by Jess Walter
The girls were in Des Moines only a few weeks when Keith took them to a nearby mall and watched Rachel ride the escalator up and down three times. She’d never seen one before. Another time, he went to an army/navy surplus store, and Sara walked along the aisles, impressing the store owner by naming all the guns.
After resenting their arrival at first, Keith now wished he could make them feel more welcome. So, he joked, the family would no longer be the Browns or Weavers. They were “the Beavers.” It stuck.
The girls started school in November, horrified at first about what might happen to them, and ready to run at the first sign of brainwashing.
“I’m not going to learn anything there,” Sara insisted. The first few afternoons, she came home frustrated, saying she had nothing in common with the people she was meeting. She still wouldn’t see a psychologist or a counselor, and so Keith and Julie encouraged her to deal with it her own way—through poetry. She wrote simple, rhyming verse, stark poems about the mountains and about missing her brother and mom.
School immediately improved for Sara. She got As on her first report card and was student-of-the-month in February. She made quick friends—a slew of nonconformist, mostly liberal students who took her to poetry readings at Java Joe’s, a downtown brick coffeehouse with eighteen-foot ceilings, burlap coffee bags hanging from the walls, and a single stool on a small stage where one night Sara stood up and read her poetry.
She was amazed at the first movie she saw—The Last of the Mohicans. It was incredible! She got a job at the Cineplex in the nearby mall and went to movies whenever she had the chance. Posters of actors Brad Pitt and Brandon Lee hung in her bedroom, where she listened to tapes of Aerosmith and Nirvana. Her favorite movie was What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, about a quirky young man who falls in love with a girl passing through his small town. The boy wants to go off with her, but he can’t leave because he is saddled with a mentally retarded brother and his horribly obese mother. Sara even got to meet the author of Gilbert Grape at a writing conference. She began to think that’s what she wanted to be—a writer.
Rachel was getting Bs at her elementary school and making plenty of new friends, but she seemed easily betrayed, coming home from school sometimes and proclaiming yesterday’s best friend “stupid.” Raised without much of anything, she hoarded candy and toys in her room and looked hurt every time she had to share something. She did talk to a school counselor, eating lunch in the counselor’s office every day and refusing to go to the cafeteria. She wouldn’t say why she hated the cafeteria so much.
That spring, Julie figured it out. She and Rachel were on the campus of Drake University one day when they wandered over to the cafeteria. Julie could see that Rachel was too terrified to eat there. It was the noise. Rachel had never heard anything like the echo of assembly-line eating, the clang of trays and silverware in a school cafeteria. To a girl who’d eaten every meal at the kitchen table or on a rock overlooking the forest, it was deafening.
Elisheba was a darling, active baby, with blondish hair and big eyes that tried to take in the world. Vicki had held her during every meal, and so she was a clinger, hanging on to Julie’s hip. She took to calling Julie “Mama” almost from the beginning and cried whenever her aunt tried to leave the room.
“No,” Julie said tenderly. “It’s Aunt Julie.”
By spring, the Browns were amazed by all the girls’ progress and tired from their own effort. There were plenty of fights—over eating, cleaning their rooms, and the inevitable arguments over white separatism. Sara made it clear from the beginning that they wouldn’t change their core beliefs, and Julie and Keith said that was fine. Conspiracy newspapers and newsletters came to the house, and Sara pored over the Bible at night and talked on the telephone with skinheads, especially David “Spider” Cooper, who’d gotten to know Sara after she came down from the cabin.
As she and Keith debated how to handle Sara’s friendship with David, Julie thought often of Vicki, and she vowed not to drive Sara off the same edge where Vicki had gone. Gingerly, she and Keith tried to show Sara their lifestyle but were careful not to infringe on her beliefs. Whenever it was possible, they showed the girls that some of what Vicki had taught them simply wasn’t true. Through the girls, they found out just how far Vicki’s beliefs had gone—alongside the dark fear of hospitals, schools, and churches was an all-encompassing theory of the world that included not just Yahweh and the Queen of Babylon, Jews, niggers and Aryans, but also space aliens and angels.
The Weaver story died down in the mainstream media, but right-wing newspapers kept writing about it, and money came in from all over the country. Crumpled twenty-five-dollar money orders arrived in the mail alongside scribbled checks for ten bucks. Bo Gritz alone raised thousand of dollars for the girls. He and Jack McLamb stayed in touch—Bo calling once just to try talking Keith and Julie out of putting the girls in public school. Every time the shy McLamb saw the girls, he gave them a hug and pressed a fifty-dollar bill into their hands, even though the family knew he wasn’t well-off himself. So much money came in to the trust fund and Randy’s defense fund (a total of $55,000 over two years), the Browns hired an attorney to manage the girls’ portion, only allowing them to spend some of it on trips to see their father and other expenses related to the case. Sara wrote a thank-you note (“May our creator bless you”) for each donation, until that became overwhelming and then she just wrote “Thank you” on the checks themselves, figuring they’d be sent back to the people who donated.
Once, a check for $800 arrived in the mail from the Ku Klux Klan. At Julie’s urging, the old leftist Keith Brown—his hair still reaching his collar—was learning to be tolerant of intolerant beliefs. But even handling a donation from the KKK was more than he could stomach.
“We’re sending it back!” he told Sara, who didn’t argue.
“If you send it back,” Julie reasoned, “they’ll just use it to burn a cross or something.” They thought about sending it to the United Negro College Fund but didn’t know how the group would feel about getting a check from the KKK. The Browns didn’t spend any of the donated money on themselves, but in this case, they made an exception. They were moving into a bigger house, so they decided to use the money to hire a moving truck. Keith took some solace in knowing that the KKK had paid to move an old sixties liberal and his family across town.
There were Asian families in the Brown’s new neighborhood and people of all sorts of ethnic and racial backgrounds who performed at Keith’s studio. One of Rachel’s close friends was an Asian girl from the neighborhood. The girls seemed tolerant of everyone, and race was rarely an issue.
Anger and fear, however, were never far from the surface.
That spring, Sara couldn’t take her eyes off the television as she watched accounts of the ATF raid and the FBI siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. They were doing it again! Her heart was in her throat as she watched the horrible video of the compound burning down, and she raged about the murderous government. For the first time in months, Keith and Julie saw the same angry young woman who’d first come to Iowa.
“How do I know you’re even really my uncle?” Rachel asked one day, during an argument over whether or not Rachel had to mind Keith. It really seemed to worry Rachel, and she asked Julie the same question while she had her arms full of Elisheba and was trying to cook dinner after a long day at work.
Randy helped convince her. He called often from jail and was always supportive of Keith and Julie. He’d tell the girls to mind if they were being troublesome and he deferred to the Browns on decisions like school.
The girls were becoming more and more relaxed, less and less political. The radical-right newspapers usually went into the garbage unopened now, and Sara was more eager to talk about gardening or movies than she was religion or race.
When a sidewalk was poured next to the Browns’ new house, Keith and Julie sent the kids out to scratch their names in the cement. Of course, Sara’d never don
e that before, and she didn’t trace small initials in some corner of the sidewalk. Her aunt and uncle smiled when they saw that she’d written in huge, block letters: “The Beavers.”
SHE WAS THE PERFECT WITNESS. That was Gerry Spence’s side of the argument as he debated Chuck Peterson over the Sara question: Should they put her on the stand? In a way, the question mirrored the larger question of whether they should put on a defense at all.
Peterson had interviewed Sara Weaver way back in October, and her story had been so compelling and had rung so true, it helped erase any doubts he had about Randy. But putting Sara on the stand was just too dangerous, especially when the case was already going their way. Why take a chance?
But she had such a great story to tell, Spence argued. And if anyone knew great stories, it was Gerry Spence. Who could look that cute young girl in the eye and think she was telling anything but God’s own truth?
Over the Memorial Day weekend—while David Nevin interviewed the Idaho state policeman who’d been dropped in their laps—Peterson and his wife flew to Spence’s house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a town alone in beauty and Western trendiness: the London Fog and Ralph Lauren outlets not far from Spence’s garrison-style office—with its garish eagle sculpture screaming from the roof.
The girls flew to Wyoming, too, just a couple of weeks after the prom.
They’d been to Spence’s sprawling mansion—like a lodge with its exposed timbers and stone fireplaces—and were uncomfortable being in what was essentially a huge cabin. During their first visit, they were still offended by images, and every wall seemed to hold a ceremonial mask or one of Spence’s vivid paintings. The creepiest one was a self-portrait of Spence without a shirt on, spread out Christ-like, his flesh being torn by birds. Every television in the house was tuned to CNN, and the girls weren’t allowed to change the channel. Finally, they were led into a high-ceilinged room with huge rocks built into the walls and a big television where they were allowed to watch a movie. Spence called it the media room. But the media room was kind of spooky itself, like a cave. Rachel entertained herself by trying to catch a mouse that was squeaking in the basement.
One morning that weekend, Spence knocked on the door to one of the guest rooms and told Peterson to get up, they had work to do. It was 5:00 a.m. For the first three hours, they kicked around ideas for closing arguments, and then they began debating whether to put Sara on the stand. They were winning, Spence argued. She would be the knockout. They could get a very compelling story in front of the jury without having their client testify. And if the prosecutors got tough with her, it would look as if they were picking on a kid. She was attractive and smart, and most of all, she was telling the truth. The truth. Spence liked that. Big deal, Peterson said. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
In the afternoon, they got Nevin on the phone and asked his opinion. The attorneys had all become so good at arguing with one another and playing devil’s advocate, it was hard to know if everyone believed the side they were spinning. But Nevin finally agreed with Spence. They should put her on.
“You guys are nuts,” Peterson said. “Bring her up here and let me cross-examine her for ten minutes.”
They brought Sara up to the second-floor office, and Spence told her he wanted to hear her testimony. Sara laid out the whole terrible story—from hearing the dog bark to seeing her mother dead—just like Spence said she would. It was an unnerving story to be sure, and she wore honorably and sadly the pain her family had been put through.
Then Peterson took over, playing the part of prosecutor. “You wore a swastika as part of your everyday existence, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“You think a swastika is a pretty good thing to wear, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you steal a pipe from your neighbors?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think it was okay to march in front of the Raus’ house and call their kids niggers?”
“Yes.”
After a few minutes of riddling her with harsh questions, Peterson turned to Spence. “I’m not even Gerry Spence, and I can do this,” Peterson said. “Don’t you think Howen or Lindquist can do this?”
In the mock witness chair, Sara wiped at her tears. Julie Brown took her out of the room, and the lawyers were quiet after she was gone. They didn’t have to say anything. They could never put her on the stand. She was just too damn honest.
“I HEARD A SHOT to my left,” Arthur Roderick testified. “I knew it was a heavy caliber weapon…. The dog just stopped. He froze to look back where the sound was coming from.”
“What happened next?” Lindquist asked.
“I shot the dog.”
“Why did you shoot the dog?” the prosecutor asked.
“A couple of reasons.” Roderick said the dog had looked back at him, like it might attack. “But mainly, that dog had just led Kevin Harris and Samuel Weaver a half-mile … to right where we were at. I was afraid if we did get into the woods and we continued down that trail, that dog would keep alerting and lead them right to us.”
If anyone could pull off that story, David Nevin figured, it was Arthur Roderick. During his second stint in the witness chair, Roderick maintained the mystique of a law officer, square-jawed, handsome, intelligent, the kind of guy who inspired calm: “I’m glad he’s out there protecting me.”
He answered defense attorneys with such disdain, it fired from his dark eyes and dripped from his Boston accent. “That’s what I said, Counselah.”
But by May 24, Nevin was in full battle mode, reacting to whatever the government threw up there. He’s lying, Nevin thought. That’s all. He’s just lying. Nevin’s job was to prick holes in Roderick’s testimony, and no matter how small the holes were, Spence would try to crawl right through them. And so Nevin asked Roderick if he realized the first shot he’d heard was the beginning of a firefight.
“Yes.”
“And you paused at that time to shoot the dog?” Nevin asked, enough disbelief to show the jury something he’d contemplated during his trip to Randy Weaver’s cabin: Who would pause to shoot a retreating dog in the middle of a gunfight?
There comes a time when every attorney has piled the bricks as high as they’ll go and just has to ask, “Is this a house?” So, after subtly tracing around the question, Nevin got right to it—again and again. If he could show that Roderick shot the dog first, then the rest of Kevin’s story fell into place—Sammy yelling “You shot my dog, you son of a bitch,” and opening fire on Roderick; Degan firing to protect Roderick, and Kevin firing to protect Sammy. Self-defense.
“In fact, sir,” Nevin said, “you shot the dog first, didn’t you?”
“No. You have heard my testimony.” Roderick was steady and calm, condescending. “No, I did not shoot the dog first.”
Nevin asked about the Idaho state policeman’s interview with Roderick, in which Roderick told him he shot the dog.
“I just started telling him what happened, which road was here, which road was there, and I said, ‘Watch out, there’s a dead dog up the trail there,’ and then he asked me a question, ‘How did Degan get shot?’ And I told him.”
“Didn’t you tell Captain Neal that you shot the dog first?”
“No,” Roderick said. “I didn’t say that I shot the dog first…. I don’t know how many times I’ve got to answer this question.”
Of course, television lawyers are the only ones who ever break a witness with a direct question like that, but as Nevin sat down, he hoped he’d given the jury enough doubts about Roderick’s story. Because Roderick himself wasn’t about to crack.
Spence took a shot, but it quickly dissolved into an Abbott and Costello routine between a Boston cop and a country lawyer.
“You told the ladies and gentlemen of the jury that you came sneaking out there in the middle of the night—”
“I did not say anything about sneaking,” Roderick said.
Glasses hun
g from a masking-taped strap around Spence’s neck, and he set them on the bridge of his nose and looked down at the witness. “You did sneak, didn’t you?”
“What do you call sneaking? You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“Sneak,” Spence said, shuffling for a dictionary, “to go stealthily or furtively.”
“Are you asking me what I said or what you said? I did not say I was sneaking. You said I’m sneaking.”
“Now don’t get excited.”
“I’m not getting excited. I’m just explaining to you what your question was.”
“You asked me, didn’t you?” Spence tried. “Or have you forgotten? You asked me what I meant by sneak.”
“Correct, but I did not say that.”
“I didn’t ask you that,” Spence said.
“Yes, you did.”
Spence chased the witness for a couple of hours like that, hurdling Lindquist’s constant objections.
“I’m ready to go home,” Spence said finally.
They had one more shot at Roderick the next day. He and Cooper had drawn diagrams of their positions at the Y, supposedly independent of each other. But when Nevin copied one of the drawings onto a seventy-five-cent transparency, then lined the two drawings up, they were nearly identical. “It must have been magic” that they drew the exact same thing independently, Spence said to Roderick on the twenty-fifth day of testimony.
Art Roderick was tired of watching his story picked over by these lawyers, who made him lay out his story over and over in different ways and then tried to find inconsistencies between the different versions. “The truth is the truth,” he said finally.
Spence paused long enough for jurors to think about every discrepancy in the government’s case so far. “Yes,” he said finally, and then he paused some more, in case anyone had missed it. In his deepest, most solemn voice, he finished. “It is.”