Rebekkah Sterling! For the year since her family had moved to town, you had been tracking her closely. Well, you tracked many girls closely in the slumped silence of your school days, but what was it about Rebekkah that set her apart? She was a very slight girl; the outline of her bones pressed against her tight skin. It was true what you would later write about her in a poem, her hair really did look like a piled fortune of amber ringlets. But she carried that hair like some burdensome heirloom her mother obliged her to wear, something that faintly embarrassed her. She’d tuck that fortune into barrettes and scrunchies, pull and chew at its ends. She seemed to spend the durations of your literature class together practicing how to make the least sound possible. When she had to sneeze, she’d first bury her head in her sweater. It was the peculiar sadness of her silence that you found so beautiful. But if not for your father’s astonishing pronouncement at dinner one Monday night, your Rebekkah Sterling story would likely have ended the way all your girl stories ended, in your own, far less beautiful brand of silence.
Over the last years, the cumulative effects of disappointment, time, and the considerable quantities of the cheap whiskey Pa consumed had eroded most of your family’s old traditions, but you still maintained a Monday night ritual, Good Things Monday, when each Loving, before supper, had to name one good thing to look forward to in the week to come. That night, as the burnt molasses of Ma’s meat loaf had wafted from the gray slab set before you, you mustered something perfunctory about a novel, Ender’s Game, which you were liking; Ma spoke of a slight alleviation of her back pain; Charlie’s Good Thing was many good things, three separate parties to which he had been invited that weekend. But the only truly Good Thing you heard that night, the first certifiable Good Thing you had heard in a very long while, was your father’s news.
“Looks like we’ll have a visitor,” Pa said.
The permanent roster of the Young Astronomers counted no member who did not share the last name Loving, but over the years, Pa had occasionally been able to cajole one of his pupils to attend a meeting. And when your father that night informed his family that he had convinced a former student of his named Rebekkah Sterling to come to Zion’s Pastures to watch the meteors, you grasped your seat.
“Rebekkah Sterling?”
“That’s what I said.” Pa grinned. “Why? That name mean something special to you?”
“No. Or I guess something. We have English together.”
Before that day you had never exchanged more than a word or two in Mrs. Schumacher’s Honors Literature class. You were certain she wouldn’t actually follow through on your father’s invitation.
Days passed, and you tried to forget that unlikeliest possibility, tried to resign yourself to the glumness of your town in that late summer. That August represented something of a crisis point in Presidio County, but it was a crisis that had been roiling for years—generations, in fact. The border between the English-speaking north and the Spanish-speaking south might have been settled a century and a half before, but it was never an entirely peaceful distinction out in your slice of the borderland. On the white side of that divide, you’d grown up under your late grandmother’s alternative Texas history, “the true story of this country they’d never teach in those schoolbooks of yours,” a place where for 150 years immigrants had been building the towns and doing the menial tasks, the enduring threat of deportation used to enforce a sort of soft slavery. Granny Nunu had told you how, as recently as her own childhood, your school had conducted a mock burial for “Mr. Spanish,” a ceremony in which the Latino students were made to write Spanish words on slips of paper, drop them into a hole in the earth, and bury them. “Shameful, shameful business, behind us now, thank the Lord, but you can’t ever forget it,” Granny Nunu told you.
But in your own childhood, these old divides hadn’t seemed quite so dire. Spanish was now a required course for all students; in your grade-school days, white and Latino children were often invited to the same birthday parties. And yet, in recent years, as the cartels seized vast powers in Mexico, the white population had been fretting, with growing panic, over the stories of narcotic warfare coming from only a few miles away. Down the river, at the border town of Brownsville, police had recently found body parts of a number of Honduran immigrants scattered across the highway. Up in Presidio, local ranchers were reporting bands of cartel soldiers crossing their properties by night. Immigration had leapt to numbers unknown for generations. And as all these addled refugees came over the river, they arrived to a county blighted by lack of commerce. Ranching and mineral mining had long ago gone bust in your hometown. The only real industries left in the county were sluggish tourism, out in the state and national parks; border control enforcement; and the few local businesses that the employees of these federally funded enterprises could support. The last thing that hardscrabble Blissians wanted was a multitude of new workers, willing to toil for less-than-legal wages.
Something had to be done, was the white opinion, and so it had been a summer of a great many deportations, whole families carted from Bliss to the other side of the Rio Grande. For the TV cameras, the West Texas Minutemen—one of those jingoistic militias that patrolled the desert for surreptitious immigrants—were doing frequent demonstrations at the river, shooting their rifles into the Mexican sky.
Though this fraught border between nations lay thirty miles to the south of Bliss, another border ran down the center of your schoolhouse. Just as the towns all over your county were split in two, neighborhoods segregated by language and skin tone, you’d come to see that Bliss Township School was truthfully two schools; the honors classes were almost entirely white, the “regular” classes mostly Latino. All of the school’s officially sanctioned activities—dances, football games, academic clubs—were white, and the Latino activities were mostly ones that the school officials tried to disperse: the Tejanos’ daily gatherings out front, right on the schoolhouse steps, where they blasted music from their cars, causing a minor, perpetual commotion.
It was out there, just beyond the school gates, that something of a brawl had broken out the first week of school, when Scotty Coltrane and his pale cronies began barking abuse at the grounds crew. “Andale, andale!” Scotty was yelling at a lawn-mowing man when a Mexican kid crept up from behind and bloodied Scotty’s nose. Under ordinary circumstances, it might have ended there, the boys called before Principal Dixon, a suspension issued, but in that tense August the fight turned into a brawl, a dozen boys piling on.
But even in this divided school, you felt yourself to be in a further subdivision all your own, a boy who wanted only to pass his days unnoticed. It was shaping up to be another lonesome year, the worst yet, until that actual miracle happened.
You had been in your father’s art classroom, after school that Thursday, marking up your biology homework as Pa worked paint thinner into the student tables. Your brother was sketching something at an easel—a ballerina in a tutu, screaming as two lions devoured her legs—when he turned his head to an arrival at the door. Rebekkah Sterling stepped timidly into the room.
“Rebekkah,” you said, feeling ashamed to speak her name to her face.
“So!” Rebekkah said. “Today I get to see where Oliver Loving lives.”