American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [81]
Now there was us.
“You hungry, Takey?” Grandpa Doc finally said to my mother.
She looked at Papi. He was arched over the desk, studying a map now, running one hand through his curly, black hair. “Well, maybe the children are,” she said softly. “How about you, Daddy? How about Mother?”
“Aw, hell. She won’t eat much,” my grandfather said, and then he reached around and spat a black gob of tobacco juice into a brass spittoon.
George and I glanced at each other and grinned. Vicki’s eyebrows shot up like two birds.
“Well, go downstairs to the store and charge up anything you like,” he said. “Tell ‘em to put it on Doc Clapp’s account.”
“All right, Dad. Tomorrow Jorge and I will start looking for our own place to stay.” She walked over to her father and put a light hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her with a wistful smile. They did no more than that, and yet I felt a bond between them. A language they understood. They didn’t need to fill the air with chatter, these gringos, unburden their hearts, peck each other noisily on the cheek. They could sit stonily by, staring down at their hands, and communicate. They could tend a dying mother without touching her. As we said good night to him, I vowed to learn how to do all of that someday. But first, I’d learn how to spit.
AS THE HOURS unfolded on that first day in Rawlins, Mother made a point to tell us about the Clapps. It was clear we were disoriented, out of our element, and her teaching nature returned in the form of quick lectures on family history. She began by describing the great-grandmother I had yet to meet, Grandpa Doc’s mother, Lucinda Ellen Adams-Hatter Clapp.
Great-Grandma Clapp claimed to be a descendant of John Quincy Adams. The rest of the family accepted that lineage without argument; her mother, Matilda Adams, had said it was so. She had married young and come west with James A. Clapp, my great-grandfather. James A. Clapp had descended from one of five Clapp brothers who had set sail from England six years before the American Revolution. Two of those five original brothers had sought prosperity in Canada. Two eventually built names for themselves in Boston. The Boston Clapps produced lawyers and bankers, one newspaper editor, one famous etymologist, one generous patron of Amherst College—pillars of New England society. But the fifth of those English brothers went west to preach God’s word. That was the Clapp of my line.
In 1880, James A. Clapp, who had studied law, and his wife, Lucinda Ellen, established a merchandise business in Hollenberg, Kansas, which included a bank, a law firm, a U.S. Post Office, and a dry-goods store. Within twenty years, they had amassed a fortune. When my great-grandfather died and left his wife everything, she proved a gritty businesswoman. By 1908, she had sent one son to medical school, another to law school, married off their daughter, and made each of their children the gift of a farm.
But Great-Grandfather Clapp’s death was not her first challenge. Great-Grandma Clapp had known her share of disasters. She had survived a Civil War. She had seen insect plagues descend in black clouds and chew landscapes bare. She had seen Indian braves whack their way through white settlements to avenge the death of Sitting Bull. After her husband’s death she outwitted two World Wars by having had sons and great-grandsons who were too old or too young to fight. She survived the Great Depression because her store was stocked and debtors paid her with real estate. Acres and acres of it. She owned so much land that it almost didn’t matter whether she lost a little to the government now and then. “I know all the crooks and turns of the mercantile business,” she crowed to newspaper reporters, but the worldwide financial disaster would change everything. The Clapps became land rich, suspicious of banks.