Living Witness (3 page)

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.”

“Give me a minute,” Henry said. He looked out on Main Street again. Annie-Vic was still walking. She was ninety-one, but she walked more than he did, and she walked faster. He ran his tongue along his lips and wondered why they hurt.

“If you don't need me,” Christine said.

“Did you ever meet Annie-Vic?” Henry asked her. “Meet to talk to, I mean.”

“Of course I've met Miss Hadley,” Christine said. “She's come here, you have to remember. She's come to talk to you about the lawsuit. With those people from Fox Run Estates, and that lawyer from Philadelphia.”

“Ah,” Henry said.

“I don't like it, “ Christine said. “I don't like those people over at the development. They move here from wherever. They don't even have real homes, if you think about it. They don't put down roots. They don't care about their neighbors. They just come in here and all of a sudden we're all supposed to change to suit them.”

This was new. Christine didn't usually talk like this. Or maybe she did, at home or at church, but she didn't usually talk like this in the
office. They'd taught her better than that at Katie Gibbs. Henry looked at her long and hard. She was young and pretty in that smalltown way that wouldn't last, all fair skin and “cute” features. She had a small solitaire diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. The boy she was engaged to had never managed to make it past his second year at community college, but he had a “good” job doing something or the other at one of the technical companies, where all the
really
good jobs went to the people who lived in the development, and who had moved here from somewhere else.

“I don't like it,” Christine said again, obviously getting ready to go. “And I don't like Miss Hadley, either. She thinks she's better than the rest of us. She thinks she's smarter. She thinks we're all idiots. But she doesn't know everything. She doesn't know the Lord.”

Henry cleared his throat, but Christine ignored him. Surely she knew he “didn't know the Lord” any more than Annie-Vic did, but there was that thing again, that thing Annie-Vic did to people. If she was in the room, nobody noticed anybody else.

Christine turned on her heel and walked out, closing Henry's office door behind her. In another kind of woman, the exit would have said volumes, none of it pleasant. Christine was incapable of making that kind of gesture, or any kind of gesture, with any kind of force.

Henry went back to the window and back to looking at Annie-Vic. It wouldn't work out, in the long run, if things kept on going as they'd been going. Annie-Vic didn't know enough about what was going on to be the sole spokesperson for the lawsuit. She wouldn't know what to say when the time came to say it, or she would say whatever came into her head, whether it helped the cause or not. Besides, it was Henry who filed the lawsuit in the first place. It was Henry who put the coalition together.

“Damn,” Henry said, so close to the window that his breath fogged it.

On the street, Annie-Vic looked as strong and vigorous as a forty-year-old. She really was a force of nature. She wasn't likely to be going anywhere anytime soon.

 

4

 

Alice McGuffie couldn't remember a time when she had not been angry, and she couldn't remember a time when she had not been laughed at. People in town thought she didn't know what they said about her, but they were wrong. She had always known, all the way back to elementary school, when that prissy Sheila Conoway had called her “a really stupid moron” in the second-floor girls' bathroom right after lunch. Alice was fifty-three now—and she knew she was supposed to be over it, but Alice never got over anything. It didn't matter how “stupid” she was supposed to be, or how many people said she couldn't think her way out of a paper bag—that was Sheila Conoway again, in high school that time, when they'd had that big fight over Alice's asking questions in Miss Marbledale's class. Alice had a memory that wouldn't quit. She remembered every giggle. She remembered every sneer. Most of all she remembered every one of the hundreds of classes she had attended over time, when she had been called on and unable to answer, or just called on and left standing at her place, unable to say anything at all. That was what school had been like for Alice McGuffie, and that was why she hadn't spent a single day in a classroom after she'd finally managed to graduate from high school. She hadn't known it at the time, but she was being prepared for a Great Mission. She was on that mission now, and she didn't intend to quit.

“Vile little bitch,” she said out loud to Annie-Vic's retreating back. Alice hated Annie-Vic the way the Lord is supposed to hate sin. She hated everything about the woman, the way she walked, the way she talked, the things she said. It was the one fly in Alice's ointment at the moment that Annie-Vic was a member of the Snow Hill School Board, right at that moment when Alice herself had managed to get elected to it. Not that Alice would have run for school board on her own. It wouldn't have occurred to her. It had occurred to Franklin Hale, though, and Franklin went to Alice's church, and there they all were now, sitting where they could do some good.

Except for Annie-Vic. Except for Miss Ann-Victoria Hadley.

What did it say about a woman that not only had she never married, but that she said she never wanted to be married, that marriage only “got in the way.” Got in the way of what? Alice wanted to know. Alice had been married three times, the last time in the church, and she didn't see that it had got in her way at all.

“Vile bitch,” Alice said again, but she said it under her breath this time, and there was nobody around to hear her. It was too cold to be standing outside in nothing but her waitress's uniform. The skin on her arms had begun to feel hard and brittle. The roots of her hair stung. Oh, but she did remember it all, every day of it, from beginning to end, without a break. There hadn't even been a break in the vacations, because of course nobody ever went anywhere—this was Snow Hill. People just hung around their houses in the summers or got jobs in town. Sheila Conoway was there, but so was Miss Marbledale, coming into the grocery store to do her shopping, getting a visit from her unmarried sister who lived in Ohio, packing up her small car to go to Ohio herself when August rolled around, but only for a week, because school was about to start. Alice could smell school coming a mile away.

Miss Marbledale was still teaching at Snow Hill High School. Alice still saw her when she came into the diner for a cup of coffee or for her dinner on Thursday nights. Alice had no idea how old the woman was. She had seemed ancient forty years ago. She was even more ancient now. Alice remembered the time when stories had gone all over town about Miss Marbledale. People said that she was a “woman who liked women,” because they didn't want to come right out and call her a dyke. People said that the woman who came every summer to visit wasn't really her sister, or that she was, but it didn't matter because they were doing it anyway. Alice couldn't imagine Miss Marbledale doing it. She could imagine Miss Marbledale being a lesbian, because you had to be a lesbian to act the way Miss Marbledale acted and think the things she thought. Miss Catherine Marbledale and Miss Ann-Victoria Hadley. Maybe they were doing it together.

Alice turned away from Main Street and went back into the diner. There wasn't much in the way of business at this time of the morning. Breakfast was always full up, but that was over, and at this time of day people were at their jobs. Alice checked out the booths along the south wall. They were all empty and had all been cleaned. They all had little wire racks for sugar packets and ketchup bottles were all full. Alice had been waiting tables all her life when she met and married Lyman McGuffie, but it was only after that that she had paid any attention to how a business like this was run. There was proof positive, though, of everything she had ever believed in. All that talk about “education” was a crock. You didn't need an “education” to succeed in life. Lyman himself had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and had built up this diner with his own two hands, and it was one of the most successful businesses in town. Alice had learned nothing by staying to graduate, except that it was all a crock, and the only reason for it was to make it possible for some people to prance around acting like they were better than everybody else.

Alice checked the counter. There were two men, sitting far apart, occupying stools. Both of them had coffee. There was one waitress. The waitress was trying to look busy, because it was Lyman's one inflexible rule that nobody should ever be on the floor without looking busy. Alice went to the back of the room and let herself through the swinging doors to the kitchen. Lyman was back there, checking inventory and keeping an eye on the dishwasher who was not only loading dishes, but trying to clean off the grill.

“Well,” Lyman said.

Alice shrugged. “I couldn't help myself,” she said. “I can't always be polite, Lyman, you know that. I can't always be Christian. It's a failing. But that woman.”

“Which woman?”

“Annie-Vic.”

“Ah,” Lyman said.

Alice made a face at him, behind his back. “It's all well and good to
say ‘ah,' ” she said. “But that woman does real damage. We wouldn't be in this lawsuit if it wasn't for her.”

“It was Henry Wackford's idea to file the lawsuit,” Lyman said. “He'd have done it whether she wanted to go along with it or not.”

“Still,” Alice said. “You know what I mean. She's right in the middle of it. Who does she think she is, anyway? It was a vote. The majority won. The minority is supposed to shut up and like it.”

“Well, that's true enough,” Lyman said. He started to pull big metal tubs out of the refrigerator: shredded lettuce; shredded cheddar cheese; black California olives; tomato slices; onion slices. It was the setup for lunch. Most of the people who came in for lunch wanted hamburgers of one kind or another.

“I think they make it all up anyway,” Alice said, taking two of the tubs from him and carrying them over to the sandwich counter. “I don't think it has anything to do with science. How stupid do they think we are? Nobody could believe that stuff they're saying, and then they throw in all those words—like you're supposed to be scared of their words. ‘Allele,' that was one of those words. Do you know what that word means? Nobody knows what that word means. They make it up. And then that fussy old maid just came right out and lied. Do you know what she said?”

“No,” Lyman said. He had brought out the big stack of American cheese slices for the grilled cheese sandwiches.

“She said that survival of the fittest had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Can you believe that? Nothing to do with it! What's the theory of evolution anyway, except survival of the fittest? Everybody knows that. Everybody always has known it. They think you're going to be scared of them. They prance around with their noses in the air and they think you're just going to curl up and die because they went to Vassar and they went to Wellesley and they have degrees and you're just an ignorant moron who ought to shut up and stay in your place. Well, we didn't shut up, did we? We're not going to shut up.”

“It's a good thing you're doing,” Lyman said. “I liked the idea right off, right when Frank came and asked you to run for the school board.
I'd have run myself except I knew it wouldn't look good, because I didn't graduate. But you graduated.”

“If it wasn't for Annie-Vic, there wouldn't be any lawsuit,” Alice said again. “The whole school board would be united. Henry Wackford wouldn't have dared file a lawsuit then. He wouldn't have dared. I don't know what people in this town were thinking, voting for that old hag. She's an out-and-out atheist. You watch.”