Jeannette Walls - Half Broke Horses

“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 PULLEDinto 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 BACKto 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.