Half Broke Horses

“Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who'd saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel.”

After Lily and her siblings returned home after surviving a flash flood, her siblings pray with their mother. However, Lily questions why they are praying, when it was thanks to her intellect that they survived. This is a moment when Lily realizes that she is different than her mother and her siblings. 

“...when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God’s will and what wasn’t.”

Throughout her childhood, Lily’s mother talks about how everything was God’s will whether it was a bad thing, like the flood that destroyed their dugout home, or a good thing, like finding the wood that they used to build a wooden house . Lily says this because it is difficult to tell what is happening while it happens. It is easier to look back and analyze what was happening. Once again she calls her mother’s faith into question and differentiates herself from her mother.

“God deals us all different hands. How we play 'em is up to us.”

This is Lily’s father’s response when she asks him about God’s will. As a child, Lily’s father was struck in the head by a horse. The accident affected his speech and his physical abilities, but he did not let the challenges bring him down. Lily learns from her father’s successes and failures and she learns to play any hand that she is dealt.