Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“We received a complaint, ma’am, alleging you took a potshot at one of the townspeople.”

“There was a menacing intruder, and I was defending myself and my children. I’ll be happy to stand up in court and explain exactly what happened.”

The sheriff sighed. “Around here, we like people to work out their differences amongst themselves. But if you can’t get along with these folks, and there’s many that can’t, you probably don’t belong here.”

After that, I knew it was only a matter of time. I continued to teach in Main Street, telling those girls what I thought they needed to know about the world, but I stopped getting dinner invitations, and a bunch of the parents took their kids out of the school. In the spring I got a letter from the Mohave County superintendent saying that he didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to continue teaching in Main Street come next fall.

I WAS UNEMPLOYED AGAIN,which really fried my bacon because I’d been acting in the best interests of my students. Fortunately, that summer a teaching job opened up in Peach Springs, a tiny town on a Walapai reservation about sixty-five miles from the ranch. It paid fifty dollars a month, but in addition, the county had set aside ten dollars a month for a part-time janitor, ten dollars a month for a bus driver, and another ten dollars a month for someone to cook lunch for the kids. I said I’d do everything, which meant eighty dollars a month, and we’d be able to sock away almost all of it.

The old school bus had died, so the county had also budgeted money to buy another one-or at least some form of transportation-and after scouting around, I found the perfect vehicle at a used-car lot in Kingman: a terrifically elegant dark blue hearse. Since it had only front seats, you could jam a whole passel of kids in the back. I took some silver paint and, in big block letters, wrote SCHOOL BUS on both sides.

Despite my fancy silver sign, people in those parts, including my husband, were pretty literal-minded, and they all kept calling it the hearse.

“It’s not a hearse,” I told Jim. “It’s a school bus.”

“Painting the word ’dog’ on the side of a pig don’t make the pig a dog,” he said.

He had a point, and after a while I started calling it the hearse, too.

I’d get up around four in the morning and cover upward of two hundred miles a day between traveling to and from Peach Springs and picking up and dropping off the kids at the different stops all over the district. I’d teach the whole bunch by myself, take them all home, return to the school and do the janitoring, then head back to the ranch. I farmed out the cooking at five dollars a week to our neighbor Mrs. Hutter, who made pots of stew that I took to the school. Those were some long days, but I loved the work, and the money started piling up pretty quickly.

Rosemary was seven by then and Little Jim was five, so I took them with me in the morning, and they became part of the class. Rosemary hated being taught by her mother, particularly because I sometimes gave her paddlings in front of other students to set an example and show I wasn’t playing favorites. Little Jim had also become a handful, and he got his share of paddlings as well, though a spanking never kept either of those rascals out of mischief for long.

I had to make two trips to collect all the kids, and I left Rosemary, Little Jim, and the kids from the town of Yampi at the school while I made my usual second run to pick up the kids from Pica. One morning when I got back to the school, Little Jim was lying on his back on my desk, stone-cold unconscious. The other kids explained that he’d fallen out of the swing, trying to make it all the way to heaven like the little ghost boy.

I was in a bind. I needed to take Little Jim to the hospital, but the nearest one was in Kingman, thirty-five miles away, and I couldn’t leave the kids unsupervised for that long. I packed as many of them as I possibly could into the hearse and had the rest stand on the sideboards, hanging on through the open windows. With Rosemary holding limp Little Jim in her lap beside me, I set out to take all the kids home, going to Yampi and then Pica-the kids on the sideboards having the time of their lives, hooting and hollering, treating it like a carnival ride-before heading for Kingman.

We were barreling down Route 66 when Little Jim suddenly sat up. “Where am I?” he asked.

Rosemary, thinking this was hilarious, burst into laughter, but I was furious. I wanted to take Little Jim to the hospital anyway, but he insisted he was fine and even stood up on the car seat and started dancing around to prove it, which got me even more furious. I’d done all that driving around for nothing, canceling class for no good reason, and I was worried I’d be docked a day’s pay.

“We’re just going to go round up all those kids a second time,” I said.

“But they’ve already gone home,” Rosemary said. “They’ll be out playing and won’t want to come back.”

“I’ve told you before, life’s not about doing what you want.”

Rosemary looked a little pouty. Then she started saying she didn’t feel so well, she was dizzy and needed to go home.

“Oh, so you’re the sick one now?” I said.

“That’s right, Mommy.”

“Well, I’m going to take you to the hospital, then,” I said.

“I just want to go home.”

“Not another word,” I said. “If you’re sick, you don’t need pampering, you need treatment.” Whenever she tried to protest, I repeated myself.

I drove straight to the Kingman hospital. After a talk with one of the nurses about a daughter who wanted to play hooky, I arranged for Rosemary to spend the night in a room by herself where she could ponder truth and consequences. If I was going to be docked a day’s pay, someone, at the very least, was going to learn a lesson from the experience.

“Feeling better?” I asked Rosemary when I picked her up the next day.

“Yep,” she said.

And we both left it at that. But the kid never tried to play hooky again.

ONE SATURDAY MORNING THATfall, when I went out into the yard, I looked over at the hearse parked next to the barn. It was just sitting there, and that struck me as a real waste. Unlike a horse, a car didn’t need a day off every now and then. If I could put the hearse to work for me on the weekends, it would-after gas-be pure profit. I decided to start up a taxi service.

On the side of the hearse, under SCHOOL BUS, I used the same silver paint to add AND TAXI. Jim came up with the idea of strapping some old buggy seats in the back when we had paying passengers.

There weren’t exactly a lot of people standing by the road trying to hail taxis in that part of Arizona, but there were folks without cars who from time to time needed to get to the courthouse in Kingman or be picked up at the train depot in Flagstaff, and they’d hire me. They’d leave word in advance with Deputy Johnson in Seligman, and every day or two I’d stop by his office to see if I had any customers.

Most of the money went into our savings, but I kept some aside for the occasional flying lesson.

I was an excellent driver. I didn’t particularly like city driving, with all the stoplights and street signs and traffic cops, but out in the country I was in my element. I knew the shortcuts and the back roads and had no hesitation heading out cross-country, barreling through the sagebrush and startling the roadrunners out of the undergrowth.

If we got stuck in a ditch while I was ferrying around the schoolkids, I had them get out and push while we all chanted Hail Marys. “Push and pray!” I’d holler while gripping the steering wheel and gunning the engine, sand and rocks spraying behind the spinning tires as the car fish-tailed its way out of the ditch. My paying passengers were also expected to help push if we got stuck. I didn’t make them say Hail Marys, but I used the same line: “Push and pray!”