Half broke horses: a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls

Author:Jeannette Walls
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: B&N
ISBN: 9781416586289
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-10-04T20:30:00+00:00

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.

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