Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “The world has grown many shades darker in that time. Not only Vineland. The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.”

  “I’m sure you are right,” he said, mildly surprised that her sympathy fell to the nation’s misfortunes rather than Aurelia’s. Mary seemed oddly uncurious about Thatcher’s personal life. He had waited all day for even this small exchange. Aurelia’s snub in the post office had dealt its blow, no doubt. But on previous occasions when he raised his predicaments, Mary had seemed sympathetic.

  “I would like to impose on you for advice, Mary. Not on the subject of my mother-in-law, but something else. And I worry that Selma might be upset by the topic. How soon will she return?”

  “In another quarter hour, I think. It must be about cakes, or the Heavenly Father. The girl is fearlessly open minded on all topics but those.”

  “It is the latter. My employer wants him to preside over my science class.”

  “As he should. As he does over all our endeavors. Do you not think so?”

  “Of course. I have no objection to the Lord’s Prayer we recite at assembly. My complaint is with some of the Lord’s more extravagant prophets. Namely Sir Thomas Browne and the Religio Medici, as interpreted by Professor Cutler.”

  “Oh, blast. I suppose it does no good to tell you Cutler was an ally of Joseph’s, at least for a time. They had long chats in our parlor about this porridge-minded Thomas Browne. I always excused myself to scour the stove grate.”

  Thatcher was thrilled by a glimpse of fire behind Mary’s decorum. “I wish I could do the same. He comes into my class uninvited to lecture on mysteries imperfectly answered in the scripture. To which we are to find answers with the help of Thomas Browne and himself.”

  “How did all creatures disperse from Noah’s ark, when time is but five days elder than ourselves? That business?”

  “That business exactly. How can we have creatures here that are not found in Europe and Asia, given that all began their progress from the Mountains of Ararat? With the help of bridges made by archangels, he says. We need only look to the great Professor Cutler to answer all questions, using scripture bent back on itself like a fish hook.”

  “And he knows nothing of modern thinking on the age of the earth? Has he not even read Charles Lyell?”

  “He reads next to nothing. It might interfere with his knowledge of the universe.”

  “And he inflicts this nonsense on your pupils. How disgraceful.” Mary’s disgust was gratifying.

  “We are his trial audience. He says these difficult times in our shattered country call for a return to fundamentals. I suspect he is growing restless in Vineland and wants to return to his former eminence on the lecture circuit.”

  She offered a sly grin. “If he leaves, you will not much miss his support, but greatly welcome the peace in which to work.”

  “I wish it were so. Cutler won’t leave Vineland permanently. The school is too valuable as a platform. He will keep the reins over us here while he launches his magnum opus, explaining every scientific paradox unanswered by the Bible.”

  “While adhering to its want of scientific logic. Well forevermore. This is an affront on the good book, do you not think?”

  “I do. I can find consolation in the Psalms when no amount of earthly reckoning will satisfy my heart. Precisely because those verses are not an earthly reckoning. They ease us from ourselves.”

  Mary nodded. “That is so. Science directs us to study our maker’s creation, but his thoughts on its purpose are only his to reveal.” She looked at him, alarmed. “Does Cutler see himself as a prophet, then? Does he mean to write a new book of scripture?”

  “I think he does. Reconciling the problems of our modern century with the Bible.”

  “I see. And your campaign of teaching scientific method is at odds with his ambitions.”

  “He wants to be rid of me. He shuts down anything I propose. Field outings, experiments in the classroom, every reading I submit for his approval. Cutler is offended by the clear logic of Darwin.”

  “The offense is widespread, I’m afraid. Dr. Gray writes me that the dread of Darwin is rising to hysteria, even among his learned colleagues. It was not long ago people blamed Darwin’s Origin for encouraging the abolitionists and the war. But now even abolitionists and transcendentalists have turned against him.”

  “How are people so irrational?” he asked, but he knew. Even the abolitionists had no wish to be placed inside creation, subject to its laws. They wished to rule over it from the head of God’s table.

  “People may be persuaded of small things,” Mary said, looking away from Thatcher, speaking in the direction of the forest. “But most refuse to be moved on larger ones. An earth millions of years old appalls them, when they always have seen it otherwise. A humanity derived from the plain stuff of earth frightens them even more. Rather than look at evidence they would shut themselves up in a pumpkin shell like Peter Piper’s wife.” Her head nodded very slightly as she spoke, continuously and almost imperceptibly, like a grass touched by breeze. “Presumptions of a lifetime are perilous things to overturn. Presumptions of many lifetimes, in this case.”

  Of all lifetimes ever lived, in this case. Every person in history must have placed himself at the head of a Creator’s table. To see that table overturned, cutlery and china dashed to the floor, one’s very place lost, was to witness the sky falling. Thatcher hadn’t fully considered Darwin in such threatening light. But still, the old constructions no longer squared with the evidence. A pumpkin shell offered poor shelter. Could not men see the uselessness of clinging to their outmoded philosophies? And if not, why were he and Mary different?

  “No breach in this world seems to heal,” he said. “We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.”

  She gazed at the running creek. Thatcher brushed bread crumbs from his trousers. He picked up a pebble and tossed it at the rust-colored water. “Life should be simpler than this,” he said. “I only want to do my work. Truth is objective. A man should be respected for telling it, not threatened.”

  “Mr. Darwin and Dr. Gray must sometimes feel even God is against them, for the abuse they’ve had to bear,” she agreed. “Mr. Agassiz goes all around the country declaring them monsters.”

  “I’ve seen Agassiz. He says anything to please a crowd, exaggerates, and oversimplifies. His need for acclaim has compromised his science. Agassiz was a good geologist in his time but now he behaves as a showman who only cares for the size of crowd he can draw. First he won Europe, now he’ll have the Americans.”

  “Mr. Darwin is dismayed by the violent attacks.” Mary seemed physically pained by the misery of her friend at Down House. “He doesn’t truly feel he invented his theory. Others were on the same trail, he was only first to turn over enough stones to find it out and set it credibly in writing. Why should a man be blamed for his diligence?”

  “Mr. Darwin blamed for the finding, and Dr. Gray for standing as its champion on our side of the Atlantic. And for bringing it to Vineland, I am threatened by my employer.”

  “And still your pupils depend on it, Thatcher. Their little families have come here looking for safety, but they will go on laboring under old authorities until their heaven collapses. Your charge is to lead them out of doors. Teach them to see evidence for themselves, and not to fear it.”

  “To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.”

  She looked at him with such warm regard, Thatcher felt lightheaded. He had little experience with admiration. “Your school must have other beneficent men who support the same endeavor,” she offered hopefully.

  If the alleged beneficents were his fellow teachers, they excelled at camouflage. “I wonder what service is possible, Mary. When half the world, with no understanding of Darwin at all, will rally around whoever calls him a criminal and wants him hanged.”

  She said nothing to this. But it was no exaggeration, he’d witnessed this very thing in a
market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey’s tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up! The provocateur was an itinerant preacher in a threadbare rabat and pieces of an infantryman’s uniform, boots, and greatcoat he must have pulled from a dead soldier. Thatcher had stood astonished, watching violence in its own bloody birth canal.

  The heron now patrolled the bank of the creek very near where they sat. Thatcher and Mary watched it snake through the tall reeds seeking its prey. Watched the red creek flow, blood of this forest dissolving its earth.

  “I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

  “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.”

  *

  Thatcher found his household in high dudgeon. The women were dressed to extremes and already exasperated with Thatcher even before his train returned to Vineland. They would be late to the performance at the Merchant’s Hall. If Thatcher had any previous knowledge of this engagement, he had forgotten it. The performer was General Tom Thumb.

  “And his wife!” Polly all but screamed.

  “A wife! Does she tower over her spouse?”

  “No, no, no, she is just like him. The most gracious lady you ever could meet, and no taller than a butter churn.”

  She must have memorized the handbill. Poor Polly, admiring the dimensions of a butter churn, destined herself for the tall, lank frame of the Jersey cow. Rose fretted over every inch of new growth for the further limits imposed on her sister’s prospects. She was already taller than half the town’s well-heeled scions. She didn’t care now but would soon enough, Rose warned. And so the female tragedy would commence, for Polly as with all the rest.

  “As you can see, we’re already dressed for the performance,” Rose said, pulling on dove-colored gloves that looked unfamiliar to Thatcher, and expensive. Scylla and Charybdis had slunk to a far corner of the parlor, sensing the winds of war. They stared at Thatcher from under the settee.

  “And as you can see,” Polly announced, “Mother is trying to asphyxiate me.”

  “Ah. Filicide. It happens in the best of families.”

  “It isn’t humorous, Thatcher. It’s horrible!”

  He gave Polly a second look. “You’ve changed something, haven’t you? You look older. Is it your hair?”

  “No, it’s a corset!” she wailed, and Thatcher saw the female tragedy had already commenced. How sad, in Polly’s case. So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.

  Rose assessed the day’s work on his trousers. “And you are fit for mucking a stable. Oh, Thatcher. What have you done? How disappointing. Come upstairs.”

  “Mrs. Brindle will come to the rescue on Wednesday,” he said, following her up the stairs at a trot. He thought of Mary piloting through the Batsto men with himself in her wake. A follower.

  “You cannot always count on the rescue of women. You must learn to look after yourself. But how could you get so filthy?” Rose ushered him into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Instantly her tone shifted from burdened matron to wronged wife. “It’s beyond understanding, why you would want to spend the whole day with Mrs. Treat and leave your own family.”

  “Dearest. I spent the day in scientific endeavors. A man must work. And the few who are lucky as I am get to come home at day’s end to a beautiful wife.”

  “A man must work! Your position is in the school, not the barnyard. Everyone says Batsto is horrid with mills and liquor. I can’t think what you and that woman could find to do there all day.”

  “I was with Mrs. Treat and her associate, and we weren’t in Batsto, we were in the forest. Studying the adaptations of plants to a bog environment.”

  “There, you see!” Rose wheeled and flung her open hand at him as if he had testified against himself. Then pulled off her gloves and turned her attack on the bureau, opening drawers with unnecessary vigor, retrieving clean stockings and trousers while he removed his offending attire. “Thatcher, you can’t go on neglecting us. The paper is peeling from the wall in Mother’s room. With all these rains the plaster has grown damp inside. You must call a man at once. But you’re never here, how would you know what we need in this house?” She turned and narrowed her eyes at his throat. “The shirt will pass, I suppose. With a fresh collar.”

  “I needn’t go. I can live without seeing a man the size of a butter churn.”

  “You’re confusing him with his wife. The general is thirty-nine inches tall.”

  “All the same. Men I have seen, some large. This one is small.”

  “Thatcher! Are you exhausting on purpose, or just simple? General Thumb is famous. One of the most famous men in the country, here in Vineland for only the one engagement. You are shockingly ungrateful to Captain Landis. Your attitude is very distressing to Mother.”

  “Ungrateful to Landis?”

  “Yes! For how he looks after us in Vineland, bringing these enlightenments.”

  “I’m sure you are right. Wretch that I am, I will be content to stay home from the enlightenment. With a plate of cold ham and a book.”

  “And leave the three of us defenseless, without an escort.”

  “Honestly, Rose. Pouting doesn’t suit you.”

  “Oh, well. I assume Mrs. Treat never pouts.”

  “Will you stop.” The runaway calamities of marriage could never be explained to a single man. Shouldn’t be, for the good of the species. “Please just quiet down.”

  She stood with eyes ablaze and mouth clamped in a fierce pantomime of subjugation. Quiet did not sit well on the fair shoulders of Rose.

  “Darling,” he coaxed. “You are my only wife, to whom I’ve pledged eternal devotion. Comparison is absurd. I think of you every minute while I spend my days with colleagues. When I must be with Mrs. Treat we speak of science, and that is all.”

  “I suppose I’m a useless companion if I can’t discuss the palpitations of a bog.”

  He looked down, buttoning his braces, hiding a smile. “You are the fairest of all companions. Look how bewitching you are in your yellow frock. Of course I will go, for the pleasure of having you on my arm and the envy of every male who has eyes.”

  He saw her shoulders soften slightly as she pretended to rearrange the drawer, unready yet to surrender the advantage of indignation. She was hardly past girlhood, and working so hard to be mistress of this house. She needed a child badly, Thatcher thought, so she could rule it. Please, Heavenly Father, let it be soon.

  “You grieve, don’t you? For our child,” he risked saying, and she wheeled, seeming angry, though her pale eyes brimmed.

  “And you don’t!”

  “Of course I do, Rosie. Only it must be different for men. I never felt the babe was real, as you must have.”

  For a long moment she didn’t move. Then sat herself on the bed, a simple lowering of herself that collapsed her skirts like a bellows. She covered her face. He sat next to her, but felt some current from her body that made him hesitate to touch her. Instead he folded his hands between his thighs.

  The storm passed, abrupt as a spring shower. She lowered her hands from her face but looked straight ahead. “I found Mother weeping today. In the pantry.”

  “In the pantry.” He could no more imagine his mother-in-law in the pantry than in a shoe factory. Aurelia did not labor, she deployed.

  “She went looking for the bottle of Dr. Garvin’s tonic, and saw the biscuit tin with the sweet picture of the little boy and the pup. Mrs. Brindle must have put it away there so we wouldn’t see it.”

  “Mrs. Brindle cannot know we’ve lost a baby.”

  Rose looked at him with such wordless astonishment, he could see himself as she did: as an outsider to a house of female confidences. As he ever would be.

  “I’m sorry, Rose. We’re
bereft, all of us. But babies arrive in houses every day.” In wombs, he meant, but couldn’t make himself say it, even if he had rested his head on her belly and stroked the soft yellow grass of her pubic hillock, as many times as he cared to remember. “I love you,” he said. “Where there is love, there will be children.”

  He took one little hand into his. Rose looked down at it in his lap, seeming to study the composition like an artist preparing to draw it.

  “You make it sound simple, and it isn’t. Mother is old. She is nearly fifty, Thatcher. She fears she might not live to see our children.”

  “I believe she will, Rose. She has nothing to dread, where our mutual intentions are concerned. I will tell her so, if you like.”

  Rose nodded, withdrew her hand, and then the moment was over.

  “We will be late,” she said.

  He stood up, put on his good coat, and opened the bedroom door, taking some pains to lead and not follow his wife down the staircase. She set up a fresh scolding from the rear flank as if nothing at all had just passed between them, and he wondered what part of his married life was real, what was performance. She quickly drew in her recruits, who waited at the bottom of the stair in their capes and bonnets.

  “He says he shall be the envy of all the men at the Merchant’s Hall! Isn’t it a pity we’ve taken so much trouble to dress but won’t be seen? Thatcher has made us so late, the hall will be filled and we will be left standing at the back.”

  “Oh, dear,” Aurelia whimpered. “Shall we have to? The man is so small. We might not be able to see him.”

  “We will see General Thumb,” Polly insisted. “People are always too timid to take the chairs at the front. I’m right, aren’t I, Rose? The whole first row goes empty. And I am not timid so I can dash right ahead and claim the best ones.”

  “Very well done,” Rose said to Thatcher. “We shall be the talk of the town: the Greenwood family who arrive late, and push to the front of the line.”