husband’s house, in the driveway where her grandchildren were adults of immense physical presence, holding the ribs of pigs, talking about how she saved their lives, I imagined her as large and powerful. But she was slight and cautious. Watchful and intent. There was inside her a core of fury and independence and self-preservation, the genetic heritage of survival.
McMinnville to Nashville, Tennessee, to Denton, Texas: 714 miles, not counting the miles walked from the woodpile and the well to the house of the woman who beat her, or the miles walked in the forest picking blackberries and selling them in pails along the road.
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,