Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“People are like animals,” Jim went on. “Some are happiest penned in, some need to roam free. You got to recognize what’s in her nature and accept it.”

“So this is a lesson for me, then?”

Jim shrugged. “Our daughter’s found something she likes, this painting, and someone she wants to be with, this Rex fellow, so she’s way ahead of a lot of folks.”

“I guess I should try to let it go.”

“You’ll be happier if you do,” Jim said.

I told Rex and Rosemary I’d pay for everything if they’d get married in a Catholic church, and we’d do it in style. I was hoping that a big traditional wedding would get them off on the right foot and might even lead to a traditional marriage.

We rented a banquet hall at the Sands Hotel, which had just been built in downtown Phoenix. I got a good deal, since the hotel was new and trying to drum up business. I helped Rosemary pick out a wedding dress, and I got a good deal on that, too, because another bride-to-be had returned it when her wedding had fallen through. But it fit Rosemary perfectly.

I invited practically everyone I knew: ranchers and ranch hands, teachers and former students, administrators, members of the Arizona Democratic Party, people from my past like Grady Gammage, who got me that first teaching job in Red Lake, and Rooster, who wrote back to his old writing teacher that he’d be bringing the Apache girl he’d married. I was going to wear my Gone with the Wind gown, but Jim put the kibosh on that idea. He said he didn’t want me upstaging the bride.

“What are you going to do for a honeymoon?” I asked Rosemary as the day approached.

“We’re not going to plan one,” she said. “It’s Rex’s idea. We’re just going to get into the car after the wedding and go where the road takes us.”

“Well, honey, you’re in for a ride.”

Rosemary did look beautiful at her wedding. Her dress reached to the floor, with layers of lace over white silk, a long lace veil, and matching lace gloves that came up to her elbows. In her white high heels, she was almost as tall as Rex, who looked rakish as hell in his white dinner jacket and black bow tie.

Rex and his buddies were nipping from their pints all day, and things got a little wild at the reception. Rex gave a big speech, calling me “Amelia Earhart” and Jim “The Parachutin’ Cowboy” and Rosemary “My Wild Rose.” When the music started, he twirled Rosemary around the room, dipping and spinning her. She was having the time of her life, flouncing her lace dress and kicking up her white high heels like she was a cancan girl. Then Rex led everyone in a conga line and we all snaked around the room, swaying our hips and kicking out.

At the end, when the newlywed couple came out of the hotel, Rex’s borrowed Ford was waiting for them at the curb. It was a late afternoon in May, and that golden Arizona light filled the street. We all crowded onto the steps to wave good-bye. When they reached the sidewalk, Rex grabbed Rosemary by the waist, leaned her backward, and planted a long, deep smooch on her mouth. They almost fell over, and that set them laughing so much it brought tears to their eyes. As Rosemary climbed into the car, Rex patted her behind like he owned it, then got in beside her. They were both still laughing as Rex gunned the motor the way he always did.

Jim put his arm around me and we watched them take off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.

Jeannette Walls, age two

JIM AND I LIVEDon in Horse Mesa. Jim was getting along in years, and he soon retired, though he stayed busy as our little camp’s unofficial mayor-giving one neighbor’s wayward child the stern talking-to he needed, helping another neighbor patch a roof or unclog his gummed-up carburetor. I kept teaching. Like Jim, I was never one to lounge around with my feet propped on the porch rail, and knowing my students would be waiting for me made me wake up every morning raring to go.

Little Jim and Diane settled into a tidy ranch house in the Phoenix suburbs, and they had a couple of kids. Their life seemed pretty stable. Rex and Rosemary, meanwhile, drifted around the desert, Rex taking odd jobs while working on his various harebrained schemes, sipping beer and smoking cigarettes as he drafted blueprints for machines to mine gold and giant panels to harness the sun’s energy. Rosemary was painting like a fiend, but she also started dropping babies right and left, and every time they visited us-which they did a couple of times a year, staying until Rex and I started hollering at each other to the point that we darned near came to blows-she was either expecting another one or nursing the one that had just popped out.

Rosemary’s first two babies were girls, though crib death got the second before she was one year old. The third was also a girl. Rex and Rosemary were living in Phoenix at the time she was born, in our house on North Third Street, but they didn’t have the money to pay the hospital bill, so I had to drive down with a check-and some choice words for that reprobate Rex. Rosemary named the baby Jeannette and, probably still under the influence of her old art teacher, spelled it with two Ns the way the Frogs do.

Jeannette was not a raving beauty-and for that I was thankful- with carroty hair coming in and such a long, scrawny body that when people saw her lying in the stroller, they told Rosemary to feed her baby more. But she had smiling green eyes and the beginnings of a strong, square jaw just like mine, and from the outset, I felt a powerful connection to the kid. I could tell she was a tenacious thing. When I took her in my arms and stuck out a finger, that little critter grabbed it and held on like she’d never let go.

With the way Rex and Rosemary’s life together was shaping up, those kids were in for some wild times. But they came from hardy stock, and I figured they’d be able to play the cards they’d been dealt. Plus, I’d be hovering around. No way in hell were Rex and Rosemary cutting me out of the action when it came to my own grandchildren. I had a few things to teach those kids, and there wasn’t a soul alive who could stop me.

THIS BOOK WAS ORIGINALLYmeant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.

My grandmother was-and I say this with all due respect-quite a character. However, at first I resisted writing about her. While I had been close to her as a child, she died when I was eight, and most of what I knew about her came secondhand.

Still, I’d been hearing the stories about Lily Casey Smith all my life, stories she told over and over to my mother, who told them to me. Lily was a spirited woman, a passionate teacher and talker who explained in great detail what had happened to her, why it had happened, what she’d done about it, and what she’d learned from it, all with the idea of imparting life lessons to my mother. My mother-who struggles to remember my phone number-has an astonishing recall for details about her mother and father and about their parents as well as an amazing knowledge of the history and geology of Arizona. She never once told me something, whether about the Havasupai tribe or the Mogollon Rim, slaughtering cattle or breaking horses, that I could not confirm.

While interviewing my mother and other family members, I came across a couple of books about her paternal grandfather and maternal great-grandfather that confirmed some of the family stories: Major Lot Smith, Mormon Raider , by Ivan Barrett, and Robert Casey and the Ranch on the Rio Hondo , by James Shinkle.