Half Broke Horses

by Jeannette Walls

  Helen, however, was inconsolable. She was convinced that Mom in particular would never forgive her for bringing shame on the family. Mom and Dad would disown her, she believed, the same way our servant girl Lupe’s parents had kicked her out when she got pregnant. No man would ever want her again, Helen said, she had no place to go. She wasn’t as strong as me, she said, and couldn’t make it on her own.

  “Don’t you ever feel like giving up?” Helen asked. “I just feel like giving up.”

  “That’s nonsense,” I said. “You’re much stronger than you think. There’s always a way out.” I talked again about the cottonwood tree. I also told her about the time I was sent home from the Sisters of Loretto because Dad wouldn’t pay my tuition, and how Mother Albertina had told me that when God closes a window, he opens a door, and it was up to us to find it.

  Helen finally seemed to find some comfort in my words. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way.”

  I was still awake and lying in bed with Helen when the first gray light of dawn began to appear in the window. Helen had finally fallen asleep, and I studied her face as it emerged from the shadows. That silly platinum hair had fallen forward, and I tucked it behind her ear. Her eyes were swollen from all the crying she’d been doing, but her features were still delicate, her skin still pale and smooth, and as the light filled the room, her face seemed to glow. She looked to me like an angel, a slightly bloated, pregnant angel, but an angel nonetheless.

  All of a sudden I felt a lot better about things. It was Saturday. I got out of bed, put on my trousers, and brewed some strong coffee. When it was ready, I brought Helen a cup and told her it was time to rise and shine. A new day was beginning, and we had to get out in the world and make the most of it. What we’d do, I said, was borrow the Flivver from Jim and go for a picnic up to the Grand Canyon. Those mighty cliffs would give us some perspective on our puny little problems.

  Helen smiled as she sat there drinking her coffee. I told her I’d go get the car while she got dressed, and we’d get an early start to make the most of the day. “Back in a jiffy,” I said at the door.

  “Okay,” Helen said. “And Lily, I’m glad you asked me to come out here.”

  It was a beautiful morning, the air so clear and crisp in the sharp light of the November sun that every twig and blade of grass stood out. The range had turned the color of hay. There was not a wisp of cloud to be seen anywhere, and mourning doves were cooing in the cedars. I walked past the old adobe houses and the newer frame houses, past the café and the gas station, past the farm families in town for market day, then all at once I felt like something was choking me.

  I put my hand to my throat, and in that instant I was overtaken with a horrible feeling of dread. I turned and ran back as fast as I could, the stores and houses and puzzled farmers all flying by in one big blur, but when I flung open the door, I was too late.

  My little sister was dangling from a rafter, a kicked-over chair beneath her. She’d hanged herself.

  FATHER CAVANAUGH WOULDN’T LET me bury Helen in the Catholic cemetery. Suicide was a mortal sin, he said, the worst of all sins, because it was the only one for which it was impossible to repent and receive forgiveness; therefore, suicides were not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground.

  So Jim, Rooster, and I drove out onto the range, far from town. We found a beautiful site at the top of a rise overlooking a shallow forested valley-so beautiful that I knew in God’s eyes it must be sacred-and we buried Helen there, in my red silk shirt.

  V LAMBS

  Big Jim holding Rosemary

  WHEN PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

  For months after Helen’s death, pain laid so dark and heavy on me, like a big slab of lead, that most days I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed if I hadn’t had kids to teach. The idea of riding horses-much less racing- playing cards, or driving the Flivver out into the country seemed so pointless as to be repulsive. Everything got on my nerves: kids yelling or even just laughing in the school yard, church bells ringing, birds chirping. What the hell was there to chirp about?

  I thought of quitting my job, but I was under contract, and anyway, I couldn’t blame the kids for what the parents had done. But I was through with Red Lake, and when the school year was over, I was moving on. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a teacher anymore. I felt like I’d given everything I had to the kids of this town, and when I’d needed a little understanding, their families hadn’t cut me any slack. Maybe I should stop devoting myself to other people’s kids and instead have some kids of my own. I had never particularly wanted kids, but when Helen killed herself, she also killed the little baby inside her, and something about that made me want to bring another baby into the world.

  As time passed, and without my even realizing it, this idea of having a baby of my own eased my grief. One day in the spring, I got up early, as usual, and sat on the front step of the teacherage, drinking my coffee as the sun rose over the San Francisco Mountains to the east. The shafts of light gliding across the plateau had that golden color that they get in the spring, and when they reached me, they warmed my face and arms.

  I realized that in the months since Helen had died, I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

  * * *

  And if I was going to have a baby, I needed to find a husband. I started looking at Jim Smith in a different light. He had plenty of good qualities, but the most important one was that I felt I could trust that man inside and out. Once I’d made up my mind about this, I didn’t see the need to beat around the bush or make any grand gestures. It was late afternoon in early May with school over for the day when I saddled up Patches and rode over to the garage. Jim was on his back underneath a car, and all I could see were his legs and boots sticking out. I told him I needed to talk to him, so he slowly pushed himself out and stood up, wiping the grease off his hands with a rag.

  “Jim Smith, do you want to marry me?” I asked.

  He stared at me a moment and then broke into a big grin. “Lily Casey, I wanted to marry you ever since I saw you take that fall off that mustang and then get right back on him. I just been waiting for a good time to ask.”

  “Well, this is it,” I said. “Now, I only got two conditions.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The first is that we’ve got to be partners. Whatever we do, we’ll be in it together, each sharing the load.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “The second is, I know you were raised a Mormon, but I don’t want you taking any more wives.”

  “Lily Casey, from what I know of you, you’re just about as much woman as any man can handle.”

  WHEN I TOLD JIM how my crumb-bum first husband had given me a fake ring, he got out a Sears, Roebuck catalog and we chose a ring together so I’d know I was getting the genuine article. We got married in my classroom once school was out for the summer. Rooster was the best man. Before the ceremony, he gave me a kiss.

  “I knew I was going to smooch you one day, but I didn’t think it would be because you were marrying my buddy,” he said. “Still, I’ll take what I can get.”

  Rooster had a friend with an accordion, and since I still had a soft spot for teaching, instead of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” I asked him to play the PTA anthem.

  The year was 1930, and I was twenty-nine. A lot of women my age had children who were practically grown, but getting a late start didn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy the journey every bit as much-maybe even more. Jim understood why I wanted to leave Red Lake, and he agreed to move his garage to Ash Fork, about thirty miles west, just over the Yavapai County line. Ash Fork was a bustling little town on Route 66 at the base of Williams Mountain. It wa
s a stop on the Santa Fe Railroad, with a roundhouse, and some days the streets were filled with sheep being shipped to market. Ash Fork had a general store run by a descendant of George Washington’s brother, not one but two churches, and a Harvey House restaurant for the railroad passengers, where Harvey Girls in white aprons served you an entire quarter of a pie when you ordered a slice, and diners wiped their mouths with elegant linen napkins.

  At the Ash Fork bank, Jim and I took out a loan and built a garage made of Coconino sandstone, laying the stones and spreading the mortar ourselves. We hung the GARAGE sign from Red Lake over the door. With money from the loan, we sent off for a tire pump, a ball-bearing handle jack, and a stack of ribbed tread tires from the same Sears catalog that we’d used to order my ring.

  We had also brought the gas pump with us from Red Lake. The big glass cylinder on top was filled with gasoline-dyed red so you could tell it apart from kerosene-and every time you filled a car, air bubbles gurgled up through it.

  Business was brisk. Since we were partners, Jim taught me to pump gas. The pump was hand-operated. I’d pump, pump, pump, and the gas would go glug, glug, glug. I also changed oil and fixed flat tires. By that winter, I was pregnant, but I was still pitching in every day, filling up gas tanks and making change while Jim worked on cars.

  We built a little house-also made of Coconino sandstone-right on Route 66, which was still a dirt road, and in the dry season, dust kicked up by the wagon wheels and automobile tires sometimes drifted through the windows, coating the furniture. But I loved that house. We ordered the plumbing system from Sears and installed it ourselves. In the kitchen we had running water that gushed out of shiny nickel-plated faucets, and a chain flush toilet-just like the rich people I cleaned for in Chicago-with a porcelain enamel bowl and a lid of mahogany veneer.

  When the house was finished, Rooster paid us a visit. Like my dad, he couldn’t believe that anyone would ever want a crapper in the house. “Ain’t it unsanitary?” he asked.

  “Everything goes down the pipe,” I said. “If you want to freeze your behind off in an outhouse, that’s fine by me.”

  Rooster was just one of those people who didn’t like change regardless of how it might improve his lot. As for me, I was so danged proud of my indoor plumbing that if someone looking for directions knocked at the door, I couldn’t resist the temptation to say, “Would you like a glass of fresh tap water?” or “Do you, by chance, need to use the toilet?”

  BY THE TIME I was eight and a half months pregnant, I had swelled up pretty big. I was happy to continue working at the garage, but Jim thought that in my condition, it might be dangerous. I could slip on an oil spill, he said, or faint from gasoline fumes, or break my water trying to twist off a rusted radiator cap. So he insisted I stay at home, where I’d be safe. For a lot of women, it didn’t get any better than that, lounging around in a housecoat with nothing to do. But after a few days, I started getting cabin fever, cooped up by myself reading books and mending clothes, and maybe that was why I got so irritated with the Jehovah’s Witness who stopped by.

  I was usually friendly to folks like Jehovah’s Witnesses, admiring their genuine conviction, but this fellow was particularly persistent, lecturing me, giving me a lot of poppycock about how Armageddon was imminent and for the sake of my unborn baby I needed to seek salvation and convert. Who the hell was he to tell me what I had to believe? I asked. All folks needed to find their own way to heaven. One of the problems of the world today was all the muttonheads- like those Bolshies in Russia-going around convinced they were the only ones who had the answers and killing everyone who didn’t agree with them.

  I got so steamed up, pacing back and forth and arguing with the fellow, that without thinking about what I was doing, I sat down on my sewing, and a needle stuck me in my behind. I let out a yelp, started cussing, and tried to work the needle out of my rear, while the Jehovah’s Witness wagged his finger and argued that this was a sure sign from Jesus that I needed to see the error of my way and get right with the Lord.

  “What it’s a sign of, mister,” I said, “is that I shouldn’t be staying at home by myself, getting in theological arguments with harebrained strangers.”

  I headed back to the garage, where I told Jim what had happened. “I don’t care if I only man the cash register,” I said, “but I’m working until I go into labor. Sitting at home is just too dangerous.”

  The baby came two weeks later, on a scorching-hot July day. I gave birth at home with the help of Granny Combs, the best midwife in Yavapai County. One of Granny Combs’s legs was shorter than the other, and she walked with an even worse limp than my dad. She also chewed tobacco, though she was a spitter and not a swallower like Rooster. Still, all the women in the county swore by her. If Granny Combs couldn’t bring your baby into this world, they said, it wasn’t meant to be here.

  When I went into labor, the pain started coming in waves. Granny Combs told me that I couldn’t stop the pain, but she could teach me how to get the best of it. What I needed to do was separate the actual pain from the fear that something terrible was happening to my body. “The pain is your body complaining,” she said. “If you listen to the pain and tell your body, ’Yeah, I hear you,’ then you won’t be so afraid of it. I’m not saying the pain goes away, but it ain’t gonna make you crazy, either.”

  My labor lasted only a couple of hours, and Granny Combs’s advice did help keep the pain in check-sort of. When the baby came out, Granny Combs said, “It’s a girl,” and held her up. She was purple, and I felt a stab of alarm. But Granny Combs started slapping and kneading her, and the baby let out a cry and gradually turned pink. Granny Combs cut the cord and rubbed the baby’s navel with a burned cork to close up the wound.

  Granny Combs had a sixth sense-the way I sometimes felt I did- and could read minds and tell fortunes. While I held the baby and nursed her, Granny Combs tore herself a plug of tobacco and laid out cards to see what the future had in store for my newborn.

  “She will have a long life, and it will be eventful,” Granny Combs said.

  “Will she be happy?” I asked.

  Granny Combs chewed her tobacco and studied the cards. “I see a wanderer.”

  I NAMED THE BABY Rosemary. Roses were my favorite flower, Mary was a good Catholic girl’s name, and Rosemary was a darned useful herb. I was hoping the kid would have a practical side. Most babies looked to me like monkeys or Buddhas, but Rosemary was a beautiful thing. When her hair came in, it was so pale and fine it looked white. By the time she was three months old, she had a wide smile to match her merry green eyes, and even early on it seemed to me she looked a lot like Helen.

  Helen’s beauty, as far as I was concerned, had been a curse, and I resolved that I would never tell Rosemary she was beautiful.

  A boy followed a year and a half later. A big new hospital had just opened in the town of Williams, forty miles to the east, and I was determined to have my baby there, but as I went into labor, a hellacious winter storm blew in from Canada, covering the roads with drifting snow. We almost didn’t make it through, the Flivver spinning and skidding, but Jim got out the jack and put the chains on the wheels, hunkering down against the driving snow while I sat there taking deep breaths behind the steamed-up windows. We arrived just as my contractions were becoming severe.

  Granny Combs’s mind-over-matter method of getting through pain was pretty good when it came to a stubbed toe, and it had helped me get through my first childbirth, but it couldn’t compare to the marvelous modern anesthesia they used to knock me out at the hospital this time.

  The doctor put that mask over my face, and I just drifted off to dreamland. When I woke up, I had a son. He was a big bruiser of a boy, the first baby born in that hospital, and the nurses and doctors were as proud as Jim and me. We named him after his dad and from the outset called him Little Jim.

  * * *

  It was around then that hard times hit northern Arizona. A big part of the problem was that too many
farmers and greenhorn ranchers had moved into the area. They didn’t understand that Arizona wasn’t like the land back east, where thousands of years of decaying trees had built up a deep loam. This land had just a thin layer of topsoil that, if plowed, would blow away with the first strong wind. The greenhorns had all made fun of the Navajos for planting each stalk of corn in a little hole three feet from the next, instead of a foot apart in plowed rows, but the Indians understood that was all the soil could bear. Land that God had never intended for the till had been farmed beyond its limit, and too many cattle had grazed the once green range into hard, dry stubble. The grass couldn’t reseed, and when it rained, there wasn’t enough grass to hold the water, so it would run off, eroding the good soil, and the fine land would be ruined forever. When a long drought hit, stretches of countryside all around the state turned to swirling dust, which rose a half mile into the air.

  At the same time, the country was a few years into the Depression. At first that seemed like a problem afflicting mostly the big cities. But it soon hurt the cattle market because so many folks back east couldn’t afford to eat steak anymore. Some of the littler ranches in Arizona started going under, and ranch hands joined the stream of Okies making their way past our house on Route 66 in the hopes of finding work in California.

  A lot of people could no longer afford gas, and they began selling off the tractors and cars they’d been persuaded to buy, leaving many of them wishing they’d kept their plow horses. Business at the garage dwindled. Jim was also too generous for his own good, undercharging people who were poor and even doing repairs for free.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, working the numbers, looking for ways to cut expenses, but no matter what angle I came at it from, the bottom line was inescapable: We had more going out than coming in, and it was just a matter of time before we went broke. With the loans we’d taken out, that meant bankruptcy. I took the babies to the garage and helped out as much as I could, but I figured there must be something else we could do to bring in a little extra cash.