As Nature Made Him Read online

  Ron, fifteen years old at the time, hated the move. Kleefeld itself was little more than a ramshackle scattering of stores along a few hundred yards of gravel highway (grain store, post office, grocery), with nowhere for Ron to channel his formidable work ethic. He would pick two hundred pounds of saskatoons and sell them for twenty-five cents a pound—grueling labor for little pay; nothing like the money he was able to make in the city. And his father insisted on taking even those paltry sums from Ron for upkeep of the old clapboard farmhouse on its patch of scrubby land.

  It was in this state of boredom, penury, and growing friction with his strict and authoritarian father that Ron, at seventeen, accepted the invitation of his friend Rudy Hildebrandt to visit Rudy’s girlfriend in the nearby town of Steinbach. Rudy’s girlfriend had a nice-looking roommate, a girl named Janet, whom Ron might like.

  Like Ron, Janet Schultz was raised in Winnipeg, the eldest child of Mennonite parents who had joined the postwar migration from the prairie to the city. Growing up in the Winnipeg neighborhood of St. Vital, Janet was a lively and inquisitive girl whose passion for reading—first Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, then thrillers, and eventually books on psychology—opened up for her a perspective on life beyond the traditional Mennonite values of her parents—and in particular her mother, with whom she constantly clashed. “I wanted an education, but my mother wanted me to get out to work and bring home money,” Janet says. Eventually she was convinced to quit school after ninth grade and take a job at a sewing factory. Janet gave her paychecks to her mother, which did little to foster goodwill between them. A further gulf opened between mother and daughter when Janet, in her early teens, stopped attending the Mennonite church. “I found it was so restrictive,” she says. “I didn’t think it was biblical. They said it was a sin to smile. I didn’t think that way.” In fact, by age fifteen, Janet was given to joking about her parents’ religion. “Why don’t Mennonites ever make love standing up?” she liked to ask her friends. “Because someone might think they were dancing!” Janet herself loved to go dancing and roller-skating, and as an exceptionally pretty hazel-eyed brunet with a shapely figure, she never lacked for dates.

  Convinced that their eldest child and only daughter was slipping dangerously from their control, Janet’s parents, like Ron Reimer’s, joined the migration of city Mennonites back to the farm. In 1960, when Janet was fourteen, the Schultzes relocated to New Bothwell, a tiny settlement amid the silos and grain fields forty-five minutes from Winnipeg. Janet missed the city’s movie theaters, restaurants, roller rinks, and dance halls—and soon began accepting dates from any boy who had a car and thus could offer her escape from the farm. Janet’s mother tried to curb her daughter’s social life but to no avail. Shortly after Janet’s fifteenth birthday, her mother told her to move out. Janet went gladly. She moved to the nearby city of. Steinbach, where she found work at a sewing factory and shared a small apartment in a rooming house with her cousin Tina. Not long after that, Tina’s boyfriend brought a young man over to meet Janet. He was a tall blond boy of seventeen with large blue eyes and a shy way of glancing at her. His name was Ron Reimer. “I was flirting with Ron,” she says, laughing, “and I was thinking he wasn’t flirting back, so I figured he didn’t like me.”

  Ron did like her, but was too shy to reveal his feelings in front of the other couple. He invited Janet to have a look at his car on the street, then asked her out to see a movie on the weekend. He raised money for their date by taking the transmission out of a junkyard Ford and selling it to a friend for ten dollars. That weekend, Ron and Janet went to see Gidget Goes Hawaiian. “I don’t think I watched five minutes of that movie,” Janet laughs. “I was too busy eyeballing him. Oh, he was so sexy!”

  Over the course of the summer they saw a lot of each other, joining Tina and Rudy on double dates—usually just a drive out to one of the isolated country roads where they would park, drink a six-pack, make out, and talk. As Ron and Janet compared their backgrounds, they were amazed to discover how much they had in common. Their similarities drew them together, but paradoxically enough so did their differences. Janet could compensate for Ron’s sometimes passive reluctance to take decisive action; Ron, on the other hand, with his slow, considered approach to life, could rein Janet in from her more reckless enthusiasms and impulses. Together they made up a single entity stronger than either one of them.

  When Janet decided to move back into Winnipeg, there was never any question but that Ron would follow her. Though they did not rent an apartment together—this was the early 1960s, and such boldness would have been unthinkable for a pair not yet out of their teens—Ron did spend much of his time with Janet in her rooming house. It was there that they slept together for the first time. Both had been virgins. And not long after that, Janet missed her period. She had just turned eighteen. Ron was nineteen, soon to turn twenty. It was young to marry, but they had talked about marriage before. This was simply a sign that they should bless their union sooner rather than later. The two were married on 19 December 1964 in the city of Steinbach. In acknowledgment of the emancipation they now felt from their disapproving parents, they deliberately declined to be married in one of the city’s twenty Mennonite churches.

  The newlyweds moved into a tiny cold-water flat in downtown Winnipeg. They couldn’t afford better. Janet was getting minimum wage working as a waitress at the Red Top diner; Ron was toiling for low pay at a factory that made windows. That they would have to bring in more money was obvious—especially when, during one of Janet’s checkups with her obstetrician, she learned that she was pregnant with twins. Ron was nervous, but Janet refused to be anything but optimistic. “I was so excited,” she says, “because all my life I’d been dreaming, Oh wouldn’t it be wonderful to have twins?”

  That June, when Janet was five months pregnant, Ron landed a union job at one of the city’s biggest slaughterhouses, and his pay more than doubled, enabling them to move into a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Dubuc and Des Meurons Streets. Then the couple had a scare. When she was in the latter stages of her pregnancy, Janet developed a serious case of toxemia—a pregnancy-related form of high blood pressure that, untreated, can be harmful to the fetus. Her doctor recommended that she have her labor and delivery induced.

  On 22 August 1965, some four weeks before her projected due date, Janet was admitted to St. Boniface Hospital. During his wife’s labor, Ron sat in the visitor’s lounge nervously awaiting the outcome. After several hours, a nurse came and announced that everything had gone fine and that he was the father of identical twins. In his relief and excitement at hearing that Janet and the babies were alive and well, Ron failed to take in anything else. So as he hurried through the doorway toward the nursery to see his children, he was brought up short by a smiling nurse who called out to him, “Boy or girl?”

  “I don’t know!” Ron called back. “I just know there’s two of ’em!”

  * * *

  They named the twins Bruce and Brian. They were so similar in appearance that people could not tell them apart, but Janet and Ron, like the parents of most identical twins, could soon distinguish the children easily. Bruce, the elder of the two by twelve minutes, had been born slightly underweight and as a result had had to stay in the hospital a few days to be fattened up. But by the time he joined his twin brother at home, it was clear that he was the more active child, tending to writhe and wriggle and to wake in the night with greater frequency than his brother Brian, a peaceful, less rowdy baby. Both bore a striking resemblance to Janet, with their upturned noses and small round mouths.

  By the time the boys were six months of age, Janet felt like an old hand at pacifying, feeding, and changing them. Ron had received another raise, and the family moved to a still bigger and nicer place to live—an actual house on Metcalfe Street, not far from their former apartment. Life seemed to be shaping up beautifully for the young family.

  Which is what made it so unsettling when, shortly after the twins were seven mo
nths old, Janet noticed that they seemed to be in distress when they urinated. At first she thought it was just the wet diapers that made them cry; then she noticed that even after a diaper change they would scream and complain. She examined their penises and noticed that their foreskins seemed to be sealing up at the tip and making it difficult for the boys to pass water. She took the babies to see her pediatrician, who explained that they were suffering from a condition called phimosis. It was not rare, he said, and was easily remedied by circumcision. After talking about it with Ron, Janet agreed to have the children circumcised at St. Boniface Hospital.

  The operations were scheduled for the morning of 27 April, but because Ron was working the late shift at the slaughterhouse, he and Janet decided that he should drive the kids in to be admitted the night before. Apart from the normal concern any parent would feel on the eve of such an operation, Ron and Janet felt no particular trepidation about the circumcisions. Nor should they have. St. Boniface was an excellent, fully modern general teaching hospital. Housed in a seven-story building, it had seven hundred beds, a cardiac care unit, and a children’s hospital where, in the mid-1960s, some 2,600 babies were delivered annually and roughly a thousand circumcisions performed each year, all without mishap.

  “We weren’t worried,” Janet says. “We didn’t know we had anything to worry about.”

  * * *

  Ordinarily, pediatricians experienced in circumcisions performed the procedure at St. Boniface Hospital, but on the morning of 27 April 1966 the usual attending physician, for reasons lost to history, was not available when the Reimer twins were scheduled for their operations. The duty fell to Dr. Jean-Marie Huot, a forty-six-year-old general practitioner.

  When a nurse was dispatched to collect the first of the children, it was pure happenstance that she lifted baby Bruce from the bassinet first.

  With the baby fixed and draped on the operating table, Dr. Max Cham, the anesthesiologist, administered gas to put Bruce to sleep. (Though newborns were routinely circumcised without anesthesia, a child of eight months, like baby Bruce, could not be operated on while conscious.) Sources differ slightly on what happened next. Court papers later filed against the surgeon, hospital, and three attending nurses refer to an “artery clamp” that was used to secure the piece of foreskin that was meant to be cut away. An artery clamp, however, would be a most unusual choice for such a procedure. According to Dr. Cham, with whom I spoke in the winter of 1997, Dr. Huot used the standard Gomco clamp. Designed specifically for circumcisions, the clamp is used to prevent excessive bleeding: the foreskin is stretched over a bell-shaped metal sheath; a round clamping device then closes over the stretched foreskin and compresses it against the bell, squeezing the foreskin and thus making it blood-free for excision by scalpel.

  Regardless of which clamp was used, it is not in doubt that Dr. Huot elected to use not a scalpel to cut away Bruce’s foreskin, but a Bovie cautery machine. This device employs a generator to deliver an electric current to a sharp, needlelike cutting instrument, which burns the edges of an incision as it is made, sealing the blood vessels to prevent bleeding—a quite superfluous consideration if Huot had indeed used a Gomco clamp, and a dangerous one, since it would bring perilously close to the penis a current that could be conducted by the metal bell encasing the organ. If, at the same time, the current to the needle were to be turned up almost to the maximum, the results could be cataclysmic.

  According to the later testimony of operating room personnel, the electrocautery machine was turned on, and the hemostat dial, which controlled the amount of heat in the needle, was set at the minimum. Dr. Huot lowered the needle and touched it to Bruce’s foreskin. Subsequent testing of the machine revealed that it was in proper working order. Whether through temporary mechanical malfunction, user error, or some combination of the two, the needle failed to sever the flesh on the first pass. The hemostat control was turned up. Once again the instrument was applied to the foreskin; again it failed to cut. The cautery machine’s current was increased. The needle was once again brought into contact with the foreskin.

  “I heard a sound,” recalls Dr. Cham, “just like steak being seared.”

  A wisp of smoke curled up from the baby’s groin. An aroma as of cooking meat filled the air.

  A urologist was quickly summoned. On duty that morning was Dr. Earl K. Vann. He cleared the instruments and inspected the organ. It appeared oddly blanched in color. He felt the penis with his gloved hand and noticed that it had an unusual firmness. Vann took a probe and attempted to pass it through the urinary meatus—the hole at the end of the penis. The probe would not pass through. Vann told the operating room personnel that he would have to perform an emergency suprapubic cystotomy to place a catheter and thus enable the baby to pass urine. He made an incision below Bruce’s belly button, then threaded a length of tubing into the incision, through the muscle wall, and into the bladder. This was sewn into place. A bag to catch the child’s urine was affixed to the free end of the catheter. The baby was then wheeled out to the burn ward.

  It was decided not to attempt to circumcise his twin brother.

  * * *

  On nights when Ron worked the late shift, the Reimers’ normal routine was for Janet to prepare dinner, which they would eat together when Ron got home from work shortly after midnight. They would talk about their day, maybe watch a little TV, and often not make it to bed until two or three in the morning. They’d usually sleep until noon or one. They were sleeping on the morning of 27 April when the phone rang.

  Janet answered. It was the hospital calling.

  “They said to come in and see the doctor,” Janet recalls. “They said there was a slight accident, and they needed to see us right away.” Ron took the phone and asked the person on the other end of the line what was going on. “They just said they wanted to see us,” Ron says. “They didn’t say there was anything wrong.”

  But Ron and Janet could tell by the person’s tone of voice that something unusual was happening. They dressed and headed out to their car. Opening their front door, they discovered that the city, which for some weeks had been in the full delicious flood of early spring, had been hit by a freak blizzard. The pathway to the curb was completely obliterated by snow; the car was buried up to its bumpers. Flakes continued to sift down thickly from a bleached sky.

  Ron dug the car out, and they began the slow journey through streets clogged and snarled with snowbound traffic. Five blocks north on St. Mary’s Road, then a right turn onto Tache Avenue and the eight blocks up to the hospital. Over the car radio they heard that the airport had been closed down. Seven inches were expected to fall over the course of the day. Already the weathermen were proclaiming it one of the worst blizzards in the city’s history. Longtime residents would recall the storm clearly more than thirty years later.

  Having finally made it the one mile from their house to St. Boniface Hospital, Ron and Janet rushed inside, only to wait in the doctor’s office for what seemed a very long time. Dr. Huot entered. In a businesslike voice he told the Reimers that there had been an accident while circumcising baby Bruce.

  “What do you mean, an accident?” Janet said.

  Dr. Huot said that Bruce’s penis had been burned.

  “I sort of froze,” Janet recalls. “I didn’t cry. It was just like I turned to stone.” When she finally gathered her wits enough to speak, Janet found herself asking if they had also burned her other child.

  “No,” Dr. Huot replied. “We didn’t touch Brian.”

  Ron and Janet asked to see their injured baby right away. The doctor said that Bruce was recovering from a surgical procedure to install a catheter. The Reimers were told not to worry, that they could see the child tomorrow. They collected their uninjured son, Brian, and drove home through the steadily falling snow.

  The next day Ron and Janet returned to the hospital. Dr. Vann took them to see the baby. Janet’s first glimpse of her son is a memory that even three decades later causes her face t
o drain of blood. Standing over Bruce’s bassinet in the burn unit, she looked at his penis—or what was left of it.

  “It was blackened, and it was sort of like a little string. And it was right up to the base, up to his body.” To Ron the penis looked “like a piece of charcoal. I knew it wasn’t going to come back to life after that.”

  Nevertheless, Janet asked the urologist, “Will it still grow, and he’ll just have a little penis?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s not the way it works.”

  Over the next few days, baby Bruce’s penis dried and broke away in pieces. It was not very long before all vestiges of the organ were gone completely.

  * * *

  Bruce remained in the hospital while Ron and Janet watched a parade of the city’s top local specialists examine him. The doctors gave little hope. Phallic reconstruction, a crude and makeshift expedient even today, was in its infancy in the 1960s—a fact made plain by the plastic surgeon, Dr. Desmond Kernahan, when he described the limitations of a penis that would be constructed from flesh farmed from Bruce’s thigh or abdomen. “Such a penis would not, of course, resemble a normal organ in color, texture, or erectile capability,” Kernahan wrote in his consultation report. “It would serve as a conduit for urine, but that is all.” Even that was optimistic, according to Dr. M. Schwartz, a urologist who also examined the child: “Insofar as the future outlook is concerned,” he wrote, “restoration of the penis as a functional organ is out of the question.” Dr. G. L. Adamson, head of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the Winnipeg Clinic, evaluated Bruce’s projected psychological and emotional future. “One can predict,” Adamson wrote, “that he will be unable to live a normal sexual life from the time of adolescence: that he will be unable to consummate marriage or have normal heterosexual relations, in that he will have to recognize that he is incomplete, physically defective, and that he must live apart.”