by Jodi Picoult
Social: Those who seem to be desirable citizens—law-abiding, self-supporting, and doing some social work. Unsocial: insane and suicides. Undetermined: Those who, while not definitely showing either of the defects, do not seem to show any socially desirable tendencies, and those about whom too little is known to make any judgment possible. “Lottie,” she said, “where did you find this?”
She unrolled a second chart on top of the first. PEDIGREE OF A GYPSY FAMILY, THE DELACOURS. A handwritten message floated down to the floor. “Tell Harry—sex-deficiency seems to be holandric. Perhaps use charts in hearings for Sterilization Bill?” The stationery was printed at the top: Spencer A. Pike, Professor of Anthropology, UVM.
The box was filled with more genealogies and correspondence and index cards written in a careful hand, which seemed to be case studies of the people who had figured into these pedigree wheels: Mariette, a sixteen-year-old girl at reform school, had a history of petty larceny, an inability to control her temper, an abnormal interest in sex, and a slovenly disposition. Oswald had dark skin and shifty eyes, had retained his tribe’s roving tendency, and—as a result of an “illegal union,” had produced seven subnormal children in as many years. Shelby pulled out the Fourth Annual Report of the Vermont Committee on Country Life. It fell open to a dog-eared page, an article cowritten by H. Beaumont and S. A. Pike. “Degenerate traits do not breed out,” Shelby read aloud. “But they may be held at bay and diluted with a favorable choice of mate.”
“Eugenics,” Lottie read, holding up another annual report. “What on earth is that?”
“It’s the science of improving hereditary qualities by controlling breeding.”
“Oh, you mean like they do for cattle.”
“Yes,” Shelby said, “but these people did it to humans.”
Eli had gone off duty at nine, but years ago he’d made it a habit of doing a final check before he went home—sort of like tucking his town in for the night. Normally, when he felt like things were settled, he’d drive back to his place . . . but tonight, with Cecelia Pike’s murder weighing on his mind, he just didn’t feel like his work was finished.
He drove aimlessly down the access road to the quarry, Watson at his side. Solving this case wasn’t going to get him a citation. It wasn’t going to bring Cissy Pike back to life. And no prosecutor was going to try a nonagenarian with advanced liver disease. So why did any of this matter?
Watson turned and butted Eli on the arm. “It’s too cold out. I’m not rolling down your window.”
The answer was: Cissy Pike had gotten him thinking. About what it meant to belong—to a family, to a lover, to a heritage—and what it cost to hide the truth. He knew, as a detective, that even people you thought you knew could surprise you with their actions. But it turned out that you could surprise yourself, too.
Eli wanted to go to the ceremony that Az Thompson would perform to gather the remains of Cissy Pike and her child. Not because he was a cop involved in the case . . . but because, like her, he was half-Abenaki. And because, like her, he knew what it felt like to keep that hidden.
Watson sidled closer on the seat, burrowing his nose in the neck of Eli’s shirt. “All right,” he conceded, and opened the window. Watson liked driving that way, the wind flapping his loose lips up and down like small wings. Suddenly, he raised his nose and began to howl.
“Jesus, Watson, people are sleeping.”
The dog only keened a higher note, then stood up on the seat and began to wag his tail in Eli’s face. Faced with the possibility of driving off the road, Eli pulled over. Watson leaped through the open window as they rolled to a stop, and loped to the fence that surrounded the eastern wall of the quarry. He started to bark, then stood on his hind legs and caught his claws in the chain links as someone on the other side stepped forward. The kid was wearing gloves. It was cold out, but not that cold. Squinting, Eli tried to make out a face beneath the brim of the baseball cap, but all he could see was skin that glowed as white as the moon. “Ethan?” he called out.
The boy’s head came up. “Oh,” he said, deflating before Eli’s eyes. “It’s you.”
“What are you doing here? Who let you into the quarry?”
“I let myself in.”
“Your mom know you’re here?”
“Sure,” Ethan said.
Eli knew that the quarry was blasting tomorrow at dawn—they always let the police department know, for the sake of safety—and that having Ethan in the vicinity of explosives was not a good idea. “Climb over,” he ordered.
“No.”
“Ethan, it’s just as easy for me to haul ass over the fence and get you myself.”
Ethan took a step back, and for a moment Eli thought he would bolt. But then he tossed his skateboard into Eli’s hands, and hurtled toward the chain-link. Scrambling effortlessly as a spider, he dropped to the ground beside Eli and held out his wrists. “Go ahead. Cuff me for trespassing.”
Eli stifled a smile. “Maybe I’ll break protocol. I’m assuming this is your first offense.” He started walking to the car. “Want to tell me how you wound up here?”
“I went outside and just kind of kept going.”
Eli looked down at the gloves on Ethan’s hands again.
“Didn’t she tell you?” the boy said bitterly. “I’m a freak.”
“She didn’t tell me anything.” Eli pretended that he couldn’t care less whether Ethan chose to continue the conversation. He dropped Ethan’s skateboard, walked to the back of the truck, and whistled for Watson. “Well. See ya.”
The boy’s mouth dropped open. “You’re leaving me here?”
“Why shouldn’t I? Your mom knows where you are.”
“You mean you believed me?”
Eli raised a brow. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
In response, Ethan threw his skateboard into the pickup and got into the passenger seat. Eli started to drive. “When I was born, my fingers were webbed together.” He felt Ethan’s gaze shoot to his hands on the steering wheel. “The doctors had to cut them apart.”
“That’s gross,” Ethan said, and then he blushed. “Sorry.”
“Hey, you know, whatever. It’s just the way I was made. Didn’t keep me from doing what I wanted to do.”
“I have XP. It’s like being allergic to the sun. If I go out during the day, even for a minute, I get burned really badly. And it does keep me from doing what I want to do.”
“Which is?”
“Swim in a bathing suit and dry off in the sun. Take a walk outside during the day. Go to school.” He glanced at Eli. “I’m dying.”
“So’s the rest of the world.”
“Yeah, but I’m going to get skin cancer. From all the exposure to the sun before anyone knew what I had. Most kids with XP die before they’re twenty-five.”
Eli felt his stomach tighten. “Maybe you’ll be the one who won’t.”
Ethan stared out the window for a few miles, silent. Then he said, “I woke up early, and no one was around. So I went outside. Hung out at the school, skateboarding. But then the other kids had to go home, to bed. And I wasn’t even tired, because I’d been sleeping all day. I just kept walking, and I wound up here. I’m a freak,” he repeated. “Even when I try, I don’t fit in.”
Eli turned to him. “What makes you think it’s different for anyone else?”
Ross had fallen asleep over the keyboard, where he was currently inventing a ghost. He woke up, ran his tongue behind his teeth, and tasted despair. Even after brushing and rinsing with Listerine he still couldn’t shake it—bitter as licorice, with small crystals that melted on the tongue and left it the sunset color of hopelessness. Grimacing, he padded downstairs to the kitchen to pour a glass of juice and realized he’d forgotten about Ethan. It was nearly midnight—and his nephew would have been up for hours.
“Eth?” he yelled, but the house was silent.
When he glanced out the window, Shelby’s car wasn’t in the driveway. That was strange,
too—she should have come home from work by nine, at the latest. The message light on the answering machine blinked like an evil eye; he hit the button. “Ross, it’s Shel. I’m caught up in something you won’t believe. Just tell Ethan I’ll be there soon, and make sure you’re home . . . I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
So she hadn’t taken Ethan somewhere. Ross opened the door, but he wasn’t skating in the driveway or holed up in the backyard. Inside, he took the stairs two at a time and opened the door to Ethan’s room. His bed was made; his pajamas twisted in a Gordian knot on the floor. Where was he?
Panic slid down Ross’s throat. Any nine-year-old kid could get into trouble, but for Ethan, the world posed a whole different set of dangers. “Ethan, this isn’t funny,” he shouted. “Get your ass over here.”
But he knew, even as he was calling out, that Ethan wasn’t there to hear. He grabbed his car keys from his bedroom and hurried downstairs again. Maybe if he could find Ethan before Shelby got home, no one would have to know that he’d ever been lost.
He had only just gotten into his car when a truck pulled in behind him. Eli Rochert’s dog leaped out as if he belonged at Shelby’s house, and then Ethan got out of the cab. Ross’s eyes did a quick inventory—all in one piece, smiling. Then he considered throttling the kid himself. He looked from Ethan to Eli, who crossed his arms but didn’t say a word. “You want to tell me where you were?”
Before Ethan could answer, Shelby pulled into the driveway. An enormous box was in the hatchback of her car. “What’s going on here?” she asked.
“Nothing,” all three men said simultaneously.
“Then what’s a policeman doing at my house at midnight?”
Eli stepped forward. “I, um, came here because I knew you’d be up. With Ethan. But when I got here, you weren’t. Here, I mean.”
Shelby stiffened. “Did you need more help with research?”
“No, I wanted to ask you out.”
The words seemed to surprise even Eli. Ethan nudged Ross in the side, and he shrugged to show that he didn’t know what was going on either. But in that moment, when Eli did not rat out Ethan, Ross’s respect for him doubled.
And that wasn’t even taking account of what it did for Shelby. She pinked, then looked away, and finally met Eli’s eyes. “I’d like that,” she said.
From the way they were locked onto each other, as if a homing device had pinned them both, Ethan and Ross might as well have been on Jupiter. “You would?” Eli said.
Ethan snorted. “I’m gonna hurl,” he announced, and slipped into the house.
His departure broke the spell. Shelby cleared her throat, then opened the hatchback of her car. “Carry this in for me, will you?”
“What is it?” Ross hefted the box, stumbling under its weight.
Shelby dusted off her hands on her shorts. “History.”
“It was called An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization,” Shelby explained, “and it was passed on March 31, 1931. Vermont was the twenty-fourth state out of thirty-three to pass sterilization legislation. From what I could dig up, it seems like Henry Perkins was the mastermind behind the genealogical surveys done on families believed to be a burden to taxpayers . . . and Spencer Pike and Harry Beaumont were his right-hand men.”
They had spread out a few of the pedigree charts on the floor of the kitchen, and were sitting cross-legged around them. “They thought that delinquency and degeneracy was something you could inherit from your parents, like eye color or height. And the best way to make Vermont a showplace for the nation was to make sure its gene pool was as strong as possible. Which, following that logic, meant preventing the folks who were diluting it from having any more kids.”
“Why would anyone have believed them?” Ross asked.
“Because the eugenicists of the thirties were doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges. They were people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Coolidge, Margaret Sanger. People who truly felt that what they were doing, in the long run, was best for everyone.” She pulled out papers from the Vermont Industrial School, the Waterbury Hospital for the Insane, the State Prison. “They started out targeting three families whose individual members kept cropping up at state institutions. The Chorea family was chosen because of a recurring neurological disorder. The Pirate family lived on houseboats and in waterfront shanties and was known for loose living and abject poverty. The Gypsy family was nomadic and often in trouble with the law . . . and there were so many of them. They weren’t even necessarily related—the eugenicists called them ‘families’ just to create that closeness where it didn’t always exist.
Anyway, in the late 1920s, six thousand people were recorded by the survey’s field workers, and organized into sixty-two notorious lineages. The idea was to sterilize these people, so that they wouldn’t create more like themselves.”
“Who would be naïve enough to talk to them? Eventually, even these families had to figure out what was going on,” Ross said.
“I imagine that when you live in a tent and have ten children and no money, and a fancy white woman arrives one day and asks to talk to you, you are too surprised to do anything but let her in. And when she asks to see pictures of your children, you show them out of pride. And when she asks about your relatives, you tell family stories. You never know that the whole time, these women are writing down comments about how slovenly your home is and how stupid you are because you can’t speak English well.”
Eli had told Ross and Shelby everything he’d learned from Frankie—genealogy, again, of a different sort. Shelby’s discovery had been the missing link, the reason why Gray Wolf and Cecelia Pike’s kinship might have led to her death. Pike’s reaction to that news, given his eugenical convictions, would have been extreme. But would it have made him commit murder?
He hunkered down over one wheel-shaped chart. It was hard to read, but simple to understand—dotted from generation to generation were all the flaws that had made this kinship network a target. Some of the relations at the tail ends of the chart were men and women Eli still knew, most of whom had suffered more than their share of hard times. Was this just a matter of bad luck . . . or had shame kept them in their place? “How many people were sterilized?” Eli asked.
Shelby shook her head. “That was the one piece of information I couldn’t really find. As of 1951, there were 210 reported sterilizations in Vermont—mostly in institutions for the feebleminded, or the insane asylum, or the jail. Of course, the people who were in those institutions were there in the first place because they weren’t living the way society thought they should: their marriages weren’t valid, for example, under Vermont law . . . so social services would take their children to the industrial school, the wife to a mental institution for having loose morals, and the husband to jail for being a sexual offender.”
“But the operation was voluntary,” Ross said.
“In theory. But there were different levels of ‘voluntary.’ Sometimes the only consent needed was that of two doctors. The patient apparently didn’t always know what was best for himself.”
Eli could feel a headache building behind his left eye. In all the years he’d been in this town, he’d never heard of the eugenics project. The site of the survey office, 138 Church Street, was now a shop that sold incense and candles.
He thought of old Tula Patou, who lived down by the river, and had no children in sixty years of marriage. Of uncles and aunts of his own who had remained childless, though not for lack of trying. Had they been sterilized?
Did they even know?
There would be people in Comtosook still haunted by the memory of what had happened in the 1930s. People who’d straddled both sides of the debate. Victims who were too afraid to speak of it, for fear that it might happen again. And proponents who kept silent out of guilt.
If the dispute over the Pike property had seemed volatile, then this discovery was incendiary.
Suddenly Eli remembered standing with his mother in line to register
for school. He couldn’t have been more than five, and the sun was strong on the neat part she’d made in his hair. She held his hand like all the other mothers, but when they were coming close to the secretary at the table, she kissed him on the cheek and told him she would wait for him outside.
“With your looks, you can pass,” she told him cryptically, when he caught up with her afterward.
It was not that the Abenaki didn’t remember the days when they were mistakenly christened Gypsies; it was that they remembered too well.
Eli bent over another pedigree chart. “What if Pike didn’t know? What if his beloved wife gave birth . . . to a baby a little too dark-skinned?”
“And she was in Gray Wolf’s company, because she’d found out he was her natural father—” Ross interrupted.
“And Pike assumed, incorrectly, that the baby was Gray Wolf’s.”
To a man who had spent his career proving that the Abenaki were genetically inferior, this would not sit well. It explained why Pike might have buried the stillborn before any authorities could see its face. And it explained why he might have killed his wife.
“What happened to the project? Why did it stop?” Ross asked.
Shelby began to gather some of the documents again. “They ran out of funding. And then along came Hitler. The Nazi Law for Protection Against Genetically Defective Offspring was based on American models for sterilizing the unfit.”
“So when was the Vermont law repealed?”
“That’s the thing,” Shelby said. “It wasn’t, entirely. It was challenged by the ACLU in the seventies . . . and the original language has been changed . . . but there is still a sterilization law in effect.”
Suddenly a name on this particular chart leaped out at Eli. Pial Sommers, married to Isobel DuChamps, who was feebleminded. Their children: Winona, Ella, and Sopi, who had died at age seven. Ella Sommers had married a man she met while working as a waitress in Burlington. His name was Robert Rochert, and he had been Eli’s father.
Pial Sommers had been one of seven children, the only one who was not, according to this chart, insane or criminal or perverse. One short dotted line separated him from his mother’s side of the family, and ten first cousins, the youngest of whom was named John “Gray Wolf ” Delacour.
