Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Mrs. Treat has begun a botanical society,” Thatcher offered. “They meet Wednesdays.”

  “Well and good for her, but I am thinking of my sister’s education,” Rose informed him agreeably. “We’re fortunate to have so many philosophical men in Vineland. Mr. Charles Campbell is giving one of his lectures on spiritualism at Plum Hall on Friday. His talks are always packed to the rafters. And Friday next is Reverend Pittinger on science and the Bible. When you go to meetings regularly you won’t want to be seen in the same dress time and again, Polly. You’ll see. And there’s no need to fuss over money, Thatcher. Mrs. Clark knows you are situated and has been kind about extending credit.”

  “Kindly allowing us to go into debt,” Thatcher said. “In the vein of important subjects overlooked, I would like to discuss the house.”

  Aurelia turned away from the table, signaling to Mrs. Brindle for the coffee. Rose said nothing. Later she would punish him for this. None of it could be helped.

  “Mr. Martini has proposed a possible scheme of repairs. I’m afraid the cost is more than my salary, this year or any year. But this work of salvage has fallen to me, and it can’t wait any longer. If we postpone it, the damage will grow worse very quickly and this house will have to be abandoned in a few years’ time.”

  “If he wants so much for the work, he must be dishonest,” Aurelia said. “My husband did not like Mr. Martini.”

  Thatcher paused to collect his words. “Yes. Mr. Martini told me your husband disagreed with his advice on the building plan before they began construction. I know he was dismissed from the project. I’m sorry to have to tell you Mr. Martini’s predictions about the load-bearing beams have turned out to be correct.”

  Neither Rose nor Aurelia looked at him, only Polly. He felt a sensation under his breastbone that surpassed pain, verging on anger. He addressed Aurelia now, staring at her face while she scrutinized her lace cuff. “You can see broken lintels and window frames from where you sit, in a structure that’s hardly a dozen years old. You’ve said yourself, the staircase is frightening. I did not invent this problem. I am only addressing things that have already happened. The mistake was in joining the new construction to the original stipulation house.”

  Aurelia didn’t look up.

  “It was a clever suggestion from some of your husband’s colleagues. I’ll grant that. I understand the appeal of retaining an old structure rather than paying to tear it down before rebuilding. It might have seemed sensible to annex the upstairs bedchambers directly over the older lintels and beams. We are often persuaded that what is convenient is also right. But these associates were not architects. Their idea was unsound.”

  Mrs. Brindle brought the coffee. Aurelia poured, no one spoke. Rose took a sip, looked deeply into her cup, and set it down.

  “Mrs. Clark has gotten in the new Godey’s Lady’s Book, Mother. You’ll want to go and see. There are so many sweet bonnets. And you won’t believe it but she has new designs from Madame Demorest. She went to her shop in Philadelphia and memorized the styles so she could copy them out for us. Our Mrs. Clark is cunning.”

  “We’re lucky to have her,” Aurelia agreed.

  “And Thatcher, the piano should be tuned. Will you see to it? Polly needs to resume her lessons. Mrs. Marberry or not.”

  Silence settled on the dining room. The candle flames flinched in unison as an exterior door was opened and closed. Thatcher listened to a household driven by its endless preoccupations: china teacups vexing their saucers, the pump handle creaking out in the yard where Mrs. Brindle pumped water for washing up after their meal. The lifting and closing of the wooden lid of the toilet stool upstairs, where Gracie would find the stains of a secret bereavement as she cleaned the bedchambers. The quiet refrains of his disintegrating home.

  *

  “I have here a substance in a bottle,” Thatcher said, holding up his stoppered vial. The students squinted doubtfully at its emptiness. Science was a bewilderment they approached with fixed expressions of disbelief, the young ladies adding to this a sulkiness owned by their gender, peering up at teacher from under an eave of curled fringe. Thatcher adored the lot of them.

  “Don’t worry, your eyes aren’t failing. You can’t see what is in the bottle because it is not a solid or a liquid. It is a gas. We generally can’t see gas, can we?”

  “No sir, but we smell it sure. When my pa passes one you’ll know it in the next room. Specially if he’s been at the liver and onions.”

  This wisdom came from Willis Chester, who looked startled when his classmates burst into laughter. An earnest boy was Willis, smaller than both of his male classmates and most of the females. His family might have allowed him the two extra years’ schooling in hopes he might grow before getting thrown to hard labor. Thatcher had come to this post expecting to meet the offspring of historians and philosophers, but if those elderly men reproduced at all, they were adding only droplets to Vineland’s ocean of toilers. Nearly all these pupils came from farm or factory stock, sprouts like poor Willis who seemed to be waiting for the first full meal of his life. Thatcher was tempted to smuggle him crusts from home.

  “Willis, you are absolutely correct. We often know a gas from its smell, and that is the basis of our experiment today. I am going to open the cap of this bottle, and we will all sit very still and see what happens. When you believe you can identify our gas, please don’t name it aloud. I only want you to raise your hand.”

  At the very instant he pulled out the cotton stopper a hand shot up at the back of the room: Icyphenia Bottom, of the frayed orange plaits and yellow gingham worn every day of her life, inherited from one or more older sisters. Icyphenia wanted fiercely to please; through trial and error Thatcher had learned the kindness of letting her fill all the inkwells each morning, and otherwise overlooking her. The other pupils, paired at their desks, now sat with eyes wide and nostrils flared, wary but keen for enlightenment. The lamps flickered overhead, no one spoke. After a moment, a confident hand rose from the front row: Giovanna Persichetti. Round faced, bookish, and quiet, Giovanna knew every answer he ever had called her to recite aloud, and probably all those he hadn’t. Giovanna’s deskmate followed, then more hands, all in the vicinity of Giovanna. As slowly as movement in a dream, the wave of olfaction lifted hands from the front to the back of the room. After some five minutes, only a few outliers were left with direly knit brows, still struggling either to smell or to identify.

  “Very good. Now you may answer aloud, what is it?”

  “Ammonia,” cried the class, a motley chorus in which Thatcher also heard “alkie air” and a few other variations, along with “chicken house.”

  “Ammonia is correct. Otherwise called alkaline air. You’ve all used it at home as a disinfectant. I heard some of you say ‘hart’s horn.’ That name comes from a manufacturing process that uses the hooves and horns of deer and other animals. Later on we will talk about that chemical process. Now I want you to think about what we just observed. How this ammonia came to your noses. Did it reach everyone, all at once?”

  The heads wagged a confident negative. Thatcher reached forward to set down the flask on his desk. Then on second thought, tucked it into a drawer.

  “No. It reached the front row first, and the last row last. The gas moved, just as a swarm of bees might move through the air.” A few girls shuddered dramatically at this notion, so he amended his analogy. “A flock of pigeons, then. Or a school of fish moving through water. And that is because the gas is made of particles, exactly as a flock is made of birds. The particles are called molecules.”

  He turned and wrote the word molecule on the slate wall behind him, noting as always how dubious a word may appear when written large, inches from one’s nose. He turned back to his choir. “And like birds or fish, which tend to move at a particular rate of speed, so do molecules. In the case of ammonia, with a velocity of nearly a third of a mile per second, as it happens. Which is very fast, isn’t it?”

  All th
e boys and Icyphenia nodded heartily.

  “Now, if that is the case, why should it take the molecules such a long time to travel to the back of this room?”

  He felt an odd dislocation as all their attention went suddenly to the door behind him, to his left. He glanced surreptitiously, though he didn’t have to. It would be Cutler, lurking. As long as the man didn’t speak, Thatcher could feign ignorance and decline to invite him in. Sometimes he went away.

  “They moved more slowly because something stood in their path. This room was already filled with another gas, which we call air.”

  Blank gazes. He could tell Cutler was still at the door. He struggled to keep an appearance of relaxed composure that had been genuine, just moments before. “A mixture of gases, really. If you doubt that it’s here, just take a deep breath and feel it expand your lungs.”

  Thatcher watched the power of suggestion enlarge a dozen chests. While they rose and fell, he wrote the formula NH3 on the slate, then gripped the back of his chair to steady his train of thought. “The molecules of one gas strike those of another as they travel, sometimes bouncing backward. Going every which way, really. Please pardon me, young ladies, but the molecules really behave just like a swarm of bees, with every insect darting about furiously while the entire hive moves rather regally through the air. You have all seen this sight, have you not?”

  Some heads nodded. All still visibly preoccupied with the doorway. Damn the man.

  “When one gas diffuses through another, the progress is like that hive. Inevitable but slow. If we could close the door to this room,” he said pointedly, “and seal the windows, and wait a day or so, these molecules would become uniformly mixed throughout the air of the room. This property of gases diffusing through one another was first observed by a great scientist, the discoverer of oxygen, Mr. Joseph Priestley.”

  Cutler executed an imperial throat-clearing and stepped into the room. “Good afternoon, Greenwood. I see you are harrowing our children with tales of bumblebees.”

  “Only metaphorically, Professor Cutler. How kind of you to visit us. We’re beginning our term by studying the basic properties of matter. We were discussing the diffusion of molecules.”

  “I keep hearing this word, molecule. And yet I do not find it in Johnson’s dictionary.”

  Thatcher would be hard pressed to avoid insulting this silly man. Could he truly not know a thing so fundamental? “You’re right, it is a modern word. Belonging entirely to the language of modern chemistry. We find it in Nuttall’s Scientific Dictionary, which you kindly provide our students in the library. I predict the word will show up even in Johnson’s, in future years.” He hazarded a smile. “Since the molecules are bound to persist.”

  “Are we inspired, children? By the molecules? These modern chemists declare they are flying all about us, exactly as God created them, perfect and immutable in their number and form.”

  Thatcher was rattled by everything about this sudden apparition, not least by his use of the word “children,” not once but twice. Without school, these students would be hammering soles to shoes or grubbing straw onto autumn berry fields. If not yet married, then soon to be. Thatcher handed over his reins to Cutler and stood watching these timid, full-grown beings poised on the cusp of their fates. Somehow they broke and mended his heart all at once. The girls were the age Thatcher’s mother must have been when she began her brief, intense reproductive spate: one boy per year until the sixth one left her too weak to produce either milk or a name. As the story went, she lay gazing out the window, inspired at the last moment by the fellow sparring thatch on the roof of a neighbor’s cottage. Whenever his father recounted this tale—every few years, stupidly drunk—he made it out lucky for Thatcher she hadn’t spied the tin peddler instead, or some hag dumping her piss pot. Then his brothers would remember again to call him Tinker, or better, Pisspot. There was no knowing whether fondness had existed between their parents, but when the old man was in his cups he could conjure enough affection for the dead wife to blame his last runt for all present deprivations.

  Cutler was going on about God and molecules, making them his own. “Thus we find when we follow the pure scientific path, we arrive at that elysian pasture where science must stop and devotion begin. Is this not correct, Professor Greenwood?”

  Thatcher watched their eyes linger on the missing hand, or rather the device that stood in for it. Today it was the standard double-pincer hook, probably more useful than wooden fingers for gripping, certainly more menacing. Student lore had it that he kept a golden arm at home in a padded violin case, for high holidays. Regardless of prosthesis, he kept the wrist always hovering near his hip, probably believing it wasn’t noticed there.

  A long silence followed, before Thatcher realized he’d been asked a question. Eyes reluctantly parted from the absent hand, swinging expectantly to the teacher. Thatcher longed for some magical doorway through which he might lead them all away from this man. “I am not quite sure what you mean, sir?”

  “Do you agree there can be no natural cause for a molecule, only a holy one?”

  “What we know of natural causes, we learn from observation.”

  Cutler’s head drew back comically, as if Thatcher had pulled a false snake from his vest. His face alone was ridiculous: rarely in his life had Thatcher seen a male so devoid of whiskers. “Can you show us a molecule?” he demanded. “We should all be delighted to see it!”

  “I could, but it would require considerable patience. Before you joined us, I was about to explain to the class that Bernoulli’s observations of pressure led him to suspect the existence of minute moving particles. And that the experiments of Le Sage later confirmed it. Along with Dr. Joule, who has calculated the velocity of these particles inside a cloud of hydrogen gas.” Thatcher felt his confidence stabilize, as if Joule and Bernoulli were standing just behind him. “These men have shown us molecules in the same way I might show you a hurricane, for instance. Not by its visible air, but by the impression of its force against the blowing trees and damaged stable roofs. Things we can see very well. This is how we know of molecules.”

  Cutler made a quizzical face, unintentionally clownish. The round-cheeked face was poorly served by nakedness, a very odd choice for a man so gripped with fashion. “We know of molecules from the damage to barn roofs?”

  Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man’s confidence in his own wisdom. “Well, sir, you have caught me again in metaphorical speaking. This is how we know the strength of hurricanes, yes, and molecules we know in a similar but not identical way. In both cases we use deduction. Thank you for helping me to clarify. We study the unseen particles by observing their effects. Discovery comes from the small increments of weight and measurement we call data, providing answers to questions we have carefully framed.”

  “But data cannot enlighten us to the origin of things, you see.” Cutler turned his back on Thatcher, facing the class. “The molecules, the planets and their orbits, all these mysteries depend on a collocation of matter. Weight and measure, children, tell us only about ourselves, for they are the products of our own aspiration. They tell us not of the universe but of man, our quest for accuracy in sight and sound, and our longing for truth. Our noblest attributes, in other words.”

  Thatcher stood by silently as the man ran away with himself. If Bernoulli and Joule had been at Thatcher’s shoulder, they now crept off to the cloakroom. He watched Cutler’s lonely right hand doing more than the work of two, chopping out the rhythm of his sentences as if conducting some half-blind orchestra. “And we may claim these noble attributes only because they are essential constituents of him who created us. He who in the beginning created not only birds of the air and beasts of the land. For first, you see, he had to create the materials of which these things are made—”

  Cutler stopped abruptly, interrupting his sermon with a doleful sniff at the air. “I smell cleaning fluid.” He looked about himself warily. �
�Has there been an accident or a spill?” He turned to scowl at Thatcher. “Not a mess from an experiment, I trust. We have discussed this.”

  “Sir, your policy is clear. I would never subject our pupils to danger.” Thatcher glanced at the formula NH3 writ large on the slate, and dared a half wink at his pupils. “A diffusion of gases, I expect. It could be a case of liver and onions.”

  *

  Thatcher’s annoyance rarely left his mind, even at home. He pursued arguments with Cutler inside his head so often that Rose caught him in the parlor speaking aloud and asked him earnestly if he’d seen a ghost.

  “Of course not.” He knew to kiss her forehead and soothe her alarm. They might adore Poe and the falling house of Usher, but the women of this house would tolerate no ghosts under their own roof.

  Rose retrieved some trifle from the settee and went away again, leaving him to stew in his broth. He stood where he was by the window, gazing blankly at the lawn between Mrs. Treat’s house and his own. Polly had let Scylla and Charybdis out the back door. He watched them follow the ordained path of their morning constitutional: a direct line to the oak, which they sniffed and circled, then crossed to the beech where they both micturated. Rose had surely never noticed, or she would take it personally. Much happiness rested upon what Rose did not know.

  Plagued by a torment he hid from his wife, he decided to speak again with Mrs. Treat about the insufferable Cutler. She had been encouraging the first time, regarding Thatcher’s rectitude at least, if not entirely sympathetic to his misery. But an ally, surely. Also the leader of a botanical society attended by some of Vineland’s upper matrons. Her friend Phoebe was wife of Charles Campbell, of the famed spiritualism lectures, town historian, and confidant of Landis. By way of these lateral channels, Mrs. Treat might have some influence.

  *

  He waited for a new chance to rescue the dogs but they had forgotten their former savior and now swore allegiance to Polly. Left to grope for another stratagem, Thatcher decided on the excuse of borrowing or loaning a book. He took two under his arm: his treasured copy of Hooker’s Flora Novae-Zelandiae and Gray’s newly published How Plants Behave. The latter, written in simple language meant for young people, Thatcher had submitted for approval to use in his class. He would ask Mrs. Treat whether she thought Cutler might let it by. Thatcher was optimistic; he didn’t think the man had the brain to recognize it as a primer in pure Darwinism.