Living Witness(4)
“Which doesn’t change the fact that we can’t be part of a lawsuit against the teaching of anything at all at the public schools, when our children don’t go to the public schools.” Nick walked all the way down the center aisle and looked at the choir box. Some churches had choir lofts, but they hadn’t planned for that when they built the building, so the choir was going to be in a small boxlike enclosure at the front, to the left of the pulpit and a little ahead of the first lefthand pew. It looked nice, Nick had to admit, even though he was sure there had never been anything like it in any Holiness Church anywhere.
“Somebody’s going to do something about that woman someday,” Harve said. “She doesn’t have any children in the public schools, either. She doesn’t have any children. She’s a radical feminist. Why’s she even on the school board?”
“She’s on the school board because she ran for a place and the people elected her,” Nick said firmly, “and that’s the essence of democracy. We’ve got to learn to live with it. We’ve also got to learn to live with what’s about to happen in this town come the trial starting up in a couple of weeks. Have any of you talked to the Hendersons like I asked you to?”
Pete and Harve both looked away.
“They’re not easy to find,” Harve said.
“Well, we’d better find them,” Nick said. “Because as sure as the sun rises and the moon sets, they’re going to be the first citizens of Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, to hit the cable news networks, and you know it. There’s going to be no monkey trial in Snow Hill without the media trying to make Christians look bad.”
“Monkey trial,” Harve said. “You got to be an intellectual to be stupid enough to believe this crap.”
Nick went past them into the vestibule in the back. It was a good, solid building, after years in the shacks and shifting arrangements of the hills. It was a good thing they’d done, too, getting so many of their people into better jobs, and building a school so their children could get real educations and not be forced out by the snobs on the public school faculty. All the things they’d done were good, Nick was sure of it, but there was no getting away from the fact that they were who they were, they were Holiness, they spoke in tongues, they got slain in the spirit, and some of them—some of them—handled snakes.
Oral Roberts University wasn’t Vassar, but Nicodemus Frapp had seen how the outside world lived. He didn’t give a flying damn whether the public schools of Snow Hill taught evolution or intelligent design or creation or the origin myths of H. P. Lovecraft, but he did mind what was about to happen here, because it was about to happen to him.
Sometimes he thought he couldn’t be angry enough at Annie-Vic.
3
Henry Wackford had always wanted to like Ann-Victoria Hadley, just as he always wanted to like anyone he could consider an ally in his lifelong war against Ignorance, Stupidity, and Unreason. He thought of the terms in just that way, with capital letters, as he thought of the term Reason itself. He didn’t know where he’d picked up that habit, but he was sure he’d had it for a very long time, at least since the days when he’d been in high school in Snow Hill. There were teachers still teaching at Snow Hill High School who remembered him. There were even some who remembered his greatest local triumph, when he’d received his scholarship to Williams and become the first local person since Annie-Vic to go off East to college. Maybe there was something about Snow Hill that made people come back after they’d gone off, and after they knew better. Henry didn’t know. He only knew that this last thing had also been the last straw. There was just so much crap he could put up with. Then he couldn’t put up with anything more.
He was standing at the window of his office, looking down from the second story of his building onto Main Street. He could see Annie-Vic pumping along, her arms and legs moving like a robot’s, with too many angles to be human. Henry wanted to like her, but he couldn’t, even if she was crucial to this lawsuit. She was a publicity hound; that was the trouble. And what was worse, she didn’t know what to do with publicity when she got it. When Henry had first decided to file this lawsuit—and yes, it was his decision; he even had children in the system to give him standing; nobody else would have thought of it in a million years—he had imagined himself as a sort of spokesman for science. He had seen himself standing up in front of a bank of microphones at press conferences, or at single microphones held by reporters he’d watched on television, laying out the case for keeping “Intelligent Design” out of the Snow Hill public schools.