by Jeanette Walls, 2009 “A True-Life Novel”
Jeannette Walls tells the life story of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who grew up on a ranch in Texas and then New Mexico. Her dad taught her how to break horses and work on the ranch. She was the oldest of 3 children-smart, hard-working, fearless. She really wanted to get educated but her dad spent all her tuition money on some dogs, Great Danes, that he was going to breed and make money from. Their neighbor ends up shooting them because they wandered freely.
She ends up going to teach school in Red Lake, AZ – rode her horse, Patches, 500 miles to get there. But when the Great War ended, she lost the job because she wasn’t certified. She goes to Chicago and works as a maid-marries a two-timing crumb-bum, finds out he was married already with 3 kids and the diamond ring he gave her was fake.
She ends up getting her teaching job again at Red Lake, AZ. Her sister, Helen, ends up living with her – Helen was pregnant and abandoned by the father in Hollywood. Helen is shamed by the Catholic priest in Red Lake and sees no way out of her predicament so hangs herself. Lily by then has met Jim Smith, the man she marries and spends her life with. He’s into automobiles but in the Great Dust Bowl – they end up running a huge ranch in Northern Arizona on the Mogollon Rim. He runs the ranch with Lily’s help and they spend 15 happy years there. Have 2 children, Rosemary and Little Jim. They are happy there. Lily saves the ranch by deciding to build dams to catch rainwater so the cattle have water. After 15 years, the owners sell the ranch to Hollywood movie makers. They fire Jim. They move to Phoenix, hate it-then to Horse Mesa in the Superstition Mountains. Rosemary ends up marrying Rex Walls, a fly boy-and they have Jeannette – the author – along with other babies. Lily dies when Jeannette is 8 years old. She was quite a lady-tough, hard-working, resourceful, fearless.
Loved the relationship between Jim and Lily. Husband and wife but teammates. In Phoenix, Lily gets jealous and worried that Jim might cheat on her. She has Rosemary follow him at lunch. He goes to a park and eats his lunch. The next day, Lily tells Rosemary to follow him again, “…then around the corner came Jim with Rosemary. He was holding her hand, and she looked a lot happier than she had when she’d left.
“Jim knelt down by my window. “Lily, what the hell is going on?”
“I thought of coming up with some complicated lie, but Jim was smarter than that, and I knew the game was up. “I was trying to prove to myself and Rosemary what I hoped would be the case – that you are a faithful husband.”
“I see,” he said. “Let’s all go have lunch.”
Also, Lily beats one of her students who put his hand up a girl’s dress: “That boy needed to be taught to keep his grimy hands to himself, so I put my book down, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face. He looked at me, bug-eyed with shock, and then he reached up and slapped me in the face.
“For a second I was speechless. A smile started creeping across Johnny’s face. The little squirt thought he had the best of me. It was then that I hauled him up and threw him against the wall, backhanding him again and again, and when he cowered down in a ball on the floor, I grabbed my ruler and started whaling his butt.”
She ends up getting fired for that.
On training horses, “He was always repeating that phrase: “Think like a horse.” “The key to that, he said, was understanding that horses were always afraid…They were all the time looking for a protector, and if you could convince a horse that you’d protect him, he would do anything for you.”
Also: “I cut her out from the herd, lassoed her, and then slowly walked up to her, following Dad’s rule: “around strange horses to keep your eyes on the ground so they won’t think you’re a predator.”
Good book – once you get to the ranching part with Big Jim on the Mogollon Rim.
Mom gave me the book to read and then send to Adam because she thinks his writing style is like Jeannette Walls – and he has stories to tell, just like she does.