By the mid-’80s, she’d cashed in on Grampa’s policy, after having “accidentally” dispatched him when he came home from that three-day binge he’d blindly spent at the home of his mistress. It also helped that Gramma had the reprehensible habit of putting sub-rosa life-insurance policies on all the males of the barrio, betting the odds that, at some point, some bit of malfeasance would befall us and she’d be able to tuck away a nice bit of change, maybe kicking in a couple thousand to the grieving family for the funeral. Guns never depreciate on the border, in Texas.Įveryone in the barrio owed her money, even me, since I wanted that Indiana Jones action figure Mom wouldn’t buy for me. Gramma knew where she was going to keep her money: under her mattress, and in guns. Jewelry, electronics, perfume, real estate, travel-none of this mattered to Gramma. And she would never wash away the bloodstains of a freshly slaughtered animal on her hands, which in Gramma’s cosmology truly defined wealth. She wouldn’t wear the cheap floral perfume popular in the barrio, meant to cover the garlic and cumin smells of meat-heavy cookery. She always dressed like a regular widowed Mexican peasant woman, clutching her bulging black imitation leather purse, and she kept her gold Catholic idolatry to a minimum. She was like a labor boss in this regard: able to secretly earn a fairly good living though presumably doing nothing, meanwhile maintaining a status in the barrio as the chief moneylender.
This is how Gramma learned to live during her entire adolescence and into her first marriage: coping with circumstances others would find crushing, terminal. She was depressed, sure but what could she or anyone else do about it? You’re a starving twelve- year-old Mexican girl on a dying farm you deal with it, find a way to cope.
Having grown up destitute during the Great Depression, Gramma had developed the survivor’s ability to draw profit from circumstances other people would find debilitating.
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