Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (20 page)

She provided no details, and John didn't ask. He arranged to see Story and returned in less than an hour. The doctor had denied any wrongdoing and said, "I'm sorry if that's what Mae imagined. I guess I'll have to have a nurse in the room to avoid misunderstandings." John told Caroline that it sounded reasonable to him.

She thought, I should have told John everything. I should have told him what was done to me, not just what was done to Mae. I didn't give him enough ammunition, and Story gave a convincing explanation. It's too late now.

She advised Mae to forget what had happened. "If you don't, you'll never get over it." She didn't know what else to say. She felt as though she'd arranged her daughter's rape.

At
3 a
.m
., she was still thinking about Arden McArthur's visit. She'd had nine years of fitful sleep. The memory of how she'd failed her daughter crept up on her when the lights went out and sometimes stayed with her all night.

I was too late then, she said to herself, and it's still too late. If I was guilty then, I'm more guilty now for keeping it a secret.

She brooded for a few more days, then took the boldest step of her life. She wrote the Medical Board but warned that she could

"DOC

never go public, even under subpoena. Neither John nor Mae's hotheaded husband Bill could ever know the truth. She had enough on her conscience. She didn't want to be an accomplice to murder.

23

MEG ANDERSON

On a windy night in midsummer, at about the time of the second hoeing of the beets, Meg McArthur Anderson found herself at a class reunion with her childhood friend Susan Story. Nursing school hadn't changed the older daughter. She was friendly, but she retained something of the somber air that the McArthurs had always noticed in the Story females.

Meg was apprehensive when the two of them were assigned to the same table. As they "vizted," it became clear that Susan was unaware of her father's perilous situation. The realization made Meg feel like a hypocrite as she talked about old times and tried to pretend that nothing had changed between them.

For several weeks after the reunion, she met Susan in dreams and guiltily assured her that she treasured their friendship. She explained that Dr. Story was sick, not evil, but that he was hurting defenseless people and had to be stopped for everyone's good, including his own. In each dream, Susan listened understandingly and gave her a friendly hug.

When Meg was awake, she felt like a traitor.

24

ALETHA DURTSCHE

The letter carrier kept bumping into the Storys. It was spooky, especially since she'd sent off her complaint to the Medical Board. One day when she was delivering mail to the clinic, Marilyn Story called out "Aletha!" as though greeting an old friend. Her eyes looked so inflamed that they appeared to be infected, and Aletha figured she either had an eye disease or she'd been crying for days. "Look here!" Marilyn said with an enthusiasm that seemed put on. "We've finally got your picture framed."

Aletha looked at the stalking tiger she'd painted six years before. Why were they just getting around to framing it? She was afraid she knew.

Oh, Marilyn, she said to herself, you found out about my letter. I'm the one who ruined your eyes. How could I be so cruel to such a nice lady?

After her shift, she went home and cried herself.

BOOK II

THE LAW'S DELAYS

25

MARILYN STOW

Whatsoever house I enter, there will I go for the benefit of the sick, refraining from all wrongdoing or corruption, and especially from any act of seduction.

—The Oath of Hippocrates

Marilyn knew who was behind the trouble. It was the McArthurs, with help from Caroline Shotwell. John had made the mistake of telling Caroline she was overweight, and the silly thing had been ticked off ever since. As for the McArthurs, Marilyn had been warning him about Arden for twenty years. "Why do you spend so much time talking to that woman?" she would say. "You're getting farther and farther behind."

John always shrugged. He talked religion and politics with everybody. And Arden—well, she could talk the spots off an Ap-paloosa. Marilyn had laughed when Arden sent in the Mormon missionaries. Who did they think they were dealing with, a Unitarian? John had studied Scripture since the age of twelve, and it wasn't something forced on him by fanatical parents, either—it was his own free choice. He'd spun the LDS missionaries' heads.

Marilyn wondered why John stopped talking about the silly charges against him. She wished he wouldn't shield her from his problems. Except at the very beginning of their courtship, they'd never talked much. By the time he came to bed at night, she was usually on her second or third dream. He read Scripture, medical books and bulletins, books on religion, patriotism, conservative politics, U.S. history. If he was scheduled for surgery in the morning, he would bone up on the procedure till long after midnight. Sometimes he studied in the doctors' lounge till it was time to scrub up. He'd always been painstaking to a fault.

But Marilyn had learned early that medicine was his true love. "It's been a lonely life," she reflected later, "especially now that my girls are grown and gone. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I'm alone most of the time, but I guess that's true of any good doctor's wife. At the end of the day he doesn't want to rehash everything that happened—he's too tired. Even when John's home, I'm alone, because he reads medical books constantly. We have a garage full of them. He delivers a lot of babies, and that means we can never schedule a vacation. I don't know how many times the girls and I have driven to family reunions by ourselves. He'll fly out later—or not come at all."

Marilyn consoled herself with the thought that she'd never expected to marry so important a man. As a child in the Rockies, she'd considered herself ordinary.

She was born in 1930, one of seven children of a well-to-do Colorado rancher. "My childhood would have been perfect," she said, "except for horses." Even full grown, she was only three and a half inches over five feet, and when she was a child, every horse on the Taussig spread looked liked a Clydesdale. "Dad put me on a horse when I was a baby," she said with a grin. "It bucked me off and he caught me in midair. My stirrups were always too long, and when I was a kid the cowhands were too busy to shorten 'em for me. I've been thrown off, run away with, scraped off of trees, whipped by willow branches, bumped and bruised over every inch of my body."

Luckily, she enjoyed her family's other animals, especially the six hundred registered Herefords. During World War II, when her brothers were gone, she worked side by side with the buckaroos. She rode fence, checked gates, roped calves, helped brand. Sometimes a dogie would wander off, and she would find herself riding among hundred-year-old junipers, three feet tall. In summer, when the herd followed the freshly greening grasses up the mountainsides, she bunked in a log cabin without running water or lights. In that male society, she was no stranger to privation or fear and no quitter, but when her father's favorite saddle bronc, part quarterhorse and part Thoroughbred, flipped her into a herd of cows, she vowed never to ride again. She was fifteen.

She grew into a fine-boned handsome woman, a perfect size four, with a dazzling smile, long black hair, and strongly chiseled features that displayed her part-Indian ancestry. After a year of business school in Denver, she took a job as a secretary, and hated it. "I guess I missed the cows," she said.

One Christmas she visited her brother and a cousin at Wheaton College ("For Christ and His Kingdom") and enjoyed the school and the maple-lined Illinois town so much that she got a job and planned to stay. Then she met a young premed student. Nearly forty years later, the memory still excited her.

"John was four years older, handsome, very mature, and eligible. He showed some caring. He was a 'Christian.' He had black hair and deep-set brown eyes that kind of sloped; we called them triangle eyes. He was a charmer, a tease. When I found out that his mother was Inez and his aunt was Lola, I asked him where those names came from and he said his grandpa's name was Ferrero and they were Mexicans. That's still a family joke!

"He asked my dad for my hand, and we were married in the little Parshall Chapel near our ranch. My head was in the clouds. I looked forward to a lovely life as a doctor's wife. We honeymooned in Yellowstone in Dad's big old Oldsmobile because John didn't own a car. That was a rude awakening—the first time I'd ever had to worry about money. I was such an airhead!"

When John was in medical school and money was still short, he would take her to the Omaha Stockyards on his nights off. "I was working full time as a secretary, putting him through school, and Omaha was a tough adjustment. I missed my cattle. We'd walk on the stockyard overpasses. What a sight! I just like watching 'em bawling and carrying on. I like their sound, their smell." The familiar white faces took her back to the Indian paintbrush and columbines in the high pastures around her childhood home.

Except for the stockyards tours, she seldom saw her studious husband. "It was a bad way to start a marriage," she admitted later. "I didn't discover till we were married that he's a night owl. If he wasn't working late, he was reading till all hours. When he interned in Omaha, he worked thirty-six hours on and twelve off, and I was really alone. I about died in Omaha. All I remember is the heat. We had to live in low-cost public housing without air-conditioning. John was embarrassed about living in a subsidized setting. He didn't like public handouts; that was his main topic of conversation with everybody. But we weren't gonna make it otherwise. We were thrown in with black people and cockroaches. I hadn't seen either one in Colorado.

"We moved to Ogden, Utah, for his surgical residency. Mormons were all around us. That's where I first heard the expression 'secret and sacred.' One day I got into a backyard argument with a Mormon man about the trinity. I found out they just don't understand it and there's no use trying to explain. Their heads are set hard against the trinity and the cross, and they speak of Jesus as their 'brother.'

"One day John came home all red in the face. He said, 'Do you know what a Mormon nurse told me? She said, "As we are now, God once was. As God is now, we will become."' He said, 'Why, that's blasphemous!' John never trusted Mormons after that."

She saw the Mormon religious garment hanging on a clothesline and asked him to find out about it. John reported that ultrapious Mormons insisted on wearing the protective underwear till death. During surgery some of the doctors would let it dangle from a wrist or an ankle. Others would remove it and slip it back on before the anesthetic wore off. Both Storys thought it was a silly charade.

After Susan was born and John completed his residency, they moved back to his hometown of Maxwell to share the big old gabled home with his mother and sister. "John sat up till all hours talking to Gretchen or reading," Marilyn remembered. "I went to bed alone every night. They'd talk about the good old days. I couldn't handle it."

Through the medical grapevine, they heard that an ailing physician named Dr. Ben Bishop needed someone to help with his practice for $1,000 a month. John accepted the challenge and moved his wife and baby into an upstairs apartment in the Nebraska panhandle town of Crawford. Eight months later Marilyn spotted a newspaper ad saying that Lovell, Wyoming, needed a doctor.

"I was pregnant with Linda," she recalled, "and we drove up to look the town over, me and John and baby Susan. John likes big cars. We had an old tan Lincoln Continental, a four-door sedan, with the fanciest inside you ever saw—electric windows, leather, the works."

The drive was an education. After crossing the wet green prairies of Nebraska and the undulating antelope plains of southeastern Wyoming, the northern part of the Cowboy State looked lunar: brown scorched land littered with geological rubble and screes, slashed and pocked with gullies and caves. Salt sage and greasewood dotted the escarpments and the flanks of the mountains, and cottonwoods crowded the twisting river bottoms, but little else seemed to grow except on irrigated benches and hard-scrabble patches of farmland. They could see ten miles ahead on the highway. The wind blew constantly, stirring up grit. They passed fumaroles puffing like volcanoes. Phosphates, bromates and chlorides had pushed up to the desert surface along with other ates and ites and ides, giving the countryside a thin frosty coating. Pumping jacks dipped and raised and dipped and raised, but the oil fields looked marginal.

It was a relief to cross the last thirty miles of desert and drive under the trees of Lovell. For an hour or so they just rode around town. Magpies fluttered on Main Street. A cloying smell reminded them of rotting hay; John was usually tolerant of such things, but he said that this particular smell would take some getting used to. They found out that the aroma came from hot beet pulp in the sugar refinery at the west end of town. As they drove past, they heard the whir and hum of the machinery and saw the white plume flowing heavy from the stack.

On balance, the place made a pleasing impression. "We saw a nice little town with wide streets and irrigation ditches running along the gutters," Marilyn recalled. "The Mormons watered their lawns and gardens with it. Quaint. The town needed a doctor desperately, and they treated us like royalty. So we decided to help out for a while. We didn't intend to stay. We found a house up on Nevada Avenue—it was a dirt road then—and I didn't even buy new curtains. John set up in that little building downtown but refused to sign a five-year lease.