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

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