Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  Homer smiled. He had chosen wisely. The dodo was the key. “Your extinction is at the very center of this case,” he gravely informed the dodo. “Death is the operating principle, not the life-giving touch of God in the garden of Eden, don’t you agree?”

  Again the dodo squawked in agreement, but this time it sounded grumpy, as though not entirely sure.

  Homer was in full spate. Abandoning his prosecutorial role, he began to lecture, as if the court were an enormous classroom, and the giraffe and the giant tortoise and the gray seal his earnest pupils. “All the burgeoning life observed by the accused in the jungles of Brazil, all the interconnected life forms he found in an entangled bank, they were all part of the struggle for life and the war of nature, isn’t that so?”

  The dodo was now distinctly annoyed, and it merely gurgled in its throat.

  Homer called up from memory whole pages of The Origin of Species. “The extinction of forms less fit for survival permits the better-adapted to increase, isn’t that right? Oh, no offense,” added Homer, as the dodo clucked and ruffled its feathers.

  And then Homer launched out on his own, inventing a crazy theory. “Gentlemen of the jury, let us think of God as a species, undergoing a normal process of evolutionary variation and change. Beginning in ancient times as an entire genus of primitive divine forms, the varieties of God were diminished by the process of extinction until only a few remained. If we consider, gentlemen, only the Judeo-Christian God, we can witness the falling away of competing species and the survival of a single variety. The nature of this variety changed over the ages, becoming more refined, more noble, compassionate and just.” Homer spun around to address the encircling jury with a dramatic appeal—“Then, slowly, after a long illness culminating in the year 1859, when Darwin published his great book, God began to fail. Consider, gentlemen, that the beautiful chapels in these Oxford colleges are merely fossilized bones like those of Darwin’s giant sloth. At the turn of the third millennium, God threatens to become dead as a dodo. Soon only a skull and one foot will remain.”

  At this there was a rattle and clatter from the skeletons hanging overhead—the beluga whale and the bottle-nosed dolphin—but whether in applause or disapproval Homer couldn’t be sure. Some of the golden scientists were shifting uneasily on their pedestals, glancing out of the corners of their stone eyes at the figure of Charles Darwin, which stood so mildly among them, lost in thought.

  “Oh, I don’t mean,” said Homer, correcting himself, “that God is altogether extinct. Here and there you can still catch a glimpse of Him, or possibly Her, because I should explain that God has recently undergone a sex change, or perhaps He’s only a cross-dresser. There have been sightings, He has been seen holed up in a third-class hotel in Paris, dodging behind a pickup truck in a parking lot in Omaha, disappearing down a Roman staircase. Perhaps,” said Homer, congratulating himself on his cleverness, “someone should put him in a zoo, and mate him with some old mother goddess, in order to carry on the species Deus divinus, or Dea divina, whichever it is.”

  The iguanodon regarded this as a frightful lapse of taste. “That’s quite enough of that!” he said severely. Then he pointed a claw at Francis Bacon, the jury foreman. “The jury will now consider its verdict.”

  “But I’m not finished yet,” protested Homer. “And what about the defense attorney? Isn’t anyone going to cross-examine this witness?”

  But the witness, the dodo, was waddling away, and Homer could detect a sleepy film forming over the hollow eye sockets of the iguanodon, as the court hack howled a repetition of the judge’s command: “The jury will consider its verdict! Is the defendant, Mr. Darwin, guilty or not guilty of murder in the sublime degree?”

  A hush fell over the court. For a moment the jury was silent, staring stonily into empty air. Then, abruptly, they, swung around on their pedestals to face Charles Darwin. Euclid pointed a naked arm, Priestley an accusing finger. Leibnitz rolled back his heavy sleeve and thrust out a pointing hand. Even Linnaeus woke from his dream to lift his furry arm and point it at Darwin. “Guilty,” cried the jurors. “Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

  It was the signal for chaos. The silence gave way to a tremendous cacophony of cawing, growling, singing and roaring. There were flapping wings, rattling bones, crackling wing cases. A thousand butterflies rose in a cloud to the peak of the roof. Ten thousand insects buzzed up off their pins and took flight. In their wooden drawers the Darwin crabs scuttled sideways. In the Zoology Office an infant auk tumbled out of the petrified egg and tottered, peeping, up and down the mantel. In the courtyard the orangutan and the dark-handed gibbon leaped to the top of a glass case, lunged at a couple of light fixtures and heaved their bodies through the air. The spider monkey romped up one of the cast-iron columns and gnawed at a wrought-iron water lily. The elephants trumpeted, the tarsier gazed at the tumult with moony golden eyes, and the bivalves clapped their shells open and shut, while the birds of the British Isles soared above everything else, uttering hoarse cries.

  Homer ducked as a tern swooped over his head. Were all of these creatures celebrating the death of God, or were they objecting to the verdict? It was impossible to tell. He wanted to ask the iguanodon, but the head of the great reptile was nodding. It was falling asleep.

  Homer looked anxiously at the prisoner in the dock. What sentence was to be carried out on the great man? Would he be hanged, guillotined, burned at the stake? Homer was glad to see that in spite of the verdict Darwin had not lost his melancholy dignity, although he was now engulfed in a throng of living organisms. Butterfly orchids were draped over his shoulders like a shawl, a parade of dazzling beetles crawled up his cloak, finches and mockingbirds skimmed over his head, a hundred barnacles were fastened to his trouser legs, and a slithering mass of earthworms tumbled around his feet.

  No one, thought Homer, had asked how Darwin would plead to the charge of murdering God. Was he speaking up? Was he whispering, Not guilty, my Lord? Or muttering a confession under his breath: Guilty as charged?

  Homer listened, but Darwin said not a word.

  CHAPTER 54

  “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice.

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The iguanodon was again only a towering heap of bones. The court hack had withdrawn behind the glass of the primate display in the north corridor, the butterflies were back in their drawers, and the newborn auk was only a fossilized shadow within its petrified egg. The jury and the accused were again merely tall blocks of stone, lost in reverie. Homer walked out of the courtyard and said goodbye to Edward Pound.

  “You’re leaving, are you?” said the porter, shaking his hand. “Well, I hope you and your wife have a pleasant journey home. Tell me, sir, is it true that Dr. Shaw is still under suspicion for the death of that young priest?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so, but don’t worry, Mr. Pound. I’ll take care of it. Nothing to it.”

  And Homer did take care of it. He called Gopal Mukerji from the public phone in the basement, talking loudly and cheerfully while a school party from Bristol crowded past him to stow their lunchboxes and hang up their coats. “It was suicide, Gopal, not murder, and I can prove it. I’ve already persuaded a judge and jury.”

  “What judge and jury? Homer, my friend, are you mad?”

  “Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter. Listen, Gopal.”

  It was probably Mukerji’s Hindu background that made him susceptible to Homer’s insane theory. He listened politely as Homer ranted on about the moonlight.

  “And the bishop’s throne,” said Homer. “Did you hear about that?”

  “The bishop’s—Homer, what are you talking about?”

  “The bishop’s throne in Christ Church Cathedral. Very significant. A second crime in the sacred precincts. The first Oliver murdered a bishop in the cathedral, the second tried to destroy the bishop’s throne. Proof positive of the destruction of his faith, which had once rejoiced in bishops.”

&
nbsp; After a pause Mukerji breathed a sigh into the phone. “Well, all right, Homer. I don’t know what the hell you’re going on about, but I’ll accept the fact that Clare cut his own throat. Why did the harp string break? I forced a note beyond its power. As a matter of fact, I was about to arrive at the same conclusion myself. Mrs. Jarvis has produced another tidbit of information.”

  “Mrs. Jarvis! No kidding! She’s been hugging it to her bosom all this time?”

  “Mrs. Jarvis, the oracle of St. Barnabas Street! The smoke rises and she peers at the mystic auguries and makes ritual gestures.” Gopal’s voice faded, and Homer pictured him spreading out his arms and rolling his eyes at the ceiling. “Then she delivers her divine pronouncement. But only when its time has come.”

  “Well, what the hell did she say? Oh, sorry.” Homer glanced apologetically at the children who were scrambling past him up the stairs.

  “She never sleeps. That’s what we should have realized at once. That woman does not sleep. She is a goddess, an emanation from on high, a bodhisattva. At night she floats around in the dark, observing the suffering world.”

  Homer laughed. “In our country we’d call her a witch. A white witch, perhaps, but still a witch. Tell me, Gopal, what did she see on the night Oliver died?”

  “She saw Hal Shaw come and go. She saw Freddy Dubchick come and go. She didn’t know Oliver was dead, but she guarded that house like a watchdog, all night long. She looked out the windows of her ground-floor flat and saw no one, nothing, although the moon was shining bright as day. Hal Shaw did not return. I asked her, ‘Why, Mrs. Jarvis? Why didn’t you go to bed?’”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t go to bed because she was waiting for the call.”

  “The call? What call?”

  “The call of nature. The call from her intestinal tract. Mrs. Jarvis suffers from constipation. The call never came.”

  “I see. So she was up and about, wandering around her flat, alert for every sign, watching and waiting, is that it?”

  “Exactly. Homer, my friend, it was astonishing. For once she was talkative, voluble! She told me everything about the action of the stomach and the movement of the upper and lower bowel, as exemplified in her own case. I was quite instructed.”

  “Am I to understand that Mrs. Jarvis’s intestinal disorder has removed all suspicion of murder from Hal Shaw?”

  “Entirely. Thank heaven, because I am overwhelmed with a wave of new cases. There’s been a stabbing in the Covered Market, a strangling at Blenheim Palace, a shooting in a bingo parlor on the Cowley Road, and a broken body at the foot of the steeple of the church of All Saints, foul play suspected.”

  “It wasn’t your boss at the foot of the steeple, was it, Gopal? It wasn’t the realization of your dream? You didn’t push him over the railing?”

  “Alas, no.” Mukerji laughed. “You are leaving, my friend? Traveller, we are helpless to keep you. We have only our tears.”

  “Goodbye, Gopal. I’ll miss you. I’ll miss Tagore too.”

  Homer went back upstairs, hearing for the last time the humming reverberation in the courtyard, the spinning out of voices into a fabric of interwoven sound. He felt bereft.

  It wasn’t just a sentimental attachment to a fine old building. No, it was much more than that, because within these walls Homer had become a different man. The museum had picked him up and shaken him, until all the scribbled notes in his intellectual pockets had fluttered out, leaving nothing behind. His pockets were empty. He was bankrupt of mental coinage from the past.

  Homer pushed open the door and stepped out into the frosty air. The lawn glittered with ice crystals. The trees, no longer shapeless clouds of leaves, displayed their rising trusses. A dog trotted along Parks Road, tugging at its leash, its master half-running behind it. Bicycles whizzed in both directions. The sky was beautiful and blue.

  Oh, damn, what difference did it make that the sky was beautiful and blue? Darwin had insisted that nothing was made beautiful for our sakes. Otherwise, he said, it would demolish his whole theory. Suppose, Homer told himself bitterly, the sky just happened to be the color of mud. People would clap their hands and exclaim, How beautiful the sky is today! How exactly it resembles mud!

  Oh, goddamn it.

  Homer crossed the street and walked through the Keble gateway. Mary would still be shopping, hurrying up and down the Broad, the High, the Turl, looking for Christmas presents. On the quadrangle he looked up at the gaudy brick checkerboard walls of the chapel, and at once his head cleared.

  The trouble was, the theologians claimed too much and the scientists too little. The scientists said the natural world was exalted enough, you didn’t need a benevolent deity to add a lot of phony magic. Nature was complex and wonderful, but you shouldn’t expect it to be good, to be kind as well as majestic. All that sort of thing was up to us. Homo sapiens might be an accident, but as long as we were here, we could invent our own morality.

  Well, that was okay, as far as it went. The theologians went a lot further, and that was the whole trouble. They went altogether too far. They weren’t satisfied with the elemental religious sense of wonder at beholding the stars, they had to attach a lot of baubles to it, until pretty soon you had kneeling stools embroidered by the Ladies’ Guild, you had cathedrals and heretics burnt at the stake. Oh, it was superb, the whole tippy pile of sacred miscellany. It was drenched in human truth and life and trouble, it was choked with glorious dogmas inspiring treasures of art and music and marvelous works of charity and frightful acts of bigotry. But it went too far.

  Homer climbed the stairs of his entry and found the door to their rooms wide open. Mary was back from shopping. Laughing, she showed him the things she had bought, the dodo coffee mugs, the chocolate portraits of Henry VIII and his six wives, the Oxford college scarves. “I’m told it’s only tourists who buy these scarves,” she said, dangling them in front of Homer, “but our nieces and nephews won’t care. The stripes are beautiful, don’t you think?”

  “Ah, what is beauty?” said Homer, stumbling over a suitcase. “Mud-colored scarves would be just as good.” He picked up the suitcase and all the clothes fell out.

  “Homer dear, how would you like to go for a walk while I finish packing?”

  “Well, certainly,” said Homer. “If you’re sure you don’t need my help?”

  “No, no, Homer. Just run along.”

  Outdoors again, he saw at once that the universe was mocking him. A blazing early sunset splashed rose-colored bars on a stretch of golden cloud. Homer crossed the street into the University Parks, where everything was flushed with glowing color. A bird skimmed from one bush to another.

  It was just some ordinary bird, uttering its chirping note. It was only defining its territory. That bird and all the other birds in the world were interested only in eating, mating, and reproducing. They were not made beautiful for our sakes.

  And yet—

  Homer walked along the path in the direction of the river, falling back with relief on his old friend Henry Thoreau. Henry had fought the good fight, back home in Concord. He was a naturalist, and a witness to nature’s mystery at the same time. The air over these fields is a foundry full of molds for casting bluebirds’ warbles. The wood thrush makes a sabbath out of a weekday.

  Henry hadn’t gone too far, that was the point. He had been content with the basic religious impulse. He had exalted it. He had spent his life on his knees to the glory of woodchucks, the wonder of battling ants, the marvels of birdsong. He hadn’t built a church, he hadn’t invented a tormented and resurrected deity, he had stuck to his simple undergirding reverence for the world.

  So the mystery remained a mystery. Thoreau didn’t say what it meant, and neither would Homer. But the presence of value in the world was as real to him as the law of gravity, as solid as the rules governing the growth of the rough grass under his feet.

  The bird struck up again. Philosophically Homer pinned the whole burden of his argume
nt to this single bird in the Oxford University Parks. Oliver Clare should have listened to this bird, he should have been content with the moonlight. The answer wasn’t yes and it wasn’t no—it was both at the same time. Oh, it was all very well to be rational and iconoclastic, to read The Origin and agree to the whole thing, but every time a bird sang, something unanswerable and demanding reasserted itself.

  It would never go away. A thousand years from now children would be taught the laws of biology and physics and chemistry in all their complexity, but every time a bird sang, they would be confronted with the same haunting strangeness, and the crude double nature of the world would present itself again. It was a clumsy universe, after all. It didn’t make sense. Somebody had blundered.

  There was a wooden bridge over the Cherwell. Homer leaned on the railing and looked at the dark water, and tried to sum things up by listing to himself the world’s wonders. It was another balancing act. To every stammered rapture there was probably a riposte—

  Well, come on, let’s start with the seashore. Look at the way a pale translucent wave runs up a sandy beach in parabolas of foam, and then slips back. How about that?

  Well, all right, that’s nice, I guess, but you forget that the sand under the wave is full of little carnivores grasping at microscopic animals carried over them in the water and eating them alive.

  That doesn’t surprise me at all, but so what? Look, what about flowers? Take a peony, for instance, a white peony splashed with red. What about that?

  Oh, I suppose peonies are all right, as far as they go. But as you know perfectly well, the only reason for color in flowers is to attract insect pollinators. I mean, you must know that. That’s all it’s for.

  Trees! What about winter branches against the sky? The sound of the wind moving in ten thousand leaves?

  Well, naturally, you idiot, the leaves are there to collect sunlight, and the wind is merely the flow of air from centers of high pressure to—