THE SKULL IN THE ROAD
An Hispanic
Folktale
Heard in childhood in Texas and
retold by Richard
Alan Young
PART ONE
To the mountains of the Sierra Madre the lure of silver and gold drew miners of many languages... anglos, hispanos, Irish, Germans. From the peaks of southwestern Mexico, northward through the Chisos and Guadalupe Mountains in Texas, and up into the snow-covered ranges of Colorado, men hunted their Fortune with a pick and shovel. Many of those men never returned home...they fell down mine shafts, or were killed by Indians on whose hunting grounds they trespassed, or were murdered for their nuggets of shining metal by other miners. A traveller on a lonely mountain path was not surprized if he saw parts of an old human skeleton uncovered by the spring rains.
To see a skull lying in the road did not strike fear into a traveller's heart. But if he stepped over the skull, walked on down the path, and looked back to see the skull sitting right behind him, staring at him with hollow eyeholes...then he was afraid.
Legend says there was a skull that did this!
If you saw it and walked on past it -- twenty steps or more -- and turned around: there it sat, right behind you, looking up, asking its wordless question. The only way to escape the skull was to run off the path and through the rocks; the thing did not follow you there!
One day a young man named Juan was walking along such a mountain path, going from his hidden diggings to his humble hut. He came around a corner and saw a skull lying in the middle of the road, its hollow eyeholes toward him. Juan stood still as a stone for a moment, staring at the skull, wondering if it would follow him if he walked by.
Suddenly, to prevent the skull from following him, he stepped forward and gave the skull a hard kick. The skull flew through the air, but struck a dirt embankment and rolled back to the center of the trail, where it sat with its hollow eyes toward him.
Juan strode up to the skull, and put his fists on his hips, looking down at it.
"Don Calavera*(1)," he said, "how rude of you to stare at me!"
Out of the skull came a voice like the roar of a distant mountain waterfall: "How rude of you...Don Juan...to kick me for no reason."
Juan stumbled backward in fear, dropping his pack and walking stick. There was a moment of silence...the silence found only in the high mountains...then Juan spoke again, more politely.
"A thousand pardons, Don Calavera, I did not know what a wise and able skull you were. I offer my apology for kicking you. Please allow me to make amends. Please come to my jacal*(2) for supper this evening."
The sun was sinking low. Juan tipped his hat, picked up his pack and walking stick, and strode past the skull, never looking back. Surely a skull could not travel so far as Juan's tree-limb hut by suppertime, nor could a skull with no jawbone eat much supper anyway. When he was a mile down the path, he finally looked back. The skull had not followed him and he let out a laugh of relief.
In an hour, Juan had almost forgotten his unnatural conversation on the trail. He sat at his rough-sawn little table and watched a venison stew boil in a pot over the fire. >From the darkness outside came a hollow call that echoed off the cliff face:
"Aló-o-o-o."*(3)
Juan froze with fear. Not a living soul had ever come to call on him in his little jacal before this night. Nor on this night either, it seemed.
Trembling, Juan called back weakly, "Pase."*(4)
CONTINUED ON STORY OF THE MONTH
