Part One
When I met Hector I was sitting in my old pickup truck in the middle of a Mexican-American cemetery in Laredo, Texas. I had spent the better part of that hot, dusty morning meandering through the sprawling field of headstones, crosses and colorful decorations, deciphering names, ages and dates, putting families together, taking pictures, documenting time and lives woven together, coming and going.
The morning had started out cool enough, as it does on an early spring day in Laredo, but by the time I finished the sun was sitting on top of the cemetery and the day was simmering. The chill had gone and I was soaked with sweat. I slid into the cab, took a slug of the now warm water bottle I had brought with, and l looked up to see him standing in front of three mounds of sand strewn with flowers, water bottles, bright ribbons and paper flowers.
His back was to me and he was hunched over, flannel shirt and jeans billowing in the gritty wind. When I took notice of him, he looked back at me, his stained baseball cap tugged low over his brow. After sizing me up, he turned back to the graves and stood, motionless. He wasn’t going anywhere, and I’m sure he wondered what the white guy was doing in a beat-up pickup truck in this cemetery. It made me briefly wonder what I was doing there myself, but I’m fascinated by the stories that unfold for me in these silent places.
After a couple of minutes, he approached my truck and said hello, asked me if I needed help. I climbed out of the truck and introduced myself, towering over him with my boots and cowboy hat. He weakly shook my hand and like almost everyone in that part of the world, had a surgical mask covering his chin and mouth.
“I’m John, just traveling the country taking pictures and talking with people,” I said, pointing at my camera. I had come to understand that strictly English speaking people were a tiny minority in southern Texas, and I had started punctuating my speech with clumsy gestures.
“I’m Hector”, he said, and I knew his English was good immediately. “Not many people to talk to here,” he said, looking around.
“No, but I like cemeteries”, I said. “All these monuments and headstones are stories where I can try and fill in the blanks.”
“We don’t have headstones yet,” he said, motioning with his head towards the graves. “My wife and her two sisters died in December, and it’s going to be maybe a year from now before they get here, from what they’ve told me.” He shrugged his shoulders and looked at the ground.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. “Losing three people in a month, that’s tragic.”
“It is,” he said, and fell silent, nodding in affirmation.
I reached into my truck and grabbed a bottle of water, which was on the floor and still cool. I offered it to him and he took it.
“Thank you,” he said. “I spend almost all my time here and I forget to bring something to drink.”
He motioned over to a rusty wrought iron bench and asked if I wanted to sit for a minute. We sat down and looked at the graves. I wanted to start asking questions, but soon enough he started to speak.
“Covid.” He said, pointing his bony fingers at the graves. “All three of them, Covid.”
“Shit,” I said.
“These three women were my life, the life of our family.” He said.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“They were the life of our family.” He said. “When they died, one right after the other, so did the family.” He said, faintly. “See those two graves over there?” He said, pointing his finger to two fresh mounds about ten yards away, covered by the same paper flowers and streamers, with bottles of water and beer cans perched on top.
“Yes?” I said.
“That’s my nephew and my niece. They overdosed on the same night six weeks later. Losing their mothers got them using again, and now they are gone too.”
I had nothing to say, stunned by all the loss that one extended family could sustain in a matter of months.
“We lose so many from drugs down here,” he said. “So many. It’s a fucking disaster.”
“Tragic.” Was all I could muster.
“Broke my heart.” He said, and then looked at me. “Broke my fucking heart.”
I nodded, with nothing to say. What do you say to an old man who has lost so much in such a short amount of time? I was sick to my stomach thinking of what he must be going through.
“My wife and her sisters were all careful about the Covid.” He said, and I understood.
I had been in gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants and even walking around town, in the open air, almost everyone was fully masked. Where up north we had grown weary of wave after wave of shutdowns and restrictions and vaccinations, we had grown lazy and fed-up and by and large, mask wearers were the small minority before I had left in early February. Down here, at the end of March, everyone here was still wearing masks and keeping their distance, even in the outdoor parks that dotted the downtown area. When I would walk around, people would look at me curiously, and it finally dawned on me that I was the stupid gringo who was taking risks, both for myself and for them. I felt guilty and began to stuff my pockets with masks again, putting them on whenever I’d be within arms distance of anyone.
“When my nephew started going on and on about how Covid was a government plot to turn everyone into sheep and wearing masks were dangerous, they listened to him. He had gone to college and they hadn’t, so they thought, he must know something they didn’t. They never got the vaccinations, because he kept warning them that there were chips inside of them and they were going to be tracked. They were scared enough of the government, they couldn’t take the risk of chips,” he said. “He had been in the Army, in Iraq, and they figured he was an expert, of sorts.”
He continued, “Me, fuck that. I thought he was full of shit anyhow, always have. I didn’t tell anyone but I went to the health center and got the shots and the booster. Fuck that. And now look. He’s dead from drugs and they are dead from Covid. And now I might as well be dead, too. All I do is sit here all day anyhow. Nothing else to do. I can’t go home, I can’t go to sleep, I can’t think anymore. Fuck that.”
After a long silence, where I sat trying to figure out how I could start asking about his life and not seem like a complete asshole, I thought about the one tenant that I had developed as a photographer and a writer and what had often pushed me forward to get the photo or the story I wanted: don’t ask, don’t get.
“Do you mind me sitting here?” I asked.
“Not at all,” he said, “thank you for the water, I forget these things.”
He looked at me again, pulling back slightly, taking me in. “What about you?”
I nodded. “Me? Oh. Me.”
He nodded back. “What brings you here?”
Part Two
I felt a heaviness come over me, a tightening in my gut. I didn’t have any answers for why I was sitting in a graveyard, in a dusty, broken-down town where I knew no one. I sighed and hunched over, my forearms on my thighs, nodding slightly. “I don’t know, really. I quit my job at the end of January, I’d had enough. I’m getting old. I don’t even know what makes me happy anymore, other than writing and taking pictures. I just felt I needed to get the hell out of Dodge and go out in search of pictures and stories of people. Something about doing that makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. What that is, I don’t know.”
Truth was, I had been mired in depression for a long time. Much longer than I had wanted to admit to myself. I hadn’t really picked up on it until last summer, with the pandemic grinding on, feeling very alone, when it took everything I had to just get out of bed and get dressed, much less get to work, or to socialize. It had been a combination of a lot of things, but the end result was a low-level, persistent feeling of agitation and entropy.
A lifelong friend and I had made plans to hike in Europe, but he had developed serious health issues and the pandemic was nowhere near over, so those plans had been shelved, leaving me further adrift. The street portraits I had done for years seemed like a lifetime ago, when you could see the expression on people’s faces and get close enough to connect. Curiosity had been replaced by fear, for me and for the people I approached.
He nodded in understanding and took a long draw of his water. “Understood. So here you are, and what do you think of Laredo?” He asked, and it was half-hearted, the question of a man so deeply wounded that his words floated in the air, intention-less, untethered.
“I’ve never been here before. Looks like a lot of places along the border.” I said. “Dusty, kinda broken down, lots of businesses seem to have come and gone. The weather is really nice, though.”
“Wait until we get into June and July. It’s hot as hell down here, fry your ass. Not cool like today.”
“I’ve lost five friends in the last few years,” I said, “friends of mine dying of heart attacks and cancer, all my age, all seemingly in pretty good health. It’s been really weighing on me. It made we wonder how much time I have left. And what the fuck am I doing with that time? Working for someone doing a job that doesn’t make me happy? It all began to feel pointless, and I was considering moving across the country, to find a place where I could find a reason to keep going. So I packed as much as I could into my old truck and tiny camper, stuffed the rest into storage, and took off. I thought I’d just slowly crawl along the country, find people to connect with, spend time alone, take pictures of birds and nature and shit and try and figure things out for myself. I guess that’s what brings me here.”
“To a fucking Mexican graveyard?”
“I like graveyards. Something about them makes me peaceful. There are so many stories here. It feels settled to me. No one can bother these people. Their names and dates, how their graves and headstones look, who in their family is with them here, who comes and visits and tends to them. All of that tells stories that these people wanted told, I guess.”
“We don’t have headstones yet and it’s gonna be awhile. At least a year, from what they told me. They’re behind because of what Covid did to all of us Mexicans. Most of the folks here couldn’t afford to stay at home and not work. They had to be out, doing their jobs, and they got sick and so many died,” Hector said. “How old are you?”
“Me? I’m 62.”
“Same age as my wife when she passed, her sisters were a little older. Between the three of them they had five full-time jobs, for over forty years, we figured. They did it all, and kept their homes perfect. They worked like you have never seen, and never complained. Never. Worked third shift and first shift and any shift they were asked. Between the three of them I bet they never got a full night’s sleep for one person. Me, I’m lazy as fuck and I love to drink beer and fish. But them, they never complained. And all they did was work.”
I felt that deep down heaviness I could not shake, and felt worse that I had no direction, had quit my job, had gone off in search of something I had no idea what I was looking for. All I knew is that I wanted to do something good, something that made me happy, before I was done. What that was, I still wasn’t sure.
“I have been struggling with depression,” I said.
“I get you, man.” He said. “I think all of us struggle with what you’re talking about. My wife wanted us to open up a little restaurant, or a shop, but I had a decent job trucking. I didn’t want to do anything else. We talked about it, she was such a good cook, but it never happened. Now, gone. I’ve lost everything when Anna, Rosa and Olinda died. All three of them were my life for over forty-five years. Now, I haven’t gotten into the truck and hauled since they got sick after Thanksgiving. I just come here, have a drink, talk to my wife, and wonder what the fuck to do next. My kids are in San Antonio, I’ve gone to see them, but they are working and working and have kids too. They don’t have time for me.” He kicked the dirt with the toe of his boot.
We sat there, us two, in the midday heat, the cool breeze now feeling like a convection oven, the little shade of the old mesquite tree behind us creeping over our shoulders, just enough to make it bearable.
“Yep, my kids too. You raise them to work hard and be independent and it’s great that they are, but now what?” I thought of my own two kids, who I’m so proud of, but who have their own lives. I knew the feeling. Now what?
“These women, they were angels,” Hector said, after a long pause. “They took care of everyone and went to Church every Sunday. Cooked for everyone, kept track of everything that mattered, and they lived for each other. They all left together because I think that’s the only way it could have been for them.”
“Where are you from? Originally?” I asked.
“Originally, I’m from here, Laredo. My family came from Monterrey, but I was born here. My wife and her sisters came from Mexico, from a little town just south of Oaxaca. I was a young guy when I helped them cross, it was something,” He said.
“How was that? What happened?”
Part Three
“You want to hear this?” He said, turning to look at me.
“Well, neither one of us is going anywhere right now, and I have more water in the truck.” I got up, grabbed another couple of bottles, and handed him another one as I sat down again. Even shuffling my feet covered our boots in a fine grit of talcum-like dust.
“See the water bottles on the graves?” He asked.
“Yep, I see that on a lot of graves.”
“Every day I bring fresh water and end up drinking most of it myself, just sitting here, but it’s for them.” Hector said, taking a gulp from the water bottle I handed him. “Those three, when I first met them, they hadn’t had water in over three days.”
“What?”
“Okay. My family came across to pick cotton and beans in Texas before I was born. My mother and father, all their families, would get brought over by Texas farmers to help with the crops. There was twenty or thirty of us, but when the crops were done, we were supposed to go back. For years, after the crops were in, the families would get back into the farmer’s trucks and they’d go back over the border until the next year. One year, when the truck came to pick them up that last night, no one was there, they had all decided to stay in the US. Things were really tough back in Mexico and they had all found jobs in Laredo and my Mom and her sister were pregnant. My cousin Ribby and I were born in America, the families wanted us to be real Americans. See, they loved the US. My Father had found a job working in a chicken processing plant and my uncles were working on ranches. Every adult had more than enough work to stay. No one was going back, so that was that.”
He took another long pull on his water bottle, then out of his pocket came a pint of tequila. “Looks like noon,” he said, and we both took a sip.
“Me, I went to school but I hated it, so I quit before high school and worked with my uncles on the ranches. It was long hours and didn’t pay shit, but it was work and better than being in school. I’m good with cattle but it’s tough work. I was offered extra money to help people cross at night, so on the weekends we would cross along the river and we’d head out into the desert and bring whole groups of people across.”
“What the hell was that like?” I asked. I had spent days driving along the more remote stretches of the border and the thought of people crossing many miles across the most inhospitable land I had ever seen seemed almost impossible. Camping I had already seen rattlers and couldn’t imagine being out there at night.
“I was young, and it was scary and exciting and Jesus it was difficult. My uncles didn’t want me doing it, they warned me that I’d go to jail, but it was money and I wanted to buy a really nice pickup truck,” he said. “One January night we go out, out deep onto the other side, and it’s cold. Really cold, we had to go almost eighteen miles in, across from Del Rio, and that’s a bad area. Thick with thickets and thorns that will shred you up, all chaparral. Very tough to make time because it’s so thick, and it’s very hilly and it was goddamned dark.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I said. “Did you have flashlights?”
“Oh yes, and we had lanterns too, but you have to be very careful, there were border patrol moving around and if they saw light, they’d just wait you out, until you had to come back. Nowadays, they have atvs and they’ll chase your ass down. Then, they’d just wait and if you came out alive, they’d pick you off.
We finally got to the meeting place, it was 1:30 in the morning, and you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face, it was that dark. When we put on our lanterns, there were a group of sixteen people, half adults half children, and they were in bad shape. That’s where I met my Anna, and her two sisters. They had lost their little brother and their Mother along the way.
“They didn’t have enough clothes, and they hadn’t had water or food in over three days. Anna was carrying Rosa. Pitiful. They looked like they couldn’t go another few steps, much less another eighteen miles. They had already come almost a thousand, can you believe that?”
“All on foot?” I asked.
“No, the last couple hundred miles they had walked. They thought they had paid to be driven across the border but that was bullshit. They had been dropped off with a couple of coyotes who marched them the rest of the way, at night, in the dark. Their clothes were torn and they were bloody and frozen and looked like they’d been in a war. The coyotes had all the water and the food, and they didn’t share. They had lost twelve people along the way.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“We had brought water with us, and just a little food, so I gave water and food to the girls, but we had to get going, we needed every minute to get back across to our trucks.” As he talked I could see him deep in his memory of that night. It had been seared into him, like a branding iron.
“We took off and one of the families, a man and two boys, couldn’t go on. We begged them to keep going, we’d make it I told them, but they enough, they told us they needed to rest, they were sick and couldn’t continue. We left them there, in the cold fucking dark, and moved out, and I still think of them every day. There is no way they made it out of there. No way. The rest of us marched to the border, and we made it back right before dawn, packed everyone in the back of the cattle trailer, and took off back to Laredo.”
“Jesus!” I said.
“When we got back, we dropped them all off downtown, but I circled back and picked up the girls. I couldn’t just leave them there, especially Anna. She had nothing left but steel in her eyes, man she is tough, but they were in trouble and knew no one.”
“Wow.” I said, stunned.
“Wow is right,” Hector said, and we took another couple of swigs. “What some of those people go through to get here, by sheer hope and prayers, is fucking crazy. But they did it. And those girls were so close, you wouldn’t believe. They had lost their Mother and little brother out there in the desert, and buried them with rocks and stones, and kept moving, even when they had no water or food. Figure that out.”
“What happened next?”
“I took them to my aunt’s restaurant for breakfast, and when she saw them she broke out and cried. We fed them and gave them water and they slept on the floor in the back of the restaurant, slept for a full day. When they woke up, my Mother and her sister took care of them, and do you know, I didn’t hear those girls talk for almost a week? I was sleeping on a cot in the back too, but I had to go sleep in my truck because they were crying all night, just sobbing and sleeping. It was too much.”
“My Father was pissed at me. What the fuck are you doing crossing the fucking border you fucking idiot? He yelled and smacked the shit out of me. You tell me right fucking now that you are never crossing that fucking border again or I will go out to the truck right now and get my shotgun and fucking end your life, right here and now. But he didn’t have to tell me that. I was done. After I had brought them back, I was done. No fucking way I was ever going to do that again.” Hector said.
“And in a way, I had brought back what I was supposed to, from the way I saw it. Anna and Rosa and Orli were our family now too, and that was it. Anna and I got married a year later, and then we had the kids. My two cousins married Rosa and Orli about the same time and we were all family. It took years but we finally got their papers. We spent a shitload of money, and they became US citizens. They were so proud but never quite believed it. They loved God and prayed for their Mother and brother, and they’d have sooner died than jaywalk, but the thought of having the government put chips in their arms scared the shit out of them. No way were they going to end up across that border again.”
“Those women, they may have been part of our family, but the three of them were so tight, it was a family within a family. They didn’t go a half a day without talking to each other, and they had a bond like iron. Only they knew what it cost them to make that journey. When Anna died right before Christmas, they were already sick and I knew they were gonna go too. No way were they going to go on without each other. I took those women for granted so many times…”
Hector began to weep, and so did I. Between the story he was telling me, the tequila and the heat, I didn’t have a choice.
“You know, those women were saints. They really were. They never complained and they worked their asses off for their families and no matter what, they showed up,” he said, his bony shoulders shaking. “All they drank was water, they fucking loved water. I know it was because of the crossing. You go three days without water out in that fucking desert and you bury your Mom and your brother, you know the value of water. They never forgot that. It’s what made them the saints they were.” And he hung his head and cried, and all I could do was sit next to him under the fickle shade of that wiry mesquite tree without a word.
Finally, Hector got up, walked over to the graves, opened up the plastic gallons of water, and poured them over them, and the dust rose in the air like incense. “Here you go girls, mis amores, here is your water for the journey.” He said.
I got up then, and asked him if he needed anything at all. I told him I could go get food, but he waved it off, he was just going to sit there for awhile, and thanked me for listening to an old man complain.
“Oh no, Hector. It was an honor meeting you. I’m sorry for your loss”, and the words trailed off, sounding empty and inadequate.
“Safe travels to you, my friend. You will find what you’re looking for, I think. Keep looking,” he said and shook my hand.
“Same goes for you. Keep looking,” I said.
I got into my truck and drove away, feeling my heart breaking and then filling, feeling that sadness lift and a great gratitude rise in me, changing the nature of my tears. I felt as though I’d been given a gift, wrapped in tragedy, and a better understanding of what I had made the trip for, and what it would take for me to cross that space. I would keep looking, still battling my demons, still mostly lost in that desert I had found myself in more than a year ago. But now I had a better understanding of the value of water.