Paco's Tales: This Is a Historical Novel of Forty Years of Texas History Seen Through the Eyes of a Mexican Orphan Boy: Book #1.

By James A. Broussard

Paco is a good kid in the BIG THICKET series of short stories. He is patterned after Laura Ingles in Little House on the Prairie, a TV show that lasted 9 years. Paco shows good morals and has an optimistic behavior; he has deep strong feelings and shows he cares by making himself useful.

Being raised from age 9 to 19 In Beaumont Texas where these stories are set and doing my homework about Texas has given me relative experience. I wrote from love of this area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469735528

James A. Broussard

Started writing short stories at 14 years old. At 13 I had gotten my ?rst bicycle paper route for the Enterprise and Journal in Beaumont Texas. This six year job helped me to write the Saga THE BIG THICKET. This showed me how to put down the thousands of short stories running through my head. At 19 I became an AIR FORCE POLICE, 4 years 6 months 22 days 1 hour and thirty minutes later I was given my honorable 214 discharge and walked. Five marriages later I’m selling my stories to buy a sailboat and really retire. Wish me luck.

Book preview

Paco’s Tales

Book 1

This is a

HISTORICAL NOVEL

of forty years of Texas history

seen through the eyes of

a Mexican orphan boy

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Paco’s Tales

Book 1

Copyright © 2012 James A. Broussard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-3551-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4697-3552-8 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 1/5/2012

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 1

Blasts of Sunshine: Our Hero Paco’s Story

Paco was an orphan in Beaumont, Texas. He showed up with his mom in 1810 as a newborn. She died a month later, and Paco was raised by the settlement of Beaumont, passing from a wet nurse to others as he grew older.

He had feelings that talked to him. These voices he heard were his alone and were there in his mind every day, telling him that he was angry or fearful, in pain or tearful. Yet he was in no way these or many other things. He was even told he was cold when he stood in hot sunshine at the time. These feelings came on quickly and left as fast in a flash of insight.

On the flip side was Paco’s identical twin, which was raised in Canada by a French family. The twins were separated at birth because their mother had no milk for them. Paco’s natural mother died the day after the twins came. Two nursing mothers who had enough milk each took one of the twins to wet-nurse. Each mother had a large family, and neither could take both twins. One went south in a flatboat to Beaumont, and the other left Canada seven years later and took a flatboat to New Orleans to live there. One twin, Paco, learned Spanish as his first language, while Jean La Mire spoke French. Each was the mirror image of the other.

Jean too had feelings the way Paco did and could not understand why he felt flashes of anger or fear or any number of feelings when he had no reason to. Both of them grew up with these feelings coming and going a dozen times a day. They learned that the flashes had no bearing on their real feelings, and they did not act any differently because of the jolts coming to them. To them it was normal; they did not know that other people experienced feelings differently. Both the boys learned to control the feelings by being calm for the few seconds it took for the feeling to pass.

It wasn’t until the twins turned seven years old that pictures flashed between them in a split second and then were gone. These pictures could not be held for study, nor were they like anything either boy knew around himself. When the feelings were stronger, the pictures flashed more times, but were still not clear.

The twins had been born of the same sperm from the father and the same egg from the mother. It was a one-in-a-million birth, and they were two of a kind. They shared a base of feelings, one experiencing the feeling directly and the other getting only flashes of his brother’s emotion.

The twins’ closeness enabled them to adjust easily to the ways of the rough people in nineteenth-century frontier towns. They both smiled a lot. One twin would be in a bind or a hurt, and the other twin would send him a flash of good feelings to counter the bad feeling. Both boys welcomed these good feelings that came as Blasts of Sunshine. Even in sleep, flashes of feeling flew from one to the other. It was not the same as talking to each other in words, but it was the next best thing.

Paco tried to find out who around him was the one sending these flashes. But nobody around Paco was affected by flashes, nor did he feel that the flashes coming to him were from anyone around him as far as he could see.

Then girls became important to the twins. By age twelve they both had girlfriends. By thirteen they were having sex regularly. But they would have it at different times during the day and flash each other the tingle of the sex. All in a flash they would be turned on, as if a switch had been flipped that said "Go for it now!" It was a good thing that the two boys were used to sleeping the same hours or the flashes would have awakened them.

Neither Paco nor Jean ever suspected he had a twin out there somewhere until a traveler heading west stopped in Beaumont and handed his horse over to Paco to take to the stables. Thanks, Jean, but how’d you beat me here from New Orleans? he asked.

Paco said, I haven’t been to New Orleans but once, and that was a year ago. Did I meet you there?

Sorry, young man, but you look enough alike to be a twin to a guy named Jean who stabled my horse four days ago at a plantation north of New Orleans called Matera Plantation. If you get out that way, go by and see for yourself what I’m talking about.

Paco nodded and went off to put the man’s horse in a stall. He gave the animal a bag of grain and then rubbed the horse down. He did not put much importance on the man’s words. People said all kinds of things just to get attention or to pretend to be a friend.

It was two months later that a lady walking up Main Street called him Jean as she waved. She came back later when Paco was still sweeping the boardwalk in front of the Epson Hotel, and she stopped. Paco addressed her in Spanish with a Good morning.

The lady frowned and said, I thought you were French, Jean.

Paco switched to English and asked her, Why would you think I am named Jean? I’m Paco.

Let me ask you—how did you come from New Orleans to Beaumont faster than we did?

Paco thought back to the man who had called him a twin and told the woman, Well, you must have seen my twin. Everyone has a twin somewhere.

Paco wondered about his twin, if he knew about Paco and if he got flashes of feelings like Paco got. When would Paco find out more? He started taking notice when friends were heading to New Orleans, and his curiosity grew as the flashes became more vivid and stronger. His twin was on his mind a lot.

Big Bob, a teamster Paco liked, offered him a round trip to New Orleans, knowing Paco would help make the trip better with his good company. The next morning, Paco was on his way on the big red wagon. This was the first of what became many trips Paco made to find his twin. But they kept missing each other. The two would always get Blasts of Sunshine from each other but never meet face to face.

CHAPTER 2

Paco’s Indian Days

Paco went through a period when he was as much an Indian as a Mexican or Anglo. His days were filled with visits to the bow maker and the medicine man, or to visit a sick or hurt Indian. Often he would eat the Indian foods, and he learned how they hunted and fished and how the foods were prepared. Paco went to the river banks to pick blackberries with the Alabama Indians. Many times he had the opportunity to drink a mug of berry wine the Indians made. This Indian tribe believed in the use of firewater in moderation, if at all. The chief gave out stiff punishments when a drunken Indian did not behave. The chief was the Indians’ law.

Paco wanted to become an Indian because whites worked all the time, whereas he saw Indians hunting and fishing. He’d had to spend too many days looking at the ass end of a cow or horse and saw Indian life as a fresh, new start at freedom-loving behavior.

What Paco did not realize was that the Indians worked as hard as any rancher just to scratch out a living. From hunting and gathering in the Big Thicket of pine woods in East Texas to wading through rivers, lakes, slues, and bayous with frog gigs, fishing poles, nets, or fish traps, every waking moment was spent trying to whack out a living from this harsh environment. Bugs and snakes ate a person up despite the bear grease the Indians used to cover arms, face, and legs. After many hours of wading, the grease would wash off and bugs would feast again on the exposed flesh. Winter never brought a deep freeze for very long, so it didn’t get rid of the bugs like the cold weather did up north. The bugs brought in birds to feast on them. Flocks of birds swarmed as well as bats that lived in hollow trees and barn lofts.

Paco soon went back to ranching. That was his change to having a tutor of formal education that slowly turned him back into an Anglo.

CHAPTER 3

Blu Menthal

Blu, Paco’s step father was a cowboy, a city slicker, and, in his later years, a politician. He was the kind of guy a person would pick to be his or her best friend. He was also Texas-born, half-Indian and half-gringo on his father’s side of the family.

Blu’s dad was a train track engineer. What that meant was he was in the crew that laid out the right of way for the railroads. He was the advance scout who found the river fords and the mountain passes, or the way across the plains that had the fewest washed-out places. The final decisions were always made by the men in camp, but without Blu’s father, the rails would have taken years longer to go west.

In 1796, Blu’s father was in Alabama starting out as a guide for the railroads when he met an Indian maid who was heading west to Louisiana with the Alabama Indians. Their eyes met in passing on the trail, and they smiled at each other. It was love at first sight.

The fifteen-year-old boy followed the sixteen-year-old girl for a week before he was permitted to talk to her. A month later he bought her for two months’ wages and a gold watch that had a compass built into the back. That was about double what most young men paid for an Indian wife in those times. Then they wed in an all-week feast given by the whole tribe.

Blu’s father lived with the Indians and his wife in Louisiana for years, where four of Blu’s brothers and sisters were born. But Blu was conceived on the banks of the Sabine River and born west of it in the Big Thicket of East Texas.

When Blu was born, there were only two small bands of Alabama Indians in Texas. There were dozens of bands of Tahas, Waco, and other Indians, but all of these tribes were quickly being decimated every time the white man’s sicknesses passed through. Most native Texas Indians moved south to central Mexico or blended into other tribes until they disappeared altogether.

Texas was where most American outlaws went to avoid the law. Half the Anglo population consisted of these rough, crude, dangerous men and women, who had no respect for man or beast. The outlaws swept through the Indian camps, taking children from five