Living Witness (7 page)

Franklin hired all his help from people he met at church. He would never hire somebody who wasn't a Christian to work in one of his stores. You could never tell with people who weren't Christians. Some of them were all right, but most of them had no morals. How could they have morals? They didn't believe in a God that gave out rules for living.

Louise was hovering. Franklin hated hovering.

“What is it?” he asked her.

Louise cleared her throat again. “It's that man. From the place in Michigan. The law place.”

“The Ave Maria School of Law.”

“No,” Louise said, sounding desperate. “The other place. The one with
institute
in its name.”

“The Discovery Institute,” Franklin said. “That one's in Oregon.”

“Yes, excuse me. I'm sorry. I really am very bad at remembering things. Anyway, he's called here before. He wants to talk to you.”

“All right,” Franklin said. He didn't move. Annie-Vic was coming closer and closer. She didn't look like she was breathing hard. How could anybody be in that kind of shape at the age of ninety-one? She probably didn't even believe in death. She probably thought she was going to live forever. That was why she was the way she was.

Louise coughed again.

“All
right
,” Franklin said, without turning his head.

Annie-Vic was coming right up to the window. She was right on the other side of the plate glass. Her face was flushed, but it was
flushed in a good way, a healthy way. Her hair was coming loose of that bun she always put it in. Franklin wanted to shove his hand through the glass and grab her by the neck and shake her and shake her and shake her until the bones broke into pieces and her head came loose. He could almost see the blood on the sidewalk, the deep, thick red spreading out against the white of the pavement. The pavement was very white. It was that kind of chalk white it got when it had been covered with rock salt and then the salt had melted. Annie-Vic was pumping and pumping and pumping and Franklin was thinking about blood, and then she was gone.

“
Mr. Hale
. . .” Louise said, close to hysterical.

Franklin Hale turned away from the window. His head hurt again. His muscles felt as if they belonged in somebody else's body. He felt the way he did when he and Marcey almost made love but didn't quite, and then she turned away from him and left him hanging.

“I'm coming,” he said, to forestall another sigh.

Then he strode right past Louise and to the back, where his office was.

 

9

 

Annie-Vic didn't usually power walk all the way home after she'd taken her exercise. It had been at least a decade since she'd been able to do that without feeling that she was about to fall over at the end of it. Today, though, she was feeling invigorated, and she was fairly sure it wasn't because of the weather. My, but growing up in a town like this developed your antennae, and coming back to it after having been away made those antennae sharp. Or maybe not sharp. Maybe antennae couldn't be sharp. She couldn't remember, and for once she didn't care. If she had been one of those people who thought everything happened for a reason, she would have decided that the reason she had never just bolted from Snow Hill and not looked back was because of this day.

Home was up off Main Street to the north, on Carpenter, and then left up the hill on Jerusalem Cemetery Road. The Cemetary along side
the road had belonged to a small church—Congregationalist it was when it was still in operation—that served people who had moved here from New England. Annie-Vic wasn't old enough to remember that, and she didn't think anybody else was either, not the way this world worked. No, the Congregationalists had built their own church right on Main Street around the time of the American Revolution, and that was probably the last time the Calvinists had really had any influence in this part of Pennsylvania.

“Fanatics,” Annie-Vic's father used to say, when she was in high school and deemed old enough to hear “serious” discussion. Ah, but Annie-Vic's father had never been able to let go of his need for all kinds of discussion. Annie-Vic had heard it from the cradle, and so had her brothers and sisters, the whole lot of them sitting around that dinner table every night while Papa railed on and on about religion and politics and the moral philosophy of the Greeks. They'd all gone off to “good” colleges, too, in the East, just as Papa wanted them to, and they'd all left Snow Hill forever soon after that. Annie-Vic didn't know why she had never really gone, all the way, since she'd come so close a couple of times.

At Jerusalem Cemetery Road, Annie-Vic stopped power-walking and just walked. The hill was relatively steep, and her own house was at the top of it. The church had never moved their cemetery. She could still see the thin, plain headstones row on row among the weeds and brambles. The weeds and brambles grew up every summer and every winter brought them down, as if something in nature wanted you to notice where the bodies were buried. Maybe they hadn't known how to move a cemetery back then. Annie-Vic wasn't entirely sure how they moved it now. Did they dig up the bodies? If they didn't, what got moved? What would it mean to people if they came out to visit their loved ones and visited only a stone? Did people care?

This was the way she got when she was tired: she asked questions she didn't know the answers to. She reached into her utility belt and came up with her little thing of water—there was a name for the thing, but she couldn't remember it. Her grandniece had given it to
her. Her grandnieces and nephews gave a lot of things to her, and one of them had represented her when she'd threatened to sue the AAVC over not being allowed to go to Mongolia.

Up the hill. Into the house. Have some yogurt. Make some tea. Sit down in the living room and listen to the next lecture in the Music History series she'd bought from The Teaching Company. What she really needed was a series on evolution. She hadn't been able to find one of those.

The house was big and dark. It had been her father's house, and her grandfather's. It had eight bedrooms. People in town had called it a mansion when Annie-Vic was growing up, and she supposed that in the middle of the Great Depression it had looked like a mansion. It wasn't one, though. It had only had a single bathroom back then. Every morning was an agony of waiting in line.

Annie-Vic let herself into the pantry door and sat down on the bench there to take off her walking shoes. They were the kind of shoes she would have called “sneakers” when she was younger, but you couldn't call something a “sneaker” when it cost a hundred and fifty dollars at the discount store. There were four bathrooms in this house now, “retrofitted” in the early eighties at the insistence of her plain nieces and nephews, whose parents had all been dying out and who saw old Aunt Annie-Vic as some kind of parental substitute. Annie-Vic didn't understand any of that nurturing stuff. She really didn't. Psychology, like music history, was not something she'd spent a lot of time studying at Vassar.

She'd left a pair of ballet flats under the bench for when she came inside. She was damned if she was going to start wandering around the house in her slippers like an old person. She put on the ballet flats and went through into the kitchen. It had been updated in the eighties, too, but it looked old-fashioned, nevertheless. Annie-Vic wasn't much interested in her kitchen.

One of those things she remembered about being very young was Halloween, and running in among the gravestones of the Jerusalem Cemetery, as if by making enough noise they could raise the dead.
People thought they were crazy, those Hadley children, running around in there among the tombstones as if it didn't matter. But then, people had thought they were crazy anyway, all the time. If Annie-Vic had to put a finger on what it was that made her so angry about this town—and she was angry about it; the place made steam want to come out of her ears—it was the way people had been about the cemetery. It was bad enough to be ignorant. It was something truly evil to be proud of being ignorant, and that was what too many people in this town were.

“Proud of being ignorant and proud of being stupid,” Annie-Vic said out loud, because at her age she could talk to herself in her own house without being branded some kind of basket case.

There was something very wrong with people who were proud of what they didn't know and proud of what they couldn't understand, and there was something even more wrong with a place that encouraged it. That was what this whole thing with evolution was all about. It wasn't about religion. Not really. Most of the religious people in town didn't care one way or the other, or they took their problems up with their Sunday school or they sent their children to Nick Frapp's Christian academy.

No, no, what this thing was really about was the temerity of some people to consider themselves smarter than Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie, a pair of prime idiots at the best of times and now worse off than the Sweeney child at the other end of the road, and the Sweeney child had Down syndrome. It was the resentment, the anger, the endless carping and fury at the mere existence of people who were not only intelligent but willing to work at it, who wouldn't sit down and pretend that being stupid was
just as good
.

“I'm
just as good
as you are,” Alice McGuffie had said, coming out of the diner this morning with her voice at full shriek.

“No, you're not,” Annie-Vic had told her, and then gone on power-walking up Main Street while Alice went on shrieking, this time something about burning in Hell.

Annie-Vic was old enough to remember when respect was something that had to be earned, and something that could be lost, too.
She didn't believe in Hell any more than she believed in heaven, but she knew that Alice McGuffie wasn't even
just as good
as Richard Nixon, who had been a vile man but not a willfully stupid one.

Annie-Vic hated stupidity more than she hated anything else on earth.

She went on through to the dining room. The swinging door with its felt covering rocked a little on its hinges. She would have to ask the proper grandnephew to do something about it before it fell on her foot. The dining room table was covered with papers having to do with the lawsuit, legal papers and informational brochures sent out by the National Center for Science Education explaining evolution in the simplest, clearest, most concise possible way, as if it were possible to get through to people like Franklin Hale, which it wasn't.

Annie-Vic ran her hands over the mess and then proceeded to the living room. The ceilings in this house were so high they disappeared into darkness over her head. The furniture was so dark that it seemed to fade into the shadows. It had been her parents' furniture, all of it. She should have sold it and brought something new in long ago.

She was thinking about the furniture when the attack came—not about evolution, or intelligence and stupidity, or even her lunch—and at the last minute, when her assailant stepped out of the darkness of the niche next to the fireplace and the steel pipe connected with her midsection and knocked the air right out of her, all she could think of was:
That's not who it's supposed to be at all
.

 

Nor should the reality of “irreducible complexity” be ignored. While presenting macroevolution as truth, the schools should at least own the fact that “since” it is true, irreducibly complex organisms must have therefore evolved via punctuated equilibrium, and that this phenomenon happened many, many times. All the interconnected parts must have emerged fully developed (or developed enough to provide a beneficial function) in an instant
.

—“Ken” of the blog
http://walrus.townhall.com
, quoted
in
Townhall Magazine
March, 2008

 

How natural selection can drive the evolution of tightly integrated molecular systems
—
those in which the function of each part depends on its interactions with the other parts
—
has been an unsolved issue in evolutionary biology. Advocates of intelligent design argue that such systems are “irreducibly complex” and thus incompatible with gradual evolution by natural selection
.

“Our work demonstrates a fundamental error in the current challenges to Darwinism,” said Thornton. “New techniques allow us to see how ancient genes and their functions evolved hundreds of millions of years ago. We found complexity evolved piecemeal through a process of Molecular Exploitation
—
old genes, constrained by selection for entirely different functions, have been recruited by evolution to participate in new interactions and new functions.”

—press release from the University of Oregon

 

 

 

Gregor Demarkian had not been part of the staging of his first wedding—and he would never have used “staging” to describe it, because he'd have been set on by dozens of little old Armenian ladies, wanting to know why he had no respect for the Church. He was using “staging” to describe what was happening to his second wedding, though, because it was a word even Father Tibor Kasparian couldn't object to, under the circumstances. And the circumstances were getting more insane by the day. It had reached the point, this morning, that Gregor had been convinced he was hearing things. As it turned out, he wasn't, and the sound of Bennis's voice floating in from the living room was just an aspect of reality he hadn't been smart enough to anticipate.

“You give the swans something to make them constipated,” she was saying. “That way, they don't crap all over the buffet.”

Gregor was lying in bed, which made him feel more than a little guilty. It had to be seven o'clock. He was usually showered and dressed and on his way to the Ararat by now. Even the gloom of the day outside didn't give him any excuse for slacking off. He lived in
gloomy days. He had chosen to spend his life in Philadelphia instead of the South, which was where most of his colleagues from the Bureau eventually retired. He had nothing against the South, as far as he knew. He had nothing against sunny days and temperatures that never dipped far below forty. He was just used to Philadelphia, that was all. He thought of it as home.