Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell (7 page)

She earned degrees in speech and theater but still yearned for love and marriage. Twice she became engaged and disengaged, then fell deeply in love with a handsome agnostic and even flew to New York to meet his parents. On the return flight to Utah, she remembered the warmth of her dad's hands on her head as he gave her the priesthood blessing. How could she deny this experience to her own children? Ever since she'd been a little girl, her fondest dream had been to be sealed in the temple with her husband and children and go on to eternal life in the Celestial Kingdom. She loved her irreligious fiance, but earthly time was no more substantial than a fast paradiddle on her drums.

She waited till his birthday to tell him it was off. He made her promise never to communicate with him again. She felt terrible. He was the first enemy she'd ever made.

5

MINDA BRINKERHOFF

Introducing the bent handle of a spoon, I saw everything as no man had ever seen before. . . . The Speculum made it perfectly clear from the beginning. ... I felt like an explorer in medicine who views a new and important territory.

•—J. Marion Sims, M.D., father of nineteenth-century American gynecology

Boys entered Minda's life at fifteen, but she had no particular interest in sex. Her first boyfriend would put his head in her lap while they watched TV on the floor. "I didn't catch on," she said in laughing retrospect. "I never got aroused. I just didn't
know."

One night when Meg was home from college, she told the young couple, "I just don't think you should lie around like that."

Minda said, "Like what? Watching TV?"

Inevitably, the boyfriend took her for a drive and tried for a kiss. "I didn't give anything back," she recalled, giggling at her naivete. "He kissed me again and I still didn't respond. He says, 'Are we having a good time or what?' Then he took me home. Gol, I wondered what ticked him off."

She fell in with rowdies from Calley, six miles up the Billings highway, telling herself she was "raising their souls." It was an odd mix. She'd been girls' president of the Mutual, the LDS young people's group. Her new friends dubbed her "Little Miss Churchy" because she attended every Mormon function, neither drank nor smoked, and insisted on being home fifteen minutes before her father's 10
p.m
. curfew. And she never stopped chattering about the mission she planned and the souls she would save for her Heavenly Father.

In her junior year, she met classmate Scott Brinkerhoff, a devout Mormon from an old Lovell family. He was six feet tall and built like a linebacker, with broad shoulders and a narrow backside. He had liquid brown eyes and a lovely golden tan. He wore his slightly wavy brown hair in a "missionary cut" that she knew her parents would approve. His baby face didn't look as though it would ever support a beard or mustache. She liked his values and his style. He wore cowboy boots to school. He hunted and lumbeijacked in the Shoshone, Big Horn, Pryor, and Absaroka Mountains, the ranges that defined the Big Horn Basin. His idea of a good time was rising at dawn and cutting firewood all day. "Scott," she chided him, "you won't quit till you've logged the whole mountain."

"That's my plan," he admitted with a laugh.

He intended to go on a two-year mission and then become a cowboy. He was president of the local seminary, a high honor, but he remained quiet and modest. Like her, he had a zest for work. He left school an hour early each day so he could help his dad build houses.

After Minda and Scott had become friends, he confessed that his parents sometimes griped about "that damn Dean MacArthur." Minda was dimly aware that a few citizens resented her dad. There would always be folks who couldn't stand perfection.

Scott recounted an odd story. In the mid-70s the Brinkerhoffs had built Dr. Story's new clinic up near the hospital. The place still smelled of sawdust and fresh paint when the doctor complained, "This examining room door is hung backward. I want more privacy for my patients."

Gerald Brinkerhoff, a wiry little man with a quick tongue, didn't mind making sensible changes, but this door swung inward and leftward against the wall—perfectly standard. If it opened to the right, it would cover the light switch.

"Too late, Doc," Scott's father said. "We've got the wires in."

A few days later, Brinkerhoff heard that Dr. Story was downtown shopping for heavy drapes to circle his examining table. The two men finally settled on a doorknob that could be locked from the inside of the room with a twist. Scott said his father had passed the incident off as an example of Dr. Story's weirdness.

For a long time, Minda loved Scott but kept it to herself. "Then one night he said, 'I love you, Minda,' " she recalled, "but I took Mom's advice and kept quiet. She'd always said, If you ever say I love you to a boy, you'll feel committed to him and you won't know how to get out of it. I loved Scott, but I never said the words."

It almost seemed to Minda that she learned the theory and practice of lovemaking simultaneously. As she wrote later, "I gave something to Scott and it was all I had that was mine and mine alone."

The next morning she wondered if he would speak to her. "I went to school early. Scott walked in and said, 'Good morning.' I was real uncomfortable. I thought, Shoot, what have I done to this perfectly good relationship? He leaned over my desk and kissed me and told me he loved me more than ever. After that, we were totally dependent on each other."

While Minda's parents were on a day trip to Billings, the young lovers considered eloping. She held back. "What about my dad?" she said. "It would hurt him."

Late that night, her mother tiptoed into her room and asked, "Minda, are you awake?"

"Yes, Mom." They often had bedside chats.

Arden said, "I need to ask you something." There was a tremulous note in her voice. "Are you . . . sleeping with Scott?"

The McArthur children did
not
lie. "Yes, Mother," Minda said. "I am."

"How long?"

"Two or three months. Oh, gol, Mom, why are you asking?"

"I don't know," Arden said. "It's just something I had to know." She paused, and Minda didn't know how to fill the silence. "Are you pregnant?"

"Oh, no. Hunh-uh!"

Shortly after her mom left, Minda tiptoed to her parents' bedroom and asked if she could go deer hunting with Scott after her chores in the morning.

Her father said, "Well, I don't think it's a good idea right now. I need to think a little bit more. I'm not thinking real good right now."

She was milking in the morning when he took her aside. He looked as though he hadn't slept. "I can forbid you to see Scott," he said, speaking softly, "but then you'd just see him behind my back." He reached out and took her hand. "If there's anything I can do to help you . . ." His voice trailed off, and he started again. "You know what I think is best, Minda? I don't think you should be sleeping with the young man, but I'm not gonna say you can't. I'll support you. Do you need anything? What're you doing about birth control?"

"We're fine," she said. She felt squirmy talking to her dad about sex. "Gosh, Dad, we're being careful."

He warned, "There's no such thing as being careful."

She didn't tell him that birth control was Scott's department. She knew nothing about it and didn't want to know.

The lovers exchanged the deepest vows short of a wedding ceremony. "We knew dang good and well that they wouldn't let us be married," Minda said, "so we just finally decided to be committed to each other and not to care what our parents thought. We just wanted to be together. Then one night Scott said, 'I'm not gonna be careful anymore.' "

A few months later, in November 1975, she realized that she was pregnant. She hadn't missed a period, but she knew. She even figured the baby's due date: August 20. She was positive.

When she told Scott, he said, "Well . . . okay. Are you gonna tell your parents?"

She said yes.

She told them two months later. Her dad said, "You're
not
pregnant, Minda. Mom told me you've been having your periods. You're just too ashamed and embarrassed about what's going on, and it's getting harder for you to face us."

"No," Minda said. "I'm really pregnant."

Her mom chimed in, "No! You can't be!"

But her father's face showed that he believed. "Well," he said, "what do you want to do about it?"

She knew he wasn't referring to abortion. No former LDS bishop would consider such an offense against the Heavenly Father.

The three McArthurs met with Scott. Her parents proposed giving Minda money so she could give birth outside the range of Lovell's jungle drums. "You can go to your uncle's in Texas," Arden said. "That'll give you time to think, to get a little older."

Scott said, "As long as Minda carries my baby, she's not going anywhere without me."

Her dad asked Scott if he intended to tell his folks.

"I just can't," he said.

Dean McArthur said he would handle that chore, and he did.

At school the next morning, Scott reported that his parents believed he'd been seduced by "that McArthur girl." It was the only explanation the Brinkerhoffs could accept. Their son was still president of the seminary and a shining example for the other Mormon boys. A boy that pure couldn't be blamed for anything. ,

Minda kept going to class but frequently had to slip into the girls' room to compose herself. Her family was supportive. Sometimes Scott, as manly and strong as he was, cried along with her. To people who ranked immorality just short of murder, the situation seemed hopeless.

Scott filled her in on developments at the Brinkerhoff bungalow on Nevada Avenue. For the first three days after they found out about the pregnancy, he said, his parents refused to speak to him. On the fourth, there were cookies on the table when he came home from school, with "Scott" written in icing. He ate them in his room.

Next came a painful family, meeting. Scott said that his mother insisted that he verify the pregnancy because "Minda might be trying to trap you into marriage."

Minda dried her tears and drove up the hill to Dr. Story's new clinic. With her own mother in the room as usual, she underwent her first pelvic examination. It was quick and painless. The family doctor told her she was two months gone.

Years later, she remembered every detail of the events that followed. "We asked our bishop, Brownie J. Brown, to marry us. The LDS church doesn't have a paid clergy. Our high priests can be anything from day laborers to bank presidents. Bishop Brown was a farmer, a school board member, a nice man. He said he'd be glad to officiate. But Scott and I made one mistake. We didn't cry or act ashamed. Shoot, we were all cried out."

A shotgun wedding was arranged by the unfriendly families. After intense negotiations, the date was set: Friday, January 23, 1976. Territorial problems were headed off by scheduling the ceremony in the home of a relative who lived midway between the McArthurs and the Brinkerhoffs. It was agreed that no one but family members would be invited, and publicity would be minimal. "They're treating it more like a spy plot than a wedding," Minda complained to Scott. "The only feeling I have is dread."

On the day of the wedding, a classmate said. "Aren't you getting married tonight? What on earth are you doing at school?"

Minda said, "What should I be doing?"

"You should be home getting ready."

"Oh?"

"Minda, you only get married once!"

The wedding was an ordeal. All four parents looked ashamed. The grandparents stared into space. The little kids paraded in and out of the bathroom and were told to shush. Bishop Brown sounded like a funeral director. The cake was too small. There were no wedding checks or jokes or toasts, no conviviality, nothing to remember with pleasure or joy.

Minda's father took her aside and promised that it would be different when she and Scott were remarried in the temple at Idaho Falls. He said, "We'll have a great big cake, and we'll take pictures and everything. We'll do it up like we should have tonight." Then he cried.

The next day Brownie J. Brown summoned the newlyweds to his office in the big Mormon church that dominated the center of town like a set piece. Even in the dead of winter, flowers lined the walkway from Main Street; they were grown in homes and hot houses and replaced by the women of the stake. The broad green lawn was hidden under an inch or two of gray snow, and the weeping birch at the west end was droopy and denuded.

The bishop smiled and said, "We're here because we need to know where you guys stand on this. Tell ya the truth, neither one of you kids seemed very contrite. Scott, you're seminary president and everybody looks up to you." He quoted one of the seminary teachers to the effect that an example had to be made.

As she listened, Minda thought of three other couples who'd recently been forced to marry. They'd all had big happy weddings and nice honeymoons and their pictures in the
Chronicle
—and not one couple had been admonished by the church. She was too shocked to protest when Brownie J. Brown announced that he was convening a bishop's court.

All Minda remembered about the trial was that the two of them were put on indefinite probation, one step short of disfellowship. "We were ordered to attend all church functions, keep up our tithing, show contrition and
repent.
They told us we darn had to straighten up. We couldn't hold any office or teach any classes, something we'd both always done. Scott was mad. He went to church a couple times and stopped. We'd already been following all the steps to forgiveness, the way you're supposed to. We'd gotten married to make things right, and then they gave us a bishop's court, just because it was Scott and me."