Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“I can see that,” he said. All the screaming was discombobulating the two of them. “We have to check these things out, but we’ll be on our way.”

The lawmen were happy to be out of there, and as soon as they left, Rosemary stopped her howling. “You sure saved my chestnuts, little girl,” I said.

When Jim came home, I told him about the visit from the law and how the chorus of howling youngsters had driven those deputies right out the door. It already seemed to me like a pretty funny story, and it got Jim laughing, too, but then he stopped and said, “Even so, they were putting us on warning. It’s time we get out of the bootleg business.”

“But Jim,” I said, “we need the money.”

“I’d rather see you in the poorhouse than behind bars.”

Selling liquor had kept us afloat for a year. But we shut the operation down, and six months later, the bank foreclosed on us.

FALL WAS USUALLY MYfavorite time of year, when the air turned cool and the hills were green from the August rains. But I didn’t have much time to enjoy the September sunsets and the crisp, starry nights. Jim and I had decided to auction off everything-the furniture, his tools, the tires, the tire pump, the handle jack, and the gas pump with its pretty glass cylinder. Once we’d done that, we would strap our suitcases on the roof of the Flivver and join the stream of Okies heading to California for work.

Mulling our prospects made us feel both ground down and wound up. One morning we were in the garage, tagging tools and arguing about what we should take with us, when Blackie Camel, the older of the two Camel brothers, stopped by. Blackie was a swag-bellied man with a bushy black beard who wore his embroidered vest everywhere. He was kind of a mathematical genius when it came to sheep, and he could glance at a flock and tell you not only how many animals were in it but also how many pounds of wool they were carrying.

Ever since Jim had saved the lambs, Blackie had taken to dropping by the garage to shoot the breeze. The more he got to know Jim, the more he liked him. Jim, he was fond of telling people, knew not only sheep, he also knew cattle and horses and just about every creature with fur or feathers. Jim never bragged about himself, which Blackie also liked, and Blackie was particularly impressed with a story he’d heard from a local Hopi about how, when Jim was a young man, an eagle was going after a newborn calf and Jim actually lassoed the bird in midair.

That morning, as we sat at the wobbly linoleum table Jim used as his desk, Blackie told us that he and his brother had sold their ranch to a group of investors in England who wanted to run cattle there. They had asked him and his brother to recommend someone to manage the ranch, and Blackie said that if Jim was so inclined, he and his brother would put Jim’s name forward.

Jim reached under the table and squeezed my hand so hard that my knuckles cracked. We both knew the only jobs out in California were picking grapes and oranges, and the Okies were fighting over what little work existed, while the Daddy Warbucks owners kept cutting everyone’s wages. But there was no way we were going to acknowledge to Blackie Camel how desperate we were.

“Sounds like something worth considering,” Jim said.

BLACKIE SENT A TELEGRAMto London, and a few days later, he dropped by to tell Jim the job was his. We called off the auction, and Jim kept most of his tools, but we did sell the gasoline pump and tires to a mechanic from Sedona. Rooster brought a buckboard down from Red Lake, and we loaded our furniture onto it, put the kids and Mei-Mei in the back of the Flivver, and then, with Jim behind the wheel, Rooster on the wagon, and me bringing up the rear on Patches, we set out on our little procession for Seligman, the town nearest the ranch.

That part of the journey was smooth and passed quickly because Route 66 was being paved for the first time with a layer of shiny black asphalt. Seligman wasn’t as big as Ash Fork, but it had everything a ranch town needed: a building that served as both the jail and post office, a hotel, a bar and café, and the Commercial Central, a general store where pairs of Levi’s were stacked four feet high on the wide-planked floor next to shovels, spools of rope and wire, water buckets, and tins of crackers.

From Seligman we headed west for fifteen miles through rolling rangeland covered with rabbitweed, prairie grass, and juniper trees. The Peacock Mountains in the distance were dark green, and overhead the sky was iris blue. After fifteen miles, we turned off Route 66 and followed a narrow dirt road for another nine miles. It took a full day to get from Seligman to the ranch by wagon. Finally, late in the afternoon, we came to a gate where the road just ended.

To the right and left of the gate, barbed-wire fencing, held up by neatly trimmed juniper saplings, stretched away into the distance. There was no sign on the gate, which was closed, but we were expected, so the gate was dummy locked-the chain that kept it shut was held together by a padlock that had been left unsnapped. Beyond the gate was a long driveway. We followed it another four miles and finally reached a fenced-in compound with a collection of unpainted wood buildings shaded by enormous cedar trees.

The buildings were at the foot of a hill dotted with pinyon and scrub cedar. Facing east, you looked out over miles and miles of rolling rangeland that gradually sloped down toward a flat grassy basin known as the Colorado Plateau. It stretched out all the way to the Mogollon Rim, big blush-colored bluffs where the earth had shifted along a single fault line that ran all the way to New Mexico. From where we stood, you could see to forever, and there wasn’t a single other house, human being, or the slightest sign of civilization, only the huge sky, the endless grassy plain, and the distant mountains.

The Camel brothers had let most of the hired help go, and the place was deserted except for one remaining hand, Old Jake, a grizzled, stogiechewing coot who came limping out of the barn to greet us. Old Jake had a lopsided walk because, to avoid serving in the Great War, he had put his foot on a railroad track and let a train run over his toes. “Won’t win any dancin’ contests,” he said, “but don’t need toes to ride-and it beats spittin’ up mustard gas.”

Old Jake showed us around. There was a main house with a long porch, its unpainted wood siding a sun-bleached gray. The barn was huge, and next to it were four small log buildings: the grainery and the smithy; the meat house, where hides and sides of beef were cured; and the poison house, which had shelves full of bottles containing medicines, potions, spirits, and solvents, all with corks or rags stuffed in their tops. Old Jake kept pointing out various details-the bags of sulfur and jars of tar used for treating injured livestock, the knife sharpener in the smithy, the troughs that collected runoff rainwater from the roofs.

He took us into the other outbuildings, including a toolshed, chicken coop, and bunkhouse. Then we came to a garage filled with twenty-six carriages, wagons, and vehicles-brogans, surreys, phaetons, an old Conestoga covered wagon, a few beat-up cars, a rusty Chevy pickup. Old Jake proudly named every one. He showed us the pit in the garage that you could climb down into, then have someone drive the car over it when you needed to work on the undercarriage.

Finally, Old Jake led us back through the barn to a double corral: one made of six-foot-high saplings posted vertically and used to break horses, the other made of standard post-and-wire fencing with a small herd of tough little ponies inside it.

Jim walked around nodding and taking it all in. We could both see that although the buildings were weathered, they were solid and true.