Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Leverett says that man is a fiend,” Rose now said to Thatcher in a quiet voice, suggesting she had darker knowledge to impart. “Mr. Landis has been trying to make business arrangements abroad, and he requires more workers from Europe. Lots of them I suppose, for new factories and farming concerns. But now he can’t get them to come.”

  “I see. The peasants are wary of his false promises.”

  “Only because of this vile Carruth! These negative and oppositional reports he makes are frightening them away.”

  How his friend would rejoice to hear of his newspaper’s reach, even across an ocean. This, truly, was the tumbling of Jericho’s walls. Thatcher could not countenance the thought of this giant force of a man snuffed out. Not while the sun blazed its ordinary light and late March broke the buds on the trees. From the rumors that flooded Vineland that week, Thatcher gleaned only two facts he chose to believe: Landis was in the Bridgestone jail, and Carruth was still alive.

  *

  The house was not easy to locate. He found an associate of Carruth’s at work in the Independent’s office, or at any rate saw him through the pane in the locked door, but the boy would not let Thatcher in. It was not Hank Wilbur but someone younger, leaning over a rack, setting type slugs with his youthful spine arched like a bow. No matter how Thatcher knocked and called through the glass, vowing himself a friend, he had no proof to offer. The boy straightened briefly, shook his head anxiously, and continued with his urgent project, perhaps an obituary for his employer. After several minutes the typesetter walked to the door and sadly pulled down the shade, leaving Thatcher to feel humiliated. And useless, as a friend. How could he have shown so little curiosity about Carruth’s home and family? But it might have been Carruth’s habit to avoid such talk, out of caution, as this young man was being exceedingly cautious now. Carruth had enemies, to be sure. How deadly they were, and how brazen, Thatcher could not have imagined.

  He followed his nose. The parlor of the little house in the Italian quarter where he and his friend had drowned several sorrows was now full of Carruth, in the spirit of a premature wake. Even at this hour, late morning, men from the night shift crowded in to absorb the shock and commiserate. They spoke of their friend as if he were mayor of an alternate Vineland just around the corner, where invisible laborers had more determinate flesh and commanding voices, along with fatter pay. They sent Thatcher straight down the alley to a cottage with a bramble of leafless roses twined through its fences and a ginger-haired child beating a tin drum on its front step.

  “Is Mr. Uri Carruth your father?”

  The boy looked up at Thatcher with the deep-set eyes he recognized. The effect was startling: those great, weary eyes on a child not older than six. “I’m to ask who goes there,” he reported.

  “I see. You are the lookout. Very well done. You can run inside and tell your ma I’m her husband’s good friend Thatcher. Or Mr. Greenwood. The schoolteacher.”

  The boy hesitated, perhaps overwhelmed by too much choice. The drumstick hung limp from his hand.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t want to be playing your drum inside. To give your papa a headache.”

  The moon eyes studied him. “Papa’s gone away. He’s here, but he doesn’t know it.” The boy disappeared, leaving Thatcher in grief. Gone away.

  A pretty Mrs. Carruth in a tired blue apron ushered him in, and the whole household struck Thatcher at once. So much life was being lived in a single room that served as kitchen, parlor, nursery, and sickroom. A yellow pup sat by the butter churn with ears cocked to the stranger’s arrival. The officious adolescent twins with identical white caps tied under their chins hovered about the bed; a younger sister sat near it with a bowl and a spoon; a second boy sat on the floor, this one drumless, only a little older than the lad outside. At the center of this small universe was Uri, propped up in a bed or chaise of some kind wearing flannel pyjamas, his lower body buried under quilts and his head so copiously bandaged he resembled a Rajasthani. Uri would have found the comparison amusing, if he were there. The eyes were open and vacant, unmoving, the gaze seeming fixed on something beyond the walls of this cottage. Thatcher’s grief threatened to blind him. He managed to introduce himself to Mrs. Carruth, who was younger than he’d expected. She seemed both desolate and distracted as she pushed back curls of tomato-colored hair that strayed out of her cap onto her brow.

  “Has he spoken at all, since the attack?”

  The mournful looks all around told Thatcher more than he wanted to know.

  “He can swallow a little,” one of the twins offered. “You have to set the spoon just so on his tongue.”

  “Has a doctor seen to him?”

  “Not so much as you would call it seeing to,” Mrs. Carruth said. “They brought him here in a shay with some swaddling round his head and some idiot declaring he’ll be fine in a day or two.”

  “Nothing more than that? No examination or treatment?”

  “None. I was here with the boys and here came those men barging in the gate with Uri strapped on a gurney like a pig trussed for the spit. Think of it, sir. The boys having to see that. It was the first we knew of any harm done to Father.”

  Thatcher did think of it, struggling to fathom the miles of woe this family had trod together in seven days. Their great bear, the jokester and zealot who strode from this house each day with his cap set to a more reasonable world than the mess they’d inherited. In every conceivable way, they had lost their sole provider.

  “Can I call someone in? I would gladly pay the doctor’s fee.” Gladly, he thought, and in practical terms, not easily.

  “I thank you. Many have made the same offer but …” She trailed off, looking at her husband with a tenderness that struck Thatcher through the heart. Here was a marriage.

  “I hate to ask, but the … bullet. Is it still with him?”

  “Are you trying to spare us? Look at him. That’s just how he came to us Friday last, only with some extra bandaging we’ve boiled and put to his head.”

  “You’re boiling the bandages, then. That’s wise.”

  “We’re educated people, Mr. Greenwood.”

  “Of course. I meant no … Uri speaks highly of the children. How keen they are at reading and learning.”

  “Like their father.”

  “Like those who’ve reared them. A mother is often the greater influence.” Thatcher had immediately noticed she was well spoken, with a hint of Irish in her vowels and a better claim on grammar than most of his pupils. He counted another sadness to add to his own lot: he would not be teaching science to these clever twin girls next autumn. To anyone’s children, clever or not.

  “The bleeding has stopped, I take it.”

  “It stopped soon after. But nothing else has come out, in the way of a bullet.”

  “A doctor should extract it. To relieve some of the pressure on his brain.”

  “Well, the doctors. They’re all friends with Landis, you see. They won’t come here to treat him.”

  “They had better,” Thatcher said angrily, thinking of what he’d shouted at Aurelia. Some goodwill here would benefit their friend if they didn’t want him hanging for murder. Landis was a free man, had paid the bond himself and walked out of Bridgestone with no charges against him so long as Carruth lay in limbo.

  “Landis’s fate is tied with your husband’s recovery,” he managed to say.

  “I expect the doctors see a lost cause, and don’t want to get tangled with it.”

  “It’s not a lost cause. We’ll get him back. I’ve never met a stronger man than your husband. That is the gospel. The Uri Carruth I know is not a man who gives up a fight.”

  She stared at him for a moment seeming put out, like a mother whose child is being difficult. Then abruptly turned away. “I’ll make you some tea. You sit awhile there with your good, strong friend. It would be a pleasure to him if he could see you’ve come. Maybe he does see yet.”

  “He blinks,” one of the twins put forward, bringi
ng a chair for Thatcher. “At loud sounds. We’re sure he hears them.”

  “Or would you rather a cup of warm broth, Mr. Greenwood? For a cold day? Do you think this winter will end?”

  “Please don’t bother. I haven’t come to be a burden on your family. Only to take some of it away, if I could.”

  “If you could,” Mrs. Carruth said without looking at him. She opened the stove and prodded the fire under the kettle. “If you had some magical potion for him to drink.”

  “Please allow me to be hopeful,” Thatcher said, made miserable by the sound of his own selfishness. He took the chair that was set for him very close to the lifeless right arm of his empty friend. Thatcher reached for the hand, whether to shake it briefly or hold on to it he didn’t know until he touched the flesh. It was not cold, but oddly insensible. He had to let it go.

  “Men are known to surprise us in cases like this. Especially men like your husband and father.”

  All the children looked at him, expressing a range of doubts. They were remarkable and unnerving, those hooded eyes replicated so exactly in the progeny. Uri’s legacy on earth would be these eyes, left to search out a more sensible world than the one they’d got. It was cruel to give them hope. Thatcher found he could do nothing else.

  “I’m not a doctor but I worked many years among medical men, studying the humors and organs. Please believe what I say. Men like your father may have unexpected reserves.”

  15

  Unexpected Reserves

  The end came, with none of the signifying drama they’d been led to expect. Iano was on watch that night. He and Nick went to sleep, and only one of them woke up.

  Now, a week later, Willa sat in the dining room feeding Dusty his lunch, listening to an asthmatic wheeze from the dog asleep at her feet that really might qualify as “death rattle,” and trying not to look at a baby-food jar containing some of Nick’s ashes on the other end of the table. It felt like an excessively rendered tableau of the Stages of Life.

  Outside, the grass was greening. Willa might have felt cheerful if she hadn’t been missing Iano. Two nights in a row he’d checked in by phone, but from the midst of a family clamor where he couldn’t really talk. She’d been wistful, and wondered aloud how many years it had been since they’d slept apart. He reminded her: not that long. It was when she’d gone to Boston after Helene died. Willa recalled ruefully that she hadn’t called home much either. It was lonelier to be the one left holding the fort. Especially this one, with a dead man’s equipment lurking around. The oxygen compressor’s powerful pulse had gone still, and the consequent silence kept startling her awake at night. Hospice was arranging for the pickup of the hospital bed, wheelchair, and other large equipment they had on loan, but not the unused needles, cannula or tubing, the pulse oximeter, vials, pill crushers, any of that. The baggage of terminal illness was mostly nonreturnable.

  And human remains, Willa learned, were considered a hazardous material. Mailing them turned out to be legal but complicated, and ultimately unnecessary. Iano flew with the ashes back to Phoenix on Athena’s husband’s frequent flyer miles. Willa thought this sounded like a Greek mythology Mad Lib. But to Iano it was home and family. As the male heir of the Tavoularis clan, he had ceremonial duties.

  The night before he left, Willa and Tig had robbed the urn, taking out a pinch of Nick they planned to bury in the Vineland cemetery. A promise is a promise. Iano could be oddly superstitious, so Willa insisted they keep their thievery on the downlow. The “urn” was a plain metal canister inside the cardboard box they’d picked up from the crematorium (payment due on receipt). Inside the canister, a plastic bag. “Talk about excess packaging,” Tig had complained. “Do they think he’s going to try to get out?” Once they finally got through to the goods, they were both struck with a squeamishness that surprised them. Surely the hazardous label applied more before, given the oozy wounds and anger-management issues. But some barrier between living and nonliving human substance rose up, not wanting to be crossed. It didn’t even make sense that this was Nick. That such a very large man, when all was said and done—when a lot was said and done—could be reduced to a couple of heaping handfuls of gritty white powder.

  Not that they touched it with their hands. Tig was the scientist, Willa reasonably pointed out in an effort to coax her on. She should just see this as so much carbon and calcium. “Nuh-uh, you,” Tig said, pushing the spoon at Willa. Eventually Willa mommed up and did the deed, reaching in with a teaspoon, nervously transferring some of the sand-like grit into a baby-food jar she’d washed and saved (because, as Tig said, she’d paid good money for it). A fine cloud rose from the plastic bag and they both held their breath, pretty seriously not wanting to inhale him.

  For the burial of this secret stash of Papu they assumed they would need the cover of night. The dispensation of human substance was a closely watched business, they already knew, and poaching on cemetery ground could not possibly go down well with the landlords. They had a week to work out a plan before Iano got back.

  Right then Willa was enjoying the smell of April drifting in the open windows after a long winter’s fight to seal the elements out of her stupidly leaky shelter. She shoveled lunch into Dusty as fast as a baby-size spoon could do the job. There was no reconciling her memories of last fall—Aldus of the puny disposition and endless howls—with this jolly boy in the high chair who opened not just his face but his whole being to Willa’s tendered grace. The mouth popped wide with every approach of the spoon. He was working on a rainbow coalition of Tig’s pureed vegetable cubes—beets, pumpkin, green beans would be a guess—plus a spoonful of peanut butter as per instruction. It all felt wrong to Willa, but the pediatric gospel had reversed again: modern advice was to throw the kitchen sink at babies, foodwise, as soon as they could chew and swallow. Even the allergy triggers, early and often. Willa as a young mother had been ordered to sterilize everything within a hundred yards of baby, hold back on solids, and avoid potential allergens, ideally until voting age. And now the doctors said: bring on the peanut butter. Put the babies on the floor, let them eat dog hair.

  She was scraping out the bowl when Iano called. She handed spoon and bowl over to Dusty, keeping an eye that he didn’t give himself a tonsillectomy.

  “How’s Dixie?” Iano asked immediately.

  “Fine. And so am I, thanks.”

  “Sorry, moro. How are you?”

  “It’s okay. I’m nervous about Dixie too.” The plan was to bury her under one of the two big trees. Willa couldn’t decide which Dixie favored—the beech where she always peed, or the oak where she didn’t. This and other matters would be decided when the time came. Jorge and Tig had volunteered to dig the hole. Willa found all of it unthinkable. An inadmissible position, to a husband who’d just lost his father. “We’re all good here. How are your sisters? How was your flight? You haven’t told me anything.”

  He let out some air, a sound she knew. The release valve on the Greek family pressure cooker. “It’s kind of a soap opera, to tell you the truth.”

  “Are they okay with the rest of us not being there?”

  “Of course, they know what flights cost. Really it’s the opposite, you’re a saint now. ‘Ianaki, your wife that poor woman,’ et cetera. Everybody feels guilty he died on our watch. That we had the hardest part.”

  Ianaki, little Iano. Willa pictured his diminutive sisters all stretching on tiptoe to fawn over him. “Well, we did. We took one for the team. They can be grateful.”

  “And how do they show this? By taking it out on each other. Triangulating, I guess you call it. Each one has to pull me aside for a secret bitch session about the others. What can I say? Sisters.”

  “Wish I knew.” As an only child, Willa could hear people’s complaints about their siblings only as a primal form of bragging. They had a tribe. They belonged.

  “And the flight, gamo to. You don’t even want to know.”

  Willa watched Dusty biting the plastic-coated bowl of hi
s little spoon with an expression of deep satisfaction. Working his first teeth through the gums. “Well, your airplane took off, it landed, and we didn’t pay for it,” she said. “Sounds good to me.”

  “Because you weren’t there. In a middle seat, with Tweedle One oozing over onto me from the window side and Tweedle Two, ditto, from the aisle. And she has a dog. One of those little rug mops, in a carrier at her feet. It never stopped yapping.”

  “You can’t blame your seatmates for being big, Iano. I’m sure they were more uncomfortable than you.”

  “No, moro, I blame them for lifting the armrests to express their full privileges of billowing. They booked the aisle and window so they could use all three seats. They were a husband and wife. At thirty thousand feet I was caught in their marital crossfire. ‘Will you stifle your stupid dog? I told you not to bring the dog!’ ‘What, leave him with your lazy nephew who already killed all my plants?’”

  Willa smiled. “It’s Dee and Dum.”

  “What?”

  “Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They’re from Alice in Wonderland.” She pictured Iano between a giant couple in beanies, licking lollipops.

  “My knees had no place whatsoever to go, they were jammed into the seat in front of me. So the guy sitting there turns around to give me a nasty look. I invited him to trade places with me, and that took care of his ass for the duration. Jesus. I couldn’t get out of my seat, and of course like a fucker I had to piss the whole time, from Philly to Phoenix. Trapped like a rat in steerage.”

  This line of complaint was making Willa feel less guilty about her heartbreak over Dixie. “There’s your free flight. A Tweedle sandwich.”

  “And a dog.”

  Willa rubbed Dixie’s soft coat with her bare feet. The asthmatic seesaw paused for the release of an appreciative sigh. “So, I have some good news. I’ve finished the justification section for the historic registry application. Basically a thumbnail sketch of our man Greenwood, and why I think he’s a person of historical interest. Chris has found a guy to come and put a date on the house for us. Some historic architecture specialist out of Philadelphia. No charge.”