Several authors are coming out with stories based on three songs by Marty Robbins: El Paso, Faleena and El Paso City. The story titles will be: "El Paso - author's name" e.g. "El Paso – Jake Rivers"
This is a follow on to our first "invitational" in the fall of 2006 with entries based on the Statler Brother's song, "This Bed of Rose's." If there is continuing support we might make this a regularly semi-annual event.
Thanks to Copperbutterfly for her editing work.
It was a hard country, this central part of the relatively new state of New Mexico. The terrain was rough, hilly, cut from centuries of flash floods and baking sun. Vegetation was sparse, filled with cacti, saw grass, and creosote brush. The few trees that grew in areas where their roots could find any moisture at all were mostly mesquite, scrawny little trees that provided little shade and only crooked little branches coated with hard inch-long thorns, or scraggly little crooked juniper trees.
Yet it seemed like the land of promise to 'Nando Gonzalez and his wife, Reena. Both of them had come from large families of poor Mexican dirt farmers who tried to scratch out a living in the arid sands of the state of Chihuahua. At least here they were able to stake out land of their own, to put down roots for a family of their own, rather than share everything with so many other family members. Here was a chance at independence for the young couple, something that Mexico did not offer them.
With little in the way of natural resources for building, 'Nando had dug into the hard dirt, excavating a space large enough to create a two-room dugout house, with a thatched room covered with layers of dirt to take advantage of the lower temperatures below the surface of the scorched earth.
In the meantime, Reena had hacked out a little space for a garden so that she could grow some vegetables for their meals. As she carefully planted seeds brought with loving care from their former home, Reena drew and carried water from their well and nurtured the seeds.
Their water source started out as a seep from a rocky outcrop behind the dugout; 'Nando had carefully dug out a well a few feet from the seep, having to excavate nearly 25 feet before he hit a fairly steady stream of cool water. It took days of tortous work to prepare a concrete-like mixture and lower it bucket by bucket while he packed the walls of the well to keep it from caving in.
That first year, most of their food came from the results of 'Nando's hunting trips into the surrounding area. He felt lucky when he found the occasional white-tailed deer and brought it back for Reena to smoke. More often than not, the fare consisted of one of the areas abundant jack rabbits, tough but life-sustaining.
It was a tough life but not without its rewards. 'Nando and Reena both felt a deep sense of accomplishment in making their own way and that only deepened their love for each other. Tired from the day-after-day backbreaking work that lasted from sunup to sundown, they still found time for each other in the evening hours. So it was no surprise to either of them when, in the early fall of their first year together, Reena informed 'Nando that she was with child.
The following June on a night filled with lightning and desert thunder, Reena delivered their first child, a beautiful baby girl that they agreed to call Faleena. She was the apple of her daddy's eye and the love child of her parents' union. As it turned out, Faleena was just the first of a large family; she would have four brothers and three sisters in the next fourteen years.
Even as a toddler, Faleena became used to the hard life of her parents. She went with her mother to tend to the crops during the growing season. Her mother taught her how to carefully distribute the precious seeds into the rows behind her hoe as she worked the dry soil. 'Nando provided Faleena with a double-bladed hoe of her own when she was only half as tall as the hoe handle; yet she learned to wield it well enough to keep the weeds down around the young plants.
Faleena was put in charge of the scrawny chickens, providing feed to supplement what they could scrounge from the countryside as well as gathering eggs every morning. It didn't take but one accident with the egg basket for her to learn to be careful lest she and her family go hungry when the eggs spilled on the ground.
When 'Nando brought home a deer from a successful hunt or butchered the occasional longhorn, Faleena learned how to tan the hides, scraping them free of the excess meat and fat, working the hide into soft leather that she then watched her mother fashion into clothes for family members. Perhaps hardest of all was cutting the meat into strips and jerking it to keep it from spoiling.
Late summers and early falls were filled with harvesting corn and beans. The corn had to be shucked and silked, then dried so that the kernels could be scraped from the cobs and stored for the winter; Reena would later grind the corn into meal for tortillas. The beans were shelled and dried and became the basic staple of the family's diet. Every one of the little ones learned how to help with these chores as soon as they could hold bean pods.
Generally every third winter, when the harvest was in and work slackened off somewhat, 'Nando and Reena packed their little ones into an old buckboard wagon hitched behind a pair of mules and headed south through the sprawl of El Paso, across the Rio Grande, through Tiajuana and into Chihuahua to visit their respective families. It was always fun for all of the family to spend time with their relatives but, for Faleena, the big attraction was the city of El Paso. She had never seen so many people, wearing such bright clothing.
Riding through the streets of town, they could hear the sound of music from the plethora of saloons and raucous laughter from the inhabitants, both male and female. Shops abounded like she had never, ever pictured could exist anywhere. People walked on boardwalks all over town as if they never had work to do. Instead of scrambling everyday to make a living like Faleena's family did, those people seemed to be happy and without a care in the world. On the trip during her twelfth year, Faleena vowed that one day she would be just like them.
