The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Perhaps the death penalty can be rationalized with a concise argument: some criminals deserve death. It doesn’t matter if the death penalty doesn’t actually deter murders or if it wastes millions of dollars. Taxpayers are willing to foot the bill because the person being put to death has done something so terrible that we as a society are obligated to end his or her life. Here, we are left with the question of death itself, one that must be decided individually: What is the import of avenging crimes with death? It’s not a decision that can be made for any of us, but rather one that must be determined by each of us in the chambers of our conscience—quiet or chaotic as they might be—because it’s a judgment that hammers on the center of so many moral dilemmas we face. To decide, we must consider how we view our station on earth. Do moral absolutes exist, or is the world grayer than we would generally like to acknowledge?

  Is the question of whether death deserves death simple, or is it troubling, scratching at the doubt that lives in the pulpy center of our bodies, that mutable place that’s capable of morphing?

  Isai Ramirez

  (Photo by Laura Tillman)

  Minerva Perez

  (Photo by Brad Doherty)

  Alejandro Mendoza

  (Photo by Brad Doherty)

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  In the Garden

  I used to believe some people desirve daeth because of their heart being so cold and evil but who of us is beyound repentance, can not God do anything and change anyone?

  —JOHN ALLEN RUBIO

  I took a drive to Brownsville on a muggy day, the sky a haze of deep gray that made the little houses downtown look like unfinished figures in a charcoal drawing. I’d been traveling for two months, and they had been good ones, filled with family and friends. Yet, when I drove up behind the building and saw the stairs had been ripped off and replaced with plywood, the backyard stripped of grass and converted into raised garden beds, I felt as if I’d missed something important, and the place had changed when I turned my back. I’d tricked myself into believing that I’d mastered it with my mental energy, memorizing its form.

  The building had had a good summer, too. Families were planting vegetables and herbs in the garden beds and flowers to attract butterflies. A row of benches had been built under the shade of an awning, and the space was tidy and inviting. The garden had accomplished something unexpected—it made the building seem beside the point.

  The story of what had happened here lent strength to this new incarnation, a symbol of renewal in a spot where death once reigned. A large sign, facing the street, announced that this would be called the tres ángeles community garden. Three angels—in honor of the children. The story had been modified by a single word: angels. Angels do not haunt. They protect. Angels bless. The change was startlingly positive, moving the dead from hell to heaven.

  The power of the living over the dead was cruel in its totality. The dead could make no claims on how they would be remembered. They could only wait silently as the living adjudicated the nature of their legacy. But then the cycle would continue, until those now alive joined the dead, each new generation living at the cusp of history until forced to surrender their power to an unstemmable tide of new life.

  As for the lives of Julissa, Mary Jane, and John Stephan, they had not been erased. The new garden indicated that still more history was to be written on this piece of earth. Life-sustaining vegetables and herbs could grow here. The living would not stop for the dead, but they could acknowledge the existence of both in the same space.

  I called the number on the sign and spoke to the man in charge of the garden project, Dr. Wayne Wells. I wanted to meet him at the building.

  “The tragic building,” Wells said, his voice set back in his throat.

  In October, Wells and Rosie Bustinza, the garden manager, walked me around, pointing out the crops that the members of the garden were growing in raised beds. Climbing spinach, healthy and prolific, shared space with broccoli, cauliflower, and cilantro. Peppers, eggplant, and basil, tomatoes and okra, crowded together in the boxes.

  Wells said they were still hoping the building would come down, and that a little park with a memorial to the children would take its place. “We’re hoping for January,” he said. “They promised us they won’t disturb the garden.”

  The city held a christening for the garden. Refreshments were lined up on a table, and the audience sat underneath a tent facing the garden and the building at its side.

  “We’re celebrating restoration, we’re celebrating future harvests, and we’re celebrating being together,” Dr. Belinda Reininger, a professor of public health, told those gathered. “I know every time I have a visitor here I’m showing it off. I think it’s a place that’s not only transformed this local community, but Brownsville in general.”

  A couple of the gardeners got up and spoke about their experiences. Then Chris Patterson, the burly Parks and Recreation Department director, took the microphone. “For the longest time you drove by here, wondering what was going to be here,” he said earnestly, “but you also got this empty feeling, just an empty feeling. A really dark feeling—I did. We started doing the community garden, and slowly but surely, it was like life was coming back. And so now I actually drive through here every morning just to see it.”

  Patterson tentatively read something he had written for the occasion. Stumbling a little, he began, “The cycle of life. All life begins, living things all have a moment at which time they become alive. That beginning of life marks the first point on the circle of life. This garden is the first point on the new cycle of life, this neighborhood. It is quickly bringing life back into this area. It was once a dark, dreary, empty lot, home to vagrants, rodents, and trash, and I should admit, a lot of that was here. It is now a lively, fresh, green sanctuary full of life. This event marks the start of a new life for our three little angels, who live in each root and stem and leaf of each plant in this lot. This neighborhood is now alive,” Patterson said, as though, through these words, he was granting an unspoken wish. He urged everyone to keep the space clean.

  Mayor Tony Martinez, a short, slim man in his sixties, with tailored clothes and a mop of shiny gray hair, walked to the podium. Martinez spoke warmly to the people of Brownsville, the proud parent to every girl and boy in the audience.

  “This is gorgeous for the community, and when I say the community, I mean you and me. I don’t want anybody to kind of walk out of here going, like, ‘Well, that’s a nice neighborhood but that’s not my neighborhood.’ Every neighbor is your neighbor, every brother is your brother, and every sister is your sister. We are the human family. There’s nothing that divides us. There’s nothing that makes us apart. We may be short, we may be tall, we may be a little chubby, we may be a little bit thin, whatever it is, but we’re all the same. And so, that equality and that likeness of mind that brings that love out of your hearts, that’s what I want to make sure that we allow to grow. If we want to do something from this point on, this is the first garden, but there’s many more to come. But I encourage every one of you to spread the word. I want everyone to know about what you’re doing here.”

  A previous mayor went on trial for allegations that he’d stolen money from the city and was acquitted. Martinez, with personal wealth and a clean reputation, seemed like a fresh start for Brownsville. He was paying more attention than his predecessors to beautification projects such as community gardens, hike and bike trails, and historic preservation. Brownsville had too many long-standing problems to be cured by a single public figure, but examples of progress were beginning to accumulate.

  On Halloween, the city put on a party at the garden and the streets that surrounded it, in Barrio Buena Vida. Orange plastic pumpkins had been placed around the garden beds. Rosie Bustinza was there with her grandchildren, and they piled onto the benches for a group photo. She was buzzing with
pride, both in her family and what they’d planted together. In the street, long tables were set up, and volunteers from the posh private school were handing out apples and bananas. As it got later, the streets filled with people. Toddlers wobbled in superhero costumes, and teenagers, covered in fake blood and wounds, watched their friends perform an exercise demonstration on a large stage that had been set up in the middle of the intersection. Again, the building was secondary. If the kids were aware of how jarring it was to see the fake gashes on their bodies in this setting, they didn’t acknowledge it.

  When I’d thrown away the shoes I wore inside the building, I recognized the irrational root of my action, but I couldn’t resist the impulse. There was a nauseating immediacy in the contact between those shoes and the floor of the apartment. That Halloween, however, the faux-gory costumes signaled a change, a loosening of the grip the crime had on the neighborhood. It could be overlooked for an evening in the name of good-natured fun. Maybe one day the building would psychically blend back into the landscape, joining a family of other Brownsville buildings that had also survived, despite the complicated memories they inspired.

  I walked around the corner, away from the celebration and toward Minerva’s house. She was there with her nephew Manuel, and they invited me inside. I asked her what she thought about the garden.

  “It’s nice, but they should tear out this thing,” she said of the building.

  The garden didn’t change her mind?

  “No.” Minerva said that she’d been invited to plant a plot, but declined because she was often out of town.

  “As long as you have that thing over there, there’s always going to be a bad spirit,” Manuel said. “They can have watermelons over there, they can have cucumbers. You need to understand one thing, the spirit—bad—is going to be over there.”

  Manuel said he walked by the building every day, sometimes late at night, and he could feel the spirits of the children as a physical presence. He could hear them, too.

  “What do they sound like?”

  “Like they’re going to escape.”

  Minerva agreed with her nephew. “For us, we were here when that thing happened, we couldn’t sleep for months! My mom was still alive, she was one hundred years old, she used to see the little kids go by to Good Neighbor for dinner or lunch.”

  Julissa would be sitting on John’s shoulders, and Minerva’s mom would hand out Popsicles to the kids.

  Local politicians had made many promises to Minerva about the building. None had been fulfilled. It hadn’t been destroyed, and while the garden had improved the back half, Minerva couldn’t see that side from her house.

  Mr. Mendoza, Minerva’s lifelong neighbor, walked through the grassy lot that separated their houses and stood outside Minerva’s living-room window.

  “Acuérdate la güera?” she asked him, smiling. Do you remember the white woman? He did. I asked him what he thought about the garden. He didn’t like it—of course. Mr. Mendoza never liked anything, by his own admission. His reaction made me smile—members of the garden had cheerfully told me about the time they’d spent cleaning up his yard.

  “I’m not an outside man,” he said. Also, he didn’t like plants.

  I walked with Minerva and her nephew down the street. The kids from the private school were still handing out fruit, while around the corner candy was distributed. Pop music blared and children in costumes and face paint swarmed around us, most demurring at fruit in favor of candy.

  I told Minerva I’d gone to death row to meet John and that he’d told me he regretted his actions.

  “I’m not here to judge him. The only one who can judge him is God,” she said. “I know he did wrong, but we don’t know what was going on in their world, you know. The only thing is, I feel sorry for those little kids! Because they were little angels, like all of these ones right here.”

  Minerva and Manuel and I wandered past the ballerina and bumblebee, the zombie and the Superman and the French maid. Minerva’s memories of John were kind, and her desire to tear down the building didn’t stem from vengeance or hatred, but from a subtler place. The deaths of the children were disturbing to her because she cared—because Julissa, Mary Jane, and John Stephan were real to her. So was John, a nice young man from the neighborhood. John was never disrespectful of her elderly mother, Minerva said, unlike some of the other people who stopped by.

  “They’re here right now,” Minerva said of the children’s spirits. The street was full of children who could have been the Rubio children, mothers who could have been Angela, and fathers who could have been John. She was right—they were all around us.

  Proximity. That was key to understanding the crime’s impact—and the limitations of that understanding. Minerva was physically close to the building, and more than that, she was sensitive and couldn’t ignore its pull. I’d been trying to comprehend it, but when she asked me questions, challenging me—what would you think if you lived there? How would you feel if it were converted into an office and you had to work there every day?—I had to admit that I still didn’t know what it felt like to be at the center. Maybe it would never be possible to transcend that final gap that separates us all from one another.

  The picture was starting to meld. The building, the jail, the crime scene—yes. But also, the garden, the neighborhood, the commonality of childhood, the creases of history. It was astonishing to see the world as a single, quivering entity, rather than a set of various concerns parsed into distinct compartments. The murder and murderer could coexist with the rest—life, the city—and not be a feature set apart or used to demonize the inadequacies of the rest. It was one more thing, a sad and terrible thing, that happened to people, because of people, and belonged here along with the children picking leaves of climbing spinach from the vine, their grandmother Rosie standing by, full of pride. If it could be this way, integrated into the sprawling whole, then maybe it could be shaped like the earth, and there could be a modification of the human landscape. Maybe it could be a feature addressed as part of that whole. Tragedy is one more element, along with happiness, victory, grief, goodness, and on and on, in this pulsing, changing, densely connected human network that harmonizes and contradicts, all at once. Only then, when these events are not set aside on the shelf of the worst moments of the human race, and they become what they are—another element that is intricately bound—can we change. We can stop these crimes from happening, using the concrete tools and the subtler actions that often elude us. We can see children like Julissa, Mary Jane, and John Stephan grow up, and we can stop remembering victims as we choose—as angels or ghouls—and prevent them from becoming victims at all.

  Already, this is happening in the little corner of Brownsville near East Tyler Street. There is a shift. You can feel it. That shift may be helping one family, or ten, to live a little better, have a little more support, so that they may evade a different kind of unfolding of their lives. It gives me hope that maybe this wasn’t, as some people said, a sad story of evil, monstrous people. A story with no meaning. That’s not the legacy of Julissa, Mary Jane, and John Stephan. Their long shadows make it possible to see the world more clearly, as neither pure light nor pure darkness, but a landscape where crest and valley are cast in shades of gray.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  Three Graves Together

  I told them that they got hurt by their parents, and that now they are asleep and now with Jesus.

  —DIANA HERNANDEZ, CHOIR LEADER AT THE CHILDREN’S FUNERAL

  In a grassy plain bordered by trees, John Stephan, Julissa, and Mary Jane lie quietly under nearly identical headstones alongside hundreds of other departed souls, just a few miles away from where they lived and died. Most of the graves in this cemetery have a container for flowers, and most of the headstones, embedded flat in the ground, are punctuated by the reds, pinks, and blues of artificial petals.

  At
the front office, I asked to be directed to the headstones of the children.

  The secretary knew the spot. “The three graves together, just around the curve.”

  That visit took place early in the process of learning about the children, their parents who had come before them, and how residents across Brownsville had mourned and interpreted their passing. I’d never stood so close to them, but true knowledge remained far away.

  In the seven years since I first stepped inside the building to the moment I arrived at the end of my inquiry, its fate had been in a constant state of uncertainty. The city had received a federal grant, which was used to purchase the building in 2009, with a plan to turn it into a community center. The endeavor was disorganized from the start. A struggle ensued to find an organization that would be willing to partner with local government to create such a center. The building’s historic status complicated the issue—more red tape for any group that might want to take on its renovation. After several years, no collaborator could be found, and the city decided to return the federal funding in 2013, which would allow them to proceed with demolition. But just as it seemed the issue would be resolved, the new mayor, Tony Martinez, said he wanted the city to wait—with the creation of the Tres Ángeles Community Garden and its central location near the farmers’ market came the hope that the building could one day be used for Brownsville’s expanding health initiatives.

  While this took place behind the scenes, the residents of Barrio Buena Vida witnessed the continued deterioration of a vacant structure where a tragic event once happened. A ten-year memorial service with the building as its backdrop further emphasized the lack of change. Many other possibilities were voiced—perhaps the building would be leveled and a park would honor the children. Maybe it could be used as a warehouse, an administrator proposed, to store parts of other restoration projects. Some hoped a colorful mural would brighten the exterior. Yet, years came and went and its doors remained shuttered. Even as the community garden brightened the back of the building, the interior collected new tenants—bats, Minerva had told me nervously—and rats.