The Weavers had filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million but settled out of court when the government offered Vicki’s three daughters $1 million each. Randy Weaver was awarded $100,000 and all charges, except two related to court appearances, were dropped. Randy Weaver had been interviewed by major news organizations and had even co-written a book with his daughter. He now made his living speaking at gun shows.
If it was a cover-up, it was a very bad one. There had been media coverage, official inquiries, oversight. Wasn’t that the measure of a democracy?
There was one thing I still didn’t understand: Why had federal agents surrounded Randy Weaver’s cabin in the first place? Why had Randy been targeted? I remembered Dad saying it could just as easy be us. Dad was always saying that one day the Government would come after folks who resisted its brainwashing, who didn’t put their kids in school. For thirteen years, I’d assumed that this was why the Government had come for Randy: to force his children into school.
I returned to the top of the page and read the whole entry again, but this time I didn’t skip the backstory. According to all the sources, including Randy Weaver himself, the conflict had begun when Randy sold two sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent he’d met at an Aryan Nations gathering. I read this sentence more than once, many times in fact. Then I understood: white supremacy was at the heart of this story, not homeschool. The government, it seemed, had never been in the habit of murdering people for not submitting their children to a public education. This seemed so obvious to me now, it was difficult to understand why I had ever believed anything else.
For one bitter moment, I thought Dad had lied. Then I remembered the fear on his face, the heavy rattling of his breath, and I felt certain that he’d really believed we were in danger. I reached for some explanation and strange words came to mind, words I’d learned only minutes before: paranoia, mania, delusions of grandeur and persecution. And finally the story made sense—the one on the page, and the one that had lived in me through childhood. Dad must have read about Ruby Ridge or seen it on the news, and somehow as it passed through his feverish brain, it had ceased to be a story about someone else and had become a story about him. If the Government was after Randy Weaver, surely it must also be after Gene Westover, who’d been holding the front line in the war with the Illuminati for years. No longer content to read about the brave deeds of others, he had forged himself a helmet and mounted a nag.
* * *
—
I BECAME OBSESSED WITH bipolar disorder. We were required to write a research paper for Psychology and I chose it as my subject, then used the paper as an excuse to interrogate every neuroscientist and cognitive specialist at the university. I described Dad’s symptoms, attributing them not to my father but to a fictive uncle. Some of the symptoms fit perfectly; others did not. The professors told me that every case is different.
“What you’re describing sounds more like schizophrenia,” one said. “Did your uncle ever get treatment?”
“No,” I said. “He thinks doctors are part of a Government conspiracy.”
“That does complicate things,” he said.
With all the subtlety of a bulldozer I wrote my paper on the effect bipolar parents have on their children. It was accusative, brutal. I wrote that children of bipolar parents are hit with double risk factors: first, because they are genetically predisposed to mood disorders, and second, because of the stressful environment and poor parenting of parents with such disorders.
In class I had been taught about neurotransmitters and their effect on brain chemistry; I understood that disease is not a choice. This knowledge might have made me sympathetic to my father, but it didn’t. I felt only anger. We were the ones who’d paid for it, I thought. Mother. Luke. Shawn. We had been bruised and gashed and concussed, had our legs set on fire and our heads cut open. We had lived in a state of alert, a kind of constant terror, our brains flooding with cortisol because we knew that any of those things might happen at any moment. Because Dad always put faith before safety. Because he believed himself right, and he kept on believing himself right—after the first car crash, after the second, after the bin, the fire, the pallet. And it was us who paid.
I visited Buck’s Peak the weekend after I submitted my paper. I had been home for less than an hour when Dad and I got into an argument. He said I owed him for the car. He really only mentioned it but I became crazed, hysterical. For the first time in my life I shouted at my father—not about the car, but about the Weavers. I was so suffocated by rage, my words didn’t come out as words but as choking, sputtering sobs. Why are you like this? Why did you terrify us like that? Why did you fight so hard against made-up monsters, but do nothing about the monsters in your own house?