Half broke horses: a true-life novel (4 page)
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.
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 the 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.
I’d wanted to go to a real school for years, and the day finally came when Dad hitched up the buckboard and we set out on the two-hundred-mile journey, camping at night on bedrolls under the stars. Dad was almost as excited about me going off to school as I was, and seeing as how I hadn’t spent too much time around girls my age out on the ranch, he gave me an earful of advice about how to get along.
I tended to be a tad bossy, he said, as I was used to ordering around Helen and Buster and Lupe and the migrants. But in school there were going to be a lot of bigger, older girls who’d be bossing me around—not to mention the nuns—and instead of fighting with them, I’d have to learn how to get along. The best way to do that, Dad said, was to figure out what somebody wanted, because everybody wanted something, and make them think you could help them get it. Dad admitted that, as he put it, he wasn’t the best exemplar of his own creed, but if I could find some way to apply it to my life, I’d go a lot further.
Santa Fe was a beautiful old place—Dad pointed out that the Spanish arrived here even before the first Poms got to Virginia—with low adobe buildings and dusty streets lined with Spanish oaks. The school was right in the middle of town, a couple of four-story Gothic buildings with crosses on top and a chapel with a choir loft reached by what was known as the Miraculous Staircase.
Mother Albertina, the Mother Superior, showed us around. She explained that the Miraculous Staircase had thirty-three stairs—Jesus’s age when he died—and that it went in two complete spirals without any of the usual means of support, such as a center pole. No one knew what type of wood it was made of or the name of the mysterious carpenter who showed up to build it after the original builder failed to include a staircase and the nuns prayed for divine intervention.
“So you’re saying it’s a miracle?” Dad asked.
I started to explain what Dad was saying, but somehow Mother Albertina understood him perfectly.
“I believe everything is a miracle,” she said.
I liked the way Mother Albertina said that, and from the beginning, I liked her, too. Mother Albertina was tall and wrinkled and had walnut-colored skin and thick black brows that formed a single line above her eyes. She always appeared calm even though she was constantly on the move, checking in on the dorms at night, inspecting our fingernails, walking briskly along the paths, her long black robes and white-trimmed headdress billowing in the wind. She treated all of us students—she called us “my girls”—the same, whether we were rich or poor, Anglo or Mexican, smart or utterly lacking in any talent whatsoever. She was firm without being stern, never raised her voice or lost her temper, but it would have been unthinkable for any of us to disobey her. She would have made a fine horsewoman, but that wasn’t her Purpose.
I also really liked the academy. A lot of the girls moped around feeling homesick at first, but not me. I had never had it so easy in my life, even though we rose before dawn, washed our faces in cold water, attended chapel and classes, ate corn gruel, practiced piano and singing, mended our uniforms, swept the dorms, cleaned the dishes and privies, and attended chapel again before going to bed. Since there were no barn chores, life at the academy felt like one long vacation.
I won a gold medal for my high scores in math and another for overall scholarship. I also read every book I could get my hands on, tutored other girls who were having problems, and even helped some of the sisters grade papers and do their lesson plans. Most of the other girls came from rich ranch families. Whereas I was used to hollering like a horse trainer, they had whispery voices and ladylike manners and matching luggage. Some of the girls complained about the gray uniforms we had to wear, but I liked the way they leveled out the differences between those who could afford fancy store-bought clothes and those of us, like me, who had only home-dyed beechnut brown dresses. I did make friends, however, trying to follow Dad’s advice to figure out what someone wanted and help her get it, though it was hard, when you saw someone doing something wrong, to resist the temptation to correct her. Especially if that someone acted hoity-toity.
About halfway into the school year, Mother Albertina called me into her study for a talk. She told me I was doing well at Sisters of Loretto. “A lot of parents send their girls here for finishing,” she went on, “so they’ll be more marriageable. But you don’t have to get married, you know.”
I’d never thought much about that before. Mom and Dad always talked as if it was a matter of course that Helen and I would marry and Buster would inherit the property, though I had to admit I’d never actually met a boy I liked, not to mention felt like marrying. On the other hand, women who didn’t marry became old maids, spinsters who slept in the attic, sat in a corner peeling potatoes all day, and were a burden on their families, like our neighbor Old Man Pucket’s sister, Louella.
I wasn’t too young to start thinking about my future, Mother Albertina continued. It was just around the bend and coming at me fast. Some girls only a year or two older than me got married, she said, while others started working. Even women who got married should be capable of doing something, since men had such a habit of dying on you and, from time to time, running off.
In this day and age, she went on, there were really only three careers available. A woman could become a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher.
“Or a nun,” I said.
“Or a nun,” Mother Albertina said with a smile. “But you need to have the calling. Do you think you have the calling?”
I had to admit I wasn’t sure.
“You have time to reflect on it,” she said. “But whether or not you become a nun, I think you’d make a wonderful teacher. You have a strong personality. The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers.”
“Like you,” I said.
“Like me.” She paused for a moment. “Teaching is a calling, too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy—angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.”
For the next couple of months, I thought about what Mother Albertina had said. I didn’t want to be a nurse, not because I was bothered by the sight of blood but because sick people irritated me. I didn’t want to be a secretary because you were always at the beck and call of your boss, and what if it turned out you were smarter than him? It was like being a slave without the security.
But being a teacher was entirely different. I loved books. I loved learning. I loved that “Eureka!” moment when someone finally figured something out. And in the classroom, you got to be your own boss. Maybe teaching was my Purpose.