Gibbon's Decline and Fall (28 page)

“But one man, the man who had lain with the eldest sister, saw what she did with the medicine bag, and he went to his brothers to tell them what had happened. He found his brothers in their house, all mourning the loss of their sex, for it had made their lives exciting and dangerous. ‘I know where it is,' he said. ‘If you will all come with me to hold her down'—for Elder Sister was very strong—'we will take the medicine bag away.'

“And this is what they did. They came in the night, while Elder Sister was sleeping, and they held her down while the one man found the medicine bag, and they tied her so she could not stop them when they ran away. They could not open the medicine bag, so they took their knives and cut it into tiny pieces, to let their sex out. And the pieces of the medicine bag stuck to every man's sex, and the little pieces are there today, wrapped around the tips of men's penises, a sign of their pride and their shame, for it is the sign of rape and force, and some men even cut it away, so as not to be reminded that they took sex by force and against women's will
.

“Of course, the women's sex came out of the bag as well, and since that time men have strutted their sex all the time and have fought and crashed their heads together, and women have lusted after improper males, and men and women have not seen one another clearly, so that men have laid hands on women to force them to do what women would not do.”

“End of story?” Carolyn had asked, enthralled.

“No,” Sophy had replied, staring into the distance as though mesmerized. “I have to give it a new ending because of all the new stories I've learned. I think that Elder Sister was very angry, and she started making a new medicine bag right away, and every time there is a rape, she weaves a little. Every time a man beats or kills a woman, she weaves a little. Every time men lock a woman up, or veil her face, or beget children on her out of pride in their manhood but without regard for the children's future lives, Elder Sister weaves a little, and in the fullness of time the bag will be rewoven and sex controlled once more. Then we will see one another clearly and we will have peace again.”

“I'm so glad we have that to look forward to,” snapped Ophy, thinking of herself and Simon. “Honestly, Sophy, you don't want women to have any fun.”

Sophy's face had changed, as though she'd forgotten them
for the moment and was only now coming to herself again. “Well, that's what I was saying. That's the reason decline and fall has to be up to our consciences. We have such different ideas about what women are. For instance, in your religion your priests say woman brought sin into the world when she bit into the apple, but my people would say man brought sin into the world when God asked who did it and Adam blamed Eve. Which is the greater sin? Intellectual curiosity? Or betrayal? Scientific experimentation? Or disloyalty?”

This sent them into laughter, and the original argument was forgotten. Or at least mislaid. Such different ideas among the seven of them. To Agnes the weirdness at the 1997 meeting, followed by Sophy's suicide, had been the ultimate fall. How had Sophy squared that with her conscience? Had Sophy even had a conscience? Or had she been something else, something that didn't need a conscience?

Something that had stopped being … no. There was the nagging seed of doubt. There was the burrowing chigger, the itching place that demanded scratching. Deny it as she would, reject it as she had tried to do, Agnes wasn't convinced that Sophy had stopped being. Perhaps Father Girard had touched the reality of the situation when he had said that Sophy might have been … demonic. She could have been. She could still be. Out there somewhere, in here somewhere, in Aggie's very soul there could be this canker festering, this worm gnawing. There was something Sophy wanted from Agnes, perhaps something evil, and Agnes was terribly afraid of what it might turn out to be.

C
AROLYN MET
S
TACE AT
C
ASA
Sena for lunch midweek. The warm-weather tourists were not yet packing the town, so they didn't have to wait to get a corner table away from the main flow of diners and waitpersons.

“Though,” said Stace, “if it's waitpersons, it really ought to be dinepersons also, oughtn't it?”

“Or diners and dinettes,” said Carolyn, taking a thoughtful sip of her margarita. She didn't usually drink at noon but today needed something to blunt the edges. “Maybe diners, dinesses, and dinettes, including the kids.”

“That isn't something that's ever bothered you, is it?” Stace laughed at her.

“Words? Not really. Mankind is a good word.” She set down her glass with a thump. “Or humankind. I'm afraid we've spent a lot of feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions. All through the seventies and eighties we should have been pushing for a truly bicameral government: a men's Senate and a women's Senate, a men's House of Representatives and a women's House, with each sex electing a president in alternate terms.” She lifted her glass again, toasting her daughter. “Instead of gingriching issues affecting primarily women and children, like pregnancy, childbirth, abortion, welfare, childhood education, and the like, men would leave them to women to decide. Men could then
pay full attention to issues of preeminent concern to men, like restructuring professional baseball.”

Stace blinked. “What's the matter?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I know you've got a militant side, Mom, but you don't generally go on like this.”

“Oh. That. Well, for one thing, I've been having crazy dreams. Unpleasant, I guess you'd say. And for the other, you know very well what's the matter. Lolly Ashaler is the matter.”

Stace flushed. “I should have figured that.”

Carolyn dipped a finger into her water glass and drew a wet circle on the tabletop. “Here's a cipher, a blank, a female virtually without personality, a girl who at age fourteen was gang-raped, impregnated, and subsequently threatened with death. Her grandmother, who died around the same time, was her only emotional support. Her sole sexual education has been by TV, hampered by inadequate vocabulary to understand much of it. Her sole child-care experience has been what she herself received as a child, which was nil. She is functionally illiterate. She gave birth unattended in an alley, was revolted by the mess, wrapped it in a roll of paper towel, and stuffed it in a Dumpster. She knew, at some level, that this was ‘sort of' a baby, but she was not prepared to mother it. She said she didn't have the ‘stuff,' and she was correct on several semantic levels: In fact, she did not have the emotional, spiritual, experiential, or material stuff. Though she couldn't articulate it, she was a living refutation of the Hail Mary Assumption.”

“The what?”

“I'll tell you all about it when we get our strategy set. Let's just say she was stating the first law of human parenthood according to Crespin: It's not what your reproductive organs do that counts, it's what your mind intends before that moment. Lolly intended nothing at all, she had nothing to intend with. Now she's in jail, and we have one of the most dangerous men in the state howling for her blood for murdering her child.” She wiped out the circle with a swipe of her hand.

Stace kept her eyes focused on the menu. “One of the most dangerous men? Mom?”

“That's what your father calls him. And it says in the morning paper he's going for murder one, the death penalty.”

Stace's jaw dropped. “But she's a juvenile! We don't execute juveniles in this state.”

“We've tried juveniles for murder one before. And I'll bet Jagger figures he can get the law interpreted in a way that will allow execution.”

Stace was stunned. “He's saying it was premeditated?”

“That's what murder one means. Did Belmont hear you tell Lolly about me?”

“No. Dr. Belmont left the room first, while I was still packing up the tape recorder and labeling the tapes. No one heard me tell Lolly about you except Lolly herself.”

“Don't mention me to Belmont. Don't mention our relationship.” She sighed. “Normally, my first act would be to get Lolly out on bail, but I don't think I will.”

Stace looked up alertly. “Why?”

“She's been threatened. Also, I can defend her best if she remains pretty much as she is now. If I let her out, some do-gooder may take her in and clean her up. The more respectable she looks and sounds, the less likely I'll be able to get her off.”

Someone came to take their order. Stace mumbled, Carolyn pointed distractedly, and the person went away.

“God, Mother! Murder one. I can't believe it.”

“Have you seen what the papers are making of this case? Jagger is riding this thing for a good deal more than it's worth. Lolly's evidently going to be used as a human sacrifice.”

Stace shook her head, her face white. Abstractedly, she buttered a bit of bread and bit into it.

Carolyn smiled bleakly. Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Have you heard of the American Alliance, Stace?”

“Some sort of ultraconservative think tank, isn't it? Dad mentions it occasionally.”

“Back in their Washington days your dad and Mike Winter were analysts responsible for keeping track of the ultraright, even though the Bureau was far more worried about commies and blacks and revolutionaries than it was about fascists. Mike is a good bit younger than your dad; he's still with the Bureau, and he keeps in touch.”

“I don't get the connection to this case, Mom.”

“Possibly none. But Jake Jagger is an Alliance protégé.”

Stace stopped chewing. “Is he really?”

Carolyn smiled bleakly. “Would I kid you, kid? After that run-in I had with Jagger some years back when the walls came
crashing down on my head, your dad told Mike about it, and Mike told Hal to watch out for me because I was tangling with a powerhouse. According to Mike, Jagger has a lot—and I mean a
lot
—of Alliance money behind him.”

“What's he doing here? I mean, this state is hardly a power base!”

“You yourself told me he came out to get into politics. Arkansas doesn't have a lot of power, either, but it was a good political stepping stone to the presidency. I'm telling you this so you'll be discreet. Do not go shooting your mouth off about this case among your friends.”

“I still don't get what all that has to do with this trial.”

“Exactly my question. Politics and right-wing organizations should have absolutely nothing to do with this trial. This is a stupid little case! There are Dumpster babies found every year, all over the country, in New York and Kansas and Hawaii and California and Georgia and everywhere else. Infanticide and infant neglect exist in inverse ratio to the accessibility of abortion services. We know that. So why should there have been an article about this particular New Mexico baby in the
Wall Street Journal
this morning? Even given the
Journal
's rightist bias, there's no way they'd have covered the story in the normal course of events. Someone is plugging this particular Dumpster case, talking it up, publicizing it, speculating on the first-degree murder charge as a ‘trendsetter' toward the ‘reestablishment of morality'—I'm quoting.”

“I guess I missed it. All I read was the comics.”

“Oh, this is comical enough. The only reason for the coverage is to identify Jagger with a particular cause, and that cause is to redefine women's role in life and then to punish them if they don't perform it. The fact that it's a national publication, not a local one, argues that he may have been picked for something at the national level.”

“He'll really want to win, then.”

She nodded grimly. “Win or lose, he'll really want to be seen as a true believer, fighting the forces of evil. Lolly's so pathetic she doesn't stack up like much of an opponent, so Jagger needs to build her up some. Or he can add some bigger devil to fry along with her. Like me, for instance. If he makes the connection between you and me, he might come after you.”

Stace gripped her hands in her lap. “Come on. You're exaggerating.”

Carolyn flushed. Why was she doing her best to scare Stace just because she herself was scared? She took a deep breath. “Maybe I am. Maybe I'm just having a bad case of the jitters. Time will tell.”

The server arrived with their food. They bent to their plates, glad of the interruption. Carolyn chewed and became calmer, like a ruminant, she told herself. Chewing convinces one the world is all right. Still …

She asked, “What did your psychologist come up with in her report to the DA's office?”

Stace rearranged silverware. “She wrote it up as a common guilt reaction. She said Lolly was afraid to tell her mother she was pregnant, so the ‘murder' was a cover-up for the crime.”

“I doubt her mother was ever around long enough or sober enough for Lolly to tell. And what was the crime? Getting raped.”