Half broke horses: a true-life novel (13 page)

Ever since Jim had saved the lambs, Blackie had taken to dropping by the garage to shoot the breeze. The more he got to know Jim, the more he liked him. Jim, he was fond of telling people, knew not only sheep, he also knew cattle and horses and just about every creature with fur or feathers. Jim never bragged about himself, which Blackie also liked, and Blackie was particularly impressed with a story he’d heard from a local Hopi about how, when Jim was a young man, an eagle was going after a newborn calf and Jim actually lassoed the bird in midair.

That morning, as we sat at the wobbly linoleum table Jim used as his desk, Blackie told us that he and his brother had sold their ranch to a group of investors in England who wanted to run cattle there. They had asked him and his brother to recommend someone to manage the ranch, and Blackie said that if Jim was so inclined, he and his brother would put Jim’s name forward.

Jim reached under the table and squeezed my hand so hard that my knuckles cracked. We both knew the only jobs out in California were picking grapes and oranges, and the Okies were fighting over what little work existed, while the Daddy Warbucks owners kept cutting everyone’s wages. But there was no way we were going to acknowledge to Blackie Camel how desperate we were.

“Sounds like something worth considering,” Jim said.

BLACKIE SENT A TELEGRAM
to London, and a few days later, he dropped by to tell Jim the job was his. We called off the auction, and Jim kept most of his tools, but we did sell the gasoline pump and tires to a mechanic from Sedona. Rooster brought a buckboard down from Red Lake, and we loaded our furniture onto it, put the kids and Mei-Mei in the back of the Flivver, and then, with Jim behind the wheel, Rooster on the wagon, and me bringing up the rear on Patches, we set out on our little procession for Seligman, the town nearest the ranch.

That part of the journey was smooth and passed quickly because Route 66 was being paved for the first time with a layer of shiny black asphalt. Seligman wasn’t as big as Ash Fork, but it had everything a ranch town needed: a building that served as both the jail and post office, a hotel, a bar and café, and the Commercial Central, a general store where pairs of Levi’s were stacked four feet high on the wide-planked floor next to shovels, spools of rope and wire, water buckets, and tins of crackers.

From Seligman we headed west for fifteen miles through rolling rangeland covered with rabbitweed, prairie grass, and juniper trees. The Peacock Mountains in the distance were dark green, and overhead the sky was iris blue. After fifteen miles, we turned off Route 66 and followed a narrow dirt road for another nine miles. It took a full day to get from Seligman to the ranch by wagon. Finally, late in the afternoon, we came to a gate where the road just ended.

To the right and left of the gate, barbed-wire fencing, held up by neatly trimmed juniper saplings, stretched away into the distance. There was no sign on the gate, which was closed, but we were expected, so the gate was dummy locked—the chain that kept it shut was held together by a padlock that had been left unsnapped. Beyond the gate was a long driveway. We followed it another four miles and finally reached a fenced-in compound with a collection of unpainted wood buildings shaded by enormous cedar trees.

The buildings were at the foot of a hill dotted with pinyon and scrub cedar. Facing east, you looked out over miles and miles of rolling rangeland that gradually sloped down toward a flat grassy basin known as the Colorado Plateau. It stretched out all the way to the Mogollon Rim, big blush-colored bluffs where the earth had shifted along a single fault line that ran all the way to New Mexico. From where we stood, you could see to forever, and there wasn’t a single other house, human being, or the slightest sign of civilization, only the huge sky, the endless grassy plain, and the distant mountains.

The Camel brothers had let most of the hired help go, and the place was deserted except for one remaining hand, Old Jake, a grizzled, stogiechewing coot who came limping out of the barn to greet us. Old Jake had a lopsided walk because, to avoid serving in the Great War, he had put his foot on a railroad track and let a train run over his toes. “Won’t win any dancin’ contests,” he said, “but don’t need toes to ride—and it beats spittin’ up mustard gas.”

Old Jake showed us around. There was a main house with a long porch, its unpainted wood siding a sun-bleached gray. The barn was huge, and next to it were four small log buildings: the grainery and the smithy; the meat house, where hides and sides of beef were cured; and the poison house, which had shelves full of bottles containing medicines, potions, spirits, and solvents, all with corks or rags stuffed in their tops. Old Jake kept pointing out various details—the bags of sulfur and jars of tar used for treating injured livestock, the knife sharpener in the smithy, the troughs that collected runoff rainwater from the roofs.

He took us into the other outbuildings, including a toolshed, chicken coop, and bunkhouse. Then we came to a garage filled with twenty-six carriages, wagons, and vehicles—brogans, surreys, phaetons, an old Conestoga covered wagon, a few beat-up cars, a rusty Chevy pickup. Old Jake proudly named every one. He showed us the pit in the garage that you could climb down into, then have someone drive the car over it when you needed to work on the undercarriage.

Finally, Old Jake led us back through the barn to a double corral: one made of six-foot-high saplings posted vertically and used to break horses, the other made of standard post-and-wire fencing with a small herd of tough little ponies inside it.

Jim walked around nodding and taking it all in. We could both see that although the buildings were weathered, they were solid and true.

There was nothing fancy about the place, it was a real working ranch, but tools were hung in their place, ropes were coiled neatly, harnesses mended, fence posts stacked in tidy bundles, and the barn floor was swept. On a ranch you had to be able to find a given tool in a hurry when there was an emergency, and you had to hand it to the Camel brothers. They knew the importance of keeping things shipshape.

Rooster was visibly impressed. “A fellow could do a lot worse than this,” he said. “Jim, you old hound dog, you got lucky.” He glanced at me. “Again,” he added.

I swatted Rooster on the arm, but Jim just shook his head and grinned. Then he looked out across the range. “I think we can make this work,” he said.

“I think we can,” I said.

I could tell life at the ranch was going to be a lot of hard work. We were too far from town to count on anyone else for anything. Jim and I would have to be our own veterinarian, farrier, mechanic, butcher, cook, as well as cattle driver, ranch manager, husband and wife, and mother and father of two little children. But Jim and I both knew how to roll up our sleeves, and in times like these, I knew how lucky we were not just to have work but to be our own bosses doing something we were good at doing.

I felt nature calling and asked Old Jake where I could find the facilities. He pointed toward a little wooden shed in the north corner of the compound. “It’s nothing fancy, just a one-holer,” he said. “No moon cut in the door to advertise it, either, ’cause we all knows what it is.”

Inside the outhouse, once you’d closed the door that didn’t have a moon, enough light came through the cracks in the wood so that you could see. Spiderwebs dangled in the roof corners, a sack of lime sat on the dirt floor, and there was a scoop to sprinkle it into the hole to keep the flies down. A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush. As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.

Next to the seat was a stack of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, and I picked one up and leafed through it. I came to a page advertising silk bodices and lacy chemises. I won’t be ordering from this page, I thought, and when I was done with my business, that was the one I tore out and used.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AS
Rooster was getting ready to head back to Red Lake, he caught me alone in the kitchen.

“Thank you for helping us move,” I said, and handed him a cup of coffee.

He looked at me for a moment. “You know I always been carrying a torch for you,” he said.

“I know.”

“Funny,” he said. “Just can’t help it.” He paused and then asked, “You think I’ll ever get married?”

“I do,” I said. I had just been being polite, but suddenly I saw it clearly. The right woman was out there for him. “I do,” I said again. “You just got to look in unexpected places.”

After Rooster left, Jim said our first order of business was to tour the ranch. It was a big place, with a little over a hundred thousand acres— almost 160 square miles—and it would take us at least a week just to ride the outer fence line. We loaded one pony with supplies. Jim and Old Jake mounted up two others, and I was on Patches, with Little Jim in my lap, while Rosemary climbed on with her dad.

We headed west until we reached white and yellow limestone foothills, then swung south. A hot, dry wind blew across the valley. We passed pinyon and juniper trees and now and then saw a herd of white-tailed antelope on distant slopes, grazing on the gama grass. Old Jake showed us Tres Cruces, a group of rocks on which someone had carved stick figures of horses and riders carrying three crosses to depict—according to ranch lore—an early Spanish expedition. Late in the afternoon, we reached a high point below the Coyote Mountains. From there we could see south toward the Juniper Mountains and east to the Mogollon Rim.

“Lot of land,” Jim said. “Not a lick of water.”

“Drier than a crone’s dugs,” Old Jake said.

There were a few dirt ponds, small sad things dug out to collect rain, but the water disappeared during dry spells, and the ponds were now empty, cracked pits.

After ten days, we’d made a big circle, covering most of the ranch, although there were large stretches of territory we didn’t have time to see. And while we passed any number of gullies and draws that you could tell ran with water during flash floods, there wasn’t a single stream, spring, or natural source of water on the whole spread. “No wonder the Camel brothers threw in the towel,” Jim said.

Jim sent to Flagstaff for a water witch, and the two of them set out on another tour of the ranch, stopping at clumps of trees and spots where the grass was green. The water witch walked around holding a forked branch in his outstretched arms, waiting for the branch to dip, a sign that there was water underground. But the branch never dipped.

I kept thinking about all those gullies and draws we’d passed during our trip around the ranch. The only water this land would ever see was going to come from the sky. During flash floods, thousands and thousands of gallons of water would roar through all those gullies and draws only to soak through the range floor. If we could figure out how to trap that water for ourselves, we’d have plenty.

“What we really need to do is build a dam,” I told Jim.

“How?” he said. “You’d need an army.”

I thought about it for a while, and then it came to me. I’d read magazine articles about the building of the Boulder Dam, as it was called by those of us who hated Herbert Hoover and refused to call it the Hoover Dam. Alongside the articles were photographs of some of the newfangled earthmoving machines used in the construction. “Jim,” I said, “let’s rent us a bulldozer.”

At first Jim thought I was nuts, but I decided we at least needed to look into the idea. I drove into Seligman, and someone knew someone in Phoenix who had a construction company with a bulldozer. Sure enough, when I tracked him down, he said that if we were willing to pay for it, he could send his bulldozer and its operator up to Seligman by rail. We’d need to find a flatbed truck to haul it out to the ranch. It wouldn’t be cheap, but once the bulldozer was here, it could build a good-sized earth dam in a matter of days.

Jim said we needed to present the idea to the English investors. A group of them was headed our way in a few weeks to meet us and survey their property.

The Poms arrived by wagon after taking a steamer from England to New York and a train to Flagstaff—a three-week trip. They had clipped accents and wore bowler hats and suits with vests. None of them had ever pulled on a pair of cowboy boots or cracked a bullwhip, but that was just fine with Jim and me. They were businessmen, not dudes out to play cowboy. And they were polite and smart. You could tell from the questions they asked that they knew what they didn’t know.

The first night they arrived, Old Jake built an open fire and roasted a shoulder of beef. He kept making fun of the investors under his breath, saying things like “Rather cheeky” and “Jolly good” in an English accent, and rolling up his cowboy hat to look like a bowler, so I had to bop him in the back of the head. I prepared a few range specialties like rattlesnake stew and prairie oysters to give them something to talk about when they got back to their London clubs.

Afterward we sat around the fire eating tins of sliced peaches. Jim took out his little cotton sack of Bull Durham, rolled himself a cigarette, closing the sack by pulling on the yellow string with his teeth like he always did, then made his pitch.

Only two things really mattered to a rancher, he said: land and water. We had plenty of land in these parts, but not enough water, and without water, the land ain’t worth nothing. Water made the difference. Water out here was precious, he said, more precious than you gentlemen, living on that rainy island of yours, can possibly imagine. That was why, for centuries, the Indians and the Mexicans and the Anglos had all been fighting over it, why families were torn apart over it, why neighbors killed each other over it.