Half Broke Horses

I was ten years old the day the flash flood came for us on Salt Draw. My brother Buster, my sister Helen, and I were bringing in the cows when a low rumbling in the earth told me what those stiff-legged animals already knew. There was no time to make it to high ground, so I shoved my siblings up into the branches of an old cottonwood tree just as a six-foot wall of caramel-colored water slammed into its trunk. We clung to that tree all through the long night, my arms locked around Helen, quizzing them on multiplication tables and state capitals to keep them from drifting off to sleep and falling into the surge. When Dad saw us walking up the hill the next morning, he let out a yelp. Mom sank to her knees and thanked her guardian angel. “There weren't no guardian angel, Dad,” I told him. He just squeezed my shoulder. “Well, darling,” he said, “maybe the angel was you.”

Life in west Texas was hard country, a place for tough nuts like me and Dad. We lived in a dugout carved into the riverbank, a place cool in the summer but prone to snakes dropping from the ceiling. Dad, with his gimp leg from a horse kick and his garbled speech, was a brilliant man who trained carriage horses and wrote long letters to politicians about phonetic spelling. Mom was a lady, concerned with proprieties and her velvet curtains, who fainted from lacing her corsets too tight and refused to do manual labor. When another flood finally collapsed our dugout, we salvaged lumber from a neighbor who'd had enough and built a proper wooden house. But then a tornado tore the place to shreds, and Dad decided it was time to leave Texas and return to the family's KC Ranch in New Mexico.

The KC Ranch was so green I could hardly believe it. But Dad, consumed with writing a biography of Billy the Kid and pursuing harebrained schemes, left the running of the place to me. He and Mom had promised I could go to school, and at thirteen, they sent me to the Sisters of Loretto in Santa Fe. It felt like a long vacation, a world of order and learning where I won gold medals for scholarship. But my joy was short-lived. Dad wrote the school that he couldn't assemble the funds for my tuition. He'd spent the money on four Great Danes he planned to breed. I was sent home on a stagecoach, my one shot at an education seemingly blown. As Mother Albertina, the Mother Superior, saw me off, she took my hand. “When God closes a window,” she said, “he opens a door. But it's up to you to find it.”

Back on the ranch, Dad's dogs were shot dead by our neighbor, Old Man Pucket, for chasing his cattle. Dad wanted to kill him, but I helped talk him down. At the hearing, I spoke for our family, and though the judge sided mostly with Pucket, he ordered him to give us eight of his half-broke horses in compensation. One of them, a smart pinto mare I named Patches, was all mine. It was on Patches that I set out alone at fifteen, riding five hundred miles to Arizona after Mother Albertina sent word of a teaching shortage. For three years, I was the mustang-breaking, poker-playing schoolmarm of Coconino County, moving from one remote town to the next, until the war ended and I was told my services were no longer needed.

I returned to the ranch, but it was no longer my place. I struck out for Chicago, a city of soaring skyscrapers and endless blue water. I worked as a maid, scrubbing floors for women who treated me like I was invisible, and went to school at night. I fell for a fast-talking vacuum-cleaner salesman named Ted Conover, a man with the gift of gab and a diamond ring he'd gotten through “connections.” We were married, saving for a future he told me was full of promise. But after a roadster knocked me off my feet, a call to his office revealed the truth: his wife's name was Margaret. He had a whole other family. I shattered the frosted glass on his office door with my purse and threw his fake diamond ring into the lake.

I came back to Arizona with a high school diploma and a plan to get my college degree. I found a teaching job in Red Lake, the first town I'd ever taught in. I raced horses, won purses, and bought a brilliant red silk shirt that became my trademark. I met a man there named Jim Smith, a big, quiet rancher twenty years my senior who'd been a lumberjack, a prospector, and a cavalryman in Siberia. He was the son of the great Mormon pioneer Lot Smith, and he was as solid and dependable as the mountains. I wasn't looking to marry again, but then my sister Helen arrived from Hollywood, her dreams broken, her hair peroxided, and her belly swollen with the child of a man who'd abandoned her. When the townspeople and the school superintendent turned on us, Helen fell into despair. One morning, I returned to our little teacherage to find she had hanged herself from a rafter. We buried her out on the range, in my red silk shirt.

The pain of Helen's death laid on me like a slab of lead, but I knew I had to go on. I asked Jim Smith to marry me, and we moved to the town of Ash Fork, where we built a sandstone house and a garage on Route 66. The Depression hit hard, and to make ends meet, I started selling bootleg liquor out the back door. But the bank foreclosed anyway, and just as we were about to auction everything off, we were offered the job of managing a 180,000-acre ranch for a group of English investors. We moved there with our two children, Rosemary and Little Jim, and when a drought nearly wiped us out, I had the idea to bring in a bulldozer - the first in those parts - to build a massive dam that would trap the rainwater. The pond it created was the finest body of water I'd seen since Lake Michigan, and everyone called it Big Jim.

For eleven years, that ranch was our life. I went back to teaching, driving the kids to a one-room school in a converted hearse I'd painted SCHOOL BUS on the side. I took on local authorities, from a polygamous elder in the Arizona Strip to a corrupt deputy, and got fired more times than I can count. I took flying lessons, hoping to become a crop duster. I finally got my college degree in Phoenix while the kids were away at boarding school, but they hated being penned in and were as half-broke as the horses we raised. When the English investors sold the ranch to a Hollywood director who wanted to “goose the magic” with knotty pine, we were fired and forced to leave the only real home we'd ever known.

We moved to Phoenix, a city of locked doors and air-raid sirens that made us all feel puny and penned in. Jim took a desk job in a warehouse, and I taught in a city high school full of bureaucrats and spoiled kids. Rosemary, now a teenager, was a wild-hearted artist who dreamed of the ranch and argued with me about everything from the atom bomb to God. She fell for a flyboy named Rex Walls, a charming, hard-drinking hellion from West Virginia who was all talk and grand plans. He was the last man on earth I would have chosen for her. “You need an anchor,” I told her. “The problem with being attached to an anchor,” he told me, “is it's damned hard to fly.”

Rosemary married him anyway. I threw them a grand wedding at a fancy hotel, and Jim and I watched them drive off, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses. They drifted around the desert, having babies and living hand-to-mouth on Rex's harebrained schemes. The third was a scrawny girl with my square jaw and smiling green eyes. When I held her, the little critter grabbed my finger and held on like she'd never let go. Her name was Jeannette. I knew her life would be a wild ride, but she came from hardy stock. And I'd be hovering around. I still had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn't a soul alive who could stop me.