My grandfather always bought cars he couldn’t afford. Eight kids and a wife on a salary of next to nothing. Forty dollars a week for groceries. That kind of life. But he would come home on a certain day and bring with him a car like you wouldn’t believe. Something candy apple red or seafoam green. He would just drive up to the house with the motor roaring and go inside and say I bought a car. Come and see. The kids would come and his wife would come. He hadn’t consulted anyone. Not that he would have. People who knew him called them inappropriate purchases, to do something like that and not even ask.  

There’s a photograph of my grandfather and grandmother on an early date, one of those worn yellow pictures and in it he’s standing next to her holding a dead bobcat by the tail. Vague brushland behind them. A .22 rifle in his other hand. The smile on her face huge and probably she knew then that she would marry him. For the bobcat and for what it meant he would be. This was a man who had grown up working a farm that yielded no crops, an Arizona desert farm with soil you would till only out of foolishness or desperation or some sweet immigrant mixture of the two. His father’s father’s father had settled it. A bearded Swiss who had his religion and little else until he bought a piece of dry land and reared a family on it. His progeny did the same. Three generations of choosing to stay. Temperatures in the low hundreds. Nothing around of note. No rain or shade or trees. Did they know what the rest of America looked like? What life was like for others? 

My great-grandfather was a profound man who killed himself on the cusp of sixty. Sometime after midnight he left his wife in the bedroom and went outside to do it, and she woke to the snap and echo and found him lying in the desert in the dark. A night drama played out against a backwards reeling firmament of stars and blackness. My grandfather wasn’t any weaker for it. But he left the farm and the thirty-plot cemetery where they buried his father under something more like dust than dirt and he went to be where people were. And he took my grandmother bobcat hunting and maybe back to the farm so that she could see what life had been like for him, and that too was why she married him. Today she is dying and must labor to remember any of this or be told that it happened to her. I haven’t spoken to either of them in some time. We find it hard to communicate.