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

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