later learned, Angie filed for unemployment benefits, and when the
Department of Labor called my parents to confirm that she had been
terminated, Dad lost what little reason remained to him. It was not the
Department of Labor on the phone, he said, but the Department of
Homeland Security, pretending to be the Department of Labor. Angie
had put his name on the terrorist watch list, he said. The Government
was after him now—after his money and his guns and his fuel. It was
Ruby Ridge all over again.
I pulled off the highway and onto the gravel, then stepped out of the
car and gazed up at Buck’s Peak. It was clear immediately that at least
some of the rumors were true—for one, that my parents were making
huge sums of money. The house was massive. The home I’d grown up
in had had five bedrooms; now it had been expanded in all directions
and looked as though it had at least forty.
It would only be a matter of time, I thought, before Dad started
using the money to prepare for the End of Days. I imagined the roof
lined with solar panels, laid out like a deck of cards. “We need to be
self-sufficient,” I imagined Dad would say as he dragged the panels
across his titanic house. In the coming year, Dad would spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars buying equipment and scouring the
mountain for water. He didn’t want to be dependent on the
Government, and he knew Buck’s Peak must have water, if he could
only find it. Gashes the size of football fields would appear at the
mountain base, leaving a desolation of broken roots and upturned
trees where once there had been a forest. He was probably chanting,
“Got to be self-reliant” the day he climbed into a crawler and tore into
the fields of satin wheat.
—GRANDMA-OVER-IN-TOWN DIED ON MOTHER’S Day.
I was doing research in Colorado when I heard the news. I left
immediately for Idaho, but while traveling realized I had nowhere to
stay. It was then that I remembered my aunt Angie, and that my father
was telling anyone who would listen that she had put his name on a
terrorist watch list. Mother had cast her aside; I hoped I could reclaim
her.
Angie lived next door to my grandfather, so again I parked along the
white picket fence. I knocked. Angie greeted me politely, the way