even aware that we were airborne—it was that smooth—then I saw the ground falling away beneath us and I knew I was flying.

  We circled around. The kids were running back and forth waving like mad, and even Jim was enthusiastically flapping his hat. I leaned out and waved. The sky was a royal blue, and as we gained altitude, I saw the Arizona range rolling away in all directions, the Mogollon Rim to the east, and in the distant west, beyond a serpentine river, the Rockies, with some thin high clouds hovering above them. Route 66 threaded its way like a ribbon through the desert, a few tiny cars moving along it. Living in Arizona, I was used to long views, but still, the sight of the earth spread out far below made me feel huge and aloof, like I was beholding the entire world, seeing it all for the first time, the way I figured angels did.

  Goggles operated the controls for most of the lesson, but by keeping my hand on my stick, I was able to follow the way he banked, climbed, and dived. Toward the end, he let me take over, and after a few heart-stopping jerks, I was able to put the plane into a long, steady turn that brought us right into the sun.

  Afterward, I thanked Goggles, paid him, and told him he’d be seeing me again. As we walked back to the car, Rosemary said, “I thought we were supposed to save money.”

  “Even more important than saving money is making it,” I said, “and sometimes, to make money, you have to spend it.” I told her if I got a pilot’s license, I could bring in cash dusting crops and delivering mail and flying rich people around. “This lesson was an investment,” I said. “In me.”

  WORKING AS A FREELANCE bush pilot struck me as one glorious way of earning a living, but I knew it would take a while to get my pilot license, and we needed money now. I finally decided that the smartest way for me to bring in the bucks was to put my most marketable skill—teaching—back into use. I wrote Grady Gammage, who had helped me get the job at Red Lake, to ask if he knew of any opportunities.

  He replied that there was a town called Main Street with an opening. It was up in the Arizona Strip, and I’d be welcome there, he said, because Main Street was so remote and, quite frankly, so peculiar that no teacher with a college degree wanted the job. Truth be known, he went on, the people in the area were almost all Mormon polygamists who’d moved all the way out there to escape government harassment.

  Neither remoteness nor peculiarity troubled me, and as for Mormons, I’d married one, so I figured I could handle a few polygamists. I wrote back telling Grady Gammage to sign me up.

  What made most sense was to take Rosemary and Little Jim with me, so one day late in the summer, we packed the Flivver, which was still running but on its last legs, and headed for the Arizona Strip. Jim followed in the Chevy to help us get settled.

  The Arizona Strip was in the northwest corner of Mohave County, cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. To get there, we had to drive into Nevada, then Utah, then turn back south to Arizona.

  I wanted my children to see the awesomeness of modern technology, so we stopped off at the Boulder Dam, where four enormous turbines generated electricity that was sent all the way to California. I
t was Jim’s idea to also visit one of the ruined cities of the Hohokams, an ancient and extinct tribe that had built elaborate four-story houses and a complex irrigation system. We stood there for a while, looking at those collapsed sandstone buildings and the troughs that had carried water directly to the Hohokams’ houses.

  “What happened to the Hohokams, Daddy?” Rosemary asked.

  “They thought they could civilize the desert,” Jim said, “and it was their undoing. The only way to survive in the desert is to recognize that it is a desert.”

  The Arizona Strip was desolate but beautiful country. There were grassland plateaus where distant mountains sparkled with mica, and sandstone hills and gullies that had been carved into wondrous shapes— hourglasses and spinning tops and teardrops—by wind and water. The sight of all that time-worn stone, shaped grain by grain over thousands and thousands of years, made it seem like the place had been created by a very patient God.

  The town of Main Street was so small that it didn’t appear on most maps. In fact, the main street of Main Street was the only street, lined with a few ramshackle houses, one general store, and the school, which had a teacherage. It was nothing fancy, one tiny room with two box windows and a single bed that Little Jim, Rosemary, and I would share. The water barrel outside the kitchen was swimming with pollywogs. “At least we know it’s not poison,” Jim said. “Just drink with your teeth closed.”

  Many of the people in the area herded sheep, but the land had been overgrazed, and it was startling how threadbare the local folks were. None of them had cars. Instead, they drove wagons or, too poor to afford saddles, rode horses with just blankets on their backs. Some lived in chicken coops. The women wore bonnets, and the children came to school barefoot and in overalls or dresses stitched from feed sacks. Their underwear—if they had any—was also made of feed sacks. Some Mormons were sewed into ceremonial undergarments during a special church ritual, and since the garments were supposed to protect them from harm, snide folks referred to them as Mormon wonder underwear.