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By Root 667 0

They began carrying their money in satchels, twenty-five thousand dollars at a time. They owned chunks of Kansas, chunks of Wyoming. When two of Great-Grandma Clapp’s three children died of leukemia, her only living son, my Grandpa Doc, inherited the wealth. Grandpa Doc had grown up with plenty of money. His instinct, unlike his forefathers’, was to spend it. But another of his instincts, right down the family line, was to head west. Ever west. When his four daughters were grown, he took Grandma Lo, left Kansas, and followed that impulse. When my mother became a widow and her Uncle Elver proposed to pay her way through a music conservatory, it never dawned on her that her father might have made the proposal. She did not ask him; he did not offer. Grandpa Doc took his money satchels to Wyoming. He dusted off his medical degree and hung it on a wall.

On our second day in Rawlins, Papi took me into Room 7, one of the apartments in the Ferguson Building, to meet Great-Grandma Clapp. She was a dried-out little husk of a woman in a black taffeta bonnet, a calico dress, and a circus magician’s black cape. Her long white hair was gathered into a jelly roll at the back of her head. Her jaw was set in a flat grim line. I bowed and kissed her leathery cheek as my father had instructed me to do and then perched on the edge of a hard wood sofa while her two steely eyes took me in. She was stringy, puckered, thatched with a frizzled brow. She’s a big help to your Grandma Lo, my father was saying—in a booming voice so that she could hear—but I could see that the woman was a big help to no one. She seemed unreliable, cracked.

We sat there awhile before she got bored and began shuffling her newspapers. She bought two or three a day and went at them with two pairs of glasses—mounted on each other over her nose—and an enlarging glass to boot. “So long as I live in this world,” she squeaked triumphantly at my father, “I want to know what’s going on.” Papi glanced at me and winked. Clearly, he had reached some level of comfort with her on his last visit. “Just how old are you now, Grandma Viejecita?” he shouted in her ear. She squinted and stuck out three fingers in response. She preferred to reckon her age toward a date rather than from one. She was three years from a century. Ninety-seven. She had been born in the age of the musket and would die in the age of the nuclear bomb.

I had no equivalent in my Peruvian life for Great-Grandma Clapp. I had met elderly aunts in Lima—lively, bustling round women with silky soft faces and bosoms redolent with perfume. I knew about femininity, had heard my abuelita say that fine shoes and conversation could carry a woman far. But this wizened little ancestor was like no woman I had ever known: I had no way to gauge her. In her boots, she stood little taller than I did, swaggered as if she were a man. She was beyond my powers to compute.

It wasn’t much later that I found that Room 8, next door to Great-Grandma Clapp, was where my cousins lived. Huey was Aunt Erma’s son—a tall, gangly eighteen-year-old with radiant eyes. Nub was Aunt Helena’s boy—sixteen, unruly, brooding, and beautiful. They were students at Rawlins High School and temporary wards of our grandfather, who had volunteered to break them in.

When we saw the boys, they seemed different as a pair of wild broncos, on the far side of tame. In Huey’s case, he was there because Aunt Erma, my mother’s oldest sister, was a teacher out on the range, in a log-cabin schoolhouse, improving the minds of a rich rancher’s children. We saw Erma only on weekends, mincing up the metal stairs of the Ferguson Building with books under one arm, a pencil jutting from her hair.

Nub was there because his mother was “plumb out of her gourd,” living in an asylum, having her skull rocked with electric shocks, and because his father was nowhere to be found. He was a bad-boy virtuoso, a genius for testing the law. He had started small: joy rides in the wee hours of morning. A little gas from a neighbor’s truck. But soon enough he was heading down Route 30 in swiped