Book of Mercy (11 page)
On the November evening of the school board meeting, Antigone settled back in the hard auditorium seat, gazed at the frieze circling above her, and tried to relax. She had always liked this piece of art. It told its story with pictures, shapes, and forms that she could have run her hands over if she had had a ladder tall enough and if Sam and Ryder would let her climb a ladder in her condition.
When they arrived, she’d been shocked to find the auditorium packed. She and Sam wouldn’t have found seats if Nancy Sandhart hadn’t been saving two beside her. She was also surprised to see a large crowd of students, which included Ryder and his friend Ben, standing in the balcony, waving signs and chanting.
Antigone leaned over and whispered to Sam, “I’m scared.”
Sam squeezed her hand and tucked it in the crook of his arm. “Not too late to bail. You don’t have to put yourself through this. Let’s go home.”
“And let all these people down? Some of them gave up their favorite television shows to be here and see me make a fool of myself.”
“That’s something to be proud of—beating out
America’s Most Wanted.
”
“After this meeting,
I’m
going to be America’s Most Wanted.”
Antigone had no note cards or papers. The last thing she needed to worry about was speaking
and
reading. She’d gone over what she planned to say again and again in her head. She’d given her speech a dozen times to the deer by the pond. She took several deep breaths and thought surely everyone could hear her heart beating.
“Do you think it’s hot in here?” she asked Sam.
“No,” he said.
Antigone patted her stomach. Let me be doing the right thing, she prayed.
I
N THE BEGINNING, THE
people of Mercy had thought the WPA project was a waste of taxpayers’ money. In fact, upon first viewing the frieze, many were horrified and wanted the town fathers to take a jackhammer to it. Naked people in a school, they sniffed with disgust. Apparently, a scarf here and a hat there didn’t cut it when it came to the sensibilities of the people of Mercy. Eventually, however, cooler heads prevailed, and through the years, the frieze became a local landmark.
When the auditorium was renovated in 1993 through a successful fund-raising drive spearheaded by the Mercy Study Club, the club hired an expert to remove fifty-four years of grime, gum, spitballs, and who knew what else the students of Mercy High had thrown, slung, and blown up there. It took the restorer five weeks, clinging to a ladder and cleaning the frieze with what looked like an electric toothbrush, to scrape away generations of juvenile high jinks.
Every time Irene Crump saw
Mercy Full
, she knew the restorer had been worth every penny. Some of the club members had complained about flying in a frieze expert from New York; surely, they said, there were local people who could do the same thing with a sponge, a hose, and a bucket of Spic and Span. But Irene had insisted that the job be done right. “This is a work of art, for goodness sake,” she told her husband Arthur, “an artistic interpretation of our town.”
In fact, art historians considered
Mercy Full
to be one of the finest pieces of public art to come out of the WPA. As one scholar noted, “It glorifies the everyman in all his small town splendor. It’s Norman Rockwell meets the Pillsbury Dough Boy.”
Irene admitted that the restorer had been a strange fellow to deal with, always wearing a headlamp strapped to his bald head, even while he ate lunch at the O. Henry Café. His glasses had been as thick as his New York accent. When you looked into his eyes, it was like staring into fish eyes through the magnification of water and glass—startling and otherworldly. But he knew his way around plaster, friezes, and art. He pronounced Mercy’s pride and joy “some piece of work.”
Irene had always felt close to Mercy’s only piece of public art. She couldn’t explain it and long ago had stopped trying to get Arthur to understand how special
Mercy Full
was to her. She only knew that when she looked at the frieze, during every school function, she felt something stir inside her. It made her feel a part of something bigger. The figures in the tableau were creating a new world, a place where families were wholesome and towns were alive with commerce, education, spiritual growth, and civic pride. The frieze stretched before Irene like a dream of what the real Mercy could be. Except in the real Mercy, everyone was wearing clothes. Thank goodness.
That’s what this meeting was really about, Irene told the Study Club, which was heavily represented in the first two rows. “This meeting is about taking back our community, our children, our very lives. It’s about saying no to sexual perversion, crime, drugs, welfare mothers, juvenile delinquency, disrespect, cults, abortion—all the obscenities we’ve allowed to steal into our lives through the back door of the Bill of Rights.”
R
YDER DIDN'T KNOW WHY
but he liked the chubby art people marching around on the auditorium walls. Ben had told him that in Mercy—you either loved the frieze or hated it. As Ryder listened to a reporter who identified himself as Dash Morgan interview Ben, he also kept an eye on Antigone. She leaned over and said something to the librarian, Nancy Sandhart. Sandhart shook her head. He could have told Antigone she wasn’t getting any help from that corner. In his old neighborhood, Sandhart would be considered a liability—someone who wouldn’t come through for you in the end and, in fact, would probably get your ass shot off.
He turned his attention back to Ben and the reporter. Ben had organized the protest and was considered the spokesperson. There were about thirty students gathered in the balcony. Ryder didn’t know many of them. But, he had to admit, they were an excited bunch. They carried signs: “Free Our Books,” “Our Town Shows No Mercy to Books,” “Is This Russia?” They chanted, “No more censorship! No more censorship!” Ryder noted that Art Junior and his clowns weren’t among the protesters.
“We’re here because this is our school, Mr. Morgan,” Ryder heard Ben say, “and we’re not going to tolerate people banning books.”
A girl beside Ryder, dressed like a French Resistance freedom fighter—beret pulled over her short, spiky hair; long, black wool coat with a scarf dangling to her knees; and gloves with the fingertips cut out—chimed in, “Yeah, you can’t tell us to be good little citizens in social studies class and then pull fascist moves in the library.”
“How do you know books have been removed from the library?” Morgan asked.
“We have our sources,” Ben said.
A boy in a flannel shirt lifted a pierced eyebrow and said, “Yeah, man, book banning is, like, so uncool.”
Ben smiled at Dash Morgan and shrugged. “Our parents have screwed up—just about everything. Global warming, AIDS, corruption in governments, racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, financial meltdown. How are we going to solve these problems? We need more information, not less. More books, not fewer.”
The reporter jotted something down in the little notebook he carried. “It’s a light year leap from a few missing books to genocide.”
“Genocide’s all about exterminating those who are different,” Ben retorted. “Censorship exterminates ideas that are different. Being different is something teenagers know about.”
“We were born different,” Resistance Girl piped up.
“Somebody has to stop the ruin, man,” nodded Flannel Boy.
“Mr. Morgan,” Ben swept his arm to encompass the walls and the chubby people of the Mercy frieze, “FDR, the guy who gave us this, said once in a speech, ‘Books may be burned and cities sacked, but truth, like the yearning for freedom, lives in the hearts of humble men and women. No people in all the world can be kept eternally ignorant or eternally enslaved.’”
“Yeah,” said Flannel Boy, “fuck that slavery shit.”
Ryder rolled his eyes.
“I
HATE MEETINGS,”
N
ANCY
mumbled, rummaging in her purse for a cigarette. Antigone watched her friend, now clutching a pack of cigarettes, eye the exit. “This job is making me crazy.”
“Duck into the girls’ room. I’ll save your seat,” Antigone said.
Nancy made a face. “You know what that’s like.”
Nancy claimed the girls’ rest room smelled of high school girls, sanitary napkins, and semen. At least that’s what she imagined ever since she discovered a used condom in the corner of one of the stalls. Nancy had always had her doubts about the efficacy of the janitorial staff. Now, she said, she went to the bathroom twice before leaving home in the mornings, with the idea of delaying the inevitable for as long as possible.
“I hate books,” Antigone mumbled as Irene Crump, the chair of the school board, called the meeting to order at precisely seven o’clock. Antigone had spent her whole life avoiding public appearances. She
really
did not want to be here. She
really
did not want to do this. Reading was her nemesis, wasn’t it? Antigone could hear her mother’s voice in her head: “A smart woman always carries a book and a credit card—the book for when she has nothing to do and the card for when she has too much to do. Oh, and darling, she always wears moisturizer.”
Antigone fingered the round stone in her left pocket, lifted it to her cheek, closed her eyes, and enjoyed its cool smooth surface. At least, she thought, I moisturized this morning.
All day Antigone had been thinking of her parents. She had tried to call her mother but never got through. She left a message. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to tell them: “Hey, Mother, I’m going to share my biggest secret today. Can you believe I’m doing this for some books?”
As Antigone mulled over her love/hate relationship with the written word, Irene cruised through the agenda. When she came to the call for new business, Antigone imagined the packed auditorium grew quieter. She feared stages and the front of classrooms. She hated microphones. Still, she made her way to the microphone placed in the center aisle facing the school board up on the stage. In her hand was the green marbled stone with white veins that she’d found one day by the pond. She imagined the forces of nature caressing this simple stone as she was doing. Her heart was galloping, and her breath was coming in small shaking whispers. She poured her fears and stresses into that rock, hoping to steel her resolve.
To further combat her stage fright, Antigone looked at each board member and imagined that he or she was a deer. She pretended she was at the pond, and they were simply listening and grazing. The school board was like a herd. There was the old buck, Howard, a hardware store owner, who thought all of their problems could be solved by taking a chainsaw to every television in town. Then there were the young bucks: Gary, the only dentist in town and president of the Chamber of Commerce; Hank, an accountant; and Luther, a foreman at the mill. They jostled for power, glory, and attention. They couldn’t wait for Howard to go down in the next election. They had children in kindergarten, in middle school, and on the high school soccer team. The males could be counted on to agree on one thing: money. The teachers got too much of it, the administration didn’t know what to do with it, and the taxpayers providing it ought to have something to say in how it was spent.
The females on the board—Ellen, a homemaker/volunteer; Kalinda, an artist; and Irene Crump—were all mothers. In the bucks’ opinion, mothers were entirely too soft, too willing to defend children, and too quick to demand action. The problem with does, the bucks thought, was that they were always putting children first and that’s no way to run a school.
Antigone cleared her throat, clutched her stone, and began to speak. The microphone amplified her words into the auditorium, and, suddenly, the room caught its breath.
“I have a complaint,” Antigone paused, took a shaky breath, and proceeded. “Irene and the Mercy Study Club have pressured librarian Nancy Sandhart into removing certain books from the school library.”
There was a rustling in the crowd.
“They’re removing books
they
don’t like. Banning books. Like the Nazis did.”
A few parents gasped. Heads swiveled toward the school board. Irene tugged on the hem of her jacket. “There are no Nazis in the Mercy Study Club. We are making an effort to protect our children from inappropriate literature. Smut.”
“Smut? These books are
dirty
books?” a woman in the audience asked.
“If they’re dirty, what are they doing in the library in the first place?” a man growled.
Antigone forced herself to breathe calmly. Her insides were so wired she believed she could hear her baby’s heartbeat. “These are good old American books. Classics. Award winners.” She recited a list of the books, which Nancy had helped her memorize. “
1984. The Catcher in the Rye. Of Mice and Men. To Kill a Mockingbird.
”
“Winning a prize doesn’t make it good literature,” Irene retorted.
Someone shouted from the audience. “This is America. We don’t ban books!”
The students erupted with shouts of “Yeah,” and “You said it, man,” and “Nazi bitch.” They began chanting again. “No more censorship! No more censorship!” Some of the parents joined in. Antigone turned to look up at Ryder, who was watching her in silence from the balcony. She gave him a nervous smile. He did not smile back.
Irene began hammering on the table with her gavel. “That’s enough. Quiet!” Coach Mac and the vo-tech instructor approached the students and motioned for them to settle down. Antigone glanced at Dash Morgan, who was scribbling furiously in his notebook, then at the book club members, who had begun to look uncomfortable. The burst of support washed through her. She relaxed her grip on the stone in her hand.
When the room had quieted, Hank the accountant faced Antigone. “Antigone, this really isn’t the place for this discussion. We have a review committee whose job is to decide what books our school will or will not carry.”
“Irene’s group didn’t go through a review committee.”
“Well, we’ll rectify that right now,” Hank said with a frown to Irene. “Both the list of books you’ve just recited
and
any challenges presented by Irene’s group will be forwarded to the committee members, and they can make the decision.”
“Hank,” Antigone said, “that sounds like a political dodge to me.”
“Yeah,” said a large woman taking up two seats at the end of the third row. “I’d like to know where this board stands on smut.”
The chairs on the stage began to creak under the weight of seven shifting bottoms.
“Of course, we’re against smut,” said Howard in exasperation.
Gary the dentist agreed. “Yes, none of us want our children reading pornography. I’m sure Antigone doesn’t want that either.”
Ellen, wearing a patient Earth Mother expression on her face, leaned forward. “Antigone, you’re having a baby soon. Surely, you want to protect it.”
Antigone cast a glance at Sam. “That’s why I’m here. I-I- don’t think these books are indecent. Books are simply the keepers of someone’s ideas, and, even if we don’t agree with those ideas, we have to protect their right to express them. Even if I hated the ideas in those books, I’d still fight for their right to exist.”
Irene said in exasperation. “Have you read some of this trash?”
Antigone lifted her shoulders. “Probably not.”
“Then I suggest you do a little research before you pass judgment,” Irene retorted
Antigone’s hand tightened on the stone. She looked down, took a deep breath, then lifted her head. “I would, Irene, but you see, I can’t read.” It was as if someone had sucked the air from the room. Irene’s mouth dropped open, then quickly snapped shut. “I’m dyslexic. I may not know everything about the books on the banned list, but I know about censorship. I’ve lived with it all my life. Words on the page move when I try to read them. Sometimes I can get the dancing words to behave, and sometimes they defeat me. I depend a lot on Sam.”
She looked at her husband. “I’ve always been at the mercy of others to help me because I can’t easily access all the different opinions and pieces of information out there. I don’t want my child to be limited—whether by a disability or by someone else’s idea of what makes good literature.”
Antigone looked from the school board to the people crammed into the auditorium. “You don’t realize what gifts books are. They set you free. Doesn’t it mean anything that even though I sometimes hate books—and believe me, they’ve caused a lot of misery in my life—I’m still standing here defending them?”
Irene stammered for a moment then recovered. “We have the right to decide what our children will read.”
“What
your
child will read, Irene, but not mine,” Antigone said.
Antigone could hear the whispers growing all around her.
She can’t read? I never knew.
But she runs all those businesses . . .
She doesn’t have children yet; she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
My Johnny has a reading disability. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Antigone closed her eyes, trying to shut out the remarks seeming to grow louder and crowding in on her. When she opened them, Sam was pushing his way to her side. In the balcony, she saw Ryder stir, making his way toward the exit.
Irene banged the gavel again.
Kalinda the artist said, “I think Antigone’s right. We can’t go around banning books.”
The students began chanting again and thrusting fists in the air: “Keep America cool, keep America cool, keep America cool!”
“Order! Order!” Irene shouted. The crowd wasn’t listening. The whispers grew into arguments all over the auditorium.
We’re not Nazis, for gawdsakes.
Then stop acting like one.
Hey, I’m Jewish.
Then you ought to know better.
Better than what? Lighten up, lady. We’re talking about a few dirty books.
Who says they’re dirty?
Who decides what’s indecent anyway?
We do. It’s our community.
This isn’t supposed to happen in America. We don’t
do
censorship.
It happens more than you think.
Wait until the press gets a hold of this.
Gary, the chamber president, cast an anxious glance in Dash Morgan’s direction. “Now, we don’t want to get a reputation for being close-minded. Book banning is bad for the community’s image.”
Irene raised her chin in disdain. “I’d rather be a little close-minded and keep our children’s minds from rotting with disgusting ideas than worry about our image, Gary. This is
our
town. We decide what we will or will not tolerate.”
“No, Irene,” Antigone said, “the Constitution decides. I have to tolerate your ideas—even though they’re wrong—and you have to tolerate mine. Because we live in a democracy.”
Irene exploded, “Don’t go waving a flag in my face, Antigone Brown, you and your strange animals and vegetarian food!”
“I’ve known you to order tofu take-out,” Antigone said.
The crowd laughed.
Irene gasped, “That’s for Arthur.”
Hank placed his hand over the microphone in front of Irene, but Antigone could still hear him. “For crissakes, Irene, what have you gotten us into? Throw the issue to the review committee and be done with it.”
He turned to the auditorium and said with a placating smile, “We’ll turn this matter over to the review committee. In the meantime, I move for adjournment. It’s bedtime.”
T
WO HOURS AFTER THE
crowd shuffled out of the auditorium, Nancy Sandhart woke with stabbing pains in her chest.
She clawed at Bob snoring beside her. “My heart! My heart!”
Her husband peered at her through one eye and said, “What?”
“Hospital! Hospital! Now.”
He flung the blanket aside, fell out of bed, and snatched up jeans, a shirt, and the car keys. Helping Nancy into a robe and slippers, the barefooted Bob then carried his wife to the car. The Sandharts lived in the country on a farm where Bob grew up. The hospital in Mercy was fifteen miles away. He figured he could make better time than the EMTs. He ignored stop signs and hit an opossum. He didn’t stop. As he tore through the dark night at eighty miles per hour on crazy narrow county roads, his wife slumped in the passenger seat, clasping her chest and praying, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
After running a battery of tests, the doctor put Nancy on oxygen and gave her a shot to calm her. The young Pakistani doctor, pulling his second twelve-hour shift in emergency, diagnosed that Nancy’s heart was not turning against her. She had had an anxiety attack.
“But it felt so terrible,” Nancy trembled.
“Are you sure?” asked Bob uneasily. “Maybe we need a second opinion.”
The doctor gave them a weary, boyish grin. “I assure you, Mr. Sandhart, I’m not worried about your wife. I know this is a scary feeling. But all the tests check out normal. She needs some peace and quiet. No worries. Does she have a stressful job?”
“Incredibly stressful,” Nancy said.
“Well, it’s not brain surgery,” Bob growled.
The doctor glanced at the chart. “Let’s keep you overnight, Mrs. Sandhart. Just to be safe. Once again, this is nothing to worry about. It’s just a sign to take it easy. Do something soothing. Be kind to yourself. Take a bubble bath. Read a book.”
“Don’t talk to me about books,” Nancy moaned.
Two days later Nancy Sandhart, who had been an employee of the Mercy school system for ten years, gave in to her husband’s nagging and resigned from her position as librarian of the Mercy High School Media Center.
Now, she told herself, she could smoke all day if she wanted. She wondered why that didn’t make her happier.