Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (5 page)

"After the first milking, we'd all pitch in and do the beets, singing away. I'd help shovel the green tops onto the truck and my dad would run 'em out to the animals for fodder. Some mornings it was so cold you could see every note in your breath."

An uncle and aunt went on a two-year mission to New Zealand, and every morning and evening Meg and her year-older sister, Marie, saddled their uncle's two crazy horses—"they were green-broke but they didn't know it"—and rode to the relatives' farm to milk their cows. There was no mention of pay. Meg was happy to help bring the truth to a far-off land.

From the time she was twelve, her favorite childhood
experience
had been the visit to the temple in Idaho Falls to be baptized for the dead. For weeks the children would pore through family histories and genealogies and write out lists of candidates. Usually Meg would be baptized for ten or fifteen people at a time, but once she'd gone in with a thousand names. It was exciting to think about saving so many souls and meeting them later in the Celestial Kingdom.

Except for her experiences with Bob Asay, Meg reckoned that her childhood would have been close to perfect. He was "Uncle Bob" to the McArthur children, although he was really their father's distant cousin. Asay (pronounced "Acey") was a common name in Lovell. The first Asays had come to the Big Horn Basin in a wagon train in the spring of 1900, and by the 1970s there were twenty in the thin Lovell phone book and more in the back country. Dean McArthur sometimes laid rugs for his cousin's business, Bob Asay Carpet and Furniture, and was paid in so.rely needed cash. Asay, a bachelor who lived in an apartment in his store, had been welcome in the McArthur farmhouse for as long as Meg could remember. He brought candy and ice cream, let the children sit on his lap and steer his car, took them on church excursions, regaled them in a lovely voice with songs that he composed himself, and stripped them of their innocence.

They had no means of defense. Like most LDS children, they'd been kept in the dark about sex. Meg had never seen her parents naked. Her earliest sexual memory was of a hot summer day when she'd taken her shirt off and her mother had yelled, "Put a shirt on! You're a girl." The two-year-old child had burst into tears.

None of the McArthur children ever gave sex much thought. Meg witnessed barnyard couplings but didn't relate them to human activity—and certainly not to her parents or herself. At school she learned how amoebas and frogs and worms reproduced, but nothing about the sexual practices of humans. At the end of her junior year, she went to her bishop, lowest-ranking officer in the Mormon hierarchy, to renew her Temple Recommend.

"Do you masturbate?" he asked.

She said no. Later she asked another girl what masturbation was. "Oh, my word," Meg exclaimed. "Who would do
that!"

At nine or ten, she'd become the first of the McArthurs to be bothered by "Uncle Bob." She couldn't imagine why a devout LDS businessman in his late thirties would want her to stroke his thing or why it grew so large in her hand, but Uncle Bob was always nice about it.
¹
A year or two passed before she began to feel that she was doing something wrong.

She thought of complaining to her mother, but the subject was still taboo. Something told her to keep her secret from her friends at church and school. Instead, she smiled, kept up her good works, and held her shame inside.

She didn't know how to turn Uncle Bob away. He was pleasant about his persistence, teasing and cajoling but never brutal. If he wasn't pestering her, he was pestering her siblings, sometimes in front of one another. By the time the children united against him, Meg had developed a pronounced aversion to sex and a morbid fear of rape. For most of her years in high school, she refused to go out alone at night. She wasn't positive what a rapist did, but she knew it would be torture.

Confused about sex, she didn't read any sinister significance into her painful GAA physical. Dr. Story was as unassailable in his lofty position as the Lovell stake president. Nor did she make any retroactive connections in college when she visited a Utah doctor for a pelvic examination. Meg asked him, "Are there different instruments that you use? My doctor back home said that I was so small that he could never give me an exam."

The gynecologist shook his head and went to work. There was a twinge of pain, and in about two minutes the exam was over. Meg asked, "Any problems?"

He said, "Did you feel the instrument?"

"No."

"You don't have any problems."

"DOC"

Meg felt self-conscious as she raised herself off the table, "Well," she said, "I was just under the impression that I was too small, because my other doctor said he couldn't give me a pelvic."

The Utah doctor didn't comment. Apparently doctors never discussed doctors. It was no big deal to Meg.

MINDA McARTHUR BRINKERHOFF

"Do you know the middle-child syndrome?" she asked, her words flying out at a disk jockey's speed. "I was fifth out of nine—the syndrome is you don't get enough attention." She talked right through a deep breath. "Gosh, I would never go back to being a kid again." She sounded as though she expected to be interrupted any second. Like most of the McArthurs, she had a rich full voice. At the evening meetings of the Mormons' Mutual Improvement Association, "the Mutual," she rippled the curtains with her vibrato:

Genealogy, I am doing it.

My gen-e-a-lo-gy!

And the reason why I am doing it

Is very very plain to see.

I will write my book of re-mem-ber-ance.

I'll write my his-to-reeeee. . . .

Minda was as tall as her mother, with slender legs that turned shapely in heels and a willowy figure that she bemoaned. Her curly

dark-blond hair hung long in back. She had the widest eyes in the family, a firm chin, a straight nose that tilted up at the end—and a tendency to slouch. "All my life I heard, 'Stand up straight,' and Mom would push my shoulders back. She used to get so mad. I wore a shoulder brace in my freshman and sophomore years, but no one could see it. I didn't like to stand straight because it looked as though I was pushing out something I didn't have."

When Minda discussed her childhood, she made it sound like a painful sequence of hardships and tragedies, mostly involving livestock. "I was the best milker, but I forgot to milk one night and the next morning, Oh, shoot! Their udders were painful and swollen! . . . My sister Michele slept on our goose and killed it. . . . My dad stepped backward and broke his pet goose's neck. We didn't have too much luck with geese. ... A heifer knocked me off the fence onto the cement 'cause I got too close to her calf. Gol, we had the
meanest
bulls. It was a challenge to get across the pasture to the canal."

She remembered the way the pigs squealed when she held them down for her dad's knife. "They ate each other's bags when Dad threw 'em," she said, giggling and turning red. "Honest Injun! They fought over 'em and gobbled 'em down.
Uggggh!
Double
uggggh!"

When she was in junior high, a dog maimed the chickens, "so we had to have a big chicken kill. We'd run 'em to Dad and he'd step on their heads, hang 'em up on the fence and let 'em drain. Then we'd run 'em to Mom and she'd dip 'em in the boiling water and we'd pluck the feathers." She laughed hysterically. "It was a warped childhood." She rolled her blue-green eyes at her own exaggeration.

One day her Aunt Ramona had hurt her feelings by saying, "Minda doesn't take life seriously enough. Everything's a big joke to her."

It was true that Minda never used one word when ten would suffice. To some she came across as a scatterbrain, but her friends and family knew better. She was nervous, bright and quick. Her popcorn-popper speech and loud spasms of laughter helped dissipate nervous energy. Sister Meg had a tendency to do the same, and so did her mother, though neither with the middle child's intensity. In between laughs, Minda berated herself about every little thing: "Well, gol, girl, you've got to do those dishes!" "Come on, you silly!
Move it!"
She would say, "Shame, shame, double shame! Minda, what is the
matter
with you?"

In Lovell High School she'd been a tomboy who barely spoke-to girls, played football and "Army" with the boys, and starred as first trumpeter in the band. She loved to blow her horn; she bragged that she could play anything up to (but not including) "The Flight of the Bumble Bee." In church she usually got stuck with the third part harmony "because nobody else would play it." The Lovell church was the only known LDS congregation with a trumpeter playing third part. At informal church functions, her luminous sister Meg pounded the drums on uplifting songs like "Genealogy" or the rousing Mormon marches.

Minda's childhood problem was low self-esteem. "Everybody thinks I'm the outspoken one. But gosh, I wasn't that way as a kid. I hated housework, so I'd go out and help my dad. I'd milk, feed the animals, grind the hay, run the tractor. I love my mother, but we weren't as close as me and my dad. I got along with the other kids, I guess. The household rule was, don't mess with Minda. My sister Michele and I used to wrestle, and I always won. My little brother Mike, I could just clean his plow. When it came to wrestling, I knew little tricks, like get 'em in a leg-lock and squish 'em hard."

Her voice lowered. "I spoke my mind and didn't take anything off anybody." Her family advised her to soften, but she couldn't. Who would stand up for the middle child if she didn't stand up for herself? "I served my time in the principal's office. In those days, my best friend was my journal. Some subjects were just too personal. I filled notebook after notebook."

She giggled as she pulled a yellowing Stenopad from a box crammed with papers. "I wrote this on my thirteenth birthday in 1971. 'Everybody forgets my birthday, even the kids at school.' Two days later, Michele and I were baby-sitting our baby brother Marc. We let him play on the lawn while we cleaned house, and our dog Champ chomped him on the face. Dr. Story wasn't around and another doctor had to take stitches. Michele and I were gonna run away. We knew that Dad was gonna
kill
us."

For blood offenses, church doctrine called for blood atonement (one reason that the Mormon theocracy known as Utah permitted execution by firing squad). Minda and her sister feared that their father might follow the stricture, and they composed a plea called "Watch My Tiny Baby." It opened:

We have run away cuz Champ bit Marc this very day.

And ended:

We hope you keep your cool, So we can go to school. So we

Can go so nice and clear with out bruises on the rear.

The two sisters were so frightened that night that they made their grandmother sit between them as their parents walked in the door. Dean McArthur ignored the girls and exacted his blood atonement on the dog.

Minda thought she could put her finger on the exact moment when she began to think of herself as a lower form of life. "Uncle Bob began on me when I was seven," she said, and burst into tears. "Oh, gol," she wailed, "I'm so ashamed." She composed herself and told her story in fits and starts:

"He did it to me dozens of times. I kept it to myself till I found out that he was bothering my sisters and brothers. Nobody would've believed me anyway. Shoot, I was a little kid and he was a businessman with mooga-bucks.

"After the first year or so, he'd be with us in our living room ... and he'd have one of us massaging it in front of the others.

He used the same technique, the same words. 'Come sit on my lap.' He always had bags of candy,
tons.
He'd say, 'Don't you want to drive my car?' Or 'Come over here. I have something for you.' He'd put your hand on his penis and make it go up and down, and he'd be saying, 'We sure been having good weather lately, haven't we?' 'How're things at school?'

"I don't know if he had, uh, orgasms. I wouldn't have known what they were. Meg says she's always hated the smell of semen, and she thinks the aversion might have started with Bob Asay. But she's blocked all the details out and . . . she's not sure.

"At night I was always cold, 'cause Dad set our thermostat at fifty-five, and I would sneak down and sleep in front of the old gas fireplace in our living room. Uncle Bob caught on and started coming into the house after Mom and Dad went to bed. I would be the only one in the living room. Once I panicked—a little kid with this huge man on top of me. I pushed him off and ran upstairs to my room. After that, I started sleeping in my mom's closet where there were warm pipes and ducts. He never found me there.

"I used to hide from him in the daytime—we all did. Mom and Dad wouldn't be out the door five minutes when he'd be on the phone. 'Are Dean and Arden there? Well, when'll they be back, honey?'

"We caught on and wouldn't answer, so he just started dropping in. He'd say, 'I called and nobody was home.' We hid in the dirt room under the floor till he found us there. I hid on a shelf in a walk-in closet. I'd drag in a box and hide behind it and pull a blanket over me. Mom and Dad would come home and be all upset 'cause the work wasn't done around the house. Uncle Bob was so close to them, we didn't dare tell.

"I was supposed to be baptized when I was eight, and I told my mom I wasn't worthy. I couldn't say why, so she had me baptized anyway. I cried a lot. My mom picked up that I didn't like myself. She put a sign on my mirror: 'I like what I see.' Gol, you gotta give her credit. She was in there trying.