One thing about Phoenix, though: There were a lot more jobs available than in Yavapai County. Jim was hired as the manager of a warehouse stocking airplane parts, and I landed a teaching position in a high school in South Phoenix.
There were also investment opportunities in the city. After paying for our house on Third Street, we still had money left over, and we used it to buy a few other small houses that we rented out. Distressed properties were always coming onto the market at bargain prices. Jim and I attended courthouse auctions and bid on foreclosures, and I started carrying a ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check in my purse, just in case I happened across anyone needing to sell quickly at a discounted price. For the first time in our lives, we were living on the backs of others, but that was how you got ahead in the city. When Jim said it made him feel like a vulture, I told him that scavengers got a bum rap. “Vultures don’t kill animals, they live off the dead,” I said. “And that’s what we’re doing. We’re not bringing misfortune on these people, we’re just taking advantage of it.”
I worried constantly that someone might snatch my purse and make off with the check, so I kept the bag clutched to my chest when I walked through town. That was only one of a number of things I found myself worrying about in Phoenix. We had bought ourselves a radio that we could listen to all day long now that we were living in a house wired for electricity. At first I thought that was just grand, but it meant that for the first time I was also listening to the news every day, and about every day, it seemed, there was a report about some crime or another in town. People were always getting robbed or having their cars stolen or their houses burgled if they weren’t getting raped, shot, or stabbed. A Phoenix woman named Winnie Ruth Judd—known as the “Blonde Butcher” and the “Trunk Murderess” because she’d killed two people and put their bodies in her luggage—kept escaping from the insane asylum she’d been sent to, and the news was always filled with accounts of possible Trunk Murderess sightings, along with warnings to the citizenry to lock all doors and windows.
So I kept my pearl-handled revolver under my bed. I also bought a little twenty-two pistol to carry in my purse along with the check. Every night I made a point of bolting the doors, which we had never done at the ranch, and I slept on the outside of the bed I still shared with Rosemary, keeping her next to the wall so if anyone got through the locked doors and attacked us, I could fight them off while Rosemary escaped.
“Mom, you’ve become such a worrywart,” she said.
Rosemary was right. On the ranch, we worried about the weather and the cattle and horses, but we never worried about ourselves. In Phoenix people worried about themselves all the time.
PEOPLE ALSO WORRIED ABOUT bombs. Every Saturday at noon, the air-raid siren was tested, and an earsplitting whoop-whoop-whoop blared throughout the city. If the siren sounded at any other time, that meant an attack was under way and you were supposed to run to the bomb shelters. Rosemary couldn’t abide the siren, and when it went off, she buried her head under a pillow. “I can’t stand that noise,” she said.
“It’s for your own good,” I said.
“Well, all it’s doing is scaring me, and I don’t see the good in that.”
The girl was developing a pronounced contrarian streak. One morning that August, when Rosemary and I were walking down Van Buren Street, we passed a storefront where a bunch of people were gathered, gawking at an automatic donut-making machine. Next to it was a newsstand, and it was when I glanced down at the headlines that I first learned about the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima. I bought the paper, and as I read, I tried to explain to Rosemary what had happened. Rosemary couldn’t believe that a single bomb had obliterated an entire city— hundreds of thousands of people, not only soldiers but also grandparents, mothers, children, as well as dogs, cats, birds, chickens, mice, every living thing. “Those poor, poor creatures,” she kept sobbing.
I tried to argue that it was the Japs who’d started the war, and because of Hiroshima, thousands more American boys would not have to die fighting them, but Rosemary decided there was something sick about the atom bomb. The deaths of all those mice and birds was just as upsetting to her as the deaths of the people. After all, she said, the animals hadn’t started the war.
She also decided there was something sick about Americans who would stand there gawking at a donut maker while there was so much agony on the other side of the world.
“Focus on the positive,” I said. “You live in a country where no one has to make donuts by hand.”
* * *
Rosemary’s feelings got even darker that fall. We’d enrolled her at St. Mary’s, a Catholic school a few blocks from the house, and the nuns, who kept reminding their students that all life was sacred, showed some Japanese news reels of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scenes of flattened city blocks, incinerated corpses, and babies deformed by radiation gave Rosemary nightmares. The nuns told her that we needed to pray for the Japanese because they were God’s children, too, and they had lost their sons and daughters and fathers and mothers. I was less sympathetic. “That’s what happens when you go around starting wars,” I said. But Rosemary was distraught. No one but God, she thought, should be able to kill so many people so easily and so quickly as we had done with the atomic bomb. That her own government had that kind of power made her very afraid of it. Now that it had the bomb, who was it going to bomb next? What if it decided she was the enemy?
When I got tired of explaining that the end justified the means, I told Rosemary to stop talking about Hiroshima, because if she stopped talking about it, she’d stop thinking about it. She did stop talking about it, but one day I looked under the bed we still shared and found a folder full of drawing after drawing of animals and children, all with Japanese eyes and angels’ wings.
ROSEMARY STARTED DRAWING AND painting more obsessively than ever. As far as I could tell, it was her one talent. Her grades were still terrible. I signed her up for violin and piano lessons, but her instructor said she lacked the discipline to practice. I tried to defend her, arguing that improvisation, not recitation, was her musical forte, but one day the instructor said if he had to listen to her torturing that poor violin one more minute, he’d puncture his own eardrums.
“What are we going to do with you?” I asked her.
“I’m not worried about me,” she said. “And no one else should be, either.”
A lot of pretty girls lost their looks when they reached adolescence, but Rosemary was still a stunner, though I’d kept my promise to myself never to tell her this. However, I was getting a little desperate, and one day when I read a newspaper article about a beauty contest, I figured maybe Rosemary should go ahead and play that card. “I have an idea,” I said. “You can be a beauty queen or a model.”
“What are you talking about?” Rosemary asked.
I told her to put on a bathing suit and walk back and forth in front of me. It wasn’t promising. She had the looks and the figure, but she moved like a cowgirl, not a beauty queen, swinging her arms vigorously with each big stride. So I enrolled her in modeling school, where she learned how to walk with a book on her head and get out of a car without showing her underpants. But at her first photo session, when the photographer told her to flirt with the camera, she couldn’t stop giggling self-consciously, and the man shook his head.
What Rosemary really wanted to do was be an artist.
“Artists never make any money,” I said, “and they usually go crazy.”
Rosemary pointed out that Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington had both gotten rich painting western scenes. “Art’s a great way to make money,” Rosemary said. For the cost of a piece of canvas and some paint, she went on, you could create a picture worth thousands of dollars. In what other line of work could you do that? A blank canvas, she kept arguing, was a treasure waiting to happen.
I finally took some of her drawings to a few frame shops and asked the clerks if they thought my daughter had any talent. They said
she showed promise, so I arranged for her to take lessons with Ernestine, an art teacher who wore a beret just in case you couldn’t tell from her accent that she was a Frog.
Ernestine taught Rosemary that white wasn’t really white, that black wasn’t really black, that every color had other colors in it, that every line was made up of more than one line, that you should love the weeds as much as the flowers because everything on the planet had its own beauty and it was up to the artist to discover it, and that for the artist, there was no such thing as reality because the world was as you chose to see it.
This all struck me as a lot of hogwash, but Rosemary really lapped it up.
“You know what’s the greatest thing about painting?” she said one day.
“What?”
“If there’s something about the world that you don’t like, you can paint a painting that makes it the way you want it to be.”
With Ernestine’s lessons, Rosemary’s paintings became less and less about the thing she was painting and more about what she was feeling at the moment. Around this time, she started spelling her name Rose Mary because she thought it made for a prettier signature. I continued to pay the Frog for the lessons, but I kept reminding Rosemary that art was an iffy proposition, that most women still had to choose between being a nurse, a secretary, and a teacher, and for my money, teaching beat the others hands down.
The funny thing was, even while telling Rosemary this, I was not, for the first time in my life, enjoying my job. I was teaching math and English at a large high school. A lot of the kids came from highfalutin families, wore fancy clothes—a few actually drove their own cars—and refused to obey me if they didn’t feel like it. It was also the first time I had not been on my own, teaching in a one-room school. I had principals and other teachers second-guessing me, forms to fill out, and committees to sit on. Half my day was spent doing paperwork for the bureaucracy.
There were more rules for teachers than for students, and those bureaucrats were awfully persnickety about you following those rules. Once when I opened my purse in the teachers’ lounge, one of the other teachers saw my little pistol and just about had a fit.
“That’s a gun!” she gasped.
“Barely,” I said. “It’s only a twenty-two.”
Still, she reported me to the principal, who warned me that if I ever brought a gun to the school again, I’d be fired.
“How am I going to protect myself and my students?” I asked.
“That’s what the police are for,” he said.
“Who’s going to protect us from the police?”
“Just leave the gun at home.”
JIM NEVER COMPLAINED, BUT I could tell his job chafed him as much as mine did me. He was bored—a big, broad-shouldered guy sitting awkwardly behind a little metal desk, checking his inventory list and watching the Mexican workers boxing up airplane parts. Jim wasn’t a desk man. He also had a lot of downtime, which he wasn’t used to, and he spent a fair amount of it shooting the breeze with the warehouse bookkeeper, a tarted-up divorcée I did not take to named Glenda. She called Jim “Smithy” and was always asking him to light her cigarettes.
My husband just didn’t see the point of city life, didn’t understand why anyone would want to live like this. So many things about it struck him as contrary to the proper and natural way of the world. Shortly after we moved to the city, they cut down all the orange and cottonwood trees that shaded the streets to make room for more parking. “Seems to me you lose more than you gain,” Jim said.
The simple truth was, he missed the outdoors. He missed the sweat and dust and heat of ranching, the smells and hard labor. He missed the way that ranch life forced you to study the sky and the land every day, trying to anticipate nature’s intentions. On Sundays we took walks in Encanto Park in the middle of the city, and out of habit, Jim continued to be mindful of what the plants and animals were telling him. As fall came on that year, he noticed that the birds were migrating south earlier than usual, squirrels were storing extra nuts and their tails were unusually full, acorns were especially large, the bark on the cottonwoods was thicker, and so were the hulls on the pecan nuts.
“Going to be a hard winter,” he said. The signs were all there. He hoped other people were reading them, too.
And that winter was hard. It came on early, and in January it snowed in Phoenix for the first time in most folks’ memory. Back on the ranch, a blizzard like that would have been a call to action, forcing us to run around collecting firewood, bringing in the horses, and carting hay to the range. Jim would build a windbreak to protect the cattle. He’d empty all the wagons out of the garage and make a wall of them between the house and the barn, covering it with tarps, coats, and blankets, then buttressing it with old trunks and anvils and dirt and rocks and whatever he could find. He’d round up as many cattle as could fit into the barn, and when the storm reached us, he was outside on horseback, keeping the cattle moving, keeping their blood circulating. Every couple of hours, he’d rotate a new group into the barn and behind the wall of wagons so they could get a break from the wind and snow.
Living in the city, all we did was turn up the radiator and listen to the hiss and clank of the pipes.
The snow kept falling, and the next day the governor went on the radio, declaring a state of emergency. School was canceled and most businesses were closed. The National Guard was called out to rescue people stranded in remote parts of the state. Jim said he hoped that Boots and Gaiters knew what they were doing. He hoped all the cattle had been moved off the plateau down to the winter range and the hands had broken the ice on the ponds. “The first thing you got to do is break the ice,” he said. “The cattle’ll die of thirst before they starve.”
On the third day of the storm, we got a knock on the door. It was a man from the Arizona Department of Agriculture. Cattle were dying across the state, he said. Ranchers needed help, and the name that kept coming up was Jim Smith. It had taken them a while to track him down, the man said, but he was needed.
Jim threw some heavy clothes into his old army duffel bag, grabbed his hat, and was out the door in less than five minutes.
The first thing Jim did was organize drops of hay. He had a big cargo plane filled with round bales, and they took off into the storm. When they reached the range, the crew rolled the bales out the back of the cargo bay and watched as the hay tumbled through the snow and bounced on the ground.
Since the roads were impassable, Jim asked the government for a small plane and a pilot, and they flew across the state, touching down at isolated ranch houses. Jim explained to the ranchers, most of whom had never seen a blizzard the likes of this one, what to do. You got to break the ice on the ponds, he told them, and cut down the fence wire. Let the cattle roam. They need to move to keep their blood circulating, and they’ll instinctively move south, but if they hit a wire fence, they’ll all press up against it and die. Let them get into big herds and huddle for warmth. You can sort them all out by the brands later.
At one ranch up in the hills, there was no place to land. Jim had never put on a parachute before, much less jumped, but he strapped one on. “Count ten, pull the cord, and roll into the fall,” the pilot said, and Jim heaved himself out of the plane.
The storm had stopped, but the temperatures were still frigid when Jim reached the Showtime Ranch. Even before he landed, he could see from the air that no one had broken the ice on Big Jim. Carcasses of frozen cattle lay clustered along the pond’s edge. When he got to the ranch house, he found Boots and the new hands sitting around Gaiter’s fancy propane stove, their feet up, drinking coffee.
Any muttonhead can run a ranch during good times. You only find out who the real ranchers are when calamity strikes. Those dunces sitting around that stove may not have been able to read tree bark, but at the very least, they should have been listening to the weather reports, and when they heard that a devil of a storm was coming down from Canada, they would have had twenty-four hours to prepare. I would h
ave lit into that fool Boots and those other chumps, but that was not Jim’s way. He did, however, get their sorry butts out and mounted up to cut wire, break ice, and start the cattle moving.
There were thousands of dead cattle lying rock-hard in the snow, piled along the southern fences. Some of the cattle that had survived were so weak they couldn’t walk, so Jim had the men bring hay and water and hand-feed them. He massaged their legs, which were cut from where they’d tried to break the ice themselves, and helped them stand again. If he could get them moving, he knew, they’d live.
Jim was gone two weeks. That whole time I didn’t know where he was or how he was doing, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. When he finally came back, he’d lost twenty pounds. His face and hands were raw. He hadn’t slept for days, and there were dark circles under his eyes. But he was happy. He hadn’t felt this useful since leaving the ranch. He’d been out doing what he was meant to do. He was Big Jim again.
A few days after Jim returned, he got a call from Gaiters. When Jim had been back in Yavapai County during the blizzard, people had told him that Gaiters had been going around referring to him as a “relic” and a “washed-up old geezer.” But that was before the storm. Now Gaiters was so impressed with the way Jim had salvaged what remained of the Showtime’s herd that he offered Jim his old job as ranch manager. He’d even build us our own knotty pine caretaker’s cabin. “You’re the real thing,” Gaiters said.
Jim and I discussed it, but we agreed right away that it was not for us. Before, we had been the ones running the ranch, making all the decisions. The storm had humbled Gaiters somewhat, but he still had his cockamamie notions for goosing up the Showtime. Jim didn’t want to do Gaiters’s bidding or have to spend his time arguing the man out of foolish ideas. What was more, there was no possibility of us someday buying the place. I told Jim I didn’t want to live in a caretaker’s cabin, even a knotty pine one, waiting for the owner to fly in with his Hollywood friends for weekend parties and leading dudes on trail rides. I’d been a servant before, and once was enough.
Half broke horses: a true-life novel Page 20