Falling From Horses Read Online Free PDF

turning, the earth carrying my body on it like a raft. There had been an odd comfort that night in coming to know in some deep part of my brain the immenseness and indifference of the universe.
    The moon had set, and when the flares finally went out, there was suddenly enough darkness to uncover all the stars. I wasn’t used to seeing the sky this far south, and it took a while to realize I was looking at the whole of Scorpius along the southern horizon. I made a sound of surprise, I guess, and Lily looked over at me.
    If I had kept still, I know she would have gone right back to her notebook. And it wasn’t in my mind that she and I might get to be friends. I had been keeping to myself for the last year and a half, drifting around without wishing to make any friends, which could have been something I had decided or just the life, the cowboy life, I had chosen. So I can’t tell you why I wanted to get back in Lily’s favor right then. But I know it had something to do with the way she didn’t seem to care whether I liked her or not.
    I pointed as if she had asked me something and said, “Up north, Scorpius is down below the horizon by this time of year. Most of it, anyway. But we’re far enough south now, you can see the whole thing.”
    She looked where I pointed.
    â€œAntares is the bright one,” I said. “People call it the scorpion’s heart. And then, if you look left and down, you can see the curve of the tail and the stinger. You have to use your imagination. There’s a couple of star clusters in the tail, but you can’t really see them without a telescope or good binoculars. In July the whole constellation would show up over the ranch for a few weeks. I used to go up to the fire lookout near our place and look through the ranger’s binoculars so I could see the clusters—the Butterfly Cluster and Ptolemy’s Cluster.”
    I was showing off, which of course she knew. She studied the sky while she made up her mind if I was worth talking to again.
    Up to this point, I imagine she had been thinking I was a ranch kid with a backwoods education, a kid without much knowledge of the world. I had gone to a two-room grade school, and I’d never finished high school, so that wouldn’t have been a bad guess. But I came from a family of readers, and we’d always had a lot of discussion around our dinner table. My dad liked to read out loud from the newspapers, anything he found of interest. All of us talked about the books we were reading, and Mary Claudine and I were encouraged to talk about what we were learning in school. I’d had a couple of bright and lively grade school teachers and half a dozen high school teachers who brought the life of the mind into their classrooms. This is not to say I was a kid with intellectual attainment, but I could rise to the occasion.
    Finally she said, “Who taught you about the stars?”
    â€œI mostly learned it from books. From
The Book of Knowledge.
”
    â€œIs that an encyclopedia?”
    â€œI guess it’s like that. It’s a set. There’s twenty books.” My mother had bought
The Book of Knowledge
from a salesman at the Harney County Fair with money she had earned from the sale of a horse. I was pretty sure the expense had been hard for my father to accept—there had been a prolonged silence between my parents and then whispered voices from their bedroom late at night. But all of us, even my father, liked to pore over the colored pictures of muscles in the body, and drawings of Borneo people, and step-by-step instructions on building a dry stone wall, and answers to questions like “Why is the sky blue?” There were drawing lessons in almost every volume; I learned a lot about perspective and values and shading from
The Book of Knowledge.
    Lily didn’t ask me anything else, but eventually she lay back on the grass herself, and after she had studied the sky a while