Guestward Ho! (23 page)

Like a lot of other women, I'm a gregarious soul and I start going a bit stir-crazy left all alone with nothing
but one husband and two drunks to keep me company for
three months in a row. Conversely, when I've been up
to my eyeballs in guests for three months I get that won't-
they-ever-go-home feeling. It's either a feast or famine
with me, while Bill can always adjust himself to any situation and come through grinning. I didn't know what was the matter with me at the time—I do now; it was idleness,
boredom, and fear of the poorhouse—but I was getting the nipsy-darts holed up in that lonely ranch house with , only the deficit as my constant companion.

And then suddenly there were guests. About ten assorted people showed up for no particular reason at all; and in addition we were expecting a charming New England family named Cromwell who had been sent to us by our Santa Fe friends Helen and Barry Atwater. The Atwaters are a wonderful couple. Barry is one of those rarities—the really good painter who enjoys his success while he's alive. He mostly paints biggish local landscapes in a style that is workmanlike but still imaginative and refreshing and in colors so soft and beautiful you want to wear them, decorate rooms with them,
eat
them. (
As this otherwise lighthearted book goes to press, it is my un
happy task to report the death of Barry Atwater on January 15,
1956.)
Helen is a designer, and she is one of those tall, casual,
handsome women who can reach into a dark closet, fish
out an old pair of dungarees and one of her husband's
paint-splattered shirts, and put them on in a way that
makes you think that the masterminds of Paris have been planning that very outfit for the past six months. We knew
that anybody sent to us by Helen and Barry would be
pretty special and we wanted everything to be especially
nice.

The Cromwells drove in with their little girls, were
given their rooms, and then decided to go out on horse
back right away. Since it was to be a big riding party, and since there were young children along, Bill and I
both decided to ride out with them. It was late when we came back. I charged through the kitchen on my way to
the tub and smelled chicken frying. It smelled great. "Good old James B.," I said to myself. "He may have his failings, but he can always rise to the occasion."

By a quarter past six I was looking as chic as I ever would and Bill was a vision, of sorts, in one of those
tacky little shoestring ties men out West insist upon wear
ing. The Atwaters had just driven in, not only to dine,
but to talk over old times with the Cromwells. As things
turned out, they had ample opportunity to discuss every
trivial event from that evening right back to the First
Crusade before dinner was served, but I didn't know that
as I said in my airiest hostess voice, "If you'll just excuse
me for a second, I'll see how things are going in the kitchen."

The sight I saw nearly floored me. There was fried
chicken and nothing else but fried chicken. No hot
canapés
,
no rolls, no vegetables, no potatoes, no salad, no dessert—just fried chicken, and a
mountain
of it, growing cold and greasy at the side of the stove. James B.
Smith was so drunk he could barely lift his head. Lee was
hardly better.

That evening I was seething. "Bill," I said with a wan
little smile and what I hoped was a convincingly casual tone, "will you please see that everybody has another drink and then come out here, dear?"

"What the hell's going on out here?" Bill roared when he came in, in a tone that must have carried not only to our guests but to Denver.

"Oh, Mister Bill," James B. moaned, "I'm sick. I'm dying. I'm having a heart attack."

"He's drunk," I snapped.

"Oh, no, Miz Barbara. It's my heart. The ole ticker. I'm a goner."

"You're a guzzler and a double-crosser, damn you!" I growled. But I wasn't certain. For all I knew he way
having a heart attack as well as an impromptu spree, and
I didn't want a dead cook on my hands.

"Get to bed," Bill said coldly.

"Dinner," I announced, smiling idiotically through the
kitchen door, "will be just a little late—about an hour, in fact."

Bill and I set to in a frenzy to get some kind of food
onto the table. No time, by then, to prepare all the complicated little treats the menu called for, such as hollan
daise sauce and grated Gruyere cheese and meringues.
What had been originally planned to be a well-balanced,
elegant dinner was rapidly turning into one of those
grubby catch-as-catch-can meals that bachelors throw to
gether after a tough day at the office.

I was livid with rage and so was Bill. Lee, I think, was thoroughly frightened and tried to pull herself together enough to peel a few potatoes, but she was too far gone in alcohol to do much more than cut her hand so severely that we had to drop everything and administer first aid.

"I wish you'd cut your bloody throat instead," Bill
hissed at her. "Now get out of here and sleep it off!" So
there we were—just the two of us—an irascible Darby
and Joan rushing hysterically around the kitchen, bump
ing into each other, snapping and snarling while fifteen
guests waited patiently in the lounge and while the fried
chicken burned to tough, charred, shrunken, tasteless little pellets.

At nine dinner was served. The Cromwells' little girls
were so heavy-eyed with sleep that they had to be led to
the table and propped up in their chairs. I was so
ashamed as I set each plate down that I could have wept.

And I did weep when I tried to cut into the fried chicken. James B., in his stupor, had used
stewing
hens, each so
sinewy that even cremation had failed to render them tender. A lousy time was had by all.

"Now,
Bill," I said after the last guest had departed, smiling bravely and telling us what a delicious dinner it had been over pangs of hunger. "It's entirely up to you. At twelve noon tomorrow either the Smiths will be out of here or I will. Take your choice."

The Smiths went. But even their departure carried with
it a certain raffish air of drama.

Bill went out and fired them good and proper, but
being a considerate employer—did I say considerate? Bill
was a martyr—he followed them into town and escorted
them both to our doctor's office. When two hours passed
and Bill still hadn't returned, I began to develop qualms of conscience. What if I had sent a dying man out into the cold? When another hour went by, I telephoned the
doctor.

"James B. Smith is a sick man, all right, Barbara," the
doctor said jovially. "But it's not his heart. He has the heart of a bull."

"What is it, then?" I asked.

"Acute alcoholism and malnutrition and his wife is
very little better. But all they need is to go on the wagon for a long, long time, take heroic doses of vitamins, and eat. You and Bill ought to be able to straighten them out
in about three months' time."

"No, we ought
not,
thank you," I said and hung up.

Just then a rusty, wheezing old car chugged up the
driveway and a woman got out accompanied by two
tough-looking men. Somehow they just didn't have the
air of holiday-makers out for a jolly fortnight of ranching.
The woman looked slightly familiar, but I couldn't quite
think where or when I had seen her before.

"Y-yes?" I said.

"I want to see James B. Smith," the woman said
darkly.

"Well, I'm awfully sorry," I said, "but James B. Smith
doesn't work here any longer. He and his wife have just
left and . . ."

"
I
am his wife," she said.

Then I realized that she was the woman who had been
on the Santa Fe bus the
first
time James B. Smith left our employ.

“Oh! Oh, really!" I spluttered. "I understood—that is, I was led to believe, I mean . . . Well, aren't you and
James B.
divorced?"
This was one of those social en
counters for which Mother had never prepared me.

"No, we ain't divorced. That no-good old lush divorced
his
first
wife to marry
me,
an' I got the certiffy-kit right
here," she said, rummaging around in her purse.

Just then I was saved by the telephone bell. "Excuse me," I said, grateful for the interruption.

"Hello," I said, closing the door between the other Mrs. Smith and me.

"Miz Barbara," James B. wailed sepulchrally from the
other end of the wire, "Lee an' me is in
trouble."

"You certainly are," I said frigidly. From somewhere in the background I could hear a band blaring out "In the Mood."

"Yes ma'am. I got a coronary thrombosis an' I'm in a
oxygen tent."

"That's the first oxygen tent I've ever heard of with a
built-in juke box, James B."

"Oh, Miz Barbara, Lee an' me may not see you for a long time."

"I can wait," I said. I was beginning to enjoy myself with James B. for the first time.

"So I wondered if you could loan me two hundred dollars . . ."

"For lawyers' fees?" I asked.

"What's that, Miz Barbara?"

"I said, James B., you'll probably need every penny you can lay hands on to beat the bigamy rap—or maybe even'
trigamy,
if there is such a word—that's facing you."

"Miz Barbara, don't fool with me. I'm a sick man. I'm in a oxygen tent, like I tell you."

"Well, James B., if I were you, I'd move that oxygen
tent across the Mexican border as fast as I could, because
there's somebody out here who's just
itching
to take care
of you—
and
Lee."

"Whooooo?"

"The
last
Mrs. James B. Smith," I said. There was a gulp at the other end of the wire and then James B. Smith and "In the Mood" were silenced forever.

The other Mrs. James B. Smith left empty-handed in
hot pursuit of her fickle husband. Some women just don't
know when they're well off. Lee—or Mrs. James B. Smith, III, IV, or V—did not leave empty-handed. In
fact, she had the foresight to pack up half of all the nice
things I owned—six settings of silver, six of every kind of
china, six of each kind of crystal and linen—to take with
her as a little souvenir of Rancho del Monte. By the time
I discovered the loss there was no hope of tracing any of
the Smiths; and although our private entertaining was curtailed to just six people per sitting, the loss was worth
it, just being rid of James B. and Lee.

Bill showed up late that afternoon with yet another
couple, armed with well-thumbed references and glib declarations as to their fidelity, sobriety, and talents. An hour
after they'd been in the kitchen the woman came to me and said: "Mrs. Hooton, could I have a little sherry to put in the steak and kidney pie?"

"Well?" Bill said.

"Well,"
I said, "I'll give them just six weeks."

The end of our first year as guest ranchers was drawing near and I looked forward to the middle of March—ides,
income taxes, equinoctial storms and all—as eagerly as
though it were my birthday.

I'll admit I was at a particularly low ebb around that time. Everything had gone wrong. The couple I'd given six weeks had lasted just six days. On their first day off they had quietly packed their belongings and taken what the English call "French leave" and what the French call "English leave." Call it what you will,
they were gone, never to return, and Bill and I were stuck
with the guests to feed. One of our horses got sick.
Another fell through a cattle guard, broke a leg, and had
to be shot and carted away. The lights went on the blink
and about two hundred dollars' worth of meat rotted
quietly away in the freezer before the short circuit in the
wiring could be located and repaired. Then the pump
broke. The station wagon developed a chronic and near-
fatal complaint. One of our departed guests' checks
bounced—and it was a big check. One of The Girls got
sick and the other joined her out of sheer sympathy. Some
old New York friends of ours—the kind of people whose
marriage is described as "firm as the Rock of Gibraltar"—
went through a long, involved, and sordid divorce with
suits and countersuits and name-calling and all that sort
of thing. The cantankerous old stove blew up in my face and removed every eyelash I'd ever owned. Our wrangler of the moment presumably got a local Spanish girl into
trouble, and there were all kinds of the most menacing, talk in languages I didn't understand before a sweet stiletto marriage was narrowly averted. Three sets of
guests in a row—people whose reservations I'd accepted
without extracting deposits—welshed on their reserva
tions. We were first servantless and then guestless.

In a word, I was, depressed.

In a few more words, I was so sick and tired of New
Mexico and Rancho del Monte at that point that one
windowless room in a New York tenement with an inadequate relief check arriving sporadically looked like
paradise to me.

Silently, I bided my time, went over the day-to-day figures in my deficit book, added them again and again on the office adding machine, and got all ready to confront Bill. Needless to say, I had never kept any account of the money coming in, since I can barely count to
twenty on my fingers and toes and also because the in
coming money, as compared to the outgoing money, seemed too paltry to consider.

Finally I was ready to pounce.

"Guess what day this is, Bill," I said one morning as we were eating our solitary breakfast.

"It's Sunday, March 14, 1954, Barbara," Bill said.

"And doesn't this date have any special significance for
you?" 1 asked.

"If you mean did I mail the income tax form in, yes. I sent it last Tuesday."

"Income tax?" I asked archly. "Had we any income to
be taxed?"

"Some. Why?"

"Well, Mr. Hooton, in case you'd forgotten, this is our
anniversary."

"Nonsense, Barbara. We were married in October."

"I didn't mean
that
anniversary. I meant that today makes exactly one year since we've been here. Three hundred and sixty-five days of drudgery and debts . . ."

"And dramatics?" Bill said pointedly.

Ignoring him loftily, I went on. "You recall, of course,
our initial agreement?"

"Certainly I do, Barbara," Bill said maddeningly. "We
agreed that if we didn't make any money the first year, we'd give up and go back East."

"Well," I said nastily, "why don't you start packing up all those little banker's gray suits? Why don't you write
your old friends and see if they know of any available jobs
in New York? Why don't you tell Bess Huntinghouse to come back and . . ."

"Because, Barbara, we
made
money."

"Impossible," I gasped, flourishing my little black def
icit book. "Just tot up these deficits,
if you please."

"I know the deficits," Bill said, "but do
you
know the income?"

To my horror, Bill had anticipated me and had all the
books ready for my bumbling inspection. I felt he lacked
chivalry, to say the least, to have been lying in wait for me just as I had been lying in wait for him. A real
gentleman
would never have stooped so low.

I was aghast at the thoroughness of his bookkeeping.
I'm perfectly willing to admit that mathematics is the one
exact science and it's much too exact for me. But there
was everything down in black and white and red—rent,
dues to various organizations, salaries, social security,
food, licenses, liquor, hardware, repairs. It showed a net
profit of exactly four dollars and ninety-eight cents.

"Satisfied?" Bill asked a little too triumphantly.

"Aha, but what about the
current
bills?" I said, leaping at my opportunity.

"All paid," Bill said smugly.

"All?"

"All!"

Feverishly I tried to think of some of the staggering
bills that had come in during the last couple of weeks—
repairs on the pump, the vet's fee, the charge for burying
our poor dead horse, garage bills, even postage stamps.
Every one of them was paid.

"So?" Bill asked.

"Okay," I said as gamely as seemed possible under the
circumstances. "You win."

"Do we try it another year?"

"Yep," I said. "One more year. But just one question."

"Which is?"

"Which is: Do we take that four-ninety-eight profit and
plow it into a fund for our old age?"

"We do not," Bill said staunchly. "We put every penny
of it back into the ranch."

"That's what I thought," I said.

As though my defeat hadn't been bitter enough, as though another year of ranching didn't loom before me,
I also got involved in a horse rustling episode that
practically caused a revival of the Spanish-American War—
just to launch our second year at Rancho del Monte.
One morning when Bill was down at the corral feeding
the horses he noticed a new animal among our string. It was a small, dun-colored mare, practically all bones,
and fairly ugly bones at that. How she got there was a
mystery to us. All the gates were closed and locked, and
a scrawny, starving horse like that one would never have
had the strength to jump the fence. She was. pitifully
hungry and thirsty, and so she was watered and fed along
with our steeds and then turned loose.

Not far up the road from us was a little Spanish town
named Chupadero. There were a few houses and even fewer horses and burros. Every once in a while one of
their animals broke loose and came down to Rancho del Monte to join our beasts for a meal. We always gave the
Chupadero animals a handout and then they usually wandered back home. We thought that this must have been the case with the wretched little mare.

But the next day she was back in time to have lunch with our horses. This time we fed her and then led her far up the road, across the cattle guard, and halfway up to Chupadero, where we gave her a thwack across the
rump and sent her trotting off for home and loved ones.
The following day she was back
again,
which meant that
she had crossed the cattle guard—traditionally hell on horses—and picked her way down to our corral. This
time we kept her for a few days, expecting someone to
come around and claim her. When nobody did, we called
the cattle inspector to come and have a look.

The cattle inspector keeps a record of all the brands in
the county and can tell you at a glance just where any
stray horse belongs. But he gave up on this one.

"She's an old horse," he said, "and she ain't got no brand. I reckon I better travel around some an' see if anybody's lost a nice little Palomino."

"Palomino?"
I said. "That's the first time I've ever seen a Palomino with a henna rinse."

"Well, she is a little on the ginger side," he admitted,
"but clean her up good and you got yourself a right pretty
little Palomino mare."

The traditional procedure for lost and found horses in
New Mexico runs as follows: When you find a horse and
no one claims it, you call the cattle inspector. If he can't
locate the rightful owner, he puts a notice in the news
paper every day for a month. If no one claims the horse
by then, it belongs to the state. The state can then either
sell it for dog food or the finder can buy the horse for what the process has cost the state.

The ad ran for a month, and Ginger, which was what we took to calling her, ate off the fat of our land for a
month. Still nobody claimed her, so for twelve dollars—
which is what a month's newspaper ads cost the state of New Mexico—we owned a horse, and a horse that turned out to be quite a pretty little Palomino, at that.

In fact, it looked as though we were going to get quite a lot of horses for our fodder and twelve dollars because it became apparent to all of us that Ginger was in-a so-
called delicate condition.

About a week after we had legally acquired Ginger,
some young Spanish men from Chupadero appeared. "I
think you got our horse," they said genially.

"What horse?" Bill asked.

"That Palomino," they said, gesturing in Ginger's di
rection.

Bill got out the bill of sale and explained all about the daily ad and how the inspector had gone up to Chupadero
to inquire. They said they hadn't missed the horse until
that very day because she had been out to pasture. But it
was theirs and they wanted her. Bill said we'd be glad to
turn Ginger over to them for twelve dollars and for what
her feed had cost.

They laughed delightedly at this strange idea and drove
away.

Nothing more was heard from them.

But a few weeks later I saw our wrangler tearing out of the bunkhouse, strapping his .45 around his waist. In
a minute he was mounted and galloping down the drive
in real horse-opera style. Since he was something of an
exhibitionist, I didn't pay much attention. In no time at
all, however, he was back sitting very grandly astride his
horse and being preceded by Ginger and two young Span
ish gentlemen. Our wrangler was wielding his gun all too
melodramatically, and while this stringy procession re
minded me a bit of a provincial Italian opera company's
triumphal march from
Aida,
I didn't like to contemplate
getting into any trouble with our Spanish neighbors.

Our wrangler was hardly handling the situation with
what you might call tact, what with herding them all in
at gun point. After all, these young men hadn't done any
thing underhanded. In broad daylight they had come to
collect what they legally felt to be their horse. They had
simply slung a belt around Ginger's neck and led her off.

Once again Bill went through the technicalities of
ownership—the bill of sale, the ads, the inspector, the feed, and so on. He apologized for the cavalier way in
which they had been handled and again offered to release
Ginger to them for cost. Again they shrugged and went
away. This happened three more times and I was getting more and more nervous with each performance. "They'll never understand these Anglo ways, Bill," I kept saying. "Since I don't want to see any of us get stabbed, let's just
forget about the lousy twelve bucks and the feed—after all, that
is
hay—and give her back to them the next time they come down to kidnap her. First thing you
know, Wild Bill Hickok out there in the bunkhouse will
start taking pot shots at those Spanish boys and then we'll
be in
real
trouble."

But they never came back and I'm certain they're still
sitting up there in Chupadero wondering among them
selves just how long those
loco Yanquis
down at the ranch are going to insist upon keeping their Palomino.

As for Ginger herself, she kept getting bigger and
bigger until finally one night our wrangler, who professed
to know everything about pregnancy—and should have if
half the stories I'd heard about him were true—announced
that Ginger's time was at hand and she should be dropping
her foal within a few hours. I was in a perfect flurry,
rushing about in a white dress trying to look as much like
a midwife as possible. I knew absolutely nothing about
the birthing of foals, or of anything else for that matter, but I was determined to be helpful. We built a great big fire and had pots of water steaming and stayed up all night in the delivery stall, prodding poor Ginger's sides
and pacing up and down. Nothing happened.

When two months went by and Ginger still had not
produced, we began to get worried. Then one day we
were short a mount and it was essential to saddle Ginger
to accommodate a rider.