Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

Her mama’s name was Rose, and she’d had three other children, all by her husband Will. That may have been part of the trouble. Rose was old, near forty, when she lay down with Will in the summer of 1894. It was winter when the child came due, and Rose was that much older, and more things went wrong than the midwife could make right. She bled to death on the earthy floor of their cabin, while Will held his quiet baby girl close at his coat and screamed blue murder to the rafters.

As the days wore on, old Will’s screams quieted, and little Lou-Ellen—she stayed quiet. Lou-Ellen didn’t cry in her blankets, she didn’t laugh or coo when her brothers and sister would wiggle their fingers at her. By the time she was two, everyone had worked out that Lou-Ellen had been born simple and she might never be able to look after herself. It led to some awful talk among the families, about how a girl ought to be able to pull her weight. But it was only talk and it didn’t go on for long. Lou-Ellen was kin, everybody’d liked Rose and only a few didn’t care for Will. So they all cared for Lou-Ellen as she grew. They fed her even when food was scarce, gave her hugs and played with her, and when she got so she could make some words, they rechristened her Loo, which was something she could say back.

She managed to make herself useful, too. By the time the folks from Eliada came, she was tending goats and cleaning kills and minding the garden patch.

There were three men that made the trip up the hill. Two of them carried Winchester rifles on their backs and made it clear that they were not to be trifled with. A third was a fat old doctor (when Andrew asked if the name Nils Bergstrom rang a bell, Norma thought that might’ve been it).

The doctor talked to a couple of them and said he was there to provide free medicine—that some people out east had decided it was a good way to spend their money, to make sure that folks who couldn’t afford it got properly looked after by doctors.

There were some in the families who were suspicious, but they were quiet about it. The two riflemen looked like they had other friends besides this doctor, and no one wanted to have those ones drop by. So the riflemen set up a tent and started inviting folk inside for examinations.

No one was sure what sort of conversation went on when Loo was in the tent, but others from the families reported that the doctor just asked a lot of questions, looked into their eyes and listened to their hearts with a stethoscope.

The doctor heard many complaints, but by the time he packed up his tent and headed back to town, he’d offered little to cure them that the family couldn’t figure for themselves.

He did, however, offer what he called “preventative medicine.” His last day there, he invited a few people back, who’d had no complaints at all. It was mostly the younger folk—Loo, her sisters and brothers, and the two boys. He was, he said, going to give them a special operation that would make it easier on them. Loo, he said, would go into the tent first.

She would also be the last to go in.

Loo never spoke of that operation, but her cousin Jacob got the whole story for them. Jacob was little for his age, but fast and smart. While he was waiting his turn outside the tent, he managed to slip away and get around the back side, and stick his head underneath the cloth to see what was going on.

Loo was strapped down to a bench, and struggling a bit. The doctor held what looked like a shoe over her face, and she stopped moving. Then he took a shiny knife, and started cutting away at her middle—her privates. There was a bit of blood, and although she was quieter, Jacob could tell by the way she moved that it still hurt.

Before the doctor was done with her, Jacob had relayed all this to the rest of the family—and when the doctor came out, he found himself faced with Norma, Hank, and Karl ( the giant that Andrew had seen coming in, Norma explained).

There might have been shooting, but the doctor seemed anxious to avoid it. He begged the families to trust him, that he was doing this work for the good of everyone. When Karl wondered what he meant by that, he explained:

“I am doing you a service,” he said. “Your daughter Lou-Ellen was born feebleminded. If she had children of her own, the chances are that they would be feebleminded too. Now, there is no danger of that.”

“What d’ you mean to do to the rest of ’em?” asked Norma.

The doctor shrugged. “You are all family,” he said. “You all carry the germ. You all need to be cleaned.”

The doctor and his men left not long after. For as the talk went along, guns and knives and axes started to appear among the families, and the two men with rifles took the measure of their hosts and whispered to the doctor that a fast leave-taking might be the best.