Living Witness (46 page)

“Not the last time I checked,” Demarkian said.

“Then you'll know what I mean,” Henry said. “We have to do something about these people. We have to do something that brings this country back to the path of reason and science. We're drowning in a sea of religiosity. We can't be a leader in the twenty-first century if our minds are in thrall to the thirteenth. Never forget: When religion ruled the world, they called it the Dark Ages.”

Gregor Demarkian made no response at all to that. Henry sat down and clasped his hands. He was suddenly very nervous.

“Well,” he said. “I'm sure you didn't come all the way over here this early in the morning to hear me natter on about fundamentalists and the religious right. Is there something I can do for you?”

The words came out in too much of a rush. Henry swallowed. There was something very disconcerting about this man. He was too
still. And Henry didn't really know what he thought about religion. He wished the man would talk.

Gregor Demarkian shifted a little on his chair. Henry twitched.

“Well,” Demarkian said, “for starters, I think you know both of the women who were murdered, Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman. They were both plaintiffs in the lawsuit.”

“That's right,” Henry said. “Most of the plaintiffs were from the development. I think Annie-Vic and I might have been the only Snow Hill natives proper. Oh, and of course, Miss Marbledale, who is on our side even if she isn't a formal plaintiff. Although we talked about that, back when all this started. We thought it might be an interesting thing if the science teachers sued the school board. But some of them didn't want to.”

“Some of your science teachers are sympathetic to the board's position?”

“Oh, no,” Henry said. “Some of the other teachers are, the ones who don't teach science, but the science teachers are squarely behind the teaching of evolution. It's not that way everyplace. You wouldn't believe how many science teachers across the country reject evolution and want to teach Creationism themselves. But that hasn't been our problem here. No, the thing is, there's no percentage in it. The science teachers are going to have to go on teaching here, and the town has already shown its willingness to elect a school board that will persecute anybody who doesn't toe the line on its fundamentalist beliefs. Although, if you ask me, that's just because too many of our own people are completely irresponsible.”

“Irresponsible how?”

“They don't vote,” Henry said emphatically. “I'm serious, Mr. Demarkian. The people in the development, they represent the best hope Snow Hill has of emerging in the modern world. Finally. But they come from places where they don't have to worry about this kind of thing. They come from New York and California and Connecticut, where nobody would ever think of putting Creationist nonsense into the schools. There are barely any people who believe in Creationist
nonsense. But we're here, aren't we? And Snow Hill is full of the kind of people who would be more than happy to shove a ten-thousand-year-old earth down the throat of every child within screaming distance. So when the people from the development didn't vote, and the people from town did, well, you see what we got. Franklin Hale and the God-intoxicated stupids.”

“So that's why you and the other members of the old school board lost the last election? Because people from the development didn't vote?”

“Exactly,” Henry said. “Oh, some of them did, of course. Judy Cornish did. She was a wonderful woman, Mr. Demarkian. She really was. But a lot of them up there just weren't thinking. And they didn't know Franklin Hale or Alice McGuffie either. They didn't realize what they were going to be stuck with if they didn't get out and vote.”

Demarkian appeared to be only half-listening. Henry went back to fiddling with the folders on his desk.

“If you're looking around and see one of those that says Books to Print, I wish you'd tell me about it,” Henry said. “It's the file I'm looking for. I can't find it anywhere. I used to think Christine was good at filing things, but I guess she wasn't. The damned thing isn't here anywhere.”

“I thought,” Gregor Demarkian said, “that the reason the old school board was rejected and the new one was elected was essentially a practical issue. People tell me that the problem was your own and your board's lack of attention to necessary details. The teachers' contract issues, for instance. And the new school complex.”

“Bullshit,” Henry said. “The new school complex? There wouldn't be one if it weren't for me. You don't know what this place is like. They resent every dime they have to spend on education. Every dime. They'd let the schools go without paper and pencils. We've already had to start charging our kids to play sports. The buildings are falling down. They're antiquated and inadequate. It took me six years to get that project approved, and then it was only halfhearted approval. Franklin Hale would end it altogether if he could.”

“But the building on the project has gone on for a while, hasn't it?” Gregor said. “It's been something like five years?”

“Because I could never keep the town on track to keep the funding up,” Henry said. “We do our school budgets by referendum, you know. Every year, we have to go to the town and beg for money, and most of the time we can't get a budget approved for months. Hell, there have been years we haven't been able to pay our teachers, or anybody else, until practically Thanksgiving because we haven't been able to get a budget through. As soon as there were cost overruns on the project, we were in trouble, because we had to go back to the town and ask for more. And the town never wants to give more. Never. If it wasn't for the state and state law, they'd throw out the teachers' contracts, set a salary scale that looked like it was written for waitresses at the Snow Hill Diner, and refuse to hire anybody who wouldn't work for that. We'd end up with teachers who'd flunked out of ed school, or worse. We'd end up without any teachers at all.”

“I thought teachers' contracts were another of those things the town thought your board wasn't handling very well,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“They only thought we weren't handling it well because they didn't want to pay the going rate for teachers,” Henry said. “Most of these people have no respect for what teachers do. Their idea of education is a lot of rote recitation of what they think of as Timeless Truths: God Loves You, the United States of America Is Never Wrong, Don't Have Sex Until Marriage. Not that many of them listened to their own advice when they were in high school. Marcey Hale almost didn't make it to her own high school graduation, she was that close to showing. It doesn't matter. They don't think they have to make sense. They don't have the decency to be ashamed of their hypocrisy. They weren't ever going to like any of the teachers' contracts as long as the contracts had defined benefit pension plans, and that's not going to change unless the unions go bust. Which they won't.”

“All right,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“It makes me nuts when I hear people say that they voted for
Franklin Hale because of practical considerations,” Henry said. “It's a lie. It's a bald-faced, unvarnished lie. There isn't anybody in this town who doesn't know who and what Franklin is, except for some of the people from the development, and they'd never vote for him anyway because he doesn't want to spend money on schools. But as for the people of Snow Hill, the regulars, the ones who have been here forever—if they voted for Franklin Hale, it's because they wanted what he had to offer, and what he has to offer is religion in the Snow Hill Public Schools.”

 

Catherine Marbledale knew this was going to be a bad day, but she had had no idea just how bad before the students began piling out of the school busses at eight o'clock. The busses were late, too. She'd even considered calling a snow day, since there was a sleet storm to provide an excuse for it, but in the end she'd decided to let the day unfold. If you had too many snow days, they tacked on extra school days in June. None of the kids liked that, and she didn't like it, either. It was bad enough trying to teach students who didn't want to learn in the first place. It was worse trying to teach them when they felt that their sacred vacation time had been violated. Sometimes she wondered why she was still doing what she was doing. Back about ten years ago or so, she could have moved on to any private school in the country. She could have taught at Exeter and had nothing to worry about but academically gifted, intellectually ambitious kids. She should have done it. She was delusional to think that she was on a mission from God.

Marty Loudan had come out to the foyer as the number 6 bus began to unload, and he was the one who saw it first.

“Is that a meeting at the pole?” he asked. “In this weather?”

The weather was, indeed, very bad. It was much colder than it had been only yesterday, and there was precipitation on and off. Catherine went up to the big plate-glass windows and looked out. There was
indeed a meeting at the flagpole, ten or so students standing in a circle holding hands, their heads bowed.

“They've got a right to meet at the pole,” she said. “We hashed all that out a couple of years ago.”

“I'm not questioning their rights, I'm questioning their sanity,” Marty said. “They've got to be freezing out there. They're going to be sick.”

Catherine looked out again. Barbie McGuffie was there, with her knee in a cast and a pair of crutches. Most of the rest were what Catherine thought of as “quiet ones.” They came to class. They did their homework. They didn't cause trouble. They didn't perform in that spectacular, singular way that made a student stand out. Catherine didn't think she had had a student with that kind of spark since Nick Frapp. She often wondered what would have happened to him if he'd been born to a different kind of family or in a different kind of place.

“They
are
going to get sick, if they keep that up,” Marty said. “I know we're not supposed to break up the meeting until the bell rings, but maybe somebody could go out there and reason with them. You know what kind of trouble we're going to be in if one of them comes down with pneumonia.”

“All right,” Catherine said.

She wasn't wearing her coat—she'd already hung it up in her office—but she went outside anyway, pausing for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the front doors while the number 5 bus pulled in and unloaded. The number 5 bus came in from the development, and the children piling off were subdued. As far as Catherine knew, none of the students from the development participated in Meet Me At The Pole. It was yet another way the schools, and the town, had divided itself. Catherine bit her lip, and the bus pulled out, and she was looking at the circle again.

She crossed the drive to the circular grassy median where the flagpole was. The flag had not been raised, because it was not supposed to be raised in seriously bad weather, but the circle of students holding hands with their eyes closed did not seem to care one way or the other.
As Catherine drew closer, she could hear the murmuring. They were still on the Lord's Prayer, which was always the first prayer they did. That made her feel a little better. If they were still on the Lord's Prayer, they couldn't have been there long. There was no danger of pneumonia right this second.

She reached the grass and waited. When the murmuring stopped, she touched a student on the arm. It was Tom Radnor, the only kid in Snow Hill these days who was likely to end up an Eagle Scout. Catherine also thought he was probably also headed for the military, maybe with a start in ROTC somewhere small and not very prestigious. He was honest, honorable, likable and morally straight, but he was not—well, Catherine thought, he was not Nick Frapp.

“Tom,” she said. “Come inside. It's freezing out here. And there's sleet.”

“We can't come inside,” Tom said. “We want to pray. School is a prayer-free zone.”

“Tom, you know that's not true,” Catherine said. “You pray in school all the time. You get a whole table full of people praying at lunch in the cafeteria every day. I see you.”

“And we keep quiet,” Tom said. “Because that's the deal. We have to keep quiet. We can't be heard praying out loud. Our faith is something we have to hide. Only secular humanism gets to speak out loud in a public school.”

Catherine rubbed her fingers against her forehead. She was getting the kind of headache that was going to last all day.

“I wish,” she said, “that every single one of you went to Nick Frapp's church.”

“Reverend Frapp is an admirable man,” Tom said seriously, “but I don't completely agree with him on all points of faith.”

“I don't agree with him on any,” Catherine said, “but he's got more sense than to work his people up like this. I take it your pastor has been lecturing you all on Godless evolution at Wednesday night prayer meeting.”

“There were never any murders in Snow Hill before,” Tom said,
suddenly eager. “You have to see that, Miss Marbledale. Snow Hill has been here since before the Civil War, and in all that time, I'll bet there hasn't been a single other murder like these we've got now.”

“People kill each other in Snow Hill,” Catherine said. “They don't do a lot of it, but they do do it.”

“Not like this,” Tom insisted, and now the rest of the students were out of the circle and crowding around, listening. “People killed each other, sure, but it was mostly stupid stuff. Because they got too drunk or they got really angry and couldn't control themselves. But this is different. You know it is. This is—this is on purpose.”

“It's the start of something bad,” another student said.

Catherine looked around and saw that this was Brittany Morse. She was fairly sure that Brittany did not date Tom. She looked around the circle. The faces, except for Barbie McGuffie's, all belonged to students who did not usually cause trouble, and that made her uneasy.