Living Witness (2 page)

“Use it or lose it,” she whispered to herself, under her breath.

That was just the moment she was coming up on the Snow Hill Diner, and on Alice McGuffie, standing right outside.

“Filthy little bitch,” Alice McGuffie said, in a voice loud enough to carry all up and down the street. “You're going to burn in Hell.”

 

2

 

Nicodemus Frapp saw Alice McGuffie come out onto Main Street just as old Miss Hadley was about to pass, and he knew—even standing all the way up at the other end of town—that it was not a situation likely to end in an exchange of “Good mornings.” At least, it wasn't going to end that way for Alice. Annie-Vic was polite to a fault. She was polite in that way that highly educated, highly sophisticated people often were, with such a meticulous dedication to detail that she seemed to be insulting you in a way you couldn't put your finger on. It was the
kind of ability Nick had envied endlessly when he was growing up. He had even envied it in old Miss Hadley, since he had grown up in Snow Hill. Now he knew that it was not the kind of thing he would ever be able to do, and that it wouldn't be good for him if he could. There were people in his congregation who thought Nick was highly educated himself. He'd been “away at school” long enough to have figured out the difference between the Oral Roberts University and Vassar.

Main Street was bright and hard this morning. It was too cold for this late in the winter. Nick watched Annie-Vic on her walk, the upright posture, the heel-to-toe “power foot” execution. He'd grown up in the hills. His people were miners and farmers. His own father hadn't lasted but a few months past his fiftieth birthday. Nick could remember himself coming down to school every day with his lunch packed into a plastic beach bucket. All the hill kids had beach buckets to carry their lunches in, because the buckets went on sale cheap at Kmart at the end of the summer, and because it was much too expensive to buy lunch at the cafeteria at school. Nick was willing to bet that Annie-Vic had been able to buy her lunch when she was in elementary school, or—if the cafeteria didn't exist yet; Nick was only thirty-six; some parts of the town's social history still confused him—able to walk home and have it served to her by her mother. Nick's own mother had had a job at a package store most of the time he was growing up. The package store would have killed her, if his father hadn't gotten around to doing it to her first.

Nick took one last look at Annie-Vic, going by the hardware store, and Mr. Radkin stepping out to talk to her.
That
ought to be a conversation, he thought. But there was no conversation. Annie-Vic didn't stop moving. Nick looked up at George Radkin and back at Annie Vic and then around at his own new church, built from scratch less than ten years ago, from money made by the people who had once had to send their children to school with beach buckets. Then he turned his back to the town and went inside. There was a time in his life that he'd thought that he was turning his back on this town for
good. He'd thought he would get himself ordained and go to work in a church in a place he'd never seen, an exotic place, like Florida. He didn't know why he'd decided, in the end, to come back home, but he had this to hold on to: he believed in God the way most people believed in their own left shoulders. He could feel the presence of the Almighty with him at every hour of the day and night. He knew that God understood him better than he understood himself, and that God wanted only good things for him. Nick was not the kind of preacher who promised hellfire and destruction. He wasn't even the kind of preacher who believed in it.

Inside the church, two of the men from the Men's Study Group, Harve Griegson and Pete DeMensh, were painting the front of the new choir box. Nick hadn't been sure about putting in a choir, but some of the women had really wanted it, and he didn't think it would do any harm. Still, it was a lot different from the Holiness Church he remembered from his childhood, which had been in the old minister's ten-by-twelve-foot living room in a house where the “driveway” was nothing but mud ruts dug by the minister's big pickup truck. It had been a blessing to get to the summer and be able to worship in a field, no matter how hot it was. It had been a blessing when no more than two people had to be taken to the hospital, too, and not just because there was a legitimate worry about somebody dying from the rattlesnake venom. Dear Lord, the way the nurses at the emergency room had looked at them, every time.

“Nick?” Harve Griegson said.

“I was thinking about the snakes,” Nick said. He had turned his back on the two men while he was thinking, and he didn't turn around now. He was looking at the row on row of shiny wooden pews, every one of them planed and sanded and stained and waxed so that they looked like something out of a Hollywood movie about church. Was there something wrong with that? America had moved on since the days when his father had been a boy. It had moved on in the days since he himself had been a boy. Wasn't it right that the hill people should be moving on too?

“You're not thinking about bringing back the snakes, are you, Nick?” Harve Griegson asked. “Because, you know, I thought that was one of your better changes. My daddy died from one of those snakes. You got to wonder what people were thinking.”

“They were thinking that God keeps his promises,” Nick said, but then he was sorry he'd said it. Harve Griegson had a house with indoor plumbing, two trucks, and a big flat-screen TV, but he'd still never gone beyond his sophomore year in high school, and he barely got through that. It was one of the few things that could make Nick really angry after all these years. It was a joke, what the town used to call an “education” for the hill kids. It was worse than a joke. The only way Nick himself had been able to overcome it was that he was a natural reader. He read everything and anything, and he sat in the library one afternoon for six hours until they broke down and let him have a library card. The hill kids he'd grown up with had barely learned to read at all, and barely learned to figure, and as soon as they got within shouting distance of their fifteenth birthdays they'd gotten the message that everybody would be glad if they would just go.

“Nick,” Pete said, sounding worried, “are you all right?”

“He's thinking about bringing back the snakes,” Harve said. He sounded worried.

Nick turned around to look at them. “I'm fine. I'm not thinking about bringing back the snakes. I just saw Annie-Vic have a run-in with Alice McGuffie.”

“Annie-Vic,” Harve Griegson said.

“I still don't get it,” Pete said. “I don't get why we aren't part of that lawsuit.”

“We've got no reason to be part of that lawsuit,” Nick said. “Our children don't go to the public school. We've got our own school.”

“She thinks she's better than everybody,” Harve said. “Just look at her. Fancy college. Going off all over the place. She thinks the rest of us are brick stupid.”

“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.

“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.