Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Claire initiated a sporadic correspondence with Preece as she continued her itinerant existence—first heading to New York, to take care of her ailing mother after Sirak left for college, and then moving back to Colorado in 2005, and Wyoming two years later, to teach in Adventist schools. In each place, she felt the strange pull of the shooting tug at her. Once, in a sporting goods store in the Rocky Mountains, she decided to stop at the gun counter and ask the clerk if she could look at a .30-06. (Whitman had in fact shot her with a 6mm bolt-action rifle, but Claire had been told otherwise.) The clerk laid the .30-06 out on the glass counter and Claire studied the weapon, finally reaching out to touch its stock, before pulling her hand back a moment later, unsure what she had come to see. Another time, while driving through the Denver area, she chose to take a detour through Columbine, even circling around the high school. She could not say exactly what she had gone looking for “except for some deeper understanding,” she told me, that went unsatisfied.

  Claire had stayed away from Austin for nearly forty years, but in 2008, when Preece asked her to attend a building dedication for the law enforcement officers and civilians who had helped bring Whitman’s rampage to an end, she felt compelled to return. The previous year, a student at Virginia Tech had armed himself and opened fire, killing 32 people and injuring 17, and Claire, rattled by yet another tragedy, craved human connection.

  At the ceremony, which took place at a county building far from campus, she fumbled for the right words as she tried to convey her thankfulness to Houston McCoy, one of the police officers who had shot Whitman. When she later joined him, Preece, and several former officers on a visit to UT, she was dismayed to find that the only reference to the horror that had unfolded there was a small bronze plaque on the north side of the Tower. Set in a limestone boulder beside a pond, it was easy to miss. As Claire surveyed the modest memorial, an industrial air-conditioning unit that sat nearby cycled on and a dull roar broke the silence. “I had heard about the memorial and had taken solace in thinking that it was a lovely place,” she told me. “I was so disappointed to find no mention of Tom, the baby, or any of the victims.”

  Afterward, at his home, Preece showed her old news footage that TV cameramen had shot on the day of the tragedy, looking out onto the South Mall. As she watched, Claire was startled to realize that she was looking at a grainy image of her younger self, lying on the hot pavement. When she saw two teenagers dash out from their hiding places and run headlong toward her, she leaned closer, dumbstruck. Local news stations had aired the footage in the aftermath of the shooting and on subsequent anniversaries, but Claire had never seen any of it, and witnessing her own rescue was revelatory. She had always known the name of one of the students who saved her; James Love, a fellow freshman, had been in her anthropology class, and she had stopped him on campus once in 1967 to thank him for what he had done, but he had seemed ill at ease and eager to break free from the conversation. His partner, a teenager in a black button-down shirt and Buddy Holly glasses, had remained unknown to her, so much so that she had half wondered, until she saw the black-and-white footage, if he had been an angel.

  Preece helped her solve the mystery in 2011, after he spotted a headline in the American-Statesman that read “Man Who’s the Life of the Party Has Brush with Death.” Below it, the article detailed how a local performance artist named Artly Snuff, a member of the parody rock band the Uranium Savages, had survived a near-fatal car accident. Born John Fox, Snuff had graduated from Austin High and been weeks away from starting his freshman year at UT when Whitman opened fire. Though the article never referenced the shooting, the mention of Snuff’s name jogged Preece’s memory, and he recalled an American-Statesman column on Snuff years earlier in which he was praised for having helped carry a pregnant woman in the midst of the massacre.

  Preece tracked down Snuff on Facebook, and in 2012, he put Snuff and Claire in touch. “To finally hear her voice was stunning, because I’d wondered what had happened to her so many times,” Snuff told me of their first phone call, which spanned hours. “For both of us, just talking was a catharsis. I’d seen things no seventeen-year-old should ever have to see, and I’d carried those memories with me, and Claire understood.”

  Snuff told Claire how he had crouched behind the Jefferson Davis statue with Love—a friend of his from high school whose life was later cut short by bone cancer—as gunfire erupted around them. They had agonized about what to do, he explained, as they looked onto the South Mall and saw her lying there, still alive. Too terrified to move, they had initially stayed put—Snuff’s own cowardice, as he saw it, measured in 15-minute increments whenever the Tower’s bells chimed on the quarter hour. In a voice thick with emotion, he told her that he had always regretted taking so long to work up the courage to help her.

  Claire assured him that he owed her no apologies, saying that she loved him and would always think of him as her brother. She said so again when they saw each other in Austin in 2013, wrapping her arms around him in the entrance of the Mexican restaurant where they had agreed to meet. Oblivious to everyone else, they embraced for several minutes. “It was so affirming to finally say thank you,” Claire told me.

  Around them, a national debate about gun control had just erupted with new force. Three months earlier, in Newtown, Connecticut, a disturbed young man had fatally shot 20 children, none more than seven years old, and six adults, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In a forceful speech at a memorial service for the victims, President Barack Obama had pushed for tighter regulation of firearms, warning that the cost of inaction was too great. In response, many gun owners had bristled at the notion that fewer licensed weapons, and more government regulation, would keep anyone safe. In Texas, where the legislature was in session that spring, lawmakers had proposed several “campus carry” bills, which sought to upend the long-standing state law banning firearms at public universities. If passed, concealed handguns would be permitted on university grounds, in dorms, and in college classrooms.

  Claire had returned to Austin because Jim Bryce, a lawyer and gun-control activist whom she had met when they were both students at UT, had asked if she, as a victim of campus gun violence, would testify at the Capitol. Though she had not engaged in any activism since the sixties—the Seventh-day Adventist Church advocates strict political neutrality—she felt that she could not turn down Bryce’s invitation. And so on March 14, 2013, Claire appeared before the Homeland Security & Public Safety Committee, one among scores of people who had come to voice their support or opposition to the bills. No longer the campus radical she had once been, she did not stand out in the overflow crowd; at 65, everything about her—from her chin-length silver bob to the reading glasses she slid on when it was her turn to speak to her comfortable shoes—was muted and sensible.

  Like the other speakers, Claire was allotted three minutes. Compressing the totality of her experience into a few sound bites seemed impossible, but once at the microphone, she tried. “I never thought about somebody using a gun to kill themselves or others until August 1, 1966, when I was walking across the campus of the University of Texas,” she said, her voice clear and steady. She sketched out what had happened to her in a few unadorned sentences—“I was eighteen and eight months pregnant”—and when she reached the end of her story, she added, “I was not able ever again to have a child.”

  She expressed her reservations, as both an educator and a sixth-generation Texan who had grown up around guns, about the proposed bills, arguing that the legislature’s objective should be to prevent future attacks, not arm more civilians. “A campus is a sacred place,” she said. Then her time was up.

  That fall, Claire received an email from Gary Lavergne, with whom she had met and corresponded after reading A Sniper in the Tower. The email told of an astounding discovery. “My Dear Friend, Claire,” it began. “A few years ago, while working on my last book, I downloaded a database of grave sites located in the Austin Memorial Park. (My purpose was to locate the g
raves of some of the persons I had written about in Before Brown.) It wasn’t until this past weekend that, while browsing among the almost 23,000 entries in that dataset, I noticed an entry for a ‘Baby Boy Wilson.’”

  Lavergne went on to explain that the burial date for the child was listed as August 2, 1966—the day after the massacre. Records showed that the unmarked plot had been purchased by a Lyman Jones, a man whose name Lavergne did not recognize. Claire did, immediately; a veteran journalist who had written for the Texas Observer during the ’50s and ’60s, Jones was her mother’s second husband, and Claire’s stepfather at the time of the shooting.

  Claire had always been aware that the baby had received a proper burial, but she had not pressed her mother for details until her later years, when her mother’s memory was failing and she could no longer summon them. The small plot, she now learned from Lavergne, was located in a section of the cemetery mostly devoted to infants and stillborn babies. “Claire, I hope this gives you comfort,” he wrote, explaining that he had gone to Austin Memorial Park to find the burial place. “Attached is a picture I took of the grave site. Your son is buried beneath the flowers I placed there so that you can see the exact spot.”

  Claire read and reread the email in silence, brushing away tears. Your son. Buried beneath the flowers.

  She would visit the cemetery the following August, after Lavergne and his family had a headstone made, with Claire’s blessing. Below the image of a cross, it read:

  Baby Boy Wilson

  August 1, 1966

  It stood near the perimeter of the cemetery, on a sunburned stretch of grass near a single hackberry tree. When Claire found it, she knelt down and gathered a handful of soil, placing it inside a folded sheet of paper for a keepsake. Then she prostrated herself, pressing her forehead against the marble marker, which was cool even in the blazing August sun. She thought about Tom and about the baby’s father, John Muir, whom she had called and spoken with, after a decades-long estrangement, before he had passed away that June. As she lay there, she was acutely aware of the baby’s presence, of the molecules somewhere below the earth’s surface that belonged to him. Claire stayed for a long time and prayed. “I felt not so hollow,” she said. “I felt close to God.”

  [ VI ]

  Claire lives in Texas now, having finally, after all her years of wandering, come home. Six years ago, she moved to Texarkana—which, with some 37,000 residents, is the most densely populated place she has lived for some time. An Adventist school had needed a teacher, and so, as she had done more than a dozen times before, she started over. Not since Eden Valley has she remained in one place for so long.

  When I went to visit her earlier this year, we met at her white double-wide trailer, which sits on the pine-studded western edge of town. Her bedroom window looks out onto a pasture, and though the view lacks the grandeur of the Rockies or the Great Plains, it allows her to imagine that she still lives in the wilderness, far from civilization. A few steps from her front door, in raised beds she built herself with wood, she had planted a winter garden. Collard greens and kale flourished next to fat heads of cabbage, and despite a recent freeze, a few stalwart strawberry plants thrived. As we talked, Claire bent down and tore off a few sprigs of mint, handing me some to taste. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, her pale blue eyes widening.

  When Claire told friends about her life in Texarkana, she focused on the happy things: her garden; the Nigerian family she had befriended; her students, many of whom lived below the poverty line, who hugged her waist and called her Miss Claire. She did not share her worry about Sirak, who was standing beside her on that January morning. He wore a cheerless expression, a black wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows, his shoulders squared against the cold. He had moved back in with her in August, not long after his thirtieth birthday, but he bore little resemblance to the young man she had sent off to college. Unless prodded to talk, he said little, and his speech was slow and leaden. Every now and then, as Claire and I chatted, he would smile at the mention of a childhood friend or a story about his and Claire’s days in the Arizona high desert. Except for those moments, he seemed to have taken up residence in a world of his own.

  For Claire, the first clue that something was not right with Sirak came in 2007. Then a month shy of graduating with a music degree from Union College, in Nebraska, Sirak had called her late one night. “Mom, my thoughts are racing and I can’t make them stop,” he confided, adding that he had not been sleeping much. Claire offered reassurance, certain these were the typical jitters of a graduating senior. But that July, shortly before he was set to begin a prestigious teaching fellowship in the University of Nebraska’s music program, he called again and begged her to take him home. Rather than try to reason with him, she made the 10-hour drive from Colorado. When she arrived, she found Sirak standing in the parking lot of his apartment complex, wide-eyed and on edge. He refused to step foot inside his apartment by himself. “He was terrified, shaking, talking so fast,” she told me. “That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”

  At home, his behavior only grew more erratic. Sirak, usually a modest person, would walk to the mailbox at the end of their driveway in nothing but his underwear. He slept little and was reluctant to venture far from the house. Once, after he and Claire ate out, he told her he was sure that the restaurant’s staff had put laxatives in their food. She took Sirak to see a series of mental health professionals, but no one could offer a definitive diagnosis; a prescription for Lexapro, a popular antidepressant, did little to lessen his anxiety. Sometimes he would slip into a manic state, and Claire would coax him into her car and head for the emergency room. “At the hospital, I always got the same question: ‘Is he threatening you or trying to hurt himself?’” she said. “And I would say, ‘No,’ and they would tell me that they couldn’t help me.”

  Rather than face his descent into mental illness alone, Claire reached out to his biological father, who had been granted asylum in 1999. (Her ex-husband, Brian, had remarried and largely receded from Sirak’s life.) The rest of Sirak’s family—his mother, two brothers, and two sisters—had immigrated when Sirak was thirteen and settled with his father in Atlanta. Sirak had visited them nearly every summer since, and he and his siblings had forged an easy bond. Claire believed that Atlanta, with its big-city mental health resources, would be a better place for him than rural Colorado, and in 2008, it was agreed that he would go live with his Ethiopian family.

  In Atlanta, a psychiatrist finally diagnosed Sirak with bipolar disorder and prescribed him lithium, a mood stabilizer. During long, discursive phone conversations with Claire, Sirak assured her that he was taking his medication, but despite his sincere longing to get well, he never consistently followed his treatment protocol. Though he managed to hold a number of menial jobs—he bagged groceries, worked as a drugstore clerk, cleaned out moving trucks, delivered auto parts—his employment was often cut short when a manic episode overtook him. By 2012, during one of many voluntary commitments to Georgia Regional, a large, state-run hospital with a psychiatric ward, his diagnosis was modified to reflect his worsening condition. “I have Bipolar One, manic severe, with psychotic features,” Sirak explained to me matter-of-factly, referring to the most severe form of the disorder.

  When Claire saw Sirak on a visit last July, she was stunned. His doctors had put him on a powerful antipsychotic drug to keep his most serious symptoms in check, but it was plain that he was overmedicated. Sirak absently raised his feet, walking in place where he stood, and looked unfocused, his clothes rumpled, his hair uncombed. When he sat, he sometimes drifted off to sleep, and when he spoke, his voice was a curious monotone. “I’m not enjoying being alive very much right now,” he told her. Eager to find a way to dial back his medications, she moved him to Texarkana the following month and gave him her spare bedroom. She found a psychiatrist to fine-tune his prescriptions and arranged for weekly talk therapy sessions. The change of scenery seemed to help him, at least at first.
“Today Sirak told me he no longer wants to die,” Claire emailed a handful of close friends in late August. “Rejoice with me.”

  By the time of my visit, he had lapsed back into a depression, and he announced that he wanted to return to Atlanta. (Several weeks later, he did.) Though he had once devoted hours each day to the piano—in 2012 he even went to New York to audition for the master’s program at Juilliard—he had stopped playing, he told me, because he had lost his passion for music. “My doctor said I have something called anhedonia,” he said. “It’s like hedonism, but the opposite. It means I don’t feel pleasure anymore.”

  He brightened only when he changed the subject to an obsession of his: his conviction that he will one day be reborn as a “child of prophecy,” or a sort of modern-day messiah. As he described the superpowers he would possess when the prophecy came to fruition, he grew elated, his face alight. Beside him, Claire sat in silence, staring down at her clasped hands.

  What if Whitman’s bullet had never found her? Claire sometimes thinks about the intricate calculus that put her in his sights that day. What if her anthropology class had not let out early? What if Tom had lingered over his coffee one minute longer before they had gone to feed the parking meter? Such deliberations have never satisfied her, because each shift in the variables sets in motion other consequences. If she had not been shot, she might never have found God. If she had given birth, she would not have known the exhilaration, at 41, of becoming a mother, or the hard-won joy of raising Sirak. Sometimes she finds herself calculating the age of her first child, had he lived, and the number always astonishes her. She wrote it in my notebook one afternoon, carefully forming each numeral: 49. He would probably be a father by now, she observed, and she a grandmother.