Half Broke Horses

EPILOGUE. THE LITTLE CRITTER

Jeannette Walls, age two

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

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

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

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

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