Half Broke Horses

IV THE RED SILK SHIRT

Helen Casey, Red Lake

YOU SAW PLENTY OF cars in Santa Fe now, and even out in the countryside, but when I got back to the KC, I was surprised by how little things had changed except that Buster and Dorothy had a couple of kids, the third generation of Caseys to be raised on the ranch. Dad had completely abdicated responsibility for the place but was still corresponding with old cowpokes about Billy the Kid’s exploits. Mom had grown more frail and complained that her teeth hurt. A couple of years earlier, Helen had moved to Los Angeles to chase her dream of making it in the movies. While she’d yet to get any roles, as she explained in letters home, she’d met a few producers and in the meantime was working as a sales clerk in a millinery.

The first day back, I went out to see Patches, who was standing by herself in the pasture. She was a little whiskery, but she seemed to have aged better than anyone else. I saddled her up and we rode out into the valley. It was late afternoon, and the long purple shadow we cast dipped and swelled across the rolling grassland. Patches was a good seventeen years old, but she still had the juice, and at a rise I clucked her up to a gallop, her hooves clattering over the hard ground while the wind whipped my hair back and whistled in my ears. I hadn’t been on a horse since leaving for Chicago, and it just felt right.

I was a mite concerned about Helen, seeing as how she was not the most self-reliant creature in the world, but Mom, to my surprise, had encouraged her to go to Los Angeles, insisting that with that pretty face and those delicate hands, she was sure to be discovered, and if not, she could find a rich Hollywood husband. Mom also hinted a couple of times that it was good I was going on to college, since with one failed marriage behind me, I’d have trouble landing a good husband and would need something to fall back on. “A package that’s been opened once doesn’t have the same appeal,” she said.

Unlike the last time I came home, no one begged me to stay. Even Dad acted as if he assumed I’d be moving on, and that was fine by me. I didn’t belong in Chicago, but it had changed me, so I didn’t belong on the KC, either. I even felt out of place sleeping in my old bed. Also, if I was going to stay put, I’d need to pitch in on the chores, and after all those years of maid work, cleaning the chicken coop and mucking stalls didn’t exactly call to me. I left early for Flagstaff.

Although I was older than most of the other students, I loved college. Unlike many of the boys, who were interested in football and drinking, and the girls, who were interested in boys, I knew exactly why I was there and what I wanted to get out of it. I wished I could take every course in the curriculum and read every book in the library. Sometimes after I finished a particularly good book, I had the urge to get the library card, find out who else had read the book, and track them down to talk about it.

My only concern was how I was going to pay the next year’s tuition. But after I’d been at the university for exactly one semester, Grady Gammage, president of the college, asked to see me. He said he’d been contacted by the town of Red Lake, which was looking for a teacher. He’d been following my performance because he’d also worked hard to put himself through college and admired others who did the same. The folks in Red Lake remembered me from the time I’d taught there. They were willing to sign me up, even though I had just begun college, and Mr. Gammage thought I had what it took as well. “It’s a tough choice,” he said. “If you start teaching now, you’ll give up school, and a lot of people find it hard to come back.”

It didn’t seem a tough choice at all. I could either pay money to go to classes or get paid for teaching classes.

“When do I start?” I asked.

I WENT BACK TO the ranch to get Patches, and for the third time that horse and I made the five-hundred-mile journey between Tinnie and Red Lake. Patches was out of shape, but I easied her along, and she toned up pretty quick. We both enjoyed being on the move in open country.

I ran into more people than I had last time, and every now and again a car would barrel past, the driver white-knuckling the wheel as he bounced over the wagon ruts, trailing a cone of dust. But there were still long stretches of solitude, only me and Patches ambling along, and as I sat by my little fire at night, the coyotes howled just like they always had, and the huge moon turned the desert silver.

The town of Red Lake still felt like it was located at one of the world’s high points, the range land sloping away on all sides, but it had changed since I first saw it almost fifteen years before. Arizona, with its wideopen spaces and no one peering over your shoulder, had always been a haven for folks who didn’t like the law or other busybodies to know what they were up to, and there were more scoundrels and eccentrics around-Mexican rumrunners, hallucinating prospectors, trenchcrazed veterans still wheezing from mustard gas, a guy with four wives who wasn’t even a Mormon. One of that guy’s kids was named Balmy Gil because when he was born, the guy opened the Bible at random and, eyes closed, planted his finger on the passage about the Balm of Gilead.

More farmers had also put down stakes and more stores had opened, including a new automobile garage with a gasoline pump out front. The grass outside town, which used to be high enough to touch the cattle’s underbellies, had been grazed down to the nub, and I wondered if maybe there were more people here than the land could bear.

The schoolhouse now had a teacherage built onto the back, so I had my own room to sleep in. I had thirty-six students of all ages, sizes, and breeds, and I made sure when I entered the classroom that each and every one of them stood up and said, “Good morning, Miss Casey.” Anyone who talked out of turn had to stand in the corner, and anyone who sassed me was sent out to pluck a willow branch so I could give them a hiding with it. Kids were like horses in that things went a lot easier if you got their respect from the outset rather than trying to demand it after they’d started seeing what they could get away with.

When I’d been in Red Lake a month, I went over to the town hall to pick up my first paycheck. A corral was next to the building, and inside it stood a small sorrel mustang, all veined up and with saddle sweat still on his back. When he saw me, he gave me a baleful look, ears flat, and I could tell right off that was one ornery horse.

Inside the hall, a couple of deputies were lounging by a desk, hats tilted back and pants tucked into their boots. When I introduced myself, one of them-a skinny guy with rooster legs and close-set eyes-said, “I hear you come all the way from Chicago to teach us hicks a thing or two.”

“I’m just a hardworking gal here for her paycheck,” I said.

“Before you get it, you needs to pass a simple test first.”

“What test?”

“Ride that there little fella out in the corral.”

I could tell from the sidelong glances Rooster Legs and his buddy were giving each other that they thought they were going to play some prank on the greenhorn schoolteacher. I could tell they figured I was a know-it-all about reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, so they were going to put this city girl in her place when it came to the fourth R-riding.

I decided to play along with them and we’d see who got the last laugh. Fluttering my eyes and acting all coy, I said this test seemed highly unusual, but I supposed I could give the horse a try since I had ridden before, and I assumed he was a gentle creature.

“Gentle as a baby’s fart,” Rooster said.

I had on a loose dress and my sensible schoolteacher shoes. “I’m not wearing riding clothes,” I said, “but if he is as advertised, I guess I could trot him around a bit.”

“You could ride this horse in your pajamas,” Rooster said with a smirk.

I followed the two comedians out to the corral, and while they saddled up the mustang, I went over to a hedge of juniper, broke off a nice limber branch, and stripped the twigs from it.

“Ready to pass your test, ma’am?” Rooster asked. He thought the impending disaster was going to be so hilarious that he could barely contain himself.

The mustang was standing stock-still but watching me out of the corner of his eye. He was just another half-broke horse, and I’d seen plenty of them in my lifetime. I hiked up my skirt and shortened the reins, twisting the horse’s head to the right so he couldn’t swing his hindquarters away.

As soon as I got my foot into the stirrup, he moved off, but I had him by the mane and I swung into the saddle. He immediately started bucking. By now the two guys were splitting their sides with laughter, but I paid them no mind. The way to stop a horse from bucking was to get his head up-he had to drop it to kick out with his hindquarters-and then send him forward. I popped the horse hard in the mouth with the reins, which jerked his head right up, and whaled his rump with the juniper branch.

That got that little varmint’s attention-and the comedians’ as well. We set off at a good gallop, but he was still throwing his shoulders around and fishtailing. I was following the motion, riding with my upper body loose, my heels jammed down, and my legs clamped like a vise around his sides. Rooster and his buddy were not going to be seeing any daylight between me and the saddle.

Each time I sensed the small hesitation that meant a buck was coming, I popped the horse’s mouth and whaled his rear again, and he soon learned that the only way out for him was to do what I wanted him to do. In no time he settled, and I patted his neck.

I walked the mustang back to the comedians, who were no longer laughing. Both of them had lost their patter. They were even a little slack-jawed. I could tell it was killing them that I could get the best of a horse that must have given them plenty of trouble, but I didn’t rub it in.

“Nice little pony,” I said. “Can I have my paycheck now?”

WORD ABOUT ME BREAKING that mustang spread around Red Lake, and people began regarding me as a woman to be reckoned with. Both men and women asked for my opinion on problem horses and problem children. Rooster-whose real name was Orville Stubbs but whom I always called Rooster-started acting like my faithful sidekick, as if, since I’d bested him at a game of his own devising, he owed me his utter devotion.

Rooster worked only part-time as a deputy. He lived above the Red Lake stable and also made a little money on the side mucking stalls, shoeing horses, and helping out on roundups. Like most folks out in the country, he didn’t have a particular job, much less a career, but got by doing whatever came his way. Rooster turned out to be a likable little guy, even though he had his less than charming habits. He chewed tobacco and was a swallower, not a spitter. “Spitters just waste good juice,” he declared.

Rooster introduced me to the other horsemen in Red Lake, telling folks I was the former Chicago flapper who’d given up drinking champagne and doing the Charleston to come teach the kids of Coconino County. He encouraged me to enter that mustang, which was his and which he’d named Red Devil, in local races. They were pickup affairs on the weekends, with five to ten horses in quarter-mile heats and a purse of five or ten dollars. I started winning some of those races, and that put around the word about me as well.

I also started playing poker on Saturday night with Rooster and his pals. Our games were in the café, and they involved a fair amount of inebriation. Most folks in that part of Arizona didn’t pay much attention to Prohibition, considering it a perverse eastern aberration. All it really meant was that saloon keepers started calling their establishments cafés and stashed their liquor bottles under the counter instead of on the shelf behind the bar. Wasn’t no one going to come between a cowboy and his whiskey.

Rooster and the others would put away a good quantity of what they called “panther piss,” but I’d sit there nursing a single glass all night long. I avoided the elaborate bluffing favored by the cowboys, and always just played the hand I was dealt, folding as soon as the bidding got too rich for my cards, and going for small victories rather than high-stakes table sweepers. Still, on most nights I’d end up ahead of the game, a nice little stack of coins sitting on the table in front of me.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn’t half bad to be in a place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

After a while I could tell Rooster was sweet on me, but before he made his intentions clear, I let him know I’d been married once, it hadn’t worked out, and I had no desire to marry again. He seemed to accept this, and we stayed good friends, but one day he came by the teacherage with a shy, sober expression.

“I got something I needs to ask you,” he said.

It sounded like he was going to propose. “Rooster, I thought you understood we were just friends.”

“It ain’t like that,” he said. “So don’t make this any harder.” He hesitated for a moment. “What I was going to ask was could you show me how to write out ’Orville Stubbs’?”

And that was how Rooster became my secret student.

ROOSTER STARTED DROPPING BY on Saturday afternoons. We’d work on his reading and writing, then head out for a night of fivecard stud. I was still racing Red Devil and winning more often than not. I had spent some of my winnings to buy a crimson-colored shirt of genuine silk, and I wore it whenever I raced. That way even shortsighted spectators could recognize me. I just loved that brilliant, shiny red shirt. Anyone could tell at a moment’s glance that it was mail-order, not homemade or home-dyed, and that shirt became my trademark.

One day in early spring, Rooster and I rode down to a race on a ranch south of Red Lake. It was a bigger meet than usual, with five heats, a final, and a fifteen-dollar purse, and it was held on an actual track, with an inside rail where the spectators had gathered.

Red Devil’s legs were on the short side, but that little mustang had fire, and when he got going, he moved so quickly that his hoofbeats sounded like one long drumroll. We took the lead early in the second heat. We were still ahead going into the first turn when a car near the rail backfired with a loud bang. Red bucked and veered sharply to the right, I went left, and before I knew what was happening, I was rolling on the track.

I clamped my hands over my head and lay still, eating dirt, as the other horses thundered by. I’d had the wind knocked out of me, but otherwise, I was fine, and when the sound of the hoofbeats faded, I got up and smacked the dirt off my behind.

Rooster had caught Red and was jogging back toward me with the horse. I climbed into the saddle. I had no chance of catching up with the others, but Red needed to learn that my taking an involuntary dismount didn’t mean he got out of doing his job.

When I crossed the finish line, the judge stood up and doffed his Stetson. I raced in a later heat, but Red was off his stride, and we finished toward the back. I had felt that fifteen-dollar purse was within my reach, and afterward, as Rooster watered the horse, I was still cursing about that backfiring car when the judge came over. He was a big man with a deliberate way of moving, a weathered face, and steady pale blue eyes.

“That was quite a tumble you took,” he said. His voice was deep, like he was speaking from inside a bass fiddle.

“No need to be reminding me, mister.”

“Everyone takes spills, ma’am. But I was mightily impressed with how, instead of calling it a day, you got right back on and finished the race.”

I started railing about the backfiring jalopy, but Rooster cut me off. “This here is Jim Smith,” he said. “Some folks call him Big Jim. He owns the new garage in town.”

“Don’t much like automobiles, do you?” Jim asked me.

“Just don’t like them spooking my horse. Truth is, I always wanted to learn to drive.”

“Maybe I can teach you.”

I WAS N’T ABOUT TO pass up an opportunity like that, so Jim Smith taught the teacher how to drive. He had a Model T Ford with a brass radiator, brass headlights, and a brass horn. The car, which Jim called “the Flivver,” was an ordeal-and sometimes an outright menace-to start. On really cold days you couldn’t get it going at all, and even on warm days it helped to have two people, because otherwise you had to crank it by hand, then jump into the front seat to pull out the choke. Sometimes the car lurched forward while you were cranking it, and other times the engine kicked back, causing the crank to suddenly reverse. When that happened, people had been known to break their wrists.

But once you got the Flivver started up, driving it was a hoot. I discovered that I loved cars even more than I loved horses. Cars didn’t need to be fed if they weren’t working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn’t run off or kick down fences. They also didn’t buck, bite, or rear, and they didn’t need to be broke and trained, or caught and saddled up every time you needed to go somewhere. They didn’t have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you.

I practiced driving with Jim out on the range, where you didn’t have to worry about hitting anything but a juniper tree, and I got the hang of it quickly. In no time at all, I was tootling around the streets of Red Lake at a breakneck twenty-five miles an hour, operating the pedals with my feet and the levers with my hands while honking at the chickens in my way, swerving to avoid hitting the poor foot-bound sodbusters, and startling horses with the occasional backfire.

But they had to get used to it. The automobile was here to stay.

My driving lessons with Jim Smith began to include trips to the Grand Canyon to deliver gas to a filling station near there, then picnics. After I’d learned to drive, we continued the picnics and also took horseback rides out to places like the ice cave near Red Lake, a hole so deep that if you climbed way down into it, you could find ice in the middle of the summer. We used that ice to make cold lemonade to go with our biscuits and jerky.

After a while it became clear that, without saying anything directly, Jim was courting me. He’d been married once before, but his wife-a pretty blond thing-had died in the influenza epidemic ten years earlier. I still wasn’t interested in marriage, but there was a lot about Jim Smith that I found to admire. For one thing, unlike my previous crumb-bum husband, he didn’t lay down a smooth line of patter. He spoke when he had something to say, and if he didn’t, he felt no need to fill the void with hot air.

Jim Smith was a Jack Mormon. He’d been born into the faith but didn’t practice it. His father was Lot Smith, a soldier, pioneer, and ranger who had been one of Brigham Young’s chief lieutenants when the Mormons went to war with the U.S. government. At one point the federals put a thousand-dollar price on his head, but when they came to arrest him, Lot Smith held off the soldiers at gunpoint. He also helped found the Mormon settlement in Tuba City and was killed there by a Navajo- or by a rival Mormon, depending on which story you believed.

Lot Smith had eight wives and fifty-two children, and those kids learned to fend for themselves. When Jim turned eleven, his father gave him a rifle, some bullets, and a packet of salt and said, “Here’s your food for a week.” Jim became an excellent marksman and horseman and a wrangler at age fourteen. He worked in Canada for a while but fell afoul of the Mounties for using his pistols a little too freely. He returned to Arizona and became a lumberjack and homesteader. After his wife died, he joined the cavalry and, during the Great War, served in Siberia, where American soldiers were protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway in the midst of the fighting between the White Russians and the Red Russians. While he was in Siberia, his homestead was seized for failure to pay taxes, so after being mustered out of the cavalry, he become a prospector before finally opening his garage in Red Lake. The man was no slouch.

Jim Smith was going on fifty, which made him twenty years older than me, and he had some wear and tear on him, including a star-shaped bullet scar on his right shoulder from an incident he felt wasn’t worth discussing. Plus, he was pretty much bald, and all the hair was missing from the left side of his body on account of the time that he was dragged by a horse for two miles. But Jim Smith was hardly worn out. He could spend twelve hours in the saddle, lift a car axle off the ground, and cut, split, and stack enough firewood to keep his stove going all winter.

Jim could see things with those pale blue eyes that other people couldn’t see-the quail in the thick brush, the horse and rider on the horizon, the eagle’s nest in the side of the cliff. It was what made him a crack shot. He also noticed everything-the small lump below a horse’s knee that meant it had a bowed tendon, the hand calluses that only farriers had. He could spot liars, cheaters, and bluffers from the get-go. But while nothing escaped him, he never let on that he knew what he knew.

And nothing ever rattled Jim Smith. He was always calm, never lost his temper, and never flailed about trying to figure out his own mind. He always knew what he thought and how he felt. He was dependable and established. He was solid. He had his own business, and it was a steady and respectable one. He fixed cars that needed fixing. He wasn’t trying to sell vacuum cleaners to gullible housewives by throwing dirt on their floors.

Even so, I still wasn’t prepared to marry again, but Jim hadn’t yet broached the subject of marriage, so we were enjoying ourselves having picnics, taking horseback rides, and bombing around Coconino County in the Flivver when I got the letter from Helen.