Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

The Poms were so thrilled with Jim’s work on the ranch that they sent us a pure-blooded Guernsey. Bossie was dun-colored, big and beautiful, and she gave us two gallons a day of rich milk with good cream. She was such a good milk cow that I planned to breed her in the fall, sell the calf in the spring, and sock away the proceeds. I had already begun to think about saving for the day when we could afford a ranch of our own.

But one day someone left Bossie’s stall unlatched, and she broke into the granary, where she devoured almost an entire bag of feed. When Old Jake came upon her, she had bloated and was leaning against the barn wall, her stomach swollen while she groaned in pain.

Jim and Old Jake did everything they could. To get her to throw up, they made a mixture of the worst stuff they could think of: tobacco and milk of magnesia and whiskey and soapy water. They put it in a whiskey bottle and tried to pour it down her throat, but Bossie wouldn’t swallow, and it dribbled out the sides of her mouth. So then Old Jake held her jaws apart while Jim stuck the bottle so far down inside her gullet that his arm disappeared up to his elbow.

He poured the concoction directly into her stomach, and she did throw up a little, but she was so far gone by then that it made no difference. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed slowly to the ground. In desperation, Jim punctured her gut with his pocketknife to let the gas out. But that didn’t work, either, and in another hour, our big, beautiful Guernsey was gone, lying glass-eyed and heavy on the barn floor.

I was furious, heartbroken about the death of Bossie, but beside myself about the loss of what I hoped we’d earn come calving season. I was sure that it was Rosemary, with her misguided notions about animals and freedom, who had let Bossie out. The girl had been too horrified to watch Jim and Old Jake ministering to the cow, and I found her on the long porch, sobbing about Bossie’s end. I felt like smacking her good, but she insisted she hadn’t let the cow out, that it was Little Jim who’d done it, and since I didn’t have any proof one way or another, I had to let the matter go.

“Just you remember,” I said, “that this is what could happen when an animal gets freedom. Animals act like they hate to be penned up, but the fact is, they don’t know what to do with freedom. And a lot of times it kills them.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE HERDarrived, Jim set out to repair all the fencing on the ranch. The job took a month. He brought Rosemary along with him in the pickup, and they were gone for days at a time, sleeping in the bed of the truck, cooking over campfires, and returning only for resupplies of food and wire. Rosemary adored her father, and he was completely unfazed by her wild streak. They were happy to spend hours in each other’s company, Rosemary talking nonstop and Jim barely saying a word, just nodding and smiling-with an occasional “That so?” or “Sounds good”-as he dug holes, trimmed posts, and tightened wire.

“Doesn’t that kid ever shut up?” Old Jake once asked.

“She’s got a lot to say,” Jim told him.

While they were gone, I settled in to life on the ranch. There was always more to do on any given day than you could get done, and I quickly established a few rules for myself. One was to dispense with any unnecessary cleaning-no maid’s work. Arizona was a dusty place, but a little dirt never killed anyone. That bit about cleanliness being next to godliness was a lot of balderdash as far as I was concerned. In fact, I considered it downright insulting. Anyone who worked the land got dirty, and in Chicago I’d seen my share of less than godly people living in squeaky-clean mansions. So I gave the house a going-over only once every few months, working myself into a frenzy and blazing through all the scrubbing and dusting in a single day.

As for clothes, I flatly refused to wash them. I made sure we all bought loose-fitting clothes that let us do squats and windmill our arms-none of that tight buttoned-up stuff like my mother favored. We wore our shirts till they got dirty, then we put them on backward and wore them until that side got dirty, then we wore them inside out, then inside out backward. We were getting four times more wear out of each shirt than persnickety folks did. When the shirts reached the point where Jim was joking about them scaring the cattle, I’d take the whole pile into Seligman and pay by the pound to have them all steamcleaned.

Levi’s we didn’t wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil-and then we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi’s reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn’t get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but briar-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi’s reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn’t pay a cowboy to let you wash his.

I kept the cooking basic as well. I didn’t make dishes the way fancy eastern housewives did-soufflés and sauces and garnished this and stuffed that. I made food. Beans were my specialty. I always had a pot of them on the stove, and that usually lasted two to five days, depending on how many cowboys we had around. My recipe was fairly simple: Boil beans, salt to taste. What I liked most about beans was that as long as you added water from time to time, you couldn’t overcook them.

When we weren’t having beans, we had steak. My recipe for steak was also fairly simple: Fry on both sides, salt to taste. With the steak came potatoes: Boil unpeeled, salt to taste. For dessert, we’d have canned peaches packed in tasty syrup. I liked to say that what my cooking lacked in variety, it made up for in consistency. “No surprises,” I’d tell the cowboys, “but no disappointments, either.”

Once when some milk had spoiled and I was feeling ambitious, I did make cottage cheese the way my mother made it when I was growing up. I boiled the clabbered milk and cut up the curds with a knife. Then I wrapped it in a burlap sugar sack and hung it overnight to let the whey drain out. The next day I chopped it again, salted it, and passed it out at supper. The family loved it so much they wolfed it down in under a minute. I couldn’t believe I’d worked so long over something that was gone so quickly.

“That was the biggest waste of time,” I said. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Rosemary was eyeing me.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” I told her.

Jim never had it in him to raise his hand to his daughter, and when he and Rosemary returned from fixing fences, she was more rambunctious than ever. Even though Rosemary was still just a little girl, I could sense the beginnings of a fundamental difference of opinion between her and me. I felt there was a lot I needed to teach her. I wanted to give her an early grounding in the basics of arithmetic and reading, but even more important, I wanted to get across the idea that the world was a dangerous place and life was unpredictable and you had to be smart, focused, and determined to make it through. You had to be willing to work hard and persevere in the face of misfortune. A lot of people, even those born with brains and beauty, didn’t have what it took to knuckle down and get the thing done.

From the time she was three, I drilled Rosemary on her numbers. If she asked for a glass of milk, I told her she could have it only if she spelled out “milk.” I tried to make her see that everything in life-from Bossie to the cottage cheese-was a lesson, but it was up to her to figure out what she’d learned. Rosemary was a bright little kid in a lot of ways, but math and spelling confused her, and answering questions on cue bored her, as did the routine of daily chores. Jim told me to lighten up, she was just four, but by four I’d been gathering eggs and taking care of my baby sister. I began to worry that Rosemary was unfocused and that if we didn’t stamp it out early, it could become a permanent part of her character.