Tom Lea

"The hands of Cantu" are the gifted hands of the best horseman ever seen in New Spain.

Beginnings, present development, and biography of the owner.

Born in 1907 in El Paso, Texas, Lea says he can't remember when he didn't like to draw pictures. Recognizing his talent, his parents and teachers encouraged him to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. After high school graduation in 1924, he boarded a train for Chicago, where for ten years he studied and worked with his mentor, the muralist John Norton. Drawn back to the Southwest in 1934, Lea lived in Santa Fe for two years and then returned to El Paso, which has been his home ever since. During World War II, Lea was a war correspondent for Life magazine, and he witnessed action in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, Europe and North Africa. As a portraitist, he came in personal contact with men who changed the course of history, including Jimmy Doolittle, Claire Chennault, and Chiang Kai-Shek. After the war, an assignment with Life took him to Mexico where his interest was stimulated in bullfighting. That experience led to the writing of his first novel, The Brave Bulls, published in 1949. It became a bestseller and a successful film. In the 1950s and 1960s Lea wrote and illustrated three more novels, an autobiography, and the notable two-volume history, The King Ranch.

This is the story of a man alone in a life of violence, riding a harsh country hungry, searching for home in his heart. In the manner of its telling it is an adventure story. It is the story of Martin Brady, with much blood on his hands, with two languages on his tongue, torn between two ways of life, between two cultures, riding the lonesome leagues in the bright desert light on a black horse named in Spanish Lágrimas - Tears. It is a story of seventy or eighty years ago in "the wonderful country" - a strange, vast country "with a river running right down the middle of it" - the Rio called Grande on one side and Bravo on the other, that marks the line between the United States and Mexico. Martin Brady knew that the river meant. He swam it once at night, a scared boy, alone- "This kid Martin used his father's pistol on his father's killer," the vaquero Mateo Casas boasted. He fed the kid Martin, taught him, helped him while he learned the tongue and the toil, a boy from Kingdom Prairie, Missouri, in peonage on a hacienda in Chihuahua. When Martin Brady rode north to cross the river again, he had spent fourteen years in Mexico, "more than half his life." He knew Mexico, its hunger, its grace, its cruelty, its songs. He knew the people of Mexico, from the humble peon Pablo who drove oxen, to the exalted Don Cipriano Castro who drove men, men yoked as securely as oxen are yoked. Martin Brady, the paid pistolero called Martín Bredi, the exile with blood on his hands, knew the gall of the yoke. He wanted to cross the river. he wanted to know what it might be like on the other side. He found out. Many pople, various as the people of a wide world, form a part of Martin Brady's story: the Mexican Don Santiago Santos who heart pumped rich with the authentic virture and poetry and generosity of his land; the American John Rucker, captain of Texas Rangers, who offered Martin Brady an image of himself "finding a camp at last, lost no longer"; the Negro Tobe Sutton, segeant, 10th Calvary USA, who was proud to say, "Somebody colored got to teach colored people"; the Jew Ludwig Sterner, fresh from Kassel in Prussia, who learned his uncle's business in Texas, "in houses of mud, in the wind", the Apache Magues, who "looked down the many rifle barrels, turned the many knives in flesh, hung a meat hook into screaming soft nakedness." From a March sandstorm on the opening page to another March gale at the story's end, through the four parts of the book, the four seasons of the that year from March to March, the country and the people in it grip at Martin Brady, test him, weave at his fate, in the worn saddle on the black horse named Lágrimas.