“I think it’s mean to make mice have a lot of babies and then make cats
to kill them.”
“You’ll have to discuss that with God, I’m afraid.”
“You mean when I go to bed tonight and say my prayers?”
“Best time,” she said, freshening the coffee in her mug with the supply
in the thermos.
Toby said, “I always ask Him questions, then I always fall asleep
before He answers me. Why does He let me fall asleep before I can get
the answer?”
“That’s the way God works. He only talks to you in your sleep. If you
listen, then you wake up with the answer.”
She was proud of that one. She seemed to be holding her own.
Frowning, Toby said, “But usually I still don’t know the answer when I
wake up. Why don’t I know it if He told me?”
Heather took a few sips of coffee to gain time. Then she said, “Well,
see, God doesn’t want to just give you all the answers. The reason
we’re here on this world is to find the answers ourselves, to learn and
gain understanding by our own efforts.”
Good. Very good. She felt modestly exhilarated, as if she’d held on
longer than she’d any right to expect in a tennis match with a
world-class player.
Toby said, “Mice aren’t the only things get chased and killed. For
every animal, there’s another animal wants to tear it to pieces.” He
glanced at the TV. “See, there, like dogs want to murder cats.”
The cat that had been chasing the mouse was now, in turn, being pursued
by a fierce-looking bulldog in a spiked collar.
Looking at his mother again, Toby said, “Why does every animal have
another animal that wants to kill it? Would cats overrun the world
without their natural enemies?”
The Why Game train had come to another dead end in the track. Oh, yes,
she could have discussed the concept of original sin, told him how the
world had been a serene realm of peace and plenty until Eve and Adam
had fallen from grace and let death into the world. But all of that
seemed to be heavy stuff for an eight-year-old. Besides, she wasn’t
sure she believed any of it, though it was the explanation for evil,
violence, and death with which she herself had grown up.
Fortunately, Toby spared her from the admission that she had no
answer.
“If I was God, I woulda made just one mom and dad and kid of each kind
of thing. You know? Like one mother golden retriever and one father
golden retriever and one puppy.”
He had long wanted a golden retriever, but they’d been delaying because
their five-room house seemed too small for such a large dog.
“Nothing would ever die or grow old,” Toby said, continuing to describe
the world he would have made, “so the puppy would always be a puppy,
and there could never be more of any one thing to overrun the world,
and then nothing would have to kill anything else.”
That, of course, was the paradise that supposedly once had been.
“I wouldn’t make any bees or spiders or cockroaches or snakes,” he
said, wrinkling his face in disgust. “That never made any sense. God
musta been in a really weird mood that day.”
Heather laughed. She loved this kid to pieces.
“Well, He musta been,” Toby insisted, turning his attention to the
television again.
He looked so like Jack. He had Jack’s beautiful gray-blue eyes and
open guileless face. Jack’s nose. But he had her blond hair, and he
was slightly small for his age, so it was possible he had inherited
more of his body type from her than from his father. Jack was tall and
solidly built, Heather was five four, slender. Toby was obviously the
son of both, and sometimes, like now, his existence seemed
miraculous.
He was the living symbol of her love for Jack and of Jack’s love for
her, and if death was the price to be paid for the miracle of
procreation, then perhaps the bargain made in Eden wasn’t as lopsided
as it sometimes seemed.
On TV, Sylvester the cat was trying to kill Tweetie the canary, but