Into That Darkness (20 page)

The woman rolled a sore shoulder, frowned.

But this faith influenced his teaching, and his teaching influenced his students. As will happen, I suppose. One of his students wrote in her graduating essay that only the church had been brave enough to challenge the scientists. She wrote that evolution is an attempt to take people away from God and the truth. She thought it was sad that so many people in the world today do not want to know the truth of their origins. This man, her teacher, wrote in the margins of that essay:
But the real evidence has been suppressed
and most people don't realize it.

You'll think I'm making this up, the old man said. I'm not making this up. All of this was printed in the newspaper when the fighting broke out. There were more examples. Another student argued for the necessity of teaching all theories of creation in the classroom, and in this way allowing the students to decide whether they came from apes or not. An honour-roll student acknowledged the global conspiracy of scientists to discredit facts that proved the earth to be not even twenty thousand years old. Scientists, they argued, should not be allowed to brainwash people any longer. It was clear to them that all evidence confirmed evolution to be impossible. The scientists needed to be stopped.

He gazed fixedly at the white storm of lights below, the shadowed wicker of bent girders and gaping masonry and the men trudging through it. He touched the paper cup gingerly to test its heat but did not lift it nor move it. Then he grunted deep in his throat, tapped the ash from his cigarette. Our inclination to believe begins early, he murmured. We all of us have to rely on advice, on opinion. That's how we learn.

What did the parents think of all this? the woman asked.

The parents of the students? You'd expect them to be outraged?

I don't know. Yes.

The old man grimaced. This man, this creationist, entered his classroom one morning to find the principal and a school board official waiting for him. The three men sat facing each other in the small desks and while the principal spoke the creationist folded his hands before him on the desk. He had big scarred hands, a strangler's hands.

It seems complaints had been lodged. Newspapers had been notified. On the evening news in Calgary a segment had been aired and the teacher was now to be fired and a replacement from the city brought in. You must understand, the old man said, how difficult it was. These men were friends. All three attended the same church and all three believed vehemently in the literal bible. But to the creationist, there could be only the one moral path. God allowed for no half measures. And so he cleared out his desk that very morning and carried his possessions—pens, paperweights, books—in a cardboard box out to his truck and set them rattling down on the floor and slammed the door shut and he didn't teach in that town again. It's an old story. The man of God set ablaze in his beliefs suffers the more for them. Had he believed less fiercely or lived less admirably he'd have met with less misfortune. Can I help you with that?

The woman shook her head. With her good hand she was prising off the lid and then she blew the steam from her coffee and drank.

The old man continued. And so a replacement teacher drove out from the city that very week. He arrived in an old sedan and rented a room in a local boarding house and there he shelved and drawered his few books and clothes. There were news reporters from the city staying nearby who wished to interview him but he asked them to leave. He was a tall man with a wind-pitted face and hard black eyes and he was very thin. A man more voice than flesh who in his spare time was something of an amateur geologist.

I think I can see where this is going, the woman said.

You think so?

What happened to the geologist?

Well. He was a man of science, of course. But he believed the true value of science lay not in the opening of nature's secrets, but in the opening of men's minds to such secrets. He believed truth holds no value except to the extent that it leads us back to ourselves.

He doesn't sound like much of a scientist.

No? He understood that men do not hunger for truth but for belief.

Is that right. And what do women hunger for?

Men.

She smiled.

In any case, he said. Truth holds little sway in the hearts of the devout. The geologist had
wanted
this assignment. He'd been angered by what the creationist had done, he was eager to teach the truth. But he found that nobody believed what he said. His students were suspicious of his science and countered his facts with the creationist's theories.

How? What did they say?

The old man shrugged. What are facts when stripped of their authority? Just testimony. The students demanded the geologist account for various mysteries in the world and when he'd fumble for an answer they'd laugh.
What is air for?
they'd ask.
What's the
point of water?

The geologist was troubled by this. But when he spoke to his colleagues he found many of them had been persuaded by the creationist's claims as well and he too began to doubt. Not the facts, of course, the old man said quickly. But the purpose behind the facts, whether it mattered what men believed. He would lie awake in his small rented bed at night with his heels hanging over the edge of the mattress and he'd watch the headlights slide across the far wall. The school library had many books which supported creationism and when the geologist brought in books and films with photographic images of erosion, fossils, sedimentary deposits, all were dismissed as fakes. Evidence from assorted journals was shrugged off. The students believed it was all a scientific hoax of the greatest magnitude, a conspiracy. The creationist's firing had only fuelled their conviction. What source could be believed? What evidence upheld? In their minds, if all the world was deceived, who could be trusted?

He regarded her, wetting his lips as if unsure how to proceed. He said, At last it occurred to the geologist to take his students on a field trip. He'd show them the badlands. He'd explain to them the sandstone hoodoos eroding there beyond the old museum. He rented an old bus. Its folded doors leaked and whistled with wind while he drove and its tires roared up through the steel wells so that he had to shout to be heard but still it took his students there in one piece. And so they went.

The old man described the features of that country with great precision and care. The low grey sky and its flat light and the alluvial shifts and patterns of wind. A moonscape of sheer rock wall and hawks in slow spirals overhead like curls of blown dust. The museum itself an inelegant wood structure flexing and contracting in the dry air through whose dark windows their watery reflections strode warping and strange. In the grainy light sat cabinets of tagged bones and water-stained skulls many millennia lost. Garish paintings. Herds of monster lizards. A gruesome wire-strung devil like a thing of nightmare suspended in the air overhead. A local guide led them along a walk discussing the rock formations and her voice shivered and distorted in the smooth rocks and came back and faded. Lichens and weeds and fierce yellow grasses among the stones. The geologist had phoned in reporters from the city who also spoke with the students. Free books were distributed. A film shown. In the museum courtyard boys clambered up the spine of the Albertosaurus and girls grinned shyly under its painted fangs and the geologist snapped their photos.

Surely it failed, the woman said. Surely they weren't convinced.

On the contrary. They returned to their town convinced by evolution and of the gradual nature of geologic change. And that evening they all watched the national news. It was a program on the students and they were interviewed and discussed.

The woman frowned. What about the parents?

The old man nodded. The parents. The parents had been convinced by the creationist's claims too. The school board's forcefulness on this issue appalled them. They kept their children home from school in protest. A public meeting was called one Tuesday night in the high school gymnasium. A chance for all sides to speak out. And so once again the reporters came back.

The old man watched his cigarette stub burn steadily down and with great delicacy he transferred it to his other hand. Thin webs of stars were shining in the blackness.

Chairs were set up in rows and the big steel doors wedged open onto the night air as the hall filled. The parents were seated in the folding chairs, and in the back other townsfolk stood in a blue haze of smoke under the basketball netting where the backboards had been dragged aside and tied off. A microphone stood at one end of the aisle.

Anyone who wished to speak was allowed. One man said that if the earth were even half its age the land would have eroded as flat as a table millennia ago. A woman announced that studies had proven the ocean's accumulated sediments not older than four thousand years. The local pastor plucked the microphone from its stand and spoke about grace and God's presence among them and of the uprightness of their town. Shaking and with the microphone unclipped and pacing the aisle with the strut of his god in him like a revivalist preacher.

The coffee was still hot and the old man removed its lid and sipped grimacing.

You're not exaggerating? the woman asked. Just a little?

The old man held out a hand. In the end the creationist's sister got up and made her way to the microphone. The hall went quiet. Her left arm was withered and she held it to her side by its wrist but despite this she was very beautiful. It seems this girl had slipped from a wagon as a child on a patch of sandy earth and landed under the rear axle and been crushed but in a sort of miracle hadn't died. As if she were touched by that very grace their pastor swore to. The old man coughed and held up the glowing stub of his cigarette as if to consider its worth. He blew on it, its ember flared briefly. Then he continued. She spoke not of what was true but of what was right. She said there were many truths all of them credible but of varying worth and she said it seemed to her the immorality of evolution should not be ignored.

The woman shifted her feet. How is it immoral? It is what it is.

But what is that? the old man asked her. After a moment he shrugged. The creationist's sister said that such thinking led to the evils of racism for if all men were born of monkeys then those who lived closest to them must yet be near relations. She said such thinking led to the strongest laying claim upon the weakest and the weakest being unworthy of survival. She feared to so contradict the teachings of the bible and warned that without a moral compass no sense was to be made of the world. And as she spoke she gazed sadly at the geologist in the audience and her eyes were very clear. She said to live by such a theory was to remake God in man's image or to deny Him altogether and no good could come of either. She shook her head and warned,
If we teach our children
they are beasts, we must not be surprised when they behave like beasts.

The old man fell silent. He wet his thumb and forefinger and crushed out the embers of his cigarette and pocketed the butt in his shirtfront. His wristwatch glinting in the floodlights.

What did they come to at that meeting? the woman asked. Did it amount to anything?

Does it ever? What is ever possible between men of opposing faiths?

Evolution isn't a matter of faith.

What would you call it?

Science.

Science is a secular faith.

The woman smiled. Not in the way that you mean it. Why would the geologist agree to the debate?

It wasn't a case of agreeing.

Those people weren't going to be convinced by anything he had to say. Why would he go through with it?

The old man inclined his head, breathing softly. Who knows why any of us do anything? he said. Even in stories something acts upon all of us and we don't know what that is.

You don't mean God.

The old man waved his hand irritably. The trouble with that sort of talk is that God means many things to many men.

He watched the woman sitting in that blackness with her hand knotted in her lap and her eyes shut tight as if some more consoling darkness lay within. The far lights below darkened her eye sockets, carved more deeply her tired face. She opened her eyes.

You were the geologist, she said abruptly.

What makes you say that?

Tell me I'm wrong.

You're wrong.

I don't believe you.

The old man opened and closed his hands in his lap. Out in the ruins a small bulldozer was scraping into its maw a crumbled retaining wall and a crash of rubble carried up to them where they sat. It sounded muffled and very far off. A cloud of white dust drifted past the floodlights and out to the night.

He said he had lived his entire life looking for answers to just a few questions. And when he found one, he lived badly with it. He slid a handkerchief from his hip pocket and coughed and wiped at his chin. He said a spirit of inquiry deserved respect but that it had to be tempered with modesty. He did not mean humility. He had little time for those who would suggest men should not seek answers. But an answer is only ever the edge of an outer question. And all of us keep moving outward. His eyes were stinging with the late hour and he rubbed at them and blinked. I wasn't the geologist, he said. I've been a painter my entire life and I wouldn't know where to begin. You don't have to believe me.

She watched him quietly.

I'll be sixty-nine years old this year, he said. And I don't know what to believe. He gestured grimly out at the darkness. When my wife died I turned from all of that. She died in 1964. She wasn't even thirty-five. A child to me now. Almost a grandchild. I've smoked all my life and here I am healthy as an ox. God? Grief? He shrugged. You live long enough and you come to see your own smallness in it.

So what do you think? There's no sense in any of it?

No, he said. I don't think that.

Why are you looking at me like that?