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.
When Raphaella went upstairs to the washroom I walked across the damp grass to the shore of the lake. The moon was full, casting sliver lace on the surface of the water. A small sailboat, moored offshore, bobbed peacefully, the halyard ping-pinging against the mast.
A sudden raunchy laugh burst my reverie and I went back to the house. The patio was lit up with hanging multi-colored globes, and the two glass-topped tables were littered with beer bottles and empty paper plates. Somebody had ground a cigar butt into the glass.
A young woman stepped clumsily through the sliding door and onto the flagstones. At first I didn’t recognize her. In a glittering silver dress with spaghetti straps, a dolphin tattoo on her shoulder, hair artfully arranged to look tousled, she didn’t look much like the nun she had played in the WME, the one who sings, “How do we solve a problem like Maria?”
“Oh,” she said when she noticed me.
I excused myself and reached for the door handle.
“You’re Garnet.”
“That’s right.”
On her tanned skin, just above the dress line, was a wisp of cigarette ash, as if someone had used the space between her partially visible breasts as an ashtray. She swayed slightly as she spoke.
“I’ve seen you around school. I’m a grade below you.”
She put a cigarette between glossy lips — her lipstick color matched her dress — and lit it with a plastic throw-away lighter.
“I enjoyed the musical,” I lied, unable to think of anything else to say. Garnet the Tongue-tied.
She held her cigarette down at her side, raised it to take a fast puff, lowered it again in a jerky, awkward motion, as if she was just learning to smoke and didn’t particularly like it.
“It was alright.” She looked me up and down. I felt like a lamp on sale in a department store. “You’re going out with Raphaella.”
“That’s right.”
“She still belong to that cult?”
“That what?”
“I heard she was a member of some cult or other. They’re into Satan worship and crap like that. Her mother, too. The one who owns the health food store. Nuts and berries, you know. A watchacallit. A coven. That’s why she left Park Street, I heard. People found out and she got hassled.” She took a rapid hit off the cigarette. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I don’t hang around with the right people.”
She didn’t get the hint. “I also heard that mark on her face, that stain, sort of, she got in some accident in a ritual,” she confided, and sucked on the cigarette. She blew the smoke from her mouth as if it had a bad taste and licked her lips. “Anyway, I’m not saying it’s true. I never seen anything funny going on all the time she was working on the show. I just heard things, that’s all.”
“Excuse me,” I said, sliding the door open. “I think my car is on fire.”
I entered the house, struck by the racket and heat, seething inside. A shrill female laugh grated on my ears. Somebody jostled me, pushing through the crowd, gripping two beers in each hand by the bottle necks. The background music — some pathetic rock group whose claim to fame was trashing hotel rooms — hurt my ears.
The girl on the patio had made me sick. She passed on hurtful gossip, then disavowed it all by saying she had “just heard it,” a kind of verbal hit-and-run. I wanted to find Raphaella and get out of there.
She was by the buffet table, a long linen-covered disaster area that looked as if it had been carpet-bombed. Glasses, some empty, some half full, some knocked over; plates with lumps of uneaten food; stains on the cloth. A wedge of orange clung to the inside of an empty punch bowl.
The director of the WME had his arm around Raphaella’s shoulder, kneading her upper arm as he spoke earnestly into her ear. In his free hand he held a drink, and he waved it as he talked, slopping liquor onto the carpet.
Raphaella looked my way, caught sight of me, desperately mouthed “Help.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Mackie,” I shouted above the din.
The director turned my way, a look of irritation on his reddened face. He reeked of whiskey and expensive cologne. He removed his arm from Raphaella’s shoulder, raked his fingers through his long salt-and-pepper hair.
“Eh?” he said.
I felt like punching him. Instead, I said, “Miss Skye, your ride is here, waiting in the driveway.”
Raphaella smirked and winked. “Why, thank you, Mr. Havelock. You are most kind.”
“I can drive you home, dear,” Mackie slurred, stepping between us with his back to me. “Be glad to.” His voice was syrupy.
“I’d better not,” I heard Raphaella say. “It’s my boyfriend and he hasn’t been the same since he got out of jail. Temper, you see. I just hope,” she added, putting down her glass of ginger ale and stepping away from Mackie, “that he didn’t bring his biker friends with him this time.”
“Eh?” Mackie said again.
He stood with his mouth open as we left him and plowed through the raucous crowd.
We drove to my house and played cards with Mom and Dad. They were trying to teach us to play bridge. After a while, I took Raphaella home.
“We sure are dull,” I remarked as I turned onto her street.
“Leaving the party, you mean?”
“Yeah, and spending the evening with my parents. Make sure you mention that to your mother. That I’m boring. Unexciting. Unadventurous. And therefore no threat.”
“I already have,” she said, laughing, and kissed me good night.
I had decided not to say anything about the girl in the silver dress and what she had told me. Raphaella and her mother, part of a cult? Ridiculous. And yet, I had to admit I had doubts. The key to a cult was, I supposed, secrecy. Raphaella had things that she wouldn’t talk about. And she had studied the occult. She knew about numerology.
I drove home. Whether I was angrier at Silver-dress for the gossip or myself for my doubts, I couldn’t tell.