Back home in Preston, New Mexico where I grew up, there was a man named Elias P. Jones. Today, folks refer to him as the “Prodigal of Preston” but Elias wasn’t really a prodigal, at least not in the strictly biblical sense. He never went anywhere from which he had to come back, unless you count Vietnam, which doesn’t at all line up with the biblical story because Vietnam was anything but “riotous living.” He lived his entire life in Preston where he did live riotously, but then, you could also say that he was raised riotously too, so it wasn’t a departure for him to continue living that way. No, the “prodigal” label doesn’t fit Elias, but his life was noteworthy for its peculiarity.
As I said, Elias never left Preston, New Mexico for any reason other than the war. Elias claimed to be an Apache, and said that his blood was tied to Preston, New Mexico, the land of his people. We always wondered if that were true. His mother certainly had Apache blood in her, and she had relatives that lived out on the reservation, but, since Elias looked nothing like his mother, and no father ever showed, we always thought that he must have been an adoption of some sort. He could have been born out on the reservation, which would explain his lack of a birth certificate, a fact that almost kept him out of the army, but Uncle Sam was pretty desperate for soldiers in the sixties, and looked the other way. Elias wasn’t naturally athletic, but his chest was as wide as the broadside of a destroyer, and Uncle Sam liked big, strong boys. He was the pack horse in his platoon, the guy who carried all the excess explosives and ammunition. He told us that they called him “Eli the Bomb” since at any given time he was usually carrying enough ordinance to destroy the entire platoon. When he got back from the war, he grew his raven hair out long and wore it in a loose ponytail, not because he wanted to look like a hippy, but because he thought it made him look more like an Indian brave. He was always like that, making light of things that most of us stuffy people thought should have been serious. He always said that the war hadn’t changed him, and indeed, he did act like the same carefree guy we had always known, but there was one sign that hinted at something deeper: he began to drink.
Now, by “he drank” I don’t just mean he that he consumed alcoholic beverages as a natural part of his life. I don’t just mean that he enjoyed drinking on weekends, or with his friends. I don’t just mean he was an alcoholic. By “he drank” I mean that was what he was known for. That was what he did. Constantly. He drank everything: whiskey, beer, wine, Jack Daniels, Budweiser, vodka, mojitos, tequila… I don’t think I know enough drinks to cover them all. He drank morning, noon, and night. There was no “happy hour” for Elias P. Jones – any time of the day was happy hour. He worked long hours in the mines or the factory, and later as a farm hand when he was down on his luck, and it seemed that every minute he wasn’t working was consumed with alcohol. He was always drunk, getting drunk, or recovering from being drunk. To Elias Jones, life was one long hangover.
He wasn’t a bad drunk. He didn’t get violent or angry, he didn’t beat his kids or wife, and he didn’t wantonly destroy property like many of the drunks we had in Preston (I guess we were known for them at one time). On the contrary, Elias was pleasurable when he was drunk. He got really goofy and even more friendly than he normally was. He used to walk through the streets singing everything from Bob Dylan to Bill Gaither with anyone who would join in. He got clumsy and was always tripping over himself, but when you would laugh at him, he wouldn’t get angry like other drunks. Instead it encouraged him to act even goofier, with no concern for his health. There was a time when he tripped walking down the steps of Willardson’s and did a perfect somersault. It was so funny that he kept trying it over and over to see if he could do it again (he couldn’t). He ended up black and blue all over, and was so sore in the morning that he couldn’t get out of bed to go to work. No, Elias Jones wasn’t a “bad drunk” but his drinking certainly hurt himself and his family. They were always moving from place to place because they couldn’t pay rent or mortgage due to him wasting all their money. It wasn’t just the god-awful amount he spent on liquor, but also the extensive property damage that he caused. There was the time when he got behind the wheel of his faded, but still blue 1969 Camaro drunk as a skunk and drove it all the way through the courthouse door. Twice he backed up into Jeremiah Stackhouse’s antique 1930 Packard 734 Speedster Runabout and had to pay for the damage. Another time he accidentally threw a brick through Madame Broussard’s Antique Gallery and destroyed a grandfather clock from the 1600’s. But his most infamous incident was when he and Rick Adams, a fellow factory worker, drove through the construction site for the new city hall and took out all the supports for the new bell tower. They brought the entire structure including the bell down around their heads. The firefighters had to dig them out. Luckily, they both survived with only minor wounds, but that didn’t save them from having to pay for the new bell, which cost more than a year’s worth of salary apiece. As always, Elias was quick to volunteer to pay for the damage, but both he and the city council knew that he didn’t have the money, nor would he ever have it. Elias did eventually give them quite a bit of money towards it, but I don’t think he ever paid it all back.
Around the time of the bell tower incident, Elias’s wife Brandy (see, he really did love alcohol) decided that she’d had enough and threw him out. Elias didn’t argue, because he didn’t blame her; he just packed a bag and moved in with Rick Adams. Only his youngest daughter, little Margie, the only child born after the war, seemed sad to see him go. His two older children, Bekah and Donnie, were already teens by that time and had learned to despise him. Elias continued to work in the factory, but also continued to pay child support to his wife for their kids. And he continued to drink, spiraling farther and farther down into the dark abyss of the bottle.
It was the summer of 1981 when the weird stuff began to happen. A big, burly preacher and his tiny wife who went by the names of the Reverend Joseph and Sister Emily Donahoe showed up in a dusty, cream-colored station wagon with a massive tent folded in the back end and started up an old-time camp-meeting. They set up in an abandoned field on Diane Ave. on the outskirts of town and stayed there for about two weeks. It wasn’t a really popular meeting, not like those old camp-meetings that you hear about from the early days of the century that drew hundreds every day for months. I think they might’ve had a hundred people there on the biggest night, but most of the nights didn’t see more than fifty or sixty attendees. But that isn’t the weird part. The weird part was that they had a camp-meeting in the first place. I mean, those sorts of spontaneous meetings didn’t happen anymore, and hadn’t happened for years. In 1981 everyone went to his or her own church, and it was in a building, once a week, at the same time every week. People didn’t have church in a field, nor did they have church every day. It just wasn’t the way things were done.
Most of the local churches disapproved of the meeting and didn’t attend. Some actively tried to hinder the meeting. The Methodist church refused to allow the Rev. Donahoe to use their outdoor meeting space behind their church, as did the Presbyterians and the Baptists. The pastor of the local Foursquare Gospel Church even went to the city council meeting and unsuccessfully tried to get them to shut the meeting down. Many people in the city were rude to the Donahoe’s, and the rest shunned them in passing. But despite the attitude of the majority of the city, the camp-meeting survived, mostly on the support of the lowest level of its citizens: the bums, the hell-raisers, the druggies, the alcoholics, and Elias P. Jones. The only reason Elias went was because Rick Adams got turned-on by a woman he met in the DMV. She was going to the camp-meeting and Rick went to impress her with his mostly non-existent piety; he guilt-tripped Elias into coming along to serve as his wingman. Rick never went back after that one night (the woman saw right through his charade), but Elias stayed.
None of us who knew Elias knows for sure what happened in that camp-meeting. There was a lot of screaming, hollering, and whooping that went on, and rumors abounded of strange babbling and wild dancing. “Just another drunk Indian hoedown,” many people said, “it will die down before the end of the week, when the derelicts run out of liquor money.” Many of those people were right – the meeting only lasted for two weeks, mainly because the Donahoe’s didn’t have the funds to continue. Late one Friday night, they packed up their tent and disappeared. The next morning, the city workers went out and cleaned up the field so it was like they’d never existed. But Elias P. Jones was never the same after that meeting. What he told us was that God had changed him, that he’d been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, and that he’d spoken in tongues “because the Holy Ghost had given him the utterance.” Now, most of the citizens of Preston had heard of the unique experience of speaking in tongues; Aimee Semple McPherson herself had come to Preston once in the twenties and had started the Foursquare Gospel Church, which had originally been known for speaking in tongues. People generally thought that it was all a load of hogwash, and when Elias told them that he’d been changed by the Holy Ghost, they smiled behind his back, and when they said, “only a God-honest miracle could’ve change Elias P. Jones,” what they meant was that nothing could change Elias P. Jones.
But the coming months proved that Elias Jones had changed, first and foremost in that he stopped drinking. Cold-turkey. There was no struggle, no withdrawal, no period of temptation, and no relapse. He just simply stopped. His drinking buddies would invite him to go drink and he would politely decline, saying that the grace of God had delivered him, and he couldn’t go back to what he had been before. They would laugh and tease him, berate and scorn him, but eventually they grew to respect his decision when he continued to refuse them. He would go to the grocery store and Bill the grocer would have his alcohol ready for him behind the counter, but he would refuse it, politely saying that his paycheck was no longer his own to waste. Bill would stare, stutter, babble, and then awkwardly ring-up the rest of his purchases, but eventually he stopped bringing it up. People on the streets, would attempt to pass Elias on the opposite side of the street, expecting him to yell an obscene greeting to them, but were shocked when he would shout “God bless you,” instead. The cops would slow down as they passed his now beat-up Camaro, expecting him to stagger out with a bottle in hand, but instead he would emerge with a Bible. It seemed as if an honest-to-God miracle had occurred in the life of Elias Jones.
His spontaneous sobriety wasn’t the only change in his life. Because he wasn’t constantly hungover, he was able to keep his job at the factory, which he began to work with a new passion and contentment. His on-site foreman, and eventually the superintendent both took notice, and he received a promotion that he never would have gotten before. His wild behavior became nonexistent and his reputation around Preston began to rise. No longer was he seen as an uncouth, unreliable, troublemaker, but as a hard-working, faithful, honorable man. It seemed that at first, the citizens wanted to be proved right that Elias’s change had been temporary, and that he would soon fall back into decadence, but as the months passed and he continued to behave, they began to quietly root for him in their hearts. Even his wife took notice, and eventually invited him to move back in with her after another year. She never regretted her decision. Elias’s change had extended to his treatment of their relationship, and instead of inconsistent and detached, she found him faithful and devoted.
However, despite Elias’ miraculous change, the strangest part of his story is what happened afterwards. Mainly, his life went to hell, and for no apparent reason, which is strange, because most people will tell you that when you find Jesus, all your problems will be solved and everything becomes fine and dandy, and full of love, peace, and happiness. But not for Elias. About eighteen months after his miraculous conversion, he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Not liver cancer, which would have made more sense since he’d been such a terrible alcoholic, but a completely unrelated intestinal cancer. He went in for a routine physical and came out with a cancer diagnosis. To make matters worse, the factory where he had been faithfully working shut down weeks after his diagnosis, and he could only get intermittent work over the next few years until he finally got a stable job managing a Kroger’s Supermarket. His wife had to go back to work as a receptionist, in order to help pay for his medical bills. To her credit, she was more loyal to him after his conversion than she had ever been before, and selflessly took care of him. But the rest of his family wasn’t so forgiving. Seventeen-year-old Bekah didn’t agree with her mother’s decision to take him back, and she was only partially successful in suppressing her feelings. She made no effort to repair her relationship with her father, and, soon after graduating, she moved to Albuquerque to work her way through college. Donnie outright hated his father. He was, perhaps, the most hurt by his father’s drunken behavior and by his mother’s initial decision to throw him out, so when she accepted him back, his puberty-stricken emotions couldn’t cope. He lived in open rebellion to his parents for a year, and then ran-off with some friends the day after his sixteenth birthday, hours after receiving his driver’s license. He eventually made his way to California, where he found nothing but pain, rejection, and early fatherhood, but decided to stay. He refused to even contact his family for almost two years, and then it was only to speak to his mother, never his father. Donnie’s hatred hurt Elias the most, for he knew that on some level he deserved it. But little Margie, who was only nine at the time Elias returned, loved her father unconditionally, and between her and Brandy, Elias received more love than he knew he deserved.
Elias’ woes weren’t short-lived. His battle with cancer was slow and torturous, and he eventually lost it twenty years later. The doctors caught it early, but for some reason they could never completely eradicate it from his body. He went through chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and just about every new drug that modern science invented between 1981 and the turn of the millennium, but none of them were able to cure him. He went through some good times, when the cancer’s effect on his life was minimal, and it even went into remission for a short time in the early nineties, but it always came back. His job situation was adequate at best, and at worst, he and his family had to move onto the reservation for a couple of months with his relatives. Bekah and Donnie continued to shun him, nearly breaking his heart, though he blamed himself for their loss. Yet Elias remained as positive and as joyful as ever. Many people expected him to return to the bottle after his diagnosis, and by the time his children left and he lost his job, they all would have forgiven him for returning to his old ways. But he, Brandy, and Margie continued to stay positive, and continued to attend church services at a little Pentecostal mission that popped-up a couple years after the camp-meeting of 1981. Despite all the doctor’s visits, the interviews, and the late nights, Elias remained as steadfast after his conversion as he had been unfaithful before his conversion.
One time I asked Elias how he could stay so joyful when the world around him was falling apart. I had just run into him when he was coming out of Dr. Hampton’s office, and found out that he had received a particularly negative report on his cancer. Yet, he had greeted me so warmly and cheerfully, that I just had to ask. I’ll never forget his response.
“Clarence,” he said, as he looked past my shoulder into the distance, “everybody got to pay the ferryman, whether in this life, or in the next. Now, I’ve done a lot of wicked things in this life, and by the grace of God, I found a way to escape the punishment I deserve in the next life. But everybody still got to pay the ferryman. All this stuff that’s happening to me is a result of my heathen days that are long gone. I think you can admit that I deserve some of it, and even what I don’t deserve, is still just the cost of living on planet Earth. But thank God this is only for a short time. Someday soon I’ll be crossing that river Jordan into that beautiful city where Jesus is waiting for me. So you see, the reason I’m so joyful during all this mess is because I’m paying for all my sins in this life, so that I don’t have to pay in the next.”
He inquired about my family and went on his way, but I stood there for several minutes thinking about what he’d said. It didn’t make any sense to me then, and it still doesn’t make sense to me now, but I can look at his life and get at least a glimmer of understanding. His life didn’t really improve any; in fact, at the end, his body had been so wracked with cancer that the doctors couldn’t even do treatments anymore, even if he would’ve allowed them to (which he didn’t). The end of his life was the end of a tough, weary journey, but you wouldn’t have known it by how he passed. When he died on September 13, 2003 he had reconciled with his kids, and had enough money saved up to take care of his wife and give a good offering to his church. Both Bekah and Donnie reconciled with him before he passed, and little Margie, who had grown into a beautiful, caring, highly successful young woman, had blessed him with two grandchildren already. According to his wife, he died peacefully, with a wide smile on his face, without a mentioning a single regret (except that he never got to compare conversions stories with Johnny Cash, his favorite singer, who had died the day before).
It still baffles me, how he lived so fully on so little. Because I’ve known people with ten times what he had, who didn’t live a tenth as fully as he did. Certainly Elias P. Jones was a man that no one wanted to be, with a life that no one wanted to live. But I think there are millions of people out there who would love to have the peace he had at his death. That is a curious case indeed.
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