And then the wind started.
For the first few hours, it just shook the windows and door hinges and made people sneeze—all that new mold now flying through the air—but by nightfall, it was bringing down tree branches and shingles. By morning, it had knocked down phone lines and garden fences and was tearing at the awnings on Center Street.
And worse: By late afternoon, with most of the surface water gone (blown to Shearerville, everyone said), the tarp blew off the old pool. No one was outside to see that part, but a fair number were witness to it flying smack up against the library, five blocks south, before continuing on its way. It took folks a while to realize what it was—and by that point, there was gravel skittering down the streets nearest the pool. There was moldy hay in everyone’s yard.
Gwendolyn Lake came banging on the parsonage door to tell Reverend Hewlett. His first thought was to run and see if the elephant was uncovered, but his second thought was of Stanley, who should be kept from the pool. Stanley, who would want to run there but would regret it later. Who might take it all as some sort of sign.
Hewlett told Gwendolyn to get her brothers. “Use sheets,” he said, “and bricks.” He himself ran in the opposite direction, toward Center Street. The wind wasn’t constant but came in great lumps: Every three or four seconds, a pocket of air would hit him, would lift him from beneath. If he’d had an open umbrella, he’d have left the ground. Trees were down, garbage blew through the streets, the bench in front of the barbershop was overturned.
Sally Thoms ran crying down the other side of the road, blond hair sucked straight up like a sail. “My cat blew away!” she cried. “He was in a tree and he just blew away!”
“I’ll pray for you!” the Reverend called, but the wind ate his words.
He pulled with his full weight on the door beside the one that read STANLEY’S DINER, the door that everyone knew led up to the real place. Stanley stood in the kitchen, peeling carrots.
He said, “You’re early for lunch, Rev.”
For some reason—even later he couldn’t figure out what had possessed him—the Reverend said, “I’d be happy if you called me Jack.”
“Sure,” Stanley said, and laughed. “Jack. You want to peel me some carrots, Jack?”
They stood side by side at the counter, working.
“What do you make of this apocalypse, Jack?”
He began to answer as he always did of late—something about God wanting to test us now and then, maybe something about Job—but instead he found himself telling a joke. “You hear about the man who couldn’t see what the weather was like, because it was too foggy?”
“Ha!” He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Stanley laugh before. It was more a word than a laugh. Stanley said, “I know an old circus one. Wh/d the sword swallower swallow an umbrella?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Wanted to put something away for a rainy day.”
It was a terrible joke, but Hewlett started laughing and couldn’t stop—perhaps because he was picturing Stella Blunt’s bearded fire eater, an umbrella blossoming in his throat just as the baby had stretched Stella’s figure. This wasn’t funny either, but the laughter came anyway.
He went to the sink for a glass of water, to cure his laugh and the cough that followed it. As he drank, he looked out the back window, over the yards behind Fifth Street and the abutting yards behind Sixth Street. Down below, on the other side of the block-long stockade fence, the Miller family had ventured out into the yard with baby Eloise. In the time between gusts, they were examining the damage to the old well, the top of which had tumbled into a pile of stones. A summer of baking and a summer of rain must have loosened everything, and all it took was a day of wind to knock things about. There was Ed Miller, peering down the hole, and there was Alice Miller, holding the baby, when a blast of wind—up here Jack Hewlett could see and hear but not feel it—tore limbs from trees and tore shutters from houses and tore Eloise from her mother’s arms and into the air and across the yard. He must have made a noise, because Stanley rushed to peer over his shoulder just in time to see the baby, her pink face and her white dress, go flying over the garden and over the next yard and finally into the Blunts’ yard, where, just as she arced down, there he was, Mayor Blunt, running toward the child. He caught her in his arms.
Hewlett heard Stanley inhale sharply. Neither man moved.
The mayor had been outside alone—presumably inspecting the maple that had fallen across his yard, the one that, were it still standing, the baby would have blown straight into—but now his wife ran out, and his son, and Stella. The two men watched from above as Stella leaned over the baby, covering her own mouth. Her mother’s hand was on her back, and Hewlett wondered if she was crying, and—if she was—how she’d explain it. Well, who wouldn’t cry at a baby landing in their yard?
The wind took a break, and Mayor Blunt handed the baby to Stella and wrapped his coat around her front, covering them both. Hewlett imagined what the man would have said: something about “You know I can never hold a baby right.” Or “This should be good practice for you!” And the mayor led a procession around the front of the house and down the street to the Millers’. Hewlett hadn’t thought to look back to the Millers for a while—they weren’t in their yard. Ed Miller had scaled the fence to the lawn between his and the Blunts’ and was running through the bushes, around the trees, behind the shed. Alice Miller stood out front, hands to her head, shouting for help. She ran toward the Blunts when she saw them, but she couldn’t have known what was under Stella’s coat until the mayor pulled it back, chest puffed out, proud of his miracle. He handed the baby back himself. Alice Miller covered the infant with kisses and raced her into the house, Mayor and Mrs. Blunt following. Stella stayed out on the walk a minute, looking at the sky. What she was thinking, Hewlett couldn’t even guess.
“Well,” Stanley said. “Pardon the expression, but Jesus Christ.” The carrot and peeler, still in his hands, were shaking.
Hewlett wanted to run down, to see if Stella was all right, to make sure the baby wasn’t hurt. But he wasn’t a doctor. And he couldn’t leave Stanley alone, couldn’t let him think of checking on the pool. So he just said, “I think we’ve seen the hand of God.” He wasn’t at all sure this was true. Part of him wondered if he hadn’t seen a miracle at all but its precise and brutal opposite—a failure of some kind, or the evidence of chaos. Whatever he’d just seen, it troubled him deeply. Was God in the wind, blowing that baby back to Stella where she belonged? Or was God in the catch, in the impossible coincidence of the mayor being in the right spot, in the return of the child to the Millers? Or—and this was the thing about a crack in faith, he knew, the way one small fissure could spread and crumble the whole thing into a pile of rocks—was God in neither place?
Stanley put his carrot down and turned. His face was soft and astonished, blue eyes open wider than Hewlett had ever seen them. He looked like a man who’d just survived an auto crash, a man who’d taken part in something bizarre and terrifying, not just witnessed it from above. “It’s not true, is it?” Stanley spoke slowly, working something out. “What I said before, about Nineveh. We’re—we’re all where we’re supposed to be. I was supposed to wind up here.” He braced himself on the counter, as if he expected God to blow him across town next. “A beast brought Jonah to Nineveh, and a beast brought me here.”
Hewlett said what he’d said so many times before. “The thing is to be listening when God speaks.”
By the time Reverend Hewlett walked home that night by way of the old pool, Davis Thoms and Bernie Lake were down there mixing batch after batch of cement and pouring it into the hole. For the first time in more than a year, there was both enough water to mix the stuff, and not so much water falling from the sky that it would turn to soup.
He continued toward the parsonage. The wind was done. It had simply left town.
It was so strange to be outside without the roar of wind or rain, without the feel of air or wa
ter ripping at his skin, that Reverend Hewlett stood awhile on his own porch feeling that he was floating in the midst of vast and empty space. Everywhere he turned, there was nothing. No baking sun, no drenching storm, no raging wind. There were people coming out of houses, and people going into houses, and people walking from one store to the next. And people picking up branches, and people sweeping up glass. As if they’d been directed to do these things.
All this happened a very long time ago. And it’s hard now to argue that what happened so far back wasn’t inevitable. If the elephant hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be, on top of the old swimming pool, the playground that originally had some other name but quickly became known as Elephant Park; and the Little Fork High School football team would not be the Mammoths; and Stanley Tack wouldn’t have stayed in town, and the son he had with the Beedleman girl (she was expecting already that day of the windstorm, she just hadn’t told him yet) wouldn’t have married Eloise Miller, and today the town of Little Fork wouldn’t be half-full of Tacks of various generations, all descended (though none of them know it) from a fire eater.
Jack Hewlett might not have given up the cloth and returned home to be with his girl, with Annette, who’d waited for him even after her letters stopped—only to be drafted two months later, no longer clergy, no longer exempt from war. He might not have died in France, a bullet through his lung. But who’s to say that the outcome of that battle—even of the entire war—hadn’t hinged, in one way or another, on the bravery of one man? He was, after all, an exceptional soldier. He took orders well.
Or at least it can be said: This world is the one made by the death of that elephant.
The Sunday following the storm, Reverend Hewlett looked out from the pulpit at his battered congregation. There were black eyes and broken arms from the wind, and the women with husbands stationed overseas were exhausted from cleaning up their own yards and their elderly neighbors’ besides. It was a good town that way. These people believed in things. Eloise Miller, unhurt and pink, slept in her mother’s arms through the service. A green bonnet framed her face.
Hewlett, under his robe, was thin. He’d lost five pounds that week. His stomach felt empty even when it was full, so why bother to fill it?
Stanley Tack held hands with the Beedleman girl. For the first time, he joined the hymns. He opened the book of prayer.
Stella Blunt looked pale and tired. Hewlett tried to catch her eye. He felt he owed her at least a look, one she’d be able to interpret later, the next morning, or whenever it was that the citizens of Little Fork would find the parsonage deserted.
If he owed anything to Stanley Tack, he’d already given it. Hadn’t he handed the man his own faith? It was in safer hands now than his own.
He said, “Let us read from Paul’s letter to the Romans: Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”
He said, “Let us lift up our hearts.”
GARY INDIANA
Death-Qualified
FROM London Review of Books
The following is a book review of The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, by Masha Gessen. The book appeared in April 2015 and the review was published in September 2015.
ON JUNE 24, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of two Chechen-American brothers responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013, was sentenced to death in a Boston federal court. (His older brother, Tamerlan, died following a street battle with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, several nights after the bombing.) The brothers had placed, and detonated by remote control, two explosive devices fashioned from pressure cookers stuffed with shrapnel; three people were killed in the blasts, and more than 260 others suffered serious, permanent injuries, including 16 who lost limbs.
Footage from multiple surveillance cameras overlooking the Boston Marathon dispelled any reasonable doubt that the Tsarnaev brothers had planted the bombs and set them off. At Tsarnaev’s trial, notwithstanding his “not guilty” plea on thirty separate capital charges, his chief defence attorney told the court: “It was him.” This effectively confined the defence case to the assertion that Dzhokhar had acted under the powerful influence of Tamerlan, and would not have carried out the bombing on his own, counting on character witnesses in the trial’s penalty phase to dramatize this idea to the jury. One witness testified that Dzhokhar had been “like a puppy following his brother,” a characterization eerily illustrated by surveillance videos of Dzhokhar trailing Tamerlan by several meters on the pavement lining the marathon route.
The defence team’s sole objective was a life sentence for their client, an unlikely outcome from the outset, given that the court denied motions to change the trial venue from Boston itself to a town where jurors’ friends or families were less likely to have been affected by the bombing. In a non-death penalty state like Massachusetts a federal case in which execution is an option can still be heard so long as the jury is “death-qualified”—i.e., all the jurors have declared themselves willing to deliver a death verdict. Since 80 per cent of Massachusetts residents specifically opposed execution in the Tsarnaev case, the jury was necessarily drawn from an unusually narrow pool, and was therefore disproportionately likely to impose capital punishment. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has since been moved to federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, since—although a non-death penalty state can deliver a death verdict—the executions themselves must be carried out in a state that has death penalty statutes. This risible scruple has a practical aspect: such states also have the requisite killing equipment on hand, and often seem to relish the chance to use it. (In recent Ohio, Arizona and Oklahoma executions, a European export embargo on lethal injection drugs has prompted mix ’n’ match improvisations with untested pharmaceuticals, with results Josef Mengele would consider plagiarism.) Timothy McVeigh, whose trial venue was shifted from Oklahoma City to Denver, Colorado, got transferred post-trial to the same death row in Terre Haute.
Whether Tsarnaev will, as McVeigh did, forgo the often decades-long appeals process to hasten his end is an open question. While hiding from police inside a boat in a backyard in Watertown, Dzhokhar managed to write a rather long note on the boat’s hull that began: “I’m jealous of my brother who ha [bullet hole] ceived the reward of jan-nutul Firdaus (inshallah) before me.” (“Jannatul Firdous” is a name for “the highest paradise” in Arabic, as well as a line of speciality fragrances available online from Givaudan Roure, “the oldest perfumery house in the Arabian Gulf.”) For all we know, Dzhokhar’s jealousy may already have cooled. If so, ample grounds for appeal exist. There is the venue issue. Then too, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. refused to give the standard jury instruction, which says that a single holdout juror can avert a death sentence permanently—that is, without the penalty phase of the trial being repeated until a unanimous verdict is reached. The grotesqueness of executing a 22-year-old is not considered grounds for appeal: the death-qualifying age, so to speak, is 18.
Unlike several recent books on the marathon bombing, Masha Gessen’s The Brothers is uninflected by consoling homilies, Manichean narrative framing or civic propaganda. Gessen’s is a superlative work of reporting that locates the Boston atrocity and the Tsarnaevs in the queasy context of the modern world, where atrocities happen every day, in places presumed to be “safe” as well as those beset by civil war. The Brothers provides essential Soviet and post-Soviet geopolitical background, charting the Tsarnaev family’s peregrinations from Kyrgyzstan (to where Stalin brutally transplanted the entire Chechen population in 1944) to Novosibirsk in south central Russia, where the brothers’ parents, Anzor and Zubeidat, met (he was finishing his Soviet military service, she seeking her eldest brother’s permission to move to Moscow). They later moved to Kalmykia, the Soviet republic where Tamerlan was born; back to Kyrgyzstan, where two daughters, Bella and Ailina, were added to the family; then to Chiry-Yurt in Chechnya, Dzhokhar’s birthplace.
From Chech
nya they returned again to Kyrgyzstan to escape the 1994 Russian bombing of Grozny. In 2000, they moved to Makhachkala in Dagestan, where the second Chechen war was spilling over the border. Wahhabi fundamentalism had spread through the Caucasus, its suspected adherents a target for Russian troops and local police. As Gessen writes:
Makhachkala and much of the rest of Dagestan became a battleground . . . This was the Dagestan to which Anzor and Zubeidat brought their four children, including Tamerlan, who at 14 was on the verge of becoming that most endangered and most dangerous of human beings: a young Dagestani man. [They] had to move again, to save their children—again.
They would go to America after all.
The Tsarnaevs weren’t always fleeing incipient war zones. Sometimes they just rolled elsewhere in search of a better deal. More often than not, his mother, Zubeidat, the more willful and ambitious of the parents, decided where they would go. Bad timing, bad luck and defective reality-testing all feature prominently in the story Gessen tells; so do seemingly minuscule ethnic and religious distinctions that caused the Tsarnaevs to feel out of place wherever they lived. They were Chechens outside Chechnya, Muslims in only the nominal sense that their ethnic codes reflected a vaguely Islamic influence.
Things didn’t work out in America. The Tsarnaevs arrived soon after 9/11, when Muslims began to replace communists as objects of fear for the media demonization industry. Chechens, who had once been welcomed as refugees from Russian aggression, became suspect after Russia and the U.S. began collaborating in the “war on terror.” (The US ignored Russian atrocities in Chechnya in exchange for air bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.) While it’s unclear whether the Tsarnaevs experienced egregious anti-Muslim, anti-Chechen or other discrimination in the U.S. (they didn’t wear Islamic dress, and one daughter successfully copped a Latina identity for a while), their ethnicity and religion complicated the legal status of some family members, and they must have seen themselves as part of a despised, if nebulous, minority.
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