Body Farm 04 - Bones of Betrayal (23 page)

WE WORE BADGES EVERYWHERE IN THOSE DAYS—NOT
just to work, but to the grocery store, the post office, even church. Heaven forbid you should try to gain access to Jesus when your clearance was only for Yahweh. MPs ranged everywhere checking badges. The black section of town, Colored Town, was practically fenced off. If the face on your badge wasn’t black, a guard or MP sitting in a jeep beside the road into Colored Town might wave you over and ask what business you had in there.

The business I had in there was an abortion.

A year after I married Novak, I realized I was pregnant. This was not happy news. For one thing, I was working with radioactive materials.

We know a lot more now than we knew then about radioactivity and birth defects. I was working with equipment that flung atoms of U-235 and U-238 all over the place. In theory, the calutrons were collecting all the uranium, but in practice, it wasn’t so
neat and tidy. It was probably like one of those big movie-theater popcorn poppers, the kind with the pot suspended up high inside a glass box. It’s designed to contain the popcorn, but if you look at the floor back there behind the concession stand, you’ll always see stray kernels that have ricocheted out through a gap in the gizmo. The calutrons were like that. At the end of every shift, they would run Geiger counters over us as we were leaving, and sometimes they’d find a stray particle or two of U-235 on somebody’s coveralls, which they’d remove with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It wasn’t that they were concerned about our health; it was that the uranium was so precious, they couldn’t afford to let a speck of it slip out the gate.

Today, they won’t let you have an X-ray in the doctor’s office if you’re pregnant. Back then, though, there were thousands of young women of childbearing age working in areas filled with radiation sources. It amazes me there wasn’t a whole herd of babies with birth defects born in Oak Ridge in 1944 and 1945.

But the reason I needed an abortion wasn’t because I was worried about birth defects. The reason I needed an abortion was because the baby wasn’t Novak’s. After twelve months of marriage, we’d still never consummated it. Leonard Novak was many things—smart, funny, a brilliant scientist, a great jazz pianist—but heterosexual wasn’t one of them. At least not with me.

I had done my best to seduce my husband. At bedtime, I would undress in front of him. Sometimes I’d brush my hair out, a hundred strokes, sitting in my slip in front of the mirror. I’d get him drunk, hoping that would lower his inhibitions. Once the lights were out and we were under the covers, I would press myself against him. None of it worked, ever.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman whose husband shows absolutely no desire for her? Never makes any move to touch her? I knew enough by this point to know that I liked sex. Needed it, too. Maybe it was because my father died and my mother abandoned me when I was still young. Whatever the reason, I craved affection. Or maybe I just wanted sex because I was a healthy, fertile young woman surrounded by healthy, virile young soldiers and construction workers.

Within a week of marrying Novak, I knew I’d made a mistake, and within six months, I was getting restless and flirting with other men. Around noon every day, while Novak was off making plutonium at the Graphite Reactor, I’d walk down the hill to the recreation hall and strike up a conversation with some guy at the soda fountain. Sometimes we’d just talk for a while and then I’d catch the bus out to Y-12 for my evening shift at the calutron; sometimes the guy, whoever he was, would take me to a dorm room or a car or a trailer. It felt furtive and dirty, but it took away some of the loneliness. It gave me something to look forward to—and something to remember—during those long afternoon hours in a factory filled with vacuum pumps and invisible atoms and magnetic fields that pulled the bobby pins out of my hair. And it gave me something to cling to in the long, empty hours at night, when my husband gave me a peck on the cheek and rolled to the far side of the mattress.

Novak had to know I was being unfaithful to him. He was a smart man, after all; how could he not notice that the woman who’s been throwing herself at him, night after night, suddenly isn’t anymore? Did his relief that I was letting him off the hook make it easy for him to keep quiet about whatever he was noticing or wondering or suspecting? I can only guess that it must
have. And I chose to interpret his silence as tacit approval, in some way.

But a baby: I knew a baby would change everything. A baby would have forced us to confront the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun. I couldn’t do it. And so it was I found myself one Saturday night—a night when I was pregnant and Novak was away—on the bus into Colored Town.

I wasn’t alone. I was riding with a young black woman from Y-12. Mary Alice was a cleaning woman in my building. That was the only sort of job they gave black people during the war—manual labor or janitorial work. I’d gotten to know her during smoke breaks and I liked her. Her mother, she said, was a sort of midwife, nurse, and healer. And an abortionist. When I found out I was pregnant, it hadn’t been hard for me to come up with a pretext for catching a bus with Mary Alice to Colored Town. I would sneak in by posing for the cameras.

When I became the calutron poster girl, I’d gotten chummy with the photographer, Ed Westcott. Nothing improper, not with him, but anytime he was taking pictures in my building, he’d stop by and chat for a minute. And when I found out that Mary Alice and her mother could help me out of my dilemma, I came up with an idea. Westcott was always looking for human-interest pictures—kids playing in a swimming hole, cub scouts learning to build campfires, cars stuck in the mud. Once he shot Santa Claus being frisked by security guards. Christ, we thought, if even Santa’s getting checked for contraband, who are we mere mortals to complain?

Westcott was famous, in a way. As the project’s photographer, he was free to come and go pretty much wherever he pleased, and he’d been ranging all over the townsite and the plants since
the very beginning. Most of the guards would motion him right through checkpoints, smiling and waving; some of them would stop him just long enough to strike a pose and ask him when he was going to take their picture. Occasionally he did, which earned him all sorts of goodwill.

Anyway, what I suggested to Westcott was a picture showing me giving reading lessons to Mary Alice and some of the other girls in Colored Town. “I think it could be a good civic project,” I said. “Maybe if you did a picture and the paper ran it, we’d drum up some interest and some volunteers.” He liked the idea, and he agreed to meet me at the colored recreation hall. So when the bus driver asked me why a white woman was heading into Colored Town on a Saturday night, I told him Mr. Westcott was coming to take a picture of me teaching colored girls to read. That seemed to be a good enough reason.

Colored Town was officially called the “colored hutment area” on the map. Hutments were shabby, prefab plywood shacks, sixteen feet square. They were trucked in by the thousands and shoehorned together, about ten feet apart. There was a hutment area for whites, too, but the white hutments were better. The colored hutments didn’t even have real windows, just screened-in openings covered with hinged panels of plywood. If the people inside wanted daylight, they’d swing up some of the hinged panels and prop them open. That might have been okay in decent weather, but when it was cold, the choice was between warmth and light, and even the warmth wasn’t all that warm—every hutment had a cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the room, but as drafty as the buildings were, and as scarce as coal rations were, people in the hutments were miserably cold in the winter. The other thing about the colored hutments was that there were men’s hutments
and women’s hutments, four people per hutment. Black couples who were married got split up so the army could cram four people into every one of those dreadful little shacks.

Colored Town had its own rec center, too, and the story there was the same—it was cheaper and crummier than the white people’s version. No Ping-Pong tables or pool tables or piano; just a few tables and chairs. Even so, when Mary Alice and I walked in that night, the place was crowded and lively. Couples sat at some of the tables playing bridge; groups of men with poker chips at others. At one end of the room, somebody had a radio, and couples were jitterbugging to the music. The instant I walked in the door, the noise died down and every head turned in our direction. Thousands of black people crammed in a shabby ghetto, and in walks a lily-white woman.

“You in the wrong place, white girl,” said a man just inside the door, but then Mary Alice called him by name and told him to mind his business. “She’s all right,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with me.” She led us to a distant corner of the room where a middle-aged man and woman sat in straight-backed chairs angled toward each other. “Mama, this here is Beatrice, that I told you about.” Her mother looked me up and down. The man looked away, as if to give us a measure of privacy, and I was grateful.

“You sure this is what you got to do?” I nodded. “You got the money?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, and took two ten-dollar bills out of my skirt pocket. She smoothed and folded them, then tucked them into her blouse.

“Mary Alice,” she said, “you come with me and this white girl.”

She led us through a doorway into the women’s restroom. The restroom held one sink and three toilet stalls, none of them with a door. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned lately. She must have seen the look of revulsion on my face, because she said, “You want a nice doctor’s office, you come to the wrong place, white girl. You want to change your mind about this?”

“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m just scared.”

“Ought to be,” she said. “This is scary business. Sad, too. How come you not want to have this child?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”

“Course you can, baby,” she told me. “You just won’t. ‘Can’t’ not the same thing as ‘won’t.’” She pointed at the third stall. “You need to pull off your panties and raise up your skirt. Sit on that toilet and scootch up to the front of the seat. You got to spread your knees wide and hang your bottom off the front edge so I can get in there. But you ought to pee first, if you can.”

I stared from her to Mary Alice and back again. “It’s all right,” said Mary Alice. “She’s done this a hundred times. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll be right there beside you. You go on and use the bathroom, and I’ll come in when you flush.”

I sat down on the toilet and bent over to hide my face while I peed, then reached back and flushed the toilet. Then I pulled off my underpants, and Mary Alice squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.

“Now scoot on up here and open up your legs,” said Mary Alice’s mother. “I know you know how to do that.”

“Mama!” Mary Alice sounded shocked.

“Mary Alice, don’t you start with me,” she said. “I know you’ve been opening yours for a while now, too. Women been
gettin’ told to open their legs since the fall of man. That’s one part of the Lord’s curse. This here’s another part.”

She pulled a small bottle from her apron pocket, uncorked it, and handed it to me. “Here, drink this down. Absinthe. Help you relax.” The liquid in the bottle smelled like licorice, but it burned like whiskey going down. Within seconds I felt the heat in my stomach, then felt it spread through my belly and out into my arms and legs, and my head began to hum. Next she took a handkerchief from her apron and tied it into a fat knot. “Open your mouth,” she said, and when I did, she jammed the knot between my teeth. “Now you bite down hard. This gonna hurt some.” I clenched my jaws, and felt the knot begin to flatten under the pressure. “Mary Alice, you get ready.”

Somehow, despite the narrowness of the toilet stall, Mary Alice managed to turn and swing one leg over me, so she was straddling me—one leg on either side of the toilet—facing me, her chest in my face. She reached down and took my hands in hers, lacing her fingers through mine. I felt her mother kneel between my knees. “All right, easy does it,” she said. “If you can relax, that’d be good. If you can’t, you hold real still. This be over before you know it.”

I felt something cold and sharp pierce me to the core, and I heard a scream burrowing its way out of my throat and through the knot of fabric. My knees jerked up and my shoulders strained forward as my body fought to curl itself into a ball. “By God, white girl, you hold still. If you want to stay alive, you hold still,” she said. “Mary Alice, you got to hold her good.”

My nose closed from my tears, and the handkerchief filled my mouth. I could not breathe, and I began to gasp and gag. Every
thing started going black—everything except for the white-hot flame of pain. Then, just when I was sure I was dying, I felt the fabric yanked from my mouth, and I could breathe again and see again. “Done,” I heard Mary Alice’s mother say. “Done. Lord forgive us, it’s done.” I felt my belly cramping, and every spasm felt as if I were clenching shards of glass or slivers of metal deep within me. “I got to put these rags inside you,” she said. “Catch the blood. You wait till tomorrow evening to take ’em out.” I gasped when she prodded at me again, but it was a duller pain this time.

Mary Alice let go of one hand and swung her leg back across me, so she was beside me again. She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You done just fine,” she said. “You’ll be all right now.” I shook my head and cried.

I heard water running in the sink, and a moment later Mary Alice’s mother stepped into the stall again, holding two damp cloths. She handed one to Mary Alice, who mopped my face; with the other, she bent down and swabbed my blood-smeared thighs and bottom.