Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“Sounds good to me.”

“The second is, I know you were raised a Mormon, but I don’t want you taking any more wives.”

“Lily Casey, from what I know of you, you’re just about as much woman as any man can handle.”

WHEN I TOLD JIMhow my crumb-bum first husband had given me a fake ring, he got out a Sears, Roebuck catalog and we chose a ring together so I’d know I was getting the genuine article. We got married in my classroom once school was out for the summer. Rooster was the best man. Before the ceremony, he gave me a kiss.

“I knew I was going to smooch you one day, but I didn’t think it would be because you were marrying my buddy,” he said. “Still, I’ll take what I can get.”

Rooster had a friend with an accordion, and since I still had a soft spot for teaching, instead of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” I asked him to play the PTA anthem.

The year was 1930, and I was twenty-nine. A lot of women my age had children who were practically grown, but getting a late start didn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy the journey every bit as much-maybe even more. Jim understood why I wanted to leave Red Lake, and he agreed to move his garage to Ash Fork, about thirty miles west, just over the Yavapai County line. Ash Fork was a bustling little town on Route 66 at the base of Williams Mountain. It was a stop on the Santa Fe Railroad, with a roundhouse, and some days the streets were filled with sheep being shipped to market. Ash Fork had a general store run by a descendant of George Washington’s brother, not one but two churches, and a Harvey House restaurant for the railroad passengers, where Harvey Girls in white aprons served you an entire quarter of a pie when you ordered a slice, and diners wiped their mouths with elegant linen napkins.

At the Ash Fork bank, Jim and I took out a loan and built a garage made of Coconino sandstone, laying the stones and spreading the mortar ourselves. We hung the GARAGE sign from Red Lake over the door. With money from the loan, we sent off for a tire pump, a ball-bearing handle jack, and a stack of ribbed tread tires from the same Sears catalog that we’d used to order my ring.

We had also brought the gas pump with us from Red Lake. The big glass cylinder on top was filled with gasoline-dyed red so you could tell it apart from kerosene-and every time you filled a car, air bubbles gurgled up through it.

Business was brisk. Since we were partners, Jim taught me to pump gas. The pump was hand-operated. I’d pump, pump, pump, and the gas would go glug, glug, glug. I also changed oil and fixed flat tires. By that winter, I was pregnant, but I was still pitching in every day, filling up gas tanks and making change while Jim worked on cars.

We built a little house-also made of Coconino sandstone-right on Route 66, which was still a dirt road, and in the dry season, dust kicked up by the wagon wheels and automobile tires sometimes drifted through the windows, coating the furniture. But I loved that house. We ordered the plumbing system from Sears and installed it ourselves. In the kitchen we had running water that gushed out of shiny nickel-plated faucets, and a chain flush toilet-just like the rich people I cleaned for in Chicago-with a porcelain enamel bowl and a lid of mahogany veneer.

When the house was finished, Rooster paid us a visit. Like my dad, he couldn’t believe that anyone would ever want a crapper in the house. “Ain’t it unsanitary?” he asked.

“Everything goes down the pipe,” I said. “If you want to freeze your behind off in an outhouse, that’s fine by me.”

Rooster was just one of those people who didn’t like change regardless of how it might improve his lot. As for me, I was so danged proud of my indoor plumbing that if someone looking for directions knocked at the door, I couldn’t resist the temptation to say, “Would you like a glass of fresh tap water?” or “Do you, by chance, need to use the toilet?”

BY THE TIME Iwas eight and a half months pregnant, I had swelled up pretty big. I was happy to continue working at the garage, but Jim thought that in my condition, it might be dangerous. I could slip on an oil spill, he said, or faint from gasoline fumes, or break my water trying to twist off a rusted radiator cap. So he insisted I stay at home, where I’d be safe. For a lot of women, it didn’t get any better than that, lounging around in a housecoat with nothing to do. But after a few days, I started getting cabin fever, cooped up by myself reading books and mending clothes, and maybe that was why I got so irritated with the Jehovah’s Witness who stopped by.

I was usually friendly to folks like Jehovah’s Witnesses, admiring their genuine conviction, but this fellow was particularly persistent, lecturing me, giving me a lot of poppycock about how Armageddon was imminent and for the sake of my unborn baby I needed to seek salvation and convert. Who the hell was he to tell me what I had to believe? I asked. All folks needed to find their own way to heaven. One of the problems of the world today was all the muttonheads- like those Bolshies in Russia-going around convinced they were the only ones who had the answers and killing everyone who didn’t agree with them.

I got so steamed up, pacing back and forth and arguing with the fellow, that without thinking about what I was doing, I sat down on my sewing, and a needle stuck me in my behind. I let out a yelp, started cussing, and tried to work the needle out of my rear, while the Jehovah’s Witness wagged his finger and argued that this was a sure sign from Jesus that I needed to see the error of my way and get right with the Lord.

“What it’s a sign of, mister,” I said, “is that I shouldn’t be staying at home by myself, getting in theological arguments with harebrained strangers.”

I headed back to the garage, where I told Jim what had happened. “I don’t care if I only man the cash register,” I said, “but I’m working until I go into labor. Sitting at home is just too dangerous.”

The baby came two weeks later, on a scorching-hot July day. I gave birth at home with the help of Granny Combs, the best midwife in Yavapai County. One of Granny Combs’s legs was shorter than the other, and she walked with an even worse limp than my dad. She also chewed tobacco, though she was a spitter and not a swallower like Rooster. Still, all the women in the county swore by her. If Granny Combs couldn’t bring your baby into this world, they said, it wasn’t meant to be here.

When I went into labor, the pain started coming in waves. Granny Combs told me that I couldn’t stop the pain, but she could teach me how to get the best of it. What I needed to do was separate the actual pain from the fear that something terrible was happening to my body. “The pain is your body complaining,” she said. “If you listen to the pain and tell your body, ’Yeah, I hear you,’ then you won’t be so afraid of it. I’m not saying the pain goes away, but it ain’t gonna make you crazy, either.”

My labor lasted only a couple of hours, and Granny Combs’s advice did help keep the pain in check-sort of. When the baby came out, Granny Combs said, “It’s a girl,” and held her up. She was purple, and I felt a stab of alarm. But Granny Combs started slapping and kneading her, and the baby let out a cry and gradually turned pink. Granny Combs cut the cord and rubbed the baby’s navel with a burned cork to close up the wound.

Granny Combs had a sixth sense-the way I sometimes felt I did- and could read minds and tell fortunes. While I held the baby and nursed her, Granny Combs tore herself a plug of tobacco and laid out cards to see what the future had in store for my newborn.

“She will have a long life, and it will be eventful,” Granny Combs said.