The Seth Thomas clangs eight times. The curtains are drawn on all the windows, and the children have been put to bed. Seven candles in an assortment of holders are aligned in the center of the dining-room table to light our deliberations. My joints ache unremittingly tonight. I sit trapped in my fragile, pain-ridden body, gazing at the stack of books at the far end of the table: Miriam’s exhibits in the case for the prosecution.
At these family meetings Jerry always sits at the west end—the head—of the table, but otherwise there’s no customary seating order. Tonight I chose to sit at the foot of the table. At my right is Bernadette, gray eyes revealing only dispassionate curiosity. Next is Enid, clasping and unclasping her hands anxiously. Then Esther, as motionless as the Benin sculpture she always calls to mind. Miriam has placed herself at Jerry’s right hand. I’m sure she considers that fitting. And Grace sits at Miriam’s right hand. Grace hasn’t once looked directly at me.
Jerry slumps in his chair, tugging at his beard, his brooding frown exposing his uncertainty. Finally he pulls in a deep breath. “We have a problem to settle tonight.”
Miriam rises, and in the golden candlelight she is as beautiful as a tigress and as single-minded and incapable of mercy: she recognizes no alternative to her actions.
She says, “The problem we have to settle tonight, Jeremiah, is our children’s souls. We’ve trusted this woman to teach our children, and she is teaching them blasphemy.”
Jerry grimaces. “Miriam, I don’t think Mary means to—”
“Who knows what she means to do? Look at this.” Exhibit A, a historical geology textbook. She paws through it, stops at a time chart. “See what it says here: life begins—three and a half million years ago!”
“That’s billion, Miriam,” I say, “not million.”
She glares at me, pushes the book to the center of the table, picks up another, the physiology text I’d given Jonathan to explain human reproduction. “Look at these pictures—men and women naked, showing bodily parts that God decreed in the Garden of Eden should be covered.” That book thumps on top of the other, and I wince.
The next exhibit is another geology text. “Look at these pictures. Satan’s monsters! And this—” The geology book is tossed on top of the others, slides against a candlestick, and jars a spatter of wax onto the offending illustration of a stegosaurus. The book whose pages she is creasing in her haste is on twentieth-century art. “Look at these devil’s scrawls! Who but a worshiper of Satan could draw people like that?” Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is exposed for the family’s scrutiny as Miriam throws that book down, and if her carelessness is calculated to blind me with outrage, it is approaching success.
The last book is folio size, bound in gold-stamped linen, filled with color reproductions on thick, satiny paper. She opens it, roughly thumbs through it. “Heathen idols! Every page full of heathen idols!”
And I say coldly, “Mythology, Miriam, the study of ancient religions and legends, and you will put that book down—carefully—now.”
Her eyes, narrowed as if to contain the flaring resentment in them, fix on me. She grabs a handful of pages, and the ripping sound is accompanied by the scrape of my chair as I lunge to my feet, by shocked cries from the other women, by Jerry’s, “Stop it, Miriam!”
She responds to his command, if reluctantly, and I gaze at the beautiful book, its bent, torn pages like the wings of an injured bird. “Was it Jesus who taught you maliciousness, Miriam?”
“It was Jesus who taught me to hate evil, and these books are full of evil!”
“You say there’s evil in them, but evil is in the minds of men—and women. There’s no evil in those books!”
Jerry cuts in. “Be quiet, both of you. You’ll wake up the children.”
I sink back into my chair, pulse ringing in my ears. Yes, the children, and for them I should be able to keep my temper.
Miriam is still on her feet, and she’s also thinking of the children. “The Lord gave me my children so I could bring them up to be God-fearing. I won’t have them taught to deny there is a God!”
I respond, as levelly as I can, “Don’t be ridiculous. Where in those books does it say anything to dispute the existence of god?”
“Where?” She is triumphant now. “Wherever it says that fiendish creatures walked the Earth, that men came from monkeys!”
“You’ll never find that in any of these books. Homo sapiens did not evolve from monkeys.”
That makes her pause, but only briefly. “These books deny the Bible!”
“Only two of them have anything to do with the evolution of life on Earth, if that’s what you mean, and they’re—”
“Whatever denies the Bible denies God! The Bible is God’s truth, God’s word, and the only truth there is!”
I take a long breath, keep my voice steady when I want to rage. “You can teach the children what you call truth, but I will teach them to recognize reality as best they can.”
“Truth and reality are the same thing!”
“No! Reality will not change to conform to your idea of the truth. Reality will not bend, Miriam—not for you or me or anyone else.” I rise, cross to the old spool cabinet on the north wall, and when I return, I place what seems to be a piece of stone in front of Miriam, then go back to stand at the foot of the table. “What is that, Miriam?”
At first, she seems loath to take her eyes off me, but finally she picks up the stone that is obviously more than it seems. It is a tusklike tooth five inches long, curving to a blunt point, composed of opaque, blue-black agate with the texture of the enamel perfectly delineated.
The silence is as heavy as the tooth in Miriam’s hand. It is Jerry who breaks it. “Let me see that.” Miriam hands it to him, and he examines it. “Looks like a horn. Or a sea lion’s tooth, except bigger. What is it, Mary?”
I don’t answer him. “Miriam, what do you say it is?”
She replies impatiently, “A tooth, I suppose. What difference—”
“Yes, a tooth. But is that the material of teeth? No. It is stone. That’s a fossil, Miriam, the canine tooth of a saber-toothed cat. And it’s approximately thirty million years old.”
She laughs harshly. “There! She denies God herself—”
“Have you ever heard me deny god? You are denying reality, Miriam, and that’s my point. How do you explain this stone tooth?”
“Somebody carved it out of stone, and it was probably you.”
“Why? Simply to confound you? And with these hands?” I smile bitterly as I hold up my swollen, misshapen hands. “But what about all the millions of fossils found all over the world—found and cataloged and photographed. Did I carve all of them?”
“I’ve heard of rocks like that,” she says truculently. “Seashells made of rock. God put them in the high places to test our faith in Him.”
“Does your god lie?”
“What? No, of course not, but that—”
“Of course not! It says in the Bible: God that cannot lie. The shells in the mountains aren’t tricks or shams. They are a testament to the process of creation. You don’t even know enough to identify that tooth, yet you think you know enough to understand the mind of God!” She tries to interrupt me, but I raise my voice, indifferent to whether it will wake the children. “You live in a state of abysmal ignorance, Miriam! You can barely read, you don’t understand a fraction of what you see, yet you think you can tell other people what to believe! You call up Genesis and say—”