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

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