Young children sometimes have a tendency to develop protection mechanisms when their lives are in turmoil. The techniques they employ can range anywhere from inventing a guardian, to denying their unpleasant, unhealthy environment exists, to turning the turmoil around them inward. As a child of eight, I developed constant stomach pain. At one point I invented a guardian figure, although my imaginary guardian was material and he was a real person. He came into my life after two years of my family being homeless off and on, sometimes living in the car when the weather wouldn’t allow us to sleep out on the ground. We would have a rented home for a month or so, but then we inevitably found ourselves on the move again every few months. My mother claimed our nomadic life was due to my father’s alcoholism.
One spring day in the early 50s my family was told a farm in Chino Arizona was hiring a farm hand. As we drove down a dirt lane lined with alfalfa fields on both sides, Daddy stopped the car and turned to me and my two brothers sitting in the back seat. We were hungry, to say the least. At some point when my mother left my three brothers in the car as she went in search of work as a waitress, she handed me three Hershey bars with the instructions that we were not to eat them until our stomachs hurt so bad we couldn’t bear it. My three brothers and I sat in the car for three days, waiting for Mama to reappear, as we nibbled on those Hershey bars now and then when we were so famished I felt we should eat the grass growing beside the car. Mama had left me with a baby bottle, a container of water, a bottle of Karo syrup, and Carnation canned milk as formula for my youngest brother who was not yet a year old. It was so cool as we sat there that there was no need to refrigerate the canned milk to prevent it from spoiling. I don’t know how long it was after Mama reappeared that we were heading to the farm with alfalfa spread like a deep green carpet to either side of us.
“How about an alfalfa sandwich,” Daddy asked jokingly as he plucked a fistful of the sweet smelling vegetation that grew beside the car on the other side of the barbed wire fence. I had no idea what alfalfa was, but I was game. I was hungry enough to eat anything and popped the alfalfa into my mouth. It tasted sweet as I chewed it, but not quite what I felt would quell the rumbling ache in my stomach. Daddy apologized for making such a lame joke before we headed down the road to the farm house where Daddy was hired.
The farm’s owner allowed Mama and Daddy and my baby brother to sleep in a small building he’d used as a hatchery, which wasn’t in use as such at that point. It was too small, Mama claimed, to accomodate all of us, so the farmer allowed us to clean an abandoned chicken coop as sleeping quarters for my two younger brothers and me. We scrubbed and bleached the entire wire enclosed coop with a strong solution, scraping the chicken manure from the concrete floor with a square shovel before scrubbing and bleaching it as well. We scrubbed every inch of the coop, from the ceiling to the walls and floor.
Shortly after we moved into the coop, my sixteen-year-old sister who was newly divorced and expecting her first child came to live with us, as well as did my sister that was three years older than I. The grandson of the couple that owned the next farm became enamored with my sixteen-year-old sister, and he began frequently appearing with groceries when we had little food. He never failed to bring candy for my brothers and me as well, and I soon saw him as my knight in shining armor. He was a cowboy and a magnificent silversmith. He was a Korean Conflict veteran with a metal plate in his forehead, the result of a traumatic head injury in battle. I was eight, and my guardian was twenty-seven, eleven years my older sister’s senior. Although he was enamored by her, she wasn’t exactly impressed with him, even though he tried his best to wheedle his way into her heart.
My cowboy guardian was a kind, gentle man that touched my heart at a time when I needed a friend most. I am loyal to my memories of my friend. I truly believe God brings people into our lives when we need them most. Years later when I told my mother that I felt our cowboy friend was my guardian, she sarcastically proclaimed that he was nothing more than a worthless alcoholic (she worded it a bit more harshly); so much for appreciation.
I received a visit from my friend when I was eighteen, shortly before I left home on my own. I hadn’t seen him since I was eight. My mother was less than kind to him, as he sat on the floor and described his life as a cowboy over the previous ten years.
As a tribute to my memories of that cowboy silversmith, who came into my life when I needed human kindness the most, I developed my main character for my Joaquin trilogy around my feelings of fondness for this gentle, kind, caring man. To my knowledge, my friend wasn’t part Indian, even though my main character in the Joaquin trilogy is. My guardian, my cowboy friend from my youth, would truthfully rather sit on the floor than in a chair, and he claimed he preferred sleeping on the floor as well. He claimed it was because he had spent so much of his life on the Arizona desert, rounding cattle and living the simple life of a cowboy. Hence, the character of Joaquin; my main character of Joaquin, unlike the man my mother described my cowboy friend to be, is a non-drinker.
