Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  He took us into the other outbuildings, including a toolshed, chicken coop, and bunkhouse. Then we came to a garage filled with twenty-six carriages, wagons, and vehicles—brogans, surreys, phaetons, an old Conestoga covered wagon, a few beat-up cars, a rusty Chevy pickup. Old Jake proudly named every one. He showed us the pit in the garage that you could climb down into, then have someone drive the car over it when you needed to work on the undercarriage.

  Finally, Old Jake led us back through the barn to a double corral: one made of six-foot-high saplings posted vertically and used to break horses, the other made of standard post-and-wire fencing with a small herd of tough little ponies inside it.

  Jim walked around nodding and taking it all in. We could both see that although the buildings were weathered, they were solid and true.

  There was nothing fancy about the place, it was a real working ranch, but tools were hung in their place, ropes were coiled neatly, harnesses mended, fence posts stacked in tidy bundles, and the barn floor was swept. On a ranch you had to be able to find a given tool in a hurry when there was an emergency, and you had to hand it to the Camel brothers. They knew the importance of keeping things shipshape.

  Rooster was visibly impressed. “A fellow could do a lot worse than this,” he said. “Jim, you old hound dog, you got lucky.” He glanced at me. “Again,” he added.

  I swatted Rooster on the arm, but Jim just shook his head and grinned. Then he looked out across the range. “I think we can make this work,” he said.

  “I think we can,” I said.

  I could tell life at the ranch was going to be a lot of hard work. We were too far from town to count on anyone else for anything. Jim and I would have to be our own veterinarian, farrier, mechanic, butcher, cook, as well as cattle driver, ranch manager, husband and wife, and mother and father of two little children. But Jim and I both knew how to roll up our sleeves, and in times like these, I knew how lucky we were not just to have work but to be our own bosses doing something we were good at doing.

  I felt nature calling and asked Old Jake where I could find the facilities. He pointed toward a little wooden shed in the north corner of the compound. “It’s nothing fancy, just a one-holer,” he said. “No moon cut in the door to advertise it, either, ’cause we all knows what it is.”

  Inside the outhouse, once you’d closed the door that didn’t have a moon, enough light came through the cracks in the wood so that you could see. Spiderwebs dangled in the roof corners, a sack of lime sat on the dirt floor, and there was a scoop to sprinkle it into the hole to keep the flies down. A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush. As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.

  Next to the seat was a stack of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, and I picked one up and leafed through it. I came to a page advertising silk bodices and lacy chemises. I won’t be ordering from this page, I thought, and when I was done with my business, that was the one I tore out and used.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AS Rooster was getting ready to head back to Red Lake, he caught me alone in the kitchen.

  “Thank you for helping us move,” I said, and handed him a cup of coffee.

  He looked at me for a moment. “You know I always been carrying a torch for you,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Funny,” he said. “Just can’t help it.” He paused and then asked, “You think I’ll ever get married?”

  “I do,” I said. I had just been being polite, but suddenly I saw it clearly. The right woman was out there for him. “I do,” I said again. “You just got to look in unexpected places.”

  After Rooster left, Jim said our first order of business was to tour the ranch. It was a big place, with a little over a hundred thousand acres— almost 160 square miles—and it would take us at least a week just to ride the outer fence line. We loaded one pony with supplies. Jim and Old Jake mounted up two others, and I was on Patches, with Little Jim in my lap, while Rosemary climbed on with her dad.

  We headed west until we reached white and yellow limestone foothills, then swung south. A hot, dry wind blew across the valley. We passed pinyon and juniper trees and now and then saw a herd of white-tailed antelope on distant slopes, grazing on the gama grass. Old Jake showed us Tres Cruces, a group of rocks on which someone had carved stick figures of horses and riders carrying three crosses to depict—according to ranch lore—an early Spanish expedition. Late in the afternoon, we reached a high point below the Coyote Mountains. From there we could see south toward the Juniper Mountains and east to the Mogollon Rim.

  “Lot of land,” Jim said. “Not a lick of water.”

  “Drier than a crone’s dugs,” Old Jake said.

  There were a few dirt ponds, small sad things dug out to collect rain, but the water disappeared during dry spells, and the ponds were now empty, cracked pits.

  After ten days, we’d made a big circle, covering most of the ranch, although there were large stretches of territory we didn’t have time to see. And while we passed any number of gullies and draws that you could tell ran with water during flash floods, there wasn’t a single stream, spring, or natural source of water on the whole spread. “No wonder the Camel brothers threw in the towel,” Jim said.

  Jim sent to Flagstaff for a water witch, and the two of them set out on another tour of the ranch, stopping at clumps of trees and spots where the grass was green. The water witch walked around holding a forked branch in his outstretched arms, waiting for the branch to dip, a sign that there was water underground. But the branch never dipped.

  I kept thinking about all those gullies and draws we’d passed during our trip around the ranch. The only water this land would ever see was going to come from the sky. During flash floods, thousands and thousands of gallons of water would roar through all those gullies and draws only to soak through the range floor. If we could figure out how to trap that water for ourselves, we’d have plenty.

  “What we really need to do is build a dam,” I told Jim.

  “How?” he said. “You’d need an army.”

  I thought about it for a while, and then it came to me. I’d read magazine articles about the building of the Boulder Dam, as it was called by those of us who hated Herbert Hoover and refused to call it the Hoover Dam. Alongside the articles were photographs of some of the newfangled earthmoving machines used in the construction. “Jim,” I said, “let’s rent us a bulldozer.”

  At first Jim thought I was nuts, but I decided we at least needed to look into the idea. I drove into Seligman, and someone knew someone in Phoenix who had a construction company with a bulldozer. Sure enough, when I tracked him down, he said that if we were willing to pay for it, he could send his bulldozer and its operator up to Seligman by rail. We’d need to find a flatbed truck to haul it out to the ranch. It wouldn’t be cheap, but once the bulldozer was here, it could build a good-sized earth dam in a matter of days.

  Jim said we needed to present the idea to the English investors. A group of them was headed our way in a few weeks to meet us and survey their property.

  The Poms arrived by wagon after taking a steamer from England to New York and a train to Flagstaff—a three-week trip. They had clipped accents and wore bowler hats and suits with vests. None of them had ever pulled on a pair of cowboy boots or cracked a bullwhip, but that was just fine with Jim and me. They were businessmen, not dudes out to play cowboy. And they were polite and smart. You could tell from the questions they asked that they knew what they didn’t know.

  The first night they arrive
d, Old Jake built an open fire and roasted a shoulder of beef. He kept making fun of the investors under his breath, saying things like “Rather cheeky” and “Jolly good” in an English accent, and rolling up his cowboy hat to look like a bowler, so I had to bop him in the back of the head. I prepared a few range specialties like rattlesnake stew and prairie oysters to give them something to talk about when they got back to their London clubs.

  Afterward we sat around the fire eating tins of sliced peaches. Jim took out his little cotton sack of Bull Durham, rolled himself a cigarette, closing the sack by pulling on the yellow string with his teeth like he always did, then made his pitch.

  Only two things really mattered to a rancher, he said: land and water. We had plenty of land in these parts, but not enough water, and without water, the land ain’t worth nothing. Water made the difference. Water out here was precious, he said, more precious than you gentlemen, living on that rainy island of yours, can possibly imagine. That was why, for centuries, the Indians and the Mexicans and the Anglos had all been fighting over it, why families were torn apart over it, why neighbors killed each other over it.

  One of the Poms piped up to say he knew firsthand how precious water was, because at the hotel in Seligman, he’d been charged an extra fifty cents to take a bath. Everyone got a laugh out of that, and it made me hope that Jim’s pitch would receive a sympathetic hearing.

  Seeing as how the ranch had no natural source of water, Jim said, one had to be created if it was going to support a sizable herd. Some ranchers went drilling for water, but you might drill all sorts of dry holes before you actually found water, and there was no guarantee of how long it would last. When the Santa Fe Railroad had needed water for its steam engines, it had drilled a hole half a mile deep in these parts and come up dry.

  What made the most sense, Jim went on, was to build a big dam to trap rainwater. He described my plan to bring up a bulldozer from Phoenix. When Jim mentioned the cost, the Poms looked at one another, and a few raised their eyebrows, but then Jim pulled out a column of numbers I’d drawn up and explained that without the dam, they could run only a few thousand head on the ranch; with it, they could go to twenty thousand, and that meant bringing five thousand head to market every year. The dam would pay for itself in no time.

  The next day the Poms went into Seligman to cable the rest of the investors. After some backing and forthing about engineering details, we got the go-ahead. The Poms wrote a check before they left, and in no time, a flatbed truck was pulling up to the ranch with a big yellow bulldozer on the back. It was the first bulldozer to be seen in these parts, and people came from all over Yavapai County to marvel at it chugging away.

  Since we had the darned contraption there, we decided to build dams all over the ranch, the operator scraping out the sides of gullies and draws, lining the bottoms with packed-down clay, and using the fill to build up the walls that would hold back the water from the flash floods. By far the biggest dam we built—so big you needed five minutes to walk around it—was the one in front of the ranch house.

  When the rains came that December, the water coursed through the gullies and draws and poured right into the ponds created by the dams. It was just like filling a bathtub. That winter was unusually wet, and by the spring, the water was three feet deep in the big pond—the finest body of water I’d seen since Lake Michigan.

  In one sense, that pond was nothing more than a hole in the ground, but Jim treated it like our proudest possession, and that was what it was. He checked the dam every day, measuring the depth of the water and inspecting the walls. In the summer, folks drove from miles away to ask if they might take a dip, and we always let them. Sometimes during dry spells, neighbors without as much water would come over with wagonloads of barrels and ask, as they’d put it, to borrow from our pond, though there was no way they were ever going to repay us, and we never charged for it, since, as Jim liked to say, the heavens had given it to us.

  The dam and its pond came to be known as Big Jim’s Dam, and then just Big Jim. People around the county measured the severity of dry spells by the amount of water in Big Jim. “How’s Big Jim doin’?” people in town might ask me, or “I hear Big Jim’s low,” and I always knew they were talking about the water level in the pond, not my husband’s state of mind.

  THE RANCH’S OFFICIAL NAME was the Arizona Incorporated Cattle Ranch, but we always called it the AIC, or just The Ranch. It was only dudes and greenhorns—people who got their ideas about ranching from western movies and dime-store novels—who gussied up their ranches with highfalutin names like Acres of Eden or Rancho Mirage or Paradise Plateau. A fancy name, Jim liked to say, was a sure sign that the owner didn’t know the first thing about ranching.

  With the Depression still going strong, owners like that—as well as plenty of owners who did know a thing or two about ranching—were going out of business. That meant more people were selling than buying cattle, and Jim traveled around Arizona picking up entire herds for rock-bottom prices. He hired about a dozen cowboys, mostly Mexican and Havasupai, to drive the cattle to the ranch and brand them before sending them out to the range. Cowboying was rough, and so were those kids—misfits, most of them, runaways and boys who’d been whipped too hard. For these young fellows, it was a question of joining the roundup or joining the circus—not a lot of other options out there for them—and they took life day by day. The one thing they knew how to do better than anything else was stick a horse, and they took great pride in that.

  When the cowboys arrived, the first thing they did was head out into open country and round up a herd of range horses, which they proceeded to break—after a fashion—in the palisaded corral. The horses bucked and fishtailed like rodeo broncs, but those hard-assed boys would just as soon bust every bone in their bodies before calling it quits. They weren’t much more than half-broke horses themselves.

  I stood there watching them with Rosemary. “I feel bad for the horses,” she said. “They just want to be free.”

  “In this life,” I said, “hardly anyone gets to do what they want to do.”

  Once the cowboys each had a string of horses, they started bringing in the cattle and branding them. They were all living in the bunkhouse, and I had my hands full cooking for everyone, in addition to helping out with the branding. The cowboys got steak and eggs for breakfast and steak and beans for dinner, with as much salt and roof water as they wanted. Anyone who asked for one could have a raw onion, as good as an orange for staving off scurvy. Most of the boys peeled those onions and ate them like apples.

  I didn’t particularly trust them around Rosemary, who wasn’t allowed to go near the bunkhouse—where there was nonstop cussing, drinking, brawling, card play, and knife play—and that was when I got in the habit of sleeping with her in the bedroom of the ranch house while Big Jim and Little Jim slept in the main room.

  Rosemary was also a little like a half-broke horse. She was happiest running around out of doors, without a stitch of clothing if I’d let her. She climbed the cedar trees, splashed in the horse trough, peed in the yard, swung from vines, and jumped from the barn rafters onto the hay bales, yelling at Mei-Mei to stand clear. She loved spending the day on horseback, holding on behind her father. The saddles were too heavy for her to lift, so she rode her little mule, Jenny, bareback, mounting her by grabbing mane and toe-walking up the animal’s leg.

  Jim once told Rosemary that she was so tough, any critter that took a bite of her would spit it out, and she just loved that. Rosemary was never afraid of coyotes or wolves, and she hated to see any animal caged, tied up, or penned in. She even thought that the chickens should be freed from the coop, that the risk of being eaten by a coyote was a price worth paying for freedom, and besides, she said, the coyotes needed food, too. That was why I always blamed Rosemary for what happened to Bossie the cow.

  The Poms were so thrilled with Jim’s work on the ranch that they sent us a pure-blooded Guernsey. Bossie was dun-colored, big and beautiful, and sh
e gave us two gallons a day of rich milk with good cream. She was such a good milk cow that I planned to breed her in the fall, sell the calf in the spring, and sock away the proceeds. I had already begun to think about saving for the day when we could afford a ranch of our own.

  But one day someone left Bossie’s stall unlatched, and she broke into the granary, where she devoured almost an entire bag of feed. When Old Jake came upon her, she had bloated and was leaning against the barn wall, her stomach swollen while she groaned in pain.

  Jim and Old Jake did everything they could. To get her to throw up, they made a mixture of the worst stuff they could think of: tobacco and milk of magnesia and whiskey and soapy water. They put it in a whiskey bottle and tried to pour it down her throat, but Bossie wouldn’t swallow, and it dribbled out the sides of her mouth. So then Old Jake held her jaws apart while Jim stuck the bottle so far down inside her gullet that his arm disappeared up to his elbow.

  He poured the concoction directly into her stomach, and she did throw up a little, but she was so far gone by then that it made no difference. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed slowly to the ground. In desperation, Jim punctured her gut with his pocketknife to let the gas out. But that didn’t work, either, and in another hour, our big, beautiful Guernsey was gone, lying glass-eyed and heavy on the barn floor.

  I was furious, heartbroken about the death of Bossie, but beside myself about the loss of what I hoped we’d earn come calving season. I was sure that it was Rosemary, with her misguided notions about animals and freedom, who had let Bossie out. The girl had been too horrified to watch Jim and Old Jake ministering to the cow, and I found her on the long porch, sobbing about Bossie’s end. I felt like smacking her good, but she insisted she hadn’t let the cow out, that it was Little Jim who’d done it, and since I didn’t have any proof one way or another, I had to let the matter go.