Authors: Matthew Chapman

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail

Trials of the Monkey (23 page)

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey

8.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Now, at last, the Great Commoner was to be heard.

Bryan was so used to talking to the crowd that much of his speech was made with his back to the judge, who, by rights, he
should have been addressing. In his book, Scopes says he made a poor beginning, that the brilliance he had seen when Bryan spoke in Salem was sadly diminished.

His tone was jovial as he derided evolution and Darwin, but to an educated observer he came across as merely ignorant. As Mencken put it, ‘Somehow he reminded me pathetically of the old Holy Roller I heard last week—who damned education as a mocking and a corruption. Bryan too is afraid of it, for wherever it spreads, his trade begins to fall off, and wherever it flourishes he is only a poor clown.’

At one point, he read from Hunter’s biology textbook, the one Scopes had used, and laughed at the enumeration of species. ‘Two thirds of all the species of all the animal world are insects and sometimes in the summertime we feel that we become intimately acquainted with all of them … Now we are getting up near our kinfolk, 13,000 fishes. Then there are the amphibia. I don’t know whether they have not yet decided to come out or have almost decided to go back.’

This got a big laugh.

‘And then we have mammals, 3,500, and there is a little circle and man is in the circle. Find him, find man! There is the book they were teaching your children, that man was a mammal and so indistinguishable among the mammals that they leave him there with 3,499 other mammals.’

He waited for the applause to die down and then added:

‘Including elephants,’ which got a huge laugh.

Next he read from
The Descent of Man
, in which Darwin describes the way in which man may have developed. It is full of technical terms and Latin names and Bryan’s intent was clearly to make it seem nonsensical, an affront to common sense and a poor reason to ‘undermine the faith of these little children in a God who stands back of everything and whose promise we have that we shall live with Him forever by and by.’

He spoke of Nathan Leopold and how Darrow had suggested that because Leopold read Nietzsche at university he had become a murderer. This was precisely the danger of taking God out of
education and replacing Him with concepts like the survival of the fittest and Nietzsche’s morally unaccountable ‘superman.’

‘The Bible,’ Bryan said in closing, ‘is not going to be driven out of this court by experts who come hundreds of miles to testify that they can reconcile evolution—with its ancestors in the jungle—with man made by God in His image … The facts are simple, the case is plain, and if these gentlemen want to enter upon a larger field of educational work on the subject of evolution, let us get through with this case and then convene a mock court, for it will deserve the title of mock court if its purpose is to banish from the hearts of the people the Word of God as revealed.’

He then sat down. The trial record noted there was ‘Great applause.’

Once it died down, Dudley Field Malone stood up to argue for the defence. Malone, the lone Catholic on the defence, though divorced and remarried to a suffragette, was exceedingly well dressed and fastidious. He was the only attorney on either side who had never taken his jacket off in spite of the incredible heat, a fact which had been widely noted in the press.

Malone stood in the body of the courtroom, thinking for a moment, and then slowly he removed his jacket. He folded it carefully, and laid it over the back of a chair. The court became quiet.

He started gently, sitting on the edge of the defence table. Having chided Bryan for his anti-education bias, he pointed out that it had been seventy-five years since Darwin’s theory was first explained and that much had been learned not only to confirm it but to contradict the Bible. Cities had been discovered showing a high degree of civilisation 14,000 years ago. ‘Are we to hold mankind to a literal understanding of the claim that the world is 6,000 years old because of the limited vision of men who believed the world was flat and that the earth was the center of the universe? ’

He spoke of how, three centuries earlier, Galileo had been prosecuted by theologians. ‘Haven’t we learned anything? … Are we to have our children know nothing about science except what the church says they shall know?’ He spoke of the burning of the
library at Alexandria and how a plea had been made of Kalif Omar to spare it because it contained all the truth that had been gathered up to that point. ‘And the Mohammedan general said, “But the Koran contains all the truth. If the library contains the truth that the Koran contains we do not need the library, and if the library does not contain the truth that the Koran contains then we must destroy the library anyway.” ’

He defended the young against the old. ‘The least our generation can do, your honor, is to give the next generation all the facts, all the available data, all the theories, all the information that learning, that study, that observation has produced—give it to the children in the hope of heaven that they will make a better world than we have been able to.’

To everyone’s astonishment, the audience began to cheer for Malone, who now turned toward Bryan. ‘My old chief … I never saw him back away from a great issue before … We have come in here ready for battle. We have come in here for a duel … but does the opposition mean by a duel that our defendant shall be strapped to a board and that they alone shall carry the sword? Is our only weapon—the witnesses who shall testify to the accuracy of our theory—is our only weapon to be taken from us so that the duel will be entirely one-sided? That isn’t my idea of a duel.’

Now his voice began to rise, getting louder and louder like an old-time preacher. The court was either in absolute silence, transfixed by him, or they were cheering him, and cheering him more loudly than they had Bryan. Scopes, glancing over at the old Commoner found his reaction to Malone’s speech startling. In his book,
Center of the Storm,
he wrote, ‘I have never seen such a great change hit a human being as fast as it did Bryan. Malone spoke for only twenty minutes. There was only dejection on Bryan’s face; the victory that had been his only a few moments before was suddenly, disastrously dissipated.’

‘There is never a duel with the truth,’ Malone continued. ‘The truth always wins and we are not afraid of it. The truth is no coward. The truth does not need the law. The truth does not need the forces of government. The truth does not need Mr.
Bryan. The truth is imperishable, eternal, and immortal and needs no human agency to support it … We are ready. We feel we stand with progress. We feel we stand with science. We feel we stand with intelligence. We feel we stand with fundamental freedom in America. We are not afraid. Where is the fear? We meet it. Where is the fear? We defy it. We ask your honor to admit the evidence as a matter of correct law, as a matter of sound procedure, and as a matter of justice to the defense in this case.’

‘Profound and continued applause,’ states the trial record.

In truth, the audience—who had applauded Bryan less than an hour ago—now went completely wild. The judge banged his gavel and called for order, but could not stop the cheering and yelling and clapping. A policeman was seen banging his nightstick on a table so hard he split it. When another officer came up to help him restore order, the man said, ‘I’m not trying to restore order! Hell, I’m cheering!’

Malone had stolen Bryan’s day.

Finally, the cheering died down. Stewart tried to repair the damage done by Malone, but nothing could rise to the level of Malone’s great speech for reason and fairness.

When court was finally adjourned, the reporters rushed off to file their stories, many of which contained Dudley Malone’s speech in its entirety. Scopes stayed behind, sitting next to Malone, and the courtroom gradually emptied out.

Soon only Scopes, Malone, and William Jennings Bryan remained.

Scopes reports that the ‘Peerless Leader,’ the ‘Great Commoner,’ the one-time ‘Boy Orator of the Platte,’ the author of the marvellous ‘Cross of Gold’ speech, the most brilliant speaker of his generation, sat in his rocking-chair over by the prosecution table, fanning himself with his palm leaf fan. Every now and then he would let the fan drop and just stare ahead vacantly. Eventually, without turning to look at Malone, he spoke.

‘Dudley, that was the greatest speech I ever heard.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Bryan,’ Malone replied softly. ‘I am sorry it was I who had to make it.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Head Symptoms

The next morning when I wake up the light is still on and the trial transcript lies across my sour stomach. I get dressed and, exhausted and hung over, plod across the parking lot to the Frontier Diner, picking up a
Herald-News
on the way in. Hoping to quell a continuing feeling of dread and disorientation, I order eggs and bacon with biscuit and gravy and settle back in the damp, airless greasiness of the place to read.

Another victim has been claimed by the railroad track. A young boy, honour student at the high school, no history of drugs. Inexplicable, the curse of Dayton.

I look across the page.

‘Scopes Trial Festival Attracts Crowds.’

Funny, I haven’t seen any crowds. The first paragraph of the article says that more than a thousand people ‘viewed the play.’ What do they mean, ‘viewed’? Today is Thursday and tonight is opening night, so how can anyone have
viewed
the play, let alone one thousand of them? I read the headline again. ‘Scopes Trial Festival Attracts Crowds.’

‘Attracts.’ Present tense.

As I read on, however, panic blossoms in the pit of my stomach. The article clearly states that the last performance of the Scopes Trial was on Monday,
last
Monday, three days ago.

I read the article again. Apart from the headline,
everything is in the past tense!

As documented in the Desmond/Moore biography
Darwin,
Charles Darwin, who was either a hypochondriac or permanently
damaged by his trip on the
Beagle
, probably the former, wrote a note to his new doctor in 1865, listing his symptoms:

‘For 25 years, extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence, occasional vomiting, on two occasions prolonged during months. Vomiting preceded by shivering, hysterical crying, dying sensations or half-faint, and very copious very pallid urine. Now vomiting and every passage of flatulence preceded by ringing of ears, treading on air, and visions. Focus and black dots, air fatigues, specially risky, brings on the Head symptoms …’

A
trifle
compared to how I’m feeling.

I pay as fast as I can and rush back to my room. I grab my notebook with the tickets pinned inside, and, with churning stomach, head for the bathroom. I sit there and stare in horror at the tickets.

They were for last weekend.

I’m a week late!

The central event of my book lies irretrievably in the past. I missed it, and it won’t happen again
for another 360 days
!

I start walking around the room, banging into the Jacuzzi and muttering, ‘How did this happen? How did I make this incredible mistake? What the hell am I going to do?’ I’ve told Tom, my publisher, about the idea of spinning the whole book out from the re-enactment—‘the hub from which all the spokes of the book will radiate’ and all that bullshit—and he liked it. He liked it a lot, in fact.

‘Excellent idea,’ he had said. ‘It gives it a centre, gives it unity.’

Now there’s no centre and no unity and I’m out here floating in a vacuum, incompetent and faint, dots before the eyes, head symptoms, ringing ears. I’ve even got the copious and pallid urine.

A friend of mine taught parachute jumping in California. In every group there was one arrogant prick who wouldn’t listen to instructions, bragged about his fearlessness, and mocked those more cautious than himself. Sometimes when the time came for this character to make his jump, my friend would say, ‘Okay,
jump!’ and then as the man hurled himself from the plane, he’d yell, ‘No,
wait!’

Hopeless though it was, they all tried to get back into the plane, clawing at the air, trying to turn back time. This is how I feel. There must be a way to
go back
—and yet I know there isn’t. The
Beagle
has left for the Galapagos, I just tripped out the door without a ’chute, I’m irredeemably ruined. This is a disaster.

I hurry over to the gas station across the way and buy some cigarettes. Light up. Feel sicker. I don’t smoke. I can’t handle this. I sit down and consider. But what is there to consider? It’s a catastrophe, no way to pretend it isn’t. I know how this happened. When I booked the tickets I was so obsessed by my script—with making money, with staying afloat, with scrabbling for respect and meaning!!!—that I made a rapid and completely erroneous assumption: the real trial ran over two weekends with a week in the middle and I assumed the weekend of the re-enactment would coincide with the date of the
last weekend
. Instead, just to exacerbate an already severe condition of existential panic, these psychic Baptists chose the
first
weekend, hoping to tip me over the edge.

But even this reasoning does not work. Today is Thursday, July 23. The real trial was completely finished by July 22, which was a Tuesday. There is no excuse. A balanced person would have checked the tickets for the play and
then
booked the flight. I didn’t have time, I just snatched up a phone and …

Time! This is the problem. I don’t have time to reflect. I don’t have time to reserve airline tickets on the right day. I don’t have
time
for anything, not even for my own daughter, not even for this book, not even for my own rage. Maybe my brain is being consumed by its own unfulfilled ire—the corruption of politics by money, the Pope’s attitude to contraception, corporate phone systems which prevent you from speaking to a human being, fat little men who sneer at you around their cigars, the barbarity of the death penalty, I could go on—so many peeves large and small locked corrosively inside my brain because I have no time to vent them.

Late
? It’s astonishing I got down here at all.

I’ll have to lie, it’s the only solution, it’s what I’ve always done.

Who’ll know if I was here on the wrong weekend? Who’s going to check? I’ll find the woman who directed the play, I’ll get the script, I’ll talk to Sheriff Sneed and ask him how it went; I’ll
imagine
the play.

I call Denise. I want to tell her what has happened and then burst into tears. I know she’ll be sympathetic. I don’t tell her. We talk for a few minutes and then I begin to feel nauseous and hang up. If I decide to tell the lie, what am I going to do down here for five days? I lie down and then get up—and trip over the Jacuzzi again.

If only I believed in God. Here is a moment tailor-made for prayer. I’m on my knees already! My first book, and I’ve screwed it up before writing a single word of it! God help me!

I get up and
again
trip over the Jacuzzi. It’s everywhere.

That’s
the problem: it’s none of the above, it’s just there’s
too much stuff in my life,
too many projects, too much pressure, too much confusion, too many green Jacuzzis!

Fine! I’ll move rooms. Action of some kind! I’ll finish my script! Clear the decks, get ready for the next storm. I move to a pair of rooms on the other side of the motel—there’s plenty of rooms because no
one’s here,
they were all here
last weekend,
enjoying themselves, making sceptical jokes and having atheist sex (silent orgasms, none of that ‘Oh, my God!’ nonsense)—all this while I toiled over my wretched script about New Yorkers tearing each other’s throats out.

I set up my computer and start to work on the script, thinking if I can just concentrate on one thing for an hour, this panic will subside. But I can’t and it doesn’t. I keep going back to my stupidity, my lack of organisation, the
consequences.

What if I lie about the play and get found out? Clearly no one in Dayton is going to like the book. Suppose someone reads it and busts me. ‘He wasn’t even down here for the show! He’s an atheist
and
a liar!’ I remember reading about a reporter who wrote a touchingly realistic piece about teenage junkies, won a
Pulitzer, and then it was discovered there were no teenage junkies. She’d made it all up. She was ruined.

I’m
ruined. This is the end.

I lie on the bed and go to sleep. An hour or two later I wake up feeling more optimistic. I’ve been punching myself in the head since I was five. I’ve recovered before, I’ll recover again: a nasty blow, down but not out.

I decide to go see the editor of the local newspaper. I’ll do some research into the boy who just got killed on the tracks. No getting up off the canvas for him.

‘Bizarre,’ says the editor. ‘We are the pedestrians-killed-by-trains capital of America and we don’t understand it. Sometimes it’s suicide, sometimes it’s someone gets stuck on a bridge and tries to outrun the train, and sometimes, like this one, it’s a mystery. Everyone says he was a good boy, didn’t do drugs, honour student, happy at home, no girl trouble. An accident? There’s a
massive
light on the front of these trains and the horn is deafening. How can it happen?’

He shakes his head, confounded. The evening of his death, the boy played with his young niece and then stayed up to watch TV while the rest of the family went to bed. A couple of hours later, a train driver saw a figure walking away from him along the track. He hooted his horn—a teenage boy turned and glanced over his shoulder into the bright light, then turned, raised his arms—and took it. Within five seconds he was dead. He had changed his clothes as if to meet someone. That’s all anyone knows.

He gives me the phone number for Gale Johnson, the director of the play, and of Joe Wilkie, a science teacher at Dayton High. I think it might be interesting to interview whoever now occupies the Scopes position down here.

I go back to the hotel and call Sheriff Sneed. I remind him of his offer to let me ride with one of his cops. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘you come on down any ol’ time you like.’

I pick Friday night. That should be amusing. Next, I call Kurt Wise. He’s taking a group of Bryan College summer students on
a Cave Geology Tour on Saturday afternoon and invites me to come along.

Spelunking with Christians—who could ask for anything more? Things are looking up.

Now I call the director of the play, Gale Johnson. Gale agrees to have lunch with me on Friday. She sounds defensive.

That evening, I dine at the Western Sizzler along the highway on the other side of town. I get talking to two high school girls, Christina and Samantha. Both knew the boy killed on the tracks but not well. Samantha’s father and uncle died by train, the father a suicide. Christina is a Pentecostal and tells me about speaking in tongues.

‘You have to open yourself to the Lord, let him come in you, speak through you. I had a friend took all kinds of drugs, liked them, but she said speaking in tongues was the best high she ever had.’

Samantha, who admits she’s been through a ‘bad’ phase, catches my eye and winks as if to say, ‘Yeah, right.’

I go back to the hotel and call Denise. I tell her how I’ve managed to miss the re-enactment. She is silent for a moment. I can imagine her in our apartment overlooking the East River, but I cannot quite imagine the expression on her face. Is she concerned, as I am, that I am losing my mind?

‘This is incredible, Matthew,’ she says, and I think I can hear her smiling.

‘No, it is, it is …’

‘As we say in Brazil, it looks like you’ve stepped on the ball here.’ This is a soccer metaphor: a player who steps on the ball, trips, and falls headlong.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s how it looks, doesn’t it?’

‘No, it is
incredible.
How did you do this?’

‘I don’t know.’

She can hold back no longer. I hear her start to laugh on the other end of the phone. I start to laugh too, and fall in love with her again.

When we have finished laughing, she says, ‘Well, it’s funny. That’s good. The book should be funny.’

‘I’m not sure it should be this funny,’ I say, and she starts to laugh again. She isn’t worried, you see. She has faith.

I wait until 11:30 to go to the Best Western bar. Half an hour of speed-drinking is all I can take, never mind the addition of potentially lethal moonshine. The bar is more crowded; several rednecks surround Emerson perched around his bar stool. Right next to him is a stocky grey-bearded man slumped forward on the bar, asleep. His arms are folded in front of him and his face rests on the surface. His mouth, which is squashed out sideways, lies in a small puddle of dribble and emits a steady, restful snore audible above the juke.

Emerson turns toward me with glazed eyes. ‘Ah, tharyare,’ he says. ‘Gotcha moonshine. Me an’ my buddy here,’ he indicates the sleeper, ‘had to go up the mountain.’

‘So,’ I say, looking at the comatose man, ‘good stuff?’

Emerson studies his companion for a moment, considering, then looks back at me with his small, hard eyes.

‘It is,’ he says. ‘Course it’s different for me, I’m three hundred pounds, I can take it.’

He produces a brown paper bag and slips it to me. I look inside. There’s a jam-jar in there about a third full of clear fluid.

‘Let me pay you for this,’ I suggest.

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey

8.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads