Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  I was eleven, the sixties had begun, and the exile of John Thomas was over.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  God Takes a Shot

  Gloria has got up early and taken twenty croissants out of the freezer, enough to feed all the ghosts of the Magnolia House. It’s raining. It’s been raining off and on ever since I got here. It’s either raining or so humid it might as well be. As you walk around, your clothes chafe damply against your skin. Last night the thunder competed with the trains to keep me awake.

  I shuffle into the kitchen. A cigarette burns in an ashtray but Gloria is nowhere to be seen. On the table is a magazine called Discount Store News (‘Wal-Mart—Back to the Customer,’ and ‘Employee crunch leads to creative recruitment’). Fate is pulling her away. Under the magazines I find a copy of yesterday’s Dayton Herald-News. Gloria appears from the garden and starts heating up the croissants. I go to the dining-room which adjoins and drink coffee and read the newspaper.

  In some places the local paper publishes a list of men caught visiting prostitutes. Here the Dayton Herald prints a list of people who have not returned their library books. On the front page, the big news is a fatal crash on Route 27. At the back, mobile homes are offered for sale. A brand-new one goes for $11,995 and that includes ‘Blown ceilings (not buttons); 2 by 4 sidewalls; appliances; dead bolt locks and FREE SATELLITE!’ A used one can be had for well under $3,000. There’s a syndicated column by the conservative John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, warning us to watch our ‘values’ as the millennium approaches. F. R. Duplantier of America’s Future Inc., talks about students putting on hip-hop records for ‘their rutting peers’ who will then ‘writhe on the ground like toxic cockroaches.’

  There’s a local Religion Page with several tract-like articles by various preachers surrounded by paid advertisements taken out by rival men of God seeking to poach some business. There are forty-five churches in Dayton, despite it having a population of only 6,000. This means, according to someone I know who can do long division, that if every single Daytonian, man, woman, and child, went to church every Sunday, there’d only be about 133 people in each church. In other words, competition is fierce and the Scopes Trial was a waste of time.

  The personals are wholly innocent. The women, many of whom are divorced, enjoy church, country dancing, the great outdoors, and ‘cuddling by the fire.’ They are looking for an LTR (long-term relationship) with an honest, sincere Christian man who enjoys old-fashioned values. The men enjoy hunting, fishing, camping, racing, movies, and fun! They’re looking for the type of woman the women claim to be. Many of the men insist almost coyly that ‘friendship must come first.’

  Of course there’s crime news too, everything from alcohol abuse to vehicular manslaughter: an alphabet of sins. Five students make a home-made bomb, put it in someone’s mailbox and detonate it. Drunks crash with unnerving frequency, and dope is imported, grown, bought, sold, and used.

  There’s a Sports section which includes, along with articles on local football, basketball and baseball teams, others on fishing contests and hunting achievements. Participants in these two latter sports can be viewed proudly holding up their victims. The Chamber of Commerce figures prominently in many articles, and everyone recognises photographs of Sam Swafford, the banker-mayor, and Leon Sneed, the farmer-sheriff, both of whom have lived here all their lives.

  At one end of the town is a big Wal-Mart supermarket, at the other end the La-Z-Boy factory. In between are some cut-and-sew operations, a couple of small agricultural businesses near the railroad track, and, at the courthouse and City Hall, the business of local government. It’s a typical small Southern town except for the Scopes Trial and one other thing.

  Up on a hill at the northern edge of town is a Christian college founded in honour of the Great Commoner himself, after his comical and humiliating visit to Dayton. Comical and humiliating in my view, not theirs. It’s proudly called Bryan College and today I intend to pay a visit.

  I finish my croissant and depart. It isn’t raining. I drive past the courthouse and then make a right and get onto the highway, heading north. Toward the edge of town at the side of the highway, a sign reads, ‘Christ Above All—Bryan College—Founded 1930,’ and an arrow points up a winding residential street. Two fat drops of rain smack the windscreen ominously, but no more are forthcoming. After a while the street opens out into a small campus. The first building I see is a modern church on my left.

  Is it a coincidence that since Nietzsche said ‘God is dead,’ churches, once the most beautiful of buildings, have become the most ugly? The entire world is littered with these concrete and/ or red brick malevolencies, deformed pyramids, hunched and angular, with jabbing spires and blundering stained-glass windows. You can see them in India, you can see them in Europe, and you sure as hell can see them in America. Is it a kit you buy? ‘Erecta-church ∼ Designed by the Devil to test the devout.’ If so, this is the mid-size version and, aesthetically speaking, is pretty standard; in other words a tad less inspiring than your average bunker.

  I’m thinking these thoughts and smiling to myself when suddenly, as I drive past the Main Building and a sign saying ‘Thou Shalt Not Park Here,’ a gigantic bolt of lightning shoots out of a modest grey sky and hits the driveway about thirty yards from my front fender. It’s followed instantly by an equally huge explosion of thunder which is so violent the antenna vibrates and the raindrops on the windshield tremble.

  He’s going to take me here! He’s going to strike me down only yards from the ‘Thou Shalt Not Park Here’ sign! Hilarious! A great-aunt of mine snuffed herself, leaving a note saying, ‘Hey diddle, diddle, here goes,’ but I reckon if I get struck by lightning on the campus of a conservative Christian college, my death will provide even more laughter than that.

  About five seconds later, as I’m parking, God takes another shot. I see the lightning hit the hill across the valley. Not even close, pal.

  But then I think: with these Christians it’s all about threes—the cock crowed thrice, the Trinity, et cetera—so I park quickly and jump out. Give Him a moving target. I’m plunging up the steps toward the main entrance when—Bang!—and this one nearly hits the church! I slow down and walk calmly to the front doors, laughing. There was a time He could demolish whole armies with a single smite; now He can’t even hit an overweight atheist.

  I have an appointment with Tom Davis, a teacher at the college, who has been organising the Scopes Re-enactment Show for the last few years. I find him in an office off the large, quiet corridor on the ground floor. He is short man with unruly hair and a gentle smile. He gives the impression of someone who has a lot to do but whose good manners will not permit him to dodge his social obligations, in this case me.

  He tells me this year he has turned over the direction of the re-enactment to a woman named Gale Johnson, wife of a local preacher, who has some theatrical training. She rewrote the script and came to him with it. Now she’s already preparing the play.

  ‘It’s a slightly different slant,’ he says. ‘Are you coming back for it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I assure him. ‘It’s going to be the centrepiece of my book.’

  He offers to give me a tour of the college. The four-year course, he tells me, as we start walking around, costs about $14,000 a year, but most of the 500 students get financial aid or scholarships. When they graduate, they tend to go into teaching, business, or accounting. Some become missionaries.

  In the basement of the Main Building is a library sparsely stocked with religious books, and homilies for sale. Everyone in the library is very nice. One of the ladies behind the counter asks Tom if I’ve been up to see Professor Wise yet. Tom smiles to himself and says, no, Wise is busy this morning, and we leave.

  We go up to the second floor. The lights are on, but as we emerge from the stairwell there’s instantly a change in atmosphere and I realise why.

  Dead things. Lots of them.

  The broad corridor is lined with specimen cas
es from one end to the other, large, glass cases with deep shelves. Some are stocked with stuffed animals and birds, others with skeletons and bone fragments (Prehistoric Elephant, Mammoth), and fossils (Ammonites and Trilobites). There are snakes from Africa and India. There are lizards and fish, international insects of all sizes, and rocks of all ages (Geothite, Petrified Wood). To an uneducated eye, it seems like comprehensive proof of the great antiquity of earth and the slow development of species. Tom tells me the specimens have been sent in from all over the world from ex-students, many of them missionaries.

  ‘Who to?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, to Professor Wise,’ he says with another smile. ‘You should talk to Kurt if you get a chance, he’s a brilliant man.’

  ‘Who is this Kurt Wise?’ I ask.

  ‘He’s our science teacher. He’s busy this morning, teaching a class in Origins, but he’ll be around this afternoon. He’s one of the leading creationists in the country. Studied under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard.’

  This is someone I want to meet. Stephen Jay Gould is one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists and palaeontologists in the world. A professor at Harvard, he is a great admirer of Darwin. Like many modern biologists, he disagrees with Darwin’s adherence to an entirely gradualist theory of evolution, believing evolution can also occur in rapid bursts over periods as short as a thousand years; however, he vigorously defends his essential ideas, particularly when they are under attack from creationists.

  And here is one of his students out in the sticks, a creationist.

  I tell Tom I’ll come back in the afternoon.

  I want to interview Sheriff Leon Sneed, who plays the sheriff in the re-enactment, so I drive back into town and find the police station. It’s a small one-storey bulding next to an even lower-slung brick jail such as you might find in Soweto.

  Sneed has been variously described to me as ‘coy as a catfish’ and ‘tough and effective.’ He’s facing re-election and his opponent and predecessor, Paul Smith, has already started a vigorous campaign. It’s a nasty race and it’s going to get a whole lot nastier.

  Leon takes me into his office and sits down. He’s a compact man in his fifties with grey hair and smiling eyes, an amiable good ol’ boy and nobody’s fool. He wears tan pants, cowboy boots, and a plaid shirt. As I talk to him, the sun moves around so it shines right in his face and his eyes get narrower and narrower until eventually I can only see the faintest glimmer of eyeball in one eye, and the image of a catfish lurking back there watching me seems increasingly apt.

  He tells me about the county and its crime. He’s very down on drunk-driving, for which he’s not popular with a lot of people. They have some drug problems, a lot of domestic abuse, a small amount of cock- and dog-fighting, and some moonshine production. The marijuana growers, he tells me, now use global positioning systems. In the spring they go up into the woods and sow their crop. Each plant stands alone, deep in the woods. A note is made of each plant’s exact location on the GAPS. The growers then return on dark nights, using the GPS to guide them in, and harvest the plants one by one. This makes it extremely hard for the cops. Even in the unlikely event they catch someone, they’ve only got a small portion of his crop. Sneed says he enjoys playing the sheriff in the re-enactment but this is his last year. He doesn’t say as much, but I get the sense that he isn’t enjoying this year’s preparations as much as usual.

  After a while, he tells me he has to go off somewhere, but next time I’m down, would I like to ride with a cop for a night or two?

  I tell him I most definitely would and shake his hand gratefully. It’s one of those big clamping wads of muscle and dense flesh.

  He grins at my discomfort and says, ‘Okay, old chap, awfully nice to have met you,’ in an English accent to which I instantly reply, ‘Okay, ol’ buddy, thank y’all for lettin’ me visit with y’all,’ and he laughs and leaves me in the company of a couple of his detectives, who show me the property room at the back. It’s full of dozens of sawn-off shotguns and jam jars of moonshine and marijuana seeds.

  I ask one of the deputies how things are with the Ku Klux Klan.

  ‘Well, you don’t git a lot of that now. I tell ya, the Klan used to be okay till all the nerts started comin’ in.’

  ‘Nerts?’

  ‘Yeah, the nertcases spoiled it. In the old days the Klan ’ud take care of people: guy didn’t work, take care of his family; fella beat his wife, they’d go in there and whurp the piss out of him.’

  I go to meet Gloria and her Aunt Ruth for lunch at the Dayton Diner.

  The diner is about three blocks from the courthouse and is the social and business hub of the town, but only at lunch-time. In the evening the place is closed, beaten no doubt by the flashier fast-food temptations of the highway. An oblong room with booths down one side, it’s packed. We find a table at the front and sit down. Aunt Ruth is about to hit ninety and is a small, alert woman with neat, permed hair and bright eyes. She and Gloria look around and comment on a few people.

  Bobby-Sue, Gloria’s girlhood friend, and her new husband, Jimmy McKenzie, grandson of Ben McKenzie of Scopes Trial fame, occupy one of the booths. About seven hundred hamburgers ago, Bobby-Sue, like Gloria, must have been quite a girl. Jimmy is a local attorney running for judge in the upcoming elections. He’s a short, anxious-looking man with darting eyes. Gloria waves desultorily at Bobby-Sue, who responds in kind.

  For forty-two years Aunt Ruth owned the Highway Gardens, a flower shop in the old Aqua Hotel. When Gloria was in school here, Aunt Ruth would wake her up at 5:30 in the morning by playing ‘Amazing Grace’ on the big pump organ downstairs in her house on the hill above Dayton; then they’d drive down to the flower shop and Gloria would go to sleep again in a storeroom upstairs until it was time for school. One night, I think in the Seventies, Aunt Ruth received a call. The Aqua Hotel was on fire. She had laryngitis, but drove quickly to the place to save what she could. She got lost in the smoke and when she tried to call out for help her voice wouldn’t work and no one heard her. Finally, she escaped with whatever she could carry, but both the hotel and her shop were destroyed. She sighs and then, apropos of nothing in particular, she says, ‘People don’t care about the finer things, they just want to gratify their own wishes.’

  We lapse into an uncomfortable silence. Since Gloria came back to live here, she has been taking care of Aunt Ruth, driving her to the doctor in Chattanooga and taking her to lunch every week, and I can see the old lady is dreading her departure.

  After a while, Bobby-Sue and Jimmy McKenzie get up and start walking out.

  ‘That Bobby-Sue’s put on some weight since she got together with Jimmy,’ Aunt Ruth observes.

  ‘Yeah, an’ Jimmy’s lost some since he got shot,’ says Gloria.

  McKenzie, it turns out, was representing a woman in a divorce case. One day he was crossing the courthouse lawn from his office on the corner when the woman’s husband came out from behind a pickup truck and shot him six times with a semi-automatic, mainly in the gut and legs. The seventh bullet, which would have been the finisher, jammed. McKenzie managed to stagger over to the bank and survived.

  After lunch, I drive over to see Leland Frazier as I had promised. Before I get to the church doorway, I encounter one of the big brutes from last night and he turns out to be a jail preacher too. He tells me that 90 per cent of the crimes that put people in jail are ‘drug or akyhol related, but child molestation’s a lot too, big, big number now.’

  ‘Why’s that, d’you think?’

  ‘Well, they just miss order for their lives, they left God out of their lives and they’s just hooked on sin. This whole world’s gone wild and crazy just like God said it would in the last days.’

  At this point, Leland, a moustachioed bloodhound in search of lost souls, scampers out of his church and takes me back inside to show me around. Behind the altar is a baptismal Jacuzzi where one may be born again under a painting of Mount Hermon (I think) rendered in Italian restaurant st
yle. Next door to this mystic trough is a little room with a curtain.

  ‘This here’s the dressing room,’ Leland tells me.

  ‘So they strip off in here and then … ?’

  ‘No, no,’ he interrupts, ‘they go in in their clothes but they bring some spare to change into afterwards. Mebbe one day you’ll end up in thar,’ he says, nodding into the pit, his round little eyes glistening with the desire to plunge me in and get me all wet and sobbing and going ‘Boo-hoo, Lord save me,’ but today I’ve come prepared and as soon as he starts in on any of that, I shut him down.

  ‘So, what else have you got in here? Any tracts? Any tapes?’

  ‘I got plenty of tracts, but I don’t want to give you no tapes unless you’s comin’ back tonight.’

  I tell him I’ll do my best and we head to the rear of the church and into a back room where he has a tape duplication machine. He can duplicate a whole tape, both sides, in a minute and a half. While he duplicates a tape of the jail preacher, he starts dispensing the tracts.

  Where Will You Spend Eternity? The Choice Is Yours contains such lay questions as, ‘Now that I realize I’m guilty of sin, deserving hell, and hopeless on my own; where do I turn for help?’ The Bible Believer and Heretics gives you ten tips on how to deal with people like me: ‘Try them. Mark them. Rebuke them. Have no fellowship. Withdraw thyself. Turn away from them. Receive them not. Have no company with them. Reject them. Be ye separate.’ Is it just me or do the last seven seem to make the same point? Mary’s Command for Catholics ends with the question, ‘What Is Your Decision?’ under which are two boxes to be filled in, presumably with a cross. The first option is: ‘I choose to believe what Jesus says.’ The second option is, ‘I feel this tract is anti-Catholic,’ under which is written, ‘Friend, the reason we gave you this tract is because we love you and do not want to see you go to hell when you die. If you feel this tract is anti-Catholic, you had better re-examine your beliefs. Anyone who rejects what Jesus Christ says is Anti-Christ.’