The Tin Horse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

into the hallway, where I felt my way by touching the wall, then through the living room and into the kitchen. A light came from under Zayde’s door, and I heard rustles of some kind of activity going on. I lingered outside his door for a few minutes, but I was afraid to disturb him.
    In the morning, Papa found Zayde asleep in his chair, slumped over the small table in his room. On the table were metalworking tools, scraps of solder, remnants of the tin cans he had cut for materials, and three crude but recognizable tin animals: a rooster, a lamb, and a horse.
    Zayde woke up when Papa came into his room. He rose and started stuffing his belongings into a potato sack; he was moving to Aunt Sonyaand Uncle Leo’s, he announced. Sonya was always after him to live in her house, so much nicer and bigger than ours, but he’d said Sonya kvetched so much, she would make his ears fall off. Papa kept asking him what was wrong. All he said was, “A man deserves respect.”
    He was already gone when Barbara and I came into the kitchen for breakfast. Papa brought out the tin animals and asked what was going on. “Nothing,” we both replied.
    Barbara waited until Papa left the room. Then she asked Mama, “Could I have the horse?”
    Mama eyed her suspiciously but said, “Yes, all right. Elaine, what about you?”
    “I want the rooster.” I would have liked the lion, but that was the one animal Zayde hadn’t made. Maybe he fell asleep before he got to it, but I suspected that treasure was for Agneta alone.
    Terrified of discovery, I waited until Barbara and I were a full block away from home, on our way to school, before I pounced on her.
    “Look what you did!” I said, distressed by everything that had happened and frantic to push the blame onto her.
    She tossed her head. “What
I
did?”
    “You accused him of lying about Agneta.”
    “Well, you didn’t say you believed him. You didn’t say anything.”
    These distinctions of culpability meant nothing to Papa, of course, when he found out everything from Pearl. He rarely hit us, but that night he spanked Barbara and me so hard that we wept. Then he stood over us while we wrote letters of apology to Zayde. I meant every word I wrote. And in spite of my misery over hurting him and getting punished, I was deeply relieved that his story about Agneta, at least, was true. I think Barbara felt that way, too, because she cherished the tin horse. She kept it on her side of the dresser we shared and got furious if she thought anyone had moved it an inch.
    Our letters, along with Aunt Sonya’s carping and her mediocre cooking, persuaded Zayde to move back to our house two weeks later. But everything had changed by then.
    The day after Barbara goaded Zayde into breaking his vow never towork tin again had swelled into a national uproar: Black Tuesday, the collapse of the stock market. Men on Wall Street jumped out of windows, and people all over the country—including us—lost their savings. Somehow, in my imagination, my sister had precipitated that disaster. Mingled with my horror was awe at Barbara’s power.

B OYLE HEIGHTS SITS ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE LOS ANGELES RIVER . That means nothing anymore, since the river’s course was fixed in concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers, a project that began when I was in high school and was completed around 1960. My granddaughter once asked about the concrete ditch we were driving over, and her older brother informed her, “That’s where they film car chases.”
    The river once meant a great deal, however. In fact, as Papa used to tell us, the river ruled Los Angeles.
    “Where do you live, girls? What’s the name of your city?” he would begin one of our history lessons.
    “El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles,” we learned to answer.
    “What language is that? What does it mean?”
    “Spanish. It means ‘the Town of the Queen of the Angels.’ ”
    “And what was the queen of the Town of the Queen of the Angels?Why did they