Living Witness(57)

“What?”

“The face of God,” Nick said. “That’s what all these people were looking for, really, even the ones who didn’t think they believed in God. It’s what we’re all looking for. Man cannot rest until he rests in Him.”

“If you’re quoting, it’s going to be wasted on me,” Gregor said. “Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I don’t understand it. What are you doing here? If you do this sort of thing, if this is the way you think, you could have gone off to graduate school and ended up at a university. Instead of—”

“Instead of ending up in a backwater small town where most of my neighbors can’t pronounce Liebniz, never mind read him?”

“Something like that.”

Nick sat down behind his desk. It was a big desk, which was good, because he needed big furniture to accommodate him.

“How come you came to me first?” he asked. “Did Gary Albright point me out as a prime suspect?”

“No, not at all. He did say a few things. None of which I understood.”

“Gary and I went to high school together,” Nick said. “Hell, we went all through school together. And I’ve got to admit it up front that Gary’s a remarkable man. He had a record of courage in the Marine Corps. And there was that thing with the leg. Not many men could do what he did, and even fewer would do it to save a dog.”

“But,” Gregor said.

“But,” Nick agreed. “In the end, Gary can’t help being who and what he is. He was the football hero. I was the trash. We were all trash to the people in town, all of us who came from up in the hills. We’d come down here to town for school and we might as well not have bothered, because the teachers all assumed we were mentally retarded and they treated us that way. You don’t know how many of the boys I grew up with ended up in prison before they were twenty. Real prison, not juvenile hall. And dead of drugs and alcohol. And all the rest of it. Year after year, decade after decade, going back generations. Because there’s no point in trying to educate the retards.”

“You got educated,” Gregor said.

“I did indeed,” Nick said. “But that was Miss Marbledale, combined with the fact that I have an unusual amount of drive. When I finished college and came back here, I looked around and I saw that it was still going on. They were still treating the hill kids like retards. So I went back up into the hills and I started preaching, and after a while we managed to buy this place. And after that we managed to start the school. We don’t have it all done yet. I mean to have a full high school by the time we’re finished. But we do the first eight grades now. And, lo and behold, our hill kids do better on every standardized test than anybody from town.”

“It makes me wonder,” Gregor said. “I’d think they’d like you for that. Gary Albright seems mad at you.”

“Yes, I suppose he is. We didn’t join the lawsuit. Although, you know, I’m not sure just what old Franklin Hale wanted us to do. Our kids don’t go to the public school. We aren’t interested parties. But he wanted us to do something. Stand up in solidarity, or something. I’d say he wanted us to file an amicus brief, but I don’t think Franklin knows what that is.”

“Why didn’t you file an amicus brief?” Gregor asked. “Are you teaching Darwin here on top of everything else?”

“Our eighth graders are asked to read parts of The Origin of Species in their world history class. But no, since that’s what you’re asking, our biology classes don’t teach evolution here. Or rather, they do, but they concentrate on the problems with the theory. Yes, and I do know that there aren’t any problems the scientists think they can’t answer, but then we’re not worried about the science when it comes to evolution. Nobody is. Did you know that?”

“Gary Albright said as much,” Gregor said. “It’s a little beyond me. Evolution is a scientific theory. If you aren’t worried about the science, what are you worried about?”

“The culture,” Nick said firmly. “There’s a lawsuit going on in this town and it has nothing to do with the science. Franklin Hale wouldn’t know science if it bit him in the ass and left a note. It’s the culture that matters, the culture that says that people who believe in God are ignorant idiots, that there is no grounded morality of any kind, that it doesn’t matter what you do with yourself or your life, it’s all just—choices, I suppose. You have no idea how I hate that entire ideology of choice.”