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Mammoth Lakes, CA
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Thursday, September 2, 2010
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True-life story of frontier woman |
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Saturday, 31 October 2009 |
“Half Broke Horses”
by Jeannette Walls, author of “The Glass Castle”
By Catherine Billey
Mammoth Times Staff Writer
 scanned image Jeannette Walls’ new book tells the story of her grandmother’s life in the American West.
Ironically, granddaughter Jeannette Walls, known for her bestselling memoir, “The Glass Castle,” at first resisted writing about her.
But fortunately for those who appreciate compelling, plainspoken literature of the West, she did, and the result is her recently released true-life novel, “Half Broke Horses.”
“My grandmother was – and I say this with all due respect – quite a character,” Walls writes in an author’s note. “I’d been hearing stories about Lily Casey Smith all of my life, stories she told over and over to my mother, who told them to me.”
Because Walls could still recall her grandmother’s distinctive voice (she died when Walls was eight), she decided to write “Half Broke Horses” in the first person.
“Since I have also drawn on my imagination to fill in details that are hazy or missing ... the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.”
It reads as if Lily herself wrote it – a tribute, in a way, to both grandmother and granddaughter. Lily was born at the dawn of the 20th century, when ranchers of the American West still caught stagecoaches to handle medical emergencies and some considered indoor bathrooms to be vile and disgusting.
Though Lily played many unique roles in her life, she was above all a teacher who, in an era when many went just through 8th grade, fought for a complete education and eventually earned a college degree.
At 15, when the men had all gone to fight the first World War, she signs up to teach at a remote Arizona town, taking her horse Patches for a solo, 28-day, 500-mile ride through the desert. Eventually, she loses her teaching positions when the men return, and heads for industrial Chicago, where she loses a treasured friend – to the jaws of a machine when she fails to pull back her hair – and then falls for a con man who’s already married.
Written in vivid short chapters, some of which could stand on their own as vignettes, the novel begins with a typical adventure: How Lily saves herself and her two siblings from a flash-flood near their ranch after putting her head to the ground to discover the tell-tale rumble. “Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did,” reads the first sentence. She hustles her siblings into the branches of a cottonwood tree and industriously keeps them awake through the night with mathematical, political, and geographic quizzes while muddy waters swirl below.
What is clearly a tough physical existence (a rattlesnake falls from the ceiling during one Easter dinner, homes are lost to flood and tornado, drought is an ever-present danger), is also filled with magic, as when the heavenly mirage of Tinnie, New Mexico, can be seen in the clouds near the family ranch.
Ancestors and friends are fondly, if unsentimentally, brought back to life with Walls’ words, most especially Lily’s father, Adam Casey (who teaches Lily the value of education even as he nearly sabotages it, and knows how to scientifically explain all kinds of mirages), and an early mentor, Mother Albertina of the Sisters of Loretto in Santa Fe, who bluntly describes three careers for a woman of Lily’s time: nurse, secretary or teacher.
“I think you’d make a wonderful teacher,” Mother Albertina says. “You have a strong personality. The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers.”
Lily is wise enough to know she’d make a bad secretary – “because you were always at the beck and call of your boss, and what if it turned out you were smarter than him?”
In Chicago, when Lily works as a maid, she discovers she is indeed smarter than her boss, a wealthy woman who fires her for failing to know her place and not keeping her head down.
Lily’s life is a constant struggle against the elements, one that continues when she marries the love of her life, Jim Smith. Eventually, natural elements give way to the human elements of an increasingly bureaucratized world inhibiting her ability to teach in her unique frontier style. In later years, for example, her outdated habit of keeping a pearl-handled pistol in her purse gets her into trouble with “fish faced bureaucrats” again and again.
As the century rolls through two world wars and the Great Depression, Walls bears witness to the changing times. After successfully managing a 100,000-acre ranch in Texas for years, for example, the Smiths are forced out when “Hollywood types” buy the spread. They settle for an unsettling life in Phoenix until disaster strikes and their skills are once again in demand.
Unfortunately, “Half Broke Horses” loses some of its adventurous momentum when Walls’ mother, Rosemary, is born to Lily, and it begins to feel as if a series of lessons are being given to a child who refuses to learn from a no-nonsense example.
A second child, Jim, gets oddly short shrift, and people the reader came to know in the beginning (such as Walls’ great-grandparents) disappear from the pages until a few sentences are devoted to their deaths.
A poignant exception exists in Lily’s sister Helen, who meets with a haunting fate. Helen’s tragedy provides the best understanding of why Lily became so overprotective of Rosemary, leading paradoxically to unconventional marriage to Rex Walls and their mutual choice to lead the lives of half broke horses, so well documented by Walls in “The Glass Castle.”
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Last Updated ( Friday, 06 November 2009 )
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