Emily Varnell
There it is, your father says, pointing out the windshield, and there it is. A sign leans toward the road on a rusted pole, an advertisement for a rundown liquor store that sells more than liquor. It has two words, all caps, written in red, white, and blue. Your parents laugh, marveling that it has survived decades. You marvel, too, at the boldness of it.
The town you have driven an hour to visit has begun. The highway morphs into a residential street with stately, historic-looking homes. Your parents and husband ask for directions while you try to take notes. You have recently moved back to your home state after many years of living in another, and you have it in your head that you need to fully know this part of the earth, this landscape that you have enjoyed your entire life thanks to the cabin your grandparents built by a river named for its cold water. To do this, you have been visiting historical markers in the area, taking the time to read and process the history of a place embedded in your being for the first time. A website with an interactive map that pinpoints every marker in the state helps narrow your search. Each marker must have some connection to the cabin, or the route to the cabin, or the main street where you spent countless Fourth of July weekends scrambling for candy at the local parade, to make the cut.
The town you are in now holds no bearing on your childhood. This place is an hour from the much smaller town nearest the cabin, the town with the main street parade. But you are here because your mother knows about this project and wants to do something besides sit in the river, and because everyone in the car—and the country—knows what happened in this town one year and three months and eight days ago.
You doubt you would have considered driving to this town in search of historical markers had a national tragedy not occurred. You would not have considered this town worthy of witness. It did not fit the scope of your vision. What a limited, false excuse. You know this when you see the first mural, a flash of color between buildings a block over.
I want to see those, your mother says. All of them. Yes, everyone says. Of course. The first marker you want to visit is close, and your father parks the car.
It is mid-morning, and the heat is already insufferable. The marker stands in front of a string of shops, and you read about the original high school that burned to the ground. The marker goes on about a growing, bustling community, and now, with multiple new schools raised and built and expanded, for more than a century, the students of this town have become valuable community members.
The relationship between this marker and your planned final stop, a spot where another building once stood, is obvious. A building not burned, but demolished. Salted earth. At least, that is what everyone has in their heads, from some article not one of you actually read.
Your husband takes a picture of an old car parked in front of the business that now stands on the site of the original high school. Everyone waits, sweating, until you finish reading. Together, you cross the street in search of shade and continue to the historic town square. The square is like any other: an uninspired courthouse looms on one side, and on the other, stone buildings turned into antique shops surround a small park. The park has green grass and trees and a fountain in the center. The only other people in sight, a family perhaps, gather around the fountain and the white, wooden crosses encircling it.
Oh, your father or your mother or your husband says. No one realized how entrenched in grief this town would be, and no one is quite ready to face it. Not yet.
When the stoplights turn, and the once-quiet square fills with noise and exhaust as cars drive up the street between the courthouse and the park, you continue toward the courthouse. The courthouse lawn has multiple markers about the history of the county, but you do not make any notes. You are thinking only of what may happen when you cross the street to the park. Two granite markers, one pink and one grey, are on the far corner of the lawn, and you walk over to them to delay the inevitable.
The corner is at the intersection with another main road, and you are keenly aware of the drivers watching you study these two markers. The pink one is fading and crammed with text, so you take a picture to read it later, but the grey one simply states, with giant, stark letters, the funders for this fading pink marker, a group of women known for erecting civil war memorials. It is apparently more important to read the name of this group from your car than the actual historical marker, and you can guess what’s stated in the marker because of it.
You turn around and notice another marker on the other side of the street, in a corner of the park. The group surrounding the crosses has left. Your father stands beside you.
Shall we, he says.
You have tunnel vision, focusing in on the marker and blocking out the rest of the park. Everyone stares up at the black and silver sign, which rises above your heads. Over a century ago, this park was the pioneer wagon yards. A place bustling with human life, where travelers cooked bacon and boys learned to whip bullies. The marker text is as manicured as the park. You take a picture of the marker to read more later, because you have noticed other murals in an alleyway on the far side of the park, now in the background of your picture. The white crosses, too, are in the bottom right corner of the frame, and you have no choice now but to walk toward them.
You distance yourself from your husband, your parents, and begin a slow walk around the fountain. You have sweated through your shirt. Each white cross has candles, toys, stuffed animals. A picture. Enough time has passed for the paint to begin to chip and the fur of the stuffed animals to fade from the relentless summer sun.
You have never before witnessed the aftermath of a shooting, a massacre, and you feel very far away. Beautiful, dead children are smiling up at you. A dead teacher is smiling up at you.
Your mother teaches kindergarten, and while she works in a wealthy private school in the suburbs of one of the fastest growing cities in the country, she and her students can die in this fashion any day. Have police hesitate to respond and intervene. Have her picture and name be part of a memorial to be forgotten by legislators and voters when it suits them.
You complete the circle around the fountain and rejoin your family. Your mother has probably wiped away tears. You cannot remember saying a word. It is imperative, then, to leave the park and cross the street to an antique store. Two cheery, older women call out a greeting from behind the register. Everyone splits up to wander the aisles. The out-of-body feeling fades as you stare at and pick up old junk. Amid the shelves crammed with randomness, you see a ceramic plate celebrating the Confederacy in a box on the floor, on sale for $9.
Everyone leaves the antique store and turns to complete the loop around the square. You walk past the alley with murals that you saw when taking a picture of the wagon yard marker. The alley is wide, and several cars are parked in it. The three kids in these three murals, many, many times larger than their photos in front of the crosses, tower above, more of their favorite things or activities painted around them. A man is sitting in his truck with the door open, looking at a mural with the child’s name written in the Pokémon font, and you assume, because of his posture and the color of his skin, that he must be family. An uncle, a grandfather, a father. You walk past him quickly, a mix of sadness and shame seething through your chest, for your presumptions and for simply staring at his grief if you are right.
You end the walk around the square with the town’s ancient opera house. The wooden sign swinging above the door, something about mischief or town gossip or possibly mildly inappropriate, makes everyone laugh. Some of the heaviness lifts. You have been speaking only in hushed whispers or sighs or with no sound at all.
On the walk back toward the old high school marker and the car, you pass a few people holding signs with slogans and last names in big, bold letters. A political rally of some sort is happening in a different part of town. You wonder how many parents of the dead children might be there.
Back at the car, you inform your family of another marker that you want to see. It is, you say, very close to the originally planned final stop, if anyone is still interested in going there.
Your father drives through the square to a different neighborhood, one with much more modest houses than the ones you saw driving in. This marker is also in a park, an empty park with a small playground and one white building in the center. The neighborhood itself is still and quiet. You do not see anyone in their driveways or yards or even driving through the streets. The marker is next to the sidewalk, so instead of parking and getting out, you have your husband roll down his window and take a picture of it so you can read about the former site of the town’s segregated school at a later date. You are looking more intently at a dilapidated shack across the street from the marker that, without a doubt, is someone’s home.
The question now is whether to go to the final stop, which is only a few blocks away. Everyone decides, after some deliberation, to go. You decide you are honoring their lives by going to this place. No pictures, though. Not of any memorial or of the flattened area where the school once stood. Someone puts the address into their phone.
But it has not been demolished. You were wrong. The school stands behind a temporary chain-link fence, the kind used for construction sites. An empty police car is parked in the drop-off loop. The windows are boarded up with plywood. Some visitors have parked and walked up to the large cross with beads and candles and flowers near the front door. One woman holds up her phone to take a picture.
Unlike the square and the crosses and the murals, this place is both beyond comprehension and immediately overwhelming. Your mother lets out a cracking “Oh!” and your father does not stop the car. You try to absorb all of it without taking a single note, because any moment not spent in utter silence and stillness seems unforgivable.
Imagine, your mother says as your father drives back through the silent neighborhood, all of the funerals. All of these homes. Having to go to every single one.
Everyone desperately needs to return to the practical, the living. Someone needs something from the grocery store, which is much larger than any store in the smaller town by the cabin. The parking lot is packed, and it is the first place you’ve witnessed human beings bustling about daily life.
Back at the car, there is bickering about whether to stop for lunch, and after a failed attempt to find some restaurant your father had eaten at countless years before, it’s decided that your time in this town is over. The heat is officially overpowering, the cold river water at the cabin beckoning for many, many reasons. Your father begins to drive back, and your mother says nothing of the first set of murals everyone had promised to see. On the residential street with the stately homes, you notice another school. By the steps up to the front lawn from the sidewalk is a sign forbidding media from coming any farther.
As you drive away from the site of the tragedy, everyone begins to speak more openly about it. You rattle off some fact about one of the mothers of the dead children. She had never been on a plane before, but she got on one to make a statement, a plea, to lawmakers thousands of miles away. You remember this from an article you barely read months ago, written by an award-laden reporter whom many people have trusted with their stories. That is all you had done before coming to this town, read headlines and skimmed over pain.
The sign is back. Your father asks if anyone wants a picture. No.
***
Later, you attend a book festival and hear an author speak with such passion and clarity that you buy his book of essays. The first essay contemplates inserting the self into history, letting emotions get in the way of actual work. A photograph, personal experience, catharsis does nothing and solves nothing.
The work in this author’s essay is unequivocally different from yours, but you cannot deny these connections that struck you after writing about that summer day. You, a white woman, the type of person that, for so many decades and centuries, other writers, abolitionists, and activists have used in a plea for other white people to finally register the pain of others, have inserted yourself into an event that you have almost no relation to whatsoever. You have experienced some form of catharsis and in doing so, muddled up this historical moment.
These words, then, are a continuation of that tradition. And yet, you still asked an editor to publish them, because someone may need them and because you are alive. This is the reason why the author from the book festival ultimately allowed himself to commit an action he had sworn to suppress. You are alive, and the children in a town 50 miles from the border, and an unfathomable number of others across this country, are not.
Bibliography (in order of reference)
Details for Original Site of Uvalde High School. Marker Number 12258. Texas Historical Commission: Texas Historical Sites Atlas, 1997. https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/Details/5463012258/print
Details for Fort Inge, Camp Dix, C.S.A. Marker Number 1991. Texas Historical Commission: Texas Historical Sites Atlas, 1963. https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/Details?fn=print&atlasnumber=5463001991
Details for Early Texas Wagon Yards. Marker Number 1358. Texas Historical Commission: Texas Historical Sites Atlas, 1966. https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/Details/5463001358/print
Details for Nicolas Street School. Marker Number 17070. Texas Historical Commission: Texas Historical Sites Atlas, 2011. https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/Details?fn=print&atlasnumber=5507017070
Reeves, Roger. “Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind.” Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. Graywolf Press, 2023.