In November, Giles and Justin watched The Day After, a made-for-TV movie depicting the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Justin, who tended to take the world’s problems to heart, had often fretted over the disarmament issue. When the program was over, Giles could tell that Justin was upset. “I knew it had a strong impact on him because ordinarily he talked about these things, but this time he didn’t. He seemed dispirited.” Giles tried to draw him out but was unsuccessful. “It was as if he were in a state of shock and couldn’t talk about it. He seemed to get the feeling that nuclear destruction was almost inevitable.” That night Justin lay awake and wept, thinking about the movie and what could happen. The next day he wrote a letter to the president saying that he had been so concerned about the threat of nuclear holocaust that he hadn’t slept. Couldn’t we find a better way of solving our problems? Justin never mailed the letter.
As the New Year began, Justin was brimming with plans. He intended to perform puppet shows at the library during February recess. He had started writing science fiction stories. He had arranged John Denver’s song “Perhaps Love” as a solo with chorus backup and planned to audition with it for the spring musical. He was excited about returning to camp—this time he wanted to stay for two weeks. He was trying to persuade his parents to let him attend a summer Dungeons & Dragons convention in Minnesota. He was already talking about what kind of party he wanted for his fifteenth birthday the following October, and he was campaigning for a new archery bow as a junior high school graduation present. “It’s only $169, Mom,” he’d plead as he danced around her. “I really need it if I’m going to be an Olympic archer.”
In February his Honors English class read Julius Caesar aloud. Justin, who adored Shakespeare, lugged his massive two-volume edition of the complete plays into class each day, but the teacher, exasperated, told him he had to use the same paperback as the other students. Justin won the role of Caesar, which he read with great feeling and flourish. Though he tended to show off a bit, the class was impressed.
On Sunday evening, February 12, there was a Youth Group meeting. Justin had pushed for the session, at which he unveiled an elaborate scheme to raise funds for scholarships to camp. He proposed a flea market and barbecue modeled on the church’s annual barn sale. Reverend Cox didn’t want to quash Justin’s enthusiasm, but he said it didn’t seem practical. He suggested a car wash or a bake sale. He promised to discuss Justin’s plan at the next board meeting. The other boys and girls in the group agreed that Justin’s project was too complicated. Although Justin quickly changed the subject and proposed that next week his parents talk to the group about their work in emergency services, Cox could tell that Justin felt deflated. That evening when Giles picked up his son, he asked him how the meeting had gone. “Well,” said Justin, “they shot me down again.” They talked about it a little on the way home, and Giles knew Justin was disappointed because he was so quiet.
Tuesday, February 14, was Valentine’s Day. Justin was up in time to have a quick breakfast with his father before Giles left for work. Then he and Leah caught the bus for school. That morning Justin got a French test back. He had done well and showed his paper to Mike LoPuzzo, to his guidance counselor, and to anyone else who would look. “This is the best I ever did,” he exulted. After lunch Reverend Cox happened to be at the school discussing plans for the annual career day with the principal when Justin walked into the office. Cox, remembering Justin’s defeat at Youth Group, asked him how he was doing. Justin said he was fine and told Cox about his success on the French test. In English class that afternoon Justin performed the role of Caesar with his customary panache.
At the end of class the teacher handed out Valentine’s Day carnations. Each year the Student Council took orders for flowers at one dollar apiece, and just before school let out on February 14 they were distributed. Coaches bought them for members of their teams; friends bought them for friends; and some bought them for classmates they had crushes on. While popular students received several—one pretty ninth grader received eight—some people didn’t get any. Justin, of course, was one of them. “I don’t think it bothered him,” says a classmate. “I’m sure he didn’t send one, so I’m sure he didn’t expect to receive any.” Justin told Mike he would bring him another book of Doonesbury cartoons tomorrow.
When Anne returned from shopping at three, Justin and Leah were already back from school. She had bought Justin some jelly beans and a valentine but decided to save them until Giles got home so that he could sign the card, too. Justin was out playing with a friend. Anne called him in and kissed him good-bye, then left for her four-to-midnight shift as police dispatcher. When Giles arrived home around six-thirty, it was already cold and dark. Leah was inside playing with a friend. Giles asked her where her brother was. Leah said she had gone out for a while and, when she returned, Justin was gone. Giles thought this was a little odd. On the living room floor there was a pile of wood shavings.
Giles went outside and called for Justin. When he chooses to use it, Giles has a booming voice that carries quite a distance; often when Justin was out playing or even when he was indoors at a friend’s house, Giles would call to him and Justin would hear and come home. This time there was no answer. Giles grew concerned. He telephoned a few of the neighbors and the parents of some of Justin’s classmates. No one had seen him. Between calls Giles went to the door and shouted his son’s name into the night.
Giles worried that Justin had fallen and hurt himself or that he might have made wisecracks to some older teenagers and they had ganged up and beaten him. Once before when Justin had disappeared, that is what Giles had feared. Justin, eleven at the time, had been with friends at Lake Oscawana, about a half mile from home. At dusk Giles and Anne had called his friends, who said Justin had walked home alone hours before them. Giles recruited some neighbors, and they had fanned out and searched the area between the Spoonhours’ house and the lake, calling his name. They didn’t find him. They phoned the police, who hurried over. While Giles and Anne were in the living room telling the police what they knew, in walked Justin, rubbing his eyes, wondering what all the fuss was about. He had been asleep for hours in the storage room and had just awakened.
Giles hoped that this time around something similar would happen, but by ten-thirty, after trying everyone he could think of, he called Anne, who thought of some more people to call. At eleven-fifteen, Giles called Anne again and said he was really worried and wanted her to come home. Anne arranged for someone to finish her shift. A friend at the station offered to help, and grabbing a couple of battery-powered searchlights, they drove quickly to Lookout Manor. When they got home, the three of them began searching the neighborhood, calling Justin’s name. Giles looked around the rocks where Justin and his band liked to play war; Anne searched the yard. Then she and her friend crossed the road and walked into the woods, their flashlights cutting tunnels of light in the dark. About a hundred yards from the house Anne heard her friend cry out, “Oh my God.” She started toward the sound of his voice, but he came crashing forward, shouting at her to stay put. He ran toward the house, yelling for Giles. Anne turned on her light and saw her son, his eyes dilated, his tongue swollen and protruding, hanging from a tree.
The following morning one of Justin’s teachers was driving to school when news of his death was broadcast on the radio. She was so shocked she nearly drove off the road. News travels fast in Putnam Valley, and by the time students arrived at school, many of them had heard. Students and teachers clustered in the halls crying, and as new arrivals were told, some of them burst into tears. The first reaction of a few students was “Good—he’s gone,” but when the truth sank in, they were stunned into silence. Diana Wolf hadn’t listened to the radio that morning, and when she arrived at school, she heard a girl spreading the news. “I went up to her and said, ‘What are you talking about?’ She said, ‘Justin hung himself. My mother heard it on the radio.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ I went to my homeroom teacher and aske
d him if it was true. He had yelled at Justin for being late just the day before. He looked down and said, ‘Yes.’ In my first class everybody was talking about it. One kid said, ‘Well, it’s the only thing Justin ever did right. He finally did something right.’”
At his locker that morning Mike LoPuzzo heard the talk about Justin and prayed that it wasn’t true. “I thought, ‘Jeez, I hope nothing happened to him, because these people don’t give a damn about him, they’re gonna love it.’” First period he was alone in a classroom, minding computers for a teacher, when he looked out the window and saw several policemen talking to Justin’s father. “I knew then that something had really happened.” Mike thought of the Doonesbury book Justin had promised to bring him that day. “In a strange way I felt that he let me down,” he says. He felt even more let down by the thought that his classmates had finally gotten to Justin. “I was mad at him. ‘Why did you let them get to you?’ I said to myself. ‘That’s just what they wanted. How could you let those idiots push you over the edge?’” Later that day a school counselor approached Mike. “I hear you were friends with Justin,” he said. “Well, I really wasn’t his friend, but I was friendly to him,” Mike replied. After he said it he felt guilty and wondered why he had been defensive.
Early that morning, Richard Brodow, the superintendent of Putnam Valley schools, was having his car fixed at a garage when he got a call from the school telling him what had happened. Brodow, who had known Justin enough to say hello to him by name, was stunned. The biggest problems he had faced as superintendent of the small, eleven-hundred-student district had been budget fights—just the day before he had steered a lengthy but productive budget meeting. The idea of a suicide seemed unbelievable. “As an administrator you may be trained in curriculum, you may be trained in personnel, you may be trained in supervision,” he says, “but this is something that you’re never trained for.”
There had been suicides in Putnam Valley before, including those of teenagers, but they had been met with hushed silence, almost as if people had agreed to pretend they hadn’t occurred. However, even if Brodow had wanted to bury the news, which he didn’t, the notion of business as usual was absurd. When he arrived at the school during the first period, students were still gathered in the halls, sobbing. His teachers were doing their best to cope, but many of them were as bewildered as the students. It was obvious that no lessons could be conducted—the entire school was essentially in shock. Brodow telephoned Peekskill High School and asked them to send over two counselors, who, in addition to Putnam Valley’s psychologist and guidance counselor, would visit each classroom to discuss Justin’s suicide and answer questions. Students were told that counselors were also available in the guidance office to talk privately. The staff drew up a list of students who seemed particularly distressed, and a counselor met with each of them. Their parents were called and told that their children should be watched closely over the next several days. After-school activities were canceled; the flag was lowered to half-mast.
For many students Justin’s suicide was their first experience with death. That the death was of someone their own age was frightening; that it was intentional was incomprehensible. Students who had teased Justin were terrified that they had driven him to suicide. “Why did I pick on him?” they said. “Why did I tell him he smelled?” Others felt guilty for tolerating the teasing or for ignoring Justin. “I think he was just too good for us,” one child told a counselor. Teachers wrestled with their own feelings of guilt. They worried that they had not treated Justin as well as they might have, that they had missed signs, that somehow they could have prevented his death.
The last class of the day was Honors English, in which Justin had played Julius Caesar with such intensity twenty-four hours earlier. Today, the guidance counselor spoke to the class about Justin’s death. He had met with Justin the day before to discuss his schedule for his first year at high school. Justin had seemed cheerful and confident, said the counselor, but perhaps he had already made his decision to kill himself, and that had made him seem happy. Diana Wolf, who had kept control over herself all day, began to weep. At the end of the day when Brodow, over the public address system, asked the school to stand for a moment of silence in Justin’s memory, Diana couldn’t stop sobbing. When she got home, she went to her room, took out her journal, drew a fat black X instead of the day of the week, and wrote: “One of my classmates, Justin Spoonhour, hung himself last night. He’s dead. Our class of 115 is now a class of 114. I’ll never see him again. . . . Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I can’t handle it. Right now I’m crying uncontrollably. This is awful. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to take a shower. I don’t want to go for a walk or go to sleep. I haven’t eaten all day, and I don’t intend to because I might throw it up. I’m going to watch ‘The Guiding Light’ now. I better blow my nose first. Justin, underneath, we did love you. Why did you do it?”
Over the next few days the entire town struggled to answer that question. Certainly, many people were aware that Justin Spoonhour had been “a square peg in a round hole,” as they said, and that he had been ostracized for it. But he had never complained or indicated that he was unhappy or depressed, and he had never spoken of death. He had endured the teasing for years—why had he killed himself now? Some were convinced it had been an accident, that Justin had been playing around and had gone too far. A few people murmured that Justin had become so involved in Dungeons & Dragons that he had been unable to distinguish fantasy from reality and had committed suicide as part of the game. Others felt that on Valentine’s Day, when the whole world was supposed to be in love, the years of isolation had finally gotten to him. Still others suggested that Justin may have gotten the idea of killing himself from the newspaper. Ten days earlier, thirteen-year-old Robbie DeLaValliere had been found hanging from a tree in the town park in Peekskill, ten miles south of Putnam Valley. His suicide had made headlines in the local papers. Justin had not known DeLaValliere, and no one had heard him mention the boy’s death, but people wondered if he had read about it and decided that he had found a solution to his problems.
But there were no convincing answers. Justin himself had left no note, and although everyone kept expecting someone—a friend to whom he might have confided his plans, perhaps—to come forward with an explanation, no one did. There were rumors, of course. Some said that Justin had fought with his English teacher that afternoon; others claimed that he had been given a flower as a Valentine’s Day joke. One student said that on the school bus a few weeks before his death, Justin had showed him a noose he had fashioned from a piece of string. “See?” Justin had said. “This is a strong knot.” But that was all he had said. It was just another stray clue that seemed significant only in retrospect, like the pile of wood shavings Giles had found on the living room floor. But while the clues were inconclusive, it seemed that Justin, in the end, had been resolute. The coroner determined that he had hanged himself about six o’clock, three hours after getting home from school, with a rope from the cellar.
Most of Justin’s classmates came to the wake, including many of those who had harassed him. One boy with whom Justin had had a shoving match at a basketball game a few months earlier came several times, each time with different friends. Many of the children wept, and a few became hysterical as they approached the open casket where Justin lay in his size 20 collegiate jacket, his chorus sweater, and a burnt-orange turtleneck, borrowed from a friend of Anne’s, to cover the rash where the rope had bitten into his neck. Justin looked handsome and neat, but not too neat. Before the wake Anne’s best friend had leaned over the casket and mussed his hair.
Friday at noon, several hundred people packed Grace United Methodist Church for Justin’s funeral. More than half his class attended with their parents. Reverend Cox, who had stayed up until 2 a.m. writing the eulogy, spoke of his shock at Justin’s death. He wondered why Justin hadn’t come to him, why he hadn’t recognized any signs of unhappiness, and he co
ncluded that perhaps he had attributed an adult maturity to Justin that he did not have so early in his life. As for reasons, said Cox, we can speculate, but only God can know. Giles, one hand on Justin’s coffin, spoke of the terrible irony of a father burying his son. “I had been looking forward to sharing so many things with him—school and college and career choices and helping him struggle with adolescent problems and dating and getting serious and choosing someone and raising a family. . . . I will miss him, and I’m convinced I will see him again.” Giles nearly broke down several times. “I shaved this morning with the razor I was going to give to Justin,” he said. “My God, my son wasn’t even old enough to shave yet.” When Anne sang a hymn to her son, the church was pierced with sobs. “There are no answers for what happened,” she told Justin’s classmates. “But if you want to honor my son, you will try to love and be more aware of each other.” The organist played the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and Justin’s drama teacher sang “Perhaps Love,” the song Justin had hoped to sing in the spring concert:
Perhaps love is like a resting place
A shelter from the storm.
It exists to give you comfort
November of the Soul Page 5
