Sterling Bennett

Who knows where stories come from. My novel Comandante Ibarra, the first book in a trilogy of three love stories, was about a Mexican rural policeman, or as they say in Spanish a Rural. He had had had a stroke from which he had mostly recovered. But it changed his thinking about the Mexican constitution of 1857 which had not granted many rights to the Yaqui Indians of the Mexican State of Sonora just below Arizona.

For hundreds of years the Spanish crown and then the governments of Sonora in Mexico had been trying to wipe out the Yaquis and take their rich farmlands and water for themselves. And they are still at it, the state and the federal governments. Then a few years passed and I began a sequel to the second novel in the trilogy: Playing for Pancho Villa, called Himari Likes Water. Frank Holloway, the protagonist from Playing for Pancho Villa, returns from WW1 gassed and wounded. Again, he rides down into the Mexican State of Chihuahua to recover in the mountains he loves. There he suffers a stroke and topples off his mare Himari. He falls in with a fifteen-old girl who has fled from her abusive father’s circus train. A train that also carries war surplus French 75mm cannons which he sells to factions in the ongoing Mexican Civil War. The girl Fátima escapes with her best friends, a camel and a white Bengal Tiger. Fátima is damaged, but so is Frank. He hopes to dump them. She helps him cope with his stroke and war damage while looking for a good father. It is 1920 when this strange family finds its way through ancient Apache land to Mogollon , New Mexico and the silver mine his father runs and where Frank’s extraordinary wife Rosa Marta waits for him. Not too much later after starting this novel, my fourth, I the author suffered a stroke here in Guanajuato, Mexico in 2020, 100 years after protagonist Frank Holloway and some 120 years after protagonist Comandante Ibarra.