Free Ghost Horses by Gloria Skurzynski Page A

mother did the laundry, the food shopping, and packed the kids’ lunches every day. Both of them liked to cook, so they took turns with that.
    Jack and Ashley didn’t have any boy/girl division in their chores; they both had to stack the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and take the clean dishes out, fold their own clothes, keep their personal junk out of the living room, and run the vacuum cleaner. He wondered about Ethan and Summer, whether they had to do chores in their grandmother’s house on the reservation—or in what used to be their grandmother’s house. The social worker said that starting now, their grandmother would spend the rest of her life in a nursing home.
    Just to aggravate Jack, Ashley kept whispering, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” until he gave her an elbow in the ribs.
    â€œMo-om, Jack hit me,” she whined, and then she started to laugh and said to Summer, “Just kidding. That’s how we used to act when we were little and took long trips in the car.”
    Summer blinked uncertainly.
    â€œDidn’t you do that?” Ashley asked her. “You must have gone on long trips in a car with your brother, didn’t you? Like, when you went to powwows?”
    â€œGrandmother never had a car,” Ethan answered. “So we never went anywhere, ’cause there was no bus, either. Just the school bus to junior high in Lander, outside the reservation. Summer doesn’t ride the bus ’cause she’s not in junior high yet.”
    â€œYou mean your grandmother never left the reservation in her whole life?” Even though Jack hadn’t been talking to Ethan, he couldn’t help but blurt out the question. It seemed impossible that a person could live in the United States but never leave one tiny corner of it. Maybe it was because Jack and Ashley had been hauled around the country since they were old enough to walk.
    â€œNot when she could decide for herself.”
    â€œWhat does that mean? Did she leave when she was younger?” Jack pressed.
    Again Jack saw the flash of anger in Ethan’s eyes as he answered, “When Grandmother was a little girl like Summer, white people came and took her to a boarding school. She was supposed to learn to be like a white person—she didn’t want to, but they said she had to. They wouldn’t let her talk in Shoshone, only in English. Once she forgot and said something in Shoshone, so they taped her mouth shut and made her scrub the whole big gym floor on her hands and knees to punish her. It took her all night.”
    That was the most words they’d ever heard all at once from Ethan, and it left the Landons in stunned silence. Is this what his dad meant when he said Jack should walk around in Ethan’s shoes? As bad as all that sounded, Jack told himself, it still didn’t give Ethan the right to roll rocks on their heads.
    Steven answered, “Different times, different people, Ethan. That would never happen today. Any school official who punished a kid that way would be fired. Or maybe even arrested.”
    Olivia added, “Lots of things have changed for the better since your grandmother was a little girl. For just one example, wild mustangs used to be rounded up, jammed into big trucks with horrible conditions, and shipped to slaughterhouses, where they were butchered for dog food. Today we protect the mustangs.”
    Ethan just turned his face to the window and peered out.
    Dry and dusty, the rangeland that slid past their SUV now showed endless acres of yellowish brown grass, broken here and there by clumps of sagebrush and an occasional small tree. Behind the flat land, the mountains looked more like hills, cone-shaped brown hills dotted with junipers and pinyon pines.
    So this was the range that the Bureau of Land Management was sworn to protect. Fence posts made from stripped, narrow tree trunks held miles of barbed wire strung across the tops of the posts,