Half broke horses: a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls

  Still, particularly with a green horse, you never knew what to expect, and I got thrown plenty, which terrified Mom, but Dad just waved her off and helped me up.

  “Most important thing in life,” he would say, “is learning how to fall.”

  Sometimes you fell in slow motion. The horse stumbled or shied, your weight got thrown forward, and you ended up hugging the horse’s neck, your feet losing their lock in the stirrups. If you couldn’t right yourself, your best bet was to let go and roll off to the side, then keep rolling once you hit the ground. The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn’t have time to react.

  Dad once bought this big gray gelding for a song. The horse had been in the U.S. Cavalry, and since he was government-issue, Dad named him Roosevelt. Maybe it was because Roosevelt had been fed too much grain, maybe because he’d heard too many bugle calls and too many cannons fired, or maybe he was just born a worrier, but for whatever reason, he was one spooky horse. Roosevelt was beautiful to look at, with dappled hindquarters and dark legs, but sudden noises or movement made him jump up like a jackrabbit.

  Shortly after we got Roosevelt, I was riding him back to the barn when a hawk swooped down in front of us. Roosevelt spun around and I was flung off him like a rock out of a slingshot. I tried to break the fall with my arm and ended up snapping my forearm clean in two. The jagged ends of the bones were poking up, making a bulge under my skin. Dad was always telling me I was one tough nut, but with my arm bent and dangling like that, danged if I didn’t start bawling like a little girl.

  Dad carried me into the kitchen, and when Mom saw me, she got so upset she started gasping for breath, telling Dad when she could get the words out that a little girl like me had no business breaking horses. Dad told Mom she had best leave until she could get control of herself, and she went into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Dad set the bone and had Lupe cut strips of linen while he made up a paste of chalk, gum, eggs, and flour. Then he wrapped the linen strips around my arm and smeared them all over with the paste.

  Dad took me in his arms and we set on the porch looking at the distant mountains. After a while, I stopped crying because there just wasn’t any cry left in me by then. I sat there with my head on my shoulder like a little bird with a broken wing.

  “Dumb horse,” I finally said.

  “Never blame the horse,” Dad said. “It’s just something he learned along the way. And horses aren’t dumb. They know what they need to know. Matter of fact, I always figured horses are smarter than they let on. Kind of like the Indians who pretend they can’t speak English because no good ever came from talking with the Anglos.”

  Dad told me I’d be back in the saddle in four weeks, and I was. “Next time,” Dad said, “don’t try to break a fall.”

  “Next time?” Mom asked. “I trust there won’t be a next time.”

  “Hope for the best and plan for the worst,” Dad said. “Anyway,” he told me, “once you’re going down, accept it and let your rump take the punishment. Your body knows how to fall.”

  Meanwhile, Dad enrolled Roosevelt in what he called Adam Casey’s School for Wayward Horses. He tied Roosevelt’s head to his tail and left him to stand in a stall until he learned patience. He filled empty tin cans with pebbles and tied those to his mane and tail until Roosevelt got used to commotion.

  Once Roosevelt was reformed—more or less—Dad sold him at a nice profit to some easterners bound for California. While Dad didn’t blame horses for anything, he wasn’t sentimental about them, either. If you can’t stop a horse, sell him, Dad liked to say, and if you can’t sell him, shoot him.

  ANOTHER ONE OF MY jobs was feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs. We had about two dozen chickens and a few roosters. First thing every morning, I’d toss them a handful of corn and some table scraps and add lime to their water to make the eggshells strong. In the spring, when the hens were really fertile, I could collect a hundred eggs a week. We’d set aside twenty-five or thirty for eating, and once a week I drove the buckboard into Toyah to sell the rest to the grocer, Mr. Clutterbuck, a pinched man who wore garters on his sleeves and toted up sales figures on the brown paper he wrapped your goods in. He paid a penny per egg, then sold them for two cents each, which seemed unfair to me since I’d done all the work, raising the chickens, collecting the eggs, and bringing them into town, but Mr. Clutterbuck just said, “Sorry, kid, that’s the way the world works.”

  I also brought in peacock eggs, finally giving those showy old birds a way to earn their keep. At first I thought they’d fetch twice as much as chicken eggs, seeing as how they were twice as big, but Mr. Clutterbuck would give me only a penny each for them. “Egg’s an egg,” he said. I thought that danged grocer was cheating me because I was a girl, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. That was the way the world worked.

  Dad said it was good for me to go into town and bargain with Mr. Clutterbuck over egg prices. It honed my math and taught me the art of negotiation, all of which was going to help me achieve my Purpose in Life. Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody’s time.

  That was why Dad never bought any of us kids toys. Play was a waste of time, he said. Instead of playing house or playing with dolls, girls were better off cleaning a real house or looking after a real baby if their Purpose in Life was to become a mother.

  Dad didn’t actually forbid us from ever playing, and sometimes Buster, Helen, and I rode over to the Dingler ranch for a game of baseball with the Dingler kids. Because we didn’t have enough players for two full teams, we made up a lot of our own rules, one being that you could get a runner out by throwing the ball at him. Once, when I was ten and trying to steal a base, one of the Dingler boys threw the ball at me hard and it hit me in the stomach. I doubled over, and when the pain wouldn’t go away, Dad took me into Toyah, where the barber who sometimes sewed people up said my appendix had been ruptured and I needed to get up to the hospital in Santa Fe. We caught the next stagecoach, and by the time we got to Santa Fe, I was delirious, and what I remember next was waking up in the hospital with stitches on my stomach, Dad sitting next to me.

  “Don’t worry, angel,” he said. The appendix, he explained, was a vestigial organ, which meant it had no Purpose. If I had to lose an organ, I’d chosen the right one. But, he went on, I’d almost lost my life, and to what end? I’d only been playing a game of baseball. If I wanted to risk my life, I should do it for a Purpose. I decided Dad was right. All I had to do was figure out what my Purpose was.

  IF YOU WANT TO be reminded of the love of the Lord, Mom always said, just watch the sunrise.

  And if you want to be reminded of the wrath of the Lord, Dad said, watch a tornado.

  Living on Salt Draw, we saw our share of tornadoes, which we feared even more than those flash floods. On most occasions, they looked like narrow cones of gray smoke, but sometimes when it had been especially dry, they were almost clear, and you could see tree limbs and brush and rocks swirling at the bottom. From a distance they seemed to be moving slowly, as if underwater, spinning and swaying almost elegantly.

  Most weren’t more than a dust devil gone a little wild, ripping at the laundry on the clothesline and sending the chickens squawking. But once, when I was eleven years old, a monster came roaring across the range.

  Dad and I were working with the horses when the sky turned dark real quickly and the air got heavy. You could smell and taste what was heading our way. Dad saw the tornado first, coming in from the east, a wide funnel reaching from the clouds to the earth.

  I set about unharnessing the horses while Dad ran in to warn Mom, who started opening all the windows in the house because she’d been told that would equalize the air pressure and make it less likely that the house would explode. The horses were stampeding like crazy around the corral. Dad didn’t wa
nt them trapped, so he opened the gate and they galloped through it, heading across the range, away from the tornado. Dad said if we got through this, we could worry about the horses later.

  By then the sky overhead was black and streaked with rain, but off in the distance you could see sunlight slanting through golden clouds, and I took that as a sign. Dad had us all, including Apache and Lupe, scramble into the crawl space under the house. As the tornado came closer, it whipped up sand and branches and broken bits of wood in one big swirl around the house, roaring so loud it sounded like we were right under a freight train.

  Mom grabbed our hands to pray, and while I didn’t usually feel the call, I was scared—scareder than I’d ever been—and I started praying harder than I’d ever prayed, asking God to please forgive my earlier lack of sincere faith and promising that if he spared us, I’d pray to him and worship him every day for the rest of my life.

  Right then we heard a crash and the sound of splintering wood. The house seemed to groan and shudder, but the floor above our heads held fast, and very quickly the tornado moved on. Everything grew quiet.

  We were alive.

  THE TORNADO HAD MISSED the house, but it had plucked up the windmill and smashed it down on the roof. The house, made from wood that had already been busted apart once in that flood, was a total wreck.

  Dad started cussing up a blue streak. Life, he declared, had cheated him once again. “If I owned hell and west Texas,” he said, “I do believe I’d sell west Texas and live in hell.”

  Dad predicted that the horses would come back at feeding time, and when they did, he hitched the six-year-olds to the carriage and drove into town to use the telegraph. After some backing and forthing with folks in the Hondo Valley, Dad reckoned he was not going to be tried again on that phony old murder charge and it was safe to return to New Mexico and take up life on the Casey ranch, which he’d been renting out to tenant farmers all these years.

  The chickens had disappeared in the tornado, but we had most of the peacocks, the six pairs of horses, the brood mares and cows, and a number of Mom’s choice heirlooms, such as the walnut headboard that we’d rescued from the dugout. We packed it all into two wagons. Dad took the reins of one, with Mom and Helen next to him. Apache and Lupe were in the second. Buster and I followed on horseback with the rest of the herd on a string.

  At the gate I stopped and looked back at the ranch. The windmill still lay toppled over the caved-in house, and the yard was strewn with branches. Dad was always going on about the easterners who came out to west Texas but weren’t tough enough to cut it, and now we were folding our hand as well. Sometimes it didn’t matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you’d been dealt.

  Life had been hard in west Texas, but that low yellow land was all I knew, and I loved it. Mom was saying, as she always did, that it was God’s will, and this time I accepted it. God had saved us, but he had also taken our house from us. Whether as payment for saving us or as punishment because we didn’t deserve it, I couldn’t say. Maybe he was just giving us a kick in the behind to say: Time to move on.

  II

  THE MIRACULOUS

  STAIRCASE

  Lily Casey, age thirteen, at

  the Sisters of Loretto

  WE TRAVELED THREE DAYS to reach the Casey Ranch, which Dad, with his love of phonetic spelling, insisted should officially be renamed the KC Ranch. It was in the middle of the Hondo Valley, south of the Capitan Mountains, and the countryside was so green that when I first laid eyes on it, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The ranch was really more of a farm, with fields of alfalfa, rows of tomato vines, and orchards of peach trees and pecan trees planted a hundred years ago by the Spanish. The pecan trees were so big that when Helen and Buster and I joined hands, we couldn’t reach all the way around.

  The house, which Dad’s pa had bought from a Frenchman when he first moved to the area, was made of adobe and stone. There were two bedrooms inside—so the grown-ups and kids didn’t have to sleep in the same room—and a woodshed outside for Lupe, while Apache took over one of the barn stalls. I couldn’t believe we would live in such grandeur. The walls were as thick as Dad’s forearm was long. “No tornado’s ever going to knock this feller down,” he said.

  The next day, while we were unpacking, Dad hollered for us to come outside. I’d never heard him so excited. We ran out the door, and Dad was standing in the yard, pointing up at the sky. There, floating in the air above the horizon, was an upside-down town. You could see the low, flat stores, the adobe church, the horses tied to the hitching posts, and the people walking in the streets.

  We all stared slack-jawed, and Lupe made a sign of the cross. It wasn’t a miracle, Dad said, it was a mirage, a mirage of Tinnie, the town about six miles away. To me, the mirage seemed nothing short of a miracle. It was huge, taking up a big hunk of the sky, and I was mesmerized watching those upside-down people silently walking through those upside-down streets.

  We all stood staring at the mirage for the longest time, and then it got all fuzzy and faded until it finally disappeared. We’d seen mirages before, patches of blue on the ground that looked for all the world like puddles on the driest days. Dad said that those were ground mirages, and what looked like water on the ground was really the sky. This was a heavenly mirage, he said, which was created when the air closer to the ground was cooler than the air above it.

  Even though I was usually good at science, I couldn’t grasp what Dad was saying. He drew me a diagram in the dirt, showing how the light was refracted by the cool air, which bent it along the curve of the earth’s surface.

  The idea of light somehow bending didn’t make any sense, until Dad reminded me that when you held up a glass of water, your fingers on the far side of the glass looked like they’d been chopped off and moved. That was because the water was bending the light, and the cold air did the same.

  All of a sudden what Dad was saying did make sense, and the knowledge of it truly lit me up.

  Dad, who was watching me, said, “Eureka!” He started telling me about this ancient Greek fellow named Archimedes who ran naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” after he figured out a way to calculate volume while sitting in his bathtub.

  I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

  DAD RELISHED THE NOTION of being a big landowner but not the headaches that came with it. Instead of the fenced-in range land we had in west Texas, there were now fields to be tilled, planted, and weeded, peaches picked, pecans collected, manure spread, watermelons hauled to market, migrants hired and fed. Because of his gimp leg, some of the work—like pruning peach trees from a ladder—was beyond Dad, and his speech impediment made it hard for the help to understand him, so even though I was still only eleven, I took on the hiring and overseeing.

  Also, Dad was never the most practical man in the world, and in New Mexico he started getting caught up in all sorts of projects that had nothing to do with running the farm. We were still training horses, and Dad was still writing politicians and newspapers, railing against modernization. But now he spent hours making two copies of every letter he wrote, filing one in his desk and keeping the other in the barn in case the house burned down.

  At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water. “Ghoti,” he liked to point out, could be pronounced like “fish.” The “gh” had the “f” sound in “enough,” the “o” had the short “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” had the “sh” sound in “nation.”

  Dad also started a biography of Billy the Kid, who had stopped at the Casey Ranch when Dad was a teenager and asked to swap his spent horse for a fresh mount. “Right polite feller,” Dad always said. “And sat a horse well.” It turned out th
e Kid had been on the run, as Dad found out an hour later when a posse stopped and also asked to swap horses. Dad, secretly rooting for the Kid, passed off some old nags on them. Now, in New Mexico, he became so obsessed with the Kid that he put a tintype of him on the wall. Mom hated the Kid, whom she called “two-bit trash” because he’d killed a man who was engaged to her cousin, and she hung that fellow’s picture next to the Kid’s.

  But Dad felt the cousin must have deserved to die. The Kid, he said, never shot anyone who didn’t need shooting. Dad considered the Kid a good American boy with hot Irish blood who’d been vilified by the cattle barons for standing up for the Mexicans. “History gets written by the winners,” he said, “and when the crooks win, you get crooked history.”

  His biography was going to vindicate the Kid, prove that Dad, despite his speech impediment, was better with words than anyone who’d ever laughed at him, and make us more money than we’d ever make growing peaches, pecans, tomatoes, and watermelons. Westerns sell like hotcakes, he kept saying, and besides, a writer’s got no overhead and he never has to worry about the weather.

  THE FALL THAT I turned twelve, Buster left to go to school, even though he was two years younger than me. Mom said that his education was important for his career—for becoming anything he wanted to become—and they enrolled him in a fancy Jesuit school near Albuquerque. But they’d promised me that when I turned thirteen, I could go to the Sisters of Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe.