Kind of Kin (11 page)

“What did He say?”

“Who, Terry?”

“The Lord Jesus. In the Olivet discourse. Matthew twenty-five.”

“I don't know! He said a lot of things! Most of which nobody in their right mind could live up to!” She reached for her keys. “I'll be back as soon as the bank opens.”

“It's too late, Sweet. But don't worry, hon. Please don't. ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.' ”

“This is not
good,
Daddy. It's a freaking mess!”

“I'll talk to Dustin. He'll settle down.”

“It's not Dustin! It's you! What's the matter with you? The judge was all set to let you go, and then you stand there like a dope and piss him off!”

“You don't want to plead Not Guilty to a charge that's bogus to begin with.”

“
I
wouldn't want to put myself in a position to have to!”

“No,” her father said. “I guess you wouldn't.”

She glared at him. “Terry's right. You've spent too much time with those people. They've got your mind all twisted.”

“Reckon he would know.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Sweet said.

“Ask him.”

A deputy was standing in the doorway, the same hulking guy who'd sat in the courtroom. Her father got to his feet. “I'll square things with Holloway,” he said. “Bring Dusty on up this afternoon.” The deputy stepped back for her father to walk in front, and they disappeared down the hall. Sweet stood confused and furious. But nothing's settled! her mind cried out. We didn't get anything done! She looked around vaguely, then wandered along the corridor to the front of the building, where she waited for the girl behind the glass to buzz her out.

Coming out into early morning sunlight was like stepping out of a dark movie theater. She blinked, saw the logoed van in the alley, turned quickly the opposite direction, and nearly smacked into Sheriff Holloway talking to a pretty brunette holding a microphone. “Well, here's his daughter right here,” the sheriff said. “You might want to talk to her.”

Wednesday | February 20, 2008 | 7:50
A.M.

Latimer County Jail | Wilburton

B
ob Brown followed the broad khaki back of Deputy Beecham along the cobalt hall. The Olivet discourse. Probably his daughter hadn't known what he was talking about. For such a strong Baptist and Christian, Sweet's biblical knowledge was sadly lacking, in Brown's opinion. He attributed this primarily to some of the larger failings on his part. That, and the fact she hung around that bunch who preached Salvation like a house afire but sorely neglected the Master's teachings. Maybe if he'd said “Sermon on the Mount of Olives” she'd have known, though probably not the right verse: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” He should have been clearer.

At the end of the painted hallway he stood with his teeth clamped and his shoulders squared, waiting for the big deputy to unlock the steel door. He dreaded going back to the drunk tank—all that cold concrete, the relentless light and noise, the absolute boredom, no matter how much they prayed and sang. Not that he hadn't been through it before, or would have turned back now if he had the choice. Still, just dawdling in the outside hall a few minutes felt good. “What's today, Darrel? Thursday?”

“Wednesday.”

“Huh,” Brown said. “Time passes slow.”

“That's what I hear.” The deputy swung the steel door open, motioned Brown into the cinder-block passageway. The drunk tank was here at the near end, no need to walk past the crowded, noisy main run where they'd started out their first night, him and Garcia, sitting on the cell floor next to the reeking urinal, praying and singing hymns—until one of the tattooed young men jumped Bob Brown halfway through the fifth chorus of “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus,” cutting the top of his head with his bare knuckle. Garcia had tried to help, several others mixed in it, and soon the jailer was running along the hall, yelling, with his hand on his baton. That was when Brown and Garcia got moved here to the drunk tank, and here they remained. “Reckon y'all are going to need your tank back come Saturday evening?” Brown said.

“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.