Half Broke Horses

V LAMBS

Big Jim holding Rosemary

WHEN PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.

For months after Helen’s death, pain laid so dark and heavy on me, like a big slab of lead, that most days I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed if I hadn’t had kids to teach. The idea of riding horses-much less racing- playing cards, or driving the Flivver out into the country seemed so pointless as to be repulsive. Everything got on my nerves: kids yelling or even just laughing in the school yard, church bells ringing, birds chirping. What the hell was there to chirp about?

I thought of quitting my job, but I was under contract, and anyway, I couldn’t blame the kids for what the parents had done. But I was through with Red Lake, and when the school year was over, I was moving on. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a teacher anymore. I felt like I’d given everything I had to the kids of this town, and when I’d needed a little understanding, their families hadn’t cut me any slack. Maybe I should stop devoting myself to other people’s kids and instead have some kids of my own. I had never particularly wanted kids, but when Helen killed herself, she also killed the little baby inside her, and something about that made me want to bring another baby into the world.

As time passed, and without my even realizing it, this idea of having a baby of my own eased my grief. One day in the spring, I got up early, as usual, and sat on the front step of the teacherage, drinking my coffee as the sun rose over the San Francisco Mountains to the east. The shafts of light gliding across the plateau had that golden color that they get in the spring, and when they reached me, they warmed my face and arms.

I realized that in the months since Helen had died, I hadn’t been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn’t really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

And if I was going to have a baby, I needed to find a husband. I started looking at Jim Smith in a different light. He had plenty of good qualities, but the most important one was that I felt I could trust that man inside and out. Once I’d made up my mind about this, I didn’t see the need to beat around the bush or make any grand gestures. It was late afternoon in early May with school over for the day when I saddled up Patches and rode over to the garage. Jim was on his back underneath a car, and all I could see were his legs and boots sticking out. I told him I needed to talk to him, so he slowly pushed himself out and stood up, wiping the grease off his hands with a rag.

“Jim Smith, do you want to marry me?” I asked.

He stared at me a moment and then broke into a big grin. “Lily Casey, I wanted to marry you ever since I saw you take that fall off that mustang and then get right back on him. I just been waiting for a good time to ask.”

“Well, this is it,” I said. “Now, I only got two conditions.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The first is that we’ve got to be partners. Whatever we do, we’ll be in it together, each sharing the load.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“The second is, I know you were raised a Mormon, but I don’t want you taking any more wives.”

“Lily Casey, from what I know of you, you’re just about as much woman as any man can handle.”

WHEN I TOLD JIM how my crumb-bum first husband had given me a fake ring, he got out a Sears, Roebuck catalog and we chose a ring together so I’d know I was getting the genuine article. We got married in my classroom once school was out for the summer. Rooster was the best man. Before the ceremony, he gave me a kiss.

“I knew I was going to smooch you one day, but I didn’t think it would be because you were marrying my buddy,” he said. “Still, I’ll take what I can get.”

Rooster had a friend with an accordion, and since I still had a soft spot for teaching, instead of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” I asked him to play the PTA anthem.

The year was 1930, and I was twenty-nine. A lot of women my age had children who were practically grown, but getting a late start didn’t mean that I wouldn’t enjoy the journey every bit as much-maybe even more. Jim understood why I wanted to leave Red Lake, and he agreed to move his garage to Ash Fork, about thirty miles west, just over the Yavapai County line. Ash Fork was a bustling little town on Route 66 at the base of Williams Mountain. It was a stop on the Santa Fe Railroad, with a roundhouse, and some days the streets were filled with sheep being shipped to market. Ash Fork had a general store run by a descendant of George Washington’s brother, not one but two churches, and a Harvey House restaurant for the railroad passengers, where Harvey Girls in white aprons served you an entire quarter of a pie when you ordered a slice, and diners wiped their mouths with elegant linen napkins.

At the Ash Fork bank, Jim and I took out a loan and built a garage made of Coconino sandstone, laying the stones and spreading the mortar ourselves. We hung the GARAGE sign from Red Lake over the door. With money from the loan, we sent off for a tire pump, a ball-bearing handle jack, and a stack of ribbed tread tires from the same Sears catalog that we’d used to order my ring.

We had also brought the gas pump with us from Red Lake. The big glass cylinder on top was filled with gasoline-dyed red so you could tell it apart from kerosene-and every time you filled a car, air bubbles gurgled up through it.

Business was brisk. Since we were partners, Jim taught me to pump gas. The pump was hand-operated. I’d pump, pump, pump, and the gas would go glug, glug, glug. I also changed oil and fixed flat tires. By that winter, I was pregnant, but I was still pitching in every day, filling up gas tanks and making change while Jim worked on cars.

We built a little house-also made of Coconino sandstone-right on Route 66, which was still a dirt road, and in the dry season, dust kicked up by the wagon wheels and automobile tires sometimes drifted through the windows, coating the furniture. But I loved that house. We ordered the plumbing system from Sears and installed it ourselves. In the kitchen we had running water that gushed out of shiny nickel-plated faucets, and a chain flush toilet-just like the rich people I cleaned for in Chicago-with a porcelain enamel bowl and a lid of mahogany veneer.

When the house was finished, Rooster paid us a visit. Like my dad, he couldn’t believe that anyone would ever want a crapper in the house. “Ain’t it unsanitary?” he asked.

“Everything goes down the pipe,” I said. “If you want to freeze your behind off in an outhouse, that’s fine by me.”

Rooster was just one of those people who didn’t like change regardless of how it might improve his lot. As for me, I was so danged proud of my indoor plumbing that if someone looking for directions knocked at the door, I couldn’t resist the temptation to say, “Would you like a glass of fresh tap water?” or “Do you, by chance, need to use the toilet?”

BY THE TIME I was eight and a half months pregnant, I had swelled up pretty big. I was happy to continue working at the garage, but Jim thought that in my condition, it might be dangerous. I could slip on an oil spill, he said, or faint from gasoline fumes, or break my water trying to twist off a rusted radiator cap. So he insisted I stay at home, where I’d be safe. For a lot of women, it didn’t get any better than that, lounging around in a housecoat with nothing to do. But after a few days, I started getting cabin fever, cooped up by myself reading books and mending clothes, and maybe that was why I got so irritated with the Jehovah’s Witness who stopped by.

I was usually friendly to folks like Jehovah’s Witnesses, admiring their genuine conviction, but this fellow was particularly persistent, lecturing me, giving me a lot of poppycock about how Armageddon was imminent and for the sake of my unborn baby I needed to seek salvation and convert. Who the hell was he to tell me what I had to believe? I asked. All folks needed to find their own way to heaven. One of the problems of the world today was all the muttonheads- like those Bolshies in Russia-going around convinced they were the only ones who had the answers and killing everyone who didn’t agree with them.

I got so steamed up, pacing back and forth and arguing with the fellow, that without thinking about what I was doing, I sat down on my sewing, and a needle stuck me in my behind. I let out a yelp, started cussing, and tried to work the needle out of my rear, while the Jehovah’s Witness wagged his finger and argued that this was a sure sign from Jesus that I needed to see the error of my way and get right with the Lord.

“What it’s a sign of, mister,” I said, “is that I shouldn’t be staying at home by myself, getting in theological arguments with harebrained strangers.”

I headed back to the garage, where I told Jim what had happened. “I don’t care if I only man the cash register,” I said, “but I’m working until I go into labor. Sitting at home is just too dangerous.”

The baby came two weeks later, on a scorching-hot July day. I gave birth at home with the help of Granny Combs, the best midwife in Yavapai County. One of Granny Combs’s legs was shorter than the other, and she walked with an even worse limp than my dad. She also chewed tobacco, though she was a spitter and not a swallower like Rooster. Still, all the women in the county swore by her. If Granny Combs couldn’t bring your baby into this world, they said, it wasn’t meant to be here.

When I went into labor, the pain started coming in waves. Granny Combs told me that I couldn’t stop the pain, but she could teach me how to get the best of it. What I needed to do was separate the actual pain from the fear that something terrible was happening to my body. “The pain is your body complaining,” she said. “If you listen to the pain and tell your body, ’Yeah, I hear you,’ then you won’t be so afraid of it. I’m not saying the pain goes away, but it ain’t gonna make you crazy, either.”

My labor lasted only a couple of hours, and Granny Combs’s advice did help keep the pain in check-sort of. When the baby came out, Granny Combs said, “It’s a girl,” and held her up. She was purple, and I felt a stab of alarm. But Granny Combs started slapping and kneading her, and the baby let out a cry and gradually turned pink. Granny Combs cut the cord and rubbed the baby’s navel with a burned cork to close up the wound.

Granny Combs had a sixth sense-the way I sometimes felt I did- and could read minds and tell fortunes. While I held the baby and nursed her, Granny Combs tore herself a plug of tobacco and laid out cards to see what the future had in store for my newborn.

“She will have a long life, and it will be eventful,” Granny Combs said.

“Will she be happy?” I asked.

Granny Combs chewed her tobacco and studied the cards. “I see a wanderer.”

I NAMED THE BABY Rosemary. Roses were my favorite flower, Mary was a good Catholic girl’s name, and Rosemary was a darned useful herb. I was hoping the kid would have a practical side. Most babies looked to me like monkeys or Buddhas, but Rosemary was a beautiful thing. When her hair came in, it was so pale and fine it looked white. By the time she was three months old, she had a wide smile to match her merry green eyes, and even early on it seemed to me she looked a lot like Helen.

Helen’s beauty, as far as I was concerned, had been a curse, and I resolved that I would never tell Rosemary she was beautiful.

A boy followed a year and a half later. A big new hospital had just opened in the town of Williams, forty miles to the east, and I was determined to have my baby there, but as I went into labor, a hellacious winter storm blew in from Canada, covering the roads with drifting snow. We almost didn’t make it through, the Flivver spinning and skidding, but Jim got out the jack and put the chains on the wheels, hunkering down against the driving snow while I sat there taking deep breaths behind the steamed-up windows. We arrived just as my contractions were becoming severe.

Granny Combs’s mind-over-matter method of getting through pain was pretty good when it came to a stubbed toe, and it had helped me get through my first childbirth, but it couldn’t compare to the marvelous modern anesthesia they used to knock me out at the hospital this time.

The doctor put that mask over my face, and I just drifted off to dreamland. When I woke up, I had a son. He was a big bruiser of a boy, the first baby born in that hospital, and the nurses and doctors were as proud as Jim and me. We named him after his dad and from the outset called him Little Jim.

It was around then that hard times hit northern Arizona. A big part of the problem was that too many farmers and greenhorn ranchers had moved into the area. They didn’t understand that Arizona wasn’t like the land back east, where thousands of years of decaying trees had built up a deep loam. This land had just a thin layer of topsoil that, if plowed, would blow away with the first strong wind. The greenhorns had all made fun of the Navajos for planting each stalk of corn in a little hole three feet from the next, instead of a foot apart in plowed rows, but the Indians understood that was all the soil could bear. Land that God had never intended for the till had been farmed beyond its limit, and too many cattle had grazed the once green range into hard, dry stubble. The grass couldn’t reseed, and when it rained, there wasn’t enough grass to hold the water, so it would run off, eroding the good soil, and the fine land would be ruined forever. When a long drought hit, stretches of countryside all around the state turned to swirling dust, which rose a half mile into the air.

At the same time, the country was a few years into the Depression. At first that seemed like a problem afflicting mostly the big cities. But it soon hurt the cattle market because so many folks back east couldn’t afford to eat steak anymore. Some of the littler ranches in Arizona started going under, and ranch hands joined the stream of Okies making their way past our house on Route 66 in the hopes of finding work in California.

A lot of people could no longer afford gas, and they began selling off the tractors and cars they’d been persuaded to buy, leaving many of them wishing they’d kept their plow horses. Business at the garage dwindled. Jim was also too generous for his own good, undercharging people who were poor and even doing repairs for free.

I sat down at the kitchen table with pencil and paper, working the numbers, looking for ways to cut expenses, but no matter what angle I came at it from, the bottom line was inescapable: We had more going out than coming in, and it was just a matter of time before we went broke. With the loans we’d taken out, that meant bankruptcy. I took the babies to the garage and helped out as much as I could, but I figured there must be something else we could do to bring in a little extra cash.

One day Mr. Lee, the Ash Fork Chinaman, knocked on our door. Mr. Lee ran a chop-suey joint in a tent near the garage and made enough money from it to drive a Model A that Jim repaired. Mr. Lee was usually one happy, beaming Chinaman, but that day he was in a panic. Prohibition had ended a few years earlier, but a lot of people had gotten used to the easy money that came from selling bootleg liquor, and Mr. Lee was one of them, offering his customers shots of home brew to wash down their noodles. But he’d heard that the revenuers were onto him, and he was looking for a place to hide a few cases of booze.

Mr. Lee and Jim had hit it off because Mr. Lee had been a soldier in Manchuria when Jim was seeing service in Siberia, and they’d lived through the same bitter winters, picking icicles out of their hair and gnawing on frozen meat. Mr. Lee trusted Jim. We agreed to take the booze and stashed the cases under Little Jim’s crib, where they were hidden by the skirt.

That night I lay awake thinking about Mr. Lee’s hooch, and a plan occurred to me. I could bring in extra money by selling bootleg booze out the back door. Although Dad had been a staunch prohibitionist, his pa had sold booze from the store on the KC Ranch, so I had family tradition going for me. Also, I never saw anything wrong with an honest man taking a well-deserved drink. I even had one myself from time to time.

When I proposed the idea to Jim at the breakfast table the next morning, he wasn’t so keen on it. Although he had stopped drinking years ago, after shooting up some Canadian town while on a bender, he didn’t have any problem with booze itself. He just didn’t want to see the mother of his two children wind up in jail for rum-running.

It was because I was a mother with two kids, I said, as well as a respected former schoolteacher, that the revenuers would never suspect me. There was a definite market out there, since everyone was looking to save pennies wherever they could. It wasn’t like we’d be running a speakeasy, just a little retail operation with absolutely no overhead. And we’d even be striking a blow for the little guy, giving a hardworking cowboy a chance to have a drink without being forced to fork over a nickel to Uncle Sam every time he did so.

I kept hammering away at Jim, pointing out that I couldn’t see any other way to keep us afloat, and because I would give him no peace on the matter, he reluctantly agreed. Since we’d done him a favor, Mr. Lee also agreed, promising to provide me two cases a month from his bootlegger if we split the profit.

I was a good liquor lady. I discreetly put the word out, and soon local cowboys were knocking at the back door. I sold only to people I knew or those who came recommended. I kept things friendly but businesslike, inviting them in briefly but not allowing anyone to linger around or drink on the premises. I began to get regular customers, including the Catholic priest, who always blessed the babies on the way out. My regulars got a discount, but I never gave credit and I never sold to anyone I thought was drinking the rent money. After Mr. Lee got his cut, I made a quarter on each bottle I sold. Soon I was averaging three bottles a day, and that extra twenty dollars or so a month balanced the books.

ONE DAY THAT SPRING, when Rosemary was three and Little Jim was starting to talk, the Camel brothers drove their huge flock of sheep past our house and into town toward the depot. The Camel brothers had bought a big ranch west of Ash Fork in Yavapai County with the idea of raising sheep for wool and mutton. They were from Scotland and knew a lot about sheep but precious little about conditions on the Arizona range. The Camel brothers had decided that the forage in Yavapai County was too dry for sheep, especially with the drought, and they’d made up their minds to sell off their flock, as well as the ranch, rather than watch their sheep grow gaunt and weak while more and more of them got picked off by wolves and hungry hobos.

It was a dry, hot day, and the sheep filled the streets of Ash Fork, kicking up the dust so bad you had to cover your mouth with a bandana. The ewes were bleating and the lambs were mewing as the Camel brothers’ hands rode back and forth, driving the flock toward the shipping station, cracking whips at wandering strays.

The Camel brothers weren’t there-they were back at the ranch, rounding up the remaining sheep-and when the flock reached the shipping pen, some numbskull hand got the brilliant idea of separating the lambs from their mothers. As soon as they’d accomplished that, bedlam broke loose. The lambs were still nursing and were hungry from the journey, so they started scrambling around, crying for their mothers. The ewes, for their part, were frantically calling out for their babies.

The hands, realizing their mistake, opened the gate separating the ewes from the lambs, and the sheep all mingled together, mothers looking for babies and babies looking for mothers. That was when things got really bad. The more frantic the lambs became, the more energy they burned, which made them all the hungrier, but the flock was so big and so jumbled up that none of them could find their mothers. After a couple of hours of this, the lambs grew weak from hunger. They tried to nurse from any ewe they could, but the ewes wanted to save the milk for their own babies. They put their noses up to the lambs, and if the smell was unfamiliar, the ewes kicked them away and continued searching for their own.

The hands, frantic themselves, were wading around in the flock, trying to force the ewes to let any lamb nurse, but the ewes weren’t cooperating. They were kicking and bawling and squirming, making a god-awful racket and filling the air with even more dust as the cowboys cursed and the townspeople who had gathered around stood there watching, some calling out advice, others chuckling, shaking their heads, and waiting to see how it was all going to play out.

I was there with Little Jim and Rosemary, who was fascinated by the idea that a ewe could smell its own lamb and was running around shoving her nose into the lambs’ wool. “They all just smell like sheep to me,” she announced.

The Camel brothers finally showed up, but they were at a loss about what to do, and the situation was getting desperate, with lambs starting to drop from heat and hunger.

“You should talk to my husband,” I said. “He knows animals.”

The Camel brothers sent for Jim, who was at the garage. When he arrived, the hands explained what had happened.

“What we got to do,” Jim said, “is get those ewes to accept any lamb as her own for the time being. Then we can worry about straightening out the flock.”

Jim sent me back to the house for an old bedsheet while he fetched two cans of kerosene from the garage. He had the Camel hands tear the sheet into rags, dip the rags in the kerosene, and wipe the ewes’ noses with them. That blocked their sense of smell, and they let whatever lamb was at hand nurse their milk.

Once the lambs had been fed and the immediate crisis had passed, Jim had the hands separate the lambs and the ewes again. One by one they brought each lamb into the ewe pen and carried it around until its mother recognized it. The flock was so big that this took the better part of two days, with stops to douse the mothers’ noses again whenever the remaining lambs got hungry.

Little Rosemary was riveted by the scene and terribly concerned that all the lambs find their mothers, and she stayed there watching the entire time. When it was finally done, there was one little lamb that no ewe had claimed. Its black eyes were frightened, its white wool thick with dust, and it ran around on its spindly legs, bleating mournfully.

The Camel brothers told Jim to do whatever he thought best with the lamb. Jim scooped it up in his arms and carried it over to Rosemary. He knelt down and set the lamb in front of her. “All animals are meant for something,” he said. “Some to run wild, some for the barnyard, some for market. This little lamb was meant to be a pet.”

ROSEMARY LOVED THAT CREATURE. She shared her ice cream cones with it, and it followed her everywhere. So we decided to name it Mei-Mei, which Mr. Lee told us was Chinese for “little sister.”

A couple of weeks after Jim straightened out the flock, I heard the sound of a car pulling around the house and then a knock on the back door. A man was standing outside, smoking a cigarette. He’d left his car door open, and a girl and a young woman were sitting inside, watching us. He was a good-looking fellow with a lock of sandy hair falling across his forehead, and although his teeth were crooked and stained, he had the easy smile of a charmer. Even before he said anything, I could tell from the slightly off-balance way he was standing that he was a little potted.

“I’m a friend of Rooster’s,” he said. “And I heard this is where a man could get his hands on a good bottle of shellac.”

“Looks to me like you’re already pretty shellacked,” I said.

“Well, I’m working on it.”

His smile became even more charming, but I looked over at the woman and the girl, and they weren’t smiling at all.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink as it is,” I said.

His smile disappeared and he got all indignant, the way drunks do when you point out that they’re drunk. He started telling me his money was as good as anyone else’s, and who was I to go around deciding who had and hadn’t had too much to drink, I was just some two-bit moonshine madam. But I didn’t budge, and when he realized I wasn’t giving in and he’d be leaving empty-handed, he really lost it, telling me I was going to regret crossing him and calling me nothing but the sister of a whore who’d hanged herself.

“Wait right there,” I said. Leaving the door open, I walked into the bedroom, got my pearl-handled revolver, walked back out, and pointed it at the man’s face. The end of the barrel was about six inches from his nose. “The only reason I don’t shoot you right now is because of those two women in that car,” I said. “But you get out of here and don’t ever come back.”

That night I told Jim what had happened.

He sighed and shook his head. “We probably haven’t seen the end of it,” he said.

Sure enough, two days later, a car pulled around the house, and when I opened the door, two men in khaki uniforms and cowboy hats were standing there. They had badges on their shirt pockets, guns in their holsters, and handcuffs dangling from their belts. They tipped their hats. “Afternoon, ma’am,” one of them said. He hitched up his pants and stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Mind if we come in?” he asked.

I didn’t see that I had much choice in the matter, so I led them into the living room. Little Jim was asleep in the crib, and under it, behind the white cotton skirt, were two cases of bootleg hooch.

“Would you fellows like a nice cool glass of tap water?” I asked.

“Thank you, ma’am, no,” the talker said. They were both glancing around, trying to suss the place out.

“We received a report,” he went on, “that liquor is being illegally sold from these premises.”

At that moment Rosemary came running into the room with Mei-Mei right behind. It must have been the sight of all that gleaming metal and shiny leather, but as soon as Rosemary saw the two lawmen, she gave out a shriek that could have woken the dead. Howling, she flung herself at my feet and grabbed my ankles. I tried to pick her up, but she’d become truly hysterical and was flailing her arms, screaming, and blubbering.

Mei-Mei was bleating, and all the noise woke Little Jim, who stood up in the crib and started wailing.

“Does this look like a speakeasy?” I asked. “I’m a schoolteacher! I’m a mother! I got my hands full here just taking care of these kids.”

“I can see that,” he said. All the screaming was discombobulating the two of them. “We have to check these things out, but we’ll be on our way.”

The lawmen were happy to be out of there, and as soon as they left, Rosemary stopped her howling. “You sure saved my chestnuts, little girl,” I said.

When Jim came home, I told him about the visit from the law and how the chorus of howling youngsters had driven those deputies right out the door. It already seemed to me like a pretty funny story, and it got Jim laughing, too, but then he stopped and said, “Even so, they were putting us on warning. It’s time we get out of the bootleg business.”

“But Jim,” I said, “we need the money.”

“I’d rather see you in the poorhouse than behind bars.”

Selling liquor had kept us afloat for a year. But we shut the operation down, and six months later, the bank foreclosed on us.

FALL WAS USUALLY MY favorite time of year, when the air turned cool and the hills were green from the August rains. But I didn’t have much time to enjoy the September sunsets and the crisp, starry nights. Jim and I had decided to auction off everything-the furniture, his tools, the tires, the tire pump, the handle jack, and the gas pump with its pretty glass cylinder. Once we’d done that, we would strap our suitcases on the roof of the Flivver and join the stream of Okies heading to California for work.

Mulling our prospects made us feel both ground down and wound up. One morning we were in the garage, tagging tools and arguing about what we should take with us, when Blackie Camel, the older of the two Camel brothers, stopped by. Blackie was a swag-bellied man with a bushy black beard who wore his embroidered vest everywhere. He was kind of a mathematical genius when it came to sheep, and he could glance at a flock and tell you not only how many animals were in it but also how many pounds of wool they were carrying.

Ever since Jim had saved the lambs, Blackie had taken to dropping by the garage to shoot the breeze. The more he got to know Jim, the more he liked him. Jim, he was fond of telling people, knew not only sheep, he also knew cattle and horses and just about every creature with fur or feathers. Jim never bragged about himself, which Blackie also liked, and Blackie was particularly impressed with a story he’d heard from a local Hopi about how, when Jim was a young man, an eagle was going after a newborn calf and Jim actually lassoed the bird in midair.

That morning, as we sat at the wobbly linoleum table Jim used as his desk, Blackie told us that he and his brother had sold their ranch to a group of investors in England who wanted to run cattle there. They had asked him and his brother to recommend someone to manage the ranch, and Blackie said that if Jim was so inclined, he and his brother would put Jim’s name forward.

Jim reached under the table and squeezed my hand so hard that my knuckles cracked. We both knew the only jobs out in California were picking grapes and oranges, and the Okies were fighting over what little work existed, while the Daddy Warbucks owners kept cutting everyone’s wages. But there was no way we were going to acknowledge to Blackie Camel how desperate we were.

“Sounds like something worth considering,” Jim said.

BLACKIE SENT A TELEGRAM to London, and a few days later, he dropped by to tell Jim the job was his. We called off the auction, and Jim kept most of his tools, but we did sell the gasoline pump and tires to a mechanic from Sedona. Rooster brought a buckboard down from Red Lake, and we loaded our furniture onto it, put the kids and Mei-Mei in the back of the Flivver, and then, with Jim behind the wheel, Rooster on the wagon, and me bringing up the rear on Patches, we set out on our little procession for Seligman, the town nearest the ranch.

That part of the journey was smooth and passed quickly because Route 66 was being paved for the first time with a layer of shiny black asphalt. Seligman wasn’t as big as Ash Fork, but it had everything a ranch town needed: a building that served as both the jail and post office, a hotel, a bar and café, and the Commercial Central, a general store where pairs of Levi’s were stacked four feet high on the wide-planked floor next to shovels, spools of rope and wire, water buckets, and tins of crackers.

From Seligman we headed west for fifteen miles through rolling rangeland covered with rabbitweed, prairie grass, and juniper trees. The Peacock Mountains in the distance were dark green, and overhead the sky was iris blue. After fifteen miles, we turned off Route 66 and followed a narrow dirt road for another nine miles. It took a full day to get from Seligman to the ranch by wagon. Finally, late in the afternoon, we came to a gate where the road just ended.

To the right and left of the gate, barbed-wire fencing, held up by neatly trimmed juniper saplings, stretched away into the distance. There was no sign on the gate, which was closed, but we were expected, so the gate was dummy locked-the chain that kept it shut was held together by a padlock that had been left unsnapped. Beyond the gate was a long driveway. We followed it another four miles and finally reached a fenced-in compound with a collection of unpainted wood buildings shaded by enormous cedar trees.

The buildings were at the foot of a hill dotted with pinyon and scrub cedar. Facing east, you looked out over miles and miles of rolling rangeland that gradually sloped down toward a flat grassy basin known as the Colorado Plateau. It stretched out all the way to the Mogollon Rim, big blush-colored bluffs where the earth had shifted along a single fault line that ran all the way to New Mexico. From where we stood, you could see to forever, and there wasn’t a single other house, human being, or the slightest sign of civilization, only the huge sky, the endless grassy plain, and the distant mountains.

The Camel brothers had let most of the hired help go, and the place was deserted except for one remaining hand, Old Jake, a grizzled, stogiechewing coot who came limping out of the barn to greet us. Old Jake had a lopsided walk because, to avoid serving in the Great War, he had put his foot on a railroad track and let a train run over his toes. “Won’t win any dancin’ contests,” he said, “but don’t need toes to ride-and it beats spittin’ up mustard gas.”

Old Jake showed us around. There was a main house with a long porch, its unpainted wood siding a sun-bleached gray. The barn was huge, and next to it were four small log buildings: the grainery and the smithy; the meat house, where hides and sides of beef were cured; and the poison house, which had shelves full of bottles containing medicines, potions, spirits, and solvents, all with corks or rags stuffed in their tops. Old Jake kept pointing out various details-the bags of sulfur and jars of tar used for treating injured livestock, the knife sharpener in the smithy, the troughs that collected runoff rainwater from the roofs.

He took us into the other outbuildings, including a toolshed, chicken coop, and bunkhouse. Then we came to a garage filled with twenty-six carriages, wagons, and vehicles-brogans, surreys, phaetons, an old Conestoga covered wagon, a few beat-up cars, a rusty Chevy pickup. Old Jake proudly named every one. He showed us the pit in the garage that you could climb down into, then have someone drive the car over it when you needed to work on the undercarriage.

Finally, Old Jake led us back through the barn to a double corral: one made of six-foot-high saplings posted vertically and used to break horses, the other made of standard post-and-wire fencing with a small herd of tough little ponies inside it.

Jim walked around nodding and taking it all in. We could both see that although the buildings were weathered, they were solid and true.

There was nothing fancy about the place, it was a real working ranch, but tools were hung in their place, ropes were coiled neatly, harnesses mended, fence posts stacked in tidy bundles, and the barn floor was swept. On a ranch you had to be able to find a given tool in a hurry when there was an emergency, and you had to hand it to the Camel brothers. They knew the importance of keeping things shipshape.

Rooster was visibly impressed. “A fellow could do a lot worse than this,” he said. “Jim, you old hound dog, you got lucky.” He glanced at me. “Again,” he added.

I swatted Rooster on the arm, but Jim just shook his head and grinned. Then he looked out across the range. “I think we can make this work,” he said.

“I think we can,” I said.

I could tell life at the ranch was going to be a lot of hard work. We were too far from town to count on anyone else for anything. Jim and I would have to be our own veterinarian, farrier, mechanic, butcher, cook, as well as cattle driver, ranch manager, husband and wife, and mother and father of two little children. But Jim and I both knew how to roll up our sleeves, and in times like these, I knew how lucky we were not just to have work but to be our own bosses doing something we were good at doing.

I felt nature calling and asked Old Jake where I could find the facilities. He pointed toward a little wooden shed in the north corner of the compound. “It’s nothing fancy, just a one-holer,” he said. “No moon cut in the door to advertise it, either, ’cause we all knows what it is.”

Inside the outhouse, once you’d closed the door that didn’t have a moon, enough light came through the cracks in the wood so that you could see. Spiderwebs dangled in the roof corners, a sack of lime sat on the dirt floor, and there was a scoop to sprinkle it into the hole to keep the flies down. A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush. As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things-though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart-and at the ranch, I could see, we’d have pretty much everything we’d need but precious little else.

Next to the seat was a stack of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, and I picked one up and leafed through it. I came to a page advertising silk bodices and lacy chemises. I won’t be ordering from this page, I thought, and when I was done with my business, that was the one I tore out and used.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AS Rooster was getting ready to head back to Red Lake, he caught me alone in the kitchen.

“Thank you for helping us move,” I said, and handed him a cup of coffee.

He looked at me for a moment. “You know I always been carrying a torch for you,” he said.

“I know.”

“Funny,” he said. “Just can’t help it.” He paused and then asked, “You think I’ll ever get married?”

“I do,” I said. I had just been being polite, but suddenly I saw it clearly. The right woman was out there for him. “I do,” I said again. “You just got to look in unexpected places.”

After Rooster left, Jim said our first order of business was to tour the ranch. It was a big place, with a little over a hundred thousand acres- almost 160 square miles-and it would take us at least a week just to ride the outer fence line. We loaded one pony with supplies. Jim and Old Jake mounted up two others, and I was on Patches, with Little Jim in my lap, while Rosemary climbed on with her dad.

We headed west until we reached white and yellow limestone foothills, then swung south. A hot, dry wind blew across the valley. We passed pinyon and juniper trees and now and then saw a herd of white-tailed antelope on distant slopes, grazing on the gama grass. Old Jake showed us Tres Cruces, a group of rocks on which someone had carved stick figures of horses and riders carrying three crosses to depict-according to ranch lore-an early Spanish expedition. Late in the afternoon, we reached a high point below the Coyote Mountains. From there we could see south toward the Juniper Mountains and east to the Mogollon Rim.

“Lot of land,” Jim said. “Not a lick of water.”

“Drier than a crone’s dugs,” Old Jake said.

There were a few dirt ponds, small sad things dug out to collect rain, but the water disappeared during dry spells, and the ponds were now empty, cracked pits.

After ten days, we’d made a big circle, covering most of the ranch, although there were large stretches of territory we didn’t have time to see. And while we passed any number of gullies and draws that you could tell ran with water during flash floods, there wasn’t a single stream, spring, or natural source of water on the whole spread. “No wonder the Camel brothers threw in the towel,” Jim said.

Jim sent to Flagstaff for a water witch, and the two of them set out on another tour of the ranch, stopping at clumps of trees and spots where the grass was green. The water witch walked around holding a forked branch in his outstretched arms, waiting for the branch to dip, a sign that there was water underground. But the branch never dipped.

I kept thinking about all those gullies and draws we’d passed during our trip around the ranch. The only water this land would ever see was going to come from the sky. During flash floods, thousands and thousands of gallons of water would roar through all those gullies and draws only to soak through the range floor. If we could figure out how to trap that water for ourselves, we’d have plenty.

“What we really need to do is build a dam,” I told Jim.

“How?” he said. “You’d need an army.”

I thought about it for a while, and then it came to me. I’d read magazine articles about the building of the Boulder Dam, as it was called by those of us who hated Herbert Hoover and refused to call it the Hoover Dam. Alongside the articles were photographs of some of the newfangled earthmoving machines used in the construction. “Jim,” I said, “let’s rent us a bulldozer.”

At first Jim thought I was nuts, but I decided we at least needed to look into the idea. I drove into Seligman, and someone knew someone in Phoenix who had a construction company with a bulldozer. Sure enough, when I tracked him down, he said that if we were willing to pay for it, he could send his bulldozer and its operator up to Seligman by rail. We’d need to find a flatbed truck to haul it out to the ranch. It wouldn’t be cheap, but once the bulldozer was here, it could build a good-sized earth dam in a matter of days.

Jim said we needed to present the idea to the English investors. A group of them was headed our way in a few weeks to meet us and survey their property.

The Poms arrived by wagon after taking a steamer from England to New York and a train to Flagstaff-a three-week trip. They had clipped accents and wore bowler hats and suits with vests. None of them had ever pulled on a pair of cowboy boots or cracked a bullwhip, but that was just fine with Jim and me. They were businessmen, not dudes out to play cowboy. And they were polite and smart. You could tell from the questions they asked that they knew what they didn’t know.

The first night they arrived, Old Jake built an open fire and roasted a shoulder of beef. He kept making fun of the investors under his breath, saying things like “Rather cheeky” and “Jolly good” in an English accent, and rolling up his cowboy hat to look like a bowler, so I had to bop him in the back of the head. I prepared a few range specialties like rattlesnake stew and prairie oysters to give them something to talk about when they got back to their London clubs.

Afterward we sat around the fire eating tins of sliced peaches. Jim took out his little cotton sack of Bull Durham, rolled himself a cigarette, closing the sack by pulling on the yellow string with his teeth like he always did, then made his pitch.

Only two things really mattered to a rancher, he said: land and water. We had plenty of land in these parts, but not enough water, and without water, the land ain’t worth nothing. Water made the difference. Water out here was precious, he said, more precious than you gentlemen, living on that rainy island of yours, can possibly imagine. That was why, for centuries, the Indians and the Mexicans and the Anglos had all been fighting over it, why families were torn apart over it, why neighbors killed each other over it.

One of the Poms piped up to say he knew firsthand how precious water was, because at the hotel in Seligman, he’d been charged an extra fifty cents to take a bath. Everyone got a laugh out of that, and it made me hope that Jim’s pitch would receive a sympathetic hearing.

Seeing as how the ranch had no natural source of water, Jim said, one had to be created if it was going to support a sizable herd. Some ranchers went drilling for water, but you might drill all sorts of dry holes before you actually found water, and there was no guarantee of how long it would last. When the Santa Fe Railroad had needed water for its steam engines, it had drilled a hole half a mile deep in these parts and come up dry.

What made the most sense, Jim went on, was to build a big dam to trap rainwater. He described my plan to bring up a bulldozer from Phoenix. When Jim mentioned the cost, the Poms looked at one another, and a few raised their eyebrows, but then Jim pulled out a column of numbers I’d drawn up and explained that without the dam, they could run only a few thousand head on the ranch; with it, they could go to twenty thousand, and that meant bringing five thousand head to market every year. The dam would pay for itself in no time.

The next day the Poms went into Seligman to cable the rest of the investors. After some backing and forthing about engineering details, we got the go-ahead. The Poms wrote a check before they left, and in no time, a flatbed truck was pulling up to the ranch with a big yellow bulldozer on the back. It was the first bulldozer to be seen in these parts, and people came from all over Yavapai County to marvel at it chugging away.

Since we had the darned contraption there, we decided to build dams all over the ranch, the operator scraping out the sides of gullies and draws, lining the bottoms with packed-down clay, and using the fill to build up the walls that would hold back the water from the flash floods. By far the biggest dam we built-so big you needed five minutes to walk around it-was the one in front of the ranch house.

When the rains came that December, the water coursed through the gullies and draws and poured right into the ponds created by the dams. It was just like filling a bathtub. That winter was unusually wet, and by the spring, the water was three feet deep in the big pond-the finest body of water I’d seen since Lake Michigan.

In one sense, that pond was nothing more than a hole in the ground, but Jim treated it like our proudest possession, and that was what it was. He checked the dam every day, measuring the depth of the water and inspecting the walls. In the summer, folks drove from miles away to ask if they might take a dip, and we always let them. Sometimes during dry spells, neighbors without as much water would come over with wagonloads of barrels and ask, as they’d put it, to borrow from our pond, though there was no way they were ever going to repay us, and we never charged for it, since, as Jim liked to say, the heavens had given it to us.

The dam and its pond came to be known as Big Jim’s Dam, and then just Big Jim. People around the county measured the severity of dry spells by the amount of water in Big Jim. “How’s Big Jim doin’?” people in town might ask me, or “I hear Big Jim’s low,” and I always knew they were talking about the water level in the pond, not my husband’s state of mind.

THE RANCH’S OFFICIAL NAME was the Arizona Incorporated Cattle Ranch, but we always called it the AIC, or just The Ranch. It was only dudes and greenhorns-people who got their ideas about ranching from western movies and dime-store novels-who gussied up their ranches with highfalutin names like Acres of Eden or Rancho Mirage or Paradise Plateau. A fancy name, Jim liked to say, was a sure sign that the owner didn’t know the first thing about ranching.

With the Depression still going strong, owners like that-as well as plenty of owners who did know a thing or two about ranching-were going out of business. That meant more people were selling than buying cattle, and Jim traveled around Arizona picking up entire herds for rock-bottom prices. He hired about a dozen cowboys, mostly Mexican and Havasupai, to drive the cattle to the ranch and brand them before sending them out to the range. Cowboying was rough, and so were those kids-misfits, most of them, runaways and boys who’d been whipped too hard. For these young fellows, it was a question of joining the roundup or joining the circus-not a lot of other options out there for them-and they took life day by day. The one thing they knew how to do better than anything else was stick a horse, and they took great pride in that.

When the cowboys arrived, the first thing they did was head out into open country and round up a herd of range horses, which they proceeded to break-after a fashion-in the palisaded corral. The horses bucked and fishtailed like rodeo broncs, but those hard-assed boys would just as soon bust every bone in their bodies before calling it quits. They weren’t much more than half-broke horses themselves.

I stood there watching them with Rosemary. “I feel bad for the horses,” she said. “They just want to be free.”

“In this life,” I said, “hardly anyone gets to do what they want to do.”

Once the cowboys each had a string of horses, they started bringing in the cattle and branding them. They were all living in the bunkhouse, and I had my hands full cooking for everyone, in addition to helping out with the branding. The cowboys got steak and eggs for breakfast and steak and beans for dinner, with as much salt and roof water as they wanted. Anyone who asked for one could have a raw onion, as good as an orange for staving off scurvy. Most of the boys peeled those onions and ate them like apples.

I didn’t particularly trust them around Rosemary, who wasn’t allowed to go near the bunkhouse-where there was nonstop cussing, drinking, brawling, card play, and knife play-and that was when I got in the habit of sleeping with her in the bedroom of the ranch house while Big Jim and Little Jim slept in the main room.

Rosemary was also a little like a half-broke horse. She was happiest running around out of doors, without a stitch of clothing if I’d let her. She climbed the cedar trees, splashed in the horse trough, peed in the yard, swung from vines, and jumped from the barn rafters onto the hay bales, yelling at Mei-Mei to stand clear. She loved spending the day on horseback, holding on behind her father. The saddles were too heavy for her to lift, so she rode her little mule, Jenny, bareback, mounting her by grabbing mane and toe-walking up the animal’s leg.

Jim once told Rosemary that she was so tough, any critter that took a bite of her would spit it out, and she just loved that. Rosemary was never afraid of coyotes or wolves, and she hated to see any animal caged, tied up, or penned in. She even thought that the chickens should be freed from the coop, that the risk of being eaten by a coyote was a price worth paying for freedom, and besides, she said, the coyotes needed food, too. That was why I always blamed Rosemary for what happened to Bossie the cow.

The Poms were so thrilled with Jim’s work on the ranch that they sent us a pure-blooded Guernsey. Bossie was dun-colored, big and beautiful, and she gave us two gallons a day of rich milk with good cream. She was such a good milk cow that I planned to breed her in the fall, sell the calf in the spring, and sock away the proceeds. I had already begun to think about saving for the day when we could afford a ranch of our own.

But one day someone left Bossie’s stall unlatched, and she broke into the granary, where she devoured almost an entire bag of feed. When Old Jake came upon her, she had bloated and was leaning against the barn wall, her stomach swollen while she groaned in pain.

Jim and Old Jake did everything they could. To get her to throw up, they made a mixture of the worst stuff they could think of: tobacco and milk of magnesia and whiskey and soapy water. They put it in a whiskey bottle and tried to pour it down her throat, but Bossie wouldn’t swallow, and it dribbled out the sides of her mouth. So then Old Jake held her jaws apart while Jim stuck the bottle so far down inside her gullet that his arm disappeared up to his elbow.

He poured the concoction directly into her stomach, and she did throw up a little, but she was so far gone by then that it made no difference. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed slowly to the ground. In desperation, Jim punctured her gut with his pocketknife to let the gas out. But that didn’t work, either, and in another hour, our big, beautiful Guernsey was gone, lying glass-eyed and heavy on the barn floor.

I was furious, heartbroken about the death of Bossie, but beside myself about the loss of what I hoped we’d earn come calving season. I was sure that it was Rosemary, with her misguided notions about animals and freedom, who had let Bossie out. The girl had been too horrified to watch Jim and Old Jake ministering to the cow, and I found her on the long porch, sobbing about Bossie’s end. I felt like smacking her good, but she insisted she hadn’t let the cow out, that it was Little Jim who’d done it, and since I didn’t have any proof one way or another, I had to let the matter go.

“Just you remember,” I said, “that this is what could happen when an animal gets freedom. Animals act like they hate to be penned up, but the fact is, they don’t know what to do with freedom. And a lot of times it kills them.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE HERD arrived, Jim set out to repair all the fencing on the ranch. The job took a month. He brought Rosemary along with him in the pickup, and they were gone for days at a time, sleeping in the bed of the truck, cooking over campfires, and returning only for resupplies of food and wire. Rosemary adored her father, and he was completely unfazed by her wild streak. They were happy to spend hours in each other’s company, Rosemary talking nonstop and Jim barely saying a word, just nodding and smiling-with an occasional “That so?” or “Sounds good”-as he dug holes, trimmed posts, and tightened wire.

“Doesn’t that kid ever shut up?” Old Jake once asked.

“She’s got a lot to say,” Jim told him.

While they were gone, I settled in to life on the ranch. There was always more to do on any given day than you could get done, and I quickly established a few rules for myself. One was to dispense with any unnecessary cleaning-no maid’s work. Arizona was a dusty place, but a little dirt never killed anyone. That bit about cleanliness being next to godliness was a lot of balderdash as far as I was concerned. In fact, I considered it downright insulting. Anyone who worked the land got dirty, and in Chicago I’d seen my share of less than godly people living in squeaky-clean mansions. So I gave the house a going-over only once every few months, working myself into a frenzy and blazing through all the scrubbing and dusting in a single day.

As for clothes, I flatly refused to wash them. I made sure we all bought loose-fitting clothes that let us do squats and windmill our arms-none of that tight buttoned-up stuff like my mother favored. We wore our shirts till they got dirty, then we put them on backward and wore them until that side got dirty, then we wore them inside out, then inside out backward. We were getting four times more wear out of each shirt than persnickety folks did. When the shirts reached the point where Jim was joking about them scaring the cattle, I’d take the whole pile into Seligman and pay by the pound to have them all steamcleaned.

Levi’s we didn’t wash at all. They shrank too much, and it weakened the threads. So we wore them and wore them until they were shiny with mud, manure, tallow, cattle slobber, bacon fat, axle grease, and hoof oil-and then we wore them some more. Eventually, the Levi’s reached a point of grime saturation where they couldn’t get any dirtier, where they had the feel of oilskin and had become not just waterproof but briar-proof, and that was when you knew you had really broken them in. When Levi’s reached that degree of conditioning, they were sort of like smoke-cured ham or aged bourbon, and you couldn’t pay a cowboy to let you wash his.

I kept the cooking basic as well. I didn’t make dishes the way fancy eastern housewives did-soufflés and sauces and garnished this and stuffed that. I made food. Beans were my specialty. I always had a pot of them on the stove, and that usually lasted two to five days, depending on how many cowboys we had around. My recipe was fairly simple: Boil beans, salt to taste. What I liked most about beans was that as long as you added water from time to time, you couldn’t overcook them.

When we weren’t having beans, we had steak. My recipe for steak was also fairly simple: Fry on both sides, salt to taste. With the steak came potatoes: Boil unpeeled, salt to taste. For dessert, we’d have canned peaches packed in tasty syrup. I liked to say that what my cooking lacked in variety, it made up for in consistency. “No surprises,” I’d tell the cowboys, “but no disappointments, either.”

Once when some milk had spoiled and I was feeling ambitious, I did make cottage cheese the way my mother made it when I was growing up. I boiled the clabbered milk and cut up the curds with a knife. Then I wrapped it in a burlap sugar sack and hung it overnight to let the whey drain out. The next day I chopped it again, salted it, and passed it out at supper. The family loved it so much they wolfed it down in under a minute. I couldn’t believe I’d worked so long over something that was gone so quickly.

“That was the biggest waste of time,” I said. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

Rosemary was eyeing me.

“Let that be a lesson to you,” I told her.

Jim never had it in him to raise his hand to his daughter, and when he and Rosemary returned from fixing fences, she was more rambunctious than ever. Even though Rosemary was still just a little girl, I could sense the beginnings of a fundamental difference of opinion between her and me. I felt there was a lot I needed to teach her. I wanted to give her an early grounding in the basics of arithmetic and reading, but even more important, I wanted to get across the idea that the world was a dangerous place and life was unpredictable and you had to be smart, focused, and determined to make it through. You had to be willing to work hard and persevere in the face of misfortune. A lot of people, even those born with brains and beauty, didn’t have what it took to knuckle down and get the thing done.

From the time she was three, I drilled Rosemary on her numbers. If she asked for a glass of milk, I told her she could have it only if she spelled out “milk.” I tried to make her see that everything in life-from Bossie to the cottage cheese-was a lesson, but it was up to her to figure out what she’d learned. Rosemary was a bright little kid in a lot of ways, but math and spelling confused her, and answering questions on cue bored her, as did the routine of daily chores. Jim told me to lighten up, she was just four, but by four I’d been gathering eggs and taking care of my baby sister. I began to worry that Rosemary was unfocused and that if we didn’t stamp it out early, it could become a permanent part of her character.

“She’ll outgrow it,” Jim said, “and if she don’t, that means it’s her nature, not something we can change.”

“It’s up to us to set her straight,” I said. “I turned illiterate Mexican kids into readers. I can make my own daughter shape up.”

Rosemary was always getting caught up in dangerous situations, almost as if she was drawn to them. She was constantly falling into draws and out of trees. It was always the buckingest horse that caught her eye. She loved to catch snakes and scorpions, keeping them in a jar for a while, but then she’d grow worried that they were lonely and missed their families, so she’d turn them loose.

That first October on the ranch, we bought a pumpkin in Seligman and carved it into a jack-o’-lantern to celebrate Halloween. Rosemary had dressed for Halloween in a tattered old silk dress she’d found in a trunk in the storage barn, and she held it up over the jack-o’-lantern, fascinated by the patterns that the flame made through the thin fabric. Jim and I weren’t paying much attention when she lowered the dress too close to the candle and it caught fire, the dry silk bursting into flames.

Rosemary was screaming while Jim grabbed his horsehide duster and wrapped it around her to smother the flames. It was all over in an instant. We carried her into the bedroom, and Jim quietly talked her down from hysteria while I cut off the remains of the silk dress. Rosemary had a wide burn across her stomach, though it wasn’t too deep. The nearest hospital was over two hours away, and besides, I didn’t care to splurge on a doctor, so I lathered her burn in Vaseline, which cured everything from boils to rashes, and bandaged her up. When I was finished, I looked down at her and shook my head.

“Are you mad at me, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.

“Not as mad as I should be,” I said. I just didn’t believe in mollycoddling kids when they hurt themselves. Fussing over her wasn’t going to help her realize the mistake she’d made. “You’re the most accidentprone little girl I’ve ever known. And I hope at least you’ve learned what happens when you play with fire.”

Still, she’d been pretty brave about it all-she was always a brave little kid, you had to hand it to her-and I softened up.

“Same thing happened to my brother, Buster, when he was small, and to my grandfather,” I said. “So I guess it runs in the family.”

THAT FIRST WINTER, JIM and I paid fifty dollars for a marvelous long-range radio from Montgomery Ward. It had a big wire antenna that a couple of the cowboys helped us rig up, stringing it between two of the tall cedars outside the house. “Brings the twentieth century to Yavapai County,” I told Jim.

Since we had no electricity, we ran the radio off two massive batteries that cost another fifty dollars and weighed about ten pounds apiece. When the batteries were fresh, we could get stations all the way from Europe with announcers jabbering away in French and German. Adolf Hitler had taken over in Germany, and a civil war was brewing in Spain, but we weren’t particularly interested in European affairs. The reason we shelled out so much money was to get the weather report, which was much more important to us than what the Krauts were up to.

Every morning we got up before dawn and Jim turned the radio on low, crouching down next to it to listen to the weather report from a station in California. The fronts that came our way usually started there, though sometimes we were hit by winter storms that traveled all the way down from Canada. With water so scarce and severe storms so dangerous- drowning or freezing cattle, flattening barns, washing away entire families, the lightning electrocuting horses with steel shoes-we lived and died by those forecasts. You could say we were true aficionados of the weather. We’d follow a storm that started out in Los Angeles and moved east. The clouds usually ended up getting caught by the tip of the Rockies, where they’d dump most of their moisture, but sometimes that storm drifted south, making its way east through a passage above the Gulf of California, and that was when we got our big rains.

Rosemary and Little Jim loved the storms more than just about anything else. When the skies turned dark and the air grew heavy, I called them onto the porch and we all watched as the storm, with its boiling clouds and cannonading thunder, its white claws of lightning and drifting sheets of black rain, rolled across the range.

A distant storm sometimes seemed small in the huge sweep of the plateau, darkening one patch of land while everything else remained bathed in sunlight. Sometimes the storm veered off and missed us altogether. But if it hit the yard, the excitement really began, the thunder and lightning splitting the sky, the water hammering on the tin roof and pouring off the sides, filling the cisterns, the draws, and the dams.

To live in a place where water was so scarce made the rare moments like this-when the heavens poured forth an abundance of water and the hard earth softened and turned lush and green-seem magical, almost miraculous. The kids had an irresistible urge to get out and dance in the rain, and I always let them go and sometimes joined them myself, all of us prancing around, arms upraised, as the water beat down on our faces, plastering our hair and soaking our clothes.

Afterward, we all ran down to the draws that led to Big Jim the dam, and once the first rush of water had passed, I’d let the kids strip off their clothes and go swimming. They’d stay out there for hours, paddling around, pretending to be alligators or dolphins or hippopotamuses. They had a heck of a time playing in the rain puddles, too. When the water sank through the soil and all that was left was mud, they’d keep playing, rolling around until everything but the whites of their eyes and their teeth was plastered with mud. Once the mud dried, which didn’t take long, it sheared right off, leaving them pretty clean, and they got back into their clothes.

Sometimes over supper, when Jim got home after a storm, the kids would describe their escapades in the water and mud, and Jim would recount his vast store of water lore and water history. Once the world was nothing but water, he explained, and you wouldn’t think it to look at us, but human beings were mostly water. The miraculous thing about water, he said, was that it never came to an end. All the water on the earth had been here since the beginning of time, it had just moved around from rivers and lakes and oceans to clouds and rain and puddles and then sunk through the soil to underground streams, to springs and wells, where it got drunk by people and animals and went back to rivers and lakes and oceans.

The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus himself might have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard-ice. Sometimes it was soft-snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless-clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible-vapor-floating up into the sky like the souls of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we’d die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water for granted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it.

THE RAINS USUALLY ARRIVED in April, August, and December, but in our second year on the ranch, April came and went without rain. So did August and so did December, and by the following year, we were in the midst of a serious drought. The range turned sandy and windblown, and the mudflats became dry and cracked.

Every day Jim listened grim-faced to the weather report, hoping in vain for a forecast of rain, and then we’d go down and check the water level of Big Jim. The days were beautiful, with endless deep blue skies, but all that fine weather only gave us a desperate, helpless feeling as we stood there, watching the water level sink and sink until the bottom of Big Jim became visible. And then the water disappeared altogether and there was nothing but mud, and then the mud dried out with cracks so big you could stick your arm into them.

Early into the drought, Jim had sensed it coming on. He’d grown up in the desert, so he knew that one came along every ten or fifteen years, and he had culled the herd deeply, selling off steers and heifers and keeping only the healthiest breeding cattle. Even so, once the drought was in full swing, we had to bring in water. Jim and I hitched up the Conestoga wagon to the pickup and hauled it into Pica, a stop twenty miles away on the Santa Fe Railroad where they were shipping in water. We loaded old fuel drums with as much water as the Conestoga could hold and hauled it-the wagon’s suspension groaning under all that weight-back to the ranch, where we drained it into Big Jim.

We made that trip a couple of times a week. We darned near broke our backs loading those fuel drums, but we saved the herd, whereas many ranchers around us went bust.

The following August, the rains returned. And when they came back, they came with a vengeance, a terrific deluge the likes of which I’d never seen. We sat at our kitchen table, a long wooden thing with patterned linoleum nailed to the top, listening to the rain drum on the roof. Unlike other storms, this one didn’t peter out after half an hour. Instead, it kept raining and raining, striking the tin roof so loud and incessant that it began to get on my nerves. After a while Jim started worrying about Big Jim. If too much water flooded into the dam, he said, its walls might burst and we’d lose it all.

The first time Jim went out to check the dam, he reported back that it was holding, but an hour later, with the rain still coming down in sheets, he checked it again and realized that if nothing was done, it would give. He had a plan, which was to go out in the middle of the storm and dig furrows in the draws and the wash approaching the dam, to drain off the water before it reached Big Jim. To dig the furrows, he was going to harness old Buck, our Percheron draft, to the plow.

Jim had on his horsehide duster, waterlogged and dripping. I put on my canvas coat and we headed out into the rain, which was coming down so furiously that within moments it had worked its way past my turned-up coat collar, down my sleeves, and was soaking through my shoes. I felt it trickling all over me, and even before we got to the barn, I had reached the point where you give up trying to stay dry.

The barn was dark from the storm, and we couldn’t find the harness, which no one had used in years. Old Jake, who had sprained his good foot falling off a horse and was hobbling around worse than ever, started getting panicky at the idea of the dam giving out and washing away the cattle, but I told him to hush his mouth. We all knew what was at stake, and if we were going to save the ranch, we needed clear heads.

What we could do, I said to Jim, was hitch the plow to the pickup. If he handled the plow, I could drive. Jim liked the idea. Old Jake was useless, so we left him to fret in the barn, but we brought the kids with us. The water out in the yard was more than ankle-deep by then, the rain coming down so hard that the force of it practically knocked Rosemary to the ground. Jim scooped her up in his arms. I followed with Little Jim, who was still a baby, grabbing a wooden carton so we’d have something to keep him in, and we sloshed out to the Chevy.

At the equipment shed, Jim jumped out and threw the plow, together with some ropes and chains, into the pickup bed. Once we reached the wash above the dam, we rigged up the plow to the Chevy’s hitch, and I got behind the wheel, putting Little Jim in the carton on the floor so he wouldn’t slide around too much.

I looked in the rearview mirror, but the rain was splattering so hard on the window that Jim was just a blur. I had Rosemary stand up on the seat and stick her head out the window and take directions from him. Jim was gesturing and shouting, but the rain was making such a racket that it was hard to figure out what he wanted.

“Mom, I can’t hear him,” Rosemary said.

“Do the best you can,” I said. “That’s all anyone can do.”

I needed the pickup to creep along at a walking pace, but the Chevy wasn’t geared to go that slow, and it kept stalling and lurching, jerking the plow out of Jim’s hands and sending Rosemary tumbling off the seat and into Little Jim’s box. Making matters worse, the earth around the dam was that godforsaken malpais rock, and the tires would spin on it, then catch, and we’d pop forward.

We knew we didn’t have much time, and Jim and I were both cussing like sailors while Rosemary, her hair plastered, scrambling back onto the seat every time she was knocked off, did her best to read Jim’s gestures and shouts and relay them to me. Finally, I figured out that by engaging the clutch, easing up on it ever so slightly, then reengaging it, I could send the truck forward just a few inches at a time, and that was how we got the job done, digging four furrows off the sides of the wash that drained the rising water away from the dam.

It was still raining furiously. Jim heaved the plow into the pickup bed and climbed in beside me. He was as wet as if he’d fallen into a horse trough. Water sloshed in his boots and dripped from his hat and sopping horsehide coat, pooling on the seat.

“We did a good job-good as we could,” he said. “If she breaks, she breaks.”

SHE DIDN’T BREAK.

While our place was spared, not everyone fared as well. The rains washed away a few bridges and several miles of railroad track. Ranchers lost cattle and outbuildings. Seligman was flooded, several houses were swept off, and the rest had mud lines five feet high, which was so astounding that no one wanted to paint over them. For years afterward, folks who’d lived through the storm pointed out those mud lines in a combination of disbelief and pride. “Water come clean up to there,” they’d say, shaking their head.

But a few hours after the rain stopped, the plateau turned bright green, and the next day the ranch was covered with the most spectacular display of flowers I had ever seen. There were crimson Indian paintbrushes and orange California poppies, white mariposa poppies with their magenta throats, goldenrod and blue lupines and pink and purple sweet peas. It was like a rainbow you could touch and smell. All that water must have churned up seeds that had been buried for decades.

Rosemary, who was ecstatic over it, spent days collecting flowers. “If we had this much water all the time,” I told her, “we might have to break down and give this ranch some greenhorn name like Paradise Plateau.”