Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (3 page)

After running a few errands on this sweltering day, Arden dropped into the Rose Bowl drive-in. Another well-dressed woman was sitting there, and Arden recognized Marilyn Story. It was a surprise. For the most part, the doctor's wife kept to herself. She was a petite, pretty woman with thick dark hair and a slightly hawkish nose that was said to come from an Indian ancestor. To the lanky Arden, Mrs. Story seemed a perfect match for her small husband. Together, they looked as though they'd just walked off the top of a wedding cake.

The two women pulled up chairs at the same table, and the subject turned to religion, as it so often did in this small town where the three main topics of conversation were God, the price of oil at the well-head, and the status of the beet crop. After a while, Mrs. Story said pleasantly, "You know, Arden, you and I don't believe in the same God."

Arden was accustomed to such comments from Gentiles, but she was so certain of her own theology that she never felt defensive or belligerent. The various religions had coexisted happily in Lovell ever since a new Lutheran pastor had preached against the Saints and watched as half his congregation walked out. "Those are our friends you're talking about," he'd been told. "We know the LDS and they're not like that."

Now Arden responded, "But, Mrs. Story, there's only one God."

The doctor's wife said she would be teaching a Bible class that night at the Baptist church. "Why don't you come," she said, "and I'll show you the difference."

After forty years in the Mormon church, Arden felt no need for a Baptist Bible lesson, but she didn't mind listening while she finished her lemonade. Marilyn described an omnipotent God so big that he covered the universe and so small he could be in your heart. Then she added, "But of course you Mormons don't believe in Jesus Christ."

"Why, of course we do," Arden said patiently. Why else, she asked, would we call ourselves the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Jesus was a prophet and so was the current president of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City. The main difference was that the president was alive and capable of receiving and revealing divine truth; Jesus was dead and his words were preserved in the Bible.

Arden issued a polite invitation of her own. "Marilyn, you can come to our church anytime, Sunday school, sacrament meetings, I don't care, and you'll hear about the life of Christ."

"Well, you don't understand what I mean."

"Perhaps I don't." She decided to try simple logic. "Do you believe Christ was born and grew up and he was crucified and hung on the cross?"

"Yes."

Arden held up her palms in a gesture that said Marilyn had just proved her point. "Well, if you believe that God and Christ are the same individual, why would he put his self into the womb of a woman and come forth as a child and grow up in normality as a mortal being on this earth? He wouldn't have to do that, Marilyn, not if he's God. It wouldn't make sense to go to all that trouble."

They batted the subject back and forth till it was time to go home and irrigate. As Arden left, she handed the doctor's wife her personal copy of the book
Jesus the Christ,
which was the LDS priesthood manual at the time. "Read this," she said, "and you'll see that we do believe in Christ."

Marilyn thanked her and said she would.

The next time Arden ran into the doctor's wife, neither woman mentioned the textbook or the evening Bible classes. Arden didn't push. Mormons were energetic proselytizers, and she liked to remind her children, "We're a missionary church." But something told her that Marilyn Story's religious beliefs were no more susceptible to change than her own.

Sometimes the two women chatted at the office while Arden waited to see the doctor. She learned that Marilyn had been brought up on a cattle ranch and revered her cowboy father. "My dad was a wonderful Christian," she said. "He taught Scripture."

To Arden, that explained a lot. She herself had a good knowledge of Scripture, but both the Storys could out-Bible her every time. "That Dr. Story!" she told Dean one night. "He just loves to banter Scripture." Non-Mormons had an unfair advantage; they only had to learn the Bible, not the four "sticks" studied by every devout Saint. Why, the Book of Mormon ran almost 800 pages, and there were two other sacred books,
Doctrine and Covenants,
and
The Pearl of Great Price,
plus the Bible itself. That was a lot to remember.

Gradually Arden came to admire the doctor's wife. Beneath her cool exterior, she showed a survivor's sense of humor. "And she's never ignorant towards others," Arden told Dean. (In the Big Horn Basin, "ignorant" meant "rude.") But Marilyn seemed to have a low opinion of herself, and Arden couldn't imagine why. "I was such an airhead," Marilyn described herself as a young woman. She didn't seem to think she was living up to her role as the town doctor's wife. Arden wondered if the self-deprecation had something to do with her life at home, some deficiency in love or warmth. Marilyn admitted that she'd never been tactile. "I love to have affection shown me," she said in a moment of candor, "but I'm not the one that's gonna go up and hug my little girls and stuff like that. I almost have to make myself do that. Doctor is different. He shows affection. He's a very touching person."

Apparently Marilyn wanted a larger family, but there was a problem. "There's more women come into this office with tipped uteruses," she complained one day. "He's more concerned with them than he is with me. My uterus is tipped so bad that my chances of getting pregnant are nil."

A few months later, Arden heard that the doctor's wife was pregnant. She telephoned her congratulations. "Oh, wouldn't it be nice," she said, "if you had a boy."

Marilyn said in a curiously flat voice: "We don't want a boy."

"Well, my lands!" Arden said. "Why not?"

Marilyn explained that she was five three and a half and her husband was only a few inches taller and "he doesn't want to bring another short boy into the world."

In later years, Arden hated to think about the little girl's tragic life. Annette Story was born in 1967, curiously hairless except for a faint blond fuzz. Arden thought she was the saddest child she'd ever seen. The other two daughters favored the Story side, but this child had a long unsmiling face and big sad eyes. Marilyn said the baby favored her own family, the Taussigs of Colorado.

At twenty months of age, Annette was playing in her front yard when Marilyn stepped inside her house just long enough for the child to toddle into the blind spot of a woman who was backing her car down a neighbor's driveway.

For a while, Arden and her friends hadn't been sure that Marilyn would survive. She was too distraught to go out and have her lovely black hair done for the funeral. Arden went to the house and did it for her.

Everyone knew that the old Baptist church would be too small to hold all the townspeople who wanted to offer their sympathies to the bereft doctor and his wife. Arden and some of the high priests saw to it that the Saints offered their much larger building, but Dr. Story chose the Lutheran church. The overflow crowd spilled under the maples and cottonwoods. Arden had never seen such a public display of sympathy in Lovell.

Dr. Story seemed to snap back, but Marilyn remained in deep mourning. "Listen here," Arden told him on an unannounced visit, "you've got to do something about your wife. She needs to get out and see people."

Story seemed surprised that anyone had noticed a problem. "She's working in the back of the office," he said. "She does the billing."

"Yes, in that dang back," Arden said angrily. "Get her out in front where she won't be stuck all by herself."

The next time she came in, she saw that Marilyn's desk had been moved from behind a closed door. But the poor woman still looked as though she'd cried all night.

A few months after the tragedy, Arden learned that Story had resigned his position as Sunday School teacher and led a rebellion in the Baptist church. The word was that the local Baptists had become too liberal for him, trying to interpret Scripture instead of following it. The splinter group was meeting at the Oddfellows Hall and already raising a building fund!

The Lovell Bible Church opened a year later, up among the small frame houses on West Eighth. It was a plain wooden building with a simple wooden cross on the front, no stained glass or other ornamentation, a church as simple as its founding principle that the Bible held all truth.

Arden and her pretty daughter Meg attended the dedication and open house. They hadn't taken two steps inside the foyer, walking across a rug that Dean McArthur had helped install on his part-time job, when Arden stopped short. She thought, They're building an edifice to our Father in Heaven and these geeks are smoking. Why, it smells like a pool hall!

Dr. Story 'cook her by the elbow. She jerked away and said, "I can't believe that you would allow tobacco to be smoked in your church."

He promised to order a ban. He took her aside and said, "If you have any questions about our church, ask me." His face was never easy to read—he spoke in the same soft monotone no matter v/hat he was discussing, and he seldom showed emotion—but on this day he radiated deep pride and satisfaction.

It wasn't long before Arden heard that the local Baptist church was going broke; Dr. Story's rebellion had cut heavily into the membership and the diminished congregation couldn't pay its bills. He-argued that it was their own fault. "They were taking too much direction from out of town," he explained on her next office visit. "A new preacher was coming in and he told everybody, 'We'll start using the northern Baptist literature.' That means humanizing the Scriptures, teaching that the Bible isn't the word of God. How could a Christian accept that?"

Arden realized it was his old bugaboo again. How he hated to be controlled! It wasn't necessarily a bad trait, but he seemed to carry it to extremes.

He changed the subject to the Mormon church. She knew that he had strong opinions about the Saints, even though he expressed them without rancor.

She teased him by quoting a hallowed precept: "As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become."

"That's just plain impossible," he exclaimed. "What makes you Mormons think you can put yourselves on the same plane as God? Why, that's audacious."

Arden said, "Can you put yourself on the same plane as your father?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because he's older. He's had other experiences."

"Okay, what's the difference? You could still grow. While you're growing, your father's growing, and it's a continual circle."

He looked put off, so she took another tack. "I want to ask you about your dedicatory prayer the other day. You always say that we Mormons use Canaanite language in our prayers, thee and thou and thine, but when you gave the prayer you talked to the Lord just like I was sitting here talking to you. And you say we put ourselves on the same plane as God?"

He tried to respond, but she plowed ahead. "You're bringing him down to your language. We speak to him as a deity, with thee and thine, because that's the way he talked when he was on earth. But you—you don't go to his level. You bring him down to yours."

Dr. Story seemed bored with the subject. He said, "What other questions do you have?"

She felt a little impish. "Well," she said, "I heard them call you Elder Story. Why do you settle for being an elder in your church when you could be a high priest in ours?"

He smiled. They both knew she was being facetious.

They talked off and on for two hours. He didn't yield and neither did she. At the end, she told him half-jokingiy that he was "stiff-necked and impudent."

He seemed bemused and said, "That's Ezekiel, isn't it?"

Trying to build up its membership, Dr. Story's new church brought in a traveling speaker, an excommunicated Saint who was making a career out of "exposing" Mormons. Arden's church had never lacked apostates. They wrote books against LDS, published newsletters, sold cassettes, bought time on the radio. Mormon-bashing was big business, even in the shadow of the Salt Lake City Temple. "Mom," her daughter Minda once asked, "how come so many people write against us? We don't write against anybody."

"I don't know what they're so het up about, honey," she'd answered. "We work hard and mind our own business. I guess that bothers some folks."

Lovell history had been written in the Saints' sweat and blood. Mormonism thrived in barren regions; it was a religion of abstinence and cooperation, simple joys, pleasures deferred till the worthy stood together in flowing white robes. There was a time, early in the century, when the whole Big Horn Basin, towns like Cowley, Deaver, Frannie, Powell, Lovell and Arden's childhood village of Byron, were peopled almost entirely by Mormon colonizers dispatched by the high priests of the St. George temple in Utah. They'd broken through the alkali crust with pickaxes and laid track for the railroad and dug canals to irrigate badlands where only cactus and greasewood had grown. Making something out of nothing had always been a Mormon specialty.

The handful of non-Mormon settlers, including cattleman Henry Clay Lovell, had watched the colonization and concluded that the Saints could make water run uphill. LDS planners, following principles laid down by Brigham Young, partitioned the bottomland into one-acre plots with a house at each corner and communal property in the middle. The first streets were wider than most big-city thoroughfares, including New York City's Broadway. (Arden held the accepted belief that President Young had insisted on wide streets because he looked into the future and saw cars and trucks, while others claimed that he simply measured out the width required to turn a horse and wagon.) Trees and shrubs had sprung to life as platoons of colonists brought cuttings up from St. George.