In the Country of Women. Susan Straight
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.