Half broke horses: a true-life novel (22 page)

“What turns to stone is inside you.”

In the afternoon Rosemary and I walked around the village. She continued to pester me about going swimming. I could tell that she could really see herself living here.

“Mom, it’s the Garden of Eden,” she kept saying. “The Garden of Eden still exists on this planet.”

“Don’t idealize this way of life,” I said. “I was born in a dirt house, and you get tired of it pretty quickly.”

In the evening, after another meal of biscuits and jerky, we turned in early again, but I was wakened in the middle of the night by a commotion. Rosemary, streaming wet, was standing outside the hut wrapped in a blanket. Miss Pearl had her by one arm and was shaking her, hollering about how she’d gotten up for some fresh air, heard laughter, and found Rosemary, Fidel, and a few other Indian kids swimming buck-naked in the moonlit pool.

“I wasn’t naked!” Rosemary shouted. “I was wearing underwear.”

“As if that makes a difference,” Miss Pearl said. “Those boys could
see
you.”

What I was hearing made me practically blind with rage. I couldn’t believe Rosemary would do this. I knew that Miss Pearl was appalled, not only at Rosemary but at me as well, wondering what kind of mother would raise such a shameless child. Miss Pearl might well decide it made me unfit to be a teacher. But I was also plain furious with Rosemary. I’d slept next to that girl every night to protect her. I thought I had taught her to be smarter than this, taught her that young men were dangerous, that seemingly innocent situations could result in trouble, that one misstep could lead to a disaster she might never recover from. Plus, I’d told her she couldn’t go swimming, and she’d outright disobeyed me.

I grabbed Rosemary by the hair, pulled her into the hut, and threw her onto the floor, then whipped off my belt and started hiding her. Something dark came out of me, so dark it scared me, but even so, I kept at that girl, who was scrambling around on the dirt floor whimpering, until I had the sickening feeling that I’d gone too far. Then I threw down the belt and stalked past Miss Pearl and Miss Finch out into the night.

THE NEXT DAY IT
was a long ride back up to the canyon rim. Fidel Hanna had made himself scarce, but one of the other Havasu boys came along to bring back the horses. Miss Pearl kept going on about how she was going to report Fidel Hanna to the sheriff for committing indecencies with a minor, but Rosemary and I stayed quiet. Whenever I glanced at Rosemary, she had her eyes on the ground.

Back at the ranch that night, I got into bed with Rosemary and tried to put my arm around her, but she pushed me away.

“I know you’re mad at me, but you needed that whipping,” I said. “There was no other way to teach you a lesson. Do you think you learned it?”

Rosemary was lying on her side staring at the wall. For a minute she was silent, then she said, “All I learned is that when I have children, I’m never going to whip them.”

That trip to the Garden of Eden turned out badly for just about everyone. After I told Jim about it, we agreed that hiring Fidel Hanna again was out of the question. That was a moot point, because when Fidel heard that Miss Pearl was threatening to turn him in to the sheriff, he joined the army.

He became a crack sharpshooter and was sent off to fight in the Pacific Islands, but war eventually unhinged Fidel and he was sent home suffering from shell shock. Not long after he returned, he came apart altogether and shot up a Hopi village. No one was killed, and when Fidel was freed from the state pen in Florence, he returned to the valley. But the Havasupai wouldn’t allow him into the village because he’d brought shame on the tribe, and he became an outcast, living by himself in a lonely corner of the reservation. He had, in the end, turned to stone.

AFTER THAT BUSINESS WITH
Fidel Hanna, I decided the ranch was no place for my teenage daughter. If she’d go skinny-dipping with Fidel, she’d go skinny-dipping with any ranch hand who took her fancy. To instill a proper sense of caution concerning men, I gave Rosemary copies of
True Confessions
magazine with articles like “We Met in Alleys and He Led Me Down the Path of Sin.” I also wrote to the Mother Superior at the academy in Prescott, telling her that Rosemary had matured and was eager to try boarding school once more.

Rosemary didn’t want to go, but we packed her off again. No sooner had she left, it seemed, than we began receiving letters full of homesickness as well as reports of the D’s and F’s she was earning. All she wanted to do, the Mother Superior wrote, was draw pictures and ride horses. I was getting pretty exasperated with Rosemary, but also with those nuns, who I wished would learn to cut a fourteen-year-old daydreamer a little slack.

But by then we had something a lot bigger to worry about.

The Poms wrote us a letter saying that, with the war on, they were going to sell the ranch to put their money in the munitions industry. If we could pull together a group of investors, they’d entertain our offer, but from that moment forward, the ranch was on the market.

Jim and I had been squirreling away everything we could, and our savings were considerable—particularly because the Poms had given Jim bonuses during good years—but we didn’t have nearly enough to buy Hackberry, much less the entire spread. Jim talked with neighboring ranchers about forming various kinds of partnerships. He also met with a few bankers, and I called Buster in New Mexico, but the fact was, because of the war, hardly anyone had two extra nickels to rub together. People were rationing cloth, collecting tin cans, and growing victory gardens.

Most people.

* * *

Late on a January morning, a big black car pulled up in front of the ranch house, and three men got out. The first was wearing a dark suit, the second had on a safari jacket and leather gaiters, and the third wore a big Stetson, pressed jeans, and snakeskin boots. Suit introduced himself as the Poms’ lawyer. Gaiters turned out to be a movie director famous for his westerns who was interested in buying the ranch. Boots was some rodeo cowboy Gaiters had cast in a few bit parts.

Gaiters, a beefy, red-faced man with a groomed silver beard, was one of those people who acted as if everything that came out of his mouth, even the most obvious remark, was profoundly interesting. Each time he said something, he’d look over at Suit and Boots, who’d either chuckle appreciatively or nod sagely. It took Gaiters about three minutes to mention that he’d worked with John Wayne, or, as he called him, Duke. He said things like “Duke’s the ultimate natural” and “Duke’s first take is always his best take.”

When Old Jake shuffled out from the barn, Gaiters was standing on the porch, surveying the land. He pointed to a willow next to the pond. “That’s picturesque,” he said. “Good place to plant a willow.”

“Ain’t got time around here to go planting no picturesque trees,” Old Jake said. “I reckon it just growed there.” He limped back to the barn, shaking his head.

Jim and I showed them around, but since we weren’t particularly keen on seeing the place sold out from under us, Jim was even more taciturn than usual. Gaiters, for his part, acted almost as if we didn’t exist. He never asked questions. He and Boots kept tossing ideas at each other about how to improve the place. They were going to build an airstrip to fly in from Hollywood. They were going to install a gasoline-powered generator and air-condition the ranch house. They might even put in a pool. They were going to double the herd and breed palominos. It was clear that Boots was this rhinestone cowboy who had dazzled Gaiters with horse jargon and rope tricks when, in fact, he didn’t know diddly about ranching.

In the middle of our tour, Gaiters stopped and looked at Jim as if seeing him for the first time. “So you’re the manager?” he asked.

“Yes, sir”.

“Funny, you don’t look like a cowboy.”

Jim was wearing what he always wore: a long-sleeve shirt, dirty jeans with the cuffs turned up, and round-toed work boots. He looked at me and shrugged.

Gaiters studied the weathered gray outbuildings with his hands on his hips. “And this doesn’t look like a ranch,” he said.

“Well, that’s what it is,” Jim said.

“But it doesn’t feel like one,” Gaiters said. “The magic is missing. We need to goose the magic.” He turned to Boots. “You know what I see?” he asked. “I see everything in knotty pine.”

And knotty pine it was. After buying the place, Gaiters tore down the ranch house and built a fancy new place with exposed beams and walls of varnished knotty pine. Then he tore down the bunkhouse and built a new one in matching knotty pine. He renamed the spread the Showtime Ranch. True to his word, he put in the airstrip and doubled the size of the herd.

Gaiters also fired Big Jim and Old Jake. They were too old and too old-fashioned—”old-timers,” he called them—and he said he needed people who would help him goose the magic. Then he fired all the ranch hands, who were mostly Mexicans and Indians, because he said they didn’t look like cowboys. He hired Boots to run the place and brought in a bunch of fellows from the rodeo circuit who wore tight new jeans and embroidered shirts with pearl snap buttons.

We had lived on that ranch for eleven years, and we loved the place. We knew each and every one of those 180,000 acres—the gullies and washes and mudflats, the sagebrush plateau, the boulder-strewn mountains and juniper-covered foothills—like we knew our own hearts. We’d respected the land. We knew what it could and couldn’t do, and we’d never pushed it beyond its limits. We’d never squandered the water, and we’d never overgrazed the grass, unlike our neighbors. Anyone riding the fence line would see grass four inches high on our side and one inch on theirs. We had been good stewards. The buildings may have been a little rough on the eyes, but they were in good repair, still solid and true. There wasn’t a more honestly run ranch in all of Arizona. We’d known all along, of course, that we didn’t own the place, but at the same time, we couldn’t help considering it ours, and we felt dispossessed, like my dad and his pa did when the settlers started fencing in the Hondo Valley.

“Guess I’ve been put out to pasture,” Jim said after Gaiters delivered the news.

“You know you’re the best at what you do,” I told him.

“Just seems like what I do don’t need to be done anymore.”

“We’ve never felt sorry for ourselves before,” I said, “and we’re not going to start now. Let’s get packing.”

We had our savings, so we weren’t in a bind financially. I decided we should move to Phoenix and make a fresh start. Arizona was changing, money was pouring in. Because it had perfect weather for flying, the air force had discovered the state, building bases and landing strips all over the place. At the same time, lungers—folks with breathing problems— were arriving in droves, and what was more, air-conditioning had become affordable, making places like Phoenix appealing to all those eastern lace-panties who couldn’t tolerate its true temperatures. The city looked like it was going to take off.

When I called Rosemary to tell her we were leaving the ranch, she became almost hysterical. “We can’t, Mom,” she said. “It’s all I’ve known. It’s inside me.”

“It’s behind you now, honey,” I said.

Little Jim was beside himself as well and said he outright refused to go.

“It’s not up to us, and it’s not up to you, either,” I told him. “We’re gone.”

Since ranching was going to be in our past, I wanted to get rid of most everything that had to do with it. We sold all the horses to Gaiters except Patches, who was pushing thirty. I gave her to the Havasupai. Rosemary might never see the Garden of Eden again, but at least she’d know that a horse she loved was there.

I did keep the English riding pants and the pair of field boots I’d been wearing the day I’d fallen off Red Devil and met Jim, but that was about it. Everything we owned fit into the back of the hearse, and on a beautiful spring day when the lilac was blooming and warblers were singing in the hoptrees, we packed it all up and headed down the drive. Rosemary was still at boarding school. She’d never returned to the ranch. Little Jim, who was sitting between me and Jim, twisted around for one last glance.

“No looking back,” I said. “You can’t. You just can’t.”

VIII

GUMSHOES

Rosemary, age sixteen, Horse Mesa

JIM DECIDED THAT WE
should start our new life in Phoenix by splurging.

“Name something you’ve always wanted,” he said.

“New choppers,” I said immediately. My teeth had been giving me trouble for years, but folks on the Colorado Plateau weren’t big on dentists. If a tooth wouldn’t stop aching, you found yourself a pair of pliers and pulled the bugger. I also had a gap between my two front teeth where they had rotted in from the sides. I tried to keep the gap plugged with a piece of white candle wax, but when the wax fell out from time to time, I had to admit it looked a little scary. Jim’s teeth were every bit as bad.

“You get yourself a pair, too,” I said.

Jim grinned. “Two new sets of choppers. That should get us going just fine in this here town.”

We found a nice young dentist who shot us full of Novocain, pulled out our worn-down brown teeth, and fitted sets of new dentures to our gums. The first time he put them in place and held up the mirror, I was thrilled by those two flawless rows of big gleaming white porcelain, as shiny and square as kitchen tiles. Overnight I’d gotten myself the smile of a movie star, while Jim looked about thirty years younger. The two of us walked around the city beaming radiantly at our new neighbors.

We also bought a house on North Third Street. It was a big old place with high windows, sturdy wooden doors, and adobe walls about two feet thick. Finally, we junked that beater of a hearse and bought a maroon Kaiser, a new kind of sedan made in California, with wide bumpers and running boards. I was proud of that house and proud of that car, too, but nothing made me prouder than my new set of choppers. They beat the pants off real teeth, and from time to time when I was in a restaurant or someplace telling someone about them, I couldn’t help it, I had to pull them out and show them off to prove that they were the genuine article.

“Look!” I’d say as I held them up. “They’re not teeth. They’re real dentures!”

AT FIRST I THOUGHT
Phoenix was terrific. Our house was near the center of town, and we could walk to stores and movie theaters. I made a point of going to every single restaurant on Van Buren Street. I especially loved cafeterias, because you could actually see the food before you ordered it instead of flying blind with a menu. After all those years of sitting on orange crates and drinking from coffee cans, I went out and bought a carved mahogany dining set and Bavarian china. For the first time in our lives, we got a telephone, which meant people who wanted to get in touch with me didn’t have to leave a message with the sheriff.

Little Jim, however, hated Phoenix from the get-go. “You feel penned in,” he said. “You feel puny.”

And when Rosemary’s boarding school let out and she joined us in the city, she hated it, too. They hated the black asphalt and the gray concrete. They thought air-conditioning was weird and noisy, and the telephone just allowed busybodies to pester you day and night. Phoenix was square and straight, boxy and boxed in, and above all, fake.

“You can’t even see the ground,” Rosemary complained. “It’s all covered up with pavement and sidewalks.”

“But think of the advantages,” I said. “We eat at cafeterias. We have indoor plumbing.”

“Who cares?” Rosemary said. “Back at the ranch, you could hunker down and take a pee whenever you had the urge.” She added that living in Phoenix was even making her question her faith. “I’ve been praying daily to go back to the ranch,” she said. “Either God doesn’t exist or he doesn’t hear me.”

“Of course he exists and of course he hears you,” I said. “He has the right to say no, you know.”

But I did begin to worry about the effect Phoenix was having on that girl. She had no use for indoor plumbing, questioned the existence of God, and even acted all embarrassed when, the next day at a luncheonette, I took out my dentures to show them off to the waitress.

* * *

I didn’t care to admit it to the kids, but after a few months, I started feeling a little penned in myself. The traffic drove me crazy. Back in Yavapai County, you drove wherever you wanted at whatever speed you wanted, and left the road whenever you were so inclined. Here there were stoplights, cops with whistles, yellow lines, white lines, and all manner of signs ordering you to do this and forbidding you from doing that. Cars were supposed to mean freedom, but all these people stuck in traffic on one-way streets—where you weren’t even allowed to make a U-turn to get the hell out of the jam—might as well have been sitting in cages. I found myself constantly arguing with other drivers, sticking my head out the window of the Kaiser, which was always overheating, and hollering at those dimwits that they should go back east, where they belonged.

Nothing had ever made me feel as free as flying, and I was only a few hours away from getting my pilot’s license, so I decided to take up lessons again. The airport had a flying school, but when I showed up one day, the clerk passed me an entire sheaf of forms and started yammering about eye exams, physicals, takeoff slots, elevation restrictions, and nofly zones. I realized that these city folks had boxed off and chopped up the sky the same way they had the ground.

One thing about Phoenix, though: There were a lot more jobs available than in Yavapai County. Jim was hired as the manager of a warehouse stocking airplane parts, and I landed a teaching position in a high school in South Phoenix.

There were also investment opportunities in the city. After paying for our house on Third Street, we still had money left over, and we used it to buy a few other small houses that we rented out. Distressed properties were always coming onto the market at bargain prices. Jim and I attended courthouse auctions and bid on foreclosures, and I started carrying a ten-thousand-dollar cashier’s check in my purse, just in case I happened across anyone needing to sell quickly at a discounted price. For the first time in our lives, we were living on the backs of others, but that was how you got ahead in the city. When Jim said it made him feel like a vulture, I told him that scavengers got a bum rap. “Vultures don’t kill animals, they live off the dead,” I said. “And that’s what we’re doing. We’re not bringing misfortune on these people, we’re just taking advantage of it.”

I worried constantly that someone might snatch my purse and make off with the check, so I kept the bag clutched to my chest when I walked through town. That was only one of a number of things I found myself worrying about in Phoenix. We had bought ourselves a radio that we could listen to all day long now that we were living in a house wired for electricity. At first I thought that was just grand, but it meant that for the first time I was also listening to the news every day, and about every day, it seemed, there was a report about some crime or another in town. People were always getting robbed or having their cars stolen or their houses burgled if they weren’t getting raped, shot, or stabbed. A Phoenix woman named Winnie Ruth Judd—known as the “Blonde Butcher” and the “Trunk Murderess” because she’d killed two people and put their bodies in her luggage—kept escaping from the insane asylum she’d been sent to, and the news was always filled with accounts of possible Trunk Murderess sightings, along with warnings to the citizenry to lock all doors and windows.

So I kept my pearl-handled revolver under my bed. I also bought a little twenty-two pistol to carry in my purse along with the check. Every night I made a point of bolting the doors, which we had never done at the ranch, and I slept on the outside of the bed I still shared with Rosemary, keeping her next to the wall so if anyone got through the locked doors and attacked us, I could fight them off while Rosemary escaped.

“Mom, you’ve become such a worrywart,” she said.

Rosemary was right. On the ranch, we worried about the weather and the cattle and horses, but we never worried about ourselves. In Phoenix people worried about themselves all the time.

PEOPLE ALSO WORRIED ABOUT
bombs. Every Saturday at noon, the air-raid siren was tested, and an earsplitting whoop-whoop-whoop blared throughout the city. If the siren sounded at any other time, that meant an attack was under way and you were supposed to run to the bomb shelters. Rosemary couldn’t abide the siren, and when it went off, she buried her head under a pillow. “I can’t stand that noise,” she said.

“It’s for your own good,” I said.

“Well, all it’s doing is scaring me, and I don’t see the good in that.”

The girl was developing a pronounced contrarian streak. One morning that August, when Rosemary and I were walking down Van Buren Street, we passed a storefront where a bunch of people were gathered, gawking at an automatic donut-making machine. Next to it was a newsstand, and it was when I glanced down at the headlines that I first learned about the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima. I bought the paper, and as I read, I tried to explain to Rosemary what had happened. Rosemary couldn’t believe that a single bomb had obliterated an entire city— hundreds of thousands of people, not only soldiers but also grandparents, mothers, children, as well as dogs, cats, birds, chickens, mice, every living thing. “Those poor, poor creatures,” she kept sobbing.

I tried to argue that it was the Japs who’d started the war, and because of Hiroshima, thousands more American boys would not have to die fighting them, but Rosemary decided there was something sick about the atom bomb. The deaths of all those mice and birds was just as upsetting to her as the deaths of the people. After all, she said, the animals hadn’t started the war.

She also decided there was something sick about Americans who would stand there gawking at a donut maker while there was so much agony on the other side of the world.

“Focus on the positive,” I said. “You live in a country where no one has to make donuts by hand.”

* * *

Rosemary’s feelings got even darker that fall. We’d enrolled her at St. Mary’s, a Catholic school a few blocks from the house, and the nuns, who kept reminding their students that all life was sacred, showed some Japanese news reels of the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The scenes of flattened city blocks, incinerated corpses, and babies deformed by radiation gave Rosemary nightmares. The nuns told her that we needed to pray for the Japanese because they were God’s children, too, and they had lost their sons and daughters and fathers and mothers. I was less sympathetic. “That’s what happens when you go around starting wars,” I said. But Rosemary was distraught. No one but God, she thought, should be able to kill so many people so easily and so quickly as we had done with the atomic bomb. That her own government had that kind of power made her very afraid of it. Now that it had the bomb, who was it going to bomb next? What if it decided she was the enemy?

When I got tired of explaining that the end justified the means, I told Rosemary to stop talking about Hiroshima, because if she stopped talking about it, she’d stop thinking about it. She did stop talking about it, but one day I looked under the bed we still shared and found a folder full of drawing after drawing of animals and children, all with Japanese eyes and angels’ wings.

ROSEMARY STARTED DRAWING AND
painting more obsessively than ever. As far as I could tell, it was her one talent. Her grades were still terrible. I signed her up for violin and piano lessons, but her instructor said she lacked the discipline to practice. I tried to defend her, arguing that improvisation, not recitation, was her musical forte, but one day the instructor said if he had to listen to her torturing that poor violin one more minute, he’d puncture his own eardrums.

“What are we going to do with you?” I asked her.

“I’m not worried about me,” she said. “And no one else should be, either.”

A lot of pretty girls lost their looks when they reached adolescence, but Rosemary was still a stunner, though I’d kept my promise to myself never to tell her this. However, I was getting a little desperate, and one day when I read a newspaper article about a beauty contest, I figured maybe Rosemary should go ahead and play that card. “I have an idea,” I said. “You can be a beauty queen or a model.”

“What are you talking about?” Rosemary asked.

I told her to put on a bathing suit and walk back and forth in front of me. It wasn’t promising. She had the looks and the figure, but she moved like a cowgirl, not a beauty queen, swinging her arms vigorously with each big stride. So I enrolled her in modeling school, where she learned how to walk with a book on her head and get out of a car without showing her underpants. But at her first photo session, when the photographer told her to flirt with the camera, she couldn’t stop giggling self-consciously, and the man shook his head.

What Rosemary really wanted to do was be an artist.

“Artists never make any money,” I said, “and they usually go crazy.”

Rosemary pointed out that Charlie Russell and Frederic Remington had both gotten rich painting western scenes. “Art’s a great way to make money,” Rosemary said. For the cost of a piece of canvas and some paint, she went on, you could create a picture worth thousands of dollars. In what other line of work could you do that? A blank canvas, she kept arguing, was a treasure waiting to happen.