Broken Ground (32 page)

I am halfway to the cabin where Thomas lives when a pickup truck pulls up beside me.

“I bought it just an hour ago,” he says as I jump into the cab beside him. “From a man who wanted to purchase bus tickets to Nebraska for his family of five. In places farther from the border the chances of deportation are slimmer, the man heard. It still happens. It's happened as far away as Detroit and New York. But it costs more to transport people those extra miles. So I guess it's not so worth it. Not yet.”

We return to Luis and Silvia's, and together we decide to leave at dawn the next morning. We want to get a good night's rest. Thomas, Luis, Daniel, and I decide to stow our goods in the back of the truck now. It is nearly ten o'clock at night when we finish doing so. Our belongings piled on each other rise a few feet above the cab. Luis scrambles up on top, and with Thomas throwing ropes from either side, he helps position them so that when the things are cinched and secured, they are less likely to fall. Whoever isn't driving will ride in the back of the truck with Daniel. That person will be me most of the time, I imagine. Daniel and I will nestle down like Edna Faye and her siblings once did while Silvia stays as comfortable as she can in the cab.

There's not room for every single thing, but Luis and Silvia say that's all right. Like Thomas and me, like the other residents of Kirk Camp, they are hoping that this total evacuation—for this is what it has become—is a false alarm. We're hoping to return soon, when we're sure there will be no trouble and the farm bosses are begging for help in the fields. Who knows? Maybe the hourly wage will go up, so great will be the farmers' needs. “That would be the silver lining,” Thomas says. “That would be a miracle,” I agree. In my mind's eye, I see snowflakes glittering on blue and red mittens. Charlie's and my mittens, lifted up to the snowy sky on the night Charlie and I fell in love. I don't believe that will be my one and only miracle any more, I realize. This year has held an abundance of miracles. Helen, Daniel, Silvia and Luis, and Thomas—the love I feel for each and every one of them. And my deepening love for Miss Berger, Mother, and Daddy. The black fog lifting, at least for now. God's voice saying,
Go
. Once I start tallying the miracles, they proliferate from one and only to innumerable. And if I allow them—I believe this now—more will come my way.

We've all agreed to travel north for the fall harvest. Luis has heard there are farms up that way that are still interested in hiring Mexican migrant workers. Their labor costs less than that of their white counterparts, after all. And north is farther from the Mexican border. If the evacuation does prove necessary, we're all hoping and praying that north will prove a safer, less volatile place to be.

Thomas has returned to his place and Daniel is already sound asleep on his pallet beside Silvia and Luis when I lie down on my cot for what may be the last time. The curtain is drawn, but I can hear them murmuring in their bed. They haven't said how worried they are about what effect tomorrow's ride on rugged roads will have on their baby, whose birth may be in a matter of days. But I can see it in their faces. I imagine this is what they're discussing now. Silvia gives a little cry of pain, and then I hear her muffled weeping. I saw the back of her skirt tonight, lightly streaked with blood. If Luis could ferry her in an ambulance to the nearest hospital, I imagine he would do so immediately. I know I would. But they've heard the stories, as I have. There's a good chance he wouldn't be allowed through the door. And the trip would put them at risk of permanent separation. So they stay right where they are.

In what seems a matter of minutes, screams awaken me. I leap from the cot and part the curtains. It's Silvia screaming. Though the place is still dark, I can see her at the open door, clinging to Luis, who's being dragged out into the night. The two men who are doing the dragging—two white men in overalls—are cursing at his efforts to resist. Outside, the bright beam of a flashlight wildly ricochets, illuminating a police officer, the gun in his hand, and another man who holds a clipboard, and now Luis's stricken face, as a man pushes Silvia back toward their bed. She stumbles, gasping, and then all in a rush, water spills down her thighs. Her thin nightgown clings to her now, accentuating her legs. She drops down on the mattress and curls into herself, hiding herself from the men who hold Luis, and from the other white men who are waiting outside. Daniel bolts to Silvia's side. He is crying, but he stands between her and the men; he tries to shield her from their stares. Slight and small, he tries to protect her like a man.

But the men are gone now. Luis is gone.

“Go!” Silvia cries.

I run from the cabin to see Thomas trying to push his way through the crowd gathering in the road. There's a cacophonous din of shouting. Two police officers grab hold of Thomas; he struggles, but they're big, burly men, and with his crutches, he's no match for them. Thomas casts a frantic look my way. “Luis!” he shouts. “Help him! Help anyone you can!”

I see Luis then, already a block away, hustled by his captors to a paddy wagon. The two men are unable to shove Luis inside, but when more join them—ultimately, five against one—Luis is unable to fight them off. In the wagon now, he crouches in the huddle of other men from Kirk Camp, men I recognize as the fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers of the children I teach.

Standing beside the wagon, watching as people are rounded up and forced inside, is a white man I recognize. For a moment I can't think where I know him from, but then I remember. It's the man whose photograph was on the flier advertising the Labor Day picnic—the owner of the farm worked by people I now call friends. It's Mr. Ronald Kirk. He wears a pale summer suit, the fabric of which shimmers like changeable water in the swinging, shining beams of the flashlights and kerosene lamps.

Without thinking, I run over to him and grab the lapels of his jacket. “What's going on!” I don't ask this. I shout it: an order to which Mr. Ronald Kirk must respond.

He stares coldly at me. “I believe this would be called a government-sponsored action.”

“I call this criminal!” I give him a hard shake, very much as Mother used to discipline me as a child. “Some of these people are U.S. citizens! Others have legal work papers!”

Is it possible that he is sneering? It is.

“And some of them aren't and don't. Still others are known dissenters who've caused a lot of trouble for people like me—their employers, who pay their wages and provide them with homes.” He jerks his head toward the inside of the paddy wagon. “Like those men. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile. We don't have another mile to spare. Time they go back to where they belong.”

A police officer stands beside me now. His hand comes down hard on my shoulder. “You need help here, Mr. Kirk?”

Again the sneer, the corners of his mouth turning down at the edges as his anger creeps closer to the surface. “What'll it be? Unhand me, young lady? Or would you like help?”

The police officer wrenches me away, then hustles me back to Luis and Silvia's cabin. He shoves me at the open doorway, where Daniel waits, still protecting Silvia. She is sitting on the bed now, and she is shaking. I sit down beside her, wrap my arms tightly around her, draw her close. And then another hand settles on my shoulder, a gentle hand. It's Thomas.

“You okay?” he asks.

“I have nothing to worry about. It's everyone else.”

He nods.

Silvia pulls away from me and stands. Blood seeps pinkly into the wet fabric of her nightgown. She takes a jacket, draped over a chair—Luis's worn jacket with its frayed cuffs—and puts it on. She goes to Daniel, takes his hand, and before either Thomas or I can stop them, they run outside.

We go after them, Thomas and I. We beg Silvia to wait.

“They're not taking Luis away without us,” she says wildly. “We won't let them.”

She and Daniel run to the paddy wagon. Silvia, who leaves a faint trail of blood in her wake, is going with Luis to jail. And Daniel, just a little boy.

“Stop!” I shout.

They don't stop. They are resolute; I can see it in the set of their shoulders. In a moment, they are at the paddy wagon. In the next moment, they have climbed inside.

The sweep continues. Other paddy wagons have arrived and two school buses. Our neighbors and friends, the children whose stories I know now, both their real ones and their imagined, and their parents, and the elderly women—all of them are forced to do what they don't want to do, go where they don't want to go. All of them are being taken away.

“We'll follow them,” I tell Thomas. “Come on.”

W
e're in the truck, me behind the steering wheel, Thomas beside me. The paddy wagon holding Luis, Silvia, Daniel, and so many others is already gone, but we know where's it heading. So we rattle after it, passing through the camp gates, where Mr. Ronald Kirk still smiles from the Labor Day posters. I turn the truck onto the two-lane road and drive as fast as I'm able.

“Tell me this,” I say as we hurtle toward town. “Just this. How long will it keep on happening—the raids and deportations?”

Thomas cuts me a sharp look. “Something will end this hard time. Rain will fall. The dust storms will stop. There will be steady work again. But the conviction that one person deserves something more than another—even when that something is a decent life? Well, that conviction is as old as Cain and Abel, isn't it? I don't think it's ending any time soon.”

I press my foot down still harder on the accelerator, and we speed toward Puebla and the pinking horizon.

WE PARK IN
front of the police station and hurry inside. There are people from Kirk Camp being held there along with others who have a history of protests and striking, “troublemakers,” as Mr. Ronald Kirk said. The officer on duty tells us this. He also says Luis, Silvia, and Daniel are not among those being held. When Thomas asks to see the men in the cells, the officer says no. When I ask what will happen to them, the officer says, “Guess.” When we ask where Luis, Silvia, and Daniel might be, the officer shrugs. “Try the bus station,” he says. I remind him that Silvia is about to give birth, and the officer bristles at my tone. He tells us we better hurry up and leave. Or we'll wind up in a cell with the other troublemakers.

Thomas grabs me by the arm and hustles me from the station. Back in the truck, he points in the direction of the bus depot. I drive there as fast as I can.

The small, grimy place is packed with people from Kirk Camp, all waiting for the buses that will deliver them to Mexico. There are others waiting, too—people I don't recognize.

“They did it,” Thomas says, his expression stunned, his voice hollow. “They hit all the surrounding camps. They got everyone they could.”

We split up and search the depot. It takes us nearly half an hour to work our separate ways through the crowd. It would take much longer if we allowed ourselves to talk to everyone we know. I gravitate to the mothers of the children I've taught; they tell me, some in Spanish, some in English, some in a melding of the two, that they don't know where they're going or when. They haven't learned a thing other than that they have no choice. They cling to their children; their children cling to them. When the children look at me now, they are silent, guarded. Why trust any white person? They're filled with doubt, as they should be. They've been betrayed.

Thomas talks with the men. In the last years, he's stood beside them during their strikes. He's translated as needed, at times played mediator with the authorities. When we've spoken to everyone who's willing to talk and still learned nothing about Silvia, Luis, and Daniel's whereabouts, we say our goodbyes, and then we leave the station. There's nothing we can do here—not really. Our best hope is to search widely for our friends. Our best hope is to confirm that Silvia is alive, and her baby, and to help them if we can. We make our way to the truck and, driving slowly so we won't miss a thing, we scour the streets of Puebla. It feels futile; they could be behind any door or already gone. But it's all we can think to do. We stop at churches, the doctor's office, every open shop, the Farm Security medical clinic, housed in a tent on the outskirts of town. We ask if anyone has seen a pregnant woman, a man, and a boy. But there's no sign or news of them. When our hunger is too great for us to ignore it, we find an open market and buy a loaf of bread, a few slices of cheese, a jug of milk, and a bag of oranges. Then we pull over to the side of the road in a shady patch and eat our food in silence there.

“We've about run out of places to check,” Thomas says as we finish up. “Homes outside of town. They're all that's left.”

“We could knock on every door. We could try the next towns over.”

“We could.” He sounds like he's saying just the opposite. He looks sharply at me then. “The school.”

“What?”

“The local public school. It serves the surrounding towns as well as Puebla. It was damaged in the earthquake in 1933. They're rebuilding it, but for now it's a collection of tents and outbuildings. Ezra is there. He's taught there all along, but now he's trying to open up the classrooms to the children of Kirk and the other camps. Or he was. He's a U.S. citizen, and he's a good friend of Luis's. If he got wind of what's happened, he did everything in his power to help. You can be sure of that.”

The school is located about half a mile outside town, among the farm fields. The low, humble buildings and tents appear to be empty of people. But there is one car parked near a larger building that once must have been a garage for farm equipment. We stop the truck there. The building's door is closed. Thomas tries the handle; sure enough, it's locked. He knocks; then he knocks again, louder. We wait for a few long minutes. When there's still no sound from within, Thomas yells, “It's Thomas Everly and Ruth Warren. Could we speak with you? We won't take much of your time.”