Stones (16 page)

He swallowed. His eyes focused again. “She — remember she went in-country to do a piece on the refugees? One of the militia bands grabbed her, held her for a day, and left her at the side of a road. Roughed her up, Wade said, but she’s all right. Nothing broken. I wrote down the flight number … somewhere.”

There was a notepad beside him on the table.

“It’s here, Dad. She gets in tomorrow.”

“Right. Right, tomorrow.”

I knew what was going through his mind, the question he wouldn’t have asked Wade Thompson. I didn’t ask it either.

Neither of us slept that night. In the morning we left for the airport far sooner than we had to, only to spend two and a half hours waiting at the terminal, drinking bad coffee from a vending machine. Travelers passed to and fro, walking like zombies, trailing wheeled suitcases behind them.

We didn’t talk much. Dad kept jumping up and checking the monitors that listed the flight arrivals, and after the first few times I stopped reminding him that Mom’s flight wasn’t due for a long while.

At last Qantas 1507 appeared on the monitor, flashing to show the plane had touched down. Dad called out to me and we rushed to the wide double door of gate 5B, but it was another twenty minutes before passengers, tanned and laughing and weighed down with carry-on luggage and souvenirs from Australia, began to trickle through the sliding doors. I almost missed Mom. She was in a wheelchair pushed by a steward, almost invisible behind a wide man with a stuffed koala bear under each arm.

“There she is!” I said.

When he caught sight of her, Dad groaned.

The wrinkled scarf on her head covered most of the cut just below her hairline, but not the ugly yellowy-blue bruise that encircled her left eye, which was swollen almost shut. Her left arm was in a sling. When she got to her feet, aided by the steward, she winced when she took her first step.

When Dad and I approached her, she tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

“Annie,” Dad whispered, “oh, Annie.”

She stepped up to him, put her free arm around his neck, rested her forehead on his chest and began to cry. I put my arms around both of them. I hoped that what she felt was what had filled my mind when I left the place where Hannah walked — the overwhelming relief that things are back to normal and you’re safe.

“It’s okay,” Dad whispered, his voice shaking. “We’re together again.”

Mom didn’t say a word on the way home, and we didn’t press her. She would have been impatient with falsely happy chatter. She sat with her eyes closed and her head back on the headrest. As soon as we got home, Dad put her to bed and sat in the armchair by her side all day.

When I went to bed, he was still there, reading by the small light beside the bed.

Over the next week or so, I watched my mother closely, after I heard her cry out in her sleep that first night. I stayed with her in the mornings until Dad got home at noon, then went to school.

She spent her time reading, dozing, visiting friends, watching a little bit of TV. Sometimes I caught her wandering through the house touching things, as if to convince herself that she was safe now. In the afternoons she and Dad went for a long walk. Gradually her limp faded. On the fourth day she threw away the sling. The bruise on her face began to recede. But the look that came into her eyes sometimes scared me.

She said nothing about her ordeal for a week. Then she let it out — but only to Dad. One evening when Mom had gone up to bed early, he told me.

“She can’t talk about it,” he began. “She feels humiliated. So don’t ask her anything.”

“Okay.”

“It was like Wade said. A militia band — they’re all over the place, like packs of wolves — grabbed her and her two colleagues. Teenagers with guns, out of control, vicious and unpredictable. They let the two men go right away and took your mother with them. As near as I can figure out — she wasn’t very clear about this — they wanted to punish her.”

“You mean, for what she wrote?”

“No. Scum like them had no idea what she put in her articles. They were religious extremists. Fundamentalists who thought females should stay at home, cover every square inch of their flesh with black cloth, hide behind veils and do what they’re told. Seeing a woman in shorts and a T-shirt giving orders to two guys, driving a jeep — they wanted to make an example of her.”

I was aware of an aching throb at my temples, a wave of unexpressed rage.

“They mocked her, criticized her in broken English, and when she fought back they slapped her around, kicked her, beat her up using their gun butts. When her colleagues found her the next day she was wandering the road. They almost missed her. The militia had dressed her in a black mantle and a veil. On her forehead
they had written a dirty word in red lipstick.”

Dad’s voice caught in his throat. “She doesn’t even wear lipstick,” he said. He took a deep breath. “For the first time in my life, I think I could kill somebody. That’s what I hate about people like that. They drag you down to their level.”

“Dad, did they —?”

“No. But she feels violated. ‘Unclean’ was the word she used. As if they had raped her dignity. Don’t ask her about it,” he repeated. “She needs to heal in her own way.”

As my father covered his face with his hands I wondered, at another time or in another place, would the militia have stoned my mother to death?

chapter     

I
soon fell into a routine that was unusual for me. My teachers had practically died of shock when I began to turn up every day — well, almost every day — for class. I did my best to catch up, plowed through the daily work, clapped together the assignments, survived the tests. I can’t say I was any more interested in school than ever, but I kept reminding myself that it would be over in a couple of weeks.

There was one glimmer of enthusiasm supplied by an English essay I had to write, the last one, I hoped, of my life. Paulsen had dreamed up a list of topics — he never let us choose our own; we might actually get interested in something — and when I saw mine, I just about lapsed into a coma on the spot. “Discuss the main conflict in the play
Inherit the Wind.”

“What did you get?” I asked Raphaella in the chaos of the hallway outside Paulsen’s room.

“I have to compare any three stories from Matt Cohen’s collection
Café Le Dog.”

“Cool title,” I offered.

“Yeah. What’s yours?”

I showed her. She rolled her eyes and gave me a sympathetic look.

I made the mistake of telling Mom about the assignment. I knew she was getting back to normal when she started badgering me about it.

“When’s it due?”

“I don’t know. A week or so.”

“You don’t know the due date? How can you plan it out?”

“Relax, Mom. It’ll be fine.”

I put off opening the book as long as I could and then, one day when the due date threatened like an unfed dog, I dragged an armchair out onto my little balcony and began to read, making notes as I went along.

Setting: the 1920s, a small town in Tennessee, the buckle on the Bible Belt. A boring opening, people milling around Hillsboro’s town square, excited about something, with a few jokes about monkeys. But soon I was hooked. The sinking sun was throwing long
shadows across Brant Street when I finished. I went downstairs for dinner.

Back in my room, at my desk, I began to sketch out the conflict. The play was based on a real event, the Scopes trial. Scopes had been an elementary school teacher with progressive views who taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, knowing it was against the law. At first, it looked like just another courtroom drama with a slightly interesting twist.

On a simple level the conflict was Scopes against the State of Tennessee. But I was going to argue in my essay that the trial was part of a larger issue: Science vs. Religion, the theory of evolution against the creation story told in the Bible.

I wrote furiously in point form, the ideas almost leaping out of my pen. The big conflict was played out through the personal rivalry of Scopes’s lawyer, the civil rights advocate and defender of Darwin’s theory, and the prosecutor, a religious fundamentalist opposed to anything that seemed to contradict the Bible.

So, I concluded, feeling very pleased with myself, the main conflict was played out on three levels: Scopes vs. Tennessee; Science vs. Religion; defence lawyer vs. prosecutor.

The next day after dinner I drove out along
the Old Barrie Road. I thought maybe I could clear my head before I converted my notes to essay form. It was a perfect evening, warm and still, and the late-afternoon light illuminated the fields and woods from the side with a warm, brilliant clarity.

I cruised the roads, a plume of dust chasing me along, the rumble of gravel under the tires, the occasional
ping
as a stone popped up and hit the van. I passed a farm. A man and woman came out of a barn, each lugging two pails, as a collie bounded ahead of them across the barnyard. The woman threw her head back as if laughing.

And then I began to think of the men and women and children who had walked the roads and worked the farms long before that couple and I were born. The grass came up every spring, the trees put out new leaves, the wild-flowers in the ditches beside the road returned. There was a permanence to them. But what about all those people? Were they nothing more than boxes of dust in graveyards?

If I’m more than my physical body, I thought, where does the “more than” go when I die? I didn’t buy the heaven thing — millions of spirits with or without wings and harps singing hymns and bowing to a god with an
inflated ego. But the idea that death was a sort of cancellation, a disappearance, like the flame from a blown-out candle, didn’t convince me either. People lived in other people’s memory. Was that existence?

As I drove through the hills of Oro I began to feel that the spirits of the dead were, in a way, still there, like the land and the sky. And I realized that I was only beginning to realize what Raphaella had always known.

And then, just as I turned toward Orillia, I slammed on my brakes, pounded the steering wheel and laughed out loud, even though I knew that I would have to start my essay all over again.

To say that the main conflict of
Inherit the Wind
was between science and religion, Darwin and Genesis, is misleading, I wrote. That interpretation takes us down the wrong path — trying to decide which viewpoint is right.

Scientists base their belief on provable facts and experiments that can be repeated, on logic and mathematics, on observation and information that we get through our senses. If a
statement can’t stand this kind of test, it can’t be accepted, they say. They are, I thought with a smile, really into techno-mode. On the other hand, the prosecutor, the local minister and the people of Hillsboro accepted faith, revelation, God talking to prophets, and the words in the Bible exactly as they were written. If you have faith, experiment and proof are not necessary.

So, I concluded, the real question of the play isn’t Who’s right, Darwin or the Bible? It’s What is Knowledge? Each side has a different answer to that question and won’t accept the alternative.

No wonder the Darwinists and findamentalists argue, I wrote. They can’t get together because they don’t agree on what knowledge is.

I got an A+. But I had to share the glory, because, before Raphaella, I could never have written it.

It was my mother’s wishes and Raphaella that kept my “nose to the grindstone,” as Dad happily put it when he realized that I was a half-decent student again. School was a place where Raphaella and I could be together — in the
same building, at least; we shared only one class — for part of the day, without pressure from her mother.

Raphaella met my mom, and Mom was very taken with her. I knew that Raphaella would tune in on Mom’s state of mind and help her. The two of them seemed to click right from the start, and before long they were giggling and talking in whispers like sisters.

“They’re making fun of us,” Dad would say.

“I know.”

“You love her, don’t you?” he asked once when we were alone.

“Yes.”

“Good” was all he said.

The
WME
was staged, had its two-week run, got a rave review in the local paper and a lukewarm passing mention on Barrie TV. I suffered through the final performance for Raphaella’s sake.

“I hope you realize the sacrifice I’m making,” I complained.

“Yes, Garnet. I know you’re putting your entire psyche at risk.”

I went to the cast party with her. She didn’t really want to go but felt she should, and decided definitely to attend once her mother ordered her
not to. It was a pretty wild event, held at the home of the director, a retired teacher from Georgian College who, according to Raphaella, thought he was Steven Spielberg. There was a lot of raucous talk, a lot of booze flowing, and on the patio where the smokers gathered, there was the sweet odor of the glorious weed.

Raphaella and I hung back, like two wallflowers at a grade nine dance. I tried to loosen up with a beer, but Raphaella, who never touched alcohol, was quiet. Around us, conversation swirled like a river, and laughter splashed sporadically across the room. The house was packed, hot, noisy. I felt like a blade of grass, standing elbow to chest in the throng.