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Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
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Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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From the author of The Glass Castle and Hang the Moon—“Walls vividly depicts her astonishing, resilient grandmother with a lightness of touch that is plainspoken yet heartfelt” (Chicago Tribune). Half Broke Horses has transfixed readers everywhere.

“Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s no-nonsense, resourceful, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town—riding five hundred miles on her pony, alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car and fly a plane. And, with her husband, Jim, she ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one who is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds—against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn’t fit the mold. Rosemary Smith Walls always told Jeannette that she was like her grandmother, and in this true-life novel, Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa or Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. Destined to become a classic, it will transfix readers everywhere.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateOct 6, 2009
ISBN9781439160534
Author

Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.

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Rating: 4.026249168880455 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    About a third of the way through this book I realized I'd read it before. Still enjoyed it, but once it felt like familiar territory I put it down.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I won a copy of this book and I have to say, it has inspired me to write some of my remaining family’s history. The author’s words evoke images of life before all the amenities we now take for granted, in such a way that you yearn to have experienced the life of her grandmother, Lily. Lily is such a strong female character – I am happy her story has surfaced and made its way into the world – she demonstrates just how strong and savyy women really are, even in seemingly impossible situations.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A story about Lily Casey, Jeanette Walls Grandmother (Glass Castle). I enjoyed the Glass Castle, but I didn't enjoy this as much. Lily born in 1901, a ranch hand essentially, a hardworking woman, went after what she wanted hands down. Her daughter Rose Mary, was more of a free spirit unlike her hardworking Mother. I am amazed at the strength of Lily, in those day's it just had to get done, and she accomplished it. I admire Jeanette's Grandmother and loved hearing the pioneer stories. Can't imagine myself growing up in that era, were too spoiled with all of the technology these days.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Biographical fiction from Jeannette Walls, who wrote "The Glass Castle," a memoir that I could not. put. down. This is her grandmother's life story and she has taken liberties where there were gaps, changed names to protect the innocent, etc., thus making this a "true-life novel." It's a good read about a VERY sassy and opinionated prairie girl and it ties in nicely with Walls' family if you have read her memoir.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is the story of Jeannette Walls' grandmother, Lily. Like her granddaughter, Lily was a strong, independent child who grew up to do things girls and women were not supposed to do. She rode 500 miles on her horse, by herself, to her first teaching job. She learned to run a farm, drive a car and fly an airplane. After reading Half Broke Horses, it's easy to see how Jeannette survived her own abusive childhood. Once again, Walls tells her story with insight and humor.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Half Broke Horses takes us through a time in our history of which we only guess about. For that I give the book high praise. However, although this book was interesting, and definitely worth reading, it left me wanting something more.

    I read, The Glass Castle, first, and if I tore off the covers, I would not be able to tell one book from the other. The back cover mentions, ‘Jeannette Walls channels that kindred spirit’, meaning her grandmother. I didn’t read it that way. I was still very curious as to how Lily Casey Smith felt about all those true life adventures she experienced. What about love? Love of her friends, husband, even her own children? What blast of emotions did she feel when her friend died! What about her sister?

    The book was very detailed about the descriptions and adventures, but dry with the human interactions. It also dribbled to a close after her daughter, Rosemary got married. Since this was a true life novel, I would have liked it to have completed her and her husband’s lives. It didn’t even let us know how they died, or who died first. If her husband died first, how did she manage?

    The book was finished, just not enough. It left me feeling a little irritated because the book was very good. It had so much potential.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Half Broke Horses is Jeannette Walls interpretation of the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. She calls it a true-life novel as the story is told from the perspective of Lily herself and some of the details are intuited rather then factual. This adds to the story rather than detracting from it as it contributes depth and fleshes out the story. Its a grand story of a woman who lived life large. Lily was a tough, smart, outspoken, and resourceful woman who lived through floods, tornadoes, marriage to a crumb-bum husband, and selling bootleg booze to support her family. She never apologized for who she was or for doing what she believed was right.I immediately liked Lily Casey Smith and wanted to keep reading to see what would become of her. Her utter frankness was humorous and her ability to pull herself up by her bootstraps admirable. The western landscape is a major character with its droughts, floods, canyons, and plains. The writing is beautifully descriptive yet the conversation and people are authentically captured as well. Half Broke Horses is a well-written, entertaining, easy read!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a fun, delightful read! As you probably already know, the author wrote this "true life" novel about her very own grandmother, Lily Smith. It covers her life from the early 1900s to the 1950s. Her story takes readers to the wild Texas west, 1920s Chicago, and both the ranch life and city life of Arizona. Lily plays many a role. Besides being a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and eventually a grandmother, Lily at some time or another steps into the role of teacher, bus driver, horse racer, horse trainer, maid, gas pumper, rancher, lady pilot, and even a taxi driver. The novel, told from her point of view, tells about her parents, the land, the weather, her pregnant sister, job losses, foreclosures, suicide, and the trials of having a thirteen year old daughter that skinny dips with the ranch hands. And let's not forget her failed first marriage, a story of its own. I had a favorite part or two I just have to mention so everybody can get the gist of this darn good yarn. I especially liked the part in which Lily is teaching in Arizona in a mostly Mormon one room school house and tries to show the young girls under her tuition that "there were other things they could do besides being brood mares dressed in feed sacks." That just goes to show, what kind of woman Lily was. I laughed with absolute glee when she aimed her gun at stalking Uncle Eli and said "you come round here again, you better be wearing your wonder underwear.." This is truly a great book that shouldn't be missed. I recommend it to women everywhere that like to read about other strong women. As Lily would say, "you'll get the lace knocked off your panties!"
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I finished the book last night and loved it. I didn't know if I would enjoy a book that was set in the wild west at the turn of the century, BUT I LOVED IT. I loved the first person viewpoint and Jeannette is an incredibly talented story teller. It's quick in pace, but incredibly detailed. The characters aren't overly explained, but you know them well. The story line ebs and flows and you hold on to the very last page. One little suggestion. Why didn't this book come out before The Glass Castle? It should have. Read this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Tenacious. This is protagonist Lily Casey Smith, also the grandmother of author Jeannette Walls. Her spirit, intuition and concrete convictions of what ought to be taught in life are not only the marks of her character, but the bare necessities that get her through the weathered mid-west. This is not only a portrait painted, but straight-up adventure of true cowboys and ranchers.Always a person who lives life the hard way and lives to tell the tale, Lily is strong and resourceful. She makes a living for herself as a schoolteacher who isn't afraid to name a thing for what it is, what it is not and what she's going to do about it. Be it leaving Chicago after being sick of playing the undervalued housemaid in the indifferent city, caring for her starry-eyed sister in her depression, coming to grips with why Jim would be the man for her to marry, even if their constant love for the outdoors and tact to tame the wild horses don't betray enough of their common spirits, and saving the ranch from drought by building a dam. Much of the story is told with Rosemary, Walls' mother, in the picture. As a mother, Lily is bent on teaching her daughter the right life lessons but Rosemary is a kindred spirit that can't be tied down either way. " 'I always like to think I'd never met a kid I couldn't teach,' [Lily] said. 'Turns out I was wrong. That kid is you.' " We see Rosemary grow up as the sympathetic girl to even the meanest of animals to a young bride whose husband flew Lily on a plane right below the telephone lines to convince her of his gumption. Rosemary herself is secondary in the novel, but a significant counterpart to Lily's life -- like the wild creature that proves talent to the one who can tame her.I found the author's note to be equally as interesting: at first, Walls resisted the idea of writing a book about her grandmother, opting to write about her mom Rosemary instead. But as she conducted her family research, more arrows pointed to Lily as the one with the story to tell, and Walls writes the novel in first person to capture her grandmother's voice. I'm no westerner but the voice Walls employs puts me right in the Casey's world; at the centre of the 20th century and absolutely enamoured by the grit, grease, and gullies of ranch life.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Half-broke Horses was good, interesting even, but does not explain the horror that is Rose Mary Walls which is what I wanted to understand when I picked it up.Lily Casey is a compelling character and the times she lives in (the homesteading outposts of the early 20th century wild west), are rarely boring. Still, I read the book hoping for answers. I didn't really find them.The detatched narrative that worked so effectively for me in Glass Castle kept me unconnected to Lily.The jawdropping selfishness of Rose Mary in Glass Castles demands an explanation if you're going to continue the saga, and this didn't provide one. Lily was a ballsy woman but I found her story sort of unremarkable. On its own it is a good, quick and satisfying read, but I still don't have the answers I was looking for.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved this book. After having read "The Glass Castle," by this author, I was thrilled to delve into the history of how someone's life becomes what it does. What made her parents who they were? I suppose because I ponder the same question of my own. The book won't be what you expect. It won't make you cry like her first one did me but it will make you laugh, and more importantly it will make you think. The title alone leaves me questioning, whether half broke horses are all that bad after all.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Read it in a big gulp. Loved the no nonsense Lily and the telling of her life story. Dovetailed Glass castles. Though she called it fiction because she had to shade in a lot of missing information and address conflicting accounts of her family's history. Excellent book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    3.5 starsJeanette Walls decided to write about her grandmother's life. She decided, since there were a lot of blanks to fill in (and dialogue), she would call it fiction, but she also considers it an oral history of her family. Her grandmother, Lily, was born in the early 20th century and was a spunky woman! She mostly grew up on a ranch, but left to become a teacher. She also lived in the big city of Chicago for a while, before moving back to a ranch. She married, had kids, and continued to move around. I enjoyed this. I (mostly) liked Lily and her spunk, though I didn't agree with some of the stuff she did (I guess, in part, it was the times). It wasn't nearly as good (I didn't think) as The Glass Castle, but it was still enjoyable.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Much better than the author's first book; I like the novelization of her grandmother's stories. Quite the family. The chapters are short, it's a quick read. The characters are sometimes maddeningly real and complicated. The landscape - especially the American west - are vibrant and larger than life. While not written specifically for a Young Adult audience, I think this is a story every young woman to read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was very excited to read this book after enjoying Jeannette Wall's earlier novel, The Glass Castle so much. I thought it was a good read, but it paled in comparison to her memoir. While the author’s grandmother, Lily Casey Smith has an interesting life story I felt that I was reading a movie script. I kept imagining Hilary Swank riding a mule, or flying her plane on an IMAX screen. It was enjoyable, but left me wanting more. Perhaps if I had read this book first I would have liked it better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This rich, evocative literary novel-memoir is a true delight. The author recreated her grandmother's life as a story of fiction, but based on the true stories handed down through the family by her mother. Jeannette Walls doesn't disappoint.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a biography masquerading as a novel. The author has reconstructed the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily, and tells the story in the first person. Lily Casey Smith is an interesting woman -- strong-willed, resourceful and adventurous. Her life was one of overcoming personal and financial set-backs on the beautiful but rugged land of Arizona. As a biography, this book would have worked reasonably well. However, as a novel, I found it lacked depth in the way the story was told and in the development of any characters other than Lily herself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enjoyable no-frills style, great characters simply presented. Walls' grandmother was someone I would love to have known, whose strength and spirit I would have envied- from a safe distance. Makes me want to re-read Glass Castle for better continuity of this family's story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    After having been swept away by Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, I couldn't avoid having high expectations for her new book, Half Broke Horses, so I was thrilled to receive it as an advance reading copy. I am happy to say it is a wonderful book, but it is very different in tone and voice from The Glass Castle, so be prepared for a new, excellent, experience from this author.Half Broke Horses is subtitled "A True-Life Novel" which put me on my guard, as I have issues with ambivalent writings that can't seem to commit fully to either the nonfiction or the fiction side of literary expression but rather weave and waffle in and out; however, Ms. Walls makes clear in the Author's Note at the end of the book (interesting choice, to put it at the end) that this book had started out "to be about my mother's childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona…but she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily."Using anecdotes from family members and her own childhood recollections, the author fleshes out a voice and personality for her grandmother and chooses to put the book in the first person from her point of view. Therein lies the 'novel' part of the 'true-life' and accounts for the 'voice' of this book being so different from Glass Castle. At first, I felt this was a shortcoming, but very soon into the book I realized that the author was intentionally not letting the telling get in the way of the story.The sweeping story of Lily Casey Smith takes us through both the rigors of making a living and the death-defying challenges of life in the American frontier in the early 20th century. From drought-plagued west Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the remote Arizona Grand Canyon, with an attempt at urban life in a rough and growing Chicago, Lily's life embodies a time when rugged individualism carried depth of meaning. Outstanding among a list of remarkable feats was a fifteen-year-old Lily riding her pony, alone, 500 miles to her first school teaching job.In the second half of the book, Lily's little daughter Rosemary, the author's mother, grows up between the near total freedom of life on a ranch and the near-prison-like atmosphere of Catholic boarding schools for girls. Through Lily's eyes, we can see how this unique young daughter grew up to be the complicated mother in The Glass Castle. Though this link is important for those who read The Glass Castle, it is not essential to appreciating Half Broke Horses, which easily stands on its own as a story of the pioneering spirit of the American southwest.My book club has already selected this title for reading later this year.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I won a copy of this book and I have to say, it has inspired me to write some of my remaining family’s history. The author’s words evoke images of life before all the amenities we now take for granted, in such a way that you yearn to have experienced the life of her grandmother, Lily. Lily is such a strong female character – I am happy her story has surfaced and made its way into the world – she demonstrates just how strong and savyy women really are, even in seemingly impossible situations.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jeannette Walls's "The Glass Castle" is a very tough book to beat. The almost unbelievable tale of an abusive childhood spent with totally irresponsible parents, it became a book club staple and basically invented the Misery Memoir genre. Happily, no sophomore slump here. Walls is an incredible writer who tells the story of her adventurous, pioneering, ranching, teaching, crop dusting grandmother Lily Casey Smith in that woman's splendid voice. Photos are a fabulous addition to the narrative. Riveting and colorful, the reader is now given enough background to really understand the blissfully freestyle childhood of Walls's mother Rose Mary, which led to the horror of Jeannette's scattered upbringing. Cinematic Western writing, reminding me of Edna Feber's "Giant" and "Cimarron", not to be missed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book is good - not as good as The Glass Castle - but maybe thats only because I read The Glass Castle first and I really, really lked that one. I was told by others who read this book that the best part of it is that it explains to you why Rose is the way she is in TGC. I agree. I almost wish I had read this one 1st. I have recommended it to a friend and she is going to read this one 1st so I will be interested to see what she thinks of each book.

    Either way, this book is an easy read and I finished it in 3 days. The characters are wonderfully described and the story keeps you interested from the 1st page to the last. Its definitely one I would recommend :)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lily is my kind of gal. She is pragmatic, hard-working, and straight talking. Jeanette Walls has put together a great family yarn.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I picked this book up for an easy read. Jeannette Walls has fictionalised the life story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Growing up on a parched patch of West Texas land, Lily is running the family ranch with her father before she is in her teens. Her dad breaks and trains horses to pull a carriage and Lily learns to ride and break the horses as a young child. We follow Lily's escapades through from West Texas, to Arizona, Chicago, Colorado and back again. Through floods, droughts, a sham marriage, unsuccessful bouts at a convent school from the first world war, through the great depression, second world war and into the 50s. Whoever has said this book is boring has clearly only skimmed the pages. Lily is feisty (a little too feisty), tough on her children, determined, can-do, practical and adventurous. For the first half of the book, Lily is also a likeable character. There is a darker side to Lily; whilst she has been through a lot of potentially traumatic experiences, her outlook on parenting is very tough. I know I am taking Lily's behaviour out of context. At times, Lily beat her children; she whipped Rosemary until she whimpered, she kicked a schoolboy she was teaching to the floor for misbehaving, Lily carried a gun into her school for protection, she never gave her children sympathy when they cried, she sent her children to boarding school on three separate occasions despite them hating it...... The real success her is how Jeannette Walls has created a voice for Lily which does not shy away from the imperfections in her character and is really gritty and at points, totally out of order. This book was gripping and a great family history. 4 stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    If you enjoyed The Glass Castle by Walls, you will also like Half Broke Horses. Walls tells the story of her maternal grandmother, a strong woman during the first part of the 20th century, growing up in the west. The story also adds insight into her own mother, and herself. Very good read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am posting my review before I finished the book because Library Thing says I received this by July 7th and I actually just received it last week. (July 30th)The book starts off with a great 1st chapter, kept me interested and wanting more. Its a biography thattakes place in Eastern Texas and New Mexico in the early 1900s? (have to check) so far. The characters are interesting. The book is narrated in the voice of Jeannette Walls' grandmother. It starts when she is nine or so. The father is handicapped although that word is never used. An interesting character with a speech impediment and dragging foot and a prison record, but seems to be a loving father. The mother is drawn as a somewhat useless woman. God fearing and very protective of her skin. The sister is very similar to the Mother in temperament and not much as been revealed of the brother. Looking forward to reading more.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Unexpectedly compelling, despite its simplicity, the story of Lily Casey is interesting and engaging. Jeanette has given her grandmother a unique voice - part true, part fictionalised. It is the actions of her grandmother that I admire most - a woman who made a lot of her tough circumstances. Having said that, Lily is hardly maternal and a not one for compromises, which may contribute to a lot of Rose Mary's later choices. Yet Lily is essentially portrayed as a likeable woman who worked hard, cared for her family and did the best she knew how. My only complaint is that the ending felt way too abrupt, I would have liked to have more to the story even though it would have overlapped with Jeanette's own memoir.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this book, and I enjoyed Walls' simple writing style portraying her grandmother's strong voice. The vivid Arizona setting was captivating, and I can still imagine those waterfalls, droughts, sunsets, and plateaus that Walls depicted. If you have read The Glass Castle, this book will give you great insight into why Rosemary Walls was the mother to Jeannette and her siblings that she was. It was interesting to see Lily's character develop, and I was almost saddened by the way she became hardened by the world over time. I suppose this development is natural, though, especially when she had no modern conveniences or never really had an easy road in life. I recommend reading Half Broke Horses for the strong characters and great scenery. Whether you read it before or after The Glass Castle does not really matter. Although The Glass Castle was written first, I personally wish I would have read them out of order since Half Broke Horses provides neat background for the story of Jeannette Walls' life.

Book preview

Half Broke Horses - Jeannette Walls

I

line

SALT DRAW

photo

The KC Ranch on the Rio Hondo

THOSE OLD COWS KNEW trouble was coming before we did.

It was late on an August afternoon, the air hot and heavy like it usually was in the rainy season. Earlier we’d seen some thunderheads near the Burnt Spring Hills, but they’d passed way up to the north. I’d mostly finished my chores for the day and was heading down to the pasture with my brother, Buster, and my sister, Helen, to bring the cows in for their milking. But when we got there, those girls were acting all bothered. Instead of milling around at the gate, like they usually did at milking time, they were standing stiff-legged and straight-tailed, twitching their heads around, listening.

Buster and Helen looked up at me, and without a word, I knelt down and pressed my ear to the hard-packed dirt. There was a rumbling, so faint and low that you felt it more than you heard it. Then I knew what the cows knew—a flash flood was coming.

As I stood up, the cows bolted, heading for the southern fence line, and when they reached the barbed wire, they jumped over it—higher and cleaner than I’d ever seen cows jump—and then they thundered off toward higher ground.

I figured we best bolt, too, so I grabbed Helen and Buster by the hand. By then I could feel the ground rumbling through my shoes. I saw the first water sluicing through the lowest part of the pasture, and I knew we didn’t have time to make it to higher ground ourselves. In the middle of the field was an old cottonwood tree, broad-branched and gnarled, and we ran for that.

Helen stumbled, so Buster grabbed her other hand, and we lifted her off the ground and carried her between us as we ran. When we reached the cottonwood, I pushed Buster up to the lowest branch, and he pulled Helen into the tree behind him. I shimmied up and wrapped my arms around Helen just as a wall of water, about six feet high and pushing rocks and tree limbs in front of it, slammed into the cottonwood, dousing all three of us. The tree shuddered and bent over so far that you could hear wood cracking, and some lower branches were torn off. I feared it might be uprooted, but the cottonwood held fast and so did we, our arms locked as a great rush of caramel-colored water, filled with bits of wood and the occasional matted gopher and tangle of snakes, surged beneath us, spreading out across the lowland and seeking its level.

*   *   *

We just sat there in that cottonwood tree watching for about an hour. The sun started to set over the Burnt Spring Hills, turning the high clouds crimson and sending long purple shadows eastward. The water was still flowing beneath us, and Helen said her arms were getting tired. She was only seven and was afraid she couldn’t hold on much longer.

Buster, who was nine, was perched up in the big fork of the tree. I was ten, the oldest, and I took charge, telling Buster to trade places with Helen so she could sit upright without having to cling too hard. A little while later, it got dark, but a bright moon came out and we could see just fine. From time to time we all switched places so no one’s arms would wear out. The bark was chafing my thighs, and Helen’s, too, and when we needed to pee, we had to just wet ourselves. About halfway through the night, Helen’s voice started getting weak.

I can’t hold on any longer, she said.

Yes, you can, I told her. You can because you have to. We were going to make it, I told them. I knew we would make it because I could see it in my mind. I could see us walking up the hill to the house tomorrow morning, and I could see Mom and Dad running out. It would happen—but it was up to us to make it happen.

To keep Helen and Buster from drifting off to sleep and falling out of the cottonwood, I grilled them on their multiplication tables. When we’d run through those, I went on to presidents and state capitals, then word definitions, word rhymes, and whatever else I could come up with, snapping at them if their voices faltered, and that was how I kept Helen and Buster awake through the night.

*   *   *

By first light, you could see that the water still covered the ground. In most places, a flash flood drained away after a couple of hours, but the pasture was in bottomland near the river, and sometimes the water remained for days. But it had stopped moving and had begun seeping down through the sinkholes and mudflats.

We made it, I said.

I figured it would be safe to wade through the water, so we scrambled out of the cottonwood tree. We were so stiff from holding on all night that our joints could scarcely move, and the mud kept sucking at our shoes, but we got to dry land as the sun was coming up and climbed the hill to the house just the way I had seen it.

Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of his gimp leg. When he saw us, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps toward us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank to her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood.

It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel, she said. And you thank me, too.

Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who’d saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arm around my shoulders.

There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad, I said. I started explaining how I’d gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them.

Dad squeezed my shoulder. Well, darling, he said, maybe the angel was you.

WE HAD A HOMESTEAD on Salt Draw, which flowed into the Pecos River, in the rolling gritty grassland of west Texas. The sky was high and pale, the land low and washed out, gray and every color of sand. Sometimes the wind blew for days on end, but sometimes it was so still you could hear the dog barking on the Dingler ranch two miles upriver, and when a wagon came down the road, the dust it trailed hung in the air for a long time before drifting back to the ground.

When you looked out across the land, most everything you could see—the horizon, the river, the fence lines, the gullies, the scrub cedar—was spread out and flat, and the people, cattle, horses, lizards, and water all moved slowly, conserving themselves.

It was hard country. The ground was like rock—save for when a flood turned everything to mud—the animals were bony and tough, and even the plants were prickly and sparse, though from time to time the thunderstorms brought out startling bursts of wildflowers. Dad said High Lonesome, as the area was known, wasn’t a place for the soft of head or the weak of heart, and he said that was why he and I made out just fine there, because we were both tough nuts.

Our homestead was only 160 acres, which was not a whole lot of land in that part of Texas, where it was so dry you needed at least five acres to raise a single head of cattle. But our spread bordered the draw, so it was ten times more valuable than land without water, and we were able to keep the carriage horses Dad trained, the milking cows, dozens of chickens, some hogs, and the peacocks.

The peacocks were one of Dad’s moneymaking schemes that didn’t quite pan out. Dad had paid a lot of money to import breeding peacocks from a farm back east. He was convinced that peacocks were a sure-fire sign of elegance and style, and that folks who bought carriage horses from him would also be willing to shell out fifty bucks for one of those classy birds. He planned to sell only the male birds so we’d be the sole peacock breeders this side of the Pecos.

Unfortunately, Dad overestimated the demand for ornamental birds in west Texas—even among the carriage set—and within a few years, our ranch was overrun with peacocks. They strutted around screeching and squawking, pecking our knees, scaring the horses, killing chicks, and attacking the hogs, though I have to admit it was a glorious sight when, from time to time, those peacocks paused in their campaign of terror to spread their plumes and preen.

*   *   *

The peacocks were just a sideline. Dad’s primary occupation was the carriage horses, breeding them and training them. He loved horses despite the accident. When Dad was a boy of three, he was running through the stable and a horse kicked him in the head, practically staving in his skull. Dad was in a coma for days, and no one thought he’d pull through. He eventually did, but the right side of his body had gone a little gimp. His right leg sort of dragged behind him, and his arm was cocked like a chicken wing. Also, when he was young, he’d spent long hours working in the noisy gristmill on his family’s ranch, which made him hard of hearing. As such, he talked a little funny, and until you spent time around him, you had trouble understanding what he said.

Dad never blamed the horse for kicking him. All the horse knew, he liked to say, was that some creature about the size of a mountain lion was darting by his flanks. Horses were never wrong. They always did what they did for a reason, and it was up to you to figure it out. And even though it was a horse that almost stove in Dad’s skull, he loved horses because, unlike people, they always understood him and never pitied him. So, even though Dad was unable to sit in a saddle on account of the accident, he became an expert at training carriage horses. If he couldn’t ride them, he could drive them.

I WAS BORN IN a dugout on the banks of Salt Draw in 1901, the year after Dad got out of prison, where he’d been serving time on that trumped-up murder charge.

Dad had grown up on a ranch in the Hondo Valley in New Mexico. His pa, who’d homesteaded the land, was one of the first Anglos in the valley, arriving there in 1868, but by the time Dad was a young man, more settlers had moved into the area than the river could support, and there were constant arguments over property lines and, especially, water rights—people claiming their upstream neighbors were using more than their fair share of water, while downstream neighbors made the same claim against them. These disputes often led to brawls, lawsuits, and shootings. Dad’s pa, Robert Casey, was murdered in one such dispute when Dad was fourteen. Dad stayed on to run the ranch with his ma, but those disputes kept erupting, and twenty years later, when a settler was killed after yet another argument, Dad was convicted of murdering him.

Dad insisted he’d been framed, writing long letters to legislators and newspaper editors protesting his innocence, and after serving three years in prison, he was set free. Shortly after he was released, he met and married my mom. The prosecutor was looking into retrying the case, and Dad thought that would be less likely if he made himself scarce, so he and my mom left the Hondo Valley for High Lonesome, where they claimed our land along Salt Draw.

Lots of the folks homesteading in High Lonesome lived in dugouts because timber was so scarce in that part of Texas. Dad had made our home by shoveling out what was more or less a big hole on the side of the riverbank, using cedar branches as rafters and covering them over with sod. The dugout had one room, a packed earth floor, a wooden door, a waxed-paper window, and a cast-iron stove with a flue that jutted up through the sod roof.

The best thing about living in the dugout was that it was cool in the summer and not too cold in the winter. The worst thing about it was that, from time to time, scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centipedes, and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings. Once, in the middle of an Easter dinner, a rattler dropped onto the table. Dad, who was carving the ham, brought the knife right down behind that snake’s head.

Also, whenever it rained, the ceilings and walls in the dugout turned to mud. Sometimes clumps of that mud dropped from the ceiling and you had to pat it back in place. And every now and then, the goats grazing on the roof would stick a hoof clear through and we’d have to pull them out.

*   *   *

Another problem with living in the dugout was the mosquitoes. They were so thick that sometimes you felt like you were swimming through them. Mom was particularly susceptible to them—her bite marks sometimes stayed swollen for days—but I was the one who came down with yellow jack fever.

I was seven at the time, and after the first day, I was writhing on the bed, shivering and vomiting. Mom was afraid that everyone else might catch the disease, so even though Dad insisted that you got it from mosquitoes, he rigged up a quilt to quarantine me off. Dad was the only one who was allowed behind it, and he sat with me for days, splashing me with spirit lotions, trying to bring the fever down. While I was delirious, I visited bright white places in another world and saw green and purple beasts that grew and shrank with every beat of my heart.

When the fever finally broke, I weighed some ten pounds less than I had before, and my skin was all yellow. Dad joked that my forehead had been so hot he almost burned his hand when he touched it. Mom poked her head behind the quilt to see me. A fever that high can boil your brain and cause permanent damage, Mom said. So don’t ever tell anyone you had it. You do, you might have trouble catching a husband.

MOM WORRIED ABOUT THINGS like her daughters catching the right husband. She was concerned with what she called proprieties. Mom had furnished our dugout with some real finery, including an Oriental rug, a chaise longue with a lace doily, velvet curtains that we hung on the walls to make it look like we had more windows, a silver serving set, and a carved walnut headboard that her parents had brought with them from back east when they moved to California. Mom treasured that headboard and said it was the only thing that allowed her to sleep at night because it reminded her of the civilized world.

Mom’s father was a miner who had struck gold north of San Francisco and became fairly prosperous. Although her family lived in mining boom towns, Mom—whose maiden name was Daisy Mae Peacock—was raised in an atmosphere of gentility. She had soft white skin that was easily sunburned and bruised. When she was a child, her mother made her wear a linen mask if she had to spend any time in the sun, tying it to the yellow curls on the side of her face. In west Texas, Mom always wore a hat and gloves and a veil over her face when she went outdoors, which she did as seldom as possible.

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, floor-boards. 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

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