Half Broke Horses

VI TEACHER LADY

Lily Casey Smith before a flying lesson

THE WATER WE BOUGHT during the drought cost a fortune, but the Poms knew that ranching was a long-term proposition only for people with wallets fat enough to tough out the bad times and then make a killing in the good. They actually saw the drought, and all the bankruptcies it was causing, as a buying opportunity. So did Jim. As much land as we had, he realized that if the ranch was going to make it through the next drought, we needed even more land-land with its own water. He convinced the investors to buy the neighboring ranch, called Hackberry. It had some hilly terrain with a year-round spring, and out on the flat range, there was a deep well with a windmill that pumped water up to the cattle troughs.

Jim’s plan was to move the herd back and forth between the two ranches, keeping the cattle in Hackberry during the winter and bringing them back to the high plateau around Big Jim in the summer. When the two ranches were combined, they totaled 180,000 acres. It was a big spread-one of the biggest in Arizona-and in good years, we could bring some ten thousand head of cattle to market. When the Poms saw those numbers, they were more than happy to pony up for Hackberry.

The first time we rode out to Hackberry, I flat-out fell in love with the place. It was down off the plateau, between the Peacock and the Walapai mountains, the range dotted by chaparral. Runoff from the mountains fed the plain, and there was also that spring in the granite foothills. The house, nestled in a hollow, was a former dance hall that had been taken apart, moved to the spot, and reassembled, with a swank linoleum floor and the walls painted with signs saying NO ROUGH STUFF and TAKE THE FIGHT OUTSIDE.

The first time I saw the windmill, I took a drink of its well water, which came from deep beneath us and had been there for tens of thousands of years waiting for me to taste it. That well water tasted sweeter than the finest French liqueur. Some folks, when they struck it rich, liked to say that they were in the money, and that was how I felt-rich-only we were in the water. Our days of busting our humps hauling fuel drums over dirt roads were gone for good.

After the Poms bought Hackberry, one of the first things Jim did was to drive all the way to Los Angeles in the Chevy and return with a truck-load of half-inch lead pipe. It was a mile from the spring to the house, and we laid pipe the entire length, running strips of inner tube between the interconnecting pipe ends and tying it up with bailing wire. It wasn’t indoor plumbing-and it wasn’t exactly pretty-but it brought a constant supply of spring water to our back door, spurting forth clear and fresh when you opened the spigot.

Next to the spigot, we kept a metal cup, and few things were finer than coming back from a hot, dusty ride and filling that cup with a cold, wet drink, then pouring what was left over your head.

We moved the herd over to Hackberry in the fall and stayed there until the spring. I always loved bright colors, and at Hackberry, I decided to really go to town. I painted each room a different color-pink, blue, and yellow-put Navajo rugs on the floors, and got some red velvet curtains for the windows, using several books of S &H green stamps that I’d saved over the years.

Rosemary loved the colors even more than I did. She was already showing some artistic talent, tossing off perfect little line drawings without once lifting the pencil from the paper. Both kids were crazy about Hackberry, its green mountains, the lilacs, the birds of paradise, the tamarack trees around the chicken coop. There were several deep canyons running down out of the mountains, and after it rained, I’d rush with the kids up to the lip of one of them and we’d watch and cheer as the flash floods came thundering down the dry creek beds, shaking the ground beneath us.

Rosemary and Little Jim were also fascinated by the story of Hack-berry’s ghosts. Years earlier, a fire had broken out in the house when two children were inside. The mother rushed in and saved the boy, then returned to get her baby girl, but they both died in the flames and the little boy standing outside could hear their anguished cries. A few months later, the boy was on his swing, and he started going higher and higher, pumping his legs, trying to get up to heaven to be with his mother and sister, but he swung so high that he fell off and died as well.

All three of them supposedly haunted the ranch, and Rosemary, instead of being frightened, couldn’t stop looking for them. She’d wander around at night, calling out their names, and whenever she heard a sudden noise-a distant bobcat, a rustling in the tamarack trees, oil drums expanding with a bang in the heat-she’d get excited thinking maybe it was the ghosts. She was particularly intrigued by the little boy ghost, and she wanted to explain to him that since he was with his mother and sister, everything was in fact okay, and they were all free to go to heaven.

Ever since moving to the ranch, Jim and I had talked on and off about buying it, or at least buying a place of our own one day, but we’d had our hands full getting the ranch up and running, and buying had seemed a distant dream. Now that I’d spent time at Hackberry-a beautiful spread with good water-I wanted it and was determined to turn my dream into a plan.

We needed cash. We were never going to go into debt again, I swore, we were not going to lose this place the way we’d lost the house and the filling station in Ash Fork. I worked up the figures and decided we might be able to swing it in ten years if I started bringing in money and we scrimped and saved, pinching every penny till old Abe Lincoln yelped.

We’d always been frugal-Jim made the Poms a lot of money, but he made it a nickel at a time, reusing nails, saving old barbed wire, building fences with juniper saplings rather than milled posts. We never threw away anything. We saved bits of wood in case we needed shims. When our old shirts finally frayed to pieces, we cut off the buttons and put them in the button box; the shirts we either used as rags or gave to a seamstress in Seligman who turned them into patchwork quilts.

But now I came up with additional ways to save money. We made the children chairs out of orange crates. Rosemary drew on used paper bags-both sides-and painted on old boards. We drank from coffee cans with wire tied around them for handles. Whenever possible, I drove behind trucks so their slipstream pulled me along and I saved on gas.

I also came up with all sorts of moneymaking schemes, some more successful than others. I sold encyclopedias door-to-door, but that didn’t go over so well, seeing as how there were not a lot of bookish ranch hands in Yavapai County. I did a lot better visiting neighbors to solicit orders for Montgomery Ward, and I didn’t even have to resort to tricks like throwing dirt on the floor the way my crumb-bum first husband did. I also stayed up late writing short stories about cowboys and gunslingers for pulp magazines-using the nom de plume Legs LeRoy because I figured those pulp editors wouldn’t buy western tales from a lady-but I got no takers. I collected scrap metal in the Chevy and sold it by the pound. I also started playing poker with the hands, but Jim put a stop to that after I cleaned a couple of them out. “We don’t pay them enough as it is,” he said. “We can’t go taking what little they get.”

On weekends, I drove down Highway 66 with the kids, sending them out to pick up bottles that people had thrown out their car windows. Rosemary would take one side of the road, Little Jim the other, each of them dragging a burlap bag. The deposit was two cents for Coke bottles, five cents for cream bottles, ten cents for milk bottles, and a quarter for gallon jugs. One day we collected thirty dollars’ worth of bottles.

Sometimes other drivers would stop to see if we were okay. “You folks need any help there?” they’d call out.

“We’re just dandy,” I’d say. “Got any empties?”

Rosemary loved our scavenging expeditions. One day all four of us were over paying a call on our neighbors, the Hutters. After dinner, we were heading back to the Chevy, parked near their barn, when Rosemary spotted a bottle in the fuel drum that they used to hold trash. She ran to fetch it.

“Lily, this is getting a little out of hand,” Jim said. “We’re not so darned broke that we need to have our daughter digging around in someone’s garbage for a two-cent bottle.”

Rosemary held up the bottle. “It’s not a two-center, Dad,” she said. “It’s a ten-center.”

“Good girl,” I said, and turned to Jim. “Ten cents adds up. And anyway, I’m teaching them resourcefulness.”

BY THEN I WAS closing in on my thirty-ninth birthday, and there was still one thing I’d never done and had always wanted to do. One summer day Jim and the kids and I had driven the Flivver over to Mohave County to look at a breeding bull Jim was interested in buying when we passed a ranch with a small plane parked near the gate. A hand-painted sign in the windshield read: FLYING LESSONS: $5.

“That’s for me,” I said.

I had Jim pull into the driveway, and we stopped to look at the plane. It was a two-seater, one behind the other, with an open cockpit, a faded green paint job, rust rings around the rivets, and a rudder that creaked in the wind.

I remembered the first time I’d seen an airplane, when I was riding Patches through the desert back from Red Lake. I loved Patches, but that had been one long, rump-numbing journey. On an airplane, it wouldn’t have been much more than a little hop.

A fellow came out of a shack behind the plane and sauntered up to the Flivver. He had a windburned face, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, and a pair of aviator goggles pushed up on his forehead. He rested his elbows on Jim’s open window and said, “Looking to learn her?”

I leaned across the gearbox. “Not him,” I said. “Me.”

“Whoa,” Goggles said. “Ain’t never taught a woman before.” He looked at Jim. “Think the little lady’s up to it?”

“Don’t you ’little lady’ me,” I said. “I break horses. I brand steers. I run a ranch with a couple dozen crazy cowboys on it, and I can beat them all in poker. I’ll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell me that I don’t have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.”

Goggles stared at me for a moment, then Jim patted him on the arm. “No one’s ever won betting against her,” Jim said.

“That don’t surprise me,” Goggles said. He pulled out a fresh cigarette and lit it with the old one. “Ma’am, I like your spirit. Let’s take ’er up.”

Goggles brought out a flight suit for me, along with a leather aviation helmet and a set of goggles. As I pulled them on, he walked me around the plane, checking the struts, pointing out the ailerons, explaining basics such as lift and tailwind, and showing me how to operate the copilot’s stick. But Goggles wasn’t much for theory, and soon he was climbing aboard and having me climb in behind him. As I did, I realized that the fuselage wasn’t made of metal after all, but canvas. That airplane was a right spindly contraption.

Then we were taxiing down the driveway, bumping along, gathering speed. The bumping stopped, but at first I wasn’t even aware that we were airborne-it was that smooth-then I saw the ground falling away beneath us and I knew I was flying.

We circled around. The kids were running back and forth waving like mad, and even Jim was enthusiastically flapping his hat. I leaned out and waved. The sky was a royal blue, and as we gained altitude, I saw the Arizona range rolling away in all directions, the Mogollon Rim to the east, and in the distant west, beyond a serpentine river, the Rockies, with some thin high clouds hovering above them. Route 66 threaded its way like a ribbon through the desert, a few tiny cars moving along it. Living in Arizona, I was used to long views, but still, the sight of the earth spread out far below made me feel huge and aloof, like I was beholding the entire world, seeing it all for the first time, the way I figured angels did.

Goggles operated the controls for most of the lesson, but by keeping my hand on my stick, I was able to follow the way he banked, climbed, and dived. Toward the end, he let me take over, and after a few heart-stopping jerks, I was able to put the plane into a long, steady turn that brought us right into the sun.

Afterward, I thanked Goggles, paid him, and told him he’d be seeing me again. As we walked back to the car, Rosemary said, “I thought we were supposed to save money.”

“Even more important than saving money is making it,” I said, “and sometimes, to make money, you have to spend it.” I told her if I got a pilot’s license, I could bring in cash dusting crops and delivering mail and flying rich people around. “This lesson was an investment,” I said. “In me.”

WORKING AS A FREELANCE bush pilot struck me as one glorious way of earning a living, but I knew it would take a while to get my pilot license, and we needed money now. I finally decided that the smartest way for me to bring in the bucks was to put my most marketable skill-teaching-back into use. I wrote Grady Gammage, who had helped me get the job at Red Lake, to ask if he knew of any opportunities.

He replied that there was a town called Main Street with an opening. It was up in the Arizona Strip, and I’d be welcome there, he said, because Main Street was so remote and, quite frankly, so peculiar that no teacher with a college degree wanted the job. Truth be known, he went on, the people in the area were almost all Mormon polygamists who’d moved all the way out there to escape government harassment.

Neither remoteness nor peculiarity troubled me, and as for Mormons, I’d married one, so I figured I could handle a few polygamists. I wrote back telling Grady Gammage to sign me up.

What made most sense was to take Rosemary and Little Jim with me, so one day late in the summer, we packed the Flivver, which was still running but on its last legs, and headed for the Arizona Strip. Jim followed in the Chevy to help us get settled.

The Arizona Strip was in the northwest corner of Mohave County, cut off from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. To get there, we had to drive into Nevada, then Utah, then turn back south to Arizona.

I wanted my children to see the awesomeness of modern technology, so we stopped off at the Boulder Dam, where four enormous turbines generated electricity that was sent all the way to California. It was Jim’s idea to also visit one of the ruined cities of the Hohokams, an ancient and extinct tribe that had built elaborate four-story houses and a complex irrigation system. We stood there for a while, looking at those collapsed sandstone buildings and the troughs that had carried water directly to the Hohokams’ houses.

“What happened to the Hohokams, Daddy?” Rosemary asked.

“They thought they could civilize the desert,” Jim said, “and it was their undoing. The only way to survive in the desert is to recognize that it is a desert.”

The Arizona Strip was desolate but beautiful country. There were grassland plateaus where distant mountains sparkled with mica, and sandstone hills and gullies that had been carved into wondrous shapes- hourglasses and spinning tops and teardrops-by wind and water. The sight of all that time-worn stone, shaped grain by grain over thousands and thousands of years, made it seem like the place had been created by a very patient God.

The town of Main Street was so small that it didn’t appear on most maps. In fact, the main street of Main Street was the only street, lined with a few ramshackle houses, one general store, and the school, which had a teacherage. It was nothing fancy, one tiny room with two box windows and a single bed that Little Jim, Rosemary, and I would share. The water barrel outside the kitchen was swimming with pollywogs. “At least we know it’s not poison,” Jim said. “Just drink with your teeth closed.”

Many of the people in the area herded sheep, but the land had been overgrazed, and it was startling how threadbare the local folks were. None of them had cars. Instead, they drove wagons or, too poor to afford saddles, rode horses with just blankets on their backs. Some lived in chicken coops. The women wore bonnets, and the children came to school barefoot and in overalls or dresses stitched from feed sacks. Their underwear-if they had any-was also made of feed sacks. Some Mormons were sewed into ceremonial undergarments during a special church ritual, and since the garments were supposed to protect them from harm, snide folks referred to them as Mormon wonder underwear.

When we first arrived, the people around Main Street were polite yet guarded, but after they found out my husband was the son of the great Lot Smith, who fought the federals with Brigham Young and founded Tuba City and had eight wives and fifty-two children, they warmed right up. As a matter of fact, they started treating us like visiting dignitaries.

I had thirty students of all ages, and they were a sweet and well-behaved lot. Because they were polygamists, they were almost all related in one way or another and talked about their “other mothers” and “double cousins.” The girls doted on Rosemary, who was now six, and Little Jim, who was four, fussing over them, combing their hair, dressing them up, and practicing mothering skills. The girls were all listed in the “Joy Book,” meaning they were eligible for marriage and were waiting for their “uncle” to decide whom they would marry.

The houses they lived in, I came to see, were essentially breeding factories where as many as seven wives were expected to churn out a baby a year. The way the Mormons saw it, God had populated earth with beings in his likeness, so if Mormon men were going to follow the path of God, they had to have their own brood of kids to populate their own heavenly world in the hereafter. The girls were raised to be docile and submissive. In the first few months I was there, a couple of my thirteen-year-old girls simply disappeared, vanishing into their arranged marriages.

Rosemary was fascinated by these kids with all their multitudes of moms, and these dads with all their sets of wives, and she kept asking me to explain it. She was particularly intrigued with Mormon underwear and wondered if it really gave the Mormons special powers.

“That’s what they believe,” I told her, “but that doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Then why do they believe it?”

“America is a free country,” I said. “And that means people are free to believe whatever cockamamie thing they want to believe.”

“So they don’t have to believe it if they don’t want to?” Rosemary asked.

“No, they don’t”

“But do they know that?”

Smart kid. That, I came to see, was the heart of the matter. You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being broodmares dressed in feed sacks.

In class, I spent the bulk of my time on the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic, but I also peppered my lessons with talk of nursing and teaching, the opportunities in big cities, the Twenty-first Amendment, and the doings of Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. I told them how, when I was no older than they were, I was breaking horses. I talked about going to Chicago and learning to fly an airplane. Any of them could do all that, too, I said, long as they had the gumption.

Some of them-both boys and girls-looked shocked, but more than a few seemed genuinely intrigued.

I hadn’t been in Main Street for long when I got a visit from Uncle Eli, the patriarch of the local polygamists. He had a long graying beard, scraggly eyebrows, and a beaklike nose. His smile was practiced and his eyes were cold. I gave him a drink of pollywog water, and as we talked, he kept patting my hand and calling me “Teacher Lady.”

Some of the mothers, he said, had told him their little girls were coming home from school talking about suffragettes and women flying airplanes. What I needed to understand was that he and his people had moved to this area to get away from the rest of the world, and I was bringing that world into their very schoolroom, teaching the children things their mothers and fathers considered dangerous and even blasphemous. My job, he went on, was to give them just enough arithmetic and reading to manage the household and make their way through the Book of Mormon.

“Teacher Lady, you’re not preparing these girls for their lives,” he said. “You’re only upsetting and confusing them. There will be no more talk of worldly ways.”

“Look, Uncle,” I said, “I don’t work for you. I work for the state of Arizona. I don’t need you telling me my job. My job is to give these kids an education, and part of that is letting them know a little bit about what the world is really like.”

Uncle’s smile never wavered. Rosemary was sitting at the table drawing, and he walked over and stroked her hair. “What are you drawing?” he asked.

“That’s my mom riding Red Devil,” Rosemary said. It was one of her favorite stories about me, and she was always making drawings of it. She looked up at Uncle Eli. “My daddy used to be a Mormon.”

“But he’s not any longer?”

“No. He’s a rancher.”

“Then he is lost.”

“Dad never gets lost-and he doesn’t even need a compass. He just says Mom made him throw away his wonder underwear. Do you wear wonder underwear?”

“We call it the temple garment,” Uncle said. “You’ll make some man a fine wife one day soon. Shall we put you in the Joy Book?”

“Leave her out of this,” I said. “And leave her out of that darned book.”

“I’m done talking to you,” he said. “If you don’t obey me, we will all shun you as the devil.”

THE NEXT DAY I gave an especially impassioned lesson on political and religious freedom, talking about the totalitarian countries where everyone was forced to believe one thing. In America, by contrast, people were free to think for themselves and follow their hearts when it came to matters of faith. “It’s like one of the wonderful department stores in Chicago,” I said. “You can go around trying on different dresses until you find one that suits you.”

That night when I went to throw out the dishwater, Uncle Eli was standing in the yard, his arms crossed, staring at me.

“Evening,” I said.

He didn’t reply. He just kept staring at me, like he was giving me the evil eye.

The next night I looked up from fixing dinner, and there he was again, standing framed in the window, staring out from under his unruly eyebrows with the same baleful expression.

“What’s he want, Mommy?” Rosemary asked.

“Oh, he’s just hoping I’ll have a staring contest with him.”

The teacherage didn’t have curtains, but the next day I sewed together some feed sacks and tacked them over the window. That evening there was a knock at the door. When I opened it, Uncle Eli was standing there.

“What do you want?” I asked.

He just stared at me, and I closed the door. The knocking started up again, slow and persistent. I went into the room where we slept and loaded my pearl-handled revolver. Uncle Eli was still knocking on the door. I opened it, and as I did, I swung the gun up and across so that by the time he saw me, the gun was pointed dead at him.

The last time I’d pointed the gun had been at that drunk in Ash Fork who’d called Helen a dead whore when I wouldn’t sell him any hooch. I hadn’t fired then, but this time I aimed just to the left of Uncle Eli’s face and pulled the trigger.

When the shot rang out, Uncle Eli barked in fright and instinctively jerked his hands up. The bullet had whizzed by his ear, but the barrel had been close enough that his face was sprayed with soot. He stared at me, speechless.

“You come knocking around here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear,” I said, “ ’cause next time I won’t aim to miss.”

Two days later, the county sheriff showed up at the school. He was an easygoing country fellow with a goiter. Investigating a schoolmarm for shooting at a polygamous elder wasn’t something he did every day, and he seemed uncertain how to handle it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right, Mommy.”

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

“I just want to go home.”

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

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

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

“Yep,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 WERE a 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 YEAR at 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.

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 SURE everybody 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.

“That’s not the way it is at all,” Jim said.

“ ’Course it’s not,” I told him. “Who would pay good money to see an actual smelly cowboy? You go to movies to escape from the way things really are.”

“I guess gangsters complain about gangster movies, too,” he said.

But Jim agreed to be my Gone with the Wind chauffeur, and the night of the premiere, he drove me in the hearse-a little dented after the crash with the Brooklyn broads-into Kingman. When we pulled up to the theater, spectators were milling around on the sidewalk, watching everyone arrive in their finery. Deputy Johnson stood out front in his uniform, directing traffic. Jim got out and opened the hearse door for me, and I stepped onto the red carpet, waving grandly to the crowd-and to Deputy Johnson-as the photographer’s flashbulb popped.