Half Broke Horses

II THE MIRACULOUS STAIRCASE

Lily Casey, age thirteen, at the Sisters of Loretto

WE TRAVELED THREE DAYS to reach the Casey Ranch, which Dad, with his love of phonetic spelling, insisted should officially be renamed the KC Ranch. It was in the middle of the Hondo Valley, south of the Capitan Mountains, and the countryside was so green that when I first laid eyes on it, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The ranch was really more of a farm, with fields of alfalfa, rows of tomato vines, and orchards of peach trees and pecan trees planted a hundred years ago by the Spanish. The pecan trees were so big that when Helen and Buster and I joined hands, we couldn’t reach all the way around.

The house, which Dad’s pa had bought from a Frenchman when he first moved to the area, was made of adobe and stone. There were two bedrooms inside-so the grown-ups and kids didn’t have to sleep in the same room-and a woodshed outside for Lupe, while Apache took over one of the barn stalls. I couldn’t believe we would live in such grandeur. The walls were as thick as Dad’s forearm was long. “No tornado’s ever going to knock this feller down,” he said.

The next day, while we were unpacking, Dad hollered for us to come outside. I’d never heard him so excited. We ran out the door, and Dad was standing in the yard, pointing up at the sky. There, floating in the air above the horizon, was an upside-down town. You could see the low, flat stores, the adobe church, the horses tied to the hitching posts, and the people walking in the streets.

We all stared slack-jawed, and Lupe made a sign of the cross. It wasn’t a miracle, Dad said, it was a mirage, a mirage of Tinnie, the town about six miles away. To me, the mirage seemed nothing short of a miracle. It was huge, taking up a big hunk of the sky, and I was mesmerized watching those upside-down people silently walking through those upside-down streets.

We all stood staring at the mirage for the longest time, and then it got all fuzzy and faded until it finally disappeared. We’d seen mirages before, patches of blue on the ground that looked for all the world like puddles on the driest days. Dad said that those were ground mirages, and what looked like water on the ground was really the sky. This was a heavenly mirage, he said, which was created when the air closer to the ground was cooler than the air above it.

Even though I was usually good at science, I couldn’t grasp what Dad was saying. He drew me a diagram in the dirt, showing how the light was refracted by the cool air, which bent it along the curve of the earth’s surface.

The idea of light somehow bending didn’t make any sense, until Dad reminded me that when you held up a glass of water, your fingers on the far side of the glass looked like they’d been chopped off and moved. That was because the water was bending the light, and the cold air did the same.

All of a sudden what Dad was saying did make sense, and the knowledge of it truly lit me up.

Dad, who was watching me, said, “Eureka!” He started telling me about this ancient Greek fellow named Archimedes who ran naked through the streets shouting, “Eureka!” after he figured out a way to calculate volume while sitting in his bathtub.

I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

DAD RELISHED THE NOTION of being a big landowner but not the headaches that came with it. Instead of the fenced-in range land we had in west Texas, there were now fields to be tilled, planted, and weeded, peaches picked, pecans collected, manure spread, watermelons hauled to market, migrants hired and fed. Because of his gimp leg, some of the work-like pruning peach trees from a ladder-was beyond Dad, and his speech impediment made it hard for the help to understand him, so even though I was still only eleven, I took on the hiring and overseeing.

Also, Dad was never the most practical man in the world, and in New Mexico he started getting caught up in all sorts of projects that had nothing to do with running the farm. We were still training horses, and Dad was still writing politicians and newspapers, railing against modernization. But now he spent hours making two copies of every letter he wrote, filing one in his desk and keeping the other in the barn in case the house burned down.

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water. “Ghoti,” he liked to point out, could be pronounced like “fish.” The “gh” had the “f” sound in “enough,” the “o” had the short “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” had the “sh” sound in “nation.”

Dad also started a biography of Billy the Kid, who had stopped at the Casey Ranch when Dad was a teenager and asked to swap his spent horse for a fresh mount. “Right polite feller,” Dad always said. “And sat a horse well.” It turned out the Kid had been on the run, as Dad found out an hour later when a posse stopped and also asked to swap horses. Dad, secretly rooting for the Kid, passed off some old nags on them. Now, in New Mexico, he became so obsessed with the Kid that he put a tintype of him on the wall. Mom hated the Kid, whom she called “two-bit trash” because he’d killed a man who was engaged to her cousin, and she hung that fellow’s picture next to the Kid’s.

But Dad felt the cousin must have deserved to die. The Kid, he said, never shot anyone who didn’t need shooting. Dad considered the Kid a good American boy with hot Irish blood who’d been vilified by the cattle barons for standing up for the Mexicans. “History gets written by the winners,” he said, “and when the crooks win, you get crooked history.”

His biography was going to vindicate the Kid, prove that Dad, despite his speech impediment, was better with words than anyone who’d ever laughed at him, and make us more money than we’d ever make growing peaches, pecans, tomatoes, and watermelons. Westerns sell like hotcakes, he kept saying, and besides, a writer’s got no overhead and he never has to worry about the weather.

THE FALL THAT I turned twelve, Buster left to go to school, even though he was two years younger than me. Mom said that his education was important for his career-for becoming anything he wanted to become-and they enrolled him in a fancy Jesuit school near Albuquerque. But they’d promised me that when I turned thirteen, I could go to the Sisters of Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe.

I’d wanted to go to a real school for years, and the day finally came when Dad hitched up the buckboard and we set out on the two-hundred-mile journey, camping at night on bedrolls under the stars. Dad was almost as excited about me going off to school as I was, and seeing as how I hadn’t spent too much time around girls my age out on the ranch, he gave me an earful of advice about how to get along.

I tended to be a tad bossy, he said, as I was used to ordering around Helen and Buster and Lupe and the migrants. But in school there were going to be a lot of bigger, older girls who’d be bossing me around-not to mention the nuns-and instead of fighting with them, I’d have to learn how to get along. The best way to do that, Dad said, was to figure out what somebody wanted, because everybody wanted something, and make them think you could help them get it. Dad admitted that, as he put it, he wasn’t the best exemplar of his own creed, but if I could find some way to apply it to my life, I’d go a lot further.

Santa Fe was a beautiful old place-Dad pointed out that the Spanish arrived here even before the first Poms got to Virginia-with low adobe buildings and dusty streets lined with Spanish oaks. The school was right in the middle of town, a couple of four-story Gothic buildings with crosses on top and a chapel with a choir loft reached by what was known as the Miraculous Staircase.

Mother Albertina, the Mother Superior, showed us around. She explained that the Miraculous Staircase had thirty-three stairs-Jesus’s age when he died-and that it went in two complete spirals without any of the usual means of support, such as a center pole. No one knew what type of wood it was made of or the name of the mysterious carpenter who showed up to build it after the original builder failed to include a staircase and the nuns prayed for divine intervention.

“So you’re saying it’s a miracle?” Dad asked.

I started to explain what Dad was saying, but somehow Mother Albertina understood him perfectly.

“I believe everything is a miracle,” she said.

I liked the way Mother Albertina said that, and from the beginning, I liked her, too. Mother Albertina was tall and wrinkled and had walnut-colored skin and thick black brows that formed a single line above her eyes. She always appeared calm even though she was constantly on the move, checking in on the dorms at night, inspecting our fingernails, walking briskly along the paths, her long black robes and white-trimmed headdress billowing in the wind. She treated all of us students-she called us “my girls”-the same, whether we were rich or poor, Anglo or Mexican, smart or utterly lacking in any talent whatsoever. She was firm without being stern, never raised her voice or lost her temper, but it would have been unthinkable for any of us to disobey her. She would have made a fine horsewoman, but that wasn’t her Purpose.

I also really liked the academy. A lot of the girls moped around feeling homesick at first, but not me. I had never had it so easy in my life, even though we rose before dawn, washed our faces in cold water, attended chapel and classes, ate corn gruel, practiced piano and singing, mended our uniforms, swept the dorms, cleaned the dishes and privies, and attended chapel again before going to bed. Since there were no barn chores, life at the academy felt like one long vacation.

I won a gold medal for my high scores in math and another for overall scholarship. I also read every book I could get my hands on, tutored other girls who were having problems, and even helped some of the sisters grade papers and do their lesson plans. Most of the other girls came from rich ranch families. Whereas I was used to hollering like a horse trainer, they had whispery voices and ladylike manners and matching luggage. Some of the girls complained about the gray uniforms we had to wear, but I liked the way they leveled out the differences between those who could afford fancy store-bought clothes and those of us, like me, who had only home-dyed beechnut brown dresses. I did make friends, however, trying to follow Dad’s advice to figure out what someone wanted and help her get it, though it was hard, when you saw someone doing something wrong, to resist the temptation to correct her. Especially if that someone acted hoity-toity.

About halfway into the school year, Mother Albertina called me into her study for a talk. She told me I was doing well at Sisters of Loretto. “A lot of parents send their girls here for finishing,” she went on, “so they’ll be more marriageable. But you don’t have to get married, you know.”

I’d never thought much about that before. Mom and Dad always talked as if it was a matter of course that Helen and I would marry and Buster would inherit the property, though I had to admit I’d never actually met a boy I liked, not to mention felt like marrying. On the other hand, women who didn’t marry became old maids, spinsters who slept in the attic, sat in a corner peeling potatoes all day, and were a burden on their families, like our neighbor Old Man Pucket’s sister, Louella.

I wasn’t too young to start thinking about my future, Mother Albertina continued. It was just around the bend and coming at me fast. Some girls only a year or two older than me got married, she said, while others started working. Even women who got married should be capable of doing something, since men had such a habit of dying on you and, from time to time, running off.

In this day and age, she went on, there were really only three careers available. A woman could become a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher.

“Or a nun,” I said.

“Or a nun,” Mother Albertina said with a smile. “But you need to have the calling. Do you think you have the calling?”

I had to admit I wasn’t sure.

“You have time to reflect on it,” she said. “But whether or not you become a nun, I think you’d make a wonderful teacher. You have a strong personality. The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers.”

“Like you,” I said.

“Like me.” She paused for a moment. “Teaching is a calling, too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy-angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.”

For the next couple of months, I thought about what Mother Albertina had said. I didn’t want to be a nurse, not because I was bothered by the sight of blood but because sick people irritated me. I didn’t want to be a secretary because you were always at the beck and call of your boss, and what if it turned out you were smarter than him? It was like being a slave without the security.

But being a teacher was entirely different. I loved books. I loved learning. I loved that “Eureka!” moment when someone finally figured something out. And in the classroom, you got to be your own boss. Maybe teaching was my Purpose.

I was still getting comfortable with that idea-and in fact, finding it mighty appealing-when one of the nuns told me that Mother Albertina wanted to see me again.

MOTHER ALBERTINA WAS SITTING behind her desk in her study. She had a solemn expression I’d never seen before, and it gave me an uneasy feeling. “I’ve got some unfortunate news,” she said.

Dad had paid the first half of my tuition at the beginning of the year, but when the school billed him for the rest, he’d written back to say that, due to a change in circumstances, he was unable to assemble the funds at this juncture.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go home,” Mother Albertina said.

“But I like it here,” I said. “I don’t want to go home.”

“I know you don’t, but the decision’s been made.”

Mother Albertina said she’d prayed on the matter and discussed it with the trustees. Their thinking was that the school was not a charity. If the parents agreed to pay the tuition, as Dad had, the school counted on the money to meet expenses, provide scholarships, and support the order’s mission on the Indian reservations.

“I could work for it,” I said.

“When?”

“I’ll find the time.”

“Your entire day is full as it is. We make sure of that.”

Mother Albertina told me there was one other option. I could take the cloth. If I joined the order of the Sisters of Saint Loretto, the church would pay my tuition. But that would mean going to the novitiate in California for six months, then living in the convent instead of the dormitory. It would mean marrying the Lord Jesus and submitting totally to the discipline of the order.

“Have you had any chance to reflect on whether you’ve felt the calling?” Mother Albertina asked.

I didn’t say anything right away. The truth was, the idea of being a nun didn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm. I knew I owed God a hefty debt for sparing our lives in the tornado, but I figured there had to be another way of paying him back.

“Can I have the night to think on it?” I asked.

“May I have the night,” Mother Albertina said, then added, “What I tell all the girls is that unless you’re certain, it’s probably a bad idea.”

Much as I wanted to stay in school, I didn’t really need a night of contemplation to know I wasn’t cut out to be a nun. It wasn’t just that you didn’t see a lot of nuns on horses. I knew I wasn’t called. I didn’t have that serenity nuns had, or were supposed to have. I was just too restless a soul. And I didn’t like taking orders from anyone, not even the pope.

Dad was a grave disappointment to me. Not only had he welched on the tuition commitment, he didn’t have the guts to face the nuns, and so, instead of coming to pick me up, he sent a telegram telling me to take the stagecoach home.

I was sitting in the common room in my home-dyed beechnut brown dress, my suitcase next to me, when Mother Albertina came to take me to the depot. The moment I saw her, my lip started quivering and my eyes welled up with tears.

“Now, don’t start feeling sorry for yourself,” Mother Albertina said. “You’re luckier than most girls here-God gave you the wherewithal to handle setbacks like this.”

As we walked up the dusty street to the depot, all I could think was that, my one shot at an education blown, I was going back to the KC Ranch, where I’d spend the rest of my life doing chores while Dad worked on his cockamamie Billy the Kid biography and Mom sat in the chaise longue fanning herself. Mother Albertina seemed to know what I was thinking. Before I boarded the coach, she took my hand and said, “When God closes a window, he opens a door. But it’s up to you to find it”

WHEN THE STAGECOACH PULLED into Tinnie, Dad was sitting in the buckboard outside the hotel, with four huge dogs in the back. As I got out, he grinned and waved. The stagecoach driver tossed my suitcase off the roof, and I lugged it over to the carriage. Dad got down and tried to hug me, but I shrugged him off.

“What do you think of these big fellas?” he asked.

The dogs were black with glistening coats, and they sat there regarding the passersby regally, like they were the lords of the manor even though they were also drooling ropes of slobber. They were the biggest dogs I’d ever seen, and there was hardly any room in the back for my suitcase.

“What happened to the tuition?” I asked Dad.

“You’re looking at it.”

Dad started explaining that he’d bought the dogs from a breeder in Sweden and had them shipped all the way to New Mexico. They were not just any dogs, he went on, they were Great Danes, dogs of the nobility. Historically, Great Danes were owned by kings and used to hunt wild boars. Practical and prestigious, Dad said. Can’t beat that. And believe it or not, no one west of the Mississippi owned any. He’d checked into it. These four, he said, had cost eight hundred dollars, but once he started selling the pups, we’d make the money back in no time, and from then on it would be pure profit.

“So you took my tuition money and bought dogs?”

“Watch that tone,” Dad said. After a moment he added, “You didn’t need to be going to finishing school. It was a waste of money. I can teach you whatever you need to know, and your mother can add the polish.”

“Did you take Buster out of school, too?”

“No. He’s a boy and needs that diploma if he’s going to get anywhere.” Dad pushed the dogs over and found a spot for my suitcase. “And anyway,” he said, “we need you on the ranch.”

ON THE WAY BACK to the KC, Dad did most of the talking, going on about what great personalities the dogs had and how he was already getting inquiries about them. I sat there, ignoring Dad’s prattle about his harebrained schemes. I wondered if buying those dogs had simply given Dad an excuse to stop paying the tuition, so I’d have to come back home. I also wondered where in the blazes was that door Mother Albertina had talked about.

The ranch had fallen into a state of mild disrepair in the months I’d been gone. Fence boards had come loose in a few spots, the chicken coop was unwashed, and tack lay scattered on the barn floor, which needed sweeping.

To help out around the ranch, Dad had brought in a tenant farmer named Zachary Clemens and his wife and daughter, and they were living in an outbuilding on a corner of the property. Mom considered them beneath us because they were dirt-poor, so poor that they used paper for curtains, so poor that when they first arrived and Dad gave them a watermelon, after eating the fruit, they set aside the seeds for planting and then pickled the rind.

But I liked the Clemenses, particularly the daughter, Dorothy, who knew how to roll up her sleeves and get things done. She was a big-boned young woman with ample curves, handsome despite a wart on her chin. Dorothy knew how to skin a cow and trap rabbits, and she tilled the vegetable garden the Clemenses had fenced off, but she spent most of her time at the big kettle that hung over the fire pit in front of the shed, cooking stews, making soap, and washing and dyeing clothes she took in from the townspeople in Tinnie.

Dad let the Great Danes roam free, and one day a few weeks after I’d returned home, Dorothy Clemens knocked on the front door to report to Dad that she’d been out collecting pecans near the property line we shared with Old Man Pucket’s ranch and had found all four dogs shot dead. Dad charged into the barn in a fury, hitched up a carriage, and drove off to confront Old Man Pucket.

We were worried about what was going to happen, but talking about your fears only scares you and everyone else even more, so nobody said anything. To keep our hands busy, Dorothy and I sat on the corral fence shucking pecans until Dad drove back up. He was usually careful to avoid overexerting his horses, but he’d pushed that gelding so hard his sides were heaving and his chest was covered in lather.

Dad told us Old Man Pucket had unapologetically admitted killing the Great Danes, claiming they were on his property chasing his cattle and he was afraid they were going to bring one down. Dad was cursing and carrying on about how now he was going to bring down Old Man Pucket. He ran into the house and then came back out with his shotgun and jumped into the carriage.

Dorothy and I raced over. I grabbed the reins as Dad kept trying to crack them. The reins were snaking up and down on the horse’s back, and it panicked, starting to bolt, but Dorothy leaped up on the seat and, being a big strong woman, pushed down the brake and wrestled the gun away from Dad. “You can’t go killing someone over dogs,” she said. “That’s how feuds get started.”

When her family was living in Arkansas, she went on, her brother had killed someone in self-defense when a dispute broke out during a game of horseshoes, then he’d been killed by that man’s cousin. The cousin, afraid Dorothy’s father was going to avenge his son’s death, had come after him. They’d had to leave everything behind and take off for New Mexico.

“My brother’s dead, and we ain’t got two nickels to rub together,” she said, “because a stupid argument over a damn game of horseshoes got out of hand.”

I thought about how Lupe had stepped in during Dad’s spat with the tinker, and how no one with a level head had been there to calm down the man who’d killed Dad’s pa when he was shot in a dispute over eight dollars. So I reminded Dad about all that.

Dad eventually settled down, but he kept stewing over the matter and the next day went into town to file a legal case against Old Man Pucket. He prepared obsessively for the hearing, detailing his grievances, researching the case law, taking statements from vets about the value of Great Danes, and writing the politicians he’d corresponded with over the years to see if they’d file friend-of-the-court briefs. He appointed me to speak for him in court, and he had me rehearse my statements and practice my examination of Dorothy, who was to be a witness testifying about her discovery of the dead dogs.

On the day of the trial, we all got up early, and after breakfast we piled into the buckboard. When the circuit judge came to town, he held court in the lobby of the hotel, sitting in a wing-backed chair behind a small desk. The various plaintiffs and defendants leaned against the walls, waiting their turn.

The judge was a rail-thin man who wore a string tie and a jacket with a velvet collar, and he looked at you alertly under his bushy eyebrows, giving the impression that he didn’t tolerate fools. The bailiff called each case, and the judge listened to the two sides, then made his decision on the spot, brooking no argument.

Old Man Pucket was there, along with a couple of his sons. He was a stumpy little guy with skin the color of beef jerky and thumbnails he left untrimmed because he used them to pry things open. By way of dressing up for court, he had buttoned the top button of his frayed shirt.

Our case was finally called late in the morning, and I was kind of nervous as I stood to make the presentation Dad had cooked up for me.

“The history of the Great Dane is a proud and storied one,” I began, but the judge interrupted me.

“I don’t need a damned history lesson,” he said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

I explained how Dad had imported the dogs from Sweden, planning to breed them as an investment, but they’d been found shot to death in the pecan grove near the fence line we shared with the Puckets.

“I’d like to call my first witness,” I said, but the judge cut me off again.

“Did you shoot those dogs?” he asked Old Man Pucket.

“Sure did.”

“Why?”

“They was on my property chasing my cattle, and from a distance I thought they was big ol’ wolves.”

Dad started arguing, but the judge shushed him.

“Sir, I can’t make out what you’re saying, and it don’t matter any-how,” the judge said. “You got no business keeping dogs bigger than wolves in cattle country.”

Turning to Old Man Pucket, he said, “But those were valuable animals, and he deserves some compensation for their loss. If you’re shy of cash, some livestock-horses or cattle-would do it”

And that was that.

A FEW DAYS AFTER the trial, Old Man Pucket showed up at the ranch with a string of horses. Dad, still harboring a grudge, refused to leave the house, so I went out to meet Old Man Pucket, who was turning the horses into the corral.

“Just like the judge ordered, miss,” he said.

Even before Old Man Pucket had shot the dogs, we’d had our differences. Like most folks on the Rio Hondo, he did what he could to get by, and if that meant encroaching on someone else’s land or diverting a creek onto his property, he was prepared to do it. Dad called him a dirt farmer, but I thought of him as a scrapper who understood that sometimes, instead of asking another person’s permission, you were best off doing what needed to be done, defending it with bluster, and then apologizing later-if and when it came to that.

“Payment acknowledged,” I said, and shook his hand. Unlike Dad, I saw no point in carrying a grudge with a neighbor. You never knew when you might need someone’s help.

Old Man Pucket handed me a bill listing what he claimed was the value of each horse, then tipped his hat. “You’d make a mighty fine lawyer,” he said.

After Old Man Pucket left, Dad came out and looked at the horses. When I handed him the bill, he snorted in disgust. “None of those nags is worth twenty dollars,” he said.

It was true. Old Man Pucket’s valuations were wildly inflated. There were eight horses in all, stumpy, tough little mustangs, the kind that cowboys rounded up out in the wild and sat on for a day or two so they’d just barely accept a saddle. I figured that was what Old Man Pucket’s sons had done with these critters. None of the males was gelded. They were unshod, with chipped-up hooves in terrible need of trimming, and their manes and tails were matted with burrs. They were also scared, watching us nervously and clearly wondering what sort of dreadful end these humans had in store for them.

The problem with half-broke horses like these was that no one took the time to train them. Cowboys who could ride anything caught them and ran them on fear, spurring and quirting them too hard, taking pride in staying on no matter how desperately they bucked and fishtailed. Not properly broken, they were always scared and hated humans. A lot of times the cowboys released them once the roundup was over, but by then they’d lost some of the instincts that kept them alive out in the desert. They were, however, intelligent and had pluck, and if you broke them right, they made good horses.

One in particular caught my eye, a mare. I always liked mares. They weren’t as crazy as stallions but had more fire than your typical gelding. This one was a pinto, no bigger or smaller than the others, but she seemed less scared and was watching me intently, as if trying to figure me out. I cut her out from the herd, lassoed her, and then slowly walked up to her, following Dad’s rule around strange horses to keep your eyes on the ground so they won’t think you’re a predator.

She stood still, and when I reached her, again moving slowly, I raised my hand to the side of her head and scratched behind one ear. Then I brought my 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 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 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.