Verbena had not been aware of it at the time, but the snow monkey incident was not the first question Elner had concerning Adam and Eve. Years ago, when Elner still lived out in the country, long before she had watched the Discovery Channel, she had been listening to the Bud and Jay early morning farm report on the radio, when Bud had announced the question of the day. “Which came first,” he asked, “the chicken or the egg?” After the show, Elner had gone on about her chores for a little while, then right in the middle of feeding her chickens, she stopped dead in her tracks, put the pan down, and went inside and called Norma.
Norma picked up. “Hello.”
“Norma, I think there is a mistake in the Bible, who do I tell, Bud and Jay or Reverend Jenkins?”
Norma looked over at the clock. It was five-forty-five and still dark outside. “Hold on a minute, Aunt Elner. Let me go and pick this up in the kitchen, Macky’s still asleep.”
“Oh, did I wake you up?”
“That’s all right, hold on.” Norma got up out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, put the light on, and plugged in her percolator. Now that she was awake, she might as well fix the coffee. She picked up the phone. “Here I am, Aunt Elner. Now what?”
“I think I may have discovered a serious error in the Bible. I don’t know why I hadn’t figured it out before.”
“What error?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“What? That’s not in the Bible.”
“I know that, but just answer me this, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“I have no idea,” Norma said.
“Well, don’t feel bad, they say it’s the age-old question that nobody’s been able to figure out, but the answer just came to me a minute ago, just as clear as a bell and here it is…. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Norma yawned.
“The chicken came first, no doubt about it.”
“Ahh…and how did you come up with that?”
“Simple! Where does an egg come from? A chicken; so the egg had to come after the chicken, the egg couldn’t lay itself. But then I got to thinking, if the chicken came before the egg…then how could Adam get here first, when Eve was the only one who could give birth?”
Norma reached for a cup out of the cabinet. “Aunt Elner, I think you may have forgotten that according to the Bible, nobody gave birth, God made Adam, then took a rib from Adam, and made Eve.”
“I know it says that, Norma, but the sequence is off…. It’s the hen that lays the egg with the rooster inside…the rooster doesn’t even lay eggs.”
Norma said, “Yes, honey, but there has to be a rooster to fertilize the egg.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Elner said, “Well, you’ve got me there. I guess I need to do some more thinking about it. Oh, shoot. Here I was thinking I’d just solved one of the great mysteries of the world, but I still think there’s a chance that Eve came first and the men who wrote the Bible changed it around at the last minute so they could be first, and if that’s so, we may have to rethink the entire Bible.”
At around seven-thirty, when Macky had come into the kitchen, he found Norma sitting at the kitchen table wide awake.
“What are you doing up so early, couldn’t you sleep?”
She looked at him. “I could have…if the phone hadn’t rung before the crack of dawn and woke me up.”
“Oh,” said Macky, getting his cup. “What did she want to know this morning?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
Macky laughed as Norma went over to get the cream out of the refrigerator.
“You can laugh, Macky, but she was just about to call the radio station and tell them that there was a mistake in the Bible, thank God I stopped her.”
“What does she think is a mistake?”
“She’s convinced Eve was created before Adam. Can you imagine the uproar that would have caused?”
Macky smiled. “Well, at least she has an open mind, you can say that for her.”
“Oh, it’s open all right,” Norma said. “I just wish it would open a little later in the day. Last week she woke me up wanting to know if I knew how much the moon weighed.”
“Why did she want to know that?”
“Who can tell? All I know is, she can ask more questions in one day than most people do in a year.”
“Yeah, she can.”
“And you wait, once she’s off and running with this Adam and Eve thing she’s going to be calling me all day.”
As predicted, around ten AM, just as Norma had finished applying her special Merle Norman facial mask for dry sensitive skin, the phone rang for the fourth time that morning. “Norma, if Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth, then where did Cain and Abel meet their wives?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Aunt Elner…at Club Med? Don’t ask me. I don’t even know why the chicken crossed the road.”
“You don’t? Well I do!” said Aunt Elner. “Do you want me to tell you?”
Norma gave up and sat down. “Sure,” she said. “I’m just dying to know.”
“To show the possum it can be done.”
“Aunt Elner, where do you hear these silly things?”
“From Bud and Jay. Did you know that another name for the potato bug is the Jerusalem grasshopper?”
“No.”
“Did you know there are forty-seven trillion cells in the human body?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, that was the correct answer yesterday. It won somebody an electric knife.”
Norma had just put the phone down and was headed to the bathroom when the phone rang again.
“Hey, Norma, you just wonder who had the time to count all those cells, don’t you?”
To Believe or Not to Believe
8:49 AM
Norma was driving as fast as she could, and just missed the last red light by a second and had to slam on her brakes, causing Aunt Elner’s insurance files to spill all over the floor of the car. She was so upset by this time, and wanted to pray for help with her nerves, but she knew she either had to pray or drive carefully; she couldn’t do both, so she decided to pay attention to the road.
Besides not wanting to have a wreck, she was also not 100 percent sure that praying would help. Norma had struggled with her faith all her life, and wondered why believing had not been easy for her, like English or speech had been in high school. She had made all A’s in both subjects; everyone said she had a lovely speaking voice, and to this very day, she could still conjugate a sentence. But she of all people needed to have faith in something. Macky was absolutely no help; he was as sure there was nothing out there as Aunt Elner was sure there was, contrary to what Verbena thought. Aunt Elner had called her just last week and said, “Norma, since I’ve been watching my science shows, my opinion of the Maker has shot up, I knew he was great, but I didn’t know how great, how anybody could think of so many things to create is beyond me, why just your different species of tropical fish alone are a miracle.”
Aunt Elner had no doubt whatsoever, but Norma was stuck right in the middle, fluctuating back and forth. One day she believed, the next she was not sure. Norma wished she could talk to someone about it, but she couldn’t confide in her minister, who was just starting out, and needed all the encouragement she could get. But even though Norma was not sure who or what she was praying to, she often did pray for help in overcoming her character flaws: not to notice when people put the ketchup bottle on the dinner table, or kept their garage full of junk and left the doors wide open, not to recoil at the sight of Verbena’s solid oak toilet seats, but she failed miserably, disappointing herself over and over again.
Norma was convinced her inability to not be offended by people with bad taste, terrible manners, or those who used incorrect grammar and said “went” instead of “gone” was directly related to the fact that she was unsteady in her faith. She hoped that one day she might get a sign, some kind of revelat
ion, to prove that something was out there. Verbena said she was always on the lookout for “signs, wonders, and miracles,” and Norma would take anything at this point, but so far she had seen nothing. If she died in a car crash right now on her way to Aunt Elner’s, her tombstone would have to read:
HERE LIES NORMA WARREN
DEAD, BUT STILL CONFUSED.
The Newspaper Woman
8:50 AM
The moment Cathy Calvert heard the loud siren of the ambulance as it sped past her downtown office, she knew she would have a story to write. Cathy, a tall thin woman in her early forties, with dark brown hair, was the owner-editor of the small weekly newspaper. She did most of the reporting herself, and from past experience, whenever an emergency vehicle was called to Elmwood Springs, it was either an accident or a serious mishap of some kind. She walked outside to see if it was a fire engine or an ambulance, but missed seeing it, and was surprised to hear the screaming siren cut off so close to town. Usually when an ambulance or a fire engine had been called, it was headed on out to the new four-lane traffic stop, where people were always crashing into each other, or else it was headed on out to the mall. Since Weight Watchers had moved next to the Pottery Barn, people trying to walk off those few pounds before they weighed in had sometimes overdone it and fallen out with heart attacks.
She went back into the office and grabbed her camera and her pad, and ran over to the spot where she thought the siren had stopped. As she came around First Avenue North, she saw that it was an ambulance, and it was parked right in front of Elner Shimfissle’s house. “Oh no,” she thought, “don’t tell me she’s fallen off the ladder again.” When Cathy reached the scene, Tot was standing on the sidewalk looking very distressed, and ran up to her. “She’s done it this time. She fell clean off the ladder and knocked herself out, and Norma is going to have a fit. Macky just called her to come over.”
Cathy suddenly forgot about writing her story and became just another concerned friend of Elner’s standing around feeling helpless. After a while, when so many neighbors had gathered and there was nothing she could do to help, she suddenly felt funny about being there with a camera. She didn’t want anyone to think she was there as a reporter, so she asked Tot to call her and keep her posted about Mrs. Shimfissle’s condition, and walked back up to the office. Although she was concerned, she was not overly concerned, because Elner Shimfissle was a pretty hearty old gal, who had fallen off things before and lived to tell the tale. Cathy knew firsthand Elner was a tough old bird in more ways than one.
Some years ago, after Cathy had graduated from college, she had taught a class in oral history at the community college, and Elner Shimfissle had attended with her friend Irene Goodnight. Both had been excellent students with interesting histories. Cathy had learned from that class that looks could be deceiving. For instance, at first glance, you never would have suspected that Irene Goodnight, a plain-looking, quiet grandmother of six, had at one time been known as “Goodnight Irene,” and with teammate “Tot the terrible, left-handed bowler from hell” had won the Missouri State Champion Lady Bowlers title three times in a row. And if a stranger were to meet Elner for the first time, they never would have guessed that underneath that old lady façade she was still as strong as an ox.
In exploring Elner’s history with her, Cathy had learned that during the Great Depression, when her husband, Will, had been bedridden with tuberculosis for over two years, Elner had risen at four every morning and with nothing but a mule and a plow had single-handedly kept their farm going. She had somehow managed to survive one of the worst floods in Missouri history, plus three tornadoes, had taken care of her husband, and had grown a crop large enough to feed them and half their neighbors. The most amazing thing about it to Cathy was that it had never occurred to Mrs. Shimfissle that it had been anything extraordinary. “Somebody had to do it,” she said.
Before she had taught oral history, Cathy had always wanted to be a writer, even dreamed of one day writing the great American novel, but after a few semesters she ditched the idea completely and went into journalism. Her new philosophy was “Why write fiction? Why read fiction?” Scratch any person over sixty, and you have a novel so much better, certainly more interesting than any fiction writer could ever make up. So why try?
Oh No, Not That Robe!
8:51 AM
When Norma finally got across town and pulled up to the house, the ambulance was already there. She had arrived just in time to see Aunt Elner, to her great dismay wearing that old brown plaid robe she had begged her to throw away years ago, being shut into the back of the ambulance. Norma jumped out of the car with her purse and all the papers and ran over, but before she could get to Aunt Elner, they had already closed the doors and were driving away. Then Norma and Macky both got into his car and started down the street, following behind the ambulance. As they drove the forty-five minutes to the Kansas City hospital, Macky, who was very concerned, didn’t say much, just an occasional “I’m sure she’s going to be fine, Norma, it’s just better that they take a good look at her and make sure nothing’s broken.”
But Norma wasn’t listening and did most of the talking all the way there. “I don’t know why they didn’t let me ride with her, I’m her closest family member, I should be with her, she’s probably scared to death, and why is she still wearing that ratty old brown robe? It has to be at least twenty years old, and it’s falling apart at the seams. I got her a brand-new one out at Target last week. When she shows up at the hospital in that thing, they are going to think we are just plain old white trash, I don’t know why she has to always act as if she didn’t have a dime in the world, I said, ‘Aunt Elner, Uncle Will left you plenty of money, there’s no reason in the world you should run around in the yard wearing that ratty old robe,’ but would she listen to me? No…and now this.”
Norma sighed. “I should have just taken it and burned it, that’s what I should have done. I just pray she hasn’t broken her hip or her leg. I knew she should have moved in with us, but no, she has to stay in that old house, and she won’t lock her doors. The other night I went over to leave her suppositories on the porch and her front door was standing wide open. I said, ‘Aunt Elner, don’t come running to me when you are murdered in your bed by some mass murderer.’”
Macky made a left turn. “Norma, how many mass murders have there been in Elmwood Springs?” Norma looked at him and said, “Well that’s no guarantee it won’t happen in the future…. You thought she would be all right back living in her house all alone. See…you don’t know everything, Macky.”
“Norma, try not to worry yourself into a fit, until we find out anything, OK?”
“I’ll try,” she said, but she couldn’t help but be mad at Macky, and the more she thought about it, the madder she became. The fact that Aunt Elner had fallen off the ladder in the first place was entirely his fault. He was the one who spoiled her and thought everything she did was so funny. Even when Aunt Elner had let her friend Luther Griggs park his huge, ugly eighteen-wheeler truck in her side yard for six months, Macky had taken her side, and if he hadn’t let her keep that ladder, had taken it away from her like she had asked him to do, Aunt Elner wouldn’t be lying up in the hospital right now.
Norma suddenly turned to her husband and said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Macky Warren, this is the last time I let you and Aunt Elner talk me out of anything, I told you she was too old to be living alone!”
Macky did not say anything. For all he knew, at this point, she might be right. He wished Aunt Elner had not gotten on that ladder by herself as well. He had just been at her house earlier that morning, having coffee with her before he went to work. She hadn’t mentioned anything about figs. All she’d wanted to know was, what good was a flea, and where was it on the food chain. Now he was in trouble with Norma and worried sick over Elner himself. He just hoped she had not broken anything major, or he would never hear the end of it.
Norma suddenly reached up and felt the top of her
head. “My God,” she said, “I think I feel my hair turning completely white! I hope you’re happy, Macky. Now instead of just touching up a few spots, Tot will probably have to do a complete dye job on me.”
And if things weren’t bad enough, when they were within ten minutes of reaching the hospital Macky decided to take a shortcut, and of course the first thing that happened was they got caught at a railroad crossing and had to wait while a freight train passed by. With every fiber in her being Norma wanted to scream, “I told you to just follow the ambulance! Now look!” But she didn’t. It never did any good. He always said the same thing. “Norma, don’t start the blame game,” and his saying that always made her madder, so she quietly stewed and did her deep breathing as they sat and watched one railroad car after another rattle by.
“Why won’t people listen to me?” she wondered.
She had been right about her daughter, Linda. She had told Linda not to marry that boy she was dating. She had even been modern about it and had advised her to live with him for a while, but no, Linda wanted the big wedding and the honeymoon, and then what did she do? She ended up with a big divorce as well. “Why don’t they listen? It’s not as if I like being right all the time, being right is certainly not fun for me.” Being right, especially about your husband, can be painful; and sometimes you would give your left arm to be wrong. As she sat there waiting for the end of the train to pass, she thought about the events of the last few days. She had been feeling a little more anxious than usual, and now wondered if she had not been having some kind of premonition that something terrible was about to happen.