by Rilla Askew
“Might could.” Deputy Beecham unlocked the cell door. “We generally get a few takers along about time the Hartshorne bars close.” He shut the cell door behind Brown, relocked it. Garcia watched from his cement bunk, his round, shiny face expectant. This was the first time either of them had been let out since Sunday. Brown waited for the deputy to leave. When the steel outer door clanged closed, he sat on the second bunk—a poured concrete slab jutting from the cinder block. Everything here was designed to be easily hosed down. “That was Sweet come to see me,” he said.
Garcia’s face showed his surprise. “The sheriff will allow visitors in the week?”
“Arvin Holloway does things just however he wants to.”
“This is true.” Garcia studied his friend’s lowered gaze, his creased frown. “How is your boy doing?”
“Not real great, Sweet said. But then Sweet tends to the hysterical.” Brown began scraping one laceless work boot back and forth on the cement floor. “Tell you what, amigo,” he said after a moment, “this standing mute is a lot harder than it looks.”
“This also is true.”
Early on that first night a redheaded kid from Clayton had leaned toward them from his steel bunk. “Pssst, dudes,” the kid said. “When that judge asks how you plead? Keep your mouths shut.” The kid had canted his eyes around the cell to see if anybody was listening; he was doing a two-year bid for possession. He fancied himself a pretty shrewd jailhouse lawyer. “Standing mute, they call it,” the kid said. “You’re like telling them this is bullshit, see? The charge is bogus. These proceedings ain’t legit.” At once Jesús Garcia and Bob Brown had looked at each other. Was this not evidence of the Master’s hand? Jailed for violating an un-Christian law and already, hardly an hour into their jailing, they’d been given a quiet Christian way to make a stand. The Lord speaks in many ways, through many people. Might he not speak through a young drug dealer in a jail cell as well as anyone else?
Later, after they’d been moved here to the drunk tank, the two men had knelt on the cold floor and made their prayerful vow: they would bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things, in surrender to the Father’s will in this matter. Plus, they would follow the advice of the redheaded kid from Clayton. So far they’d had no reason to doubt.
“Dustin will be all right,” Brown said. “I told Sweet to bring him up here and let me talk to him.”
“The sheriff will allow this as well?”
“I don’t know.” Brown stared at the floor. After a moment he added, “That prelim’s sure looking a mighty ways away, ain’t it? What is it? Ten more days?”
“Fifteen.”
This, then, had been their plan: to stand mute to the charges and remain jailed until the preliminary hearing as a way to deny the legitimacy of that law—the redheaded kid from Clayton had explained this all to them, although he’d used coarser words—and meanwhile the outside attention would gather. If they pleaded Not Guilty at the arraignment, bonded out, went home to fight the law with lawyers and all the regular ways, well, what kind of attention would that get? Neither of them were political men, but you didn’t have to be political to know that jailing a Pentecostal pastor and a Christian white man would make some news. And Bob Brown had had enough run-ins with the law as a young man to know that if a fellow couldn’t make bail, well, there in the jailhouse you sat. It had come as a complete surprise to him in the courtroom when the judge started to release him. He’d gone on staring at the judge in silence, not because the idea of a contempt charge had occurred to him, but because he’d set out to stand mute and hadn’t figured out what to do next.
But then, it had worked, hadn’t it? More evidence of the Lord’s hand. They’d been remanded to custody—Brown on the contempt charge and Garcia until the court could come up with a translator for a new arraignment hearing—and already the publicity was starting to build. Hadn’t he just heard there was a reporter outside talking to Holloway this minute? Things were working together for good, just the way the Lord promised, because he and Garcia had aimed all along to stay in jail, and Arvin Holloway wanted it that way, and now, as a matter of fact, so did District Attorney Tom Waters. Each man had his reasons—the D.A.’s, political; Brown’s and Garcia’s, principled; and Sheriff Arvin Holloway, as Brown told himself, so he could keep his fat nose in the public eye to show off.
So. Two more weeks until the preliminary, Brown thought. Dustin could hold on that long. After that, they would see what the hand of the Lord would do. Maybe He’d throw the law to the courts, hang it up there. This was the suggestion of Garcia’s church friends in Texas. Or maybe He would send them a high-powered attorney to help them fight it. They had discussed the different possibilities.
That law. Even before the sheriff’s raid last Friday, Bob Brown had despised it, although he’d understood almost nothing about what it contained. But from the day it took effect last November he had seen the growing fear, in the Heavener church services, among the busboys and wait staff at La Abuelita. And then came that night just before Thanksgiving when his granddaughter called, sobbing so hard on the phone she couldn’t get the words out: her husband had been taken. Brown remembered standing in the kitchen, trembling, the phone pressed tight to his ear, all the pain and grief and rage in his granddaughter’s voice pouring through the line, and him powerless to do one thing in this world to stop it or fix it. Looking back, Brown knew that was the moment that changed things. “This ain’t right, Lord,” he’d whispered after he hung up. “You know it ain’t. Somebody’s got to do something!”
Well, and he’d have done something himself, if he’d had any notion of what to do, or how. There was nothing he could do for Juanito now, even if he’d had the kind of money it takes to pay an immigration lawyer. About all the help he could think of to offer Misty Dawn was to send a little money order now and then, whenever he could scrape together a few bucks. He’d griped pretty loudly about the new law to some of the local men sitting around drinking coffee in the snack bar at the E-Z Mart, but that was sure enough spitting in the wind. Useless. Helpless. Bob Brown had done nothing but fume and pray and wait on the Lord Jesus to do something.
Which He did. Of course He did. No mistaking the Lord’s hand when He sets it in motion, Brown believed. And so that blustery winter evening, a little over a week ago, when his friend the Pentecostal pastor Jesús Garcia drove over from Heavener to ask for his help, Bob Brown hadn’t hesitated. “Sure thing,” he’d said. “Bring them on over. You reckon you could get hold of some cots? Maybe a few extra blankets?” The pastor nodded. “I think it will be only a few nights,” he said. “Possibly two or three. But perhaps you will want to pray about this first? Because this new law, you know, it makes harsh penalties to anyone sheltering undocumented workers.”
No, Brown had not known that. He knew it now. He definitely knew it now. The image seared through him: Dustin coming down the back steps, the deputy’s hand clamped on his shoulder. “Unh,” Brown grunted aloud. Abruptly he pushed himself up from the bunk, walked the few steps to the thick glass block that served as a window. The glass was set deep in the wall and frosted opaque, the view further obscured by four thick steel bars embedded in the cinder block on this side. Still, Brown stood squinting at the murky square as if he could see through it. “Dustin’s a good boy,” he murmured. “He’ll do all right.”
“Maybe you could pay the fine and be released,” Garcia offered gently. “We have been here five days now. Perhaps this is all the Lord asks.”
Brown shook his head. “You know Holloway’s liking all this attention too much. It’s not going to be that easy now.” He turned from the window and began to pace the small perimeter of the cell again. After a few turns he stopped, stood with his hands gripping the bars, staring at the empty hallway, then he reversed direction, walked the square counterclockwise.
In silence, the pastor watched him. The two men were as
different in their temperaments as they were different, in some ways, in their faith: both were born-again believers, both prayed aloud to the Father in the name of the Son. But Bob Brown talked constantly in his mind to the Son Jesus, while Jesús Garcia communed in silence with the Holy Spirit. He’d been raised a Catholic in Texas, but he had come to his true faith in a great ecstatic surrender at the age of thirty-one. Baptized once in water at a tiny storefront Pentecostal church in Waco, he’d been baptized many times since in the gifts of the Spirit. This was the source of his peace.
Their first night here, as they’d sat on the floor next to the foul urinal singing hymns and praying, Bob Brown had remained agitated, fidgety. A dozen times he’d gotten up to make his way around the crowded cell, drawing the jeering attention of the young men, but Garcia had sat serenely. If an earthquake had come along at midnight to shake open the cell doors, as happened for Paul and Silas at Philippi, he would not have been surprised. Signs and wonders continue unto this day, the pastor knew that. The fact that the people had been in Brown’s barn in the first place, that was the first sign. How else explain why Garcia himself had been warned that the raid was coming? Not the raid by the deputies on Brown’s barn, but the first one, by la migra, on the poultry plant in Heavener.
More than a week ago he’d received a phone call from a white Methodist minister in Oklahoma City, a prayerful man whose secretary’s brother’s first cousin happened to work on the cleaning crew that serviced the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in the capital city. And so when ICE agents stormed A-OK Foods in Heavener last Thursday, they’d found the processing plant running at half capacity, utilizing a skeleton crew, and when they checked the green cards of the remaining workers, they found them all in order. The manager had blustered a confused story about workers having been laid off “due to a sudden nationwide reduction in demand for chicken parts,” and meanwhile, the undocumented workers were already safe in Brown’s barn—safe, that is, until the county sheriff and his men pushed their way inside Friday night.
Garcia’s heart was gripped for a moment, remembering the khaki-clad men with their loud voices and freckled hands, how they’d brandished their pistols, corralling the people, prodding them into the two waiting vans—even the pregnant girl, her large belly telling the men to take care, but they did not. Yet even in this Pastor Jesús Garcia could see the workings of the Holy Spirit. Not the manhandling! No. That would be the work of the Devil, manifested, he believed, in the bullying, bellowing person of the county sheriff. But it could not have been coincidence that the people had been kept safe from la migra in Heavener only to be taken by local officials from Brown’s barn.
No simple coincidence that Garcia himself happened also to be there—running late, yes, a flat tire on an unpaved back road, the long wait for a stranger to come along with a tire jack to help him, because the pastor had loaned his own jack away. Then the bumpy drive to Cedar, more than an hour, so that Garcia arrived not in the late afternoon to make arrangements to move the people from Bob Brown’s barn, as he had planned to do, but well after dark. The sheriff and his men poured into the barnyard only a few moments later. And so, Jesús Garcia believed, their arrest and jailing, his and Brown’s, must be because the Holy Spirit willed it. And why would that be but that they were to serve as the public faces to test this new law that struck such fear and separated families? Bob Brown’s face because his was white. Jesús Garcia’s face because his was not.
Brown’s gritty voice broke the silence. “ ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God,’ ” he quoted the apostle.
“ ‘To them who are the called according to His purpose,” Garcia completed the verse in his Spanish-tinged accent. Brown returned to the cement bunk and sat scraping his boot against the concrete floor. After a moment Garcia said, “If you decide to go, my friend, this would be all right. Don’t you think? Much has already been accomplished.”
“Such as what?” Bob Brown asked.
A good question, though not one the pastor could readily answer.
Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 8:20 A.M.
Sweet’s house | Cedar
Sweet slammed in the house, said not one word to the boys eating cold cereal in front of the television. If Terry wanted their son grounded for fist-fighting, he could blame well do it himself. She went straight to her room and took a shower, standing in the cramped stall sobbing while the water pounded down. She didn’t care anymore. She did not give a damn! She wrapped up in her robe and sat in the front room watching cartoons with the kids, and she did not call the school to set up a parent-teacher conference, or even to find out how long they were going to be suspended, and she did not call the preacher to tell him Mr. Bledsoe’s surgery was scheduled for eight o’clock tomorrow morning so he could get the prayer chain going, and she did not, especially did not, try to reach her husband on his cell phone. Instead she fixed the boys peanut butter crackers and instant oatmeal and tried not to think about the empty room down the hall or what she’d said to that reporter.
She told herself she wasn’t going to watch, but when noon rolled around, she picked up the remote and switched channels, told her whining son he could like it or lump it, y’all go play in the bedroom; then she sat in her husband’s chair, gnawing her cuticles through the newscaster’s cheerful promise of freezing rain in the forecast, plus details on the latest Tulsa shooting, and then, boom, there was Arvin Holloway in his felt Stetson hat with his big nose and his drawly voice making it sound like he was the only thing standing between law-abiding Americans and the masses of river-swimming hordes, which was just stupid—how many Mexicans lived in Oklahoma even before that law? Not many. And now there were less. Then the camera’s eye swung toward a redheaded woman sneaking past with her jean jacket buttoned crooked. It took Sweet a second to recognize herself. God. She looked like Reba McEntire on a bad hair day. “Miss Brown,” the reporter chirped, “is it true your father intends to serve as a test case for House Bill 1830?” Sweet’s face scowled on the screen. That moment had felt like an eternity when it happened, but on the clip it only lasted a second before she turned and walked away. The reporter hurried around in front, thrusting out the microphone. “How does it feel as his daughter to be at the vortex of this contentious issue?” Sweet remembered that part, remembered trying to walk on around her; she didn’t remember batting her hand at the microphone like that. The reporter’s bubbly voice babbled on: “Some have indicated there may be a personal element at work here for your father. Would you care to comment?”
On the screen the person who was at once herself and not herself stopped. She glared at the reporter. “Hell, yes, it’s personal!” she snapped. “My daddy’s a born-again Christian, he takes that personally! Is that what you mean?” The reporter was young, she was pretty, but she was good. She segued without a blink right to the next question: “So you’re saying your father is part of the new evangelical sanctuary movement?” “I’m not saying anything! My daddy’s got a conviction in his heart! That is all. End of story.” Sweet started again to walk away. “Your father’s arrest is unrelated, then, to a family member being deported?” the young woman called after her. How do they know about that? she remembered thinking. And then: Don’t you dare make this seem small! On the screen Sweet whirled, jabbed her finger in the woman’s face. “This is about my daddy’s faith! Can’t you people get that? He’s doing what Jesus said to do—unlike some other so-called Christians in this county I could name!” Then, as if things weren’t bad enough, the camera showed her backside as she stomped away. Lord, she’d had no idea her jeans were that tight. A quick cut to the beaming reporter: “As you can see, Glenda, this case is provoking high emotions here in southeastern Oklahoma. Live from the Latimer County Courthouse in Wilburton, Logan Morgan, 2News Working for You.”
Later, Sweet would blame it on that bubbly reporter and her questions, plus the phone call afterward, nosy old Claudi
e Ott wanting to know if Sweet had seen the twelve o’clock news. “My stars,” Claudie said, “we never had even one person from this town on the Tulsa news, much less two—you and Arvin! I wisht my boy Leon had been here to see it. But they’ll run it again at five, don’t you reckon?” Sweet stood in the kitchen thinking, yes, more than likely they would run it again at five, and then it wouldn’t be just a handful of stay-at-home busybodies but the whole blamed town who would see it. Especially after Claudie Ott got done calling. Sweet threw on some sweatpants, told the boys she was going to the store and she’d better not hear one peep about them fighting. If they behaved themselves, she said, she’d bring them a treat. Then she left the house, but she didn’t turn west on the highway toward Roy’s Cardinal Food Store in Wilburton; she turned east, toward the Poteau Walmart. A thirty-mile drive. She needed to clear her head, she told herself. She needed to shop economically for her family.
What she really needed, what she wanted, was to escape. If she could have, she’d have just kept going, on around the Poteau bypass to Fort Smith and hopped on I-40, headed east to Memphis, to Nashville, to . . . she’d never been past Nashville, she didn’t even know what was out there, but she wanted to go there, go anywhere, just keep going and not have to think back to the drive home from the hospital last night, how she’d found herself humming a praise-and-worship song behind the wheel—humming! rejoicing!—because the surgeon had told her that Mr. Bledsoe couldn’t come home, he would have to go to a rehab facility after the surgery. How she’d picked up the boys from the preacher’s sweet-faced wife with barely a thank you and sent them off to bed without mentioning what they’d been through that day—finding the old man splayed and bawling with pain in the hall; that was the preacher’s word, splayed, she could only imagine what that looked like—just so she could sit in the front room and flick through the channels over and over, waiting for Terry to get home. The terrible gaping black feeling like maybe he wasn’t coming home again, ever, and worse: the silent hope that he would stay gone. Because how was she going to tell him? What would she say? She couldn’t come up with any non-self-incriminating way to start the conversation, and so the minute she heard his truck out front she had snapped off the TV and rushed to the bedroom, crawled under the covers, pretending to be asleep, pretending all was well, all was normal, no need for him to walk back to the rear bedroom and see the empty bed, the turned-over wheelchair, his stepgrandfather gone.
