Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Why, let me think. She broke her wrist on the school playground, a spiral break, not too serious. And a broken rib, from a fall. And there were contusions once.”

  “You don’t work with abused children, do you, Doctor?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “So you probably wouldn’t know whether the injuries in the record were consistent with injuries observed among abused children?”

  “I’m sorry. I simply wouldn’t know.”

  “Do you recall from the records a treatment for a venereal disease when Lolly was ten?”

  The doctor frowned, said with distaste, “Yes. I do.”

  Carolyn frowned. “Dr. Fulling, you said Lolly was normal. Is there a range of normalcy?”

  He looked surprised. “There is wide variation, yes.”

  Jagger rose. “Your Honor, what bearing does this—”

  Carolyn interrupted. “This witness testified that my client is normal, Your Honor. I am merely trying to ascertain the meaning of ‘normalcy’ as used by this witness.”

  Judge Rombauer frowned, as though remembering something unpleasant, then mumbled, “Overruled, Mr. Jagger. The witness may answer.” He made a tally.

  Carolyn, looking up in surprise, realized that Rombauer was keeping score! He’d been told off by Judge Frieze, so he’d decided to overrule Jagger every now and then. What was he doing, flipping a coin? Or just alternating yes’s and no’s?

  She went on bemusedly, “Let me see if I understand you. In most respects normal people are genetically much alike, but they can vary considerably in the details.”

  The doctor nodded. “There are many variations among people who are considered normal.”

  Jagger rose. “Your Honor …”

  Rombauer nodded. “Move along please, counselor.”

  Carolyn smiled. “So two people can both be normal, and still be quite unlike each other?”

  “I said that.”

  “That’s all, Your Honor. Thank you, Dr. Fulling.”

  Carolyn had important questions for only one of the afternoon witnesses, the last one, the neighbor who had told Lolly she was pregnant.

  “Mrs. Maquina, when you told Lolly she was pregnant, was she surprised?”

  “I dohn know. Maybe.”

  “It’s important, Mrs. Maquina. Do you think Lolly knew she was pregnant?”

  The woman stared into the middle distance, face working, saying at last: “I dohn guess so, no. She never seem to know much. Never seem very much anything, you know? Never happy. Never cryin’. Awways just sort of … nothing.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Maquina.”

  The prosecution was finished. Rombauer recessed the trial for the day. Carolyn went home to find that Ophy and Jessamine had fixed dinner and the eastern contingent, newly arrived, was setting the table.

  “I may have found a clue to Sophy’s whereabouts,” Hal told them when they were seated around the table. “That is, based on what you told Carolyn on the phone last night.”

  “How?” breathed Bettiann.

  “Where?” demanded Faye, more to the point.

  “Well,” said Hal around a mouthful of chicken casserole, “I started with a bunch of dead ends. The foundation correspondence mentions the Lizard Rock or Piedras Lagartonas schools, but the state education office has no record of there ever being a school at such a place; the postal service says it never had a post office by that name. You got the name of a postmaster, but the federal postal service has never heard of Chendi Qowat.

  “The women in Vermont, however, remembered Sophy saying the place was south, near Mexico. I’ve got a friend who was with the post office in Deming when he was younger. We used to go fishing together and then lie about what we caught, so I called him, told him we were trying to find this Lizard Rock place, and he broke out laughing. Said there hadn’t been such a place for thirty or forty years.

  “So I asked him where it had been when it was a place, and he told me when he was a young man, he used to drop off mail for Lizard Rock at a roadside box in Cloverdale, to be picked up by someone else. He says once in a while there was an old man waiting for him, driving an old school bus.”

  “Old school bus?” asked Faye. “Sophy said the man who brought her food in the desert lived in a … what? Old yellow bus …”

  “So you told us. Anyhow, the route man said the old guy told him he was from Piedras Lagartonas, which was a little south of the Spring of Contention—”

  “Which is what one of Sophy’s women said,” Faye interjected.

  “There’s no such place,” said Agnes flatly.

  Hal picked up a map book from beside her and handed it to her. “I wouldn’t have thought so, either,” he said. “But I spent a little time with a magnifying glass, going over the latest edition of Shearer’s Roads of New Mexico, the 1998 edition. Here on page one twenty-four, just below the gray-blue area labeled Coronado National Forest. Blue letters, very small.”

  “My lord,” said Agnes reverently. “That’s what it says. Spring of Contention. But there are no roads anywhere near it.”

  “Which is probably why nobody knows where it is,” offered Faye.

  Hal said, “I looked up that section in some of the previous editions of that atlas, going back to the eighties, and they also show the Spring of Contention. It’s probably a spring to which the water rights have been contested. Some of these water cases can go on practically forever. Whatever it is, it’s been there awhile.”

  “The distance cross-country from the nearest improved road is about ten miles,” said Carolyn, unfolding another map. “Here on this topo map it looks like one could pick a route that avoids the steeper hills. There are a lot of dirt roads down there, and there may be others that aren’t on the map, as well. We’ll find our way.”

  “But where, exactly?” Agnes asked. “Where is this?”

  Eyes still fixed on the map, Carolyn said, “It’s in the far southwest corner of the state, a thirty-by-fifty-mile chunk of Hidalgo County that sticks down into Mexico. I’ve never been there.”

  Hal stretched, got up to get a glass of water, saying over his shouder, “Hunters go there looking for javelina. Cloverdale and Antelope Wells used to be on maps of the area; they’re not even shown on most maps now. There is a border crossing called the Antelope Wells crossing, south of where the town used to be, but that’s across the continental divide from what you’re looking for.”

  “How do we get there?”

  Carolyn turned to the front of the book, where the whole state was shown on a single page, and traced out the route. “We borrow a Land Rover from some friends of mine. We drive south to Las Cruces, here, then west to Deming, then west some more until road one forty-six cuts off to the south. Let’s see, then we go south to the town of Hachita, set in the Hachita Valley alongside the … Little Hatchet Mountains—sort of a bilingual landscape. Then where? Here we take a more-or-less road, number nine, west again, about thirty miles to this town called Animas. From there we head south on another more-or-less road, number three thirty-eight, which, hmmm … pretty soon becomes a less-and-less road. We’ll definitely need a cross-country vehicle.”

  “And?” prompted Faye.

  “And,” Carolyn said, “we’ll hunt for whatever Piedras Lagartonas is or was, if anything.”

  “And what do we expect to find?” demanded Jessamine. “A ghost town? A cemetery? Sophy’s grave?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” said Carolyn. “But I think we have to go down there and—”

  The ringing of her bedroom phone, from down the hall, interrupted her, and she got up to answer it.

  “Carolyn?” came the voice. “This is Mike Winter.”

  “Mike! Do you want Hal?”

  “I have a message for Hal. Tell him I called in some IOUs, plus I’ll be sending you that stuff he asked for. Okay?”

  “He’s right here, Mike—”

  “No time, dear. Just tell him.” And he was gone.

  They were talking ab
out something else when she returned to the kitchen; she didn’t mention the call. Only when she and Hal were alone together later that night, in bed with the door closed, did she tell him what Mike had said.

  “Called in some IOUs?” she said doubtfully.

  He shrugged. “Those pictures Helen sent you? The information on Rombauer had to be investigated by the locals, but they’d have paid no attention to me, or to you. Jagger would be able to prevent that.”

  “So what has Mike done?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see. Something. Though it’s getting rather late to be helpful.”

  “He mentioned stuff you asked for?”

  “I asked him to send whatever he knew about the Alliance and this guy Webster.”

  When the court reconvened on Tuesday morning, defense’s first witness was Ophy Gheist, M.D.

  Carolyn asked, “Dr. Gheist, do you have experience in obstetrics?”

  “I do. My specialty was gynecology and obstetrics up until ten years ago, when I switched to emergency medicine.”

  “Was your experience confined to the United States?”

  “No. I did postdoctoral research in primate reproduction as well as the childbirth practices of native peoples in Africa, South America, and New Guinea. I also studied obstetrical and gynecological health systems in countries medically more advanced than the United States.”

  “There are countries more advanced?”

  “Several, yes.”

  “How do you characterize an advanced system?”

  “If we take low maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity rates as the indicator, we’d say an advanced system is one that identifies all women at risk of pregnancy, regardless of age or economic condition, and provides that entire population with preventive health care, which must include contraception, particularly contraceptive implants for sexually active women who aren’t responsible: the very young, those who have certain disabilities, and those who are substance abusers. This early intervention prevents the conception of babies who would be drug addicted, who would have fetal alcohol syndrome, or who would be infected with HIV, all of whom are now born in great numbers in this country.”

  One of the jurors frowned slightly, as though at a sudden thought.

  Ophy noticed the interest and spoke directly to that juror: “Also, in advanced systems there is routine provision of pre- and postnatal care, childbirth education, parenting education, and monitoring of the infant for several years following birth. Needless to say, there is also provision of food for children, so none of them go hungry. Holland and the Scandinavian countries have systems like this. They have almost no teen pregnancies or drug-addicted babies, and no hungry children.”

  “How does this differ from a system that is not advanced?”

  “Some systems are primitive and some are barbaric. Primitive systems exist where people don’t know any better or don’t have the resources to provide care. Infant and maternal mortality aré high. Barbaric systems are interested only in babies; they don’t care if the woman is dying or drug addicted or alcoholic or if she’s twelve years old or retarded or has AIDS. They will not make it easy for her to prevent a pregnancy or to abort one. For an example we can look at Communist Romania. The regime wanted babies, they insisted that every woman have at least five, they forbade contraception and forced women to have children they couldn’t provide for. Many of the chidren were abandoned. When the Communist government was overthrown, state nurseries were packed with hundreds of thousands of abandoned children, many of them sick, many of them congenitally disabled. You can see the same thing in Latin America, where contraception is forbidden by the Church and hundreds of thousands of children are simply abandoned on the streets.” Her voice tightened. “There are killer squads in those countries, armed men who go out at night and shoot kids. I’ve talked with some of them. They feel they are public-health workers, eliminating a menace, just as they’d shoot rats.”

  The jury stirred uneasily. Carolyn let the discomfort build for a moment before asking, “How would you characterize the system in the United States?”

  “At the present time, under the current administration, we actually have two systems in this country—an advanced one for well-to-do and well-educated people, and a barbaric one rather like Communist Romania for the poor.”

  “Into which category would the defendant fall?”

  “She’s poor and uneducated.”

  “And what does our barbaric system provide people like her?”

  “Little or nothing. The current government doesn’t routinely provide sex education or abortion or contraception or parenting education. Public-health programs aimed at the poor have been cut. Feeding programs for poor women and children have been cut. Frequently, women don’t even get to the hospital to have the baby.”

  “Why is that?”

  “If a woman is an addict, if she’s very young, if she’s mentally retarded, if she’s sick, if she’s ignorant about pregnancy and childbirth, if she’s scared, if she had no one to help her, if she doesn’t know she’s pregnant or denies that fact, she might not get to the hospital. Sometimes denial is so great that the whole episode is unreal, including the infant itself.”

  “You’re saying the woman doesn’t realize she’s pregnant?”

  “It’s a matter of learning. Among all animals, including humans, getting pregnant is purely biological. Impregnation, pregnancy, and birth are all mechanical, instinctive, totally programmed. We like to pretend that we can control it, that a woman can control it. The truth is, she alone cannot. If a girl is not to become prematurely pregnant, her family or society has to protect her. Girls living in areas where there is no protection have no defense. They are at the mercy of sexual predators and a million years of evolution. Not getting pregnant takes a lot of thought and planning and care and attention and goodwill. Getting pregnant doesn’t take any thought at all, it just happens.”

  “What about the ‘just say no’ approach?”

  “I think you can visualize what happens when a girl weighing a hundred ten says no to two or three male predators weighing a total of five hundred pounds. Or if she says no to her mother’s boyfriend. Or if she says no to her incestuous father or brother. Or if she says no to someone who’s drunk or high. Or if she says no to her own boyfriend, the guy she stays with because he protects her against ten other guys, or maybe simply because she has no one else.”

  “So she gets pregnant. Then she has the baby.”

  “Then she has the baby. If the child is going to live, it has to be cared for. Girls learn how to provide care by watching mothers. If they don’t learn how, their own babies die.”

  “You have seen this happen?”

  “I’ve seen births where the infant was simply ignored, or disposed of, and I’ve seen babies die of neglect.”

  “But that’s rare?”

  “No! It isn’t rare. We like to pretend it’s an aberration, but it isn’t. There are lots of Dumpster babies every year in this country, and for every Dumpster baby that’s discovered, there are probably twenty that no one ever knows about. And on top of that, every doctor or public-health nurse knows of infants who die later, or end up in foster care or institutions simply because the mother doesn’t care about them or know how to care for them.”

  “But isn’t motherhood instinctive?”

  “It’s instinctive among animals who have young in bunches, like alligators, pigs, dogs, fish. It’s instinctive among animals who don’t live very long, like mice, rabbits, spiders. It’s instinctive among animals with precocial young, like an antelope or a chicken. It isn’t instinctive for animals who live a long time and have helpless babies, one at a time. If an infant needs care for years, you have to learn how to provide it. Some primate females pick it up fairly quickly; others don’t learn it until they’ve had several pregnancies; most important, some aren’t interested in learning it or can’t learn it. It’s like music: Some people are born with perfect pitch, others can be t
aught to sing a little, and some are born tone deaf. It’s not their fault—they just can’t hear music. Not every person with ears can be a good musician; not every person with a throat can be a good singer; not every woman with a uterus can become a good mother.”

  The courtroom rustled; there were whispers; Judge Rombauer looked up with the expression of someone waking from a doze.

  Carolyn asked quickly, “Dr. Gheist, are you familiar with Lolly Ashaler’s history?”

  “I am, yes. I’ve seen her medical records. I’ve examined her medically and I’ve taken a case history and talked with her at length.”

  “Had she learned to be a mother?”

  “She hadn’t even learned to be a person.”

  Someone in the courtroom giggled. There were murmurs in several voices. Rombauer tapped his gavel. Jagger, who had also been distracted, rose with his teeth clenched. “Your Honor, I object to this continuing—”

  “Do move it along, counselor,” said the judge with an apologetic look at Jagger.

  Carolyn waited for the room to quiet. “Does Lolly Ashaler fit the pattern of a woman who doesn’t know enough to mother a child?”

  Ophy nodded slowly. “She’s totally ignorant of mothering. She was not mothered as a child. Her own mother acquiesced in her sexual abuse; her mother’s boyfriend gave her a venereal disease; the pregnancy was caused by a gang rape—”

  Jagger again. “Your Honor! This hasn’t been established.”

  Carolyn: “Your Honor, we will establish the rape. In the meantime the witness is a physician. She has talked with the defendant; she has examined the defendant.”

  “Hearsay, Your Honor!”

  Judge Rombauer stared over the tops of his glasses.

  Carolyn took a deep breath. “May we point out that Mr. Jagger called Dr. Belmont as a witness, and all Dr. Belmont knew about the defendant is what the defendant told her during one interview. A case history taken by a professional is not usually regarded as hearsay.”

  Rombauer was flipping a mental coin again, she could tell. He had his pencil ready to make his little tick mark.

  “The witness may answer.”

  Jagger subsided, jaw set.