“A weed!” I repeated in disgust. “You should see my Hobo!”
“There, there, Annie. It’s like some garden flowers—like the larkspur and lilies. In the East, they jump the walls and go wild. Some people think they’re regular weeds, not having the eyes to see. It’s the same with horses. Weedlike though they be, a band of mustangs racing across the sand under the pale desert sky is one of the finest sights in the West.”
My hate began to melt. “Then you know all about this picture, don’t you? Who put it there?” I asked.
“I did,” he replied quietly. “I felt the artist understood the beauty and wild freedom of the mustangs. And sometimes when I feel all tired and trapped . . . ”
“You? Trapped?” I stammered almost angrily, seeing him standing there, his big arm muscles bulging.
He shut his eyes and sighed. And when he spoke, his voice was gentle and sad. “Do you think,” he asked softly, “a man is free who has to put little girls in plaster casts, knowing how it feels inside? Do you think that a doctor who must treat sickness he cannot cure, and dying people he cannot save, is really free? It’s the worst kind of prison of all. You do your best, you pray, you beat against the bars. But sometimes—many times—you lose every step of the way. You are trapped and helpless. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded dumbly with tears in my throat. But a thrill ran up and down my crooked spine as I felt a glow of kinship with the doctor. He shared my prison!
“So,” he said, “I look long and deep at the painting until my tiredness goes away and something inside me is all free once more, like the mustangs tearing down the wind. Do you understand, Annie?”
I just nodded again, being too choked up for talking.
“That’s why I had the painting hung there,” the doctor said. “I thought maybe the mustangs could help the patients, too, when they felt tired and trapped like me.”
The tears came up from my throat and moved to my eyes, and then rolled down inside my cast. But I was crying from happiness, knowing I wasn’t alone any more.
The big doctor turned and walked away. And I could see that his shoulders were heavy and bent with his worry.
It was that picture in the hospital which saw me through. Sometime I would be free like that. All those days I lived on the promise of my own liberty.
• • •
Weeks went by. And months. Spring came again, and with it my freedom. Early one morning the cast was taken off entirely. I could bend! I could run! Soon I could ride Hobo!
I rushed to the mirror to see the transformation. One look and I gaped in horror. The face that stared back at me was the one I had seen long ago in the cracked mirror on the barn. The two sides of my face did not match! The hard plaster cast had made it grow crooked.
This time I did not laugh. I hid my face in shame and sobbed. All that day I felt abandoned by the world. Naked and despised, as if God cared more about poor fallen sparrows than me. I heard the nurses whispering behind my back. “Whatever is to become of the poor child now?” For a moment I longed to run to the hospital dump and find the discarded cast, and shut myself up in it again. There I could see without being seen.
Then I heard a step down the hall. Boot heels clicking. It had to be Pa!
5. “To Lazy Heart Ranch”
IN SUDDEN WILD energy I brushed a nurse out of my way and fled to his arms. “Papa!” I cried. “Oh, Papa!” Starved for his love, I burrowed my head into his rough jacket. He smelled sweet of hay and horses and leather and apples. He held me tight for a long time, and there we stood in my little cell of a room clinging to each other, rocking back and forth, not saying a word.
Then my loving feelings suddenly snapped. I thought, Let him look at me like I am. Suddenly I wanted to say, Look! Look what you and Mom did to me! I wrenched violently away and flaunted my face at him.
A nurse started to come in, but she whirled about like a mustang afraid of being trapped. Papa still did not speak. He put his big hands around my face and cradled it ever so gently as if it were a hurt bird. Then he leaned his head down on my stubbly new-growing hair and wept like a child. I could feel his shoulders heaving and the hot tears dampening my scalp. In quick shame I knew that Pa was the one to be pitied. He and Mom thought they were doing the greatest good in the world for me, but the good had backfired like Grandpa’s old flintlock.
We didn’t talk much on the long way home over the beautiful Sierras that I loved. So much had changed. We were riding in a painted-over truck instead of a wagon drawn by one of our shiny-rumped teams. Papa explained. “Long and short of it is, Annie, it don’t pay to haul by wagon any more.”
A terrible thought came to me. The horses—were they gone? “Papa!” I cried. “You haven’t sold Hobo and . . . ”
“‘Course not, child.”
Satisfied, we both lapsed into silence. I felt strangely uplifted. I forgot about my face. My prison term was over and all joy had not been squeezed out of me. I could run. I would ride again. I drank deep of my freedom. The sun swam in a blue bowl of sky that was almost empty of clouds—only scraps of white wool caught on the saw-toothed peaks. I couldn’t tell which was snow, which cloud.
April lay on the land. Miles on miles of April—greening over the mountains, fuzzing over the meadows, and the air so clean and fine I gulped it in great lungfuls. A doe deer and a buck bounded across the road in front of us. I laughed, watching until their white tails flashed out of sight.
It was plain as anything that God still cared for me. Why else had He left me all His creation? More contented than I had been in months, I fell into a deep sleep, my head in Papa’s lap. Not until we were alongside the Truckee River, winding down through the meadows on its banks did I waken.
Papa picked up our talk where we’d left off. “We’re going to need ‘em more than ever now.”
“The horses?”
“Yep. And I’ll be needing a good young hand around the new place. One who can drive and ride and muck out and mend harness and paint and shingle . . . ”
The new place? What did Pa mean?
“That is,” he added without ever meeting my gaze, “if your back’s done hurtin’, and your neck.”
“Oh, yes!” I answered quickly. “Even over the bumps I scarce noticed a thing.”
“Good!” he said with a deep intake of breath. “The new place is down the canyon a piece, just a skip and a holler from Reno. Remember that old road to the Indian reservation?”
“Sure I do. Every time I wore my beaded moccasins at the hospital I closed my eyes and thought about our visits with the Paiutes and old Chief Many Feathers.”
“Reno’s just getting too big,” Pa said, talking as much to himself as to me. “Sidewalks now ‘stead o’ good old dirt. A man can’t even raise a dust when he walks. And houses pressin’ in closer and closer. Why, a feller can hardly breathe.”
His hands suddenly tightened on the wheel until the blue veins flattened to nothing. “Speakin’ of houses . . . ” the words came slowly now, very slowly “ . . . your Mom had to get away from our old house.”
I felt a cold clutch of fear. What had happened to my pretty Mom?
“They say . . . ” Pa’s voice strangled in his throat. He tried again. “They say lightning never hits twice . . . ”
“Was our house struck by lightning?”
He gave me a quick-flung glance as if trying to remember I was still only twelve. He spoke faster now. “Two months after you went away, your little brother came down with the polio, too. Only he died.”
I reached for Pa’s hand. An awed silence came between us. When he finally spoke again, it startled me.
“Pardner,” he said when he could steady his voice, “we tried the best way we knew to take care of you. Can’t say we did a good job of it, but we tried. Now you got to help us.”
I squeezed his hand harder.
We kept going, past the old familiar landmarks, past our old home and the barns, and kept right on, still traveling alongs
ide the Truckee but leaving houses behind. City streets gave way to green meadows, and brown cows dotting the landscape like freckles sprinkled lightly. And I loved the vast loneliness and the rimming crags of mountains.
Already I was arranging with my mind to accept the shape in which I’d been re-created. With Mom and Pa needing my help, I would have to figure out a way. Besides, my back didn’t hurt any more and I could turn my neck some, and I could see and smell beauty. “Dear God!” I whispered in a sort of prayer. “Your world is beautiful.”
We began bearing right, still meandering along the river, and now we turned off the highway, and the truck rattled down a rocky road past a new, unweathered marker. “To Lazy Heart Ranch,” it said. And after one more bend we jolted to a stop in front of a long shed, freshly painted white. There was no house anywhere. Only this long shed with an open shelter in the middle and an enclosed place at each end.
Mom came running out of the nearest door. She still looked young and pretty, only thinner. Her eyes were so full of happy tears that she couldn’t see me real plain, and while she was hugging me as if she’d never let me go again, I looked over her shoulder and caught movement in the shed at the far end. Above the half-door I saw a pair of ears pricked, then a blazed face bobbed up, and there, miracle of miracles, was my dream—the white barn, the half-door, and my horse looking for me.
Arm in arm the three of us, me half-running, pulling Pa and Mom, reached the shed.
“Are you really Hobo?” I whispered. “Why, your coat’s slick as a chestnut!”
“And why not!” Pa announced with a proud grin. “Just because he’s got a lot o’ mature mustang sense, you don’t recognize him. And besides, I been grooming him within an inch of his life.”
And then Hobo put in his word. He began whinnerin’ in that sweet snorty way of his and pawing at the door, and I didn’t care if it was his barley he wanted, or if he was hankerin’ to be out with the other horses, or whether it was me he recognized. I just opened the fancy latch, the likes of which we’d never had back in Reno, and I went in. And I kissed the blaze on his face like some silly girl who’d never been around horses, and cried all over his shiny neck and his mane, and I didn’t care.
After a minute Pa tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to a sheet of paper tacked on the wall. “Stop your muggin’ and come see this,” he coaxed.
I tore myself away from Hobo and studied Papa’s printing. It was a proper-looking bill of sale saying a lot of things I knew already—that Hobo was out of a mustang mare by a mustang sire, and he was a bright buckskin with black points and a blazed face. It also said: In return for a year’s work helping to build us a house, I hereby transfer ownership of one Hobo with the Lazy Heart brand to Annie Bronn to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy. And there was Pa’s signature, Joseph Bronn, bold and black. And beneath it a dotted line where I was supposed to sign. Dangling from a piggin’ string was a new-sharpened pencil.
Joyously I picked it up and wrote with the biggest flourish I knew how,
annie Bronn
Now Hobo was really, truly mine.
6. It Takes a Smart Mustang—
QUICK AS a flash flood, my months of loneliness washed away. I was my Pa’s Pardner again. And Hobo was my very own, and Foxy and Old Baldy and Dolly were good as mine, and the mountains and sky were mine, and the green grass rumpling in the wind, and the meadow larks trilling like all Heaven was in their throats. Even the scaredy rabbits and the noisy magpies were my friends. At last I was free as they were. No casts to imprison me. No cold white walls to fence me in.
After the ether and Lysol smelliness of the hospital, our living quarters in the barn were sweet with the scent of horses and hay. The dirt floor was friendly to bare feet. And the bunk-beds, sawhorse tables, and orange-crate shelves seemed beautiful as store-bought mahogany. Mom made two rooms out of one by hanging an Indian blanket over a clothesline. To me it hung prettier than velvet or satin.
Mom never once mentioned my looks, but I caught her putting away her pretty gold-framed mirror that she had saved from her girlhood days. I never let on that I knew why—even when I watched her combing her long hair by guess. My hair was so short I could comb it with my fingers and spit. Of course, if Mom caught me, I had to begin all over with a comb, not the old toothless one that hung on the side of the barn at home, but a brand new one. It had sharp teeth and I hated it.
Mom did everything with a song—even her cooking on an old two-burner plate that took up half the kitchen table. She boiled, stewed, and fried on one burner, and in a tin oven atop the other she baked flaky biscuits and crisp apple fancies that all but melted in your mouth before you could swallow ‘em. For the first time in all my life I couldn’t get enough to eat, and I’d clean my plate so’s Mom never had to scrape it. With honey from our own bees and eggs from our own hens, breakfast was worth getting up for.
Bathing was a hit-or-miss affair in a galvanized tub behind the Indian blanket. As I soaped and splattered and rinsed, I felt gawky as a stork in a canary dish.
Except for eating, sleeping, and bathing, I spent no time at all in the house. It seemed as if Nature grabbed me by the hand and pulled me outside. I had to bask in, wallow in, work and play in all outdoors.
We had our own small sea of grass along the banks of the Truckee, and that’s where I spent my days. It was alive with little creatures—ladybugs and lizards, deer mice and chickarees, pocket gophers and jackrabbits. Pa always called them “jackass rabbits,” but Mom forbade me to say it. Occasionally deer came down out of the hills and scrubbed their tongues at our salt licks, and once a spotted owl perched on my head, quiet as a sigh.
Much as I’d dreamed of my own horse looking out over the half-door, pining for me, I knew now that was city stuff, for horses who had never run wild. Almost the first thing I did was to give Hobo all the freedom of the Lazy Heart Ranch. Snorting his thanks, he exploded out the door, sunfishing at the sky. Then he lined out for the open meadow. I could picture him leaping the fence, racing on and on until he was clean out of sight. Instead, he rounded up Dolly and Foxy and Old Baldy and told them he was still boss of the band.
It was a long time before he entered his private stall again. Only once did he go there of his own free will. It had been sleeting all night, and in the morning I rushed out to see if he and the others were blanketed with ice. To my surprise, they were steamy warm, all four of them crowded and cozy in Hobo’s stall, with the bottom half of the door closed! Pa said that Dolly had surely pushed down the bar, her being so motherly. But of course I knew it was Hobo.
Water for the horses came from the irrigation canal nearby. Once a week Pa would raise a gate to let water gush into the ditches. Then it would be a big flow, enough for the horses to splash knee-deep. But other times it was only a trickle.
My first weeks at home were full of wonder and happiness. Then, gradually, almost without my knowing, a small worry crept in. Pa stayed home so much, and he even had time to ride with me. How was he earning any money? And what about Mom? She seemed happy enough now with our picnic way of life. But when she grew older, like Grandma, wouldn’t she want a real house to live in? Why didn’t we begin building it?
I said nothing of my worry, but tried to be Pa’s strong right arm and help him more as I grew bigger and stronger. We raised alfalfa hay to sell to cattle ranchers for winter forage, and I drove the mower around the field while Hobo and Dolly nodded their heads as we made smaller and ever smaller circles.
In time Pa let me drive the dump rake, too. He and Charley Johnston, a neighbor boy, heaved the hay on top of the wagon and I was allowed to build the load.
Charley was six years older than I, and distant kin to the Delaware Indians. In some ways he was a lot like them, even though he didn’t have their dark eyes or hair. But his skin was browned by desert sun. If he’d been naked with only a breechclout like the Indians used to wear, and if he’d ridden our Old Baldy bareback, they’d have looked all of one piece.
Pa admired Charley and was loud in his praise. “That young feller,” he told Mom, “is rugged and steadfast as the mountains, and brave enough to spit in a cougar’s eye.”
It was Charley who finally helped Mom to get her house. Of course, Pa birthed the idea. Then he and Charley, with all our horses pulling, dragged home three old boxcars discarded by the railroad. By knocking out the ends and snugging them together, they built as cozy a house as any beaver’s. What I liked about it was the way it formed a kind of U with a long room on each side. This left garden space open to the sky, where we could plant a willow tree and picnic in its shade. In spite of Mom’s fears I helped with the shingling, just like I’d promised. It was scary up on that high slidy roof, but I wouldn’t let on, especially to Charley.
We kept working on the house after school began that fall. Sometimes Charley and I rode out on the wide sage-stubbled ranges to find old wagon wheels to make a gate and to outline Mom’s flower bed. I was glad he liked to ride, because Mom wouldn’t let me ride alone. During school hours I studied like mad just to be free in the evening for Hobo and the rest of the horses. Was it a guilty feeling I had? Was I trying to make up to them for Pa’s taking ’em away from their mountains? If truth were known, I thought far more of them than of my schoolmates; they ranked right alongside Mom and Pa.
As for my feelings for Charley, I kind of lumped him with all outdoors. I never thought about him much until several years went by. By then I had a high school diploma with honors in shorthand and typing. The first time I began thinking about Charley as a person was on the Saturday he came over to borrow Hobo.
“Quick, Annie!” he said. “It’s an emergency!”
“What is?”
“The Grafs’ new Appaloosey got away and he’s headin’ clean for Idaho ‘cause he just came from there.”