Half broke horses: a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls

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