#kind grandfatherly sparkle

[columboscreens]

columbo - columbo goes to the guillotine

#columbo #season 8 #columbo goes to the guillotine #8x01 #shiny #kind grandfatherly sparkle

[severusish]

It is hilarious to me that Albus Dumbledore was potentially casually trying to use the Pavlovian effect throughout his career as Headmaster. He tried to get kids (and teachers?) to eat his lemon drop candies — and it LOOKS like this was designed to have them associate candy (good thing) with visits to his office (potentially not so good thing) and thus associate meetings with him as being a good thing in their minds (Dumbledore = candy = good). Except that if that’s what he was trying to do then HE UTTERLY FAILED. How many times in canon did he offer someone candy and they said no? So. Many. Times. Like??? If he was trying to pull some Pavlov shit on people, it clearly wasn’t working.

And that can’t be because none of the kids liked his candy. What kid will say no to candy? Aside from those who don’t like candy lmao or Hermione Granger. If the kid says no (and yet is a kid who normally likes candy) then that kid, deep down, knows that something about that candy is suspicious.

And don’t try and tell me the idea of him trying to manipulate the children is entirely out of the realm of possibility. The use of candy — and candy-themed passwords — has Dumbledore written all over it. I 100% agree with the headcanon that those candies could have easily been laced with Pepper-Up or a Calming Draught.

NOW. On the other hand he could just be an eccentric old wizard who is harmlessly offering candy that no one other than himself likes, so that there’ll be more candy for him to have as a snack later since no one else wants any. And his passwords being related to sweets would just be part of his quirkiness. *shrugs*

I love the idea of Dumbledore doting on Snape and being concerned about him while also being an all powerful old-ass wizard with loads of tricks up his sleeve and a twinkle in his eye. I also LOVE getting angry when I see Dumbledore written as a character who twists people’s words and sets traps for his pawns.

I both love Grandfatherly Eccentric Sparkling Colorful Kind Concerned Dumbledore and LOVE to HATE (as one Anon in my inbox once said) Manipulative Conniving Ice-Cold Fake-Sparkles Wartime General Dumbledore 😌

How do you all see this?

#discuss #Dumbledore headcanon #Dumbledore #albus Dumbledore #long post #Dumbledore discourse #dumblediscourse #dumblecourse #severusish says #pro snape #snape community #snapedom

[hxrlfvxnweavingtxniii]

(under the cut is the post, as it is rather long. Please enjoy!)

The city of Washington D.C. was a strange one, a place where the extraordinary happened everyday, where Demigods, Force Users, even actual Gods, were running about with their own lives and powers and abilities. And yet, here he was, an ordinary man in an extraordinary world. Feet tapped against the comfortable flooring, clad in cozy dress shoes that clacked with every step. It was not a loud noise, however, but a small one, a gentle, quiet noise that pervaded the bookstore’s open-air “library”, a measly two stories in comparison to some of the other shops that existed. Harulf, however, worked on a different matter entirely, as a cup of fresh tea was clutched in one hand, a small muffin in the other on a plate. Making his way to the bakery’s little outdoor tables, the cool temperature of the environment was contrasted by the radiant sun, warming the plush, congenial chairs and the (bolted-down) tables. Mustache twitching slightly in an uptick of thoughts, of the wars he served in, of how many life experiences he carried himself through. Harulf von Weavington III enjoyed his blueberry-grape muffin with a small passion. At least with being human came with having taste buds, because he missed his fur... Though, he kept the mustache, and that was alright by his measures. Stretching out contently like a cat, Harulf’s warm tea kept his throat and mouth from going parched, the small hinting of spice within enough to keep him awake.

It was going to be a long day, though. Rumor had it somebody was visiting his bookstore, and considering the open-air patio was right by the entrance (where as the enclosed patio was off to the back alongside a garden of orchids, roses, and geraniums. But the orchids were always his favorite, Harulf and his wife dearly adored the flowers as if they were their own family, and it showed. A soft sigh escaped his lips, and it wasn’t until his prior-closed eyes blinked open, that Harulf underwent a double-take. Mainly because it shocked him internally, yet, Harulf retained his composure, his warm, friendly smile, and stood up, aching joints and painful knee giving him slight pause, yet not stopping him. A nod of the head followed, the sign close-by reading a written message of the day, and the sign displaying a book wrapped by lilac-hued orchids. Simple, yet excellent calligraphy displayed the name. ‘Hilde’s Literature’ But still, even as Harulf, who mildly regretted not getting his cane, made his way over to the person to greet them and welcome them to the shop, one thing still remained ever-present on his mind... Why was the President of the United States at his doorstep? Leia Organa, none-the-less, which is what really surprised him; Harulf, however, didn’t question the logic of the strange, unusual place. In a way, the old, tough man admired and respected the tranquility of the place, though home was ever-present on his mind, of course. Keeping a cup of tea in one hand, and another at his side; eyes sparkled with humble, tenderhearted warmth, grandfatherly voice that was rather welcoming. A voice that declared in one, singular regard that it didn’t matter if he was but an ordinary man in an extraordinary world, for with kindness, even such an ordinary man could change an extraordinary world for the better. Eyes studying the woman’s own, lips curved in a slight smile and mustache twitching as he spoke.

“Greetings! Welcome to Hilde’s Literature, how may I assist you? (closed starter; Harulf & Leia) @mcrcki

#harulf von weavington III #closed harulf starter #food tw #war mention tw #injury tw #leia organa (maig)

[murdershegoat]

the one you’ll love forever

(also on ao3 // kofi)

lena’s had the envelope for as long as she can remember; it’s thick and padded and the very last thing her father gave to her before he killed himself. though it’s yellowed with age, lionel’s immaculate script still stands out, the ink as black as when he first wrote on it. 

open when you find the one you’ll love forever

she had almost opened it once before, young and reckless and hopelessly in love with her high school girlfriend. part of her is glad she caught her cheating before she decided to open it, part of her - a much larger, more bitter part - still hates veronica sinclair with a fiery passion.

but now she knows it’s finally time.

it’s been a long time since she and kara first met. it’s been a long time since they said ‘i love you’ for the first time, since she cleared a drawer for kara at her place. their lives are so far intertwined that lena can no longer imagine what life would be like without kara by her side.

but this morning, lena rolls over in bed and although kara’s side lies empty, she can smell the coffee percolating and she sees a note scribbled in kara’s messy scrawl.

bad guys who start before 8 are evil guys. coffee and bagels waiting for u -- love u!

and somehow, lena knows. she knows, as a peaceful warmth spreads through her body, that this is all she’ll need forever.

kara is the only person she ever wants to love.

she stretches as she stands up, her neck annoyingly stiff, and heads to the safe that sits in the very back of her closet.

and then, as she drinks her morning coffee she finally opens the envelope. there’s no long letter like she used to dream of, but instead she finds a key and a piece of paper with an address. a quick google search later, she’s already scheduled her private, ridiculously fast Luthorcorp jet to leave for switzerland in a couple of hours.

she’s already on board and sitting across from jess when she gets a call from kara.

‘hello, sweetheart,’ she says, blushing as she sees the little smirk on jess’s face.

‘i called your office and they said you’re out for the day,’ kara says quickly. ‘everything okay?’

‘just a last minute meeting in switzerland,’ lena lies easily. ‘thought it would be easier to convince them to sign the contract if i was there in person.’

‘do you want me to meet you for lunch?’

‘that little place in zurich?’ lena offers.

‘you read my mind. okay. gotta run, love you.’

‘love you, too,’ lena replies, this time whispering into the phone, lest jess smirk at her expense one more time.

it’s only when they’re in the air, each with a drink in their hand that jess says,

‘strange, i don’t remember seeing a meeting on the books for today.’

lena laughs nervously. ‘how very strange indeed.’

///

zurich is much colder than national city, but lena welcomes the change in weather. she wishes she could go skiing or sightseeing, but instead the car takes her straight from the airport to a bank in the middle of the old town. the building is aging, yet beautiful, and as soon as lena steps inside she is greeted by a woman who takes her coat and leads her to a counter.

‘my name is lena luthor--’ 

‘of course, ms. luthor,’ the concierge cuts her off. ‘we’ve been expecting you since this morning!’

lena frowns; she hadn’t informed them of her impending visit. but she bites her tongue as she’s led through the building. eventually, she finds herself on the seventh floor in an empty office.

‘ms. luthor!’ says an older man walking in after her, and going to stand behind his desk. ‘my name is rudy, i’m an old associate of your father’s. it is a pleasure to meet you.’ he shakes her hand warmly, and despite the instincts she’s spent a lifetime refining, she decides she can trust him.

‘i’ve got this,’ she says, skipping pleasantries and holding up the key.

‘i know,’ he says, and lena manages to hide her surprise. ‘there is a sensor in the key that lets us know when it has been held by a person. it was advanced technology back in the day, courtesy of mr luthor.’

so that’s how they knew she was coming.

‘that key, as you may have guessed, opens a safety deposit box that has been held here for you for a very long time.’ he buzzes the intercom and doesn’t even say anything. moments later, a young banker walks in with the box.

‘and it’s never been opened?’

‘not since your father closed it.’ he regards her for just a moment, in an almost grandfatherly way. ‘you know, you don’t look a thing like him. but there is a kindness in your eyes that i fondly remember was in his as well.’

lena doesn’t know how to respond; she can’t remember the last time somebody said something nice about her family to her face. rudy senses her awkwardness, and smiles graciously.

‘i’ll give you some privacy.’

he retreats from the room and suddenly lena is alone with the mystery that’s been with her for most of her life. she inserts the key into the lock, and turns it. with a satisfying click, the latch opens.

inside, she finds a ring box, and a handwritten note, again in her father’s writing.

it was your mother’s, and her mother’s before that. i’m sure you know by now, but her name was Anne, and she was absolutely wonderful in every way imaginable. she loved you more than life itself, and i know she would’ve wanted you to have this.

lena knows that her mother’s name was anne -- she had hired a private investigator a long time ago. but seeing it confirmed in her father’s handwriting brings tears to her eyes, and suddenly she feels like a child again, lost without the parents for whom she so desperately yearns. there’s a polaroid attached to the note. in it, anne sits on a window ledge, staring out at the view. her hand grasps the sill she sits on, and a ring sparkles on her finger, catching the light in a glorious way.

she opens the ring box, and is surprised (yet again that day) to find, not a  claddagh ring, but a simple silver band with a modest diamond set in it. it’s so unlike any of the luthor jewelry she has - big and extravagant and worth millions.

and yet, it is priceless.

she slips the box into her purse, along with the note and polaroid. she thanks rudy for his kindness.

and then she meets her girlfriend for lunch.

///

‘so the meeting went well?’ kara asks an oddly quiet lena. they’ve finished lunch, and slowly work on the hot chocolates kara decided they both needed. lena decides she doesn’t want to lie to her.

‘i didn’t have a meeting,’ lena says. ‘i was emptying a safety deposit box.’

‘oh,’ kara says with a frown. ‘why didn’t you tell me?’

‘i wasn’t sure what i was going to find.’

a beat passes.

‘well? what was it?’

lena hesitates for just a moment.

and then she puts the box on the table between them, and flips it open.

‘oh my god.’

‘i know this moment is supposed to be thought out and planned and romantic or whatever. i don’t know. this ring was my mom’s and-and my father left it for me to give to ‘the one i’ll love forever.’’

‘lena--’

‘i know we haven’t talked about marriage much, and i don’t want to make you feel pressured in any way. but i know that my love for you feels... it feels steady. it feels like i’ve had it in my heart forever. and i know that this ring is meant for you, if you want it.’

kara smiles. she smiles and lena feels as though she wants to cry because of the overwhelming love that aches in her chest.

‘there’s a ring sitting in my old room in midvale that eliza’s been keeping safe for me. my mother heard me talking about you when i was last on argo city and handed it to me almost immediately.’

‘a ring?’ lena asks, her voice breaking.

‘i love you, lena. i plan on loving you forever, if you’ll let me.’ 

‘forever doesn’t seem long enough,’ lena says, and kara laughs. she leans across the table and kisses her deeply.

‘i’m sure we can figure something out, then.’ 

#lena luthor #kara danvers #supercorp #supergirl #fanfic

[babyspiderling]

The Moonwalker and the Time-Traveler Prologue

California, 2020

 “Ms. L/N, I suggest you wake up for my class if you want to pass this course.” I blink up at my professor, it seems that I fell asleep during history class again. “I’m sorry Professor Berkley, I was up all last night with my roommate tinkering all night.” At that he softens, a grandfatherly look in his eye. “Oh Y/N, I understand, but if you truly want to be a history major, you have to stay awake! I will not simply give you a free pass while trying to adjust, just please, try to stay awake in my class.” Standing, I nod. “Yes sir. I’ll do my best.” After this, I am dismissed and head back to my dorm room to hopefully catch a nap. 

Kicking the door shut, I move to collapse onto my bed, but am blocked by whatever my engineering major roommate has built in the dorm for his latest project. “Seriously dude? Don’t you have a lab for this kind of stuff?” I kick off my shoes and do my best to move around it, finally, truly collapsing onto my bed. I fall asleep quickly, hopefully revisiting the dream I had during class. 

Lord knows how much later, I wake up to my roommate continuing to tinker on his project. Grumbling under my pillow, “Danny, don’t you have a lab for this shit? Why do you have to do it here, I’m sleeping in classes because of this!” He sheepishly lifts his head up to respond. “Uh, well, I uh… It’satimemachine.” Snapping my head up, I question “It’s a what?” Once again he looks shy and guilty. “It’s a, uh, Time Machine. Or at least that’s what I’m wanting it to be. I’m still working on it.” Well, I’m definitely awake now. “So, like, what’s the problem?” Finally putting down his tools, Danny turns to me, “It should work. I ran the simulations and used the one that worked. It’s just… not connecting I guess.” Glancing at the clock, it’s getting late. “Look Danny, I’m going to clean up some of my stuff. Go get some food. I know you haven’t eaten yet.” With a defeated sigh, Danny agrees and leaves the room. I slip into a pair of shorts and an old David Bowie tour shirt I had found at a thrift store. Picking up things here and there, folding abandoned pieces of laundry, I hum and bop around the room, dancing along to “Working Day and Night”, practicing turns and isolations to the beat. Taking a deep breath I prep and spin as fast and as long as I can, but my foot slips out from under me. I tumble to the floor, tripping over some cord. Oh well, it’s probably Danny's “mood lighting”, I plug it in and decide to check out the “Time Machine”. “Ground Control to Major Tom! Prepare for lift-off!” I press random buttons, dicking around and typing 1984, then some other buttons. “Huh, sucks it really doesn’t work. It’d be cool if you really could time travel.” Once again I trip over Danny’s junk on the floor of the project and slam into one last button I had yet to press. On the way down I hit my head, and the world went black as a whirring sound filled my ears. 

Waking up, I find myself in a room about the size of mine, decorated much like my side of the dorm, with a funky retro feeling to it. “Danny, this isn’t funny, I get it, I’m gullible for believing the machine was real. Now how the Hell did you change all this so quick… and get rid of the machine?” I continue searching the room for Danny, and realise that the sun had already risen hours ago. I may have been out for longer than I thought, and come crashing into a body. Awesome! Now I can really teach that boy a lesson for pulling that. “Hey, what are you doing in my dorm? Nice shirt by the way, I was at the Anaheim show a couple months ago. That’s where you got the shirt, right?” I blink at the guy my age, still processing the amount of denim and hair products he has decided to use for the day. “What? Oh, uh, my shirt. Wait, did you say you saw him in Anaheim a couple months ago? What year are you from?” He knits his brows together. “1984. Are you ok? Did you get a bad hit or something? Do I need to call someone for you?” I space myself from him, the stimulation of this whole situation too much. “No, no I’m ok. What’s today’s date?” His eyes are still filled with concern as he replies with January 26th 1984, and that I’m still at University of Redlands, just 36 years before I attend. “Wait, January 26th, why does that sound so familiar? I hear Beat It blare down the hall and I can practically see the light bulb above my head. “Do you know how to get to the Shrine Auditorium?” 

We zip down the highway on Tyler’s motorcycle, making a trip down to L.A. He had me explain my whole ordeal to him before he just drove me to a random concert venue. It took a bit to convince him, but the second I pulled my smartphone out he was on board. He pulls off to a strip mall and helps me dismount. “Wait, why are we at a mall? I need to get to that venue before security secures it.” He just rolls his eyes. “If you want to get in and stay in without too much attention, you need to look a little bit different. Time to fit in.” He drags me into store after store, and I finally piece together a “Bad” inspired outfit. A black crop top slips off one shoulder, leather pants pull tight around my legs and hips, a blood red leather jacket drapes my shoulders, and matching leather boots clutch my feet. “Tyler, this is too much. I can’t even pay you back.” He rolls his eyes and pays for the clothes, letting me keep my own hoops and rings. “Look, just meeting a time traveler is cool, dressing one is even better. When you get back home and you still want to pay me back, we’ll figure it out. Let’s get you to the moonwalker himself.” 

As we pull into the parking lot for the venue, there isn’t another soul in sight. “Hey, here’s my address, if you ever want to mail me, or just let me know that you’re doing ok.” He hands me a slip of paper, and I hug him tightly. “Thank you Tyler, I am forever in your debt. If you’re anywhere near the university in 2020, let me know.” With that, he rides back home into the sunset, and I sneak into the venue before security shows up. 

It’s a good thing I like the song Billie Jean, because I have heard it about 72 times in the last hour. During sound check alone I almost lost my mind, with just the baseline intro playing for 30 minutes. As I hear the cue from the director that it is time to actually film the commercial. I hear “Take One!” in the distance and I ditch my jacket behind a stack of crates, my phone hidden in the pocket. I find the side entrance of the stage as take 3 is anounced. I crouch down in a runners position at take 5, launching myself at take 6. Michael nears the pyrotechnic and I slam my body into his as it goes off, now missing him by inches. There are screams of terror and shock as we fly through the air, now spun so that I land on my back, Michael on top of me. His brothers quickly help him up and off of me as I am seized by security, doing my best to put as little weight on my now injured ankle as possible. I raise my hands in surrender, trying to think my way out of this. “Look! Look, I can explain all of this, including how I knew that this take wasn’t going to go well. Let me explain and I will never try to contact any of you again!” Everyone around me exchanges glances, deciding whether to trust me or not. Tito steps forward, his eyes full of scrutiny. “Alright girl, explain.” I sigh and grimace in pain. “I can’t do it out here. Too many people. And my evidence of my claims are in my jacket backstage.” He glances back at Michael, nodding in response to his younger brother. I am escorted backstage, am allowed to sit down to relieve my ankle, and I start my story. “I’m from the future, 36 years in the future to be a bit more specific. I’m not crazy.” Michael crouches down in front of me, “If you’re really a time traveler I would love to talk about the future with you!” He’s nudged and given a look from his older brothers, and his smile is dimmed a bit. “But if you’re from the future, wouldn’t you know songs I haven’t released yet?” I nod my head, but I get hit with the issue of Thriller already being released and the “Bad” sessions not yet started for at least another 6 months, if not more. I flip through the collection of Michael songs I know by heart, trying to find one he’s recorded but not yet released. “Oh! I know about “Love never felt so good”! The one you recorded with Paul Anka! I can sing it for you!” I start at the chorus, my brain too frazzled to remember it’s entirety. Everyone else who knows about the song exchanges looks, one brother even shouting questions of how I knew it. “It’s on my phone, and I’m from the future. All your music’s been released. Well, almost all of it. There’s still tracks from your upcoming session that I have yet to find. Here, I can show you.” Lifting myself from my seat, I reach to retrieve my jacket from behind the crates. Everyone watches me with baited breath, wanting to see what the time traveler will pull out next. I pull out my phone and search for the Xscape album. I press play on the original track and Michael's voice rings out from the speaker. I switch it up to “Working Day and Night”, what I was listening to before I got here. 

“Look, I can play you anything you’ve already recorded. I just can’t play you anything you haven’t done yet. Those are the rules.” Michael escorts me back to his dressing room to ask me questions about the future since I am no longer seen as crazy. “Are there flying cars ? What about people living in space? Are there aliens?” I giggle at his excitement. “Well, we do have people living in space, it isn’t commercialized yet, so you and I couldn’t go. We don’t have flying cars, but we do have self driving ones. And there are no known aliens yet. Music is accessible though. If I had any service in 1984, I could play you any song any time from anyone. I could listen to “Wanna be Startin Somethin’” for 3 days straight if I wanted to. All I’d have to do is type it in and press play.” His eyes sparkle in awe of the future. He opens his mouth to ask more questions, but Jermaine and another man enters the room before he can get a word out, “Come on Mike, we need to finish the commercial. This is an EMT we had on site, he’s here to fix her ankle.” As Michael leaves his seat, I grab his hand. “Please, don’t let them turn the pyrotechnics back on. Please.” He nods and pats my hand before leaving the room. The EMT removes my new boots and my ankle swells before my eyes, no longer constrained in the tight leather. We make small talk as he works until the commercial is done recording. 

#80's imagine #michael jackson x reader #michael jackson #michael jackson imagine #80's x reader #series #80's series #80's fanfiction #time travel au

[mailieu-duskwing]

Kickbacks

Mailieu gets acquainted with one of the new refugees as they gather construction materials for Dream’s Refuge.

It was late afternoon when Mailieu crawled out of her solitary tent on the outskirts of the grove, partially concealed between a pair of holly bushes. She hadn’t exactly asked permission to set her camp off by itself, but neither had anyone objected to it, yet -- and she guessed that they would regret her bringing her night terrors into a crowded barracks. She did sorely miss having someone to share her bedroll with, but at least here, she could enjoy some privacy, and not lay her burdens on anyone else.

shink-shink-shink

The soft metallic sound drew Lieu out of her reverie, and she turned her awareness toward the supply tent, where an older human fellow was seated on a stout crate, drawing a whetstone over the blade of a hand axe. Despite his age, she saw that his arms were thick with corded muscle, likely built over a lifetime as a hard laborer -- or a bruiser. As Lieu strolled toward him, he glanced up at her, taking in her measure. His eyes lingered briefly on the heavy axes hanging from her belt. "You cut more than demons with those?" he called out as she approached. "Could use a second set of hands."

"Maybe," she said, head tilted, her wild hair spilling to the side. "What are we cutting?"

"Saw that we needed logs felled for seating. Thought I'd apply myself to it." His voice was quiet and steady with a light rasp, and his eyes returned to his work without waiting for her reply.

"How altruistic of you," Lieu commented flatly, gauging his reaction.

He made a thin wry smile, the corners of his coiffed gray moustache curling up. "Hardly. Bored out of my gob, if I'm honest. Just keeping my hands occupied."

"I see." She loosened an axe from her holster and ran a thumb carefully across the blade. Blunt as a spoon. "Needs sharpening, but they could do the job."

"Good. You can have the stone in a tick. Marcellus Fitch," he said, pausing his work long enough to extend a hand to her. She grasped it in greeting and he gave her a warm, grandfatherly smile. His grip was strong, and his skin rough with callouses. "Folk call me Governor."

"Lieu," she replied simply, fangs flashing in the late afternoon sun as she grinned. "What do you do, Governor?"

"Cobbler," he said, returning the stone to his blade. "I was working out of the Gilnean enclave in Teldrassil when... well, you know. I was lucky to be down at the docks when it happened, but I lost all my stock, everything except myself." A black cloud of bitterness crossed his face for a moment, but it was gone as quickly as it arrived. "Anyway, figured I may as well try a new start here."

He dropped heavily from the crate and swept the metal dust from his pant leg. For all his politeness, she could feel a chasm of wary distance between them. She didn't sense any dishonesty from him, but there was a shrewdness behind his eyes that belied his humble story.

"Sharpen while we walk," he said, tossing her the whetstone. "I'd like to get this done before dark."

===

Governor bellowed a warning call through the woods as Mailieu gave the dead tree a final shove, her knee braced just above the felling cut to prevent a kickback. The sound of dry splintering branches crescendoed into a resounding boom as the trunk struck the earth. Wordlessly, the two set to work on the felled log, hacking at the trunk with their axes to break it into sections that could be more easily carried.

"Have to admit," Governor said, breathing heavily in his exertions. "I'm curious to see what the long-term plan is for all these refugees."

"So am I," Lieu muttered in genuine consternation. A new load of refugees scheduled to come in two weeks, and their amenities were, what? Tents and a firepit? How long were they to live there? What kind of lives were they supposed to lead? And who was to rule them? Her expression darkened into a scowl. A million questions, and no indication whether the leaders of the Shadow had given the matters any thought at all. Sentinels never gave up the reins willingly, and were notoriously bad at managing civilian affairs.

She realized suddenly that the human was watching her and she cleared her throat, making her expression neutral. "Afraid I don't know any more than you do. I'm a new recruit. And, well..." she made a gesture that encompassed her horns, blindfold, the scars around her mouth, "this is not exactly inner circle material here."

His steel blue eyes sparkled in amusement. "Must admit, I am surprised to see one of you among the Shadow. I was in Darnassus long enough to learn that Sentinels and demon hunters don't mix."

"Some are more difficult than others," she agreed carefully. Diplomacy was not her strong suit, but she had a gut feeling that it would be unwise to reveal something that could be used as leverage. "As for the Shadow, their heart is in the right place." She could still feel his eyes on her, but she said nothing more, bending back to her work.

===

Governor sank his axe into the cut he had been working on and left it there, turning to take a seat on the log as he mopped the sweat and shavings from his brow with a handkerchief. "With labor like this," he said, catching his breath, "it's almost criminal they don't have a ready supply of whiskey on hand."

Lieu chuckled richly. She had finished her cut, and was working on stripping away the dry bark as she listened. "Keep the whiskey. What I really need right now," she said, ripping loose a long strip of bark, "is some tallstrider eggs."

"Tallstrider eggs," Governor repeated in surprise, rubbing the thinning hair atop his head as his expression turned thoughtful. "I doubt you'll find a farm here, but I heard a rumor the orcs brought some layers with them to Stonard. Supposedly, some of 'em got loose and started breeding in the wild. Might be you'd find some for sale in Marshtide Watch."

Lieu's eyebrows shot up at the news. "How far is that from here?"

Governor gave a nonchalant shrug of his broad shoulders. "Maybe one week round trip on foot through Deadwind Pass," he said. "Of course there's dust devils and rock slides to contend with this time of year, and that's not even to mention the swamp. Rough going, unless you have some way to fly over it." Lieu grimaced. She did not. And one week was a long time to disappear. Her absence would definitely be noted.

Governor was watched her reaction, rubbing his beard as he let the silence draw out. "Or," he continued pointedly, spreading his hands with a smile, "You can deal with me. I have connections around here, ways of helping people find things they're looking for. Always a demand for that, in settlements like this."

There it was. Things were coming together. His shrewd, cagey demeanor; doing business at the docks; his bitterness over the loss of his stock. "I thought you were a cobbler," she said coyly.

"My mother was," Governor chuckled. "Picked up enough of it growing up to make a passable front. Although," he said, pausing to look down at Lieu's feet, which were bare save for a thin cloth wrapping, long black claws extending from her toes, "it doesn't look like you'll have any need for those services yourself."

Mailieu snickered. "I've ruined enough shoes not to bother anymore," she said.

Governor smiled amiably, then raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Now, I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression. My work is all above board. All I want to do is get in on the ground floor here; help establish a trade network while the getting is good, if you follow me.”

Lieu nodded slowly, not entirely sure she believed him. Why bother with a front if he was a legitimate merchant? She realized that the man was taking a gamble, revealing his connections to her. He had made a calculation, guessed that she was more likely to be an asset than a roadblock -- and he may have been right. That all depended on what manner of cargo he intended to move. There were only a handful of refugees yet, but they all had their sights set on the Refuge for different reasons, and not all of those reasons were immediately clear. Lieu supposed it would be wise to keep her ear to the ground, suss out the intentions of people like Governor if she could.

The light of the sun was slanting through the trees, casting lengthening shadows over the cut logs; it was sure to be even darker within the crater grove. "We ought to get these back," she said finally. "I'd hate to see an old man try to fumble his way home in the dark."

When the light of the sun finally crested over the treetops overlooking the caldera, four stout logs had been laid encircling a firepit of scorched earth and flagstone. Accompanying them was a pile of stripped branches Lieu had collected herself after the old man had turned in, long and sturdy enough to support around two dozen tents. Exhausted, Mailieu dropped heavily onto her bedroll and settled into a blessedly dreamless sleep, with visions of tallstrider eggs dancing in her head.

#lieu stories

[whenhelbreaksloose]

Quite some time before the earth began to shake…

Phil was still not that popular with the ladies. Why he thought things would be different in Germany, he didn't know why. Apparently half animal-human beings were not that widespread this far north and the humans fell into two categories: the disgusted ones and the very curious ones. Not many young and pretty women fell into the latter category. The closest he came, was with an old witch hawking wooden bear carvings but that was only because she thought he was part bear.

The old goat did manage to find the one tavern where he could get a drink and hear some local boasts. One thing the Nordic barbarians knew how to do was to have a jolly good time. Although the music was loud, it was not enough to completely eclipse the conversation that was taking place further down the bar.

At the other end of the bar was a rather short girl whose dark hair was tied into two large buns and wore a furry stole that just barely covered the revealing cut in her drindle. She had a cute round face that was full of strained smiles with sparkling eyes that darted towards all of the exits. She had reason to smile so nervously for she had large barbarian men on either side of her trying to garner her attention.

"Honey, what were you doing in that well?" Said a large bearded man who was certain his overly sweet nicknames were the way to a woman's heart.

'Well I've always been a bit of a clumsy kid. I'm just soooo glad that you were there to help me." The young woman cooed and twirled a loose hair.

One of the men, covered in fur both animal and his own leaned in and murmured, "You know if you need anyone's arms to fall into, you always have mine." Another, although shorter man, who very well could be part bear winked at her.

The woman whose name happened to be Ganglat crinkled her nose and tried to suppress a gag at the corny line and counted down until life threw in some kind of distraction. Even Phil thought that line was bad, and he was king of cheap pick-up lines.

The short woman jumped down from the stool and announced, "You guys are really sweet! But I must be off! I have a festival to enjoy!"

"No wait! I got to tell you about the time we snuck into Fafnir's den and-"

"Like I said… I really need to not be in here, and I should be out there, but thank you for the- "She was cut off as her wrist was grabbed not too tightly to cause her to protest.

Phil knew this was just another classic D.I.D., and if he played things just right, he might just have a plan to get those men to leave her alone… So he can mercilessly hit on her. He stepped outside before he could even be noticed, waited a couple of seconds and then kicked the door in. "ALE BRAWL IN THE CENTER OF TOWN!" He yelled at the top of his lungs. The sentence made absolutely no sense. The context even less. But he knew that all he needed were for the tiny lizard brains in those thick skulls to grasp at just a few key words in order to get into gear.

You could hear a pin drop in the tavern as all eyes fell upon the little goat man. For a second Phil wondered if maybe he jumped the crossbow on this one, but the sudden clamber of bodies from the bar towards the door was the best answer he was going to get. The old Satyr tried to swim to the top of the crowd but he was not the young kid for quite a very long time.

Meanwhile Ganglat… Poor sweet Ganglat… Was dragged into the mob until she was able to wrench her wrist free. She bounced around in the stampede for a few seconds before attempting to swim to the top of the crowd as well. She bounced around at top like some party beach ball, before she was finally tossed onto the floor behind the counter as the crowd thinned out. The fall was enough to break her shift, revealing not a short and attractive woman, but a short and semi attractive Mare.

After the mob abandoned the tavern, Phil was no longer left with a sea of people to surf on and well, he was left to wipe out.

Ganglat in her true form is what some may call a Mare*. The very being that gives us the base word for Nightmare today. The lilac skinned Mare rubbed her hind quarters that extended out into short yet delicate horse like hooves, the appearance of which made her gasp. She even had a long fluffy horse like tail, but the rest of her was fairly human like despite being covered in light fur and sporting a singular stubby horn on her forehead. If it wasn't for her tiny pointed teeth, bat-like wings and cat like pupils, she would almost be something imagined by a five year old girl. She tugged at her horse like ears and groaned in frustration. Why do humans have to be so infuriating? The clopping of hooves turning around the corner of the bar alerted Ganglat that someone or something was coming. In an instant she transformed back into her human like form just in time for Phil to step around the corner.

"Well that's one way to clear the room…" Phil reaching for a couple of wooden wine cups and polishing them with a cloth. He smiled at the short woman, "But now that we're alone..."

Before he could even get into relentlessly hitting on her, the Mare-in-Disguise got up to her feet and smiled awkwardly at the goatman. It was the kind of smile a woman gives a man that has decided to help her with a small task that she didn't even ask for, insisted upon it and has ulterior motives for offering. "Gee thanks… I was thinking I needed a few more bruises and footprints on my skirt but I wasn't entirely sure how I would get that accomplished today…" Gangalt stood up and pushed by Phil making him drop the cups.

"Hey! I was just only trying to help, I thought you wanted to get away from those guys!" He protested while following after her.

"I did!" Ganglat turned and huffed, "I just didn't want to be trampled on, or stepped on, or followed by some ... Some… Just what the Hel are you anyways?"

Phil growled, feeling his forehead heat up from anger. "I'm a Satyr, Haven't you people ever heard of a Satyr?"

"Nope. Is that like a Finnish thing?" Ganglat shrugged her shoulders.

Phil slapped his forehead, "It's Greek!"

The woman stared at him for a few uncomfortable minutes. Ganglat seriously had not even heard of that land before. "Is that like very far away?" Ganglat had few opportunities to explore outside of the Nordic lands, and had been tied to her work. However, she knew this Satyr thing could be of some valuable information. A couple of gears began to turn in her head.

The old Satyr would have gotten annoyed but her confused state just made her all that more innocent and less intimidating. "Why yes!" He hopped towards her, balancing on one hoof. "It's a land far to the south, with beaches! And exotics!"

Before Ganglat could even escape, he had her swept back into his arm, 'Land of wine, honey, poetry… Amore..."

Ganglat's eyebrows furrowed all the while her smile strained to stay in place. It struggled to stay there. It was truly an Olympian feat. "Oh. I see, that sounds… Interesting…" She inhaled deeply trying to compose herself. I am a manipulative and beautiful Mare, I'm a beautiful and manipulative Mare. This guy is a chump. After she exhaled and opened her eyes, her smile and the twinkle in her eyes were the kind that could win awards.

"Oh that sounds wonderful… I just… I need to run a few errands, but why don't you tell me more about it!'

Phil brushed his greying hair back and bowed to the short woman, "Lead the way."

_________________________________________________

On the other side of town, Icarus had not even noticed the sudden absence of his best friend. He was far too busy stockpiling up on as many trinkets and festival gear, from horribly inaccurate horned helmets to footwear that for some reason as being used as drinking vessels. "I see, it's to get that proper fermented taste..." He mused while peeking one eye down into the boot. The shop keeper, nodded with a wide grin while shuffling his entire broken stock of clay vessels out of site.

"But will it be good enough for Dadalus?" Icarus held the boot away from his face and squinted his eyes at it. It didn't even take a split second before shoving it under a free arm, "Aw who am I kidding!? I'll take it!"

Now that he was satisfied with his socially required purchase he handed the boot to the space where Herc should have been. "Hey Herc, do you mind carrying this for me?" He wiggled the boot midair, expecting it to be taken. And waited. And waited some more. "Well if you don't want to just say so!"

Icarus whirled around to the empty spot. "Oh! You won't carry it 'cause you're not here!" His smile immediately turned into a frown as it dawned on him that he was in the middle of a foreign country during a festival completely alone. Normally a person in that position may react in the following order 1) looking around and yelling for a lost comrade 2) getting a little panicky but not succumbing to it too soon, 3) approach someone and try to petition someone for help, 4) find the nearest authority figure to help locate their party.

Why would you expect Icarus to do any of these things that made sense?

The meltdown was the first and most obvious choice to make. Followed by calling out for the names of his friends, then more screaming, then of course attempting to climb to the highest location that he could find and locate them that way. You know, as you do. When that didn't work, he tried running all over town calling out his friends names. When he got no response, he did the next logical thing. Breaking down in despair and crying.

"Oh now what is this?" The grown man heard an older, grandfatherly voice say.

"I- I Lost my friends and I can't find them anywhere!" Icarus sniffed pathetically and answered the very short and stubby legged, stubby armed beard. Yes, a Beard. It was like this short man was all beard stuffed into layers of leather, armor and had two arms and two legs stuck on as an afterthought.

"Aw there, there, I'll help you find them. What's your name little man?" The beard asked him all the while looking up.

"Icarus." He replied, "My friends are named Hercules and Philitetes but he goes by Phil."

"Well it's nice to meet you, I'm Ivaldi. Just hold my hand and I'll take you to my cart and we can wait there while we have your friends paged. How does that sound?"

"Mmmhmm." Icarus nodded, and took the dwarf's hand as he was led away to Ivaldi's cart.

The cart was a huge assemblage of wood but mostly metal, but one hundred percent moving parts. Icarus had seen many inventions in his life and even helped out with them, and this sort of thing was only surprising in how..."Oh Hey! This looks like some of the things my Dad makes!" The eternal child in a man's body yelled.

"Oh is that so?" Ivaldi laughed running a hand through his gray beard, "I don't think I ever heard of humans making steam machines."

"Oh yeah, we've made a solar powered one too."

"Solar powered?" Ivaldi blinked his teensy black eyes from the area where his eyes should be. It's hard to tell when a dwarf's beard blends into his eyebrows. He never even though of using the sun as energy source before. Ivaldi pulled on a lever that stuck out of his cart causing it to slowly and somewhat smoothly transition from a small humble yet very weird steam powered cart to a larger booth with chairs to sit on and cupboards that opened up to reveal… Cuckoo clocks.

"That's pretty interesting actually… Although where I'm from, we don't have much sun." Ivaldi climbed up onto his seat and reached into his pocket and pulled out some hard candies to offer to Icarus.

Icarus took a piece and sat down in a seat. "Oh is that cause of winter? Don't worry, you always got summer."

"Something like that." Ivaldi said as he cleared a pulled down a long series of pipes that lead to the top of his cart and ended in a funnel shape. Perfect for making announcements. "You really aren't familiar with dwarves are you? Do they not have any where you're from?"

Icarus shoved the candy into his mouth and waved the old dwarf off, "Oh, they prefer to be called little people..."

"No not smaller humans, dwarves." Ivaldi chuckled, "You know, us short human like beings, long beards, thick accents and live underground? No? Bah! Don't worry about it. Now what were your friend's names?"

Icarus stared at him in confusion, but it only lasted a second, "Woah you live underground? Doesn't that get a bit dangerous? They're named Phil, short for Philitetes and Herc, short for Hercules."

The old dwarf shook his head "Not that dangerous... Well It is, but it's gotten a lot better from when I was a wee Lad." Ivaldi shrugged and cleared his voice to announce through the pipe, "Philitetes and Hercules we have a very special buddy who is waiting for you. Please meet your party at the Steam Wagon. Please meet your party at the steam wagon."

He put the phone down and swiveled his seat towards Icarus. "We'll wait a bit and do another announcement. In the meantime, I got business to do." Ivaldi pulled out a large heavy trunk from under his desk sat it on his workspace with a loud thud. Icarus leaned over Ivaldi's shoulder and watched obnoxiously close as the dwarf pulled out tiny tweezers, gears and metal. There was already a partially put together thinga-ma-jig. "So, uh, what's ya working on?" Icarus asked while breathing down Ivaldi's hairy neck.

"I call it a clock. It's like a sundial that doesn't use solar power. This old one has just stopped working so I need to take it apart and see what's wrong. I suspect it might be something to do with the wind up function. I really do need to figure some other way to power it."

The clock was a very intricate although tiny thing about the size of a small jewelry box. The hands on the golden clock were motionless but would have circled around a center dial and at each number were smaller spheres each depicting different scenes.

"Oh right, because of the whole underground thing." Icarus reached for the tools beside Ivaldi, one of which being a little magnifying glass that he held in his eye.

Ivaldi smirked, noticing the curiosity in his eyes, "This clock depicts the nine worlds…" He pointed to a sphere with a pair of tweezers depicting humans tending to a farm, "We are here in Midgard. And here," He pointed to another sphere depicting two stalagmites standing parallel to each other, towards the bottom, "is where I live. Nidvallir or also called Svaltalfheim if you're an elf."

"What are those other ones?" Icarus asked now fiddling with a few gears himself, putting things into place.

"The one in fire is Muspelheim, home of the fire giants, this one is Nifleheim, it was home of the frost giants, here is Asgard, realm of the gods… Hey! You're pretty good at that! Look at you, just picking up on it so quick, I could have you help me with this."

"Ooh! That's probably where Herc is!" Icarus nearly knocked all of Ivaldi's things over as he pointed towards the small Asgard sphere.

"What!? I am so sorry! I thought we were looking for living friends!"

"No, no, Herc's alive, he just got an invite by Odin..."

Ivaldi cupped a hand to his forehead and ran it through his white hair in disbelief. "And you're worried about the underground being dangerous."

"What?"

Before Ivaldi could clarify himself he was interrupted by none other than Phil who was walking with his arm around a very uncomfortable looking short woman as he made his way towards the cart.

"Geez! I can't go anywhere with you guys! Hey, where's Herc?"

Ivaldi blinked at Phil, took off his glasses, polished them and placed them back on. It wasn't the strangest creature he has seen, but it was pretty up there. "Are you Phil and Herc?"

What? No! I mean, I am Phil and this..." He took Ganglat's hand and kissed it. She attempted to not make a face,

"Astrid." She said, her eyes landing on Ivaldi and then widening. What was he doing here? He was not supposed to be here!

"Oh, well, nice to meet you. My name is Ivaldi and it seems like I found this lost little guy..." Ivaldi turned to Icarus who was supposed to be sitting next to him but was now throwing himself over both Phil and Ganglat.

"I was sooooo loooost! I was scared and I looked everywhere!" Icarus bawled. Phil attempted to push Icarus off but his grip was ironclad. "Enough already! You're getting my fur all wet!"

As he struggled to pry the human off of him, Ganglat was standing there with her jaw agape.

"Is something wrong miss?" Ivaldi asked.

"What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here."

"Well that's a bit uncalled for. I may be a dwarf, but I have every right to be here and sell my wares. I even have my pass to do so right here..." Ivaldi began to rummage through pockets for the amulet that gave him passage. Ganglat slammed, well tried to slam her hands on the desk but she had to climb up the chair and slam her hands onto the desk.

"Ivaldi! What are you doing here? You can't be here because things are going down here. We can't have things go down if you're in the way."

Ivaldi squinted at Ganglat behind his glasses, "Do I know you?"

From behind them, she could here Phil still struggle to get Icarus off of him, "Have you tried checking by the MVG area? He's probably meeting his parents there with the rest of the gods."

The color drained from Ganglat's face. "Gods?" She asked turning towards Phil. "There are Gods here?"

"What do you mean things are going down?" Ivaldi asked but Ganglat was in no place to answer.

"Ivaldi, just do everyone a favor and get out of here! Far away!" She yelled scrambling past Phil and Icarus, "I need to find Ganglati!"

"Hey where are you going? I thought we had dinner plans!" Phil yelled at her as he tried to wrench himself free of the sniffling Icarus.

Ivaldi stood there in disbelief, as he watched Ganglat run off. "Ganglati?" He knew that name and the other names attached to it, "Ganglat!?"

"Well she's off in a hurry... I got to say Phil, that has to be a new record for a girl to stick around before running off." Icarus noted, finally releasing the Satyr. He looked back to his new old friend who was hurriedly packing up his steam cart with a speed he had never seen in an old person. "Packing up already? We were just getting to the good part! At least stay for Oktoberfest dance!"

"We need to find your friend and leave, that was Ganglat!"

"Ganglat? I thought her name was Astrid." Phil asked.

"That's Ganglat, and if Ganglat and Ganglati are both here than trouble isn't too far behind."

Then the ground began to finally shake.

_______________________________________________________

Still some time before the ground shook, because we still need to establish some things before we cut to the action, far down, deep below the center of town, in a very large, very damp cave system, angry voices echoed against the cavern walls instead of the sound of pickaxes. Three groups were gathered around a large hunk of machinery and arguing amongst each other.

"I don't trust this one bit! It looks like it's going to collapse and blow up!" A feminine sounding figure dressed in silken robes and a wooden carved mask gestured to the large machinery in the middle of the large cavern. The machine could be best described as a large upward facing drill that had three smaller ones ready to spin around it like some terrifying amusement state fair ride, with all of the stability and legitimate safety of a state fair ride.

"Or blow up and collapse," chimed in a similarly dressed figure right behind her.

"Or that!"

"Oh, Shush you mushroom eatin' pansies!" The gruffer, Scottish accented and stereotypical dwarf known as Pyrite fought back. It is a known fact that all dwarves had large beards, Scottish accents and a love for ale. Yes, Even the She-dwarves. Especially the She-dwarves. "It's practic'ly in mint condition!" He said as he punched the side of one of the smaller drills causing a board holding one of the side plates to loosen and slide off. "That's jus' a cosmetic feature."

"We are abandoning this mission." The masked dark elf said disdainfully.

"You gonna tell the boss that Runatntha!? Cause I'm sure Boss would just be thrilled about hearing that from you after you made the prediction that this would be the most profitable hit we'll have this year? Go on ahead!"

"I'm sure you would want that, wouldn't you! Just to have the biggest hit be ruined and collapsing and blaming it on us!" The dark elf had heard the rumors. Centuries of rivalry between them and the dwarves ensured that they were always trying to undermine the other faction to ensure their position in Svaltalfheim.

"Well…" A grave voice spoke up after very patiently waiting. "We could wait for the boss and see what she wants." The large undead man spoke very slowly, causing the other participants in the argument to tap their feet and look at their watches as they waited for him to finish.

"Boss said to start up the machine! And we're starting up the machine!" A screw fell from a strut and bounced off of his helmet. The other dwarf next to him bent down and handed the screw back to his brother. "It's fine. Jus' cosmetic."

"And we are not starting that machine!"

"We should just wait-"

"I do fine work!"

"ENOUGH!" echoed throughout the caverns and was followed by a drastic drop in temperature.

The whole cave system fell quiet as everyone watched their breaths fog up before them and they slowly turned their eyes to the much taller figure advancing on them. Returning from the narrow crevice that led to well water and sending her two minions to the surface. As tall as she was, she was still very young: a thirteen-year-old kid dressed in a tattered hooded tunic, and trousers tucked into boots. Much of her clothes were held in place using bone and found objects. Every bit of skin was wrapped in bandages and her face was covered by a wooden death mask. Only her red eyes could be seen from behind her mask.

Even though she was very young, she knew how to intimidate a crowd. It was easy when you're a lot bigger and stronger than almost everyone else; but being a ball of adolescent rage also helps. She glared at the quarreling parties, "First rule!" She demanded.

"Cut it out." The entire group groaned in unison.

"Now second rule." She held out two fingers.

"What you says goes."

"And I say, we're gonna wait 'till dumb and dumber get back and clear things up, and then we can start the drill. What's the Ymir-dammed problem!?'

"Boss, If I might..." The elf spoke meekly, "We are concerned about the state of the drill, and we would not wish for it to fail on us… It doesn't look to be in the best shape. Look, two more pieces just fell off of it right now!" She pointed to the fallen pieces of the machine.

"I told ya! It's jes cosmetic! Just for looks. It will be fine." Pyrite spoke up defensively.

The masked figure could only rest her hand on the brow of the smiling mask and groaned. Always with the bickering over one thing or another. Just one day, if she could go without having to settle their petty squabbles, she could live that one day happy in this miserable frozen hole. At least the dead weren't as annoying, slow, painfully slow but not nearly as annoying.

"Ugh, just shut up the two of you! Here's what we're gonna do, to shut you both up! Pyrite, you're gonna run a maintenance check, and you're gonna be the one to turn it on and stay there."

"What?" Pyrite gasped eyes widening as it suddenly dawned on him, that he may not be entirely sure that those minor cosmetic issues are entirely minor. 'I- I- I"

"Unless you doubt your craftsmanship…"

The elves behind her Hooted with laughter.

"But I am sure you wouldn't be that dumb to create something that would just fall apart right on top of you."

The masked figure was blunt and cold, so her words cut right to the point and right into his pride. Pyrite grew red faced and marched his way towards the center machine that held a few levers and pulleys.

"There's no point in this, because I know it's perfectly safe, but if it makes you and the gutless elves happy then so be it." He grumbled.

The taller masked figure turned to the rest of the working crew, "And while he does that, you get back to work! We ain't gonna be standing around with our fingers up our noses until Ganglat and Ganglati get back! So, pick up an axe and start chippin' away at the foundations." She said while pointing towards the horde of Draugar and turned to the elves, "And you, make sure the escape tunnels are clear, I want this to be a clean grab and dash."

In the time span it took her to give orders and collect a pick axe herself, she heard the distinct sounds of the machine kicking into gear and turning on. She turned her head as the earth around her began to shake.

"Well… Shite"

_________________________________________________________

*Mare, also known as an Alp, is primarily Germanic in lore. It is the origin of our term Nightmare, and was a being that was sometimes considered to be faun like or horse like in appearance, or sometimes even hag like. I've combined different mythologies to create Ganglat's appearance since Germanic, and Nordic folklore like most folklore is often varied even within the same culture. Tales and myths of Germanic and Norse mythology was not fully written about until hundreds of years later after Christianization and so I took this as an opportunity to take some fictional license with some of the lore.

#whenhelbreaksloose #fanfiction #Disneyhercules #Norse

[lodelss]

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause. 

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.”

***

Three years after Finicum’s death, inside a VFW hall on a puddled side street in Salem, Oregon, a specific brand of nostalgic, stars-and-stripes patriotism is unmistakably on display. 

A Betsy Ross flag hangs in one corner; a flag poster is tacked to the far wall. A bulletin board is bordered by stars-and-stripes rickrack. Red, white, and blue practically seep from the walls as if it were sap pushed from the very planks that hold up the roof. 

On the breast of every person who has paid $50 to be here is a round pin that reads Justice for LaVoy, set on a border of American flag ribbon.

When the day’s program begins, some 100 people push themselves up from folding chairs the best they can, placing palms over hearts. A curly-haired cowboy in tight jeans leads the room in a twangy rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The room turns its collective body — overwhelmingly white and over 50 — toward a  yellow-fringed flag. They sing low and soft with the cowboy, like it’s church. 

As this day unfolds, it will become evident that this is, in a way, a kind of church. These people are believers in an American religion with its own martyr, its own symbols. They have their own prayers, moral teachings, and deadly sins. The name Robert LaVoy Finicum  — or just LaVoy — is a hallowed one in the collective mind of the Patriot movement.

The people have gathered here to remember the death of Finicum. They are angry, mourning. 

And the Passion of Finicum is bolstered by another belief held here: The federal government is so corrupt that it will kill its own citizens if they live too freely.

That message, to one degree or another, has always been on the wind in the West. Since the federal government sent troops in to exterminate Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest; since it declared the polygamous Mormons in Utah in rebellion; since it put a sniper on a mountaintop in rural Idaho and shot a bullet through Vicki Weaver, standing inside her cabin at Ruby Ridge in 1992, holding her infant daughter. But it’s the primary teaching of the Patriot movement — a movement that was around long before the Bundys — that will remain long after Cliven has faded into a folk herodom. 

There’s a key difference between Cliven Bundy and LaVoy Finicum. As I’ve written about the Patriot movement, I’ve come to understand that Bundy might be the godfather of a movement that has bedeviled feds across the West. But to a lot of ranchers, he’s a joke — an affront to everything so many public lands ranchers have worked for. Those people see Bundy’s ideas about the federal government as outlandish and a distraction from the real issues in rural America: jobs, water, development, health care.

But Finicum’s death resonated in the Bundys’ world and far beyond it. He believed in the same disproven, unsupported claims as the family, but the difference was that he believed in those things enough to die for them. Death seems to have softened more people to the idea that the government is the aggressor. With his death, Patriots could point to another marker on its timeline arguing that the government can and will come after people. 

But who Finicum really was before 2016, what he really believed, has never been clear to me. He’s no ancient prophet with a story lost to time. His life story can be told. The government said that Bill Keebler, after bombing the BLM building, claimed his actions weren’t for LaVoy, but for “what he stood for.” So what did he stand for?

Finicum in January 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the armed takeover led by the Bundys. Finicum described himself as wanting “to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.” (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Glenn Jones wrote something in his journal about Finicum, and Keebler said his bomb was for whatever Finicum stood for. Both craved eye-for-an-eye acts of revenge, payback: virtues the Patriot movement has always prized. The movement is fueled by a burning for comeuppance, and at its worst, that’s gotten a lot of people killed. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — an apparent act of revenge for Ruby Ridge and Waco. 

Since Finicum’s death, the message of his martyrdom has been amplified by a very powerful voice: a woman sitting at the back of the VFW behind a table of belt buckles, T-shirts, stickers, and hats bearing Finicum’s distinctive cattle brand. Miniature American flags decorate the tablecloth. 

Dorethea Jeanette Finicum, who goes by Jeannette, is a pretty 59-year-old woman with blue eyes that sparkle and a bright smile with a perfect gap between her two front teeth. She wears a denim shirt embroidered with blue flowers, ashy-blond hair that suggests she’s from a different era, a different world where hairstylists still feather and shag. She is the Patriot movement’s Lady of Sorrows, and people here love to touch her: placing hands on her back, offering handshakes. One man holds her in a tight embrace: “Jeanette, I will never, ever forget you,” he says. Behind her, someone has displayed an Old Glory afghan for the room to see.

She’s a “chuck wagon mom” who, the moment three state-issued bullets ended her husband’s life, turned into a full-blown political activist. Today, she is indisputably one of the stars of the modern Patriot movement. 

She sells stacks of Only By Blood and Suffering, the novel her late husband wrote about an overbearing government that attacks a cowboy rancher, shooting and killing him. Sitting next to her behind that table of goods is her new husband — a plain man in a plaid shirt who scurries away at the sight of a reporter. 

Since the summer of 2018, the widow Finicum has taken a film about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking on the road — a film she and its producer, a 49-year-old Washington state man named Mark Herr, describe as a documentary made up mostly of footage from Finicum’s free YouTube channel. 

Before queuing up the first hour of the documentary, Herr takes the microphone. All eyes turn his way. “All right let’s get started,” he says. “If you oppose white supremacy, if you oppose — you’re against — white supremacy, would you please stand?” 

The room rises. 

“You don’t agree with white supremacy? OK,” Herr says. “If you’re pro–responsible government — you’re pro-government. You’re pro–responsible government, would you please clap?”

The room claps.

“Wow!” Herr exclaims. “Very interesting!” 

This goes on: Sit if you want the federal and state governments to combine (no one sits). Sit if you want the legislative, judicial, and executive branches to combine into one big entity (no one sits for that either, including producer Ryan Haas and I, who felt it was the sporting thing to do).

“Oh that’s so interesting!” he says, forcing surprise into his words.

“Guess who you’re standing with,” he says, as the room settles back onto the folding chairs. “You stood with LaVoy Finicum.”

Just before Herr hits play, a woman who organized this event reminds the room that there is security here. Anyone caught recording will be removed. A huddle of men and women in sweatshirts bearing the logo of the Idaho Three Percenters militia settles into seats. A man with a handgun on his hip — nestled in a leather holster embossed with the words “We, the People”  — leans against the wall near the only two reporters in this room, me and Haas. 

Dead Man Talking is Finicum’s story told through the eyes of the Patriot movement — so it’s mostly about his life after he went to the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014. The movie doesn’t answer questions about how Finicum came to believe what he did, or how that belief compelled him to die.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

The film is concerned, primarily, with the man’s death. Dying, after all, is what he’s known best for; Finicum’s public life was only a blip: 21 months out of 54 years. From the time Finicum arrived, alone, at Bundy Ranch in 2014, to the time he died a leader at the Malheur occupation in 2016, only 650-some days passed. He was a martyr made at the speed of the internet.

Finicum’s videos — posted to his YouTube channel — say pretty much nothing anyone in the Patriot movement wouldn’t have heard before. He was like a low-calorie Cliven Bundy delivering a droll, monotonous soliloquy about the Constitution, the founding fathers, freedom, liberty. 

But the videos are a window into everything Finicum wanted to be seen as. In some videos, he wore a cowboy hat, black suit coat, and a Western bow tie — as if he’d just strolled out of a tintype photograph. Behind him: a woodstove, a kerosene lantern, a painting of a cowboy crouched by his horse, and one of a Mormon temple. 

In other videos, blades of grass wiggled in front of the camera, a bright blue sky behind him. “It doesn’t take too much to see that dark storm clouds are gathering,” he said, crouching in front of the camera. “We need to have our houses in order. We need to have our relationships in order. We never know how many days we have on God’s green earth here, and we need to make the best of each and every one of them.”

His channel shows him stockpiling for the end. And in the Bundys, it is as if he saw proof that the horses of the apocalypse were on the horizon.

But the Bundys were shopping a conspiracy theory that Finicum bought hook, line, and sinker when he arrived at Bundy Ranch, as if he’d been waiting to hear it. Like he’d had his finger on a light switch in a dark room for years, itching for the chance to flip it and light up his whole world. 

  II.

LaVoy Finicum and his cousin Josh Cluff both called the tiny, tiny town of Fredonia, Arizona, home. In the winter, the wide-open lands all around it are an otherworldly picture show of red cliffs dripping with melting ice against blue skies. Snowfields are untouched, stretches of pure white fleece that go all the way to the edge of the earth. 

At a lone gas station near Kanab, Utah, where Haas and I make a pit stop, a large pickup truck is surrounded by women and girls in matching prairie dresses: navy blue, plum, lime green. They’ve formed a chain, passing a truckload of boxes into a FedEx van. Their hair is pinned back in braids and waves, styles unmistakably associated with polygamous sects like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a radical offshoot of Mormonism. 

Seeing them is a reminder that polygamy is still alive and well in this area and around the rural West, despite FLDS leader Warren Jeffs being sentenced to life in prison in 2011. The towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, aren’t far from here — and they’ve long been FLDS strongholds. And they were, essentially, in LaVoy Finicum’s backyard.

The homes and rusted trailers of Colorado City spread south along State Route 389, petering out, then swelling again to form the town of Cane Beds. That’s where the Finicums lived. They participated in civic life, which often intersected with the FLDS church. One of Finicum’s post office boxes was in Colorado City. He attended town hall meetings there, too. Today, just off State Route 389, LaVoy Finicum Road leads the way to Cane Beds (one report attributed the naming of the road to Finicum himself, who requested the switch before he died). 

In the days after his death, prominent polygamists joined the anti-government chorus in declaring Finicum a martyr. Ross LeBaron Jr. — whose father created the polygamous sect Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times — gave a written statement to a Salt Lake Tribune reporter: “LaVoy, the Bundy’s [sic] and others are my heroes. They stood for something bigger then [sic] themselves. They are not sellouts like many are today. I thank God for all those that are standing for the greater good.”

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As I’ve reported in desert towns around the West — up north in Panaca, all through the Arizona Strip — I’ve noticed that this type of interaction between mainstream Mormons and FLDS is typical. Sam Brower, a private investigator who wrote a book called Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation Into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, says polygamists are “part of the landscape.”

Cane Beds, he says, is for “FLDS refugees” and people who often “still believe in polygamy,” but it’s also just a really cheap place to live. 

“I know after [Finicum] was killed, there were people — ex-FLDS people I know — that were saying, ‘I knew that guy, he was living down the road from us.’ They knew who he was.” 

I tell him about the women I saw near Fredonia, how it surprised me to see a group I thought was so fringe, living outside the boundaries of the law, out in the open. “There’s a degree of tolerance,” he says. “You just become more callous to having them around all the time.” I’m bothered by this. Finicum, at the end of his life, was so obsessed with freedom and liberty, and yet I never heard him rage on YouTube about the oppression of women and sexual abuse of girls happening in his literal backyard.

Finicum, who was Mormon, lived around and in FLDS strongholds for much of his life — could even have been friendly with them. In talking to Brower, I have to wonder if living so close to people with a radical lifestyle might have made Finicum more open to hearing fringe religious ideas. 

Like when the Bundys talked to him about the White Horse Prophecy — how they believed their quest against the government was prophesied by Joseph Smith himself. If Finicum had been around people who were preaching an alternate gospel all his life, might he have been more open to believing fringe ideas, instead of questioning them?

***

Robert LaVoy Finicum was born January 27, 1961 to David and Nelda Finicum, and was baptised nearly two weeks later in the Fredonia LDS ward by his uncle, elder Merlin Cluff. 

By the 1960s, Finicums and Cluffs had been around the Arizona Strip for generations. LaVoy’s grandparents Dale and Beulah Finicum homesteaded in the area, living in a dug-out house in the ground. LaVoy’s parents, too, embraced the pioneer grit that helped settle this region. When Finicum’s father, David, was a teenager, he made local headlines when he shot himself in the leg. He was riding on a horse when it brushed against a tree branch that  caught the hammer of the revolver in his saddle and shot him. He rode for 20 more miles before getting help, according to one account.

In 1986, Finicum’s parents rode in a horse-drawn covered wagon from Kanab, Utah, to St. George in a reenactment of the Honeymoon Trail — a wagon train that, in the 1870s, helped populate the Arizona Strip along with transporting goods to St. George to help in the construction of the LDS temple there. After the building was complete, the trail continued to be used, carrying couples, instead of supplies, to be married in the temple.

LaVoy, though, was raised in the far northwestern corner of Arizona Navajo territory, where his father took a job with the Arizona Department of Transportation, paving and repairing roads. He attended school in Page, Arizona.

The family home was close to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, named for Mormon settler John D. Lee. Lee was executed for helping murder 120 pioneers traveling through a Utah canyon on their way west, an event now known as the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is considered one of the earliest acts of domestic terrorism. 

Lee’s Ferry, also, is the birthplace of a foundational prophet of the FLDS church, Leroy Johnson, who was also an early leader in Colorado City. 

In February 2019, I traveled to the Fredonia home of Finicum’s younger brother, Guy. He looks, and sounds, eerily like LaVoy: He’s bald, wears wire-rimmed glasses, speaks in a measured-tone. And he laughs when I say I just want to hear more about who his brother really was. “Nobody would have dirt like the little brother,” he says. He’s a licensed mental health counselor who works with substance abuse recovery programs, and his words come across with a measured delivery.

“We were kind of isolated down there. No television, only the friends in the couple houses next to us and then the Navajos that lived on the reservation around us,” he says. It took them 45 minutes to get to school. “We’d be the only white faces on the bus.” He says the family was accepted with open arms by the tribal community.

Guy says his brother, as a child, was “the Batman and Joker rolled into one character. He was my nemesis,” Guy says. “He loved to tease me. But as soon as we left the home he was my hero. … He said, ‘Hey, here’s my brother.’ He included me.”

He tells me that LaVoy always wanted to be a cowboy, but “as a little boy, he didn’t have any cattle. So that was my job. I was his livestock,” he says, letting a laugh loose again. “I got a hog tied and earmarked more than once.” I’m so used to hearing grim recollections of LaVoy’s death, it’s surprising to hear his brother laugh about a memory of him.

In high school, LaVoy turned his attention to basketball. Their father poured asphalt by the house so LaVoy could put up a hoop. 

“Every morning I’d wake up hearing that ball bouncing,” Guy says. 

After graduation, LaVoy served his LDS mission in Rapid City, South Dakota, but held onto his passion for basketball long after it was realistic for him to keep pursuing it. 

Upon returning home, he married a woman named Kelly “after a very short courtship,” according to Guy, and the pair soon had their first child. Kelly was from Oregon, and the newlyweds moved there so LaVoy could take a job managing apartments in a Portland suburb. Finicum also hoped he could walk onto a local college basketball team, but quickly realized he couldn’t spend money on tuition that could be used to feed his family.

“He regretted that decision because he was never able to get a college degree. … He had to go to school to play basketball,” Guy says. “But he felt like he had neglected his wife and his little kid.” 

Kelly and LaVoy had four children, and got a divorce in 1989. “LaVoy’s problem is, he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Guy explains.  

Finicum, from his 20s to 40s, bounced around the West. I found addresses for him in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, near Flagstaff, in St. George, Cedar City, and Provo, Utah. For the most part, he worked as a property manager — something he excelled at, Guy says. But the work never seemed to really interest him. 

“Every time he’d get successful, he’d get sick of living in the city and try to move back home. And when he’d come back home, he just could never get a foothold and find anything that he could support his family on. So they’d come back here and be dirt poor and struggle,” Guy says. Sometimes LaVoy would move to cities before his family, sleeping in his car as he looked for work, brushing his teeth and shaving with a jug of water. 

As we’re talking Guy gets up from his seat in the living room. “I want to show you something,” he says, and disappears into a nearby room. He emerges with a packet of papers in his hands, fixed together with a single strand of suede cord. 

He explains that one year when LaVoy had no money to buy Christmas gifts, he gave him these drawings instead. Guy delicately fingers through the old pages. There’s a drawing of their grandparents’ house, and below it LaVoy wrote about the old wood cookstove inside, the ticking clock on the wall, the smell of percolating coffee — a beverage choice that set them apart from their LDS relatives. 

Guy smiles, but as we look, one page strikes me as particularly haunting. It’s a sketch of the private family cemetery plot in Cane Beds, where LaVoy is now buried.

In LaVoy’s depiction of it, he sketched the place as if there was just one body buried there. In the center of the drawing is a sole gravestone and a mound of fresh dirt. Around it is an old wooden fence, two trees, then vast white nothingness.

***

In July 1990, several months after his divorce, LaVoy married a woman named Rachel, and soon they had two children together. That marriage was short-lived. (I reached out to both Kelly and Rachel on Facebook, but never heard back.)

In 1992, Jeanette Finicum was at a singles dance at her church, and she was line dancing when her future husband walked in. “I can remember being out on the floor and this gorgeous cowboy walked into the room,” she said. “He sat up on the stage and he just sat there watching all of us dance. And I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I want to dance with him.’” 

They danced — a slow song. And when Jeanette asked LaVoy to keep dancing, he said he had no rhythm. She called him chicken. “He says, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me how many kids I have, I’ll dance this next dance with you.’”

She guessed six. He nodded.

“I went, ‘Oh my gosh, you have six kids?!’ And I’m going, ‘Oh my heck, you are definitely the package deal,’” she recalled. “To make a long story short, two weeks later we were married.” (According to Finicum’s obituary, the couple married in 1994.)

The pair raised 11 children together. LaVoy and Jeanette later moved near Prescott, Arizona, where they became foster parents. Guy explained that being a foster father was perfectly suited to his brother. “He was a very alpha personality. And he just carried presence with him that nobody ever wanted to challenge,” he said. Boys who other foster parents couldn’t control “just would fall in line behind him.” Foster parenting, too, allowed him to earn enough to attain his cowboy dream. 

Records from the Bureau of Land Management show Finicum cosigned a grazing permit in 2009 with his father, but started ranching by himself in 2011 near Mount Trumbull, deep in the Arizona desert, near the Grand Canyon. In 2014, he was in good standing with the BLM. He always paid his bills on time. 

According to Guy, the Finicum boys were raised hearing stories of how the federal government was trying put ranchers out of business. Ranchers who once could run cattle near the Grand Canyon were slowly pushed out, and national monuments like the Grand Canyon-Parashant further reduced grazing areas. 

“That was kind of the culture we grew up with is these guys are here to tell us what to do and take away what we have,”said Guy.

Even when LaVoy was finally able to ranch, something he achieved in his 50th year of life, “he couldn’t make it work very well,” Guy said. Then he went to Bundy Ranch in 2014, met Cliven Bundy and saw yet one more rancher saying the government was no friend to ranchers. 

When he died, Guy said,  ”he was right in the middle of his dream.”

  III.

On June 23, 2015, Finicum wrote a letter to the BLM: 

“I am writing you this letter to express my appreciation for the time we have associated together in connection with my grazing on the Arizona Strip. It has been a pleasant association and without conflict,” he wrote. “I have the greatest respect for you and judge you to be honorable men.” 

He continued: “At this time I feel compelled to stand for [sic] up for the Constitution of our land and in doing so please do not feel that I am attacking your character.” He repeated what Cliven Bundy had been telling people at Bundy Ranch: about the Founding Fathers; about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17; and the idea of government-owned land being a ruse. Wool pulled over the eyes of hard-working Americans. 

“This is not about cows and grass, access or resources, this is about freedom and defending our Constitution in its original intent.” 

This confused BLM employees. 

On July 13, an employee called Finicum “to discuss what’s going on.” Finicum was cordial but explained he was making a stand. 

“When asked if he was going to turn-out his Livestock + pay his grazing fees, he wouldn’t answer + resorted back to the Constitution and making a stance,” the employee wrote. 

In 2015, Finicum’s permit only allowed for him to graze cattle from October 15 until May 15. But on August 7, a BLM employee called Finicum to let him know he saw 24 of his animals in two pastures, asked him to remove them within a week, and told him he couldn’t put any more cattle out. 

Finicum replied that  he was “not asking for permission.”

Finicum published a video to YouTube that same day, claiming the BLM had drained his water tank to fight a wildfire “without so much as a hidey-ho or a please.” 

“It’s mine. It’s for my cows. I need it,” he said. “Quit stealing.” 

Three days later, the BLM received another letter from Finicum, which stated, “I am severing my association with the BLM.” He took to YouTube again, telling viewers it was time to “do something more than just talk.”  In the video, he’s crouched by the camera in fringed leather chaps with a long scarf tied around his head and a cowboy hat over it. This isn’t the same droll Finicum of the year before, in front of the woodstove and the temple paintings. He’s fired up — and he’s talking directly to the men at the BLM — the people who, two months earlier, he said he had so much respect for. “You gonna come in there like you did with my friend Cliven?” he said. “Well, I’m telling you, leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave Cliven alone.” 

Finicum in the video posted to hisYouTube channel, pAug. 14, 2015.

In the days that followed, the BLM found 32 cows, two bulls, and 24 calves under 6 months old in trespass. All had Finicum’s brands and earmarks. Nearby more were observed near a water trough, but the water was off. 

On August 24, the BLM mailed Finicum a trespass notice. On United States Department of the Interior letterhead, they told him he owed $1,458.52. 

***

Guy Finicum tells me his brother was always a crusader for the little guy. He says that’s why he went to Bundy Ranch: LaVoy saw a little rancher being bullied by the big government.

“There are individuals to this day who consider LaVoy the best friend they ever had. And often these individuals were those who had no friends — the ostracized ones, the ones who were picked on,” he says. “And LaVoy wouldn’t stand for anybody picking on anybody.” Court documents allege that on September 1, 2015, Finicum was meeting with Keebler — the Utah man who would later go on to push the button on a dummy bomb given to him by the FBI, believing it would destroy a BLM building near Finicum’s ranchlands. Finicum, according to the documents, told Keebler he was ready to plan a confrontation similar to the one at Bundy Ranch. In a meeting with Keebler, which was recorded by the FBI, Finicum said he “wants to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square” and that if he died in a confrontation with the government, “then the cause is the poor rancher’s widow.” 

According to the federal government, that meeting occurred one week after Finicum received notice that he was racking up BLM fines. About a month later Keebler brought the two FBI agents — who he thought were his fellow militiamen —to a meeting at Finicum ranch in Northern Arizona to strategize a standoff. 

By October, his trespass fines had increased to $5,791.72. 

“We as a family were quite concerned when he started drawing a line in sand with the BLM,” Guy says, “because I’m like, ‘LaVoy, I know you don’t like bullies, but you’re picking a fight with the federal government — they don’t lose! They don’t lose’ … And he’s like, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’”

The way his brother explains it, after LaVoy went to Bundy Ranch, all he could see, everywhere he looked, was the federal government “amassing more and more power.” 

“He went from a person flying under the radar to a person who became very vocal in just a matter of a year,” he says. LaVoy believed the country was on the verge of a collapse. It was the entire premise of his novel, Only By Blood and Suffering. 

“He wrote a story with an ending of a cowboy getting into a shoot-out with the federal government and gets killed, and then here that’s exactly what happened to LaVoy,” says Guy. “What do you make of that?” I ask.

He pauses. “It’s no accident.”

LaVoy didn’t do all the things his cowboy protagonist did. But “that was the person he wanted to be,” Guy says. “He wanted to be a person who had the ability to stand up and make a difference and protect what he believed in.”

None of this seems important to the people inside the Patriot movement: the man who struggled to make ends meet; the foster father devoted to helping the kids who needed direction; the rancher who failed time and time again to achieve his dreams, only to finally attain one and only see it for its imperfections. 

Finicum, the Patriot martyr, is a man obsessed with his own end, a man willing to conspire against the government, then die over and over again in an infinite internet loop. 

“It must be so painful to see the video of the shooting,” I say to Guy. 

“What’s harder is hearing the commentary on it, and people saying, ‘Well this is who he is, and this is what he was doing, and this is what happened,” Guy says. I ask for an example. He points to the way the media reported his brother was reaching for a gun in the inside pocket of his jacket. “There is no way my brother would put a gun in his pocket. OK? And how do I know that? I grew up with him,” he says. “We’ve carried guns in a lot of ways, and carrying a gun in a coat pocket doesn’t work. … When you carry it without a holster, it goes in one place. It goes in your waistband, tight against your body.”

The gun in Finicum’s inside pocket is the source of many conspiracies around Fincum’s death — ones that seemed to gain traction during the summer of 2018, as one of the FBI HRT agents, who’d been on the scene, stood trial. Agent W. Joseph Astarita was accused of firing two bullets at Finicum as he leaped out of the truck, then lying about those shots. Video footage does, in fact, show a round piercing the ceiling of the truck as he jumps out with his hands up. Astarita was acquitted of all charges, and the bullets still haven’t been accounted for. To people who saw conspiracy in Finicum’s death, the trial, some felt, gave their version of events credence: If someone was lying about a bullet, wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a gun, too? YouTubers analyzed photos from the scene. Some reason that if Finicum’s weapon was found as police photographs show it inside his jacket pocket, and he tried to reach for it, that gun would have come out upside-down.

It’s not a surprise to me that as even-keeled and even-minded as Guy Finicum seems, that he might not see the reasoning for the shooting in the video of his brother. He theorizes that LaVoy wasn’t reaching for a gun, but was trying to keep his balance in the snow after being shot with a nonlethal projectile. He doesn’t understand why the FBI set up the roadblock where they did, in a place where Finicum might not have been able to brake in time.

He and LaVoy disagreed a lot about liberty — about the best way to convert the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans. LaVoy wanted to fight the government; Guy thought getting individuals to think about liberty — and what it meant to them — was more effective. 

“He’d say, ‘No, we got to make a stand.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ I don’t think we need to, I think we just need to put our hearts in the right place and become that within ourselves,” he recalls.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising for Guy to watch LaVoy go to Harney County, Oregon, to join the Bundys in the refuge occupation. But with no end in sight to the standoff, Guy was worried. So worried, in fact, that he drove to Oregon. 

“I thought things were kind of crazy, and I thought, ‘What in the world’s my brother doing?’ I went up there to talk sense into him, honestly,” he says. But at the refuge, he listened to what LaVoy and Ammon Bundy had to say. He got to know people. He thought maybe it wasn’t what the media had made it out to be.

“My whole attitude completely shifted, and I left saying to my brother, ‘Stay the course. Stick to what you know you’re doing,’” he says. Guy doesn’t think his brother committed suicide by cop. But he claims that he felt his brother was going to die in Oregon.

“People may say you can’t know things like this, but I knew when I said goodbye to him up there in Oregon he was going to die up there. I knew,” he says. “Don’t ask me how I know. I was just standing there and all of a sudden it hit me that he was going to die there. So when I said goodbye to him up there, I really thought it would be the last time I’d ever seen him.”

Guy shakes his head. Says he can’t believe he just told us that. It’s so personal. 

And I don’t know what to do with it either. Sitting there in his living room, I don’t think I understand a love that is so strong you can simply step aside and watch someone you love get what they want most, even if it will kill them, leaving behind daughters and sons, foster children, a wife, a mother, a brother. A ranch. A hard-fought dream.

It makes me wonder if LaVoy’s dream was never about being a lone horseman in the country, but was a way to further escape reality and dissolve into the fictional, apocalyptic world where he could be a hero. 

He ranched in a place so far-flung, it makes Cliven Bundy look like he is ranching in New York City. Finicum was so alone out there. He had his cows, his old cow dog. It looked perfect. And yet, even then, it wasn’t perfect enough. He believed he was entitled to something more. 

Guy Finicum, like people across this country, has a sticker donning his brother’s name on the back of his truck. I ask if he thinks of LaVoy as a martyr. 

“He is a martyr for his cause. He did far more to push the word out about what he stood for by dying than he ever would have if he was out there speaking on the circuit,” he says.

He’s seen Patriots around the country talking about LaVoy like they knew him. Like they really got him. For a while, Guy argued with people online, tried to edit his brother’s Wikipedia page to correct all the things someone somewhere was saying his brother was based off the final seconds of his life. 

People didn’t really know LaVoy, he says. “I believe the vast majority people don’t even know who LaVoy really was, or what he really was standing for.”

  IV.

Back in Oregon at the VFW, Jeanette Finicum is talking to her flock about Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. During the 41-day Malheur occupation, Wyden told a news station that “the virus was spreading” the longer the armed standoff continued. 

“What was the virus?” Finicum asked the crowd. 

“Freedom and truth,” the only person in this room wearing a red Make America Great Again hat calls back. 

But if the goal of the movie Dead Man Talking is to tell the truth and buck the media’s portrayal of LaVoy Finicum as an extremist, racist, or anti-government radical, the journey it has taken over the past six months has been circuitous. She hasn’t shown it to schools, libraries, mainstream GOP groups, or media. 

In fact, if the film’s hosts across America show anything, it’s that the Patriot movement is everywhere — not just the West. It is alive and thriving, and it adores Jeanette Finicum: the poor rancher’s widow. 

The film debuted at the Red Pill Expo in Spokane, Washington, a conference that featured speakers known for homophobia, climate change denial, and an overall obsession with how the “deep state” is apparently operating behind the scenes of the American government. 

Last September, the Colorado Front Range Militia screened the film; the next day, the Heritage Defenders — a conservative group linked to anti-Muslim legislation — got a preview.

The film made its way to Tucson, hosted by people involved with a group of gun-toting local conspiracy theorists that believed they had found evidence of an immigrant child sex trafficking ring — a wild conspiracy that drew the interest of QAnon and Pizzagate believers nationwide—which actually turned out to be just a pile of junk in the desert.

The path continues like this: Finicum brought it to Utah, hosted by the widow of the bankroller of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Bert Smith. It went to Pennsylvania, hosted by an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist. It went to Northern Idaho, paid for by an Idaho Three Percenter who floats QAnon theories on Twitter.

Last summer, Finicum and Herr hosted one of Dead Man Talking’s very first showings at a separatist religious community called Marble Community Fellowship in northeastern Washington. She appeared onstage next to Washington state representative Matt Shea. 

In Salem, the crowd doesn’t hear about how, eight months after LaVoy’s death, Jeanette applied for a new grazing permit with the Bureau of Land Management, or how she met with BLM employees in November 2017 to pay all the fees they owed. 

“The meeting went well” in “what could have been an awkward situation,” wrote one of the federal employees in an email afterward. 

It was as if when LaVoy died, his own personal stand against the government died with him. He became an avatar for whatever anyone wanted him to be.

Jeanette, at the microphone at the VFW, talks about how police shot her husband. “That’s murder, people,” she says. 

“That’s right,” someone in the audience calls back. 

“No American citizen deserves that,” she says. “We deserve our right to due process. We deserve our right to a trial. We deserve to have charges. We deserve to be served with a warrant. We deserve that process. Do we not?”

“You hear my husband saying, ‘We’re going to go see the sheriff, you can arrest me there. Follow me and you can arrest me there,’” she recalls. “He was not fleeing law enforcement when he left that first stop. He left to go to law enforcement whom he trusted. That’s what he was doing.” 

The room nods. 

They believe Finicum — after fighting with the government, after occupying a federal property for weeks — was entitled to choose which agency arrested him. To do what he pleased. 

“He had done nothing wrong,” she says.

Before the day is done, the Old Glory afghan that’s been sitting behind Finicum’s table is auctioned off from the stage. 

The singing cowboy leads the room again; this time he’s an auctioneer. Quickly, there’s a bidding war over the blanket. Two hundred. Three hundred. Seven hundred. Finally a couple wins the afghan. They pay $1,500. That money will go to Jeanette. Behind her merchandise table, Jeanette pops up from her seat one more time as people file downstairs for a spaghetti dinner. Someone is making an offering. 

She hands a man a copy of Only By Blood and Suffering. As if collecting tithes, she accepts his offer. He gives her $500 for the book. 

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

#IFTTT #Blogger

[lodelss]

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Three: The Widow’s Tale

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (7,518 words)

Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

I.

I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die. 

Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.

When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.

In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves. 

That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause. 

But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.

Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”

“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”

In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.

“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked. 

“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down. 

“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!” 

Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road. 

Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”

This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup. 

You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead. 

Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.

As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.

And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.”

***

Three years after Finicum’s death, inside a VFW hall on a puddled side street in Salem, Oregon, a specific brand of nostalgic, stars-and-stripes patriotism is unmistakably on display. 

A Betsy Ross flag hangs in one corner; a flag poster is tacked to the far wall. A bulletin board is bordered by stars-and-stripes rickrack. Red, white, and blue practically seep from the walls as if it were sap pushed from the very planks that hold up the roof. 

On the breast of every person who has paid $50 to be here is a round pin that reads Justice for LaVoy, set on a border of American flag ribbon.

When the day’s program begins, some 100 people push themselves up from folding chairs the best they can, placing palms over hearts. A curly-haired cowboy in tight jeans leads the room in a twangy rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The room turns its collective body — overwhelmingly white and over 50 — toward a  yellow-fringed flag. They sing low and soft with the cowboy, like it’s church. 

As this day unfolds, it will become evident that this is, in a way, a kind of church. These people are believers in an American religion with its own martyr, its own symbols. They have their own prayers, moral teachings, and deadly sins. The name Robert LaVoy Finicum  — or just LaVoy — is a hallowed one in the collective mind of the Patriot movement.

The people have gathered here to remember the death of Finicum. They are angry, mourning. 

And the Passion of Finicum is bolstered by another belief held here: The federal government is so corrupt that it will kill its own citizens if they live too freely.

That message, to one degree or another, has always been on the wind in the West. Since the federal government sent troops in to exterminate Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest; since it declared the polygamous Mormons in Utah in rebellion; since it put a sniper on a mountaintop in rural Idaho and shot a bullet through Vicki Weaver, standing inside her cabin at Ruby Ridge in 1992, holding her infant daughter. But it’s the primary teaching of the Patriot movement — a movement that was around long before the Bundys — that will remain long after Cliven has faded into a folk herodom. 

There’s a key difference between Cliven Bundy and LaVoy Finicum. As I’ve written about the Patriot movement, I’ve come to understand that Bundy might be the godfather of a movement that has bedeviled feds across the West. But to a lot of ranchers, he’s a joke — an affront to everything so many public lands ranchers have worked for. Those people see Bundy’s ideas about the federal government as outlandish and a distraction from the real issues in rural America: jobs, water, development, health care.

But Finicum’s death resonated in the Bundys’ world and far beyond it. He believed in the same disproven, unsupported claims as the family, but the difference was that he believed in those things enough to die for them. Death seems to have softened more people to the idea that the government is the aggressor. With his death, Patriots could point to another marker on its timeline arguing that the government can and will come after people. 

But who Finicum really was before 2016, what he really believed, has never been clear to me. He’s no ancient prophet with a story lost to time. His life story can be told. The government said that Bill Keebler, after bombing the BLM building, claimed his actions weren’t for LaVoy, but for “what he stood for.” So what did he stand for?

Finicum in January 2016 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge during the armed takeover led by the Bundys. Finicum described himself as wanting “to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.” (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Glenn Jones wrote something in his journal about Finicum, and Keebler said his bomb was for whatever Finicum stood for. Both craved eye-for-an-eye acts of revenge, payback: virtues the Patriot movement has always prized. The movement is fueled by a burning for comeuppance, and at its worst, that’s gotten a lot of people killed. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City — an apparent act of revenge for Ruby Ridge and Waco. 

Since Finicum’s death, the message of his martyrdom has been amplified by a very powerful voice: a woman sitting at the back of the VFW behind a table of belt buckles, T-shirts, stickers, and hats bearing Finicum’s distinctive cattle brand. Miniature American flags decorate the tablecloth. 

Dorethea Jeanette Finicum, who goes by Jeannette, is a pretty 59-year-old woman with blue eyes that sparkle and a bright smile with a perfect gap between her two front teeth. She wears a denim shirt embroidered with blue flowers, ashy-blond hair that suggests she’s from a different era, a different world where hairstylists still feather and shag. She is the Patriot movement’s Lady of Sorrows, and people here love to touch her: placing hands on her back, offering handshakes. One man holds her in a tight embrace: “Jeanette, I will never, ever forget you,” he says. Behind her, someone has displayed an Old Glory afghan for the room to see.

She’s a “chuck wagon mom” who, the moment three state-issued bullets ended her husband’s life, turned into a full-blown political activist. Today, she is indisputably one of the stars of the modern Patriot movement. 

She sells stacks of Only By Blood and Suffering, the novel her late husband wrote about an overbearing government that attacks a cowboy rancher, shooting and killing him. Sitting next to her behind that table of goods is her new husband — a plain man in a plaid shirt who scurries away at the sight of a reporter. 

Since the summer of 2018, the widow Finicum has taken a film about her husband called LaVoy: Dead Man Talking on the road — a film she and its producer, a 49-year-old Washington state man named Mark Herr, describe as a documentary made up mostly of footage from Finicum’s free YouTube channel. 

Before queuing up the first hour of the documentary, Herr takes the microphone. All eyes turn his way. “All right let’s get started,” he says. “If you oppose white supremacy, if you oppose — you’re against — white supremacy, would you please stand?” 

The room rises. 

“You don’t agree with white supremacy? OK,” Herr says. “If you’re pro–responsible government — you’re pro-government. You’re pro–responsible government, would you please clap?”

The room claps.

“Wow!” Herr exclaims. “Very interesting!” 

This goes on: Sit if you want the federal and state governments to combine (no one sits). Sit if you want the legislative, judicial, and executive branches to combine into one big entity (no one sits for that either, including producer Ryan Haas and I, who felt it was the sporting thing to do).

“Oh that’s so interesting!” he says, forcing surprise into his words.

“Guess who you’re standing with,” he says, as the room settles back onto the folding chairs. “You stood with LaVoy Finicum.”

Just before Herr hits play, a woman who organized this event reminds the room that there is security here. Anyone caught recording will be removed. A huddle of men and women in sweatshirts bearing the logo of the Idaho Three Percenters militia settles into seats. A man with a handgun on his hip — nestled in a leather holster embossed with the words “We, the People”  — leans against the wall near the only two reporters in this room, me and Haas. 

Dead Man Talking is Finicum’s story told through the eyes of the Patriot movement — so it’s mostly about his life after he went to the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014. The movie doesn’t answer questions about how Finicum came to believe what he did, or how that belief compelled him to die.

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

The film is concerned, primarily, with the man’s death. Dying, after all, is what he’s known best for; Finicum’s public life was only a blip: 21 months out of 54 years. From the time Finicum arrived, alone, at Bundy Ranch in 2014, to the time he died a leader at the Malheur occupation in 2016, only 650-some days passed. He was a martyr made at the speed of the internet.

Finicum’s videos — posted to his YouTube channel — say pretty much nothing anyone in the Patriot movement wouldn’t have heard before. He was like a low-calorie Cliven Bundy delivering a droll, monotonous soliloquy about the Constitution, the founding fathers, freedom, liberty. 

But the videos are a window into everything Finicum wanted to be seen as. In some videos, he wore a cowboy hat, black suit coat, and a Western bow tie — as if he’d just strolled out of a tintype photograph. Behind him: a woodstove, a kerosene lantern, a painting of a cowboy crouched by his horse, and one of a Mormon temple. 

In other videos, blades of grass wiggled in front of the camera, a bright blue sky behind him. “It doesn’t take too much to see that dark storm clouds are gathering,” he said, crouching in front of the camera. “We need to have our houses in order. We need to have our relationships in order. We never know how many days we have on God’s green earth here, and we need to make the best of each and every one of them.”

His channel shows him stockpiling for the end. And in the Bundys, it is as if he saw proof that the horses of the apocalypse were on the horizon.

But the Bundys were shopping a conspiracy theory that Finicum bought hook, line, and sinker when he arrived at Bundy Ranch, as if he’d been waiting to hear it. Like he’d had his finger on a light switch in a dark room for years, itching for the chance to flip it and light up his whole world. 

  II.

LaVoy Finicum and his cousin Josh Cluff both called the tiny, tiny town of Fredonia, Arizona, home. In the winter, the wide-open lands all around it are an otherworldly picture show of red cliffs dripping with melting ice against blue skies. Snowfields are untouched, stretches of pure white fleece that go all the way to the edge of the earth. 

At a lone gas station near Kanab, Utah, where Haas and I make a pit stop, a large pickup truck is surrounded by women and girls in matching prairie dresses: navy blue, plum, lime green. They’ve formed a chain, passing a truckload of boxes into a FedEx van. Their hair is pinned back in braids and waves, styles unmistakably associated with polygamous sects like the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a radical offshoot of Mormonism. 

Seeing them is a reminder that polygamy is still alive and well in this area and around the rural West, despite FLDS leader Warren Jeffs being sentenced to life in prison in 2011. The towns of Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, aren’t far from here — and they’ve long been FLDS strongholds. And they were, essentially, in LaVoy Finicum’s backyard.

The homes and rusted trailers of Colorado City spread south along State Route 389, petering out, then swelling again to form the town of Cane Beds. That’s where the Finicums lived. They participated in civic life, which often intersected with the FLDS church. One of Finicum’s post office boxes was in Colorado City. He attended town hall meetings there, too. Today, just off State Route 389, LaVoy Finicum Road leads the way to Cane Beds (one report attributed the naming of the road to Finicum himself, who requested the switch before he died). 

In the days after his death, prominent polygamists joined the anti-government chorus in declaring Finicum a martyr. Ross LeBaron Jr. — whose father created the polygamous sect Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times — gave a written statement to a Salt Lake Tribune reporter: “LaVoy, the Bundy’s [sic] and others are my heroes. They stood for something bigger then [sic] themselves. They are not sellouts like many are today. I thank God for all those that are standing for the greater good.”

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As I’ve reported in desert towns around the West — up north in Panaca, all through the Arizona Strip — I’ve noticed that this type of interaction between mainstream Mormons and FLDS is typical. Sam Brower, a private investigator who wrote a book called Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation Into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, says polygamists are “part of the landscape.”

Cane Beds, he says, is for “FLDS refugees” and people who often “still believe in polygamy,” but it’s also just a really cheap place to live. 

“I know after [Finicum] was killed, there were people — ex-FLDS people I know — that were saying, ‘I knew that guy, he was living down the road from us.’ They knew who he was.” 

I tell him about the women I saw near Fredonia, how it surprised me to see a group I thought was so fringe, living outside the boundaries of the law, out in the open. “There’s a degree of tolerance,” he says. “You just become more callous to having them around all the time.” I’m bothered by this. Finicum, at the end of his life, was so obsessed with freedom and liberty, and yet I never heard him rage on YouTube about the oppression of women and sexual abuse of girls happening in his literal backyard.

Finicum, who was Mormon, lived around and in FLDS strongholds for much of his life — could even have been friendly with them. In talking to Brower, I have to wonder if living so close to people with a radical lifestyle might have made Finicum more open to hearing fringe religious ideas. 

Like when the Bundys talked to him about the White Horse Prophecy — how they believed their quest against the government was prophesied by Joseph Smith himself. If Finicum had been around people who were preaching an alternate gospel all his life, might he have been more open to believing fringe ideas, instead of questioning them?

***

Robert LaVoy Finicum was born January 27, 1961 to David and Nelda Finicum, and was baptised nearly two weeks later in the Fredonia LDS ward by his uncle, elder Merlin Cluff. 

By the 1960s, Finicums and Cluffs had been around the Arizona Strip for generations. LaVoy’s grandparents Dale and Beulah Finicum homesteaded in the area, living in a dug-out house in the ground. LaVoy’s parents, too, embraced the pioneer grit that helped settle this region. When Finicum’s father, David, was a teenager, he made local headlines when he shot himself in the leg. He was riding on a horse when it brushed against a tree branch that  caught the hammer of the revolver in his saddle and shot him. He rode for 20 more miles before getting help, according to one account.

In 1986, Finicum’s parents rode in a horse-drawn covered wagon from Kanab, Utah, to St. George in a reenactment of the Honeymoon Trail — a wagon train that, in the 1870s, helped populate the Arizona Strip along with transporting goods to St. George to help in the construction of the LDS temple there. After the building was complete, the trail continued to be used, carrying couples, instead of supplies, to be married in the temple.

LaVoy, though, was raised in the far northwestern corner of Arizona Navajo territory, where his father took a job with the Arizona Department of Transportation, paving and repairing roads. He attended school in Page, Arizona.

The family home was close to Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, named for Mormon settler John D. Lee. Lee was executed for helping murder 120 pioneers traveling through a Utah canyon on their way west, an event now known as the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is considered one of the earliest acts of domestic terrorism. 

Lee’s Ferry, also, is the birthplace of a foundational prophet of the FLDS church, Leroy Johnson, who was also an early leader in Colorado City. 

In February 2019, I traveled to the Fredonia home of Finicum’s younger brother, Guy. He looks, and sounds, eerily like LaVoy: He’s bald, wears wire-rimmed glasses, speaks in a measured-tone. And he laughs when I say I just want to hear more about who his brother really was. “Nobody would have dirt like the little brother,” he says. He’s a licensed mental health counselor who works with substance abuse recovery programs, and his words come across with a measured delivery.

“We were kind of isolated down there. No television, only the friends in the couple houses next to us and then the Navajos that lived on the reservation around us,” he says. It took them 45 minutes to get to school. “We’d be the only white faces on the bus.” He says the family was accepted with open arms by the tribal community.

Guy says his brother, as a child, was “the Batman and Joker rolled into one character. He was my nemesis,” Guy says. “He loved to tease me. But as soon as we left the home he was my hero. … He said, ‘Hey, here’s my brother.’ He included me.”

He tells me that LaVoy always wanted to be a cowboy, but “as a little boy, he didn’t have any cattle. So that was my job. I was his livestock,” he says, letting a laugh loose again. “I got a hog tied and earmarked more than once.” I’m so used to hearing grim recollections of LaVoy’s death, it’s surprising to hear his brother laugh about a memory of him.

In high school, LaVoy turned his attention to basketball. Their father poured asphalt by the house so LaVoy could put up a hoop. 

“Every morning I’d wake up hearing that ball bouncing,” Guy says. 

After graduation, LaVoy served his LDS mission in Rapid City, South Dakota, but held onto his passion for basketball long after it was realistic for him to keep pursuing it. 

Upon returning home, he married a woman named Kelly “after a very short courtship,” according to Guy, and the pair soon had their first child. Kelly was from Oregon, and the newlyweds moved there so LaVoy could take a job managing apartments in a Portland suburb. Finicum also hoped he could walk onto a local college basketball team, but quickly realized he couldn’t spend money on tuition that could be used to feed his family.

“He regretted that decision because he was never able to get a college degree. … He had to go to school to play basketball,” Guy says. “But he felt like he had neglected his wife and his little kid.” 

Kelly and LaVoy had four children, and got a divorce in 1989. “LaVoy’s problem is, he always wanted to be a cowboy,” Guy explains.  

Finicum, from his 20s to 40s, bounced around the West. I found addresses for him in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Vegas, near Flagstaff, in St. George, Cedar City, and Provo, Utah. For the most part, he worked as a property manager — something he excelled at, Guy says. But the work never seemed to really interest him. 

“Every time he’d get successful, he’d get sick of living in the city and try to move back home. And when he’d come back home, he just could never get a foothold and find anything that he could support his family on. So they’d come back here and be dirt poor and struggle,” Guy says. Sometimes LaVoy would move to cities before his family, sleeping in his car as he looked for work, brushing his teeth and shaving with a jug of water. 

As we’re talking Guy gets up from his seat in the living room. “I want to show you something,” he says, and disappears into a nearby room. He emerges with a packet of papers in his hands, fixed together with a single strand of suede cord. 

He explains that one year when LaVoy had no money to buy Christmas gifts, he gave him these drawings instead. Guy delicately fingers through the old pages. There’s a drawing of their grandparents’ house, and below it LaVoy wrote about the old wood cookstove inside, the ticking clock on the wall, the smell of percolating coffee — a beverage choice that set them apart from their LDS relatives. 

Guy smiles, but as we look, one page strikes me as particularly haunting. It’s a sketch of the private family cemetery plot in Cane Beds, where LaVoy is now buried.

In LaVoy’s depiction of it, he sketched the place as if there was just one body buried there. In the center of the drawing is a sole gravestone and a mound of fresh dirt. Around it is an old wooden fence, two trees, then vast white nothingness.

***

In July 1990, several months after his divorce, LaVoy married a woman named Rachel, and soon they had two children together. That marriage was short-lived. (I reached out to both Kelly and Rachel on Facebook, but never heard back.)

In 1992, Jeanette Finicum was at a singles dance at her church, and she was line dancing when her future husband walked in. “I can remember being out on the floor and this gorgeous cowboy walked into the room,” she said. “He sat up on the stage and he just sat there watching all of us dance. And I thought to myself, ‘Boy, I want to dance with him.’” 

They danced — a slow song. And when Jeanette asked LaVoy to keep dancing, he said he had no rhythm. She called him chicken. “He says, ‘I’ll tell you what. If you can tell me how many kids I have, I’ll dance this next dance with you.’”

She guessed six. He nodded.

“I went, ‘Oh my gosh, you have six kids?!’ And I’m going, ‘Oh my heck, you are definitely the package deal,’” she recalled. “To make a long story short, two weeks later we were married.” (According to Finicum’s obituary, the couple married in 1994.)

The pair raised 11 children together. LaVoy and Jeanette later moved near Prescott, Arizona, where they became foster parents. Guy explained that being a foster father was perfectly suited to his brother. “He was a very alpha personality. And he just carried presence with him that nobody ever wanted to challenge,” he said. Boys who other foster parents couldn’t control “just would fall in line behind him.” Foster parenting, too, allowed him to earn enough to attain his cowboy dream. 

Records from the Bureau of Land Management show Finicum cosigned a grazing permit in 2009 with his father, but started ranching by himself in 2011 near Mount Trumbull, deep in the Arizona desert, near the Grand Canyon. In 2014, he was in good standing with the BLM. He always paid his bills on time. 

According to Guy, the Finicum boys were raised hearing stories of how the federal government was trying put ranchers out of business. Ranchers who once could run cattle near the Grand Canyon were slowly pushed out, and national monuments like the Grand Canyon-Parashant further reduced grazing areas. 

“That was kind of the culture we grew up with is these guys are here to tell us what to do and take away what we have,”said Guy.

Even when LaVoy was finally able to ranch, something he achieved in his 50th year of life, “he couldn’t make it work very well,” Guy said. Then he went to Bundy Ranch in 2014, met Cliven Bundy and saw yet one more rancher saying the government was no friend to ranchers. 

When he died, Guy said,  ”he was right in the middle of his dream.”

  III.

On June 23, 2015, Finicum wrote a letter to the BLM: 

“I am writing you this letter to express my appreciation for the time we have associated together in connection with my grazing on the Arizona Strip. It has been a pleasant association and without conflict,” he wrote. “I have the greatest respect for you and judge you to be honorable men.” 

He continued: “At this time I feel compelled to stand for [sic] up for the Constitution of our land and in doing so please do not feel that I am attacking your character.” He repeated what Cliven Bundy had been telling people at Bundy Ranch: about the Founding Fathers; about Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17; and the idea of government-owned land being a ruse. Wool pulled over the eyes of hard-working Americans. 

“This is not about cows and grass, access or resources, this is about freedom and defending our Constitution in its original intent.” 

This confused BLM employees. 

On July 13, an employee called Finicum “to discuss what’s going on.” Finicum was cordial but explained he was making a stand. 

“When asked if he was going to turn-out his Livestock + pay his grazing fees, he wouldn’t answer + resorted back to the Constitution and making a stance,” the employee wrote. 

In 2015, Finicum’s permit only allowed for him to graze cattle from October 15 until May 15. But on August 7, a BLM employee called Finicum to let him know he saw 24 of his animals in two pastures, asked him to remove them within a week, and told him he couldn’t put any more cattle out. 

Finicum replied that  he was “not asking for permission.”

Finicum published a video to YouTube that same day, claiming the BLM had drained his water tank to fight a wildfire “without so much as a hidey-ho or a please.” 

“It’s mine. It’s for my cows. I need it,” he said. “Quit stealing.” 

Three days later, the BLM received another letter from Finicum, which stated, “I am severing my association with the BLM.” He took to YouTube again, telling viewers it was time to “do something more than just talk.”  In the video, he’s crouched by the camera in fringed leather chaps with a long scarf tied around his head and a cowboy hat over it. This isn’t the same droll Finicum of the year before, in front of the woodstove and the temple paintings. He’s fired up — and he’s talking directly to the men at the BLM — the people who, two months earlier, he said he had so much respect for. “You gonna come in there like you did with my friend Cliven?” he said. “Well, I’m telling you, leave me alone. Leave me alone, leave Cliven alone.” 

Finicum in the video posted to hisYouTube channel, pAug. 14, 2015.

In the days that followed, the BLM found 32 cows, two bulls, and 24 calves under 6 months old in trespass. All had Finicum’s brands and earmarks. Nearby more were observed near a water trough, but the water was off. 

On August 24, the BLM mailed Finicum a trespass notice. On United States Department of the Interior letterhead, they told him he owed $1,458.52. 

***

Guy Finicum tells me his brother was always a crusader for the little guy. He says that’s why he went to Bundy Ranch: LaVoy saw a little rancher being bullied by the big government.

“There are individuals to this day who consider LaVoy the best friend they ever had. And often these individuals were those who had no friends — the ostracized ones, the ones who were picked on,” he says. “And LaVoy wouldn’t stand for anybody picking on anybody.” Court documents allege that on September 1, 2015, Finicum was meeting with Keebler — the Utah man who would later go on to push the button on a dummy bomb given to him by the FBI, believing it would destroy a BLM building near Finicum’s ranchlands. Finicum, according to the documents, told Keebler he was ready to plan a confrontation similar to the one at Bundy Ranch. In a meeting with Keebler, which was recorded by the FBI, Finicum said he “wants to be like the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square” and that if he died in a confrontation with the government, “then the cause is the poor rancher’s widow.” 

According to the federal government, that meeting occurred one week after Finicum received notice that he was racking up BLM fines. About a month later Keebler brought the two FBI agents — who he thought were his fellow militiamen —to a meeting at Finicum ranch in Northern Arizona to strategize a standoff. 

By October, his trespass fines had increased to $5,791.72. 

“We as a family were quite concerned when he started drawing a line in sand with the BLM,” Guy says, “because I’m like, ‘LaVoy, I know you don’t like bullies, but you’re picking a fight with the federal government — they don’t lose! They don’t lose’ … And he’s like, ‘Well, they’re wrong.’”

The way his brother explains it, after LaVoy went to Bundy Ranch, all he could see, everywhere he looked, was the federal government “amassing more and more power.” 

“He went from a person flying under the radar to a person who became very vocal in just a matter of a year,” he says. LaVoy believed the country was on the verge of a collapse. It was the entire premise of his novel, Only By Blood and Suffering. 

“He wrote a story with an ending of a cowboy getting into a shoot-out with the federal government and gets killed, and then here that’s exactly what happened to LaVoy,” says Guy. “What do you make of that?” I ask.

He pauses. “It’s no accident.”

LaVoy didn’t do all the things his cowboy protagonist did. But “that was the person he wanted to be,” Guy says. “He wanted to be a person who had the ability to stand up and make a difference and protect what he believed in.”

None of this seems important to the people inside the Patriot movement: the man who struggled to make ends meet; the foster father devoted to helping the kids who needed direction; the rancher who failed time and time again to achieve his dreams, only to finally attain one and only see it for its imperfections. 

Finicum, the Patriot martyr, is a man obsessed with his own end, a man willing to conspire against the government, then die over and over again in an infinite internet loop. 

“It must be so painful to see the video of the shooting,” I say to Guy. 

“What’s harder is hearing the commentary on it, and people saying, ‘Well this is who he is, and this is what he was doing, and this is what happened,” Guy says. I ask for an example. He points to the way the media reported his brother was reaching for a gun in the inside pocket of his jacket. “There is no way my brother would put a gun in his pocket. OK? And how do I know that? I grew up with him,” he says. “We’ve carried guns in a lot of ways, and carrying a gun in a coat pocket doesn’t work. … When you carry it without a holster, it goes in one place. It goes in your waistband, tight against your body.”

The gun in Finicum’s inside pocket is the source of many conspiracies around Fincum’s death — ones that seemed to gain traction during the summer of 2018, as one of the FBI HRT agents, who’d been on the scene, stood trial. Agent W. Joseph Astarita was accused of firing two bullets at Finicum as he leaped out of the truck, then lying about those shots. Video footage does, in fact, show a round piercing the ceiling of the truck as he jumps out with his hands up. Astarita was acquitted of all charges, and the bullets still haven’t been accounted for. To people who saw conspiracy in Finicum’s death, the trial, some felt, gave their version of events credence: If someone was lying about a bullet, wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a gun, too? YouTubers analyzed photos from the scene. Some reason that if Finicum’s weapon was found as police photographs show it inside his jacket pocket, and he tried to reach for it, that gun would have come out upside-down.

It’s not a surprise to me that as even-keeled and even-minded as Guy Finicum seems, that he might not see the reasoning for the shooting in the video of his brother. He theorizes that LaVoy wasn’t reaching for a gun, but was trying to keep his balance in the snow after being shot with a nonlethal projectile. He doesn’t understand why the FBI set up the roadblock where they did, in a place where Finicum might not have been able to brake in time.

He and LaVoy disagreed a lot about liberty — about the best way to convert the hearts and minds of their fellow Americans. LaVoy wanted to fight the government; Guy thought getting individuals to think about liberty — and what it meant to them — was more effective. 

“He’d say, ‘No, we got to make a stand.’ And I’m saying, ‘No, I don’t.’ I don’t think we need to, I think we just need to put our hearts in the right place and become that within ourselves,” he recalls.

So it wasn’t entirely surprising for Guy to watch LaVoy go to Harney County, Oregon, to join the Bundys in the refuge occupation. But with no end in sight to the standoff, Guy was worried. So worried, in fact, that he drove to Oregon. 

“I thought things were kind of crazy, and I thought, ‘What in the world’s my brother doing?’ I went up there to talk sense into him, honestly,” he says. But at the refuge, he listened to what LaVoy and Ammon Bundy had to say. He got to know people. He thought maybe it wasn’t what the media had made it out to be.

“My whole attitude completely shifted, and I left saying to my brother, ‘Stay the course. Stick to what you know you’re doing,’” he says. Guy doesn’t think his brother committed suicide by cop. But he claims that he felt his brother was going to die in Oregon.

“People may say you can’t know things like this, but I knew when I said goodbye to him up there in Oregon he was going to die up there. I knew,” he says. “Don’t ask me how I know. I was just standing there and all of a sudden it hit me that he was going to die there. So when I said goodbye to him up there, I really thought it would be the last time I’d ever seen him.”

Guy shakes his head. Says he can’t believe he just told us that. It’s so personal. 

And I don’t know what to do with it either. Sitting there in his living room, I don’t think I understand a love that is so strong you can simply step aside and watch someone you love get what they want most, even if it will kill them, leaving behind daughters and sons, foster children, a wife, a mother, a brother. A ranch. A hard-fought dream.

It makes me wonder if LaVoy’s dream was never about being a lone horseman in the country, but was a way to further escape reality and dissolve into the fictional, apocalyptic world where he could be a hero. 

He ranched in a place so far-flung, it makes Cliven Bundy look like he is ranching in New York City. Finicum was so alone out there. He had his cows, his old cow dog. It looked perfect. And yet, even then, it wasn’t perfect enough. He believed he was entitled to something more. 

Guy Finicum, like people across this country, has a sticker donning his brother’s name on the back of his truck. I ask if he thinks of LaVoy as a martyr. 

“He is a martyr for his cause. He did far more to push the word out about what he stood for by dying than he ever would have if he was out there speaking on the circuit,” he says.

He’s seen Patriots around the country talking about LaVoy like they knew him. Like they really got him. For a while, Guy argued with people online, tried to edit his brother’s Wikipedia page to correct all the things someone somewhere was saying his brother was based off the final seconds of his life. 

People didn’t really know LaVoy, he says. “I believe the vast majority people don’t even know who LaVoy really was, or what he really was standing for.”

  IV.

Back in Oregon at the VFW, Jeanette Finicum is talking to her flock about Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. During the 41-day Malheur occupation, Wyden told a news station that “the virus was spreading” the longer the armed standoff continued. 

“What was the virus?” Finicum asked the crowd. 

“Freedom and truth,” the only person in this room wearing a red Make America Great Again hat calls back. 

But if the goal of the movie Dead Man Talking is to tell the truth and buck the media’s portrayal of LaVoy Finicum as an extremist, racist, or anti-government radical, the journey it has taken over the past six months has been circuitous. She hasn’t shown it to schools, libraries, mainstream GOP groups, or media. 

In fact, if the film’s hosts across America show anything, it’s that the Patriot movement is everywhere — not just the West. It is alive and thriving, and it adores Jeanette Finicum: the poor rancher’s widow. 

The film debuted at the Red Pill Expo in Spokane, Washington, a conference that featured speakers known for homophobia, climate change denial, and an overall obsession with how the “deep state” is apparently operating behind the scenes of the American government. 

Last September, the Colorado Front Range Militia screened the film; the next day, the Heritage Defenders — a conservative group linked to anti-Muslim legislation — got a preview.

The film made its way to Tucson, hosted by people involved with a group of gun-toting local conspiracy theorists that believed they had found evidence of an immigrant child sex trafficking ring — a wild conspiracy that drew the interest of QAnon and Pizzagate believers nationwide—which actually turned out to be just a pile of junk in the desert.

The path continues like this: Finicum brought it to Utah, hosted by the widow of the bankroller of the Sagebrush Rebellion, Bert Smith. It went to Pennsylvania, hosted by an Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist. It went to Northern Idaho, paid for by an Idaho Three Percenter who floats QAnon theories on Twitter.

Last summer, Finicum and Herr hosted one of Dead Man Talking’s very first showings at a separatist religious community called Marble Community Fellowship in northeastern Washington. She appeared onstage next to Washington state representative Matt Shea. 

In Salem, the crowd doesn’t hear about how, eight months after LaVoy’s death, Jeanette applied for a new grazing permit with the Bureau of Land Management, or how she met with BLM employees in November 2017 to pay all the fees they owed. 

“The meeting went well” in “what could have been an awkward situation,” wrote one of the federal employees in an email afterward. 

It was as if when LaVoy died, his own personal stand against the government died with him. He became an avatar for whatever anyone wanted him to be.

Jeanette, at the microphone at the VFW, talks about how police shot her husband. “That’s murder, people,” she says. 

“That’s right,” someone in the audience calls back. 

“No American citizen deserves that,” she says. “We deserve our right to due process. We deserve our right to a trial. We deserve to have charges. We deserve to be served with a warrant. We deserve that process. Do we not?”

“You hear my husband saying, ‘We’re going to go see the sheriff, you can arrest me there. Follow me and you can arrest me there,’” she recalls. “He was not fleeing law enforcement when he left that first stop. He left to go to law enforcement whom he trusted. That’s what he was doing.” 

The room nods. 

They believe Finicum — after fighting with the government, after occupying a federal property for weeks — was entitled to choose which agency arrested him. To do what he pleased. 

“He had done nothing wrong,” she says.

Before the day is done, the Old Glory afghan that’s been sitting behind Finicum’s table is auctioned off from the stage. 

The singing cowboy leads the room again; this time he’s an auctioneer. Quickly, there’s a bidding war over the blanket. Two hundred. Three hundred. Seven hundred. Finally a couple wins the afghan. They pay $1,500. That money will go to Jeanette. Behind her merchandise table, Jeanette pops up from her seat one more time as people file downstairs for a spaghetti dinner. Someone is making an offering. 

She hands a man a copy of Only By Blood and Suffering. As if collecting tithes, she accepts his offer. He gives her $500 for the book. 

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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