Authors: Matthew Chapman

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

Trials of the Monkey (27 page)

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey

10.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

‘I think it was more than six thousand years ago.’

‘Have you any idea how old the earth is?’

‘No.’

‘The book you have introduced in evidence tells you, doesn’t it?’

‘I don’t think it does, Mr Darrow.’

Darrow pointed out that the Bible which the state of Tennessee claimed evolution was in conflict with, contained Ussher’s calculations and, as they had just agreed, these claimed the earth was created 4,004 years before the birth of Christ, thus making it less than 6,000 years old. Darrow hopped around, keeping Bryan off balance, jabbing at him and then circling around to jab again in the same place.

‘Do you think the earth was created in six days?’

Bryan hesitated.

‘Not six days of twenty-four hours.’

The crowd gasped. Bryan, the ‘Fundamentalist Pope,’ had committed blasphemy. True fundamentalists believed (as most still do, including Kurt Wise) that when the Bible says six days, it means Monday through Saturday, six literal, twenty-four-hour days. Darrow pressed on.

‘Doesn’t it say so?’

‘No, sir.’

Stewart, seeing things going badly, tried again to make another objection. What was the purpose of this line of questioning? Before the judge could answer, Bryan spoke up.

‘The purpose is to cast ridicule on everybody who believes in the Bible, and I am perfectly willing that the world shall know that these gentlemen have no other purpose than ridiculing every Christian who believes in the Bible.’

‘We have the purpose,’ said Darrow, ‘of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States and you know it, and that is all.’

There were more objections from Stewart and counter-arguments from Darrow and Hays.

‘Your honor,’ intoned Bryan, trying to get himself back into the proceedings, ‘they have not asked a question legally, and the only reason they have asked any question is for the purpose—as the question about Jonah was asked—for a chance to give this agnostic an opportunity to criticize a believer in the word of God; and I answered the question in order to shut his mouth, so that
he cannot go out and tell his atheistic friends that I would not answer his question. That is the only reason, no more reason in the world.’

Perhaps wearying of his protestations, or having absorbed his apostasy on the six literal days issue, or maybe even because they liked Darrow and felt Bryan’s attack was unfair, the crowd did not cheer.

Malone, the hero of Thursday, stood up. ‘Your honor, on this very subject, I would like to say that I would have asked Mr. Bryan—and I consider myself as good a Christian as he is—every question that Mr. Darrow has asked him for the purpose of bringing out whether or not there is to be taken in the court only a literal interpretation of the Bible … We are here as lawyers with the same right to our views. I have the same right to mine as a Christian as Mr. Bryan has to his, and we do not intend to have this case charged by Mr. Darrow’s agnosticism or Mr. Bryan’s brand of Christianity.’

Malone’s speech was greeted with ‘great applause.’ Bryan flinched visibly. The audience was applauding, a direct attack on
him
, William Jennings Bryan, their ‘Peerless Leader’! Coming as it did on the heels of his own courageous bleatings, which had received none, the effect must have been devastating. Caught between wanting to please his fundamentalist supporters and not wanting to appear entirely idiotic to more educated people, had he made a terrible error in admitting he did not believe in the literal six days of creation?

Raulston told Darrow to continue.

‘Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam’s rib?’

‘I do.’

‘Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?’

‘No, sir, I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.’

Darrow went back to the six days of creation.

‘Does the statement, “The morning and the evening were the
first day,” and “The morning and the evening were the second day,” mean anything to you?’

Again—what else could he do?—Bryan held to his previous statement. ‘I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four-hour day … I think it would be as easy for the kind of God we believe in to make the earth in six days as in six years or in six million years or in six hundred million years.’

‘Do you think the sun was made on the fourth day?’ Darrow continued.

‘Yes.’

‘And they had evening and morning without a sun?’

‘I am simply saying it is a period.’

‘They had evening and morning for four periods without the sun?’

‘I believe in creation as there told, and if I am not able to explain it I will accept it. Then you can explain it to suit yourself.’

‘Do you believe the story of the temptation of Eve by the serpent?’

‘I do.’

‘And you believe that is the reason that God made the serpent to go on his belly after he tempted Eve?’

‘I believe the Bible as it is, and I do not permit you to put your language in the place of the language of the Almighty. You read that Bible and ask me questions, and I will answer them. I will not answer your questions in your language.’

‘I will read it to you from the Bible: “And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because you hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl upon its belly?’

‘I believe that.’

‘Have you any idea how the snake went about before that time?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?’

The audience laughed.

Darrow had more questions, but as he was in the middle of asking the next one, Bryan launched off into another of his martyred protestations.

‘Your honor, I think I can shorten this testimony. The only purpose Mr. Darrow has is to slur at the Bible, but I will answer his question. I will answer it all at once, and I have no objection in the world, I want the world to know that this man, who does not believe in God, is trying to use a court in Tennessee …’

‘I object,’ said Darrow.

‘ … to slur at it, and while it may require time, I am willing to take it.’

‘I object to your statement,’ said Darrow, losing his temper. ‘I am examining you on your fool ideas that no intelligent Christian on earth believes!’

Suddenly, the two men were on their feet, glaring at each other.

Everyone stared at them in shock. Was Bryan going to hit Darrow or Darrow Bryan?

Raulston banged his gavel and adjourned court until nine the following morning.

Darrow, the hero of the hour, strode away across the lawn, surrounded by the crowd and by admiring reporters, off to file their stories around the world.

‘For Bryan,’ writes Scopes in his account, ‘there was only despondency; he was left alone on that green, spacious lawn, a forgotten, forlorn man.’

Insulated by the adoration of his flock and by his own complacency, had Bryan never considered any of the questions Darrow raised? Had he entered this fight against science without once thinking about its potential for revealing the absurdities of his own faith? If this was so, and it seems possible, the experience must have been shattering. He had sought to re-invent himself with this new cause and instead had been dismantled. He must have known he did not have long to live and this would be a
part, a large part, of his legacy, this humiliation at the hands of Darrow.

‘His career,’ wrote Mencken a few days after the trial, ‘brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung pile.’

Bryan comforted himself with the thought that he still had two chances left in which to redeem himself. He would put Darrow on the stand and question him and he’d dazzle the world with his closing argument for the prosecution.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Achtung, Rocky!

It’s Friday night in Dayton, exactly seventy-three years—and one irretrievable week—after Darrow humiliated Bryan, and I’m in Sheriff Sneed’s office, staring up at Deputy Sheriff Rocky Potter, who is going to take me out on a tour through the Tennessee night.

Rocky wears a tight brown uniform and resembles a 250-pound sausage with a tennis ball perched on top. He is six-foot-two and his chest and arms are so swathed in muscle that he’s forced to adopt the posture of a gunslinger, arms out from the side, elbows slightly bent, hands hanging away from his hips. His shoulders are square and wider than the average doorway. A thigh-sized neck emerges from these shoulders and on top of the neck rests a shaved head, in the middle of which are two small eyes and a Zapata moustache.

As I’m introduced to him by Sneed, the eyes check me out with the cold, almost angry suspicion of the cop. I instinctively shrink back. Rocky does not stand, he
looms,
and looking up at him, I’m reminded of a character in a boy’s comic book, the corporal who, at the last possible moment, comes plunging through a wall with a growl of righteous indignation and starts tossing Germans and howitzers around.

‘Achtung! It’s der Amerikaner, Herr Rocky!’

‘Yaaagh!!!’

A power-lifter for the cops, Rocky later admits that although he can bench 460 pounds, he can’t run a hundred yards without getting puffed; but God help you, I think to myself, if he gets to you before then.

A writer tends to be impressed by a cop. He’s the physical manifestation of the writer’s art. While the cowardly scribe sits in the comfort of his lair trying to envision the dramatic extremes of life, the cop is out there plunging around in them. A writer wonders what lies beyond the door—the cop kicks the door down and enters.

Sneed completes the introduction and Rocky smiles at me amiably as he reaches out to shake my hand. I’m ready for it and tense the limb to avoid injury. Rocky turns and beckons me to follow.

‘I’ll show you the jail, then we’ll go serve some warrants,’ he says, and we walk out the front of the sheriff’s office and around the back to the Soweto-like structure that lies behind.

On one side are a few cells for the trusties. On the same side are a couple of cells for men who need to be protected and the cells for the female prisoners, though I did not see any. On the other side is the meat of the place, two lines of cells known as the Grey Bar Motel. Designed to house no more than fifty men at most, it often contains sixty to seventy. I meet two jailers, an older man with a wooden leg and a strange dent in his head, and a woman, Billie, who takes my arm, grinning and laughing, and leads me back.

Tough but obviously well-liked, she’s one of those women of indomitable goodwill and optimism. She unlocks a door and pushes her way in. She can’t be more than five feet and has to be approaching fifty years old. She carries no weapon.

Country boys, lots of them, stripped to the waist—lean, manipulative, whining—crowd around her as we go down the first row. Here is space. Here is space divided by bars and saturated with nicotine. Here is no space, no privacy, just time, dead time, lots of it. Bunks crammed against walls, dirty mattresses on the floor or rolled aside, eight to ten in cells built for four. Kids playing cards, kids jammed in the corridor, men in despair, lying on the six-feet-by-four-feet area to which, I suppose, they have some claim. It’s a camp, a sleepover, a bazaar, bizarre. Some are in here for a night, some for years. I wouldn’t last a week, not
because of violence, not for want of comfort, but for lack of solitude.

‘Hey, Billie, can I take a shower?’

‘Hey, Billie, what about that sandwich?’

‘Hey, Billie, did my bondsman come through yet?’

She bats them aside, affectionate but firm, more den mother than jailer.

They look at me, figuring the deal. Who is he, why is he here, what can I get out of him? One of them, nineteen, long blond hair shaved along the sides, one pupil paper-white (shot out by a BB gun, I’ll bet), winks at me and grins. My nervousness gives way to a sense of camaraderie. I’ve stolen things with kids like these, worked with them in factories, dealt with them on film crews. They’re the sad adventurers, exuberant boys of unfixed ambition, losers without sufficient will or intelligence to escape their destiny; boys who, in celebration of careless youth and limited freedom, dodge this way and that for a couple of years before eventually being taken by what they dread far more than this: the inevitable mouth of the long tube of the production line, which will suck them in, set them on a march of endless days marked by 32,000 sorry punchings of a clock, and then, once they are exhausted, will blow them out the other end, into retirement and death.

We leave and go along the other row, much the same but for the added frisson of attempted murder—Jimmy McKenzie’s assailant lurking deep in the furthest cell, awaiting results of a test of his insanity.

It’s still light as Rocky, carrying a large wad of warrants to be served, leads me to his car, talking about eating. He has to eat a lot and frequently because of the lifting.

Rocky was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1960, but his mother was a Dayton native and when she split up with her husband in 1979, she decided to move back. Rocky came through a short while later on his way to Houston, Texas, where he was planning to work on the oil rigs. He stayed with his mother a couple of weeks and was impressed how friendly everyone was
and how the town was so peaceful. When he got to Houston, he worked a few days hefting barrels, but didn’t like it, missed his mother, and decided to try life in Dayton. He worked seventeen years at the La-Z-Boy factory, serving as an auxiliary cop on evenings and weekends.

Now he’s full-time, always working the night shift, seven to seven. His wife, his second wife, works at Long Johns, one of the eateries out along the highway. Between them they have three kids, two hers, one his. He has breakfast with them when he comes home, sees them off to school, then sleeps. In the afternoon, he runs errands, lifts some weights, and when the kids come back, he plays with them or helps with their homework. Around six, he eats one of his many meals in their company, kisses them goodnight, and hits the road.

Our first stop is to check on a runaway girl whose parents have taken out a warrant on her, to try and get the courts to control her. As we’re driving up the hill, a pickup comes down toward us and stops. There are two men in the cab. The driver leans out.

‘Hey, Rocky, just saw a pair of shitheads in a red Chevy Camaro, you might wanna keep an eye out for ‘em.’

Rocky talks to them for a while (they turn out to be off-duty fellow officers) then thanks them and we continue.

‘Is there an exact definition for “shitheads”?’ I ask.

‘shitheads,’ he explains, ‘is the term we use around here for the bad guys. Shitheads. Friday night. Lot of shitheads cruising around.’

We pull up outside a house one step up from a trailer and moments later are joined by the parents of the runaway. She has not come back. They seem defeated almost to the point of indifference. Their daughter’s got a new boyfriend. The boyfriend’s a drug user … It’s a familiar tale. Rocky explains to them who to see at the courthouse, what their options are, and they thank him deferentially.

Soon we’re back cruising around the county. It’s not the best night for serving warrants, not yet at least, because the shitheads are out drinking or doing whatever it is shitheads do of a Friday
night in Dayton; but for me it’s an opportunity, a guided tour. The warrants lead us to the flickering satellites of crime and misadventure: a preacher whose wife has taken out a restraining order to stop him beating her; a man who keeps throwing rocks at local kids; another who refuses to pay rent. None are in. After each visit, Rocky rechecks his warrants, looking for one that might either end in success or provide some entertainment. There’s been a dispute in the Little League Football team. One of the VPs of the team, a woman, needs to be served a warrant to appear in court where the matter will be settled. An ex-beauty queen from some local contest, she has long blonde curly hair and is in consequence known as ‘Little Mermaid.’ She lives in a nice middle-class home up in the hills. But she’s not in either.

We get a call directing us to a neighbourhood across the tracks, Morgantown, a domestic dispute. We cross back over the highway, bounce over the tracks, weave along sunset streets, and soon find ourselves in what can only be described as a rural slum. Decaying one-storey wooden houses with peeling paint behind chain-link fences. Dirty children playing among cars rusting in the yards and on the street. Even the trees look dusty and worn out.

The windshield of the car becomes like a camera or a telescope, no longer a frame through which you idly gaze, but something purposive with which you seek. I find myself watching differently, hoping to see something Rocky misses, a figure running off alongside a house, the red Camaro. It’s strange how quickly the instinct takes root.

Many people are outside in the heat, lounging around, drinking, playing with the children, but we’re still a hundred yards away when I know the house we’re going to. A couple in the yard, two children, a tableau of aggrieved shock.

We pull up and Rocky gets out. I follow, slightly behind, face expressionless. A woman in her late twenties, prematurely faded, once attractive, bad teeth. A man in a baseball hat and jeans, ginger hair and beard, shirt off. Both are moderately drunk. Two boys: one a five-year-old, already with dark resentful eyes, the
other under two, in diapers and nothing else, no shoes, no shirt. The younger child’s filthy skin is covered in red dots, like small bites. On his shoulder is a red mark about the size of an adult hand.

The woman shows Rocky a similar mark on her neck running up toward her ear, through which, she claims, she can no longer hear. Her ex-husband has been down here trying to pick up the smaller of the kids, his son, but he was drunk and hit them both when she disputed custody. Rocky tells her the smacking is a domestic matter and as he didn’t see it, she has to swear out a warrant if she wants to prosecute him for assault or get a restraining order. Meanwhile, he’ll go in search of Dave (although that’s not his name) to get his side of the story.

We turn the car around and drive up a track toward Dave’s mother’s house. Dave is a regular down at the jail, Rocky tells me, that’s how it goes, the same band of petty miscreants circling through. We’ve been driving around for about an hour since we left the jail, and something’s changing in me. At first I was afraid, wary, hoping nothing bad would happen; but now there’s a different feeling. I have begun to feel the power.

You drive down a bad street and it’s as if you’re invisible. No one looks in your direction, yet everyone is acutely aware of you. It’s respect, it’s fear, it’s fun. And now, suddenly, I’m hoping there’s going to be some trouble, some resistance, no guns, please, but
something,
some minor altercation which will reveal the extent of the power. I’m ready to hit someone if I have to. (Preferably after Rocky’s softened them up a little first.)

We’re on a dirt road overhung with tall trees clattering with cicadas and now there he is up ahead in the waning light, Dave, pale-skinned, stumbling along, jeans at his hips, shirt off, scrawny as a boy. He has long dirty blond hair hanging out of a baseball hat. He looks back, sees us coming, but does not run. Rocky stops the car and gets out. Dave grins involuntarily up at him. A narrow face, more bad teeth.

‘Hey there, Rocky,’ he says.

‘Hey,’ says Rocky, keeping a little distant, unafraid but ready. ‘So what’s been happening?’

Dave explains he’s just come out from five weeks in the slammer. It was not his turn to take the kid, but he figured as he’d missed five weekends, his ex-wife might bend the rules a little.

‘Yeah, well maybe she might have but you’re drunk and you shouldn’t have hit her,’ says Rocky. ‘I’m going to have to take you in.’

‘But I just got out, Rocky …’

‘I know it.’

‘Oh, man, do I have to go back in again?’ he pleads, but clearly without expectation of success.

‘’Fraid so. You know how it goes. Drunk in public. No way ’round it.’

For a moment Dave seems to be figuring the odds. Make a run for it?

‘Tell you what,’ offers Rocky, ‘take the P.D. and I’ll overlook the domestic violence.’ (P.D. stands for public drunkenness.)

‘Thanks, man,’ says Dave.

‘Get in the car,’ Rocky tells him, opening the back door.

‘Ah well, shit happens,’ says Dave as he slides into the back seat, uncuffed, compliant, and unaware that the offer Rocky made him has no value. It’s the ex-wife who has to press charges on the domestic matter, not Rocky.

Rocky and I get in the front of the car and Rocky turns it around.

‘Yeah, shit happens,’ Dave repeats from the back.

‘Yep,’ says Rocky.

‘I just got out, now I’m going back in.’ He shakes his head. How do these things happen to him?

‘Ah well,’ says Rocky, giving no lecture.

‘How come there’s no door handles back here?’

‘That’s so you don’t jump out,’ Rocky tells him.

BOOK: Trials of the Monkey

10.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads