The Muse is Loose

The woman leaned against the side of her store building smoking a cigarette. The uniform identified her as a store employee. Conversation revealed she was manager. Across the little highway that intersected with a major one a few yards away was a fence lined with dolls, religious articles, unidentifiable objects, and water bottles. We had stopped at this place many times for a break and gasoline. I had noticed these things on the fence and ground and guessed a car accident had claimed the life of someone. I asked the woman and she told me it was the location of a grisly event that shocked the nation and the world. On May 14, 2003, an eighteen-wheeler driver abandoned the trailer he was towing, at this place. He had sensed something bad was wrong as other truck drivers saw hands and a red handkerchief being waved from the trailer; a distress sign. The woman told us when the trailer was opened bodies tumbled to the ground. Others bodies were inside. Those alive, who could, ran for cover. Of the seventy-four illegals in that trailer nineteen died. This woman saw all this and the newspeople who came like buzzards, circling the death scene .( That's the way she saw them.) The bodies were left in the road until a Mexican official came to help with their indentification. They were from several countries. One was a four-year old boy. Another was a 91 year-old man! I am sure each time the woman slips out there for her smoke break the scene comes back. How could one ever forget something like that? It happened, not on a battlefield of war, but near a well-traveled South Texas Highway.
Those people did not pay to board that trailer thinking something like this would happen. The driver and other greedy, thoughtless, cruel "coyotes" did not plan for it to happen. But it did.
Events like this simply cannot be undone after the fact. Times and events can be unforgiving when such tragic mistakes are made. The driver is doing a twenty-year sentence, but how can any sentence, even a death penalty, undo what has been done? Those who paid for illegal freedom have to share some blame. Nineteen of them cannot for it took their lives.
I will always have the roadside picture of flowers and dolls and water bottles imprinted in my memory. I will also remember the woman leaning with one foot against the side of that building, looking 100 feet across the way and remembering again what she saw that fateful day.