The California Coven Project

by Bob Stickgold

  “It’s complicated.”

  “I’m sure it must be, Mrs. Stone. But perhaps we can work our way through it. Shall we try?” Georges began to pace in front of the stand. “For example, Mrs. Stone, have you always employed this procedure? When you first tried this potion’ of yours on your own mother, for instance, did you drive her into an emotional frenzy?”

  “It’s not really a frenzy,” Maggie tried to explain.

  “I don’t care what you call it!” Georges shouted. Then he dropped his voice to a near-whisper. “Mrs. Stone, did you use this emotional aspect of the treatment on your mother?”

  “Yes,” Maggie answered. “Well, no, I mean—”

  “Maybe you don’t remember, Mrs. Stone?” Georges offered sarcastically.

  “No.” Maggie tried to pull herself together. “I’ll explain. The first time I treated Mom, I gave her the potion without first psyching her up—that’s what we call it—but it didn’t work. Nothing happened from the treatment that I could see at all. So, after giving the matter some thought, I decided that maybe ‘psyching up’ would help, that maybe that was necessary for the potion to work.”

  Georges nodded his head sympathetically. “I think that maybe I understand now. Perhaps. Mrs. Stone, in your worry and anxiety over your mother’s condition, you tried, as so many others have, to find some unorthodox treatment for her illness, in the frantic hope that it might help. This much you’ve said yourself. But because of your training in science and medicine you couldn’t just fly to any quack cure; you knew that they had been tested and that they didn’t work, so you tried finding an old, lost cure. Again, so much you have said yourself. It was almost a search for a fountain of youth.

  “And then you found this potion, this recipe, in a moldy old book, and your hopes were fired up, and you cally derived cure that could cure your mother. So you copied ‘the recipe’ and you took it home and you tried it and it failed. Yes, all this you’ve admitted yourself in your testimony.

  “But now we have the final key, the point that until now I haven’t understood. For, you gave your mother the medication and it failed—that must have been so painful for you, Mrs. Stone. You must have built up your hopes, your beliefs, until you truly believed that this musty old recipe would work. And then it failed.” He shook his head and turned toward the jury. “And when her treatment failed, she turned to mysticism, to religion, trying frantically to salvage some hope from despair. Perhaps we would do the same. She retained the medication, her faith in science, but the crux of her treatment now became faith. It became a potion, not a medication, and she formed a group and called it a Coven, a group of witches.”

  “But it worked!” Maggie interrupted, her voice shaky and quiet. “It worked!”

  Georges nodded his head. “Or so you felt.” He picked up a file folder from his table. “I have here Dr. Krueger’s file on your mother, Ann Stone. It says, and I quote, ‘Mrs. Stone, your mother, appears, based on these tests, to have gone through a spontaneous remission of the classical type.’ Interestingly, there are sonic further notes here, that aren’t quite so clear. Perhaps you could help me, Mrs. Stone. It says, ‘daughter feels she cured mother.’ Did you tell him that at the time, Mrs. Stone?”

  “No,” Maggie said. “My mother sort of let it slip out we were both so excited when the X-ray results came back. . . .”

  “So,” Georges interrupted, “Dr. Krueger got some inkling that you thought you bad done something that cured her, is that right?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Now, Mrs. Stone, that line I read you, the one about the daughter thinking she had cured her mother, there’s a black line drawn through that sentence crossing that sentence out, and below is written, and I quote, ‘Foolish religious mysticism, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Can you tell us, Mrs. Stone, why he might have written this?”

  “Oh!” Maggie let out a nervous laugh. “You see, I didn’t want him to know about the cure.” She pointed to Beckie, who was sitting next to Linda Coles at the defense table. “Beckie and I decided that until we had run more tests, we didn’t want to let anyone in the medical profession know. So I made up a story to tell him, to throw him off the track, and so that’s why he wrote that down.”

  “And just what was that silly story. Mrs. Stone.”

  “That I had gone up and down the coast and prayed for my mother at all of the old missions. I think I said I lit candles to each of the saints, or something outrageous like that.” She smiled.

  Georges smiled too. “Did you?”

  “What?” Maggie was confused by the question.

  “Did you go up and down the coast, lighting candles at all the old missions, hoping that this would help your mother?”

  “No! I told you, it was just a silly story that I made up, to throw Dr. Krueger off my trail.”

  “And you thought that he would find that less believable than what you have said you did do? You thought that if you told him that you grabbed the recipe for a magic potion of the 1500s, combined it with religious mysticism, and gave it to your mother, that then he would have known that you really did have a cure for cancer? Is that why you made up that ‘silly little story’?”

  “It’s not religious mysticism,” Maggie insisted, still a bit confused.

  “Then what is it, Mrs. Stone?”

  “It’s—well, it’s complicated.”

  Georges turned and looked over the gallery. Then he looked at his watch. “Very well, Mrs. Stone, we have the rest of the afternoon. In your own words, at your own speed, tell me, tell the jury, if it isn’t religious mysticism, what is it?”

  * * *

  Maggie took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. “It’s complicated,” she repeated, “because there are so many different threads that are pulled together into it. I—I don’t know where to start.” She paused, and for once Georges said nothing. “A while ago you asked me ‘wasn’t it ironic’ that I had come up with a cure for cancer when so many others had failed.” She paused again.

  “You see, if I was going to come up with a cure, and so many others had tried, with so much more knowledge and expertise then it could only he because they were going about it all the wrong way. The cure would have to be some simple thing that for one reason or another they weren’t able to see.

  “And that’s why I researched old cures. The women who practiced folk medicine weren’t fools. Today everyone believes they were merely superstitious. But those are vicious lies spread to enhance the power and reputation of modern doctors, and used back then by men when they were first trying to usurp the role of healer from women. And to prove that they were better than women at healing, early doctors vilified the ways of those women, said that the women’s ways couldn’t possibly work, and when they did work, used the cures as evidence that the women were witches! All this is fact that I’m telling you, it’s accepted in history books. I’m not making it up, or reinterpreting what others have said. This is true!

  “But I went a step further, I said to myself that whenever one culture conquers another—and that is in essence what happened—that they denigrate the culture of the conquered, they label it primitive or sacrilegious or Communist, or whatever the opposite of their own culture is seen as. And when the more powerful culture does that it rejects the good as well as the evil in the conquered culture. Consequently, it can no longer learn from the wisdom of the conquered.

  “Well, that is exactly what happened when men began taking over the medical profession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They rejected and denied the wisdom and knowledge of women healers. So at first that is what I thought might be the key, the simple thing that all of those doctors and scientists would be blind to, that they would overlook—the wisdom of the old women healers— and that is why I looked for an old folk remedy.”

  She paused a moment before continuing. “There’s another reason why I find my current situation ‘ironic’.” She looked nervously at Beckie, but continued. “Over the last sever
al weeks, while Beckie—Ms. McPhee—has been on trial here, a lot of sensational rubbish was published in some of the papers about our calling ourselves a coven, suggesting that we’re all witches just a minute ago, you used that word, ‘witches,’ too.” She glanced at Beckie again, uncertainly. “You see, that’s what male doctors did in the 1600s to attack women who practiced the healing arts. And the real irony is that one of my ancestors, a woman physician named Margaret Jones, was—because of her medical successes—tried as a witch in this country, in the mid-1600s. So here I am, 350 years later, being charged for all practical purposes with the same crime—the crime of opposing the male medical establishment. But you see, Mr. Georges, there never were any witches, were there?”

  “That’s all very interesting, Mrs. Stone, but it doesn’t really get at my question, does it? Perhaps this explains why you tried a treatment from four hundred years ago, but the cure you found didn’t work? And then you came up with this—what I call near-hysteria—that you say makes the difference, and that has nothing to do with the old cures, has it? Because that’s what I asked you about, to explain why you used this emotional pitch as part of your treatment.”

  Maggie shook her head vehemently. “I know, I know. But the subject is complicated, I told you that.”

  “But could you perhaps speak just a bit more directly to—”

  “I know!” Maggie insisted. “I’m explaining it. Because, as you said, it didn’t work, and I had to ask myself why not, and that’s when I thought of the emotional aspect.” She looked to see if Georges was going to interrupt.

  “Go ahead then. Try to confine yourself to that aspect, please.”

  “I am.” She paused to gather her thoughts, “I had to ask myself why the medicine hadn’t worked, and I had to ask myself again whether any folk remedies worked or was it all a fraud, and I answered myself, ‘No, they weren’t frauds, because they would have died out over the generations if they were.’ So I asked myself what I was doing differently. Why had the recipe worked in the past? What was it that I wasn’t seeing—like the scientists and the doctors—what was the subtle difference that even I was overlooking?” She hesitated before continuing. “And the answer I came up with was faith.” She turned to face Georges. “You see, you can look at faith from two different perspectives. You can look on it as a mystical religious belief that is supposed to bring down the hand of God or something like that, or you can look on it as a psychological state of mind.

  “Forget for a minute what the faith is in, whether it’s in a God or in one’s luck or one’s cleverness or strength or whatever. Look at the essence of faith, and you will find that there are certain features that all these different kinds of faith have in common. There’s a unifying mental state and physical state. Clinically, you see increased sympathetic-nervous-system activity, similar to the fight-or-flight reflex. But you see other things, too.” She paused to collect her thoughts.

  “Do you know what the placebo effect is?” she asked Georges.

  “No,” he replied, a little uncertainly.

  “It was a scientific anomaly for a long time, a phenomenon discovered by doctors and scientists for which they had no explanation, Most simply stated, if you give patients with intractable pain—pain with a clear physiological basis—if you give such patients pills containing nothing but sugar and tell the patients that the pills contain a powerful new painkiller, about half of the patients taking the sugar pills will report marked reduction in the amount of pain that they are experiencing. Well, for a long time scientists gave their standard explanation for things they didn’t understand, that said it was all in the patients’ heads—the pill obviously couldn’t cause a reduction in the amount of pain.

  “And the researchers would have left it there if pain wasn’t such a terrible problem. Because finally they had to say, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s just in the patient’s head, because that’s all that pain is anyhow, something in your head and if giving them sugar pills and convincing them that the pulls will work means that the patients will actually experience less pain, well, that’s all any painkiller is supposed to do.’

  “For years this phenomenon lay at rest in psychology texts, a curious quirk of some human minds. It wasn’t discussed in physiology texts or in pharmacology tests because it didn’t fit in with what they knew of how the body works. Or at least not until their knowledge of the body improved.

  “It was in the late ’70s that researchers discovered a chemical in the brain, which they named endorphin, meaning a morphinelike compound endogenous to the body, which was as potent a painkiller as morphine itself, and whose release into the body was controlled by the mind. And when they went back and tested those people who reported diminished pain when given sugar pills, scientists discovered that they were releasing endorphins into their body.” She paused again to reinforce what she had said. “When the patients thought they had been given a painkiller that could cure their pain, when they just thought this, when they had faith in this their minds and their bodies took that faith, and through the mysterious workings of the brain translated that into a signal to cause the physical release into their own bodies of, possibly, the most potent painkiller ever found. This is scientific fact, accepted by doctors and scientists and the A.M.A. and the National Academy of Science.

  “And I realized, Mr. Georges, that this element of a cure, which you describe so scornfully, is the one element of those ancient cures that everyone, including myself, had dismissed as absurd. It must be a terribly deep-seated fear in us, Mr. Georges, that even now, years after scientists have conclusively proven that in at least one case faith can cure, that even now we refuse to see it.

  “You painted such a pathetic picture of me, Mr. Georges, sinking into hopelessness and then reaching out to mysticism, but in fact, you couldn’t have been further from the truth. What I did was the opposite of that, Mr. Georges, and infinitely harder to do. I came to an understanding that what I was about to try was not mysticism but science, that what I was doing was not being done out of a sense of hopelessness, driving me into religious fervor, but rather that I was rejecting the religious superstition of this scientific age that labels certain concepts heresy, and that I was opening myself to a possible truth which, as all truths eventually do, would transcend the superstitions of our age.

  “But all this only led me to have the confidence to contemplate a heretical hypothesis. It was merely an idea to test, and it was only after I did test the hypothesis and found that it was correct, that I told others of it, and decided to carry out further tests. You know the rest, Mr. Georges. That is why we arc here. Except I’m afraid, Mr. Georges, that your own acceptance of the superstitions of our age prevents you from understanding the simple results of those experiments. We can cure cancer.”

  Maggie sank back into her chair. She felt calm, at peace with herself in the absolute silence of the courtroom. It was several seconds before Georges was able to respond, and when he did his voice lacked the confidence that it had shown earlier. “Mrs. Stone, it is clear that you do believe in your cure, that you believe that it can cure cancer, but I must ask you, where is your proof? This is a court of law, Mrs. Stone, and although we are very much interested in people’s opinions—that is why I asked you to explain your use of this psychological treatment—we must, in the end, rely on facts, not opinions. So I must ask you, where is your proof that the treatment cures cancer?”

  Maggie sat a moment. Then, slowly, she rose from her chair and raised her right arm, pointing to the gallery. “There,” she said in a loud, firm voice, “there is my proof!”

  Every eye in the jury turned to follow her finger. A woman in her sixties, with short white hair and deep creases in her face, rose to her feet in the gallery. “I am her proof, I am her living proof.” And as she stood, first one and then another and another rose to their feet until fully thirty people were standing, all bearing on their faces the signs of their long, painful struggles with cancer.

  In a vo
ice so soft that it was barely audible, Maggie said, “Yes, these are my proof!”

  Chapter Fifty

  THERE was a party that evening at Maggie’s, Beckie was present, and Sue Tiemann, the two lawyers, Linda Coles and Liz Jason, Ann and Carol. It was the first Maggie had seen of Ann since going into hiding, and she was ecstatic at the improvement in her mother’s condition. Ann hadn’t looked so healthy in years.

  The group had just finished watching the evening news when Linda opened a bottle of champagne. “To the Coven.” Glasses clinked. “I think we’ve won it today,” she said. “Between Bill Krueger’s testimony and yours, Maggie, even a conviction is bound to bring no sentence. The news media have gone wild. I think you may even have convinced old Georges.” She laughed aloud. “I’ve never seen him so totally at a loss for words. I think he was convinced you were going to make a fool of yourself, and instead you turned the trial around.”

  And so it seemed she had. The next day, Georges continued his cross-examination of Krueger, but he couldn’t find a single hole in the doctor’s support for the medical validity of Maggie’s cure. By the end of the day, Linda had begun calling witness after witness who had been treated by the Coven and been cured. After the second of these Georges even stopped cross-examining.

  Liz Jason was waiting for them when they came out of court. “Things are jumping. Pat White has a meeting of the Senate Committee set for tomorrow morning, and she’s going to push for a vote against repeal of the licenses of N.M.A. Members.”

  Maggie and Beckie turned to each other, each about to speak. “No, wait,” Beckie said. “I have to be in court tomorrow, but you don’t, Maggie. Go with Liz. Go to the hearings.”

  “But I couldn’t desert you like that, Beckie!”