Growing up in North Carolina, I knew of three guns in my home. First, there was the BB rifle that rested barrel-up against the corner of the wall behind my father’s spot on the couch. He liked to lean it out the window and shoot squirrels who climbed onto the bird feeder. He also owned two shotguns that he took with him on hunting trips. I’d like to say he always stored them in a safe or the attic, but I think I came across them in the coat closet a few times. I had no interest in the guns but liked to make dollhouse furniture with their orange plastic shells.
Then, when I was in my late teens, my dad brought me down to the basement closet, where he stood on a stool and slid a shoebox from the top shelf. He lifted the lid and unwrapped a cloth, revealing a handgun. He said it had been my step-grandfather’s, and we had inherited it when he passed away. He said this in a hushed, serious tone. Then he showed me where to find the bullets, in case anything ever happened.
In We Burn Daylight (Random House, 2024), Bret Anthony Johnston’s novel reimagining the infamous 1993 Waco siege, guns are everywhere from the very beginning, just like guns are always everywhere in America—even more so in the South, even more so in Texas. The story is told by two teenage narrators. The first, Roy, comes from a long line of law enforcement. His father is the county sheriff, his older brother is a Marine, and his grandfather is a retired sheriff who, legend has it, used to sprinkle gunpowder on his eggs—to give him energy. No wonder Roy describes the stars as looking “like bullet holes.” When he is anxious, a friend asks him, “Are you waiting for a starter pistol?”
When we first meet Roy, he is not playing with guns but learning to pick locks—an activity that, for all its illegality, is a far less dangerous way of getting into a locked building than what law enforcement will later resort to. Roy says, “I knew my father’s life—and my brother’s and grandfather’s—wouldn’t be mine.”
Our other narrator, Jaye, is the daughter of a woman who moved to Waco to help establish a commune with a preacher calling himself “the Lamb.” Not long after Jaye arrives at the compound, the Lamb—her would-be abuser—hands her a Derringer. But Jaye learns to drive instead of shoot. She will solve her problems behind the wheel of a truck rather than the barrel of a gun.
As Roy and Jaye connect and their respective communities stockpile weapons in preparation for a showdown, we sense their relationship is doomed. And yet it’s hard to know who poses a greater threat: the Lamb, or the ATF. In Waco, the condoned and uncondoned live side by side: there’s Fort Hood and the compound; the Baptist preacher and the cult leader; the legal guns and the illegal ones—perhaps equally dangerous, perhaps not. These doubles remind me of the doubling back I experienced in my own understanding of the siege at Waco. I was seven when it took place and grew up thinking of it as little more than a violent end to a wacky cult. Years later, I came to believe the massacre was something more complex: a tragedy of excessive violence, brought on at least in part by law enforcement.
Law enforcement shows up to this novel in big and complex ways. Roy’s sheriff father is the quintessential “good cop”—a mild-mannered man in a Stetson just trying to do right by his constituents. His Farmer’s Almanac, his “adding machine,” and his folksy, Andy Griffith–esque way of speaking are so clearly from a different American consciousness as to feel mythic rather than real. Johnston may intend the character this way, or he may intend him as an outmoded form of community law enforcement—a cop from a better, simpler time, powerless to impact the bigger picture.
I never trusted him. When he says, “[The Lamb is] going to get himself killed. Him and all of those knuckleheads, none of them are long for this world,” I wondered if the utterance was a prophecy or a threat. Despite Roy’s close relationship with his father, when Roy finds a grenade on the Lamb’s ranch, he keeps the evidence a secret. For all the sheriff’s good intentions, Roy can’t quite believe he’ll keep Jaye and himself safe. The teens in this book seem to know something the adults don’t: that if they are going to have any kind of future, they must create it themselves.
Twenty years after that day in my dad’s basement, I was walking my daughter home from preschool when I felt the buzz of a news alert on my phone. There had been another school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas. My phone continued to buzz, announcing more alerts, the death count rising in real time along with my steps: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen children in total—elementary school students—plus two teachers and the eighteen-year-old shooter. I later learned that the city had spent forty percent of its budget on police—police who waited over an hour before trying to save the children, police who physically restrained desperate parents trying to enter the school to do what the cops wouldn’t.
These massacres have turned the names of towns and schools into shorthand for violence: Uvalde. Sandy Hook. Columbine. Waco.
We all know how the siege at Waco ends, and so we know how the novel will end too: in bloodshed, in violence. In short: not well. I was surprised, then, when (spoiler) the last few pages of the book departed from this bleak inevitability. The siege on the Lamb’s compound still turns bloody, and the people inside, even the children, still die, but our two protagonists receive an epilogue that flips the tale on its head. We Burn Daylight asks us not only to relive our national traumas—as if we don’t already continually do so—but to reimagine new endings for them.
I’m sensitive these days, and the conclusion of this book brought me to tears—not only because of the unbearable relief I felt for these characters, whom I love, but also because the ending is so fantastic and farfetched that it draws attention to itself as fiction, an effect I trust Johnston intends. Jaye and Roy’s epilogue is the one we would want for our own children and for the children of Uvalde; it is the ending we would want for ourselves. In a barren desert landscape where law enforcement is designed not to protect but to dominate, and where it is always the children who must reap the results of escalating violence, Johnston’s ending plants a green seedling of hope.
The title is a quote from Romeo and Juliet, another famous tragedy. “To burn daylight” means to waste time—but on what? On love? On fiction? On something other than violence and domination? I don’t know. But I know the daylight was gone by the time I turned the last page of this book, under the light of my bedside lamp. It was nearly midnight here in Atlanta. My oldest child—the same one I walked home the day of the Uvalde shooting—lay next to me, having awakened and climbed into my bed. Now, she slept, her chest rising and falling where, many nights since last October, holding my phone under the covers, I have watched footage of dead children, their faces shrouded in white sheets, their parents weeping over their bodies.
As I closed my eyes, I dreamed of a better world, one more worthy of her and her friends. And I promised her, silently—perhaps foolishly—that when she awoke, I would burn daylight creating it with her.
