A Death in Belmont. Sebastian Junger
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SEBASTIAN JUNGER
A Death in Belmont
FOR MY MOTHER, ELLEN SINCLAIR JUNGER
And they said to the Prophet, “How may we stop our ears to the rant of the fool and yet show him charity?”
And he answered, “You show yourselves charity by opening wide your ears to him. The fool in the midst of his babble shall speak truths which the minds of the wise cannot perceive.”
—unattributed quote pinned to the office
wall of a Massachusetts appellate lawyer
CONTENTS
If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks in this book, it means that the person was speaking into a tape recorder or before a court stenographer. In some instances I wrote my interviews in notebooks, but that was rare; almost all my interviews were done with a tape recorder. Conversations in this book were obviously not recorded as they happened, so they never take quotation marks. As reproduced in this book, however, they do faithfully represent the recollections of the people involved. In all cases—including in some published texts—I have made grammatical changes for the sake of clarity, as well as minor edits for the sake of brevity.
ONE MORNING IN the fall of 1962, when I was not yet one year old, my mother, Ellen, looked out the window and saw two men in our front yard. One was in his thirties and the other was at least twice that, and they were both dressed in work clothes and seemed very interested in the place where we lived. My mother picked me up and walked outside to see what they wanted.
They turned out to be carpenters who had stopped to look