Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “Where does the Mormon church stand on evolution?” I asked. I told myself that I just wanted to know. Brigham Young University had a thriving geology department, so that meant the Mormon church was okay with evolution, right? I was annoyed too quickly to admit to myself that Katie had hit a sore spot I had been too preoccupied to remember to cover.

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. Ray squeezed his eyes shut for an instant, opened them, stared wide-eyed into his plate, and chewed.

  Katie cleared her throat. “What’s evolution got to do with dinosaurs?” she asked.

  “Everything,” I answered. “That’s the whole game with paleontology—to try to understand how all the different species evolved, and how some of them went extinct. Isn’t that so, Nina?” I smiled at her, sure she would chime in with something George had taught her. “What did George tell you about that?”

  Nina swallowed a noodle, smiled wistfully, and said, “They drowned in the Flood.”

  That did not compute, so I ignored it for the moment. There was something more than a bit apples and oranges about Nina, this naïve young thing in rags who claimed to be the widow of one of the best-known paleontologists of his day. Did she mean Noah’s Flood? Would he have told her that as a joke? Was she being funny? “Does the Mormon church teach creationism?” I asked no one in particular.

  “What is the teaching on that, Ray?” Ava asked evenly.

  I was beginning to wonder where Mr. Ava was, or, more specifically, how long he’d been gone. Ray was sitting in what I presumed to be his father’s chair, and being asked likewise to embody his authority. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “There is no policy on that,” he said simply.

  “The church has better things to think about,” Enos added.

  “Oh,” I said. I said “Oh,” instead of the response that crowded into my head about five seconds later, which was, Isn’t the church even half as fascinated as I am with the question of how we all got here? But by the time that thought had entered my mind, I had decided it was time to keep my mouth shut before I got any more than my foot caught in it.

  Someone asked someone else to please pass the butter, and I got to looking around the walls of the room, kind of abstracting myself from the group to give myself a chance to calm down, and I noticed a portrait over the sideboard of a very plain man with eyeglasses and a gentle, patriarchal smile. Beneath the portrait, on a special shelf beside a lit candle, lay leather-bound copies of The Book of Mormon and a volume entitled Doctrine and Covenants, all carefully arranged and lovingly displayed. Resting on bows that had been artfully tipped up onto the books was the pair of eyeglasses depicted in the portrait, cocked and ready, as if their owner might at any moment return and lift them to his eyes. The tableau had the flavor of a private altar. I concluded that Ray’s father was dead.

  Katie spoke again, her tone a bit too studiedly light just to be joking. “So Em, you believe we’re descended from monkeys?”

  “No,” I answered evenly, “but I do believe that monkeys and humans are descended from a common ancestor.”

  Katie laughed. Her mother shot her a warning look that said, Be polite to our guest, but Katie said, “Then you think Adam and Eve were the parents of monkeys.”

  I stopped with a forkful of carrots halfway to my mouth. I had heard that some people believe the Adam and Eve story literally, but until that moment, I had not met that belief in direct conversation. I put down my fork and folded my hands on the edge of the table. “Let me tell you what I believe, Katie, and you can tell me what you believe, or not, whatever you please. I believe in evolution, but let me define my terms: evolution is change through time.”

  Katie rotated her head slightly to one side in an expression of doubt.

  I said, “I believe what I can observe directly, and as a scientist, I hold this empiricism to an even higher standard, requiring that the phenomena I observe be repeatable. Only then can I be sure to observe objectively, and consider all possible variables so I can hope to sort out cause and effect.”

  “What do you observe about this family?” Katie asked.

  She may not have gone to college and learned to stretch her mind around alternative beliefs, but she wasn’t stupid. I smelled a trap, but I was beginning to get riled and ran right into it. “Well, I look around this table and I see Ava’s striking good looks repeated in all of her children—the wonderful angles of the bone structure, the beautiful coloring, the tilt to the corners of the eyes—and yet I also see other traits she doesn’t have. For one thing, Chloe has her father’s nose—that is Mr. Raymond in that portrait there, isn’t it?—or should I say, a nose very much like her father’s, and I can see ears shaped like his in his grandson.”

  “And?”

  I raised my hands and interwove the fingers, taking care not to alternate them evenly. “I know from the work of other scientists—men and women whose work I trust—that each time an egg and a sperm unite, DNA reshuffles their coding information like a deck of cards, taking some traits from each parent to form a new individual. That’s change, through time. With each generation, with each new individual, there is change from its parents. That’s all evolution is. I can observe the results, and so can every person alive. We all say, ‘He has Grampa’s ears,’ and ‘She has Papa’s nose,’ so in a sense, there’s a scientist in every one of us, an observer. Perhaps this shuffling, this process of evolution, is entirely random. Perhaps it is driven by divine plan. That, I don’t know. That, I haven’t personally observed, one way or the other. I would suggest that a divine plan, if it doesn’t follow the system of physical laws that have always been present, is subjective, and therefore not repeatable or without unobservable variables.”

  Katie smiled, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Of course it’s by divine plan. Heavenly Father rewards us for living a worthy life by giving us beautiful children.”

  Here, Ray shot her a look. Perhaps there was a Mormon teaching against arrogance. Whatever was behind that look, Ray, as usual, was communicating more with his body than with words.

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to start a big debate,” I said, feeling like shit because I certainly had. “I’m a scientist. I practice the scientific method, which is designed to test ideas scientists have regarding observations we have made. That’s all it does. And these observations are made with our five senses, or with instrumented extensions of them. If you have a sixth sense that tells you why you’ve inherited this trait or that, I can’t argue.”

  Katie smiled sweetly and nodded.

  I stared across the table at her, thinking, You’d damned well better be glad there’s a scientific method, sister, because if you value your children’s capacity to transmit your good looks to another generation, you’ll be glad to know that there are scientists hard at work on your behalf. They’re studying such interesting phenomena as the drop by half in our lifetime, of the concentration of sperm in the average human male’s semen. That’s half his firepower gone; how far do you think that trend can run before you wind up with no grandchildren? And you grew up here in Utah, where there have been aboveground nuclear tests just upwind, and scientists are out there with Geiger counters. Here I dropped my mental tirade, because, of course, scientists were the ones who had made those bomb tests possible in the first place. Sometimes it’s best to keep one’s mouth shut. I counted to ten and then tried to shift the conversation away from my beliefs to hers by asking, “What exactly does the Mormon church teach about the origin of life?”

  Nina answered in a singsong voice, “We believe that Heavenly Father created the heavens, the earth, and all living things in six days. It’s just over six thousand years old.” Then, with great enthusiasm, she concluded, “We’re in the final millennium!”

  A chunk of carrot lodged in my throat. All eyes turned toward Nina. Her face had brightened and a gentle smile had found its way to her lips. She was looking heavenward, her hands clutched ecstatically to her breast.

  “Yes,” I said slowly, “according t
o the calculations of Bishop Ussher, the earth celebrated its six thousandth birthday in October 1997.”

  “But you believe differently?” Katie asked.

  I tried to count to ten again but got lost by four. “Yes, I do. Modern scientific thought and analysis suggests it’s more like four point six billion years old.”

  “Give or take a few thousand,” said Katie.

  “Katie, that’s enough,” said her mother.

  Katie’s eyes went blank. “Sorry, Mother. I meant no unkindness.”

  “Apologize to Em, dear; she’s the one you’ve been baiting.”

  Katie turned toward me, opening her mouth to speak, but I held up a hand, the one that happened to have the big wad of gauze on it. “I’m the one who should apologize. Sorry.” Uncomfortable showing my physical wound as well as my psychic ones, I dropped my hand, wincing as I hit my bandaged thumb on the edge of the table. I felt confused and agitated. The fights at my parents’ house never ended with apologies.

  Nina said, “George says that Heavenly Father made the earth just look old to test our faith.”

  As my mouth sagged open, Katie turned toward Nina. “Nina, what church do you attend?”

  Nina blinked. “Well, I’m Mormon … .” she said, letting her voice trail off oddly.

  Ray, who had scrupulously worked to train his five senses on his dinner throughout my skirmish with his sister, kept his head bowed toward his plate, but his eyes were now alert and on Nina.

  Katie said, “But I don’t recall that teaching. Which ward do you attend?”

  Nina’s mouth opened and closed again. “We … I attend … I’m not …”

  “Not supposed to say?” I asked.

  Nina closed her eyes and nodded. The color had drained from her face.

  With exasperation heavy in her voice, Ava said, “Katie, you are my most inquisitive daughter. But can you please set your curiosity aside for now? I am concerned that you should save your questions for your hours of prayer, so that your curiosity might better sustain your faith.”

  “Certainly, Mother,” Katie replied. “Kirsten, could you please pass the rolls?”

  RAY LED ME out onto the patio above the swimming pool while the other women cleared away the dinner. “I’d prefer to be helping them clear the table,” I told him. Little that I liked adhering to presumed roles of male and female behavior, I wasn’t ready to be alone with him. Not now, and maybe not ever. My brain was wired to examine everything, to consider every idea and bit of evidence it was presented, and I just couldn’t stand to consider that his world might be right and mine wrong. That would be too shattering.

  “I need to talk to you before I go home,” he said.

  And be alone with the memory of your wife, I thought. “Okay,” I said with a sigh. “But shoot low, Sheriff, I’m riding a Shetland.”

  Ray stared out into the dance of lights that was Salt Lake City. “I’m sorry if things got uncomfortable in there for you,” he said. “My sister—”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said, pulling myself toward my moral center. “Through bitter experience, I have learned that it’s better to apologize as I go along than to store up a load of guilt and idiocy for worse humiliation later on. I bought into a fight in there, and when it went bad on me, I was more defensive than the situation warranted. I’ve just been sucked into so many debates with creationists that I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve started throwing the first punch.” Even though this sounded like an apology, it was, in fact, a challenge. I wanted to know what Ray believed. I wanted to know if there was any hope for a relationship with him, any hope that I hadn’t been dreaming when I imagined that a life of questioning might be truly welcome with him. I wanted him to speak, to string words together, to tell me what he was thinking for a change.

  Ray said, “It’s true that the church has no policy on all that.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was beginning to be my reply to everything.

  “Brigham Young admired the work of Charles Darwin.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said, ‘The glory of God is intelligence.’”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s carved in the walls at BYU.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Now Ray said, “Mmm.”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess I don’t really care what other people believe as long as they’re not saying that all people who don’t agree with the power elite must suffer in silence or be exterminated.”

  The corners of Ray’s lips curled. His eyes danced. “That’s harsh.”

  I looked away. I couldn’t look into those dark blue eyes and see that spark and not feel ignited by it. “Well, yeah, but the thing is, I do feel exterminated, or just a little part of me does, every time some proselytizing zealot sticks a foot in my door and chants a pat system of beliefs at me.”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  Embarrassed, I said, “I was thinking of the Jehovah’s Witness missionaries, not yours. The closest contact I’ve had with Mormon missionaries was when a couple of your guys got lost and stopped to ask directions to the highway from a back road near my folks’ ranch. You go on a mission?” I asked, immediately wishing I hadn’t. Part of me preferred to leave my knowledge of Ray as generic as possible, lest my fantasies collapse under the harsh weight of reality.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “In New York City.”

  For once, Ray had offered a piece of information about himself unasked. It felt oddly intimate, and in spite of my best instincts, I began to lower my guard, and my mind slipped unconsciously into absorbing this bit of data, analyzing it, seeing where it fit. It made sense that he had done his mission in a city, rather than in the country. I could not see Ray in some Third World country, slogging along a dirt trail from hut to hut in a narrow black tie, black pants, white shirt, and ELDER RAYMOND badge.

  He said, “I’m hoping you won’t mind staying here a day or two to kind of keep an eye on Nina.”

  I snapped back to present time and space, furious. “And see what else I can get out of her? Maybe get her to say something self-incriminating?”

  Ray bowed his head. He’d jammed his hands into his pockets and now he hunched his shoulders to his ears. Between his teeth, he said, “She seems to trust you.”

  “She’s a grown woman. Why not just let her go home?”

  Ray said, “We don’t know she isn’t a minor.”

  “Right,” I said, “and she may or may not have been George’s wife, but she didn’t live with him. So where is home? Maybe she’s eighteen or even twenty now, but how long has she been married?”

  “And why’s she dressed in rags?” Ray continued. “What kind of care is anyone taking of her? Think about it, Em; she doesn’t come from the same kind of life you and I have known.”

  His words cut to my heart. I thought, I have not known a life like yours, but I said, “Maybe she’s a reincarnated hippie.”

  Ray sighed in exasperation.

  “No sale, Ray; you’re going to have to spell it out for me. What is it you’re trying to get out of her?”

  He said nothing for a while; then, evasively, and with great discomfort, he said, “There are groups that don’t conform to central church teachings.”

  “So?”

  “Polygamy is no longer, ah, sanctioned by the church.”

  “And?”

  Ray struggled, but got the story out. “And there have been cases of very remote … very isolated groups that have split off from the church. But they still call themselves Mormon. They get pretty far out there in their beliefs and teachings. Like marrying off fourteen-year-olds. Like … Em, Nina seems frightened. She didn’t go home when she ran away from George Dishey’s house. Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What if she fears a beating? The matron who frisked her down at the station found bruises that looked like they’d been systematically applied. She also found burn scars and in her finger
s bones that had been broken and poorly set.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Maybe she knows who killed George, and—”

  I groaned. “She told George’s corpse she’d be with him soon …”

  Seeing that he’d made his point, Ray said no more.

  I said, “But I can’t stay here tomorrow. Can’t your mother look after her or something?”

  Ray looked a question.

  Mentally shaking myself free of the irons he was putting on me, I said, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you what I learned this afternoon at the university.” I cut to the chase, explaining why I couldn’t babysit Nina. “I’m going on Dan Sherbrooke’s field trip. Don’t worry, I’ve made arrangements to get on the bus down by the Salt Palace Convention Center, not up in Snowbird. It’ll get me out of shooting range all day and I’ll learn stuff that might have a bearing on the case. If it has no bearing, then I’m in no danger going on the trip. I can ask people on the bus all kinds of things. You see, Dan and George had this competition going, and—”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got no way to hold me!” I stared straight into Ray’s eyes, and he stared back at me, furious and frightened.

  Katie spoke from the doorway. “Momma’s waiting for you to lead the prayer,” she said.

  Ray gave me two more counts of heat, spun around, and stalked into the house.

  I watched through the doorway as he stormed about the living room, marching this way and that past his astonished family, now picking up a book, now marching out to the entryway and returning with a small vial, now putting both down on an end table and rubbing his face with his hands. All waited patiently as he collected himself. No one spoke as he stared for a while out a far window, then turned, bowed his head, raked one hand through his hair, and mouthed silent words. At last, he lifted a calmed, tired face to his sisters, mother, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephew, smiled to Nina, and began to speak audibly. “Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the bounty of health and happiness Thou hast bestowed upon us. We ask a blessing upon this family and upon our guests. May each” He looked up at me. “and every one of us know Your love and guidance in the days ahead and travel always in Your light and protection. In Christ’s name, amen.”