In 2011 we had a pretty cold winter here in the Texas desert. On morning I was up fixing some fences and noticed my asses intently watching something at the corner of my land. I walked around the barn and saw a little group of teenaged boys.
“Trabajo por su animalitos, Senor?” and I knew they had crossed the border to here. They didn’t have American clothes- soccer club shirts just aren’t worn here.
I said, “Come on over aqui”, and took them into an old Airstream next to the barn. One had some English, about as bad as my Spanish.
I asked, because they looked like city kids, “Y’all from cuidad Musquiz?” “Si”.
It was cold, had got down to 15F or so during the night.It became known that they had walked 110 mikes from the border, through the mountains in the Big Bend National Park, over the hills behind the Border Patrol checkpoint, and somehow made it into our town. T shirts and jeans.
I pointed to my feet. “Ah” said one, and took off his shoes. His feet were bleeding. All this time I was trying to figure out what to do with them. I didn’t want to take the risk of driving them anywhere in my old pickup- we would not have gotten far.
I went out to the barn and got a jar of gall salve and brought it back in. “Por el burros hooves”, I said, making a motion to put it on their feet. That broke any tension, and they started laughing- so did I. I had some rice and leftovers and they devoured it.
“Uno minuto”, I said, and went down to the gas station, asked my friend Ernesto, a solid member of the gente, if I should take them to the priest. “Oh no, not him”. Then I remembered Jesus down the road, who is originally from Coahuilla. I found him and said, “i got quatro undocumentados in my hay shed, come on over here with me”.
The kids were so glad to see someone with their lingua, from their city...Jesus told them to stay in the hay shed, not to go out or be seen, “no cigarros, no lights. Don’t go out.” He told me they’d been dropped off at the old La Linda mine on the border, well over a hundred miles from me. Best of all, he handed me a scrap of paper with a cell phone number on it. It was from up in Fort Worth.
Jesus told me they had a relative up there and that the kids had no idea of the distances here in Texas.
I couldn’t understand the Spanish words for “stepfather”, called the number. A old style Texas drawn-out drawl, “Welllll, I can come on down thar an git ‘em but not til I get off work Friday mornin’. Where y’all at?”
We made arrangements. I kept them holed up in my hay shed until Thursday night, sharing meals and hearing their stories. 17 to 22, not dirt poor, but wanting work and school. (The minimum wage in the state of Coahuilla is $8 a day). They had paid someone $200 to drop them off at La Linda, and they asked me over and over if they could do work on my place in exchange for the food and shelter. I just laughed. It wasn’t costin me nothing to clean out my refrigerator.
Late Thursday night I called the number again. The Anglo stepfather said he’d be in town at 11 Friday night. I told him to call me when he was half an hour out a town, and I told him how to flash his lights at the entrance to my street.
It went just fine. When he called, I told the boys, held up five fingers, “Five minutos”. I waited at the top of my street and flashed my brake lights, got his head lights in return. He pulled up in a old Suburban. Many hugs and tears. I just stood there. Then the old cowboy said, sincerely, “God bless you, Sir” and put his arms around me. All the boys and the woman in the truck said the same, and “gracias”.. They old boy shook my hand and put his finger up to his lips- there were three twenties in his hand. From the looks of them, it was all they could spare.
When I went back to re-arrange my hay bales, I found a little ziplock bag. In it were medicines and notes from their mothers- “Por Dolor” and which to take for headache, cold, stomach ache. It about made me cry. I put the notes and pills in a little frame, just noticed it today.
So here in Texas the mothers and kids are stacked in detention centers, and our leaders are telling us that our state won’t take refugees from Syria or any where else.
It’s easy to get depressed about how bad things are, I guess I wrote this to say that you can help if you get a chance, you don’t need to be heroic, or well-connected, just take a little chance to help when you can. If I was young and brave I’d do a hell of a lot more.
Somebody helped my family when they came over here from the old country, and they didn’t speak nothing but German either. I just can’t believe what I hear on the radio now a days.
It is International Woman’s Day, I guess thinking about those detention centers made me write this this morning.