When we first arrived, the people around Main Street were polite yet guarded, but after they found out my husband was the son of the great Lot Smith, who fought the federals with Brigham Young and founded Tuba City and had eight wives and fifty-two children, they warmed right up. As a matter of fact, they started treating us like visiting dignitaries.
I had thirty students of all ages, and they were a sweet and well-behaved lot. Because they were polygamists, they were almost all related in one way or another and talked about their “other mothers” and “double cousins.” The girls doted on Rosemary, who was now six, and Little Jim, who was four, fussing over them, combing their hair, dressing them up, and practicing mothering skills. The girls were all listed in the “Joy Book,” meaning they were eligible for marriage and were waiting for their “uncle” to decide whom they would marry.
The houses they lived in, I came to see, were essentially breeding factories where as many as seven wives were expected to churn out a baby a year. The way the Mormons saw it, God had populated earth with beings in his likeness, so if Mormon men were going to follow the path of God, they had to have their own brood of kids to populate their own heavenly world in the hereafter. The girls were raised to be docile and submissive. In the first few months I was there, a couple of my thirteen-year-old girls simply disappeared, vanishing into their arranged marriages.
Rosemary was fascinated by these kids with all their multitudes of moms, and these dads with all their sets of wives, and she kept asking me to explain it. She was particularly intrigued with Mormon underwear and wondered if it really gave the Mormons special powers.
“That’s what they believe,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Then why do they believe it?”
“America is a free country,” I said. “And that means people are free to believe whatever cockamamie thing they want to believe.”
“So they don’t have to believe it if they don’t want to?” Rosemary asked.
“No, they don’t”
“But do they know that?”
Smart kid. That, I came to see, was the heart of the matter. You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being broodmares dressed in feed sacks.
In class, I spent the bulk of my time on the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic, but I also peppered my lessons with talk of nursing and teaching, the opportunities in big cities, the Twenty-first Amendment, and the doings of Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. I told them how, when I was no older than they were, I was breaking horses. I talked about going to Chicago and learning to fly an airplane. Any of them could do all that, too, I said, long as they had the gumption.
Some of them—both boys and girls—looked shocked, but more than a few seemed genuinely intrigued.
I hadn’t been in Main Street for long when I got a visit from Uncle Eli, the patriarch of the local polygamists. He had a long graying beard, scraggly eyebrows, and a beaklike nose. His smile was practiced and his eyes were cold. I gave him a drink of pollywog water, and as we talked, he kept patting my hand and calling me “Teacher Lady.”
Some of the mothers, he said, had told him their little girls were coming home from school talking about suffragettes and women flying airplanes. What I needed to understand was that he and his people had moved to this area to get away from the rest of the world, and I was bringing that world into their very schoolroom, teaching the children things their mothers and fathers considered dangerous and even blasphemous. My job, he went on, was to give them just enough arithmetic and reading to manage the household and make their way through the Book of Mormon.
“Teacher Lady, you’re not preparing these girls for their lives,” he said. “You’re only upsetting and confusing them. There will be no more talk of worldly ways.”
“Look, Uncle,” I said, “I don’t work for you. I work for the state of Arizona. I don’t need you telling me my job. My job is to give these kids an education, and part of that is letting them know a little bit about what the world is really like.”
Uncle’s smile never wavered. Rosemary was sitting at the table drawing, and he walked over and stroked her hair. “What are you drawing?” he asked.
“That’s my mom riding Red Devil,” Rosemary said. It was one of her favorite stories about me, and she was always making drawings of it. She looked up at Uncle Eli. “My daddy used to be a Mormon.”
“But he’s not any longer?”
“No. He’s a rancher.”
“Then he is lost.”
“Dad never gets lost—and he doesn’t even need a compass. He just says Mom made him throw away his wonder underwear. Do you wear wonder underwear?”
“We call it the temple garment,” Uncle said. “You’ll make some man a fine wife one day soon. Shall we put you in the Joy Book?”
“Leave her out of this,” I said. “And leave her out of that darned book.”
“I’m done talking to you,” he said. “If you don’t obey me, we will all shun you as the devil.”
THE NEXT DAY I gave an especially impassioned lesson on political and religious freedom, talking about the totalitarian countries where everyone was forced to believe one thing. In America, by contrast, people were free to think for themselves and follow their hearts when it came to matters of faith. “It’s like one of the wonderful department stores in Chicago,” I said. “You can go around trying on different dresses until you find one that suits you.”
That night when I went to throw out the dishwater, Uncle Eli was standing in the yard, his arms crossed, staring at me.
“Evening,” I said.
He didn’t reply. He just kept staring at me, like he was giving me the evil eye.
The next night I looked up from fixing dinner, and there he was again, standing framed in the window, staring out from under his unruly eyebrows with the same baleful expression.
“What’s he want, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.
“Oh, he’s just hoping I’ll have a staring contest with him.”
The teacherage didn’t have curtains, but the next day I sewed together some feed sacks and tacked them over the window. That evening there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, Uncle Eli was standing there.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He just stared at me, and I closed the door. The knocking started up again, slow and persistent. I went into the room where we slept and loaded my pearl-handled revolver. Uncle Eli was still knocking on the door. I opened it, and as I did, I swung the gun up and across so that by the time he saw me, the gun was pointed dead at him.
The last time I’d pointed the gun had been at that drunk in Ash Fork who’d called Helen a dead whore when I wouldn’t sell him any hooch. I hadn’t fired then, but this time I aimed just to the left of Uncle Eli’s face and pulled the trigger.
When the shot rang out, Uncle Eli barked in fright and instinctively jerked his hands up. The bullet had whizzed by his ear, but the barrel had been close enough that his face was sprayed with soot. He stared at me, speechless.
“You come knocking around here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear,” I said, “ ’cause next time I won’t aim to miss.”
Two days later, the county sheriff showed up at the school. He was an easygoing country fellow with a goiter. Investigating a schoolmarm for shooting at a polygamous elder wasn’t something he did every day, and he seemed uncertain how to handle it.
“We received a complaint, ma’am, alleging you took a potshot at one of the townspeople.”
“There was a menacing intruder, and I was defending myself and my children. I’ll be happy to stand up in court and explain exactly what happened.”
The sheriff sighed. “Around here, we like people to work out their differences amongst themselves. But if you
can’t get along with these folks, and there’s many that can’t, you probably don’t belong here.”
After that, I knew it was only a matter of time. I continued to teach in Main Street, telling those girls what I thought they needed to know about the world, but I stopped getting dinner invitations, and a bunch of the parents took their kids out of the school. In the spring I got a letter from the Mohave County superintendent saying that he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to continue teaching in Main Street come next fall.
I WAS UNEMPLOYED AGAIN, which really fried my bacon because I’d been acting in the best interests of my students. Fortunately, that summer a teaching job opened up in Peach Springs, a tiny town on a Walapai reservation about sixty-five miles from the ranch. It paid fifty dollars a month, but in addition, the county had set aside ten dollars a month for a part-time janitor, ten dollars a month for a bus driver, and another ten dollars a month for someone to cook lunch for the kids. I said I’d do everything, which meant eighty dollars a month, and we’d be able to sock away almost all of it.
The old school bus had died, so the county had also budgeted money to buy another one—or at least some form of transportation—and after scouting around, I found the perfect vehicle at a used-car lot in Kingman: a terrifically elegant dark blue hearse. Since it had only front seats, you could jam a whole passel of kids in the back. I took some silver paint and, in big block letters, wrote SCHOOL BUS on both sides.
Despite my fancy silver sign, people in those parts, including my husband, were pretty literal-minded, and they all kept calling it the hearse.
“It’s not a hearse,” I told Jim. “It’s a school bus.”
“Painting the word ’dog’ on the side of a pig don’t make the pig a dog,” he said.
He had a point, and after a while I started calling it the hearse, too.
I’d get up around four in the morning and cover upward of two hundred miles a day between traveling to and from Peach Springs and picking up and dropping off the kids at the different stops all over the district. I’d teach the whole bunch by myself, take them all home, return to the school and do the janitoring, then head back to the ranch. I farmed out the cooking at five dollars a week to our neighbor Mrs. Hutter, who made pots of stew that I took to the school. Those were some long days, but I loved the work, and the money started piling up pretty quickly.
Rosemary was seven by then and Little Jim was five, so I took them with me in the morning, and they became part of the class. Rosemary hated being taught by her mother, particularly because I sometimes gave her paddlings in front of other students to set an example and show I wasn’t playing favorites. Little Jim had also become a handful, and he got his share of paddlings as well, though a spanking never kept either of those rascals out of mischief for long.
I had to make two trips to collect all the kids, and I left Rosemary, Little Jim, and the kids from the town of Yampi at the school while I made my usual second run to pick up the kids from Pica. One morning when I got back to the school, Little Jim was lying on his back on my desk, stone-cold unconscious. The other kids explained that he’d fallen out of the swing, trying to make it all the way to heaven like the little ghost boy.
I was in a bind. I needed to take Little Jim to the hospital, but the nearest one was in Kingman, thirty-five miles away, and I couldn’t leave the kids unsupervised for that long. I packed as many of them as I possibly could into the hearse and had the rest stand on the sideboards, hanging on through the open windows. With Rosemary holding limp Little Jim in her lap beside me, I set out to take all the kids home, going to Yampi and then Pica—the kids on the sideboards having the time of their lives, hooting and hollering, treating it like a carnival ride—before heading for Kingman.
We were barreling down Route 66 when Little Jim suddenly sat up. “Where am I?” he asked.
Rosemary, thinking this was hilarious, burst into laughter, but I was furious. I wanted to take Little Jim to the hospital anyway, but he insisted he was fine and even stood up on the car seat and started dancing around to prove it, which got me even more furious. I’d done all that driving around for nothing, canceling class for no good reason, and I was worried I’d be docked a day’s pay.
“We’re just going to go round up all those kids a second time,” I said.
“But they’ve already gone home,” Rosemary said. “They’ll be out playing and won’t want to come back.”
“I’ve told you before, life’s not about doing what you want.”
Rosemary looked a little pouty. Then she started saying she didn’t feel so well, she was dizzy and needed to go home.
“Oh, so you’re the sick one now?” I said.
“That’s right, Mommy.”
“Well, I’m going to take you to the hospital, then,” I said.
“I just want to go home.”
“Not another word,” I said. “If you’re sick, you don’t need pampering, you need treatment.” Whenever she tried to protest, I repeated myself.
I drove straight to the Kingman hospital. After a talk with one of the nurses about a daughter who wanted to play hooky, I arranged for Rosemary to spend the night in a room by herself where she could ponder truth and consequences. If I was going to be docked a day’s pay, someone, at the very least, was going to learn a lesson from the experience.
“Feeling better?” I asked Rosemary when I picked her up the next day.
“Yep,” she said.
And we both left it at that. But the kid never tried to play hooky again.
ONE SATURDAY MORNING THAT fall, when I went out into the yard, I looked over at the hearse parked next to the barn. It was just sitting there, and that struck me as a real waste. Unlike a horse, a car didn’t need a day off every now and then. If I could put the hearse to work for me on the weekends, it would—after gas—be pure profit. I decided to start up a taxi service.
On the side of the hearse, under SCHOOL BUS, I used the same silver paint to add AND TAXI. Jim came up with the idea of strapping some old buggy seats in the back when we had paying passengers.
There weren’t exactly a lot of people standing by the road trying to hail taxis in that part of Arizona, but there were folks without cars who from time to time needed to get to the courthouse in Kingman or be picked up at the train depot in Flagstaff, and they’d hire me. They’d leave word in advance with Deputy Johnson in Seligman, and every day or two I’d stop by his office to see if I had any customers.
Most of the money went into our savings, but I kept some aside for the occasional flying lesson.
I was an excellent driver. I didn’t particularly like city driving, with all the stoplights and street signs and traffic cops, but out in the country I was in my element. I knew the shortcuts and the back roads and had no hesitation heading out cross-country, barreling through the sagebrush and startling the roadrunners out of the undergrowth.
If we got stuck in a ditch while I was ferrying around the schoolkids, I had them get out and push while we all chanted Hail Marys. “Push and pray!” I’d holler while gripping the steering wheel and gunning the engine, sand and rocks spraying behind the spinning tires as the car fish-tailed its way out of the ditch. My paying passengers were also expected to help push if we got stuck. I didn’t make them say Hail Marys, but I used the same line: “Push and pray!”
When Jim heard it, he said, “Probably should paint that on the hearse, too.”
One weekend that December, three ladies from Brooklyn were staying with our neighbor Mrs. Hutter, the woman who cooked the stews for the school and who was their cousin, and they hired me to take them all up to see the Grand Canyon. I stored a picnic lunch in the hearse and brought Rosemary along with me.
I expected these Brooklyn gals to be tough and smart, and maybe even practicing socialists, but instead they were all ninnies who wore too much makeup and kept complaining about the Arizona heat, the hearse’s uncomfortable buggy seats, and the fact that there was no place in the entire state to
get a good egg cream. They had these thick Brooklyn accents, and I had to fight the temptation to correct their atrocious pronunciation.
While I tried to keep up a positive line of chatter, pointing out that the town of Jerome was named after Winston Churchill’s mother’s family, they kept saying things like “But whatta youse people do out here?” and “How do youse live wit-out electricity?”
They also kept going on about Christmas in New York, about the tree in Rockefeller Center, the window displays at Macy’s, the gifts, the lights, the kids lining up to talk to the red-suited Santas.
“What’s Santa Claus gonna bring youse dis year?” one of the ladies asked Rosemary.
“Who’s Santa Claus?” she asked.
“Youse never heard of Santa Claus?” The woman sounded bewildered.
“We don’t pay much heed to that sort of thing around here,” I said.
“Well, dat’s a crying shame.”
“So, who’s Santa Claus?” Rosemary asked again.
“Saint Nicholas,” I said. “The patron saint of department stores.”
Near Picacho Butte, I noticed that the emergency brake had been on the entire time, and without saying anything, I reached down and quietly released it. Just then we came to a long downward slope at the edge of the plateau. The hearse began picking up speed, and when I pressed down on the brake pedal, it went all the way to the floor with no resistance. We had no brakes.
I started swerving the car on and off the road, hoping the sand and loose gravel on the shoulder would slow us down. The Brooklyn women got all overwrought, telling me to slow down, asking me what was happening and demanding that I let them out. “Stop duh car!”
“Now, calm yourselves, girls,” I said. “We just got us a little runaway taxi, but everything’s under control. I’ll get us out of this.”
Half broke horses: a true-life novel Page 15