Guestward Ho! (24 page)

I was outraged womanhood when I heard about this.
"But Bill," I said, "suppose poor Ginger miscarries out on the trail? Then what?"

Nothing happened on that ride except that it was dis
covered that Ginger was a lovely little riding horse with
nice gaits. From then on those bestial men saddled her regularly, each time over my heartfelt protests. At the end
of ten months, Ginger still hadn't dropped her foal and it
was then that we discovered that there never
had
been a foal to drop. Ginger, the little glutton, had simply got so attached to the Rancho del Monte diet after the
sandy pastures of Chupadero that she'd eaten herself into
obesity and it had taken a good deal of riding to slim her down.

At that point I lost all sympathy for Ginger and for
equine maternity. "You little fraud," I said, looking her
squarely in the eye. Then I supervised her grooming my
self to make her look even more like a Palomino and
took her over as my own special mount. She became the nicest small horse in our string—frisky but easy to handle—
and I adored riding her, false pregnancy and all.

Just one last word about Bill's and my day of reckon
ing and that big, fat net profit of four dollars and ninety-eight cents for our first fiscal year. I was robbed. I was
bilked, cheated, hoodwinked, duped by my husband.

Just three months to the day after Bill had gone over
the books to show me we were in the black and therefore
remaining for another year, we were invited to a real
dress-up, black-tie evening party. It was Bastille Day, and
I was. so mad at what I discovered that I could have
stormed the Bastille and razed it singlehanded.

Having got out my own fluffy evening things for the
big occasion, I decided to be terribly wifely and get out Bill's dinner clothes for a bit of airing and pressing after
all the time spent unworn in his bottom drawer.

I dug through a great stack of neatly folded, dressy city
suits that had lain fallow, so to speak, ever since our
arrival at Rancho del Monte. At the very bottom I un
earthed his dinner jacket. As I flicked it deftly out from
under the stack of clothes a folded sheet of white paper
fluttered out and drifted to the floor. Contrary to all
established procedure in our household, I knelt down, un
folded it, and read it. It was a bill from the American Field Service in the amount of five dollars and dated
March 1, 1954. It wasn't receipted and there was no record of its payment in our check book.

Seething, I awaited my mate.

"William," I said when he came in from the pool, "a word with you please . . .
alone."

"Yes, dear?" Bill said, closing the door of our room.

"You dirty dog! You cheat, you liar, you crooked book
keeper, you hound of hell!" I stormed. "What about
this
and your big phony profit of four ninety-eight?"

"Oh, that," Bill said casually. "Yes, I guess I ought to
pay it. I just sort of filed it there under my old city clothes so . . ."

"So I wouldn't find it and so you could balance your
wretched, crooked books. Isn't that right?"

"Well, yes . . . more or less."

"Are there are others hidden away like that?" I asked.

"No," Bill said. "Just that one."

"So we really
didn't
make a profit our first year, did we?" I fumed.

"No, not actually. But it's only a difference of . . ."

"Why, Bill Hooton, for two cents I'd . . ."

"For two cents you'd be back in New York, wouldn't
you?" Bill said.

"Yes," I said quietly. "I guess I would." Then I began
wondering if I really would have wanted to be back in New York.

"What would you have done if I'd balanced the books
absolutely
honestly—counting in this bill—and we'd had
a deficit of two cents for the year?"

"Frankly, Bill," I said seriously, "at that particular time I'd have started packing and I'd have made you do the same. A bargain's a bargain. But right now . . . today . . ."

"Yes?" Bill said.

"Now I think I'd have broken open my penny bank and
presented you with
three
cents. Now go make us both a drink while I get beautiful for the party tonight."

But to get back to my story in its chronological order, I
had got through the winter of my discontent and was now
embarked on the second spring of my ditto. Acquiring a
Palomino horse for twelve dollars and keep was nice, but
not nice enough to snap me completely out of my dol
drums.

As our second Easter approached, Bill and I were look
ing forward to something of a crowd, like the one we'd had the year before. Lots of inquiries came in, but not
a single reservation. Eventually one guest moved in, a stately older woman who looked very much the
grande
dame
but who wasn't at all after you started talking to
her. She had been everywhere and done everything twice
and she was delightful company. But it looked as though
she might be our
only
company for the whole gladsome
season. I'd already commenced a new deficit book and,
profit or no profit from the first year, it looked to me as
though we were getting deeper and deeper into a hole.
Easter was almost upon us with nary a sign of guests.

Then one afternoon, as I was waxing the upstairs hall,
I heard a car drive in. It was a brand-new station wagon.
I watched a man and woman and a teen-aged daughter
alight from the front seat. Then the rear door opened and
one, two,
three
tykes descended. Hoping against hope that I'd give the air of chatelaine rather than char, I
whisked off my apron, thrust my hands behind my back,
and dashed down the stairs to greet them. If they had been a large legacy from an unknown uncle, I couldn't
have been happier to receive them and, as I was showing
them around the place, I kept computing the size of their daily bill. The mere thought of its size set me to stammer
ing. Of course, we had lowered rates for children not yet
in their teens. Just why I shall never know, since they
notoriously take up the same amount of space, eat twice
as much, make three times as much noise and four times
as much trouble. Still, with things like corrective dentistry
and higher education to look forward to, I suppose parents deserve a break once in a while, and who were we not to
give it to them? They settled on one of the cottages and
asked the price for the whole six of them.

In a jelly of nervousness, I quoted it and got all set
to say something sweet and sad like Well-it-was-awfully-nice-of-you-to-stop-in-and-inquire-anyhow.

To my shocked surprise, the man said, "All right. Where shall we park the car?"

They were one of those charming, well-off, vagabond-
like families who occasionally took it in their heads to go on a little trip, whereupon they simply piled all the
kids and, apparently, all of their portable possessions into
a car and wandered aimlessly around the continent, stopping here and there for a day, a week, or a month
and then shoving off again for no particular destination.
Well, they couldn't have found a hostess any gladder to see them if they'd been traveling for a hundred years.

I was so thrilled to think that at last we'd have a
real Easter with lots of people milling about that I ran
straight to the
non-grande dame,
who had been our sole
guest, and said, "Guess what! The nicest couple just
moved in with an almost grown daughter and three little
children. They're all so . . ."

I stopped dead in the midst of my panegyric when I saw the expression on her face. She reminded me rather of Count Dracula confronted by both wolfbane
and
a rosary.

"Children?"
she said with a shudder, and fled to her
room.

It never rains but what it pours. We rarely greeted one
guest without having a dozen more drop in within the
next twenty-four hours. And I guess the four children in residence lured still others. The following morning a writer
from Chicago arrived, unannounced, with his wife and two little ones. That afternoon a family unit of five—two parents with three under twelve—turned up. The
place was beginning to look more like a Sunday-school
outing than a guest ranch.

Our child-hating guest came down to dinner that night
in fear and trembling, and
naturally
every kid in the
house made a beeline for her. I've noticed that children,
perverse little creatures that they are, run like turkeys
from anyone who comes gooing and lisping and kitchy-
kooing at them, but the minute you're indifferent—even
cold—to them, you suddenly attain all the unattainable
mystery and glamour of Garbo and they just can't see enough of you. That's what happened at Rancho del Monte all during Easter Week.

"Bill," I kept saying, "We've
got
to do something about
this horde of children. They're driving the poor woman
out of her mind. What with their running and yelling, around the grounds all day."

"If they can't run and yell on a ranch, Barbara," Bill
said logically, "where in the world
can
they run and yell?
Besides, they're well behaved when they're indoors. You
couldn't ask for nine better kids."

Of course Bill was right. They
were
good children and,
as in all democracies, the majority ruled at Rancho del
Monte. Our one child-hater was sadly outnumbered by
nine children and six parents. Bill and I, as traditional
neutrals, stayed tactfully out of the fray. But as each day
drew to a close our child-hater grew more and more with
drawn and the nine children, grew fonder and fonder of
her.

I suppose that by all the rules of popular fiction the
child-hater's hard old heart should eventually have been
softened to the point where she went out and adopted several wee ones of her own. That wasn't the case. Instead, she bided her time tensely and took her own particular revenge on Easter.

With so many children in the house, an egg hunt was
essential, and the minute the kids had been put to bed
on the night before Easter we set about boiling eggs and
putting out cups of dye.

Much to my surprise, the child-hater came out to join
us. "Do let me help," she said. "I used to adore coloring
eggs and I can even do little designs on them if you like."

"Oh, please do," I said, thinking that her emotions had
undergone a complete revolution.

How wrong I was!

Our child-hater certainly knew her colors and her dye
pots. With unerring instinct she was able to turn out the
most nauseating-looking eggs I’ve ever seen. There were
poisonous greens, gaseous mustard yellows, unhealthy
browns, and a special taupe-and-mud hue that made the
eggs look like something laid and forgotten by a prehistoric monster. She deftly decorated some of them
with indelible skulls and crossed bones, others with hex
signs and the evil eye.

Bill and I struggled bravely to outdo her with our own
gaily tinted Easter eggs, but we were no match for her.
And even when we did manage to turn out a considerable
quantity of pretty pinks and blues and lavenders, our pallid pastels looked kind of weak and epicene next to the vitriolic creations of her manufacture.

The next morning everyone went to church—everyone,
that is, except Bill and me and the child-hater, who was
usually most particular about her devotions. We were going to stay at home and hide the eggs, and the child-
hater was determined to help us. In fact, she had to be
restrained from taking over the whole operation.

Every time Bill or I set down a little green nest of jelly beans, chocolate bunnies, and the less repugnantly colored
eggs, the child-hater would come charging down upon us.
"Oh no! Never! Not there, right out in plain sight on the terrace. Here, give me that nest! I'll hide it!" And hide
the nests she did. "This is a
hunt!"
she kept saying gleefully. It took her most of the morning, and when, out of
sheer curiosity, I nosed around the grounds to see if I could locate just
one
nest, I couldn't. Bill thought that
he had spotted one deep in the heart of a cactus plant, but
I told him he was crazy.

He wasn't.

After lunch each child was given a basket and turned
loose while the adults sat on the terrace to watch. When
ever there was a shriek of anguish we knew that one of
the child-hater's nests had been discovered out among the
thistles. Tweezers, sterile needles, iodine, and Band-aids
were at an all-time premium that afternoon, and gallons
of tears must have been shed during the alternate forays
into the cactus and the experiments in home surgery. But
finally the last of the nests was found, the last prickly spine removed from the last little hand.

"Pshaw," the child-hater said genially, "I should have,
hidden them in
really
difficult places. Those children
wouldn't have been back for days." Avenged, she went happily up to her room.

May was invariably a get-ready month instead of a
guest month. Why, I don't know, because our mountains were just as beautiful to watch when they were waking up
in the spring as when they were going to sleep in the
fall. I suppose it was just that old American vacationer's prejudice against going anyplace before Decoration Day.
But Bill and I kept ourselves occupied with paint spray,
hammer, and rake, preparing for the guests whom we hoped would pour in from June onward.

Believe it or not, we had learned a few things during
our first summer. One of them was to keep the staff down to a bare minimum. The less help, the less trouble and the
less money being paid out. Another was to give the ama
teurs a chance when it came to passing around the sum
mer jobs. Too many times we had been impressed by
lyrical references and dazzling resumes, only to find out that they were pure fiction and that the truth was a good deal stranger and a good deal less palatable. So for our
second summer we got Dick back to wrangle and to be
head wrangler, at that. We decided to turn a deaf ear to
all the nonsense about Dick's being too young to shoulder
the responsibility. I'm glad we did. Dick had just graduated from high school—an achievement mighty few of
the professional wranglers could claim—and he'd had two
summers' experience so that he knew the ranch, the peo
ple, the horses, and the terrain much better than any of
those smooth-talking, trouble-making old cowpokes who drifted from job to job with all the purposefulness of tum
bleweed.

For the house and grounds we did what was considered
a daring thing: Bill and I hired Indians. Joe Vigil had been working part time in the garden and had trans
formed it into a thing of beauty. So what could have been
more sensible than to have hired Joe full time and asked
him and his wife Veronica to move in and take over? The
Vigils accepted our offer, and we never came to regret
that, either. We had heard a lot of dire warnings about the
danger of mixing races in more or less housebound capac
ities. As far as Bill and I can tell, this is pure nonsense,
unless for some purely aesthetic reason you want all your
help to
match.
At Rancho del Monte we often mixed
white, colored, Indian, Spanish, and Anglo with no cata
clysmic results. When there was trouble—which was often
—the trouble occurred because some one person of which
ever group broke loose and
made
trouble. But the trouble
never
arose because any one employee refused to
associate with employees who happened to have different
colored complexions or ideologies.

So the Vigils moved up from the Tesuque Pueblo in
May and
with
May, their adorable little daughter of six,
who was not only the best-behaved child in New Mexico
but also the best-dressed. The combination of Vigils and
Hootons worked like a charm. Big, handsome Joe labored
not only in the garden but every place else, too, as he
knew all about plumbing, electricity, masonry, floor wax
ing, that iniquitous dishwashing machine, and all the nagging little odd jobs that came up every day and just had to
stay
up until Bill got into the house to attend to them. Joe also found work before it found him. He was a sheer joy to have around—never excited, never at a loss, and
never
idle.

Pretty little Ronnie worked with me, making beds,
dusting, and tidying, and she did it all so neatly and
scrupulously and cheerfully that she put me quite to
shame, especially when she'd look at me reproachfully and
say, "Barbara, you
can't
make a bed that way. The corners should be square." Then I'd get all hot and bothered, as though I were working for Ronnie, and promise to be a better bedmaker next time. Eventually I
was.