Half broke horses: a true-life novel

Half broke horses: a true-life novel Read Free Page B

Book: Half broke horses: a true-life novel Read Free
Author: Jeannette Walls
Tags: BN
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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

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