The Tin Horse: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

put the center of Los Angeles twenty miles inland, instead of on the ocean?”
    “Because of the river?”
    “That’s right.”
    Papa’s lessons took place erratically. Fine & Son Fine Footwear stayed open most nights until nine, and Papa often had to work in the evening. “Mr. Julius Fine gets to go home and eat with
his
family!” Mama fumed as she put our dinner on the table at six and shoved a plate for Papa into the oven. (The son in the store’s name didn’t yet work there. He was barely older than Barbara and me.) On nights when Papa wasn’t working, though, he spent half an hour after dinner instructing us in history, poetry recitation, or mathematics, depending on his mood.
    Zayde told his stories to remember who he was and where he’d come from. Papa taught us who he expected us to be: American girls. Yet in Papa’s lessons, too, I glimpsed his younger self: winner of the first prize in elocution in his tenth-grade class, his last year of school before his older brother, Harry, joined the army, and he had to take Harry’s place at the egg ranch. Papa almost sang his story about the river, which came from the speech he had written for the elocution competition. Though there were many words I didn’t understand, I didn’t dare interrupt him.
    “The river was the true
reina
, the queen, of El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles,” Papa said. “She brought water to the settlers’ vineyards and orchards through irrigation ditches called
zanjas
that fanned out from the great Zanja Madre, the Mother Ditch. The river created woodlands with sycamore, live oak, cottonwood, and wild roses. And there were turtledoves and quail. Can you imagine, girls? That was right here in Boyle Heights.
    “The river can also be an angry queen,” Papa said. “During the dry months, she can’t even maintain a permanent channel, but in the rainy season, she covers a huge floodplain. You know never to go near the river when it’s been raining, even if it’s not raining that day? You know about Micky Altschul?”
    We were only babies when it happened, but every child in Boyle Heights had heard of Micky Altschul, who went to play with a paper boat in the river the day after a big storm. It was a clear day in the city, but it was stillraining hard in the mountains, where the river started. Water flooded down from the mountains and swept Micky away. His body was found halfway to San Pedro.
    In the olden days, Papa said, the river divided Los Angeles into two very different cities. A prosperous white Los Angeles flourished on the west side of the river; to the east, everyone was Mexican or Indian, and all of them were poor. The division was so extreme that not even one white person lived east of the river until the 1850s, when an Irish immigrant bought a vineyard on the river’s east bank. The Irishman also bought the hilly land beyond the vineyard, and he built his house there and lived among the Mexicans and Indians.
    “What was the Irishman’s name, girls?” Papa asked.
    “Andrew Boyle.”
    We learned that Andrew Boyle was only fourteen when he and his seven brothers and sisters sailed to America in 1832. Motherless children, they had come in search of their father; he had left Ireland after his wife’s death and vanished into the New World.
    “How could he vanish?” I asked. “Did something happen to him?”
    “It doesn’t matter. The point of the story is Andrew Boyle coming to America. So Andrew and his family—”
    “Why didn’t he send them a letter?”
    “Maybe he went someplace on the frontier, like Alaska, that didn’t have mail service.” Papa frowned, and I knew I should stop, but hearing about the vanished father touched a primal fear of abandonment. A fear and a premonition?
    “Did he get killed by Indians?” I said. “Or eaten by a bear?”
    “Enough, Elaine! And Barbara, pay attention!”
    The Boyle children spent two years on the East Coast looking for their father, then moved to Texas, Papa