Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

When Jim heard it, he said, “Probably should paint that on the hearse, too.”

One weekend that December, three ladies from Brooklyn were staying with our neighbor Mrs. Hutter, the woman who cooked the stews for the school and who was their cousin, and they hired me to take them all up to see the Grand Canyon. I stored a picnic lunch in the hearse and brought Rosemary along with me.

I expected these Brooklyn gals to be tough and smart, and maybe even practicing socialists, but instead they were all ninnies who wore too much makeup and kept complaining about the Arizona heat, the hearse’s uncomfortable buggy seats, and the fact that there was no place in the entire state to get a good egg cream. They had these thick Brooklyn accents, and I had to fight the temptation to correct their atrocious pronunciation.

While I tried to keep up a positive line of chatter, pointing out that the town of Jerome was named after Winston Churchill’s mother’s family, they kept saying things like “But whatta youse people do out here?” and “How do youse live wit-out electricity?”

They also kept going on about Christmas in New York, about the tree in Rockefeller Center, the window displays at Macy’s, the gifts, the lights, the kids lining up to talk to the red-suited Santas.

“What’s Santa Claus gonna bring youse dis year?” one of the ladies asked Rosemary.

“Who’s Santa Claus?” she asked.

“Youse never heard of Santa Claus?” The woman sounded bewildered.

“We don’t pay much heed to that sort of thing around here,” I said.

“Well, dat’s a crying shame.”

“So, who’s Santa Claus?” Rosemary asked again.

“Saint Nicholas,” I said. “The patron saint of department stores.”

Near Picacho Butte, I noticed that the emergency brake had been on the entire time, and without saying anything, I reached down and quietly released it. Just then we came to a long downward slope at the edge of the plateau. The hearse began picking up speed, and when I pressed down on the brake pedal, it went all the way to the floor with no resistance. We had no brakes.

I started swerving the car on and off the road, hoping the sand and loose gravel on the shoulder would slow us down. The Brooklyn women got all overwrought, telling me to slow down, asking me what was happening and demanding that I let them out. “Stop duh car!”

“Now, calm yourselves, girls,” I said. “We just got us a little runaway taxi, but everything’s under control. I’ll get us out of this.”

I looked over at Rosemary, who was staring at me wide-eyed, and gave her a big wink to show her just how much fun we were having. The little creature grinned. She was positively fearless, unlike those honking lace-panties in the back.

But the swerving hadn’t slowed the car, and I realized the situation called for more drastic measures. We reached a stretch of the road that was cut into the side of the mountain. On our side it sloped down, and on the far side it rose upward.

“Ready for some hijinks?” I shouted.

“I am,” Rosemary said, but the Brooklyn ladies continued to wail.

“Hang tight!” I shouted.

I cut the car across the road and angled up the hillside, bouncing over holes and rocks, but the slope was steep, and while we started losing momentum, we also started tipping sideways, and then the car rolled once, landing upside down, exactly like I’d planned.

We got knocked around a bit, but no one was seriously hurt, and we all scrambled out through the open windows. The Brooklyn ladies were in a tizzy, cussing my driving and threatening to sue or have me arrested and my license revoked. “Youse almost got us kilt!”

“All that’s happened to you is that you’ve had the lace knocked off your panties,” I said. “Instead of carrying on, you should be thanking me, because my driving skills just saved all your necks. You ride, you got to know how to fall, and you drive, you got to know how to crash.”

THOSE BROOKLYN BROADS WEREa bunch of sissies, but they got me thinking about Christmas. For the most part, pioneers and ranchers didn’t have the time or money for gift giving and tree trimming, and they tended to treat Christmas like Prohibition, another eastern aberration that wasn’t of much concern to them. A couple of years back, when some missionaries were trying to dazzle the Navajos into converting, they had a gift-bearing Santa Claus jump out of a plane, but his parachute didn’t open, and he landed with a thud in front of the Indians, convincing them-and most of the rest of us-that the less we had to do with jolly old Saint Nick, the better off we’d be.

Still, I got to wondering if maybe I was depriving my kids of a special experience, and that week I bought some of those fancy new electric Christmas lights in Kingman and a couple of small toys from the Commercial Central, the general store in Seligman.

On Christmas morning I had Jim secretly climb up on the roof and start shaking a string of old carriage bells while I explained to the kids that it was Saint Nick and his flying reindeer visiting all the children in the world, bringing them toys that he and his elves in the North Pole had spent the year making. Rosemary’s expression went from bewildered to doubtful, then she started shaking her head and grinning. “What are you talking about, Mom?” she asked. “Any dummy knows deer can’t fly.”

“The deer are magic, for crying out loud,” I said. I explained that Santa Claus himself was magic, and that was how he was able to visit every child in the world, leaving them all gifts in socks, in the course of one evening. Then I held up two socks and passed them over to Rosemary and Little Jim.

Rosemary pulled out an orange, some hazelnuts, a roll of LifeSavers, and a small packet with a set of jacks inside. “These aren’t from the North Pole,” she said as she examined the jacks. “These are from the Commercial Central. I saw them there.”

I walked over to the window and stuck my head out. “Come on down, Jim,” I hollered. “They’re not buying it.”

Even though I couldn’t sell the kids on Santa Claus, they were beside themselves with excitement about the Christmas lights. We all drove up into the hills and cut down a short pine that the kids picked out. Jim dug a hole in the front yard and we set it in that, tamping down the dirt and stringing the lights around its branches. All afternoon Rosemary and Little Jim danced around the tree and shouted at the sun to hurry up and set.

Once it grew dark, we called the cowboys out from the bunkhouse, and Jim pulled the hearse up next to the tree. He opened the hood, attached a cable to the battery, and as we all stood in a circle around the tree, he raised the cable and the light cord above his head, and with a flourish, brought them together. The tree burst into color and we all gasped at the red, yellow, green, white, and blue lights boldly glowing in the cold night, the only lights for miles around in the immense darkness of the range.

“It’s magic!” Rosemary shrieked.

A number of the ranch hands had never seen electric lights, and a few of them took off their hats and held them over their hearts.

And those Brooklyn broads thought we didn’t know how to celebrate Christmas in style.

IN MY SECOND YEARat Peach Springs, I had twenty-five students in my one-room schoolhouse. Six of them-almost a quarter of the class-were the children of Deputy Johnson, a rawboned chain-smoker who wore an old fedora and had a droopy mustache. For the most part, I liked Deputy Johnson. He turned a blind eye to minor infractions and tended to give folks the benefit of the doubt as long as they acknowledged that he was the law, deciding what was right and wrong. But he could come down on you hard if you took issue with him. He had a total of thirteen children and, their daddy being one of the county lawmen, they did pretty much as they pleased, letting air out of people’s tires, throwing cherry bombs down outhouse holes, and leaving the babysitter tied to a tree all night.