Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Is it noon, ma’am?” Selma asked.

  Mary peered up through branches at shreds of sky. “I think it must be.”

  Selma shed her apron in a flash and threw it on the ground, then knelt on it to set out the contents of the lunch bucket, unwrapping cheeses, salted ham, and apples. A pot of cream, another of jam, a dark loaf of bread. Egg cake!

  Mary meanwhile stood motionless, staring across the carmine stream toward the opposite bank, where water had undermined a substantial section of forest. Fallen logs lay across one another in shades of deep decay.

  “A person might think we had not wholly emerged from the carboniferous era,” she observed, and Thatcher saw he could never name his friend with one tree because she was many. The fossil ferns, ancient cedars, and flowering plants joined at the root to the different eons of their emergence: Mary was all these at once. She was phylogeny.

  Selma commenced to eating a slab of bread with butter and jam.

  Mary revived from her trance, folded her apron, and sat down on it. Thatcher found an accommodating rock. Selma handed him an apple, the jam pot, most of the ham, and two-thirds of the loaf, which grew difficult to balance on his knees. “How much will the magazine pay for your series on the pines?” he asked. He’d found Mary forthcoming about financial particulars; she volunteered them. Perhaps in her effort to inhabit the world of men.

  “Eighty-five dollars per article.” Mary inspected the butter pot closely and picked out a luckless insect. “With illustrations, six or eight to each installment I should think, which I will draw myself.” She glanced at him. “Or else I will properly attribute them.”

  “I would never doubt it.”

  Eighty-five dollars. Even if it took her the full year to produce four illustrated articles, she would earn more than his three hundred from Cutler. And of course it wouldn’t fully occupy her year. Mary found time for dozens of projects on a given day. (Or a hundred, if Selma were asked.) It crossed his mind to offer his services as an illustrator, but it might seem he was begging a favor. Certainly Thatcher didn’t begrudge his friend’s fortunes, but he sank now in the grave of his own. He had forgotten his financial miseries for the span of a morning, and wished for more mornings like it.

  “One would think it easier to write for a popular magazine than a scientific one,” Mary mused, “but I never find it the case. They’ll want the proper telling of the thing to be slathered on all sides with froth, like a charlotte russe. ‘In the death-like stillness a mysterious awe steals over my senses,’ that sort of business. ‘I am transported back through the ages to a time when nymphs presided over the wood, punishing those who shortened the lives of the trees.’”

  “It’s only Heavenly Father that can rule over us,” Selma protested through a mouthful of bread.

  “And I will make that plain, dear. Otherwise your mother will not let you come to me anymore.”

  “And charlotte russe has the jelly on the inside, not the outside.”

  “Well then, a Victoria sponge.” Mary laughed. “Have mercy on me, Selma. You know what sort of a cook I am.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Again, the squashed little grin.

  “Why bother with writing sponge-cake prose, then?” Thatcher asked. “You’ve said the professional journals pay more. You have so many questions of science to pursue. With Charles Darwin and Asa Gray as colleagues.”

  Mary frowned into the cedars. “It has to be done,” she said at last. “Most people look at a forest and say, ‘Here are trees, and there is dirt.’ They will see nothing of interest unless someone takes them by the hand. I am astonished at how little most people can manage to see.”

  “I admire you, then.” Thatcher felt a few degrees elevated by a vocation he shared with Mary Treat. How could it not be noble work, to rouse a disaffected humanity and press the world’s physical truths into its palms? Even the magazine readers, even the pinafored girls. Mr. Darwin was preoccupied. And Dr. Gray was too busy.

  Abruptly Selma remembered something, pawed through her bucket, and produced a bottle of cold coffee. She flipped the wire bale and poured coffee into battered metal cups, passing one to Thatcher.

  “Have you always known yourself to be a scientist?” Mary asked him.

  He felt self-conscious under the watch of Mary and Selma, who seemed eager for him to eat quantities of bread and ham. Witness the exotic appetite of the male. “I never seem to know anything about myself at all. Except that I am curious, and put more faith in what I witness than what I am told.”

  “Then yes, a scientist born,” Mary pronounced. “My curse as well. So my husband called it. He described himself a swimmer in philosophies, free to speculate on tides and spheres while I stood on shore seeking proof of the liquid nature of water.”

  Thatcher took note of the past tense. “One might envy the swimmer’s freedom.”

  “But how muddly-puddly!” Mary said, clearly not envious. “To believe, without hindrance of actual evidence.”

  Thatcher had never heard so creative a damnation as muddly-puddly. “When did you and your husband come to Vineland?”

  “In the eighth year of the settlement. We met a man in Troy who invited Joseph to speak at Plum Hall, and he was thrilled to oblige. That was in the autumn of sixty-eight.”

  “What was the subject of Dr. Treat’s lecture?”

  “‘The Future of Vineland.’ Extolling Captain Landis’s wholesome ideals of fresh air and the agrarian conquest. Joseph had good instincts in those days for a topic to stir an audience. He even thought to mention women’s suffrage. It was a week before the election, and everyone knew of the scheme for women going to the polls in Vineland.”

  That scheme was news to Thatcher, though Polly might know of it. She tormented her mother by following the adventures of Mistresses Fowler and Tillotson, of the Grand March to Perdition in Doeskin Trousers. “I take it Dr. Treat’s homily was a success.”

  “Oh yes. Mr. Campbell invited us to return in December as his guests. We learned Vineland’s fruit trees had suffered a crisis of pestilence the previous summer, so I helped Joseph prepare a lecture on the extirpation of pests by interrupting the larval cycle. I had studied insects in my father’s orchards since long before I married.”

  “Had you?” Thatcher could picture that girl in the orchards. A species of Polly, with less leg and longer discipline. “With the intention of scientific discovery?”

  “With no proper intention at all, I suppose.” Mary looked thoughtful. “But my investigations found purpose in Vineland. He gave the lecture in January and published a tract called Insect Extinguisher that sold more than a thousand copies in a month. Dr. Treat became an instant success and we never returned to New York. We leased the house on Plum and had our things shipped from Troy.”

  “It was your success. Your work entirely. The lecture and pamphlet.”

  She smiled. “It was.”

  Wives assisted their husbands, naturally, but Thatcher saw how she would have come to confusions about proper attribution of another’s work. He also noted Selma’s disappointment in his progress on her victuals; he set himself to an apple. Mary was contemplative.

  “Vineland was different in those days. Freethinking was purpose and endeavor. Not entirely, of course. The spiritualists and such had their following as well. Landis has never understood any of the philosophies. He only cares that he is emperor of the realm.”

  “Captain Landis has more of a practical bent, you believe?”

  “A practical man who has learned from his past failures. In Vineland he created an Eden he could rule by strict regulation, and made himself powerful by attending to his subjects’ longings. Whatever they might need, he claims this place to be.”

  Thatcher had scarcely conversed with the man, but Mary’s account squared with Aurelia’s devotion. His newspaper tormented her with the dangers of drunken foreigners and rowdy youth, women in trousers, the wolf at the doorstep, and then on the next page soothed her with impossible reassurances
. After all the losses in her life, Aurelia had great need of a man with such talents.

  “In the early days people were more rational,” Mary said. “There was interest in my work on the gall moths. A thousand copies of our tract sold in a month! Think of it.”

  Thatcher did think of it, wondering at the price per issue.

  “And then I found this place, my pilgrim’s rest.” She lifted a hand toward the bog.

  “While Dr. Treat found his contentment in astronomy.”

  “He called it astronomy.”

  “His lectures on it in the Plum Hall were famous to put folks to sleep,” Selma offered, causing Thatcher nearly to choke on his apple. But Mary seemed unperturbed. The two of them began packing up the remains of lunch.

  “He lost his instincts for stirring an audience,” Mary said simply.

  “My pa says the doctor is full of his own beans.”

  Mary sealed the lid of the lunch bucket. “Selma, do you remember where we transplanted our June experiment with the ferns?”

  “Yes ma’am. Near to the fork of this crick and Maple Branch.”

  “You’ll follow this creek until Maple Branch. Then what?”

  “Twenty paces up the bank to the big chestnut. Way before the Penn Gap. If you get to Penn Gap it’s too far. We marked the plants with lemon-color ribbons.”

  “Lemon? I thought white.”

  “No ma’am. The white was the April batch.”

  “I could consult my notes, but I’m sure you’re right. Off you go, dear. If you find so much as one leaf alive, come tell us and we will go take a measurement. And if anything else, collect it.” Gravely Mary hung the tin vasculum on its ribbon around Selma’s neck as if it were a medal for valor.

  “Yes ma’am.” Selma happily dashed off into the tunnel of cedars, more than ever rabbit-like.

  Mary looked sad. “She’ll find them as dead as all the ones that went before.”

  “Ubi sunt,” he offered.

  Mary seemed about to get up, but remained in her spot. Thatcher tried to imagine his pretty wife so comfortably seated on the ground, but could not. Beauty had its price. On days other than this one, he’d felt lucky to pay it.

  “I think this will be our last trial of transplanting the ferns,” she said. “Dr. Gray encourages me but I hate to take more lives, even for the good of science.”

  “I’m very sorry about all that,” Thatcher said.

  “No warrant for it. My conclusions are clear, it is time to publish. And I’ve always been careful not to distress the original population.”

  “I mean I am sorry about Dr. Treat. For your sake, Mary. If news of his soured reputation has reached Selma’s father, the humiliation must have been extensive.”

  “In case the news had not yet reached every toad in every pond, Joseph finished the business with his vendetta in the newspaper against Reverend Pittinger. I suppose you missed all that. It happened last autumn.”

  “Oh. Did … does Dr. Treat stand opposed to the Christian faith?”

  “It’s more preposterous than that.” Mary exhaled. “Reverend Pittinger, of all people, took it on himself to press the case for empirical science. Gravity and Newtonian physics, the measurable effects of the moon on the tides. This poor man of the cloth gripped his pen week after week in defense of weight and measurement. It’s Joseph’s opinion that calculable laws are not real. He held forth and would not yield an inch.”

  Thatcher had no idea what to say to that.

  “I believe he is losing his reason,” she said quietly. “He grew so agitated he stopped sleeping. All last winter he sat at the desk writing strange little figures on every bit of paper he could find. Not proper mathematics but something he invented, the forcing of nonmathematical things into calculations. I would find his rants written on the margins of my own correspondence: ‘Fact! The perfect difference between men and animals equals the reduction of Darwin to less than zero quantity.’”

  “Oh, Mary. He disparaged Darwin?”

  “My friend did not bear the brunt alone, I assure you. Plato and Copernicus were not spared. Joseph drew up long, nonsensical treatises against science and had them published as pamphlets. With illustrations.”

  “How awful for you. But surely other people noticed his affliction.”

  “To the extent of making him a town entertainment, as you heard from Selma. She feels she is coming to my defense.”

  “That is ghastly.”

  “It’s difficult to sympathize with someone so full of himself. He insisted I enclose his tracts when I wrote to my colleagues. Charles Riley got several, and so did Dr. Gray. I confess I only pretended to send one to Mr. Darwin. I left the envelope unsealed and slipped it out on my way to the post office.”

  Thatcher was thunderstruck. “He was jealous of your correspondences.”

  She looked startled. “Why do you say so?”

  “Because he is mortal. A proud man, greedy for praise, calling himself doctor without earning it. Quietly surpassed in intelligence and accomplishment by his generous, diligent wife.”

  “Oh. I see. Then it is thanks to me he became a disciple of free love and went to New York with Victoria Woodhull.”

  So it was true. “No, Mary. A man can be a beast on his own initiative. So I’ve been informed by my wife. But for your sake I can’t feel very sorry he’s gone.”

  “This is what Charles Riley said. He told me he’d met Joseph once in Troy and found him so idiosyncratic as to be half out of his mind. He said I should not much miss Joseph’s support, but greatly welcome the peace in which to work.”

  “And is it so?”

  “Very much so. I was thinking of it on the day you and I first met, when you came in the parlor while I was trapped with my Dionaea. It occurred to me as I sat so still in that place: it was my desk now, my study. My spiders in the jars. I never could organize experiments properly with Joseph around. It is in his absence I prosper.”

  Thatcher was moved by the confession. They both went quiet watching a heron stalk through reeds at the creek’s margin. With each stilted step the long head slid forward on a smooth horizontal axis. Thatcher knew the danger in that serpentine head and neck, the forceful thrust of the knifelike beak. He had a childhood memory of floating in shallow water near a heron with his eyes just at the surface, his belly skimming mud, trying to draw close, mesmerized by the graceful locomotion. He was near enough to touch it when the head suddenly reared like a dagger drawn to strike and the boy leaped up from the shallows, startling the bird and himself, heart pounding, reckoning how near he’d just come to losing an eye. It never came naturally to Thatcher to see any life as enemy to his own. Even in that place where anything not human was apt to be claimed as food. No place for a boy who longed to know a heron.

  Thatcher felt drawn to reciprocal confession. “It had been on my mind to meet you since the first day I saw you out my window. You were lying in the grass. I wanted very much to know what you studied. Now I know. The tower-building spiders.”

  Mrs. Treat looked at him oddly, and he felt abashed. He and Rose had been spying. “I’m sorry, it isn’t worth the mention. A long time ago, it seems now.”

  Her narrow-eyed gaze held. “Which day was it?”

  The day his house began to fall. “The day of Pardon Crandall’s famous carriage accident on Landis Avenue. I recall because my wife and I were speaking in the parlor and Polly came in directly from the calamity, quite thrilled with the damage.”

  Her face rearranged. “Oh! The Crandalls’ runaway carriage. That day was a different business, nothing to do with spiders. I was watching ants. It happened to be a remarkable day for the Polyergus. Do you know Polyergus breviceps, Thatcher?”

  With Mary, conversation itself was a runaway horse. “I know they are ants, abundant in our neighborhood. And that every member of my household devoutly wishes their whole tribe dead. Polly and myself excepted. I suppose we are agnostic.”

  “Oh, well, you must prepare for conversi
on. There is no more interesting hymenopterid in the kingdom. Did you know Polyergus is a social parasite?”

  “I did not.”

  “Polyergus has lost the ability to rear its own young. They can’t forage, feed their queen, or clean the nest. They raid the nests of other ants to steal their pupae, and when these hatch they become workers of the Polyergus nest. The mutualistic relationship can persist a very long time. I’m writing an article on it.” She looked perfectly happy again, the wonder of ant parasitism supplanting any residue of the wretched Dr. Treat. How odd was her simplicity, Thatcher thought, how admirable and sometimes maddening.

  “How is your wife?” she asked then, rather abruptly, as if she had just recalled an instruction to do so.

  “She is well, thank you.” He sighed involuntarily. In the physical sense Rose was hale. A single fruit in a bushel with the unfair advantage of ripeness. On Rose an ordinary dress looked extravagant, causing women to ask about seamstresses in a vain hope of duplicating the impression. And her effect on men was the opposite; they tended to go silent and awkward about the eyes, as if guilty of seeing more than they deserved.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t called in,” Mary said. “It was my place to do so, when your family moved to Vineland. But I happened to meet your mother-in-law at the post office one morning and she behaved rather strangely. I suppose I felt discouraged.”

  “Please don’t take too much offense at Aurelia. She is a woman of powerful preferences, and was very fond of the neighbors who lived in your house before. The Newcombs, I believe they were called.”

  “Yes. Mr. Newcomb still owns the house, but has relocated his law practice to Philadelphia. We let the house from him.”

  “Ah. This, Aurelia would hold against you. That the esteemed Mr. and Mrs. Newcomb are her neighbors no more. She was forced to live away from Vineland for ten years, and many things changed without her approval. She feels disoriented. And cheated by time, I suspect. She left as a mother and returned a dowager.”

  “I see. It was during the war that she left?”

  “Near the end of it. The cause of departure was personal. Her husband died suddenly and she needed the support of her sister in Boston. You can imagine her distress. Rose was still a girl, not yet introduced. And little Polly scarcely weaned.”