Half broke horses: a true-life novel (18 page)

I was in a bind. I needed to take Little Jim to the hospital, but the nearest one was in Kingman, thirty-five miles away, and I couldn’t leave the kids unsupervised for that long. I packed as many of them as I possibly could into the hearse and had the rest stand on the sideboards, hanging on through the open windows. With Rosemary holding limp Little Jim in her lap beside me, I set out to take all the kids home, going to Yampi and then Pica—the kids on the sideboards having the time of their lives, hooting and hollering, treating it like a carnival ride—before heading for Kingman.

We were barreling down Route 66 when Little Jim suddenly sat up. “Where am I?” he asked.

Rosemary, thinking this was hilarious, burst into laughter, but I was furious. I wanted to take Little Jim to the hospital anyway, but he insisted he was fine and even stood up on the car seat and started dancing around to prove it, which got me even more furious. I’d done all that driving around for nothing, canceling class for no good reason, and I was worried I’d be docked a day’s pay.

“We’re just going to go round up all those kids a second time,” I said.

“But they’ve already gone home,” Rosemary said. “They’ll be out playing and won’t want to come back.”

“I’ve told you before, life’s not about doing what you want.”

Rosemary looked a little pouty. Then she started saying she didn’t feel so well, she was dizzy and needed to go home.

“Oh, so you’re the sick one now?” I said.

“That’s right, Mommy.”

“Well, I’m going to take you to the hospital, then,” I said.

“I just want to go home.”

“Not another word,” I said. “If you’re sick, you don’t need pampering, you need treatment.” Whenever she tried to protest, I repeated myself.

I drove straight to the Kingman hospital. After a talk with one of the nurses about a daughter who wanted to play hooky, I arranged for Rosemary to spend the night in a room by herself where she could ponder truth and consequences. If I was going to be docked a day’s pay, someone, at the very least, was going to learn a lesson from the experience.

“Feeling better?” I asked Rosemary when I picked her up the next day.

“Yep,” she said.

And we both left it at that. But the kid never tried to play hooky again.

ONE SATURDAY MORNING THAT
fall, when I went out into the yard, I looked over at the hearse parked next to the barn. It was just sitting there, and that struck me as a real waste. Unlike a horse, a car didn’t need a day off every now and then. If I could put the hearse to work for me on the weekends, it would—after gas—be pure profit. I decided to start up a taxi service.

On the side of the hearse, under SCHOOL BUS, I used the same silver paint to add AND TAXI. Jim came up with the idea of strapping some old buggy seats in the back when we had paying passengers.

There weren’t exactly a lot of people standing by the road trying to hail taxis in that part of Arizona, but there were folks without cars who from time to time needed to get to the courthouse in Kingman or be picked up at the train depot in Flagstaff, and they’d hire me. They’d leave word in advance with Deputy Johnson in Seligman, and every day or two I’d stop by his office to see if I had any customers.

Most of the money went into our savings, but I kept some aside for the occasional flying lesson.

I was an excellent driver. I didn’t particularly like city driving, with all the stoplights and street signs and traffic cops, but out in the country I was in my element. I knew the shortcuts and the back roads and had no hesitation heading out cross-country, barreling through the sagebrush and startling the roadrunners out of the undergrowth.

If we got stuck in a ditch while I was ferrying around the schoolkids, I had them get out and push while we all chanted Hail Marys. “Push and pray!” I’d holler while gripping the steering wheel and gunning the engine, sand and rocks spraying behind the spinning tires as the car fish-tailed its way out of the ditch. My paying passengers were also expected to help push if we got stuck. I didn’t make them say Hail Marys, but I used the same line: “Push and pray!”

When Jim heard it, he said, “Probably should paint that on the hearse, too.”

One weekend that December, three ladies from Brooklyn were staying with our neighbor Mrs. Hutter, the woman who cooked the stews for the school and who was their cousin, and they hired me to take them all up to see the Grand Canyon. I stored a picnic lunch in the hearse and brought Rosemary along with me.

I expected these Brooklyn gals to be tough and smart, and maybe even practicing socialists, but instead they were all ninnies who wore too much makeup and kept complaining about the Arizona heat, the hearse’s uncomfortable buggy seats, and the fact that there was no place in the entire state to get a good egg cream. They had these thick Brooklyn accents, and I had to fight the temptation to correct their atrocious pronunciation.

While I tried to keep up a positive line of chatter, pointing out that the town of Jerome was named after Winston Churchill’s mother’s family, they kept saying things like “But whatta youse people
do
out here?” and “How do youse
live
wit-out electricity?”

They also kept going on about Christmas in New York, about the tree in Rockefeller Center, the window displays at Macy’s, the gifts, the lights, the kids lining up to talk to the red-suited Santas.

“What’s Santa Claus gonna bring youse dis year?” one of the ladies asked Rosemary.

“Who’s Santa Claus?” she asked.

“Youse never heard of Santa Claus?” The woman sounded bewildered.

“We don’t pay much heed to that sort of thing around here,” I said.

“Well, dat’s a crying shame.”

“So, who’s Santa Claus?” Rosemary asked again.

“Saint Nicholas,” I said. “The patron saint of department stores.”

Near Picacho Butte, I noticed that the emergency brake had been on the entire time, and without saying anything, I reached down and quietly released it. Just then we came to a long downward slope at the edge of the plateau. The hearse began picking up speed, and when I pressed down on the brake pedal, it went all the way to the floor with no resistance. We had no brakes.

I started swerving the car on and off the road, hoping the sand and loose gravel on the shoulder would slow us down. The Brooklyn women got all overwrought, telling me to slow down, asking me what was happening and demanding that I let them out. “Stop duh car!”

“Now, calm yourselves, girls,” I said. “We just got us a little runaway taxi, but everything’s under control. I’ll get us out of this.”

I looked over at Rosemary, who was staring at me wide-eyed, and gave her a big wink to show her just how much fun we were having. The little creature grinned. She was positively fearless, unlike those honking lace-panties in the back.

But the swerving hadn’t slowed the car, and I realized the situation called for more drastic measures. We reached a stretch of the road that was cut into the side of the mountain. On our side it sloped down, and on the far side it rose upward.

“Ready for some hijinks?” I shouted.

“I am,” Rosemary said, but the Brooklyn ladies continued to wail.

“Hang tight!” I shouted.

I cut the car across the road and angled up the hillside, bouncing over holes and rocks, but the slope was steep, and while we started losing momentum, we also started tipping sideways, and then the car rolled once, landing upside down, exactly like I’d planned.

We got knocked around a bit, but no one was seriously hurt, and we all scrambled out through the open windows. The Brooklyn ladies were in a tizzy, cussing my driving and threatening to sue or have me arrested and my license revoked. “Youse almost got us kilt!”

“All that’s happened to you is that you’ve had the lace knocked off your panties,” I said. “Instead of carrying on, you should be thanking me, because my driving skills just saved all your necks. You ride, you got to know how to fall, and you drive, you got to know how to crash.”

THOSE BROOKLYN BROADS WERE
a bunch of sissies, but they got me thinking about Christmas. For the most part, pioneers and ranchers didn’t have the time or money for gift giving and tree trimming, and they tended to treat Christmas like Prohibition, another eastern aberration that wasn’t of much concern to them. A couple of years back, when some missionaries were trying to dazzle the Navajos into converting, they had a gift-bearing Santa Claus jump out of a plane, but his parachute didn’t open, and he landed with a thud in front of the Indians, convincing them—and most of the rest of us—that the less we had to do with jolly old Saint Nick, the better off we’d be.

Still, I got to wondering if maybe I was depriving my kids of a special experience, and that week I bought some of those fancy new electric Christmas lights in Kingman and a couple of small toys from the Commercial Central, the general store in Seligman.

On Christmas morning I had Jim secretly climb up on the roof and start shaking a string of old carriage bells while I explained to the kids that it was Saint Nick and his flying reindeer visiting all the children in the world, bringing them toys that he and his elves in the North Pole had spent the year making. Rosemary’s expression went from bewildered to doubtful, then she started shaking her head and grinning. “What are you talking about, Mom?” she asked. “Any dummy knows deer can’t fly.”

“The deer are magic, for crying out loud,” I said. I explained that Santa Claus himself was magic, and that was how he was able to visit every child in the world, leaving them all gifts in socks, in the course of one evening. Then I held up two socks and passed them over to Rosemary and Little Jim.

Rosemary pulled out an orange, some hazelnuts, a roll of LifeSavers, and a small packet with a set of jacks inside. “These aren’t from the North Pole,” she said as she examined the jacks. “These are from the Commercial Central. I saw them there.”

I walked over to the window and stuck my head out. “Come on down, Jim,” I hollered. “They’re not buying it.”

Even though I couldn’t sell the kids on Santa Claus, they were beside themselves with excitement about the Christmas lights. We all drove up into the hills and cut down a short pine that the kids picked out. Jim dug a hole in the front yard and we set it in that, tamping down the dirt and stringing the lights around its branches. All afternoon Rosemary and Little Jim danced around the tree and shouted at the sun to hurry up and set.

Once it grew dark, we called the cowboys out from the bunkhouse, and Jim pulled the hearse up next to the tree. He opened the hood, attached a cable to the battery, and as we all stood in a circle around the tree, he raised the cable and the light cord above his head, and with a flourish, brought them together. The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white, and blue lights boldly glowing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the immense darkness of the range.

“It’s magic!” Rosemary shrieked.

A number of the ranch hands had never seen electric lights, and a few of them took off their hats and held them over their hearts.

And those Brooklyn broads thought we didn’t know how to celebrate Christmas in style.

IN MY SECOND YEAR
at Peach Springs, I had twenty-five students in my one-room schoolhouse. Six of them—almost a quarter of the class—were the children of Deputy Johnson, a rawboned chain-smoker who wore an old fedora and had a droopy mustache. For the most part, I liked Deputy Johnson. He turned a blind eye to minor infractions and tended to give folks the benefit of the doubt as long as they acknowledged that he was the law, deciding what was right and wrong. But he could come down on you hard if you took issue with him. He had a total of thirteen children and, their daddy being one of the county lawmen, they did pretty much as they pleased, letting air out of people’s tires, throwing cherry bombs down outhouse holes, and leaving the babysitter tied to a tree all night.

One of the deputy’s sons was Johnny Johnson, who was a couple of years older than Rosemary. He’d been a handful ever since I started teaching at Peach Springs. Maybe it was because he had older brothers who sat around telling dirty stories about girls, but Johnny couldn’t keep his hands off them—a regular tomcat in the making. He had kissed Rosemary on the mouth, something I learned a few days later from one of the other students. Rosemary said it was just a yucky thing that had happened, nothing she wanted anyone to get in any trouble over. Johnny, for his part, called Rosemary and the other student lying finks and said I couldn’t prove anything.

It wasn’t worth holding a court of inquisition over, but I was still simmering about the matter a couple of weeks later when, one day during class, the little punk reached over and stuck his hand up the dress of a sweet Mexican girl named Rosita. That boy needed to be taught to keep his grimy hands to himself, so I put my book down, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face. He looked at me, bug-eyed with shock, and then he reached up and slapped me in the face.

For a second I was speechless. A smile started creeping across Johnny’s face. The little squirt thought he had the best of me. It was then that I hauled him up and threw him against the wall, backhanding him again and again, and when he cowered down in a ball on the floor, I grabbed my ruler and started whaling his butt.

“You’ll be sorry!” he kept screaming. “You’ll be sorry!”

I didn’t care. Johnny Johnson needed to learn a lesson he’d never forget, and you couldn’t spell it out on the blackboard, you had to beat it into him. Also, he was clearly in danger of becoming a crumb-bum heel like my first husband and the producer who seduced Helen, and he needed to realize there could be consequences for mistreating girls. So I kept whaling on him, maybe even beyond the call of duty, and truth be told, I got more than a little satisfaction from it.

JUST AS I EXPECTED,
Deputy Johnson showed up at school the next day.

“I’m not here to have a conversation,” he said. “I’m here to tell you to keep your hands off my boy. Got it?”

“You deputies may think you run Yavapai County, but I run my classroom,” I said, “and I’ll discipline wayward kids as I see fit. Got it?”