I gave the bucket to Rosemary, and we set out toward the horses. There were six of them, and as we drew near, they all raised their heads and looked at us warily, trying to decide if it was time to bolt. They were scruffy little buggers, with chipped hooves, long bedraggled manes, and bite marks on their rumps, but a lot of the horses on the range had been ridden at one point in their lives and, with the right coaxing, could be brought back around.
I had Rosemary rattle the grain in the bucket, and when one of the horses, a red mare with black legs, pricked her ears forward at the sound, I knew I had a candidate. I reminded Rosemary of my dad’s old rule about keeping your eyes to the ground so the horse wouldn’t think you were a predator. Instead of approaching the mare directly, we circled around her, Rosemary rattling the bucket constantly. When we got close, the other horses moved off, but the mare stayed where she was, watching. We turned our backs to her. There was no way we could catch her by chasing her, but I knew if we could get her to approach us, we’d won.
The mare took a step toward us and we took a step away, which encouraged her to take another step. After several minutes of this, she drew close enough to touch, and I had Rosemary hold out the bucket, letting the horse feed a little, then I slipped the hackamore around her neck. She looked up, startled, and pulled her head back, but then she understood we had her, and instead of fighting it, she went back to the grain.
I let her finish, then had Rosemary give me a leg up and hoisted her aboard behind me.
“Mom, I can’t believe we caught a wild horse without even a rope,” she said.
“Once they’ve tasted grain, they never forget it.”
* * *
Rosemary loved the idea that this wild animal had come up to her so willingly. Once we got back to the ranch, I told her to let the horse go, and she opened the gate, but the horse just stood there. She and Rosemary were both looking at each other, all daffy-eyed.
“I want to keep her,” Rosemary said.
“I thought you wanted all these animals to run free.”
“I want them to do what they want to do,” she said. “This one wants to stay with me.”
“The last thing we need around here is another half-broke horse,” I said. “Smack her on the rump and send her off. She belongs on the range.”
AS MUCH FUN AS ranch life was for the kids, I felt they needed more civilizing than it could provide. Jim and I decided to send them both to boarding school. While they were away, I was going to finally earn that darned diploma, get a permanent teaching job, and join the union, so beetleheads like Uncle Eli and Deputy Johnson couldn’t have me fired just because they didn’t like my style.
Since the hearse was pretty dinged up after the rollover—and because Little Jim had branded the seats with the dashboard lighter—the county let us buy it for a song. We packed it up and I drove the kids south, first dropping Little Jim, who was eight, at a boys’ school in Flagstaff, then Rosemary, who was nine, at a Catholic girls’ school in Prescott. I sat in the car watching a nun lead her by the hand into the dormitory. At the doorway, Rosemary turned around to look at me, her cheeks wet with tears. “Now, you be strong,” I called out to her. I had loved my time at the Sisters of Loretto when I was a girl, and I was sure that as soon as Rosemary got over her homesickness, she’d be fine. “Some kids would kill for this opportunity!” I yelled. “Consider yourself lucky!”
When I got to Phoenix, I found a bare-bones boardinghouse and registered for a double load of courses. I figured that if I spent eighteen hours a day going to class and studying, I could get my degree in two years. I loved my time at the university and felt happier than I thought I had a right to be. Some of the other students were astonished at my workload, but I felt like a lady of leisure. Instead of doing ranch chores, tending sick cattle, hauling schoolkids far and wide, mopping the school floor, and coping with belligerent parents, I was learning about the world and improving my mind. I had no obligations to anyone but myself, and everything in my life was under my control.
Rosemary and Little Jim didn’t share my enthusiasm for academic life. In fact, they hated it. Little Jim kept running away, climbing over fences and through windows, pulling out nails when the windows were nailed shut, and using tied-together bedsheets to shimmy down from upper floors. He was such a resourceful escape artist that the Jesuit brothers started calling him Little Houdini.
But the Jesuits were used to dealing with untamed ranch boys, and they regarded Little Jim as one more rambunctious rapscallion. Rosemary’s teachers, however, saw her as a misfit. Most of the girls at the academy were demure, frail things, but Rosemary played with her pock-etknife, yodeled in the choir, peed in the yard, and caught scorpions in a jar she kept under her bed. She loved to leap down the school’s main staircase and once took it in two bounds only to come crashing into the Mother Superior. She was behaving more or less the way she did on the ranch, but what seemed normal in one situation can seem outright peculiar in another, and the nuns saw Rosemary as a wild child.
Rosemary kept writing me sad little letters about her life. She liked learning to dance and play the piano but found embroidery and etiquette excruciating, and the nuns were always telling her that everything she did was wrong. She sang too loudly, she danced too enthusiastically, she spoke out of turn, she drew whimsical pictures in the margins of her books.
The nuns also complained that she made inappropriate comments, though sometimes she was simply repeating things I’d told her. Once, when she was wondering about the boy who’d died trying to swing to heaven, I’d said maybe it was for the best because he might have grown up to be a mass murderer, but when she said the same thing to a classmate whose brother had died, the nuns sent her to bed without dinner. Other classmates picked on her. They called her “yokel,” “bumpkin,” and “farmer’s daughter,” and when Jim donated fifty pounds of beef jerky to the school, they dismissed it as “cowboy meat” and refused to eat it, so the nuns threw it away.
Rosemary did stand up for herself. One night, she wrote, when she was doing the dishes, a classmate started teasing her about her father, saying, “Your dad thinks he’s John Wayne.”
“My dad makes John Wayne look like a pussy,” Rosemary replied, and dunked the girl’s head in the dishwater.
Good for her, I thought when I read the letter. Maybe she’s got a bit of her mother in her after all.
In her letters, Rosemary said she missed the ranch. She missed the horses and cattle, missed the ponds and the range, missed her brother and her mom and dad, missed the stars and fresh air and the sound of the coyotes at night. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in December, and everyone at the school—both the students and the nuns—lived in fear. One girl in Rosemary’s class had a brother on the battleship Arizona, and when she heard it had been sunk, she fell to the floor sobbing. The nuns kept blankets over the windows at night as part of the blackout— people were fearing that Japanese bombers were going to fill the skies over Arizona—and Rosemary said she felt like she couldn’t breathe.
Be strong, was all I could think to say when I wrote her back. Be strong.
I also corrected the grammar in her letters and returned them to her. I wouldn’t have been doing that girl any favors to let those sorts of errors go unchecked.
Near the end of Rosemary’s first year at the academy, I received a letter from the Mother Superior saying that she thought it would be best if Rosemary didn’t return for a second year. Her grades were poor and her behavior was disruptive. I had Rosemary tested that summer, and as I suspected, she was plenty bright. In fact, except for math, she tested in the top five percentile. All she needed to do was knuckle down and get focused. I wrote the Mother Superior, assuring her of Rosemary’s intelligence and pleading for another chance. The Mother Superior reluctantly agreed, but Rosemary’s grades and rowdiness got even worse her second year, and when it was over, the Mother Superior’s decision was final. Rosemary and the school were not a good fit.
Littl
e Jim hadn’t done much better. I’d earned my college degree by then, and I took both Rosemary and Little Jim with me back to the ranch. The kids were so happy to be home that they ran around hugging everything—cowboys, horses, trees—and then they saddled up Blaze and Socks and headed out to open country, quirting their horses into a gallop and whooping like bandits.
NOW THAT I HAD my college degree, I was in demand as a teacher and got a job in Big Sandy, another little town with a one-room school, where I enrolled both Rosemary and Little Jim. Rosemary was delighted not to be returning to the academy. “When I grow up,” she told me, “all I want to do is to live on the ranch and be an artist. That’s my dream.”
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.
Half broke horses: a true-life novel Page 17
