“It’s not that easy,” I say, finding this conversation an uphill battle. My daughter has many virtues, but at this stage of her life, tolerance is not among them. During her grandfather’s lucid periods, he knew that alcohol and schizophrenia didn’t mix well, but that didn’t stop him from drinking. I haven’t always known when to quit either. People drink for a reason It may not be a good one, but nobody promised that the species wouldn’t have its perverse moments.
“Maybe not,” Sarah replies, “but you have to admire the strength that enables Pastor Norman to endure her drinking and do so much, too.”
Woogie settles down on the floor, and I rub the arthritic knuckle on my left hand. I have my own bumps.
Shane Norman doesn’t seem the type to endure much of anything.
“Maybe,” I can’t resist saying, “she drinks because of him.”
Sarah puts her own spin on my remark.
“I can see how she might feel inadequate,” she says, putting a lid over the pan.
“It would be hard to feel you could ever do enough to help a man like that.”
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. How much of this crap will I have to endure? It’s not as if Shane Norman is on the cutting edge of anything. I complain, “What bugs me is the insistence on the literal belief in the Bible. I just don’t see how you and Rainey can swallow that.”
Sarah slowly turns the knob on the oven as if she were performing an experiment for her chemistry class.
My mind goes back to my sophomore year in high school. My biology teacher, who had a stutter, told our class after we summarily covered the theory of evolution in five minutes, “You can believe you came from mon-mon-monkeys, but the ‘h’ if I-I-I do.” We all laughed, but somehow even then it didn’t bother me to think my ancestors swung down out of trees. Sarah says, “You can’t explain the world any better. If the world was originated by the Big Bang, who or what began that? Where did that first little something that originated the universe come from? Nobody knows.
Something can’t come from nothing, can it?”
I sip at a can of Miller Lite and futilely try to think.
This is why I have given up the Big Questions.
“I don’t see how,” I admit.
“Sort of like, what began in the beginning?”
“God did,” Sarah says firmly. Holding a spatula so old it precedes her birth, she turns over ground beef in the skillet. We are having spaghetti again.
“But surely not just six thousand years ago,” I say, shaking my head.
“No reputable scientist believes that.”
Smelling the meat, Woogie begins to whimper. I doubt if he’s lost any sleep over the Creation. I stroke him with my foot to hush him. Sarah says, “That’s not true. In our creation science trial even the judge who ruled in favor of the evolutionists admitted in his written opinion that no scientists have been able to explain away the discovery of the existence of radioactive polonium haloes in granite and calcified wood that call into question the inference from carbon dating methods that the earth is ancient.”
Good Lord! What’s she talking about? They are already working on her. I don’t want to get into a scientific argument I’m sure to lose.
“Even assuming you’re one hundred percent right, you just can’t isolate the one blip that nobody understands and say that justifies disregarding the overwhelming body of knowledge on the subject.”
Stubbornly, Sarah shakes her head.
“It’s not knowledge; it’s theory. You just want to be on the side that appears intellectually respectable. You’re worried about what people think. If a bunch of Harvard scientists came out and said they had just discovered evidence that the world was only about six thousand years old, soon you’d start saying the same thing.”
I get up to set the table. She’s probably right. Most lawyers are suckers for authority figures. That’s how we earn our living. I feel a little tension in the room, but she doesn’t appear to be getting angry.
“Maybe that’s true,” I admit.
“But they all say the earth’s several billion years old.”
Sarah drains the boiling water from the spaghetti, and a cloud of steam rises from the sink. A documentary on Channel 2 a few weeks ago portrayed the earth dramatically cooling down after its fiery formation. Needless to say, this one re-created the beginning of life without reference to the book of Genesis. Vapor rises into the air that condenses into rain. Lightning flashes, and somehow chemicals interact, and poof! life begins. It makes more sense to me than some giant in the sky scooping up clay and molding a human who comes to life.
“You’re just afraid of looking silly,” she says benignly dishing the noodles out onto the plates.
“It’s more comfortable for you pretending you sort of under stand science when you really don’t. All you’re doing is taking someone else’s word instead of the Bible’s.”
I bring the meat over to the table. She’s right again.
I still don’t understand why the earth rotates. No Clarence Darrow or even a William Jennings Bryan, I’d be a liability to either side of a debate on the subject. Actually I’m more interested in how much time Sarah will be spending away from me than what she is being told, which, obviously, is quite a lot, if she already has been briefed about the evidence at our own monkey trial.
Since Sunday she has spent a couple of hours every day out there, even though Norman told her she should wait.
“Citing authority is about all lawyers know how to do,” I concede.
“One good precedent is worth ten pages of legal arguments.”
Tasting the spaghetti, Sarah seizes the opening I’ve given her.
“And the Bible is the oldest precedent you could possibly cite.”
Dan, my childless expert on child rearing since Rainey’s defection, tells me the more I argue (even if I knew what I was talking about), the more she will resist. But I want to cry out the obvious, which she surely knows:
the first monkey trial showed how badly eroded the Bible’s authority is for the purpose of demonstrating the origin of life, and the trial in Little Rock wasn’t any different.
I mutter, “It’s old, all right.” I guess I do care about appearances. I don’t want Sarah to be so out of step with the mainstream that she spends her life trying to defend something most of the country outside the South discarded long ago. She is too young to get stuck with such a narrow outlook on life. I thought people were supposed to be liberal when they are young and turn into conservatives when they get old. Maybe the country has become so threatening with its steady diet of violence, drugs, and sex and out-of-control economic problems that some kids will jump at the chance to bypass the complexity and uncertainty of reality for some definite answers. I know Sarah’s answer already.
The Bible is God’s truth.
Sarah puts down her fork.
“What you can’t or won’t see is how meaningful the Bible becomes when it is believed,” my daughter lectures me, “and not just taken as metaphor or statements of faith.”
Despite Dan’s injunction not to argue, I protest, “But for something to be meaningful, surely it has to make sense and be true.” As my voice gets high, Woogie stirs restlessly under the table. He doesn’t like conflict either.
Sarah moves her glass of milk around on the place mat as she responds, “When Jesus died on the Cross for us, it didn’t make sense, did it?”
I suppress a sigh. Shut up right now, I tell myself. A total no-win situation. She wants to argue with me. It will be a test to see if she already knows enough to beat the old man. What she doesn’t know is that it will bruise our relationship, and that’s the last thing I want to happen. I’m already losing Rainey. I can’t afford to lose Sarah. I try a question, myself.
“Isn’t the reason Jesus died a question of theology?”
“No!” Sarah practically shouts, her food forgotten.
“It’s what gives my life meaning.”
I have lost my appetite.
Maybe all of this is rebellion.
I am not going to fight with her. If she wants to become an evangelist, I’ll try to learn to live with it. I’m just afraid she is going to miss so much of life. The world is a larger place than Christian Life, our house, and her school.
“You’re going to end up like Leigh Wallace,” I say stupidly, my voice trembling. Who am I kidding?
Of course, I dread the thought of her cutting herself off from the twentieth century; it’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise. True enough, so much of what exists is banal or even hideous, but at least some people weren’t afraid to think and experiment. Why throw them out?
Sarah gets up from the table, knocking her chair back against the wall.
“That’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever said!” she storms at me.
“If Leigh hadn’t turned her back on Christian Life, she wouldn’t be in the situation she’s in now.”
I stand up, too, and take my plate over to the sink.
“Most people can’t live all their lives shut up in a little cocoon. Not at your age. Now is the time for broadening yourself, questioning things. The way you’re going about this is to shut yourself off. For God’s sake, Christian Life is a fortress. It might as well be patrolled by security guards. That’s not living; that’s hiding.”
Sarah follows me over to the sink.
“I suppose what you do is real living, huh?” she yells.
“After Mom died, you’d have brought a prostitute to the house if you thought you could’ve gotten away with it. You make a living defending people who spend their lives doing evil things, and then you use people who care about you to help get them off. You finally find one woman who’s good for you, and you risk giving her AIDS and jerk her around like a puppet! If that’s what you call living, who needs it?”
Sarah is way over the line. I don’t claim to be a saint, but I’m not much worse than most people I know. I turn on the hot water full blast and squirt some detergent into the sink. I am so mad right now that if I say any thing, I might regret it the rest of my life. I realize now I have told Sarah too much about my cases over the years. Dumb as a rock, I got involved once with a woman who later died of AIDS. Everything I could possibly do wrong during that case I did, but I didn’t expose Rainey to AIDS; and, even more than anything else, it galls me to realize Sarah assumes I would.
“What makes you think I’ve ever slept with Rainey?” I ask, my voice calm as I can make it.
Sarah, who is leaning against the refrigerator, says, “I’m not that naive!”
“Not that it’s any of your business, young lady,” I say, turning to face her, “but we haven’t, and you have said just about enough for one night.”
“I’m going up to the church!” she says, checking her watch.
I slam the sponge into the sink.
“What is so wonderful about that goddamned church? Before you fall too much in love with him, you might as well know that Shane Norman had as much reason to kill Leigh Wallace’s husband as she did.”
Sarah looks at me as if I had called her mother a whore.
“What are you saying?” she asks, her voice now shaky.
I back off, knowing I shouldn’t be discussing this subject.
“I’m not saying anything except people aren’t always what they seem, and the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”
Sarah’s eyes are enormous.
“Do you have any evidence he’s involved?”
“That’s none of your business!” I say harshly, ashamed to admit I couldn’t prove right now that the man came within five miles of Art Wallace the day he was shot.
“And don’t you breathe a word of this to anybody, you hear me!”
“Yes, I hear you!” she yells and bursts into tears as she runs out of the room.
“Good!” I holler after her. My voice sends Woogie slinking away after her. What is her problem? Anger that her mother died, leaving her to be raised by a not always-model father? She has really pissed me off. The trouble is that a lot of what she says is true. Granted, very few of the women I dated after her mother’s death were candidates for a convent. Although criminal defense work doesn’t usually put one in contact with the cream of society, I doubt if most of my clients have had the energy to engage in nonstop evil. I admit I haven’t always done right by Rainey, but she has backed away a time or two herself.
Sarah wants everything to be black or white, and even though I would like fewer shades of gray myself, it doesn’t work that way. Maybe she didn’t ask to be born during the last gasp of the twentieth century, but I didn’t either. The only thing I know to do is to slog through it one crisis at a time. I shouldn’t have mentioned Shane. That was stupid. Still, she’s got to learn that the only people who don’t have feet of clay have been dead for centuries. Norman may not be a murderer, but he was an overbearing son of a bitch who tried his best to smother his daughter. Even if Leigh is guilty, as far as I’m concerned, Norman has some blood on his hands. If he had let her lead her own life, perhaps she wouldn’t be facing a murder charge.
In a few minutes Sarah returns, her dark winter coat, over her gray sweats. At least Christian Life doesn’t require designer clothes. That might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“My ride’s outside waiting. I’ll be back by nine,” she says, her voice containing the bare minimum of civility. She is no longer crying, but her eyes are red.
“Is your homework done?” I ask, exercising my prerogative, though she is almost a straight-A student.
“Yes, sir,” she says, unsmiling.
“Would you like to check it?”
She hasn’t said “sir” to me this year.
“I doubt if that’s necessary,” I reply sarcastically. Damn. I want my daughter back. I thought Christianity was supposed to be about love and acceptance. For a moment I am tempted to tell her to go to her room, but all it will do is convince her even more that I am the Devil.
After she leaves, I call Rainey, who starts the conversation by telling me she is about to go to Christian Life, too.
“I’ve tried my best not to let this bother me,” I say, feeling I’m getting the bum’s rush, “but I confess I’m really beginning to resent your meddling with Sarah’s religious faith.” There is a long silence on the other end, and while I haven’t quite said what I intended, I’m not sorry I’ve said it. I didn’t mean to sound so pompous, but damn it, I want someone else to feel a little guilty, too.
Finally, Rainey says, more evenly than I expected, “All I did was tell her about Christian Life and invite her to attend. She wasn’t bound and gagged last Sunday.”
I squeeze the receiver in frustration.
“She’s a seventeen-year-old kid who got caught up in a wave of emotion. The Bible isn’t any more literally true in some places than a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s not science; it’s myth, and you know it as well as I do. I’m sick and tired of pretending it doesn’t matter to me what she believes, when it’s clear she isn’t thinking rationally about this.”
Rainey remains maddeningly calm.
“Faith isn’t rational Gideon. That’s what scares you about it. The idea of Sarah having enough faith to commit her life to something other than a career or a man frightens you to death. After all, you can’t commit yourself to anything or anybody, because you can’t get over your wife dying sooner than she should have, and you’re terrified of losing someone again.
“As long as Sarah remained under your thumb, it was easy to be wise and tolerant, but the moment you can’t control her you want to blame me. If you think Sarah isn’t thinking with her head as well as her heart, you’re sadly mistaken. Of course she is. For the first time in her life she’s being offered something more than, here, take a number, buy this, buy that, and keep smiling until you find a job and a husband. Sure, we’re taking a risk. At Christian Life we know we’re ridiculed. You saw Inherit the Wind. The character based on William Jennings Bryan was made to look like
a senile old fool, and people such as yourself haven’t gotten any kinder since then. Sarah’s not dumb. She knows you’re upset by this, and she knows that you’ll react by making her feel as guilty as you possibly can.”
I feel myself on the verge of throwing the phone through the kitchen window. I have never heard Rainey sound more condescending. There have been times when I thought she was going to be the answer to every problem I’ve had since Rosa died. We used to talk about everything; she was the one person who would always be there no matter how bad I showed my ass.
Once, when I was fired, she offered to dip into her savings. I’ve been there for her, too. During her breast cancer scare, I was the one waiting at the hospital for the surgeon to come out of the operating room. Granted, I nearly wimped out when she first told me and probably would have if it hadn’t been for Sarah, but I was there. I’ve listened to innumerable complaints about the state hospital and worried more than I ever admitted that she would lose her social worker job when the inpatient census was drastically reduced. Now, however, she is not the same person. Although she was never dogmatic before, these days she is almost a zealot. It seems every conversation we have revolves around Christian Life.
“Maybe you ought to let Sarah speak for herself. I haven’t made her feel guilty. As a matter of fact, she’s up at the church right now. For all I care, she can move in so she can be there twenty-four hours a day if she wants to.”
Rainey laughs, as if I can’t possibly be serious.
“You want to cut her throat for going up there at all. If you would let her go gracefully, she’ll come back. Kids her age have a hard time staying committed to anything.
There’s so much else for them to do.”
I shout into the phone, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If she were our age, she would at least have tried to live a normal life. Now she won’t even be able to say she tried.”
Rainey’s voice becomes impatient.
“That’s just dumb.
You’re overreacting as usual! You make it sound as if she wants to become a preacher. Listen, I have to go.
Calm down, and she’ll be all right.”
Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction Page 12
