by Steven Price
The woman shifted her feet. How is it immoral? It is what it is.
But what is that? the old man asked her. After a moment he shrugged. The creationist’s sister said that such thinking led to the evils of racism for if all men were born of monkeys then those who lived closest to them must yet be near relations. She said such thinking led to the strongest laying claim upon the weakest and the weakest being unworthy of survival. She feared to so contradict the teachings of the bible and warned that without a moral compass no sense was to be made of the world. And as she spoke she gazed sadly at the geologist in the audience and her eyes were very clear. She said to live by such a theory was to remake God in man’s image or to deny Him altogether and no good could come of either. She shook her head and warned, If we teach our children they are beasts, we must not be surprised when they behave like beasts.
The old man fell silent. He wet his thumb and forefinger and crushed out the embers of his cigarette and pocketed the butt in his shirtfront. His wristwatch glinting in the floodlights.
What did they come to at that meeting? the woman asked. Did it amount to anything?
Does it ever? What is ever possible between men of opposing faiths?
Evolution isn’t a matter of faith.
What would you call it?
Science.
Science is a secular faith.
The woman smiled. Not in the way that you mean it. Why would the geologist agree to the debate?
It wasn’t a case of agreeing.
Those people weren’t going to be convinced by anything he had to say. Why would he go through with it?
The old man inclined his head, breathing softly. Who knows why any of us do anything? he said. Even in stories something acts upon all of us and we don’t know what that is.
You don’t mean God.
The old man waved his hand irritably. The trouble with that sort of talk is that God means many things to many men.
He watched the woman sitting in that blackness with her hand knotted in her lap and her eyes shut tight as if some more consoling darkness lay within. The far lights below darkened her eye sockets, carved more deeply her tired face. She opened her eyes.
You were the geologist, she said abruptly.
What makes you say that?
Tell me I’m wrong.
You’re wrong.
I don’t believe you.
The old man opened and closed his hands in his lap. Out in the ruins a small bulldozer was scraping into its maw a crumbled retaining wall and a crash of rubble carried up to them where they sat. It sounded muffled and very far off. A cloud of white dust drifted past the floodlights and out to the night.
He said he had lived his entire life looking for answers to just a few questions. And when he found one, he lived badly with it. He slid a handkerchief from his hip pocket and coughed and wiped at his chin. He said a spirit of inquiry deserved respect but that it had to be tempered with modesty. He did not mean humility. He had little time for those who would suggest men should not seek answers. But an answer is only ever the edge of an outer question. And all of us keep moving outward. His eyes were stinging with the late hour and he rubbed at them and blinked. I wasn’t the geologist, he said. I’ve been a painter my entire life and I wouldn’t know where to begin. You don’t have to believe me.
She watched him quietly.
I’ll be sixty-nine years old this year, he said. And I don’t know what to believe. He gestured grimly out at the darkness. When my wife died I turned from all of that. She died in 1964. She wasn’t even thirty-five. A child to me now. Almost a grandchild. I’ve smoked all my life and here I am healthy as an ox. God? Grief? He shrugged. You live long enough and you come to see your own smallness in it.
So what do you think? There’s no sense in any of it?
No, he said. I don’t think that.
Why are you looking at me like that?
You’re wondering how the creationist’s tale ends.
Is there an ending?
Of course. There are three of them.
Three.
The old man nodded.
You said this was a true story.
Again the old man nodded. He said it was this very concern for the truth that made the ending so complicated. That in a certain light this problem of truth grew insurmountable for it was in fact the riddle of the world itself.
She frowned. That’s ridiculous, she said.
Why? he asked. You believe a great earthquake struck the city. But in reality many thousands of quakes struck. All of us lived through a different disaster. How does it go? No two can meet one on one road for though there be just one his shape is manifold. You doubt this but it doesn’t matter. Whether the world is one or many matters to few. It is what it is.
I don’t know. I don’t.
The old man shrugged. Men find a way regardless. It’s not what happens but what’s said to have happened that matters. We tell stories to make sense of the world. And any struggle for meaning is hopeful. And there are as many stories as there are men and stories do not die.
The old man stared at his knees. He rested his palms upon them. Well, he said. So the years passed. The geologist went on teaching evolution in that town and the newspapers turned to fresh controversies and the creationist in his anger moved away. He packed up his truck early one morning and was gone. Without even a goodbye to his sister or his father. And he didn’t write them in the years that followed. But what man, he asked, ever knows what his future holds? Or which fate plucks at his string?
The geologist, you see, had been devastated by the withered sister’s beauty on that evening. And he courted her with great gentleness. He drove out to her farm in the evenings and played bridge with her widowed father at their kitchen table and he spoke to her of the cities he had lived in and of the West Coast where he was born and she listened boldly with her cobalt eyes upon him. She told him of the gulls confounded by the prairie sky, which had trailed the dying salmon into the mountains many years before, and confessed she’d never seen the ocean. He said he’d never known God. She assured him he would someday although he didn’t believe her. They didn’t speak of her absent brother, the creationist.
The old man shifted slightly. He said, They were in time married. And very few objected though he was from the city and she touched in her strange way and he agnostic and she devout and when she became pregnant the geologist felt himself truly blessed, and when she lost the child he grew fearful, and when her rupture wouldn’t stop bleeding and she too died his life also ended for a time.
The old man fell silent. He breathed, troubled. A dog slouched up the hill towards them but stiffened some yards off its ears cocked and fiery eyes shining and then it slunk west across the grassy slope.
After a time he continued. He said the creationist in his disgrace could find no employment as a teacher and in the months which followed he drifted northward finding work in the oil fields for he was a large man and strong. He carried little with him but his anger which burned dark within him and in his new brutal life he soon turned again to drink. There were women who lived with him for a time but none who stayed for he argued with his fists and drank heavily and he was fired occasionally and drifted on. Yet in that line of work he came to believe the geologist correct and one night in a trailer broken and drunk he began to scream at his God for the madness he had suffered in His name and though he cried out no whirlwind appeared to him, no voice admonished him, his dreams did not urge him to repent. When he awoke in the morning his eyeglasses were broken and his shirt pocket where he kept his old bible was empty. Thus did he lose his faith.
The geologist meanwhile was drowning in his own grief. And each day his dead wife’s father came to him and cleaned and cooked for him and the geologist did not rise from his bed but lay frozen and mute and each day the old widower spoke to the young widower of mourning and of faith and of the many shapes loss can take. And time passed.
You must understand, the old man sa
id. Eventually it was summer. The world beyond the geologist’s windows turned sun-drenched and very fine and one day the old widower arrived to find the shades lifted and the bedroom dazzling in its brightness. And the geologist frying eggs in the kitchen. There seemed to be no reason for it, or the reasons were too many, too complicated. Thus did the geologist turn to an immense and consoling God and thus was he able to walk again in the light among men.
The old man studied the ruins of that hospital. The creationist never did regain his faith, he said. He lived bereft and aimless in the long decades he had left.
And the geologist? the woman asked. Did he ever remarry?
No. And he didn’t ever meet another woman he could have loved. But what woman could compare to a memory? It’s always this way. No, the geologist moved to Edmonton to teach in the schools there in the hope of getting away from his grief. Of course it didn’t work. We carry some burdens all our lives and never set them down.
The old man cleared his throat. So which man was the happier? The one who believed himself free at last from illusion, or the one with a new-found sense of purpose? The old man drank from his coffee and he cleared his throat again. He said, The creationist’s eyesight had always been poor. And in his old age it failed him entirely and he moved into a home for the infirm where he could wait out his days. A stooped figure with shaking hands. His eyes weeping a little always under the lashes. He’d smooth out his sheets each morning through the grey fog of his vision and shuffle with great care to his bench by the hall windows and he’d sit listening in the sunshine.
And the other?
The geologist too got old. And because he was alone he too had to move into a home and, yes, it was this very home, and sure enough he shared a room with the creationist.
I see.
The old man shrugged as if to apologize for the twist in his tale. He said a true story and a truthful story are not the same thing. That the ways of the world are strange and many and that what happens often is not to be believed.
It’s unlikely, the woman agreed.
Yes, he said and nodded. Nevertheless. The two men in the course of their confinement became friends though both were long accustomed to solitude. After a while the blind creationist asked his roommate for a favour. He said that although immersed in darkness he lived in a kind of light and that he knew his life was nearly done. When the geologist protested he wouldn’t hear of it and asked only that his friend might write out a letter to his sister whom he hadn’t seen in many years. Of course he could not have known of his sister’s death, of this man his friend’s great grief. He said he’d at one time been a religious man but had strayed, for his life with God and his life without God were no different. And now when he looked at the world he saw nothing but darkness and if there were a God He must be a god of darkness. But this he could not accept. The old man looked up. Neither man knew the other, you understand.
The woman nodded.
Well. The geologist listened to his friend and at last he said that he too had lost a great deal in his life but for a brief time he’d known happiness. He said he wouldn’t give up those days now even for all that followed. He said real goodness was possible and if so then why not God?
Why not. The old man smiled bitterly and peered up at the woman. I’ve always thought that the most elegant defense of faith. Why not. At any rate, in the days to come the two men sat together listening. And in the evenings the geologist transcribed in a trembling hand the words of his blind friend. He’d hold each sheaf close to his eyes and carefully read back what he’d written. Lines were struck out, lines added in, until at last the letter seemed complete. But the creationist wouldn’t sign his name and the geologist lowered his pen and regarded his friend. I’m sure you’re forgiven, he said. Absolutely sure. Given time enough nothing matters but to see again those we once loved. The blind creationist’s eyelashes were wet and his face was turned towards the fading sunlight and the geologist asked one last time for the address and name of his friend’s sister.
Not just yet, said the creationist. Tomorrow.
At least you must sign it, said the geologist. Please. It was a Friday evening and many of the staff at that facility were leaving for the weekend. The geologist was holding out the pen in the late sunlight to his friend. They were sitting on the porch. It was a moment of great clarity. And the geologist understood, I think, that he was offering his friend a kind of absolution.
Go on, he was saying in his quiet way, holding out the pen. Go on. Take it.
The old man waited. The woman sat with her face hidden and her ear tilted down towards him and she sat silent. After a time he said, This is the first ending.
The woman shook her head. That’s the first ending?
Yes.
Did he sign the letter?
The old man opened and closed his hands in the darkness.
So they both end up blind, she said.
Well. Blind to certain truths. But absolved.
Absolved.
The old man nodded. It is a hopeful ending. The two men who lived so differently come together and find a common ground. The creationist’s reunion with his sister lies still in the future. Everything is possible.
After a time she said, They didn’t deserve such unhappiness.
No. They didn’t.
Whoever does, though. What’s the second ending?
The old man cleared his throat. He shifted his hips. The creationist’s father, he said, the father-in-law of the geologist, the man who was supposed to receive that letter, he lived a long time after the geologist departed. He was a good man and gentle but solitary and marked it seemed by his long tragedies. He was treated with a kind of deference but it was the deference of the old and the mad. Which he in time came to be.
The old man pursed his lips slightly as if mocking his own words. Well, he said. He fell ill and grew suspicious of the world. Wrapped himself up in his faith with a kind of hopelessness. He came to believe the world capable of little but betrayal. That the economy was ruled by a cabal of bankers. That men had never walked on the moon. That a global pandemic threatened to engulf the earth at any moment. He would walk the roadside ditches in the evenings muttering to himself in his loneliness, ragged and unkempt.
No man at the end of a long life should find himself so alone. His wife and daughter were dead, his son was vanished in the northern oil fields, his son-in-law was silent and grieving in the city. He lived out the years left him praying for darkness. Who could blame him? The old man shrugged and picked a bit of tobacco from his lips. I guess he’d walked in the light too long and he’d been burned. But the world had one last mystery in store for him. As it often does.
It seems he was wading the long grass in the ditches one afternoon when he looked up at the sky and saw something extraordinary. The world went still, and the sun went black, and the sky burned itself out. And darkness covered the earth.
It was of course an eclipse, the old man said. And after a moment it passed, the shadows eased, the sunlight returned, as is the nature of things. But the old widower who’d been standing with his arms slack and his mouth agape when it came over him had collapsed.
The old man studied the woman. There are midnights in all of us, he said. The heart lives in a glove of darkness and its darkness is entire and without end. I believe the widower came to understand this. I believe he saw something in that eclipse that was in him already. The world’s heart isn’t so different from the hearts of men and men’s hearts too are a kind of fire.
What do you mean, collapsed.
The old widower died three days after the eclipse. He was buried without ceremony beside his daughter. He died in silence and alone.
Jesus, she said. How is that an ending? That’s awful.
I guess it is.
That’s the second ending? Really?
Yes.
He doesn’t get the letter from his son.
The one addressed to his daughter? No.
But
she was shaking her head and holding her bad arm. No, she said quietly. No. I see just the one ending. Just the one sequence of events. Once the second ending happens, the first isn’t an ending anymore.
The first ending remains true, the old man said.
But it’s not an ending. The second ending wrecks it. It eliminates the hope.
Does it? That is not how the two friends would see it.
It doesn’t matter how you see it. It only matters what happens.
How we see what happens becomes what happens.
That’s not my experience.
Is it not?
The woman gestured at the destruction below. A dark figure was walking slowly between the medical tarps and the low yellow bulbs strung up at intervals there blackened one by one as he passed. Look at that, she said quietly. What do you see out there? You see exactly what I see.
Some would see the hand of God.
The hand of God. There.
His mercy, yes. If God’s ways are not our ways then we cannot hope to make sense of them.
The woman leaned forward and regarded him in the darkness. You don’t believe that, she said.
He shrugged.
This is a world of horror and sickness, she said fiercely. Whatever else God may be He is not only goodness and mercy and love. There’s brutality in him too. If anything comes from him then this does too.
He said nothing for a long time. When at last he spoke his voice was low. I’d guess that if grace exists then it’s probably a simpler thing than we imagine, he said. Not a case of means and ends, of God willing this for this purpose, that for that. Not a method but a mystery.