Rosemary and Little Jim on Old Buck
I TOLD ROSEMARY AND Little Jim that I didn’t want them making friends with the other schoolkids, because if they did, those kids would expect special treatment from me. Even if they didn’t, the other students might believe they had if they got good grades. “I have to be like Caesar’s wife,” I told Rosemary and Little Jim. “I have to be above suspicion.”
We were also pretty isolated on the ranch, there being no other kids within walking distance, but Rosemary and Little Jim got along fine by themselves. In fact, those two little scamps were each other’s best friend. After morning chores, if there was no school, they were free to do whatever they wanted. They loved to rummage around in all the outbuildings. Once they found a couple of old whalebone corsets in a trunk in the garage and wore them around for weeks. They also hiked out to the Indian graveyard, collected arrowheads, swam in the dam and the horse troughs, threw their pocketknives at targets, and worked in the blacksmith shop, heating up pieces of metal and, on one occasion, fashioning something they called the Wagon Wheel Express: two wagon wheels with an axle and a central iron tongue that they’d welded to the axle and that dragged behind the wheels. They’d pull the Wagon Wheel Express to the top of hills and then sit on the tongue as the contraption barreled down.
What they loved most of all was riding. Both of them had been on horseback since before they could walk and rode as naturally as any Indian kids. The Poms, in gratitude to Jim for his success with the ranch, had sent Rosemary and Little Jim a Shetland pony. It was the meanest creature on the whole place, always wanting to unhorse whoever was on him, but Rosemary had great fun trying to hang on as the Shetland bucked away or veered under a low-hanging branch, hoping to knock her off.
Most days she and Little Jim saddled up Socks and Blaze, two chestnut quarter horses, and set out into the range. One of their favorites pastimes was racing the train. A set of tracks for the Santa Fe Railroad cut across the ranch, and every afternoon they’d wait for the two-fifteen. When it came chugging up, they’d gallop alongside it, the passengers leaning out and waving and the engineer sounding the whistle until the train inevitably pulled ahead.
It was a race they never minded losing, and they’d return hot and sweaty, with the horses all lathered up.
The kids took their share of knocks. They were always falling out of trees and off roofs and horses, getting scraped and bruised, but Jim and I never put up with any tears. “Tough it out,” we’d always tell them. They rolled boulders down hills at each other. They ate horse feed and pissants on dares. They fired at each other with slingshots and BB guns. Cattle charged them and horses stepped on their toes. Once when Rosemary and Little Jim were playing in the pond, he stepped into a sinkhole and was sucked underwater. Big Jim, who was working on the dam, dove in without taking off his boots. He kept plunging down to the pond floor, feeling around for Little Jim, and finally found one of his arms sticking up through the muck. He pulled Little Jim’s limp body to the side and, with Rosemary kneeling beside him, kept squeezing on Jim’s chest until the muddy water upgushed out of his mouth and he started gasping for air.
One day in the middle of the summer when Rosemary turned eight, she and I were driving off-road across the Colorado Plateau in the pickup, bringing supplies out to Jim and some of the hands who were riding the northern fence line, checking for breaks. Since it had rained a few days earlier, a mudflat we had to cross was soggier than I’d expected, and darned if we didn’t get stuck. We tried pushing but couldn’t budge her. I didn’t relish the five-hour walk in the hot sun back to the ranch house, and as I leaned against the hood, trying to figure my options, I noticed a herd of wild horses grazing in a copse of cottonwoods about a quarter mile off.
“Rosemary, we’re going to catch us a horse,” I said.
“How, Mom? We don’t even have a rope.”
“Just you watch.”
In the back of the pickup was a sack of feed for the ranch hands’ horses and a bucket with some rusting fence nails in it. I emptied the nails onto the flatbed and poured some feed into the bucket, dumping the rest next to the nails. Then I cut the empty feed bag into strips with my pocketknife, tied them together, and made a small loop with one end. I had me a hackamore.
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.
Little 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.
“It’s kind of ugly,” Rosemary said. “And the woman’s a little scary.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “That’s art.”
When I returned to the ranch, Jim and I sat down to figure out what we should do about the west Texas land. Jim was of two minds, but for some reason, seeing that statue had made me hell-bent on holding on to the land Dad had homesteaded.
For one thing, land was the best investment. Over the long haul, and provided you treated it with respect, land pretty much always rose in value. And while that west Texas land was definitely parched, they were drilling for oil all over the state-Dad’s papers contained some correspondence with Standard Oil-and it might well be sitting on a big field of black gold.
But Dad’s west Texas land called to me for a deeper reason. Maybe it was the Irish in me, but everyone in my family, going back to my grandfather-he’d come over from County Cork, where all the land was owned by absentee Poms who took most of what you grew-had always been obsessed with land. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to own some outright. There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a hand-basket-as it seemed to be doing-you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it. Land belonged to you and yours forever.
“That’s one unyielding patch of earth,” Jim said. He argued that we couldn’t raise much of a herd on 160 acres, and paying off those taxes would make a big dent in the fund to buy Hackberry.
“We might not ever be able to buy Hackberry,” I said. “This is a sure thing. I’m a gambler, but I’m a smart one, and the smart gambler always goes for the sure thing.”
We paid off the taxes and became bona fide Texas land barons. I felt that the Madonna of the Trail would have approved.
WE USUALLY TOOK CATTLE to market in the spring and the fall, but that year the fall roundup was delayed until Christmas because, with the war going on, the military was using the railroad to ship troops and equipment all over the place, and that was the only time the train was available. But that also meant Rosemary, Little Jim, and I could pitch in, which worked out well, because the war had created a shortage of cowboys. We usually had upward of thirty cowboys on a roundup, but that year we had half that many.
Rosemary and Little Jim had both been going on roundups ever since they were old enough to walk, first riding behind me and Jim, then on their own ponies. Even so, Big Jim didn’t want them in the thick of the drive, where even the best cowboys could get thrown off their horses and trampled by nervous cattle. So he had Rosemary and Little Jim work as outriders, chasing down strays and stragglers hiding in the draws. I followed the herd in the pickup, carrying the bedrolls and the grub.
It was cold that December, and you could see steam rising off the horses as they cut back and forth, keeping the herd together while it moved across the range. Rosemary was riding old Buck, the buckskin-colored Percheron who was so smart that Rosemary could drop the reins and he’d corner strays on his own, biting them on the butt to drive them back to the herd.
Rosemary loved the roundups except for one thing-she secretly rooted for the cattle. She thought they were kind, wise animals who, in their hearts, knew that you were leading them to their death, which was why their lowing had such a piteous tone. I suspected that from time to time, she’d helped the odd steer escape. One day, well into the drive, Jim noticed a stray sidling up a draw and sent Rosemary after it. We heard old Buck whinnying, but a little later, Rosemary rode back out all innocent-eyed, declaring that she couldn’t find the steer.
“Just plain disappeared,” she said, and held up her hands with a shrug. “It’s a mystery.”
Jim shook his head and sent Fidel Hanna, a young Havasupai, into the draw. Soon enough he came trotting out, driving the steer in front of him.
Jim gave Rosemary a hard look. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Not her fault, boss,” Fidel Hanna said. “That steer, he was hiding way up a gulch.”
Jim looked like he didn’t completely buy the story, but it got Rosemary off the hook. Fidel glanced at Rosemary, and I saw him give her a sly little wink.
Rosemary had turned thirteen that year, which put her right on the brink of womanhood-girls of my generation sometimes got married at that age-and from that moment on, she was smitten with Fidel Hanna. He was only sixteen or seventeen himself, a tall, good-looking boy with an angular face who was moody and aloof but also sweet. He had a languid way of moving, wore a black hat with a shiny silver concha, and rode like he was part of his horse.
Rosemary by then was quite a looker, with her dark blond hair, wide mouth, and saucy green eyes, but she seemed unaware of it, carrying on instead like a complete tomboy. Her crush on Fidel Hanna left her confused and acting silly. During the day, he’d catch her gazing at him. She’d do things like challenge him to Indian wrestling matches, but she also made drawings of him on his horse and left them under his saddle at night.
The other cowboys noticed and started ribbing Fidel Hanna. I figured I’d have to keep an eye on the situation.
“Watch yourself around these cowboys,” I told Rosemary.
“What do you mean?” Rosemary asked, giving me that same innocenteyed expression she’d given Jim when she couldn’t find the stray.
“You know what I mean.”
With demand for beef down because of the war, we rounded up only two thousand head of cattle, not the usual five thousand, and when we put the herd together, we drove it east across the plateau to the loading pens in Williams. Once we got there, I saddled up Diamond, one of our quarter horses, to help with the corralling and the loading. Near the end, two steers ducked out of the chute and headed through an open gate toward the range.
“Go, babies, go!” Rosemary shouted.
I looked sharply at her, and she covered her mouth with her hand, which made me realize she hadn’t even known what she was saying. She’d just blurted it out.
Fidel Hanna and I chased down the two runaways and drove them back to the chute, where they were loaded onto the cattle cars with the rest of the herd. I trotted over to where Rosemary was sitting on Buck.
“Didn’t you tell me you wanted to live on the ranch when you grew up?” I asked.
Rosemary nodded.
“What in the Sam Hill do you think we do on ranches?”
“Raise cattle.”
“Raise cattle for market, which means sending them off to be slaughtered. If that upsets you-if you’re rooting for the cattle to break free- you’re not cut out for ranch life.”
We got back to the ranch and were in the barn unsaddling the horses and cleaning the tack when Rosemary walked up to Jim and me. “I want to learn to skin a steer,” she said.
“What on earth for?” I asked.
“That’s the nastiest job on the ranch,” Jim said. “Even worse than gelding.”
“Since I’m going to be a rancher, it’s something I need to learn,” Rosemary said.
“Suppose you’re right about that,” Jim said.
At roundup time, when we had a lot of cowboys on hand, we slaughtered a steer at least once a week. A few days later, Jim picked out a healthy-looking three-year-old Hereford. He led it into the meat house, quickly slit its throat, gutted it, sawed the head off, and hooked it, then a couple of the cowboys used the pulley to hoist it up to the cross-pole.
We let the carcass hang for a day, and the following morning we all went back to the meat house for the butchering. Jim used the pedal-driven grinding stone to give the knife a razor-sharp edge, holding it with both hands and moving it back and forth along the spinning stone as sparks shot out.
Rosemary, who was watching silently, looked pale. I knew she thought of cattle as sweet creatures who never harmed anyone, and now she was standing in front of a dead steer her father had killed, steeling herself to cut it apart. When I was growing up, gelding and slaughtering had been part of my life, but since moving to the ranch, we’d had cowboys do the bloody work, and Rosemary had been shielded from it.
But the kid was trying to be brave, and as Jim tied the leather butcher’s apron around her waist, she started humming. Jim passed her the knife and guided her hand to the spot on the steer’s lower leg where she needed to make the first cut. As she drew the knife down, she started crying silently, but she kept at it, Jim directing her movements, keeping his voice low and steady, cautioning her not to nick the flesh.
Rosemary’s hands were soon covered with blood, and she smeared it on her face, trying to wipe away the tears, but she never gave up, and while it took most of the day, they eventually got the hide off and sectioned the meat.
When it was all done, I threw sawdust on the floor while Jim cleaned the tools. Rosemary hung up the leather apron, washed her hands in a bucket, and walked out of the meat house without saying a word. Jim and I looked at each other, but we didn’t say anything, either. We both knew that she’d proved she could do it, but she’d also proved that she didn’t truly have the heart for it, and none of us ever mentioned it again.
I thought Rosemary might have even lost her appetite for meat, but the girl had a real gift for pushing unpleasantness out of her mind, and that night she tucked into her steak with gusto.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER I received a letter from Clarice Pearl, a senior muckety-muck with the Arizona Department of Education. She wanted to investigate the living conditions of the children of the Havasupai, who lived in a remote stretch of the Grand Canyon. She was bringing a nurse from Indian Affairs to determine if the children met hygiene standards. She asked me to drive the two of them to the canyon and arrange horses and a guide to get us down the long trail to the Havasupai village.
Fidel Hanna, the young Havasupai ranch hand whom Rosemary had a crush on, lived on the reservation when he wasn’t staying at the bunkhouse, and I asked him to set things up. He laughed and shook his head when I told him why the superintendent and nurse were making the trip.
“Coming to inspect the savages,” he said. “My father used to tell the story about how, for centuries, the Havasu men got up in the morning, spent the day hunting and fishing, came home, played with their children, and lay down with their woman at night. They thought life was pretty good, but then the white man came along and said, ’I have a better idea.’”
“I get his point,” I said. “But my father used to sit around pining for the past, too, and I’ve seen how that kind of thinking just eats away at you.”
I drove the hearse into Williams, bringing Rosemary with me, to pick up Miss Pearl and the nurse, Marion Finch, at the depot. Both of them were stout and pucker-mouthed, with short bobby-pinned hair. I recognized the type-disapproving do-gooders. They always had very high standards, and they always let you know that you didn’t quite measure up to them.
As we headed north, I tried to entertain my customers with a little Indian lore. “Pai” meant “people,” I explained. “Havasupai” meant “people of the blue-green water.” There were also the Yavapai, the Sun People, and the Walapai, the Tall Pine People. The Havasupai, who lived in a narrow valley on the banks of the Colorado River, regarded the water as sacred and threw their babies into it when they were a year and a half old.
“Before they’ve learned fear,” I said.
“That’s just the kind of practice we’re concerned about,” Miss Finch said.
I glanced over at Rosemary and rolled my eyes. She stifled a smile.
After about two hours, we reached Hilltop, a desolate spot out in the sagebrush at the canyon’s rim, where the horse trail led down to the village. There was no sign of Fidel Hanna. We all got out of the hearse and stood there listening to the wind, my two customers clearly disgusted with the unreliability of the heathens they’d come to help. All of a sudden a band of young Indians on horseback, half naked and with painted faces, galloped up the trail and circled us, whooping and brandishing spears. Miss Pearl turned white, and Miss Finch gave a shriek and covered her head with her arms.
But by then I’d recognized that the ringleader, under his war paint, was Fidel Hanna.
“Fidel Hanna, what the blazes do you think you’re doing?” I hollered.
Fidel pulled up in front of us. “Don’t worry.” He grinned. “We no scalp’em white ladies. Hair too short!”
He and the other Havasu boys all started laughing, so beside themselves with glee at their success in terrorizing the do-gooders that they almost fell off their horses. Rosemary and I couldn’t help chuckling, too, but my customers were outraged.
“You all belong in the reformatory,” Miss Pearl declared.
“No harm done,” I said. “They’re just kids playing cowboys and Indians.”
Fidel pointed at three of his friends, who jumped off their horses and doubled up with others. “Those are your mounts,” he said to us. Then he held out his hand to Rosemary. “You can ride with me,” he said. He pulled her up behind him, and before I could say anything, they were galloping down the trail.
Miss Pearl, Miss Finch, and I followed at a walk on our horses. The trail to the village was eight miles long, and it took most of the day to travel it. The path wound down the side of the canyon through a series of steep switchbacks, passing walls of limestone and sandstone layered like giant stacks of old papers. Several years earlier, some missionaries had tried to haul an upright piano down to the village so the Havasupai could sing hymns, but it had fallen off the cliff. We passed its smashed remains- black and white keys, twisted rusting wire, and splintered wood-lying among the rocks.
After a few hours, we came to a spot where clear, cold water gushed from an artesian spring, and that was where the stony landscape of the upper canyon gave way to lush greenery. Cottonwood, watercress, and willows lined the trail. The air was cool and moist and still.
Rosemary, Fidel, and his friends were waiting for us by the stream, letting their horses graze, and we all continued on together. The stream, fed by additional springs, gathered in strength and size the farther we went. Eventually, we reached a spot where the stream descended in a series of short falls, then we rode on for a ways before reaching the most breathtaking place I’d seen in my entire life. The creek poured through a gap in a cliff wall and cascaded a hundred feet down to a turquoise pool. The air was filled with mist from the thundering fall. The water’s vivid blue-green came from the lime that leached out of the underground springs. The mist in the air had the same lime in it and had covered everything near the fall-trees, bushes, rocks-with a white crystallized crust, creating one big natural sculpture garden.
It was midafternoon by the time we reached the Havasupai village, a collection of wattle huts where the stream flowed into the Colorado River. Around the huts, the stream fed into several pools of the same turquoise water. Naked Havasupai children were splashing in the water. We all dismounted, and Fidel and his friends dove into the biggest pond.
“Mom, can I go swimming, too?” Rosemary asked, so desperate to get in the water that she was hopping from foot to foot.
“You don’t have a swimsuit,” I said.
“I could swim in my underwear.”
“Certainly not,” Miss Pearl piped up. “It was improper enough for you to be riding behind that Indian boy.”
“And it would be unhygienic,” added Miss Finch. “There’s no telling what you’d find in that water.”
Fidel showed us to the guest hut. It was tight, but there was enough room for the four of us to stretch out on the mat on the dirt floor. Miss Pearl and Miss Finch were tired and wanted to rest, but Rosemary and I still had some gas left, and when Fidel offered to show us the valley, we took him up on it.
He found us all fresh horses, and we set out on a tour. Walls of red Coconino sandstone and pink Kaibab limestone rose steeply on both sides of the river. The narrow strip of bottomland was green and fertile, and we rode past rows of widely planted maize. Once upon a time, Fidel said, the Havasupai had spent the winter hunting game up on the plateau and come down to the valley to farm in the summer. But ever since they lost their traditional hunting grounds to the Anglo settlers, they’d remained holed up down here year-round, in the most remote spot in the entire west, a secret, hidden tribe living life the ancient way while most people on the outside world didn’t even know it existed. Fidel pointed out a pair of red rock pillars towering above the cliff wall. Those were the Wigleeva, he told us. They protected the tribe. It was said that any Havasupai who left for good would be turned to stone.
“This place is like heaven,” Rosemary said. “Even more than the ranch. I could live here forever.”
“Only Havasupai live here,” Fidel said.
“I’d become one,” she said.
“You can’t become a Havasupai,” I said. “You have to be born one.”
“Well,” Fidel said, “the elders do say Anglos can’t marry into the tribe, but as far as I know, none ever really tried to. So maybe you could be the first.”
As evening came on, the Havasupai offered us fried cornmeal cakes wrapped in leaves, but Miss Finch and Miss Pearl would have none of them, so we ate the biscuits and jerky I had packed.
The next day Miss Finch gave medical exams to the Havasupai children while Miss Pearl discussed their education with their parents, sometimes using Fidel as the interpreter. The village had a one-room school, but from time to time over the years, the state had decided that the Havasupai children weren’t getting a proper upbringing and had swooped in to round them up and send them to boarding school, whether their parents wanted it or not. There they learned English and were trained for jobs as porters, janitors, and telephone operators.
After a morning of interpreting for Miss Pearl, Fidel sat down next to me and Rosemary. “You people think you’re rescuing these children,” he said. “But they just end up unfit for both the valley and the world outside. Take it from me. I was sent to that school.”
“Well, at least when you left, you didn’t turn to stone,” Rosemary said.
“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.”