Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

On the way back to Red Lake, I did most of the talking. I’d spent the last week thinking about Helen’s predicament, and as we drove through the range, I laid out what I thought were her options. I could write Mom and Dad, explaining the situation and softening them up, and I was sure they’d forgive her and welcome her home. I’d gotten the name of an orphanage in Phoenix if she wanted to go that route. There were also a lot of men in Coconino County in search of a wife, and she might be able to find someone who’d be willing to marry her even though she was in a family way. Two possibilities that had occurred to me were Rooster and Jim Smith, but I didn’t get into specifics.

Helen, however, seemed distracted, almost in a daze. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, she spoke in fragmented sentences, and instead of focusing on practicalities, her mind drifted all over the place. She kept returning to totally ludicrous plans and pointless concerns, wondering if she could get Mr. Wonderful back by putting the child into an orphanage and worrying if childbirth would ruin her figure for bathing-suit scenes in movies.

“Helen, it’s time to get realistic,” I said.

“I am being realistic,” she said. “A girl without a figure is never going to make it.”

I decided this was not the moment to push the point. When someone’s wounded, the first order of business is to stop the bleeding. You can figure out later how best to help them heal.

MY BED WAS SMALL,but I scooted over so Helen and I could sleep side by side, just as we had done when we were kids. It was October, and the desert nights were turning cold, so we snuggled together, and sometimes late at night, Helen would start whimpering, which I took as a good sign because it meant that at least once in a while she seemed to understand how grim the situation was. When that happened, I held her close and reassured her that we’d get through this, just the way we’d survived that flash flood in Texas when we were kids.

“All we need to do,” I’d say, “is find us that cottonwood tree to climb up in, and we’ll make it.”

During the day, while I was teaching, Helen kept to herself in that little room. She never made any noise and spent a lot of time sleeping. I’d hoped that once she’d gotten some rest, her mind would clear, and she’d be able to start thinking about her future in a constructive fashion. But she continued to be vague and listless, talking about Hollywood in a dreamy way that, quite frankly, irritated me.

I decided Helen needed fresh air and sunshine. We went for a stroll through town every afternoon, and I introduced her to people as my sister from Los Angeles who’d come out to the desert to cure the vapors. The next time I had a race scheduled, Jim Smith brought Helen along in the Flivver. He was courteous and considerate, but as soon as I saw them together, I could tell they were not meant for each other.

Rooster, however, immediately took a shine to Helen. “She’s real purty,” he confided to me.

But Helen had no interest in Rooster. “He swallows his tobacco juice,” she said. “I get sick every time I see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.”

I didn’t think Helen could afford to be picky at this particular juncture, but it was true that a part-time deputy who’d only just learned to write his name wouldn’t make the best husband for her.

Helen loved my crimson shirt. When she saw me in it, she smiled for the first time since coming to Red Lake. She asked to try it on and seemed so excited while she was buttoning it up that I thought maybe she had shaken off her blues. But as she was tucking the shirt into her skirt, I saw that she was beginning to show. Our story about her coming here to take the desert air wasn’t going to wash much longer, I realized, and regardless of her mood, her problems weren’t going to go away.

HELEN AND I STARTEDattending the Catholic church in Red Lake. It was a dusty little adobe mission, and I didn’t particularly cotton to the priest, Father Cavanaugh, a gaunt, humorless man whose scowl could peel the paint off a barn. But a lot of the local farmers went there, and I thought Helen might meet someone nice.

One day about six weeks after Helen had arrived, we were in the stuffy church, standing then kneeling then sitting then standing again as we listened to the mass. Incense wafted up to the ceiling. Helen had been wearing baggy dresses and a loose coat to hide her condition, but suddenly, she fainted dead away. Father Cavanaugh rushed down from the altar. He felt her forehead, then looked at her for a moment, and something made him touch her stomach. “She’s with child,” he said. He glanced at her ringless fingers. “And unmarried.”

Father Cavanaugh told Helen she must make a full confession. When she did, instead of offering her forgiveness, he warned her that her soul was in mortal danger. Because she had committed the sin of lust, he said, the only place for her in this world was one of the church’s homes for wayward women.

Helen came back from the visit with Father Cavanaugh more distraught than I’d ever seen her. She had no intention of going to any home-and I wouldn’t have let her-but now her secret was out, and the townspeople of Red Lake began regarding both of us differently. Women stared at the ground when they passed us on the street, and cowboys felt free to give us the eye, as if the word had gone around that we were loose women. Once when we walked by a Mexican grandmother sitting on a bench, I looked back, and she was making the sign of the cross.

Early one evening a couple of weeks after Helen made her confession, I heard a knock on the teacherage door. Superintendent MacIntosh-the same man who had given me the boot from my teaching job when the war was over-was standing there.

He tipped his fedora, then looked past me into the room, where Helen was washing the supper plates in a tin pan. “Miss Casey, may I have a word with you in private?” he asked me.

“I’ll go for a walk,” Helen said. She wiped her hands on her apron and made her way past Mr. MacIntosh, who, making a great show of civility, tipped his hat a second time.

Since I didn’t want Mr. MacIntosh looking at the dirty dishes as well as Helen’s suitcase lying open on the floor, I led him through the connecting door into the classroom.

Looking out the window and fingering the brim of his fedora, Mr. MacIntosh cleared his throat nervously. Then he began what was obviously a prepared speech about Helen’s condition, moral standards, school policy, impressionable schoolchildren, the need to set a good example, the reputation of the Arizona Board of Education. I started arguing that Helen had no one else to turn to and stayed well away from the students, but Mr. MacIntosh said there was no room for discussion, he was getting pressure from a lot of the parents, the matter was out of his hands, and while he was sorry he had to say it, the fact was, if I wanted to keep my job, Helen had to go. Then he put on his fedora and left.

I still felt stung and humiliated, and I sat down for a moment at my desk. For the second time in my life, that fish-faced pencil pusher Mr. MacIntosh was telling me I wasn’t wanted. The parents of my schoolkids included cattle rustlers, drunks, land speculators, bootleggers, gamblers, and former prostitutes. They didn’t mind me racing horses, playing poker, or drinking contraband whiskey, but my showing some compassion to a sister who’d been taken advantage of and then abandoned by a smooth-talking scoundrel filled them with moral indignation. It made me want to throttle them all.

I walked back into the teacherage. Helen was sitting on the bed smoking a cigarette. “I didn’t really go for a walk,” she said. “I heard everything.”