By Cat Gonzalez
December 2004
In November and December my grandparents float like clouds on the surface of my mind. I think of Great Grandmother Docking and Grandfather Marshall trekking in a covered wagon to Kansas. They were the first to settle Deep Creek. I feel the heavy snow in my bones, and see the huddled figures of the plains Indians sleeping beside the fireplace more than half a century ago.
I remember the person and the photographs of beautiful Grandmother Lu, who lost all her hair to Black Fever. She gave birth to my aunt in Alaska, and proudly accepted little gifts from the first settlers, who had never seen a white baby before.
Don Manuel and I talk about our grandparents, and he tells me, “Mine fled La Barca for their lives during the Cristero Rebellion. I was just a babe in arms. Three couples found a fisherman’s canoe and paddled it with their hands to a landing place on Lake Chapala near San Martin. They hid in the hacienda, not wanting to be involved in the war. Soldiers burned the documents in La Barca; that’s why I still don’t have a birth certificate.”
Carlos tells a typical tale of his grandmother, a lovely young 14-year old who lived in Hacienda de las Estrellas in the hot dry plateau of Zacatecas. The Española family who lived nearby looked down on indigenous people, so when their son rode by on horseback and snatched this young woman, they disinherited him. She bore him 13 children and he felt superior to her all her short life.
For five years the family lived in a hole in the ground covered loosely with the canes of a reed-like plant that grew abundantly on the unforgiving ground. What she suffered when her husband went to work in the honey refining business is unknown. The hacendado’s custom was to visit young brides during their husband’s absence.
Ramón had two grandmothers still living when he was a child, a woman of Spanish blood and an indigenous woman. “The Indita taught us her customs by example, he said; “respect, hard work, and healing with herbs. We gathered bitter capulines and ate them for the health of our kidneys and because often that and milk were the only food there was.” We loved our Indita grandmother, a tiny but very strong woman. She ruled the house without seeming to, and called my father ‘usted’. Our Española grandmother looked down on us for being of mixed blood. We did not love her.”
The grandmothers come off better than the grandfathers. Don Manuel doesn’t remember his grandfather, but he knows there was a feud between him and Don Manuel’s father. He did not approve of the son’s choice of a wife, a Cora woman from San Marin. He and the other men who worked for the hacienda de San Martin kept mum about the hiding places of the bandits. About 2 miles from the hacienda. Trees and boulders formed these hiding places, and today one can still see the boulders piled high enough to hide a crouching man. The bandits buried their treasure in the hillsides south of Lake San Marcos and once in a while someone finds the buried treasure. No ones goes up the hill looking for lost cows and those strange animals that are a cross between a goat and a sheep without keeping a sharp eye out for signs there is some sure; hang worth digging up. Around Easter is the propitious time to find treasure; it is said that the air around it glows during Holy Week.
Whatever their privations, they must have had a healthy diet, for Don Manuel’s grandparents lived to be 97 and 103, as near as he can remember. But then, I take his words with a grain of salt… he’s not exactly sure how old he is.