“No, no. Well…I don’t know…Paul! Wait!” Another long pause and then, “You have to know, Rachel.…”
“Speak to me Ruth.”
She yelled something garbled and then seemed to disappear again. I checked the phone, we were still connected.
I dove in with my questions.
“Ruth, tell me about Ada. When did she become pregnant with Eddie? The dates on the genealogy would indicate it was when she was with Mark, but Eddie is Luke’s son, right?”
Silence. “Ruth?”
She was back! But her voice had gone so deep I thought it was a man speaking, at first.
“Not unless by violence. Mark married her. Then Luke raped Ada. That’s why they fought, why he killed Mark. Mark knew…couldn’t stop his own brother.”
I said, “What do you mean by bad blood, Ruth?”
“Hasn’t anyone told you yet? Inbreeding. It led to John Stowall…the last son of their family…it’s in his book. It has a family tree. More complete. They can’t have children because they were sterilized by that nutsy doctor.” And then she was really gone.
Sterilized! There it was. The thought I’d been dancing around all this time. That’s why the little x’s on the fighting figure on Ada’s quilt—and the same little x’s over the children’s groins.
But I didn’t want to think it.
And the nutsy doctor, the one Famine just told them about, he had sterilized them! I definitely needed that man’s name.
I heard a metallic chirp and looked over to see a police car right next to me. My heart bumped. The traffic cop signaled me to close my phone by closing his hand. I did. He sped forward, where he stayed, just in front of me for a few miles.
Nice cop, giving us phone addicts a little room to roam. I wanted to call Ruth back to be certain she was okay, but pulling to the shoulder on the freeway seemed a daunting task, so I continued on.
It was another fifteen minutes before I reached the old library in Carlsbad. I redialed Ruth’s number, but there was no answer.
I sat in my car calling everyone I could think of. I even called my home phone number forgetting Matt was away…and it rang busy.
No one was home! Matt was still on the road, would be all day, in fact I’d been given instructions not to call him.
Maybe he’d returned early. Or maybe I’d dialed the wrong number.
I called home again. It rang several times. Good. So, I’d pressed a wrong button, not hard to do with these fool, teensy phones.
I called Hannah again, willing a pickup. Someone was always home at their house, or so she’d said. Still no answer. I left a second message for her to call me, and added she should contact her mother. That Ruth had called me very upset.
I called Tom Beardsley at work again. Busy. I left a second message.
And now my phone was down to two bars. And my station wagon didn’t have a phone cord in it. I glanced toward the library.
The library had phones, of course. Ruth had sounded genuinely terrified. Maybe I needed to call nine-one-one. But what was I to say? Someone hung up on me? I heard loud noises? They live somewhere on Cleveland mesa?
A plea like that would just slip to the bottom of the bin of hundreds and maybe thousands of requests for help that went out to the California Emergency Communication system every day.
I finally realized that what had unnerved me so utterly was the similarity between Ruth’s voice and words, and the words my mother spoke, just before she’d slipped into dementia.
I tried to settle myself further by carefully reviewing what Ruth had told me.
The most stunning information I had just received from Ruth was that the Stowall children had been sterilized.
But Ada had had Eddie. So, either Mark or Luke had not been sterilized. Maybe neither of them had. Ruth really hadn’t told me which one was the father, but her obvious dislike of Luke had led her to charge him with rape.
I kept going back to the four children with Xs over their genitals at the center of Ada’s quilt. One male and three females.
So maybe these were the only four that had been sterilized. John and three of the four girls. That would make sense. And maybe brain damaged Sarah was the one not sterilized because she was brain damaged. They might have figured no one would marry her anyway.
Realizing just how exhausted I was from nights of dial-tone-phone-call interrupted sleep and the insomnia that ensued, I opened my car door and willed myself towards the library.
I stepped out of the truck and breathed in the sea air. The Cole branch of the Carlsbad library commanded a view of the Pacific Ocean that is the envy of most along the coast of Southern California. Cool breezes year round, great view, excellent collection of books and databases.
Before leaving the house, I’d called to see if I could access John Stowall’s book online through the library. Many electronic genealogical tools are available online, some through local public libraries. However, I’d found that most family biographies were not. They were too obscure.
And it turned out John Stowall’s family bio wasn’t online either--as ubiquitous as the Stowall’s seemed to be. The only public copy of the book appeared to be held in Carlsbad’s closely guarded special collection room. I would have to read it there.
My first goal was to explore this bad blood thing. My second goal was to verify Eddie’s parentage. My third was to find out more about Ada’s family and get a better picture of Gordon, Jolene and Hazel.
The librarian brought me the biography after taking my ID card. I was vaguely offended that she couldn’t see that I was a librarian, too. Next time I’d wear my NCLA tee.
I was praying the book would have a detailed index as I opened the red, leather book and flipped straight to the back to find that indeed there was. The thin biography also had a sizeable collection of family photographs. But I fought the urge to start with them and flipped back to the first page.
It answered my first question immediately, at least partially. The very first sentence began, “I, John Franklin Stowall, was born with a rare blood disease, a medical event that brought an end to this branch of the Stowall family and misshaped the maturing years of my brothers and sisters.”
My breathing slowed, my blood stilled. There it was; rare blood disease. Bad blood literally. But I didn’t yet know what kind of disease.
There was no table of contents, so I flipped back to the index and searched for a further explanation. I tried “diseases”, and “blood diseases”, even looked under the keywords “Stowall, John”. Nothing.
It was as if he wanted to apologize, but was too horrified by his own affliction to discuss it further. For crying out loud! What blood disease?
Without a doubt the entire family shared in at least one disease, the disease of terminal secrecy!
Something made me look up as I felt someone watching me. I saw a figure quickly disappear around a line of bookcases. A chill ran up my spine. I waited, expecting the person to peer around at me again.
It was nothing of course, just my imagination, my nerves, after all the hangup calls. I sat gazing into space thinking about her for a few moments. Finally, I sighed and returned to my frustrating search.
John Stowall went on to dedicate the book to his siblings, and actually plead for their forgiveness for taking their right to bear children away. “It’s because of my disorder that my dear siblings suffered so. It pains me to know that I can’t even be an uncle. It pains me to know my existence has damaged their happiness in this way.”
So the mysterious blood disease was indeed genetic. I returned to the index. It was only three pages long. So I began working my way down, until I finally found it.
Not a blood disease, a blood disorder. He called it Hemostatism. A disorder that interferes with the proper function of blood clotting. A bleeder’s disease. I had never heard of this disorder, but that didn’t surprise me. Medicine was not my field.
I turned to the section indicated. It was only six pages long and I read it
knowing I would need to research further before the afternoon was out.
I would discover that John Stowall’s short book was first an apologia, second a family history--which was as much an attempt to identify the source of the ‘inherited disorder’--and finally this brief discussion of ‘Hemostatism.’
I skimmed faster. Time was fleeting. I needed to know more. I needed to know current medical knowledge, and what was known in the middle of the Twentieth Century. John Stowall’s discussion was sounding more and more fantastic, as in not real. Mythical, not factual.
As I couldn’t leave the sequestered area for archived materials, I asked the librarian for reference tools on the topic. While I waited, I studied the photographs John had included.
The photos were old, mostly of the family when it was very young and still happy--all but one, before John’s birth. The one photo of John was him as a three-month-old, in the arms of his unsmiling mother.
So even then she knew. Her last son was a bleeder.
She had to have been in her forties by then. But Victoria still looked pretty.
Most of the pictures showed a happy family. It was sad, knowing how these people would change. The dates of the photos ranged from the ‘50s into the ‘70s.
Suddenly I found a passage that really confused me. John wrote, “Thank God that since entering the holy order my spontaneous bleeding has ceased altogether.”
Or, those around him who needed him to seem to be a bleeder were no longer able to stick him with pins in the middle of the night, I mused. Munchausen’s came to mind.
I continued my examination of the book and discovered a notation on the end page advising that there was a pamphlet which accompanied the book. As the librarian brought me the medical books, I asked her for that as well. It turned out to be the other genealogy of the Jake Stowall clan, the one Ruth had just mentioned. I opened it, gingerly spreading it out over several nearby tables with the librarian’s help.
I took a moment to study it, quickly searching for some sort of confirmation of Ruth’s words that Eddie wasn’t Luke’s son. Spotted Jake and Victoria Stowall. Ran my finger down to the eldest child, Mark, and the second oldest Luke.
Ada Stowall was listed next to both of them as wife on this version of the genealogy. Ada’s marriage to Mark was dated December 8, 1964. Ada’s marriage to Luke was almost two months later, on January 26, 1965.
But Eddie was only shown under her first marriage, to Mark.
A straight vertical line down to his name and the date of his birth, Thursday, June 6, 1965. He’d been born eight months after Ada’s marriage to Mark and six months after her marriage to Luke.
It was more and more apparent that Mark was Eddie’s father. My heart lifted at the thought.
I leaned closer to the entries. The surface of the document had been repaired. A faint printing of Eddie’s name could be seen under Luke’s name, as well. And a different birth date. But it had been removed. With a thin layer of liquid paper.
I studied the entry of Eddie’s name in the pamphlet under Mark’s name. It appeared to have been part of the original document. Same font. I brushed my finger tip over the words. There was no noticeable raise or depression.
A voice whispered in my ear. “Someone tried to change the entry, way back when the book was first entered in the collection. We had to do a repair on the pamphlet when it was returned. That’s why it’s no longer allowed to circulate.”
The librarian had returned, to see what I was doing, peering so closely.
I wished I’d carried my ALA card with me.
But then she smiled. “You’re the PI, aren’t you? The one trying to figure out that old Stowall mystery. I heard you were a librarian.”
What?
“Don’t you know they have your picture on television? When you were coming out of that old house? The one the police had cordoned off? You and those other two women.”
Oh, no. Gerry.
“Everyone’s trying to figure out who those other women are.”
I said, “Janet Nelson and Helen Johnston. I partner with them sometimes.”
Those were the names of a couple of librarians I’d worked with back in North Carolina. I figured they’d love the publicity.
The librarian scurried off with a greedy smile. Probably jumped right on facebook. Or twitter, or linkedin, or…whatever.
I sighed. I’d had my fifteen minutes of fame and hadn’t even noticed.
The genealogy was much bigger than the one I had pinned to my wall. And there might well be other changes on it I needed to know. I asked if it was possible for a copy to be made of a document this size. It was, but done in sections I would have to tape together myself, and they would be scaled down.
In several places in his small tome, the author referred to himself as ‘Brother John’.
I assumed John meant “Brother” with a capitol B as in a Catholic religious. I knew that a lot of Brothers were active in Catholic schools, and that teaching was an extra vow some took, along with poverty, chastity and obedience.
I turned my attention to a couple of the books the librarian had brought me that discussed hemophilia, the Merck Manual and the volume of the Gales Encyclopedia of Medicine that contained hemophilia, thinking that this was what John’s family thought he had. But a brief review reminded me that this was only partly a genetic illness.
But it could also occur in the womb during development of the fetus, through a mechanism called chromosomal mutation.
And it could be acquired.
This latter type occurred when antibodies were formed against the “elements in the blood which are instrumental to its healthy functioning”.
Way too simply put, hemophilia was a condition where the blood failed to coagulate properly when blood vessels broke. But since there was no obvious alternative, I continued reading.
I understood very little of the medical descriptions, but something in the roman numerals and chemical script made me think of Ada’s quilt--specifically squares seven and eight. I forged on.
Only men were actually stricken by the disability--by bleeding--while women were the silent carriers, passing the scary illness to their offspring. Clearly Eddie did not have hemophilia. There was no evidence in his home or anywhere else that I could find, that he exhibited this disorder. So why was he locked up? Luke’s ignorance? Ada’s ignorance? The whole fool family’s ignorance?
Or was Luke just a nasty, rotten man who hated Eddie because he was Mark’s child—and that was the only reason he kept him imprisoned?
It all came down to Jake. Jake was the one who kept this fantasy alive, because he needed to justify what he’d done to his daughters.
Yet, Ada never had another child. I wondered if she’d been sterilized, too. After delivering Eddie. Of course, if she didn’t love Luke she might very well have avoided pregnancy in one of the numerous ways available to women since the nineteen sixties.
I wondered if John had been sterilized, even though males did not pass the disorder on.
None of these very personal questions were being answered by John’s little book. Maybe these questions didn’t really matter. Crimes had been committed before, and beyond identifying the evil doer, no rhyme or reason had been found for many of them either.
I tried to console myself with this fact. But I wasn’t happy with the lack of understanding. This was the twenty-first century.
I returned my focus to the volume I was reading.
It seemed to me at this stage of my reading that if John had hemophilia there was simple proof that it wasn’t genetically endowed. The first two males hadn’t been bleeders.
But my whole brain was glazing over—not just my eyes.
Along about three-thirty I discovered a reference in the index to snakes on page thirty-two of John’s little biography.
I hurriedly turned to this page and found a small picture of a Western Rattlesnake. But it was the caption underneath that grabbed my attention. It confirmed the worst of t
he crazy things I’d heard about this man.
“Jake Stowall believed snake venom had properties that would lead to the development of a cure for this disease.”
So it was true. Jake Stowall thought he could cure his youngest son’s bleeding problems using snake venom. So did he use the venom directly on John?
Time was slipping by much too quickly, so I flipped the pages until I saw a small illustration, this one captioned, “PDB rendering of Coagulation Factor VIII.” It leapt off the page at me.
My suspicions had been correct. Before me was Ada’s “rosary”, complete with dangling cross and two jacks, embroidered in the seventh square. And I felt convinced that when I returned home with my notes and photocopies I’d find the strange notations in the eighth square as well.
It was all coming together. But I had one more task I wanted to complete.
I returned to the section with the photographs. I needed to take more time looking at them, reading the captions.
Andrea had said Luke looked ‘like a knock-off of Jake.’ But I’d yet to spot a photograph that clearly showed this.
And then I found one. Jake was standing with his second son, side by side, out front of the backyard shed. Jake in his fifties, Luke in his late twenties. They did look very much alike. Same beady eyes with dark circles. Same stringy brown hair hanging Hitler-like from a side part. Lean. Browned by the sun. About the same height. Their faces were feature-for-feature identical.
I moved through the pictures with an increasing sense of urgency. Time had fled. I would get stuck in the rush-hour traffic for sure. I turned another page, and again something caught my eye.
A familiar photo – had I seen this before, in Victoria’s twisting hallway, Jake, Victoria and some of their children, with Jake holding a long, gnarled stick? Not quite, because that hallway photo had included only the oldest three sisters and two brothers, with Jake and Victoria flanking them.
This picture was much clearer, and I could see that the stick wasn’t a stick at all. It was a dead snake. And I could see Mark and Luke better. Mark was startlingly beautiful, with black curly hair wild about his head and piercing eyes. He was tall and stately. And he was a stark contrast to Luke--still looking very young in this picture. A gawky teen.
Ada Unraveled Page 24