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That was not the last time. Nina, brought up to be so peaceable, wondered if this was normal life. She couldn’t discuss it with him-their reunions were too grateful, too sweet and silly. He called her Sweet Nina-Hyena and she called him Merry Weather Lewis.
A few years ago, a new sort of sign started appearing on the roadside. For a long time there had been signs urging conversion, and those with large pink hearts and the flattening line of beats, meant to discourage abortion. What was showing up now were texts from Genesis.
In the begi
God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light.
God created Man in his own image. Male and Female created he them.
Usually there was a rainbow or a rose or some symbol of Edenic loveliness painted alongside the words.
“What is the meaning of all this?” said Nina. “It’s a change anyway. From ‘God so loved the world.’”
“It’s creationism,” said Lewis.
“I could figure that. I mean, why is it up on signs all over the place? “
Lewis said there was a definite movement now to reinforce belief in the literal Bible story.
“Adam and Eve. The same old rubbish.”
He seemed not greatly disturbed about this-or any more affronted than he might be by the crèche that was put up every Christmas not in front of a church but on the lawn of the Town Hall. On church property was one thing, he said, town property another. Nina’s Quaker teaching had not put much emphasis on Adam and Eve, so when she got home she took out the King James Bible and read the story all the way through. She was delighted by the majestic progress of those first six days-the dividing of the waters and the installation of the sun and moon and the appearance of the things that creep upon the earth and the fowls of the air, and so on.
“This is beautiful,” she said. “It’s great poetry. People should read it.”
He said that it was no better and no worse than any of the whole parcel of creation myths that had sprung up in all corners of the earth and that he was sick and tired of hearing about how beautiful it was, and the poetry.
“That’s a smoke screen,” he said. “They don’t give a piss in a pot about the poetry.”
Nina laughed. “Corners of the earth,” she said. “What kind of talk is that for a scientist? I bet it’s out of the Bible.”
She would take a chance, once in a while, to tease him on this subject. But she had to be careful not to go too far. She had to watch out for the point at which he might sense the deadly threat, the dishonoring insult.
Now and then she found a pamphlet in the mail. She didn’t read them through, and for a while she thought that everybody must be getting this sort of thing, along with the junk mail offering tropical holidays and other gaudy windfalls. Then she found out that Lewis was getting the same material at school-”creationist propaganda” as he called it-left on his desk or stuffed into his pigeonhole in the office.
“The kids have access to my desk, but who the hell is stuffing my mailbox in here?” he had said to the Principal.
The Principal had said that he couldn’t figure it out, he was getting it too. Lewis mentioned the name of a couple of teachers on the staff, a couple of crypto-Christians as he called them, and the Principal said it wasn’t worth getting your shirt in a knot about, you could always throw the stuff away.
There were questions in class. Of course, there always had been. You could count on it, Lewis said. Some little sickly saint of a girl or a smart-arse of either sex trying to throw a monkey wrench into evolution. Lewis had his tried-and-true ways of dealing with this. He told the disrupters that if they wanted the religious interpretation of the world’s history there was the Christian Separate School in the next town, which they were welcome to attend. Questions becoming more frequent, he added that there were buses to take them there, and they could collect their books and depart this day and hour if they had a mind to.
“And a fair wind to your-” he said. Later there was controversy-about whether he actually said the word “arse” or let it hang unspoken in the air. But even if he had not actually said it he had surely given offense, because everybody knew how the phrase could be completed.
The students were taking a new tack these days.
“It’s not that we necessarily want the religious view, sir. It’s just that we wonder why you don’t give it equal time.”
Lewis let himself be drawn into argument.
“It’s because I am here to teach you science, not religion.”
That was what he said he had said. There were those who reported him as saying, “Because I am not here to teach you crap.” And indeed, indeed, said Lewis, after the fourth or fifth interruption, the posing of the question in whatever slightly different way (“Do you think it hurts us to hear the other side of the story? If we get taught atheism, isn’t that sort of like teaching us some kind of religion?”), the word might have escaped his lips, and under such provocation he did not apologize for it.
“I happen to be the boss in this classroom and I decide what will be taught.”
“I thought God was the boss, sir.”
There were expulsions from the room. Parents arrived to speak to the Principal. Or they may have intended to speak to Lewis, but the Principal made sure that did not happen. Lewis heard about these interviews only later, from remarks passed, more or less jokingly, in the staff room.
“You don’t need to get worried about it,” said the Principal-his name was Paul Gibbings, and he was a few years younger than Lewis. “They just need to feel they’re being listened to. Need a bit of jollying along.”
“I’d have jollied them,” Lewis said.
“Yeah. That’s not quite the jollying I had in mind.”
“There should be a sign. No dogs or parents on the premises.”
“Something to that,” said Paul Gibbings, sighing amiably. “But I suppose they’ve got their rights.”
Letters started to appear in the local paper. One every couple of weeks, signed “Concerned Parent” or “Christian Taxpayer” or “Where Do We Go From Here?” They were well written, neatly paragraphed, competently argued, as if they might all have come from one delegated hand. They made the point that not all parents could afford the fees for the private Christian school, and yet all parents paid taxes. Therefore they deserved to have their children educated in the public schools in a way that was not offensive to, or deliberately destructive of, their faith. In scientific language, some explained how the record had been misunderstood and how discoveries that seemed to support evolution actually confirmed the Biblical account. Then came citing of Bible texts that predicted this present-day false teaching and its leading the way to the abandonment of all decent rules of life.
In time the tone changed; it grew wrathful. Agents of the Antichrist in charge of the government and the classroom. The claws of Satan stretched out towards the souls of children, who were actually forced to reiterate, on their examinations, the doctrines of damnation.
“What is the difference between Satan and the Antichrist, or is there one?” said Nina. “The Quakers were very remiss about all that.”
Lewis said that he could do without her treating all this as a joke.
“Sorry,” she said soberly. “Who do you think is really writing them? Some minister?”
He said no, it would be better organized than that. A masterminded campaign, some central office, supplying letters to be sent from local addresses. He doubted if any of it had started here, in his classroom. It was all pla