Half broke horses: a true-life novel (23 page)

I finally took some of her drawings to a few frame shops and asked the clerks if they thought my daughter had any talent. They said she showed promise, so I arranged for her to take lessons with Ernestine, an art teacher who wore a beret just in case you couldn’t tell from her accent that she was a Frog.

Ernestine taught Rosemary that white wasn’t really white, that black wasn’t really black, that every color had other colors in it, that every line was made up of more than one line, that you should love the weeds as much as the flowers because everything on the planet had its own beauty and it was up to the artist to discover it, and that for the artist, there was no such thing as reality because the world was as you chose to see it.

This all struck me as a lot of hogwash, but Rosemary really lapped it up.

“You know what’s the greatest thing about painting?” she said one day.

“What?”

“If there’s something about the world that you don’t like, you can paint a painting that makes it the way you want it to be.”

With Ernestine’s lessons, Rosemary’s paintings became less and less about the thing she was painting and more about what she was feeling at the moment. Around this time, she started spelling her name Rose Mary because she thought it made for a prettier signature. I continued to pay the Frog for the lessons, but I kept reminding Rosemary that art was an iffy proposition, that most women still had to choose between being a nurse, a secretary, and a teacher, and for my money, teaching beat the others hands down.

The funny thing was, even while telling Rosemary this, I was not, for the first time in my life, enjoying my job. I was teaching math and English at a large high school. A lot of the kids came from highfalutin families, wore fancy clothes—a few actually drove their own cars—and refused to obey me if they didn’t feel like it. It was also the first time I had not been on my own, teaching in a one-room school. I had principals and other teachers second-guessing me, forms to fill out, and committees to sit on. Half my day was spent doing paperwork for the bureaucracy.

There were more rules for teachers than for students, and those bureaucrats were awfully persnickety about you following those rules. Once when I opened my purse in the teachers’ lounge, one of the other teachers saw my little pistol and just about had a fit.

“That’s a gun!” she gasped.

“Barely,” I said. “It’s only a twenty-two.”

Still, she reported me to the principal, who warned me that if I ever brought a gun to the school again, I’d be fired.

“How am I going to protect myself and my students?” I asked.

“That’s what the police are for,” he said.

“Who’s going to protect us from the police?”

“Just leave the gun at home.”

JIM NEVER COMPLAINED, BUT
I could tell his job chafed him as much as mine did me. He was bored—a big, broad-shouldered guy sitting awkwardly behind a little metal desk, checking his inventory list and watching the Mexican workers boxing up airplane parts. Jim wasn’t a desk man. He also had a lot of downtime, which he wasn’t used to, and he spent a fair amount of it shooting the breeze with the warehouse bookkeeper, a tarted-up divorcée I did not take to named Glenda. She called Jim “Smithy” and was always asking him to light her cigarettes.

My husband just didn’t see the point of city life, didn’t understand why anyone would want to live like this. So many things about it struck him as contrary to the proper and natural way of the world. Shortly after we moved to the city, they cut down all the orange and cottonwood trees that shaded the streets to make room for more parking. “Seems to me you lose more than you gain,” Jim said.

The simple truth was, he missed the outdoors. He missed the sweat and dust and heat of ranching, the smells and hard labor. He missed the way that ranch life forced you to study the sky and the land every day, trying to anticipate nature’s intentions. On Sundays we took walks in Encanto Park in the middle of the city, and out of habit, Jim continued to be mindful of what the plants and animals were telling him. As fall came on that year, he noticed that the birds were migrating south earlier than usual, squirrels were storing extra nuts and their tails were unusually full, acorns were especially large, the bark on the cottonwoods was thicker, and so were the hulls on the pecan nuts.

“Going to be a hard winter,” he said. The signs were all there. He hoped other people were reading them, too.

And that winter was hard. It came on early, and in January it snowed in Phoenix for the first time in most folks’ memory. Back on the ranch, a blizzard like that would have been a call to action, forcing us to run around collecting firewood, bringing in the horses, and carting hay to the range. Jim would build a windbreak to protect the cattle. He’d empty all the wagons out of the garage and make a wall of them between the house and the barn, covering it with tarps, coats, and blankets, then buttressing it with old trunks and anvils and dirt and rocks and whatever he could find. He’d round up as many cattle as could fit into the barn, and when the storm reached us, he was outside on horseback, keeping the cattle moving, keeping their blood circulating. Every couple of hours, he’d rotate a new group into the barn and behind the wall of wagons so they could get a break from the wind and snow.

Living in the city, all we did was turn up the radiator and listen to the hiss and clank of the pipes.

The snow kept falling, and the next day the governor went on the radio, declaring a state of emergency. School was canceled and most businesses were closed. The National Guard was called out to rescue people stranded in remote parts of the state. Jim said he hoped that Boots and Gaiters knew what they were doing. He hoped all the cattle had been moved off the plateau down to the winter range and the hands had broken the ice on the ponds. “The first thing you got to do is break the ice,” he said. “The cattle’ll die of thirst before they starve.”

On the third day of the storm, we got a knock on the door. It was a man from the Arizona Department of Agriculture. Cattle were dying across the state, he said. Ranchers needed help, and the name that kept coming up was Jim Smith. It had taken them a while to track him down, the man said, but he was needed.

Jim threw some heavy clothes into his old army duffel bag, grabbed his hat, and was out the door in less than five minutes.

The first thing Jim did was organize drops of hay. He had a big cargo plane filled with round bales, and they took off into the storm. When they reached the range, the crew rolled the bales out the back of the cargo bay and watched as the hay tumbled through the snow and bounced on the ground.

Since the roads were impassable, Jim asked the government for a small plane and a pilot, and they flew across the state, touching down at isolated ranch houses. Jim explained to the ranchers, most of whom had never seen a blizzard the likes of this one, what to do. You got to break the ice on the ponds, he told them, and cut down the fence wire. Let the cattle roam. They need to move to keep their blood circulating, and they’ll instinctively move south, but if they hit a wire fence, they’ll all press up against it and die. Let them get into big herds and huddle for warmth. You can sort them all out by the brands later.

At one ranch up in the hills, there was no place to land. Jim had never put on a parachute before, much less jumped, but he strapped one on. “Count ten, pull the cord, and roll into the fall,” the pilot said, and Jim heaved himself out of the plane.

The storm had stopped, but the temperatures were still frigid when Jim reached the Showtime Ranch. Even before he landed, he could see from the air that no one had broken the ice on Big Jim. Carcasses of frozen cattle lay clustered along the pond’s edge. When he got to the ranch house, he found Boots and the new hands sitting around Gaiter’s fancy propane stove, their feet up, drinking coffee.

Any muttonhead can run a ranch during good times. You only find out who the real ranchers are when calamity strikes. Those dunces sitting around that stove may not have been able to read tree bark, but at the very least, they should have been listening to the weather reports, and when they heard that a devil of a storm was coming down from Canada, they would have had twenty-four hours to prepare. I would have lit into that fool Boots and those other chumps, but that was not Jim’s way. He did, however, get their sorry butts out and mounted up to cut wire, break ice, and start the cattle moving.

There were thousands of dead cattle lying rock-hard in the snow, piled along the southern fences. Some of the cattle that had survived were so weak they couldn’t walk, so Jim had the men bring hay and water and hand-feed them. He massaged their legs, which were cut from where they’d tried to break the ice themselves, and helped them stand again. If he could get them moving, he knew, they’d live.

Jim was gone two weeks. That whole time I didn’t know where he was or how he was doing, and it was the longest two weeks of my life. When he finally came back, he’d lost twenty pounds. His face and hands were raw. He hadn’t slept for days, and there were dark circles under his eyes. But he was happy. He hadn’t felt this useful since leaving the ranch. He’d been out doing what he was meant to do. He was Big Jim again.

A few days after Jim returned, he got a call from Gaiters. When Jim had been back in Yavapai County during the blizzard, people had told him that Gaiters had been going around referring to him as a “relic” and a “washed-up old geezer.” But that was before the storm. Now Gaiters was so impressed with the way Jim had salvaged what remained of the Showtime’s herd that he offered Jim his old job as ranch manager. He’d even build us our own knotty pine caretaker’s cabin. “You’re the real thing,” Gaiters said.

Jim and I discussed it, but we agreed right away that it was not for us. Before, we had been the ones running the ranch, making all the decisions. The storm had humbled Gaiters somewhat, but he still had his cockamamie notions for goosing up the Showtime. Jim didn’t want to do Gaiters’s bidding or have to spend his time arguing the man out of foolish ideas. What was more, there was no possibility of us someday buying the place. I told Jim I didn’t want to live in a caretaker’s cabin, even a knotty pine one, waiting for the owner to fly in with his Hollywood friends for weekend parties and leading dudes on trail rides. I’d been a servant before, and once was enough.

THE FOLLOWING MONTH I
had a school holiday and was in town running errands when I decided to swing by the warehouse. An article about the work Jim had done saving herds during the blizzard had appeared in the newspaper, along with a photograph of him standing by the plane he’d jumped out of. The headline read COWBOY PARACHUTES THROUGH BLIZZARD TO RESCUE CATTLE. My husband had become a bit of a local hero. People recognized him on the street and stopped to shake his hand. One guy even hollered: “It’s the Parachutin’ Cowboy!”

Jim thought it was all a little ridiculous, but I couldn’t help noticing the way women smiled and flirted with the Parachutin’ Cowboy when he doffed his hat or opened the door for them.

Jim didn’t expect me that day, and when I walked into the warehouse, Glenda the floozy bookkeeper was standing in his doorway, talking to him. She had jet-black hair and blood-red lipstick, wore a tight purple dress, and was leaning with her back against the door frame to show off her figure. She had on one of those wire bra contraptions, and it pushed her bosoms forward like a couple of airplane nose cones.

When she saw me, instead of seeming contrite, she gave her bosoms a little jiggle and looked at my husband. “Uh-oh, Smithy,” she said. “Are we in trouble?”

My blood boiled up, and I was sorely tempted to backhand that hussy, but instead I looked at Jim to get his reaction. If he was all hot to trot, there was going to be hell to pay, but Jim just seemed embarrassed, more for the tart than for anything he’d done. “Knock it off, Glenda,” he said.

The two of us went out to a cafeteria for lunch, and I didn’t say anything about Glenda’s little display, but I made a mental note to keep an eye on the two of them.

* * *

Truth be told, as the days went by, I couldn’t help wondering if there was actually something going on between Jim and the floozy. At times the two of them were all alone in that big warehouse, and there were plenty of hidden nooks and crannies to provide sites for hanky-panky. And then they both had lunch hour, again giving them ample time to duck into some hot-sheets hotel. In other words, they both had opportunity, and she clearly had motive. The question was, did my husband?

There was no point in confronting Jim, because if he was turning out to be another crumb bum like my first husband, he’d simply lie. I thought I knew Jim, but I also knew you couldn’t—or shouldn’t—trust men. An otherwise sensible man might be driven wild if an irresistible temptation presented itself. And there was a heck of a lot more temptation wagging its tail in Phoenix than there ever had been in Yavapai County. Also, men can change. Maybe this Parachutin’ Cowboy business had gone to Jim’s head, all the adoring ladies with their battering eyelashes and nose-cone bosoms making him think he was the prize stallion at the stud farm. Maybe it had brought out the latent polygamist in him.

Whatever the case, as the days went by, I realized I was not going to get any peace from these thoughts unless I got to the bottom of the matter. I needed to investigate.

I didn’t want to hire a private detective, the way they did in all those movies. The gumshoes were always men, and I couldn’t trust them, either. I also didn’t want to follow Jim around myself, the way I did my first husband in Chicago. I’d known that crumb bum was a louse, I’d just needed to prove it. With Jim, I was trying to make a determination of the facts, the more quietly the better. Besides, Phoenix was a lot smaller than Chicago, and people knew me. I was a schoolteacher with a reputation to maintain. I didn’t want to be caught lurking in alleys.

So I enlisted Rosemary’s help.

“But, Mom, I don’t want to spy on Dad,” she said when I explained the enterprise.

“It’s not spying, it’s investigating,” I said. “He might be cheating on me, but we don’t know. He might be innocent. That’s what we hope, and that’s what we’re trying to prove—that he’s innocent.”