Bee Dancer of Nokota

CHAPTER 1

I just returned from a funeral that was a dirty rotten shame. The few people attending the Sally Gustine service were family members, some neighbors, and a few nosy strangers. The newspaper obituary said she had died unexpectedly after "a long struggle with mental illness" and that pronouncement drew a few curiosity seekers, what O. Henry called "ocular gluttons, feasting and fattening on the misfortunes of their fellow beings ... they gloat and pore and glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed perch at the hook baited with calamity."

I first met Sally some thirty years ago when we were both college students working for the Eversharp Resort in the historic little town of Eudora in Southwestern Nokota. A millionaire, Willard Eversharp bought up the small town on the edge of a national park. The town had always existed for tourism and had supported several families who ran the two motels, a cafe, a unique bar built under a railroad car, and a trinket store that sold agates. Old man Eversharp acquired the diverse businesses and renovated their uniqueness into a string of look alike tourist traps along a boardwalk. The company biographer wrote that the Eversharps saved the town from extinction rather than the truth of how he avoided paying concession fees levied at similar government attractions.

Eversharp built dormitories and a kitchen attached to a tent that he called a cafeteria and he employed a staff of fresh college boys and pretty girls at minimum wage. To promote the old west flavor, all the summer help had to buy western uniforms. By the time the uniform, room and board were deducted, the employees left after Labor Day broke and disgusted.

Every summer Saturday, Willard Eversharp and his third wife would lead a western parade that consisted of themselves and a wagon with a sign advertising the "Pitchfork Fondue." All the college kids were required to stop making beds, waiting tables, washing dishes, mangling sheets and mowing lawns and line up along the boardwalks and cheer the couple. The Eversharps were extravagant show-offs and donned leather leggings, ornate costumes and huge hats, and they'd whoop and wave their hats like they are a wild-west show. The purebred Arabian horses were so loaded down with silver encrusted saddles and decorated riders that it was impossible for them to prance so they would plod down the two-block parade route.

Sally Gustine was a plain, big boned young woman with acne, large callused farmer hands, overgrown feet and an oversized head covered with unruly hair. Her teeth were painfully crooked and she covered her mouth when she laughed but she was very possibly the wittiest person I had ever met. She reminded me of the lowly agates - the homely rock that when cracked open would sometimes reveal silhouettes of objects or landscapes. Each rock is like nature's little Rorschach, a true philosopher's stone.

To me waiting tables felt like prostitution. As little food and drink whores we needed to convince the customer we are happy to see them and persuade the boring that what they have to say is important. In a matter of minutes, we must express love and make the "John" obligated. Everyone jumped to serve anyone dressed in the latest fashion because faddists need stranger approval and on an unconscious level, the waitresses profited from the addiction. It was not only prostitution, but a little protection racket also - if a non-tipping customer returns, not only will he not get his smile, charged premium prices for cut rate liquor, or wait forever for refills on his coffee, but also he can wait to get served at all. The alms-giving can hardly be called voluntary. The waitresses who did the best would stand very close to the men and they universally hated waiting on the women. While we waitresses pulled down good incomes, the kitchen staff, maids, store clerks were supposed to smile as part of their lowly jobs - more the homely wives than the prancing mistresses and it wasn't fair. I was the only waitress who gave part of my tips to the kitchen staff and the other waitresses disapproved.

Everyone working for the Eversharps hated Saturdays when the couple came to town for they were loud in voice and dress, obnoxious in manners and liked the world to know that they owned the town. Both Willard and his wife exhibited what passed for prairie hauteur and waitresses would cringe when they had to wait on them, despite the overgenerous tips. When the dreaded duo would enter the Eudora Cafe, a shoving match would ensue in the kitchen until the weakest girl would lose her balance and be shoved into view and thus forced into involuntary servitude. No matter what one did for the lordships, they would be loudly dissatisfied. If you were stupid enough to bring Herr Eversharp two pats of butter he would yell that you were wasting money, but if you brought one pat he would yell that you were making the place look stingy. It was all a big show to be noticed but it was at the expense of underpaid innocents. One day I was very unlucky and got stuck waiting Eversharp's table and he had yelled so loud and so long about how there was too much ice was in the water that I burst into tears in the kitchen. I bit my lip and took out the salads, but he screamed, "Any idiot knows that you bring the soup first."

When I was whispering an account of my ordeal to Sally washing dishes in the kitchen, she said "I hate bullies, do you want me to spit in their soup?"

That was the beginning of our friendship. We became roommates because we were working our way through a nearby teacher's college and were both willing to live in a low-rent unfinished basement. Sally worked part time jobs all over the campus and rode the bus fifty miles to Eversharp's resort on the weekends to work there.

Sally wasn't all that good at telling jokes but she was very observant and could accurately recount the details of some small incident with such accuracy that it would make you laugh. Sometimes she crossed the tact line. I noticed people either loved or hated her. I'd say her major fault was that if something was on her mind, it was on her lips and many times her outspoken opinions made her enemies. She had a way about her that antagonized authority and if I had to define it, I would have to say it was that she lacked deference, a tragic flaw in a any minority who doesn't "know their place". Pompous people especially seemed to inspire her wit. If something struck her as funny, she blurted out her observation without discretion for she never learned the art of social lying that keeps things running smoothly. Sally once confided that sometimes a truth she read or heard made her scalp crawl the way music did for other people.

I had been raised in a family that was abusive to me. Like many others who had found their childhood unbearable, I majored in psychology. My father was a weak, selfish man who felt child rearing was woman's work and believed his contribution to parenthood consisted of bestowing the sperm. My mother was a Jehovah Witness religious fanatic who labeled most things as sins. She was addicted to her religion, reading and rereading Watchtower publications and quoting verses for every occasion. She had given up any original thought in favor of the "truths" of the inspired word and was not only frightened but also fascinated by the prophecies. She was thrilled that we were in "the very last days" and she was picked for eternal life. In her child rearing, she demanded perfect obedience because she knew the only righteous path to salvation was to spend her time and energy in Kingdom interest and to save her children by scaring us into compliance. In the "universal war" where Satan has declared war on Jehovah we were automatically on one side or the other and if you were not doing Kingdom work you were on the side of the devil. When my teacher gave me a bead necklace for my birthday, my mother threw it away. Birthdays are evil because someone other than Jehovah is being worshipped. Christmas was evil because thousands of years ago someone worshipped the sun on December 25th. Saluting the flag was worshipping your country and a sign that you belong to Satan's kingdom rather than God's kingdom. I was so shy of people that I didn't want to attend Kingdom Hall meetings or accompany my mother on her missions and she saw my reluctance as the work of the devil in his conspiracy to destroy the Jehovah's Witnesses and I became her enemy.

I don't know when my mother first started hating me and began her campaign to ignore me. There were six children in our family and years later at my father's funeral, I looked through the family picture albums and saw there were no pictures of me after about age ten. I was only a fair student even though I loved to read. I found books that interested me and I would read and study them and give the assigned work only the cursory attention it took to get passable grades. If I disliked my teacher, I would give them the minimum, but if I liked a teacher, I occasionally tried to impress them with some observation I had gleaned from my renegade reading. My mother did not approve of my reading anything other than Watchtower publications.

My brothers and sisters sought my mother's approval by ridiculing me and I became a loner. There were plenty of incidents of physical abuse because the rod was not spared, but it was the day to day cold, critical contempt that wore me down until I became shy and withdrawn. Though I never got any praise, I could avoid condemnation by working constantly.

Sally too, was a loner and very smart in a obstinate way. She was a very hard worker but not a great employee because she would balk at orders that didn't make sense to her. She confided that she felt that her controlling mother hated her and said that every statement she made became an argument. Sally lived with constant criticism and she was given daily affirmation that her birth was an imposition, not a gift. Sally had very little for possessions. She said her first new dress was for high school graduation and that she hated it because her mother picked an out-of-style shirtwaist in the style her mother liked. When I first met Sally washing dishes at the cafe, I asked her why she didn't waitress instead and she said, "I don't know how. I've never been in a cafe before."

In those days, it was still possible to work your way through college and both Sally and I had many jobs. Sally's mother had opened her mail when she got her Eudora job application and said, "If you don't want to work at home, don't expect any money from us" so Sally just made do. She was a little on the messy side. I tried to help her to dress better, but whatever clothes we bought at the secondhand store always looked disheveled and no hairstyle seemed to suit her, so I gave up on trying to help her improve her appearance. We would often amuse ourselves by singing tunes into our miracle brushes. Sally's favorite was "I Was Not a Nazi Polka." She loved how everyone was so innocent after the fact. I would solo on "Sally Was a Good Old Girl" because it described Sally so well - selling term papers to people too lazy to do their own work, offering to buy sandwiches for students who asked her to steal at the student union. Even though she had nothing herself, she was extremely generous with other people. She was always an unconventional thinker and one time she confessed that she had the highest score in her class on the IQ test given in the sixth grade. We discussed many things including religion. We settled on calling ourselves "apathetic agnostics". If there was a god with a plan, it was none of our business. He was unconcerned about man's activities since pograms, purges, genocides, holocausts went on without interference so we didn't care about what he was up to either. When we graduated, Sally got a job teaching and I got a grant and continued my education. Through the years Sally and I kept up a sporadic Christmas letter writing contact.

CHAPTER 2

My ex-husband and I met in graduate school and stayed married three years. The marriage ceremony was in the courthouse with school friends as witnesses. Larry and I got along fine until my papers began to be published and his were not, and then he became critical of everything I did even complaining about how I ironed his shirts and about the food I cooked. In our relationship, I continually gave him support and encouragement but he never could reciprocate in kind and saw me as a competitor not a partner. When I was chosen as part of a team to help cult victims readjust, Larry was jealous and what was left of our marriage crumbled. Some of his friends made bigger career leaps than I ever did and he stayed friends with them, but in his mind there was something humiliating and castrating about being eclipsed by a woman. I worked hard to try to make him feel good about himself and minimize myself but it wasn't enough. He wanted high school attitudes - a return to the times when we girls would act dumb around boys so they would like us, a pretty cheerleader, not a fellow player.

After graduate school I won another grant and moved to Minnesota and enrolled in the University of Minnesota's doctorate program. My thesis, Jehovah Witnesses Mental Abuse of Their Children explained the introduction of phobias as a tool for indoctrination. I was thrilled when it was published in the Journal of Psychology. Through loans, grants, and teaching fellowships, I finally became a psychologist. I have my private practice, and volunteer work at The Center for Victims of Cults, a private non-profit organization working with over 1000 victims residing here in Minnesota. Contrary to public belief, powerful cults did not disappear after Jonestown but became more sophisticated and more subtle.

Psychologically, man dislikes moral ambiguity and fears that he may make the wrong decision so he will relinquish his freedom of choices to a dictatorial religion. All people share a number of fundamental psychological needs that can be met by religion. People need to feel connection and inclusion in some group. They need to feel good about themselves. They need to feel effective in protecting themselves from danger and influencing important events in their lives and religion can give the illusion of some control. Finally they need to have some form of understanding of the world and of their own place in it. As long as religion is practiced in moderation and teaches tolerance, it can be quite harmless. Any religion, even mainstream, that tries to make people phobic is unhealthy and insistence that the members relinquish their free will is a recipe for disaster.

One of the richest and the most megalomaniac cult leaders is Reverend Moon. America's founding fathers, who recognized the need for separation of church and state, are wrong according to Sun Myung Moon who said in a speech on May 17, 1973 to Unification Church leaders, "when it comes to our age, we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world ... so we cannot separate the political field from the religious ... separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most." Because Moon believes in the amalgamation of religion and politics, he involves his organizations in a wide variety of extreme right wing Republican groups. He sent hundreds of his followers to demonstrate at the "National Prayer and Fast for the Watergate Crisis" in support of Richard Nixon. He owns The Washington Times subscribed to by political conservatives. Moon, who got his start as a gun manufacturer, was a major contributor of money and guns to the CIA trained contra forces in Nicaragua and publicized the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund on the front page of The Washington Times. He also has bought UPI because he knows the power of the media. He believes he is the second coming of Christ.

People believe that it is hard to be taken in by a cult but they would be surprised at the intelligence of converts. In fact, cults target talented people because they are most useful to the organization. Like all con artists whose greatest assets are their looks and their ability to act, recruiters convey a "humanness" that fosters trust by the victim. Often using effusive praise and flattery a member will befriend a potential convert. An elitist mentality is often fostered in members by telling them they are special contributors to a higher purpose. The more information the recruiter learns about the victim the greater his chance of manipulating the person. Once the victim tells of his hopes, dreams, fears, relationships and job interests, the recruiter will often introduce the person to another member with similar interests and background. Thought reform is a subtle and sophisticated group dynamic of deceiving and manipulating the victim into willingly making prescribed choices. Feeling he is still free to make choices, the convert becomes dependent and conforming and loses his autonomy and individuality. The more insubstantial the version of reality the more threatening is the unbridled flow of ideas and censorship is the defense mechanism of collective denial. Compliance with the group often extends further than acceptance of the groups views to include participation in the attack on deviants.

Group conformity dictates that members show only the "good" side of the organization and suppress any negative feelings so members do not raise embarrassing questions or attack weak arguments. Loyalty to family and friends is transferred to the cult. All destructive groups not only seek to confuse with unclear and conflicting messages but believers are also trained to block criticism through denial, rationalization, justification or by avoiding critics. That is why once a person adopts a belief system, it is very hard to change them, they are using the confirmation bias that looks for anything that confirms their beliefs and ignores any evidence that does not. In fact, one of the things about human beings is, they like to justify what they did. When a friend says to them, "hey, did it work?" humans say to themselves, at some kind of unconscious level, "I spent money, I took time, I went somewhere, [it] must have been a rational decision, therefore I'd better say it worked."

Cults also rule by fear: they teach that the apocalypse is just around the corner and members are made to be phobic about the threat of expulsion from an elite corps of mankind participating in the most important acts of human history. For control, members of cults are limited in the information they can know. Destructive organizations control information by having many levels of "truth", and allow inner officers to know slightly more than the general cult population, while all are subservient to the leader. Everything is controlled from the top. Members are not encouraged to be friends because allegiance should go "up" to the leader, not "across" to peers and they are encouraged to spy on each other and report improper activities to leaders. They cannot make important decisions without first asking their superiors. The early honeymoon feelings of community that are exhibited at the beginning later become deliberately replaced with feelings of stress, guilt and anxiety about performance. In every destructive group I have studied, fear is a major motivator and each group creates not only an outside enemy but also terror of punishment by the leaders. Unlike organizations that recognize a person's freedom to choose, mind control groups do not recognize any legitimate way to leave or oppose them, in fact they preach that to oppose them will cause terrible things to happen. Outsiders objection to the group's activities is seen as persecution and serves to increase commitment to group goals and inherent righteousness of the group. A destructive cult will always make its members phobic and will always do whatever it takes to preserve itself. If it is trapped, it will kill its members rather than succumb, i.e. Jonestown.

The most obvious sign of conversion and loss of liberty is a radical, dramatic, sudden personality change. A person may have been politically liberal for years and is suddenly staunchly conservative, he may have preferred rock and roll music but now thinks its from the devil, he may have been religiously neutral but is now devout and divides his life as before or after "God has come into my life" or "since I have accepted Jesus as my savior". Members of a cult may strike an outsider as spooky because members have the same odd mannerisms, clothing styles, and speech inflections as they model the personality of the leader.

Demanding obedience, leaders in destructive political and religious groups show an extraordinary willfulness. Addiction to power is a mental illness characterized by the desire of certain people to control others, to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line, to help them avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming them into obedient automatons. Determined to have their own way, destructive leaders are intolerant of any criticism or other forms of narcissistic injury. Mr. Daniel Goleman said in his book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Psychology of Self Deception, "People with a desire for power do things for the sake of making an impact on others and exercising authority solely for the taste of power. They have little tolerance for interference and bristle at challenges to their opinions. High power leaders respond well to ingratiating subordinates...the leaders high in power motivation sought fewer facts from other group members and were offered fewer proposals. Once the leader expressed his views, members fell in line, deferring to him."

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, thousands of psychological experiments on the "influence process" were conducted studying the remarkable power of behavior modification, group conformity and obedience to authority. We must remember that the Nazi people were ordinary people convinced that they were doing good things and that they were an elite society - a master race. Hitler alone was just one small man, but with many eager followers. We all have to answer the question: If the Nazis came again, would we join, look the other way, or resist? The average humans indiscriminate and unquestioning obedience to authority was demonstrated by Stanley Milgram in his 1965 study that showed how ordinary people would deliver greater and greater voltage "shocks" to experimental victims at the command of the lab-coated researcher. Even though many hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim's agony and pleas, they still fulfilled their duty to the authority telling them to shock the entirely innocent other person. Not one of the forty subjects in the study quit shocking the victim even when the victim was screaming.

As a student of cult behavior, the Christian Fundamentalist movement's leadership scares me. The movement grows through the power of hate and fear. They hate faggots, dykes, feminazis, niggers, kikes, spics, chinks, commies, towelheads, tree-huggers, intellectuals, liberals, laborers, and believe people are poor because they are inferior. They know precisely what they're doing, just like any greedy bully does. They know that a small, powerful group can rule through fear, rage, and intimidation. It's a little like how the South managed to avoid Reconstruction - they didn't have the numbers, but they had the pure thuggish hatred on their side. Anton Chekhov said, "Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred of something." And like the Nazis storm troopers belt buckle slogan Gott Mit Uns (God is with us) they claim to know God's will. The power takeover has been slow but determined. Members are encouraged to take over local elections and churches distribute voting guides to their members. Academically not only are the textbooks and curricular materials attacked, but also the libraries of the country are plagued by the loss of their liberal and non creationist scientific books as charismatic Christians "lose" books and pay for them in the hope the library can not replace them or at the very least will keep the idea off the shelf for the time it takes to reorder and process the replacement. To prevent the influence of reason, tolerance, or unapproved ideas, parents are encouraged to homeschool.

Invariably the leaders are moralistic bullyboys who presume to "know" God and are more concerned with vengeance than the welfare of society. Fundamentalist leaders see themselves as agents of God in a war. Pat Buchanan said at the 92 Republican convention that "we are in a religious war much like the cold war." Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority combines phobias with anti-semitism and says that the "anti-Christ" is on the earth and is probably a Jew. Richard Viguerie, a major fundraiser and strategist for the Religious New Right said, "We've already taken control of the conservative movement. And conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party. The remaining thing is to see if we can take control of the country." Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, said, "We're radicals working to overturn the structure in this country...we're talking about Christianizing America." Coalition on Revival, an agency of the Southern Baptist is agitating to transform the United States into a fundamentalist Christian state. The leader of COR, Dr. Jay Grimstead, says the strategy to establish a "kingdom of God" is to first take over city councils and school boards and elect sheriffs and county officials. COR urges members to run for office as Christians without acknowledging their connection to COR or their real agenda. Whether by publishing lists of approved candidates at elections, silencing intellectual dissent through biblical inerrancy claims, intimidating educational institutions by attacking curricular materials and indoctrinating children early in Christian schools, freedom of thought is reduced. In their own minds, they feel they are doing good. Perhaps it is not so crazy to believe that the Christian Right would feel that everything is acceptable in a state of war and that separation of church and state was a mistake on the part of the founding fathers. They may not go so far as constructing crematoriums, but certainly "blacklisting" will be instituted.

The history of group mania is an interesting one. Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds says "Men think in herds, it will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Religion taken to the madness level was to blame for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust. The main thrust of most churches concentrates on conversion not correcting human frailities or good works. Much more money is spent on missionary work than on aiding unfortunates because religion is the most persuasive of mental viruses. Sally Gustine may unfortunately have been a victim of the new religious morality, or she may just be a paranoid schizophrenic.

CHAPTER 3

Sally showed up at my office early January of 1995. At first I could make little sense of what she was saying. She paced the room and her conversation jumped from topic to topic. She didn't seem to be able to form complete sentences or to arrange anything sequentially and it was obvious that she was in great distress. I got her to sit down with a cup of cocoa and asked her, "How can I help you, Sally?"

"Is there some kind of test to see if someone is paranoid schizophrenic cause that's what they say I am?" she asked.

I told her the most reliable test was the Present State Examination (PSE), a long series of carefully worded questions designed to bring out the symptoms of various mental illnesses. I told her I would be glad to give the test to her but I told her it was somewhat rare for the disease to appear for the first time in a person in their mid forties. Sally proceeded to tell me that she had been hospitalized and she then showed me her hospital bill and I needed only a quick glance at the volume and potency of the drugs that had been given her to know that there was some wicked medicine going on. It was absolutely criminal to administer the massive amounts of Haldol that had been given to Sally; surely Dr. Sever was stupid because the other option could only be that he was malevolent.

"Did you become psychotic?" I asked.

"Yes"

"There are lots of reasons people go psychotic besides schizophrenia - from drug abuse to Post Traumatic Stress to even psychotic depression." I told her.

It was the start of my vacation when Sally showed up and I invited her to spend the next two weeks with me at my cabin. She had always been such a strong person, so I was professionally intrigued not only by her drug maltreatment but also the path she had taken to become hospitalized in the first place. I told her it would be just like old times when we would hide out from our parents during the holidays and she started to cry. I had never seen Sally in such a fragile state and I seriously worried that the massive doses of drugs may have caused her permanent brain damage.

We left her old pickup at my house and we headed for my lake cabin, a luxury I have never regretted buying. Holidays were always hard for me so I was actually glad for the company and while Sally waited in the car with her dog, I went to the supermarket and bought all the "fixings" for a traditional post Christmas dinner. On the drive up to the cabin, I did most of the talking about nothing in particular because I could see it was a strain for Sally to concentrate on what I was saying. By the time Sally and I got to the cabin, we were both so tired we unpacked the car and went to bed. During the night, I could hear Sally pacing.

I left Sally sleeping in the morning and took her little mutt dog, Collateral, for a walk in the woods. When she first got to the cabin, she started her patrol so that anything even faintly edible was cleaned up from the floor. She was a goofy looking, small black dog and I could identify a little poodle blood from the curly hair and by her face, but the rest was a guess. Sally had said she named the dog Collateral in case "they needed her for loans at the bank", but she said the joke was on her after all because the dog was her most valuable possession.

When the dog and I returned, Sally was making coffee and crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I'm just so grateful that you will listen to me. No one else will. When I was labeled crazy, people started treating me differently. Everything I say is tainted. People won't forgive you for losing reality. Even an old withered woman in a wheelchair stuck in the corner at the nursing home shitting her big paper diaper has people still whisper around her, 'At least her mind's still good'."

"Go ahead and tell me anything you want to," I said.

"I guess it all starts with the stealing of my bees, and got worse when I moved to Spot where I was robbed over and over and over" she said, and she started to cry again. " If I tell you I think the whole town is conspiring against me does that confirm that I am paranoid schizophrenic?" asked Sally.

"Well, it is unlikely that a whole town would share the same goals enough to band together to target you. Feeling persecuted is a frequent symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. If you feel you had been robbed repeatedly, you might make the leap that all people were a threat. It is a common device for self protection. Humans cannot stay in hypervigilance for long periods of time."

"Why do you say 'If I had been robbed'? Don't you believe that my bees were stolen?" Sally demanded. "My brother said he didn't believe I had been robbed either. Nothing I say now that I've been declared insane is valid. All my life I have tried to tell the truth but now everything I say is a lie or a reason to laugh at me."

Sally's distress was so great, I changed the subject and I tried reminiscing about the past, hoping she would enjoy some of the things we laughed about in the past. I'm a pack rat and to divert her attention, I dug out a few of her old Christmas letters and I started to reread them to her. Sally was a free, independent spirit of the type the sixties produced. She never cared about money probably as a reaction to her upbringing, and it set her free to move on as soon as she lost interest or became disappointed in anything or anyone.

CHAPTER 4

"Why did you become interested in the bee business in the first place?" I asked.

Sally said Ryan had a few beehives on the farm and she would help him with them. "When I decided to become a beekeeper, I thought it would be a peaceful occupation without the politics that go along with working for other people. Surely a pound of food was a pound of food." Sally said.

"I found out differently. Like in so many blue-collar occupations, women are not very welcome in the beekeeping ranks. Racists love 'nigger' jokes and sexists love 'dirty' jokes. I always left the room when beekeepers got together. For example, their attitude towards women showed in their moniker for the Mondale presidential ticket as "Fritz and Tits". No matter what females accomplished in life, women were all "tits" in their eyes, so I avoided them. One beekeeper once told me that I was a 'guppy in a shark tank'."

I had to go back to my office to catch up on some correspondence so I asked Sally to spend the day describing Spot, Nokota for me. I promised to be back before night. I gave Sally a legal pad and she wrote in the same opinionated manner that had gotten her in trouble much of her life:

Spot was named for the wife of a railroad agent who was surveying the Nokota looking for the best route for the coming railroad. The agent, James Sphincter, thought the best route was the one most profitable to himself and there were like-minded toadies galore wooing him so that their barren lands could become more profitable. Since the county was already named for Sphincter, the debate was whether to name the town New Berlin in honor of the old country or to try to lure Sphincter by naming the hamlet after his wife's prosperous family. Sphincter's wife's maiden name was Spotz so it seemed logical to name the tiny town, Spot. What a perfect name for slogans: the Spot to Shop, the Spot to settle, the Spot to grow and prosper.

Like large areas of the state, Sphincter County and all the counties adjoining it were settled by Germans. The Germans were perfect "bottom-line" managers who could wrest the most from this unforgiving but free-for-the-taking land according to immigration officials who advertised the land only in German publications. Most Germans that settled in Nokota were Germans from Russia whose fathers had been first in line for the free land Catherine the Great had confiscated from Russian farmers to give to her kinsmen. In those days, families were huge with up to sixteen children to work the fields. When the opportunity came to get free farms in a new land, the rush was on. "There is no free lunch" was a lie to the Spot forefathers and to their offspring.

When Nokota was settled, towns sprang up every ten to twenty miles so that even with horse transportation, farmers were within a days ride of commerce and railroad towns grew every ten miles so that steam driven train engines could refill their water reservoirs. With its good location on the railroad route, the river for irrigation, and the under the table bribes that got its appointment as county seat, Spot grew more than the other small towns in that remote part of Nokota. An arrogance developed that disdained the other neighboring small towns and shunned new business that tried to move into the area and compete. It was a small town with small minds yearning for notoriety. Land and buildings were not sold to any business rivaling the townsmen and naturally the town stayed stagnant and then began to shrink. It seemed to die in spasms. Things would stay the same for several years, then one business would fold and two or three others would quickly follow as though failure was infectious.

The economic base was farming and Nokota's rural towns were founded to serve agriculture's needs and they all suffered from low farm prices, from the invention of large farm tractors and implements that enabled fewer farmers to farm vast areas of land, from government programs that removed land from production. In the late 80's, Sphincter County got a transfusion of economic blood from the introduction of the government program called CRP or Conservation Reserve Program, another government program that paid farmers not to farm. Sphincter County had more acres of land in CRP than any other county in the state although the purpose of the program was to take poor land out of production and Sphincter County had excellent farmland. The boost to the wildlife population, especially the pheasant, was an added benefit and Spot saw an opportunity to become a community for friendly killers. They erected a huge, contorted wooden pheasant on the road outside of town, stocked up on dog food and shotgun shells, raised prices at the cafe and the motel and waited for the hunters. For four months, Spot would become crowded with strangers. The bars did a good trade even though the arrogant sportsmen would humiliate the bartenders by ordering imported beers, mixed blender drinks, or water native to someplace other than the sink. The butcher shop offered to skin and gut the birds for a couple dollars. The strangers would complain about everything - the accommodations, the local yokels backwardness, the overpriced, meager selection of food. >From all over the United States, they showed up in Chevy Suburbans, Ford Broncos, and Jeep Cherokees, all with dogs, thousand dollar guns, Eddie Bauer clothes, and all pretending they were sportsmen.

The pheasant can't fly very far and with dogs to flush them from the tall grass, it was like shooting chickens in a coop. Two against one is bully-fun. The pheasant was doomed from the time the game and fish department first started trying to introduce it in the twenties. Blowing snow would suffocate the bird that was native to a moderate climate because the pheasant could either put its tail to the cold winds and freeze from having his feathers reversed or he could face the wind and have his nostrils fill with snow and suffocate. Sportsmen laughed at how stupid the pheasant was compared to the native prairie chicken that burrowed into the snow. The pheasant was imported strictly as a sport bird for hunters and the introduction was unsuccessful until the thirties when farms were abandoned and the pheasant found cover and winter protection in the idle land. Through the years the population of the game bird fluctuated with the weather until CRP provided acres and acres of grass to cover and protect their nests and to supply winter protection and then the numbers grew. The CRP is also good for bees.

The town of Spot is a typical example of Midwest decline and decay. The main street is four blocks of vacant storefronts interspersed by stores run by fools thinking they just had to hang on and things would change. The business district consisted of: a bank; an insurance company; a newspaper/stationery/trophy/office supply store that put out a weekly county paper; two beauty shops (one to serve older lady requests for tight curls from perms that last and one for more modern styles); a former gas station that was the hangout for unwanted, old men who talked about the good old days and how the world was going to hell; a cafe with a roof that leaked and a floor that was disappearing tile by tile; seven churches, five of the fundamentalist flavor; five saloons to counterbalance them; an old, run-down motel with turquoise shag carpet thick with the stale odor of socks, spilled beer and whiskey, cigarettes, dust and God knows whatall; an antique store, a grocery store run by a fat man who yelled at his clerks in public and disregarded food expiration dates; a gas station; two grain elevators; a drugstore run by two old maid sisters who argued constantly; a dentist whose business amazingly seemed to grow; a theater recently reopened by the sheriff's clerk; a hardware store run by a radical right political pundit that trapped polite people with hour long discourses on the "trouble with America"; a butcher shop with a part owner son who was a beekeeper and a failing, leaking flower shop.

The real employer in the community is the government. In addition to the school and post office, the town has an Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service Office to administer farm programs and dispense subsidies; a Farm Home Administration office to offer low interest loans to farmers; a branch of the Nokota National Guard; an office of the Nokota Game and Fish Department; a state education office; state social services office, county social service office; and the county courthouse stocked with divisions of incompetent bureaucrats in love with their red-tape power. Sometimes chicanery can be slowed by that age old social control - public opinion. For example, gossip buzzed when the biggest farmer in Sphincter County was caught farming over a graveyard tucked into the corner of one of his sections. He'd have gotten by with it, but an employee talked about dumping the headstones into a ditch and the farmer was ordered to put the stones back after enough people complained.

The sheriff, Bob North, is a son of a bitch. He spends all his hours on duty reading Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse magazines, lifting weights and cleaning guns. He loved tattoos and was covered with them. North was one of the 40+ adolescents who would trek down to the Sturgis motorcycle rally every year to show strangers what a tough, "hard liver" he was. North spent his money on toys for himself. He had 72 guns and assault rifles, had had his Suburban painted camouflage, bought the top of the line Harley. Sheriff North would get peevish and irritated if the talk turned to equality for blacks, equality for women, or welfare. His deputies were his fat, lazy brother-in-law, his fat lazy friend, a young fat guy that had been in trouble for obscene phone calls and window peeping, and a young, comely divorcee to do the paperwork. Very little patrolling went on in the county, but it hadn't always been so.

Several years earlier, the city cop's health had failed, so the town fathers gave the job to his wife, Mary. Although she was officious, Mary did do herjob and indiscriminately stopped people for any infractions. One fine summer day, Lenny Bungle, the retarded son of Billy "Bung" Bungle, the local butcher, was showing-off and speeding down main street so Mary pulled him over. Lenny, who had never learned any self-discipline from his parents, got mad, pushed Mary against the car breaking her finger, and spit in her face. Mary filed a report, even went to court, but when all things died down, Lenny was still driving around and Mary was out of a job. The Bungle's bragged at the bar about sneaking over to Mary's house and letting the air out of her tires. The city decided to disband the city police office and shift the funds to the county sheriff's office and all the important business people were relieved.

The only visible growth is the cemetery and the nursing home. The nursing home too is a government subsidy since most of the residents had artificially impoverished themselves so they could ride the government glory train to the graveyard.

CHAPTER 5

As my vacation drew to a close, I tried to get Sally to talk about her bees but she would become more distraught. Some therapists feel that to refuse to talk about trauma is to prolong the pain while another school feels recovery is quicker if trauma is suppressed and the victim moves on. Sally had come to me asking to talk, so it was obvious that she did not want to repress but expressing herself was traumatic and difficult. I noticed that her speech was slow and halting, most probably a result of the administration of massive anti-psychotics. I even debated whether I should encourage her to recount her experiences because there is some debate whether increased stress precipitates psychosis.

I suggested that she write down what happened if she found it too painful to talk about since Sally had said she needed someone to listen and writing seemed to help her organize her thoughts. I stocked up on groceries and dog food and I left her at the cabin for the week. When I returned the next weekend she had filled several legal pads with an account of her beekeeping experience:

I started out by buying three beehives from Sears the year I drove the bookmobile. I first met W. H. Wilson when I purchased some bees from him to fill the hives. He got a pretty good price for the bees. I think he felt that hobbyist were more enthusiastic than intelligent and since they usually ask a thousand questions and disturb him a hundred times, he could just add on a hidden hundred dollar consulting fee.

Wilson is a talkative guy and when I picked up the bees he told me he'd been in the bee business for forty years and had seen a lot of bad years. He said "I've been tempted to declare bankruptcy several times because beekeeping is harder than a lot of other agricultural enterprises - so many more things can go wrong with bees than say, wheat. If it's too hot the flowers dry up, if it's too cold, the bees won't fly. If it is windy or rainy the bees don't fly.'"

Wilson said that most beekeepers are gamblers hoping for the good year that will come along and put them on their feet and that is the addiction of the business. The expenses seem to get higher every year and the price of honey rises and falls with government programs, imports, and supply. He said he used every possible way to cut expenses in the bee yard and still was struggling.

The next year I went to work for Wilson. He exemplified the adage that the "stingy man spends the most." He underpaid his workers until only poor workers remained, shortchanged his bees food supply until they had too small populations to harvest much nectar when summer finally arrived, and continually moved the bees around looking for better pasture and stressing the bees even further. He made hive nucleus boxes that were so narrow they fell over and queen mating boxes of Styrofoam that the wind blew away. He was always inventing something and trying it out on 1000 hives instead of a sample and most were miserable failures or no improvement over what was available. I believe he wanted to be famous in the bee world for inventing something because he was always dreaming up some new techniques or appliances.

It was important for his ego to have a lot of people working for him. Wilson had a need to feel superior to his employees and took on the strangest bunch of misfits. He hired drunks and druggers and people with problems of one sort or another, so I was in "oddball" heaven. Wilson would counsel them for a short time after he hired them and then he would ignore them and move on to a new employee. He always had new employees because he treated people like his bees. He was stingy and always moving them around, changing their orders, pushing and bossing for no apparent reason. Though he was a tiny man, he was a bully and had a touch of criminal to him. He sold honey that was supposed to be under government storage and I suspected he burned his honey warehouse when all the non-operating vehicles and forklifts that had wintered outside for years were towed in that winter.

It didn't take me a full season to see that honey production wasn't particularly challenging and was primarily an occupation of moving boxes around and either putting them on or taking them off, but I liked the spring work of raising queens in the south. Wilson bought unhatched queen cells instead of queens from the Arrowsons of Zavalla, Texas and I was interested in making cells.

The second year, I went to Texas and worked for Bill Arrowson and his brother. He, too, deprived his bees and employees of fair payment for work and I wasn't learning much new there. The Arrowson Co. too was stingy and most of their equipment was falling apart and patched with tarpaper and duct tape. The queen mating units were downright dangerous because scorpions found a natural habitat between the marshmallow soft, wet pressed wood covers and the tarpaper repair liner and when the lids were picked up, big and little tails went up like flags. The Arrowson's were more interested in drinking, smoking dope, and chasing stupid women than in anything happening in the hive. Zavalla was a little dump of a town that still practiced segregation.

The next queen season, I headed for northern California and started visiting queen companies that had ads in the bee magazines. I got a job with Cliff Thompson, a most natural beekeeper, who gave his bees what they needed when they needed it and his bees flourished.

Cliff was one of those rare, lucky people who find something they love doing and do it very well. Everyone else I had worked for in the bee business had been so worried about every penny and cheated their bees and their employees in every way they could and here was a man who was gently giving his stock as much feed as they could eat and they were producing bountiful bees for packages and big fat queens for their mothers. Often as not, Cliff didn't have the time to worry about money and checks would blow around in the cab of his messy truck filled with old pipes and wet cigar stubs. I had always thought money was the last reason to do something and I liked that Cliff didn't worship it.

When I think about the business of queen-raising, I think of Cliff. He said, "timing and attention to details is everything in queen raising and the package business." A bee package is several pounds of bees and a queen in a screened box that is sold to beekeepers to replace their winter loss or to start new hives. To supply the amount of bees needed to fill the packages, hives must be booming with population at the same time as the queens have hatched and mated; however if the hives are too prosperous, they will swarm and there will not be enough bees left to remove from the hive to stock the packages. A lot of elements have to be just right to raise an excellent queen. The finest queens are probably natural swarm queens and the worst ones are probably emergency queens that a hive raises when their queen is destroyed. In order for a queen to be prolific, she must be raised from an egg or a very young larva, not a larva that is too old. When a hive raises a queen in an emergency situation, the bees are in such a panic about losing their mother that they start queens from too old a larva and since these are the ones that hatch first they will destroy the better queen cells. Essentially what queen raisers do is create a queenless hive and then supply as young a larva as they can to that hive and let the bees raise queens. The bees need fresh pollen, continuous feeding of a thin sugar syrup so they feel that the nectar flow is going on, a huge overcrowded population of young bees that can produce royal jelly, and no chance to make their own queen. All of this takes an incredible amount of concentration as each queenless hive is given new queens to raise every few days, the already started queen cells are moved above a hive with a queen, and others are reaching maturity and need to be removed at the same time. Not only are cells being raised, but at the same time queens are getting ready to hatch and must be each given a tiny, well fed hive and accompanying bees to take care of the virgin queen until they can mate and return to start laying eggs. While all this is going on, the queenless hives have to be inspected regularly for queen cells because the bees can move eggs and start their own queens. I had fallen in love with this occupation because the challenge of raising exceptional queens and juggling all the components that went into making them was a goal that probably would always be just out of my reach and would keep me interested. I would have stayed another season but his wife hated me.

I saw an ad for a queen company in Hawaii and went to work there for a season. Unfortunately, although I may have been in paradise, I saw very little of it because I worked six days a week and didn't know anybody. This was another "bottom line" company. No matter how good and natural some of the Hawaiian beekeepers were, some haole white guy would always be their boss and I couldn't wait for the season to finish so I could start doing things my own way. All the beekeepers except Cliff took everything they could get from the hive, even digging out the combs flanking the sides - robbing the bees of their hard work and making them live on inferior feed. Some even captured the pollen that the bees so desperately needed to raise their children. They were managers who hated their workers - underpaid them in the only way they could - typical bottom-line managers.

CHAPTER 6

The first year on my own, I built equipment for queen-raising and went to Southeast Texas to sell queens and cells to the Nokota beekeepers who wintered there. A beekeeper in my hometown was killing his bees off for the winter and I asked if I could 'borrow' any hives that hadn't already starved to death and I found forty hives still alive in the snow. I had made a loan at my local bank to build queen and cell equipment, buy hive equipment and I used up most of the rest of the loan to move to Texas, to rent an old trailer house and to buy feed for the bees. To lure the 'bottom line' managers business, I priced my cells and queens lower than the going rate. I traded queens and cells to Wilson for extra bees and feed. The feed was watered down and any bees I bought by the pound were underweight and all the brood (unhatched bees) I bought was usually on trashy frames and a lot of homemade frames that Wilson was trying to weed out of his hives.

That first year I made no money, but came back to Nokota with 160 hives. To live, I worked again part time for my neighbors who buried telephone and power cable and as I dug ditches, I thought about bees.

The second year things started better for me because I had my own bees to work with instead of buying from Wilson. Again I sold a few thousand cells to beekeepers for $1.00 and they used some cells to start new hives and some were put into mating units and after they were mated were sold for $5.00 or more. I also sold some queens but it was so very labor intensive that I was working outside all the daylight hours and grafting larva for new queens at night. That year there was a lot of yellow jasmine in bloom and the pollen from it is poisonous. Eggs would turn into larvae but would die before hatching. The queen larva also would die after the cell was formed and I lost a lot of cells. The other queen raisers removed their cells early and incubated them but I left them in the hive until the last possible day. Because the bees destroyed the dead cells, my average of queen cells to grafted cells was low, but my percentage that hatched was excellent compared to the other queen raisers in the area.

My old employer, Wilson, came over with questions about how to do various things to raise his own queens and I would tell him because I knew he could never be too successful in the queen raising business because the secret of good queens was generosity and Wilson was stingy. Although Wilson was trying to raise cells, he was still buying a lot of cells from me and selling the hatched queens as his own. One time I said, "I don't tell you everything."

What did surprise me was that as soon as I filled the initial orders, some stealing started. A couple of bars of cells disappeared first and I thought it was a guy from South Dakota who seemed to have a lot of time to come visiting. Because I believed in excellence, I threw any runty or undersized cells in the garbage and I had caught the old geezer taking some out of the trash. The South Dakota guy also constantly complained about not being able to get good help and his employee said he would only get paid for actual hours worked and this "bottom line" manager would deduct time driving between yards, lighting smokers, etc. and would forget things always to his favor, and the employee said he could work 5 days a week, 10 hours a day and only get paid for 20 hours a week. A thief is a thief and I suspected he was the culprit.

I would catch queens, put them in a populated but queenless hive and the next day, five or six queens would be gone. I kept an accurate count of the queens because I had orders for them. Cells were also regularly disappearing. As soon as it was daylight, I would be in my back yard to gather the cells of the right age, brush off the bees, cut the cells off the bars, count them and get them packed up for the customers who came at eight. Some mornings the hive covers would be loose and cells would be gone. Because these were very populous hives, they could propolis or 'glue down' the covers within a hour of being disturbed.

Another time, I was at a mating yard and when I got back, nearly all the bees had been shaken out of the queenless hives I used to raise queen cells. When I questioned the neighbors, they said they had seen two pickups in my yard, but they didn't pay too much attention because vehicles were always stopping at my house.

One other odd thing happened that year. Because queen raising is so much labor, I was having trouble feeding all the separate mating yards. Using a Wilson technique that I hate, rather than fill each little can in each of 100 little boxes spread around, I put out a barrel of sugar syrup, a method of feeding I called "slop feeding" because even though many twigs and things that float are put in the barrel, the bees get to fighting or their wings get wet and a lot are drowned. The method was a type of "robbing", a bad practice to get started. The next morning I went back to the yard to put cells in the mating units and there was no syrup, no dead bees in the barrel, and no bees in the mating units. I gathered all the little boxes up, restocked them with bees and moved them to a new location.

When I got back to Nokota, I moved to Dickton and put out 360 hives I had made up. Collateral was born next door on the same day that the Chevy garage burned. Times were tough in little dying towns and its good to be insured. I was looking for bee equipment to buy because I had been renting honey supers from the Wilson's at inflated prices. When I went to an auction near Mowhist, South Dakota, police were there because most of the better equipment that was supposed to be auctioned off was gone. One of the beekeepers there was Jim Delayman who was buying the bee business in Mowhist. I visited with Delayman and his father because they often stopped by in Texas to visit even though they bought cells from another queenraiser. There was very little of any value left to sell at the auction.

I was still looking for equipment and went to Angellake, North Dakota following an ad in the Bee Journal. I worked for five hours sorting frames and boxes to try to find something in good condition until finally a man said 'I have some better stuff over here' and behind the shed was all the boxes with the same name branded on them as the equipment still left at the Mowhist sale.

I made enough money from honey that second year to buy new honey supers and to buy my own extracting equipment so I no longer needed to pay exorbitant rental rates or be shorted on weights by the Wilson company. Although honey provided over half my income, it was the queen raising that captured my heart and I thought and planned how I would do it the next year.

The next trip to Texas, I moved to a different location outside of Fountainhead, Texas and I just gave my number to the beekeepers from the southwest Nokota area because I was still suspicious of the tightwad from South Dakota that cheated his employees. Setting up mating units for the virgin queens is a very labor-intensive job because each miniature hive has to be made up with feed, bees, a cell and they must be distributed widely to enable the virgin queen to find her own home. Because other bees or the resident virgin will kill an intruder if a virgin goes to the wrong hive, queen mating boxes are most effective if they are widely spaced in brushy areas where the virgin queens have reference points. I was behind in my work, so when a customer, told me that he had hired help that he didn't need at that time and that I could employ him to help me, I agreed to pay him for the week it took to set up my mating units. This young man was an absolute disaster and even though I stressed the importance of gentleness when setting down the mating units, he must of slammed the little boxes down because very few of the cells on his side of the yard hatched and I found cells laying on the bottom of the units when I went to catch queens ten days later. It's important not to disturb the mating units until the queen is mated because the workers are nervous when a virgin is in the hive and will "ball" her - pile on her like a heap of football players and kill her. I didn't know what a bad job he was doing until too late.

Anyway, one day I and my young 'helper' stopped at one of the Mom and Pop gas and snack stores that dot Texas and the kid walked to the back of the store and started visiting with a fat man and I said "How do you know someone a hundred miles from home?" and he said that they had been in drug treatment together. The fat man was a Baptist minister that had problems with prescription drugs, and my hired help had crack-cocaine addiction problems.

In order for a hive to raise queens, the bees must be tricked into thinking that they should prepare to swarm. As most beekeepers want their queens much earlier than would be natural, the queenraiser has to have very populous hives very early in the season so he will generally take bees or brood (bees before they hatch) from other hives and add them to hives to force the hive to an overcrowded condition so that the bees would ordinarily make swarm cells. Because only young bees produce royal jelly in abundance, the hives have to have young bees added continually. Although I was again losing queens and cells, I kept my head enough to keep trying. When I went to an outlying yard to get additional bees for my queenless hives, the bees had been shaken out and the full outside honey frames were replaced by empty homemade frames with reddish colored propolis. Because my frames had either a yellow or a brown propolis tinge from trees indigenous to my home state, I questioned the red color. In addition, the thieves' truck had backed up in the yard to turn and I always drove through to turn. When I got back home, I told my landlords about the theft and a few days later they came over and told me that their son, who drove a logging truck, had seen two red pickups in that yard but he hadn't said anything because that Sunday he had seen the same pickups in my home yard. The Delaymens from Mowhist, South Dakota had been over on Sunday and to be doubly sure, I went to a location where some of their hives were and looked in a few and saw some of the same red propolis on his frames.

I stopped at the small ma and pa grocery store where my cokehead help had recognized the fat man and was telling the lady about the frame switch and the store owner said the Delayman Company always put bees in a field behind the store. I went back on the road and saw where the Delayman were probably starting new hives because all the equipment was brand new. I asked permission from the landowner to go back and look for my cells. I was one of the few queenraisers who made their own cell base by dipping wood forms in beeswax. Since most queenraisers use plastic or purchase heavy wax cells that can hold up to shipping, I knew I stood a good chance of recognizing my own work. Then I thought that I should get someone to look with me because even if I found my cells, it would just be my word against a big company. I called Wilson but he said he couldn't come until the next day. The following morning, he and his lovely but abused wife showed up and I showed them the tracks in the yard and then the yard with the new set up hives, but there were no cell cups of any kind in any hives. One of Wilson's comments was "Did you get a picture of them?"

The next day, I went to the Sioux County Sheriff's office to make a report and a young officer took the report down and asked me if I knew where the Delayman company stayed and when I told him the name of the motel, the young officer said, "Oh, that's a big drug hangout". The young man wrote down my account of the theft and said someone would be out to look at the tracks, the foreign frames in my hives and to talk to my landlord's son. I waited two weeks and when no one showed up I called the Sioux Sheriff's department, and they told me that the report had been "lost".

I drove the fifty miles to the courthouse and they seated me in the anteroom of the County Attorney's office. I could clearly watch the county attorney as he made several phone calls, left and got coffee a few times, and read a magazine but I just waited and waited. I was patient. When I finally got to tell my story, the county attorney didn't bother to write it down, but to make the trip worth something, I insisted someone come look at the tracks and talk to my witness. Several days later when a cop finally came to see me, the tracks had been rubbed out, and he said the fact that the beekeepers were wearing beekeepers veils meant that my witness's identification of the vehicles meant nothing if he hadn't seen their faces. To make matters worse, my witness was known by the cops for various drunk escapades and for beating up his girlfriend.

I had been friends with the people at the gas station for several years and when I told them about my treatment, they convinced me to talk to the sheriff of Angel county and I told him about my thefts through the years, the stolen equipment in Angellake. The Angel County Sheriff confided that Sioux County was a dirty county and he promised to keep an eye out.

I was pissed. The next time cells were missing, I headed out to Delayman's yard to look for them. I stopped at the grocery store for coffee and as I drove up, the fat Baptist minister left the store. When I stopped at the landowners place to ask permission to go on his land, he said "You better not, they're back there now". Before I had time to leave, the Baptist minister came from their bee yard and all of a sudden it became abundantly clear to me that the minister was always at the store and was probably their lookout and why would you need a lookout for bees? I went to catch queens and kept turning the whole business over and over in my head. Why would this big bee company keep stealing from me? They had thousands of hives and their own semi truck to haul them.

I ran over to Wilson to tell him about my new theory and I said "It's more than just stealing, it's drugs".

Wilson blanched and his wife Jean turned and walked away and stood by a hive with her back to me. After a long silence, Wilson said, "Why don't you put some cocaine in his hives and get him in trouble if you hate him so much."

The next day Bill Arrowson drove up to chat which was unusual because this was such a busy time of the year. Within minutes, the three generations of Delaymens drove up with separate vehicles and wanted to talk to my witness in order to "clear this up". I started arguing with them and said there was no need to talk to any witness because they didn't even bring the red vehicles that were in my yard on the Sunday my witness saw the vehicles. Delaymen started calling me a "lying bitch" and worse, so I left and went behind the trailer to finish feeding and then I decided to unload on them some more and I went to the front and Bill was laughing with the Delaymen.

Toward the end of the season, my hives were so strong that I asked Bill Arrowson to bring over some honey supers and offered to split the honey as I was afraid the bees would swarm on me. Bill helped me put the honey supers on most of the yards and all day he talked about how full his life was since he "had taken Jesus into his heart". When the time came to pull the honey off, Bill was too busy and brought a trailer for me to pull the honey off myself. I couldn't believe my eyes when I got to the yards because nearly all the yards were stripped of bees although there was still a laying queen so the bees couldn't have swarmed. I had noticed my home yard had been acting strangely and leaving the hives in the late evening, but I had been too tired to follow them. It was after the natural nectar flow was over and the bees were inclined to "rob". I believe the thieves had put out bait honey in a screened box and after the bees had robbed for a time, they put a bee escape board on the top that lets the bees in, but not back out of the screened box. In their frenzy for free honey, the worker bees emptied out of the hive. The only hives left that were still full strength were the ones I hadn't taken Bill to. Because it was warm and a lot of bees were close to hatching, I did not lose everything but the hives were too weak for a good honey crop that year.

I tried going to Texas one more time. I moved to yet another area thinking that if I was more isolated, I would be left alone. The town I moved to was on the outskirts of a well known bass lake. There was a grocery store, a Dairy Queen, two dirty shops with an assortment of odd sundries, a cafe, a laundromat, several bait shops, and a hardware store. While I was there, another grocery store tried to get started, but it was robbed every weekend, and finally closed up. I asked my landlord why the cops didn't do anything and my landlord said the old grocery store was owned by a drug dealer and he didn't want competition. The whole town knew the cops were dirty and everyone looked the other way. I wondered if there was anywhere honest people could be safe in Texas.

It was a cold, bad year and I was a little too far north to raise many queens. I guess the final straw was when I came to a mating yard and found all the mating units overturned and obscenities like 'Suck my Cock, Cunt' and 'Whore' spray painted on the road outside the gate and arrows pointing to my beeyard.

When I got back to Nokota, I ran into Wilson at the Baker Boy donut shop and he said, "How did it go for you this year?"

I said, "O.K. except the cows kicked over a bunch of mating units." Wilson ducked his head and laughed.

I started wintering my hives in the winter of 1988. The first year, I lost half of my hives, but the next year, I took larva from the best hives to raise queens and my survival rate increased. This was the same time that the bee world was in an uproar over the internal mite and everyone was trying a variety of techniques to try and rid their hives of this parasite. Wilson called to see if I wanted to buy a miticide through him, but I said I didn't believe in continuous doctoring for people or for insects. Breeding for resistance seemed much more logical to me, let the bees seek their own balm. Like the great gardener Ann Lovejoy said, "If something is so sick you need chemicals, throw it out".

When I first started raising queens, Cliff Thompson gave me five Carniolian breeder queens as a gift to get me started. The Carniolian race of bees comes from a mountainous area of Yugoslavia and is hardy enough to survive the winters and smart enough to quit raising young during the winter. Not only does the cessation of brooding in the winter save energy because they can let the temperature of the hive drop, but cessation of brooding stopped the continual larval stage the mite needed to reproduce itself and perhaps the mite needed a higher temperature than the Carniolians used in the winter. Whatever the reason, I knew I didn't have the internal mites because my hives flourished and the other beekeepers hives dwindled. Maybe the mites were like the parasites that attacked cattle and were present all the time, but only flourished if the host was stressed. Maybe it was a combination of wintering and feeding honey and sugar instead of the cheaper corn syrup. I remembered the Hawaiian outfit telling me queens died when they used the cheaper grade of corn syrup in making the candy that goes into the queen cages. The mites had appeared at the same time everyone quit using sugar and switched to corn syrup and a poorer grade of feed could stress the bee gut.

Unfortunately, staying in Nokota didn't stop the thefts. Sometimes the bees would be shaken out and my new, excellent frames would be replaced by poor comb or Wilson's homemade frames. When Wilson's son called one time, I said I was sick of getting his father's frames and he said, "You must have gotten them when you bought brood from Dad." I said, "I threw those out the first year".

After that I started getting frames with California number brands on them instead of the distinctive homemade ones. Sometimes the honey would be gone and my supers would have angle iron marks made by an extractor that extracts honey a box at a time rather than a frame at a time the way I did. Sometimes the best hives would be shook out. I didn't know what I could do to prevent the thefts. The state of Nokota had a law requiring registration of yards and ownership identification signs in each beeyard and this information was available to anyone. When I didn't put my name on the outside of my hives, the state threatened me with prosecution.

The next year I hid enough hives to survive and I also removed my honey as soon as a super was full so they wouldn't be so tall and tempting. The thefts continued. Many times the better hives would be stripped of their bees. If the yard was well hidden, I would find circles drawn in the dirt road at every field entrance so that my truck's direction could be monitored and I remembered Don Grinder telling me about police using that as a surveillance technique. I felt like a parasite host. The thieves left me enough to exist, but not enough to get strong. I kept improving my stock for their benefit. Even though I knew what was happening, there was no way to prove it and they knew it. All I could do was collate the oddities, and there were more than just the theft of bees and honey. One time a highway patrolman stopped me for speeding and he said, "Where were you?" instead of "Do you know how fast you were going?"

The phone too was different. Whenever I would call a number different than the few family members I often talked to on the phone, the call would never go through the first time, but instead there would be a dead space and then the dial tone. The call would usually go through the second time. To be robbed over and over for six years would make anyone paranoid, so I quit talking about my bees on the phone. In fact, I think I lost my spontaneity somewhere along the way. I couldn't relax but was always patrolling.

In 1991, the warehouse I was renting in Dickton was sold. I had to find a new place, so I moved thirty five miles south to Spot, buying a house and warehouse at an auction sale. I hoped things might change in a new area, for it was no way to live, to worry constantly and to dread seeing what might be missing every time I drove into a beeyard, to watch my rearview mirror continually to see if someone was following. I just hated to give up and let the criminals beat me, because I just loved those bees.

CHAPTER 7

When I came to the cabin for the weekend, Sally had calmed down slightly. Sally's conversation was still fragmented and flighty and it seemed Sally was trying to tell a million things in fifty sentences. If Sally were given time to think about what happened and could write it down, she did a little better. I told her that the weekend was a time to rest and that she couldn't talk about Spot or bees and should try to relax. I had brought a few old Monty Python videos to watch, but Sally's sense of humor was gone. On Monday morning, I left with instructions to tell me about the people of Spot.

The first Spot people I met were Morgan and Jenny Schwartz. I was eating at the Duck Inn cafe when Morgan and Jenny sat down with me and started a conversation. Comical Morgan ran the antique store and said he did sleight of hand and magic shows for birthday parties. I told them that the warehouse I was renting in Dickton was being sold and that I was looking at the house and metal building that was to be auctioned that weekend. They said that they were the neighbors just up the hill. I was very impressed with their friendliness.

As soon as I moved to Spot, Jenny and Morgan threw a potluck "welcome to the community" party for me. In fact for the first year I lived in Spot, people were very friendly unlike most towns I'd lived in. Jenny and Morgan were often my companions. Morgan was fun to be around. He was a bundle of irritating mannerisms, a medley of sniffing and snorting and continual restless leg and hand movements and he always sought the center ring. When he would enter the cafe, he would drop a cup, kick a chair, or laugh his booming laugh to announce his presence. Morgan did a little house painting and he would show up in the morning with his clothes covered with paint wearing a tattered, moth-eaten sweater with his boots untied and flopping. Even disapproving attention was better than none. He had graduated from class to town clown.

Morgan had a lot of free time and would drive around looking for antiques in abandoned dumps and walking in the fields searching for Indian arrowheads and he was sadly and hopelessly addicted to gambling and drinking. When Morgan needed a drink, he didn't go to a bar to socialize, but instead he would sit in the country and drink himself into a stupor. His antique store was seldom open. I knew Morgan was intelligent and well read because there wasn't any topic he didn't know something about, but most of the townspeople erroneously thought he was a fool.

Jenny Schwartz was Morgan's opposite and they seemed to be at constant war. While Morgan was a drunken loafer, Jenny projected a professional image. She ran a regional education office, one of the middle layers of government bureaucracy that Nokota cherishes. Although Jenny's job consisted of supervising the special education teachers of five small schools, she pretended to have a lot of work and she always worked on Sunday afternoons. Jenny was perfectly groomed, had an air of class and sophistication, and was adept at manipulating and managing people. She was a beautiful woman, a generous and witty hostess and she usually organized any social events in the town. Jenny and Morgan would have loud public battles and sometimes they would go for days without talking. They also had times when Morgan and Jenny were like newlyweds and would hold hands and whisper conspiratorially.

Morgan was good friends with Bob Stamen and he often joined the coffee group in the morning. Bob was the minister for the Lutheran church and a ringer for Ichabod Crane. Washington Irving could have been describing Stamen when he said, "He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels and his whole frame most loosely hung together." I liked Stamen because someone told me he prayed that the pheasants would not suffer during hunting season. Rev. Stamen loved computers, electronics, anything complex and challenging and he owned nearly all the tools known to man. Like many nerds, although he was lavish with himself and his hobbies, he was stingy about spending money on the necessities of life. As a minister, he was welcome at dinner time and he and his wife abused the tradition. Stamen seldom came to my house because he was deathly afraid of dogs, even Collateral. Stamen often forgot his billfold when he came to the cafe so I contributed there.

Buck and Eunice Schaff were my other neighbors. Buck Schaff spoke with a heavy German accent even though he had been born in America seventy years ago. Buck was small in stature, meek around other men, and had an irritating habit of making up jokes that weren't funny and forcing polite people to cough up a laugh. No one remembered Buck's real name, for the moniker "Buck" stuck early. It was the joke of some local wag, maybe the same guy who traveled around renaming fat guys "Tiny". Buck was a nondescript, non-threatening, conforming man and there was nothing about Buck indicating virility and when the couple would appear on holidays wearing matching polyester theme outfits, it was obvious who wore the testicles. When the Schaffs retired and joined the town church, Eunice was so meddlesome and strident in her opinions, half the membership seceded and built a new church a block down the street. The house was decorated with religious pictures and crucifixes, the bloodier the better and the radio was always tuned to the Christian station. Like so many Christian Fundamentalists, they longed for everyone to operate on faith and obedience and saw the public schools, libraries, science and thought as a threat to God. They liked scaring themselves with stories about the antichrist, the coming apocalypse, and people wandering around with 666 on their foreheads. They embraced their paranoia as devotion to the inerrancy of Scriptures; they turned fear and superstition into an asset. People avoided social dinners at their house because Eunice loved the unusual. She pickled strange vegetables, tried out strange recipes like vinegar pie on her guests and in general most of the main dishes were a guess because she canned all her meats.

The Schaffs were preoccupied with their health and were always rushing to keep appointments with chiropractors, hydrotherapists, massagers, and herbalists. Medical doctors would tell them they were in good health for their age and would dismiss their allergies and neuralgias so they would go for a second opinion. Buck scheduled a general checkup at Mayo Clinic and was disappointed that after three days of tests, all they found were defective tastebuds. Buck and Eunice were health spa groupies and could tell you the name of every mineral bath and uranium mine cure in the United States. To ward off rheumatism they wore copper bracelets, to forestall aging they followed diets that excluded the most basic of foods. When I first moved into the neighborhood, Buck would stop every morning on his way to coffee and talk. Buck cherished his German heritage and claimed that at one time, America had considered making German the official language of the country.

I also became friends with Cathy Cowly who delivered my mail. I liked her spunk because Cathy had raised her three boys on her own. Cathy would stop for coffee and talk about her current romances. I think most middle-aged people still "looking for love" are sad and should get a dog. I despised Cathy's son, Cary. He was an incredibly lazy, stupid teenage jock with all the arrogance that usually goes with that age and intelligence, and Cathy treated him like an equal. She pampered him with money and a nice car and neglected to discipline him. She always stuck up for him when the school called. Cary, hung out with Sheriff North and his ambition was to be a cop.

CHAPTER 8

The Duck Inn Cafe was the town's social center and Morgan and Jenny were always stopping to ask me to go to coffee. Sometimes Morgan would stop by to show me arrowheads or junk he had captured from junkyards. Soon after I moved to Spot, Morgan made a crudely lettered sign saying "Home of the Bee Lady" and posted it below the oversized pheasant on the outskirts of town and I admit I was flattered. Morgan would give me things he found in the dump and I would feel obligated and buy them presents. Jenny often talked to me about Morgan's drinking and gambling and I started recounting my bee thefts and it was good to have a friend to talk to.

I visited with the Schaffs, too. They seemed interested in my bee business and asked to go out in the field with me and I took them once. In addition to Buck's daily stops, whenever I had visitors, the Schaffs would drop by, and I thought they were terribly nosy, but they were old and didn't have many friends.

Coffee with most people other than the Schwartz's was boring. The recurring topics of conversation were welfare and how those lazy people were living off the system, how the "new agers" and liberals were destroying Christian family values, how the women's movement was ruining the family and how foreigners were taking all the jobs. Some of the people that whined the most were the big farmers who owned enough land to displace twenty farm families and who put land under all their kids names so that subsidy ceilings could be avoided. A great many of the morning coffee klatch had gotten their excellent farmland put into CRP, a program designed to protect marginal, erodible land, not to provide an income for idleness. Others hid and manipulated their incomes so that their college kids could get grants that should have gone to smarter, poorer kids. There was plenty of talk about family values, none about business or government values or just values and honor in general. When they talked values, they only meant anything dealing with sex like traditional roles for women, abortion, homosexuality or Clinton's sex life not their Bible given right to dominate the earth.

After I moved to Spot, the thefts of my bees still continued. I had almost decided that the fight to keep in the bee business was fruitless and I should look for some other way to make a living. I considered starting an antiques store/bed and breakfast and started going to auctions. I had asked people to look out for strangers in my beeyard and there wasn't much more I could do. The yard I had shown the Schaff's had the honey taken off and the empty boxes put back on and the bees were shaken out.

Morgan told me that I should tell North, the county sheriff about the thefts but I didn't like him because he had a reputation as a bully. One day at coffee, Jenny introduced me to the district Highway patrolman and encouraged me to tell him about my theft problems. He asked me why I hadn't reported it to North and I said I had had experience with dirty cops in Texas and I didn't enjoy watching their smirks. He said, "Lady, this ain't Texas."

That night I went home and wrote a six page letter about Texas and bees and drugs and had Jenny Schwartz photocopy it and I sent it off to the highway patrolman. Reverend Stamen stopped over to visit and I gave him a copy of the letter to read and he read it so fast, I asked him if he had seen it before and he said Jenny had showed it to him. The highway patrolman never responded to my correspondence but after the letter people started treating me differently.

That summer everything seemed to go wrong. My bee losses escalated. I was down to half what I started with. When Cathy Cowly stopped by one day, she asked where my hives were because she would watch for bee trucks when she delivered mail. I was by now suspicious of anyone who wanted to know where my hives were and didn't tell her. I told her I was going to sell out my remaining bees and I thought I could get a good price from a bee breeder for mite-resistant bees. I wrote the state agriculture department for internal mite inspection because I needed the verification of a disinterested third party. When the inspector showed up, I took him to my remaining yards and also gave him a list of the California brand numbers I had found on my frames. He promised to research the owners of those brands and help with the thefts if he could. I waited two months and finally wrote to ask for the results. Then I wrote again. Then I called. Although the inspection was done in July, I didn't get mite-free verification until February and I was told to contact my local authorities with my theft problems. That fall I did a very bad thing and lied. I casually mentioned to Cathy Cowly that I had a cure for the internal mites and that it didn't cost much.

Cathy said, "You should market it."

"I can't because it's available in any grocery store and they would recognize it by the smell. Besides, its so incredibly cheap."

I know it is wrong to lie. The commercial miticides are expensive and not very effective, and most "bottom line" managers would believe more in a magic potion than they would in benevolent management and natural selection, so I was curious what would happen if I baited a hook. Within the week, a beekeeper from Nebraska stopped to "visit". There were long silent stretches because I didn't know what to say to him. Finally, I told him I had to get back to work and as I went into the warehouse, I covered a container of Golden Marlin, a fly poison, and he smiled and left. Another old druggie beekeeper, Keith Oldton, also showed up though I hadn't seen him in three years. Dave Verlandson, a hunter stopped to ask about a room and proceeded to tell me how he had invented a little thing that made him rich. That weekend, I went to the neighboring town to get groceries and "ran" into Don Grinder who was visiting his parents and he invited me to coffee. At coffee, he talked about how he had discovered a way to triple gas mileage by adding some small piece you could find in any junkyard. When I teased him about his paranoia he said that he wasn't paranoid anymore because he had friends in high places.

That fall, I had decided to try and start a bed and breakfast in my two-storied farmhouse because I had lost most of my bees. Certainly there must be some hunters who would prefer a clean bed to the smelly motel. I scraped and papered all the upstairs bedrooms and remodeled the bathroom, tearing out the walls, replacing them with beaded board and added a claw foot tub. I was still working on the bathroom when the Sphincter county attorney called to ask if I would have room for his friends, the district attorney from Neargo and his relatives when hunting season opened. I hoped to be done with my remodeling by then and agreed to provide housing for them. When my guests arrived, Jenny was visiting and she smiled and winked at the Neargo district attorney and I was appalled that a middle-aged woman like Jenny was flirting with such a young man. When it came time for them to leave after three days, they asked me what they owed me and I said, "I really can't charge, first because the bathroom isn't complete and secondly, because I'm still not licensed. When you called, I thought I'd be ready and there wasn't time for you to make other arrangements, so I'll just let it go."

Even though I told him it was "on the house" he asked several more times what he owed me but I just refused to quote a price. The three men had stayed three days and left $20 on the table. At coffee time at the cafe that morning, I overheard someone at the next table mention bed and breakfast and since I was the only one talking about starting one I listened a little closer and I heard talk that an unlicensed bed and breakfast was going to be prosecuted. The Chamber of Commerce listed people in the town who had extra bedrooms for rent during hunting season and I had listed my name with them, but I never got any referrals.

Late that fall, I moved half my few remaining hives to my front yard and half to a yard across the road that I could see from my upstairs window. I cruelly let them sit in the blizzards with no protection, not even wrapping them in tar paper like I usually did. If I could only have the few hives my backyard could support, I wanted natural selection to pick the winners.

That Christmas season, Jenny invited me to go shopping with her. The mall in the closest large town is small and after I finished shopping, I set out to find Jenny but I couldn't find her anywhere. I sat and waited in the center seating for three hours. Finally Jenny showed up and said she needed to stop to get groceries. We went to Buttreys and near the entrance was the magazine display and the store office. She stopped to browse in the magazines so I looked through the magazines on decorating. Jenny said, "They have no right to charge that much for a magazine. Shove it under your shirt."

My shock was replaced with the theory that maybe Jenny shoplifted, but I dismissed it as too impossible. Jenny was a leading educator in the state and had been appointed to several boards by the governor. Within minutes of my telling Jenny that I would never steal anything, Jenny's nephew came from the office and I was surprised that he did not even acknowledge me although they had both gone to college together and had both been in Jenny's brothers wedding.

As we drove home, Jenny asked, "If you could have anything you desired for Christmas, what would it be?"

"I'd want my bees back," I said.

"A person can be too good for their own good," Jenny said

That same Christmas season, Hester Goebel who lived a couple miles down the road, hosted a Christmas coffee party for the neighborhood. Hester decorated her whole house and as she led the tour through the rooms, Jenny said, "Now don't steal anything, Sally."

I was so taken aback and so offended that I was speechless. I could not understand how Jenny, who was supposed to be my friend, could be so insulting. That was twice within a week that stealing had come up in conversation.

When Hester showed one bedroom decorated in a duck motif, I asked her if she had any old duck decoys which could be quite valuable. Hester said she had some old ones in the shed. I talked about her antiques and said I had books that listed values and Hester suggested we get together after Christmas and go through some of her things. I had promised to help Hester price her lifelong collection of antiques and collectibles and spent a lot of the remaining winter over at her house. As we visited, I told her about my thefts and Hester told of having her larger arrowheads and some jewelry stolen.

There were other things about Jenny that I had chosen to ignore before. Small towns do not keep secrets well and I learned that Jenny had told the other bidder at the auction on my place to keep bidding because I could only go to $30,000. When I first came to town and had dinner with Morgan and Jenny they had said that they could possibly help me find a place to live if they knew what my price range was and I had told them $30,000. I knew Jenny hated bees, so it was possible she just didn't want bees in the neighborhood. Once Jenny bragged about getting money for an imaginary knee injury when her family staged a rear end collision when she was visiting in California and I was appalled and told her so. Another time a truck selling new furniture came to town. I hated all thieves and I went to the courthouse to report it to the cops, but they were all out of town that day, a rare thing since they usually sat at the courthouse all day. When I mentioned the furniture truck to Jenny, Jenny said, "They have invoices. Furthermore, what business is it of yours?"

CHAPTER 9

When the position of Sphincter County Superintendent of Schools for the 1993-94 school year was advertised in the paper, Jenny suggested I apply for it. The job only required a bachelor degree and was a two-day a week job with few duties and a small salary. I was very surprised when I was hired. The first day I started working as Sphincter County Superintendent, I asked to see the budget. I had a $10,000 supply budget when all the county superintendent ever needed was an occasional typewriter ribbon and stationery. Even with that bloated budget, part of the job was to solicit funds to conduct the county MATHCOUNTS and Spelling Bee competitions. As the MATHCOUNTS entry fees were due soon after I took the job, I had the auditor send a check in and the next week the paper printed that my office was the only county office operating in the red.

When I put in an invoice for a subscription to the weekly Sphincter County papers for records of school board meetings and to maintain school history records, Elroy Steinguter, the county auditor, refused to order it and I argued that with a $10,000 supply budget, I didn't see how a $20 request was unreasonable. Every encounter with Elroy was a confrontation and I could feel a cold hate whenever I was in his presence. When I had to go to his office, he would ignore me and I would just stand by the counter with my head down pretending to read until he would deign to wait on me.

I soon found out that the $10,000 was to order all the supplies for the county through a school consortium. Since my office was part time and small, it looked better financially and the bonus was that Elroy sloughed off some auditor work on someone else. Soon after I started, everyone working for the county ordered kitchen garbage sacks and when they admitted that they wanted them for personal use, I told them that I wouldn't order them. The promiscuous blond secretary said sarcastically, "Why, is it too much work for you?"

I said "No, I won't steal for anyone."

Because the supplies were ordered through the school superintendent's office, they were delivered there too. When I first started work, several boxes of surgical gloves were delivered to my office and when I asked where they went, they said Elroy used them for butchering.

The days when I was at work, strange things would happen at my house. Small, stupid things would disappear. My automatic garage door had begun to open at random times, so I always shut the power switch off and many times it would be on when I came back from work. One drizzling day, I stopped to pet my dog Collateral when I got home and her hair was wet even though I had left her in the house. Sometimes vehicles would follow me and go fast when I went fast, or slow down when I did. Almost invariably the license numbers would begin with ND or be a number followed by an A or just numbers while most state licenses were three letters starting with C or D followed by a number.

My supply room at work overlooked the street that the Bungle Butcher shop was on. One of their sons was a beekeeper and the other was the retarded one that got the policewoman fired. Once I'd seen Elroy Steinguter, the county auditor, carrying a package from a salt feeder behind Bungle's hives when there was no reason for a salt feeder to be there because the land was in CRP and supported no livestock. The local drug dealer with the "Heady" bra on his vehicle spent his free time there. I saw a constant flow of vehicles with ND on the license plates stopping and I often saw the Sheriff's patrol car there too. Every Monday, Morgan would stop and get bones for his dogs.

Even though Sphincter County was losing population and its tax base at an alarming level, somehow the courthouse received funds to buy an elaborate, sophisticated computer system in 1994. There seemed to be unlimited funds for some things. I refused to attend the Christmas party for the courthouse but I heard the food committee order lobster, crab, shrimp and steak and arrange the open bar for all the employees in the courthouse. When I asked where the money for this excess came from, the secretary sarcastically told me "the pop machine."

From the very beginning, I had trouble getting mail out. Schools would not get notification of workshop letters or agenda items and would call demanding an explanation. I quit mailing from the courthouse but letters would get lost from the post office too. People at the courthouse not only wouldn't talk to me, they would get up and leave the room when I entered. It wasn't much better downtown. At the cafe when I ordered a beef sandwich, I got gristle and fat on dry bread. At the gas station, the customer at the pumps came out from paying, saw me waiting in line, and went back in for fifteen minutes, blocking the pumps. People would turn away when I would nod a greeting. Surely these random acts of meanness and slights could not be intentional, I thought. What had I done to anyone?

When the state officials were doing their yearly audit at the courthouse, I cornered one of the auditors to ask about the supply budget. Rather than being excited about the possibility of corruption, he evaded my questions and kept turning the conversation back to the contingency fund for school competitions that I had to raise money for. The books were a mess and no one could tell the status of their department because the books weren't divided up by agency and no one ever received any financial statements.

When the county auditor took travel expenses out of the contingency fund and overdrew it by $14, the paper again published that the Superintendent of School's office was overdrawn. It was my obligation to collect contributions to pay for the MATHCOUNTS and Spelling Bee competitions. I hated begging for money, so I decided to make up a guide to the landowners of CRP, all those lands set aside by the government as highly erodible and the preferred nesting area of pheasants. Although Sphincter County had highly productive land, it unexplainably had the largest percentage of land in CRP in the state.

I spent all my free time working on the atlas. During hunting season, the town sold chances on prizes. I planned to go to the city council and get their mailing list of the prize lottery purchasers to solicit sales. Reverend Stamen was a member of the city council and offered to make mailing labels for me and anyone else in the community that could use them. After several weeks, I asked Stamen for the list but he said most of the names were illegible.

I stayed away from Sheriff North. The Sphincter Co. Sheriff's department spent most of their time on the third floor or at the Bungle's Butcher Shop. North and his deputies ignored me so I was surprised when North stopped in my office and started telling me that Charles Manson would never have been allowed to join the Nazi party and that the time would come when the streets of America would run with blood. I had been pretty sure that North was part of the lunatic fringe before, but now the fact that a man of his caliber was not only armed but also in a position of authority made me shudder.

By November, the stress was showing on me. I was getting more and more calls complaining that schools were not getting letters, I no longer went downtown for coffee, I was isolated at work, and strange things continued to happen at my house. Dumb things would disappear and reappear again. I had purchased the porch columns from the owner of an abandoned house and when I called her to ask if I could buy the baseboards, the owner agreed to give them to me and a few days later when I got to the farmhouse, the baseboards that had survived 20 years of abandonment were all broken. The harassment seemed relentless and even the smallest details took on sinister implications to me. When my sister called one day, I mentioned that I had to drive to Buttreys to get the brand of dog food Collateral liked and when I got to the store that Jennie Schwarts's nephew managed, that brand's shelf was empty. When I ordered some books on antiques, the check was cashed but I never got the books. I can't name one thing that went right. It was like my every move was anticipated. I drove to Dickton and bought a whoopie cushion after I picked up my groceries. If they wanted to listen to my life, I would give them a sample of flatulence that they could recount to their descendents. The farts were louder than a Shetland Pony pulling a milk wagon. The next day, Jenny said, "You really do change your opinion of someone when you hear them fart."

In early spring, I gathered up the twenty-five front yard hives that had made it through the howling winter and moved them to a another location for the week or so it would take them to get reoriented before I could move them to their permanent location behind my house. The next day, I took sugar syrup out to them for spring stimulation and they were already gone. At the gate were fresh Doral cigarette butts. I moved the remaining twenty hives from across the road into my backyard.

When it came time for the county spelling bee, I went to the store to arrange for cookies and milk for the break and the storeowner told me I would have to get the milk directly from the distributor who unloaded at the Bungle Butcher Shop. When I went to inquire at the butcher shop, I saw an ashtray full of Doral cigarettes.

I shared my office with two women who ran a government funded program designed to teach retarded people to be self sufficient, but all they ever seemed to do was hot glue things together and bake box cakes. Although the job was advertised as one full time position, it had been split into two part time jobs held by Elroy's niece and her friend, the wife of the county treasurer. Rather than functioning as a forty-hour worker, the two women came to work at the same time and the county got a 20 hour work force and paid twice the price.

Because of the mail delivery problems, I had run to a local school to deliver some material and when I came back, I met one of the women on the steps and she said, "I locked the door because I didn't think you'd be back."

I told her, "I want my door left open so that people coming in know I'll be coming right back, and furthermore, I never leave early, or leave all the windows open when I do go."

The next day, both women were furious and they said that it was the law that all their files had to be double locked. I grabbed a law book and looked it up and it only said files needed to be secured and told them if they didn't feel safe locking only the files, they should get a lock put on their own office door because I had an open door policy. The whole argument was so ludicrous because I often came into the office to get things on my days off and everyone was downstairs having coffee and the whole second floor was open and unoccupied.

I was very surprised to get a letter announcing there was to be a meeting with the director of Goodlands Human Services, a county commissioner, the two women and me. I felt it was an internal disagreement and a small one at that and certainly didn't warrant a meeting of this size and I was tired of standing alone, a resistance movement of one. Since no one was talking to me, my mail didn't go through and my own office was an uncomfortable place in which I had no control over my own door, I pretty well could predict the result of the meeting. Was I paranoid to think people were trying to get me in trouble?

I finally gave up and decided to sell out and leave. I tried to dispose of some of my antiques. A lady at a Capitol rummage sale had given me the phone number for her brother who collected Coca Cola signs and when I called him about a school crossing guard sign I had found in a junk pile at my parents, he was extremely excited about it. He called back three times about it, but the day I brought it to town and agreed to meet at the place he worked, he was gone and his coworker said "He isn't interested in stolen merchandise."

Even though I was planning to sell out, I couldn't resist going to one last auction when an older lady asked me to take her to a relatives auction. I returned from the auction with a box of linens and other antiques. The sheriff's deputy was at the sale but never bought anything. When I got home, Jenny called and asked, "Can I see what you got?"

I was surprised that Jenny even knew I'd gone to an auction, but I didn't know of a polite way to refuse her. I was still unpacking the linens and I was especially thrilled with two hardanger sets, one blue tea tablecloth with napkins and one full size white one with napkins. Jenny asked, "What else did you get?"

I went to the living room to get a green camera, but Jenny didn't even look at it and suddenly was in a hurry to go home. It was late, so I went to bed. The next morning, Jenny stopped by to pick me up for coffee and again brought up the auction sale and commented on my good fortune. "Well, now you shouldn't feel bad about losing your bees" she said.

It was such a stupid comment because there is no comparison between getting a bargain and being victimized and I wondered why Jenny was bringing up bees when we were talking about auction sales. When I got home, I started to put the linens into plastic bags but I couldn't find the white hardanger one.

Thinking about Jenny's bee statement, I looked in the hives I had in my yard and the bees were gone. I loaded up all the junk Morgan had dropped off at my house and dumped it in their yard and stuffed the napkins that matched the hardanger tablecloth into Jennie's mailbox at work. The only thing I didn't give back was a parrot that repeated what you said in a high squeaky voice which I regifted to my mother for Mother's Day because she thought it was funny.

The town banker, a brother to the State's Attorney General, had once turned in a woman who found a bag of money from Hardees on the street and had kept the cash, so I approached him as an honest person from a respectable family to ask him for advice about what to do about Jennie's theft. As I talked about the auction and the missing tablecloth, I could see he was enjoying himself, smiling and rocking in his chair and tapping his fingers on the desk. He suggested I talk to the lawyer who had referred the Neargo attorney to me for housing during hunting season and would have prosecuted me for an unlicensed bed and breakfast. I don't know what possessed me, but then I said, "I know this is a drug town, but it's the thefts I object to."

His chair slammed to the floor as he stopped the finger drumming and gave me such a look of hate, I couldn't exit fast enough. I walked down the street to the cafe and sat down with Reverend Stamen. I told him about the tablecloth and napkins and Stamen said, "Oh that's what Morgan and Jenny were laughing about and why Morgan said, 'At least you got some pretty napkins, all I got was junk'."

All I could think about was what I fool I'd been about Morgan and Jenny. At one auction, Morgan had bought a train and I was behind him when that was the only item he paid for. The next day at coffee, he was showing an old military compass that he said he bought at the same auction. At another sale, Morgan didn't get a bid number but I saw him playing with a metal woodpecker toothpick holder. Still another time I had stopped by the Schwartz house unexpectedly and Morgan and Jenny were poring through antique price guides looking for prices on watches because Morgan said he was planning to sell his dad's watch. At the time, it struck me odd that someone who owned an antique store wouldn't know the value of their own heirlooms. Morgan found many really nice, unbroken things in "dumps". Maybe they had more in common than I thought - agreed on stealing only a few items as a way to escape detection because their victims would think they had misplaced the item - using sleight of hand for more than entertainment.

The parrot was the only thing I had gotten from the Schwartz's that wasn't junk. Morgan had bought two, one for Jenny and one for me. Bob Stamen told me there was a way to program it to record things and play them back later, but I wasn't interested. Later the afternoon that I got it, Stamen came to my house and showed me how Morgan could have gotten a cheaper edition of the parrot out of a novelty catalog rather than the expensive editions Morgan had ordered out of a magic catalog and I thought it strange that Stamen made a special trip to show me the catalog. I got the present of the parrot soon after I wrote the letter about bees and drugs to the highway patrolman.

When I figured out that something was unusual about the parrot, I got it back from my mother and asked Bob Stamen to look at it to see if there was a listening device in it. I told him I had gotten it back from my mother and he said, "Oh that's where it was," and my scalp crawled.

Then he said, "it's too small to hold a receiver," and I knew he was a sinister minister because the parrot's very purpose was to repeat conversations so it had to have a receiver. I took the parrot to my parent's house and hid it.

In early June, I came home from the grocery store to find some boxes I had been packing in the kitchen were moved and some fine dust was below the kitchen light fixture. I removed the florescent kitchen fixture and replaced it and I locked the old fixture behind the seat of my bee truck in case there was a listening device in it. I had given a match to the kitchen fixture to Rev. Stamen when I remodeled the living room. A few days later, friends of Stamen's, an older couple named Joe and Violin Rooster, stopped by to invite me to go for a drive and when I got back, the garage lights and the power to the automatic door were on and the door to my one ton was not shut completely. The light bulbs were unscrewed in the light fixture.

In late June a tractor with a pull-type swather parked at the top of the hill. After I told Hester about how strange it was to see a swather when there was no hayland around and it was too early to swath crops, someone came with a red and black pickup and made a round in the wheatfield and parked the tractor behind the hill. The red and black pickup drove by my house several times and would go over the hill and turn around. After that a new pickup was parked at the neighboring farm and every two weeks or so, a car would come and jump-start the truck battery, the car would stay there for two or three days until the truck came back.

I thought back about all the other oddities. Soon after the highway patrolman's letter I got a call from the Schaff's asking me to come over and help move a tree. I had just walked into the yard when a phone serviceman stopped wanting to know "where Sally Gustine lived" because "she had called in with some phone trouble." I told him I had not called in.

It wasn't just the phone and the conversations in the house, even my mail was tampered with. When I tried to sell my bee equipment I wrote an ad for The Bee Journal that read: "Theft of bees forces sale of equipment 1200 (new in 86) honey supers with permadent; about 700 deeps, 1200 mating units and all queen raising equipment, nets, and all support equipment. Always took pride in nice equipment. Also would like to hear from beekeepers with following brands found in my hives: 3-56, 8-245, 44-17, 10-58, 54-00." The check was never cashed and the ad never ran.

During this year, the town was raising money to bring in a vitamin company from Nevada that had gone bankrupt but would be "viable under a different management". One Sunday when my parents came for a visit, I took the opportunity to run and get some groceries. Dave Velandson who ran a boat dock near Brainard, Minnesota stopped by while I was gone. Even though I didn't like him, I thought I would try and send some hunting guides with him to sell, so I checked around town until I found him. I was very surprised when I saw the back of his Scout full of "vitamins" when the vitamin company still hadn't come to town. He talked about Bungle's butcher shop being so dirty that he wondered how it could pass health inspections. I had met Verlandson during hunting season and it seemed odd to me that he would come 1000 miles from home during the busy season at his dock.

After my bees were stolen, I just left the equipment in my yard. I had tried to put the boxes away several times, but I just couldn't go near them without crying and being overcome with a deep stomach aching sadness. In July, I was surprised to see bees coming and going, and found three hives of bees that must have swarmed out from some hives near town. I was sure they were my bees because my Carniolans were so dark and gentle and most of the other beekeepers kept yellow Italians. I was very happy to see some of my girls come home.

One day Cathy Cowley's son, Cary, stopped by to use the bathroom. He then sat down and talked about how the town was "freezing" him out and that Sheriff North knew everything he was doing. I found my keys in a drawer in the bathroom when I knew I had left them on the kitchen counter. I bought a new lock and replaced it.

Several days later the Schaffs, who had been ignoring me for several months, stopped by to invite me for supper and when I refused, they told me it was unhealthy to never get out. Against my better judgment, I accompanied them to the local supper club and the next day I noticed no bees were flying and my three hives of bees were gone. The new dead bolt lock I had put on was also badly scratched and the bell button was broken.

I decided to try and get away to clear my thinking. In August, I borrowed one of my dad's cars telling him I was going to see my sister. I started out at 3 a.m., stopped and left a note to my parents and the keys to my house with Hester Goebel and took back roads to South Dakota. I noticed that every intersection had a newer unoccupied vehicle parked right past it and it struck me as too incredible a coincidence for such remote roads. When I got to the intersection of two major roads I saw two cars parked facing the opposite intersections. I started south, then doubled back on country roads and went to Crow Mountain, an Indian reservation, where an old boyfriend taught school. Even though the Indians all had houses, they were the truly homeless and the aimless wanderings of a whole race of people depressed me even more. I stayed about a month and decided that the bleak reality of reservation life was worse than death and I regained a little perspective.

When I got back to Spot, I went to see Hester. Hester said she overheard at coffee from the dentist's wife that someone had toured my house with the intention of buying it and the only thing they would really like to change was the kitchen cupboards. I went over to the dentist's house and when I knocked on the door, she said to "come in" as she hung up the phone and said "she's here now, I have to go."

I went home to return my parent's car and they told me they had gotten calls from a lot of people asking where I had gone. Jenny called my sister in Denver because she was so "concerned". Cathy Cowly had called about where to transfer mail, Hester Goebel had called several times and the Schaffs had called my brother to ask about my whereabouts.

Nobody came to visit much anymore. Cathy stopped once or twice but I was uncomfortable with her since I felt my mail was tampered with. I told her that I thought that Spot was a drug town. She said, "What does it hurt?"

Then though I hated doing it, I lied that I had talked to some newspapers about it when I was on my trip. I hoped the idea that someone knew of my plight might save me. I trusted no one except Hester who stopped occasionally with antiques she wanted priced.

CHAPTER 10

I seldom left the house. I spent time watching vehicles go by my house and timing how fast they came back. Pickups would go over the hill and return immediately. Joe and Violin Rooster stopped by and gave me a melon and after they left Collateral vomited several times so I threw the melon in the compost pile. The next morning, a skunk was staggering across the front yard and the melon was gone. I was scared. I usually would crawl under the windows when I went from room to room as it was hunting season and I feared a "stray" bullet. I would only leave the house when I was completely out of food and would drive to the neighboring town to shop. I continued to pack up my belongings. People don't just sit and think up ideas or inventions, they stumble over them. As I packed, I looked through the old newspapers I had in the basement. I ran across minutes for an old city council meeting that listed the recipients of liquor licenses and included the Spot Columbian Club, a fictitious name. Another paper had the minutes for a school board meeting and showed payments made for athletic supplies to Jack Raven Sports but Raven worked at the ASCS office. Still another listed flood disaster aid that had been given to Sphincter Co. when all the flooding had been on the Blue River in Eastern Nakota. When I first came to Spot, I would see the local drug dealer driving around town all summer with a snowblower carton on the back of his truck and all winter with a grill bra that said HEADY on it. I often saw a Tire-Rama truck come and leave town but it never carried any tires. I had once overheard a coffeehouse gossip say that there were 72 businesses in town and now I suspected that I had heard correctly. It was all a big joke to the town. There was a boldness about things that frightened me and the license plates that had an A or a ND on them were issued at the state level.

I'll admit I was paranoid. I looked at the problem from every angle, but it was unsolvable. There was no sense involving the law, since any encounters with them were bound to be humiliating. Every time I had approached the police, criminal activity against me increased with a vengeance. A long time ago, my cousin, who sometimes tended bar in Capitol, told me that she overheard an FBI agent laughing about bringing drugs back when he went to Texas for meetings.

I thought about how so many of the people that were participating in this monkey business were "reborns" - the conservative right, the right to life fanatics, and most had A's on their license plates. I also stared wondering why so many people I knew that liked drugs were now reborn Christians.

All in all, it was a very unhealthy situation and I was so obsessed by the enormity of it all. The drug business didn't upset me much because it will always be and you cannot legislate morality, but I believed that it was sanctioned and financed by public officials using public funds and to live in a corrupt society sickens me. Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame said "I always tell people the '90's are the 60's standing on your head," and everything was indeed inside out. Here I was imprisoned, paranoid, and unprotected in my house while the drug dealers advertised their business in the paper and probably openly communicated by elaborate computer networks paid for by the taxpayers. It was like "they" practiced "Omerta," the Sicilian double moral standard: those inside the group must be treated fairly; whereas those outside are fair game.

Hester Goebel was the only person I still visited. When I had first moved to town I had gotten an irate call from Hester accusing me of insulting her son at one of the bee yards I had along Liver River. At the time, I knew I had never run into anyone in that yard and I hurried over to the implement dealership to talk to Hester's son and find out who had been in my yard. He said he couldn't remember anything about it.

Mrs. Goebel had had a brain tumor and had gone from doctor to doctor telling about her headaches and they dismissed her complaints as hypochondria and menopausal depression. At one point, the doctors were going to commit her to the state mental institution. Finally someone discovered her tumor, but by the time they operated, the tumor had grown to such a large size that half her face was disfigured. Hester was a marshmallow lady who always hugged everyone and she acted sympathetic toward me and said she knew how it felt to be doubted so I trusted her despite her weekly Bible study classes. Hester had hung around with the movers and shakers of Spot before her deformity, but she often talked about how her friends had abandoned her after her surgery and she was a very lonely woman. She amazingly still could find arrowheads with her one good eye and spent many hours walking the fields. She told me her biggest ones had been stolen the winter before.

I told her about all my suspicions. When my bees were stolen while I was at the auction sale with the older lady, Hester asked if I believed the lady could be part of what was going on and I said, "Probably not, but her kids could and she would defend them."

Hester started to cry and left and I thought her reaction was odd at the time. After I deduced that Jenny and Morgan were thieves, I asked Hester if she still had the duck decoys she had mentioned at Christmas and we went to the shed to look and they were gone. I remembered one of the times when Jenny had moved out on Morgan and I went to console her, she was putting large arrowheads into a big display case and she said it was a gift for Morgan which didn't make sense because she was talking divorce at the time. I told Hester about the arrowheads and suggested that Jenny and Morgan were her thieves, but amazingly now she didn't seem interested.

On the night before Christmas eve, Hester stopped by with a plastic Santa planter and a commercial box of fudge in a plastic tray. It was such a lonely Christmas season and I ate the fudge and watched "It's A Wonderful Life."

The next day, I woke up with chills and a headache. I wrapped up in a blanket and was watching television when my normal television reception stopped and two ordinary-looking people were walking back and forth in what looked like a local television studio. There was no sound, but they appeared to be praying as they paced back and forth. Then the words "Tune to KVNW" appeared at the top of the screen and I switched to that channel and ironically "The Guiding Light" was on. I laughed and started to talk to the TV thinking it was God and complimented him on his good sense of humor and I felt a fatherly hand laid on my head.

I lay down on the bed and when I opened my eyes, the pictures on the wall opposite my bed were flashing green. I started imagining that the people I had seen on the TV were going to come to rescue me and take me to a safe place. I was sure that one of the people who would save me was a writer since "In the beginning was the Word" and I was sure that the world would end the same way. I laid out my 1909 unabridged dictionary and its stand for that savior. Then I got it into my exploding head that surely the Indians would come back into their own in this failed experiment called democracy. Wasn't a white buffalo born on Haider's farm in Wisconsin the sign waited for 500 years? I set out a Navajo saddle blanket and a soft leather fringe jacket for the second savior who would surely be an Indian who knew that hunting was for food, not sport, and knew enough to thank his game.

After some time, my aching head told me that I should find anything in the house that Morgan and Jenny had ever admired and give it to them since money and things meant so much to them. After making a mound of possessions outside my front door, I started marching up and down the road in front of my house singing "Santa Claus is coming to town, he's making a list, checking it twice, going to find out who's naughty and nice, you Nazi bastards."

About then the cops and my parents showed up. I don't know who called my dad but I got into their car and kept singing about Santa Claus coming to town. While the spirit of Christianity was an irresponsible promise of forgiveness and absolution for evil, the spirit of Santa was one of justice. No wonder religions railed against Santa displays and called them "commercial" and anti-Christ. Didn't they know that Santa was invented to give abused and neglected children hope and light? Didn't they know that someone noticed who was really good and who was really bad and rewarded you for being "good for goodness sake", that justice did exist? Didn't they know there was an omniscient being who saw everything and could still be jolly? In my new mind, revenge would be swift and complete, the time for evil was over. Nazis, racists, religious and gender bigots, child abusers, wife beaters, liars, thieves, the drug business that ran my little town, everyone I hated would be dead soon. I just had to wait until God checked the list twice to see who was naughty or nice and soon I would be in a peaceable kingdom. My throat was raw, but I kept screaming and screaming and cursing about Santa Claus coming to town and punishing those Nazi bastards.

When my parents got to town, they stopped at the grocery store and my mother went into the store and I got my dad to put some polka music on because I thought that would make the car safe. Once I got home my mother made me a spicy pork sausage sandwich and yelled at me when I gave some to the dog. I crawled into bed and passed out.

When I came to, Mom gave me a couple pills. I was laying in bed having conversations with Jewish comedians about how to fine tune jokes and pick just the right words to make the everyday hilarious and they were thanking me for yelling at the Nazis for them. I was convinced that to get to heaven was to become a muse. All day long you got to think and be amusing and listen for the meanings in music and visit with authors and musicians. Words and emotions were the gifts you could bequeath, a lyric here, a poem stanza there, a little joy to alleviate some suffering. I visited with Jim Henson who said he would be one of my soulmates and I could be his Miss Piggy and I asked if I could "kick as much beekeeper ass with my sharp little cloven hoof as I wanted."

"In the game of life, Good always plays by the rules," my guide said, "but because you didn't follow the most important rule of all, I'm so sorry but you have to go back to hell."

Suddenly things turned horrible. I thought my dead mean grandmother was trying to get out of hell by possessing my body. I thought all my hometown neighbors were part of a game of demon possession and that they could take over a soul and get one of their own out of hell by putting a good soul into hell in that person's place. I was scared they would eat my body and drink my blood. When my mother said something about taking my place, I went really berserk because in my mind I knew my mother was playing in the possession game and willing to sacrifice me for her mean mother. I grabbed my dog because in my madness, I knew that these demons would hurt or kill what you loved for fun, and the only way to safety was to get out of this possessed house. I ran to the garage and got into the pickup.

All life was a big game designed by evil. If a person trying to be good didn't follow all the rules, she lost. I figured one of Good's rules was that we had to help ourselves and find our own way, but evil had the advantage that it could play with no rules, cheating was expected. It was just a game and every human was unknowingly playing it. Every human choice between good and evil was a move on the board and the game would go until good or evil gave up. Death wouldn't even stop the game for any soul, it just came back and played again. Good kept forgiving and saying "try again" and Evil gloated, "you'll never figure the rules out, they go against human nature." The game had gone on for generations and it was obvious that evil enjoyed hurting the innocent, good people most of all and soon most would break the rules and lose.

If I'd figured out it was a game, why didn't I get a choice about whether I wanted to play or not? A new level of terror overcame me as I realized that I wasn't a player in the game, I WAS the game, to be stalked, terrorized and then killed.

About then a cop showed up with my brother and they put my hands in handcuffs behind my back and hauled me to the hospital. Why was I a prisoner? What was my crime? I couldn't believe that not only my mother was willing to help them, but also my brother and was there no end to betrayals? I kept saying to my brother, "How can you help them. What kind of brother are you?"

There were about ten people staring at me at the hospital as I continued to try to convince my brother to help me, not them. After a little while, they all came at me and strapped me onto a table. It felt like they would take turns lifting my arms and legs and if I offered any resistance they would all push down on me. I remember saying over and over until I passed out "The truth is the truth, the truth is the truth, the truth is the truth." Once in a while, I would say "it's just a game," because I held a little hope that you couldn't be possessed if you wouldn't take them seriously and remembered that life was all a game and every move you made brought you closer to or farther from God.

I have no idea how many days I was passed out, but when I awoke, my hands were strapped to the hospital bed. I worked myself free and then I started to try and find a way out of the building. I staggered up and down the hall and for a while I sat in a room of a girl with a pushed in nose that reminded me of my first dog, Poochie.

A few attendants came into the room, held me down and gave me another shot. When I awoke, I again started walking the halls, though it was hard to keep my balance and my tongue seemed too big for my mouth. My hands felt tingly and were shaking. The staff was always bringing four or five pills and I would take them and shuffle up and down the halls, drool and wet my pants. I was through with menopause, but I again started to menstruate. Sometimes I'd curl in a ball and sit in a corner.

I'd had been there many days when one of the other patients asked me what I was getting for medication and I told her Haldol, and the other patient said, "Don't take it, that stuff is horrible" so the next time they came around with my medication, I refused and unbelievably, no one forced me to take anything. The old, fat saint with bright, wild, dyed red hair that warned me about taking Haldol, later confided that she was a movie star. No one on the hospital staff talked to any of the patients as far as I could see. The patients talked among themselves mostly about their medications. I never talked to a doctor.

The doctor told my mother that they could do nothing for me and I would have to be committed to the state mental institution because I wouldn't take my medication but, strangely, the next day the doctor sent me home. When I got home, I looked at the hospital bill and saw two shots of antihistamines were prescribed and withdrawn the night before I went home and I did remember waking up several times during the night and asking the nurses what they wanted and they said they were just checking on me.

After about a week at home, I went to the library because I wanted to check on any information they had on the medications prescribed. I found several books that cautioned that the two medications, Haldol and Lithium, were not to be taken together because they could sometimes have fatal results. After that, I quit taking all medication and in about two weeks, the foggy feelings disappeared enough for me to concentrate enough to come here.

CHAPTER 11

"Do you believe you lost touch with reality?" I asked.

Her religious psychotic delusions were common as estimates of 80% to 90% of delusions are religious in nature, even among people who do not subscribe to a religion.

"Yes, but I think I was drugged." Sally said.

"It is possible, but there is no way to know because there are no lab entries on this bill from the hospital. It is difficult to make the diagnosis of schizophrenia in someone who has had a single episode of psychosis which may represent a manic episode or the effect of a drug. The facts that you said you saw flashing lights and can remember your thoughts while you were psychotic leads me to be suspicious of schizophrenia because both would be highly unusual. Why weren't any blood or urine tests for drugs taken?"

I looked at her hospital bill again and started adding up the doses of Haloperidol that had been ordered by Doctor Severs. On December 27 she had been ordered 170 milligrams; on December 28, 240 milligrams; on December 30th, 80 milligrams; on December 31, 60 milligrams; on Jan. 1, 60 milligrams; on January 2, 100 milligrams; on January 3, 120 milligrams; on January 4, 120 milligrams; on January 5, 140 milligrams and on January 6, 60 milligrams. The recommended daily dose of Haloperidal is 6 milligram and experts agree that one should never exceed 30 milligrams.

The side effects of Haldol are horrible, so bad in fact that Soviet dissidents were regularly given overdoses of it thereby turning exceptionally bright people into blathering idiots. Not only was Sally given huge overdoses of Haldol, but after the first few days she was also given lithium which is very dangerous because the combination has been known to sometimes prove fatal.

"What do you think is going on?" I asked Sally.

"I think you have to go along to get along, and I even think they wanted me to break the law so that they would have the leverage to incorporate me into their group. First the carrot, then the stick. I would have been an asset because I know a lot about raising queens for their friends. Either that, or they hate me for being in a competing business or because I am a liberal or because I'm a woman," she said.

"I used to think the drug industry was a disorganized bunch of old hippies that only came out at night. A lot of druggies are in the beekeeping business but I always liked them and thought they were nice people and to tell you the truth, the ones that stole from me were the more upright, clean cut type. Many of them have switched from pothead drunks to religious zealots like the Arrowsons and Wilson's oldest son. Beehives are a good place to transport drugs. I should have recognized the same signs of a crooked town that I saw in Texas where the grocery store was repeatedly robbed and the police would protect and serve the criminals, not the victims."

"I don't know a lot of people in the drug business, but the ones I do know have gone through a conversion. My brother-in-law went from raising hydroponic pot in his basement to quoting Rush Limbaugh. My cousin's shirt-tail relative that was dealing drugs and running a coin con is now sporting a gold cross around his neck and running a legitimate business."

"What do you think the license plates represent?" I asked.

"I know two of the people with the A license plates. One is the county clerk at Sphincter County and he is very strong in the right to life movement, in fact his daughter is state president of the Teens for Life. The other is Linda Falkman's father who is a plumber in Belville, my hometown. Maybe you remember Linda from Eversharp's Resort, she was kind of a mousy girl that worked in the laundry and was my best friend in high school. Now she belongs to some strong right-wing religion and teaches first grade in a private Christian school. I was visiting my parents and ran into her about five years ago and at that time she said she 'was living in a Christian community' and she talked about a time coming when a 'purge' would be necessary to save Christianity. It saddened me that she had become a fanatic religious zealot because I felt I had lost a friend. Linda's mother told me that Governor Tom Eversharp was in the drug business from the time he used to live in Mexico but I discounted most of what she said from the time she first too started talking about creation science. Now I find it sinister that one of Eversharp's first acts as governor was changing the license plates for the state and adopting the slogan, 'Discover the Spirit.'"

"Another time I saw an A car was at the Russian Cultural Institute, a quasi-religious, non- profit organization in Richardson. When I drove by, I saw my aunt's car there and an A van drive up and I waited a few minutes and then went in to investigate. When I entered, the director of the institute whispered to the two young men standing at the counter, 'That's her'." On the desk were two eight-inch high piles of cash and I asked my aunt if they had had any fund-raisers lately and she said 'no'. Maybe the A stands ironically for Angel."

"The ND plates are much more common and most belong to people who own businesses," Sally said.

"Dr. Severs had plates that said,YW84F8. How sinister is that? It may be paranoia, but so many people that go to his clinic are on massive doses of medications and many of these undesirables die."

"If you were engaged in a criminal activity, wouldn't you want as much secrecy as possible instead of adopting license plate identification? Why would the drug industry want to include a lot of people in the business? Isn't it better to have fewer people involved?" I questioned.

"I don't understand power, but some people seem to seek that more than money. I think gullible people are recruited in two ways, through religious fervor or through plain common everyday greed and dishonesty. What if the license plates are like wearing a uniform to show how numerous your group is, a badge of dishonor? Identification might bring you privileges and people enjoy belonging to secret societies because it makes them feel elite. The only reason to conceal crime is if you thought there was a possibility that you would get punished. Why worry if you lived in a corrupt place and the police, judges and leaders in the community were participants?"

Involving people in something illegal is the perfect method of control. If they don't comply, all their worldly goods could be legally confiscated.

"The license plates being issued at the state level, the states attorney from Neargo staying at my house, false disaster grants to Sphincter and McKenny County, and Don Grinder's statement that he had friends in high places all lead me to believe it's a statewide hobby. I guess I think the bold move of publishing the city council minutes with the Spot Columbian Club convinces me that people feel above reproach."

"You know there have been a lot more murders in Nokota in the last few years. A farm machinery manufacturing owner was killed and when the police did nothing, the family hired a private detective to look into it. The detective investigated for several months and then the state threw him out for not being licensed. What kind of state has a law that makes the truth illegal? Also, a 19 year old eagle scout and son of a former cop was so frightened of the cops stopping him for speeding that he and his brother tried to outrun the cops and when they were run off the road the kid supposedly swung a machete and the cops gunned him down and killed him. A reporter on the scene said the car was full of papers and that the boy's brother said they were trying to get to Whynot and didn't want to stop until they were in that jurisdiction. In mid-September of 94 a young man stood on his balcony and started yelling that the Neargo police were dealing drugs and the police hauled him off and charged him with reckless endangerment. Two young men from the neighboring state were murdered and their car set on fire in McKenny County, one of the false disaster counties, in December of 1993. The parents said the men's apartment had been ransacked, but the police said it was suicide. Morally upright people who will not be corrupted are in danger. When the state's violent crime rate rose by 38 percent in 1994, the state got a federal grant to buy an elaborate computer system to keep track of criminals."

" The Capitol Tribune even publicized the names of the people who were to be arrested the day before the arrest in one of the few drug busts the state had planned and the culprits had time to destroy the evidence." "The Capital Tribune also reported in early July that a murderer of an old woman was probably traveling with the carnival but he was allowed to endanger the public until August when he was arrested at the Sphincter County Fair carnival by Sheriff North who gained much favorable publicity."

"Who do you think is the head of this drug business?" I asked.

"Now you're going to think I'm weird if you didn't before" Sally said, "but I think it is the Christian right. Some platitude like, "God moves in mysterious ways" might convince the Christian right that it was o.k. to launder drug money if the profit was used to support anti-abortion or other Christian causes. 'Do it in the name of heaven, you'll be justified in the end' according to the song One Tin Soldier. A lot of people who would never handle drugs would think nothing of laundering money. Nakota is so ignored nationally, one could just hide it in the open and no one would know."

"To fear all religious people is a great burden, but I think you have been hurt so often, you see paranoia is your best defense," I said.

I told her that people are generally a mixture of both good and evil. Lincoln freed the blacks and killed the Indians. Not all religious people are evil but many evil people hide behind religion. As Buber said in his book Good and Evil, "since the primary motive of evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church."

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I don't know but I think they will leave me alone now that they have had me declared insane," said Sally.

"I have to settle my affairs in Nokota" Sally said. "Mostly I just needed someone to listen to me and take my side. I tried to talk to my family, but they refuse to listen."

I suppose I should have told Sally one of the elements of "group thinking" is the loss of ethics, but I really wasn't convinced that she was making the right deductions. Groups of people can easily disregard their consciences. Karl Menninger in his book, Whatever Became of Sin said, "If a group of people can be made to share the responsibility for what would be a sin in an individual did it, the load of guilt rapidly lifts from the shoulders of all concerned. Others may accuse, but the guilt shared by the many evaporates for the individual. Time passes. Memories fade. Perhaps there is a record, somewhere, but who reads it?"

CHAPTER 12

I got a note from Sally several months later.

Dearest Friend,

    I asked my mother what she gave me when I was psychotic at Christmas. She said it was Benadryl and there was nothing wrong with it since her granddaughter took it for allergies. I went in the bathroom and 20 tablets were missing from the package. I could only assume it had been ground up and mixed with the sausage sandwich, especially since Dad hated pork sausage so it was never in the house. I could only assume it must have been the reason we stopped at the grocery store on our way home. I tried talking to my mother about what was done to me, told her that overdoses of benadryl cause hallucinations, told her Severs was a friend of Grinder, and showed her a book that talked about the dangers of haldol overdose but she just got mad and threw the book to the floor. She was furious and said my belief that I was drugged and that the psychiatrist was a friend of Don Grinder "is just part of your disease."
    Next I tried talking to my father and told him my experiences were similar to the harassment the IRS had put him through, hounding him for three years. He, too, got angry and said "It is nothing like what I went through."
    When I tried speaking to my brother about it, he too was furious, "Why would the drug business bother with you. You're nothing."
    I tried to explain that it had to do with the mite in the bees and the transportation of drugs in hives and he said, "I doubt your bees were even stolen."
    I said, "That is the stupidest statement I have ever heard. Wouldn't you know if your own cows were missing?"
    Then my own little brother said, "You brought it on yourself."
    I hardly talked because the only thing I wanted to talk about had to be suppressed. Every time I did try and talk about it, my voice would get hysterical and they would tell me to take more medicine. I feel abandoned and alone and the only pleasure I get is petting Collateral and coloring with my preschool niece.

Sincerely needy,
Sally

I sent Sally a note trying to help her deal with her family. When victims do seek help, they may be treated with insensitivity. The emotional damage and social isolation caused by victimization may be compounded by a lack of support, and even stigmatization, from friends, family and social institutions, that can become a "second wound" for the victim. Those closest to the victim may be unsupportive of the victim's needs and sometimes withdraw from and blame the victim. Pop therapists like "Dr." Laura are direct descendants of this "blame the victim" tradition of psychoanalysis as a kind of misguided oversimplification of psychoanalytic determinism that encourages people to understand how "they have only themselves to blame" for whatever is done to them. It is human to feel that the victim was in some way responsible. Rape victims are commonly said to have asked for it, battered wives are said to provoke their abuse and to stay with the batterer out of some masochistic need. Crime victims are thought to have been careless to be in that place at that time. Incest victims are told they must have been seductive. One German youth even said, "You gotta wonder why the Jews would let themselves be loaded into cattle cars." We do that in order to protect ourselves from anxiety about becoming victims ourselves. Blaming the victim makes us feel more powerful and more in control of our lives. Clearly, we reason, we are smarter, stronger, healthier, luckier, and have our lives more together, so nothing like that could ever happen to us. Blaming the victim is still another way helping professionals avoid feeling powerless when the client's life is in crisis. It's a way of dealing with frustration at not being sure you can help them. However, when clients are running around like Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling, it doesn't help a whole lot for you to tell them that it's all their own fault. A couple weeks went by before I heard from her again.

Dear Doctor Sue,

    While I was at home, my mother insisted I get a driver's license and stop my last act of rebellion. She saw it as further proof of my craziness for I'd been driving without one for years. I don't think that law-abiding people in a democracy should have to carry and produce "papers" for the police, but I gave in. When I went to apply for the license, the clerk asked my name and fed it into their computer. I saw my name and my correct Spot address and former phone number on the screen when there should have been no record of me since I hadn't bothered to get a license for at least five years and I'd had a Texas one then. When the clerk said there was no record of me, I pointed and said "Yes, there is, that's me there." The clerk never answered me and my paranoia was increased.
    I hated being at home but my other alternative was Spot. I was nearly out of money and I needed to get my house antiques ready for auction, sell my bee equipment, and sell the house before I could move, so I went back in April. I never even considered asking my family to help.
    The day before my birthday, May 8, Cathy Cowly stopped by with a card and a "Coke." I was surprised she knew it was my birthday. I dumped the pop out after she left. The next day as I was watching television, the normal reception stopped and was replaced by the cessation of sound and a picture of a man arranging shoes on a counter. This time I was not drugged and the odd TV interception the day after eating the fudge was explained. Though I hadn't seen him since before Christmas when I cussed him out, Buck Schaff came over that afternoon. I mentioned that my TV was acting weird and that it had happened once before at Christmas. When he smirked he reminded me of Wilson when I lied about the cows knocking over my mating units.
    The next morning, I wrote Cathy a note thanking her for the "Coke" with wishes that she could find a friend as good to her as she had been to me. After she finished her route, Cathy went over to the Schaffs and then came over to my house. Cathy started to talk about friendship and I cut her off and said, "friends don't hurt friends and since I was declared insane already, what was the purpose of this shit?" "Wasn't my Christmas present enough? Do I need one of your birthday presents, too?"
    Cathy said, "Well, don't you want me to stop over anymore?"
    Not only had they used the Christmas season's proclivity to cause depression as a time to dose me, they then tried to use my birthday for the relapse. I grieved for a few days and then feeling all alone with nowhere to go for relief of my heartbreak, I went the only place there was to go - home. When I got home, my mother was furious with me for hurting Hester's feelings.
    Mom said "How can you accuse someone like that sweet lady? Hester called crying several times. How can you humiliate me like this?"
    I countered with "I never talked to her. Why would she call and why would she cry if she wasn't guilty? If she was innocent, she would be angry."
    Feeling betrayed and alone, I went back to Spot. My house was cold because I was out of propane again. Every time I left the house, my propane tank gas disappeared. I'd never felt so abandoned.
    The next week the Crimestopper report on the radio reported that over $3,000 had been stolen on Tuesday from the Duck-Inn Cafe and Lounge, owned by North's brother-in-law. Except for hunting season, there were never more than 20 lunch customers on any day and very little of the menu offerings are over $5.00. I was worried that the next trick they might try is to "plant" this "stolen" money on me. I had no doubt that there had been rumors started that I was a thief.
    The only way I could think of to protect myself was to list my house with a realtor because no one would be stupid enough to leave money in a place with public access. I stopped to list my place with the Spot Oriole Insurance and Real Estate Company. When the owner of the agency came out, I showed him the house, gave him a key to an old dead bolt and told him the price. I said I would prefer to sell the house to a Spottite because I would feel guilty selling to a stranger and allowing him to move into a community as corrupt as this one was. He said he would bring over papers to sign later that day, but he never did.
    The next day a young couple stopped over and asked if the place was for sale and I said yes and took them on a tour. I mentioned that I had already listed it with Oriole and they said, "He's not a realtor, he just sells insurance."
    I walked over to Schaff's and asked to use the phone. I called my home and asked my dad to list the place with a hometown real estate company and to take their copy of the key to that agency because I wanted a key to be in someone's possession when I left the place. I also told my parents about the lies about the Spot "real estate agent", and as I reached my yard, the pseudo real estate man drove up and handed back my key and said "I decided not to sell your place as it would be too much trouble" and I said "good".
    Despite my overwhelming depression, I had the work of preparing for my auction to divert myself. The sale was disappointing, but finally over. After my auction sale, I went to cash the check in Dickton and when I got consecutive numbers on the bills and the bank clerk didn't even ask to see an I.D., I wasn't surprised. The parrot I had hidden at home was missing. Nothing and nobody could surprise or shock or disappoint me anymore. How long had I had my head down working and not noticing that my square little state's soul was dead, that most of the new businesses were drones that didn't produce anything but either lived off the few workers left or were false. New banks were springing up everywhere despite the dwindling population, lower grain and cattle prices, no new oil exploration, and no new tangible businesses.

Yours,
Sally

CHAPTER 13

I didn't hear from Sally for several months. I received two letters before she died.

Dear Doctor Sue,

    Even though there was nothing I could do I could not ignore this elephant in the room. I moved in with my Aunt Sarah, who lives in Capitol. I started walking the residential streets looking for license plates with the ND, A, or number only designations and I'd note the addresses. I collect the addresses and then head for the library and cross-reference them with the city directory and note where the people worked or if they owned a business. I would sit in the park and note the names of ND delivery vans and look if the names and addresses for those companies were in the phone book. I cross referenced the phone book business entries, the city directory that is compiled by door to door canvassing, and the business directory that is taken from tax rolls and listed the inconsistencies. I itemized the false businesses, the no address services, the insurance and investment companies with names similar to real ones, the slightly screwed up names of charities, the many "consultants", the tiny office buildings with twenty business listings. I enumerated the business listings that were only storage units. I found some Spot names and things that were lies, the implement dealer that Hester's son worked at had gone out of business in Spot but kept a business address at Capitol, a vacant lot at the location of a Spot man's investment firm. Sometimes they were obnoxiously bold and used names like Laundry Room, Dealer Development Systems and Shell Store. The head of the state Apiary division had a business listing in the phone book. The state museum listed sales of over $2.5 million in the business directory but there was no admission charge and only a small gift shop and it was visited daily by a ND elevator repair van. One small shopping center had sixteen businesses in the phone book and on the premises, but 44 in the city directory. There was a bookstore, theater, and fast food store that had closed five years before but still kept their addresses and phone numbers. There were 350 Capitol businesses with just phone listings and no addresses. The Spot bank was a subsidiary of Midwest Banks so I watched the parking lot and saw ND after ND and a few A licensed car depositing on Monday morning. One fake company will now buy products from the other. The products may not exist, or for authenticity's sake they may just be hugely overpriced.
    One day after it snowed, I saw three rings on the roof of my pickup where the snow melted different than the rest of the roof so I quit driving and walked everywhere. I remember reading about the government using reconnaissance paint on military vehicles so that they can track vehicles from satellite during maneuvers.
    When I was at the library I would read about the drug trade. Drugs would be second only to oil in economic value in the commodities market if they would be listed. The concealing of drugs also consists of concealing the money generated that is almost more of a problem because of the volume. One procedure is to run the money through a bank located in another country. People chosen for this task, called smurfs, seldom touch drugs and keep all transactions under the reporting requirement of $10,000, usually converting cash into money orders or cashiers checks. One of the few agencies actually making arrests in the drug trade is the Internal Revenue Service and they watch for large amounts of cash being exported out of the states. The launderers need "shell" corporations to hide under: imaginary companies or services to pose as going businesses because the fundamentals for a narcotics syndicate laundering money are the same as for corporations avoiding taxes. The British Virgin Islands alone has 64,000 legal entities with no information available about them, Panama has more. It would be much easier and the money more accessible to have the money laundered in the United States but it takes the cooperation of a lot of people including lawyers, tax accountants, bankers and people with good reputations to head the "shell" business and clean up the cash for the usual ten percent fee.

Your sincere friend,
Sally

Dear Doctor Sue,

    A few days before Thanksgiving I again went psychotic. My aunt called my parents and they came to get me. I went back to the basement room I had used when I was home before. This time, during my delusion, I talked to God, the spirit of Good and I begged for justice. "Don't confuse justice with vengeance," the spirit said.
    This time I was in ecstasy, believing that it was possible to have instant "nirvana." Indian legend said that 2000 years of evil would be followed by 2000 years of good. I believed that everyone would wake up from the same dream and see a better free world. Words suddenly had clearer meanings, song lyrics had new imports and filled me with wonder about whether they were gifts from the muses, truly inspirations and the truest trues.
    I prayed for Good to tell me of justice. "What if I told you that I forgive and give everyone unlimited chances to reach heaven? Maybe I make your soul came back as the soul of what you hated." "Forgive us our trespassers as we forgive those who trespass against us, is a rule because only love exists in heaven," the spirit said.
    I couldn't believe that justice wasn't possible on earth and my mental discussions switched to movies. I talked about High Noon and he told me I was on my own as are all people on earth and to stop wasting time looking for help in Hadleyville. Nobody but me wanted the lie to end because the state was prospering. There was no War On Drugs, but only a War For Drugs and the lure of high times and easy money was resisted by very few. Like the Communist witch-hunts, most people didn't care if it didn't affect them and it was only my bad luck to pick the bees for a business, competing with "their" friends.
    I brought up It's A Wonderful Life and said that people could help other people. He asked me why I always laughed at the part where George Bailey asks about his sweet wife Mary and Clarence, the angel, shows her coming out of the library. I said that I thought it was funny that George had been able to accept the loss of his brother and the platoon he had saved, the rejection by his mother, the selling of the town to Mr. Potter and its unwholesomeness but he broke down when he saw that Mary was an old-maid librarian as though that was as low as womanhood could go. I said I was an old-maid librarian and it wasn't so bad. "He" said the reason that George felt worst about Mary was because the one he loved had lost hope and had become frightened.
    I said, "Maybe she's gathering evidence against Mr. Potter while she's in the library."
    He said, "But Mr. Potter owns the law, so it doesn't matter how much evidence she finds."
    "There must be some other way," I said, "cause knowledge has power."
    Then the He said, "Other people don't come to the rescue of anyone who tells the truth. They love the lie. Why are you trying to deprive them of it? It brings them happiness. Bedford Falls is the dream, not Pottersville."
    I asked "Him" what his favorite movie was and he said The Wizard of Oz. Who could possibly love a movie that was sham and lies from beginning to end, that had a wizened little wizard that wanted to control and manipulate lives for his amusement? Would only admit we had power over our own lives after he was caught. My "other" maybe wasn't truth, reality, sunshine and liberty, but maybe was lies, darkness, delusion and magic and again I descended into the bowels of hell as despair washed over me. I was "in the game" again and I was "the game" again and I had no control about anything, least of all, my own life.
    The next morning my parents tried to talk me into going back to the hospital that had overdosed me before, but I refused, begged to be left in my bed to see if this madness would wear off on its own. They called the ambulance and I was handcuffed behind my back, strapped in and carried back to the hospital. I alternated between chanting the Lord's Prayer, begging to be delivered from evil and cursing and swearing. "The only way to deliver you is to make you die" my spirit said.
    "Sacrifice don't work, you've tried that before," I cried.
    "You're all powerful make them obey just because it's right." I said.
    "I gave man free will when he asked for it," the Great Spirit replied. "I don't use my power to make people obey, only evil uses power to force obedience."
    After a shot, I passed out. When I came to, I pulled the IV shunt out of my hand and laid down and tried to gather my thoughts together, but again I was so confused that I could only stagger and drool. When I got home and got the bill, I saw I had gotten hardly any medication and the bill had no notations of any intravenous medication, but I remembered pulling the shunt out and the back of my hand bleeding. People brought several pills several times a day, and I complied with their orders. I felt more disorientated than I had the time before. Every day at the hospital was the same, eating, watching TV, drugs, eating, drugs, and watching TV. The nurses would do a little visiting, but the doctors were mostly absent. I asked the nurses what had happened to the lady with the red hair and they said she had died unexpectedly. I asked about the girl that looked like Poochie, and she too was found dead in her house. I had been amazed at the huge pillbox that she carried around. I visited with a man who was there for alcoholism withdrawal.
    I was finally released to my parents. I moved into the basement of their house and seldom came up from its dankness. I seldom talked. My mother's contact consisted of asking if I was taking my medication. Once I tried cooking, but my mother said I was trying to kill Dad when I made a lemon pie. Dad is diabetic but doesn't watch his diet and had had Mom's caramel rolls for breakfast that day. I quit doing even the simplest tasks. It was a repeat of the hospital routine with nothing but meals, medications and television. I spent all my time trying to think beyond the moment but I felt like I was moving in a room of suffocating foam. My hands tingled continually and my tongue moved on its own. I heard on the news that my alcoholic friend from the hospital had died. I hated every day and knew every day would be the same.
    After a time, I came up with an idea. I wrote little notes explaining the license codes and I suggested people quit working and contact anyone with those plates and ask to be in the drug business too. Why shouldn't workers get the free money instead of just the drones? I got in my beetruck one day when Mom and Dad went to coffee and went to town. I distributed my little Nokota Sweepstakes gifts among items working men and working women buy. I felt like a worker bee that danced the flower dance to show the free money locations to the other workers. Like the jasmine that smells so sweet and looks so pretty, the pollen can be toxic to the children, but it is their free will. I'm no hunter, I'm a farmer and as I sowed the seeds, I knew that every one taking hold would help to spread the word around Nokota, the gossip capital of the world. In a true democracy, shouldn't all the workers get the same choices? I hope my old hive will choose work over robbing and throw the drones out, but, if not, let a feeding frenzy destroy this hive.
    Somehow Mom found out what I had done and told the doctors and they increased my medication. I take four different pills every day. I love my dog or I'd just quit it all.

Your sincere friend,
Sally

EPILOGUE

Psychology's main goal is to make people free from fear. In 1932, Albert Schweitzer wrote of the threats to freedom in his book Reverence for Life, "The organized political, social, and religious groups of our time are bent on inducing the individual to take up uncritically ready-made beliefs rather than inviting him to work out for himself by thought his own convictions. A man who thinks for himself and therefore is free is a troublesome and strange being. There is no assurance that he will fit comfortably into their organization. All organized groups today find their strength, not so much in the spiritual values of their ideas or of the people who are their members, but in achieving the highest possible degree of unity and exclusiveness. In this they find their strongest power and surest defense."

Nokota is a forlorn, forsaken place ignored by the rest of the nation. It is one of the many square, blank spots in the middle of the country with little to distinguish it but the harsh weather; a land of the wind chill factor, a mysterious mathematical computation of actual temperature and wind speeds that help determine the time it takes to freeze skin. Native Nokotans take a perverse pride in the cruel winter weather and claim they are hardy individualists, somehow superior to people living in "weaker" climates. Even in the summer, most days are marked by a wind so relentless that it stunts the growth of vegetation and forces gardeners to place coffee cans around their tomato plants to keep their necks from being broken. The wind pollinates the wheat but burns human skin. People buy salves and ointments for windburn as often as for sunburn and an old midwest folk song goes, "It's a wonder the wind don't tear off your skin."

The only natural trees are little scrubs that cling to the banks of the few streams that dry up in the summer. Most of the remaining tree population is planted in orderly semicircles around farmsteads. The baby trees were supplied by the government at a fee less than cost with instructions on how to plant "windbreaks" as though man could tame the wind like one "breaks" a range pony. When farmsteads were abandoned, all that remained to testify of their existence were the many patches of dead and dying trees that become obstructions to the fabric of fast farming.

At one time the state was dotted with hundreds of small farms and towns inhabited by people of diverse views, but as national populations shifted away from rural areas, Nokota's remaining inhabitants were the people who resist change at all costs and those con-men who always see any troubles as a way to improve their own fortunes. The state tried to attract new business but there was little to appeal to immigrants. The farms grew bigger and bigger and the family farm grew rare. Seeking more programs financed with federal funds, politicians from farm states talked with nostalgia about the ideals of the family farm, a place where children had chores and men's handshakes were contracts. The politicians painted a picture of strong, brave people struggling against all odds to hang on to a tradition of self-sufficient families. The verbal imagery portrayed a milk cow, a few chickens, a big garden and the whole family working together to preserve a pastoral way of life. More often than not the teenagers have no chores but are driving their cars around town getting into trouble. The truth is that farming is a business of chemicals, federal subsidies, and huge, greedy farmers that swallow their neighbors in the bad years. Land is seldom given a rest, the stubble left from the year before is chemically weeded and chemically fertilized and reseeded. The chemical companies, who claim they are only interested in stewardship of the land, tell the farmers they are stopping erosion by keeping the earth covered at all times. The growing season averages only l00 days and within a few months farming is over and Nokotans are again battling the winter blasts of Arctic airstreams but they smugly claim the extreme cold weeds out the weak in character and the "riff-raff" but leaves the true blue. The haughtiness of the state hides a painful inferiority complex because the state knows that the rest of the country ridicules it. Comedians got an easy, cheap laugh by just mentioning Nokota and their children learn early to sully their birth state like the fat man who tells the first fat joke. Privately, the citizens regard themselves as the bowed backbone of the heartland, a perfect model of the work ethic but publicly the citizens try to deflate the coastal ridicule by mocking themselves.

The state craves a clean industry like tourism but there are few natural diversions to break the monotony. Strangers swiftly passing through to other places dismiss it as a vast visual wasteland with no oceans, no mountains, no lakes, no deserts, and no big cities. Small town Rotary Clubs and Junior Chamber of Commerce Clubs have taken to erecting oversized animal statues and foisting them upon innocent hills overlooking roadways. The wily tourist rushing to other places on cruise control is seldom wooed to stay longer by the big animals that can be seen and ridiculed from the road for free. Although the small towns cry for economic development, they shun the "trash" that comes with the oil wells or the airbase or the coal and uranium mines and never take the trouble to mix with them. Nokota is queen of the welfare states in quantity of federal dollars retrieved by legislators in proportion to state taxes paid. Huge farmers place land under their children's names to avoid subsidy ceilings, friends of legislators get loans "forgiven", children of well-to-do parents get grants for school, all federal programs are plundered and through the years the state character has developed an attitude of entitlement to federal funds.

Nokota is a state ripe for a good salesman. The state needs only a little flattery and she will serve any master, letting her hills be mined for uranium and coal, her fields studded with nuclear missiles and her cavities filled with hazardous waste. Except for the few years of prosperity during an oil boom, the state's primary growth industry is government and it has the dubious national distinction of having one of the largest ratio of government employees to taxpayers. As the population continues to dwindle, new economic development agencies are formed to slow the trend, task forces are formed to study the trend, new federal grants are sought to reverse the trend, and the agencies devoted to worker concerns triple their staffs although the workers are gone. Every out-of-state crackpot or carnival geek and every in-state hustler who promises to hire a lot of people gets financial incentives. The big entrepreneur prides himself on never using his own money and he uses easy credit and government stimulants to start structures and then if he fails, he disappears. There are empty mushroom farms, empty airplane factories, empty resort towns constructed in the middle of nowhere, empty farm implement factories, empty fish farms, and empty turbine factories. When a local resident tries to start small, he is usually rejected by the banks that are too late cautious.

The politicians Nokota sends to Washington were indicative of the state's gullibility and its resistance to all change. Once a politician reaches national status, he stays in office until his death is discovered. A good example of blind state loyalty was Senator Bill Burdock who remained in office decades past his competency. During the televised Senate debate over Desert Storm, the nation saw a senator too feeble to speak coherently. At his next election bid, Burdock campaigned by call-ins to the state's few radio stations and answered questions from his Washington office. A good percentage of the calls came from people who knew Burdock and were calling in to say that the voice from Washington was not that of Burdock and the call-in campaign tactic was dropped. After a few television spots with Mrs. Burdock and print media emphasizing the state's need for seniority, Burdock won by a landslide. Bets were that Burdock wouldn't last six more years, so a little shuffling went on in Washington. The state's main man was in the House of Representatives and wanted a Senate seat so he convinced the state's other Senator, the number two man in the party, to step down at his next election so they could both be Senators eventually. The sacrificial freshman went on "Meet the Press" and announced that one of his campaign promises was to end the national debt and since he could not keep his promise, he was stepping down. Everyone was amazed at his sincere freshman courage and honesty that a promise made was a promise kept. The number one man ran and won the Senate election. When Burdock died soon after, the original senator ran for the seat and both party leaders are still in their Senate seats.

The reason that the politicians and businessmen get away with most of their shenanigans is that the majority of Nokotans are all members of small towns where social standing is everything and family names determine value. Few new ideas penetrate because there is very little democracy in small towns that are organized like strict social clubs that overlook the sins of natives with status and view newcomers with suspicion twenty years after they move to the community. In a strange recipe of opposites the citizens have combined low state esteem with provincial arrogance. No one has disturbed the illusion of wholesomeness because liberals and reformers are rare and stay in the closet. The presumption of superiority is never examined because, for most men in the state, reading books of any kind is effete and anyone who does read is mistrusted. Surely the educated fools couldn't be too smart not to catch the chicanery that flourishes unashamedly in Nokota. When Nokota's sister state to the South changed its banking laws to allow usurous credit card rates, Nokota was jealous of their newfound bonanza. It occured to them that they could also create banking magic.

The only lie bigger than that Nokota was a good, crime free state to live in and to raise children is the drug lie itself. Restrictive laws assists in increasing the volume of criminals not in stopping alcohol, prostitution, pornography, gambling or drugs. Prohibition was the mother of organized crime. The need for delusion and altered reality is in the nature of man. Alcohol, drugs, and religion are all intent on the avoidance of reality. Which is more absurd: sniffing, snorting, injecting or smoking some ingredient that would make you believe a distorted reality or working oneself into a frenzy and talking in tongues, handling snakes, or laying awake nights worrying about an Anti-Christ? Criminalizing drugs makes even casual marijuana smokers into liars because the illegality of it made them deal with the whole corrupt organization, an organization eager to upgrade the customer. Not drugs themselves, but their criminal status is responsible for the profit, the rise of gangs and the corruption of ordinary people. It is only a matter of time until the death toll rises. In 1991 in the city of Medellin,Columbia there were 79,000 fatalities. The media fails to mention that 70 percent of the narcoterrorism is the work of the government and the murders are overwhelmingly political. It would be too ironic if not only al-Qaeda but also Christian Fundamentalism were getting funding from drugs. Delusions funded by delusions.

The small town characteristics of the citizens of Nokota have fostered another peculiarity that seems to belong to them alone. Nearly all of the inhabitants play a kind of recognition game. Any Nokota citizen, upon meeting another, will ask what town they are from and then strive to find someone in common. Perhaps it will be a local girl that moved to that town to marry someone she met in college, perhaps it will be a college alumni, some summer job acquaintance or even a custom harvester or traveling salesman, but there is a feeling of unrest until this mutual acquaintance is unearthed. In a webbed sort of odd way, this has enabled most of Nokotans to know or know of most of the rest of the state's people.

To paraphrase writer Alice Kahn in her essay When Good Things Happen To Bad People "Most of us cling to the idea that justice can prevail and things will be evened up. When it does not happen, what can we do? We can go to court. We can practice voodoo. Or we can practice a simpler, less violent form of fairness and let loose the truth, increase the peace and hustle some justice. We can warn our ethical neighbors of danger. We can gossip."

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can’t stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.

From The Moon Is Always Female, by Marge Piercy
Copyright (c) 1980 by Marge Piercy