Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

One of the deputy’s sons was Johnny Johnson, who was a couple of years older than Rosemary. He’d been a handful ever since I started teaching at Peach Springs. Maybe it was because he had older brothers who sat around telling dirty stories about girls, but Johnny couldn’t keep his hands off them-a regular tomcat in the making. He had kissed Rosemary on the mouth, something I learned a few days later from one of the other students. Rosemary said it was just a yucky thing that had happened, nothing she wanted anyone to get in any trouble over. Johnny, for his part, called Rosemary and the other student lying finks and said I couldn’t prove anything.

It wasn’t worth holding a court of inquisition over, but I was still simmering about the matter a couple of weeks later when, one day during class, the little punk reached over and stuck his hand up the dress of a sweet Mexican girl named Rosita. That boy needed to be taught to keep his grimy hands to himself, so I put my book down, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face. He looked at me, bug-eyed with shock, and then he reached up and slapped me in the face.

For a second I was speechless. A smile started creeping across Johnny’s face. The little squirt thought he had the best of me. It was then that I hauled him up and threw him against the wall, backhanding him again and again, and when he cowered down in a ball on the floor, I grabbed my ruler and started whaling his butt.

“You’ll be sorry!” he kept screaming. “You’ll be sorry!”

I didn’t care. Johnny Johnson needed to learn a lesson he’d never forget, and you couldn’t spell it out on the blackboard, you had to beat it into him. Also, he was clearly in danger of becoming a crumb-bum heel like my first husband and the producer who seduced Helen, and he needed to realize there could be consequences for mistreating girls. So I kept whaling on him, maybe even beyond the call of duty, and truth be told, I got more than a little satisfaction from it.

JUST AS I EXPECTED,Deputy Johnson showed up at school the next day.

“I’m not here to have a conversation,” he said. “I’m here to tell you to keep your hands off my boy. Got it?”

“You deputies may think you run Yavapai County, but I run my classroom,” I said, “and I’ll discipline wayward kids as I see fit. Got it?”

When Jim came home that night, I told him what had happened.

“This is getting almost predictable,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“These showdowns. It’s becoming a pattern.”

“It would be either a pattern of me standing up for myself or a pattern of me getting pushed around.”

Deputy Johnson couldn’t get me fired outright, since they’d have trouble replacing me in the middle of the school year, but a few months later, I received another one of those blasted letters saying my contract was not going to be renewed. At this point I’d practically lost count of the number of times I’d been fired, and I was getting pretty sick of it.

The day the letter arrived, I sat at the kitchen table thinking about my situation. If I had it all to do over again, I’d have done the same thing. I wasn’t in the wrong. The rules were. I was a darned good teacher and had been doing what was necessary, not only for Rosita but also for Johnny Johnson, who needed to be reined in before he wound up in serious trouble. Even so, I’d been booted once again, and there was nothing I could do about it.

As I sat there brooding about all this, Rosemary walked into the kitchen, and when she saw me, a look of alarm swept her face. She started stroking my arm. “Don’t cry, Mom,” she said. “Stop it. Please stop it.”

It was only then that I realized tears were running down my cheeks. I remembered how disturbed I’d been as a little girl, watching my mother cry. Now, by letting my own daughter see me all weak and pitiful, I felt that I’d failed her in a big way, and I was furious with myself.

“I’m not crying,” I said. “I just got dust in my eyes.” I pushed her hand away. “Because I’m not weak. You’ll never have to worry about that. Your mother is not a weak woman.”

And with that I headed out to the woodpile and went on a tear splitting logs, setting each one up on the chopping block and using every ounce of strength I had to bring the ax down on it, sending the split pieces of white wood flying apart while Rosemary stood watching. It was almost as satisfying as whaling Johnny Johnson.

DEPUTY JOHNSON MADE SUREeverybody knew I’d been let go, and he also made no secret as to who was behind it. When I ran into people at the Commercial Central, they figured they couldn’t ask me how things were going at school, the way they usually did, and there were the awkward silences that everyone who’s been given the boot knows all too well.

But I was bound and determined to show folks that Deputy Johnson hadn’t broken my spirit, and I was looking for a way to do that when it was announced that a special premiere of Gone with the Wind would be held in Kingman. I decided to attend, in the fanciest dress this county had ever seen.

Gone with the Wind was by far and away my favorite book-after the Bible-and I thought it had about as many lessons in it. I’d read it when it first came out, then I’d sat down and read it again. I’d also read most of it aloud to Rosemary. Scarlett O’Hara was my kind of gal. She was tough, she was sassy, she knew what she wanted, and she never let anything or anyone get in her way.

Like most people in the country, I’d been looking forward to the movie for years. It was the most expensive movie ever made-shot entirely in Technicolor-and magazines and newspapers had been following all the details of the casting and production. Now that it was finally finished, the studio was holding premieres around the country, including the one in Kingman, and charging five dollars for a ticket-an astronomical amount compared to the nickel that a ticket usually cost.

Women were expected to wear gowns and men to wear tuxedos, or at least their Sunday best, to the premiere. Since I’d never owned a gown and wasn’t about to splurge on one-the ticket being enough of an extravagance-I decided that I’d take my inspiration from Scarlett herself: I’d fashion my own gown using the living room curtains. The way I saw it, having curtains in the bedrooms made sense, but you didn’t really need them in the living room. Those red velvet curtains I’d bought with the S &H green stamps were just hanging there in the living room at Hackberry, gathering dust and starting to fade from the Arizona sun. And red was my favorite color.

My gown wasn’t going to be the sort of fitted, wasp-waisted getup that Scarlett had to be laced into. It would be floor-length but simple and free-flowing, more Grecian than antebellum. I borrowed a sewing machine from my neighbor Mrs. Hutter, who was an accomplished seamstress. She helped me design the pattern and assisted in the fittings, but I did all the actual sewing. For a belt, I used the curtain sash.

I didn’t have a full-length mirror, but I could tell when I finished it and put it on for the first time that the gown was, quite frankly, a masterpiece.

“You look like a movie star,” Rosemary said.

“That’s a lot of dress,” Jim said. “They’ll sure see you coming.”

Jim refused to go to the premiere with me. He had no use for movies. We’d been to a few westerns, and he’d actually walked out of a couple of them, completely disgusted by what he considered the phony depiction of cowboy life-the way movie cowboys sat by the campfire singing after a supposedly rough day on the trail, the way they hung around the corral doing rope tricks instead of mending fences, the way they wore clean white hats and fringy vests and fluffy sheepskin chaps, and most of all, the way they jumped from rooftops onto their horses.