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

out into the onrushing wind.
    We traveled through the night, and even with stops for refueling and to pick up and let off passengers, the trip lasted only four days, whereas it had taken Patches, packer though she was, an entire month to go less than half that distance.
    When the train pulled into Chicago, I took down my little suitcase and walked through the station into the street. I’d been in crowds before—county fairs, livestock auctions—but I’d never seen such a mass of people, all moving together like a herd, jostling and elbowing, nor had my ears been assaulted by such a ferocious din, with cars honking, trolleys clanging, and hydraulic jackhammers blasting away.
    I walked around, gawking at the skyscrapers going up everywhere, then I made my way over to the lake—deep blue, flat, and as endless as the range, only it was water, fresh and flowing and cold even in the summer. Coming from a place where people measured water by the pailful, where they fought and sometimes killed each other over water, it was hard to imagine, even though I was looking at it, that billions of gallons of fresh water—I figured it had to be billions or even trillions—could be sitting there undrunk, unused, and uncontested.
    After gazing at the lake for a long while, soaking up the sight of it, I followed my plan: I found a Catholic church and asked a priest to recommend a respectable boardinghouse for women. I rented a bed— four to a room—then I bought the newspapers and looked at the help-wanted ads, circling possibilities with a pencil.
    * * *
    The next day I started searching for a job. As I walked the streets, I found myself staring at people’s faces, thinking, So this is what city folk look like. It wasn’t so much their features that were different, it was their expressions. Their faces were shut off. Everyone made a point of ignoring everyone else. I was used to nodding when I caught a stranger’s eye, but here in Chicago they looked right through you, as if you weren’t there at all.
    Finding work was considerably harder than I had expected. I had hoped to get a position as a governess or a tutor, but when I admitted that I didn’t even have an eighth-grade education, people looked at me like they were wondering why I was wasting their time, even after I told them about my teaching experience. “That may be fine for sod busters,” one woman said, “but it won’t do in Chicago.”
    The sales jobs at department stores all required experience, and mine was limited to my penny-an-egg deals with Mr. Clutterbuck. Businesses were advertising for clerks, but even as I stood in the long lines to fill out the forms, I knew I wasn’t going to get the job. With all the soldiers returning home and all the girls like me pouring in from the countryside, there was too much competition. My money started running low, and I had to face the fact that my options were pretty much limited to factory work or becoming a maid.
    Sitting in front of a sewing machine for twelve hours a day didn’t strike me as much of a way to get ahead, whereas if I worked as a maid, I’d get to know people with money, and if I showed enough initiative, I might be able to parlay that position into something better.
    I found a job pretty quickly working for a commodities trader and his wife, Mim, on the North Side. They lived in a big modern house with radiator heat, a clothes-washing machine, and a bathroom with a sunken tub surrounded by mosaic tiles and faucets for hot water, cold water, and icy drinking water. I got there before dawn to make their coffee by the time they woke, spent the day scrubbing, polishing, and dusting, and left after I’d cleaned the dinner dishes.
    I didn’t mind the hard work. What bothered me was the way that Mim, a long-faced blond woman only a few years older than me, treated me as if I didn’t exist, looking off into the distance when she gave me the day’s orders. While Mim seemed very impressed with herself, acting