Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

after my ass. We’d have it all over the province, could even be a strike issue, we have to think of the kids.”
    You’d think that might get to Lewis—thinking of the kids. But he was off on his own trip as usual.
    “March in Adam and Eve. With or without the fig leaves.”
    “All I want to ask is a little speech indicating that this is a different interpretation and some people believe one thing and some people believe the other. Get the Genesis story down to fifteen or twenty minutes. Read it out loud. Only do it with respect. You know what it’s all about, don’t you? People feeling disregarded. People just don’t like to feel they’re being disregarded.”
    Lewis sat silent long enough to create a hope—in Paul, and maybe in Nina, who could tell?—but it turned out that this long pause was just a device to let the perceived iniquity of the suggestion sink in.
    “What about it?” Paul said cautiously.
    “I will read the whole book of Genesis aloud if you like, and then I will announce that it is a hodgepodge of tribal self-aggrandizement and theological notions mainly borrowed from other, better cultures—”
    “Myths,” said Nina. “A myth after all is not an untruth, it is just—
    Paul didn’t see much point in paying attention to her. Lewis wasn’t.

    Lewis wrote a letter to the paper. The first part of it was temperate and scholarly, describing the shift of continents and the opening and closing of seas, and the inauspicious beginnings of life. Ancient microbes, oceans without fish and skies without birds. Flourishing and destruction, the reign of the amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs; the shifting of climates, the first grubby little mammals. Trial and error, primates late and unpromising on the scene, the humanoids getting up on their hind legs and figuring out fire, sharpening stones, marking their territory, and finally, in a recent rush, building boats and pyramids and bombs, creating languages and gods and sacrificing and murdering each other. Fighting over whether their God was named Jehovah or Krishna (here the language was heating up) or whether it was okay to eat pork, getting down on their knees and howling out their prayers to some Old Codger in the sky who took a big interest in who won wars and football games. Finally, amazingly, working a few things out and getting a start on knowing about themselves and the universe they found themselves in, then deciding they’d be better off throwing all that hard-won knowledge out, bring back the Old Codger and force everybody down on their knees again, to be taught and believe the old twaddle, why not bring back the Flat Earth while they were at it?
    Yours truly, Lewis Spiers.
    The editor of the paper was an out-of-towner and a recent graduate of a School of Journalism. He was happy with the uproar and continued to print the responses (“God Is Not Mocked,” over the signatures of every member of the Bible Chapel congregation, “Writer Cheapens Argument,” from the tolerant but saddened United Church minister who was offended by twaddle , and the Old Codger) until the publisher of the newspaper chain let it be known that this kind of ruckus was old-fashioned and out of place and discouraged advertisers. Put a lid on it, he said.
    Lewis wrote another letter, this one of resignation. It was accepted with regret, Paul Gibbings stated—this too in the paper—the reason being ill health.
    That was true, though it was not a reason Lewis himself would have preferred to make public. For several weeks he had felt a weakness in his legs. At the very time when it was important for him to stand up before his class, and march back and forth in front of it, he had felt himself trembling, longing to sit down. He never gave in, but sometimes he had to catch hold of the back of his chair, as if for emphasis. And now and then he realized that he could not tell where his feet were. If there had been carpet, he might have tripped over the least wrinkle, and even in the classroom, where there was no carpet, a piece of fallen chalk, a pencil, would have meant disaster.
    He was furious about this ailment, thinking it psychosomatic. He had never suffered from nerves in front of a class, or in front of any group. When he was given the true diagnosis, in the neurologist’s office, what he felt first—so he told Nina—was a ridiculous relief.
    “I was afraid I was neurotic,” he said, and they both began to laugh.
    “I was afraid I was neurotic, but