Half broke horses: a true-life novel (6 page)

One in particular caught my eye, a mare. I always liked mares. They weren’t as crazy as stallions but had more fire than your typical gelding. This one was a pinto, no bigger or smaller than the others, but she seemed less scared and was watching me intently, as if trying to figure me out. I cut her out from the herd, lassoed her, and then slowly walked up to her, following Dad’s rule around strange horses to keep your eyes on the ground so they won’t think you’re a predator.

She stood still, and when I reached her, again moving slowly, I raised my hand to the side of her head and scratched behind one ear. Then I brought my hand down the side of her face. She didn’t jerk back, like most horses would, and I knew she was something special, not the greatest beauty in the world—being a patchwork of white, brown, and black—but you could tell she could use her brain instead of reacting blindly, and I’d take smarts over looks in a horse any day.

“She’s yours, Counselor,” Dad said. “What are you going to name her?”

I looked at the mare. For the most part, us ranch folks liked to keep names simple. Cattle we never named at all, since it made no sense naming something you were going to eat or ship off to the slaughterhouse. As for other animals, if a cat had socks, we called it Socks; if a dog was red, we called it Red; if a horse had a blaze, we called it Blaze.

“I’ll call her Patches,” I said.

* * *

“I wanted you to finish your education,” Mom told me that night. “It was your father who had to buy those dogs, and now all we have are these useless range horses.”

I was trying hard not to see it that way. The money was gone, Sisters of Loretto was behind me, I had what I had, and I needed to make the most of it.

THE NEXT DAY WE
gelded the new males, since, if they were going to be worth anything, they had to be turned into workhorses. It was nasty work, me, Dorothy, Zachary, and his wife, Ellie—who was not quite as big as her daughter but every bit as tough—each holding a rope tied to one of the horse’s legs after we’d caught him, knocked him down, and flipped him on his back. Apache tied the horse’s two hind legs to his belly, then Dad wrapped his head in a burlap sack and held it down while Apache knelt behind his rump, working first with the cleaver then the knife, blood spraying everywhere, the horse neighing hysterically while farting and kicking and twisting his back.

But it was over pretty quick. When we let the first horse free, he rose and staggered around drunkenly for a few steps. I herded him out of the corral, and after a moment he sighed and put his head into the tall grass to graze like nothing much had happened.

“Don’t even miss ’em,” Zachary said.

“We should do Old Man Pucket next,” Dad said.

That got a chuckle out of everyone.

I set about breaking Patches properly. That was one smart horse, and in no time she had truly accepted the bit and was moving off the leg at the slightest touch of my spur. After a few months of that, she even started cutting cattle. By fall, she’d become a true packer and was ready for roundup. I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go hire out at the big Franklin ranch across the valley, but they said they wouldn’t hear of it, and neither would the Franklins. So I started racing Patches in little amateur quarter-horse races, and from time to time we even returned with the purse.

The following summer Buster came home from school, having completed the eighth grade. Mom and Dad talked about him going on to high school one day when they could afford it, but eighth grade was all the learning lots of folks figured they needed out west—it was more than most got—and Buster wasn’t interested in high school. He knew enough math and reading and writing to run a ranch, and he didn’t see much point in picking up more knowledge than that. Cluttered the mind, in his view.

Not long after Buster got back, it became clear to me that he and Dorothy were sweet on each other. In some ways it was a strange match, since she was a few years older and he scarcely had hair on his chin. Mom was horrified when she found out, but I thought Buster was lucky. He was always a little unmotivated, and if he was going to run the ranch with any success, he’d need someone determined and hardworking like Dorothy beside him.

One day in July, I rode Patches into Tinnie to pick up some dry goods and collect the mail. To my surprise, there was a letter for me, practically the only letter I’d ever received. It was from Mother Albertina, and I sat right down on the steps outside the general store to read it.

She continued to think about me, she wrote, and continued to believe I’d make an excellent teacher. In fact, she went on, she thought I knew enough right now to be a teacher, and that was why she was writing. Because of the war that had started up in Europe, there was a shortage of teachers, particularly in the remote parts of the country, and if I was able to pass a test the government was giving in Santa Fe—it was not an easy test, she warned, the math was particularly tough—I could probably get a job even without a degree and even though I was just fifteen years old.

I was so excited, I had to resist the urge to gallop all the way back to the ranch, but I held Patches at a steady trot, and as I rode along, I kept thinking this was the door Mother Albertina had told me about.

Mom and Dad didn’t like the idea at all. Mom kept saying I had a better chance of marriage if I stayed here in the valley, where I was known as the daughter of a substantial property owner. Off on my own, I’d have less to offer in the way of family and connections. Dad kept throwing out one reason after another: I was too young to be on my own, it was too dangerous, training horses was more fun than drilling illiterate kids in their ABCs, why would I want to be cooped up in a classroom when I could be out on the range?

Finally, after raising all these objections, Dad sat me down on the back porch. “The fact is,” he said, “I need you.”

I had seen that coming. “This’ll never be my ranch, it’s going to Buster, and with Buster marrying Dorothy, you have all the help you need.”

Dad looked out at the horizon. The rangeland rolling toward it was particularly green from a recent rainfall.

“Dad, I got to strike out on my own sometime. Like you’re always saying, I’ve got to find my Purpose.”

Dad thought about it for a minute. “Well, hell,” he said at last. “I suppose you could at least go and take the damn test.”

THE TEST WAS EASIER
than I expected, mostly questions about word definitions, fractions, and American history. A few weeks later, I was back at the ranch when Buster came into the house with a letter for me he’d picked up at the post office. Dad, Mom, and Helen were all there, and they watched me open it.

I’d passed the test. I was being offered the job of an itinerant replacement teacher in northern Arizona. I gave a shriek of delight and started dancing around the room, waving the letter and whooping.

“Oh my,” Mom said.

Buster and Helen were hugging me, and then I turned to Dad.

“Seems you been dealt a card,” Dad said. “I guess you better go on and play it.”

The school that was expecting me was in Red Lake, Arizona, five hundred miles to the west, and the only way for me to get there was on Patches. I decided to travel light, bringing only a toothbrush, a change of underwear, a presentable dress, a comb, a canteen, and my bedroll. I had money from those race purses I’d won, and I could buy provisions along the way, since most every town in New Mexico and Arizona was about a day’s ride from the next.

I figured the trip would take a good four weeks, since I could average about twenty-five miles a day and would need to give Patches a day off every now and again. The key to the trip was keeping my horse sound.

Mom was worried sick about a fifteen-year-old girl traveling alone through the desert, but I was tall for my age, and strong-boned, and I told her I’d keep my hair under my hat and my voice low. For insurance, Dad gave me a pearl-handled six-shooter, but the fact of the matter was, the journey seemed like no big deal, just a five-hundred-mile version of the six-mile ride into Tinnie. Anyway, you had to do what you had to do.

* * *

Patches and I left at first light one morning in early August. Dorothy came up to the house to make me johnnycakes for breakfast and wrapped a few extras in waxed paper for me to carry along. Mom, Dad, Buster, and Helen were all up, and we sat down at the long wooden table in the kitchen, passing the platter of johnnycakes and the tin teapot back and forth.

“Will we ever see you again?” Helen asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“When?”

I hadn’t thought about that, and I realized I didn’t want to think about it. “I don’t know,” I said.

“She’ll be back,” Dad said. “She’ll miss ranch life. She’s got horse blood in her veins.”

After breakfast, I brought Patches into the barn. Dad followed me, and as I saddled up, he started deluging me with all sorts of advice, telling me to hope for the best but plan for the worst, neither a borrower nor a lender be, keep your head up and your nose clean and your powder dry, and if you do have to shoot, shoot straight and be damn sure you shoot first. He wouldn’t shut up.

“I’ll be fine, Dad,” I said. “And you will, too.”

“’Course I will.”

I swung up into the saddle and headed over toward the house. The sky was turning from gray to blue, the air already warming. It looked to be a dusty scorcher of a day.

Everyone except Mom was standing on the front porch, but I could see her watching me through the blur of the bedroom window. I waved at them all and turned Patches down the lane.

III

PROMISES

Lily Casey with Patches

THE DIRT ROAD RUNNING
west from Tinnie was an old Indian trail packed down and widened over the years by wagon wheels and horse hooves. It followed the Rio Hondo through the foothills of the Capitan Mountains north of the Mescalero Apache reservation. The land in those parts of southern New Mexico was easy on the eyes. Cedars grew thick. From time to time I saw antelope standing at the riverbank or bounding down a hillside, and occasionally, a few skinny range cattle wandered by. Once or twice a day Patches and I passed a lone cowboy on a gaunt horse, or a wagonful of Mexicans. I always nodded and said a few words, but I kept my distance.

Late each morning when the sun got high, I looked for a shady spot near the river where Patches could graze on the short grass. I needed rest, too, to keep my wits about me. A walking horse could be as dangerous as a galloping one, since the easy rhythm could lull you into drowsing off just as a rattler darted into your path and your mount spooked.

When it started to cool, we moved on again and kept going until it got dark. I’d make a sagebrush fire, eat some jerky and biscuits, and lie in my blanket, listening to the howling of the distant coyotes while Patches grazed nearby.

At each town—usually a small collection of wood shacks and adobe huts, a single store, and a little church—I bought the next day’s food and chatted with the storekeeper about the road ahead. Was it rocky? Any riffraff I should avoid? Where was the best place to water and camp?

Most of the storekeepers were happy to play the expert, giving me advice and directions, drawing maps on paper bags. They were also happy to have someone to talk to. At one lonely place, the store was deserted except for the owner. The shelves were lined with a few dusty tins of peaches and bottles of liniments. After paying for a bag of hardtack, I asked the storekeeper, “How many customers have you had today?”

“You’re the first this week,” he said. “But it’s only Wednesday.”

* * *

I rode from Hondo to Lincoln to Capitan to Carrizozo, where the road wound down out of the hills into the flat, burnt stretch of desert known as the Malpais. There I headed north, the big Chupadera Mesa rising up out of the desert floor to my left. I reached the Rio Grande at a small town called Los Lunas. It wasn’t much of a river there, and a Zuni girl ferried me across in a raft, pulling us along with a rope that ran from one bank to the other.

West of the river was a bunch of Indian reservations, and one day I met up with a half-Navajo woman on a donkey. I figured she wasn’t much older than me. She wore a cowboy hat, and her thick black hair spilled out from under it like mattress stuffing. She was heading in my direction and we fell in together. She introduced herself as Priscilla Loosefoot. Her mother, she said, had traded her to a settler family for two mules, but they had beaten her and treated her like an animal, so she’d run away and now scratched out a living collecting and selling herbs.

That night we pitched camp in a grove of juniper trees off the road. I took my cornmeal from my saddlebag, and Priscilla got out some fat-back wrapped in leaves. She mixed the cornmeal and fatback with water and some salt she kept in a leather pouch, shaped a short stack of Indian cakes on a flat rock, and fried them on another flat rock she’d placed in the fire.

A lot of Navajos were quiet, but Priscilla was a real talker, and as we sat there licking our fingers while the fire died down, she went on about what a good team we’d make and how maybe we should travel together and she’d teach me how to identify herbs.

After a while we drifted off to sleep, but something woke me in the middle of the night, and I found Pricilla quietly going through my saddlebags.

The pearl-handled revolver was in my boot. I pulled it out and held it up so Priscilla could see it in the moonlight.

“I got nothing worth stealing,” I said.

“I figured you didn’t,” Pricilla said. “But I had to make sure.”

“I thought you said we made a good team.”

“We still could if you don’t hold this here against me. Thing is, I don’t get a lot of opportunities, and when one comes along, I gots to take it.”

I knew what she meant, but still, I didn’t care to wake up and find her gone and Patches with her. I stood up and gathered my bedroll. “You stay here,” I said.

“Sure thing.”

There was just enough moon to make out the road. I saddled up Patches and moved on alone.

I crossed into Arizona at the Painted Cliffs, red sandstone bluffs that rose straight up out of the desert floor. After another ten days of steady riding, I reached Flagstaff. Its hotel advertised a bathtub, and since I was feeling pretty ripe at that point, it was mighty tempting, but I kept going and two days later arrived at Red Lake.

I’d been on the road, out in the sun and sleeping in the open, for twenty-eight days. I was tired and caked with dirt. I’d lost weight, my clothes were heavy with grime and hung loosely, and when I looked in a mirror, my face seemed harder. My skin had darkened, and I had the beginnings of squint lines around my eyes. But I had made it, made it through that darned door.

RED LAKE WAS A
small ranch town on a high plateau about thirty miles south of the Grand Canyon. The range sloped away for miles, to both the east and the west, giving you the feeling that you were at one of the world’s high points. The land here was greener than the parts of Arizona I’d passed through, with thick grass that grew so high it tickled the bellies of the cattle that grazed there. For as long as anyone could remember, the range around Red Lake wasn’t used for much of anything other than grazing, but farmers had recently discovered it, and they came in with their plows and well diggers and high hopes to do the backbreaking work that was needed to bring up crops as green as the grass that grew there. Those farmers brought big families with them, and their kids needed teaching.

Shortly after I arrived, the county superintendent, Mr. MacIntosh, rode up from Flagstaff to explain the situation. Mr. MacIntosh was a slight man with a head so narrow he reminded me of a fish. He wore a fedora and a stiff white paper collar. Because of the war, he explained, men were joining the army and women were leaving the countryside to take the high-paying factory jobs the men had left behind. But even with the shortage of teachers in rural areas, the board wanted the certified teachers to have at least an eighth-grade education, which I didn’t have. So I was to teach in Red Lake until they could hire a more qualified person, and then I’d be sent somewhere else.

“Don’t worry,” Superintendent MacIntosh said. “We’ll always find a place for you.”

Red Lake had a one-room schoolhouse with an oil stove in a corner, a desk for the teacher, a row of benches for the kids, and a slate blackboard that made me especially happy, as a lot of schools lacked them. On the other hand, a lot of one-room schools had a teacherage attached, where the teacher lived, but the one in Red Lake didn’t, so I slept on the floor of the school in my bedroll.

Still, I loved my job. Superintendent MacIntosh hardly ever came around, and I got to teach exactly what I wanted to teach, in the way I wanted. I had fifteen students of all ages and abilities, and I didn’t have to round them up because their parents, eager for them to learn, brought them to the school on the first day and made sure they kept coming back.

Most of the kids were born back east, though some came from as far away as Norway. The girls wore faded floor-length gingham dresses, the boys had chopped-up haircuts, and they all went barefoot in warm weather. Some of those kids were poorer than poor. One day I stopped by the house of one of my Walapai students, and they were cooking up beef with little bugs crawling in it.

“Careful,” I said, “that meat is full of maggots.”

“Yes,” the mother said, “but the maggots are full of meat.”

We had no textbooks, so the kids brought whatever they had from home—family Bibles, almanacs, letters, seed catalogs—and we read from those. When winter came, one of the fathers gave me a fur coat he’d made from coyotes he’d trapped, and I wore it in the schoolroom during the day, since my desk was far from the oil stove, which the kids were all huddled around. Mothers made a point of bringing me stews and pies and inviting me to Sunday dinner, when they’d even set out a white tablecloth as a sign of respect. And at the end of every month I picked up my paycheck from the town clerk.

Halfway through the year, Superintendent MacIntosh found a certified teacher for Red Lake, and I was sent on to another little town called Cow Springs. For the next three years, that’s how Patches and I lived, moving from one town to another—Leupp, Happy Jack, Greasewood, Wide Ruin—after a stay of a few months, never putting down roots, and never getting too close to anyone. Still, all those little rascals I was teaching learned to obey me or got their knuckles rapped, and I was teaching them things they needed to know, which made me feel like I was making a difference in their lives. I never met a kid I couldn’t teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the day.

Then the war ended. One day not long after I’d turned eighteen, Superintendent MacIntosh caught up with me to explain that, with the men all returning home, women were being laid off at the factories in favor of the veterans. Many of those women were certified teachers who were looking to get back their old jobs. Some of the boys coming back from overseas were teachers, too. Superintendent MacIntosh said he’d heard glowing things about my work, but I hadn’t even finished eighth grade, much less earned a high school diploma, and besides, the state of Arizona needed to give priority in hiring to those who’d fought for their country.

“So I’m getting the boot?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, your services are no longer needed.”

I stared at the fish-faced superintendent. I’d figured this day might come sooner or later, but I still felt like the floor had fallen out from under me. I knew I was a good teacher. I loved it and even loved traveling to all these remote places where no one else wanted to teach. I understood what Mr. MacIntosh was saying about needing to help out the returning troops. At the same time, I’d busted my behind teaching all those wild and illiterate kids, and I couldn’t help feeling a little burned about being told by Fish Face that I was now unqualified to do something I’d spent the last four years doing.

Superintendent MacIntosh seemed to know what I was thinking. “You’re young and strong, and you got pretty eyes,” he said. “You just find yourself a husband—one of these soldier boys—and you’ll be fine.”

THE RIDE BACK TO
the KC seemed to take about half as long as that first journey out to Red Lake, but that’s the way it always is when you’re heading home through familiar territory. The only adventure occurred when a rattler parked itself under my saddle one night, but it reared back and zipped off, doing those wildfire wriggles, before I could get out my gun. And then there was the airplane. Patches and I were heading east near the Homolovi Ruins, some fallen-down pueblos where the Hopis’ ancestors had once lived, when we heard the putt-putt of an engine in the sky behind us. I looked back, and a red biplane—the first I’d ever seen—was following the road east a few hundred feet above the ground.

Patches started to scutch about at the strange noise, but I held her in, and as the plane approached, I took off my hat and waved. The pilot dipped the plane’s wings in response, and as it passed us, he leaned out and waved back. I kicked up Patches and we galloped after the plane, me flapping my hat and shouting, though I was so excited that I had no idea what I was trying to say.

Never in my life had I ever seen anything like that airplane. It was amazing that it didn’t just fall out of the sky, but for the first time it dawned on me—Eureka!—what the word “airplane” meant. That was what it did. It stayed aloft because it was planing the air.

I only wished I had some students to explain all this to.

ALL THAT TIME I
was teaching, I had never gone home, since the trip took so long. People say that when you return to the place where you grew up, it always seems smaller than you remember. That was the case with me when I finally reached the ranch, but I don’t know if it was because I had built it up in my memories or I had gotten bigger. Maybe both.

While I was away, I did write the family once a week and in return received long letters from Dad waxing eloquent and purple about his latest political convictions yet providing few details about how they were faring, and I wondered if the family had managed to keep it all together. But the place looked well run, the fences in repair, the outbuildings freshly whitewashed, a new clapboard wing on the main house, a big supply of split firewood neatly stacked under the porch roof, even a bed of hollyhocks and sunflowers.

Lupe was out front scouring a pot when I rode up. She gave a shriek, everyone came running from the house and barn, and there was a whole lot of hugging and happy tears. Dad kept saying, “You left a girl and you come back a woman.” He and Mom both had strands of gray in their hair, Buster had filled out and grown a mustache, and Helen had become a willowy sixteen-year-old beauty.