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down on because anyone opposed to the scientific method could not be all bad, while anyone cohabiting with a quasi-human creature not her lawfully wedded husband must certainly be enmeshed in the snares of Satan. By the second week of this controversy, most fundamentalist ministers, led by the Right Rev. Dwight “Happy” McElroy of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., of Rehoboth, Louisiana, had determined that the crimson sin of bestiality far outweighed the tepid virtue of a passive antievolutionary sentiment. Their sermons began to deride RuthClaire for her sexual waywardness (this was an irony that perhaps only I could appreciate) and to pity her as the quintessential victim of a society whose scientific establishment brazenly proclaimed that human beings were nothing more than glorified monkeys (a thesis that their own behavior seemed to substantiate). Happy McElroy, in particular, was having his cake and eating it too. I audited a few of his TV sermons, but almost always ended by turning down the sound and watching the eloquent hand signals of the woman providing simultaneous translation for the deaf.
    Sales of RuthClaire’s Celestial Hierarchy porcelain-plate series boomed. In fact, AmeriCred reversed a long-standing subscription policy to permit back orders of the first few plates in the series and announced to thousands of disappointed collectors that this limited edition of Limoges porcelain had sold out. It would violate the company’s covenant with its subscribers to issue a second edition of the plates. But in response to the overwhelming demand for RuthClaire’s exquisite work, AmeriCred, in conjunction with Porcelaine Jacques Javet of Limoges, France, had just commissioned from this world-acclaimed Georgia artist a second series of paintings, Footsteps on the Path to Man , which would feature imaginative but anthropologically sound portraits of many of our evolutionary forebears and several contemporary human visages besides; eighteen plates in all, the larger number being a concession to the growing public appetite for my ex-wife’s distinctive art. Further, this limited edition would not be quite so limited as the previous one. More people would be able to subscribe.
    “Congratulations,” I told RuthClaire one evening by telephone.
    “It’s phenomenally tacky, isn’t it?”
    “I think it’s called striking while the iron’s hot.”
    “I needed the money. Having a wall built around two thirds of this place didn’t come cheap, nor did the arc lights or the P.A. system. I have to recoup my investment.”
    “You think I don’t know?”
    “Besides, I want to do this Footsteps on the Path to Man series. The australopithecines I’ll have to reconstruct from fossil evidence and some semi-inspired guesswork, but for Homo habilis I’ll have a living model. It’s going to be fun putting Adam’s homely-handsome kisser on a dinner plate.”
    “Maybe I could order five or six place settings of that one for the West Bank.”
    RuthClaire laughed delightedly.
    Of course, the sermons following hard upon the new AmeriCred announcement were all condemnatory. The depths to which my ex-wife had fallen defied even Happy McElroy’s bombastic oratorical skills. He tried, though. The title of his message on the first Sunday in July was “From Angels to Apes: The Second Fall.” Whereas the celestial hierarchy was an ascent to pure spirit, the blind worship of evolutionary theory—“Theory, mind you!” McElroy roared. “Unsupported theory !”—was a footstep on the downward path to Mammon, debauchery, and hell. At the end of his remarks, McElroy asked his congregation to join with his loyal television audience in a silent prayer of redemption for paleoanthropologists everywhere and their avaricious minion in Beulah Fork, Georgia, may God have mercy, RuthClaire Loyd.
    I am not a complete pagan: I joined in.

    The attitude of my own townspeople toward RuthClaire during this period was hard