A few days ago, some folks shot a badger east of town. The badger had rabies and had bitten a man. I told my mom about the incident and we both admitted that we had no idea there were badgers in our part of Texas. Although we live in a rural area, I rarely encounter wildlife aside from birds, feral cats, and an occasional garden snake. Despite this, I never go outside to walk in the grass unless I wear boots. One of my aunts told me a story that as a teenager, a rat ran up her pants because she was barefoot. They lived out in the country back then, in a makeshift house that my mom says was still better than the house they lived at in Chihuahua, where she was born and lived part of her childhood. Some days when I go outside, I take the BB gun we keep in the living room with me - just in case. One of my other aunts was shot in the face with a BB gun when she was young. My uncle shot her, and the BB is lodged in her cheek. There are many stories of accidental violence that I hear from my tias and tios - all of whom grew up here in the same place as I have. This week it was the badger. Last week a former student of my mother’s (a library assistant at the high school) died. He was nineteen years old. When she heard the news, she described how he owed a $5 library fine that he had to pay before he could graduate, and on the final day before it was due, he showed up to pay it with a coin jar full of pennies. He dumped them onto the counter in front of her and said that was the money he owed. My mother made him count all the coins. He graduated and became a fireman, and one day, she ran into him at the local All-Sups (if you don’t know what that is - you aren’t from a rural place in Texas). She said he was so happy to see her. It was a few weeks ago, and just the other day, we watched the hearse pass by our house on the way to the cemetery, followed by the fire truck, police cars, and a long line of cars. She didn’t attend the funeral, but the day after he was buried, we drove out there to look and see where they put him. When we pulled inside the gates, she said that he would probably be on the inner plots, because that’s where the white people usually get buried. I suppose I had always known that the cemetery was segregated, but somehow, that mention of it surprised me. We found fresh dirt somewhere in the middle on the nicely manicured grass, far from the dusty outskirts where my abuelitos are interred.
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