I clamped my hands over my head and lay still, eating dirt, as the other horses thundered by. I’d had the wind knocked out of me, but otherwise, I was fine, and when the sound of the hoofbeats faded, I got up and smacked the dirt off my behind.
Rooster had caught Red and was jogging back toward me with the horse. I climbed into the saddle. I had no chance of catching up with the others, but Red needed to learn that my taking an involuntary dismount didn’t mean he got out of doing his job.
When I crossed the finish line, the judge stood up and doffed his Stetson. I raced in a later heat, but Red was off his stride, and we finished toward the back. I had felt that fifteen-dollar purse was within my reach, and afterward, as Rooster watered the horse, I was still cursing about that backfiring car when the judge came over. He was a big man with a deliberate way of moving, a weathered face, and steady pale blue eyes.
“That was quite a tumble you took,” he said. His voice was deep, like he was speaking from inside a bass fiddle.
“No need to be reminding me, mister.”
“Everyone takes spills, ma’am. But I was mightily impressed with how, instead of calling it a day, you got right back on and finished the race.”
I started railing about the backfiring jalopy, but Rooster cut me off. “This here is Jim Smith,” he said. “Some folks call him Big Jim. He owns the new garage in town.”
“Don’t much like automobiles, do you?” Jim asked me.
“Just don’t like them spooking my horse. Truth is, I always wanted to learn to drive.”
“Maybe I can teach you.”
I WAS N’T ABOUT TO pass up an opportunity like that, so Jim Smith taught the teacher how to drive. He had a Model T Ford with a brass radiator, brass headlights, and a brass horn. The car, which Jim called “the Flivver,” was an ordeal-and sometimes an outright menace-to start. On really cold days you couldn’t get it going at all, and even on warm days it helped to have two people, because otherwise you had to crank it by hand, then jump into the front seat to pull out the choke. Sometimes the car lurched forward while you were cranking it, and other times the engine kicked back, causing the crank to suddenly reverse. When that happened, people had been known to break their wrists.
But once you got the Flivver started up, driving it was a hoot. I discovered that I loved cars even more than I loved horses. Cars didn’t need to be fed if they weren’t working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn’t run off or kick down fences. They also didn’t buck, bite, or rear, and they didn’t need to be broke and trained, or caught and saddled up every time you needed to go somewhere. They didn’t have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you.
I practiced driving with Jim out on the range, where you didn’t have to worry about hitting anything but a juniper tree, and I got the hang of it quickly. In no time at all, I was tootling around the streets of Red Lake at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour, operating the pedals with my feet and the levers with my hands while honking at the chickens in my way, swerving to avoid hitting the poor foot-bound sodbusters, and startling horses with the occasional backfire.
But they had to get used to it. The automobile was here to stay.
My driving lessons with Jim Smith began to include trips to the Grand Canyon to deliver gas to a filling station near there, then picnics. After I’d learned to drive, we continued the picnics and also took horseback rides out to places like the ice cave near Red Lake, a hole so deep that if you climbed way down into it, you could find ice in the middle of the summer. We used that ice to make cold lemonade to go with our biscuits and jerky.
After a while it became clear that, without saying anything directly, Jim was courting me. He’d been married once before, but his wife-a pretty blond thing-had died in the influenza epidemic ten years earlier. I still wasn’t interested in marriage, but there was a lot about Jim Smith that I found to admire. For one thing, unlike my previous crumb-bum husband, he didn’t lay down a smooth line of patter. He spoke when he had something to say, and if he didn’t, he felt no need to fill the void with hot air.
Jim Smith was a Jack Mormon. He’d been born into the faith but didn’t practice it. His father was Lot Smith, a soldier, pioneer, and ranger who had been one of Brigham Young’s chief lieutenants when the Mormons went to war with the U.S. government. At one point the federals put a thousand-dollar price on his head, but when they came to arrest him, Lot Smith held off the soldiers at gunpoint. He also helped found the Mormon settlement in Tuba City and was killed there by a Navajo- or by a rival Mormon, depending on which story you believed.
Lot Smith had eight wives and fifty-two children, and those kids learned to fend for themselves. When Jim turned eleven, his father gave him a rifle, some bullets, and a packet of salt and said, “Here’s your food for a week.” Jim became an excellent marksman and horseman and a wrangler at age fourteen. He worked in Canada for a while but fell afoul of the Mounties for using his pistols a little too freely. He returned to Arizona and became a lumberjack and homesteader. After his wife died, he joined the cavalry and, during the Great War, served in Siberia, where American soldiers were protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway in the midst of the fighting between the White Russians and the Red Russians. While he was in Siberia, his homestead was seized for failure to pay taxes, so after being mustered out of the cavalry, he become a prospector before finally opening his garage in Red Lake. The man was no slouch.
Jim Smith was going on fifty, which made him twenty years older than me, and he had some wear and tear on him, including a star-shaped bullet scar on his right shoulder from an incident he felt wasn’t worth discussing. Plus, he was pretty much bald, and all the hair was missing from the left side of his body on account of the time that he was dragged by a horse for two miles. But Jim Smith was hardly worn out. He could spend twelve hours in the saddle, lift a car axle off the ground, and cut, split, and stack enough firewood to keep his stove going all winter.
Jim could see things with those pale blue eyes that other people couldn’t see-the quail in the thick brush, the horse and rider on the horizon, the eagle’s nest in the side of the cliff. It was what made him a crack shot. He also noticed everything-the small lump below a horse’s knee that meant it had a bowed tendon, the hand calluses that only farriers had. He could spot liars, cheaters, and bluffers from the get-go. But while nothing escaped him, he never let on that he knew what he knew.
And nothing ever rattled Jim Smith. He was always calm, never lost his temper, and never flailed about trying to figure out his own mind. He always knew what he thought and how he felt. He was dependable and established. He was solid. He had his own business, and it was a steady and respectable one. He fixed cars that needed fixing. He wasn’t trying to sell vacuum cleaners to gullible housewives by throwing dirt on their floors.
Even so, I still wasn’t prepared to marry again, but Jim hadn’t yet broached the subject of marriage, so we were enjoying ourselves having picnics, taking horseback rides, and bombing around Coconino County in the Flivver when I got the letter from Helen.
IT WAS POSTMARKED HOLLYWOOD.
Helen had been writing me regularly since she moved to California, and her letters always seemed unnaturally cheerful: She was continually on the verge of breaking into the movies, heading off to auditions and narrowly missing out on being cast, taking tap-dance lessons, and sighting stars as they drove around town in their convertibles.
Helen was also always meeting Mr. Wonderful, the man with the connections and wherewithal who treated her like a princess, who was going to open doors for her in this crazy movie business, and whom she might even marry. But after several letters, she’d stop mentioning that particular Mr. Wonderful, and then an even more terrific Mr. Wonderful would come along, so I suspected that, in fact, she was getting involved with a series of cads who used her and then, when they were tired of her, dumped her.
I worried that Helen was in danger of becoming a flo
ozy, and I wrote her letters warning her not to count on men to take care of her and to come up with a fallback plan in case, as seemed pretty obvious by now, the movie career didn’t pan out. But she wrote back scolding me for being negative, explaining that this was the way all girls made it in Hollywood. I hoped she was right, since I knew little about the ways of the movie world and hadn’t had much luck with men myself.
In this new letter, Helen confessed that she was pregnant by the latest Mr. Wonderful, who had wanted her to get a back-alley abortion. When she told him she was scared of those coat-hanger operations-she’d heard of women dying from them-he claimed the child wasn’t his and cut her out of his life.
Helen didn’t know what to do. She was a couple of months along. She knew she’d be fired from the millinery shop once she started showing. Auditions would also be out of the question. She was too ashamed to go back to Mom and Dad at the ranch. She was wondering if maybe she should go ahead and get the abortion after all. The whole mess, she wrote, made her want to throw herself out a window.
It was immediately clear to me what Helen needed to do. I wrote her back, telling her not to get an abortion-women did die from them. It was better for her to go ahead and have the child, then decide whether she wanted to keep it or give it up for adoption. She could come to Red Lake, I wrote, and live with me in the teacherage until she figured out what to do.
Helen arrived in Flagstaff a week later, and Jim let me borrow the Flivver to drive over and meet her. As she stepped down from the train carrying a raccoon coat that Mr. Wonderful had probably given her, I had to bite my lip. Her slim shoulders seemed thinner than ever, but her face was puffy, and her eyes were red from crying. She’d also peroxided her hair to that shiny white color that a lot of the starlets were favoring. When I gave her a hug, I was startled by how fragile she felt, as if she had a collapsible little bird’s body. As soon as we got into the Flivver, she lit a cigarette, and I noticed her hands were shaking.
On the way back to Red Lake, I did most of the talking. I’d spent the last week thinking about Helen’s predicament, and as we drove through the range, I laid out what I thought were her options. I could write Mom and Dad, explaining the situation and softening them up, and I was sure they’d forgive her and welcome her home. I’d gotten the name of an orphanage in Phoenix if she wanted to go that route. There were also a lot of men in Coconino County in search of a wife, and she might be able to find someone who’d be willing to marry her even though she was in a family way. Two possibilities that had occurred to me were Rooster and Jim Smith, but I didn’t get into specifics.
Helen, however, seemed distracted, almost in a daze. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, she spoke in fragmented sentences, and instead of focusing on practicalities, her mind drifted all over the place. She kept returning to totally ludicrous plans and pointless concerns, wondering if she could get Mr. Wonderful back by putting the child into an orphanage and worrying if childbirth would ruin her figure for bathing-suit scenes in movies.
“Helen, it’s time to get realistic,” I said.
“I am being realistic,” she said. “A girl without a figure is never going to make it.”
I decided this was not the moment to push the point. When someone’s wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.
MY BED WAS SMALL, but I scooted over so Helen and I could sleep side by side, just as we had done when we were kids. It was October, and the desert nights were turning cold, so we snuggled together, and sometimes late at night, Helen would start whimpering, which I took as a good sign because it meant that at least once in a while she seemed to understand how grim the situation was. When that happened, I held her close and reassured her that we’d get through this, just the way we’d survived that flash flood in Texas when we were kids.
“All we need to do,” I’d say, “is find us that cottonwood tree to climb up in, and we’ll make it.”
During the day, while I was teaching, Helen kept to herself in that little room. She never made any noise and spent a lot of time sleeping. I’d hoped that once she’d gotten some rest, her mind would clear, and she’d be able to start thinking about her future in a constructive fashion. But she continued to be vague and listless, talking about Hollywood in a dreamy way that, quite frankly, irritated me.
I decided Helen needed fresh air and sunshine. We went for a stroll through town every afternoon, and I introduced her to people as my sister from Los Angeles who’d come out to the desert to cure the vapors. The next time I had a race scheduled, Jim Smith brought Helen along in the Flivver. He was courteous and considerate, but as soon as I saw them together, I could tell they were not meant for each other.
Rooster, however, immediately took a shine to Helen. “She’s real purty,” he confided to me.
But Helen had no interest in Rooster. “He swallows his tobacco juice,” she said. “I get sick every time I see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.”
I didn’t think Helen could afford to be picky at this particular juncture, but it was true that a part-time deputy who’d only just learned to write his name wouldn’t make the best husband for her.
Helen loved my crimson shirt. When she saw me in it, she smiled for the first time since coming to Red Lake. She asked to try it on and seemed so excited while she was buttoning it up that I thought maybe she had shaken off her blues. But as she was tucking the shirt into her skirt, I saw that she was beginning to show. Our story about her coming here to take the desert air wasn’t going to wash much longer, I realized, and regardless of her mood, her problems weren’t going to go away.
HELEN AND I STARTED attending the Catholic church in Red Lake. It was a dusty little adobe mission, and I didn’t particularly cotton to the priest, Father Cavanaugh, a gaunt, humorless man whose scowl could peel the paint off a barn. But a lot of the local farmers went there, and I thought Helen might meet someone nice.
One day about six weeks after Helen had arrived, we were in the stuffy church, standing then kneeling then sitting then standing again as we listened to the mass. Incense wafted up to the ceiling. Helen had been wearing baggy dresses and a loose coat to hide her condition, but suddenly, she fainted dead away. Father Cavanaugh rushed down from the altar. He felt her forehead, then looked at her for a moment, and something made him touch her stomach. “She’s with child,” he said. He glanced at her ringless fingers. “And unmarried.”
Father Cavanaugh told Helen she must make a full confession. When she did, instead of offering her forgiveness, he warned her that her soul was in mortal danger. Because she had committed the sin of lust, he said, the only place for her in this world was one of the church’s homes for wayward women.
Helen came back from the visit with Father Cavanaugh more distraught than I’d ever seen her. She had no intention of going to any home-and I wouldn’t have let her-but now her secret was out, and the townspeople of Red Lake began regarding both of us differently. Women stared at the ground when they passed us on the street, and cowboys felt free to give us the eye, as if the word had gone around that we were loose women. Once when we walked by a Mexican grandmother sitting on a bench, I looked back, and she was making the sign of the cross.
Early one evening a couple of weeks after Helen made her confession, I heard a knock on the teacherage door. Superintendent MacIntosh-the same man who had given me the boot from my teaching job when the war was over-was standing there.
He tipped his fedora, then looked past me into the room, where Helen was washing the supper plates in a tin pan. “Miss Casey, may I have a word with you in private?” he asked me.
“I’ll go for a walk,” Helen said. She wiped her hands on her apron and made her way past Mr. MacIntosh, who, making a great show of civility, tipped his hat a second time.
Since I didn’t want Mr. MacIntosh looking at the dirty dishes as well as Helen’s suitcase lying open on the floor, I led him through the connecting door into the class
room.
Looking out the window and fingering the brim of his fedora, Mr. MacIntosh cleared his throat nervously. Then he began what was obviously a prepared speech about Helen’s condition, moral standards, school policy, impressionable schoolchildren, the need to set a good example, the reputation of the Arizona Board of Education. I started arguing that Helen had no one else to turn to and stayed well away from the students, but Mr. MacIntosh said there was no room for discussion, he was getting pressure from a lot of the parents, the matter was out of his hands, and while he was sorry he had to say it, the fact was, if I wanted to keep my job, Helen had to go. Then he put on his fedora and left.
I still felt stung and humiliated, and I sat down for a moment at my desk. For the second time in my life, that fish-faced pencil pusher Mr. MacIntosh was telling me I wasn’t wanted. The parents of my schoolkids included cattle rustlers, drunks, land speculators, bootleggers, gamblers, and former prostitutes. They didn’t mind me racing horses, playing poker, or drinking contraband whiskey, but my showing some compassion to a sister who’d been taken advantage of and then abandoned by a smooth-talking scoundrel filled them with moral indignation. It made me want to throttle them all.
I walked back into the teacherage. Helen was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. “I didn’t really go for a walk,” she said. “I heard everything.”
I SPENT THE NIGHT holding Helen in my arms, trying to reassure her that it was all going to work out. We’d write Mom and Dad, I told her. They’d understand. This sort of thing happened to young women all the time, and she could go live at the ranch until the baby was born. I’d start racing horses every weekend, and I’d save all my winnings for her and the baby, and when it was born, Buster and Dorothy could raise the child as theirs and Helen would have money to go start a new life in some fun place like New Orleans or Kansas City. “We have all sorts of options,” I said. “But this one makes the most sense.”
Half Broke Horses Page 9