by Rilla Askew
This doesnt listen well. No, I want to say . . . sound. This word doesnt sound well in english. The little-black-one. Dont say her that, ¿okay?
Okay.
Wednesday | February 27, 2008 | 1:30 P.M.
First Baptist Church | Cedar
Sheriff Arvin Holloway had understood he had a situation on his hands, but he didn’t know just what type of a situation, or how out of hand it was liable to get, until the demonstrators started showing up. Those news crews hadn’t bothered him. He knew how to talk to reporters and still take care of business, give orders, coordinate crowd control. The bullhorn never left his grip. When Clyde Herrington collapsed and everybody gasped or cried out Oh!, Arvin Holloway didn’t flinch. He let them call for an ambulance, let the EMTs carry the ornery cuss away on a stretcher. He was generous, tough, calm—a good hostage negotiator. Technically speaking, this wasn’t a hostage situation, but it had a lot of the same earmarks—an unplanned crisis, unspecified demands, one or more individuals barricaded inside a building—and throughout the fat part of the day, Arvin Holloway remained in charge of the developing situation.
Then the first vanload of protesters arrived. There were only a dozen or so—they said they were from the Muskogee chapter of Outraged Patriots—and really that alone wouldn’t have been a problem. Holloway figured these people had a right to free speech, as he certainly mentioned to several reporters, but just as a precautionary measure he told them go stand on the other side of the street away from the church. He wasn’t real happy about how the news crews all followed them over there, but they behaved themselves, and you had to pretty much agree with the signs they were carrying: AMERICA FOR AMERICANS, THIS LAND IS OUR LAND, THIS LAND AIN’T YOUR LAND, and WHAT PART OF ILLEGAL DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND?
But then that other bunch showed up, walking along Main Street from the Senior Citizens Center because they couldn’t get close enough to park. There were seven of them, all middle-aged Hispanic-looking men in suits and ties, walking close together, and the sheriff thought to himself, These people are mighty damn brave or mighty damn dumb. They tried to cross the yard to go stand with the preacher, but Arvin Holloway told them to get their butts back behind the drainage ditch. Well, that was when the Patriot group started hollering “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Illegal Aliens Have Got to Go!” and Holloway had to send a couple of deputies over to calm things down, which left him with only three actual deputies and the seven local men he’d sworn in as deputized citizens to keep order. Meanwhile Terry Kirkendall would not shut up. He kept trying to get Holloway to let him go inside and talk to Sweet, but the sheriff didn’t have time to mess with an irate husband. The yelling and name calling in the yard were getting worse, with some of the locals jumping in on the act, hollering taunts not just at that little Spanish bunch in suits and ties but also at the homefolks around the church. Holloway was worried he might soon have a riot on his hands. He got on the radio and told Cheryl to contact the LeFlore County sheriff to send him some men. “Call Highway Patrol, too! Tell them I need a roadblock set up on State Highway 270 at both ends of town, east and west! I don’t need any more of these outside agitators coming in!”
But the troopers took their sweet time getting there, and people continued to pour into Cedar, more outsiders, another news team from Oklahoma City, quite a few unemployed young beer drinkers who seemed to think they were coming to a party. Folks parked their vehicles every old which way all up and down the street, until the entire length of Main Street was jammed full, and the sheriff was having a hard time keeping everybody back out of the church yard. “Damn it!” he yelled at Cheryl on the radio. “Get me some more men here!”
“ ‘Jesus loves the little children,’ ” Sweet said. “ ‘All the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.’ And see?” She pointed to the picture in the book. “Here’s Jesus suffering the little children. Here’s the little Indian boy and the little Chinese girl and the little black boy and the little white girl, and—well, this first little boy might actually be Mexican.” She turned the page. Lucha leaned back against her daddy sitting on the low table. Her two fingers were in her mouth. Hardly a moment went by now when she wasn’t sucking her fingers. Sweet sat on the floor next to them, trying to get Lucha engaged, or at the least distracted from the hollering outside. Sweet had shown her every toy in the toy box, had tried crayons and stickers, coloring books. Nothing changed the child’s expression. Her big somber eyes were wary, watchful. “And look here,” Sweet said. “This is the little boy with the five loaves and two small fishes. Can you point to the fishes?”
The child gazed at the book but made no response. She sat on her daddy’s lap wrapped in the crib blanket while her pants dried. She’d wet herself earlier; they’d had to put her in Pampers from the stack in the closet. The top of her Sleeping Beauty sweatshirt was grimy with coal dust. A tiny smear of peanut butter showed on one cheek. Her hair was matted.
“And here’s Jesus talking to Zacchaeus in the tree,” Sweet said. “Do you know that song? ‘Zac-chae-us was a wee little man,’ ” she sang softly, “ ‘and a wee little man was he—’ ” Lucha turned away, buried her face against Juanito’s jacket.
Sweet frowned at Misty Dawn rocking fiercely in the rocker. Her niece stared back at her blankly. They had spoken little since Sweet returned from that last trip out and told her the door through the Pastor’s Study was also blocked off. Misty had cried out, “See? I told you we had to get out of here!” Well, and there had been words—Sweet’s mostly. She didn’t want to think about it. She pushed herself up off the floor and began to pace the room.
“Could you not do that?” Misty said. “Please.” Her voice was exceedingly polite. They were both very polite with each other.
“This can’t go on indefinitely,” Sweet said. “Look at her.”
“I know.” Misty Dawn had stopped her ferocious rocking. Her eyes were on her husband and daughter. Juanito stared back at her, steady. Lucha’s eyes were closed, but Sweet didn’t think she was sleeping—she was nursing her fingers too hard.
“Let me just take her over to Vicki’s,” Sweet said. “You two wouldn’t have to go, we could—”
“What? Let DHS take her?”
“No, they wouldn’t . . .” Yes, they would. That was precisely what would happen.
Lucha had opened her eyes at the sound of her mother’s voice, and Misty Dawn raised herself out of the chair and went to get her daughter. She walked the room, patting her back like a crying baby, but Lucha wasn’t crying. She hadn’t cried for some time now. Sweet could see her glazed, staring face over the back of Misty’s shoulder.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be for all that long. Maybe—”
“No!” Misty whirled, glaring hard. “I’m not doing it!” Her face held a terrible fierce protectiveness, and that chin-raised defiance that was so like Gaylene’s. “What do you think they’d do? We’re felons, for Christ’s sake! Alls they want is to send you and me to jail and Juanito to prison! And then deport him! And meanwhile strangers will be raising my baby! Forget it! I’m not doing it! Oh, why did you have to go and make matters worse?”
I didn’t! Sweet wanted to say. But in fact she feared she had. Her husband’s voice had been like a hot nasty wave pushing her out of the nursery and around the corner to the Fellowship Hall doors, where she’d yapped at the preacher through the glass: “Tell that so-and-so I am not coming out! Tell him next time he wants to make threats, I’ll give him something to get me arrested for!” And the preacher had done what she’d said, if with milder words, while she glared across at Terry Kirkendall standing next to Holloway with his thumbs hooked in his belt just like that potbellied blowhard sheriff, and their son, her son, standing there precisely like them, like a little bully-in-waiting, and the sight had made her spitting mad, and she’d shoved open the door and shouted, “Arvin Holloway, you are wasting your time here! Go on back to Wilburt
on, you skunk! You and that Judas-traitor skunk standing there with you!”
Yes, and it was right after that she’d seen Kenneth Spears go over to talk in the sheriff’s ear, and within two seconds Holloway sent the big bland-faced, crew-cutted deputy toward the west side of the building. Sweet had wheeled around and raced through the dim hall in the old part of the church to head him off, ran straight to the Pastor’s Study, where she’d slid open the latch and pushed the door halfway open, and the fierce sunlight raged in. She’d stood squinting at the side of Wade Free’s utterly calm, motionless face. His ball cap was pushed back. The sun was bright on his ruddy freckles. He hadn’t turned to look at her but kept a close watch on what was in front of him. That would be the big deputy, Sweet knew. “We’re here,” Wade Free said quietly. That was all. He was the same age as Terry; they’d gone to school together, there wasn’t that much difference between them—gas field workers, churchgoers, family men. Not that much difference—except Terry was out yonder with the sheriff, and Wade Free was here. “Thank you,” she’d whispered, and shut the door. Then she’d gone to tell the kids they couldn’t get out that way.
“Listen,” she suddenly said. “I’ll go talk to Wade Free, he’s the guy at the side door. I think he’s . . . I believe he’ll help us. Maybe he can draw off that deputy some way, give us a chance to slip out.”
“And go where? You said yourself they can see us.”
“Only if they step around to the side. Maybe Wade can draw them way off, like out past the bar ditch or something. I don’t know! I’ll just go talk to him.”
“What makes you think we can trust him?”
Sweet paused with her hand on the doorknob. “Because he’s there.” She gazed at her niece a long time. The girl’s face was red and splotchy, her eyeliner smeared, her sandy hair hanging in her eyes. “I’m doing all I can think of, Misty. She can’t stay here like this. She’s got to eat. I’ll bring in her sweatpants so you can get her ready. Tell Juanito what we’re doing. And take off that bathrobe and leave it here. It belongs to the preacher.”
Stepping into the hall, Sweet turned toward the kitchen, where she’d laid the baby’s lavender sweatpants to dry on the heat grate after rinsing the pee out of them. She passed through the small wedge of open space between the interior hall wall and the kitchen counter, glancing quickly across the room toward the glass doors, where she saw the same hunched backs outside on the walkway, the preacher’s hunkered shoulders, beyond which she spied the battered crown of an old Farm Bureau cap. Tee was standing right there talking to the preacher! The fury rushed through her, and she headed straight across Fellowship Hall to tell him he had no business here, he should take their son away from all this! That was when she heard the low, rumbling buzz of a helicopter coming in from the north, closer and closer, until it was directly overhead, circling the church.
That thwapping noise made Arvin Holloway nervous. It reminded him too much of Nam. There’d been TV news choppers following the horseback searchers, granted, but they’d stayed high enough, a respectful distance, not hovering down so close they were fixing to blow somebody’s hat off. Holloway held his Stetson down with one hand, tried to wave the pilot away using the bullhorn, but that just seemed to get the pilot’s attention to circle back in closer—and what the hell was Kirkendall doing! He’d told him, “Okay, shut up man, you got one minute to talk that wife of yours into coming out.” He hadn’t added or else because he didn’t know or-else-what—that was the whole blamed problem. But Kirkendall hadn’t even got past the preacher, much less convinced Sweet to come outside. There the man stood, gaping up at the sky like every other blamed idiot, including Holloway’s own deputies and that useless bunch from LeFlore County. The sheriff had finally had it. Enough was enough. He marched out across the yard.
Immediately he felt everybody’s eyes swing around to him, all the cameras, and that goddamn stupid helicopter dropping down even lower, till you couldn’t hear yourself think, much less talk! Standing a dozen or so feet away, Holloway hollered at Kirkendall, “WHAT’S THE HOLDUP HERE! YOU SAID YOU ONLY NEEDED A MINUTE!” He couldn’t make out the answer, though he could see Kirkendall’s mouth moving, his hand flapping at the preacher. “PREACHER!” Holloway yelled. “LET THIS MAN INSIDE TO TALK TO HIS WIFE! AIN’T THERE SOMETHING IN THE BIBLE ABOUT THAT?” He couldn’t make out what the preacher said, either. Then he saw, in the dim recesses of the building, Sweet Kirkendall standing on the other side of the glass doors. “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, SWEET? YOU’RE COSTING THIS COUNTY A FORTUNE!” Terry Kirkendall whirled around to look at his wife just as Holloway recollected what had set this whole mess in gear in the first place. “I WANT TO KNOW WHAT THAT SPIC YOU GOT IN THERE WAS DOING WITH THAT KID IN TULSA! YOU HEAR ME? SWEET!” Well, how could she, with all the blamed noise overhead? Again Holloway tried to wave the helicopter away, at which point he lost his grip on his Stetson and it went sailing off across the churchyard, flipping and tumbling toward the drainage ditch, and as the several news cameras recorded, Latimer County Sheriff Arvin A. Holloway jerked out his pistol and fired straight up in the air—not aiming to hit the bird, mind you, just get it the hell away from there—and, thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap, the chopper dipped and bowed and suddenly levitated straight up, headed back off north. Holloway turned around to continue his conversation through the door, but Sweet Kirkendall was gone.
“I’ll be goddamn,” Holloway said. He turned his glare on the preacher, skimming from him to the others standing with him, the powdery old ladies and emphysemic deacons, the Skoal-bitten farmboys and their chuffy short-waisted wives. He’d known most of them most his life, and it really pissed him off that they wouldn’t listen to him. “I’m saying this for the last time! You people stand aside and let me talk to them witnesses or I’ll sling every last one of you in jail!”
“What witnesses?” the preacher said.
“We’re witnesses,” Ida Coley said.
“Go ahead on, Arvin,” T. C. Blankenship offered. “See how well you get elected next year.”
“Heavenly Father,” the preacher started, “we come now to Your Throne of Grace—”
“All right!” the sheriff exploded. “Let’s just see how you folks like standing out here past suppertime when the sun goes down and the temperature drops!” If this wasn’t the stubbornest, prayingest, believingest bunch of Scotch-Irish pilgrims in the county, damn it, he didn’t know who was. That was when a new notion struck him—right out of the blue, but like so many of his blue notions, it was perfect. Without another word Holloway turned on his heel.
“Brother Oren,” Terry said, “would you ask her to just come back to the door and talk a minute?”
“I’m sorry, Tee. I don’t think she wants to talk to you.”
“Kirkendall! Get over here!”
Terry Kirkendall looked at the sheriff, hatless and furious, standing halfway across the yard now, and beyond him, the line of deputies and local men, and beyond them his own son looking short and scared in front of the crowd of shouting, sign-wagging strangers. “Tell her . . . tell her Carl Albert needs her to quit this nonsense and come home.” He followed the sheriff back to the other side.
Sweet grabbed up the baby’s lavender sweatpants as she sank to her knees on the tiled kitchen floor. She had never in her life been a knee pray-er, didn’t know any Baptist who was, but in this moment she became one. Help me God, help us, a one-note pleading to the one Source she believed could help them—because she had seen for the first time what was truly happening out front. All that muffled yelling hadn’t begun to tell her how many people were gathered, or how riled up they were getting. Or how ugly their expressions might be. It hadn’t told her about the news vans, either, although that part didn’t surprise her. Clutching the damp little sweatpants to her chest, Sweet pictured again the yelling faces on the far side of the yard, pushing forward, crowded all the way back into the street. She didn�
�t remember ever seeing such hateful looks, not live and in person, only in old newspaper photographs or something. What worried her more, though, was what she’d seen in the features of Ida Coley and Alice Stalcup and some of the others as they lifted their chapped wrinkly cheeks to gape at the helicopter. They were tired. They were cold. They were old. Or in any case, the majority of the ones standing with the preacher were old, and the ones who weren’t old were just kids on their cell phones, horsing around. They’d be bored soon, if they weren’t bored already. It was getting late, and they’d been out there for hours. The old people couldn’t hold up much longer. She should have thought to come out and look sooner. If she’d realized how bad it was getting, maybe she could have—what? She didn’t know. She didn’t know. Help me, God. Help us.
When she stepped back inside the nursery, Misty Dawn rushed over. “That was the SWAT team, right?”
“No, just some nosy folks who ought to mind their own business.”
“In a helicopter?”
“It’s not a SWAT team, Misty! For crying out loud.” Then she caught the look on the girl’s face. Her voice softened slightly. “Did you ever hear of a SWAT team in Latimer County?” Misty Dawn shook her head. “Well, me neither. They haven’t got that kind of a budget. Here.” Sweet pushed the sweatpants into her hands and went to the supply closet.
“They’re still damp,” Misty said.
“They’ll be dry in time.”
“In time for what?”
“We got to get ready.” Sweet gathered an armful of Pampers and the small stack of clean sheets off the closet shelf, grabbed another pastel-striped baby blanket, then she went to the crib and started pulling the sheets off the mattress.
“We’re leaving?”
“We’re going upstairs. Grab that box of crackers.”
“Upstairs! What for?”
