Play with fire, p.18
Play with Fire, page 18
*
“It was one hell of a mess,” Philippa said. She was a bouncy, apple-cheeked woman with short, shiny brown hair. Her brown eyes had laugh lines around them and a merry grin to match, neither in evidence at the moment. “They had the school district superintendent down from Fairbanks, the president of the State Board of Education, a lawyer from the ACLU, hell, there was even a guy here from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in Seattle. Oh my yes, we had a fine time there for a while. The ACLU guy told us that giving equal time to the creation theory was unconstitutional. Some school in Louisiana tried it and the parents sued and in, oh, in 1986 I think he said, the courts ruled that teaching creationism in the public schools promoted a certain religious belief in which all the students might not share and therefore violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion.” She paused. “He said the case went all the way to the Supreme Court.”
“The Supreme Court of Louisiana?”
She shook her head. “The Supreme Court of the United States of America.”
“In Washington, D.C.?”
Philippa gave a single, firm nod. “The same.”
“Were Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them made aware of this?”
“Of course.”
“And they still brought in a ringer.”
“Yes, one of the church elders, a guy by the name of Bill Prue. He didn’t have a teaching certificate, but the district superintendent said he could come in anyway.”
“Frances Sleighter?”
The nod again. “She came down in January, I think it was, on an inspection tour or something, and gave this speech about the Molly Hootch law, and how the most important thing about it was that it won for the people in the Alaskan villages who chose to have high schools built in their communities the right to have a say in what their children were taught.”
Kate sat up straight in her chair. “The intent of the Molly Hootch law was not to promote the teaching of any community’s pet religious theories.”
“No? Doesn’t matter. Ms. Sleighter said she was happy to see the community of Chistona taking such an interest in the curriculum. She said she wished more citizens got involved in their children’s education.” Phil’s words were bitten off and bitter.
“She didn’t say anything about obeying the Constitution of the United States of America. She didn’t say anything about the oath teachers have to sign, swearing they will uphold both the constitution of the state of Alaska and the Constitution of the United States of America.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then she left. And the very next week, the Chistona Little Chapel wasn’t letting the grass grow under its feet, Bill Prue came in and told my daughter and her ten classmates that it didn’t do to take everything scientists said too literally or too seriously.”
Kate and Jim laughed.
Phil wasn’t laughing. “Then he moved from science on over into history, biblical history, and explained that the Old Testament was one long account of how God kept smiting the Jews for their collective sin of egregious pride. The gist of it was He visited Hitler on them because they were too proud.”
Kate closed her eyes and shook her head.
“Yeah. So, you’d think Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them would be satisfied. They got their licks in, the kids had been exposed to an alternative look at the beginning, middle and ending of the world. But noooooooo. Then they had to start banning books.”
“Which ones?”
Phil fortified herself with coffee. “First it was only books out of the library, books we could have at home if we wanted to let the kids read them. When we didn’t make too big a fuss over that, they started in on the textbooks.” She saw their expressions and nodded again, that single, decisive gesture that seemed to be characteristic of her. “They went after the science books first, the ones with the E word in them. Evolution,” she added, in case they didn’t know.
They did, and they didn’t like it. “Then what?” Jim said.
“The history books were next. Seabolt and company didn’t care for the chapter on ancient history, or the one on World War II.” She gave a thin smile. “And then one of the kids brought home a poem. I will never forget the title of it as long as I live. ‘Church Going,’ by Philip Larkin.”
“What’s it about?” Jim said.
“A guy who goes to church and finds nobody home,” Kate said. “What happened next?”
“As if that wasn’t bad enough,” Phil said grimly, “next the teacher plays them a song, another title I will never forget, ‘Something to Believe In,’ by a rock group named Poison.”
“What’s it about?” Jim said. “Or do I have to ask?”
“Pretty much the same thing,” Kate said, “and no, you didn’t.”
“Smart ass,” Jim said, but so only she could hear him.
“What happened?” Kate asked Phil.
Phil’s usually merry mouth was stretched into a tense line. The time had obviously been a bad one and she wasn’t enjoying reliving it. “The English teacher, she quit the following spring, before they could fire her, you know what she told me? She told me if she’d wanted to participate in a religious war she’d have moved to Jerusalem where she’d heard tell there was one already in progress. All she wanted was to try to draw some parallels, make the kids realize poetry could be as everyday as rock and roll. I mean, it’s hard enough trying to get a generation raised on MTV to pay attention in class—I hate satellite dishes—but when you’re trying to get adolescents with five-second attention spans to read literature and understand it…” She shook her head and drank coffee.
“So, she sent them home with an assignment to compare and contrast the poem with the song lyrics. One of Seabolt’s congregation got hold of the textbook with the poem in it, and so then they started purging the English books.”
“‘Purging?’” Jim said.
“Purging,” Phil said with that single nod of her head. “I don’t know what else you’d call reading through them and blacking out with Marks-a-lots whatever you found objectionable.”
Kate didn’t either.
“That wasn’t the worst of it, though.”
Kate didn’t see how it could get much worse, but she didn’t say so.
“You know how it is with the smaller schools in the bush; one teacher winds up teaching three subjects to six different grades.” Kate nodded. “It’s the same in Chistona, one school, kindergarten through the twelfth grade, forty students, two full-time teachers, two part-time. Dan taught history and science, and his second year it was his turn to teach P.E., and of course that meant he got stuck with the health class, too.”
“AIDS,” Jim said immediately. “I knew that was coming.”
“AIDS?” Kate said, momentarily confused by this jump from the lyric to the epidemic.
“Sex education,” Phil explained. “The churchy people wanted the school to teach abstinence, period. Actually, they didn’t want the school to teach anything at all on the subject, but if the state insisted, a lecture on abstinence was in order.” She added, voice acid, “Essentially what they said was that they’d rather bury their kids than teach them how to protect themselves from what’s out there.”
Kate thought of Bobby, and the girl in the bathtub.
Phil ran a hand through her hair and made a face. “Sorry. I don’t mean to sound so bitter. Anyway, Daniel didn’t agree. He told the ninth through twelfth grades where babies came from, and about sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS.”
“I knew it,” Jim said.
“My daughter, Meta, was in that class. He told them the only sure way not to catch any or all of the above was, in fact, abstinence. He even told them that joke about the pill, you know the one how the pill is one hundred percent effective only if you hold it between your knees? Meta said he got a big laugh out of that. And then he told them that sometimes abstinence wasn’t the first thing you thought of in situations where abstinence might be required, and the smart thing was to be prepared, and he suggested a couple of methods. He even showed them one.”
“Condoms,” Jim said.
“Uh-huh,” Phil said.
“Horrors,” Jim said, “the C word.”
“Uh-huh,” Phil said.
“He wasn’t preaching sexual permissiveness,” Kate said. “What were they so afraid of?”
“You mean other than the twentieth century?”
Phil got up and refilled everyone’s coffee cups and passed around a plate of doughnuts, still hot to the touch. They ate them in silence around the table, in a kitchen filled with the not unpleasant smell of deep fried fat. The linoleum floor was scrubbed down to its fading pattern, the top of the oil stove gleamed blackly, the refrigerator was festooned with clippings from the newspaper, coupons and a history quiz graded with a big, red C on it and Meta Cotton’s name written in pencil in the upper right corner.
“I would have toughed it out,” Phil said, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “If Dan had been willing, I would have fought it with him, through the school district administration, through the legislature, through the courts. Those people were subverting the learning process, not to mention contravening the Constitution.” Unknowingly she echoed Kate’s words to Jack. “I want my kids to go to college. Can you imagine what life would be like for them, going away to school with crap like that stuffed into their heads?”
Kate could imagine.
“When he left—” Phil said, and stopped. “After he was gone,” she resumed, “they hired another teacher, this time a teacher personally approved by Pastor Seabolt and every member of the Chistona Little Chapel. I knew what that meant. And there was so much bad feeling in the town. I mean, there are less than two hundred people in Chistona, it’s not like you can get away from what’s going on. I couldn’t buy my groceries anymore at Russell’s because Sally was always there. Gordon—my husband—was getting harassed because I was his wife. So I resigned my position on the school board, and Gordon and I packed up the kids and moved here.”
Yes, Kate thought, that was the way these things happened. The people of good conscience were made so uncomfortable they were forced out of their homes and communities, leaving the petty dictators and the fanatics behind to run things in their own image.
“You know what the worst thing is?” Phil said. “Meta liked Dan. She really liked him. She might even have had a bit of a crush on him, but I didn’t mind that. He encouraged her to think for herself. She read more because of him. She was going to do a comparison study of AIDS and the black plague in Europe in the Middle Ages. She found this huge book, must have been six hundred pages long, and she read the whole thing, cover to cover, that’s got to be the first time in her life she’s read a book that long all the way through, on her own. She got an A in history Dan’s first year. First time that happened, too.
“And now he’s dead.” Her eyes filled with unexpected tears. “Dammit. God damn it.” She sniffled and wiped one eye. “Sorry. I don’t usually do this.”
They sat in awkward silence while she mopped up her tears and blew her nose. Regaining control, she looked at Kate, her expression strained. “You want to hear something funny? Dan loved his father. He really did. He’d loved his wife, you could see how much he missed her every time you looked at him. He’d followed his father up here after she died because his father was the only family he had left. He wanted to be close to him, wanted Matthew to know him. He didn’t want to go up against him.”
“What made him do it then?” Kate said. “He had a home, he had family, a job. A friend of his told me he was getting into the subsistence lifestyle, so he might even have been a stayer. Why didn’t he just let it ride?”
“My best guess?”
Kate raised her shoulders and spread her hands. “Serve it up.”
“Matthew.” Phil nodded once. “Simon got to Matthew right away. Dan wasn’t going for the word according to Simon Seabolt, and Simon settled for Matthew instead.” She paused, frowning. “I think Matthew was looking for his mother, and Simon saw that need and moved right in. A mother resurrected and looking down on him from heaven was one way to fill the hole she left behind when she died. And Dan saw it happen, and this was his way of fighting back. Matthew might want to go to church, but he had to go to school, too. It was Dan’s only way of reaching out to him. His only hope of retaining contact.”
The struggle for Matthew’s soul, Kate thought. It looked as if Simon Seabolt had won that fight. At any rate, with Matthew’s father dead, the field was left to Matthew’s grandfather by default.
Then again, maybe not. She remembered those thirty-four crumpled dollar bills. Thirty-four dollars was a fortune to a ten-year-old. And he had searched her out on his bike, two miles late at night down a lonely dirt road, a quarter of a mile up a forest path almost in the dark, to ask her to find his father.
Pastor Seabolt might not have it all his own way, after all. Kate hoped not.
The kitchen door slammed. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Mom, what’s for dinner? Oh.”
The two teenagers were close in age and appearance, both bouncy and brunette like their mother. Their smiles faded as they saw the expression on their mother’s face. Two pairs of bright brown eyes looked at Kate, and slid past her to settle on Chopper Jim’s uniform. There was a short silence. “What’s wrong?” one said.
The other one, taller and a little older, probably Meta, said, “Is Dad okay?”
Phil managed a smile. “He’s fine. There’s nothing wrong, or nothing we have to talk about now. Go on, up to your rooms, do your homework.” They hesitated. “Go on now. It’s spaghetti for dinner.”
They brightened at once. “All right,” the younger girl said. She grabbed a doughnut and charged up the stairs.
Meta lingered in the doorway, looking back at her mother, looking longer at Kate this time, lingering a little longer than necessary on Chopper Jim, but she was female and that was only to be expected. “Is it Mr. Seabolt?”
Phil’s head snapped around. “What?”
The girl was solemn, but her mouth wobbled a little around the edges. “They’re saying at the school that somebody found his body. Is it true?”
The mukluk telegraph was still on the job. There was a short, heavy silence. Phil held out a hand. After a moment Meta took a step forward and took it. “Yes, honey,” Phil said gently, “I’m afraid it is.” She nodded at Kate. “This is Kate Shugak. She found him.”
Meta looked at her. “I’m sorry,” Kate said.
Meta swallowed hard. “So am I,” she said, with a valiant attempt at control. She fumbled for the right words, but at sixteen years of age the right words are never close at hand. “Mr. Seabolt… I… he was okay.” She was silent for a moment, then nodded once, firmly, her mother’s characteristic gesture. “He was okay.”
Kate thought of Tom Winklebleck. A younger Kate might have described him exactly the same way.
Nine
Moreover, they imbibe other noxious qualities besides; if, for instance, the hole of a venomous serpent be near, and the serpent breathes upon them, as they open, from their natural affinity with poisonous substances, they are readily disposed to imbibe this poison. Therefore, it will be well to exercise care in gathering them until the serpents retire, into their holes.
—Pliny
“I REGARD,” Chopper Jim said judiciously, “all forms of organized religion as a blight, an abomination and a public nuisance. It is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. I’m not talking about the guy who takes a vow of silence, or poverty, or celibacy”—he shivered—“and goes and sits on top of a mountain to meditate for the rest of his life.” He fixed Kate with a stern look. “It’s the people who follow him up that mountain, and then come back down and beat His word into their fellow man who annoy me.”
She didn’t reply, and he forked up a french fry. Mutt, well aware of who was the soft touch at this table, sat pressed against his side, looking yearningly up into his face. He forked up another french fry and she took it delicately between her teeth, casting him a look of adoration in the process. “Most of those people—not all, I admit—but most of the people who subscribe to organized religion are too lazy and or too frightened to answer the hard questions themselves, and so hand their souls over for safe-keeping to a bunch of thieves and charlatans who know more about separating fools from their money than they do about God. Any God.” He took a bite of cheeseburger. “Religion is a crutch. You lean on it long enough, you forget how to walk on your own two feet.”
Bobby had called it an addiction, Kate remembered.
They were sitting in a booth by a window of the Caribou Restaurant and Motel, a faux cedar chalet fifty feet off the Glenn Highway in beautiful downtown Glennallen, a wide spot in the road 180 miles north of Anchorage. It was a lot prettier when it wasn’t raining.
Kate was trying to eat her own meal but she didn’t have much of an appetite. Outside in the gravel parking lot, a line of recreational vehicles pulled up single file. Drivers emerged, stretching, rubbing their butts. Their vehicles were covered with mud; there must be some construction going on up the road. The mud made it hard to read the plates. Illinois? Only one vowel on one end. Must not be a redneck state.
“Furthermore,” Jim stated, “organized religion legitimizes genocide. It authorizes it, encourages it, sanctifies it, and then forgives you for anything you had to do with it. As a practicing policeman, I object to jihads, crusades, murder on a large scale of any kind. It backlogs the morgues, it absorbs too much of the coroner’s time, and it’s a mess to clean up.” He stabbed his last french fry with his fork and pointed it at Kate. “W. H. Auden was right. He said in revelation is the end of reason.”
Illinois was looking pretty good right then, redneck or not. “Some people might say, only in revelation is salvation.”
