Half Broke Horses

by Jeannette Walls

  SHORTLY AFTER THE HERD arrived, Jim set out to repair all the fencing on the ranch. The job took a month. He brought Rosemary along with him in the pickup, and they were gone for days at a time, sleeping in the bed of the truck, cooking over campfires, and returning only for resupplies of food and wire. Rosemary adored her father, and he was completely unfazed by her wild streak. They were happy to spend hours in each other’s company, Rosemary talking nonstop and Jim barely saying a word, just nodding and smiling-with an occasional “That so?” or “Sounds good”-as he dug holes, trimmed posts, and tightened wire.

  “Doesn’t that kid ever shut up?” Old Jake once asked.

  “She’s got a lot to say,” Jim told him.

  While they were gone, I settled in to life on the ranch. There was always more to do on any given day than you could get done, and I quickly established a few rules for myself. One was to dispense with any unnecessary cleaning-no maid’s work. Arizona was a dusty place, but a little dirt never killed anyone. That bit about cleanliness being next to godliness was a lot of balderdash as far as I was concerned. In fact, I considered it downright insulting. Anyone who worked the land got dirty, and in Chicago I’d seen my share of less than godly people living in squeaky-clean mansions. So I gave the house a going-over only once every few months, working myself into a frenzy and blazing through all the scrubbing and dusting in a single day.

  As for clothes, I flatly refused to wash them. I made sure we all bought loose-fitting clothes that let us do squats and windmill our arms-none of that tight buttoned-up stuff like my mother favored. We wore our shirts till they got dirty, then we put them on backward and wore them until that side got dirty, then we wore them inside out, then inside out backward. We were getting four times more wear out of each shirt than persnickety folks did. When the shirts reached the point where Jim was joking about them scaring the cattle, I’d take the whole pile into Seligman and pay by the pound to have them all steamcleaned.

  Levi’s we didn’t wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil-and then we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi’s reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn’t get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but briar-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi’s reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn’t pay a cowboy to let you wash his.

  I kept the cooking basic as well. I didn’t make dishes the way fancy eastern housewives did-soufflés and sauces and garnished this and stuffed that. I made food. Beans were my specialty. I always had a pot of them on the stove, and that usually lasted two to five days, depending on how many cowboys we had around. My recipe was fairly simple: Boil beans, salt to taste. What I liked most about beans was that as long as you added water from time to time, you couldn’t overcook them.

  When we weren’t having beans, we had steak. My recipe for steak was also fairly simple: Fry on both sides, salt to taste. With the steak came potatoes: Boil unpeeled, salt to taste. For dessert, we’d have canned peaches packed in tasty syrup. I liked to say that what my cooking lacked in variety, it made up for in consistency. “No surprises,” I’d tell the cowboys, “but no disappointments, either.”

  Once when some milk had spoiled and I was feeling ambitious, I did make cottage cheese the way my mother made it when I was growing up. I boiled the clabbered milk and cut up the curds with a knife. Then I wrapped it in a burlap sugar sack and hung it overnight to let the whey drain out. The next day I chopped it again, salted it, and passed it out at supper. The family loved it so much they wolfed it down in under a minute. I couldn’t believe I’d worked so long over something that was gone so quickly.

  “That was the biggest waste of time,” I said. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

  Rosemary was eyeing me.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” I told her.

  * * *

  Jim never had it in him to raise his hand to his daughter, and when he and Rosemary returned from fixing fences, she was more rambunctious than ever. Even though Rosemary was still just a little girl, I could sense the beginnings of a fundamental difference of opinion between her and me. I felt there was a lot I needed to teach her. I wanted to give her an early grounding in the basics of arithmetic and reading, but even more important, I wanted to get across the idea that the world was a dangerous place and life was unpredictable and you had to be smart, focused, and determined to make it through. You had to be willing to work hard and persevere in the face of misfortune. A lot of people, even those born with brains and beauty, didn’t have what it took to knuckle down and get the thing done.

  From the time she was three, I drilled Rosemary on her numbers. If she asked for a glass of milk, I told her she could have it only if she spelled out “milk.” I tried to make her see that everything in life-from Bossie to the cottage cheese-was a lesson, but it was up to her to figure out what she’d learned. Rosemary was a bright little kid in a lot of ways, but math and spelling confused her, and answering questions on cue bored her, as did the routine of daily chores. Jim told me to lighten up, she was just four, but by four I’d been gathering eggs and taking care of my baby sister. I began to worry that Rosemary was unfocused and that if we didn’t stamp it out early, it could become a permanent part of her character.

  “She’ll outgrow it,” Jim said, “and if she don’t, that means it’s her nature, not something we can change.”

  “It’s up to us to set her straight,” I said. “I turned illiterate Mexican kids into readers. I can make my own daughter shape up.”

  Rosemary was always getting caught up in dangerous situations, almost as if she was drawn to them. She was constantly falling into draws and out of trees. It was always the buckingest horse that caught her eye. She loved to catch snakes and scorpions, keeping them in a jar for a while, but then she’d grow worried that they were lonely and missed their families, so she’d turn them loose.

  That first October on the ranch, we bought a pumpkin in Seligman and carved it into a jack-o’-lantern to celebrate Halloween. Rosemary had dressed for Halloween in a tattered old silk dress she’d found in a trunk in the storage barn, and she held it up over the jack-o’-lantern, fascinated by the patterns that the flame made through the thin fabric. Jim and I weren’t paying much attention when she lowered the dress too close to the candle and it caught fire, the dry silk bursting into flames.

  Rosemary was screaming while Jim grabbed his horsehide duster and wrapped it around her to smother the flames. It was all over in an instant. We carried her into the bedroom, and Jim quietly talked her down from hysteria while I cut off the remains of the silk dress. Rosemary had a wide burn across her stomach, though it wasn’t too deep. The nearest hospital was over two hours away, and besides, I didn’t care to splurge on a doctor, so I lathered her burn in Vaseline, which cured everything from boils to rashes, and bandaged her up. When I was finished, I looked down at her and shook my head.

  “Are you mad at me, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.

  “Not as mad as I should be,” I said. I just didn’t believe in mollycoddling kids when they hurt themselves. Fussing over her wasn’t going to help her realize the mistake she’d made. “You’re the most accidentprone little girl I’ve ever known. And I hope at least you’ve learned what happens when you play with fire.”

  Still, she’d been pretty brave about it all-she was always a brave little kid, you had to hand it to her-and I softened up.

  “Same thing happened to my brother, Buster, when he was small, and to my grandfather,” I said. “So I guess it runs in the family.”

  THAT FIRST WINTER, JIM and I paid fifty dollars for a marvelous long-range radio from Montgomery Ward. It had a big wire antenna that a couple of the cowboys helped us rig up, stringing it between two of the tall
cedars outside the house. “Brings the twentieth century to Yavapai County,” I told Jim.

  Since we had no electricity, we ran the radio off two massive batteries that cost another fifty dollars and weighed about ten pounds apiece. When the batteries were fresh, we could get stations all the way from Europe with announcers jabbering away in French and German. Adolf Hitler had taken over in Germany, and a civil war was brewing in Spain, but we weren’t particularly interested in European affairs. The reason we shelled out so much money was to get the weather report, which was much more important to us than what the Krauts were up to.

  Every morning we got up before dawn and Jim turned the radio on low, crouching down next to it to listen to the weather report from a station in California. The fronts that came our way usually started there, though sometimes we were hit by winter storms that traveled all the way down from Canada. With water so scarce and severe storms so dangerous- drowning or freezing cattle, flattening barns, washing away entire families, the lightning electrocuting horses with steel shoes-we lived and died by those forecasts. You could say we were true aficionados of the weather. We’d follow a storm that started out in Los Angeles and moved east. The clouds usually ended up getting caught by the tip of the Rockies, where they’d dump most of their moisture, but sometimes that storm drifted south, making its way east through a passage above the Gulf of California, and that was when we got our big rains.

  Rosemary and Little Jim loved the storms more than just about anything else. When the skies turned dark and the air grew heavy, I called them onto the porch and we all watched as the storm, with its boiling clouds and cannonading thunder, its white claws of lightning and drifting sheets of black rain, rolled across the range.

  A distant storm sometimes seemed small in the huge sweep of the plateau, darkening one patch of land while everything else remained bathed in sunlight. Sometimes the storm veered off and missed us altogether. But if it hit the yard, the excitement really began, the thunder and lightning splitting the sky, the water hammering on the tin roof and pouring off the sides, filling the cisterns, the draws, and the dams.

  To live in a place where water was so scarce made the rare moments like this-when the heavens poured forth an abundance of water and the hard earth softened and turned lush and green-seem magical, almost miraculous. The kids had an irresistible urge to get out and dance in the rain, and I always let them go and sometimes joined them myself, all of us prancing around, arms upraised, as the water beat down on our faces, plastering our hair and soaking our clothes.

  Afterward, we all ran down to the draws that led to Big Jim the dam, and once the first rush of water had passed, I’d let the kids strip off their clothes and go swimming. They’d stay out there for hours, paddling around, pretending to be alligators or dolphins or hippopotamuses. They had a heck of a time playing in the rain puddles, too. When the water sank through the soil and all that was left was mud, they’d keep playing, rolling around until everything but the whites of their eyes and their teeth was plastered with mud. Once the mud dried, which didn’t take long, it sheared right off, leaving them pretty clean, and they got back into their clothes.

  Sometimes over supper, when Jim got home after a storm, the kids would describe their escapades in the water and mud, and Jim would recount his vast store of water lore and water history. Once the world was nothing but water, he explained, and you wouldn’t think it to look at us, but human beings were mostly water. The miraculous thing about water, he said, was that it never came to an end. All the water on the earth had been here since the beginning of time, it had just moved around from rivers and lakes and oceans to clouds and rain and puddles and then sunk through the soil to underground streams, to springs and wells, where it got drunk by people and animals and went back to rivers and lakes and oceans.

  The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus himself might have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard-ice. Sometimes it was soft-snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless-clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible-vapor-floating up into the sky like the souls of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we’d die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water for granted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.

  THE RAINS USUALLY ARRIVED in April, August, and December, but in our second year on the ranch, April came and went without rain. So did August and so did December, and by the following year, we were in the midst of a serious drought. The range turned sandy and windblown, and the mudflats became dry and cracked.

  Every day Jim listened grim-faced to the weather report, hoping in vain for a forecast of rain, and then we’d go down and check the water level of Big Jim. The days were beautiful, with endless deep blue skies, but all that fine weather only gave us a desperate, helpless feeling as we stood there, watching the water level sink and sink until the bottom of Big Jim became visible. And then the water disappeared altogether and there was nothing but mud, and then the mud dried out with cracks so big you could stick your arm into them.

  Early into the drought, Jim had sensed it coming on. He’d grown up in the desert, so he knew that one came along every ten or fifteen years, and he had culled the herd deeply, selling off steers and heifers and keeping only the healthiest breeding cattle. Even so, once the drought was in full swing, we had to bring in water. Jim and I hitched up the Conestoga wagon to the pickup and hauled it into Pica, a stop twenty miles away on the Santa Fe Railroad where they were shipping in water. We loaded old fuel drums with as much water as the Conestoga could hold and hauled it-the wagon’s suspension groaning under all that weight-back to the ranch, where we drained it into Big Jim.

  We made that trip a couple of times a week. We darned near broke our backs loading those fuel drums, but we saved the herd, whereas many ranchers around us went bust.

  The following August, the rains returned. And when they came back, they came with a vengeance, a terrific deluge the likes of which I’d never seen. We sat at our kitchen table, a long wooden thing with patterned linoleum nailed to the top, listening to the rain drum on the roof. Unlike other storms, this one didn’t peter out after half an hour. Instead, it kept raining and raining, striking the tin roof so loud and incessant that it began to get on my nerves. After a while Jim started worrying about Big Jim. If too much water flooded into the dam, he said, its walls might burst and we’d lose it all.

  The first time Jim went out to check the dam, he reported back that it was holding, but an hour later, with the rain still coming down in sheets, he checked it again and realized that if nothing was done, it would give. He had a plan, which was to go out in the middle of the storm and dig furrows in the draws and the wash approaching the dam, to drain off the water before it reached Big Jim. To dig the furrows, he was going to harness old Buck, our Percheron draft, to the plow.

  Jim had on his horsehide duster, waterlogged and dripping. I put on my canvas coat and we headed out into the rain, which was coming down so furiously that within moments it had worked its way past my turned-up coat collar, down my sleeves, and was soaking through my shoes. I felt it trickling all over me, and even before we got to the barn, I had reached the point where you give up trying to stay dry.

  The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn’t find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads.

  What we could do, I said to Jim, was hitch the plow to the pickup. If he handled the plow,
I could drive. Jim liked the idea. Old Jake was useless, so we left him to fret in the barn, but we brought the kids with us. The water out in the yard was more than ankle-deep by then, the rain coming down so hard that the force of it practically knocked Rosemary to the ground. Jim scooped her up in his arms. I followed with Little Jim, who was still a baby, grabbing a wooden carton so we’d have something to keep him in, and we sloshed out to the Chevy.

  At the equipment shed, Jim jumped out and threw the plow, together with some ropes and chains, into the pickup bed. Once we reached the wash above the dam, we rigged up the plow to the Chevy’s hitch, and I got behind the wheel, putting Little Jim in the carton on the floor so he wouldn’t slide around too much.

  I looked in the rearview mirror, but the rain was splattering so hard on the window that Jim was just a blur. I had Rosemary stand up on the seat and stick her head out the window and take directions from him. Jim was gesturing and shouting, but the rain was making such a racket that it was hard to figure out what he wanted.

  “Mom, I can’t hear him,” Rosemary said.

  “Do the best you can,” I said. “That’s all anyone can do.”

  I needed the pickup to creep along at a walking pace, but the Chevy wasn’t geared to go that slow, and it kept stalling and lurching, jerking the plow out of Jim’s hands and sending Rosemary tumbling off the seat and into Little Jim’s box. Making matters worse, the earth around the dam was that godforsaken malpais rock, and the tires would spin on it, then catch, and we’d pop forward.

  We knew we didn’t have much time, and Jim and I were both cussing like sailors while Rosemary, her hair plastered, scrambling back onto the seat every time she was knocked off, did her best to read Jim’s gestures and shouts and relay them to me. Finally, I figured out that by engaging the clutch, easing up on it ever so slightly, then reengaging it, I could send the truck forward just a few inches at a time, and that was how we got the job done, digging four furrows off the sides of the wash that drained the rising water away from the dam.