Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  Gary looked over the papers again. “Thank you,” he said. It was always the best policy to be polite. That was one of the things he had not learned from his mother. “I don’t need anything you can get me. I’m wondering if we need to hire on some extra men for when the trial opens.”

  “The trial,” Tina said. Then she sniffed. “I don’t know how you can be so calm about it. To think of those people. All of them. They’re not even from here, most of them.”

  “Annie-Vic is from here,” Gary said calmly. “Henry Wackford is, too. Wackford Squeers has been on Main Street since before I was born.”

  “Still,” Tina said. She was a middle-aged woman with sparse hair that had been tinted too implausible a shade of red, and thick folds of fat that were emphazised because her clothes were always at least a size too small. If Gary had been the kind of man who wondered about how he felt about things, he would have to wonder if he liked Tina Clay.

  “And they’re suing you, too,” Tina said. “They put your name right in the suit. I saw it in the newspaper. The idea of doing such a thing.”

  “My name comes first alphabetically,” Gary said. “They don’t bother to list all the names every time they talk about the suit. It would take up too much space. And time.”

  “They should all move back to wherever they came from,” Tina said. “And Annie-Vic and Henry can move on out with them. Whatever happened to democracy? We voted you in for the school board. The people have spoken.”

  Gary wasn’t actually sure the people had spoken. In the election that had put not only Gary himself, but Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie and, yes, even Annie-Vic on the school board, not a single word had been said about the issue that had since become the biggest thing in town since the flood of 1954. There was something about the way this whole thing was set up that made Gary very uneasy.

  “It’s all about her, anyway,” Tina said. “It’s all about Annie-Vic Hadley. And you know it. There wouldn’t have been a lawsuit if it hadn’t been for her.”

  “I think Henry Wackford could have filed a lawsuit without the help of Annie-Vic.”

  “He could have, but he wouldn’t have. You know it. There she is, and the whole rest of the school board agrees, except her, and so there wasn’t a united front. I was talking to Alice about it only yesterday. If the board had a united front, there isn’t anything Henry Wackford or those people from the development could have done. We’d have God back in the Snow Hill public schools, and they’d just have to lump it.”

  “I’m pretty sure they could have sued, united front or not,” Gary said. He was still being calm, but talking about the whole thing always made him agitated. He wasn’t like Tina. He knew better than to think that all it would have taken to avoid trouble was a school board without a single dissenting voice. Still, he had a problem with Annie-Vic, and he always had had.

  “She thinks she’s so smart,” Tina said. “Going away to some fancy college full of rich girls. She thinks she’s better than all of us. And now this. This isn’t about teaching evolution, Gary, and you know it. This is Annie-Vic making us look like a bunch of rubes and hicks on national television.”

  Gary almost said that if the town didn’t want to look like a bunch of rubes and hicks, it shouldn’t act like a bunch of rubes and hicks, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say half of what he thought these days. He shuffled the papers around in front of him a few more times and admitted to himself that he wasn’t paying attention to them. He had no idea how many extra people they would need with a town full of national reporters—international ones, too. Molly who worked out at the Radisson said there was a booking for some guy from Italy. He didn’t know and part of him didn’t care.

  “I’m going to run on home for a minute,” he said. “I left my lunch on the kitchen table.”

  “Sarah won’t bring it out to you?” Tina said. “Sarah’s such a Christian woman. I can’t imagine her letting you run on home with that leg of yours.”

  “Sarah’s got Lily and Michael to look after,” Gary said, and then, to forestall one more question about why the children weren’t named after anybody in his own family, he got up and took his jacket off the back of his chair.

  “I’ll be twenty minutes,” he said, heading for the door.

  “I think it’s a miracle the way you get around on that fake leg,” Tina said. “It’s like you never lost a leg at all. You’ve got God’s grace in you. There’s nothing else to say about it.”

  There was a lot else to say about it, and Tina would say it, if he didn’t get out fast.

  The police station was right on Main Street, and when Gary looked left he could see Annie-Vic rounding the intersection at the north end of town, power pumping like a woman half her age. He did have a problem with Annie-Vic, and with all the Annie-Vics of the world, and that was part of what he didn’t understand about people. Annie-Vic was a smart woman. He’d talked to her dozens of times over the years. She was smart and well read, but she lived in delusion, and Gary didn’t know why. To Gary Albright, the existence of God was as clear and undeniable as the existence of snow. Denying it was like denying the existence of the color green. The scripture said that it was the fool who denied God, but Annie-Vic was not a fool, and Gary didn’t think she was that other thing, which his pastor always said explained the vigorous atheist. Gary couldn’t imagine Annie-Vic committing one mortal sin after another, even before she had reached this advanced age.

  No, Gary thought, moving slowly in the general direction of the Snow Hill Diner—he hadn’t really forgotten his lunch on the dining room table; if he had, Sarah would have been down at the station like a shot—whatever motivated the people who had brought this lawsuit, whatever motived people like Annie-Vic, was beyond him. Surely they had to see, not only that God existed, but that teaching evolution as if it were not just a fact, but the only fact, meant teaching children that there was no such thing as right and wrong, no such thing as morality at all—that it didn’t matter what they did, that it didn’t matter who they did it to. Gary found this so clear, so obvious, so—well, Gary thought. They had to know it, and yet they brought lawsuits like this one, they railed and screamed about any mention of God to children, they wanted . . . what? Gary didn’t know.

  He walked past the Snow Hill Diner and kept his fingers crossed that Alice McGuffie wouldn’t come out and lecture him. He got past the place safely and headed toward the Baptist Church. He thought about himself up on that mountain with Humphrey and that small infant girl he’d been taking to child services in Harrisburg, and about the blade of the knife as it had glinted in the sun on the day he knew he was going to have to sever the leg. For Gary Albright, there were things that had to be done and it was the job of grown-ups to do them. It was as if all these people—the Annie-Vics of the world, the people from the development—never grew up, and never would.

  He went on past the Baptist Church, heading home, because that was where he said he was going. He never liked being caught out in a lie.

  7

  Catherine Marbledale was sixty-eight years old, and it was only four years ago, in anticipation of her sixty-fifth birthday, that the Snow Hill Board of Education had changed its retirement policy to allow her to go on teaching. Catherine had been thinking about that event for months now, ever since Franklin Hale had called her in to the board to “grill” her about evolution. “Grill” was Franklin’s word. Catherine would never in her life have used it to describe the questioning style of somebody she remembered as nearly belligerently stupid, the kind of student she liked least. Catherine had no problem with real stupidity, with lack of innate intelligence. She knew how to deal with that, and she knew that even ungifted children could learn the basics of modern scientific thought. No, the people Catherine couldn’t stand were the people like Franklin, who were bright enough, under there somewhere, but who willed themselves to be as stupid as possible. If intelligence was a sin, Catherine was fairly sure that Franklin Hale had never committed it.


  This morning, Catherine was going through the lesson plans for her science teachers for the coming month. April was always a little tricky, because as the weather got better the attention spans got shorter. Of course, Catherine thought attention spans were already too short. It was all the media these children watched these days. Some of them had no idea how to search the library for a book, they were so used to doing their research “online.” Even so, Catherine was cautiously optimistic about the media. The fact was that you couldn’t ignore it. It was there all the time. And that meant that junk was there, but it also meant that truth was there. So far, she’d sent a dozen students to TalkOrigins, and every single one of them had come away shocked.

  The two girls standing in Catherine’s doorway were not shocked, and Catherine had been avoiding them for the past ten minutes. She really did have lesson plans to look over. The real reason, though, was that these were two girls who just made her tired. She could remember herself at that age, herself and her sister both, haunting the Snow Hill Public Library until they could sneak away with “adult” books like Anna Karenina and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was her sister, Margaret, who was so very attached to literature, but in those days Catherine read it nonstop, too. It was only later that she had discovered science. Margaret sometimes wondered what would have happened to them if they had been born at a different time and in a different place. Catherine did not wonder. She never really wanted to be a doctor or a scientist. She had always wanted to be a teacher. Teachers were the saviors of the world. They made sure that the students who’d decided to matter got the Hell out of places like this.

  Neither Barbie McGuffie nor Susan Clawde was a student who’d decided to matter. Susan was a sniffling pile of fears and resentments who cared only that she might never make the cheerleading team when she finally got to high school, and Barbie had her mother’s mulish anger at anything and everything in the universe more intelligent than herself. Catherine remembered Alice McGuffie as a student even better than she remembered Franklin Hale. Unlike Franklin, Alice actually was stupid. Unlike some other stupid students, Alice was—well, Catherine thought, Alice was then just what Barbie was now. And Alice had gotten herself elected to the school board.

  Barbie was a big, thick girl with her hair pulled back on her head with a rubber band. Susan was delicate and tiny and dressed like a cross between a fashion doll and a Los Angeles streetwalker. Come to think of it, Barbie was dressed like that, too, but the clothes didn’t have the same effect as they did when Susan wore them. Catherine wondered what mothers were coming to. Her own mother would never have allowed her to leave the house—at the age of fifteen!—with enough skin exposed to get a beach tan. But then, Catherine had never imagined that the upshot of Third Wave Feminism, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened in her lifetime, would be this craze on the part of children to look like whores.

  Barbie was shifting from one leg to the other. She had started to emit a low-grade hum that was the signal that she was about to get angry, and nobody in her right mind wanted to see Barbie McGuffie angry. Catherine looked down at the lesson plan in front of her and sighed.

  “All right,” she said.

  “You’re the one who wanted to see us,” Barbie said. “We didn’t want to see you.”

  “I know.” Catherine picked up her pen and turned it around in her fingers. Then she put it down again. There was no easy way to do this. There was never any easy way to do it. What gave her a headache was the fact that it kept happening again and again.

  Catherine bit her lip. “I had a call from Mrs. Cornish this morning. I talked to Mr. Henderson about it. Apparently, it wasn’t the first call.”

  Mr. Henderson was the vice principal. He was not a tower of strength in difficult times. Catherine suspected him, sometimes, of being on the side of Creationism and Intelligent Design, and if not, of definitely not being on her side.

  “So,” she said. “Do you want to tell me about it? Mrs. Cornish said that Mallory was very upset.”

  “Mallory Cornish is always upset,” Barbie said. “She thinks she’s better than everybody else, living out there in the development with all the rich kids. She’s nothing but a secular humanist.”

  Susan made a strangled sound. Catherine closed her eyes.

  “Do you know what a secular humanist is?” Catherine asked Barbie. “I mean, can you define it?”

  “Sure I can define it,” Barbie said. “It’s somebody who worships the devil and hates America.”

  “I don’t think they worship the devil,” Susan said tentatively. “I think they just don’t believe in God.”

  “If they don’t believe in God they worship the devil,” Barbie said. “What else? There’s only the two. I bet they have human sacrifices in that basement of theirs. I bet that’s why it’s got a whole kitchen right there on its own. They have human sacrifices and then they eat them.”

  Catherine closed her eyes. Her head hurt. Of course, neither Barbie nor Susan had been to any of the houses out in the development. The development children tended to herd together, because most of them did not have a lot in common with the kids who lived in the “real” town. And there was, of course, the money. The people who lived in the development were not rich by absolute standards, but by the standards of Snow Hill they beat anybody but old Annie-Vic.

  Catherine opened her eyes again. If this had been forty years ago, she could have required these two young idiots to make a report to the school on what secular humanism was. These days, an assignment like that would only start another lawsuit.

  “You cannot,” she said, “harass another student just because you don’t like that student’s beliefs. About anything. You can’t corner Mallory Cornish in the girls’ room and call her names. You can’t follow her to the school bus and throw things at her. You can’t do any of that. The first rule of the Snow Hill public schools is civility.”

  “My mother says she shouldn’t even be here,” Barbie said. “And my mother is right. She shouldn’t be. Why doesn’t she go back to where she came from? They’re not even from Pennsylvania, most of the people in the development.”

  “They’re northeastern liberal elites,” Susan Clawde said earnestly. “My mama said so. And our pastor said so. They’re northeastern liberal elites and all they want to do is to send everybody in the country to Hell because that’s where they’re going and they want company.”

  Susan Clawde had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Barbie didn’t either. Catherine was willing to bet money that if she asked the two of them to define any of the words they were using, they’d fall flat on their faces. All they really knew was that these words described people who were, by definition, very bad.

  “My mama says you don’t belong here, either,” Barbie said. “My mama says you look down on everybody and God will get you one day and put you into a lake of fire. My mama says you’re an atheist.”

  “Actually, I’m a Methodist,” Catherine said. “But the real point here is that you can’t call me names, either. If you don’t like my ideas, then you have to argue about my ideas. And you have to be logical, and you have to use valid techniques of argumentation. This is a school, and in school you’ll behave like human beings.”

  “I thought we weren’t human beings,” Barbie said. “I thought we were monkeys.”

  Catherine looked away, out her window, and the first thing she saw was the new junior high school building, still barely half built. It made some kind of crazy sense that Franklin Hale and his people were opposed not only to the teaching of science but to the construction of new school facilities as well. They would leave that monstrosity sitting out there for decades. In the meantime, big bullies like Barbie McGuffie would chase younger girls around and call them “secular humanists.”

  Catherine took a deep breath. “Detention,” she said. “After school every day for the next week. At the end of that time, I expect you both to apologize to Mallory Cornish in front of her entire home room class. Is t
hat clear?”

  “I’ve got nothing to apologize for,” Barbie said. “You’re trying to take away my free speech. She’s a snotty little snob and she’s going to burn in Hell forever.”

  “If you don’t apologize, you’ll stay in detention, for as long as it takes. For the rest of the year, if you have to,” Catherine said.

  “You can’t keep me in detention for the rest of the year,” Barbie said. “My mama is on the school board. She can fire you any time she wants to.”

  “She can’t fire me at all, Barbie,” Catherine said. “I’ve got tenure. Go find out what that word means. And get out of my office. I never thought I’d live to see the day when my school would be plagued by—well, by what the two of you are. Only God knows who is going to burn in Hell forever. You shouldn’t second guess Him.”

  “Yes, Miss Marbledale,” Susan said.

  Barbie McGuffie snorted. “I know who’s going to burn in Hell forever,” she said. “Anybody with any sense knows.”

  A second later, they were gone. Catherine stared for a moment at the empty doorway. Then she took a deep breath. She never realized how tense she was in these encounters until they were over, and then she felt as if she’d never get her muscles unkinked again.

  She got up and went to her window and looked out. Annie-Vic was on her daily walk. Annie-Vic had been Catherine’s hero when she was growing up. There she was, a woman who had done it, a woman who had gotten out of Snow Hill and engaged in the life of the mind.

  It was too cold to be standing at the window. The cold came through the thin panes of glass and made her joints ache. Catherine wondered if any of the people in this town understood what was going on with the children in the schools, what was happening in the girls’ rooms and boys’ rooms and lunchrooms and on the playgrounds. That was the very worst of this.

  She went back to her desk and sat down. She looked at the lesson plan in front of her. In the space for “Purpose of This Lesson,” Marty Loudan had written “to demonstrate beyond doubt that evolution is a fact.”