Half broke horses: a true-life novel Read Online Free PDF

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 MISSED the 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.

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