The paperwork for Edna’s latest real estate deal lay sprawled across Henry’s desk. Henry did all Edna’s legal work up here; she had some expensive lawyers in Harrisburg for the deals she did there. Sometimes Henry wondered why she bothered to stay in Snow Hill. She couldn’t lack the money to leave.
“Honestly,” she said. “It takes the kind of mind that populates this town to think that that man would be better at managing anything than you. He can’t even manage his own wife. He can’t even cope with her.”
“I hear rumors that she drinks,” Henry said carefully. “But I’ve never seen her drink.”
“It’s not drinking,” Edna said. “It’s Oxycontin and probably half a dozen other prescription medications. That’s why she stopped going to Dr. Dumont here in town. He wouldn’t go on writing prescriptions for her. She got some guy up in Harrisburg, and as far as I can tell he just gives her what she wants. If I were Franklin, I’d shove her straight into rehab.”
“I don’t think it’s that easy to shove somebody into rehab if they don’t want to go,” Henry said.
“Well, it should be,” Edna said. “Honestly. There are some people who just can’t take care of themselves, and it’s time we recognized it. We’re strangling in a mythology of equality, the wrong kind of equality. We don’t give a damn what kind of money people have, and what is that? It’s like letting them have loaded weapons at their disposal when they can’t think their way out of paper bags. And we let them vote for school boards, which is worse.”
Henry stiffened. “I thought I did a pretty good job on the school board.”
“You did,” Edna said. “But it wasn’t going to last, was it? Of course it wasn’t. The board was going to go straight on over to the yahoos sooner rather than later—”
“I was chairman of that school board for over ten years.”
“Yes, and then what happened? Franklin Hale happened, that’s what,” Edna said. “There couldn’t have been anybody in town who didn’t know what he was up to even if he didn’t say it right out loud. Oh, except maybe the people from the development, of course. They don’t know him. But the rest of us did, and if most of the rest of us hadn’t voted for him, he wouldn’t be where he is. And what do we get? We get what he wanted us to get all along. People living alongside the dinosaurs and God creating the world in six days.”
Henry cleared his throat. Edna was one of those people. Once she got going, it was hard to get a word in. “I don’t think they’re actually asking for God creating the world in six days,” he said. “This is a new kind of Creationism. They call it Intelligent Design.”
“I know what they call it,” Edna said. “But I know Franklin Hale, and so do you. He thinks the world was created in six days and he thinks it’s less than ten thousand years old and the only reason he isn’t saying so is that he wouldn’t get help from that fancy think tank to go to court with if he did. He a small-town, small-minded idiot loon. You’ve got to wonder what goes on in that church of his, except you don’t have to wonder, do you? We all know. So why do we think it makes sense to let people like that be on a school board? Or people who agree with him run for school boards? Education should not be amateur night. It should be left to the people who know something about it.”
“Teachers,” Henry said solemnly.
“Oh, teachers,” Edna said. “Half the teachers are just as bad as Franklin is. It should be left to people with good doctorates, that’s what. We should have a national curriculum, that all schools have to follow, and home schools, too. All schools. Even the private ones. That’s what they do in Europe. That’s why they’re so much better educated over there.”
“Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925,” Henry said.
Edna waved it away. “We make a fetish of the Constitution. We do. We act like it’s scripture. It’s not. That sort of thing was all right when the world was a different place, before we knew anything about science, but it’s a disaster now. You can’t leave that sort of thing in place. Think of the children. Think of the future. And when we do have democracy, which we do here, not only do we not get a decent education for our children, we don’t even get all that competence Franklin was blithering about. I ran into Catherine Marbledale this morning. She’s climbing the walls. She’s had another call from the teachers’ union .”
“Has she,” Henry said. He was feeling a little distracted. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate Edna. He did. In a town like this you had to really treasure the people who understood what was what and were willing to stand by you. Henry thought it was too bad that all Edna’s children were grown, so she was unable to join the lawsuit. He could have used her in the courtroom.