Prologue: Hurricane Elsa
1
FOR DAVID SANDLER, BELLERTON, North Carolina, had always been a place of rest. Bellerton was where he came on the long spring vacations when his students were in Fort Lauderdale or the Bahamas. Bellerton was where he came in the summer, with his books packed into liquor boxes in the back of his ancient Volvo station wagon and his class notes stuffed into the glove compartment. What had made him decide to come down here on his sabbatical, when he would have to do real work, he didn’t know. He had the house on the beach now. It was the only house he had ever really owned. He liked walking through Bellerton’s small town center. He liked the flat-roofed brick buildings that held the little stores that lined Main Street. He liked the tall-columned Greek revival houses that sat back on broad lawns for the four or five short blocks with sidewalks on them that made up “town” before the country started. He even liked Bellerton’s six mainstream churches—which was funny, really, because David Sandler was the man People magazine had called “The Most Famous Atheist in America.” David didn’t know if he was famous or not, but in Bellerton these days he was noted. People left Bible tracts under his windshield wipers while he was picking up milk at the grocery store. People stuffed brochures into his mailbox: glossy four-color advertising flyers with headlines that said Have You Accepted Christ As Your Personal Savior? People even tried to talk to him, awkwardly, as if they hated to intrude. David had a bright silver decal on the back of his car: a fish with legs and the word “Darwin” written inside it. People walked around that as if it could jump off the metal and go stomping around on their feet.
On the day of the hurricane, David stood on the deck of his house looking out at the sea and thinking that he didn’t like Bellerton’s other churches at all. The other churches were in storefronts and shacks and private houses out along the access roads off the interstate. They had names like The Good News Full Gospel Assembly and the Bellerton Church of Christ Jesus. They also seemed to have all the parishioners. Something had happened to the country in the thirty years since David had first started teaching. It was as if no one was interested anymore in what was really real. They preferred to shout at each other instead. They preferred to shout at him. What was worse, the more they shouted, the more they seemed to come into money.
The sea was choppy and dark. The sky was a mass of black clouds. The little portable radio David had set up on the empty deck chair was urging everybody to board up their windows and head for higher ground. It was October and it was colder than David had thought it ever could be, this far south. That was what came of spending his life in New York City, of making Columbia University his only serious home. When the article had appeared in People about his getting a grant to write a book in favor of atheism, at least two dozen people had written in to ask what else they could have expected, since Dr. Sandler was a professor at a secular humanist communist Jewish place like Columbia. Actually, David was the son of a Presbyterian minister—but that was a story he didn’t go into often, and then only if he had to.
“The National Weather Service is reporting winds over a hundred twenty miles an hour off Hilton Head,” the radio said. “If you live on the beach, get off now. This is the biggest storm we’ve seen in fifteen years. You’re not going to be able to ride this one out.”
David went through the sliding glass doors into the house. The big square living room with its twenty-foot ceiling was empty. David heard typing coming from the study and the singsong giggle that told him that Ginny Marsh’s baby Tiffany was awake and in need of attention. Ginny Marsh was the young woman from town he had hired to type up his notes. David was surprised she was still there. With all the talk about the storm and the way the baby was fussing, he had assumed she would have gone an hour ago.
David went to the door to the study and looked in. Ginny was sitting at the word processor with her back to him, typing away. Tiffany was enthroned in a blue plastic baby seat, covered with a tiny eyelet quilt. The baby’s eyes were big and dark and very solemn. Ginny’s work station was littered with objects: a cross on a stand; a picture of Jesus with his arms stretched out to receive the multitudes; a pile of brightly colored pencils with pictures of angels smiling on the sides of them and the words “Jesus Loves YOU.” The pencils were for sale in town at Rose Mac-Neill’s shop, along with lapel pins that said, “My Boss Is a Jewish Carpenter” and coffee mugs that said “Jesus Is Lord.”