“The Fall of Man? Did he blame it on Eve?” she asked sharply.
“No, actually. Matter of fact, he took a few shots at the early church fathers for painting it as the woman’s fault.”
“Well, praise the Lord,” she said sarcastically. “It’s about time Eve’s criminal record got expunged.”
“Anyhow, after the Fall, he—Mike, not the Lord—veered off into evolutionary biology and primate behavior. Male aggression, territorialism, competition for mates, mate guarding. He knows more zoology than I do. Then we got into psychology and cultural anthropology and sociology and politics: patriarchies, matriarchies, oligarchies, preserving the power structure . . .”
“All right, you win,” she sighed, popping the plate in the microwave and tapping the one-minute button. “I should’ve let you stop with ‘It’s complicated.’ But did it make you feel better, wandering down those trails with him?”
“Kinda,” I hedged. “But he didn’t really answer the question. Like I said—and like he said—it’s complicated.”
“No it’s not,” she said.
“Wait—you just agreed that it was complicated.”
“I agreed that his answer was complicated,” she said. “But my answer’s simple.” I stared at her. “Men treat women like shit for the same reason they treat children or animals like shit: Because they can. It’s a power trip. ‘I’ll feel stronger and better if I prove that you’re weaker,’ right?”
“Well . . .”
“Every guy wants to be the big man on campus,” she went on. “Bed the prettiest women; breed with the prettiest woman. It’s like a pride of lions. If you’re not the big lion—if you’re only a medium-sized lion—you take it out on the little lions. Men like that would probably rather be shits to other men, but they can’t be, so they’re shits to women and children and animals.”
Kathleen’s blunt gloss on the issue lacked the intellectual nuance of Reverend Mike’s—no detours down scenic side trails of theology and sociology and anthropology—but what it lacked in sophistication, it made up for in ringing clarity. “So you’re saying it all comes down to pecking order?”
“No. I’m saying it all comes down to pecker order; pecker size. Men who treat women badly are men with small peckers—metaphorically, at least. Probably literally, too.”
I laughed, mildly shocked but mightily impressed. “Next time Mike needs a guest preacher, you should fill the pulpit. The congregation would get some straight talk. And they’d get to Calhoun’s half an hour before the Baptists.” She smiled. “But now I’m puzzled about something else. If Mike didn’t answer the question, how come I came out of there feeling so much better?”
“That’s easy, too,” she said. “It’s in the Gospel According to James.”
“James? There isn’t a Gospel According to James.” I ticked off the four gospel writers: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.”
“I’m talking about the Gospel According to James Taylor.”
“James Taylor? The folksinger?”
“Folksinger and prophet of the human heart. ‘Shower the People’?” She wagged a finger at me and began to sing. “Once you tell somebody the way that you feel, you can feel it beginning to ease.” She cocked her head. “Right? Isn’t that why you feel better?”
“Crap, Kathleen. How’d you get to be so much smarter than I am?”
“Not just smarter,” she said. “Wiser. It’s a woman thing.” She tapped her belly with an index finger. “It’s the uterus. It gives us superpowers of wisdom and insight.” Without looking, she reached behind her back and popped the door of the microwave, cutting off the timer a nanosecond before it began its annoying beeps. “Want salad?” I shook my head. She set the plate down in front of me, singing, “Better to shower the people you love with love, show them the way you feel . . .”
The steak smelled gloriously of mesquite smoke and marinade, as if it had only that moment been lifted off the grill. Rich, reddish-brown juice seeped from the seared meat, pooling beneath the crisp potatoes. “Perfect,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And Bill?” I glanced up, my fork and knife already poised above the plate. “Thanks for not being a shit to women. Or kids. Or animals.” I smiled at her. “You’ve got a big heart.” She smiled back. “And you know what they say about the size of a man’s heart.”
“Oh my,” I said, as I caught the drift of her innuendo. “Is it true, what they say?”
“Better than true. It’s an understatement.”
Beaming, I bowed my head and tucked into the feast.
CHAPTER 35
Satterfield