TWO

SHE WAS BORN in a white, two-story farmhouse set behind a row of wind-break trees, between the central Iowa towns of Fort Dodge and Coalville, on land gently pitched like the quilt on a made bed. Her father, David Jordison, was the third generation of his family to live there, but when he moved his pretty young wife, Jeane, into the house, in 1945, there was still no electricity. Seemed neither the Coalville nor Fort Dodge power companies wanted to string a line to one lonesome house in the middle of a lake of corn and soybean. So they got by until 1949, when the crews buried the last pole in the ground, connected the wire to the house, and hooked up the Jordison farmhouse to the twentieth century.

Vicki arrived June 20, 1949, about the same time as the electricity.

She was farm pretty, with long, straight black hair, bubble cheeks, and narrow but searing dark eyes that seemed to know everything. She spoke early and with a midwestern slur, like someone with a piece of straw in her mouth. From the beginning, she was Dad’s girl, short, stoic, and serious, like her father. Julie, the cute one, was born four years after Vicki, and Lanny, the athletic one, came along eighteen months after that. There were cousins everywhere, but even in a far-ranging family of handsome and talented kids, Vicki stood out. She could do anything: sew, cook, knit, finish furniture; she picked up things without ever seeming to study them. Her mom, Jeane, could barely sew a button on, and yet Vicki took to it like she was born with her foot on the pedal. It was said she could do anything with her hands. She was distinctly feminine—domesticated, you might say—and yet there she was, crouched on the roof of the hog shed, driving nails into the new shingles with her grinning father. And smart? From the beginning, her parents felt they were having conversations with a little adult. She read everything.

She was eerily earnest: she never talked back and rarely got in trouble. Of course, that meant her younger sister had to do both. By the time Julie came along, Vicki had already mastered most of the responsible lines, so the only role open was Rebel, the one who didn’t do everything right, antagonist to Vicki’s sappy protagonist. Julie worshiped her sister, but she also felt jealous of Vicki’s looks and her accomplishments and the two argued and fought the way sisters can. Vicki would measure her thighs, then make Julie sit down before measuring hers, pronouncing them bigger than her own. Julie thought she was the only one who could see through her sister’s practiced perfection.

Still, the girls got along more often than they did not and shared the most intense and deep feelings between them, like the time, in the early 1960s, when the same electrical company that so slowly brought power to the Jordisons informed them that the family’s favorite tree—an ancient oak with limbs that reached down and practically demanded that children swing—would have to be taken out to make way for more, bigger power lines. The girls cried and tried to convince their dad to protect the tree, but there was little he could do, and it was cut down. It was Vicki’s first lesson in the glacial power of government and progress, powers that—like electricity—some people feel better off without.

LIFE REVOLVED around the farmhouse. It was built by Vicki Jordison’s great grandfather, an English coal miner who settled eighty miles north and west of Des Moines, in Coalville, the best place in Iowa to practice his trade. Eventually, he saved up enough money to leave the mines and buy 160 acres, and in the late 1800s he built the farmhouse on the edge of his property. By the time Vicki’s dad, David, came along, the coal mines were shutting down, and the Jordisons had switched completely to farming. Toward the end of World War II, David bought the original Jordison farmhouse from an uncle and set to work on the land. He was a tireless and fair man who preached hard work, responsibility, and the faith of the Reorganized Church of Latter-Day Saints.

He gave Julie and Lanny outdoor chores—feeding the chickens and cows, working in the fields—but Vicki did more work inside, helping Jeane with some of the cooking and sewing and cleaning. Like most farm families, the noon meal was called dinner and was eaten around the table—roast beef, potatoes and gravy, corn, slaw, biscuits, and tea. Having lived through the Depression, Jeane and David Jordison stockpiled food in cupboards and freezers, and they lived off the top layer of the deep freezer and the top row of canned foods.

They were a religious family, but there was a quiet discomfort around the house when it came to church. David was a devoted member of the reformed Mormon church. Jeane was a Congregationalist. And so, on Sundays, the family would split up, David and the kids trudging off to the RLDS church while Jeane stayed home. There were a few arguments, but Jeane would not change her mind.

Julie would have liked to have stayed home as well, but she had to go to church. She assumed Vicki felt the same way, although Vicki never would have said anything to her dad about it. After church, the kids went to Sunday School and the adults to their own Bible classes, where they talked about current events and church prophecy. “We are God’s chosen people,” the elders would say, spreading the Mormon doctrine that one of the lost tribes of Israel came to America and that Jesus had appeared in the New World. It was the thing that always stuck in Julie’s mind about those sermons, the strange notion that Americans alone were God’s chosen.

After church on Sunday, David would tinker around the house—as close as he ever got to resting—before sitting down in front of the television, turning on the football game, and grabbing the book of Mormon. Then, he’d talk about the things he’d heard in his Bible study, detailed predictions of Judgment Day and the worlds reserved for the true believers. He talked about a universe inside the Earth, something he’d heard about at church, and he looked for proof of it in the Bible. His favorite topic was Revelation, and he read from it in his cracked, leaning-over-the-fence, midwestern voice. Julie ignored it and figured her sister was doing the same, but later she wondered if Vicki could dismiss anything their dad said. Clearly, some of the church teachings had settled with Vicki. “You can’t tell me that Joseph Smith advocated race mixing,” Vicki wrote to a cousin years later. “There were no black RLDS elders until our generation.”

David didn’t read a lot, but he got his daughters hooked on a science fiction series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And, every summer, he took the family to the mountains in the camper he’d built from scratch, driving to the Rockies, or the Grand Tetons, camping under the stars, fishing, and exploring. “I love the mountains,” he’d say. On the camping trips, like other times around the house, Julie would be struck by how close her dad was with Vicki. It was evident when she worked outside with him and when he stood behind her, watching her cook or sew. She sewed like a musician playing by ear, and David would shake his head as he watched her tailor a suit.

“Look at that,” he’d say. “Amazing.” And she’d turn back and smile at him, and Julie would have the distinct impression she was sister to the queen.

Vicki Jordisons Iowa couldn’t be any more different than the wooded mountains of North Idaho. Straight asphalt roads cut a near-perfect grid across the farmland, interrupted occasionally by groves of hardwood trees and shallow river channels; there is no place in Iowa to hide. Small towns like Coalville remain fundamentally unchanged from a century before, when they sprouted up a half day’s horse ride from the most outlying farms. White, gabled houses top the town’s hills and American cars troll straight highways at just below the speed limit. The homecoming parade from the one high school winds through brick, downtown blocks, and each small town seems to have a hall of fame enshrining a wall of white, solid, short-haired athletes, politicians, businessmen, and farmers. The hardware store goes through six times as much white paint as any other color; the little newspaper gives better play to the photos of local boys off to Marine boot camp than it does crime stories; and next year, when that big farm kid is a senior, the football team is perpetually going to state.

“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.”

For the next two hours, with Randy and Vicki smiling at the incredible opportunities available to them, the family watched a film strip about Amway detergents, cleaning supplies, and other products. Vicki and Randy explained they were going to make a living selling them.

My God, Julie thought, they want us to buy that stuff. It wasn’t until an hour into the film that she understood she was mistaken. No, they want us to sell that stuff. She’d never seen Randy so animated and Vicki seemed to feed his zeal with her mastery of Amway products. They were a perfect team, Vicki’s studious knowledge and Randy’s tireless energy. Julie wondered if they were going to have to listen to the pitch every time they got together from then on.

“It’s good for the environment,” Vicki offered. But Randy did most of the talking, in his fast sales voice, squaring out how much they could make in a year, in five, in ten. “It’s really a wonderful opportunity.”

They presented Amway to all their friends and talked some, like Randy’s high school and army buddy, John Milligan, into selling it. But the Weavers’ interest faded quickly when they started making money elsewhere.

Randy went to school for only two quarters in 1972 before dropping out and applying for a high-paying job at a John Deere tractor factory in Waterloo, the industrial town that butts up against Cedar Falls in eastern Iowa. He got the job. Vicki was still working as a secretary, and they seemed happy and well off. It was the kind of life Julie had begun imagining for herself.

She and the wrestler, Jeff, were engaged to be married. But in 1973, while they were camping at a nearby lake, Jeff drowned. Julie was in shock when her parents showed up and drove her back to Fort Dodge, where Randy and Vicki were waiting. Julie slumped down on the couch and stared off, catatonic. Then, the television news came on and announced what had happened and she broke down, sobbing and thrashing around.

Vicki sat down on the couch and held her sister, rocking her back and forth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” After years of watching Vicki’s devastation over her awful love life, the family now turned its attention to Julie, and it was Vicki who was able to get through to her. Despite all the competition, all the petty squabbling and posturing, Julie realized that her sister was the only one who could have comforted her then.

EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE FRIENDS, Julie Jordison hadn’t voted for Keith Brown when he ran for school president of Fort Dodge High in 1968. Keith was a radical. In fact, in Fort Dodge, he was the radical. He was from a bigger city—Omaha, Nebraska—and played in a rock band. He wasn’t too happy when his family moved to Fort Dodge, smack dab in the middle of boring farm country, smack dab in the middle of Iowa.

On National Moratorium Day in 1969, when people across the country demonstrated against the Vietnam War, Keith was the only student in Fort Dodge High School to wear a black armband. It lasted through class pictures, until some football players held him down and tore it off his arm.

He and Julie Jordison were as different as any kids in the school. Her whole family was straight and square. She was a good-looking cheerleader and wasn’t about to date the Abbie Hoffman of Fort Dodge.

After high school and after Jeff died, Julie’s friend talked her into going to hear Keith’s latest group, a four-piece cover band called Locust. She didn’t recognize him when she saw him: wavy brown hair almost as long as hers and a bushy walrus mustache: Julie felt strange being there, and they tried to leave before he saw her. But on the way out, she bumped into him, and Keith leaned close in the noisy bar and asked if she’d go out with him. They began dating, fell in love, and were married the next year.

Keith’s band played Beatles and Cream songs in a circuit of taverns that took them through Cedar Falls occasionally. Once, while the band’s roadies were setting up at a college bar called The Circle, Keith looked up to see this beautiful woman walk through the door. She was wearing a tight, fitted leather coat with stitching on the wide lapels, skintight bell-bottom jeans, and high-heeled boots. Her hair was curly, black, and long, and the guys in the band stopped tuning and watched her move through the bar.

She set a large bag down on the counter, and when Keith finally saw her face, he realized it was his sister-in-law, Vicki. Randy came in then, his arms full of paper sacks, too. Inside were hamburgers for the band, the roadies, anyone who wanted them. Keith was impressed. He always thought of Randy and Vicki as too rigid and conservative to think much of his band. They didn’t even know any of the guys. In fact, they barely knew Keith, and yet here they were, springing for burgers for everyone. They drove off in Randy’s muscular Corvette, and Keith could tell that the rest of the band members were impressed. Keith had a weird sort of pride about his sister- and brother-in-law, weird because he was surprised to be so fond of people that serious, patriotic, and conservative.

ON SUNDAYS, the Jordison kids and their spouses met at the farmhouse for dinner and conversation. They all arrived in the afternoon, Vicki and Randy, Julie and Keith, and Lanny with his wife, Melanie. David would come home from church, sit in front of the football game, and talk about what he’d heard at the RLDS Sunday School. Sometimes, Keith and Randy would go downstairs to smoke, and Lanny would join them for a game of cutthroat on the pool table. The conversation quickly turned to politics. Lanny and Randy were both conservative, and they tried to convince the liberal Keith of something or other, but he was unbendable, especially when talk swung around to the war in Vietnam. With the war winding down and Americans cynical and tired, Keith and Randy could find almost no common ground.

“It’s the people back here with the signs and everything that are losing that war,” Randy said. He talked often about Vietnam, so passionately that Keith assumed he’d served over there, although he never came out and said so one way or the other.

By that time, Randy was hauling in money from John Deere. And he was spending it. He was always driving new sports cars: the low-riding, burnt orange Corvette for a while, then a Triumph Roadster and a 240Z. He bought trucks and motorcycles and snowmobiles and fishing gear. Keith watched his brother-in-law with envy, wondering how a guy got a good-looking wife, a good job, and all those toys at the same time. Randy and Vicki had recently bought a house, too, a well-kept rancher in Cedar Falls, the kind of house Keith had begun imagining himself and Julie in.

But Keith saw a side of the Weavers that worried him, too. They were idealistic and, in a way, naïve, throwing their substantial energies blindly into whatever they became interested in at the time, whether it be sports cars or Amway. Randy’s latest obsession was silver. It was the best investment around, he lectured Keith in the mid- and late-1970s. Soon the currency would be devalued, and precious metals would be the only salvation for people who wanted to survive the economic shock. As the price of silver began to climb, he gave silver medallions and coins as gifts and talked Lanny into investing heavily. The price of silver collapsed in the late 1970s, but by then the Weavers’ obsessive personalities had moved on to something else.

After those Sunday meals, the women sat around the table drinking coffee, or they went shopping. Sara was born in the middle of March 1976, and that took up most of their conversation. Vicki was crazy about babies. She didn’t just talk about them, she gave lessons, instructing Julie on morning sickness, diaper rash and breast-feeding, in her careful, scholarly way, the same way she instructed Randy on Amway before he spread the word to everyone else.

In families, years pass like that, on Sunday afternoons that blend together in a haze of barbecues, good-natured arguments, and baby diapers. They were the happiest times, from 1974 to 1978, when everyone was young and got along, and the only talk of Armageddon was from David, who lectured peacefully away in an empty living room, while his family went about the business of growing up.

“YOU’VE GOT TO READ this book,” Vicki said. She and Julie were sitting around the farmhouse sometime in 1978 or so, watching little Sara play.

Julie had heard that many times before from her sister—that she should read this book or that one. The last time, it had been some novel by Taylor Caldwell. But this one sounded different because among the things Vicki and Julie had in common was that they were both seekers, people who looked a little harder for truth than did most others.

“It’s called The Late Great Planet Earth,” Vicki said. She told her sister that it answered a lot of questions that perhaps she hadn’t thought about.

Written and published in 1970 by Hal Lindsey with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth introduced thousands of people to the idea of Old Testament prophecy. In the middle of America’s born-again movement, Lindsey’s book applied the words of biblical prophets to the world of the 1970s and came to the conclusion that people were living in the “end time.” It was a huge bestseller.

Julie tracked down a copy of the book and, for the first time since they were teenagers, became worried about her sister. It wasn’t an inflammatory book, but its message seemed aimed right at idealistic seekers like Vicki and Randy, and she wondered what such beliefs might do coupled with their intensity. They were becoming more involved in their Baptist church and believed the world was an evil place, decaying before their eyes. Lindsey’s book didn’t just impart information; it was written almost like a long letter, directly to readers like Randy and Vicki, stopping occasionally to ask if they were getting it, if it was starting to come together.

“In this book I am attempting to step aside and let the prophets speak,” Lindsey wrote. “If my readers care to listen, they are given the freedom to accept or reject the conclusions.”

The book acknowledged that the world was a mess and said the solution was in seeking out biblical prophecy. “Bible prophecy can become a sure foundation upon which your faith can grow—and there is no need to shelve your intellect while finding this faith.” The book detailed the words of Old Testament prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Micah, men who believed that God spoke directly to them and warned them of times to come. It ascribed modern definitions to Old and New Testament words: for instance, Gog, the evil empire spoken of in Ezekiel, was the Soviet Union and the ten horns of the beast from Revelation described the ten nations of the Common Market of Europe. The book showed how biblical prophecy could be used to predict an Arab-Israeli war that would trigger a nuclear holocaust between the United States and the Soviet Union, bringing about Armageddon. It was pretty familiar stuff for kids who grew up in the RLDS church, Julie thought. Still, Lindsey showed how everything was in place in the late twentieth century for the return of Jesus and, most frighteningly, the Rapture and the Great Tribulation, when true believers are snatched up by God, and the Earth is subjected to every manner of plague and violence. “What a way to live!” Lindsey wrote. “With optimism, with anticipation, with excitement. We should all be living like persons who don’t expect to be around much longer.”

Other friends noticed the change in Randy and Vicki. At a gathering of classmates from Jefferson High School in 1978, they sat in a circle of friends, talking about everything they’d gone through, the turbulent sixties and seventies. Their lives had turned in a lot of directions: drug use, family life, careers. No one thought what the Weavers had to say was particularly strange, given the range of their class. Their classmates had been fodder for a very difficult time in history, when the world seemed to be ripped apart and hastily glued back together again. True, they were from Iowa, the wholesome core of America, but they were also Vietnam veterans, counterculturalists, born-agains.

Still, no one from Jefferson High’s class of 1966 had any news like Randy and Vicki Weaver’s. They talked about living on a wooded mountaintop where there were no other people, but where they were in danger from the evil, false government, and the hordes of desperate people living below. They talked about the Great Tribulation, when Christians would be hunted down simply because of their beliefs, when those who stockpiled food would be the only safe ones. They talked about their children, each with a biblical name, who lived on the mountaintop with them.

Where did all this come from, someone asked.

“We’ve been having this vision,” Vicki began.