Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

ANOTHER ONE OF MYjobs was feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs. We had about two dozen chickens and a few roosters. First thing every morning, I’d toss them a handful of corn and some table scraps and add lime to their water to make the eggshells strong. In the spring, when the hens were really fertile, I could collect a hundred eggs a week. We’d set aside twenty-five or thirty for eating, and once a week I drove the buckboard into Toyah to sell the rest to the grocer, Mr. Clutterbuck, a pinched man who wore garters on his sleeves and toted up sales figures on the brown paper he wrapped your goods in. He paid a penny per egg, then sold them for two cents each, which seemed unfair to me since I’d done all the work, raising the chickens, collecting the eggs, and bringing them into town, but Mr. Clutterbuck just said, “Sorry, kid, that’s the way the world works.”

I also brought in peacock eggs, finally giving those showy old birds a way to earn their keep. At first I thought they’d fetch twice as much as chicken eggs, seeing as how they were twice as big, but Mr. Clutterbuck would give me only a penny each for them. “Egg’s an egg,” he said. I thought that danged grocer was cheating me because I was a girl, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. That was the way the world worked.

Dad said it was good for me to go into town and bargain with Mr. Clutterbuck over egg prices. It honed my math and taught me the art of negotiation, all of which was going to help me achieve my Purpose in Life. Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody’s time.

That was why Dad never bought any of us kids toys. Play was a waste of time, he said. Instead of playing house or playing with dolls, girls were better off cleaning a real house or looking after a real baby if their Purpose in Life was to become a mother.

Dad didn’t actually forbid us from ever playing, and sometimes Buster, Helen, and I rode over to the Dingler ranch for a game of baseball with the Dingler kids. Because we didn’t have enough players for two full teams, we made up a lot of our own rules, one being that you could get a runner out by throwing the ball at him. Once, when I was ten and trying to steal a base, one of the Dingler boys threw the ball at me hard and it hit me in the stomach. I doubled over, and when the pain wouldn’t go away, Dad took me into Toyah, where the barber who sometimes sewed people up said my appendix had been ruptured and I needed to get up to the hospital in Santa Fe. We caught the next stagecoach, and by the time we got to Santa Fe, I was delirious, and what I remember next was waking up in the hospital with stitches on my stomach, Dad sitting next to me.

“Don’t worry, angel,” he said. The appendix, he explained, was a vestigial organ, which meant it had no Purpose. If I had to lose an organ, I’d chosen the right one. But, he went on, I’d almost lost my life, and to what end? I’d only been playing a game of baseball. If I wanted to risk my life, I should do it for a Purpose. I decided Dad was right. All I had to do was figure out what my Purpose was.

IF YOU WANT TObe reminded of the love of the Lord, Mom always said, just watch the sunrise.

And if you want to be reminded of the wrath of the Lord, Dad said, watch a tornado.

Living on Salt Draw, we saw our share of tornadoes, which we feared even more than those flash floods. On most occasions, they looked like narrow cones of gray smoke, but sometimes when it had been especially dry, they were almost clear, and you could see tree limbs and brush and rocks swirling at the bottom. From a distance they seemed to be moving slowly, as if underwater, spinning and swaying almost elegantly.

Most weren’t more than a dust devil gone a little wild, ripping at the laundry on the clothesline and sending the chickens squawking. But once, when I was eleven years old, a monster came roaring across the range.

Dad and I were working with the horses when the sky turned dark real quickly and the air got heavy. You could smell and taste what was heading our way. Dad saw the tornado first, coming in from the east, a wide funnel reaching from the clouds to the earth.

I set about unharnessing the horses while Dad ran in to warn Mom, who started opening all the windows in the house because she’d been told that would equalize the air pressure and make it less likely that the house would explode. The horses were stampeding like crazy around the corral. Dad didn’t want them trapped, so he opened the gate and they galloped through it, heading across the range, away from the tornado. Dad said if we got through this, we could worry about the horses later.

By then the sky overhead was black and streaked with rain, but off in the distance you could see sunlight slanting through golden clouds, and I took that as a sign. Dad had us all, including Apache and Lupe, scramble into the crawl space under the house. As the tornado came closer, it whipped up sand and branches and broken bits of wood in one big swirl around the house, roaring so loud it sounded like we were right under a freight train.

Mom grabbed our hands to pray, and while I didn’t usually feel the call, I was scared-scareder than I’d ever been-and I started praying harder than I’d ever prayed, asking God to please forgive my earlier lack of sincere faith and promising that if he spared us, I’d pray to him and worship him every day for the rest of my life.

Right then we heard a crash and the sound of splintering wood. The house seemed to groan and shudder, but the floor above our heads held fast, and very quickly the tornado moved on. Everything grew quiet.

We were alive.

THE TORNADO HAD MISSEDthe house, but it had plucked up the windmill and smashed it down on the roof. The house, made from wood that had already been busted apart once in that flood, was a total wreck.

Dad started cussing up a blue streak. Life, he declared, had cheated him once again. “If I owned hell and west Texas,” he said, “I do believe I’d sell west Texas and live in hell.”

Dad predicted that the horses would come back at feeding time, and when they did, he hitched the six-year-olds to the carriage and drove into town to use the telegraph. After some backing and forthing with folks in the Hondo Valley, Dad reckoned he was not going to be tried again on that phony old murder charge and it was safe to return to New Mexico and take up life on the Casey ranch, which he’d been renting out to tenant farmers all these years.

The chickens had disappeared in the tornado, but we had most of the peacocks, the six pairs of horses, the brood mares and cows, and a number of Mom’s choice heirlooms, such as the walnut headboard that we’d rescued from the dugout. We packed it all into two wagons. Dad took the reins of one, with Mom and Helen next to him. Apache and Lupe were in the second. Buster and I followed on horseback with the rest of the herd on a string.

At the gate I stopped and looked back at the ranch. The windmill still lay toppled over the caved-in house, and the yard was strewn with branches. Dad was always going on about the easterners who came out to west Texas but weren’t tough enough to cut it, and now we were folding our hand as well. Sometimes it didn’t matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you’d been dealt.

Life had been hard in west Texas, but that low yellow land was all I knew, and I loved it. Mom was saying, as she always did, that it was God’s will, and this time I accepted it. God had saved us, but he had also taken our house from us. Whether as payment for saving us or as punishment because we didn’t deserve it, I couldn’t say. Maybe he was just giving us a kick in the behind to say: Time to move on.