If my father hadn't died in 1987, he'd be 103.

He grew up in a French Canadian immigrant neighborhood in a Northeastern mill town where the houses were made out of wood, the mills were made out of granite and the neighborhoods were full of people who lived on nickels. The neighborhoods were dominated by huge, ornate Catholic churches. The people who lived in the wooden houses and worked in the granite mills paid for the churches with some of the nickels.

People routinely had 10 or 12 children. My grandmother was pregnant 13 times. Seven of her children lived to be adults.

And there was a woman.

I'll let my father talk now.

"They said her mother was an Indian up in Quebec, and she learned how to make medicines from her.

"This woman used to go out in the swamp behind her house, and she'd pick all these plants and leaves, and she used them to make medicine.

"When one of us got sick, and it wouldn't go away, my mother would send one of us boys to see that woman, and you'd tell her what was wrong, and she'd give you a little cheesecloth bag with herbs in it.

"The directions you got with the medicine always said to make tea with the bag of herbs, like it was a tea bag, but to use hot whiskey to make it instead of hot water," my father said. "My mother used to make you drink it so hot you could barely swallow it.

"No matter what she gave you the medicine for, it made you sweat. Then you soiled yourself at both ends, and then you'd sleep," my father said.

"I don't know if you did all that because of the herbs or because you were 7 and you'd just had a triple shot of the moonshine they sold during Prohibition," my father said.

My father was a bartender when I was a kid. He remembered very clearly that it was a triple shot.

"Did it make you feel better?" I asked him.

"It was tough to tell," he said. "You were 7, and you had a hangover."

"It wasn't the only business that woman did," Pop said.

"She used to help out women," he said. "I don't think she used herbs for that. I heard she used a hatpin for that. I guess she knew where you put it."

My father was married for 30 years, until he died. I've been married for 13 years. Neither one of us would ever know where you put the hatpin. Neither one of us ever had to know.

"The priest used to cross the street when he saw that woman coming," Pop said.

"People had a lot of kids back then," Pop said. "It's like they didn't know what was causing it.

"And some women, they didn't want any more, and the husband wasn't what you'd call 'understanding,' so this woman, she helped them out.

"I'll tell you, though," Pop said. "She wouldn't do the job for single women or prostitutes. It was just to help out the married women."

My father's neighborhood was drenched in religion. People knelt on their living room floors and said the rosary each night. Not a child went unbaptized.

But some matters are older than Christianity, and some trouble was around long before that agonized, bloody figure hung from the cross on Golgotha, his eyes shining with mercy.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.