Read Half broke horses: a true-life novel for Free Online

that he put a tintype of him on the wall. Mom hated the Kid, whom she called “two-bit trash” because he’d killed a man who was engaged to her cousin, and she hung that fellow’s picture next to the Kid’s.
    But Dad felt the cousin must have deserved to die. The Kid, he said, never shot anyone who didn’t need shooting. Dad considered the Kid a good American boy with hot Irish blood who’d been vilified by the cattle barons for standing up for the Mexicans. “History gets written by the winners,” he said, “and when the crooks win, you get crooked history.”
    His biography was going to vindicate the Kid, prove that Dad, despite his speech impediment, was better with words than anyone who’d ever laughed at him, and make us more money than we’d ever make growing peaches, pecans, tomatoes, and watermelons. Westerns sell like hotcakes, he kept saying, and besides, a writer’s got no overhead and he never has to worry about the weather.
    THE FALL THAT I turned twelve, Buster left to go to school, even though he was two years younger than me. Mom said that his education was important for his career—for becoming anything he wanted to become—and they enrolled him in a fancy Jesuit school near Albuquerque. But they’d promised me that when I turned thirteen, I could go to the Sisters of Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe.
    I’d wanted to go to a real school for years, and the day finally came when Dad hitched up the buckboard and we set out on the two-hundred-mile journey, camping at night on bedrolls under the stars. Dad was almost as excited about me going off to school as I was, and seeing as how I hadn’t spent too much time around girls my age out on the ranch, he gave me an earful of advice about how to get along.
    I tended to be a tad bossy, he said, as I was used to ordering around Helen and Buster and Lupe and the migrants. But in school there were going to be a lot of bigger, older girls who’d be bossing me around—not to mention the nuns—and instead of fighting with them, I’d have to learn how to get along. The best way to do that, Dad said, was to figure out what somebody wanted, because everybody wanted something, and make them think you could help them get it. Dad admitted that, as he put it, he wasn’t the best exemplar of his own creed, but if I could find some way to apply it to my life, I’d go a lot further.
    Santa Fe was a beautiful old place—Dad pointed out that the Spanish arrived here even before the first Poms got to Virginia—with low adobe buildings and dusty streets lined with Spanish oaks. The school was right in the middle of town, a couple of four-story Gothic buildings with crosses on top and a chapel with a choir loft reached by what was known as the Miraculous Staircase.
    Mother Albertina, the Mother Superior, showed us around. She explained that the Miraculous Staircase had thirty-three stairs—Jesus’s age when he died—and that it went in two complete spirals without any of the usual means of support, such as a center pole. No one knew what type of wood it was made of or the name of the mysterious carpenter who showed up to build it after the original builder failed to include a staircase and the nuns prayed for divine intervention.
    “So you’re saying it’s a miracle?” Dad asked.
    I started to explain what Dad was saying, but somehow Mother Albertina understood him perfectly.
    “I believe everything is a miracle,” she said.
    I liked the way Mother Albertina said that, and from the beginning, I liked her, too. Mother Albertina was tall and wrinkled and had walnut-colored skin and thick black brows that formed a single line above her eyes. She always appeared calm even though she was constantly on the move, checking in on the dorms at night, inspecting our fingernails, walking briskly along the paths, her long black robes and white-trimmed headdress billowing in the wind. She treated all of us students—she called us “my