Read Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell for Free Online

no one shirk.
    Put your shoulder to the wheel.
    All her life, Meg loved to sing and talk about it. "To a Mormon, singing is a sign of courage and joy. We teach our kids—if you're afraid, think of a great hymn. 'Come, Come Ye Saints.' 'I Am a Child of God.' There's nothing scarier than walking into a cold dark barn, so we'd walk in singing. Then we'd sing and milk together—me, Marie, my big brother Max, Dad, and his dad—we called him Papa—and a hired hand or two. We milked a hundred cows and then did it all over again at four in the afternoon. No vacations, no days off.
    "After the first milking, we'd all pitch in and do the beets, singing away. I'd help shovel the green tops onto the truck and my dad would run 'em out to the animals for fodder. Some mornings it was so cold you could see every note in your breath."
    An uncle and aunt went on a two-year mission to New Zealand, and every morning and evening Meg and her year-older sister, Marie, saddled their uncle's two crazy horses—"they were green-broke but they didn't know it"—and rode to the relatives' farm to milk their cows. There was no mention of pay. Meg was happy to help bring the truth to a far-off land.
    From the time she was twelve, her favorite childhood experience had been the visit to the temple in Idaho Falls to be baptized for the dead. For weeks the children would pore through family histories and genealogies and write out lists of candidates. Usually Meg would be baptized for ten or fifteen people at a time, but once she'd gone in with a thousand names. It was exciting to think about saving so many souls and meeting them later in the Celestial Kingdom.
    Except for her experiences with Bob Asay, Meg reckoned that her childhood would have been close to perfect. He was "Uncle Bob" to the McArthur children, although he was really their father's distant cousin. Asay (pronounced "Acey") was a common name in Lovell. The first Asays had come to the Big Horn Basin in a wagon train in the spring of 1900, and by the 1970s there were twenty in the thin Lovell phone book and more in the back country. Dean McArthur sometimes laid rugs for his cousin's business, Bob Asay Carpet and Furniture, and was paid in so.rely needed cash. Asay, a bachelor who lived in an apartment in his store, had been welcome in the McArthur farmhouse for as long as Meg could remember. He brought candy and ice cream, let the children sit on his lap and steer his car, took them on church excursions, regaled them in a lovely voice with songs that he composed himself, and stripped them of their innocence.
    They had no means of defense. Like most LDS children, they'd been kept in the dark about sex. Meg had never seen her parents naked. Her earliest sexual memory was of a hot summer day when she'd taken her shirt off and her mother had yelled, "Put a shirt on! You're a girl." The two-year-old child had burst into tears.
    None of the McArthur children ever gave sex much thought. Meg witnessed barnyard couplings but didn't relate them to human activity—and certainly not to her parents or herself. At school she learned how amoebas and frogs and worms reproduced, but nothing about the sexual practices of humans. At the end of her junior year, she went to her bishop, lowest-ranking officer in the Mormon hierarchy, to renew her Temple Recommend.
    "Do you masturbate?" he asked.
    She said no. Later she asked another girl what masturbation was. "Oh, my word," Meg exclaimed. "Who would do that!"
    At nine or ten, she'd become the first of the McArthurs to be bothered by "Uncle Bob." She couldn't imagine why a devout LDS businessman in his late thirties would want her to stroke his thing or why it grew so large in her hand, but Uncle Bob was always nice about it. 1 A year or two passed before she began to feel that she was doing something wrong.
    She thought of complaining to her mother, but the subject was still taboo. Something told her to keep her secret from her friends at church and school.