Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (2 page)

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and candidates for godhood themselves.

When she left the new doctor's office, she asked for the bill. The geek said he would send it.

Three years later a bill for $8 arrived. She paid it and wondered what kind of an operation he was running. Luckily it didn't matter. Good old Dr. Tom Croft, brother-in-law and former medical partner of the disgraced Dr. Horsley, continued to treat the McArthur clan as he had for years. He knew his medicine, and he didn't natter around as though he'd just got out of medical school.

When Dr. Tom announced that he was leaving Lovell for good, Arden rushed to his office. She knew too much about the Rose Doctor to consider switching to him, and she didn't want to return to the geek. "If you leave, then I can't have any more babies," she complained to Dr. Tom in her slight lisp. He'd delivered six of hers, but she wanted more. The Bible said, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth"—not that the McArthurs needed the advice. In addition to their own brood, there was always an orphan or two underfoot in their two-story farmhouse, or a neighbor child whose parents were having problems, or a derelict teener. The Mormon prophet Mosiah had instructed: "Ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor." Arden and Dean were known throughout the Lovell stake for succoring those in need, especially children. Once they'd found themselves caring for three sets of twins, none their own.

"I'm leaving for good, Ard," Tom Croft said in his soothing voice, "but you needn't worry. Dr. Story's here now."

Arden said, "But I need a
good
doctor."

"Well, let me tell you something," the old Mormon said (and years later she remembered it word for word). "Whenever I've gone out of town and turned a patient over to Dr. Story, she's never come back to me."

Dr. Tom seemed to mean it as a compliment.

* * *

When she became pregnant and returned to the little clinic off Main Street, she found Dr. Story unchanged. He still mumbled, still talked in circles, still seemed . . . different. Along with other patients, Arden sat in his waiting room for hours. She would say to herself, Five more minutes and I'm walking out. But she never did. She had a reputation for forcefulness, but underneath she was still a subservient little Mormon girl, raised in a time warp, untouched by the sexual revolution or the women's movement or any of the other main currents of American life. Lovell women knew their place and stayed in it. This Story person wasn't a very impressive specimen, with his dark-rimmed glasses and wispy build and conservatively combed black hair, but in an LDS community he enjoyed an exalted station. He was a doctor, and a male.

It took Arden several visits to change her mind about the new man. When she was asked later why she hadn't quit him at the beginning, she wasn't exactly sure. There'd never been more than two or three doctors in Lovell; it seemed they were always coming or going, and at least the geek from Nebraska seemed permanent.

At that stage in her life, in the early 1960s, long before things started to go bad, Arden Loraine Tanner McArthur was considered a success by nearly everyone in town, but not for reasons that mattered to her. She and her husband Dean, who was descended from an old Lovell family, owned 160 irrigated acres at the eastern edge of town and leased 600 more. Dean was the quiet master of his domain. On the rare occasions when he raised his voice, everyone jumped.

With help from his aging parents across the road, Dean and Arden reared a brood of singing children in a two-story brick house a quarter mile off the Globe Canal. In their yard and along the ditch, billowing cottonwood trees threw up shade against the desert sun and turned into big golden globes in the fall. The lady of the house, despite the finely articulated features and wide-set blue eyes of a fashion model, was renowned for her typically
Mormon
zest for work. In her four decades of life, she'd
known
little else.

Mosiah had spoken on that subject, too: "And I did cause that the women should spin, and toil, and work . . ."

Arden enjoyed the feel of rich, moist earth and the view from the undersides of cows, but she tried not to look the part. Neither Mosiah nor any other prophet had ordered farm wives to walk with their shoulders slumped or let their backsides expand like prize pumpkins. ("Chunk City," a newswoman nicknamed Lovell when the trouble erupted years later.) Arden always kept a close watch on her posture and her diet, and made her children do the same.

As a depression child on a forty-acre truck farm west of Lovell, Arden Tanner had helped her family raise the potatoes, corn, peas, string beans and asparagus that brought in a few cents a pound. She milked, slaughtered chickens, slopped hogs, mucked out stalls and rode the sprung seat of the old family tractor to plow and cultivate. By such diligent effort, the Tanners of Big Horn County, descended from five Mormon brothers who emigrated from England, managed to eat well, pay full tithe and keep their bills current. From grammar school on, Arden held a paid job ("there was no other money") as the janitor's helper. She and her nine siblings owned one pair of shoes each and went barefooted when the ground wasn't frozen. When she was asked how the Tanners weathered the depression, she joked, "What depression?"

Like all Latter-day Saints, Dean and Arden McArthur regarded their time on earth as preparation for the Celestial Kingdom. Arden accepted the literal truth of every pronouncement by the high priests, every dictum in the Book of Mormon and other holy texts, every crackling revelation sent from the Heavenly Father to the current LDS prophet in Salt Lake City. If the church counseled against enlightening teenagers about sex, Arden complied. When the revealed truth held that blacks were ineligible for the priesthood, she believed, and when the latest prophet proclaimed that God now held otherwise, she accommodated to the change. A century earlier, she might have accepted polygamy, subsequently outlawed by church and state. She firmly believed in the priesthood —the power to act for God bestowed on males from the age of twelve—and often asked her husband or one of her older sons to anoint her head with holy oil from the refrigerator. And she believed in what the prophets called "the burning in the bosom." Such rushes of feeling transcended reason and were understood to come straight from the Lord.

Early in her marriage, Arden had seen to it that she and Dean had been sealed "for time and all eternity" in a ceremony inside the cavernous temple in Salt Lake City, a ritual that made them eligible for the Celestial Kingdom. Sometimes she traveled 350 miles to the regional temple in Idaho Falls to perform the ordinance known as "baptism for the dead," retroactively saving not only every relative she could unearth from the family genealogies but a long list of other lost souls—LDS, Christian, Jew and atheist alike. It was one of her church's deepest obligations.

She held a "Temple Recommend," which required total obedience to church discipline, the most worthy thoughts and deeds, and the purest of ideals and practices, including "compassionate services" for others, needy or not, Mormons or not. From time to time she held office in the Relief Society, the women's auxiliary. Members fed the hungry and comforted the sick and bereaved, according to the words of the prophet Moroni: "And except ye have charity ye can in nowise be saved in the kingdom of God."

The Relief Society met every Sunday under another Moroni rubric: "Charity Never Faileth." Arden visited with suffering parishioners and sometimes counseled them for hours. Through the years she baked bread and cinnamon rolls, and gave most of it away. When the first aromatic wisps curled up from her big oven, Dean would yell, "Who's it going to
this
time?" Arden's generosity was a family joke.

Eventually a few of her hot cinnamon rolls began showing up at the home of the new doctor and his family. Arden would drive the sweet-smelling tray up the easy slope of Nevada Street and wait in the family Buick while her daughter Meg or Marie or Michele ran it inside. Mrs. Story always gave a friendly wave.

* * *

By the mid-sixties, after the new doctor had been in town five or six years, Arden realized that she'd been doubly unfair—first by judging him and then by misjudging him. The Storys turned out to be active Baptists, nondrinkers, nonsmokers, as straitlaced as the most pious Saint. Arden told her friends, "Why, they even live like LDS!" One of her talents was barbering, and she began cutting the hair of the two Story children, Susan and Linda. She wouldn't take payment, but sometimes a nice gift turned up on her doorstep.

As a general practitioner, Dr. Story seemed the equal of Dr. Croft. His workups were precise; his pelvic examinations sometimes lasted a half hour or forty-five minutes, and he would take fifteen minutes to do a Pap smear. Arden was having female problems at the time and often found herself in the stirrups. Like many women, she hated the procedure, so "I willed my mind to be somewhere else, and I never felt discomfort or pain. Of course, I wasn't crazy about his surprises. You'd go in for a sore throat and he'd look at your chart and say, 'You haven't had a pelvic for a long time,' and then you'd be flat on your back."

Somehow the busiest doctor in Big Horn County always had time for the McArthurs. It seemed as though every time one of the kids had an accident, it was on Dr. Story's day off, but when they reached the emergency room he'd be waiting. "Arden," he said one day, blinking his owlish brown eyes, "I've told my office, 'If the McArthurs call in, beep me right away.' " He made house calls without complaint.

It hadn't occurred to Arden to wonder how her family rated such special treatment, so she was surprised when a friend asked: "What is it about your family and Dr. Story? He's got you way up on a pedestal."

Arden winced. "He'd better not," she said.

"He said that if all the Mormons were like you and Dean and your family, he'd be LDS himself. But the others are all hypocritical."

Arden bridled at any criticism of her church, and heights made her dizzy. She marched into the clinic. "You get me off that pedestal!" she told Dr. Story. "We McArthurs are just human beings. I don't want to be put in a position where I fall so hard that I can't be picked back up. And I don't want my family in that position, either."

"Oh, Arden," he said consolingly, and passed a few shy compliments about her style and looks. Sometimes he seemed like a sawed-off Cary Grant. To Arden, it was almost as though he realized he had to develop a warmer bedside manner. She wasn't sure what to make of all the compliments. She knew she had reasonably good looks, but didn't care. She dressed up for personal pride, not to attract males. And anyway, what difference did looks make to a doctor?

For another year or so she saw him off and on at his office, and now and then bumped into him on Main Street. Once she invited him to a political luncheon at her home. "How would that look?" he said. "We have to remember the doctor-patient relationship." She found it an odd comment; she hadn't been inviting him to a motel. He showed up at her meeting but left early.

The Storys seemed to limit their social lives to fellow Baptist church members—not that it mattered to Arden. Her time was spoken for and then some. Nevertheless, she began to realize that somehow, against all odds and probabilities, she and John Story had become good friends.

She remained aware of the proprieties and continued to address him as Dr. Story. He bristled when anyone called him Doc or John —"Don't first-name me," she heard him tell a patient. He seemed to relax a little when he saw her. He would slide his chair over to his power-driven examining table and tell her how nice she looked. When the nurse tapped on the door to remind him that he was running late, he said, "Yes, yes," and kept right on talking.

Her visits sometimes stretched to an hour. "Don't leave," he would say when he'd finished treating her. "I'll be right back." He would disappear into another examining room and return a while later, blinking behind those somnolent brown eyes that seemed overwhelmed by his glasses.

He showed a wide range of knowledge, but his favorite themes seemed to be bureaucratic incompetence, the wastefulness of the Social Security program and health insurance and public welfare, and the dangers of centralized control, not only in government but in religion and business. He'd quit the American Medical Association because it was too liberal. He spoke highly of Phyllis Schlafly, Barry Goldwater, the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and various other right-wing icons, and seemed to despise Lyndon Johnson, every Kennedy including those unborn, and "Commie sympathizers" like Hubert Humphrey, Wayne Morse and Eugene McCarthy. None of these attitudes struck Arden as particularly outlandish. Big Horn County was so conservative that its handful of dedicated liberals routinely registered Republican to keep from wasting their vote.

One midsummer afternoon when the sweet white steam from the sugar factory curled over town, Arden donned a favorite lemon-yellow frock and strolled the quarter mile to the downtown shopping strip along Main Street. She had a thin waist, a substantial bust and a shapely backside, and once in a while she liked to change out of her stiff old overalls and look like someone who didn't spend all day in the company of cows. She knew how to apply makeup. She liked to rub on a touch of blusher, pile her ginger hair high atop her head, and slip into four-inch heels that made her look even taller than her five feet seven. As she walked along the highway, shoulders back, head high, she knew that she attracted disapproving stares from local women who believed that dressing up was for church. There were even a few Lovell women (nonacquaintances, to be sure) who considered her conceited or cocky. Arden wasn't bothered; she knew what she was. Her wardrobe was sparse, but she'd learned how to mix and match, and she kept her best outfits in such pristine condition that her daughter Minda continually complained, "Oh, Mom, do I have to go to that dang dry cleaners
again!"