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Chapter 15: Signs and wondersNala has seen and heard some truly bizarre things
By Carmen Duarte
There are some things my Mama saw and heard as a child that she is not certain she believes. My Mama has seen curanderos at work. She has heard family legends of brujas, witches who lured people to their deaths. She has lived in a haunted house. Curanderos had special gifts to counter diabolic spells, but they also possessed power to harm. Some truly believed in their powers, while others scoffed and reminded the faithful to lean on God, their true defender. My Mama believes and she doesn't believe. Her faith is in God, not hocus-pocus. But she has seen and heard some amazing things. She told me not to write them down. ``They'll think I'm a crazy old woman,'' she told me. I assured her you would not.
At age 5, Nala (my Mama's nickname) just watched and listened, wondering what was real. She knew her stepfather, Don Juanito Téllez, was sick, but she didn't understand what was causing his illness. In 1921, in rural San Antonio, N.M., medical doctors were a rare option. Sickness was treated with home remedies, gathered from the fields. Serious illnesses were treated with prayer. Occasionally, my family sent for a curandero. The children were usually shooed outside when the curandero arrived. Nala recalls the story, some of which she witnessed, much of which was told to her: ``Don Davíd, a curandero, was summoned from Lordsburg, N.M., and he arrived at Nana Leonarda's house late one evening. ``Don Juanito was lying on the bed, and his stomach and legs were very, very bloated. He was so bloated that he could not walk, but yet some force was pulling him from the bed. The grown-ups were holding him down in the bed. ``Don Davíd entered the house, and when he walked to the room where Don Juanito lay, he let out a yell. `¨Qué estan haciendo desgraciados con este hombre?' (Wretches, what are you doing with this man?) ``The curandero sees evil spirits in the form of witches around Don Juanito. The spirits have their hands on Don Juanito and are pulling him from the bed. ``Don Davíd builds a fire, putting a washtub on the embers. The tub is filled with a liquid that Don Davíd makes as he says verses that are hard to decipher. ``While this is going on, bloated Don Juanito begins to vomit. He vomits a lot of liquid and a substance that is similar to balls of hair. The hair also appears to have bugs. I don't know what it was. The curandero mixed veins of chile into the vomit so that the evil would not pass on into another person. ``Don Juanito began to calm down, and out of nowhere a hen with lots of baby chicks walked into the bedroom, as if the spirits transformed into their being. The hen and chicks walked in and then quickly walked out and disappeared.'' This was Nala's first encounter with Don Davíd, an old man with a wrinkled face, a thick white mustache and salt-and-pepper hair, in his role as a curandero. He frightened her, but she knew Nana Leonarda would not let anyone or anything harm her.
Don Juanito suffered several of these episodes of bloating. One time, Mama says, Don Juanito was lying on the bed, moaning from the pain. His legs and stomach had ballooned once more. Suddenly, Don Juanito broke out in a hysterical laugh and looked out the window. He winked as though he were looking at somebody. All the women, who stood around his bed, turned their heads. They gasped when they saw what appeared to be balls of fire rolling down a nearby hill. Don Juanito recovered once again. Don Juanito's bloating ceased for good after Don Davíd's final cleansing. Again, it was at Nana Leonarda's house in San Antonio. Don Juanito lay on the bed trying to get up while Dolores and Madrina Juana held him down. The curandero went to work, as he usually did, starting a fire outside and putting a washtub over the embers. He mixed his liquids with chile seeds and other things. He mumbled his strange words. Don Juanito began vomiting. This time, he threw up a long, long worm. It was about 12 inches long. Don Juanito never bloated up again. They say Don Davíd put a protection from evil around Don Juanito. The protection, Don Davíd said, was against the spells of a woman named Francisca. Don Davíd said she was a bruja. The family was quite ready to believe him. They had already gathered evidence that Francisca's spells, whether supernatural or sexual, had caused the murder of Nala's Tío Ignacio Rodriguez in 1917. Nala heard the tales over time from her Nana Leonarda. Nala's Tío Ignacio was quite macho and ruled his home. He worked hard and fathered nine children by the time he died at 41. Ignacio farmed along the Gila River in Redrock, about 12 miles upstream from San Antonio. On occasion, Ignacio would abruptly leave the fields, walk home and tell his wife, Tía Petra, that he had to leave. It was as though he were being summoned by some force. Tía Petra - Nana Leonarda and Tata Florentino's firstborn - would ask, ``What are you going to do over there?'' ``I just have to go. I'll be back,'' he'd reply, and off he would ride on horseback. There was a simple explanation. Tío Ignacio was having an affair with Francisca, who lived across the river from the Rodriguezes. Nana Leonarda believed that this was not the ordinary kind of bewitching. She had always suspected Francisca of being a bruja. Over the years, she related the evidence she had gathered to her granddaughter Nala. Nana Leonarda said a boy named Manuel, the son of a close friend, saw something strange while hunting in the desert near Redrock one day. Francisca was carrying a doll made of cloth. She pushed it through the thorns of a mesquite tree and ordered in a loud voice: ``Me traes a Ignacio. Me traes a Ignacio.'' (Bring me Ignacio.) Before nightfall, Ignacio had left for the other side of the river. The affair lasted quite some time. Then one day, Francisca's son learned about the affair. He confronted Ignacio and angrily ordered him not to see his mother anymore. The meetings did not stop. Then one day, Ignacio rode off abruptly but did not return. After three days, a worried Tía Petra went in search of her husband, taking her children with her. Tata Florentino went along. They found Ignacio's body, floating in the Gila River. Ignacio had large cuts on his head and back. The wounds came from an ax. Francisca's son was jailed for the murder. There had been earlier evidence of spells. Francisca always carried a box, about the size of a shoe box. She said it contained tobacco. One day, Don Juanito's brother Antonio Tellez and his wife, Rosa, who was Francisca's daughter, entered the home and saw that her mother had left behind her shoebox. She and Antonio decided to open it. They had never believed it contained tobacco, and they were right. It contained the evidence of Francisca's dabblings in the occult: dead, dried frogs and tiny cloth dolls punctured with numerous pins. Antonio was angered and, they say, that anger saved him from his mother-in-law. The rebellious ones, you see, are not harmed by daños, spells. Only kind, timid souls must beware. Antonio and Rosa had never wanted to believe those rumors about Rosa's mother. Now, though, they had evidence. Both wanted to burn the box and all its contents, but a neighbor warned that such an act would hurt the people represented by the dolls. Just then, Francisca walked in. ``Give me my box,'' Francisca demanded, glaring at Antonio. Antonio stood up, holding the box in his hands. He looked at his mother-in-law and said: ``Vieja bruja, no te vamos dar la caja.'' (Old witch, we are not going to give you the box.) Francisca fumed, but Antonio stood his ground. He and Rosa left with the box. They took the pins out of all the dolls, hoping to release people from the spells. They lighted a fire and tossed the box and its contents into the flames. No one knows what happened to the people the dolls represented. Antonio and Rosa just prayed that they did not die. The last piece of testimony came much later from Don Davíd, when he told Nana Leonarda that Francisca's spells were the source of Don Juanito's illness. He said Francisca had tried to put spells on Dolores, too. But my grandmother was not one of those timid, kindly people. The spells never worked on her.
The haunted house was the wooden house on the Sanders farm that the family lived in for three years before building their own home in 1932. At first Nala was scared to go to sleep in the house, as was the rest of the family. Nala recalls: ``Every night at 9, you could hear footsteps walking up the path to the front door of the house. You heard the front door open, someone walk in and close the door. ``You could hear the footsteps make their way into the kitchen. Cups and plates rattled, as though someone were getting dishes out of the cupboard to eat. ``The top of the stove rattled, as though someone were putting a pot or frying pan on the grill. Then you heard the footsteps walking to the back door, the door opening and closing, and the footsteps walking away from the house. ``All of us heard it. We were all in the house. We'd get scared, but all the grown-ups and the men were around. After about one month, we just got used to it. ``We'd be talking while Mama was sewing, and then we'd hear the footsteps making their way to the front door. None of us felt an evil presence or anything. It was just the noises.'' These days, Mama visits a doctor when she is ill. We are 80 years and 350 miles away from these tales of ghosts and brujas and curanderos. And so my mother says to me: ``Carmen, do you have to write this? People are going to think I'm really crazy. They are going to laugh at me.'' ``No, Mama, people are not going to laugh at you. There are things that happen in life, and some are explainable and some are not. It's OK. The stories are fascinating. People will like them. You'll see.'' ``Estas segura?'' (Are you sure?) she asks. ``Yes, Mama.''
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Ch. 1: Field of death
Ch. 18: The New Deal
Ch. 24: Cotton pickers and copper miners Ch. 27: The family doubles its size
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