by Rilla Askew
CEDAR FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
“WHERE IT FEELS LIKE HOME”
SUNDAY SCHOOL 10:00
MORNING WORSHIP 11:00
PASTOR OREN DUDLEY
That little clip alone set the tone for much of the coverage, as Logan Morgan would also point out to her supervisor, not to mention netting the station a tidy sum in network usage fees. She would find it necessary to remind her boss of these helpful facts in order to counteract the considerable criticism she received for reporting the events in Cedar, repeatedly, live and on air, as “a Mexican standoff.” But, of course, all that came later.
Inside the church nursery Sweet and the kids were eating peanut butter and crackers and drinking cherry Kool-Aid left over from Children’s Church. Inside the parsonage, Vicki Dudley was at the bedroom window, holding her youngest child, Micah, and wiping his face with a damp rag, as she peered out. Carl Albert stood next to her. “What are they doing?” the boy said.
“Well. That’s a good question.”
“Are they fixing to shoot Brother Oren?”
“No. No, it’s just a . . . demonstration. Why don’t you go watch cartoons with Isaiah?”
“I want to go where my mom is. The sheriff said he was bringing me to see my mom.”
“Well, she’ll be out in a minute, she’s just—hey, quit that! I mean, please don’t put your sticky hands on the curtain. How about you go in the bathroom and wash up?”
“They’re gonna get a divorce,” Carl said, wiping his grape-jellied hands on his yellow T-shirt. “My dad told me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, on account of my mom murdered Mr. Bledsoe.”
There was a moment of complete silence in the parsonage bedroom. After a beat, Vicki Dudley said again, “I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked down, trying to figure where such a bizarre notion had come from. A good-looking, round-faced kid with a close-cropped burr and lots of freckles, the boy watched out the window with careful hazel eyes. “You reckon Dustin’s dead, too?” he said.
“No, son.” Her heart went out to him. “I’m sure your cousin’s fine. Don’t worry. They’ll find him.”
“He took my bike. And something else, too. That belongs to Brother Oren.”
“What?” Vicki said, meaning, What did you say?, but the boy took her literally.
“Something I found in the glove box. I was going to give it back, but Dustin stoled it. You reckon if he’s dead, I’ll get my bike back?”
“He’s not dead, Carl. Nobody’s dead.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bledsoe is. My daddy told me.”
Micah was squirming in her arms and starting to squall. Vicki Dudley took a deep breath. “I think we ought to all go in the living room and watch cartoons.”
“What’s Lon Jones and them doing?”
Vicki pressed her face to the window so she could take in the whole vista. She saw the five local men all moving in a slow wave toward the church porch, and the two deputies shuffling their feet uncertainly across from them on the sidewalk. She saw a dark-haired girl standing in the back of Floyd Ollie’s pickup with her phone stuck out to take pictures. She saw the WMU ladies and several others in front of Fellowship Hall begin to lock arms, elbow to elbow, and she realized that her husband, standing in the middle without a coat on, his eyes closed, his two arms holding the Bible tight to his chest, was praying. This is getting serious, she thought. “Come on, Carl,” she said. “It’s almost time for SpongeBob.”
But the boy suddenly grabbed the windowsill and leaned forward to see farther down the street. Then he shouted, “Daddy!,” and raced out of the bedroom, and she heard the front door slam. By the time she plopped Micah into his walker in the living room and grabbed her husband’s windbreaker from the hall closet and threatened Isaiah within an inch of his life to behave himself and got out the front door, Terry Kirkendall was climbing out of his truck parked cockeyed in the middle of the street. His little boy ran up to him, then halted abruptly, stood mannishly a moment with his hands poked into his back pockets. Then the two turned and made their way between the cars with the same cowboy stride.
“I GOT NO QUARREL WITH YOU PEOPLE!” the sheriff was bellowing.
The faces of the men on the church porch were dead serious, Lonnie Jones and Wade Free and the others. That’s strange to see, the preacher’s wife thought. Lon Jones was generally just so good-natured, a big smiler, he kept the crowds laughing with his jokes when he auctioneered the Mason pie suppers. At that point Vicki Dudley realized that the men on the church porch were all Masons. Well, except there was one Mason not on the porch. Kenneth Spears. That old priss, Vicki thought. He and two other men were loitering between the two groups, not too close to Holloway and his deputies, but not standing with their pastor, either. Terry Kirkendall pushed his way through the crowd. “Holloway, what the hell is this? Where’s Sweet?”
But the sheriff’s attention was entirely focused across the yard. “GET OUT OF THE WAY AND LET ME TALK TO MY WITNESS! Y’ALL DO THAT, WE CAN FORGET ALL ABOUT THIS!”
“ ‘Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses!’ ” Oren called back, having run out of welcome-the-stranger verses, “ ‘Let us lay aside the sin which doth so easily beset us!’ ”
“I’LL SIN YOU IN A MINUTE!”
“ ‘And run with patience the race that is set for us! Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith!’ ”
Well, that did it for about nine more Christians. Two men and three women and four teenagers all crossed the yard to go stand with the preacher. Not all of them were members at First Baptist, Vicki noted, but they were certainly all local churchgoers, all anxious to be looking to Jesus the author and finisher of their faith. Three more townsmen made their way up onto the porch to join the Masons. The sheriff’s face was boiled as a beet as he hollered through the bullhorn, “QUIT! QUIT! Y’ALL QUIT!” He’s going to fool around and shoot somebody, Vicki thought. She came down off the parsonage porch and started across the yard, but the slick navy windbreaker she was holding didn’t have the same white flag effect that the Bible had. The sheriff hollered at her to stay right where she was.
“I just wanted to give Oren his jacket.”
“Get back up on that porch before I have my men arrest you!”
Vicki Dudley looked across to her husband. The brief gaze that passed between them contained a lengthy conversation: “Go back in the house, honey.” “I’m not going to let you do this alone.” “I’m not alone, the Lord’s with me, and also these good folks here.” “I’m coming over there.” “No. You’ve got to stay and look after the boys.” A pause. A heartbeat. Vicki retreated to the high parsonage porch, though she did not yet go in the house. She stood awhile wondering to herself, Why are they all doing this? Well, Bob Brown’s a Mason, so that might account for the Masons, but what about everyone else? They couldn’t know the whole story, that long complicated tale Georgia Kirkendall had just unraveled in the nursery. How could they even know who was in the nursery, who the preacher was protecting inside the church? Or why Oren was doing this? They didn’t know, she decided, couldn’t know—and yet they’d made that choice.
Brushing cracker crumbs off the front of the plaid bathrobe, Misty Dawn said, “This isn’t a whole lot better than that godawful coal mine.”
Sweet cut her a look.
“Well, it isn’t! I mean, it’s still cold, and you can’t see out, and we haven’t got much to eat. The only improvement I can see is electricity.”
“You’re free to go.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“No, I mean it. You and your husband are welcome to waltz right on out of here and turn yourselves in. That would save everybody a whole lot of trouble.”
Her niece hushed. “I don’t know,” Sweet said softly after a moment. “Maybe that�
��s the only thing to do, Misty. I mean, how are we going to get out of this? Arvin Holloway’s not going to just walk away. I know the man. At some point he’s going to bully his way in here, and then what? We’re probably just making things worse.”
“Worse than Lucha not seeing her daddy for twenty years? Let’s just go! We can sneak out that back door the lady was talking about—”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know! Go to Fort Smith.”
“This town has got like five streets, Misty. We’re not going to go sneaking along on foot without somebody seeing! We got no car, remember? And anyhow that door leads out to the other side of the church, not the back. All the sheriff or anybody would have to do is take about ten steps to the left and they’ll see us.”
“Well, we got to do something!”
The stridency in Misty’s voice caused Lucha to start crying again. She toddled over to her mother’s knee and leaned her face down on the wide blue-jeaned thigh, wailing. Sweet raised her voice over the noise. “See? You think we’re going to sneak this crying baby through town? That is not going to work, Misty. Nothing’s going to work!”
Then she heard Terry’s voice outside on the street, coming over the loudspeaker:
“GEORGIA, IT’S ME. COME ON OUT NOW.”
There was a pause as if he was waiting for her to answer.
“I DIDN’T MEAN WHAT I SAID. I KNOW IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.”
“What’s he talking about?” Misty said. “Don’t believe him. It’s a trick.”
Sweet was standing at the nursery door.
“COME OUTSIDE AND WE’LL TALK THINGS OVER, OKAY? SWEET? HONEY? EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE FINE! I PROMISE. NOBODY’S GOING TO PRESS CHARGES!”
Sheriff Arvin Holloway glared at that fool Terry Kirkendall. How the hell did he get hold of the bullhorn? The sheriff had been paying too blamed much attention to that arrogant preacher and his bunch across the yard; it hadn’t occurred to him to just go over their heads and communicate directly with the suspect herself. Or witness. Or whatever the hell she was going to end up being. He snatched the bullhorn out of Kirkendall’s fist.
“LISTEN HERE TO ME, SWEET! YOU GOT TWO MINUTES TO SEND THAT ILLEGAL ALIEN OUT WITH HIS HANDS UP OR I’M COMING IN THERE WITH A SWAT TEAM!”
That wasn’t exactly what he’d meant to say, but it seemed a stroke of brilliance once the words were blurted out. Whatever this bunch of do-gooders believed they were doing, Arvin Holloway thought, harboring illegal aliens was no part of it. They would turn on that smart-aleck preacher right quick, he promised himself.
But Arvin Holloway was wrong—just as Vicki Dudley, standing on the parsonage porch a moment earlier, had been wrong. The men and women barricading the church doors did know there was a Mexican man inside. Claudie Ott’s early pronouncements had seen to that. In fact, there was hardly an adult person present who didn’t know, via whispers and text messages and phone calls and plain talk, about the man in the church nursery—although the rumors about who he was and why he was here seemed varied and contradictory. Most folks assumed he was one of those shy, quiet busboys from La Abuelita in Wilburton. Others thought he might be a Heavener chicken plant worker who had somehow escaped the raid on Brown’s farm. He obviously hadn’t come from Cedar itself, because Cedar didn’t have any Mexicans, or any other sort of minority residents for that matter, except Choctaws, who, since most of the white people in town claimed Indian blood whether they had it or not, weren’t considered a minority.
There were rumors that the man belonged to that really good roofing crew out of Panola, and some even got it correct straight off—that he was Bob Brown’s granddaughter’s husband who had been, according to news reports, deported last fall. The main unity to the rumors was how they all had the Mexican man qualifying as a stranger according to the preacher’s texts, but one with a local connection. He was an alien all right, but he was somehow their own alien. What turned out to be even more varied and elusive and in the end unpredictable was what each person thought he or she personally, as witness or citizen or civic leader or neighbor or deputy or deacon or American or Christian, ought to do about it.
The observer who got that part mostly right was the enterprising young reporter Logan Morgan filming from the back of Floyd Ollie’s pickup. Or in any case, she was the one who came closest to grasping what most of the people standing with Oren Dudley understood themselves to be doing:
“As the evangelical sanctuary movement takes hold here in southeastern Oklahoma,” she murmured softly into her iPhone, “these born-again Christians have allied themselves with their pastor.” Panning slowly to the right, she zoomed in on the perspiring face of the preacher. “Who appears,” she narrated as quietly and reverently as a TV golf announcer, “to have offered sanctuary to one or more illegal aliens sequestered inside the First Baptist Church in this small town with a population of five hundred and eighty-one.” She’d just googled the last census stats. Easing the phone around, she captured the sheriff and his megaphone. Her battery was alarmingly low. “Another local man,” she went on in her hushed tone, “Robert John Brown, was arrested two weeks ago for harboring illegal aliens, by Sheriff Arvin A. Holloway, seen here in this riveting Mexican standoff. Brown is currently being held without bond in the Latimer County Jail on state felony charges.” Worried that the battery would soon cut her off, she turned the phone around to film her own face, signing off soberly, “Live from Main Street in Cedar, Oklahoma, Logan Morgan, 2News Working for You.” It was then that she spied, with great relief, the Channel 2 news van wheeling off the highway and racing toward the church. Her camera crew.
She scrambled down from the truck just as Kenneth Spears and the two men with him moved from the neutral territory in the middle of the yard over to stand behind the sheriff, clearly aligning themselves with the rule of law. Several other citizens joined them. Then a few more witnesses walked over to join the ones lined up with the pastor. Then Kenneth Spears, gesturing around toward the back side of the church, spoke secretively to the sheriff, who leaned over and gave a quiet order in Darrel Beecham’s ear. Before Logan Morgan could get her crew set up, the deputy was making an effort to sneak around to the small obscure door in the far southwest corner of the old building. But Deputy Beecham was far too large to sneak. Two of the Masons, Floyd Ollie and Wade Free, came down off the church porch and kept pace with him around the building, positioning themselves between him and the Pastor’s Study door.
By 11:30 A.M. camera crews were setting up from KFSM-TV Channel 5 in Fort Smith as well as Channels 2, 6, and 8 out of Tulsa. A reporter from the Tulsa World was milling around, gathering comments, collecting people’s names and ages. And a well-equipped satellite van from KFOR in Oklahoma City was racing east on I-40 at eighty miles per hour. Shoshone Ballenger was hoping like anything to get footage beamed back in time for the noon news.
Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | Afternoon
Watonga Hospital
In the crackling bed, the boy stirs. His eyes open. The bruises on his face are almost healed now, only a faint yellow half-moon beneath each eye. Good afternoon, Luis says.
Good afternoon, the boy answers. ¿Is the hour more late?
¿More late than what?
The boy shrugs.
¿Have you hunger?
The boy frowns. I dont know.
Luis goes to the door and looks out. The two large women in their pastel smocks are behind the screens at the big desk. They dont look up. They are not indian like the woman doctor. They dont speak spanish. Luis thinks maybe it is better not to ask for their attention. They do not look at him with kindness, though they had kindness for the boy when they came to change the medicine in the clear bag that hangs from a hook and drips into his arm. Here the people are all lightskins, except for the woman who brings the food trays. She is black, a little short. Luis peers down the pale green hall, hoping maybe to see he
r. The hall is empty, but her cart stands at the far end. Good. He will wait until she comes nearer. Luis returns to sit beside the boy.
The food will come soon.
The boy sits in the bed, looking to the window. I have much to pay to my grandfather, he says softly. Maybe I . . . Is necessary I work to pay to him.
I and my sons, Luis says, we will pay for the truck.
¿After we go to Gai-mon?
I think you will not go there. You will go back to your town. I think the woman doctor will arrange this.
¿How do you know?
I dont know. I think it. Because of the big indian. I think maybe he told her all that you told him when we sat waiting.
¿What is it I tell him?
I dont know. You talked english.
¿How will you go to your sons now?
The indian will drive me.
¿Is the truth?
Luis nods. This is not the truth. The big indian left when an attendant came to the hospital door with a rolling chair to take the boy. Luis did not tell him thank you, because he did not realize the man was leaving.
Then I come with you and the indian, the boy says.
Luis stands and walks to the door again. He will not insist with the boy now—later will be better for that. The short black woman emerges from a nearby room, lifts a tray from the cart, and carries it into the next room. Luis glances the other direction. One of the nurses at the desk is watching him. Her face is very stern. Luis withdraws again. The little-black-one is very close now, he tells the boy. She brings the food.
