Half broke horses: a true-life novel (20 page)

The war was well under way by then, in both the Pacific and Europe, but aside from the shortage of gasoline, it had little impact on our life on the Colorado Plateau. The sun still rose over the Mogollon Rim, the grazing cattle still wandered the range, and while I prayed for the families who put gold stars in their windows because they’d lost sons in the fighting, truth be told, we still worried more about the rains than the Nips and the Nazis.

I did plant a victory garden, mostly to be patriotic, since we had all the beef and eggs we could eat. But a green thumb was not among my talents, and between my teaching and ranch work, I never got around to watering the garden much. By midsummer, those tomatoes and melons had withered on the vine.

“Don’t fret about it, honey,” Jim said. “We’re ranchers, not farmers.”

My mother had died back when I was studying in Phoenix. It was blood poisoning that got her, from her bad teeth, and it came on so quick that I didn’t have a chance to make it back to the KC before she passed.

During the summer after my first year at Big Sandy, I received a telegram from my dad. After Mom had died, Buster and Dorothy had put Dad in an old folks’ home in Tucson, since he needed nursing and I was too busy studying to help out with his care. But now, Dad said, he was fading fast and he wanted to be with his family. “You’ve always been my best hand,” he wrote. “Please come get me.”

It would be a long trip. The government had been rationing gasoline, and we didn’t have enough coupons to go the entire distance. But there was no way I was going to let my father die alone in a strange city.

“What are you going to do for fuel?” Jim asked.

“Beg, borrow, or steal,” I said.

I traded slabs of beef for coupons with a few of the people I knew in Kingman and added those to what we’d been issued by the government. We were still short, but I set out in the hearse anyway. I brought along a gas can, a length of hose, and Rosemary, figuring they’d all be useful.

It was the height of summer, a scorching Arizona day that made the roof of the hearse too hot to touch. We headed south, the road wavering in the distance. Rosemary was unusually quiet, staring out the window.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’m sad for Grandpa.”

“If you get down, all you need to do is act like you’re feeling good, and next thing you know, you are,” I told her and launched into my favorite song, “Doodle-dee-doo-rah, doodle-dee-doo-ray.”

Rosemary had her moods, but they never lasted long, and soon enough we were both belting out the tunes—”Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Drifting Texas Sands,” “San Antonio Rose,” “Beautiful, Beautiful Texas.”

We always stopped to pick up hitchhiking soldiers—and made them sing along—but none of them ever had gas coupons, and by the time we reached Tempe, the gas gauge was pushing empty. I pulled into a truck stop and parked next to a couple of long-haul rigs. Then, taking Rosemary by one hand and holding the gas can with the other, I went into the diner.

The customers were mostly men wearing sweat-stained cowboy hats, sitting at the counter drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. A few of them looked up as I walked in.

I took a deep breath. “Could I have y’all’s attention, please?” I said loudly. “My little girl and I are trying to get down to Tucson to pick up my dying dad. But we’re running shy of gas, and if a few of you fellows would be kind enough to pitch in with a gallon—or just a half gallon— we could make it to the next leg of our journey.”

There was a moment of silence as each man glanced around at the others, waiting to see how the rest of them would respond, and then one nodded, and so did a couple more, and suddenly, it became the right thing for all of them to do.

“Sure enough, ma’am,” one said.

“Happy to oblige a damsel in distress,” another said.

“And if you do run out of gas, old Slim here will push you.”

By then they were all chuckling and getting up from their stools, practically falling over one another for the chance to do a good deed. In the parking lot, the men all siphoned off a gallon or so from their own vehicles, and soon enough we had ourselves almost two-thirds of a tank. I gave each of the men a hug and a kiss, and as we were pulling out, I looked at Rosemary.

“We did it, kid,” I said. I was grinning, feeling like the cat that drank the cream. “Whoever said I couldn’t play the lady?”

WE HAD TO STOP
once more to ask for gas. We had a little problem when a smirker said sure, he’d let me siphon off a gallon if I sucked his hose, but I backhanded him and we went on to the next truck stop, trusting that most of the men we asked for help would turn out to be gentlemen, and they were.

We made it to Tucson the next day. The old folks’ home where Dad was staying was really just a ramshackle boardinghouse run by a woman with a few rooms to spare. “Ain’t been able to make out a word of your pa’s since he got here,” she said as she led us down the hall to his room.

Dad was lying on his back in the middle of the bed, the sheet up to his chin. We’d visited him and Mom in New Mexico a couple of times, but I hadn’t seen him in several years, and he didn’t look so good. He was thin, with jaundiced skin, and his eyes had sunk deep into their sockets. He spoke in a croak, but I could understand him as well as I always had.

“I’ve come to take you home,” I said.

“Won’t make it,” he said. “I’m too sick to move.”

I sat down next to him on the bed. Rosemary sat beside me and took his hand. I was proud to see that she was completely undaunted by the old man’s state. She’d been sad about her grandpa on the drive down, but now that she was here, she’d risen to the occasion. Regardless of what those nuns thought, the kid had a brain, a spine, and a heart.

“Looks like I’m going to die here,” Dad said, “but I don’t want to be buried here. Promise me you’ll take my body back to the KC.”

“I promise.”

Dad smiled. “I could always count on you.”

He died that night. It was almost as if he had been holding on until I got there, and when he knew he would be buried back on the ranch, he could stop worrying and just let go.

* * *

The next morning some of the other men in the boardinghouse helped us carry Dad’s body out to the hearse and put it in the back. I rolled down all the windows before we left. We’d need plenty of fresh air. In the middle of Tucson, we stopped at a streetlight, and two kids standing on a street corner started yelling, “Hey, that lady’s got a dead man in the back!”

I couldn’t get mad, since what they were saying was true, so I just waved and hit the gas as soon as the light turned. Rosemary, however, sank down below her window. “Life’s too short, honey,” I said, “to worry what other people think of you.”

In no time we were out of Tucson and flying through the desert, heading east into the morning sun. I was driving faster than I’d ever driven before—cars going the other way flashed past—since I wanted to make sure we got back to the ranch before the body started to turn. I figured if I did get pulled over by any police, they’d cut me some slack once they eyed the cargo.

I had to stop a couple of times to ask for gas. Seeing as how the drivers might notice the body when they came out to siphon me their gas, I varied the pitch. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I got my dad’s dead body in the back of my car, and I’m trying to get him home to be buried as quick as possible in this heat.”

That sure did startle them—one guy almost choked on his coffee— but they were even more eager to help out than the others had been, and we made it to the ranch before the stench became overpowering.

WE BURIED DAD IN
the small stone-fenced cemetery where everyone who had ever died on the ranch was buried. At Dad’s request, he was laid to rest wearing his hundred-dollar Stetson, the one with the beaded band that had rattlers from two rattlesnakes Dad himself had killed attached to it. Dad had wanted us to use phonetic spelling on his headstone, but we overruled him on that, figuring that folks would think we didn’t know how to spell.

Dad’s death didn’t hollow me out the way Helen’s had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn’t drawn the best of cards, but he’d played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?

Dad left the KC Ranch to Buster and the homestead on Salt Draw to me, but going through his papers, which was no small chore, I discovered that he owed thousands of dollars in back taxes on the Texas property. As Rosemary and I set out on the long drive back to Seligman, I considered our choices. Did we sell the land to pay off the taxes? Or did we keep it and pay the taxes by digging into the money we’d saved to buy Hackberry?

We were still stopping to beg for gas, and a couple of times I insisted Rosemary make the pitch. At first she was so embarrassed that she could barely get the words out, but I figured she needed to learn the art of persuasion, and by the end, she was throwing herself into her performances with gusto, relishing the idea that even though she was just twelve years old, she could talk grown-up strangers into doing something for her.

As a reward, I decided to make a detour up to Albuquerque so we could both see the Madonna of the Trail. The statue had been put up several years earlier, and I’d always wanted to have a look at it myself. It stood in a small park, almost twenty feet high, a figure of a pioneer woman in a bonnet and brogans, holding a baby with one hand and a rifle with the other while a small boy clung to her skirts. I thought of myself as the sensible type, not given to a lot of sentimental blubbering— and most statues and paintings struck me as useless clutter—but there was something about the Madonna of the Trail that almost brought tears to my eyes.

“It’s kind of ugly,” Rosemary said. “And the woman’s a little scary.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “That’s art.”

When I returned to the ranch, Jim and I sat down to figure out what we should do about the west Texas land. Jim was of two minds, but for some reason, seeing that statue had made me hell-bent on holding on to the land Dad had homesteaded.

For one thing, land was the best investment. Over the long haul, and provided you treated it with respect, land pretty much always rose in value. And while that west Texas land was definitely parched, they were drilling for oil all over the state—Dad’s papers contained some correspondence with Standard Oil—and it might well be sitting on a big field of black gold.

But Dad’s west Texas land called to me for a deeper reason. Maybe it was the Irish in me, but everyone in my family, going back to my grandfather—he’d come over from County Cork, where all the land was owned by absentee Poms who took most of what you grew—had always been obsessed with land. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to own some outright. There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a hand-basket—as it seemed to be doing—you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it. Land belonged to you and yours forever.

“That’s one unyielding patch of earth,” Jim said. He argued that we couldn’t raise much of a herd on 160 acres, and paying off those taxes would make a big dent in the fund to buy Hackberry.

“We might not ever be able to buy Hackberry,” I said. “This is a sure thing. I’m a gambler, but I’m a smart one, and the smart gambler always goes for the sure thing.”

We paid off the taxes and became bona fide Texas land barons. I felt that the Madonna of the Trail would have approved.

WE USUALLY TOOK CATTLE
to market in the spring and the fall, but that year the fall roundup was delayed until Christmas because, with the war going on, the military was using the railroad to ship troops and equipment all over the place, and that was the only time the train was available. But that also meant Rosemary, Little Jim, and I could pitch in, which worked out well, because the war had created a shortage of cowboys. We usually had upward of thirty cowboys on a roundup, but that year we had half that many.

Rosemary and Little Jim had both been going on roundups ever since they were old enough to walk, first riding behind me and Jim, then on their own ponies. Even so, Big Jim didn’t want them in the thick of the drive, where even the best cowboys could get thrown off their horses and trampled by nervous cattle. So he had Rosemary and Little Jim work as outriders, chasing down strays and stragglers hiding in the draws. I followed the herd in the pickup, carrying the bedrolls and the grub.

It was cold that December, and you could see steam rising off the horses as they cut back and forth, keeping the herd together while it moved across the range. Rosemary was riding old Buck, the buckskin-colored Percheron who was so smart that Rosemary could drop the reins and he’d corner strays on his own, biting them on the butt to drive them back to the herd.

Rosemary loved the roundups except for one thing—she secretly rooted for the cattle. She thought they were kind, wise animals who, in their hearts, knew that you were leading them to their death, which was why their lowing had such a piteous tone. I suspected that from time to time, she’d helped the odd steer escape. One day, well into the drive, Jim noticed a stray sidling up a draw and sent Rosemary after it. We heard old Buck whinnying, but a little later, Rosemary rode back out all innocent-eyed, declaring that she couldn’t find the steer.

“Just plain disappeared,” she said, and held up her hands with a shrug. “It’s a mystery.”

Jim shook his head and sent Fidel Hanna, a young Havasupai, into the draw. Soon enough he came trotting out, driving the steer in front of him.

Jim gave Rosemary a hard look. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.