Even before all hell broke loose at the Coop, the word on the street was that Brattleboro was going down the tubes. There was the Brooks House fire and the summary execution of a young woman caught up in the Brattleboro-Springfield drug trade. Add that to the drive-by shooting on South Main and the stabbing two years ago on Elliot Street and one could see why a local college student, living on Main Street for the summer, might look at the terrain and decide that this funky, artsy community she had just joined was going the way of East Baltimore.
Twenty years ago, at the end of an equally brilliant summer, Brattleboro was knocked sideways by the murder-suicide of a lovely young couple in a Dummerston field. Barely had we recovered our breath when a local DJ stabbed a Reformer reporter to death at the Mobil station on Putney Road. What had become of our beautiful town? All the actors in those two tragedies were well known in the community. We watched two of them grow up making music and dancing on pointe, we read one of them in these pages and heard the other on the radio. The reactions to these crimes were confusing and complex. With the murder-suicide, it was never determined who shot whom or in what order. The roles of perpetrator and victim were ambiguous. The DJ’s deranged behavior, on the other hand, took place in broad daylight, in front of motorists filling up their gas tanks. Even with that level of certainty of who did what to whom, there was no making sense of any of it.
And yet the brain can’t help but try to make sense of terrible things. I condemned the State for not protecting women. At the time of her death, Judith Hart Fournier had a restraining order against Bob Sawyer. Just before her death, one of the victims of the murder/suicide had filed a lewd and lascivious charge against a male relative. “We need stronger laws to stop male violence,” I wrote in a letter to the paper. We organized and marched, held a vigil and wrote our state legislators, and out of that rage, fear, and confusion the Violence Against Women Act was passed.
Out of tragedy some good would come, or so we told ourselves. Looking back on the sequence of events, however, it’s hard for me to feel good about supporting the Big Crime Bill of the 1990s. As welfare benefits were being cut, the State was given greater latitude to send people to prison. Decreasing social services and increasing incarceration rates may have fueled the economic boom of the nineties, but now that the boom times are over, one may question the costs of those cold-hearted policies. Not only do they increase the despair in poor neighborhoods they do not stop the town itself from going down the tubes.
So if tougher crime laws are not the answer to a bloody summer, what is?
A few weeks after Judith’s murder, a large group assembled at the Putney Road Mobil Station. We built a cairn where Judith had finally collapsed and one by one people went forward with offerings, wild flowers and crystals, the stuff of improvised religion. We gathered sticks, giving one to each person in the growing circle, and as the rain started falling, we beat the pavement sending the rage and fear and confusion out through the ends of the sticks, across the wet pavement, and into the drainage pipe. We sang songs and made the space between us stronger than one man’s kitchen knife. It was rough – a weak sort of ritual – but the woman who had been taking people’s cash on the day Bob Sawyer lost control of his mind was there. She cried and we cried with her for what she had dreadfully seen. It wasn’t just Judith who was hurt that day.
I suppose you might call what we did, Take Back the Gas Station, because that’s exactly what happened. Before the cairn and the beating of sticks, nobody wanted to go up Putney Road for gas. But after the rough ritual, business picked up, the attendant told us, things went back to normal.
From time to time, Brattleboro, like every community (even East Baltimore) goes down the tubes. Services get cut, hearts get broken, the future looks bleak, and bad things, that nobody wants to imagine could happen, do happen not just once, but twice. But this trip down the metaphoric tubes is not unidirectional. We rise again when we decide to grieve together, care together, feel confused together. Much of that work took place at the vigil held last Wednesday night by the Whetstone Brook. Addison’s ukulele and the Hallowell singers displaced the hold of a deadly minute with songs for the multitude.
The great, great harm is when these deadly minutes are mistaken for the soul of a community. “We can’t help you, East Baltimore or Holyoke, Massachusetts, because you are down the tubes and we don’t want to follow you. You are so violent, so devastated, we can’t afford to help you.” But this August, like that other August twenty years ago, is teaching us that we’re not that different from other stressed-out places. Buildings burn up, storefronts remain empty, men who can’t imagine a better future take other people’s lives into their own hands. Violence bursts in upon us and our first reaction is to throw up our hands and shake our heads. But then some lovely, young man picks up a ukulele and starts singing, “somewhere over the rainbow,” and this town, halfway down the tubes, reverses directions and rises again.
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