Living Witness (6 page)

“Do you know what a secular humanist is?” Catherine asked Barbie. “I mean, can you define it?”

“Sure I can define it,” Barbie said. “It's somebody who worships the devil and hates America.”

“I don't think they worship the devil,” Susan said tentatively. “I think they just don't believe in God.”

“If they don't believe in God they worship the devil,” Barbie said. “What else? There's only the two. I bet they have human sacrifices in that basement of theirs. I bet that's why it's got a whole kitchen right there on its own. They have human sacrifices and then they eat them.”

Catherine closed her eyes. Her head hurt. Of course, neither Barbie nor Susan had been to any of the houses out in the development. The development children tended to herd together, because most of
them did not have a lot in common with the kids who lived in the “real” town. And there was, of course, the money. The people who lived in the development were not rich by absolute standards, but by the standards of Snow Hill they beat anybody but old Annie-Vic.

Catherine opened her eyes again. If this had been forty years ago, she could have required these two young idiots to make a report to the school on what secular humanism was. These days, an assignment like that would only start another lawsuit.

“You cannot,” she said, “harass another student just because you don't like that student's beliefs. About anything. You can't corner Mallory Cornish in the girls' room and call her names. You can't follow her to the school bus and throw things at her. You can't do any of that. The first rule of the Snow Hill public schools is civility.”

“My mother says she shouldn't even be here,” Barbie said. “And my mother is right. She shouldn't be. Why doesn't she go back to where she came from? They're not even from Pennsylvania, most of the people in the development.”

“They're northeastern liberal elites,” Susan Clawde said earnestly. “My mama said so. And our pastor said so. They're northeastern liberal elites and all they want to do is to send everybody in the country to Hell because that's where they're going and they want company.”

Susan Clawde had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. Barbie didn't either. Catherine was willing to bet money that if she asked the two of them to define any of the words they were using, they'd fall flat on their faces. All they really knew was that these words described people who were, by definition, very bad.

“My mama says you don't belong here, either,” Barbie said. “My mama says you look down on everybody and God will get you one day and put you into a lake of fire. My mama says you're an atheist.”

“Actually, I'm a Methodist,” Catherine said. “But the real point here is that you can't call me names, either. If you don't like my ideas, then you have to argue about my ideas. And you have to be logical, and you have to use valid techniques of argumentation. This is a school, and in school you'll behave like human beings.”

“I thought we weren't human beings,” Barbie said. “I thought we were monkeys.”

Catherine looked away, out her window, and the first thing she saw was the new junior high school building, still barely half built. It made some kind of crazy sense that Franklin Hale and his people were opposed not only to the teaching of science but to the construction of new school facilities as well. They would leave that monstrosity sitting out there for decades. In the meantime, big bullies like Barbie McGuffie would chase younger girls around and call them “secular humanists.”

Catherine took a deep breath. “Detention,” she said. “After school every day for the next week. At the end of that time, I expect you both to apologize to Mallory Cornish in front of her entire home room class. Is that clear?”

“I've got nothing to apologize for,” Barbie said. “You're trying to take away my free speech. She's a snotty little snob and she's going to burn in Hell forever.”

“If you don't apologize, you'll stay in detention, for as long as it takes. For the rest of the year, if you have to,” Catherine said.

“You can't keep me in detention for the rest of the year,” Barbie said. “My mama is on the school board. She can fire you any time she wants to.”

“She can't fire me at all, Barbie,” Catherine said. “I've got tenure. Go find out what that word means. And get out of my office. I never thought I'd live to see the day when my school would be plagued by—well, by what the two of you are. Only God knows who is going to burn in Hell forever. You shouldn't second guess Him.”

“Yes, Miss Marbledale,” Susan said.

Barbie McGuffie snorted. “I know who's going to burn in Hell forever,” she said. “Anybody with any sense knows.”

A second later, they were gone. Catherine stared for a moment at the empty doorway. Then she took a deep breath. She never realized how tense she was in these encounters until they were over, and then she felt as if she'd never get her muscles unkinked again.

She got up and went to her window and looked out. Annie-Vic was
on her daily walk. Annie-Vic had been Catherine's hero when she was growing up. There she was, a woman who had done it, a woman who had gotten out of Snow Hill and engaged in the life of the mind.

It was too cold to be standing at the window. The cold came through the thin panes of glass and made her joints ache. Catherine wondered if any of the people in this town understood what was going on with the children in the schools, what was happening in the girls' rooms and boys' rooms and lunchrooms and on the playgrounds. That was the very worst of this.

She went back to her desk and sat down. She looked at the lesson plan in front of her. In the space for “Purpose of This Lesson,” Marty Loudan had written “to demonstrate beyond doubt that
evolution is a fact
.”

 

8

 

Franklin Hale considered himself a sensible man, but he was really a man who believed that everyone on earth was trying to trick him. Well, maybe not
everyone
. Alice McGuffie wasn't capable of it, and most of the old biddies who ran the Outreach Mission at the Baptist Church wouldn't dare to try. No, it was people like Catherine Marbledale who were trying to trick him, and all the people like her, the ones who were about to be piling into town to turn this lawsuit into a freak show. On one level, Franklin didn't blame them. This
was
a freak show. It was a bad joke. Everybody knew that the United States had been founded as a Christian nation, and that the Founding Fathers—with the maybe exception of Jefferson, who seemed to have been some kind of hippie in training all the way back in the days of the Revolutionary War—had wanted this country to stay true to the principles God gave it. That was why American law was based on the Bible, and why Americans took their oaths of office on the Bible, and said “so help me God” when they were through. Except for old Annie-Vic, of course, and Annie-Vic was, was—

Every time Franklin thought about Annie-Vic his head hurt, and
then his sinuses started to get infected. If Franklin had believed in witches and devils—but he didn't. Not every Christian went in for that kind of thing. Franklin thought Satan himself was enough evil for anybody—he'd have considered Annie-Vic to be dabbling in the dark arts. When she'd refused to swear on the Bible, and refused to say “so help me God,” he hadn't even been surprised. When she'd brought out that copy of the Constitution and pointed to Article 6, and then to that one with the oath for the President, without a single mention of the Bible and without “so help me God,” he damned near plotzed. He'd spend the entire next day looking at other copies of the Constitution just to check, because he'd been sure she'd done something to the copy she had.

Of course, Franklin didn't believe for a minute that those things proved what Annie-Vic said they proved—who'd
ever
heard of the Founding Fathers wanting to keep religion out of government? That was Communists and liberals, that's what that was—but he had come to the reluctant realization that even good intellectuals were more intellectual than they were good. He could just imagine what they were thinking, back then. They were thinking that everybody knew what they meant and why they were doing what they were doing. They were thinking they didn't want to keep the Quakers out of government because they wouldn't take oaths, or something like that. What they weren't thinking was what the Enemy would do when He got ahold of the kind of thing they'd actually done.

Annie-Vic was right in front of him, as a matter of fact. She was taking her walk. Franklin could see her pumping around the end of Main Street and saying something to Nick Frapp. Franklin didn't like Nick Frapp much more than he liked Annie-Vic, even though Nick was a Christian. In Franklin's view, Christians should stick together. If they didn't stick together, the secular humanists were going to force that evolution crap right down their children's throats, and then what would happen? The kids would all be out taking drugs and screwing like rabbits. They did that even when they had a good Christian upbringing. Franklin knew, because that was what his life in high school
had been like. He'd been captain of the varsity football squad and captain of the varsity baseball squad, and he'd spent every weekend night of his life anesthetized from the neck up and not nearly anesthetized enough from the waist down. God, but that was a long time ago. Franklin had turned fifty-four at his last birthday. He'd have gone back to all that tomorrow if he could have, and he wouldn't have given a damn if his mother complained about the vomit on his shoes.

Annie-Vic didn't actually stop to talk to Nick. She pumped away in place, her knees going up and down like pistons. Most women that age were dead. It wasn't fair that that woman was healthier than Franklin's own wife and likely to last another decade. The real problem was that they had not been entirely clear in their campaign literature when they decided to unseat the old school board. They'd had to base their arguments on incompetence, and God only knew there was incompetence to spare. That damned junior high school building, or middle school building, or whatever it was had been hanging out there on the edge of town for a couple of years, and there was still no sign of it getting done. It was crap that construction was being held up for lack of money. The town taxed the Hell out of everybody. There had to be enough money. Old Henry Wackford was always bitching and moaning about money. He liked to get his hands on it. That was the thing. Henry Wackford and all the members of the old board just liked to control all the money and do everything their own way.

If they'd been able to run the campaign straight, though, Franklin thought, they would never have gotten themselves saddled with Annie-Vic. The voters would have understood. There had been talk around town for years now. Those people from the development were like invading aliens, that's what they were. They came here bringing all their secular humanist crap and then they tried to take over the public schools, and people like Catherine Marbledale helped them. The voters would have understood the need to put a Godly board in place to bring God back into the schools and to keep out the evil rot that was ruining everything, but they hadn't been able to say anything
about that. Those lawyers they'd talked to had been adamant. Once they got into court, everything they said would be used to prove that they were trying to inject religion into the public schools, and if it looked as if they were trying to do that, then there would be a lawsuit.

Well, Franklin thought, they hadn't done any of that, they hadn't said a word about God or religion throughout the whole campaign for school board, and now they were in court anyway.

Annie-Vic was laughing at something Nick Frapp had said. Now she was moving on up Main Street on her rebound round. Franklin wanted to just go out there and ring her neck. It was what she deserved. It was what all those people deserved. All of them. Everywhere.

There was a slight cough behind him, and Franklin stepped back from the window, almost instinctively. He didn't want to be where Annie-Vic could see him when she passed. Not that she'd pay any attention to him. She never paid any attention to him except to argue with him, and he hated it when she argued with him. She always got people to laugh at him. Well, she wouldn't be laughing for long. Someday soon, she'd be confined to that great lake of fire and he'd be able to sit up in heaven and look down on every scream she let out—for all eternity. Franklin liked to contemplate eternity. His eternity had nothing at all to do with sitting on clouds and playing harps.

The cough came from behind him again, and this time he turned. It was hard to do, because he was standing right up against the plate-glass window that formed the front wall of the store and was wedged in between two tall stacks of tires. Hale 'n' Hardy, tires, that was the name of the store. He'd started it with his brother–in–law when they'd both been out of high school maybe ten years, and they still had it now, after all this time. In another month or so, they were going to open a branch out on the highway in a new strip mall that was going up with a Wal-Mart as an anchor. Franklin Hale wasn't afraid of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was for people who already knew what they were doing. Hale 'n' Hardy was for people who didn't know a lug nut from a banana split.

The cough was coming from Louise Brooker. Louise always
coughed, or “hmmed,” or something like that, instead of using actual words when she wanted to get his attention. It drove Franklin crazy. He kept himself from yelling at her by reminding himself that she couldn't live a very happy life. She was plain as ditch water. She had the kind of figure you'd be more likely to see on a mule than a woman. She had nothing to look forward to in her life. The feminists had gotten to her, that was what Franklin thought, back when she was young, before she joined Franklin's church, the feminists must have gotten to her, and now what was going to happen to her? She was going to die old and alone, with nobody to talk to but her cats.