Editor’s note: This article was submitted for publication Fall 2018. This is a late upload.
By: Wayne Head
One of my father’s earliest stories involves him playing with his cousins when he was about seven-years-old. They were playing sheriff and outlaws, and Pop was the outlaw. So, the cousins captured him and stood him on a wooden box and put a rope around his neck that was tied to a branch on the tree in front of him. Well, somehow the box got knocked over and he was hanging by the neck while the cousins ran off in fright. Fortunately for him, his older sister and his mother were walking on the road nearby and saw him struggling at the end of the rope. With Aunt Winnie lifting him up by his hips and Grandma untying the rope, they freed the little bad guy.
When he was 11, he and his cousins were swimming at the San Juan River near the Miller Bridge. They would jump off the steel girder bridge into a pool of water on the downstream side of the bridge. Suddenly, his cousin Donald, who was three years younger than my father, began to flail in the water. He was drowning. Pop swam under Donald and grabbed him by the hips and flung him upwards towards the bank. After several such boosts he was able to get Donald onto the bank of the river, therefore saving his life.
Around this same time, Pop and his younger brother, Keith, were walking by the open window of a church on a Sunday morning. Suddenly, they heard the Preacher say that he had the devil in a burlap sack. They looked in the window and saw the Preacher holding a sack out in front of himself vigorously shaking the sack. He yelled that he would let the devil out of the sack that evening at six. Uncle Keith and Pop returned to that opened window promptly at six. The Preacher wrestled some more with the devil in the sack then reached in and pulled out a whiskey bottle. Disappointed they walked home together.
Another preacher story of my father’s involves a man in Farmington, New Mexico named Oscar. Oscar was a hard-partying man. He would stay out all night drinking and gambling. One morning, he was returning home with the sun. As the sun rose, he heard a deep throated voice command him to become a preacher. He said that he clearly heard, “Oscar, go preach, go preach, go preach.” With this celestial guide, Oscar turned his life around. He became a preacher, founded a church, and built a congregation. A couple of years later he was returning home with the sun from being out all night at the bedside of an ailing parishioner. With the rising sun, Oscar again heard the admonition to become a minister, but this time he realized that what he was hearing was his neighbor’s donkey, braying at the rising sun. “Ohnee, ohnee, ohnee.” My father told me that Oscar went back to his former ways after realizing that the earlier message had been delivered by a donkey.
I was telling my father about some carne adobada that I had eaten in Santa Fe one year when he told me that must have been what his friend’s grandmother used to make them. He said that she told them that when she was younger, she had confronted Geronimo at her doorstep with a shotgun and he had ridden away without any further incident.
When my father was in elementary school, his paternal grandmother would treat coughing and a sore throat with a coating of goose grease on his chest. If he was sick for a few days, she would hang an asafetida bag on his neck and send him to school. He said that the bag gave off a sharp, foul odor. He said that maybe it worked, because people would stay away from you while wearing the bag. He said that he would leave home with the bag, find a tree on his route to school, and hang the bag on a branch. He would retrieve the bag on his way home so that his grandmother would not know that he had ditched the bag. I read up on these bags and found that they had become popular after the Spanish Flu epidemic that had killed so many nationwide. Decades later, medical research found that the main ingredient in the bag did indeed help the lungs work better. His grandmother would also give her grandchildren Mormon Tea to thin their blood in the springtime. She said that their blood had gotten thick in the winter months, and they needed to thin the blood. This herb is known as a natural blood thinner. She also told her grandchildren that a quarter moon that was hung with the ends pointing up was holding the water, and it would not rain. When the points were lowered, it would mean rain was eminent.
Just a few stories that I grew up on. I have not heard comparable stories from the folks that I know. I am aware that we all have our own recollections of their world, these are just some of my father’s stories.