“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.
Ethan rolled over on his bed as his uncle opened the door to his bedroom. “You still up?” Ross asked.
He had been staring out the window, watching the sun come up. As always, a thick pane of glass was protecting him. He knew he’d totally lucked out; if Eli Rochert had decided to be honest and if his mother hadn’t come home with that box of old papers, he’d have been reamed up one side and down another for sneaking away.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Ethan sighed. “And it’s not like I wanted you to get in trouble too.” He picked at a stitch on the quilt that covered his bed, a lame blue thing with babyish trucks on its hem. Didn’t anyone except him realize that he was growing up? “It’s just that she doesn’t get it. Not like
you
would.”
Ross sat down on the bed, and put the laptop he’d been carrying on the floor. “Why me?”
With shining eyes, Ethan turned to his uncle. “Because you’ve skydived, and played chicken with a train, and fought back when someone pulled a knife on you. All those stories you tell me about things you’ve done. Sometimes I wake up and think I want to run until there’s nowhere left to go, and that if I
don’t
do it I might as well just croak right here and now.”
Ross shook his head. “When I do those things, it’s not for the thrill. It’s because sometimes I get so down that I need to feel something, anything. And since a pinprick isn’t cutting it, I’ve got to try a meat cleaver.”
“I know,” Ethan breathed. “And that
rocks
.”
“The thing is, Eth, I’d give anything to be sitting on a bed in a house that was safe, knowing that on the other side of the wall was someone who would rather die than think of me being hurt.” He pulled at the same stitch on the quilt that Ethan had toyed with, and unraveled one appliquéd truck. “Don’t try so hard to be me,” Ross said, “when all I’m trying to be is someone else.”
Suddenly Ethan felt like a sock was stuck in his throat, and those stupid tears were coming. “I just want to be normal,” he said.
“Yeah, well . . . if it weren’t for you and me, normal people would have nothing to measure themselves against.”
Ethan hiccuped on a laugh. “I guess we’d better stick together.”
“That’s good,” Ross answered, opening the laptop so that Ethan could see the screen. “Because I’m counting on your help.”
By the time Eli got home from Shelby’s house, and this new package of nightmares, it was after three in the morning. The blasting at the quarry started at five, but he managed to get back to sleep with a pillow over his head. So when his doorbell rang at 6:30
A.M.
, he seriously considered taking his piece and shooting in that general direction, just to make the caller go away. Then he weighed the time he’d be stripped of his shield, and the ridiculous amount of paperwork he’d have to file for the simple discharge of a bullet, and dragged himself out of bed in his boxer shorts.
Frankie exploded into the apartment the minute he unlocked the door. “Wait’ll you hear this,” she said, making her way into the kitchen, where she held up the empty coffeepot and tsked. “I tested that nightgown at the state lab for you.”
“Frankie—”
“You know that stuff you thought was the victim’s blood?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it wasn’t. Don’t you keep your coffee in the freezer, Eli, like the rest of the modern world?” She turned around, holding the coffee-pot aloft. “You’re wearing your underpants, for God’s sake.”
“Underwear. Grown men don’t wear underpants.”
“Grown men usually get dressed before they answer the door.”
“Frankie,” Eli sighed, “I’ve had about three hours of sleep. Don’t screw with me.”
She unearthed the coffee, which was—of all places—in a box with his black shoe polish on top of the fridge, and began to measure it out. “It’s meconium.”