Living Witness(13)
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.