Читать книгу In the Country of Women - Susan Straight - Страница 15

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The Dance

Ruby Triboulet, Colorado Prairie, 1921

It’s the story we all heard, you three girls all saw in movies and on television and in songs, the fantasy and marriage: I fell in love with her the first time I laid eyes on her. The minute I saw her, there could never be another woman for me. Just one look, that’s all it took. I had to have her. I made sure no one else could have her.

Romantic. It’s what we girls are given as true love—first sight, and no other suitors. When I finally heard the story of how Ruby Triboulet, my grandmother, met Robert Straight, my grandfather, I was fifty years old, the same age as she was when she died in Colorado. I had finally gone to visit my relatives in Nunn, on the prairie flatlands of northeast Colorado, near the borders of Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska, where the wind blows every day.

In the small front room of a tiny house, night fell with absolute darkness as if a velvet blanket had dropped from the wide sky onto the dirt lanes of Nunn. There were only three hundred people left in town, down from fifteen hundred in the 1950s.

Dale Barnaby, whose mother, Vara, was Ruby’s sister, had moved this house in 1952 from the abandoned prairie town of Purcell. Dale was eighty-six years old, and his wife, Kahla, born in Nunn, was eighty-seven. Because I had come to stay with them, they’d called his brother Galen, seventy-seven, his younger sister Toots, seventy-four, and his sister-in-law Fuzz, seventy-six, to join us.

These five people hadn’t seen me for thirty years. In 1982, my brother Jeff and I drove across the country, and we slept one night at this tiny house. Now they stared at me. I had asked about my grandmother Ruby. They kept glancing cautiously at one another as if to decide whether I was old enough to hear this. Their voices were rough and hesitant. They didn’t even want to say my grandfather’s name.

“Well, it was right over there in Purcell, I’d say, at the schoolhouse,” Kahla said. “They had a dance, and four of the sisters went.”

“And he had a gun,” Dale said. He moved his mouth from side to side, looking at me. I was a Straight. Descendant of the man whose name no one liked to mention, even then. I felt so strange, thinking that this terrifying blood was my blood, even though my father had nothing but fear in his own bones.

“Bob Straight,” Dale finally said. “He had a gun in his coat.”

“Mom said he seen Ruby right away, she was so little and pretty, and she’d just gotten here from Illinois. Where they were from. The sisters,” Toots said.

Dale said, “He went all around the dance floor tellin’ every man not to dance with her, and he shown ’em his gun. She was just alone all night, she was real sad, and no one asked her to dance. Only him. He finally asked her and she danced with him. Then after that they got married.”

My father was Ruby’s youngest child. Richard Dean Straight.

Until I was eighteen, I saw him once a month. Maybe once or twice a year, he talked about his mother, Ruby, in very short cryptic tales, almost like fables. In our part of southern California, we lived very close to the heat of the desert, but also within sight of the mountain ranges whose spines ran the length of the state. I lived in Riverside, and my father lived with his new family twenty-four miles away, near Pomona, at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains. My father’s young life had been so turbulent, dangerous, and unsparing that he could never pull himself away from those memories, and each strange scene he gave me was out of context, like a Picasso where I was staring at noses and elbows and then a knife. He told me he ate sheep that had been dead for days. A gray-white grizzly bear that he and his father cut into pieces. We ate Wonder Bread smeared with margarine, and he told me this bread had once been a miracle to him.

He had been raised in the coldest place in America—Fraser, Colorado, elevation 8,573 feet in the height of the Rocky Mountains. In winter, he took me to the snow here in California, and when I marveled at the crystalline shimmer and the whiskers of ice inside my nostrils, he said that in Fraser, the snow would bury their ranch cabin, and ice would coat his blanket, coat the iron rims of the bed where he slept in the barn, seal their cooking water inside the bucket.

I spent one weekend a month at his house—without fail. No matter whether I missed birthday parties or trips to Disneyland or a school event—without fail. When I was small, and one time forgot to flush the toilet, he said that he never lived in a house with inside plumbing until he was twelve, and I was five, and I had always had a toilet. If I forgot to turn off a light, he said he had never lived in a house with electricity until he was twelve, and I was seven, and had always had wall switches.

But he taught me to fish. He taught me to cook a trout at the edge of the lake. At night, he bent to check the night-light near me. A night-light in each room. He was obsessive about that. Even then, I realized how much my father, so intimidating to me, was afraid of the dark.

Ruby Triboulet was the third of six sisters, born in 1901. She was small, just five feet tall, with soft waves to her dark hair. Soft eyes. Soft wide mouth, not quite a smile. Soft cheeks. Her picture, taken when she was leaving for Colorado, at nineteen, shows no bones—no sharp shelves of cheek, no bump on her nose, no prominent forehead or collarbones. Not like her mother, Amanda, or her sisters Hazel, Vara, and Emma. They are all bones. Ruby looks apprehensive, dreamy.

The Triboulet girls—Hazel, Vara, Ruby, Emma, Genevieve, and Helen—and their only brother, Carl, were born on a farm at Bear Creek, in Hancock County, Illinois. (It’s possible other babies died.) The land belonged in 1859 to their grandfather, Francois Edouard Triboulet, who had come to America from France in 1850. The farm was near the confluence of three creeks, about forty miles from the Mississippi River, which formed the border with Iowa. Their father, Francois “Frank,” born in 1872, and mother, Amanda Baldon, born in 1874, were married in 1890. Francois sounds like a gentle, hapless man whose house was full of women; Amanda’s face, which was always angry according to my father and in the two photographs I’ve seen, was replicated in the faces of four daughters with the pointed chins and hatchet cheeks and classic gaunt features of rural hard-life women. Only Ruby and her baby sister, Helen, had the round cheeks and constant curving smiles of their father.

Francois Triboulet, Genevieve Triboulet, Amanda Baldon Triboulet, Emma Triboulet, Carl Triboulet, Ruby Triboulet; in front, Helen Triboulet. Hancock County, Illinois, around 1920; Ruby and Emma are going west.

The weather was often bad, the land flooded, the crops were poor, and the daughters would inherit no land.

Hazel, the eldest, paved the way for all her siblings to move west. She’d gone bravely to the prairie drylands of northeastern Colorado, where antelope outnumbered people in the big square counties. She became a schoolteacher, and wrote to her sisters about the abundant land, the farming and ranching, the prairie schoolhouses, and the climate without humidity or drenching rain. Hazel and Vara had married two cousins, Charles and Armon Barnaby, and they all went out in 1915 in a Model A Ford to Nunn, Colorado, a tiny town on the railroad where people raised dryland crops, depending on rain. White wheat and sugar beets. Beef cattle and dairy cows.

Vara’s husband, Armon Barnaby, was a big rough dark-haired man. They didn’t live in town, but on a series of windblown ranches where Vara had ten children. Places with no water or electricity, with snow drifted inside the attics where the children slept, with deer shot in fall up on the Poudre River, and antelope shot for dinner any day on a bad week. But Armon Barnaby said that in the dry sweet air and constant wind, he could breathe for the first time in his life.

After a time, the sisters sent for Ruby, Emma, and Genevieve. (Only Helen, who was seven, stayed in Illinois.) Now there were five young women out on the prairie, loading up in the Model A Ford and heading up the Poudre Canyon to the Rockies, driving backward because those old gas tanks would empty out the other way. Picnics and fishing. Church on Sundays—they had all joined the Foursquare Gospel Church of Aimee Semple McPherson, and became Sunday school teachers. In each tiny prairie town, the first ranchers to fence land would construct a small church, a white spire to break the endless horizon of green grass and big sky.

The sisters were five young women with heart, with what used to be called verve and grit and spunk. Those midwestern and prairie words that came from odd places themselves. They loved their few dresses, their hats, their tablecloths, and singing. They were romantic and sentimental. They always had one another.

Ruby lived with Hazel when she first arrived in Colorado. Then she went to the dance at the schoolhouse in Purcell.

I have a map of America here at my desk, and for years I’ve traced with pencil the long journeys of our ancestral women. Fine was born outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, during the same three-year period that Alice Amanda Baldon, Ruby’s mother, was born at Bear Creek, Hancock County, Illinois. They were five hundred miles apart—but their states were south and north, their skin black and white, their lives defined by immigration and enslavement. Then there were the men.

What changed women’s lives was not just a man, but having a baby with that man. Who married a girl, who slept with a girl, who hunted a girl and took her, who accidentally met a girl, who was told to marry a girl for her land, for her car, who was told not to marry a girl.

Fine met Robert Hofford in the blackberry thickets.

Ruby Triboulet danced with Robert Straight because no one else asked her.

Robert Straight was the man he was that night, in Purcell, because his own father had just stolen his girlfriend and married her.

My grandfather, Robert Bates Straight, was the tenth generation of Straight men to be born in a territory farther west than the previous one—from pre-Revolution Massachusetts to Weld County, Colorado. My own father, Richard, said he knew none of this. None. He had hated his father, and knew little about his father’s father. What scraps he finally told me were in the last five years of his life, the memories often unmoored by painkillers or anesthetic, so that while I was in a hospital room with him, or driving him around the landscape of his teenaged years here in southern California, or talking to him late at night on the phone, all the scary pieces of his youth came flying at me in random fashion, like T-shirts shot out of a cannon; I’d catch them at high speed and later smooth out the material and read what was written on the chest.

Those fragments were always about his desperation and fear, of being unwanted, of being beaten, freezing, and abandoned.

I spent two years finding the previous ten generations on Ancestry, and when I finally wrote down all the names in order, in blue pen on a yellow legal pad, and told my father I’d bring them to him when we ate breakfast, he didn’t want to see the pages. They are right here. He never knew any of the names that came before Daniel Casca Straight, the father of his father, a man he remembered as being very intelligent, manipulative, having a steel plate in his skull from combat in World War I. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my father had engineering and mechanical skills that should have led them to great success. But those three generations of Straight men had tempers and no capacity to take orders from anyone, so they worked for themselves, and then quit themselves in disgust, to start a new enterprise.

My great-grandfather Daniel Casca “DC” Straight, born in 1876 in St. Croix, Wisconsin, was brought to Clay County, Nebraska, in 1880 and raised on a ranch. At twenty-two, he married Laura Bates, who was eighteen. Their oldest son, my grandfather, was born that same year, in 1902, in Loveland. Laura had ten children who lived, and at least two who died, in sixteen years. On November 1, 1918, when the youngest baby was only a year old, Laura died.

By 1921, when Robert was nineteen, he had a girlfriend named Ethel Dickerson. But in June of that year, DC Straight, who was forty-three, married Ethel, who had just turned twenty.

They had two children. Robert left the mountains of Loveland and went to work on the ranches down in the prairie, in Ault and Eaton and Greeley. One night, he went to the dance at Purcell.

The schoolhouse doubled as social hall, meeting room, and community center for those scattered prairie communities, so the Triboulet girls knew everyone. The building was crowded with young men and women, some already married, some not. The young men were ranch hands who rode the prairies rounding up heifers, or milked cows daily in freezing barns, or plowed miles of earth for wheat seed, or harvested sugar beets and transported them to train cars. The sons of Vara Barnaby spent their lives on threshing machines, cutting down wheat.

Ruby stood against the wall and waited. She wore her best dress. Though the young men all danced with other girls, they averted their faces and didn’t even look her way. She was nineteen.

If you dance with her, I’ll wait until you get outside and I’ll kill you.

Song after song. Did he watch her face? The hopefulness and lifted chin, the glimmer in her eyes when the music began and boys came to girls with one hand outstretched, the other holding a hat. Do you want to dance? Song after song, and she was invisible. Did her face grow softer and crumble, or did she lift her chin higher? How did this man, who was only twenty, know what he wanted? Did he want to crush her from the moment he saw her face, and then judge how her face changed? Was that the way he’d observed his own father, or other men? Had Ethel’s face changed when she saw his own father, or had his father made her face change with a threat or compliment? Was this way of hunting a woman, of choosing a wife, embedded in his genes?

Whether he’d decided on a particular song to end her torture (every one of us knows how it feels to be left alone on a wall, or a bench, or a folding chair, while music plays) or judged this exactly to the amount of desperation and longing and hurt on her face, he finally stood in front of Ruby Triboulet. Not a year later, in April 1922, they signed a marriage license at the courthouse in Greeley, Colorado.

The first thing he did was take her away from her sisters and the wide-open prairie where everyone knew one another in that grid of county roads, could see every truck and horse and wagon that passed and even the dust that moved along with them, every ranch or farm known by the number, and if you didn’t know the horse or vehicle, you could find out at the schoolhouse or the church picnic.

They went to the Rocky Mountains, where Robert Straight had been born. Not the romantic ideal of the mountains, of ranching and the west, of cowboys and the frigid beauty of one of the loveliest places in America. Robert Straight’s life had always been high-altitude isolation, snow and ranch, horses and sheep and grizzly bears, hard work and violence, and always, a gun. No one, not wife or children, would ever change that.

Ruby and her four children never changed that. By the time my father, Richard, was born, things were so bad that Ruby kept leaving, taking her youngest son to California. But each time, she went back to Colorado.

My father only ever got the leaving part down. When he left someone, he never went back.

Bear Creek, Hancock County, Illinois, to Nunn and Fraser, Colorado: 936 miles, not counting the times she went up and down the steep narrow highways of the Rockies to the prairie, to the leased ranches where Ruby had her babies, closer to her sisters.