The Crossings

by Deborah Larsen

  Short Stories

  While Charles was living ashore for a few weeks near Rio de Janeiro, he visited a priest who kept hounds and joined an early morning hunting party. The five dogs in the pack, she told Polly, were named Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clareina, Dorena, and Champaigna.

  She repeated. “Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clareina, Dorena, Champaigna, Polly.”

  Polly looked incredulous.

  “Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clariena, Dorena, Champaigna.” Sophie inhaled.

  “Trumpeta.”

  “Mimosa.”

  “Clariena.”

  “Dorena.”

  “Champaigna.”

  “Whereas, I heard you the first time. You may like the lilt, the rhythms, but I do not care to hear that recital one more time. It makes me jealous that Father went rambling shambling with those beasts before me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Polly looked through the glass just before a gust of wind shook the pineapple guava and then lifted her head and said, “Strumpetas.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Strumpetas.”

  “Polly, I will be like Scheherazade now,” she said. “Each day, I will give you more details of Charles’s time in South America—the things that most interest and appall and charm me.”

  Polly crossed her paws. She said, “Charming is good. Long is not. A thousand and one stories are too much. And what about the things that might charm me. Don’t forget that. Otherwise you’re just telling for your own edification. Tell charming and short for both of us.”

  “All right. And I can try short. Let’s start with armadillos. This very afternoon.”

  “The First Day. Armadillos.”

  “What?”

  “Armadillos, Polly. He did eat them in South America but he preferred them cooked without their cases because then they tasted like duck. But what I meant to tell was that he saw the gauchos killing them and wrote that ‘It seems almost a pity to kill such nice little animals, for—’”

  “Ah,” said Polly. “That was charming of him. That sounds just like Father.”

  “He gave the reason. He quoted a gaucho who was sharpening his knife on one of their backs and who said, ‘Son tan mansos.’”

  “Translate.”

  “Darwin said it meant, ‘They are so quiet.’ But I think it could mean, ‘They are so tame.’”

  “The Second Day. Wild celery and cranberries.”

  “What?”

  “Wild celery and cranberries. These were gathered in Tierra del Fuego to help prevent scurvy on the ship.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it. I love the combination.”

  “You can do a little longer than that. That’s not really a story. It’s not enough.”

  “Polly,” Sophie said, “If ever someone gathered wild celery and cranberries for me I would love that person forever.”

  “What you have said today is more than enough.”

  “The Third Day. Yammerschooner.”

  “Some sort of ship?”

  “No, a Fuegian word. Captain Fitzroy actually made a little vocabulary of the language. Yammerschooner got on Charles’s nerves in Tierra del Fuego. It was a relief to know that something could get on Charles’s nerves. Isn’t it good to think that you are not the only one whose nerves get frayed, that you are not the only one who gets crabby, that you are not the only one who has embarrassing foibles. That you are not alone?”

  “Everybody already knows that by now. That’s no story.”

  “Well, then, the Fuegians said, ‘Yammerschooner,’ all the time. Charles thought it meant ‘Give me.’ He said they would point to things, ‘even to the buttons on our coats,’ and say ‘Yammerschooner’ in different intonations.”

  Polly said, “That part is more of a story. Specifics. By the way, Yammerschooner a biscuit.”

  “The Fourth Day. Gauchos.”

  “Yes.”

  “The gauchos fascinated our Charles. He wrote that they were tall and handsome and wore colorful robes. They had a ‘most proud, dissolute expression.’ He said that they overdid their politeness but that they seemed ‘quite ready, if the occasion offered, to cut your throat at the same time—’

  “Polly, there is a part of me that would love to ride with the gauchos, smoke cigarros, grow my hair long and dyed black, wear bright robes and carry a dagger at my waist. I would roast wild cow with them, wild cow I had caught myself with lazo and bolas or by slashing the main tendon of the hind leg. And the roast would be a big slice, a round piece from the back with the skin still on it; it would go hide-side-down on the embers and as Charles wrote, ‘…in the form of a saucer, so that none of the gravy is lost.’ In this world, Polly, not a drop of good gravy should ever be lost. Nor should a drop of chimichurri sauce which is sometimes referred to as gaucho sauce.

  “When I was young, it was the Apaches and the cowboys. I wanted to ride on both sides. I wanted long braids and I wanted to help roast mescal in a pit. I would spit when I was angry. After I saw Broken Arrow, I wanted to be with both Cochise and Tom Jeffords, but especially with Cochise. It was in that film that I first saw Arizona and Tucson.

  “I wanted something wild. If I went far enough west, rode hard and fast, maybe I could get away from my grade school nuns.”

  “The Fifth Day. Kilkenny Cats.”

  “Just what did you say?”

  “Kilkenny—”

  “The second word.”

  “Cats.”

  “That’s what I thought. Don’t say that word.”

  “His way into Buenos Aires was blocked for a time by a group of General Rosas’ men who were intending to overthrow the governor. And Charles was so sick of the fighting that he wrote: ‘I wish the confounded revolution gentlemen would, like Kilkenny cats, fight till nothing but the tails are left.’ The revolution gentlemen got on his nerves, too.”

  “Good riddance. Nothing left but the tails. Charming. I like it.”

  “I thought you would, Polly.”

  “Tell me that story again.”

  “The Sixth Day. Port Desire.”

  “All right.”

  “Polly, what would you think if you realized you were eating something—”

  “Eating again. It makes me hungry. Yammerschooner a biscuit.”

  “I just gave you one an hour ago. What would you think if you were eating something and it turned out to be precious. In Patagonia, at Port Desire, the group cooked and ate an ostrich. But just afterward our Charles’s memory returned: he had earlier been told that there was a possible, just a possible “second type” of ostrich in Patagonia. He had been dying to see and collect one and now he had eaten his desire. Ye gods.

  “But here is what survived the cooking pot: head, neck, legs, wings, some larger feathers, and quite a bit of skin. He saved all of it and sent it packing to London where John Gould dubbed it Rhea darwini.”

  “Had I been there, only the feathers would have been left. I hate feathers. Yuck.”

  “Listen. Think of this. He ate a new species before he knew it. It became flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood and it ended up with his name in Latin.

  “What was happening? We think it was a simple matter of digestion, communion with a new species. But Charles also took in new languages and cultures. And they took him in. It has continued. It has continued. Look at the enrichment, the transformation of America.”

  “Watch it,” said Polly. “No politics.”

  “The seventh day. The Galapagos. They were the scene—”

  “Let’s quit this,” Polly said. “Let’s go outside. See all those humps and bumps, see all those pointies, those scenes right outside there?”

  “You mean the Santa Ritas?”

  “Whereas, I do. They are the American Gal-ap-agos. Let’s go galloping.”

&nbs
p; 3

  Dropping Anchor

  “Charles and the Beagle left South America and proceeded across the Pacific to Tahiti, the Bay of Islands, Hobart, King George Sound, the Keeling Islands, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Bahia again, the Azores, and finally Falmouth where they dropped anchor on October 2, 1836.”

  Polly said, “Let’s get right to the dropped anchor part. And wasn’t there any ship named the Terrier?”

  By the time the Beagle voyage was over, Charles had apparently given up shooting. Sophie admired him for that, just as she admired Jack for having abandoned guns for binoculars.

  Charles had also put a church career behind him. His interest in natural history was “so different a feeling to anything that I ever knew before.”

  He wrote that “…it appears to me, the doing what little one can to go on & do all in my power to encrease [sic] the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as anyone can in any likelihood pursue.”

  He also had the means—a monied family—to avoid an appointment to Cambridge University, which was in one sense a grand repository of knowledge and in another sense an institution with all the strings that came along with a professorship. Sophie knew about that. Would she have become a professor if she had been wealthy? She wasn’t sure.

  “Polly?”

  “Whereas, now what? Outside?”

  “No. When Charles got back to England, he was on the rim of a new—”

  Polly squirmed. “I thought we had dropped anchor for good. Outside, outside, outside.”

  “But don’t you want to hear—”

  “Naught. No. Nonesuch. Naughty. Nevermore. Outside.”

  “Are you on Ted’s team?”

  “Whereas, yes. You sit. You stare at the gathers of pages—those floppy whites between the stiff colors back and front.

  “I loved Father but you talk about him too much. All the while you don’t use your body parts to move. Out. Let us move. Get up. Get out. Let us go to the rim. Get up and out. Please. Just open that sliding glass door.”

  Towards the close of our voyage I received a letter whilst at Ascension, in which my sisters told me that Sedgwick had called on my father, and said that I should take a place among the leading scientific men. I could not at the time understand how he could have learnt anything of my proceedings, but I heard (I believe afterwards) that Henslow had read some of the letters which I wrote to him before the Philosophical Soc. of Cambridge and had printed them for private distribution. My collection of fossil bones, which had been sent to Henslow, also excited considerable attention amongst palaeontologists. After reading this letter I clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a bounding step and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer. All this shows how ambitious I was; but I think that I can say with truth that in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable review or a larger sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting one, and I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain fame. 14

  —The Autobiography of Charles Darwin

  Free

  Sophie had lost her audience. Whom would she tell about the next star in the constellation of events that was shining on Charles.

  For now he had encouragement and a sense of his own “course.” A letter from his sister, Susan, probably gave him the impression that his father would not object to his pursuing that course.

  Sophie was rooting for him; she was rooting for a man who was in the process of complicating her faith and the faith of others. And again she thought, good thing he had a monied family. At least he could pay all the people who waited on him. She wished all the people who waited on him could have been as free as he was becoming.

  Sophie jumped up and walked out the patio door, and onto the Saltillo tile with the traditional small animal footprints that had been stamped into wet clay and then dried. Sophie imagined the little creatures—whoever they were—terrified and wiggling in the grasp of the workers who wanted to make it look like it had happened naturally.

  “I’m glad they didn’t do that to you, Polly,” she said to her little shadow.

  Polly shuddered. “Thank you for that thought.”

  Sophie shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky. The bluest blue with one gold-foil orb etched in it. Beneath, the horizon was interrupted only by a few mesquites; by a saguaro or two, and creosote bushes. Even Mounts Wrightson and Hopkins looked like modest encroachments into that blue.

  So unlike Glynn, in the East; there, red oak and black oak mostly obscured higher reaches. Sometimes you asked yourself if there was really a sky up there. What lay beneath the trees was often such a tangle of blackberry bushes and poison ivy and rotting logs that you forgot about trying to take a walk. Abandoned the idea of getting in there to study the flora—unless, of course, you decided to take a machete with you.

  And remember the ticks. At least here, in the West—at least most of the time—you could see the rattlesnakes, see what would bite you.

  Charles was going to be free and clear. She felt free and clear here. Free. She had no debts; she had some savings, a house, a car, a modest annuity and, lately, Social Security. She could possibly run out of money before she died, but right now she liked working for herself.

  All the people who were in her position—more or less free—in Green Valley should be rushing out their patio doors (keeping a thousand eyes out for rattlesnakes, those muggers) and ringing the chimes attached to their peeled-pine posts as if it were the end of a war. They should be hearing a voice from a megaphone: “Sailors, all: hear this. Bend all those long-suffering sweethearts backwards—only if they are willing, mind; only if they agree—right now. Kiss them so hard your infernal caps fall off.”

  And then what. Freedom for what? You can’t stand around and kiss your sweetheart all day.

  She hoped then that they had their own Sedgwicks in their lives, someone to give them a little more self-confidence, someone to suggest that they could contribute to the cosmos according to their best dreams, in small or in large ways. Sophie had had a Sedgwick of her own but she knew better than to tell who it was.

  Katharina von Bora

  Sophie loved the muffins at a favorite coffee shop in Green Valley and she loved the whir, the hiss and steam of the espresso machines, and she loved the employees who seemed naturally cheerful.

  Lily said, “Why, it’s Dianne Wiest!”

  She was at a table with Michael. “Come and join us, Sophie. We were just having an argument.”

  Michael flushed. “Hello, Sophie. How are you?”

  “Weren’t we, Michael? Weren’t we having an argument? Michael would rather not be here, actually, having this ar-gu-ment. Michael would rather be riding his bicycle or helping the homeless.”

  Michael looked apologetic. Then he smiled. “I’m afraid so.”

  Lily said, “I’m afraid so, too. Am I ever afraid so.” She tilted her head toward Michael. “You know, don’t you, that he’s a bona fide liberal, a progressive—but he hadn’t come out until—lately. He’s been in the closet, religiously speaking, for longer than I can remember. He needed a job, right?” Now she scrutinized Sophie. “Do you go to church?”

  Sophie said, “I don’t go but once in a great while.”

  “What church were you raised in?”

  “Roman Catholic. The theology in the ‘60s in Chicago liberated me. Now I’m not much of a churchgoer; I just have—some faith.”

  Michael looked up from his coffee. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Mundelein College. Right next door to the Jesuits there on the Lake.”

  Michael nodded. “Chicago,” Michael said. “A great city. And I love Jesui
ts—or many of them, I mean. Many of the few there are left.”

  Lily said, “Tell her what you named your dog, Michael. She might enjoy it. Somebody needs to enjoy something around here.”

  Michael said, “Lily, please.” Then he sighed. “Katharina von Bora is the name of my dog.”

  “And he never, never shortens it. Her name. He never shortens it. Do you know who Katharina was, Sophie?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Martin Luther’s wife. You know, the ex-nun. I’m out of here,” she said and she picked up her tote bag and walked away.

  After a moment Michael said, “I should point out that neither I nor Katharina are formally Lutheran. I should go, too, Sophie.”

  She watched him leave and she watched him through the windows. She watched as he put on a glittering helmet, climbed on his bicycle, and took off out of the parking lot.

  Mr. Gould brought before the notice of the meeting, from the collection of Mr. Darwin, a new species of Rhea from Patagonia, and after offering some observations upon the distribution of the Struthionidœ, and upon the great interest attending this addition to that family, he remarked that the new species is distinguished from Rhea Americana of authors, in being one-fifth less in size, in having the bill shorter than the head, and the tarsi reticulated in front instead of scutellated, and in being plumed below the knee for several inches. It has also a more densely plumed wing, the feathers of which are broader, and all terminated by a band of white.

  Mr. Gould, in conclusion, adverted to the important accessions to science resulting from the exertions of Mr. Darwin, and to his liberality in presenting the Society with his valuable Zoological Collection; to commemorate which he proposed to designate this interesting species by the name of Rhea Darwinii.15