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unraveling his own belief system. But he never confronted the issue at hand, namely that the working poor she represented had a legitimate cause and that they were being terrorized by both growers and police officers because they wanted to form a union.
     
    Hackberry Holland’s political conversion did not take place at a union meeting or at Mass inside a sympathetic Catholic church, or involve seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus. An irritable lawman accomplished the radicalization of Hackberry Holland by swinging a blackjack across his head and then trying to kick him to death. When Hackberry awoke on the concrete floor of a county lockup, his head inches from a perforated drain cover streaked with urine, he no longer doubted the efficacy of revolutionaries standing at the jailhouse door to sign up new members for their cause.
     
    Rie had died of uterine cancer ten years ago, and their twin sons had left Texas, one for a position as an oncologist at the Mayo in Phoenix, the other as a boat skipper in the Florida Keys. Hackberry sold the ranch on the Guadalupe River where they had raised the children, and moved down by the border. If he’d been asked why he had given up the green place he loved for an existence in a dust-blown wasteland and a low-paying electoral office in a county seat whose streets and sidewalks and buildings were spiderwebbed with heat cracks, Hackberry would have had no explanation, or at least not one he would discuss with others.
     
    The truth was, he could not rise in the morning from his bed surrounded by the things she had touched, the wind blowing the curtains, pressurizing the emptiness of the house, stressing the joists and studs and crossbeams and plaster walls against one another, filling the house with a level of silence that was like someone clapping cupped palms violently on his eardrums. He could not wake to these things and Rie’s absence and the absence of his children, whom he still saw in his mind’s eye as little boys, without concluding that a terrible theft had been perpetrated upon him and that it had left a lesion in his heart that would never heal.
     
    A Baptist preacher had asked Hackberry if he was angry at God for his loss.
     
    “God didn’t invent death,” Hackberry answered.
     
    “Then who did?”
     
    “Cancer is a disease produced by the Industrial Age.”
     
    “I think you’re an angry man, Hack. I think you need to let go of it. I think you need to celebrate your wife’s life and not mourn over what you cain’t change.”
     
    I think you ought to keep your own counsel, Hackberry thought. But he did not say the words aloud.
     
    Now, in the blue glow of early dawn and the fading of the stars in the sky, he tried to eat breakfast on his gallery and not think about the dreams he’d had just before waking. No, “dreams” wasn’t the right word. Dreams had sequence and movement and voices inside them. All Hackberry could remember before opening his eyes into the starkness of his bedroom was the severity of the wounds in the bodies of the nine women and girls he had found buried by a bulldozer behind the church. How many people were aware of what a .45-caliber round could do to human tissue and bone? How many had ever seen what a .45 machine-gun burst could do to a person’s face or brain cavity or breasts or rib cage?
     
    There was a breeze out of the south, and even though his St. Augustine grass was dry and stiff, it had a pale greenish aura in the early dawn, and the flowers in his gardens were varied and bright with dew. He didn’t want to think about the victims buried behind the church. No, that wasn’t correct, either. He didn’t want to think about the terror and the helplessness they had experienced before they were lined up and murdered. He didn’t want to brood on these things because he had experienced them himself when he had been forced to stand with his fellow POWs on a snowy stretch of ground in zero-degree weather and wait for a Chinese prison