It was about 3:00 PM. I was at school, in my classroom at Wahconah Regional High School, cleaning up after another difficult day. February vacation had started when school had ended at 2:20 PM, and vacation could not have been more welcome. I was trying to get out of school early; I normally found myself working until 6:00 or 7:00 PM most days (since I spent three hours commuting every day and I normally arrived at school about 6:30 AM, I was rarely home during the week ).
My classroom phone rang. On it was a man who identified himself as an agent of the ATF. He said he had been talking to my son, that Jack had admitted to having explosives in the house, and he asked permission to search my house!
My house was a mess; one of my plans for vacation week was to thoroughly clean. Since I was never home, I hadn’t cleaned since the school year began (I mostly slept over Christmas break). I had gutted my second floor a year earlier, then ruptured a disk in my back. I spent the summer lying on the sofa, unable to stand, never mind do carpentry. I had tools, clothes, and lumber waiting in the living room, just needing time to build walls and closets in the new bedroom that I already slept in. A boxed whirlpool bathtub lay, like a beached whale, awaiting installation in the roughed-in (future) bathroom, not to mention the tileboard and boxes of tile, sink, toilet, and assorted electrical fixtures. The contents of the first floor bathroom closet were sitting on the kitchen table, the result of the removal of its shelves to run the plumbing for the new bathroom. The clutter of no closets lay everywhere. It was a disaster that I had hoped to begin to remedy over vacation.
I could barely think. I knew that Jack had been doing chemistry experiments at his father’s house but thought that he mostly had supplies and glassware at my house. He had further distilled alcohol from a bottle of rum (to make a better solvent than what he could otherwise obtain) and a few other minor experiments in my basement. He had set up his distillation apparatus on top of the washing machine, to have easy access to water and the sink. He had built a vacuum pump from a motor that he had scavenged from a dumpster at UMass and had build a series of liquid traps to bubble any gaseous side-products of his experiments. One trap bubbled gases through an acid, the next sent them through a base. In this way, any gases would be neutralized before they vented through a cut-out in the window to the outside air. I thought it was very clever.
I knew that my house was a total disaster and I was already exhausted from another long week at work; this was my first year teaching high school math and I struggled to get things done. I begged the man to come the next day, so I could move the lumber and clothing, maybe even find the table before he came. The ATF agent refused, of course. I wasn’t thinking properly, yet. I was in shock. He implied that cops were waiting to break down my door if I refused. I told him that I was over an hour away. He said that they would wait until I arrived.
I took the turnpike. I normally drove down a country highway, Route 9, but decided to take the turnpike in case it started snowing, again. And it did. There was a minor white-out as I drove through the mountains in Becket, but I was able to speed up as the road wound through Westfield. It only took ninety minutes to get home but they were the longest ninety minutes of my life. I called John on my cell phone once I reached Westfield; cell coverage was, at best, spotty in the Berkshires.
Cars were waiting when I got there, including Jack’s Subaru. The ATF agent had said that there would be four plain-clothes cops, three cars, and it would only take fifteen minutes. They asked me to not park in the driveway and said I couldn’t come in to the house, yet. Jack and the cops went inside. More police cars arrived, marked ones. I didn’t know it yet but the circus had begun.
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