“I always dreamed about being in business,” Joan McBain told Ellen over an early morning cup of coffee.
“Father and Mother spent their whole lives together working the ranch and, I’ll grant you, they had a good life but and I never wanted any part of it. I wanted to be in business, to have a clean office and air-conditioning. Not that we knew much about air-conditioning back then, but that’s what I wanted. I wanted to go to work every day and have my hair done and have long red nails.”
She held up one big hand and examined it. The short manicured nails were a blazing Revlon red.
“That’s what I wanted, a business. After two years up north I said, hell, Bobby, let’s go to the city and make a living. I had Bob Junior and Ronnie was coming and Bobby had some money put aside and Lord knows we weren’t getting fat up there. And really, he never did anything but say yes to me.” She laughed.
“So, you came to Albuquerque?”
“Yup.” She took a deep pull on her Benson & Hedges. Her red lipsticked mouth left its mark on the filter. In another hour the lipstick she wore would be nothing but a pink blur.
“I had some cousins here and they owned this empty building out on Twelfth Street. We made a deal and worked our behinds off for five years building the store. Bobby went back to his folks’ ranch to help bring in more money. Me and the kids lived behind the store, if you could call it that. We sold feed, some saddles, ropes. Not much more to start.”
She was warming to her subject. Last night had been a long, good drinking night. Ron’s new girl obviously slept in the guesthouse even if everyone made a big deal about her using one of the spare bedrooms. Joan figured this girl slipped out of the big old four-poster a few minutes after the house quieted down and ran the few hundred yards to the guesthouse. She like the girl and where she slept was of no-never-mind to her except it was only natural she would go to Ron’s bed.
“I decided I needed to go to school to learn more about running a business and I was pregnant with Sara. It sure was a busy few years.”
Her head wasn’t bad this morning even with only five hours of sleep and all that vodka.
“Coffee?” she offered.
They were sitting at the long wooden stretch of an eight-person kitchen table that ended at the desk in front of the wide bay window. From the desk, Joan McBain could see her land and her horses.
“I didn’t get into the horses, breeding and selling them, until I saw all these folks around here start buying Arabs,” she explained.
“I heard there was big money in those Arabs but I wasn’t interested in them. I kept thinking about horses, though. I took some courses at the university. I knew some already, growing up on a ranch, but bloodlines and new methods of breeding was something I was short on.
“My first real good quarter horse, well, real good for me, cost me four thousand. Bobby thought I’d lost my mind.”
She chuckled.
“Bobby died a few years ago,” Joan McBain told her, “fast, the way he would have liked it.” She sighed and reached for another cigarette from the small metal box.
“Heart attack. One minute here,” she snapped her fingers, “and bang, he’s gone. God, I do miss that man.” Her eyes sought Ellen’s. “There’s a lot of him in Ronnie, you know. In all my children.”
*
“I can’t see raising cuttin’ horses,” Ronnie said about his mother’s business. “I mean, they’re the best for working, but how long is somebody gonna pay fifteen or twenty thousand for some cow pony?”
They were almost the same words spoken by his father when Joan McBain told him her idea about raising quarter horses. No matter what he thought about the plan, he found the money for her first horses. He loved his woman as much as he loved life.
She was eighteen when he first took her to the ranch up north. The land was empty, cold and hard, no green valley like those of the surrounding ranches. Still, it was his and paid for with the years of sweat and bloodied hands on his father’s place. He started his ranch with thirty head, nowhere near enough to survive but enough to begin their life together.
They lived in a root cellar dug into the side of a hill. The small pane of glass in the door let them watch the snow grow high around their hole in the hill. Joan had her first baby ten months after they married, barely making it into Española and the doctor. She came back to a trailer Bobby hauled in for her and the baby. For the next year, she carried Bob Junior on her hip or on her back and worked the ranch with Bobby McBain.
They took their baths from a bucket. They spent their days riding the land, building fences, barbed wire cutting through tough leather gloves. She said nothing of her fear of the rattlers she knew waited for her between the rocks and under the brush. She set her mouth in a grim line and worked.
At night, even in sleet or rain, she would stand outside cooking the steaks he loved so much on an open fire. She learned to use that same fire for the stews and biscuits that made him smile. And, in the morning, she made his thick black coffee.
“That’s good, honey,” he’d say about everything she put on his plate or in his mug. “Real good.”
After two years, with Ronnie in her belly, she had to go. She could smell the future dribbling away with the cold and the cut hands and the flash floods and the calves they
