Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Thatcher could see very little from where he stood, though the professor’s regrettable voice reached every part of the hall and likely the belfry, where somnolent bats might be dropping from their roosts. He scanned the audience for his employer. Found him sitting with Landis to the right of the stage, their chairs angled for a view of audience and lecturer. With a plunging heart Thatcher realized the captain would be expecting some public ingratiation from his pupils for the privilege of free attendance. He should have foreseen this, had them write a card of thanks. Oh, blast. In these trifles of etiquette Thatcher was a dunderhead. No mother had schooled him, so the burden fell unfairly to Rose. He adored her for accepting a defective husband, generally with grace. And again wondered idly, from weeks of habit, what he could possibly conjure as a Christmas gift. Any item within his means would displease Rose categorically. She wanted a horse.

  He watched his pupils. Female heads were tilting together in conspiratorial pairs, the hair bows trembling. How well he knew the symptoms of their inattention. The end of term was approaching and they strained for release to the pressing engagements of advent and nativity, what with geese to be cooked and church pageants to be rehearsed. These strapping lads and lasses had aged beyond the silent roles—the thunderstruck holy parents, wise men, and shepherds—into the serious thespian business of Roman despots and harking angels. Thatcher felt himself in daily contest with the baby Jesus as he tried to hold their attention to the so-called imponderables of physics: light, heat, magnetism, conservation of energy. He was losing, to the more ponderable Virgin birth. His fellow teachers advised against trying. They scheduled end-of-term examinations in January, after the holiday, by which time Thatcher knew he would have lost the battle to entropy.

  At some point between the astonishing Hydra with tentacles like the head of Medusa and the mystifying Euglena which is half-plant, half-animal as if the Lord were indeed undecided about the day of its creation—why, perhaps he made it at the stroke of midnight (the pause here for audience laughter proved gratuitous), Professor Bowman began to wax theological. His highest pursuit, indeed the only justification of the modern apparatus called the micro-scope, he declared, to wit, was to reveal God’s hand. But no scientist could dare guess the Lord’s divine purpose for creating these life-forms.

  Thatcher noted his employer’s beaming approval and sighed, perhaps audibly, for the tall man in the overcoat turned to him with a face of comic dismay. Thatcher returned it, appreciative but unsettled. Did this man know him? Thatcher recognized the face, dark as a Turk’s, with a full beard and haunted eyes. But what face in this village had he not laid eyes on at some time or other? In the boot shop, the tobacconist’s, in school assemblies attended by parents. But still he felt he knew something of this man. Racked his brain through the entire deposition on the Enigmatic Amoeba, ignoring the enigmas.

  Then he remembered: the newspaper man. Carruth. He’d come to a teachers’ meeting to raise concerns over child labor and its detriment to schooling. The man’s ardor had moved Thatcher to pick up the other newspaper, the one that so distressed his mother-in-law, and now he read it weekly, finding its bluntness bracing. The Independent’s challenges to Landis orthodoxy relieved his impression of Vineland as a hill of slave ants. Most amusing were the ironic editorial pieces and a series of caricatures called “Lamentations” in which a poor, bent farmer lodges his weekly inquiry, and Landis replies in the spirit of Marie Antoinette. “What shall I do for bread?” asks the wretch. “And the Prince replied, Pine cones and acorns shall be thy food, the waters of Parvin’s branch thy drink, and as to raiment thou shalt wear a gunny bag.” Thatcher surmised it was nearly a one-man operation, Carruth and a few hands turning their press in an office on Landis Avenue, brazenly located directly next door to the Weekly. The Independent’s masthead declared in twelve-point type: “The Liberty of the Press Is the Safeguard of a Free People.” Thatcher wondered that the man had not yet been overrun by a wagon.

  Professor Bowman seemed to be inching toward his climax: the vision of science as no more or less than the study of God’s creation. “Perfect, congruous, and governed by his laws. Our Creator has stocked our planet with its wondrous creatures, neglecting not to fill even the minuscule drop of water, to wit, as a farmer chooses the livestock for each paddock of his farm. To study this menagerie is the naturalist’s noble calling, for in this study we may find revealed to us the mind of God. To borrow the words of the great Agassiz …” Here he fumbled through his notes, fearing to misquote the great Agassiz. “Ah. ‘We may find revealed the free conception of the almighty intellect, matured in his thought before it was manifested in tangible external forms.’”

  The professor paused and the audience inhaled, sensing deliverance, but into that half-second silence before the applause Bowman injected his next “to wit.” Hands fell to laps; the lecture inconceivably bore on. “We see all species distributed according to the divine logic …”

  Thatcher knew his duty was to stay, greet his pupils, shepherd them into a proper herd, and drive them to Landis for the formal grovel. Suddenly that prospect brought bile to his throat. Invocation of the glory-hound Agassiz was the coup de grâce. He glanced about for a covert route of exit, and again this man Carruth seemed to read his mind: he tilted his head, eyebrow raised, and subtly hitched his thumb toward the rear entrance. Hardly troubling the air around him, he slipped away. Mesmerized, Thatcher followed.

  *

  “How do you know me?”

  “You are better known than you think.”

  The coffeehouse at the corner of East and Landis was Thatcher’s favored refuge from the petty disputes and frigid temperatures of his household. But tonight his companion walked quickly between the tables and led him into one of the wooden booths at the back. A serving girl followed with the coffee urn. These dark, boxed-in seats were uncharted territory for Thatcher, who assumed men would need them only for brokering unseemly contracts. The man who sat down across from him now pulled a small tin flagon from his vest and poured an amber drop into Thatcher’s cup, then his own.

  “You overstate my notoriety. But you are editor of The Independent. You came to a school meeting, early in the term.”

  “Carruth.” The hand protruded like a giant paw from the bearish coat. “Uri Carruth. Pleased to make the acquaintance.” The voice matched the hand, and the coat.

  “Thatcher Greenwood. As you know, evidently.”

  Some would think the acquainting to be prerequisite for sharing contraband whiskey, not a postscript. But Thatcher was no expert. He lifted his cup and experienced the exquisite combination of coffee scald and whiskey blaze in his gullet. He’d not tasted alcohol since the day of his wedding. A lifetime before this one.

  “You come from Russia, I’ve heard it said?”

  “From Wisconsin. My father emigrated there from Russia. Whence come all breeds of agitators and bandicoots, you’ve heard it said.”

  Thatcher smiled carefully. “And you moved to Vineland for its healthful climate.”

  “Something like that.” Carruth grinned, drained his cup, set it back in its saucer. He had the extremely deep-set eyes of a man accustomed to going hungry, an impression much at odds with the hearty countenance. He might be a cabbage, Thatcher thought. Or a barrel cactus, whose round, bristling form he had seen only in drawings. But no, more fauna than flora was this one: a bear. “I put myself to that contemptible sermon tonight,” the bear declared, “because I thought I might find you. I wanted to meet the man who brought the walls of Jericho tumbling down.”

  “Ah. You have the wrong man. No vanquisher of walls here.” Thatcher thought of his house: on the first Sunday of advent the broken parlor lintel sagged abruptly, an ominous few inches. And Aurelia’s bedchamber was now uninhabitable from dampness in its walls, forcing her to share Polly’s. Neither was pleased with the arrangement.

  “I’m referring to Landis and his fifteen cents. Lex loci.”

  “The law of the land.”
Thatcher held his cup in both hands, absorbing heat. “But not the battle of Jericho. Cutler saddled my students with the obligation of attending that sermon. Bowman is an old friend of his. I only brought to his attention the problem of these pupils’ and their families’ destitution. He was quite surprised, I assure you.”

  Carruth squinted and shook his head slowly, as if spying a trap he was clever enough to avoid. “The problem of their destitution, good sir, is the Bastille. You’ve stormed it.”

  “I’m sure I told Cutler nothing he didn’t already know.”

  Carruth laughed at that, a full-bellied growl. Thatcher, at a loss, looked out the door of the booth. Across the room, the girl who had served them now stood behind the counter, wiping cups. She was the owner’s daughter, a child of Polly’s age doing a woman’s job, in a pink lace cap and an apron pinned to her unfilled bosom. On the wall behind her, many rows of polished silver coffee urns aligned on shelves, coyly catching the lamplight. It seemed an excess of coffee urns. He was thinking of the painter Vermeer, an exhibition he’d seen in Boston, when the girl glanced up, startling him.

  He hadn’t meant to summon her, but now Carruth made a signal with both hands and she hurried across the room to refill their cups and set down a plate of oysters. Despite her youth she bore the patient air of a wife, carefully hanging both their hats on pegs on the wall of the booth before hurrying off to attend other tables. Suddenly the room had begun to fill with patrons. Plum Hall must have liberated them at last.

  Carruth only now thought to shoulder out of the overcoat he’d kept on through the full suffocation of the lecture. Possibly to hide the sack coat underneath, which was separating at the shoulder seam and several years out of date. If Thatcher could think so, then probably a decade out of date. Rose would be traumatized by this coat: her strongest argument yet against reading The Independent. The editor leaned forward, sucked an oyster from its pearly shelf, dropped the shell in the dish, and fell back against the booth. “Man, do you not read that tabloid Landis churns out every week?”

  Thatcher drank his coffee, now without benefit of spirit rectification. “You might ask, do you not drink the water of Vineland?”

  “Then you know. There is no destitution in Eden.” Something in Carruth resurrected as he spoke. “Every acre of Vineland is green as the banks of the Nile. Every bushel spills over with harvest! Every farmer is solvent and all the bricklayers well paid. Half these men believe it themselves, and wonder why they’re still going hungry.”

  Thatcher, hungry himself, began devouring his share of the oysters in measured succession. This was another abstention since his wedding. Rose and Aurelia detested oysters because they were cheap, resembled snails, reminded them of Boston, and bore carnal associations: thus defining the perfect gulf between these women’s tastes and his own. (Although on the last point, Rose held considerable private dissent.)

  “I read Landis’s self-promoting rag,” Thatcher offered between oysters. “My neighbor compares the man to Phineas Barnum.”

  “Your neighbor is wise. I’m sure Landis would agree with Barnum’s famous statement that advertising is to the genuine article what manure is to the land.”

  Thatcher smiled. “That it largely increases the product.”

  “Our town has been well buried in the stuff.”

  “I’m aware of Landis’s deceptions because I read about them in The Independent. If any man is accused of blowing Gabriel’s horn, I should name Mr. Carruth.”

  The bearish head shook mournfully. “If it could be so.”

  “You’ve grown extremely bold in your critiques of Landis, these last months. ‘The Prince Travels Abroad, Hoping to Eclipse Her Royal Majesty.’ Even the captain’s wife is not spared. I have to say I’m impressed.”

  “The loudest horn does nothing to move deaf ears.”

  “You’re being modest. Your paper has its subscribers, I trust.”

  “A fair number, it would please me to say. And also its detractors.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Not naturally. It doesn’t always go along lines you expect. The peasants don’t like hearing how they’ve been used, paying for land that will go back to Landis the day they lose their first crop. They refuse to believe they’re getting tricked into building wealth for the masters of this town.”

  “No man wants to hear he has been a fool.”

  “But they hear it, and still they persist. Landis passes around his bill of sale, this egalitarian Vineland where every man stands an equal chance, and they lap it up like cats at the dish. They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.”

  “They are happier to think of themselves as soon to be rich, than irreversibly poor.” In that moment Thatcher was thinking of his wife.

  Carruth nodded thoughtfully. “A delicate business, telling the truth. So long as Landis writes a happier falsehood for these men to tell themselves, they can believe in opportunity. They are the nearly rich, as you say. Waiting for what is theirs. The Lord is good, the trees will bear fruit, and the Plum Hall lecture will always cost fifteen cents. Because no man or child ever lived in this town without fifteen cents to spare …”

  Carruth paused there to finish off the oysters. The endeavor was passionate.

  “… and then comes this man Greenwood who changes the rule. I am deeply curious about the source of his influence.”

  “I have none. In this moment I am not quite sure of you as friend or foe, Mr. Carruth. But I am sure you are wrong about my influence.”

  Carruth leaned across the table to swat a paw against Thatcher’s shoulder, twice. Evidence of friendship, presumably. “You can be sure of me. As sure as we know our common enemies.”

  “Ah, enemies. I try not to make them. It strikes me sometimes as my life’s work.”

  At this Carruth laughed hard, shoulders shaking. Everything about the man was without restraint or artifice. In other circumstances, Thatcher imagined this might be endearing. “I come from the Badger State,” he declared, wiping the mirth from his eyes. “It was the miners that started calling it that. The first industrious fellows to settle there. In winters they had to burrow into the hills like badgers to survive.” Carruth leaned forward on his elbows. “I’m the youngest of three brothers. Or was. The eldest was crushed under a pallet of logs, working for a boss who would brook no complaining about the risks of the operation. The second brother, killed by a lightning strike, ten minutes short of the end of his shift at the rail yard. This is what I’ve learned about being a badger, Mr. Greenwood. As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can’t dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.”

  “I expect I should go home to my wife, Mr. Carruth.”

  “And I to mine. Do you have children? I have five. Three girls, two boys, all scoundrels. But not an anarchist in the brood. I’ve failed completely.”

  “Would I know them? I have no Carruth among my pupils.”

  “No, not yet. The eldest you’ll have next year, twins, and then their sister. They’re a coven, those three. All at once, papa is an embarrassment. They’d rather toady up to their prosperous associates with the smart crinolines and the shiny boots.” He leaned forward in painful confidence. “They want to go riding. With the wealthy girls.”

  Thatcher smiled sympathetically, for this refrain he heard daily from his wife. Then he felt the physical shock of an inspiration: something he might arrange for Rose. Not gold or frankincense, but potentially more useful. And within his means. “Are the associates cooperative?”

  Carruth shook his head. “Disastrously not, to date. Though my little hens keep trying. They have revolutionary fortitude, if nothing else. But the smart crinolines seem to be the price of admission.”

  Smart crinolines Rose had in abundance, not to mention a rare faculty for making her company coveted—a talent the Carruth daughters probably lacked. Thatcher could pict
ure these unfortunate hens, saddled with the large-boned inheritance of their father’s frame and reputation. But yes, for his beautiful Rose, a pair of riding boots it would be. Wrapped and beribboned, with dates and riding companions arranged. He had two female colleagues with stable-owning fathers: the dance instructor Miss Dunwiddie, and Miss Hirstberger, who taught French and called herself Mademoiselle. Both asked shamelessly after his wife’s habits and wardrobe. He could set Rose up with the right clothes and friends, and the horse would come about on its own, with someone else paying for its keeping. Thatcher’s heart filled with some substance lighter than blood or air.

  “And you? Got a brood yourself?” Carruth was asking.

  “None yet. I am a beginner at marriage. Sharing my home with a mother-in-law who still seems to hope her daughter might marry better than she did. And a little scoundrel of a sister-in-law who thinks her sister stole the prize. If I were Jacob, I think I should labor the extra seven years and marry her as well.”

  “Quite a confession, from a man whose life’s work is avoiding enemies. Leah and Rachel were always at one another’s necks, as I recollect.” Carruth smiled. “Ah. But they never blamed Jacob, did they? Bartered mandrakes for the right to sleep with him.”

  Thatcher said no more, thinking it best to end this interview quickly. He watched his companion take out the flask again and with solemn regard, top up their cups.

  “I sought you out this evening for a reason. I have something important to tell you. It involves Cutler.”

  “Cutler?”

  “Your employer.”

  “As I know.”

  “With whom you have had some difficulties.”

  Thatcher felt his limbs grow cold. He was no more eager than any Vineland peasant to hear Carruth’s summary of his plight.

  “I regret to say your feud has reached beyond the walls of the school. I overheard Cutler discussing it with Landis. In a meeting of the town council, Thursday last.”