Half Broke Horse
inspiring us
Jeannette Walls was raised in poverty and hardship by skittish, eccentrically idealistic, profoundly unfit parents. As Rex and Rose Mary Walls caromed between dying mining towns, both of them too willful to hold down a job, their four children slept in cardboard boxes, set themselves on fire, subsisted on margarine and cat food, and, as they grew older, struggled to hide their meager earnings from their father, who cheerfully robbed them to pay for his alcoholic sprees.
Walls’s new book, “Half Broke Horses,” a novelistic re-creation of the life of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, in the first half of the 20th century, told in her grandmother’s voice, gives a partial answer to that perplexing question. Through the adventures of Lily Casey - mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush pilot and mother of two - Walls revisits the adrenaline-charged frontier background that gave her own mother a lifelong taste for vicissitude. “I’m an excitement addict,” Rose Mary Walls liked to tell her children.
Lily Casey was born in 1901 in a one-room dugout in West Texas, on a parched flood plain on the banks of Salt Draw, near the Pecos River. Reading the word “dugout” early in these pages will set off a memory loop in the minds of the millions of women (and not a few men) who grew up reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books about her pioneer girlhood in the 1870s and ’80s, back when families traveled by covered wagon, not S.U.V. In 1874, Charles and Caroline Ingalls (Pa and Ma) moved their growing family into a grass-covered dugout on the Minnesota prairie. Garth Williams’s illustrations depicted the place as a flower-strewn, bucolic hobbit hole.
The Caseys’ dugout was less jolly: “scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centipedes and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings.” In rainstorms, Walls writes, “the dugout turned to mud. Once, during an Easter dinner, a rattlesnake dropped onto the table, and Lily’s father took a break from carving the ham to chop off its head.
Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in “The Glass Castle,” Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. With convincing, unprettified narration, Walls weaves her own ancestor into this collective rough-and-tumble heritage.
Like Laura Ingalls, Lily Casey grew up on farms in sparsely populated country, learning self-reliance and doing chores without complaint. As the Ingalls family would say, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As restitution, Old Man Pucket gave the Caseys eight “half-broke” mustangs - unshod and unused to the saddle. It was one of these, a mare, that Lily lassoed, tamed, broke and rode off on, alone, to a teaching job 500 miles west, in Red Lake, Ariz. She was 15 at the time, the same age Laura Ingalls was when she took a job at a lonely prairie school to help her family’s finances.
Unlike Ingalls, Lily Casey wasn’t homesick; she relished her independence. Lily got hers because World War I was on, men were overseas, and certified lady teachers had left their schoolhouses to take factory jobs.
For four years, blissfully freed from back-breaking ranch chores, Lily taught school in Arizona. The Smiths rode out the hard times by managing a 100,000-acre cattle ranch for its British owners, fighting both the elements and the tax collector. When Rose Mary was little, she relished their rugged life, but hated to watch the cowboys on the ranch break wild horses. “I feel bad for the horses,” she told Lily. “They just want to be free.” “In this life,” her mother responded, “hardly anyone gets to do what they want to do.” But when Rose Mary Smith grew up and met Rex Walls, they resolved to do just that. You could have the book here.
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