Living Witness(5)

“Backwardness and superstition cannot be allowed to strangle the advance of science,” he would say, or something like that. You had to be careful when you went before the cameras. Reporters were good at making people look like fanatics, and they especially liked making nonreligious people look like fanatics. It was a conspiracy, Henry had always been sure of it. People had laughed at Hillary Clinton for saying that there was a “vast right wing conspiracy” dedicated to taking her husband down, but she’d been absolutely right. Religions wouldn’t survive for a minute if they depended on what people actually believed. Nobody could believe that tripe for five minutes if they thought about it. That was why the conspiracy had to keep people from thinking about it. It had to keep people from focusing on their fantasies of God and Heaven and get them focusing on their neighbors, especially the ones they could hate. Henry Wackford was sure he was one of the most hated people in all of Snow Hill, even though the town had elected him to the school board six terms running—right up until it had defeated him, this last time.

Underneath his window, Henry could see not only Annie-Vic, but the storefronts on the north side of the street and the reflection of his own firm’s sign in the window of the hardware store. WACKFORD SQUEERS, the sign said, just as it had in his father’s time. Henry had no idea why he’d never changed the name of the firm. Old Gander Squeers had been dead for a decade before Henry had graduated from the law school at Penn State, never mind passed the bar. For a while, Henry had thought his father would change the firm’s name to “Wackford and Wackford,” or even “Richard Wackford and Son,” but he never had. He hadn’t named Henry after him, either. Henry had asked him about that, but he would never say. Richard Wackford never would say much. After Henry’s mother died, he barely said anything at all.

Annie-Vic was passing the Baptist Church now. Henry halfexpected one of the theocrats to come rushing out to threaten her, but nothing happened. They were all theocrats, all the religious people in Snow Hill, all the religious people everywhere. They wanted power, and when they got it they wanted to kill all the people who dared to breathe the truth about the world. It was true. Look at history—look at the witch burnings, and the Inquisitions, and the reigns of terror from one end of Europe to the other. It wasn’t just Europe, either. Henry had read enough to know that Islam was as bad, or worse, if you looked at the right places in the right centuries. It wasn’t Christianity or Islam that he was afraid of, it was Religion, which was another term that always had a capital letter in his mind. It was Religion that would go on trial here in Snow Hill in just three weeks, and Henry Wackford was ready for it, even if no one else was.

Down on Main Street, Annie-Vic pumped on past the Assembly of God, but nobody came out of there, either. She looked neither to the right nor to the left. This was her daily ritual when she was at home, which she was only about half the year. There were people who said she was a force of nature, and Henry tended to agree. She was like a black hole. She sucked in all the light. What reporters had come to town so far, in anticipation of the suit, had all been interested in talking to her, and nobody else. There was even talk of doing a spot on her for 60 Minutes. Henry sometimes thought he was losing his mind. She didn’t understand anything. She really didn’t. She might not be religious, she might not even believe in God, but she didn’t understand anything. He wasn’t even sure she wasn’t religious. He only knew he never saw her coming out of any of the churches on Sunday, and that no denomination claimed her as a member and no denomination wanted to throw her out for supporting the legacy of Charles Darwin. What did it mean? What did any of it mean, when you were crushed down under the weight of provincial belligerence? That was how Henry Wackford saw himself, in spite of being the richest lawyer in town, in spite of having been six times chairman of the school board. He was crushed down, hemmed in, stifled—suffocating, under the weight of all this small-town pettiness, without a chance in Hell of getting out.

The door to the office opened behind him, and Henry turned to see Christine Lindsay walk in with a stack of file folders in her arms. Christine was Henry’s personal secretary, and she was always careful to wear her gold cross right in the hollow at the bottom of her throat, as if she’d been branded with it. Henry would have preferred to hire somebody who was an ally in the war against Unreason, but there was nobody like that in Snow Hill who had also taken a secretarial course.

“I’ve got the material you wanted on the Brander Mills development,” Christine said. “I ran the schedules and put them on the computer if you want them that way. Do you want me to send in your nine o’clock? It’s Mrs. Hennessy about the wills.”