Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

When we first arrived, the people around Main Street were polite yet guarded, but after they found out my husband was the son of the great Lot Smith, who fought the federals with Brigham Young and founded Tuba City and had eight wives and fifty-two children, they warmed right up. As a matter of fact, they started treating us like visiting dignitaries.

I had thirty students of all ages, and they were a sweet and well-behaved lot. Because they were polygamists, they were almost all related in one way or another and talked about their “other mothers” and “double cousins.” The girls doted on Rosemary, who was now six, and Little Jim, who was four, fussing over them, combing their hair, dressing them up, and practicing mothering skills. The girls were all listed in the “Joy Book,” meaning they were eligible for marriage and were waiting for their “uncle” to decide whom they would marry.

The houses they lived in, I came to see, were essentially breeding factories where as many as seven wives were expected to churn out a baby a year. The way the Mormons saw it, God had populated earth with beings in his likeness, so if Mormon men were going to follow the path of God, they had to have their own brood of kids to populate their own heavenly world in the hereafter. The girls were raised to be docile and submissive. In the first few months I was there, a couple of my thirteen-year-old girls simply disappeared, vanishing into their arranged marriages.

Rosemary was fascinated by these kids with all their multitudes of moms, and these dads with all their sets of wives, and she kept asking me to explain it. She was particularly intrigued with Mormon underwear and wondered if it really gave the Mormons special powers.

“That’s what they believe,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Then why do they believe it?”

“America is a free country,” I said. “And that means people are free to believe whatever cockamamie thing they want to believe.”

“So they don’t have to believe it if they don’t want to?” Rosemary asked.

“No, they don’t”

“But do they know that?”

Smart kid. That, I came to see, was the heart of the matter. You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being broodmares dressed in feed sacks.

In class, I spent the bulk of my time on the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic, but I also peppered my lessons with talk of nursing and teaching, the opportunities in big cities, the Twenty-first Amendment, and the doings of Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. I told them how, when I was no older than they were, I was breaking horses. I talked about going to Chicago and learning to fly an airplane. Any of them could do all that, too, I said, long as they had the gumption.

Some of them-both boys and girls-looked shocked, but more than a few seemed genuinely intrigued.

I hadn’t been in Main Street for long when I got a visit from Uncle Eli, the patriarch of the local polygamists. He had a long graying beard, scraggly eyebrows, and a beaklike nose. His smile was practiced and his eyes were cold. I gave him a drink of pollywog water, and as we talked, he kept patting my hand and calling me “Teacher Lady.”

Some of the mothers, he said, had told him their little girls were coming home from school talking about suffragettes and women flying airplanes. What I needed to understand was that he and his people had moved to this area to get away from the rest of the world, and I was bringing that world into their very schoolroom, teaching the children things their mothers and fathers considered dangerous and even blasphemous. My job, he went on, was to give them just enough arithmetic and reading to manage the household and make their way through the Book of Mormon.

“Teacher Lady, you’re not preparing these girls for their lives,” he said. “You’re only upsetting and confusing them. There will be no more talk of worldly ways.”

“Look, Uncle,” I said, “I don’t work for you. I work for the state of Arizona. I don’t need you telling me my job. My job is to give these kids an education, and part of that is letting them know a little bit about what the world is really like.”

Uncle’s smile never wavered. Rosemary was sitting at the table drawing, and he walked over and stroked her hair. “What are you drawing?” he asked.

“That’s my mom riding Red Devil,” Rosemary said. It was one of her favorite stories about me, and she was always making drawings of it. She looked up at Uncle Eli. “My daddy used to be a Mormon.”

“But he’s not any longer?”

“No. He’s a rancher.”

“Then he is lost.”

“Dad never gets lost-and he doesn’t even need a compass. He just says Mom made him throw away his wonder underwear. Do you wear wonder underwear?”

“We call it the temple garment,” Uncle said. “You’ll make some man a fine wife one day soon. Shall we put you in the Joy Book?”

“Leave her out of this,” I said. “And leave her out of that darned book.”

“I’m done talking to you,” he said. “If you don’t obey me, we will all shun you as the devil.”

THE NEXT DAY Igave an especially impassioned lesson on political and religious freedom, talking about the totalitarian countries where everyone was forced to believe one thing. In America, by contrast, people were free to think for themselves and follow their hearts when it came to matters of faith. “It’s like one of the wonderful department stores in Chicago,” I said. “You can go around trying on different dresses until you find one that suits you.”

That night when I went to throw out the dishwater, Uncle Eli was standing in the yard, his arms crossed, staring at me.

“Evening,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He just kept staring at me, like he was giving me the evil eye.

The next night I looked up from fixing dinner, and there he was again, standing framed in the window, staring out from under his unruly eyebrows with the same baleful expression.

“What’s he want, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.

“Oh, he’s just hoping I’ll have a staring contest with him.”

The teacherage didn’t have curtains, but the next day I sewed together some feed sacks and tacked them over the window. That evening there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, Uncle Eli was standing there.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He just stared at me, and I closed the door. The knocking started up again, slow and persistent. I went into the room where we slept and loaded my pearl-handled revolver. Uncle Eli was still knocking on the door. I opened it, and as I did, I swung the gun up and across so that by the time he saw me, the gun was pointed dead at him.

The last time I’d pointed the gun had been at that drunk in Ash Fork who’d called Helen a dead whore when I wouldn’t sell him any hooch. I hadn’t fired then, but this time I aimed just to the left of Uncle Eli’s face and pulled the trigger.

When the shot rang out, Uncle Eli barked in fright and instinctively jerked his hands up. The bullet had whizzed by his ear, but the barrel had been close enough that his face was sprayed with soot. He stared at me, speechless.

“You come knocking around here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear,” I said, “ ’cause next time I won’t aim to miss.”

Two days later, the county sheriff showed up at the school. He was an easygoing country fellow with a goiter. Investigating a schoolmarm for shooting at a polygamous elder wasn’t something he did every day, and he seemed uncertain how to handle it.