Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  I looked over at Rosemary, who was staring at me wide-eyed, and gave her a big wink to show her just how much fun we were having. The little creature grinned. She was positively fearless, unlike those honking lace-panties in the back.

  But the swerving hadn’t slowed the car, and I realized the situation called for more drastic measures. We reached a stretch of the road that was cut into the side of the mountain. On our side it sloped down, and on the far side it rose upward.

  “Ready for some hijinks?” I shouted.

  “I am,” Rosemary said, but the Brooklyn ladies continued to wail.

  “Hang tight!” I shouted.

  I cut the car across the road and angled up the hillside, bouncing over holes and rocks, but the slope was steep, and while we started losing momentum, we also started tipping sideways, and then the car rolled once, landing upside down, exactly like I’d planned.

  We got knocked around a bit, but no one was seriously hurt, and we all scrambled out through the open windows. The Brooklyn ladies were in a tizzy, cussing my driving and threatening to sue or have me arrested and my license revoked. “Youse almost got us kilt!”

  “All that’s happened to you is that you’ve had the lace knocked off your panties,” I said. “Instead of carrying on, you should be thanking me, because my driving skills just saved all your necks. You ride, you got to know how to fall, and you drive, you got to know how to crash.”

  THOSE BROOKLYN BROADS WERE a bunch of sissies, but they got me thinking about Christmas. For the most part, pioneers and ranchers didn’t have the time or money for gift giving and tree trimming, and they tended to treat Christmas like Prohibition, another eastern aberration that wasn’t of much concern to them. A couple of years back, when some missionaries were trying to dazzle the Navajos into converting, they had a gift-bearing Santa Claus jump out of a plane, but his parachute didn’t open, and he landed with a thud in front of the Indians, convincing them—and most of the rest of us—that the less we had to do with jolly old Saint Nick, the better off we’d be.

  Still, I got to wondering if maybe I was depriving my kids of a special experience, and that week I bought some of those fancy new electric Christmas lights in Kingman and a couple of small toys from the Commercial Central, the general store in Seligman.

  On Christmas morning I had Jim secretly climb up on the roof and start shaking a string of old carriage bells while I explained to the kids that it was Saint Nick and his flying reindeer visiting all the children in the world, bringing them toys that he and his elves in the North Pole had spent the year making. Rosemary’s expression went from bewildered to doubtful, then she started shaking her head and grinning. “What are you talking about, Mom?” she asked. “Any dummy knows deer can’t fly.”

  “The deer are magic, for crying out loud,” I said. I explained that Santa Claus himself was magic, and that was how he was able to visit every child in the world, leaving them all gifts in socks, in the course of one evening. Then I held up two socks and passed them over to Rosemary and Little Jim.

  Rosemary pulled out an orange, some hazelnuts, a roll of LifeSavers, and a small packet with a set of jacks inside. “These aren’t from the North Pole,” she said as she examined the jacks. “These are from the Commercial Central. I saw them there.”

  I walked over to the window and stuck my head out. “Come on down, Jim,” I hollered. “They’re not buying it.”

  Even though I couldn’t sell the kids on Santa Claus, they were beside themselves with excitement about the Christmas lights. We all drove up into the hills and cut down a short pine that the kids picked out. Jim dug a hole in the front yard and we set it in that, tamping down the dirt and stringing the lights around its branches. All afternoon Rosemary and Little Jim danced around the tree and shouted at the sun to hurry up and set.

  Once it grew dark, we called the cowboys out from the bunkhouse, and Jim pulled the hearse up next to the tree. He opened the hood, attached a cable to the battery, and as we all stood in a circle around the tree, he raised the cable and the light cord above his head, and with a flourish, brought them together. The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white, and blue lights boldly glowing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the immense darkness of the range.

  “It’s magic!” Rosemary shrieked.

  A number of the ranch hands had never seen electric lights, and a few of them took off their hats and held them over their hearts.

  And those Brooklyn broads thought we didn’t know how to celebrate Christmas in style.

  IN MY SECOND YEAR at Peach Springs, I had twenty-five students in my one-room schoolhouse. Six of them—almost a quarter of the class—were the children of Deputy Johnson, a rawboned chain-smoker who wore an old fedora and had a droopy mustache. For the most part, I liked Deputy Johnson. He turned a blind eye to minor infractions and tended to give folks the benefit of the doubt as long as they acknowledged that he was the law, deciding what was right and wrong. But he could come down on you hard if you took issue with him. He had a total of thirteen children and, their daddy being one of the county lawmen, they did pretty much as they pleased, letting air out of people’s tires, throwing cherry bombs down outhouse holes, and leaving the babysitter tied to a tree all night.

  One of the deputy’s sons was Johnny Johnson, who was a couple of years older than Rosemary. He’d been a handful ever since I started teaching at Peach Springs. Maybe it was because he had older brothers who sat around telling dirty stories about girls, but Johnny couldn’t keep his hands off them—a regular tomcat in the making. He had kissed Rosemary on the mouth, something I learned a few days later from one of the other students. Rosemary said it was just a yucky thing that had happened, nothing she wanted anyone to get in any trouble over. Johnny, for his part, called Rosemary and the other student lying finks and said I couldn’t prove anything.

  It wasn’t worth holding a court of inquisition over, but I was still simmering about the matter a couple of weeks later when, one day during class, the little punk reached over and stuck his hand up the dress of a sweet Mexican girl named Rosita. That boy needed to be taught to keep his grimy hands to himself, so I put my book down, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face. He looked at me, bug-eyed with shock, and then he reached up and slapped me in the face.

  For a second I was speechless. A smile started creeping across Johnny’s face. The little squirt thought he had the best of me. It was then that I hauled him up and threw him against the wall, backhanding him again and again, and when he cowered down in a ball on the floor, I grabbed my ruler and started whaling his butt.

  “You’ll be sorry!” he kept screaming. “You’ll be sorry!”

  I didn’t care. Johnny Johnson needed to learn a lesson he’d never forget, and you couldn’t spell it out on the blackboard, you had to beat it into him. Also, he was clearly in danger of becoming a crumb-bum heel like my first husband and the producer who seduced Helen, and he needed to realize there could be consequences for mistreating girls. So I kept whaling on him, maybe even beyond the call of duty, and truth be told, I got more than a little satisfaction from it.

  JUST AS I EXPECTED, Deputy Johnson showed up at school the next day.

  “I’m not here to have a conversation,” he said. “I’m here to tell you to keep your hands off my boy. Got it?”

  “You deputies may think you run Yavapai County, but I run my classroom,” I said, “and I’ll discipline wayward kids as I see fit. Got it?”

  When Jim came home that night, I told him what had happened.

  “This is getting almost predictable,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “These showdowns. It’s becoming a pattern.”

  “It would be either a pattern of me standing up for myself or a pattern of me getting pushed around.”

  Deputy Johnson couldn’t get me fired outright, since they’d have trouble replacing me in the middle of the school
year, but a few months later, I received another one of those blasted letters saying my contract was not going to be renewed. At this point I’d practically lost count of the number of times I’d been fired, and I was getting pretty sick of it.

  The day the letter arrived, I sat at the kitchen table thinking about my situation. If I had it all to do over again, I’d have done the same thing. I wasn’t in the wrong. The rules were. I was a darned good teacher and had been doing what was necessary, not only for Rosita but also for Johnny Johnson, who needed to be reined in before he wound up in serious trouble. Even so, I’d been booted once again, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  As I sat there brooding about all this, Rosemary walked into the kitchen, and when she saw me, a look of alarm swept her face. She started stroking my arm. “Don’t cry, Mom,” she said. “Stop it. Please stop it.”

  It was only then that I realized tears were running down my cheeks. I remembered how disturbed I’d been as a little girl, watching my mother cry. Now, by letting my own daughter see me all weak and pitiful, I felt that I’d failed her in a big way, and I was furious with myself.

  “I’m not crying,” I said. “I just got dust in my eyes.” I pushed her hand away. “Because I’m not weak. You’ll never have to worry about that. Your mother is not a weak woman.”

  And with that I headed out to the woodpile and went on a tear splitting logs, setting each one up on the chopping block and using every ounce of strength I had to bring the ax down on it, sending the split pieces of white wood flying apart while Rosemary stood watching. It was almost as satisfying as whaling Johnny Johnson.

  DEPUTY JOHNSON MADE SURE everybody knew I’d been let go, and he also made no secret as to who was behind it. When I ran into people at the Commercial Central, they figured they couldn’t ask me how things were going at school, the way they usually did, and there were the awkward silences that everyone who’s been given the boot knows all too well.

  But I was bound and determined to show folks that Deputy Johnson hadn’t broken my spirit, and I was looking for a way to do that when it was announced that a special premiere of Gone with the Wind would be held in Kingman. I decided to attend, in the fanciest dress this county had ever seen.

  Gone with the Wind was by far and away my favorite book—after the Bible—and I thought it had about as many lessons in it. I’d read it when it first came out, then I’d sat down and read it again. I’d also read most of it aloud to Rosemary. Scarlett O’Hara was my kind of gal. She was tough, she was sassy, she knew what she wanted, and she never let anything or anyone get in her way.

  Like most people in the country, I’d been looking forward to the movie for years. It was the most expensive movie ever made—shot entirely in Technicolor—and magazines and newspapers had been following all the details of the casting and production. Now that it was finally finished, the studio was holding premieres around the country, including the one in Kingman, and charging five dollars for a ticket—an astronomical amount compared to the nickel that a ticket usually cost.

  Women were expected to wear gowns and men to wear tuxedos, or at least their Sunday best, to the premiere. Since I’d never owned a gown and wasn’t about to splurge on one—the ticket being enough of an extravagance—I decided that I’d take my inspiration from Scarlett herself: I’d fashion my own gown using the living room curtains. The way I saw it, having curtains in the bedrooms made sense, but you didn’t really need them in the living room. Those red velvet curtains I’d bought with the S&H green stamps were just hanging there in the living room at Hackberry, gathering dust and starting to fade from the Arizona sun. And red was my favorite color.

  My gown wasn’t going to be the sort of fitted, wasp-waisted getup that Scarlett had to be laced into. It would be floor-length but simple and free-flowing, more Grecian than antebellum. I borrowed a sewing machine from my neighbor Mrs. Hutter, who was an accomplished seamstress. She helped me design the pattern and assisted in the fittings, but I did all the actual sewing. For a belt, I used the curtain sash.

  I didn’t have a full-length mirror, but I could tell when I finished it and put it on for the first time that the gown was, quite frankly, a masterpiece.

  “You look like a movie star,” Rosemary said.

  “That’s a lot of dress,” Jim said. “They’ll sure see you coming.”

  Jim refused to go to the premiere with me. He had no use for movies. We’d been to a few westerns, and he’d actually walked out of a couple of them, completely disgusted by what he considered the phony depiction of cowboy life—the way movie cowboys sat by the campfire singing after a supposedly rough day on the trail, the way they hung around the corral doing rope tricks instead of mending fences, the way they wore clean white hats and fringy vests and fluffy sheepskin chaps, and most of all, the way they jumped from rooftops onto their horses.

  “That’s not the way it is at all,” Jim said.

  “ ’Course it’s not,” I told him. “Who would pay good money to see an actual smelly cowboy? You go to movies to escape from the way things really are.”

  “I guess gangsters complain about gangster movies, too,” he said.

  But Jim agreed to be my Gone with the Wind chauffeur, and the night of the premiere, he drove me in the hearse—a little dented after the crash with the Brooklyn broads—into Kingman. When we pulled up to the theater, spectators were milling around on the sidewalk, watching everyone arrive in their finery. Deputy Johnson stood out front in his uniform, directing traffic. Jim got out and opened the hearse door for me, and I stepped onto the red carpet, waving grandly to the crowd—and to Deputy Johnson—as the photographer’s flashbulb popped.

  VII

  THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  Rosemary and Little Jim on Old Buck

  I TOLD ROSEMARY AND Little Jim that I didn’t want them making friends with the other schoolkids, because if they did, those kids would expect special treatment from me. Even if they didn’t, the other students might believe they had if they got good grades. “I have to be like Caesar’s wife,” I told Rosemary and Little Jim. “I have to be above suspicion.”

  We were also pretty isolated on the ranch, there being no other kids within walking distance, but Rosemary and Little Jim got along fine by themselves. In fact, those two little scamps were each other’s best friend. After morning chores, if there was no school, they were free to do whatever they wanted. They loved to rummage around in all the outbuildings. Once they found a couple of old whalebone corsets in a trunk in the garage and wore them around for weeks. They also hiked out to the Indian graveyard, collected arrowheads, swam in the dam and the horse troughs, threw their pocketknives at targets, and worked in the blacksmith shop, heating up pieces of metal and, on one occasion, fashioning something they called the Wagon Wheel Express: two wagon wheels with an axle and a central iron tongue that they’d welded to the axle and that dragged behind the wheels. They’d pull the Wagon Wheel Express to the top of hills and then sit on the tongue as the contraption barreled down.

  What they loved most of all was riding. Both of them had been on horseback since before they could walk and rode as naturally as any Indian kids. The Poms, in gratitude to Jim for his success with the ranch, had sent Rosemary and Little Jim a Shetland pony. It was the meanest creature on the whole place, always wanting to unhorse whoever was on him, but Rosemary had great fun trying to hang on as the Shetland bucked away or veered under a low-hanging branch, hoping to knock her off.

  Most days she and Little Jim saddled up Socks and Blaze, two chestnut quarter horses, and set out into the range. One of their favorites pastimes was racing the train. A set of tracks for the Santa Fe Railroad cut across the ranch, and every afternoon they’d wait for the two-fifteen. When it came chugging up, they’d gallop alongside it, the passengers leaning out and waving and the engineer sounding the whistle until the train inevitably pulled ahead.

  It was a race they never minded losing, and they’d return hot and sweaty, with the horses a
ll lathered up.

  The kids took their share of knocks. They were always falling out of trees and off roofs and horses, getting scraped and bruised, but Jim and I never put up with any tears. “Tough it out,” we’d always tell them. They rolled boulders down hills at each other. They ate horse feed and pissants on dares. They fired at each other with slingshots and BB guns. Cattle charged them and horses stepped on their toes. Once when Rosemary and Little Jim were playing in the pond, he stepped into a sinkhole and was sucked underwater. Big Jim, who was working on the dam, dove in without taking off his boots. He kept plunging down to the pond floor, feeling around for Little Jim, and finally found one of his arms sticking up through the muck. He pulled Little Jim’s limp body to the side and, with Rosemary kneeling beside him, kept squeezing on Jim’s chest until the muddy water upgushed out of his mouth and he started gasping for air.

  One day in the middle of the summer when Rosemary turned eight, she and I were driving off-road across the Colorado Plateau in the pickup, bringing supplies out to Jim and some of the hands who were riding the northern fence line, checking for breaks. Since it had rained a few days earlier, a mudflat we had to cross was soggier than I’d expected, and darned if we didn’t get stuck. We tried pushing but couldn’t budge her. I didn’t relish the five-hour walk in the hot sun back to the ranch house, and as I leaned against the hood, trying to figure my options, I noticed a herd of wild horses grazing in a copse of cottonwoods about a quarter mile off.

  “Rosemary, we’re going to catch us a horse,” I said.

  “How, Mom? We don’t even have a rope.”

  “Just you watch.”

  In the back of the pickup was a sack of feed for the ranch hands’ horses and a bucket with some rusting fence nails in it. I emptied the nails onto the flatbed and poured some feed into the bucket, dumping the rest next to the nails. Then I cut the empty feed bag into strips with my pocketknife, tied them together, and made a small loop with one end. I had me a hackamore.