Half Broke Horses: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Lily and Jim get much needed dentures when they get to Phoenix, which makes Lily immensely happy. They also buy a big new house and car. Lily loves Phoenix at first, impressed by the many restaurants and stores. They also get their first ever telephone. The children hate Phoenix, however, feeling boxed in by the paved streets and buildings. Soon enough, Lily begins to feel penned in as well. She hates all the rules and restrictions of the road, and when she goes to take more flying lessons, realizes how the “city folks” have “chopped up the sky the same way they had the ground.”

Jim gets a job as a warehouse manager and Lily as a high school teacher. They also buy other properties to rent out, for the first time “living on the backs of others.” With electricity they can now listen to the radio all day, but that means Lily becomes more exposed to the news. She becomes more aware of crime and worried about her surroundings. She bolts the door, which she never did at the ranch, and sleeps with her revolver under the bed. She notes that on the ranch they worried about the weather, but in the city they worry about themselves.

Air-raids sound through the city every Saturday. When Hiroshima happens, Rosemary is deeply disturbed by the atom bomb and disagrees with Lily that it was for the greater good. Rosemary paints and draws obsessively, which Lily considers her one real talent. While still keeping her promise never to tell her daughter that she is beautiful, Lily enrolls Rosemary in modeling school, but Rosemary insists that all she wants is to be an artist. Lily agrees to pay for art lessons, though she still believes the only ways for women to make a living are as nurses, secretaries, or teachers.

For the first time in her life, Lily does not enjoy teaching. Her wealthier students do not obey her, and no longer being in a one-room school house entails lots of bureaucracy. She laments that there are “more rules for teachers than students.” Jim is also bored at his job behind a desk and misses the connection to nature that comes with ranching.

When a winter storm hits, the Department of Agriculture knocks on their door to say ranchers are struggling and Jim has been recommended to help. He eagerly travels to help the ranchers in a small plane with a pilot, at one point even jumping with a parachute when there is no place to land. By the time he arrives at the Showtime Ranch, he finds dead cattle frozen by the pond as the men drink coffee by the warmth of the stove inside. He gets them to work. In all he is gone two weeks, and comes back looking tired and thin, but happy.

Gaiter calls Jim to offer him his job back managing the ranch, but he and Lily immediately agree that they do not want to have to work for Gaiter. Lily also does not want to work on someone else’s home again. Jim has become a local hero for parachuting out of the plane to save cattle, and Lily notices how women flirt with him. She arrives unannounced at his office one day to find the bookkeeper, Glenda, in his doorway with red lipstick and a push-up bra. Lily becomes worried that he is cheating and enlists Rosemary to spy on him. She follows him at lunch one day, but only finds him eating alone. The next day Jim confronts Lily about her spying. That night they agree they are feeling pent up by the city and want to leave.