Half Broke Horses
THOSE OLD COWS KNEW trouble was coming before we did.
It was late on an August afternoon, the air hot and heavy like it usually was in the rainy season. Earlier we'd seen some thunderheads near the Burnt Spring Hills, but they'd passed way up to the north. I'd mostly finished my chores for the day and was heading down to the pasture with my brother, Buster, and my sister, Helen, to bring the cows in for their milking. But when we got there, those girls were acting all bothered. Instead of milling around at the gate, like they usually did at milking time, they were standing stiff-legged and straight-tailed, twitching their heads around, listening.
Buster and Helen looked up at me, and without a word, I knelt down and pressed my ear to the hard-packed dirt. There was a rumbling, so faint and low that you felt it more than you heard it. Then I knew what the cows knew -- a flash flood was coming.
As I stood up, the cows bolted, heading for the southern fence line, and when they reached the barbed wire, they jumped over it -- higher and cleaner than I'd ever seen cows jump -- and then they thundered off toward higher ground.
I figured we best bolt, too, so I grabbed Helen and Buster by the hand. By then I could feel the ground rumbling through my shoes. I saw the first water sluicing through the lowest part of the pasture, and I knew we didn't have time to make it to higher ground ourselves. In the middle of the field was an old cottonwood tree, broad-branched and gnarled, and we ran for that.
Helen stumbled, so Buster grabbed her other hand, and we lifted her off the ground and carried her between us as we ran. When we reached the cottonwood, I pushed Buster up to the lowest branch, and he pulled Helen into the tree behind him. I shimmied up and wrapped my arms around Helen just as a wall of water, about six feet high and pushing rocks and tree limbs in front of it, slammed into the cottonwood, dousing all three of us. The tree shuddered and bent over so far that you could hear wood cracking, and some lower branches were torn off. I feared it might be uprooted, but the cottonwood held fast and so did we, our arms locked as a great rush of caramel-colored water, filled with bits of wood and the occasional matted gopher and tangle of snakes, surged beneath us, spreading out across the lowland and seeking its level.
We just sat there in that cottonwood tree watching for about an hour. The sun started to set over the Burnt Spring Hills, turning the high clouds crimson and sending long purple shadows eastward. The water was still flowing beneath us, and Helen said her arms were getting tired. She was only seven and was afraid she couldn't hold on much longer.
Buster, who was nine, was perched up in the big fork of the tree. I was ten, the oldest, and I took charge, telling Buster to trade places with Helen so she could sit upright without having to cling too hard. A little while later, it got dark, but a bright moon came out and we could see just fine. From time to time we all switched places so no one's arms would wear out. The bark was chafing my thighs, and Helen's, too, and when we needed to pee, we had to just wet ourselves. About halfway through the night, Helen's voice started getting weak.
"I can't hold on any longer," she said.
"Yes, you can," I told her. "You can because you have to." We were going to make it, I told them. I knew we would make it because I could see it in my mind. I could see us walking up the hill to the house tomorrow morning, and I could see Mom and Dad running out. It would happen -- but it was up to us to make it happen.
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'llever 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 theafternoon, we reached a high point below the Coyote Mountains.
When we came up out of the canyon, we circled back over the flats, and Rex, who could talk to me over the intercom, let me take the controls. I banked left, brought her level again, banked right in one big circle, climbed, and dropped.
Nothing in life was finer than flying.
Rex took the controls again. He sent the plane on a big rolling loop, and I couldn't help grabbing on for dear life when we went upside down. Coming out of the loop, we dove steeply and then went skimming along barely fifty feet above the ground. Trees, hills, rock formations zoomed up at us and flashed by.
"We call this flat-hatting," Rex said. "A friend of mine was doing it over the beach, and when he leaned out to wave at the girls, his plane went right into the drink."
Then we were flying toward a road with a string of telephone poles running alongside it. "Watch this!" Rex shouted over the intercom. He dropped the plane down even lower until we were practically touching the ground.
I realized he was going to try to fly under the telephone wire. "Rex, you fool! You'll kill us!" I yelled.
Rex just cackled, and before I knew it, we were lining up to shoot between two poles, then they zipped past, along with the blur of the wire overhead.
"You're a goddamned crazy man!" I said.
"That's what your daughter loves about me!" he hollered back.
He climbed again and headed north until he found what he wanted, grazing cattle. He dropped down behind the herd and approached it, once again almost skimming the earth. The cattle started stampeding away from us at their lumbering gallop, streaming out to the sides as we came onto them, but Rex banked right and then left, driving the cattle toward the center. Only when he had them back together did he pull up and away.
"Can't do that on a horse, can you?" he asked.
THAT SPRING REX AND Rosemary decided to get married. She gave me the news one evening after dinner while we were doing the dishes.
"You need someone solid," I told her. "Haven't I taught you anything?"
"You sure have," she said. "That's all you've been doing my whole life. 'Let this be a lesson.' 'Let that be a lesson.' But all these years, what you thought you were teaching me was one thing, and what I was learning was something else."
We stood there, staring at each other. Rosemary was leaning against the kitchen sink, her arms crossed.
"So you're going to marry him even if I don't approve?" I asked.
"That's the plan."
"I always liked to think I'd never met a kid I couldn't teach," I said. "Turns out I was wrong. That kid is you."
At the same time, Rex announced that his tour of duty was coming to an end and he'd decided not to reenlist. The air force wanted him to fly bombers, and he wanted to fly fighters. Also, he didn't want Rosemary to waste her life raising a brood of kids in a broiling trailer on a desert air base. Besides, he had other plans.
Big plans.