October Light (36 page)

“God moves, however, in strange ways. The dying red man got his revenge: with one of the hands that didn't know what it was doing, he gave the white man tobacco!” The bathroom door opened just as the minister was reaching it in his pacing, and Lane Walker jumped back, bowed absentmindedly in DeWitt's direction, pivoted, and paced back toward Lewis Hicks. DeWitt—tall, stoop-shouldered—moved to the head of the stairs but then, instead of going down, stood with his hand on the newel post, a wide, shy grin on his red-headed, freckled face, and listened.

“American Indians”—the minister shook his finger—“had been smoking tobacco for hundreds of years. They'd developed the lungs, the body chemistry, and the social institutions to handle it. The white man, on the other hand—also the black and the Asiatic—having no such defenses, was to find (as he still finds) his race decimated by lung cancer, heart disease, and heaven knows what. One might compare, though I will not, what happens when the opiates, hash, etcetera,—relatively harmless in the Orient—begin to be popular with young Americans. Those who have the security, wisdom, and strength to resist these poisons against which their bodies are defenseless—whether by rejecting the various drugs completely or by using them only sparingly
—those
are the people who will change the world in the most direct way possible: they will control one whole current in the gene pool.”

He paused, both in his speech and in his pacing, and drew himself up. “Now take the most interesting genetic case of all, the black!”

“More interesting than the Chicano?” Rafe Hernandez cried in mock horror, coming up the stairs.

“You are late,” Lane Walker said, raising his hand like a traffic policeman, “and like all late-comers you have no rights, so I bid you peace.”

The priest touched his chest with his fingertips in protest and made his eyes large. “I was here before Columbus!”

“In that case you are allowed one right,” Lane Walker said, bowing. “You may go piss.”

The priest smiled happily, bowed from the waist and went, in comic haste, into the bathroom.

“Why Reverend!” Sally Abbott said, more surprised, from the sound of it, than offended.

“We were speaking,” he pressed on, blushing, “of the black.” He broke in on himself, leaning toward the door: “These are serious matters, you understand. This is no trifling circus entertainment I make you privy to. We were speaking of the morals to be drawn from science, one of the most serious of human investigations, second only, I might say, to Queen Theology. I must ask you to please pay attention.” Without turning, he pointed at the bathroom door behind which Father Hernandez was emptying his stream into the toilet.
“Sh!”
Lane Walker commanded sternly, but the noise went on.

“The black,” he began, then paused, looking up at the ceiling, hunting for his place. Lewis Hicks looked up too, then down again.

Then, remembering, the minister continued, “One of the most striking things about the blacks, genetically, is the sickle cell. In times past, as you know, one-quarter of the whole black race died of sickle-cell anemia, one-quarter possessed no sickle cells and, in central Africa, died of malaria, and one-half were perfectly healthy and carried on the breed. Expensive, in terms of human lives; but it worked. But what happens, we may ask, when the threat of malaria is ended—as in fact it has, since doctors can now treat it?” He paused, leaning toward the door as if for an answer. “Exactly!” he cried, pretending to have gotten one, and again began pacing. “The so-called ‘bad gene' begins to vanish. In a few short generations—think of it—the black race has begun to lose its odd, no longer useful but still-sometimes-deadly gene. Useless adaptations, in short, tend to die, though they never disappear completely—an important point, and one we will return to.

“But consider further. There is hope among scientists at the present time that sickle-cell anemia may soon be overcome, just as we've found medical cures for other heritable diseases or shortcomings. Diabetics, that is to say, can now live a normal life with the help of insulin; nearsighted people can be helped by glasses; the deaf can use hearing aids. Natural selection, in other words, has been ‘switched off' once again by our invention of tools. What is the moral to be drawn from this odd fact?” He stared straight at Lewis. It was almost as if he were pointing. “Let us make sure we
understand
this odd fact. With every tool we invent, from the wheel to Vitamin C extract, we
avoid bodily evolution.
The more perfect the Buckminster Fuller dome, the more securely antique its occupant.”

Lewis picked at his moustache and looked guilty. At the opposite end of the hallway the bathroom door opened and the priest stuck his head out, seeing if the coast was clear. He stepped out, checked his fly, shot his cuffs, then stood waiting, smiling, palms together as if for prayer. No one even noticed.

“The moral, brothers and sisters,” said the minister—he was now so involved in the thought he was shaping that he was unaware even that Estelle Parks was being helped up the stairs by Virginia Hicks and Dr. Phelps (“What's this?” Estelle was saying, “we've been
missing
something! Why, he's giving a sermon!,” and her eyes lit up)—“The moral is that that which was once advanced may prove primitive, and that which was once primitive may suddenly prove advanced, or in the words of that great religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Nature is never spent.' We, the most primitive of apes, have proved conquerors of our specialized betters. With our wonderful way of evading the issue—our swollen brains and gift for using tools, and our anachronistic nastiness—we lock them up in zoos and put plates in their heads for our amusement and edification!—Never underestimate, by the way, the importance of nastiness to our progress so far. If intelligence and gentleness were the chief criteria, the planet would be ruled by whales!

“‘But what,' I hear you interject, ‘of the sexes?'—for cunning animal that you are, you remember the outline I gave you when I started.”

“The sexes?” Estelle said, just starting into the bathroom. Virginia raised her finger to her lips, then waved Estelle on. Estelle went in and closed the bathroom door.

“My friends,” the minister said, “in every species in which labor is divided as it was for centuries among creatures of our race—by which I mean the one, sole, indivisible
human
race—we discover a tendency for the female to become small and quick—quick of foot and quick-witted—and highly emotional, and for the male to become large and a trifle slow-witted (consider the gorilla, the orang-utang), for in farmwork and war, to say nothing of hunting, there are certain advantages to—if you will forgive me, gentlemen—stupidity. What male with any sense would be tricked by a small, coy creature's wiles into carrying boulders for a wall to keep her children safe? What crafty Odysseus would stand like a tower against the Trojans, dull-wittedly defending his genetic heritage, as did that huge slow-witted ox Ajax?” A look of confusion came over his face—possibly mere theater. “But then, of course, Odysseus' line also survived, and, unlike Ajax, Odysseus eventually, after a good deal of monkeying around, made it home to his wife. Hmmm.”

He pursed his lips and pulled at his beard, and his great slanted eyebrows lowered. The congregation waited with keen interest. It might now quite legitimately be called a congregation. The hallway was so crowded he could no longer pace. There was DeWitt in the corner at the head of the stairs, Virginia and Dr. Phelps beside him, there were the two small boys on the stairway, holding their jack-o-lanterns, there were Lewis and the priest, Sally Abbott behind the door, and there was Estelle, just emerging from the bathroom, leaning on her canes.

Now the minister raised one finger and smiled as if enlightened, making a show of having seen a new angle in the mystery of Ajax and Odysseus. “Let us try putting it another way,” he said. “Which is more primitive?—the broad range of tendencies in the X chromosome, or the broad range of tendencies in the Y? In the days when Neanderthals killed with clubs and our own progenitors used spears and darts, a skull of bone solid as a football helmet was an enormous advantage to the Neanderthal fighting a Neanderthal; and a light skull easily jerked from place to place, and easily expanded to make room for more brain, was of similar advantage to
Homo sapiens
when he had to dodge a brother's spearcast. Times change, however, and ice makes men wander. With what sad surprise must the mightiest and bravest of all Neanderthals have faced his first feather-light, dancing
Homo sapiens! ‘Oof!'
the great Ajax among men said mournfully, as the spear slipped lightly through his tank of a body, and with a last, apologetic wave to heaven, the grand beast sank clattering into darkness.

“Times change, then; that is the lesson of our text, God's first great book, as Aquinas called it, ‘The Book of Nature.' The carrying of boulders can be done these days by a trim little creature with a gift for pushing buttons, and the creature with the quickest reactions will be queen of the piano, the typewriter, and the jumbo jet. ‘Ah ha!,' you say, ‘I smell here a female-supremacist!' But not so! As we saw in the case of the sickle cell, even when a thing seems no longer of use, Nature is careful of her old spare parts. We carry, at least in genetic potential, all we ever carried from the time we were Devonian fish. Every man is part female, every woman part male, every mixture of the gene-pool a mixture for the better. Survival in a constantly evolving universe makes no petty-minded distinctions between primitive and advanced. In a word—”

The minister raised his right hand grandly, turning once again to Sally Abbott's door. “In a word, Mrs. Abbott,
Apes—or at least the more primitive apes—can and do make jack-o-lanterns!”

So saying, he turned to his little congregation in the hallway and on the stairs, bowing and smiling gently, and said, “Amen.”

“Amen, amen,” said the Mexican priest, and signed the air with a gesture more soft than any butterfly could have made, sitting in the sun, and, smiling and benevolent, fat as a Buddha and light as a balloon,
“Ite, missa est,”
he intoned, and then, in another voice,
“Deo gratias!”

“Bless you, Reverend,” Sally Abbott called from behind her door, and judging by her voice, she was deeply moved. “May all these terrible prejudices be driven from the earth!”

“Then you'll come out of your room?” Lane Walker said, delighted.

“Heavens no!” she said. “Why should I?”

Ed Thomas called up from the foot of the stairs, “Hi golly, so
that's
where everybody's gone to! Am I missing something?”

9

While his great-aunt Estelle was thinking of Notre Dame, Terence Parks stood in the old man's sitting room-bedroom, turning the French horn around and around, emptying water from the tubing. He was as shy a boy as ever lived, as shy as the girl seated now on the sagging, old fashioned bed with her hands on the flute in her lap. She, Margie Phelps, gazed steadily at the floor, her silver-blonde hair falling straight past her shoulders, soft as flax. Her face was serious, though she was prepared to smile if he should wish her to. She wore a drab green dress that was long and (he could not know) expensive, striped kneesox, and fashionably clunky shoes. As for Terence, he had brown hair that curled below his ears, glasses without which he was utterly helpless, and a small chin. He had, at least in his own opinion, nothing to recommend him, not even a sense of humor. He therefore dressed, always, with the greatest care—dark blue shirts, never with a shirttail hanging out, black trousers, black shoes and belt. He fitted the mouthpiece back into the horn and glanced at Margie. He had had for some time a great, heart-slaughtering crush on her, though he hadn't told her that, or anyone else. In his secret distress, he was like the only Martian in the world. As if she'd known he would do it, Margie looked up for an instant at exactly the moment he glanced at her, and immediately—blushing—both of them looked down.

He set his horn down carefully on the chair and went over to the window at the foot of the bed to look out. A noisy, blustering wind had come up, pushing large clouds across the sky, a silver-toothed wolf pack moving against the moon, quickly consuming it, throwing the hickory tree, the barn and barnyard into darkness. He could hear what sounded like a gate creaking, metal against metal.

“Is it raining yet?” she asked, her voice almost inaudible.

As she came up timidly behind him, Terence moved over a little to give her room at the window.

Her hand on the windowsill was white, almost blue. He could easily reach over and touch it. In the living room behind them—the door was part way open—the grown-ups were laughing and talking, DeWitt Thomas still picking his guitar and singing. You couldn't hear the words. He looked again at her hand, then at the side of her face, then quickly back out at the night.

“Rain scares me,” she said. Though her face turned only a little, he could feel her watching him.

The moon reappeared, the black clouds sweeping along like objects in a flood. Terence put his hand on the windowsill near hers, as if accidentally. He listened for the sound of someone coming into the room and realized only now that the door to his left went to the back entryway and, beyond that, the kitchen. He felt panic, thinking they might go out that door unmissed. Something white blew across the yard, moving slowly, like a form in a dream.

“What's that?” she asked, startled, and put her hand on his. Her head came slightly closer and, despite the violence of the storm in his chest, he smelled her hair.

“Fertilizer bag, I think,” he said.

“What?” she said.

He said it again, this time loud enough to hear. She did not draw her hand away, though the touch was light, as if at the slightest sign she would quickly remove it. His mind raced almost as fast as his heart, and he pressed closer to the window, pretending to follow the white thing's ghostly flight. Again he smelled her hair, and now her breath—a warm scent of apple.