A state of disobedience

From the transcript at trial: Commonwealth of

Virginia v. Alvin Scheer

DIRECT EXAMINATION, CONTINUED

BY MR. STENNINGS:

Q. How did you pay for the trip, Alvin? Did you steal the money?

A. Why no, sir. I ain't no thief. Never have been. I cashed in my wife's and my life's savings for the trip; all $742 dollars worth. Then pawned whatever else I had that was worth anything. Figured that was enough for gas and maybe a burger from time to time on the way. I planned on sleepin' in my truck.

Drivin' through Missouri, you could see folks had a lot a sympathy for what the governor was doin'. Except, funny thing, you couldn't have seen it on television.

Nope, weren't nothin' on TV that a fair man might have called fair. They were still hammerin' away on that old priest that got killed. But I knew from what I saw and was told and read before I left that there weren't but the one survivor, that little wetback girl. And I never saw her interviewed for the news I was able to catch when I stopped for gas, a meal or a beer.

So where they came up with all the stories about what that priest supposedly done with the kids? Well, I wonder if they didn't just make it up.

I'm pretty sure they did.

For one thing, I lived in Texas all my life. I know what a Tex-Mex sounds like, speakin' English or Spanish. And Puerto Ricans aren't too common back home. So why do you suppose that of all the people they interviewed on TV about the mission and the priest weren't a one of 'em that had a proper Tex-Mex accent, but a whole bunch of 'em sounded like the Puerto Ricans I'd met? In particular, they sounded like some Puerto Ricans I met once who came from New York.

I stopped once, in a small town in Missouri, and I bought me two papers. One was the local town's; the other was the New York Times. Funniest thing how the local town's was full of mail from readers, a good chunk of which was in favor of Texas and against the feds while the Times was nothin' but hate mail directed at Texas, the governor, and anything having to do with them.

I didn't know if that was how folks up north really felt, if it was the news making 'em feel like that, or if they were maybe . . . pickin' and choosin' what got into the paper. And if they were doin' that, I wondered what else they were playin' games with.

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