1
The Man with the Muddy Boots
For the first time in her life, Lacy Adams paid attention in church. There was nothing special about the service that Sunday. Her dad sat beside her, blank-faced as usual. Junior doodled in the hymnal. Her mom fanned the wet Gulf air blowing in from Harlingen, while the familiar calls of green jays floated through the open windows. But that morning Lacy felt different. She had just learned the scientific method at the end of the school year, and her teacher said it applied to everything but the Bible. And ever since then Lacy had looked at the world with narrower eyes, tingling with a sense that asking questions, using her mind, could unlock mysteries around her. She sat forward in the pew and listened. The pastor told the story of beautiful Queen Esther, a Jew in a hostile land who loved her people and saved them from slaughter when she revealed herself as one of them. And now, today, the pastor preached, let us pray for the freedom-seeking people behind the Iron Curtain, under the soulless Soviet grip, who have to hide themselves like Esther to survive.
After the sermon, the congregation rose to pass the peace. Lacy and Junior hopped to their feet, but they could never reach any hands to shake. The Adams family had a pew reserved for them, front and center, and no one sat in the pew behind them—a distance the farmers kept out of respect, Lacy knew, to give her family more of God’s light. She watched her parents lean over the empty pew, but when her dad stuck out his hand and said, “Peace be with you,” a farmer with a thick beard just stared at it, keeping his own calloused hands on his belt buckle. “Not while you’re still around,” the man growled, loud enough to hear, and turned his back to them.
Her dad didn’t blink. He turned to his wife and shook her hand, and then Lacy’s and Junior’s for good measure. The service resumed. Lacy could tell that her mom was seething, but she didn’t speak as they filed outside and piled in the red Buick and drove home. She held her tongue while she warmed the pot roast and set the table. She led them sharply through grace. “The nerve,” she huffed when they started eating. “The disrespect, inside First Baptist? After all we’ve done for them, to refuse to shake your—”
Lacy’s dad lifted his hand for silence. The family watched him sweep the last bites off his plate and run the good linen napkin over his mouth. “They’re blowing off steam, Mary,” he said, standing up. “Two days and it’ll be over.” He had changed before the meal, out of the Sunday suit and snakeskins he got in Houston, into dungarees and work boots. He settled his Stetson on his massive gray head and went out the door without a look or goodbye.
“Pure white trash,” she resumed, talking to no one in particular like she did at the table and in the car and whenever Lacy’s dad wasn’t around. She smoothed the blond hair she wore in a fluffed-up Grace Kelly style. “None of those fools had to sell to your father. Drowning in debt, and he bailed them out and gave them jobs. Couldn’t grow corn in Eden. Do you see your daddy taking a day of rest? Ten years he’s worked on the Plan—the feedlots, cattle, sticking his neck out—to change how America eats. Pure disrespect.”
“Can I have some more—” Lacy began.
“No, ma’am.” Her mom slid the bowl of potatoes out of reach. “You’ve got to reduce to look good for your Girl Scouts pageant. Junior, you want seconds?”
“Yes, please,” he said, and shot a wary look at Lacy.
“Is your troop ready?” her mom asked, serving Junior a heap of mashed potatoes. “Y’all just got the one more singing practice, right?”
“I guess,” Lacy said impatiently. “But first I have to turn in my family tree to get my Family History Badge. It’s due tomorrow.” She hated Girl Scouts. It wasn’t her choice to go, and she never wanted to mix with the uppity town girls. But anything Lacy did she did full steam, and for two weeks her mom had put her off, saying some other day they’d do her tree. “I can go get it,” she said.
“Manners, Lacy, not at the table.” Her mom sighed irritably and stabbed her pot roast. “I already told you about my family. I was orphaned, working in a washateria in Laredo when your daddy came in on a business trip with a tear in his shirt, and I had a needle and thread. Then we got married and had y’all two blessings. The end.”
“You were born in Laredo?” Lacy persisted. “I need your birth date, and your mom and dad’s names, birthplaces, and birth dates, to finish—”
“Write ‘deceased,’” her mom snapped. “Junior, how was Boy Scouts this week?”
“OK,” he chirped. “Wanna see what we did?” He wiped his face on his sleeve and jogged to the foyer. Junior was as cute as a puppy, with blond hair as light as their mom’s, not like the black mop on Lacy’s head. He charged into the room, doing an elaborate fall-roll-and-point maneuver, and aimed a pretend gun at their mom. “Kill the wetbacks!” he shrieked, spraying the table with rounds of fire.
“Junior!” their mom scolded. “Get up. Don’t say that word again.”
“What word?” he asked, rising in confusion.
“Wetback. It’s ugly. And no running in the house.”
“But that’s the name of the operation,” he objected. “Operation Wetback. We met the Border Patrol in Boy Scouts. They’re doing sweeps now. They started in Brownsville. Now McAllen, up the river to Laredo, all the way to El Paso.”
“And we like Ike,” their mom pronounced. “We always support our president. But.” She straightened her place mat. “Not all Mexicans are bad people, Junior. Some of them don’t want to blend in and be American, speak English or eat our foods—”
“Animals,” he barked. “That’s what the patrol man said. Live like pigs and send our money to Mexico, and we gotta get rid of them. He asked the Scouts what we think. I said build a big wall. With swords on top to stick them if they get all the way up.”
“Get rid of them?” Lacy said, slightly disturbed but masking it in the superior tone she had to take with her brother sometimes. “Listen, nosebleed, your patrol guy is talking about us.”
“Excuse me?” her mom blurted. “What on earth are you talking about, Lacy?”
“Our farm?” she said, suddenly filled with doubt at her mom’s tone. “Daddy’s business. His workers are Mexican, aren’t they? Like Xavier, he’s from—”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Yes, a good number of them.”
“Because one of the town girls,” Lacy muttered. “In Girl Scouts.” She bit her lip, unsure if she should continue but needing to test hypotheses. “She said Dad’s filling up the county with cow shit and Mexicans. And ruining everything.”
Her mom watched her and then leaned forward and asked, in a not-friendly voice, “Do you know what a pioneer is, Lacy? The man with the polio vaccine? Henry Ford? Thanks to your dad we’re going to be rich. We are rich.” She put a finger to her lips like they had a secret. Her eyes blazed. “But this week we’ll be really rich. Junior, you, me—the three of us. And we’ll move into town where we belong.”
Copyright © 2021 by Justin Deabler