Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

Jim’s plan was to move the herd back and forth between the two ranches, keeping the cattle in Hackberry during the winter and bringing them back to the high plateau around Big Jim in the summer. When the two ranches were combined, they totaled 180,000 acres. It was a big spread-one of the biggest in Arizona-and in good years, we could bring some ten thousand head of cattle to market. When the Poms saw those numbers, they were more than happy to pony up for Hackberry.

The first time we rode out to Hackberry, I flat-out fell in love with the place. It was down off the plateau, between the Peacock and the Walapai mountains, the range dotted by chaparral. Runoff from the mountains fed the plain, and there was also that spring in the granite foothills. The house, nestled in a hollow, was a former dance hall that had been taken apart, moved to the spot, and reassembled, with a swank linoleum floor and the walls painted with signs saying NO ROUGH STUFF and TAKE THE FIGHT OUTSIDE.

The first time I saw the windmill, I took a drink of its well water, which came from deep beneath us and had been there for tens of thousands of years waiting for me to taste it. That well water tasted sweeter than the finest French liqueur. Some folks, when they struck it rich, liked to say that they were in the money, and that was how I felt-rich-only we were in the water. Our days of busting our humps hauling fuel drums over dirt roads were gone for good.

After the Poms bought Hackberry, one of the first things Jim did was to drive all the way to Los Angeles in the Chevy and return with a truck-load of half-inch lead pipe. It was a mile from the spring to the house, and we laid pipe the entire length, running strips of inner tube between the interconnecting pipe ends and tying it up with bailing wire. It wasn’t indoor plumbing-and it wasn’t exactly pretty-but it brought a constant supply of spring water to our back door, spurting forth clear and fresh when you opened the spigot.

Next to the spigot, we kept a metal cup, and few things were finer than coming back from a hot, dusty ride and filling that cup with a cold, wet drink, then pouring what was left over your head.

We moved the herd over to Hackberry in the fall and stayed there until the spring. I always loved bright colors, and at Hackberry, I decided to really go to town. I painted each room a different color-pink, blue, and yellow-put Navajo rugs on the floors, and got some red velvet curtains for the windows, using several books of S &H green stamps that I’d saved over the years.

Rosemary loved the colors even more than I did. She was already showing some artistic talent, tossing off perfect little line drawings without once lifting the pencil from the paper. Both kids were crazy about Hackberry, its green mountains, the lilacs, the birds of paradise, the tamarack trees around the chicken coop. There were several deep canyons running down out of the mountains, and after it rained, I’d rush with the kids up to the lip of one of them and we’d watch and cheer as the flash floods came thundering down the dry creek beds, shaking the ground beneath us.

Rosemary and Little Jim were also fascinated by the story of Hack-berry’s ghosts. Years earlier, a fire had broken out in the house when two children were inside. The mother rushed in and saved the boy, then returned to get her baby girl, but they both died in the flames and the little boy standing outside could hear their anguished cries. A few months later, the boy was on his swing, and he started going higher and higher, pumping his legs, trying to get up to heaven to be with his mother and sister, but he swung so high that he fell off and died as well.

All three of them supposedly haunted the ranch, and Rosemary, instead of being frightened, couldn’t stop looking for them. She’d wander around at night, calling out their names, and whenever she heard a sudden noise-a distant bobcat, a rustling in the tamarack trees, oil drums expanding with a bang in the heat-she’d get excited thinking maybe it was the ghosts. She was particularly intrigued by the little boy ghost, and she wanted to explain to him that since he was with his mother and sister, everything was in fact okay, and they were all free to go to heaven.

Ever since moving to the ranch, Jim and I had talked on and off about buying it, or at least buying a place of our own one day, but we’d had our hands full getting the ranch up and running, and buying had seemed a distant dream. Now that I’d spent time at Hackberry-a beautiful spread with good water-I wanted it and was determined to turn my dream into a plan.

We needed cash. We were never going to go into debt again, I swore, we were not going to lose this place the way we’d lost the house and the filling station in Ash Fork. I worked up the figures and decided we might be able to swing it in ten years if I started bringing in money and we scrimped and saved, pinching every penny till old Abe Lincoln yelped.

We’d always been frugal-Jim made the Poms a lot of money, but he made it a nickel at a time, reusing nails, saving old barbed wire, building fences with juniper saplings rather than milled posts. We never threw away anything. We saved bits of wood in case we needed shims. When our old shirts finally frayed to pieces, we cut off the buttons and put them in the button box; the shirts we either used as rags or gave to a seamstress in Seligman who turned them into patchwork quilts.

But now I came up with additional ways to save money. We made the children chairs out of orange crates. Rosemary drew on used paper bags-both sides-and painted on old boards. We drank from coffee cans with wire tied around them for handles. Whenever possible, I drove behind trucks so their slipstream pulled me along and I saved on gas.

I also came up with all sorts of moneymaking schemes, some more successful than others. I sold encyclopedias door-to-door, but that didn’t go over so well, seeing as how there were not a lot of bookish ranch hands in Yavapai County. I did a lot better visiting neighbors to solicit orders for Montgomery Ward, and I didn’t even have to resort to tricks like throwing dirt on the floor the way my crumb-bum first husband did. I also stayed up late writing short stories about cowboys and gunslingers for pulp magazines-using the nom de plume Legs LeRoy because I figured those pulp editors wouldn’t buy western tales from a lady-but I got no takers. I collected scrap metal in the Chevy and sold it by the pound. I also started playing poker with the hands, but Jim put a stop to that after I cleaned a couple of them out. “We don’t pay them enough as it is,” he said. “We can’t go taking what little they get.”

On weekends, I drove down Highway 66 with the kids, sending them out to pick up bottles that people had thrown out their car windows. Rosemary would take one side of the road, Little Jim the other, each of them dragging a burlap bag. The deposit was two cents for Coke bottles, five cents for cream bottles, ten cents for milk bottles, and a quarter for gallon jugs. One day we collected thirty dollars’ worth of bottles.

Sometimes other drivers would stop to see if we were okay. “You folks need any help there?” they’d call out.

“We’re just dandy,” I’d say. “Got any empties?”

Rosemary loved our scavenging expeditions. One day all four of us were over paying a call on our neighbors, the Hutters. After dinner, we were heading back to the Chevy, parked near their barn, when Rosemary spotted a bottle in the fuel drum that they used to hold trash. She ran to fetch it.

“Lily, this is getting a little out of hand,” Jim said. “We’re not so darned broke that we need to have our daughter digging around in someone’s garbage for a two-cent bottle.”

Rosemary held up the bottle. “It’s not a two-center, Dad,” she said. “It’s a ten-center.”