Living Witness(81)
“I’m Henry Wackford,” Henry said. “I’m the Wackford in Wackford Squeers, the law firm, up there.”
“And you’re one of the plaintiffs,” Charlene said. “I remember that name.”
“Do you remember the name Judy Cornish?” Henry said.
Charlene Holder paused. “I remember a Cornish. Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Cornish?”
“Judy would be the Mrs. Cornish,” Henry said.
“So what happened?” Charlene asked. “Did she do something about the case, did she withdraw, or something like that?”
Henry blinked. Did these people honestly believe you could get an entire small town buzzing just because one plaintiff, out of God only knew how many, had decided to drop out of a suit? Besides, Judy hadn’t decided to drop out, she’d never have done that.
“She’s dead,” Henry said, although that wasn’t the way he’d intended to tell them. “She was battered to death out at the old Hadley house just a couple of hours ago. Somebody left her dead and bloody on Annie-Vic Hadley’s dining room floor.”
Maybe it was a lot for these two people to take in. Henry didn’t know. They weren’t reacting the way he was expecting them to. What had happened to the old crusading spirit and the scoop reporter? Shouldn’t they be leaping into the van and taking off to report on what was going on?
“For God’s sake,” Henry said, and then there was something in the back of his mind that said he ought to stop saying that. Too many of the yahoos thought that if you said that you secretly believed in God, or why else would you call on his name, even in vain?
“Up there,” he said, pointing in the direction of Annie-Vic’s house. “It isn’t far. If you go in that direction, you’ll find the whole pack of them. Everything but the ambulance. That already went. You must have heard it. Don’t you realize what’s happening?”
The two of them still seemed to be hesitating. The young woman rocked back and forth on her legs, obviously freezing and obviously completely unwilling to dress for the weather. Henry thought the “stupid” in “stupid American” was applying to more and more of his countrymen by the day.
“They’re killing us off,” Henry said patiently. “The Creationists. They’re killing us off one by one, because they don’t care what they have to do to get their religion imposed on everybody in the country; they don’t care if they have to commit murder. They’re going to make this a Christian nation no matter what any of the rest of us wants. And I’m going to tell the world about it. I’m going to call a press conference, with all the remaining plaintiffs on this case, and we’re going to tell the American people what these Creationists are really like.”
3
Alice McGuffie got home late, so late that the whole town was full of it, full of the murder, and full of that idiot Henry Wackford, mouthing off for the TV cameras on every television set in town. On every television set in the country, as far as Alice could tell. She wasn’t thinking straight. It was so hard to know what to do. It was harder because there had been so much in between. Barbie was hurt, hurt by that little bitch of a secular humanist, or whatever these people liked to call themselves. It was atheism, pure and simple, as far as Alice was concerned, and she knew what came along with atheism. Atheists had no morals. How could they have? They didn’t believe in God, and they didn’t believe in Hell, so they had no reason at all not just to do whatever they wanted. If you asked Alice, and nobody every did, they thought she was stupid, or, worse, a hick, or something worse than that, a hillbilly, but if you asked her, it was a crock, all this stuff about atheism and secular humanism. There wasn’t a person on earth who didn’t believe in God. These people were just looking for an excuse, that was all. They wanted a reason to go on doing what they wanted to do instead of what they were supposed to do, throwing over their families and run off to jobs on the other side of the country, dumping their kids on nannies so that they could pose around like big executives, calling themselves “vice president” this and “doctor” that. Oh, the women were the worst. Alice knew. She’d been living with these people all of her life.
Her hand hurt. Barbie needed her painkiller prescription picked up at the pharmacy. She could call Holman Carr and have him send it home with Lyman. Except that she’d have to get the prescription in somehow. It didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that if you called Holman and read him the thing over the phone, he’d make it up for you and bring it over and then check the slip on your doorstep. He couldn’t do that now because they had come. They wanted all the rules followed. They were always talking about “unacceptable risks” and “inappropriate behavior.” If there was a word Alice had come to truly hate in the last three or four years, it was definitely “inappropriate.” None of those people came out and said they thought something was wrong. None of them even called you a name to your face. They just said that whatever you wanted to do was “inappropriate,” as if that was supposed to mean something, as if that was supposed to be a reason for stopping.