Even with the paint on his face, the animal skin draped round his shoulders, I recognized him as he scaled the scaffold alongside the Capitol. He was unmistakable, the straw color of his now cropped hair, shaved on the sides then sprouting from the top of his head, the way his jeans drooped…
I watched as the mob surged through the Capitol; the news replayed the worst of the carnage, including the moment when the boy hurled a flagpole as a spear that appeared to penetrate the chest of a uniformed officer, who was soon overwhelmed by the crowd and sank out of view. Then there was that close-up of the boy’s open screaming mouth.
My son. Griffin. It was January 6, 2021, the day after his 18th birthday, and I thought—a day earlier and he could have been tried as a juvenile.
I’d been watching the breaking news, dreading possible violence but nothing on this scale. Certainly, nothing involving my son. Before dawn, I had heard Griffin‘s car start, but had no idea he’d driven down to D.C. I’d assumed he’d gone to see his girlfriend, to crawl into her warm bed. And unable to sleep, I’d thought, “Sex, does it explain everything?” and answered my own question “Maybe not everything but a lot.”
What do you do when you see your much-loved son commit such a crime? The answer is—at first nothing. I sat paralyzed in my armchair before the living room tv, a cold cup of coffee nearby on the end table, the cat warm in my lap. I couldn’t move but inwardly, my blood rushed, feeling hydraulic. I felt I might vomit.
After that first glimpse, I kept trying to spot Griffin in the crowd, as I had in years past strained to pick him out in school soccer games, parades, and at his graduations. But I didn’t see him again until he was arrested at the very end, still wearing that fur cape which I now recognized as the coyote skin from the first animal he’d shot.
Griffin, a grin on his painted face, was led away, slumped between two officers. The news reporter identified my son as a member of a right wing group called The Vow. The Vow to do what? The news closed in on their insignia, a logo that incorporated crossed assault rifles. I startled—I had seen that logo, but where?
Transfixed by the breaking news, I sat very still until 8 p.m. when Vice President Pence announced, “Let’s get back to work.” His words provoked me into action too; I jumped up, dislodging the warm-bellied cat.
Forcing myself to be organized, I packed a bag, checked my purse—yes, keys, credit cards, all my cash. iPad. Cellphone. My hands shook, as they had when I packed to leave the New York apartment. I kept dropping items, failing to find the most important …First you lose your son, then your checkbook, then your car key. The cat watched, her green eyes alight with animal sanity—why on earth are you leaving home late on a freezing winter night?
I punched in the destination U.S. Capitol, Washington D. C., on my cellphone navigation app—put on my parka, and left, locking the door behind me. On my phone, it predicted the drive would take 6½ hours, fastest route…
I drove into the darkness, the car’s brights illuminating the woods on either side of my driveway. Although the car warmed fast; it had heated seats, I shivered, almost shook. I had to grip the wheel. Drive straight through…
I will arrive at dawn.
Only the day before, my son had responded to my “Happy Birthday!” text with “I love you lots, Mom… 18 years and holding, Griffin.” He’d added a heart emoji.
Griffin had been distant, difficult the past months. He had been vanishing for hours at a time, sometimes overnight . His absences and attitude had troubled me, but I’d never suspected…this? I had attributed his monosyllabic responses, his avoidance of all we used to enjoy together—cooking meals and watching cable movies—to these new Covid moods. Covid had infected a drastic suddenness into our lives. We went on Fast Forward, and Griffin changed, almost overnight.
We’d always been so close, I thought. What a cherubic baby he had been, after that rough start, but otherwise placid. An adorable toddler, a sensitive talented preteen. Musical. How had he transformed into this violent, hideous-looking stranger?
I must go to him; I had to see him. I had no idea what I would do when I did—disown him as his father had months ago? April 1, April Fool’s Day but no kidding. That was the day Griffin disappeared and didn’t come home for 24 hours. And my husband grounded him, and Griffin had refused to go to his room, and it was my husband who left, yelling, not at Griffin but at me: ”This is your fault. You spoiled him.” And I was left crying out “But all the kids are suffering now…”
Had I spoiled him? Now what should I do? Confront my once beloved son, scream, cry?
As I drove, I mentally retravelled the past eleven months… In March 2020, when Covid-19 struck, and we heard the screaming sirens of the night city, saw the refrigerated morgue trucks, we’d packed up fast and moved into the world of our weekends—DeGroatsville.
John and I had bought the stone cabin in DeGroatsville, famous for its history, twenty years ago, before Griffin was born. It was our getaway place, weekends and holidays, a month in summer. But we never truly knew DeGroatsville, until we came to stay, really stay.
Was it the move here that jumpstarted this? Clearly he’d fallen in with a local right-wing group; belonging to an organization akin to the Proud Boys. I knew there were such groups in our area but never thought he could be interested, let alone join?
DeGroatsville is an hour and 50 minutes from the GW Bridge, but sociologically, the hamlet could be in a deep cleft in Appalachia. DeGroatsville rests on a mountain ridge, not the Catskills but “the Gunks,” shorthand for the Shawangunks. Native Indian name. Lenape lived here, hunted, fished, padded on the pine-needled forest floor, past my house on moccasined feet.
My house, hand built of fieldstone, the original center portion dating back to 1699, had been more than a retreat. I cherished its past—home to three Patriots (the word meant something positive then) who fought in the Revolution, the secret cave-like root cellar, which had served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. I like to think freedom was built into the fieldstone bones of the house.
When we first moved in, John and I had explored that cellar; you had to enter through the trap door, feet first then take a short fall to the dirt floor. On humid Hudson Valley summer afternoons I ‘d liked to slip down to that cellar to enjoy the coolness … I would curl up, knees to my chin, and think of those 1776-ers and then the runaway slaves and their dreams of freedom, and of my own grandparents who had hidden in a similar cellar only in Vilnius, to survive the Nazis during World War II. I often had an unbidden thought when I crouched there—“This is where I’ll hide when they come for me.”
The first clue that so much had changed in DeGroatsville was a Confederate flag that was raised on Main Street and not taken down; MAGA hats bloomed like red poppies. A civil war was taking place between the city people, and the natives, who were no longer Lenape but old Gunk families.
The local gun shop had a sign: “No one with a Mask Will be Served.” It was soon replaced with “Apologies, a Crazy Law Says We Must Wear Masks.”
In October, it was Griffin who reported that the gun shop, that all the nearby gun shops were sold out of ammunition.
Now, I wonder, How did my son know this?
Where exactly was he now? In a solitary cell? Or in general population, a crowded cell where longtime criminals could rape a handsome young boy like Griffin?
Should I bail him out or not?
As I drove to D.C., I went into mental reverse, seeking the answers—when and how and why had my son changed?
Was our breakup the cause of Griffin’s rebellion? John and I had a pleasant if superficial marriage for ten years before Griffin was born. That sounds funny, a long superficial marriage but it seemed casual, centered on sports, meals, movies and sex. John called it “the decade-long date” and that’s all it was. Whatever kept us together, we’d never been able to break up—saying goodbye had always brought us back together. We’d recite the breakup farewell line from college where we met—“See you around the campus.” And then fall into each other’s arms. Maybe loving was just not leaving?
The minute Griffin was born, we had begun to break apart,. Maybe Griffin was the physical embodiment of our incompatibility? He was startling-looking, that strange combination—his father’s pale eyes and turned-up nose, my almost Asian skin and slanted high cheekbones. Second generation German-American battling first generation Russian Jew?
From Day One, we never agreed on anything to do with Griffin. Then when he defied my husband, it severed our marriage. John slammed Griffin against the door, while I cried out “No. It’s a terrible time for kids…” but in another few seconds, John was gone.
Had I spoiled him? I had been indulgent, it was true since Griffin’s miraculous birth, which had actually been an escape from death.
Two months premature (“The last time I was early,” he used to joke), Griffin was born, very abruptly, as I entered the hospital’s Emergency Room. The nurses there almost hurled me onto a gurney and ran, pushing it for the delivery room. As I watched the ceiling fly by, I thought, ‘this isn’t good’… Just let him live, and I’ll do anything you want…
I wasn’t sure who “You” was, but Griffin slid, bloodied, twisted round the umbilical cord, into the bright lights. I tensed, waiting for his cry. There was none.
But there was mine: “Let me see him.”
They were about to flee, with his tiny blue body, but a kind nurse tipped his face toward me and said, “It’s not so bad…”
And I saw his little face, pretty even then, and he opened his mouth wide as if to give that birth holler, but no sound came out.
I was told later, that was his first breath, but he was too weak to cry.
I would certainly give up my life for his, this three-pound scrap of humanity, scrawny red as hamburger, but with a pale face and large eyes that, even though I was told he couldn’t see yet, implored me. His mouth opened again as if he was speaking to me. I saw the word Love hang in the fluorescent sparkling air, like indoor skywriting.
When the nurse ran from that delivery room with him, I began to fall forward as if attached, although of course the cord was cut.
I felt the sting of a needle in my own arm, and heard someone say, “Finish this up” and they clamped a mask over my face and told me to breathe as deeply as I could.
Fighting the cool creep of the anesthesia, I lost that battle and woke up to find John peering down at me.
“The baby?” I asked.
“Maybe…” He answered. He’s in the “NICU.” John already used the medical shorthand for neonatal intensive care, and I heard it as ”nick you” and thought of more needles….
Then John began to speak in his most solemn tone and said we would have decisions to make, “He’s in the incubator and if the oxygens are not exactly right, he could be blind, brain damaged, paralyzed… We have to decide how much we can handle, and I can tell you right now, I will accept blindness, maybe even physical disability but if it is mental incapacity, he’s not coming home.”
We had the fight right there, the first of the Griffin fights.
I won the gamble on survival and coming home fight, but I lost the name war—I hated the name Griffin. “Griffin sounds like a monster, a gargoyle lunging from the roof of a cathedral…”
“It’s a family name,” John said. “It would have been mine. But the first baby my parents had, the one who died, he was Griffin, so I got John.”
I stopped for gas on the Thruway at a lunar-lit station. The asphalt was frosted white from the cold. The attendant rushed out, his breath a cloud. “Fill it?”
Unmindful of the extra cost I told the attendant “yes, please.” I sat in a trance of memory as the gas gushed into the aperture of my car. More Griffin memories surfaced, as if he occupied a child’s car seat next to me. He would accompany me all night, all the way as I hurtled toward the D.C. Jail.
The first memory was one I treasured: Griffin was only three years old, and I’d pulled over to a scenic overlook above the Hudson River, to enjoy the view and a symphony playing on the Classical music station. Griffin had listened until the very end and then asked, “What is that beautiful music?”
“Beethoven,” I told him. He put his small hand in mine. We sat there for hours, through compositions by the Mendelssohn’s, Felix and Fanny. Prokofiev. Romeo and Juliet.
By midnight, I reached New Jersey, and I was recalling all our bedtime stories, how I would read aloud the sweet fairy tales, not the violent ones of children being eaten by wolves or monsters and Griffin would contribute vignettes from his dreams or questions launched from his subconscious. And I stored away our long talks in the car on our Friday night drives up from the city, as valuable as his drawings and scribbled Valentine notes.
One night when he was six years old, he asked, tapping his head—“How do I know I’m in here? What is me? How am I inside my body?”
His questions were so profound, I had no true answers. How to give my child the philosophical and medical theories that continue to confound the greatest thinkers of all time periods? I said, “You can’t see your ‘inner me’—it’s made of your spirit, your soul… it’s like air. It’s not…” and I knew I was using too big a word—“tangible.”
We got out of the car and stood in our driveway on a night as freezing as this, and Griffin exhaled a cloud of vapor, and said, “Is this me, my spirit?” and all I could do was hug him.
On another night, late in January racing up from the city to reach the country house before his bedtime, we drove over the mountain. A giant moon, the so-called Wolf Moon, rose and hung low to the horizon, disappeared on a hairpin turn, and then reappeared when we arrived at the house. Looming even larger and closer in front of us.
“How did the moon get home before we did?” Griffin wanted to know.
That sweet little boy. Where was he now? In a cell? Had the officer he speared, died? What would the charges be? Should I just let Griffin remain in custody until his trial. Let him be sentenced, serve time. Was that the best lesson?
As I approached Maryland, driving over bridges that spanned half-frozen glazed waterways, I remembered where I’d seen that Vow insignia: the vertical AR-15 assault rifle replacing the letter T in The Vow. I’d started noticing that symbol in recent weeks around DeGroatsville. Usually on cars but sometimes painted on abandoned houses. Only two days ago, I’d seen a tiny decal close to home–on the rear window of Griffin’s car. I’d stared at it, more confused than alarmed. What was it?
Now I knew—an assault rifle. And the words: The Vow.
Griffin had taken up hunting, and made friends with the Querkes Boys, a local almost all-male family, seven brothers, who turned out to be our nearest neighbors as the crow flies. I had never realized that the Querkes were that close, as the short distance between us was a mixed swamp and forest behind our house, but Griffin soon discovered and began to regularly trod a narrow path that led to the Querkes home, a two-story Colonial with a second floor porch that held a permanent display of inflated Santas and dozens of black-and-orange Halloween decorations. There was a hand-painted sign on a large cardboard that read: “STAY STRONG” and a banner was draped from the porch roof: “LOVE OUR COUNTRY.” A giant inflatable Jack-o-Lantern had long ago deflated and sagged from the upper porch balustrade, its orange grin lopsided. A lineup of glass quart bottles, half-filled with brown liquid were ultimately explained to me as their “spit jars.”
All of the Querkes boys, as they were known, were drinkers and often listed in the local papers “Law and Disorder” column. There was only one girl, named fancy like most of the local girls, “Tiffanie” but they all called her “Sister,” who was truly a flower amongst the weeds. She was about 16, with Cupid’s bow lips and large green eyes, overly outlined, and that first summer, Sister could often be seen strutting around town on high wedgies, wearing cut-offs that just skimmed her buttocks, her long legs on display. She was flat-chested, but her nipples were visible through her thin tee shirts.
I have to say I didn’t “get it” for months, that Griffin was becoming involved with the Querkes Boys, and then, falling in love with Sister. Sometimes her fraying cutoffs cut off too high, and I could see a part of a tattooed name on the half-moon of her jutting left buttock cheek: ”…IFFIN,” She’d had my son’s name tattooed on what he called her “butt.”
“That proves she loves me,” Griffin defended her. They had branded one another. True love, Romeo and Juliet in DeGroatsville. I was terrified, not of Covid but what our escape from the city had wrought. I instantly opposed Griffin hunting with the Boys and “hanging out” with Sister. I went over once, driving round, not taking the path, to rouse him from their home. He was supposed to be at our house, studying remotely. It was early summer, and the air hung heavy, and a new insect, the murder hornet, had been spotted buzzing about DeGroatsville.
I was greeted at the door by Griffin’s mother Melissa Querkes. I said I had come to pick up my son.
She told me he would be staying for dinner. And sleeping over.
I felt the blood rush to my face. Hot.
“No, he’s not,” I said.
I called out to Griffin who was in there somewhere, behind the crumpled Jack-O-Lantern. He did not emerge.
“Please tell my son to come out here. It’s time for him to come home.”
Without taking her eyes from mine, she called out, “Your mom’s here.”
We stood silent until Griffin appeared, tucking his shirt into his shorts. He avoided looking at me. I noticed he had no socks. He reeked of sex, at least I think it was sex, a musky scent I had never encountered before. Does sex explain this? I know now what I didn’t then—that you cannot separate a teenage boy or girl from their sex partner. Griffin seemed happy; he strutted about with a big grin. His happiness saddened me. I prayed she would not get pregnant. One night as he ran out, holding his cellphone as always, I ran after him to give him a packet of condoms.
I tried calling Griffin, no answer, then a lawyer friend, also no answer and finally at 5 a.m., in desperation cried out to Siri: “How can I find a bail bondsman?”
Back in the driver’s seat, going over the speed limit—I have to get there! I called a series of bondsmen, all located in Maryland, they promised more or less the same thing –Inmate Lookup– Find Your Relative, Get Him Out of Jail and I settled on one, Fred Frank’s BONDS, despite the fact I’d always been wary of people with two first names, as they seemed like aliases or cheesy singers, but one review said, “Fred Frank held my hand through the whole process.”
I drove straight into D.C which by the white artificial moonlight of phosphorescent security street lamps, appeared like a war zone, as if the troops from Afghanistan had been re-deployed home. There were soldiers everywhere, Guardsmen, tanks, squad cars…
Where was my once sweet boy? Was he a killer? Last report, the officer he speared was still alive, but in critical condition.
How it hurt to search on my iPhone for my son’s name on the Inmate Locator site. But there he was, and Fred Frank Bondsman was all he had been touted to be and directed me to the D.C. Central Detention Facility at 1900 South East to a wide L-shaped building, with an odd side addition, all the exact color of spam… They were bathed in security lights, but the sky was still dark. It was only 5 a.m. Too anxious to give in to the fatigue, I waited until I saw more cars pull in, and signs of activity. I fixed my lipstick, combed my hair and then got out and donned my mask and walked inside.
Of course, being under Covid restrictions, this had to occur by video. In-person visits had long since ceased but I could appear at his hearing as a witness by Zoom. Hunched in a socially-distanced lobby seat, I clutched my iPad and clicked on the link to the Federal Courthouse and saw the robed, masked magistrate at his podium, a young, masked woman standing before him who I assumed was the Public Defender assigned to my son, and then, turning round to the camera, at last—Griffin.
He looked strangely smaller, stooped. And as he turned, he whipped off his mask and I gasped. I could not suppress the joy that welled up within me at seeing my son’s face.
I felt my face move in a reflexive smile and I focused on Griffin—he opened his mouth wide, as he had for his very first newborn breath, and he seemed to implore me in the same silent way he had in the delivery room.
I mouthed: “I love you.”
For the next weeks, as the wounded officer lay in a coma, between life and death, I too inhabited a grim limbo.
Unable to see Griffin in person, I returned home.
I arrived at midnight, and walked across the crusted snow, between the black silhouettes of the trees. The full Wolf Moon illuminated the scene and in my mind, I again heard my little boy ask that question that had so charmed me when he was only six years old: “How did the moon get home before we did?”
Four years later, on another frigid January night, the “January 6-ers” as they were now known, were fully pardoned and released. Watching this news, I froze in my chair—again. The horror was reprised, only worse this time. Would Griffin come home? Penitent or defiant?
It did not take him long. Griffin arrived at 2.00 a.m. under the waning gibbous Wolf Moon, this time stained red at the edge, like a bloodstained gauze bandage He rapped at the door.
My son stood there, under moonlight, he was grinning, saliva glistening on his canines. I knew looking at him, that I would never let him in again.
Go away, I mouthed those words, not even aloud.
But he understood all too well and took a step toward me.
I slammed the door in his grinning face, double-locked it.
I heard his shouts and banging fist, but went straight to the mudroom, as I had long sensed I would have to do someday. I lifted the trap door, and lowered myself feet first into the space below that had once sheltered those first Revolutionaries, then the runaway slaves. I curled up in a corner then, breathing in the sweet chill, the scent of the earth.
