Half broke horses: a true-life novel Read online

  Mom kept up the dugout, but she refused to do chores like toting water or carrying firewood. “Your mother’s a lady,” Dad would say by way of explaining her disdain for manual labor. Dad did most of the outdoor work with the help of our hand, Apache. Apache wasn’t really an Indian, but he’d been captured by the Apaches when he was six, and they kept him until he was a young man, when the U.S. Cavalry—with Dad’s pa serving as a scout—raided the camp and Apache ran out yelling, “Soy blanco! Soy blanco!”

  Apache had gone home with Dad’s pa and lived with the family ever since. By now Apache was an old man, with a white beard so long that he tucked it in his pants. Apache was a loner and sometimes spent hours staring at the horizon or the barn wall, and he’d also disappear into the range now and then for days at a time, but he always came back. Folks considered Apache a little peculiar, but that’s what they also thought of Dad, and the two of them got along just fine.

  To cook and wash, Mom had the help of our servant girl, Lupe, who had gotten pregnant and was forced to leave her village outside Juárez after the baby was born because she had brought shame on the family and no one would marry her. She was small and a little barrel-shaped and even more devoutly Catholic than Mom. Buster called her “Loopy,” but I liked Lupe. Although her parents had taken her baby from her and she slept on a Navajo blanket on the dugout floor, Lupe never felt sorry for herself, and that was something I decided I admired most in people.

  Even with Lupe helping her out, Mom didn’t really care for life on Salt Draw. She hadn’t bargained for it. Mom thought she’d married well when she took Adam Casey as her husband, despite his limp and speech impediment. Dad’s pa had come over from Ireland during a potato blight, joined the Second Dragoons—one of the first cavalry units of the U.S. Army—where he served under Colonel Robert E. Lee, and was stationed on the Texas frontier, fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowa. After leaving the army, he took up ranching, first in Texas, then in the Hondo Valley, and by the time he was killed, he had one of the biggest herds in the area.

  Robert Casey was shot down as he walked along the main street of Lincoln, New Mexico. One version of the story held that he and the man who killed him had disagreed over an eight-dollar debt. The murderer’s hanging was talked about for years in the valley because, once he’d been hanged, declared dead, cut down, and put in his pine box, people heard him moving around, so they took him out and strung him up again.

  After Robert Casey’s death, his children started arguing over how to split up the herd, which fostered bad blood that lasted for the rest of Dad’s life. Dad inherited the Hondo Valley spread, but he felt his elder brother, who’d taken the herd to Texas, had cheated him out of his share, and he was constantly filing lawsuits and appeals. He continued the campaign even after moving to west Texas, and he was also battling away with the other ranchers in the Hondo Valley, traveling back to New Mexico to lodge an endless stream of claims and counterclaims.

  One thing about Dad was that he had a terrible temper, and he usually returned from these trips trembling with rage. Part of it was his Irish blood, and part of it was his impatience with folks who had trouble understanding what he said. He felt those people thought he was a lamebrain and were always trying to cheat him, whether it was his brothers and their lawyers, traveling merchants, or half-breed-horse traders. He’d start sputtering and cursing, and from time to time, he’d become so incensed that he’d pull out his pistol and plug away at things, aiming to miss people—most of the time.

  Once he got into an argument with a tinker who overcharged to repair the kettle. When the tinker started to mock the way he talked, Dad ran inside to get his guns, but Lupe had seen what was coming and hidden them in her Navajo blanket. Dad worked himself into a lather, hollering about his missing guns, but I was convinced Lupe saved that tinker’s life. And probably Dad’s as well, since if he’d killed the tinker, he might have ended up swinging, hanged like the man who’d shot his pa.

  LIFE WOULD BE EASIER, Dad kept saying, once we got our due. But we were only going to get it by fighting for it. Dad was all caught up in his lawsuits, but for the rest of us, the constant fight on Salt Draw was the one against the elements. The flash flood that sent Buster, Helen, and me up the cottonwood wasn’t the only one that almost did us in. Floods were pretty common in that part of Texas—you could count on one every couple of years—and when I was eight, we were hit by another big one. Dad was away in Austin filing another claim about his inheritance when one night Salt Draw overflowed and poured into our dugout. The sound of thunder awoke me, and when I got up, my feet sank into muddy water up to my ankles. Mom took Helen and Buster to high ground to pray, but I stayed behind with Apache and Lupe. We barricaded the door with the rug and started bailing the water out the window. Mom came back and begged us to go pray with her on the hilltop.

  “To heck with praying!” I shouted. “Bail, dammit, bail!”

  Mom looked mortified. I could tell she thought I’d probably doomed us all with my blasphemy, and I was a little shocked at it myself, but with the water rising so fast, the situation was dire. We had lit the kerosene lamp, and we could see that the walls of the dugout were beginning to sag inward. If Mom had pitched in and helped, there was a chance we might have been able to save the dugout—not a good chance, but a fighting chance. Apache and Lupe and I couldn’t do it on our own, though, and when the ceiling started to cave, we grabbed Mom’s walnut headboard and pulled it through the door just as the dugout collapsed in on itself, burying everything.

  Afterward, I was pretty aggravated with Mom. She kept saying that the flood was God’s will and we had to submit to it. But I didn’t see things that way. Submitting seemed to me a lot like giving up. If God gave us the strength to bail—the gumption to try to save ourselves— isn’t that what he wanted us to do?

  * * *

  But the flood turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It was all too much for that tenderfoot, Mr. McClurg, who lived up the draw in a two-room wooden house that he had built with timber he carted in from New Mexico. The flood washed away Mr. McClurg’s foundation, and the walls fell apart. He said he’d had it with this godforsaken part of the world and decided to return to Cleveland. As soon as Dad got home from Austin, he had us all jump in the wagon and—quickly, before anyone else in High Lonesome got the same idea—we drove over to scavenge Mr. McClurg’s lumber. We took everything: siding, rafters, beams, door frames, floorboards. By the end of the summer, we had built ourselves a brand-new wooden house, and after we whitewashed it, you almost couldn’t tell that it had been patched together with someone else’s old wood.

  As we all stood there admiring our house the day we finished it, Mom turned to me and said, “Now, wasn’t that flood God’s will?”

  I didn’t have an answer. Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God’s will and what wasn’t.

  I ASKED DAD IF he believed that everything that happened was God’s will.

  “Is and isn’t,” he said. “God deals us all different hands. How we play ’em is up to us.”

  I wondered if Dad thought that God had dealt him a bad hand, but I didn’t feel it was my place to ask. From time to time, Dad mentioned the horse kicking him in the head, but none of us ever talked about his gimp leg or his trouble speaking.

  Dad’s speech impediment did make it sound a little like he was talking underwater. If he said, “Hitch up the carriage,” it sounded to most people like “Ich’p uh urrj,” and if he said, “Mama needs to rest,” it sounded like “Uhmu neesh resh.”

  Toyah, the nearest little town, was four miles away, and sometimes when we went there, the kids followed Dad around imitating him, which made me want to thrash them something fierce. A lot of times, particularly when Mom was there, too, Buster, Helen, and I could do little more than glare at them. Dad usually acted like those kids didn’t exist—after all, he could hardly run for
his gun to shoot them, like he had with that tinker—but once, at the Toyah stable, when a couple of them were especially loud, I saw him glance down with a wounded look. While he and Buster were loading the wagon, I went back to the stable and tried to explain to those kids that they were hurting people’s feelings, but all they did was snicker, so I shoved them into the manure pile and ran. I’d never done a bad thing that gave me so much satisfaction. My only regret was that I couldn’t tell Dad about it.

  What those kids didn’t understand about Dad was that, although his speech did sound sort of marbly, he was smart. He’d been taught by a governess, and he was all the time reading books on philosophy and writing long letters to politicians like William Taft, William Jennings Bryan, and Frederick William Seward, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s assistant secretary of state. Seward even wrote back, letters Dad treasured and kept in a locked tin box.

  When it came to the written word, no one could string together sentences like Dad. His handwriting was elegant, if a little spidery, and his sentences were long and extravagant, filled with words like “mendacious” and “abscond” that most of the folks in Toyah would need a dictionary to understand. Two of Dad’s biggest concerns in his letters were industrialization and mechanization, which he felt were destroying the human soul. He was also obsessed with Prohibition and phonetic spelling, both of which he saw as cures for mankind’s tendency toward irrational behavior.

  Dad had come of age seeing too many liquored-up people blazing away at one another. His pa had sold liquor from the store he ran on the Rio Hondo ranch, but his pa also once had to shoot a drunk who tried to shoot him. Alcohol, Dad said, made Indians and Irishmen crazy. After his pa was killed, Dad axed the store’s liquor barrels, and to Apache’s deep regret, he didn’t allow anything stronger than tea on the ranch.

  The inconsistent spelling of words in the English language also vexed Dad to no end. Digraphs such as “sh” and “ph” infuriated him, and silent letters made him grieve. If words were simply spelled the way they were pronounced, he argued, pretty much anyone who learned the alphabet could read, and that would virtually wipe out illiteracy.

  Toyah had a one-room schoolhouse, but Dad thought that the teaching there was second-rate and he could do better tutoring me. Every day after lunch, when the sun was too hot to work outside, we did lessons—grammar, history, arithmetic, science, and civics—and when we were done, I tutored Buster and Helen. Dad’s favorite subject was history, but he taught it with a decidedly west-of-the-Pecos point of view. As the proud son of an Irishman, he hated the English Pilgrims, whom he called “Poms,” as well as most of the founding fathers. They were a bunch of pious hypocrites, he thought, who declared all men equal but kept slaves and massacred peaceful Indians. He sided with the Mexicans in the Mexican-American war and thought the United States had stolen all the land north of the Rio Grande, but he also thought the southern states should have had as much right to leave the union as the colonies had to leave the British Empire. “Only difference between a traitor and a patriot is your perspective,” he said.

  * * *

  I loved my lessons, particularly science and geometry, loved learning that there were these invisible rules that explained the mysteries of the world we lived in. Smart as that made me feel, Mom and Dad kept saying that even though I was getting a better education at home than any of the kids in Toyah, I’d need to go to finishing school when I was thirteen, both to acquire social graces and to earn a diploma. Because in this world, Dad said, it’s not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.

  MOM DID HER BEST to keep us kids genteel. While I was teaching Buster and Helen, she brushed my hair one hundred strokes, careful to pull backward away from my scalp, putting marrow and lanolin into it to increase its luster. At night, she curled it into ringlets with little pieces of paper she called papillotes. “A lady’s hair is her crowning glory,” she said, and she was always going on about how my widow’s peak was my best feature, but when I looked in the mirror, that little V of hair at the top of my forehead didn’t seem like much to bank on.

  Even though we lived four miles from Toyah and days would go by without seeing anyone outside the family, Mom worked very hard at being a lady. She was dainty, only four and a half feet tall, and her feet were so small that she had to wear button-up boots made for girls. To keep her hands elegantly white, she rubbed them with pastes made from honey, lemon juice, and borax. She wore tight corsets to give her a teeny waist—I helped her lace them up—but they had the effect of causing her to faint. Mom called it the vapors and said it was a sign of her high breeding and delicate nature. I thought it was a sign that the corset made it hard to breathe. Whenever she’d keel over, I’d have to revive her with smelling salts, which she kept in a crystal bottle tied around her neck with a pink ribbon.

  Mom was closest to Helen, who had inherited her tiny hands and feet and her frail constitution. Sometimes they read poetry to each other, and in the stifling midafternoon heat, they’d simply lie together on Mom’s chaise longue. But while she was close to Helen, she completely doted on Buster, the only son, whom she considered the future of the family. Buster was a rabbity little kid, but he had an irresistible smile, and maybe to compensate for Dad’s speech impediment, he was one of the fastest and smoothest talkers in the county. Mom liked to say Buster could charm the sage off the brush. She was always telling Buster there were no limits on what he could become—a railroad magnate, a cattle baron, a general, or even the governor of Texas.

  Mom didn’t quite know what to make of me. She feared she might have trouble marrying me off because I didn’t have the makings of a lady. I was a little bowlegged, for one thing. Mom said it was because I rode horses too much. Also, my front teeth jutted out, so she bought me a red silk fan to cover my mouth. Whenever I laughed or smiled too big, Mom would say, “Lily, dear, the fan.”

  Since Mom wasn’t exactly the most useful person in the world, one lesson I learned at an early age was how to get things done, and this was a source of both amazement and concern for Mom, who considered my behavior unladylike but also counted on me. “I never knew a girl to have such gumption,” she’d say. “But I’m not too sure that’s a good thing.”

  The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion made sense only if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad’s gimp, Buster’s elaborate excuses, and Apache’s tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

  We’d heard about electricity and how some big cities back east were wired with so many glowing lightbulbs that it looked like daytime even after the sun had set. But those wires had yet to reach west Texas, so you had to do everything by hand, heating irons on the stove to press Mom’s blouses, cooking cauldrons of lye and potash over the fire to make soap, working the pump, then toting clean water in to wash the dishes and dirty water out to pour on the vegetable garden.

  We’d also heard about the indoor plumbing they were installing in fancy houses back east, but no one in west Texas had it, and most people, including Mom and Dad, thought the idea of an indoor bathroom was vile and disgusting. “Who in the Lord’s name would want a crapper in the house?” Dad asked.

  SINCE I GREW UP listening to Dad, I always understood him completely, and when I turned five, he had me start helping him train the horses. It took Dad six years to train a pair of carriage horses properly, and he had six teams going at all times, selling off one team a year, which was enough to make ends meet. A team had to be perfectly matched in size and color, with no irregularities, and if one horse had white socks, the other needed them as well.

  Of the six pairs of horses we’d have, Dad let the yearlings and two-year-olds simply run free in the pastu
re. “First thing a horse needs to learn is to be a horse,” he liked to say. I worked with the three-year-olds, teaching them ground manners and getting them to accept the bit, then helped Dad harness and unharness the three pairs of older horses. I’d drive each pair in a circle while Dad stood in the middle, using a whip to drill them, making sure they lifted their feet high, changed gaits in unison, and flexed their necks smartly.

  Everyone who spent time around horses, Dad liked to say, needed to learn to think like a horse. He was always repeating that phrase: “Think like a horse.” The key to that, he said, was understanding that horses were always afraid. The only way they could save themselves from mountain lions and wolves was to kick out and run, and they ran like the wind, racing one another, because it was the slowest horse in the herd that got taken down by the predator. They were all the time looking for a protector, and if you could convince a horse that you’d protect him, he would do anything for you.

  Dad had a whole vocabulary of grunts, murmurs, clucks, tocks, and whistles that he used to speak with horses. It was like their own private language. He never flogged their backs, instead using the whip to make a small popping sound on either side of their ears, signaling them without ever hurting or frightening them.

  Dad also made tack for the horses, and he seemed happiest sitting by himself, humming at his sewing machine, working the foot pedal, surrounded by hides, shears, cans of neat’s-foot oil, spools of stitching threads, and his big saddler’s needles, no one bothering him, no one feeling sorry for him, no one scratching their heads trying to figure out what it was he wanted to say.

  I was in charge of breaking the horses. It wasn’t like breaking wild mustangs, because our horses had been around us since they were foals. Most times I simply climbed on bareback—if the horse was too skinny, its spine sometimes rubbed a raw spot on my behind— grabbed a handful of mane, gave them a nudge with my heels, and off we went, at first in awkward fits and starts, with a little crow hopping and swerving while the horse wondered what in tarnation a girl was doing on his back, but pretty soon the horse usually accepted his fate and we’d move along right nicely. After that, it was a matter of saddling him up and finding the best bit. Then you could set about training him.