Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [97]
Mr. Walker, I’ve always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else’s.
Well, thought Garnett. For goodness’ sakes. It was a lot to take in at once. He felt a moment’s relief about the whole snapper incident and an iota of sympathy for the woman’s poor ducklings (oh, Saddle Shoe!), but only an iota, before his blood pressure started to rise. The longer he stared at the letter, flipping backward through its several pages, the more its true meaning began to reveal itself to him among the flimflam phrases of her mock friendliness. Bitter old man indeed!
He forgot the pie completely—would not remember it, in fact, until a day and a half later (at which time he would sample it tentatively and find it still edible). That pie was the furthest thing from his mind as he stomped to his desk and tore a blank sheet from one of his chestnut notebooks. Without a second thought to appearances, for this was no time to stand on ceremony, he plucked a black ballpoint pen out of his pen-and-pencil cup and applied it so hard to the page that its line wavered and skipped like a terrified heart. “Dear Miss Rawley,” he scrawled,
I am weary of your grabbing every opportunity as a pulpit for your absurd views on modern agriculture!! If you can prove to me your so-called Voltaire principal, i.e. spraying pesticide is good for the health of insects, then by all means I will drink a quart of malathion, pronto!!
Furthermore, what is this business about God being three billion years old? God is ageless; the earth and its inhabitants were created in 4300 B.C., as can be proved by extrapolating backward from present population to the time of the first two people, Adam and Eve. You were unaware of this scientific formulation, probably, or were perhaps making a veiled reference to Evolutionary Theory. Because if the latter, your words fall on ears too wise for that old scam. I am a scholar of Creation Science, and suggest you think about a thing or two, i.e. who but an Intelligent, Beautiful Creator could have created a world filled with beauty and intelligence? How could Random Chance (i.e. “evolution”) have created life-forms so vastly complex as those that fill our world? I realize you’re no scientist, Miss Rawley, but I could explain to you the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all natural things move from order to chaos, quite the opposite of what the evolutionists claim. I could go much further than this, though I am fighting the inclination to wash my hands of you altogether and let you cast your own soul on the brimstone as you seem determined to do, and let you face in the jaws of Satan the same fate suffered by your precious duckling.
Hah! thought Garnett, rather proud of his dramatic twist of the knife and thinking he ought to end right there.
“But no,” he wrote, unable to stop himself,
I shall be a good neighbor and send you these thoughts which should be enough for you and your bra-burning Unitarian friends to ponder, I dare say, for many days to come.
Truly, Garnett S. Walker III
P.S. I am not a bitter old man.
Garnett carefully affixed not one but two stamps to the envelope to prove his point (he wasn’t sure exactly what point, but he trusted his instincts) and licked its seal shut before he could give himself a chance at failed nerve or courage. Politeness be hanged. This was no longer simply a matter of pride.