Half broke horses: a true-life novel (19 page)

When Jim came home that night, I told him what had happened.

“This is getting almost predictable,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“These showdowns. It’s becoming a pattern.”

“It would be either a pattern of me standing up for myself or a pattern of me getting pushed around.”

Deputy Johnson couldn’t get me fired outright, since they’d have trouble replacing me in the middle of the school year, but a few months later, I received another one of those blasted letters saying my contract was not going to be renewed. At this point I’d practically lost count of the number of times I’d been fired, and I was getting pretty sick of it.

The day the letter arrived, I sat at the kitchen table thinking about my situation. If I had it all to do over again, I’d have done the same thing. I wasn’t in the wrong. The rules were. I was a darned good teacher and had been doing what was necessary, not only for Rosita but also for Johnny Johnson, who needed to be reined in before he wound up in serious trouble. Even so, I’d been booted once again, and there was nothing I could do about it.

As I sat there brooding about all this, Rosemary walked into the kitchen, and when she saw me, a look of alarm swept her face. She started stroking my arm. “Don’t cry, Mom,” she said. “Stop it. Please stop it.”

It was only then that I realized tears were running down my cheeks. I remembered how disturbed I’d been as a little girl, watching my mother cry. Now, by letting my own daughter see me all weak and pitiful, I felt that I’d failed her in a big way, and I was furious with myself.

“I’m not crying,” I said. “I just got dust in my eyes.” I pushed her hand away. “Because I’m not weak. You’ll never have to worry about that. Your mother is not a weak woman.”

And with that I headed out to the woodpile and went on a tear splitting logs, setting each one up on the chopping block and using every ounce of strength I had to bring the ax down on it, sending the split pieces of white wood flying apart while Rosemary stood watching. It was almost as satisfying as whaling Johnny Johnson.

DEPUTY JOHNSON MADE SURE
everybody knew I’d been let go, and he also made no secret as to who was behind it. When I ran into people at the Commercial Central, they figured they couldn’t ask me how things were going at school, the way they usually did, and there were the awkward silences that everyone who’s been given the boot knows all too well.

But I was bound and determined to show folks that Deputy Johnson hadn’t broken my spirit, and I was looking for a way to do that when it was announced that a special premiere of
Gone with the Wind
would be held in Kingman. I decided to attend, in the fanciest dress this county had ever seen.

Gone with the Wind
was by far and away my favorite book—after the Bible—and I thought it had about as many lessons in it. I’d read it when it first came out, then I’d sat down and read it again. I’d also read most of it aloud to Rosemary. Scarlett O’Hara was my kind of gal. She was tough, she was sassy, she knew what she wanted, and she never let anything or anyone get in her way.

Like most people in the country, I’d been looking forward to the movie for years. It was the most expensive movie ever made—shot entirely in Technicolor—and magazines and newspapers had been following all the details of the casting and production. Now that it was finally finished, the studio was holding premieres around the country, including the one in Kingman, and charging five dollars for a ticket—an astronomical amount compared to the nickel that a ticket usually cost.

Women were expected to wear gowns and men to wear tuxedos, or at least their Sunday best, to the premiere. Since I’d never owned a gown and wasn’t about to splurge on one—the ticket being enough of an extravagance—I decided that I’d take my inspiration from Scarlett herself: I’d fashion my own gown using the living room curtains. The way I saw it, having curtains in the bedrooms made sense, but you didn’t really need them in the living room. Those red velvet curtains I’d bought with the S&H green stamps were just hanging there in the living room at Hackberry, gathering dust and starting to fade from the Arizona sun. And red was my favorite color.

My gown wasn’t going to be the sort of fitted, wasp-waisted getup that Scarlett had to be laced into. It would be floor-length but simple and free-flowing, more Grecian than antebellum. I borrowed a sewing machine from my neighbor Mrs. Hutter, who was an accomplished seamstress. She helped me design the pattern and assisted in the fittings, but I did all the actual sewing. For a belt, I used the curtain sash.

I didn’t have a full-length mirror, but I could tell when I finished it and put it on for the first time that the gown was, quite frankly, a masterpiece.

“You look like a movie star,” Rosemary said.

“That’s a lot of dress,” Jim said. “They’ll sure see you coming.”

Jim refused to go to the premiere with me. He had no use for movies. We’d been to a few westerns, and he’d actually walked out of a couple of them, completely disgusted by what he considered the phony depiction of cowboy life—the way movie cowboys sat by the campfire singing after a supposedly rough day on the trail, the way they hung around the corral doing rope tricks instead of mending fences, the way they wore clean white hats and fringy vests and fluffy sheepskin chaps, and most of all, the way they jumped from rooftops onto their horses.

“That’s not the way it is at all,” Jim said.

“ ’Course it’s not,” I told him. “Who would pay good money to see an actual smelly cowboy? You go to movies to escape from the way things really are.”

“I guess gangsters complain about gangster movies, too,” he said.

But Jim agreed to be my
Gone with the Wind
chauffeur, and the night of the premiere, he drove me in the hearse—a little dented after the crash with the Brooklyn broads—into Kingman. When we pulled up to the theater, spectators were milling around on the sidewalk, watching everyone arrive in their finery. Deputy Johnson stood out front in his uniform, directing traffic. Jim got out and opened the hearse door for me, and I stepped onto the red carpet, waving grandly to the crowd—and to Deputy Johnson—as the photographer’s flashbulb popped.

VII

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Rosemary and Little Jim on Old Buck

I TOLD ROSEMARY AND
Little Jim that I didn’t want them making friends with the other schoolkids, because if they did, those kids would expect special treatment from me. Even if they didn’t, the other students might believe they had if they got good grades. “I have to be like Caesar’s wife,” I told Rosemary and Little Jim. “I have to be above suspicion.”

We were also pretty isolated on the ranch, there being no other kids within walking distance, but Rosemary and Little Jim got along fine by themselves. In fact, those two little scamps were each other’s best friend. After morning chores, if there was no school, they were free to do whatever they wanted. They loved to rummage around in all the outbuildings. Once they found a couple of old whalebone corsets in a trunk in the garage and wore them around for weeks. They also hiked out to the Indian graveyard, collected arrowheads, swam in the dam and the horse troughs, threw their pocketknives at targets, and worked in the blacksmith shop, heating up pieces of metal and, on one occasion, fashioning something they called the Wagon Wheel Express: two wagon wheels with an axle and a central iron tongue that they’d welded to the axle and that dragged behind the wheels. They’d pull the Wagon Wheel Express to the top of hills and then sit on the tongue as the contraption barreled down.

What they loved most of all was riding. Both of them had been on horseback since before they could walk and rode as naturally as any Indian kids. The Poms, in gratitude to Jim for his success with the ranch, had sent Rosemary and Little Jim a Shetland pony. It was the meanest creature on the whole place, always wanting to unhorse whoever was on him, but Rosemary had great fun trying to hang on as the Shetland bucked away or veered under a low-hanging branch, hoping to knock her off.

Most days she and Little Jim saddled up Socks and Blaze, two chestnut quarter horses, and set out into the range. One of their favorites pastimes was racing the train. A set of tracks for the Santa Fe Railroad cut across the ranch, and every afternoon they’d wait for the two-fifteen. When it came chugging up, they’d gallop alongside it, the passengers leaning out and waving and the engineer sounding the whistle until the train inevitably pulled ahead.

It was a race they never minded losing, and they’d return hot and sweaty, with the horses all lathered up.

The kids took their share of knocks. They were always falling out of trees and off roofs and horses, getting scraped and bruised, but Jim and I never put up with any tears. “Tough it out,” we’d always tell them. They rolled boulders down hills at each other. They ate horse feed and pissants on dares. They fired at each other with slingshots and BB guns. Cattle charged them and horses stepped on their toes. Once when Rosemary and Little Jim were playing in the pond, he stepped into a sinkhole and was sucked underwater. Big Jim, who was working on the dam, dove in without taking off his boots. He kept plunging down to the pond floor, feeling around for Little Jim, and finally found one of his arms sticking up through the muck. He pulled Little Jim’s limp body to the side and, with Rosemary kneeling beside him, kept squeezing on Jim’s chest until the muddy water upgushed out of his mouth and he started gasping for air.

One day in the middle of the summer when Rosemary turned eight, she and I were driving off-road across the Colorado Plateau in the pickup, bringing supplies out to Jim and some of the hands who were riding the northern fence line, checking for breaks. Since it had rained a few days earlier, a mudflat we had to cross was soggier than I’d expected, and darned if we didn’t get stuck. We tried pushing but couldn’t budge her. I didn’t relish the five-hour walk in the hot sun back to the ranch house, and as I leaned against the hood, trying to figure my options, I noticed a herd of wild horses grazing in a copse of cottonwoods about a quarter mile off.

“Rosemary, we’re going to catch us a horse,” I said.

“How, Mom? We don’t even have a rope.”

“Just you watch.”

In the back of the pickup was a sack of feed for the ranch hands’ horses and a bucket with some rusting fence nails in it. I emptied the nails onto the flatbed and poured some feed into the bucket, dumping the rest next to the nails. Then I cut the empty feed bag into strips with my pocketknife, tied them together, and made a small loop with one end. I had me a hackamore.

I gave the bucket to Rosemary, and we set out toward the horses. There were six of them, and as we drew near, they all raised their heads and looked at us warily, trying to decide if it was time to bolt. They were scruffy little buggers, with chipped hooves, long bedraggled manes, and bite marks on their rumps, but a lot of the horses on the range had been ridden at one point in their lives and, with the right coaxing, could be brought back around.

I had Rosemary rattle the grain in the bucket, and when one of the horses, a red mare with black legs, pricked her ears forward at the sound, I knew I had a candidate. I reminded Rosemary of my dad’s old rule about keeping your eyes to the ground so the horse wouldn’t think you were a predator. Instead of approaching the mare directly, we circled around her, Rosemary rattling the bucket constantly. When we got close, the other horses moved off, but the mare stayed where she was, watching. We turned our backs to her. There was no way we could catch her by chasing her, but I knew if we could get her to approach us, we’d won.

The mare took a step toward us and we took a step away, which encouraged her to take another step. After several minutes of this, she drew close enough to touch, and I had Rosemary hold out the bucket, letting the horse feed a little, then I slipped the hackamore around her neck. She looked up, startled, and pulled her head back, but then she understood we had her, and instead of fighting it, she went back to the grain.

I let her finish, then had Rosemary give me a leg up and hoisted her aboard behind me.

“Mom, I can’t believe we caught a wild horse without even a rope,” she said.

“Once they’ve tasted grain, they never forget it.”

* * *

Rosemary loved the idea that this wild animal had come up to her so willingly. Once we got back to the ranch, I told her to let the horse go, and she opened the gate, but the horse just stood there. She and Rosemary were both looking at each other, all daffy-eyed.

“I want to keep her,” Rosemary said.

“I thought you wanted all these animals to run free.”

“I want them to do what they want to do,” she said. “This one wants to stay with me.”

“The last thing we need around here is another half-broke horse,” I said. “Smack her on the rump and send her off. She belongs on the range.”

AS MUCH FUN AS
ranch life was for the kids, I felt they needed more civilizing than it could provide. Jim and I decided to send them both to boarding school. While they were away, I was going to finally earn that darned diploma, get a permanent teaching job, and join the union, so beetleheads like Uncle Eli and Deputy Johnson couldn’t have me fired just because they didn’t like my style.

Since the hearse was pretty dinged up after the rollover—and because Little Jim had branded the seats with the dashboard lighter—the county let us buy it for a song. We packed it up and I drove the kids south, first dropping Little Jim, who was eight, at a boys’ school in Flagstaff, then Rosemary, who was nine, at a Catholic girls’ school in Prescott. I sat in the car watching a nun lead her by the hand into the dormitory. At the doorway, Rosemary turned around to look at me, her cheeks wet with tears. “Now, you be strong,” I called out to her. I had loved my time at the Sisters of Loretto when I was a girl, and I was sure that as soon as Rosemary got over her homesickness, she’d be fine. “Some kids would kill for this opportunity!” I yelled. “Consider yourself lucky!”

When I got to Phoenix, I found a bare-bones boardinghouse and registered for a double load of courses. I figured that if I spent eighteen hours a day going to class and studying, I could get my degree in two years. I loved my time at the university and felt happier than I thought I had a right to be. Some of the other students were astonished at my workload, but I felt like a lady of leisure. Instead of doing ranch chores, tending sick cattle, hauling schoolkids far and wide, mopping the school floor, and coping with belligerent parents, I was learning about the world and improving my mind. I had no obligations to anyone but myself, and everything in my life was under my control.

Rosemary and Little Jim didn’t share my enthusiasm for academic life. In fact, they hated it. Little Jim kept running away, climbing over fences and through windows, pulling out nails when the windows were nailed shut, and using tied-together bedsheets to shimmy down from upper floors. He was such a resourceful escape artist that the Jesuit brothers started calling him Little Houdini.

But the Jesuits were used to dealing with untamed ranch boys, and they regarded Little Jim as one more rambunctious rapscallion. Rosemary’s teachers, however, saw her as a misfit. Most of the girls at the academy were demure, frail things, but Rosemary played with her pock-etknife, yodeled in the choir, peed in the yard, and caught scorpions in a jar she kept under her bed. She loved to leap down the school’s main staircase and once took it in two bounds only to come crashing into the Mother Superior. She was behaving more or less the way she did on the ranch, but what seemed normal in one situation can seem outright peculiar in another, and the nuns saw Rosemary as a wild child.

Rosemary kept writing me sad little letters about her life. She liked learning to dance and play the piano but found embroidery and etiquette excruciating, and the nuns were always telling her that everything she did was wrong. She sang too loudly, she danced too enthusiastically, she spoke out of turn, she drew whimsical pictures in the margins of her books.

The nuns also complained that she made inappropriate comments, though sometimes she was simply repeating things I’d told her. Once, when she was wondering about the boy who’d died trying to swing to heaven, I’d said maybe it was for the best because he might have grown up to be a mass murderer, but when she said the same thing to a classmate whose brother had died, the nuns sent her to bed without dinner. Other classmates picked on her. They called her “yokel,” “bumpkin,” and “farmer’s daughter,” and when Jim donated fifty pounds of beef jerky to the school, they dismissed it as “cowboy meat” and refused to eat it, so the nuns threw it away.

Rosemary did stand up for herself. One night, she wrote, when she was doing the dishes, a classmate started teasing her about her father, saying, “Your dad thinks he’s John Wayne.”

“My dad makes John Wayne look like a pussy,” Rosemary replied, and dunked the girl’s head in the dishwater.

Good for her, I thought when I read the letter. Maybe she’s got a bit of her mother in her after all.

In her letters, Rosemary said she missed the ranch. She missed the horses and cattle, missed the ponds and the range, missed her brother and her mom and dad, missed the stars and fresh air and the sound of the coyotes at night. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in December, and everyone at the school—both the students and the nuns—lived in fear. One girl in Rosemary’s class had a brother on the battleship
Arizona
, and when she heard it had been sunk, she fell to the floor sobbing. The nuns kept blankets over the windows at night as part of the blackout— people were fearing that Japanese bombers were going to fill the skies over Arizona—and Rosemary said she felt like she couldn’t breathe.

Be strong, was all I could think to say when I wrote her back. Be strong.

I also corrected the grammar in her letters and returned them to her. I wouldn’t have been doing that girl any favors to let those sorts of errors go unchecked.

Near the end of Rosemary’s first year at the academy, I received a letter from the Mother Superior saying that she thought it would be best if Rosemary didn’t return for a second year. Her grades were poor and her behavior was disruptive. I had Rosemary tested that summer, and as I suspected, she was plenty bright. In fact, except for math, she tested in the top five percentile. All she needed to do was knuckle down and get focused. I wrote the Mother Superior, assuring her of Rosemary’s intelligence and pleading for another chance. The Mother Superior reluctantly agreed, but Rosemary’s grades and rowdiness got even worse her second year, and when it was over, the Mother Superior’s decision was final. Rosemary and the school were not a good fit.

Little Jim hadn’t done much better. I’d earned my college degree by then, and I took both Rosemary and Little Jim with me back to the ranch. The kids were so happy to be home that they ran around hugging everything—cowboys, horses, trees—and then they saddled up Blaze and Socks and headed out to open country, quirting their horses into a gallop and whooping like bandits.

NOW THAT I HAD
my college degree, I was in demand as a teacher and got a job in Big Sandy, another little town with a one-room school, where I enrolled both Rosemary and Little Jim. Rosemary was delighted not to be returning to the academy. “When I grow up,” she told me, “all I want to do is to live on the ranch and be an artist. That’s my dream.”