Chapter 17: Media Jihad
Sunday afternoon Clare and Clench formed a tiny convoy driving back to Greenline, making one stop for coffee.
“I hope you’re not going to be nervous staying in that house by yourself,” Clench said.
“No. My aunt wasn’t and I don’t believe she ever fired a gun. I’ll be fine.”
“We’ll keep an eye out for that boy. Sheriff Matheson will get the report too.”
Clare was glad he said “we” and not “I”.
“Awful kid,” she said. “I can’t imagine trying to force my mother to do something. I mean, my parents were a lot softer than, let’s say, their parents, but we just would not have considered trying to boss them around.”
“Oh yeah. My dad would have whupped us good if any of us had tried anything like that. We knew better than to try. Not that we didn’t do things behind their back, which at least shows some respect.”
Clare laughed.
“I know what you mean. Every once in a while my parents learn about something we did years ago that they never knew about, and now it’s too late to punish us. All they can do is be thankful we survived and didn’t get arrested.”
“Same with us. And even now that I’m living with my folks again, they run the house. Of course it’s different, they don’t try to tell me what to do anymore, no more curfews, but it’s their home. And when I have kids, same deal.”
“I never gave it much thought before, but I didn’t like that kid screaming at his mother,” Clare said thoughtfully. “I guess they don’t have the honor your father and mother rule.”
“The Koran doesn’t exactly have the Ten Commandments, but it does say to be kind to your parents.”
“Maybe they just have a different idea of what it means to be kind. Like saving her from apostasy, or, whatever. Did you have to read the Koran when you were studying Arabic and Persian?”
“Yes, I read it. To be a translator, or interpreter, you have to get some idea of how people think. It’s not just vocabulary and grammar. It’s the culture and the ideas.”
“Sounds like a lifetime of labor.”
“It can be.”
“Well, Ali’s not the only boy in America who disrespects his parents.”
“True.”
“This is more about their family than the helmet. I don’t think he’ll be back.”
Clare was wrong, but Ali came back in a way she did not anticipate. The next day, Monday, she drove into town and as usual stopped at the café to get coffee and round off her breakfast with pie, to carry her through the afternoon. The store was closed on Mondays but there was the plenty of paperwork to do. And she bought the local newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, the Columbus Dispatch, and the New York Times.
The Ohio papers reported that Ali had gotten the ACLU to mount a campaign claiming cultural rape and colonialism in Clare’s acquisition of the artifact.
“That was fast,” Clare muttered to herself, thinking that public opinion would be against her. She didn’t know how firm Mrs. Ebrahim could be in standing up against this onslaught.
And it would cost money to get her own lawyer, although the legal case was clear enough, at least according to the police.
She groaned over her chocolate meringue pie.
“What do you do with a problem like Ali Ebrahim,” she hummed to herself, but this wasn’t The Sound of Music. Of course, Roxie had an uncle who could take care of a problem like Ali. “He’s Italian, you know,” one of her aunts had whispered to her when they were introduced at a Christmas party years before, by which she meant either that he was Catholic or he was Mafia.
But that would be wrong.
She wondered if she could just ignore this, or, if she absolutely had to get a lawyer, if she could find an anti-sharia lawyer who would work pro bono. She had some money now, but there was no pointing in throwing it down a rat hole.
Or could she just work the media? Would NOW, the National Organization for Women, see this as a woman’s right issue, considering the assault on Jennifer Ebrahim? Probably not. Her mother and Roxie’s mother had been card-carrying NOW members at one time, but all NOW cared about anymore was abortion, gay marriage, and so on, but not sharia in the U.S. NOW seemed quaintly retro to Clare, insignificant, and Nicole and Roxie’s mom had lost interest years ago.
But how about other women? Mothers?
She groaned again. She absolutely did not want to do this, to organize a counter-protest or anything other than The Cellar.
Maybe she could enlist Roxie and Adventuress magazine. Adventuress wasn’t about politics, but a good fight always meant a good story. Clare picked up her cell phone.
“Roxie, listen to this.”
Clench walked in for his breakfast in time to catch part of her conversation with Roxie.
“I’ll call you back, OK? Clare hung up, or rather closed up her phone and put it in her pocket. “So don’t you ever eat your mom’s good home cooked breakfasts?”
“My mom has a job and doesn’t cook breakfast on Mondays.”
“Well, let me tell you what Ali’s up to now.”
Clare repeated the story she’d been telling Roxie.
“So, I’m asking Roxie to start a counter-campaign in her magazine. She has to talk to her editor first.”
“Well, that seems like a good idea. Avoid lawyers if at all possible. Although, there’s a group called the ACLJ that might be helpful.”
“What’s that?”
“American Center for Law and Justice. They deal with the ACLU quite a bit, but it’s mostly cases that affect constitutional rights and religious freedom. I don’t know about a little issue like this.”
“Maybe Roxy can blow it up into a matter of principle.”
“That sounds cynical.”
“So what’s Ali doing with the ACLU?”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying.”
“And besides mine and his, I don’t want to see Ali’s mother steamrolled.”
Thinking of the scene in Starbucks roused Clare to more enthusiasm for the job ahead of her.
“I’m going to talk to Roxie again later, but meanwhile I need to get to the shop. I need to concentrate on The Cellar and get it open sometime this summer.”
“Do you have enough things down there to open?”
“Well, I could open with no more than enough to stock a porch sale, but I’d prefer to have more.”
“I found a couple more bottles when I was planting. Since I’m doing it by hand, I’m not breaking them. Not many, anyhow. There seems to have been a small dump on the farm where I’m working. Not public, just family stuff, I guess. But do you know about the town dump?”
“No.”
“It’s not used anymore. But there used to be an old guy who ran a trash collection business around here. My great-grandpa knew him. Old black guy with one leg. He did this for maybe half a century, up until World War II. He lost a leg jumping from a freight train. Anyway, he and his family lived along a creek on the edge of town, in the woods, and people would pay him to haul away their trash. He sold some of it, someplace else, I guess, but there’s an area where he’d unload his wagon. And of course the grounds around his house. I used to poke around there when I was a kid, found a few old pieces of china, bottles, parts of old boots. A little china doll. I bet you could find things for The Cellar if you care to dig around.”
“Is it a lot of digging, I mean is it deep?”
“There’s a lot of stuff near the surface. Of course things have been growing over it for 60 or 70 years, and the earth has shifted and covered some things, but I wouldn’t know how deep it goes. You could find quite a few things near the surface and people might like the local angle.”
“Well, it would be exercise. Cross training. Maybe you can show me where it is someday when it’s not too hot and buggy.”