Free Half broke horses: a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls

and bake pies, but she hated any kind of work that made her break into a sweat or gave her hands calluses, and most of the Rio Hondo ranchers looking for wives wanted a woman who could not only cook and clean house but also help out with branding calves and drive the chuck wagon during roundup. Mom’s plan was to send Helen to the Sisters of Loretto—hoping that with a little polish, she’d attract a citified man in Santa Fe—but Dorothy argued that all the earnings from the ranch needed to be reinvested in machinery to raise crop yields. Helen herself was talking about how she’d like to move to Los Angeles and become an actress in the movies.
    The morning after I returned, we were eating breakfast in the kitchen, Mom passing the teapot around. I’d developed a taste for coffee in Arizona, but Dad still allowed nothing stronger than tea on the ranch.
    After cleaning up, Dad and I walked out onto the porch. “You ready to get back in the corral?” he asked. “I got a couple of new saddlebred fillies that I know you can work wonders with.”
    “I don’t know, Dad.”
    “What do you mean? You’re a horsewoman.”
    “With Dorothy in charge, I’m not sure there’s a place for me here anymore.”
    “Don’t go talking nonsense. You’re blood. She’s just an in-law. You belong here.”
    But the truth was, I didn’t feel I did. And even if there was a place for me, it was not the life I wanted. That plane that had flown overhead at the Homolovi Ruins had got me to thinking. Also, I’d seen a number of automobiles in my years in Arizona, and they gave me a sinking feeling about the future prospects for carriages—and carriage horses.
    “You ever think of getting yourself one of those automobiles, Dad?” I asked.
    “Consarned contraptions,” Dad said. “No one’ll ever look as smart in one of those fume belchers as they do in a carriage.”
    That got him going about how President Taft had taken this country in the wrong direction by getting rid of the White House stables and replacing them with a garage. “Teddy Roosevelt, now, there was a man, the last president who truly knew how to sit a horse. We’ll never see his like again.”
    As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I’d been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.
    Another thing that airplane made me realize was that there was a whole world out there beyond ranchland that I’d never seen, a place where I might finally get that darned diploma. And maybe I’d even learn to fly an airplane.
    So the way I saw it, I had two choices: stay on the ranch or strike out on my own. Staying on the ranch meant either finding a man to marry or becoming the spinster aunt to the passel of children that Dorothy and Buster talked about having. No man had proposed to me yet, and if I sat around waiting for one, I could well end up as that potato-peeling spinster in the corner of the kitchen. Striking out on my own meant going someplace where a young unmarried woman could find work. Santa Fe and Tucson weren’t much more than gussied-up cattle towns, and the opportunities there were limited. I wanted to go where the opportunities were the greatest, where the future was unfolding right before your eyes. I wanted to go to the biggest, most boomingest city I could find.
    A month later, I was on the train to Chicago.
    THE RAILROAD RAN NORTHEAST through the rolling prairie to Kansas City, then on across the Mississippi and into the farmland of Illinois, with its green fields of closely planted corn, tall silos, and pretty white-frame houses with big front porches. It was my first train trip, and I spent much of it with the window down, sticking my face