Half broke horses: a true-life novel (14 page)

One of the Poms piped up to say he knew firsthand how precious water was, because at the hotel in Seligman, he’d been charged an extra fifty cents to take a bath. Everyone got a laugh out of that, and it made me hope that Jim’s pitch would receive a sympathetic hearing.

Seeing as how the ranch had no natural source of water, Jim said, one had to be created if it was going to support a sizable herd. Some ranchers went drilling for water, but you might drill all sorts of dry holes before you actually found water, and there was no guarantee of how long it would last. When the Santa Fe Railroad had needed water for its steam engines, it had drilled a hole half a mile deep in these parts and come up dry.

What made the most sense, Jim went on, was to build a big dam to trap rainwater. He described my plan to bring up a bulldozer from Phoenix. When Jim mentioned the cost, the Poms looked at one another, and a few raised their eyebrows, but then Jim pulled out a column of numbers I’d drawn up and explained that without the dam, they could run only a few thousand head on the ranch; with it, they could go to twenty thousand, and that meant bringing five thousand head to market every year. The dam would pay for itself in no time.

The next day the Poms went into Seligman to cable the rest of the investors. After some backing and forthing about engineering details, we got the go-ahead. The Poms wrote a check before they left, and in no time, a flatbed truck was pulling up to the ranch with a big yellow bulldozer on the back. It was the first bulldozer to be seen in these parts, and people came from all over Yavapai County to marvel at it chugging away.

Since we had the darned contraption there, we decided to build dams all over the ranch, the operator scraping out the sides of gullies and draws, lining the bottoms with packed-down clay, and using the fill to build up the walls that would hold back the water from the flash floods. By far the biggest dam we built—so big you needed five minutes to walk around it—was the one in front of the ranch house.

When the rains came that December, the water coursed through the gullies and draws and poured right into the ponds created by the dams. It was just like filling a bathtub. That winter was unusually wet, and by the spring, the water was three feet deep in the big pond—the finest body of water I’d seen since Lake Michigan.

In one sense, that pond was nothing more than a hole in the ground, but Jim treated it like our proudest possession, and that was what it was. He checked the dam every day, measuring the depth of the water and inspecting the walls. In the summer, folks drove from miles away to ask if they might take a dip, and we always let them. Sometimes during dry spells, neighbors without as much water would come over with wagonloads of barrels and ask, as they’d put it, to borrow from our pond, though there was no way they were ever going to repay us, and we never charged for it, since, as Jim liked to say, the heavens had given it to us.

The dam and its pond came to be known as Big Jim’s Dam, and then just Big Jim. People around the county measured the severity of dry spells by the amount of water in Big Jim. “How’s Big Jim doin’?” people in town might ask me, or “I hear Big Jim’s low,” and I always knew they were talking about the water level in the pond, not my husband’s state of mind.

THE RANCH’S OFFICIAL NAME
was the Arizona Incorporated Cattle Ranch, but we always called it the AIC, or just The Ranch. It was only dudes and greenhorns—people who got their ideas about ranching from western movies and dime-store novels—who gussied up their ranches with highfalutin names like Acres of Eden or Rancho Mirage or Paradise Plateau. A fancy name, Jim liked to say, was a sure sign that the owner didn’t know the first thing about ranching.

With the Depression still going strong, owners like that—as well as plenty of owners who did know a thing or two about ranching—were going out of business. That meant more people were selling than buying cattle, and Jim traveled around Arizona picking up entire herds for rock-bottom prices. He hired about a dozen cowboys, mostly Mexican and Havasupai, to drive the cattle to the ranch and brand them before sending them out to the range. Cowboying was rough, and so were those kids—misfits, most of them, runaways and boys who’d been whipped too hard. For these young fellows, it was a question of joining the roundup or joining the circus—not a lot of other options out there for them—and they took life day by day. The one thing they knew how to do better than anything else was stick a horse, and they took great pride in that.

When the cowboys arrived, the first thing they did was head out into open country and round up a herd of range horses, which they proceeded to break—after a fashion—in the palisaded corral. The horses bucked and fishtailed like rodeo broncs, but those hard-assed boys would just as soon bust every bone in their bodies before calling it quits. They weren’t much more than half-broke horses themselves.

I stood there watching them with Rosemary. “I feel bad for the horses,” she said. “They just want to be free.”

“In this life,” I said, “hardly anyone gets to do what they want to do.”

Once the cowboys each had a string of horses, they started bringing in the cattle and branding them. They were all living in the bunkhouse, and I had my hands full cooking for everyone, in addition to helping out with the branding. The cowboys got steak and eggs for breakfast and steak and beans for dinner, with as much salt and roof water as they wanted. Anyone who asked for one could have a raw onion, as good as an orange for staving off scurvy. Most of the boys peeled those onions and ate them like apples.

I didn’t particularly trust them around Rosemary, who wasn’t allowed to go near the bunkhouse—where there was nonstop cussing, drinking, brawling, card play, and knife play—and that was when I got in the habit of sleeping with her in the bedroom of the ranch house while Big Jim and Little Jim slept in the main room.

Rosemary was also a little like a half-broke horse. She was happiest running around out of doors, without a stitch of clothing if I’d let her. She climbed the cedar trees, splashed in the horse trough, peed in the yard, swung from vines, and jumped from the barn rafters onto the hay bales, yelling at Mei-Mei to stand clear. She loved spending the day on horseback, holding on behind her father. The saddles were too heavy for her to lift, so she rode her little mule, Jenny, bareback, mounting her by grabbing mane and toe-walking up the animal’s leg.

Jim once told Rosemary that she was so tough, any critter that took a bite of her would spit it out, and she just loved that. Rosemary was never afraid of coyotes or wolves, and she hated to see any animal caged, tied up, or penned in. She even thought that the chickens should be freed from the coop, that the risk of being eaten by a coyote was a price worth paying for freedom, and besides, she said, the coyotes needed food, too. That was why I always blamed Rosemary for what happened to Bossie the cow.

The Poms were so thrilled with Jim’s work on the ranch that they sent us a pure-blooded Guernsey. Bossie was dun-colored, big and beautiful, and she gave us two gallons a day of rich milk with good cream. She was such a good milk cow that I planned to breed her in the fall, sell the calf in the spring, and sock away the proceeds. I had already begun to think about saving for the day when we could afford a ranch of our own.

But one day someone left Bossie’s stall unlatched, and she broke into the granary, where she devoured almost an entire bag of feed. When Old Jake came upon her, she had bloated and was leaning against the barn wall, her stomach swollen while she groaned in pain.

Jim and Old Jake did everything they could. To get her to throw up, they made a mixture of the worst stuff they could think of: tobacco and milk of magnesia and whiskey and soapy water. They put it in a whiskey bottle and tried to pour it down her throat, but Bossie wouldn’t swallow, and it dribbled out the sides of her mouth. So then Old Jake held her jaws apart while Jim stuck the bottle so far down inside her gullet that his arm disappeared up to his elbow.

He poured the concoction directly into her stomach, and she did throw up a little, but she was so far gone by then that it made no difference. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed slowly to the ground. In desperation, Jim punctured her gut with his pocketknife to let the gas out. But that didn’t work, either, and in another hour, our big, beautiful Guernsey was gone, lying glass-eyed and heavy on the barn floor.

I was furious, heartbroken about the death of Bossie, but beside myself about the loss of what I hoped we’d earn come calving season. I was sure that it was Rosemary, with her misguided notions about animals and freedom, who had let Bossie out. The girl had been too horrified to watch Jim and Old Jake ministering to the cow, and I found her on the long porch, sobbing about Bossie’s end. I felt like smacking her good, but she insisted she hadn’t let the cow out, that it was Little Jim who’d done it, and since I didn’t have any proof one way or another, I had to let the matter go.

“Just you remember,” I said, “that this is what could happen when an animal gets freedom. Animals act like they hate to be penned up, but the fact is, they don’t know what to do with freedom. And a lot of times it kills them.”

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.