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

Albertina seemed to know what I was thinking. Before I boarded the coach, she took my hand and said, “When God closes a window, he opens a door. But it’s up to you to find it”
    WHEN THE STAGECOACH PULLED into Tinnie, Dad was sitting in the buckboard outside the hotel, with four huge dogs in the back. As I got out, he grinned and waved. The stagecoach driver tossed my suitcase off the roof, and I lugged it over to the carriage. Dad got down and tried to hug me, but I shrugged him off.
    “What do you think of these big fellas?” he asked.
    The dogs were black with glistening coats, and they sat there regarding the passersby regally, like they were the lords of the manor even though they were also drooling ropes of slobber. They were the biggest dogs I’d ever seen, and there was hardly any room in the back for my suitcase.
    “What happened to the tuition?” I asked Dad.
    “You’re looking at it.”
    Dad started explaining that he’d bought the dogs from a breeder in Sweden and had them shipped all the way to New Mexico. They were not just any dogs, he went on, they were Great Danes, dogs of the nobility. Historically, Great Danes were owned by kings and used to hunt wild boars. Practical and prestigious, Dad said. Can’t beat that. And believe it or not, no one west of the Mississippi owned any. He’d checked into it. These four, he said, had cost eight hundred dollars, but once he started selling the pups, we’d make the money back in no time, and from then on it would be pure profit.
    “So you took my tuition money and bought dogs?”
    “Watch that tone,” Dad said. After a moment he added, “You didn’t need to be going to finishing school. It was a waste of money. I can teach you whatever you need to know, and your mother can add the polish.”
    “Did you take Buster out of school, too?”
    “No. He’s a boy and needs that diploma if he’s going to get anywhere.” Dad pushed the dogs over and found a spot for my suitcase. “And anyway,” he said, “we need you on the ranch.”
    ON THE WAY BACK to the KC, Dad did most of the talking, going on about what great personalities the dogs had and how he was already getting inquiries about them. I sat there, ignoring Dad’s prattle about his harebrained schemes. I wondered if buying those dogs had simply given Dad an excuse to stop paying the tuition, so I’d have to come back home. I also wondered where in the blazes was that door Mother Albertina had talked about.
    The ranch had fallen into a state of mild disrepair in the months I’d been gone. Fence boards had come loose in a few spots, the chicken coop was unwashed, and tack lay scattered on the barn floor, which needed sweeping.
    To help out around the ranch, Dad had brought in a tenant farmer named Zachary Clemens and his wife and daughter, and they were living in an outbuilding on a corner of the property. Mom considered them beneath us because they were dirt-poor, so poor that they used paper for curtains, so poor that when they first arrived and Dad gave them a watermelon, after eating the fruit, they set aside the seeds for planting and then pickled the rind.
    But I liked the Clemenses, particularly the daughter, Dorothy, who knew how to roll up her sleeves and get things done. She was a big-boned young woman with ample curves, handsome despite a wart on her chin. Dorothy knew how to skin a cow and trap rabbits, and she tilled the vegetable garden the Clemenses had fenced off, but she spent most of her time at the big kettle that hung over the fire pit in front of the shed, cooking stews, making soap, and washing and dyeing clothes she took in from the townspeople in Tinnie.
    Dad let the Great Danes roam free, and one day a few weeks after I’d returned home, Dorothy Clemens knocked on the front door to report to Dad that she’d been out collecting pecans near the property line we shared with Old Man Pucket’s ranch and had found all four dogs shot dead. Dad charged into the barn in a