Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  “You like to fly,” Rex added. “If it would get me back into your good graces, I’d be honored to take you up for a spin.”

  I HADN’T BEEN UP in a plane for years, and though I was still steamed at that hooligan, the idea thrilled me, so of course I agreed. When Rex arrived to pick me up the following Sunday, I was standing outside in my aviator’s jumpsuit, carrying my leather helmet.

  Rex leaned out the window of the two-toned Ford sedan he was always borrowing from a friend. “Amelia Earhart!” he called. “You’re alive after all!”

  Rosemary wanted to come along, but Rex told her the plane was only a two-seater. “This trip’s just me and Amelia,” he said.

  Rex drove like a demon, the way I liked to, and in no time at all, we had hurtled down Agnes Weeps, climbed out of the canyon, and were heading along the Apache Trail.

  I asked Rex a little bit about his background.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “if you’re looking for pedigree, you’re going to find more in the local dog pound.” He’d grown up in a coal town, he said. His mother had been an orphan, his father had worked as a clerk for the railroad. His uncle made moonshine, and as a teenager, Rex sometimes ran the hooch into town.

  “Is that where you learned to drive like this?” I asked. “Trying to get away from the revenuers?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “The law was our best customers. And Uncle wouldn’t allow no speeding. It was fine moonshine, and he bade me drive slow so as to let it age.”

  I told him about my days selling hooch stored under the baby’s bassinet and how Rosemary had saved me by bawling at the sight of the cops who’d come to investigate. We got along just fine, chatting away until we reached the flats and came to a beat-up trailer surrounded by junk: car axles, metal sinks, old fuel drums, stacks of folded canvas tarps, and a rusting truck up on cinder blocks.

  Rex slammed on his brakes and swerved into the yard in front of the trailer. “Look at all that crap!” he exclaimed. “Being from West Virginia, I’m a mite touchy about white-trash eyesores, and I’m going to give that fellow a piece of my mind.”

  He got out and started pounding on the door. “Will the sorry-ass lowlife who lives in this heap of rubble have the balls to show his buttugly face?”

  A scrawny fellow with a crew cut opened the door.

  “My future mother-in-law’s in that car,” Rex hollered. “And she’s sick of driving past this pigsty. So the next time I come down this road, I want to see it cleaned up, understand?”

  The two men stared at each other for a moment, and I was certain one was going to deck the other, but then they both started laughing and slapped each other on the back.

  “Rex, you ornery son of a bitch, how you been?” the fellow said.

  Rex brought him over to the car and introduced him as Gus, an old air force buddy. “You may think I’ve got the long-lost Amelia Earhart here, but she’s Lily Casey Smith. She could teach Amelia Earhart a thing or two about flying, and she really is the mother of my future bride.”

  “You’re going to let this AWOL jackass marry your daughter?” Gus cried. “Keep the bullwhip handy!”

  They both thought that was just hilarious.

  Rex explained that, strictly speaking, it was against regulations for air force pilots to take civilians up in military planes, though everyone did it all the time on the QT. Since they couldn’t take off from the airbase, in front of the controllers, the pilots picked up the civilians at the different grass fields outside the base where they practiced landings. One of those fields was right behind Gus’s trailer, so Rex was going to leave me with Gus, take off from the base, and fly the plane back to the trailer. I didn’t mind a man who ignored stupid regulations, so Rex got another check in the plus column—though the minus column was still well in the lead.

  I sat in back of the trailer, shooting the breeze with Gus. There was an orange wind sock on a pole by the landing field, but since there was no wind, it just hung there. Finally, the plane appeared. It was yellow, a single-engine two-seater with a glass canopy that Rex had shoved back. He landed and taxied toward us. After Rex stopped, Gus pointed out the footstep below the flap, and I scrambled onto the wing. Rex had me sit in the front while he got in the back. I plugged in my headphones and watched the needles on the instrument panel jiggle from the engine’s vibration. Rex throttled up, and we bumped across the field into the air.

  As we gained altitude, I again had the sensation that I was an angel, watching tiny cars creep along ribbons of road far beneath me, and gazing toward the earth’s distant curve, with that infinity of blue space behind it.

  We flew toward Horse Mesa, and Rex dropped down to buzz the house a couple of times. Rosemary and Jim came running out waving like maniacs, and Rex dipped the wings.

  Rex climbed, and we followed the spine of the mountains to Fish Creek Canyon. Then we dropped down into the canyon itself, flying above the winding river with the red stone cliff walls sweeping in and out on either side of us.

  When we came up out of the canyon, we circled back over the flats, and Rex, who could talk to me over the intercom, let me take the controls. I banked left, brought her level again, banked right in one big circle, climbed, and dropped. Nothing in life was finer than flying.

  Rex took the controls again. He sent the plane on a big rolling loop, and I couldn’t help grabbing on for dear life when we went upside down. Coming out of the loop, we dove steeply and then went skimming along barely fifty feet above the ground. Trees, hills, rock formations zoomed up at us and flashed by.

  “We call this flat-hatting,” Rex said. “A friend of mine was doing it over the beach, and when he leaned out to wave at the girls, his plane went right into the drink.”

  Then we were flying toward a road with a string of telephone poles running alongside it. “Watch this!” Rex shouted over the intercom. He dropped the plane down even lower until we were practically touching the ground.

  I realized he was going to try to fly under the telephone wire. “Rex, you fool! You’ll kill us!” I yelled.

  Rex just cackled, and before I knew it, we were lining up to shoot between two poles, then they zipped past, along with the blur of the wire overhead.

  “You’re a goddamned crazy man!” I said.

  “That’s what your daughter loves about me!” he hollered back.

  He climbed again and headed north until he found what he wanted, grazing cattle. He dropped down behind the herd and approached it, once again almost skimming the earth. The cattle started stampeding away from us at their lumbering gallop, streaming out to the sides as we came onto them, but Rex banked right and then left, driving the cattle toward the center. Only when he had them back together did he pull up and away.

  “Can’t do that on a horse, can you?” he asked.

  THAT SPRING REX AND Rosemary decided to get married. She gave me the news one evening after dinner while we were doing the dishes.

  “You need someone solid,” I told her. “Haven’t I taught you anything?”

  “You sure have,” she said. “That’s all you’ve been doing my whole life.

  ’Let this be a lesson.’ ’Let that be a lesson.’ But all these years, what you thought you were teaching me was one thing, and what I was learning was something else.”

  We stood there, staring at each other. Rosemary was leaning against the kitchen sink, her arms crossed.

  “So you’re going to marry him even if I don’t approve?” I asked.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I always liked to think I’d never met a kid I couldn’t teach,” I said. “Turns out I was wrong. That kid is you.”

  At the same time, Rex announced that his tour of duty was coming to an end and he’d decided not to reenlist. The air force wanted him to fly bombers, and he wanted to fly fighters. Also, he didn’t want Rosemary to waste her life raising a brood of kids in a broiling trailer on a desert air base. Besides, he had other plans. Big plans.

  The whole idea w
as half-baked.

  “Where are you going to live?” I asked Rosemary.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? The place where you live— your home—is one of the most important things in a body’s life.”

  “I feel like I haven’t really had a home since I left the ranch. I don’t think I’ll ever have a home again. Maybe we’ll never settle down.”

  * * *

  Jim was philosophical about Rosemary’s decision, figuring that since her mind was made up, we’d only turn her against us by arguing with her.

  “I feel like I failed,” I said.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Jim said. “She might not have turned out like you planned, but that don’t mean she turned out wrong.”

  We were sitting on the front step of our house. It had rained earlier. The red rock cliffs around Horse Mesa were wet, and runoff was pouring over crevices, creating dozens of those temporary waterfalls.

  “People are like animals,” Jim went on. “Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You got to recognize what’s in her nature and accept it.”

  “So this is a lesson for me, then?”

  Jim shrugged. “Our daughter’s found something she likes, this painting, and someone she wants to be with, this Rex fellow, so she’s way ahead of a lot of folks.”

  “I guess I should try to let it go.”

  “You’ll be happier if you do,” Jim said.

  I told Rex and Rosemary I’d pay for everything if they’d get married in a Catholic church, and we’d do it in style. I was hoping that a big traditional wedding would get them off on the right foot and might even lead to a traditional marriage.

  We rented a banquet hall at the Sands Hotel, which had just been built in downtown Phoenix. I got a good deal, since the hotel was new and trying to drum up business. I helped Rosemary pick out a wedding dress, and I got a good deal on that, too, because another bride-to-be had returned it when her wedding had fallen through. But it fit Rosemary perfectly.

  I invited practically everyone I knew: ranchers and ranch hands, teachers and former students, administrators, members of the Arizona Democratic Party, people from my past like Grady Gammage, who got me that first teaching job in Red Lake, and Rooster, who wrote back to his old writing teacher that he’d be bringing the Apache girl he’d married. I was going to wear my Gone with the Wind gown, but Jim put the kibosh on that idea. He said he didn’t want me upstaging the bride.

  “What are you going to do for a honeymoon?” I asked Rosemary as the day approached.

  “We’re not going to plan one,” she said. “It’s Rex’s idea. We’re just going to get into the car after the wedding and go where the road takes us.”

  “Well, honey, you’re in for a ride.”

  Rosemary did look beautiful at her wedding. Her dress reached to the floor, with layers of lace over white silk, a long lace veil, and matching lace gloves that came up to her elbows. In her white high heels, she was almost as tall as Rex, who looked rakish as hell in his white dinner jacket and black bow tie.

  Rex and his buddies were nipping from their pints all day, and things got a little wild at the reception. Rex gave a big speech, calling me “Amelia Earhart” and Jim “The Parachutin’ Cowboy” and Rosemary “My Wild Rose.” When the music started, he twirled Rosemary around the room, dipping and spinning her. She was having the time of her life, flouncing her lace dress and kicking up her white high heels like she was a cancan girl. Then Rex led everyone in a conga line and we all snaked around the room, swaying our hips and kicking out.

  At the end, when the newlywed couple came out of the hotel, Rex’s borrowed Ford was waiting for them at the curb. It was a late afternoon in May, and that golden Arizona light filled the street. We all crowded onto the steps to wave good-bye. When they reached the sidewalk, Rex grabbed Rosemary by the waist, leaned her backward, and planted a long, deep smooch on her mouth. They almost fell over, and that set them laughing so much it brought tears to their eyes. As Rosemary climbed into the car, Rex patted her behind like he owned it, then got in beside her. They were both still laughing as Rex gunned the motor the way he always did.

  Jim put his arm around me and we watched them take off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.

  EPILOGUE

  THE LITTLE CRITTER

  Jeannette Walls, age two

  JIM AND I LIVED on in Horse Mesa. Jim was getting along in years, and he soon retired, though he stayed busy as our little camp’s unofficial mayor—giving one neighbor’s wayward child the stern talking-to he needed, helping another neighbor patch a roof or unclog his gummed-up carburetor. I kept teaching. Like Jim, I was never one to lounge around with my feet propped on the porch rail, and knowing my students would be waiting for me made me wake up every morning raring to go.

  Little Jim and Diane settled into a tidy ranch house in the Phoenix suburbs, and they had a couple of kids. Their life seemed pretty stable. Rex and Rosemary, meanwhile, drifted around the desert, Rex taking odd jobs while working on his various harebrained schemes, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes as he drafted blueprints for machines to mine gold and giant panels to harness the sun’s energy. Rosemary was painting like a fiend, but she also started dropping babies right and left, and every time they visited us—which they did a couple of times a year, staying until Rex and I started hollering at each other to the point that we darned near came to blows—she was either expecting another one or nursing the one that had just popped out.

  Rosemary’s first two babies were girls, though crib death got the second before she was one year old. The third was also a girl. Rex and Rosemary were living in Phoenix at the time she was born, in our house on North Third Street, but they didn’t have the money to pay the hospital bill, so I had to drive down with a check—and some choice words for that reprobate Rex. Rosemary named the baby Jeannette and, probably still under the influence of her old art teacher, spelled it with two Ns the way the Frogs do.

  Jeannette was not a raving beauty—and for that I was thankful— with carroty hair coming in and such a long, scrawny body that when people saw her lying in the stroller, they told Rosemary to feed her baby more. But she had smiling green eyes and the beginnings of a strong, square jaw just like mine, and from the outset, I felt a powerful connection to the kid. I could tell she was a tenacious thing. When I took her in my arms and stuck out a finger, that little critter grabbed it and held on like she’d never let go.

  With the way Rex and Rosemary’s life together was shaping up, those kids were in for some wild times. But they came from hardy stock, and I figured they’d be able to play the cards they’d been dealt. Plus, I’d be hovering around. No way in hell were Rex and Rosemary cutting me out of the action when it came to my own grandchildren. I had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn’t a soul alive who could stop me.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLY meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.

  My grandmother was—and I say this with all due respect—quite a character. However, at first I resisted writing about her. While I had been close to her as a child, she died when I was eight, and most of what I knew about her came secondhand.

  Still, I’d been hearing the stories about Lily Casey Smith all my life, stories she told over and over to my mother, who told them to me. Lily was a spirited woman, a passionate teacher and talker who explained in great detail what had happened to her, why it had happened, what she’d done about it, and what she’d learned from it, all with the idea of imparting life lessons to my mother. My mother—who struggles to remember my phone number—has an astonishing recall for details about her mother and father and about their parents as well as an amazi
ng knowledge of the history and geology of Arizona. She never once told me something, whether about the Havasupai tribe or the Mogollon Rim, slaughtering cattle or breaking horses, that I could not confirm.

  While interviewing my mother and other family members, I came across a couple of books about her paternal grandfather and maternal great-grandfather that confirmed some of the family stories: Major Lot Smith, Mormon Raider, by Ivan Barrett, and Robert Casey and the Ranch on the Rio Hondo, by James Shinkle.

  Although those books substantiated certain events, such as the murder of Robert Casey and his children’s feud over the herd, they contradicted others. Shinkle noted that while researching his book, he came across conflicting versions of events and was frequently unable to get to the ultimate truth. In telling my grandmother’s story, I never aspired to that sort of historical accuracy. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.

  I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture Lily’s distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time I didn’t think of the book as fiction. Lily Casey Smith was a very real woman, and to say that I created her or the events of her life is giving me more credit than I’m due. However, since I don’t have the words from Lily herself, and since I have also drawn on my imagination to fill in details that are hazy or missing—and I’ve changed a few names to protect people’s privacy— the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JEANNETTE WALLS was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the Southwest and in Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her award-winning memoir, The Glass Castle, is an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. She is married to writer John Taylor and lives in Virginia.