The Criminal and Me, by O.B. Howell

By O.B. Hollow

In early 1972, when I was almost 19 and my parents were divorcing, I chose to live with

my father. He was a man who loved everyone unconditionally, but was passive beyond all reason. He had never managed, and hardly tried, to subdue his paranoid, unpredictable Italian wife. Our attractive West Texas home was a prison and she was warden. Rage and violence were the tools of her demons; so, no one was safe, not him, not me or my sisters, and not anyone who might unwittingly come to call. Perhaps because in the 50’s and 60’s a father was very unlikely to get custody of three little girls, my father endured – always present, but never intervening.

As we had each turned 18, we were allowed only “coke dates” with anyone willing to brave the warden’s blatant cruelty about how they dressed or spoke. We were too embarrassed to have visitors; school and little parttime jobs were our places of refuge – there we were valued and respected.

As a young woman, I was naïve, but knew a few things for sure. I would find a way out and never again witness her abuse; I was willing to harm her to protect myself, or someone I loved; and, because I knew what a bad wife looked like, I would someday be a good wife. What a bad man might look like was unknown to me.

My eldest sister, the closest thing I had to what a mother should be, had died tragically three years earlier. Without her good counsel, I was adrift at sea. Even living with Dad, I just wanted to be free and as far from my mother’s domination as possible. The same town was not far enough.

Other things happened in, or had happened prior to, the year 1972 that would matter to me very soon:

Research showed that untreated, abused children tend to find partners who will continue the abuse they have come to expect, and might believe they deserve;

Serious discussion of the concept of “informed consent” before a medical procedure was just beginning;

Medical doctors allowed husbands to give consent for a fully conscious and competent wife’s procedures;

Police officers could do little or nothing about threats of, or actual, domestic violence;

In October, a young female Texas attorney argued Roe v. Wade before the US Supreme Court, with a 7-2 opinion legalizing abortion handed down in January 1973; and,

A high school friend of my eldest sister needed a female singer for his country band. So, in the summer of 1972, with only the chance to leave West Texas and make my way alone, and no one to stop me, I fled to New Mexico, to sing and make what I thought was real money.

When December came, I announced plans to marry Marco.

“You sound like such a nice girl. Please don’t marry my son.” His mother’s voice over the pay phone was so kind through the heavy Italian accent. I would surprise her, I thought. I would be a good wife and everything would be as it should. I ignored her warning and when I met her in person, I was her son’s wife.

My parents and I believed everything: He had owned a building contractor business in Louisville, where his mother lived; he had attended M.I.T. (a university we knew nothing about); and, he would build us a home to start our new life together.

As it turned out, we spent the first few months of our marriage at his mother’s home. I loved her but was thrilled when she politely told us to leave. Clearly, she believed he would not earn his own living unless forced to. He told me he could find work in Tucson and there we headed.

What I learned from his mother was that Marco had spent many days as a child tied to a tree. Nadia had come to New Mexico as a very young woman with a new husband and a child on the way, only to find that her husband had another wife and family. She had no child support, no ability to speak English, one child after the next because of his random visits, and no option of abortion. Her sole support was working two jobs as a small town waitress. She felt she had no choice, and with the agreement of the local sheriff, Marco, her oldest child, was physically restrained in order to prevent the serious mischief he caused otherwise.

Within weeks of our time in Tucson, I realized I had married my mother. Nothing I did was right – the way I dressed, the way I walked, the way I talked. Verbal abuse became physical abuse. Even in my sleep I was punched in the face. “I dreamed I was fighting,” he would say.

His days away from the concretefloored, sad house became longer and longer, until he was arriving in the night, drunk and crying, begging forgiveness for losing money at billiards. I was determined to be so good for him that everything would change. Every morning I was up early to cook his breakfast, draw his bath, iron his clothes, and send him off like June Cleaver, then walk as far as I could walk, in hopes of finding my own job.

“You should beat her if you need to,” pronounced my mother when she surprised us with a visit on a hot day in summer. “You’re her husband now, Marco.” I recall them laughing together, conversing as if I weren’t there.

I finally turned to my father. In a letter, I described how miserable I was, how I detested sex. I hoped he would call, thinking over the phone it would be easier to say how fearful I was, how rough Marco was. But my father was not a man to discuss sex with anyone.

He sent flowers, and broke my heart.

What I needed, Marco and a male doctor decided together, was a female circumcision. I did not understand then that this was a form of genital mutilation. Needless to say, it made no difference; sex was painful and unwelcome.

The violence continued to escalate.

One lovely day as Marco was driving, he suddenly slammed on the brakes and his right hand flew across my face, dislocating my jaw. “I saw that! I saw you looking at that man!”

“What man?”

“That black man on the sidewalk! I know you want to be with him!”

He reached across me, opened the passenger door, and tried to push me. The car was still moving at a good speed but I was able to struggle against falling out.

With my first attempt at leaving, Marco caught up with me and I was lifted off the ground by the seat of my jeans as I came out of the bank. I had withdrawn exactly half of our balance. I managed to loosen myself from

Continued on page 10

his grip and run toward the street. I approached a group of construction workers screaming for help. They shook their heads, looked at their steel-toed boots, and turned away.

Then I flagged a passing police officer. He heard my story and followed me to where Marco stood, then directed me to the back seat of our El Camino, telling Marco to drive home and he would follow. There, he told us to sit down. I had no history with anything remotely similar, certainly not with “good old boy” scenarios, but Marco smirked. The officer smiled at Marco, advised him to be a good husband, and turned to me, saying what Marco did in our home was a private affair, marital business, not government business.

Within weeks I learned I was pregnant and tried again to leave. This time, in desperation, I called my mother. That same day, she called saying she had paid for my flight to Houston and I needed to be at the airport right away. When I arrived at the Continental Airlines counter, I was barefoot and had spaghetti sauce on my yellow T-shirt, not your typical passenger. Airline agents were able to make their own decisions in those days. They ushered me over the baggage scale and into the baggage storage area, out of sight. I made it to Houston where my mother expected me. Where else could I have gone?

She told me she had arranged an appointment with a gynecologist the next day. She and I discussed the now legal option of an abortion. I thought I would receive information from the doctor and would then make a decision, but that’s not how it happened. Shortly after what I told myself was merely a pelvic exam, the doctor told me the abortion had been performed. I would not need to return. Sometimes I feel relief that I didn’t make the decision myself, other times I suppose I need to admit that I did. But every October since that October, I think of a child who might have been. And, I wonder whether I could have protected him or her.

I’d like to say the story ends there, but there were more apologies and more pleas. He had nothing to say about losing our child and I guessed I was not the first woman to abort his child.

“I am moving to Austin to go to college. You will have to buy me a car, make a living, and let me focus on my education,” I made clear. And, he did make a living, by filing what I imagined was a false claim for Workman’s Comp against his Arizona employer. Then, he spent his time on the sofa watching television.

It took Marco shoving the refrigerator at me, then slapping a flat hand against my ear, to get my attention for the last time. I spent days with hearing loss in one ear, not knowing whether it would return. I began to secretly pack every dish and pan into boxes and hide them in the one place I knew he would never find them, in the kitchen cabinets he had never opened.

So, on the sofa watching television is where he was when my dad and stepmother arrived one Saturday. They were ready to take me and the boxes I had hidden. Marco was completely befuddled, unwilling to show his true nature to my family and shocked that there was nothing he could do. I last saw him sitting in the over-stuffed chair he had spent close to every moment of the last six months in.

It was a glorious plan. I had just finished my semester at the University of Texas and now I was on my way to ditch the trailer at a family member’s home in San Antonio and head with my dad and kind step-mother to their destination – a week at the Texas coast! More clearly than anything else, I remember my euphoria. I was barely 21 and it was over. Finally, and completely, it was over.

Streets of Mexico

By David Ellison

Teresa Urrea

She was the Mexican Joan of Arc.

In 1889, when she was 16 years old, Teresa Urrea suffered an acute case of catalepsy, which left her in a death-like coma for nearly two weeks. When she recovered in an apparently miraculous resurrection, she claimed that she’d had heavenly visions and that the Virgin Mary had given her the power to heal.

Word spread and thousands made pilgrimage to her Sinaloan town of Cábora to see Teresa and possibly to experience a miraculous cure. Many claimed they did. Soon they were calling her a saint.

Even church officials were initially impressed, reporting that Teresa was “always friendly with the sick, especially with the poor, without ever getting angry, demonstrating an exemplary humility. A heroic, she is without rest from dawn until sometimes late at night, and caters patiently and personally with the angry, touching with her hands the most nasty sores, making her bed alongside some patients who suffered from infectious diseases such as phthisis, lazarinos (leprosy), and others.”

Healing the sick was one thing. Speaking out against the church and the government was quite another. Teresa did, giving sermons dealing not just with love, but with equality and justice. She urged her mostly native crowds to pray directly to God, and not to rely on priests allied with the dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who had stolen their land.

Accounts differ regarding whether Teresa actually encouraged revolution; but, regardless, she at least inadvertently incited violent uprisings throughout the northern states of Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Sonora. For example, crying “¡Viva La Santa de Cábora!” (“Long live the Saint of Cábora!), the citizens of Tomóchic, Chihuahua, declared their independence, and then were massacred by an overwhelming government army (the unfortunate fate for many of St. Teresa’s zealots). Teresa was subsequently expelled from Mexico.

Teresa continued her folk healing and fiery sermons in the United States, and eventually opened a dispensary in Clifton, Arizona, for Mexican and Black miners who suffered from horrific diseases like tuberculosis. She, herself, succumbed to it, dying at the young age of 33.

This is a selection from Ellison’s forthcoming book, Niños Héroes: The Fascinating Stories Behind Mexican Street Names.

Abundant Joy

We have had our hillside home here overlooking Lake Chapala for twen-

ty-one magical years. It is hard to explain to someone how special it is here, unless you can show them in person. I once had a visitor who exclaimed upon first seeing the view of the lake from the mountain, “Tina Turner on the Riviera!” I’d say if my life quality approaches Tina Turner’s, I am at a pinnacle.

My husband took me to Lake Como in Italy many years ago. We stayed in what we heard was one of the finest hotels in the area. Famous people hold their weddings there. We went down to the terrace on the water, and I looked across the lake, then walked to the water’s edge. I looked up and down the water, off to the distance. I walked back to sit with my husband and order our exorbitantly priced drinks, expensive enough to give one pause. “I hate to tell you this, Honey, now that you spent all this money to get us here, but Lake Chapala puts this place to shame.”

The Chapala area has a special feeling to it. First, there is the perfect climate and verdant beauty of nature here, birds flitting constantly, breezes tickling one’s face. Perhaps it comes from the warmth and kindness of the people who inhabit the area. They take care to see that you get where you need to go, and obtain services you may need. Often they go out of their way to help you if you have a problem.

Recently we experienced our first flat tire. My husband was delighted when he found a spare tire, though it was temporary and small, hidden under a plastic screw-on cover. Our male guest, a tall gentleman approaching sixty, and my husband began the task of replacing the flat. They gave it a valiant effort! Twenty minutes passed and our guys were not having success removing the tight bolts holding the flat tire in place. Off to our right, I watched a flat-bed truck filled with young people enjoying beers at the week’s end. They were observing the gringos go about their project, as though it were a play for their entertainment. My girlfriend and I stood off to the side, the evening breezes blowing our dresses, not helping the situation, but acting as diligent observers.

Suddenly a muscle-bound young man, maybe twenty-eight years old, hopped off the back of the truck and sauntered confidently over to our area. “What’s happening?,” asked my female friend. “Superman is here,” I responded.

The young man offered in Spanish to help. Our men accepted readily, and he dropped down into what I’d call a plank position, his muscles rippling. A quick confirmation that the jack was in place and he effortlessly removed all the bolts in about two minutes, changed the tire, and replaced the bolts. He wiped his hands of dirt and oil as he stood and wished us a good evening. We offered dinero in gratitude and he adamantly refused, wishing us a safe departure. His friends whistled and applauded as their hero returned. I explained to my friend that things like this happen all the time in Mexico.

Our years here are filled with what I call “Mexico moments,” where people help you, or improvise a seemingly impossible task, clearing up problems you thought were hopeless.

There is also another aspect to these past decades that can’t go unmentioned. When we first arrived, we were invited to attend local events. Some involved helping animals, some helped the population in need, some injected music and the culture of Mexico into our lives. We jumped to attend the gatherings, not realizing the positive effects they would have on our lives. The people who are active in charitable and cultural activities are socially magnetic. They are talented and care about others. They want to give back to this community that gives such peace and happiness to their lives. In the end, one builds a circle of friends that enriches life immeasurably.

If we had stayed at home, gazing lovingly at the lake, we would never have had the opportunity to learn the inner happiness that comes from relationship building in a diverse community. We are afforded the joy of a village full of care, and the peaceful, karmic circle that ensues.

Katina Pontikes