(originally Published November 7th, 2016)

After graduating high school, I immediately put all my spare time into going to community college. No degree in mind, just a thirst to know more, to satisfy knowledge gaps. One of my favorite classes while at American River Community College was a creative writing course, where I produced a variety of work that I felt a legitimate pride for. Of these, my favorite was "The Death of Juan Reyoaso." It ended up featured in the school's literary magazine (pictured above), and I received a tiny bit of recognition for it as well.

As we are beginning to develop short stories in my 9th grade class, this seemed like an appropriate time to share it. It is worth noting that there are a number of things that I have resisted changing in this story. I've found I'm never quite satisfied with my writing, but at some point you must remove your hands from the wheel and hope the reader can take it from there. 

I hope that you enjoy this mix of truth and fiction.

The Death of Juan Reyoaso

Influenced by John Steinbeck’s “The Pearl”

1971. Yuba County, California.

1

Juan woke before the dawn had. The dark sky was patched with silver clouds and though some were edged with thin lines of orange in the east, the sun had yet to flush away the night. Outside the old farm house, crickets chirped in the tall grasses and small darting birds picked at the last of the orchard blooms. Along the blackberried drain ditch near the road, frogs indulged in morning moisture while the farm cats stalked them. Large garden spiders milled about their webs on the north side of the house.

Juan opened his eyes and looked to the empty pillow beside him. He could never remember Connie lying beside him in the morning. The quilt was always tucked neatly under the pillow. She would be making breakfast as she was always doing when he awakened. Spiced eggs and large squares of potatoes would sizzle from a greased pan, a plate of tortillas and bowl of salsa with thick chucks of tomato already set on the table. Often shreds of beef were cooked, and on special occasions the smell of goat meat would fill the rooms of the house, and it would fill his first breath. His first breath today was brisk and empty, as it had been for many months.

Juan pulled the blanket down low to let the morning cool his chest. He looked around the unlit room to the framed pictures on the dresser, and to the dusty closet near the corner, where a number of modest blouses hung. A fly slipped out the closet door to the apron draped over the only chair in the room and landed on a dried bit of food. On an orchard like this or any other, a fly is a dark thing. They hover near the dead limbs of trees, on the skin of diseased fruit whose flesh has gone to rot, and spread darkness wherever they should land. Many would avoid them, or shake their hands and curse them, but as they had never minded Juan, he had never minded them either. And so this fly, after thoroughly ignoring him, circled, shook its wings and picked at the spot before returning to the closet.

Now Juan got up and stepped to his small dresser to pull on his overalls and brown shirt and hat. He laced his work boots and went into the kitchen to make a bowl of oatmeal. He could hear the start of the day as he ate. The tractor sputtered through the orchard, pulling a train of bins and dropping each near a group of trees, then chugging on and dropping another. On the outlet road the Boss’s old Ford was grixxing its gears on the way back from the grading station, the flatbed full of dayworkers. As it neared the orchard the driver’s door would open to drag a foot until the truck stopped.

After finishing breakfast Juan rinsed the bowl with water and overturned it near the sink to use tomorrow. He took his picking sack from the hook near the door as he left the house. As Juan walked to the field his right foot dragged at the heel, leaving a snail’s trail in the wet dirt beside the steps of his left. With his good left hand he pulled the knotted loop of the sack over his head, then used the back of his crippled hand to help tie the bottom strands around his back.

Juan continued his shuffle into the field as the flatbed came to a stop. The other workers unloaded and tied their sacks around themselves as they were led to different bins around the orchard. Returning pickers could be told where they were working by the Boss’s youngest son, who spoke Spanish. Others were led to their bins by the Boss, or his elder son. The white Warf Rats would be put further away than the others, because they followed the trains and rarely stayed in one place long enough to bathe in the ditches, and so their smell was awful.

Each picker positioned his ladder beneath a tree, and set to picking immediately, with exception to Juan. Juan inspected his first tree carefully, looking to see where the peaches bunched and where they would be most ripe and then positioned his ladder. He climbed up between two full branches, with a third branching off that would be nearer to him once the eastern winds picked up.

The sun raised suddenly, a wash, a flood, consuming the grove just as Juan touched his first peach, and seeing it smooth, fuzzed lightly, and neither too large nor small, he dropped it into the sack. He picked each peach deliberately. Some were spotted in brown or still green, or holed by worms and picked at by birds, others had rot on a dead branch, and all of these Juan dropped to the ground. He worked quickly, using his left naturally and the pinch of his wrist instead of the crippled fingers of his right hand, in a motion not unlike milking an utter. Once his sack was full of fruit, he would untie the knot at his neck and the peaches would roll into the bin, then he would retie and continue to pick.

Because Juan sorted as he picked, the Boss left Juan to himself for nearly the entire day, while he and his sons sorted the bins of the other pickers. They would pull out damaged peaches in handfuls. The bins would fill quickly by a picker who happened upon the occasional giant peach, nearly the size of a melon, but too large for the canning machines, and these too were discarded. As he went to each box sorting, the Boss’s youngest son would label the bins of each picker with names that amused him, such as “The Little Old Man,” “Lefty McFast-Hands,” and “Man in the Boy Scout Shirt.”

As Juan picked at his tree, the Boss walked over from the nearest sorting bin. He watched Juan inspect and pick at his great speed with nearly all of his weight on his good left foot, and wondered how it was possible. The Boss stopped at the first of Juan’s filled bins, the name handwritten “The World's Fastest Peach Picker,” and pulled a peach from the brim.  He turned it in his hand, brushed his thumb over the soft fuzz and saw that it was perfect. “Hey, Juan.”

Juan answered softly, “Good morning Boss,” and continued to pick.

The Boss looked back through the line of trees to the old farm house, the paint peeled unevenly so that entire boards alternated between weather-worn grey and soft white. “How’s the house? You getting along okay?”

Juan picked another few peaches and stepped down from the ladder. He untied the knot at his neck and let the peaches roll slowly into the bin, so they would not settle, and his third bin was nearly filled. He turned to the Boss as he knotted the sack behind his neck, but didn’t meet his eyes. “Is good. Just empty.” Juan returned to the ladder and began to pick at the furthest peaches in his reach.

“You sure you’re okay my friend? You’ve been down at the bar a lot lately. We all miss Connie…”

Juan picked the last of the peaches within his arc and climbed down to empty them into the bin. “I done something Boss. I am ‘shamed.”

The Boss put a hand to Juan’s shoulder and was quiet as Juan talked softly to him, somber in a way very unlike him. Juan told the Boss how a family from up the road had come to the farmhouse weeks ago, a girl and her parents. They had heard of his loss, and wanted to give condolence, offering a small bundle of flowers. Their daughter had been especially upset, crying a great deal that Connie had been very kind to her, although Juan had never seen the girl before. Her parents asked if their daughter could stay and talk with Juan so that he may comfort her, and he welcomed the offer of company warmly. After her mother and father had left, the girl went to Juan, hugging and pulling herself into him. She cried into his chest and as he hunched over to hold her he could smell vanilla in her hair. Juan said that they would talk, and went to the kitchen to bring water, filling a small pot and shooing a fly from a dusty cup in the cabinet to pair the overturned one near the sink.

When he returned to the small living area her blouse was lying on the floor and she had only a shawl across her waist. From across the room she called to him, instructing him to first set the water down and then to take his shirt off. Juan set the pot and glasses on the simple dining table, but for all his loneliness his arms would not move beyond that and he stood still. She came to him instead, pulling his arms around her, and as she did there was a shout at the door.

The girl’s mother screamed at Juan, and her daughter began a fit of whooping sobs, picking her clothes from the floor and running to her father’s arms. Her father sent both mother and daughter out of the house and stomped towards Juan, yelling and shaking his fist and pointing a sharp finger. He said Juan had done a bad thing and would go to prison forever.  Juan pleaded not to go, and that he had not meant to do any bad things. The father confided that he did not wish to send Juan to prison, having been there himself, but because his daughter was so devastated by what Juan had done, she wouldn’t be able to work and make money for the family. It was offered then that Juan would pay the father weekly his daughter’s share of the family income, and in exchange the police would not hear of what Juan had done, and to this Juan agreed.

Having confessed this to The Boss, Juan lowered his head and shook it in guilt. “My friend,” The Boss said, “that old Thanner family isn’t nothing but a bunch of cheats.” He shook Juan’s shoulder lightly until he looked up. “That’s who you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

Juan confirmed that it was with a small nod.

“Well look Juan. That bastard can’t send you to no prison, cause he’s been taking money from you. That’s extortion!” The Boss leaned nearer to Juan and whispered “If he comes and bothers you again, you tell that son-of-a to go to hell!”

Juan smiled and nodded emphatically, then lifted the brim of his cap with his good hand to let the light into his eyes. “Thanks Boss.”

The Boss pat Juan on the side of his left arm and told him he was welcome. He began to walk back to the nearest sorting bin, kicking discarded peaches out of the way, when he turned again to Juan. “And stay away from the bars my friend, they aren’t any good for you. A guy was killed over at the Guatemala the other day, so you be careful.”

Juan looked to the next tree as The Boss returned to the sorting bin, and then set to moving his ladder to pick from the higher branches, where the peaches were a soft orange and yellow and a thin fuzz covered them completely. 

2

The job of the pickers ended in the earlier afternoon, before the sun was at its most unforgiving. The bins were sorted and weighed, and a total of nearly sixty bins had been filled, the workers averaging five per person, while Juan had filled eight, each nearly the size of a dumpster. Workers returning to the farm the next day would wait to collect their checks from The Boss when the week ended, but many would take the single days pay and leave, their inexperienced fingers cramped into tight little claws. Most pickers, with the exception of the Warf Rats, would wash their hands and arms in the drainage ditches at the end of the day, scrubbing away the itch of tiny spider mites that lived in the peach fuzz.

Juan sat on the wooden steps leading onto the deck of the farm house, watching the sun as it slipped low and made jagged silhouettes of the Sutter Buttes. Laid across one knee and steadied with his weak hand, Juan pointed a pellet gun towards the lawn and scanned the surface looking for ground squirrels, whose habit was to dig through dikes and flood the farm.

As he watched the ground in the waning light, mosquitoes landed and bit into his arms and neck, but they itched no more than the spider mites, so he ignored them. The vibratory hum of dragonflies could be heard darting back and forth along the deck, running from the pheasants and owls that cooed and questioned.

In the direction of the Sutter Buttes, a single truck followed the drainage ditch along the road leaving a trail of dust that caught the red of the setting sun like it was on fire. The truck turned in at the short grated trestle, crossed the ditch and followed the road that led to the farmhouse. Juan stood from the steps and casually shuffled toward the oncoming truck, until it stopped a few feet before him. The driver’s door opened and a man stepped out, his hair bushed on top of his head in a small clump. “Hey Juan, Maggie is feeling worse than ever.  She says you did horrible things to her, and she wants me to tell the sheriff."

Juan watched Mr. Thanner grin and bob his head as he leaned between the door jamb and roof of his truck. The truck had new wheels that were polished heavily before driving down the ditch road. Mr. Thanner’s compact cassette player asked “Mr. Tambourine man, play a song for me” in a cracking voice. Juan realized he still held the pellet gun and bounced it lightly in his left hand to find a better grip.

Mr. Thanner came out from behind the truck door and walked nearer to Juan. “She’s going to need more money to feel better this week Juan.”

Juan focused his eyes on Mr. Thanner and told him “No. I don’t pay anymore!”

Mr. Thanner stepped back awkwardly and shook the disbelief from his head. “What did you say to me?” he said, stepping towards Juan and leaning into him. “You want to go to prison?!"

“No prison! You are extortion!”

“Why you beaner… God damnit!” Mr. Thanner stamped his boots into the ground as he stepped back into the truck and slammed the door. The engine flared and the tail of the truck whipped around, kicking dust and rocks at the house and all over Juan. As Juan coughed on the cloud and the dust dried his eyes to tears, Mr. Thanner reversed the truck to Juan’s side and yelled out the window “You will go to prison! And you will never come back!” before accelerating and spraying another dense cloud.

Juan stumbled back to the house with his eyes squeezed shut, wiping at them with the back of his right hand as his left searched ahead for the banister that would lead him up the steps of the deck to the door. Into the house, he dragged his foot behind him across the carpet and hit a shin on the short table in the living room, then shuffled further in, past both bedrooms to the bathroom. Juan flushed his face with water repeatedly, and once he could open his eyes without the sting of gravel in them, he sat on the edge of the bathtub with a damp cloth over his face, breathing heavily. When finally his breaths slowed, he let water into the claw-footed tub and imagined Connie washing with him, scrubbing at his back the small insect bites and washing carefully behind his ears. Juan undressed and slid into the bath. He lied for a second and soaked, listening to the water lap lightly against his skin when he moved his body, and noticed a large horsefly that had followed him in. It hummed its wings at the mirror above the sink, sometimes pausing to walk circles on the reflective surface or flying into and away from it repeatedly until it finally flew out through the opened door. Juan lied in the bath for a long while, and after cleaning himself of the bites and various itching places he could reach, he went to bed.

* * *

Juan was awakened before dawn, before he could notice the empty pillow beside him and before the caravan of peach bins and laborers would sound the start of the day, by a heavy banging against the farmhouse door. He dressed quickly and went to open the door, hesitating to put on his work boots, but deciding to answer the knocking first.

On the patio a man in a tan uniform with a badge on his chest stood apprehensive, and once the door had opened Juan and the sheriff each revealed a spark of surprise in their eyes. The sheriff’s tall brow rippled as his eyebrows raised, and he considered something to himself before his brows narrowed down on his eyes and he spoke. “Juan Corona, you’re accused of the murder of twenty-one individuals.”

Juan was handcuffed and led out to a black and white Bel Air at the base of the deck, pushed along by the sheriff just quicker than he could shuffle himself, and so his left foot would stutter.

“I am not Corona. Who is Corona?”

The sheriff opened the rear door of his vehicle and bent Juan’s head down into it, and slid him in, then closed the door and entered the driver’s seat. The officer followed the ditch road south toward the Yuba Police station, ignoring Juan as he pleaded that he was not this man. Juan leaned his head forward against the passenger headrest, and with his eyes closed told the sheriff “I didn’t mean to do the bad thing, it was extortion!” He asked “Who is Corona?” a number of times, before finally opening his eyes. Laid on the front passenger seat a large sheet pronounced “Wanted: Juan Corona,” and below a picture of a man with bushy dark hair and thick eyebrows, a long nose and wide lips, sideburns half the length of his long ears, and in every detail, it was a picture of Juan.

A city, even on its outskirts, is very much a living animal. A city has a system of nerves to relay information.  A city has a pulse and a body temperature. It is not known where these nerves are or how they work so efficiently, but they relay information faster than the ring of a telephone, and as they do, the pulse of the city may rise or fall, as its temperament might rise or fall by degrees.

Before the vehicle had reached the Yuba station a crowd had gathered, shouting and moving and shaking. The sheriff helped Juan slide from the vinyl bench seat of the car to his bare feet on the asphalt. The crowd straightened themselves into a corridor, and the sheriff led Juan through its center to the door of the station. On either side people were yelling and shaking their fists and pointing their fingers. Some of the crowd were laborers whose friends had disappeared among the drifters that Juan Corona had murdered with a machete and buried in the fields where he worked. Others were folks who had lost loved ones in any number of recent years, some run away and some dead from malice or mistake, and those left behind searched for closure. As Juan was moved down the line he saw a young white boy near the age of ten yelling out “You shot my dad! You killed him!” as tears made lines down his dirty face. “I’ll kill you!” the young boy shouted, wiping wet dust from his cheeks.

The officer pushed Juan through the station and had him stop repeatedly to sign or print, or answer questions or repeat himself. “I am not Corona” he told the officers of the station as they led him to a cell with a thinly padded slab of bed.  The cell door slid closed behind him and he turned to lean against it, wrapping his left hand around the bar and his right wrist around another. “How long am I to be here” Juan asked the sheriff as he began to walk away. The sheriff turned to look at Juan against the cell door, saw his crippled hand curled around the bar and his lame right food turned heavily to hold his weight on the heel.

“We’ve been looking for Juan Corona for a long while. He’s caused a lot of hurt, and it looks like you’re him.” The sheriff closed the door to the holding area, continued into the station and left Juan alone to slump onto the pad of bed.

Outside the cell, the crowd moved to the side of the station to Juan’s barred window, where sound could seep in. They continued to yell and scream and cry, and it was all Juan could hear.  The city was scared, and hurt, and they wanted to forget about Juan Corona, and so they yelled.  Loudest of all, a little boy whose father was the only non-laborer to be victim to Juan Corona, shot in the bathroom stall of a town bar. The dead-man’s son was crying “Why did you do it? Why did you kill my Dad?!”

* * *

Juan opened his eyes in the darkness. Dense moonlight slipped through the barred window into the dusty cell. There weren’t any crickets or frogs or birds making noise outside, only silence. Inside, the keys were turning at the holding area door, and then the door was opening outward. Juan sat up from the bed and rose to his feet, tied the work boots The Boss had brought him from home, and waited at the cell door.

“Today is the day Juan,” the sheriff said, cycling through the ring of keys to find one to unlock the door. He found and slid the right key into the lock and turned it over, sliding the door back and gesturing for Juan to exit. At the door to the holding area the sheriff put Juan in handcuffs and led him out the second door through the station.

Juan shuffled around desks and past loose chairs and file cabinets the best he could, occasionally catching the toe of his lame foot and hobbling to keep balanced. “Today is the day?” he asked. “I can go home?”

The sheriff led him through the back door, to the garage and into the police vehicle. “That’s what we are going to find out.”

Juan sat idle in the back of the car as it left the garage and moved through town. The streets were dotted with a scarce few people to take notice of the police cruiser as it drove through town at such an early hour, but as whispers were passed to the uninformed, a procession of people grew to follow the vehicle towards the courthouse. These people joined the larger body already waiting at the courthouse, and as the sun began to rise the pale buildings that lined the street appeared to glow, and so too did the faces of the curious township.

Yelling and questions erupted from the crowd as soon as Juan stepped from the car, and in return he could only reply “I am not–” before his words were disregarded. The sheriff pushed him through the crowd from behind and Juan slowly shuffled his way through, the crowd’s fingers sliding along his arms and chest, some reaching out to his neck and dragging their nails across his skin. As Juan neared the end of this column of bodies the doors to the courthouse opened outward, held by two deputies in dark uniforms, and Juan was ushered inside. When he looked back Juan could see the brilliant rise of the sun behind the surging mob, and as the doors began to close the red haze of the sun diffused the faces and grabbing hands, and consumed them like a fireball.

The footfalls and drag of a foot echoed through the quiet courthouse as the deputies led Juan into a large chamber. Small groups of people sat on either side of the entry, The Boss and his family on one side with a handful of the regular pickers, and a number of people Juan had never met on the other, with the exception of Mr. Thanner, who appeared more amused than angry. Juan was brought through the center aisle, through low swinging doors and seated before the judge entered. The court would determine whether Juan was Juan Corona or not the judge said, and if the court decided so, he would be tried for a minimum of twenty-one counts of murder. Men and women took turns giving their statements to the court, answering questions, and when the gallery had exhausted their accusations and defenses, The Boss finally stood and walked to sit in the pocket of wood near the judge to answer questions himself.

“He has worked for me nearly fifteen years,” he told the Judge. “He has lived in the farm house on the property for a long time, with his wife Connie, until she died just months ago.”

The Boss looked up at the Judge and shook his head, “No, we’ve never charged him a thing to stay there, so long as he kept it maintained and keep an eye on the farm.” The Judge flipped through a small stack of papers and scratched at the corner of his eye. He looked up through the windows to judge the time by the sun, but clouds had come and the sky was gray.  After pausing to sip at the glass of water near his gavel, the Judge asked if there was anything else, and The Boss said that there was. “I’ve heard about these murders and I know for a fact Juan couldn’t have done them.” In his chair the Judge evened and set down his small stack of paper and asked The Boss how this could be, who turned to the judge and asked if he could dig a ditch with a crippled hand.

3

Juan sat on the edge of the farmhouse deck. The clouds were gray and bulbous, stretching from each horizon and tucking themselves in behind the Sutter Buttes. Everything knew the heavy rain would come: the crickets were silent in their tall grasses and the frogs waited for the rain before beginning their calls; the owls and pheasants were tucked away deep in the scrub, and the farm cats were beneath the frames of houses or in unlocked barns. Even the mosquitoes were away, and on the old wood deck of the farmhouse, Juan was entirely alone.

He listened for a long time for a sound, but nothing came. The wind didn’t comb through the grass and the drainage ditch had dried. Juan tried to hear a far away tractor, and after thinking of it, realized he was remembering its sound and not hearing it in the distance. A snap of thunder echoed from the Buttes suddenly. Though it would be better than silence, he knew that thunderstorms made for poor company and so Juan raised himself from the deck. He went to his truck and drove out over the small drainage trestle to the road and headed toward town.

Yuba was barren. Children that played in the street throughout the warmer days were inside their homes, eating dinners or watching a television. Juan drove slowly into town over the new Fifth Street Bridge, then towards and down First Street to the Guatemala Café. Juan parked at the empty curb in front of the building, and he thought briefly the bar had closed for the day, but in the corner of the red, opaque glass window a small sign read Open in dirty black and white, and Juan stepped from his truck.

Inside the heavy wooden entrance of the Guatemala Café, everything was surfaced in the glow of alternating ceiling lights, only enough white to make seeing possible, and the others a crimson to embellish the dark cherry woods throughout the bar. Each piece of wood was hand carved with numerous etchings over their surfaces, many scratched into the wood by the patrons and sealed dark later by Roy, the owner of the bar. The countertops were embedded with over a thousand silver dollars and Indian head pennies, each catching slips of ceiling light on its edge and giving the bar a bloody glow that made pitch the emptiness of the Guatemala in contrast.

Juan ordered a cerveza and looked over the dates and images on the coins.  Roy handed him his beer silently and then stepped into the corner of the bar to make a telephone call. He talked quickly and quietly into the receiver, swatting briefly at a fly that floated near the mouthpiece, and was back at the bar before Juan had taken a second sip from his bottle. “You’re the one in court earlier, aren’t you?” the bartender asked.

Juan looked up from the coins.  “Yes, they thought I was Corona,” he told the bartender.

Roy tilted his head to one side and asked “You’ve been in here a lot lately, haven’t you?”

Juan nodded his head and thought of the farm house, the pillow with the blanket tucked neatly below it, and the smell of breakfast as he woke. “Yes, it is less empty here.”

The bartender looked around the room and then to Juan. “I’m not sure who else you’re seeing in here, but looks dead to me.  Now hurry up, we’re closing for the night.”

Juan nodded and tilted his head back to drain the bottle, and set the empty back on the bar. He stepped away from the bar top, and shuffled further into the dark room.  “I must use the room, I’ll be fast.” Juan opened the door to the restroom and seeing the urinal out of order, entered the small green-tiled stall. The ventilator sucked softly at the room, and the spinning hum noise reminded him of a peach rolling out of his sack and into the bin, rolling and spinning slowly into the bin without settling, filling it quicker. He thought of himself as the “The World's Fastest Peach Picker,” and it made him smile.

Juan undid his zipper and began to go, carefully watching his stream to avoid the seat he had left down by accident. To the left of the toilet, where the green tile met the wood wall, was a splatter of dark maroon, nearly black, with a small cloud of flies buzzing over it. Some waded in it, spinning and sponging their mouths into it. When Juan finished he zipped himself and was about to turn to leave when the largest of the flies, one that had been stalking about in the red spot, flew up and landed flat on the porcelain tank of the toilet. It starred at Juan, it jittered its wings. Without thinking he brought his right hand, his bad hand, down completely flat on the top of the toilet with the speed of a peach pick. He lifted his hand up and a smear of red was in the center of his bad hand, with a veined wing stuck to it. The body of the fly was still on the white tank cover, now the center of a large red spot, and slowly it began to slip down the slight slope of the tank, leaving a streak of red behind it.

Juan struggled out of the stall and cupped his palms together as he shouldered out of the bathroom.  He dragged his right leg speedily across the dark cherry floor of Guatemala’s, Roy asking “See something you didn’t like in there Juan?” as Juan pushed through the door into the rain. At the curb he held his cupped palms to his chest and rocked back and forth, thinking of peaches and The Boss.

“You killed Him!” said a little boy to his left.  In his hands he held a pistol and was aiming it into Juan’s chest.

Juan rocked and tried to tell him the he hadn’t. He didn’t even know his father.

“You did you did you did! In There!”

The report of the pistol carried through the rain into all of Yuba. It pulled on every city nerve and it raised the city pulse, and the night was filled with excitement. The neighbors came from their houses liberally, and none locked the door in fright. The city’s body had already carried the message that Juan was at the Guatemala.

When the crowds came they found Juan lied backwards with his hands extended out to their sides, the rain slowly washing the small smears of blood from his palms. Crowded around the body of Juan, some were horrified and some feigned it, others felt relief and others stood mute, but everyone came to see.

Everyone came to see Juan Reyoaso.