Half broke horses: a true-life novel (5 page)

I was still getting comfortable with that idea—and in fact, finding it mighty appealing—when one of the nuns told me that Mother Albertina wanted to see me again.

MOTHER ALBERTINA WAS SITTING
behind her desk in her study. She had a solemn expression I’d never seen before, and it gave me an uneasy feeling. “I’ve got some unfortunate news,” she said.

Dad had paid the first half of my tuition at the beginning of the year, but when the school billed him for the rest, he’d written back to say that, due to a change in circumstances, he was unable to assemble the funds at this juncture.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go home,” Mother Albertina said.

“But I like it here,” I said. “I don’t want to go home.”

“I know you don’t, but the decision’s been made.”

Mother Albertina said she’d prayed on the matter and discussed it with the trustees. Their thinking was that the school was not a charity. If the parents agreed to pay the tuition, as Dad had, the school counted on the money to meet expenses, provide scholarships, and support the order’s mission on the Indian reservations.

“I could work for it,” I said.

“When?”

“I’ll find the time.”

“Your entire day is full as it is. We make sure of that.”

Mother Albertina told me there was one other option. I could take the cloth. If I joined the order of the Sisters of Saint Loretto, the church would pay my tuition. But that would mean going to the novitiate in California for six months, then living in the convent instead of the dormitory. It would mean marrying the Lord Jesus and submitting totally to the discipline of the order.

“Have you had any chance to reflect on whether you’ve felt the calling?” Mother Albertina asked.

I didn’t say anything right away. The truth was, the idea of being a nun didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm. I knew I owed God a hefty debt for sparing our lives in the tornado, but I figured there had to be another way of paying him back.

“Can I have the night to think on it?” I asked.

“May
I have the night,” Mother Albertina said, then added, “What I tell all the girls is that unless you’re certain, it’s probably a bad idea.”

Much as I wanted to stay in school, I didn’t really need a night of contemplation to know I wasn’t cut out to be a nun. It wasn’t just that you didn’t see a lot of nuns on horses. I knew I wasn’t called. I didn’t have that serenity nuns had, or were supposed to have. I was just too restless a soul. And I didn’t like taking orders from anyone, not even the pope.

Dad was a grave disappointment to me. Not only had he welched on the tuition commitment, he didn’t have the guts to face the nuns, and so, instead of coming to pick me up, he sent a telegram telling me to take the stagecoach home.

I was sitting in the common room in my home-dyed beechnut brown dress, my suitcase next to me, when Mother Albertina came to take me to the depot. The moment I saw her, my lip started quivering and my eyes welled up with tears.

“Now, don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” Mother Albertina said. “You’re luckier than most girls here—God gave you the wherewithal to handle setbacks like this.”

As we walked up the dusty street to the depot, all I could think was that, my one shot at an education blown, I was going back to the KC Ranch, where I’d spend the rest of my life doing chores while Dad worked on his cockamamie Billy the Kid biography and Mom sat in the chaise longue fanning herself. Mother Albertina seemed to know what I was thinking. Before I boarded the coach, she took my hand and said, “When God closes a window, he opens a door. But it’s up to you to find it”

WHEN THE STAGECOACH PULLED
into Tinnie, Dad was sitting in the buckboard outside the hotel, with four huge dogs in the back. As I got out, he grinned and waved. The stagecoach driver tossed my suitcase off the roof, and I lugged it over to the carriage. Dad got down and tried to hug me, but I shrugged him off.

“What do you think of these big fellas?” he asked.

The dogs were black with glistening coats, and they sat there regarding the passersby regally, like they were the lords of the manor even though they were also drooling ropes of slobber. They were the biggest dogs I’d ever seen, and there was hardly any room in the back for my suitcase.

“What happened to the tuition?” I asked Dad.

“You’re looking at it.”

Dad started explaining that he’d bought the dogs from a breeder in Sweden and had them shipped all the way to New Mexico. They were not just any dogs, he went on, they were Great Danes, dogs of the nobility. Historically, Great Danes were owned by kings and used to hunt wild boars. Practical and prestigious, Dad said. Can’t beat that. And believe it or not, no one west of the Mississippi owned any. He’d checked into it. These four, he said, had cost eight hundred dollars, but once he started selling the pups, we’d make the money back in no time, and from then on it would be pure profit.

“So you took my tuition money and bought dogs?”

“Watch that tone,” Dad said. After a moment he added, “You didn’t need to be going to finishing school. It was a waste of money. I can teach you whatever you need to know, and your mother can add the polish.”

“Did you take Buster out of school, too?”

“No. He’s a boy and needs that diploma if he’s going to get anywhere.” Dad pushed the dogs over and found a spot for my suitcase. “And anyway,” he said, “we need you on the ranch.”

ON THE WAY BACK
to the KC, Dad did most of the talking, going on about what great personalities the dogs had and how he was already getting inquiries about them. I sat there, ignoring Dad’s prattle about his harebrained schemes. I wondered if buying those dogs had simply given Dad an excuse to stop paying the tuition, so I’d have to come back home. I also wondered where in the blazes was that door Mother Albertina had talked about.

The ranch had fallen into a state of mild disrepair in the months I’d been gone. Fence boards had come loose in a few spots, the chicken coop was unwashed, and tack lay scattered on the barn floor, which needed sweeping.

To help out around the ranch, Dad had brought in a tenant farmer named Zachary Clemens and his wife and daughter, and they were living in an outbuilding on a corner of the property. Mom considered them beneath us because they were dirt-poor, so poor that they used paper for curtains, so poor that when they first arrived and Dad gave them a watermelon, after eating the fruit, they set aside the seeds for planting and then pickled the rind.

But I liked the Clemenses, particularly the daughter, Dorothy, who knew how to roll up her sleeves and get things done. She was a big-boned young woman with ample curves, handsome despite a wart on her chin. Dorothy knew how to skin a cow and trap rabbits, and she tilled the vegetable garden the Clemenses had fenced off, but she spent most of her time at the big kettle that hung over the fire pit in front of the shed, cooking stews, making soap, and washing and dyeing clothes she took in from the townspeople in Tinnie.

Dad let the Great Danes roam free, and one day a few weeks after I’d returned home, Dorothy Clemens knocked on the front door to report to Dad that she’d been out collecting pecans near the property line we shared with Old Man Pucket’s ranch and had found all four dogs shot dead. Dad charged into the barn in a fury, hitched up a carriage, and drove off to confront Old Man Pucket.

We were worried about what was going to happen, but talking about your fears only scares you and everyone else even more, so nobody said anything. To keep our hands busy, Dorothy and I sat on the corral fence shucking pecans until Dad drove back up. He was usually careful to avoid overexerting his horses, but he’d pushed that gelding so hard his sides were heaving and his chest was covered in lather.

Dad told us Old Man Pucket had unapologetically admitted killing the Great Danes, claiming they were on his property chasing his cattle and he was afraid they were going to bring one down. Dad was cursing and carrying on about how now he was going to bring down Old Man Pucket. He ran into the house and then came back out with his shotgun and jumped into the carriage.

Dorothy and I raced over. I grabbed the reins as Dad kept trying to crack them. The reins were snaking up and down on the horse’s back, and it panicked, starting to bolt, but Dorothy leaped up on the seat and, being a big strong woman, pushed down the brake and wrestled the gun away from Dad. “You can’t go killing someone over dogs,” she said. “That’s how feuds get started.”

When her family was living in Arkansas, she went on, her brother had killed someone in self-defense when a dispute broke out during a game of horseshoes, then he’d been killed by that man’s cousin. The cousin, afraid Dorothy’s father was going to avenge his son’s death, had come after him. They’d had to leave everything behind and take off for New Mexico.

“My brother’s dead, and we ain’t got two nickels to rub together,” she said, “because a stupid argument over a damn game of horseshoes got out of hand.”

I thought about how Lupe had stepped in during Dad’s spat with the tinker, and how no one with a level head had been there to calm down the man who’d killed Dad’s pa when he was shot in a dispute over eight dollars. So I reminded Dad about all that.

Dad eventually settled down, but he kept stewing over the matter and the next day went into town to file a legal case against Old Man Pucket. He prepared obsessively for the hearing, detailing his grievances, researching the case law, taking statements from vets about the value of Great Danes, and writing the politicians he’d corresponded with over the years to see if they’d file friend-of-the-court briefs. He appointed me to speak for him in court, and he had me rehearse my statements and practice my examination of Dorothy, who was to be a witness testifying about her discovery of the dead dogs.

On the day of the trial, we all got up early, and after breakfast we piled into the buckboard. When the circuit judge came to town, he held court in the lobby of the hotel, sitting in a wing-backed chair behind a small desk. The various plaintiffs and defendants leaned against the walls, waiting their turn.

The judge was a rail-thin man who wore a string tie and a jacket with a velvet collar, and he looked at you alertly under his bushy eyebrows, giving the impression that he didn’t tolerate fools. The bailiff called each case, and the judge listened to the two sides, then made his decision on the spot, brooking no argument.

Old Man Pucket was there, along with a couple of his sons. He was a stumpy little guy with skin the color of beef jerky and thumbnails he left untrimmed because he used them to pry things open. By way of dressing up for court, he had buttoned the top button of his frayed shirt.

Our case was finally called late in the morning, and I was kind of nervous as I stood to make the presentation Dad had cooked up for me.

“The history of the Great Dane is a proud and storied one,” I began, but the judge interrupted me.

“I don’t need a damned history lesson,” he said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

I explained how Dad had imported the dogs from Sweden, planning to breed them as an investment, but they’d been found shot to death in the pecan grove near the fence line we shared with the Puckets.

“I’d like to call my first witness,” I said, but the judge cut me off again.

“Did you shoot those dogs?” he asked Old Man Pucket.

“Sure did.”

“Why?”

“They was on my property chasing my cattle, and from a distance I thought they was big ol’ wolves.”

Dad started arguing, but the judge shushed him.

“Sir, I can’t make out what you’re saying, and it don’t matter any-how ,” the judge said. “You got no business keeping dogs bigger than wolves in cattle country.”

Turning to Old Man Pucket, he said, “But those were valuable animals, and he deserves some compensation for their loss. If you’re shy of cash, some livestock—horses or cattle—would do it”

And that was that.

A FEW DAYS AFTER
the trial, Old Man Pucket showed up at the ranch with a string of horses. Dad, still harboring a grudge, refused to leave the house, so I went out to meet Old Man Pucket, who was turning the horses into the corral.

“Just like the judge ordered, miss,” he said.

Even before Old Man Pucket had shot the dogs, we’d had our differences. Like most folks on the Rio Hondo, he did what he could to get by, and if that meant encroaching on someone else’s land or diverting a creek onto his property, he was prepared to do it. Dad called him a dirt farmer, but I thought of him as a scrapper who understood that sometimes, instead of asking another person’s permission, you were best off doing what needed to be done, defending it with bluster, and then apologizing later—if and when it came to that.

“Payment acknowledged,” I said, and shook his hand. Unlike Dad, I saw no point in carrying a grudge with a neighbor. You never knew when you might need someone’s help.

Old Man Pucket handed me a bill listing what he claimed was the value of each horse, then tipped his hat. “You’d make a mighty fine lawyer,” he said.

After Old Man Pucket left, Dad came out and looked at the horses. When I handed him the bill, he snorted in disgust. “None of those nags is worth twenty dollars,” he said.

It was true. Old Man Pucket’s valuations were wildly inflated. There were eight horses in all, stumpy, tough little mustangs, the kind that cowboys rounded up out in the wild and sat on for a day or two so they’d just barely accept a saddle. I figured that was what Old Man Pucket’s sons had done with these critters. None of the males was gelded. They were unshod, with chipped-up hooves in terrible need of trimming, and their manes and tails were matted with burrs. They were also scared, watching us nervously and clearly wondering what sort of dreadful end these humans had in store for them.

The problem with half-broke horses like these was that no one took the time to train them. Cowboys who could ride anything caught them and ran them on fear, spurring and quirting them too hard, taking pride in staying on no matter how desperately they bucked and fishtailed. Not properly broken, they were always scared and hated humans. A lot of times the cowboys released them once the roundup was over, but by then they’d lost some of the instincts that kept them alive out in the desert. They were, however, intelligent and had pluck, and if you broke them right, they made good horses.