Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“Will she be happy?” I asked.

Granny Combs chewed her tobacco and studied the cards. “I see a wanderer.”

I NAMED THE BABYRosemary. Roses were my favorite flower, Mary was a good Catholic girl’s name, and Rosemary was a darned useful herb. I was hoping the kid would have a practical side. Most babies looked to me like monkeys or Buddhas, but Rosemary was a beautiful thing. When her hair came in, it was so pale and fine it looked white. By the time she was three months old, she had a wide smile to match her merry green eyes, and even early on it seemed to me she looked a lot like Helen.

Helen’s beauty, as far as I was concerned, had been a curse, and I resolved that I would never tell Rosemary she was beautiful.

A boy followed a year and a half later. A big new hospital had just opened in the town of Williams, forty miles to the east, and I was determined to have my baby there, but as I went into labor, a hellacious winter storm blew in from Canada, covering the roads with drifting snow. We almost didn’t make it through, the Flivver spinning and skidding, but Jim got out the jack and put the chains on the wheels, hunkering down against the driving snow while I sat there taking deep breaths behind the steamed-up windows. We arrived just as my contractions were becoming severe.

Granny Combs’s mind-over-matter method of getting through pain was pretty good when it came to a stubbed toe, and it had helped me get through my first childbirth, but it couldn’t compare to the marvelous modern anesthesia they used to knock me out at the hospital this time.

The doctor put that mask over my face, and I just drifted off to dreamland. When I woke up, I had a son. He was a big bruiser of a boy, the first baby born in that hospital, and the nurses and doctors were as proud as Jim and me. We named him after his dad and from the outset called him Little Jim.

It was around then that hard times hit northern Arizona. A big part of the problem was that too many farmers and greenhorn ranchers had moved into the area. They didn’t understand that Arizona wasn’t like the land back east, where thousands of years of decaying trees had built up a deep loam. This land had just a thin layer of topsoil that, if plowed, would blow away with the first strong wind. The greenhorns had all made fun of the Navajos for planting each stalk of corn in a little hole three feet from the next, instead of a foot apart in plowed rows, but the Indians understood that was all the soil could bear. Land that God had never intended for the till had been farmed beyond its limit, and too many cattle had grazed the once green range into hard, dry stubble. The grass couldn’t reseed, and when it rained, there wasn’t enough grass to hold the water, so it would run off, eroding the good soil, and the fine land would be ruined forever. When a long drought hit, stretches of countryside all around the state turned to swirling dust, which rose a half mile into the air.

At the same time, the country was a few years into the Depression. At first that seemed like a problem afflicting mostly the big cities. But it soon hurt the cattle market because so many folks back east couldn’t afford to eat steak anymore. Some of the littler ranches in Arizona started going under, and ranch hands joined the stream of Okies making their way past our house on Route 66 in the hopes of finding work in California.

A lot of people could no longer afford gas, and they began selling off the tractors and cars they’d been persuaded to buy, leaving many of them wishing they’d kept their plow horses. Business at the garage dwindled. Jim was also too generous for his own good, undercharging people who were poor and even doing repairs for free.

I sat down at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, working the numbers, looking for ways to cut expenses, but no matter what angle I came at it from, the bottom line was inescapable: We had more going out than coming in, and it was just a matter of time before we went broke. With the loans we’d taken out, that meant bankruptcy. I took the babies to the garage and helped out as much as I could, but I figured there must be something else we could do to bring in a little extra cash.

One day Mr. Lee, the Ash Fork Chinaman, knocked on our door. Mr. Lee ran a chop-suey joint in a tent near the garage and made enough money from it to drive a Model A that Jim repaired. Mr. Lee was usually one happy, beaming Chinaman, but that day he was in a panic. Prohibition had ended a few years earlier, but a lot of people had gotten used to the easy money that came from selling bootleg liquor, and Mr. Lee was one of them, offering his customers shots of home brew to wash down their noodles. But he’d heard that the revenuers were onto him, and he was looking for a place to hide a few cases of booze.

Mr. Lee and Jim had hit it off because Mr. Lee had been a soldier in Manchuria when Jim was seeing service in Siberia, and they’d lived through the same bitter winters, picking icicles out of their hair and gnawing on frozen meat. Mr. Lee trusted Jim. We agreed to take the booze and stashed the cases under Little Jim’s crib, where they were hidden by the skirt.

That night I lay awake thinking about Mr. Lee’s hooch, and a plan occurred to me. I could bring in extra money by selling bootleg booze out the back door. Although Dad had been a staunch prohibitionist, his pa had sold booze from the store on the KC Ranch, so I had family tradition going for me. Also, I never saw anything wrong with an honest man taking a well-deserved drink. I even had one myself from time to time.

When I proposed the idea to Jim at the breakfast table the next morning, he wasn’t so keen on it. Although he had stopped drinking years ago, after shooting up some Canadian town while on a bender, he didn’t have any problem with booze itself. He just didn’t want to see the mother of his two children wind up in jail for rum-running.

It was because I was a mother with two kids, I said, as well as a respected former schoolteacher, that the revenuers would never suspect me. There was a definite market out there, since everyone was looking to save pennies wherever they could. It wasn’t like we’d be running a speakeasy, just a little retail operation with absolutely no overhead. And we’d even be striking a blow for the little guy, giving a hardworking cowboy a chance to have a drink without being forced to fork over a nickel to Uncle Sam every time he did so.

I kept hammering away at Jim, pointing out that I couldn’t see any other way to keep us afloat, and because I would give him no peace on the matter, he reluctantly agreed. Since we’d done him a favor, Mr. Lee also agreed, promising to provide me two cases a month from his bootlegger if we split the profit.

I was a good liquor lady. I discreetly put the word out, and soon local cowboys were knocking at the back door. I sold only to people I knew or those who came recommended. I kept things friendly but businesslike, inviting them in briefly but not allowing anyone to linger around or drink on the premises. I began to get regular customers, including the Catholic priest, who always blessed the babies on the way out. My regulars got a discount, but I never gave credit and I never sold to anyone I thought was drinking the rent money. After Mr. Lee got his cut, I made a quarter on each bottle I sold. Soon I was averaging three bottles a day, and that extra twenty dollars or so a month balanced the books.

ONE DAY THAT SPRING,when Rosemary was three and Little Jim was starting to talk, the Camel brothers drove their huge flock of sheep past our house and into town toward the depot. The Camel brothers had bought a big ranch west of Ash Fork in Yavapai County with the idea of raising sheep for wool and mutton. They were from Scotland and knew a lot about sheep but precious little about conditions on the Arizona range. The Camel brothers had decided that the forage in Yavapai County was too dry for sheep, especially with the drought, and they’d made up their minds to sell off their flock, as well as the ranch, rather than watch their sheep grow gaunt and weak while more and more of them got picked off by wolves and hungry hobos.