Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“She’ll outgrow it,” Jim said, “and if she don’t, that means it’s her nature, not something we can change.”

“It’s up to us to set her straight,” I said. “I turned illiterate Mexican kids into readers. I can make my own daughter shape up.”

Rosemary was always getting caught up in dangerous situations, almost as if she was drawn to them. She was constantly falling into draws and out of trees. It was always the buckingest horse that caught her eye. She loved to catch snakes and scorpions, keeping them in a jar for a while, but then she’d grow worried that they were lonely and missed their families, so she’d turn them loose.

That first October on the ranch, we bought a pumpkin in Seligman and carved it into a jack-o’-lantern to celebrate Halloween. Rosemary had dressed for Halloween in a tattered old silk dress she’d found in a trunk in the storage barn, and she held it up over the jack-o’-lantern, fascinated by the patterns that the flame made through the thin fabric. Jim and I weren’t paying much attention when she lowered the dress too close to the candle and it caught fire, the dry silk bursting into flames.

Rosemary was screaming while Jim grabbed his horsehide duster and wrapped it around her to smother the flames. It was all over in an instant. We carried her into the bedroom, and Jim quietly talked her down from hysteria while I cut off the remains of the silk dress. Rosemary had a wide burn across her stomach, though it wasn’t too deep. The nearest hospital was over two hours away, and besides, I didn’t care to splurge on a doctor, so I lathered her burn in Vaseline, which cured everything from boils to rashes, and bandaged her up. When I was finished, I looked down at her and shook my head.

“Are you mad at me, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.

“Not as mad as I should be,” I said. I just didn’t believe in mollycoddling kids when they hurt themselves. Fussing over her wasn’t going to help her realize the mistake she’d made. “You’re the most accidentprone little girl I’ve ever known. And I hope at least you’ve learned what happens when you play with fire.”

Still, she’d been pretty brave about it all-she was always a brave little kid, you had to hand it to her-and I softened up.

“Same thing happened to my brother, Buster, when he was small, and to my grandfather,” I said. “So I guess it runs in the family.”

THAT FIRST WINTER, JIMand I paid fifty dollars for a marvelous long-range radio from Montgomery Ward. It had a big wire antenna that a couple of the cowboys helped us rig up, stringing it between two of the tall cedars outside the house. “Brings the twentieth century to Yavapai County,” I told Jim.

Since we had no electricity, we ran the radio off two massive batteries that cost another fifty dollars and weighed about ten pounds apiece. When the batteries were fresh, we could get stations all the way from Europe with announcers jabbering away in French and German. Adolf Hitler had taken over in Germany, and a civil war was brewing in Spain, but we weren’t particularly interested in European affairs. The reason we shelled out so much money was to get the weather report, which was much more important to us than what the Krauts were up to.

Every morning we got up before dawn and Jim turned the radio on low, crouching down next to it to listen to the weather report from a station in California. The fronts that came our way usually started there, though sometimes we were hit by winter storms that traveled all the way down from Canada. With water so scarce and severe storms so dangerous- drowning or freezing cattle, flattening barns, washing away entire families, the lightning electrocuting horses with steel shoes-we lived and died by those forecasts. You could say we were true aficionados of the weather. We’d follow a storm that started out in Los Angeles and moved east. The clouds usually ended up getting caught by the tip of the Rockies, where they’d dump most of their moisture, but sometimes that storm drifted south, making its way east through a passage above the Gulf of California, and that was when we got our big rains.

Rosemary and Little Jim loved the storms more than just about anything else. When the skies turned dark and the air grew heavy, I called them onto the porch and we all watched as the storm, with its boiling clouds and cannonading thunder, its white claws of lightning and drifting sheets of black rain, rolled across the range.

A distant storm sometimes seemed small in the huge sweep of the plateau, darkening one patch of land while everything else remained bathed in sunlight. Sometimes the storm veered off and missed us altogether. But if it hit the yard, the excitement really began, the thunder and lightning splitting the sky, the water hammering on the tin roof and pouring off the sides, filling the cisterns, the draws, and the dams.

To live in a place where water was so scarce made the rare moments like this-when the heavens poured forth an abundance of water and the hard earth softened and turned lush and green-seem magical, almost miraculous. The kids had an irresistible urge to get out and dance in the rain, and I always let them go and sometimes joined them myself, all of us prancing around, arms upraised, as the water beat down on our faces, plastering our hair and soaking our clothes.

Afterward, we all ran down to the draws that led to Big Jim the dam, and once the first rush of water had passed, I’d let the kids strip off their clothes and go swimming. They’d stay out there for hours, paddling around, pretending to be alligators or dolphins or hippopotamuses. They had a heck of a time playing in the rain puddles, too. When the water sank through the soil and all that was left was mud, they’d keep playing, rolling around until everything but the whites of their eyes and their teeth was plastered with mud. Once the mud dried, which didn’t take long, it sheared right off, leaving them pretty clean, and they got back into their clothes.

Sometimes over supper, when Jim got home after a storm, the kids would describe their escapades in the water and mud, and Jim would recount his vast store of water lore and water history. Once the world was nothing but water, he explained, and you wouldn’t think it to look at us, but human beings were mostly water. The miraculous thing about water, he said, was that it never came to an end. All the water on the earth had been here since the beginning of time, it had just moved around from rivers and lakes and oceans to clouds and rain and puddles and then sunk through the soil to underground streams, to springs and wells, where it got drunk by people and animals and went back to rivers and lakes and oceans.

The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus himself might have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard-ice. Sometimes it was soft-snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless-clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible-vapor-floating up into the sky like the souls of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we’d die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water for granted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.

THE RAINS USUALLY ARRIVEDin April, August, and December, but in our second year on the ranch, April came and went without rain. So did August and so did December, and by the following year, we were in the midst of a serious drought. The range turned sandy and windblown, and the mudflats became dry and cracked.