Home Before Sundown

In the only photograph I have of my grandfather, taken in the 1970s, he is wearing his City of Hidalgo deputy marshal uniform. He is half smiling, head slightly askew, with one hand on his leather police belt. Whenever I see this picture, it’s not his uniform, his badge, or the .357 Magnum on his hip that draws me in. It’s the expression in his eyes: kind and gentle, but also commanding of respect and wary of wrongdoers. It’s also the way he wears his cowboy hat, back on his head and tilted left at a cocked angle. In those eyes, I see strength and courage, but also love for his family and for the town he helped build, first as a school bus driver, then a taxicab company owner, and finally a peacekeeper. I envision my grandfather Roberto Dennett Garza Sr. wearing that uniform as he gathered my uncles and aunts—children then—in their small living room to pray, as he did every day before he went to work.

I never got to know him well. My parents had moved up north to Indiana in the late ’60s, and I spent most of my childhood away from the Rio Grande Valley, seeing Grandpa Roberto only at Christmas and sometimes in the summer. He went on to glory before we had a chance to return home in 1981, a move driven by my father’s desire for his children to grow up around family. I did get to know him in my own way, though, through the stories my mother and her sisters told on Saturdays when we would visit the tiny house in Hidalgo where my Grandfather Roberto and Grandmother Juanita had raised their