by Jess Walter
“HOW CAN THEY DO THIS?” Julie Jordison asked her sister. Again, just like they had with the power company and the oak tree, Julie and Vicki felt like progress and government were trampling the family.
“I don’t know,” Vicki said. The teenage girls paced around the living room, waiting for their parents to come home from a town meeting where they were discussing the new interstate highway that was supposed to run alongside Coalville. The Department of Transportation had notified families whose farms were in the way of the new highway, and the Jordisons had been shocked to find out they would be displaced. In fact, the Fort Dodge off-ramp was going to slice right through the farmhouse, the very symbol of the Jordison family in Iowa. Like other families whose property was in the way, David and Jeane would be paid a “fair-market value” for their farm, but it wasn’t enough. It certainly didn’t pay for the four generations of Jordisons who’d already lived there and the ones that David—looking over his pasture in the late afternoon—imagined would work the land when he was gone.
Jeane and David were upset, but taciturn. “I guess you can’t stop progress,” said Vicki’s dad, a lifelong pragmatist.
Vicki and Julie weren’t taking it so well. They wondered how this could happen in America, how it could happen to their dad’s farm.
“Does our Constitution allow this?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know,” Vicki answered.
But Vicki wasn’t going to stop fighting until they bulldozed the house. She suggested her father look for gypsum on the land and then make a claim of more value than the Department of Transportation was offering. Perhaps if the house was worth too much, they wouldn’t tear it down. Then Vicki suggested that her dad hire an attorney, but he was a small farmer and didn’t think he could afford to fight the government. They’d just have to move somewhere else.
But a neighbor came to their rescue. A widow who owned ten different farms in the area hired an attorney and, in the end, the government allowed one highway in Iowa to be laid a little crooked. Yet Julie and her sister never forgot how close they’d come to losing their farm.
IN THE 1960s, Coalville’s prime was well behind it, and it was little more than a cluster of trees and grain silos, hiding 250 people in a few blocks of houses. Fort Dodge, six miles north of the Jordison farm, was the regional center for farming and banking, home to 25,000 people. Coalville kids like Vicki went to their own tiny grade school until ninth grade, when they were suddenly thrust into a 3-A high school—the biggest classification in the state—where everyone seemed to know everyone else and being from Coalville was not conducive to being homecoming queen.
But Vicki’s place was always in the family anyway, and she really didn’t seem to mind that she wasn’t as popular in school. She got A’s and found things to be involved in, becoming vice president of the Future Business Leaders of America and the unquestioned star of the Pleasant Valley Pixies 4-H. Yet by high school, she had run headlong into the first problem she had no solution for: boys.
Julie couldn’t understand it. Vicki was the pretty one, the talented one, the one with the smaller thighs, and yet, when the boys came over, they wanted to see Julie. Four years younger, she was growing into a cheerleader and a ringer for Marlo Thomas in That Girl. From kindergarten on, boys sought out Julie, and by eighth grade or so, the younger sister began wondering why Vicki never had any boyfriends.
In 1967, Vicki graduated from Fort Dodge High School and decided to go to the little community college they’d tacked on to the end of it. Iowa Central Community College had just opened the year before, in a cluster of temporary buildings on the north end of Fort Dodge. In a student body of 1,181 farm kids, the boys—studying agricultural sciences, auto mechanics, and liberal arts—outnumbered girls—future teachers, nurses, and secretaries—almost five-to-one. Even with those odds, Vicki had trouble with boys. She was eighteen, not engaged and from a farm in Iowa, a combination that meant she could easily be on her way to being an old maid. And her personality, charming to the family, could seem controlling to the boys who drove up the Jordison driveway to take Vicki to the Playmoor ballroom for a dance or to Dodger Lanes for a Coke. Some of them ran from her domesticity, her self-reliance, and her doting, their arms full of baked cookies and knitted sweaters. Her first boyfriend, Dave, was charming, but Vicki fell much harder for him than he did her, and when he broke up with her, she was devastated. Always so steady and even-tempered, she threw herself down on her bed and cried. Julie was surprised by that side of her sister: self-confident and strong around the family, all she really wanted was to find a man to devote herself to. In 1968, Vicki graduated from ICCC with a two-year degree in business and took a job as a secretary at Sears. That’s where she met her second boyfriend, a mechanic named Bob. But there was no spark for Vicki.
Then came the one she thought was right. He was a few years older than Vicki and as charming as Dave had been, but with a darker side. As before, Vicki turned herself over to him completely, even though the rest of the family didn’t trust him. He seemed slick. He hung around for months until, one day, a county sheriff’s deputy pulled up to the farmhouse, arrested him, and charged him with raping his sister-in-law.
“That woman’s been throwing herself at him,” Vicki explained patiently. “And when he rejected her, she accused him of this.” Vicki was so upset, she talked her dad into putting the farm up as collateral for his bail money. The charge was dismissed when the woman didn’t show up for court. Eventually, Vicki left him.
She was miserable, turning twenty-one, feeling old and alone.
And then she bumped into Pete.
He was charming, funny, as good-looking as her first boyfriend, with dark, close-cropped brown hair that curled at the edges when it started to get long, and bushy brown brows that covered devilish eyes. His real name was Randall, but he hated it and so everyone called him Pete. He was a year older than Vicki and had gone to Iowa Central for a year before he dropped out and took a job driving a school bus. After that, he enlisted in the army, and now he was home on leave. He came back to Fort Dodge in 1970, muscled and serious, tooling through town in his red Mustang, a fast-talking planner who was ready to do something with his life.
Vicki was in love.
“How could you be in love?” Julie asked. After the fiasco with her last boyfriend, she figured Vicki was throwing herself at the first guy she saw. “You don’t even know this guy.”
Sure she did. She’d even gone out with him once or twice, between Bob and her last boyfriend. “He was really wild and I didn’t think it was the right thing for me,” Vicki said. And he hadn’t been interested in a long-term relationship anyway.
“He told me that when he went out with me before, he knew I was the kind of girl you married,” Vicki said. “And he wasn’t ready to get married yet. Now he is.” The kind of girl you marry? After all she’d been through the last three years, Vicki couldn’t have heard anything that sounded better. To her, Pete Weaver was perfect.
Well, Julie thought, for my big sister, nothing else would do.
ASK ANYBODY: Randall “Pete” Weaver was just a regular guy. He didn’t really have the build to be an athlete, but he was wiry and strong from long summers of farm work. “I was always the little kid in school and I hated a bully,” he said. Randy started working in the fields when he was ten, and his dad was never so proud as he was the day Randy stood up to a farmer who tried to pay him less than the bigger boys. The Weaver family lived in Grant, a small town in southwestern Iowa, where Randy hid from his sisters, played Little League baseball, and goofed off with the local farm boys.
Clarence Weaver was an agricultural supply salesman who waited patiently through three girls before Randall was born, when the old man was forty. He passed on his compact toughness and his sharp features, and he invested much patriotism and Christianity in his kids. Randy, especially, strived to please him, and he was treated with the deference of the only boy and the youngest child. Clarence and Wilma Weaver were
fervent and practiced Christians, with Bible Belt intensity, especially Clarence. He bounced the family among Evangelical, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches, trying to find a denomination that mirrored his own rigid faith. When Randy was eleven, he made his dad proud again, walking down the aisle at church and accepting Jesus as his savior. His dad cried. “He was a good boy,” Clarence said. “He always believed in God, always did right by Him. We didn’t stand for anything else.”
In 1962, Clarence moved the family north, to a gray, two-story house with a square-post porch on Vine Street in Jefferson, Iowa, about fifty miles from Fort Doge. It was the perfect town for Randall, who was popular enough in school—one of those decent guys who would joke around with anyone, even though he came from one of the most religious families in town. He fit in with his new classmates and went to the Presbyterian Church youth group and Sunday School, tinkered with his car, worked summers in the fields, and tried beer with his buddies. “It was like growing up on Happy Days,” one of his friends remembered. “It was Friday night football, get the crops out of the field, and wait for the next parade.”
Jefferson had been founded in 1854 by farmers who picked a high spot between the Raccoon River and Hardin Creek, bragging that it might be the only place in Iowa safe from both flood (because of its elevation) and tornado (because it was surrounded by water). There was only one tree on the whole 3,000-acre town site, and so they nailed a plaque to it. But being on high ground on the Great Plains meant there was no break from the wind, and though they were relatively safe from flood and tornado, winter storms raked the town, until, more than a century after Jefferson was founded, a midwestern windstorm called a derecho finally blew down the founding tree.
But by 1962 there were plenty of shade trees in Jefferson. It was one of those perfect, self-enclosed farming towns, with a bank holding $15 million in deposits from the 4,500 mostly white people spread among 1,400 tidy, mostly white houses. There were eleven churches—ten Protestant, one Catholic—and no taverns. A few years later, buoyed by the completion of a thirteen-story bell tower, the chamber of commerce changed the town’s slogan from “Home of the Horn of Plenty” to “City on the Rise.” The population dropped by 250.
RANDY WEAVER GRADUATED from Jefferson High School in 1966 and enrolled in Iowa Central Community College, driving the fifty miles to class every morning. Although most students were farm kids, Fort Dodge and ICCC—unlike Jefferson—also had a small black population. Randy got along with everyone, no matter their color. At night, he and a high school buddy, Dave Luther, shagged the drag—cruising back and forth on the assigned street in Randy’s Mustang—and scooped the loop—turning the car painfully slowly around the square at the end of the drag, trying to get the attention of every girl in Fort Dodge. They went to beer parties and dances at the Playmoor, the town ballroom where the Fort Dodge custom was for a group of guys to surround a couple of dancers, at which point the boy would step back into the chain of guys and the girl would pick a new dance partner from the spinning, laughing circle around her. It was called the Trap. Girls did the same thing to boys, and in such ways, everyone knew everyone else.
Randy Weaver took a job driving a school bus and was given the Otho route, right next to Fort Dodge. Denise was a junior at Fort Dodge High and when the bus driver asked her out, he was so funny and handsome, she barely hesitated. They only went out a couple of times; once, he picked her up in the Mustang, and they drove to a friend’s mobile home in the Sunset Trailer Court, near campus, where three or four other couples sat around in the low light, drinking Schlitz beer and talking. She was uncomfortable around these college kids, and Randy seemed to understand that without her even having to say anything, and he suggested they leave. Even though he was older than she was and hung around with these drinkers, she was impressed that he was such a gentleman.
Denise was short and pretty, with dark hair and eyes. And so was another girl Randy started dating. Although he and Vicki went out only a few times, friends said they belonged together, this small, attractive pair of Iowa kids. Randy’s buddies called them the all-American couple without a bit of sarcasm.
But Randy wasn’t ready to settle down, in part, he said, because he felt his country calling. By the time he dropped out of Iowa Central for good, in 1968, he’d already enlisted in the army. One high school friend, John Milligan, was drafted about the same time Randy enlisted. When they talked about the war later, Randy told him that anyone who wouldn’t serve his country wasn’t doing his share. “I was ready to fight, ready to go over to Vietnam,” he told Milligan.
Randy was trained as a combat engineer, volunteered for airborne training and, later, passed the rigorous training for Special Forces. He told friends he was a Green Beret, part of the most elite fighting unit in the country. Back home, Clarence was more proud than he’d ever been before.
In his training, Randy learned to survive on almost nothing, to make explosives, and prepare fortifications. But mainly, he was a construction equipment operator. He was a good soldier and rose to the rank of sergeant, qualifying as an expert with the M-14 rifle and as a sharpshooter with the M-16 and the. 45-caliber handgun. His military record was spotless, and he was given a National Defense Service Medal and a parachute badge.
But, by 1969—after the bloody Tet Offensive—American sentiment was turning against the war, and troop reductions were already in the works. Strangely, Randy Weaver never went to Vietnam. At Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, he watched a trickle of other men go over to Vietnam and a flow of body bags come home. It seemed as if the government and the people protesting the war were in some way trying to lose it. An idealist, Randy was disillusioned by the grayness and corruption of military life. Once, he told friends, he was part of an army intelligence drug bust on the base. He noticed that all the confiscated drugs weren’t turned over to authorities. When he told a superior, Randy was instructed to mind his own business. They were all in on it, he decided.
He came home on leave in 1970, already planning to get out of the army. One afternoon, he showed up at the house of Denise, the high school girl he’d asked out when she rode his bus. They talked outside by his car—Randy, Denise, and one of Denise’s friends. He was a man now, hardened and world-weary, seated low in the bucket front seat of his Mustang, his hair military close and a green beret perched on his head. After a while, Denise went into the house to get something and her friend stayed outside, talking to Randy in the middle of the driveway. When the friend came inside, she said Randy had come home to find a wife. Denise peeked out the window at him and refused to go out again. She was afraid he meant her.
But Randy had his eye on a different compact brunette. During his short leave from Fort Bragg, he and Vicki went out almost every night. He met her parents, and they talked about their lives, and she made plans to go see him at Fort Bragg.
On that trip, he gave her a ring and they were engaged to be married.
“Are you crazy?” Julie Jordison asked her sister. “You just met this guy.”
She told Julie how they’d dated before, but the timing hadn’t been right. Now it was. After his stint in the army, Randy moved home, grew his curly hair, and managed some sideburns and a decent mustache.
They were married in November 1971. Still uncomfortable with the division in her parents’ religious lives, Vicki had the wedding at the First Congregationalist Church in Fort Dodge but had two ministers conduct the ceremony, a pastor from her mom’s church and one from the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints. It was a small wedding, mostly family. The bridesmaids wore purple, Vicki’s favorite color.
As Julie watched them say their vows, she felt as if her sister had restored herself to perfection again, and after three tough years of sour relationships, she’d gotten everything she wanted from life. After the wedding, Randy and Vicki moved up to Cedar Falls, on the other side of the state, where Randy was going to use his G.I. Bill loan to go to college, at Northern Iowa University. Vicki was planning to work as a
secretary for a while, but, deep down, she said, she only wanted to be a housewife and mother. Randy wanted to right the wrongs he’d seen in the army, and so he decided to go into federal law enforcement, to work for the Secret Service or the FBI.
RANDY AND VICKI CAME HOME from Cedar Falls for Thanksgiving that first year of marriage, and Julie was never so excited to see her sister. As usual, they’d argued a little in the past few years—this time, because Julie had begun smoking and drinking beer. The straitlaced Vicki always chided her about it. But lately everything seemed to be going well for both girls. Vicki was a happy newlywed, and Julie was going out with a boy named Jeff, a handsome wrestler who everyone agreed was perfect for her.
It was a regular Jordison family Thanksgiving, Jeane racing to get all ten courses on the table, and everyone talking at once about everything. After dinner, they moved to the living room to digest, and Randy could barely hide his excitement.
“Now I have something I want to show you,” he said. He ran out to the car and came back with a film projector, which he set up in the living room. “You can’t believe this stuff. It’s great. Let me show you this.”
