Months went by; the Department of Justice kept close surveillance on anyone who might be in touch with the doctor, including the imprisoned V.I. Warshawski, who’d been the doctor’s close friend for decades. They monitored the doctor’s family members in Canada, her medical colleagues, even some of her high-profile patients. No one spoke of her. No one heard from her.
Time passed. Crops were rotting in the fields because the immigrants who used to harvest them were denied entry or had been deported from a safe America. Construction sites languished. The 117th Congress overturned the most stringent sections of the Keep America Safe Act, although the criminal penalties for performing abortions on U.S.-born women remained in place.
Somewhere along the way, V.I. Warshawski was released from prison. She, too, disappeared without a trace, despite the FBI’s continued monitoring of her actions.
Every now and then, the FBI or ICE would follow up on a report of a small, black-eyed doctor performing miracle cures among indigenous Americans, or in Congo or Central America. She had a few assistants, who helped trace rapists or murderers or thieves in whatever village or jungle they found themselves, but by the time U.S. agents were dispatched across the deserts and mountains, these legendary figures had moved on.
Note
This story was written for the anthology It Occurs to Me That I Am America, Jonathan Santlofer, ed., Touchstone Books, 2018. The fifty-two writers and artists who contributed work did so without pay so that all income from the book could support the American Civil Liberties Union. This is a dystopic story; the Homeland Security courts and Keep America Safe Act are imaginary. However, women all over the country are in real life, real time, being denied access to reproductive health care under laws which are ever more punitive.
Trial by Fire
1
“Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river . . .”
When she’d shut the window twenty minutes ago, they’d been singing “Throw out the lifeline” with the same ragged tunelessness. Sophia couldn’t stand the hymns or the loud, lackluster singing. Most of all, she couldn’t stand the tent revival on her land. She wanted to stay inside with the curtains drawn, but the heat was too heavy to leave the windows shut.
A bonfire on the far side of the tent gave her a shadow play of the figures inside, the preacher waving his arms in an orgy of rhetoric, the sinners going forward to kneel in an ecstasy of self-abasement.
This was the fourth night of a six-night revival. Attendance had been small the first night, but the preacher had passed out leaflets in all the surrounding towns, and each night more people pulled up in Model-Ts or horse wagons. Sophia had tried to get Lawyer Greeley to force the tent to move onto the Schapen property—after all, it was Rufus Schapen who’d given them permission to set up.
Lawyer Greeley had patted her hand. “Miz Tremont, they’re not doing you any harm and they’re bringing comfort to a lot of people. Why don’t you just let that sleeping dog lie? They’ll be gone in a week.”
“You try sleeping with a hundred hysterical people on your land, lighting a bonfire in the middle of a drought,” she’d snapped. “And it’s high time Rufus Schapen learned that this is not his land to do with as he wishes. I’m not sure I want him to inherit it when the time comes. After all, Amos has nephews who would care for the land.”
“Maybe this isn’t the best time to make a decision like that,” Greeley said. “Tempers are already high enough in the county. Let’s wait for cooler weather and cooler minds.”
The conversation still rankled. Women had the vote now, but men like Lawyer Greeley talked to her as if she were a child, not the person who had made this farm go almost on her own for most of its existence. She was rehearsing the grievance in her mind, wondering what she could do to force Rufus to move out of the house, when she caught sight of a slim silhouette rising and kneeling in the tent.
Georgie. If she was in the tent meeting, she had only gone to torment Rufus. Ever since she’d arrived on the farm six weeks ago, she’d been looking for ways to amuse herself; taunting Rufus was one of her favorites. Not that drinking and bareback riding on Sophia’s cart horses didn’t also entertain her. Rufus rose time and again to her bait, but her arrest had definitely been the last straw. If Sophia hadn’t heard the shouting and come running, Rufus might well have beaten Georgie past recovery.
Sophia walked out of the house, wondering if she should go into the tent to remove the girl, but she stopped halfway across the yard. The silhouette with the bobbed hair had disappeared. She must have realized the crowd would think she was a true penitent, carried away by the Holy Spirit. They might try to put a white robe on her and carry her away to be baptized.
Perhaps it wasn’t Georgie, anyway: her cousin wasn’t the only young woman in Douglas County to bob her hair and paint her lips.
Sophia’s own hair hung to her waist when she unpinned it. Even though it had gone gray, it was still thick and heavy, hair that Amos used to wrap around his hands to pull her toward him. He’d been dead so many years now she’d almost forgotten those nights.
“Yes, we’ll gather at the river, that flows by the throne of God.”
Sophia turned back to the house, away from the singing. The Kaw river was so low that you could walk across it on the sandbars, but no one wanted to; the mud stank of rotting fish.
She husbanded her well and rainwater carefully, bathing sparingly, washing clothes every second week instead of every week. The deep wells were for watering the stock and keeping some of the wheat and corn crops from dying. She used water from dishwashing and laundry on her truck garden, and the Grellier farm was doing better than many, but it was a hard summer for all of them; Sophia couldn’t blame her neighbors for calling on Jesus for help. She just didn’t want them calling from her property.
2
“I don’t know how you’ve borne it all these years.” Her cousin Fanny had shuddered melodramatically when she came down for breakfast on her first morning at the farm. “Still using kerosene lamps and a coal stove, milking a cow with your own hands, and look at your skin—it’s tanned like leather.”
“The heat is unbearable,” Georgina moaned, appearing at the table in a silk chemise.
Rufus’s face turned mahogany under his sunburn. “Get some clothes on. You may think you’ve come to an Indian reservation, but this is a civilized farm. You don’t sit at my dinner table in your undergarments.”
“He’s right,” Fanny decreed. “You have a family reputation to uphold out here; don’t get off on the wrong foot.”
Georgina shrugged and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Pottery mugs. How quaint. Tell me you’re not eating dinner at eleven in the morning, cousin Sophia, not when it’s barely breakfast time. I’d like an egg and some toast. And if you have an orange or grapefruit?”
Sophia gave a tight smile. “We ate breakfast while you were still in bed, Georgina. Dinner is our midday meal on the farm, but you can make yourself an egg—they’re in the larder—that door to your right off the kitchen.”
“Dinner before noon? I am in the wilds of America. Coffee is fine, thank you, Cousin Sophia. But I prefer to be called Georgie, not Georgina.”
“Slang and nicknames are unbecoming a young lady, Georgina,” Fanny said.
Georgie smiled brightly. “If I’m to be ‘Georgina,’ then you must be called ‘Frances.’”
“Since to you, I am your grandmother, my first name doesn’t come into the equation. Sophia, would you pour me more coffee?”
After a long pause, while Georgie stirred cream around in her mug, Rupert slammed down his knife and fork and headed back to the fields.
Sophia watched him leave without a word. She certainly was annoyed with Georgie, but it was really her son-in-law, claiming it was his dinner table, that set her teeth on edge. The farmhouse and the land were Sophia’s, and she had the documents to prove it, locked prudently in a box at the bank, key hidden on a hook behind the old coal stove, but
Rufus kept thinking the farm as good as belonged to him. He took for granted that her acres would pass to him when Sophia died. Give him his due, he worked the land as carefully as if it were, indeed, his, but what her beloved Anna had ever seen in that soulless lump, Sophia had never fathomed.
Fanny and her granddaughter were the first members of the Entwistle family to come west since Sophia’s mama, Anna Entwistle Grellier, and her husband, Frederic, had emigrated in 1858 to undo the chains of the bondsmen and bring Kansas free into the union. Sophia had been ten then, an only child: all her younger siblings had died before the age of five.
“The Lord has called him home,” her grandmother Entwistle said at baby Frederic’s funeral the year before they left for Kansas Territory.
“It is not by the will of any god that my son died,” her father had replied in his accented English, his eyes bright with tears over baby Frederic’s coffin. He was a freethinker and was outraged that Mama’s family organized a Christian funeral over his objections.
He and Mama differed on Jesus, but they agreed on the need to free the bondsmen. They answered the call from the antislavery society in Lawrence for a teacher in their school for children of all races. Even Indian children were welcome there.
All the Entwistle clan were antislavery, but none of them was willing to join Mama and Frederic in the perilous journey west. Mama’s brothers worked for Grandfather in the bank; they couldn’t possibly abandon their heavy responsibilities.
Sophia herself had been furious at leaving Boston. Grandmother invited Mama and Papa to leave Sophia with them, in the white ruffled bed where Mama herself had slept as a girl, but her parents would not give her up.
It took Fanny and Georgina little more than a day to travel by train from Boston to Lawrence. In 1858, the journey took over six long hard weeks. Sophia and her parents rode by train to Cleveland and then wagon to Saint Louis, where they transferred all their belongings, including Mama’s piano, to a steamboat on the Missouri River for the week’s journey to Kansas City
They waited in Kansas City for another two weeks, the time it took for an armed escort to assemble and accompany them past the slavers who controlled access into Kansas Territory. While they waited, Mama gave birth to her third baby boy.
The baby died on the two-day wagon ride from Kansas City to Lawrence. Little Joseph, going into the wilderness, his grave was one of the first dug in the new town. With Mama weak and grieving, and Papa unable to deal with anything practical, it fell to Sophia to find the ferryman, give him a precious dollar to load and unload their goods and carry them to Lawrence.
Six miles from Lawrence, they’d crossed the Wakarusa River on another ferry, but once on the other side the wagon had splashed through water almost all the way to the town. The wagon driver told her and Papa to walk alongside the wagon, as he did, to spare the oxen: they were in wetlands, with water too shallow for a ferry, but muddy and a strain for the animals. At one point the water rose to Sophia’s waist; Papa picked her up and carried her for a time so as not to add her slight weight to the suffering beasts.
Too much water, not enough, that was the story of Kansas—drought, floods, drought, locusts, blizzards—everything that nature could send to destroy the human spirit had descended on them. Neither of her parents knew anything about farming and Papa wasn’t interested: he cared only about his school. The homestead they’d laid a claim to Sophia and Mama learned to care for, with the help of neighbors.
Sophia always assumed she would return to Boston as soon as she was old enough to live without parental decree. But then Papa was murdered by border ruffians during the Civil War, and she and Mama took over the school and still tried to run the farm, and then the Tremonts arrived from New York state with enough money to set up a ten-thousand-acre bonanza farm.
Young Amos Tremont helped Sophia, the Grellier farm began to succeed, they married, had one child who lived to adulthood and married Rufus Schapen. And now—Amos was dead, their daughter and her baby long dead in childbirth, and it was just Sophia and Rufus. She wished it were just Sophia.
Sophia had recently joined the Congregational church as a place to find companionship away from her son-in-law, and she was happy to drive the horses into town every Sunday. Rufus didn’t like the Congregationalists; he found them cold and unfeeling, lacking in the genuine Spirit that he found in tent revivals. This was the church her mother and grandparents had belonged to; she always made a silent apology to Papa during the sermon, wondering if his freethinking ideas were wrong and he was actually with Jesus in heaven. Not sure of her own ideas on the subject.
It was in the midst of Sophia’s loneliness that Fanny wrote: her granddaughter needed a change from Boston; could she spend the summer in the country with Sophia?
Rufus objected: a city girl on the farm, no doubt spoiled, the last thing they needed, but Sophia had written back at once to welcome Georgina. A young girl around the place was just what she needed to revive her spirits. She did caution her cousin that the amenities Georgina was doubtless used to in Boston would be sadly lacking.
“And if we are to feed her for three months, then a dollar a week in board would be welcome.”
She and Fanny used to spend every Sunday together at Grandfather Entwistle’s tall narrow house on Beacon Hill. They’d fought, played, shared the white ruffled bed on Sunday nights, and then, when they were ten, they were suddenly torn apart. They had written letters at first, the stilted letters of children:
Every thing here is covered with dirt and we must wash our own close in tubs there are no servants. The work is hard, but we are setting free the bondsman. We see Indyans every day and rackoons and sometimes wolfs.
She did not add that they barely had food to eat, especially since Papa was a vegetarian who would not allow murdered birds to be cooked in his house. Indeed, without the barrel of supplies Grandmother Entwistle sent them, they might well have starved to death. “Write nothing to excite pity,” Mama said, editing her letter before she mailed it. “We are here for a high moral purpose and we should be envied, not pitied, for a few material lacks.”
As time passed, the cousins’ correspondence dwindled. They sent each other news of their marriages, of their parents’ deaths, of the birth of their children and then grandchildren. Sophia had been vaguely aware of Georgie’s birth to Fanny’s younger son, but time passed and she hadn’t realized the girl was now twenty years old.
She also didn’t know that the Boston family was sending Georgie west not for her health but for the family’s. She was cutting a wide swath in Boston nightlife that was raising questions at the bank where Entwistles had been a presence for almost a century. The final scandal, which resulted in a forced stay in a high-priced sanitarium in the Berkshires, caused the whole family to gather on Beacon Hill to discuss what to do with Georgie.
It was Fanny who suggested sending her to Kansas for the summer. She hadn’t seen her dearest Sophia in sixty-five years; she’d bring her recalcitrant granddaughter west, catch up with Sophia, and then return in time to join the family at their summer compound in Newport.
Much as she scorned Sophia’s primitive cooking and plumbing out loud, after a few days on the farm, Fanny wrote to her daughter-in-law in Boston that “it couldn’t be better. Sophia doesn’t own a car: she has a gasoline tractor for the farm, but still uses horses and a buggy to go into town. And the only man on the place besides the handyman is a hulking Caliban of a son-in-law of about fifty-five. Georgina will not have much opportunity to sow her wild oats here.”
3
Georgie did not enjoy country life, at least, not life in the Kansas countryside. She described all the primitive plumbing, cooking, and work chores that she was expected to share in in extravagant letters to her chums back in Boston.
Give this country back to the Indians. No sane person wants to live without a telephone or an automobile. They have motion pictures in town but neither Sophia nor Rufus ever goes. Every dime is counted four times before i
t’s spent, so we do nothing as frivolous as motion pictures. Once one of the neighbors had a barn dance and I was so desperate I actually went! My bobbed hair and painted lips caused quite a furore. Very entertaining.
Rufus made no pretense of welcoming Georgie. As he told Sophia, almost every morning, Georgie was exactly the self-centered, frivolous brat he’d expected. One morning he came back from the fields to find her sunbathing on the grass in front of the house. She was wearing the same kind of bathing costume that everyone in her set in Boston wore.
“How dare you?” he thundered. “This is a Christian household. We don’t lie around naked like heathens and Indians.”
“Do you have a tape measure on you, Rufus? Are you hoping to join the Modesty Police?” Georgie grinned up at him. “They patrol the beaches and measure how much leg we’re showing. My friend Susan Whitney had to pay a ten-dollar fine, but as you know, I don’t have any money with me. You’ll have to send the bill to my papa, who will be appropriately enraged.”
Rufus’s head seemed to swell. Sophia feared he might suffer a stroke and moved to silence Georgie, but too late: Rufus carried her inside. She went limp in his arms and made the job as hard as possible, but he dumped her on the parlor sofa and stomped back out to the yard.
After that, Georgie went out of her way to taunt him, dressing as skimpily as possible, jutting her hip out as she walked past him, leaning over him to offer to pour him fresh hot coffee, her cleavage practically in his nose, and laughing as he started to roar at her. She would skip out of his reach when he tried to hit her.
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