Half broke horses: a true-life novel (7 page)

Buster and Dorothy had gotten married the year before. They lived in the new wing of the house, and it soon became clear to me that Dorothy was more or less running the place. She oversaw the kitchen, bossing Lupe around something fierce, and handed out the daily work assignments for Buster, Apache, and even Mom, Dad, and Helen. Mom complained that Dorothy had gotten a tad high-handed, but I could tell they were secretly glad to have someone doing what I used to do.

Mom’s biggest concern was Helen. She had reached marrying age, but pretty as she was, that girl just lacked get-up-and-go. Mom worried that Helen might be suffering from neurasthenia, a vague ailment wealthy women got that made them want to lie in a room all day with a wet cloth over their eyes. Helen was happy to sew and bake pies, but she hated any kind of work that made her break into a sweat or gave her hands calluses, and most of the Rio Hondo ranchers looking for wives wanted a woman who could not only cook and clean house but also help out with branding calves and drive the chuck wagon during roundup. Mom’s plan was to send Helen to the Sisters of Loretto—hoping that with a little polish, she’d attract a citified man in Santa Fe—but Dorothy argued that all the earnings from the ranch needed to be reinvested in machinery to raise crop yields. Helen herself was talking about how she’d like to move to Los Angeles and become an actress in the movies.

The morning after I returned, we were eating breakfast in the kitchen, Mom passing the teapot around. I’d developed a taste for coffee in Arizona, but Dad still allowed nothing stronger than tea on the ranch.

After cleaning up, Dad and I walked out onto the porch. “You ready to get back in the corral?” he asked. “I got a couple of new saddlebred fillies that I know you can work wonders with.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“What do you mean? You’re a horsewoman.”

“With Dorothy in charge, I’m not sure there’s a place for me here anymore.”

“Don’t go talking nonsense. You’re blood. She’s just an in-law. You belong here.”

But the truth was, I didn’t feel I did. And even if there was a place for me, it was not the life I wanted. That plane that had flown overhead at the Homolovi Ruins had got me to thinking. Also, I’d seen a number of automobiles in my years in Arizona, and they gave me a sinking feeling about the future prospects for carriages—and carriage horses.

“You ever think of getting yourself one of those automobiles, Dad?” I asked.

“Consarned contraptions,” Dad said. “No one’ll ever look as smart in one of those fume belchers as they do in a carriage.”

That got him going about how President Taft had taken this country in the wrong direction by getting rid of the White House stables and replacing them with a garage. “Teddy Roosevelt, now, there was a man, the last president who truly knew how to sit a horse. We’ll never see his like again.”

As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I’d been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

Another thing that airplane made me realize was that there was a whole world out there beyond ranchland that I’d never seen, a place where I might finally get that darned diploma. And maybe I’d even learn to fly an airplane.

So the way I saw it, I had two choices: stay on the ranch or strike out on my own. Staying on the ranch meant either finding a man to marry or becoming the spinster aunt to the passel of children that Dorothy and Buster talked about having. No man had proposed to me yet, and if I sat around waiting for one, I could well end up as that potato-peeling spinster in the corner of the kitchen. Striking out on my own meant going someplace where a young unmarried woman could find work. Santa Fe and Tucson weren’t much more than gussied-up cattle towns, and the opportunities there were limited. I wanted to go where the opportunities were the greatest, where the future was unfolding right before your eyes. I wanted to go to the biggest, most boomingest city I could find.

A month later, I was on the train to Chicago.

THE RAILROAD RAN NORTHEAST
through the rolling prairie to Kansas City, then on across the Mississippi and into the farmland of Illinois, with its green fields of closely planted corn, tall silos, and pretty white-frame houses with big front porches. It was my first train trip, and I spent much of it with the window down, sticking my face out into the onrushing wind.

We traveled through the night, and even with stops for refueling and to pick up and let off passengers, the trip lasted only four days, whereas it had taken Patches, packer though she was, an entire month to go less than half that distance.

When the train pulled into Chicago, I took down my little suitcase and walked through the station into the street. I’d been in crowds before—county fairs, livestock auctions—but I’d never seen such a mass of people, all moving together like a herd, jostling and elbowing, nor had my ears been assaulted by such a ferocious din, with cars honking, trolleys clanging, and hydraulic jackhammers blasting away.

I walked around, gawking at the skyscrapers going up everywhere, then I made my way over to the lake—deep blue, flat, and as endless as the range, only it was water, fresh and flowing and cold even in the summer. Coming from a place where people measured water by the pailful, where they fought and sometimes killed each other over water, it was hard to imagine, even though I was looking at it, that billions of gallons of fresh water—I figured it had to be billions or even trillions—could be sitting there undrunk, unused, and uncontested.

After gazing at the lake for a long while, soaking up the sight of it, I followed my plan: I found a Catholic church and asked a priest to recommend a respectable boardinghouse for women. I rented a bed— four to a room—then I bought the newspapers and looked at the help-wanted ads, circling possibilities with a pencil.

* * *

The next day I started searching for a job. As I walked the streets, I found myself staring at people’s faces, thinking, So this is what city folk look like. It wasn’t so much their features that were different, it was their expressions. Their faces were shut off. Everyone made a point of ignoring everyone else. I was used to nodding when I caught a stranger’s eye, but here in Chicago they looked right through you, as if you weren’t there at all.

Finding work was considerably harder than I had expected. I had hoped to get a position as a governess or a tutor, but when I admitted that I didn’t even have an eighth-grade education, people looked at me like they were wondering why I was wasting their time, even after I told them about my teaching experience. “That may be fine for sod busters,” one woman said, “but it won’t do in Chicago.”

The sales jobs at department stores all required experience, and mine was limited to my penny-an-egg deals with Mr. Clutterbuck. Businesses were advertising for clerks, but even as I stood in the long lines to fill out the forms, I knew I wasn’t going to get the job. With all the soldiers returning home and all the girls like me pouring in from the countryside, there was too much competition. My money started running low, and I had to face the fact that my options were pretty much limited to factory work or becoming a maid.

Sitting in front of a sewing machine for twelve hours a day didn’t strike me as much of a way to get ahead, whereas if I worked as a maid, I’d get to know people with money, and if I showed enough initiative, I might be able to parlay that position into something better.

I found a job pretty quickly working for a commodities trader and his wife, Mim, on the North Side. They lived in a big modern house with radiator heat, a clothes-washing machine, and a bathroom with a sunken tub surrounded by mosaic tiles and faucets for hot water, cold water, and icy drinking water. I got there before dawn to make their coffee by the time they woke, spent the day scrubbing, polishing, and dusting, and left after I’d cleaned the dinner dishes.

I didn’t mind the hard work. What bothered me was the way that Mim, a long-faced blond woman only a few years older than me, treated me as if I didn’t exist, looking off into the distance when she gave me the day’s orders. While Mim seemed very impressed with herself, acting terribly grand, ringing a little silver bell for me to bring in the tea when she had visitors, she wasn’t that bright.

In fact, I wondered if anyone could really be such a dodo. Once a French woman with a toy poodle came for lunch, and when the dog started barking, the woman spoke to it in French. “That’s a smart dog,” Mim said. “I didn’t know dogs could speak French.”

Mim also did crossword puzzles, constantly asking her husband the answers to simple clues, and when I made the mistake of answering one, she shot me a short, sharp look.

After I’d been there two weeks, she called me into the kitchen. “This isn’t working out,” she said.

I was stunned. I was never late, and I’d kept Mim’s house spotless. “Why?” I asked.

“Your attitude.”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing. But I don’t like the way you look at me. You don’t seem to know your place. A maid should keep her head down.”

I got another job as a maid pretty quickly, and although it was against my nature, I made a point of keeping my mouth shut and my head down. In the evenings, meanwhile, I went to school to get my diploma. There was no shame in doing hard work, but polishing silver for rich dunderheads was not my Purpose.

Busy as I was, and pretty exhausted most of the time, I loved Chicago. It was bold and bawdy and very modern, though bitterly cold in the winter, with a wicked north wind that blew in off the lake. Women were marching for the right to vote, and I attended a couple of rallies with one of my roommates, Minnie Hanagan, a spunky Irish girl with green eyes and luxurious black hair who worked in a beer-bottling plant. Minnie never met a topic she didn’t have an opinion on or heard a comment she couldn’t interrupt. After working all day as a zip-lipped maid, keeping my thoughts to myself and my eyes on the ground, it was great to unwind with Minnie by arguing about politics, religion, and everything else under the sun. We double-dated a couple of times, factory boys squiring us around to the cheaper speakeasies, but they were usually either tonguetied or loutish. I had more fun talking to Minnie than I did to any of those fellows, and sometimes the two of us went off and danced by ourselves. Minnie Hanagan was the closest thing I’d ever had to a genuine friend.

Minnie asked me what my birthday was, and when it rolled around— I was turning twenty-one—she gave me a tube of dark red lipstick. It was all she could afford, she said, but we could make ourselves up to look like real ladies and go to one of the big department stores, where we’d have fun trying on all the things we’d be able to buy one of these days. I’d never been one for makeup—few women were in ranch country—but Minnie applied it for me, rubbing a dab into my cheeks as well, and darned if I didn’t look a bit like a stockbroker’s wife.

Minnie led me through the department store. It was as big as a cathedral, with vaulted ceilings, stained glass windows, pneumatic tubes that whooshed the customers’ money from floor to floor, and aisle after aisle after aisle of gloves, furs, shoes, and anything else you could possibly imagine buying. We stopped at the hat department, and Minnie had me try on one after another—little hats, big hats, hats with feathers, hats with veils or bows, hats with artificial flowers arranged along the wide brims. As she sat each one on my head, she’d evaluate it—too old-fashioned, too much brim, hides your eyes, this one belongs in your closet—and as the hats piled up on the counter, a salesclerk came over.

“Are you girls able to find anything in your price range?” she asked with a cold smile.

I felt a little flustered. “Not really,” I said.

“Then maybe you’re in the wrong store,” she said.

Minnie stared at the woman square on. “Price isn’t the problem,” she said. “The problem is finding something up-to-date in this dowdy stock. Lily, let’s try Carson Pirie Scott.”

Minnie turned on her heel, and as we walked off, she told me, “When they get high-handed, all you have to do is remind yourself that they’re just hired help.”

AFTER I’D BEEN IN
Chicago for almost two years, I came home from work on a July evening to find one of my other roommates laying out Minnie’s only good dress on her bed.

Minnie, she said, had been at the bottling plant where she worked when her long black hair got caught in the machinery. She was pulled into these massive grinding gears. It was over before anyone nearby even had time to think.

Minnie was supposed to wear her hair up in a kerchief, but she was so proud of those thick, shiny Irish tresses—they made every man in Chicago want to flirt with her—that she couldn’t resist the temptation to let them down. Her body was so badly mangled that they had to have a closed-coffin funeral.

I loved that girl, and as I sat through the service, all I could think was that if I’d been there, maybe I could have rescued her. I kept imagining myself chopping her hair off, pulling her back, and hugging her as we sobbed happily, realizing how close she’d come to a gruesome death.

But I also knew that even if I’d been right there—and somehow happened to have had a pair of scissors in my hands—I wouldn’t have had time to save her once her hair got tangled up in the machine. When something like that happens, one moment you’re talking to the person, and then you blink and the next moment she’s dead.

Minnie had spent a lot of time planning her future. She had been saving her money and was confident she’d marry a good man, buy a little house in Oak Park, and raise a boisterous brood of green-eyed kids. But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant.

There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.