Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She thanked the expert, took his card, and sent him away in his white truck. Chris seemed to want to hang around for a debriefing but Willa couldn’t bear it. She pretended she had things to do inside, a baby to check on. She kept waiting for tears but what came to her instead was a weird, deathly calm. Beyond the mess of everyone’s wants and needs lay a simpler calculus of what this house could be, and what it couldn’t. She’d asked for a fact-finding mission and that’s what she got, even if the facts blew up everything she’d counted on. Nothing is free.

  *

  They went to the graveyard by day. Tig pushed Dusty in a lightweight fold-up stroller she’d gotten in trade when she decided to get rid of the Cadillac buggy. And Nick of course fit handily in Willa’s pocket. This family was learning to travel light.

  After some reconnaissance they’d realized their illegal interment would be less risky in broad daylight than at midnight. Almost no one ever came into this cemetery, but cars passed steadily on Park Avenue and North Valley, and nocturnal shenanigans would likely attract more notice from people driving by. To normalize the appearance of their mission they brought a picnic, which they laid out on a blanket in the appointed spot. It had been Willa’s idea to get a bottle of ouzo, which neither of them had ever tasted, and wasn’t all that easy to find. They’d toyed with the idea of bringing shot glasses to throw down and shatter after the toast, Zorba style, but decided against it. This being not yet the afterlife, someone would have to pick up the pieces.

  “His self-confidence was herculean,” Willa said, lifting her juice glass and knocking it back. Ouzo was alchemical: clear as water in the bottle, but when poured into a glass with water it instantly turned whitish, like an ammonia-based cleaning fluid. That pretty well defined the taste also, though Tig had the better palate. She got cleaning fluid with notes of licorice.

  “To self-confidence,” Tig said, knocking back her shot, wincing.

  They sat cross-legged on a plaid blanket staring at the babyfood jar of ashes that sat between them. Dusty also could sit unassisted now, making it a foursome.

  “So was his vocabulary. Herculean,” Willa said, raising an empty glass. “But I think I’m done with the fucking ouzo.”

  “Me too,” Tig agreed, setting down her cup. “Here’s to Papu’s vocabulary, and fuck the Virgin Mary!”

  “To the whore ocean! Pou se gamoun ta psaria, I think.”

  “Gamo to!”

  Willa glanced at Dusty. He’d recently learned to manage a bottle himself and was doing that now, while watching them both with wide eyes over the plugged-in dome. “I’m sorry he’ll never know Nick. But can you imagine? Sending him to preschool with that kind of language rattling around in his head?”

  “Mom, you were almost as bad. We never told you, but Zeke had to go to the principal in fourth grade for telling the lunch lady no thanks, he didn’t want any fucking green beans.”

  “Zeke did?”

  “He swears to this day he didn’t know it was a bad word. He’d heard it from you and Dad so much he just thought it was a regular adjective.”

  Willa, without a defense, picked up her tomato and cheese sandwich and finished it off. They’d stuffed a generous picnic into the mesh pocket on the back of the new little stroller, which weighed ounces instead of pounds, easily lifted with one hand. It felt like the end of an era, being done with that ostentatious stroller. In the same trading session Tig had ditched the Gucci diaper bag and all other baby items that were more showy than functional. The car seat they’d retained, but not the baby monitors with TV cameras or the mobiles with literal bells and whistles. In the exchange, along with a good deal of cash, Tig procured a wardrobe of lightly used clothes, as Dusty had suddenly outgrown every stitch he owned. Also a bale of cloth diapers, because Tig was sick of throwing shit away. Willa thought she would sweep the motherhood medals if she stuck that one out, but something told her this wasn’t just a show of sincerity to impress Willa. The process had a life of its own, and at this stage of her nonpregnancy Tig was nesting, in her antimaterial way. Preparing for a baby on her own terms. And really, after everything she’d done for Nick, how bad was baby shit?

  Dusty emptied his bottle, threw it down, and lifted his arms to be picked up. Tig swooped up the boy and lifted him in the air, making him shriek ecstatically. He worked his arms and legs like an earnest little swimmer mastering the air. Tig cooed nonsense as she lowered his face toward hers, touching his button nose to her own. He reached for the handles of her hair and she swooshed him upward again, both of them squealing. Willa remembered the days in a grief-drenched Boston apartment where she’d first watched her son with his son, waiting for the chemical magic that would rivet them together for life. Waiting for this.

  Willa lay on her back and looked up at the sky through tree branches that glowed with a faint green haze of a leafiness soon to come. It reminded her of the heartbreaking, awkward furze on a thirteen-year-old boy. The end of something that everyone agrees must end. She had no earthly idea where she was going to live now. What would become of her family. The only one with an assured destination was Nick. After a while Tig put Dusty down on the blanket, got out the hand trowel they’d brought, and carefully lifted a divot of grass. She pushed the baby food jar into the slot, exactly as if she were planting a large seed. Willa started to help replace the sod, but Tig stopped her.

  “Hang on.” She reached into the back pocket of her jeans. “I told him this would go with him. You’ve seen it, right?”

  She handed over a small slip of photo, not exactly square. It had been cut down from a larger size, maybe to remove other people or to make it fit in a tiny frame. It was creased, had been bent. Extremely worn. “Where did this come from?”

  “He used to keep it in his cigarette lighter. Remember that gold one he had with the little sliding compartment on the side?”

  “Oh, yeah. I do.”

  “After we made him quit smoking, he kept it different places.”

  “Like where?”

  Tig shrugged. “The drawer in his nightstand, in a wallet he never used. When we rearranged everything to bring in the hospital bed he kind of freaked. He kept asking me to hide it someplace or another. Finally I stuck it in with his morphine stuff, the pill crusher and all. He liked it being in there. I figured you would have seen it.”

  All of this astonished Willa: That he’d had such presence of mind at that late stage, and managed to maintain an arena of privacy. Mostly, that she’d missed it altogether. The photo was a black-and-white portrait with the yellowy-brown cast of antique chemicals losing ground against time. Taken in Greece, she could tell by the whitewashed stone wall behind the couple. Who but the Greeks pursued that obsession with whitewash? The background was a haze of yellowish clouds but the subjects were clear enough: a tall man with an arm around his tiny bride, gripping her as if gale force winds were expected. But smiling, both of them. Her head was enlarged by a hat or a headscarf—or a crown. If this was a wedding portrait, Willa realized that’s what it would be, the stefana made of leaves and flowers. She and Iano had worn these, in the only trace of orthodoxy they’d allowed into their wedding. In the old days the couple wore them for a week, but if Nick wore any headgear in this photo it was drowned under the mane of black curls. Willa held the photo as close as her eyes could focus. The little bride in the vise grip of her man looked fiercely happy. Small but undominated. She looked like Tig. And the young man, so exquisitely undamaged. Tall, dark, and handsome.

  She handed the photo back to Tig with salt burning her eyes. Tig stared at her.

  “Mom. Are you sad? About Papu?”

  “He’s …” The words caught. When Nick died, she’d called the proper authorities and watched the body roll out of the house on a gurney without feeling much of anything. On Wednesday when the architecture expert took the wrecking ball to her future, no tears arrived. Nothing got to Willa anymore. She shook her head to clear this away.

  “He looked just like Iano,” she
said finally. “I never knew that. I wish I had.”

  “Seriously? You didn’t see how much they looked alike?”

  “Not at all.” Willa had a disorienting recollection of Tig making a face at the goth girl in reference to Iano’s putative attractiveness. Antwack, if she remembered correctly. Her beautiful Iano, just another old guy.

  Tig kneaded grass and sod back in place over the burial, leaving no visible trace, and quietly began packing up their picnic. She’d kindly offered no judgment on Willa for failing to see the resemblance, absolving the evergreen human crime of denying the past and seeing oneself as original. Willa looked around at an April day struck through with clear light. It felt like more than she deserved.

  “As long as we’re here, I’d like to look for somebody. A grave.”

  “Who, Mary Treat?”

  Willa was startled. “You knew she’s buried here?”

  “I know where she is.”

  With Dusty back in the stroller they bumped over the grass to the paved road that snaked through the grounds. Outside the cemetery’s tall iron fence the traffic steadily passed, but in here the grounds were all theirs. They followed the road into the oldest section, where gravestones took more liberties: obelisks, corbels, ogees. A few unapologetic phalluses. Statues of angels. Many names were all but erased from the stones’ rain-washed faces. Tig led the way, going off-road again to enter a section of smaller markers, and suddenly there was Mary.

  “Goodness.” Willa sat down beside the marker. It was as modest as the woman herself, not even a headstone exactly, just a small stone column about knee high and equally wide with a slanted top engraved with the name and dates. MARY A. TREAT, 1830–1923. The weathered granite was discreetly mottled with aureoles of yellow and green lichens, channeling the soul of a woman who loved ferns and mosses. Willa laid her face against the stone. After months of cat and mouse, thinking she’d nearly touched Mary before losing her again, this was as close as she was going to get.

  “Is that what you call a plinth?” Tig asked. She, standing by, and Dusty in his stroller had their heads tilted in a similar quizzical aspect that made Willa laugh aloud.

  “What?” Tig asked, startled. “Is that a dumb question?”

  “No. Not at all. Technically this style is called a pulpit. What’s dumb is that I actually know that.”

  She knew because decades ago in her more commercial days, she’d done a brochure for a monument company. And her brain seemed resistant to the life-changing art of pitching things out. Willa had written hundreds of articles about thousands of things and probably could still list most of them. None had laid any lasting claim on her heart. She pressed both hands against this cool stone, feeling the roughness of the lichens. Mary had lived her discipline. Both of them had, she and Thatcher, with an integrity that led them to give up, practically speaking, their lives. Born under the moon of paradigm shift, they got to be present to a world turning over on itself. Willa ached for a devotion like that, something to move her beyond herself. Out from under the soggy cardboard box she might be holding over her head—a visual Tig had lodged in her mind that Willa would pay good money to erase.

  “Over here is another Treat,” Tig said. “I think it’s Treat. You can make out ‘eat,’ almost, and it sort of matches. Husband?”

  Willa got up to look. “Husband. Sort of.”

  Now here was a conspicuously uneasy his-and-hers setting. The matching monument was set much more than an arm’s length away. More like the proverbial ten-foot pole. And it really didn’t match. It was slightly bigger, all square angles, no lichens, and a flat top that took the full brunt of eroding rains. The j. treat was almost gone. No date had been engraved. Willa knew Joseph had died just a few years after running off to New York in pursuit of free love and a bigger audience. Victoria Woodhull spurned him, he devoted a few last years to revenge-shaming her, and died without friends. Mary would have been obliged to buy this plot for the two of them. Probably she told her relatives, “Okay. But not too close.”

  And then she outlived him by more than forty years. While most people who knew her probably pitied her for lacking the protection of marriage, she lived adventurously and committed her voice to the page so well that Willa could hear it plainly.

  Tig sat on the ground a little distance away to admire Mary’s real estate, with Dusty on her lap and an accommodating family stone for a backrest. Willa joined them. Dusty was drifting. After lunch and bottle came nap.

  “How did you know where this grave was?”

  “I know people here.” Tig grinned.

  Willa knew she came here often. It made sense she would have noticed the name when she happened on it. For a beautiful ten minutes or so they were quiet, with nothing required to complete the space between mother and daughter. Willa relaxed her focus and took in the view of all that even ground, the immense trees with their arms lifted, the motley garden of stones at their feet bearing an aspect of afterthought. Little flags posted here and there signaled flashes of patriotism that had flared and burned out.

  “I know you come here a lot,” Willa finally said. “I guess I’ve wondered why.”

  “It’s comforting. All these dead people.”

  “That might not be a conventional position.”

  “I know. But I’m not superstitious. I just … like seeing all these lives. Most of them started in this town, and ended here.”

  “They’re rooted.”

  “Yeah. Literally. Most of the coffins have degraded, especially the older burials. Before people got all defensive about trying to keep their bodies out of the carbon cycle.”

  Willa had to smile. Only her daughter would see embalming as defensive. “So you think we should have dumped Papu out of the jar? To get him recycled?”

  Tig looked at her. “Would that be okay with you?”

  “Of course. If we can even find that spot again. We can liberate him.”

  Tig was pleased. “Pine box with a body inside, no preservatives. That’s how most of these people went down. So now they’re part of those trees. Isn’t that where you want to end up, Mom? In a tree like that?”

  Willa looked at the oak over their heads. Its trunk was a monument to resilience and its branches to tenderness, touched at their tips with the faint rose color of baby oak leaves. Who would not want to end up in a tree like that?

  “Plus,” Tig said, “it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting.”

  “For people to die?”

  “Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they’re applying that to now. It’s just so ridiculous.”

  Willa could see the reason in this, unnerving as it might be. “I get that your generation is waiting for their chance. I remember feeling that way too. But there’s no guarantee, unfortunately. Like, poor them.” She pointed at the family stone facing them: Frank and Emma, both born 1859, produced four children who all died in 1888. And so did Frank.

  “Oh yeah. The Keurigs. I’ve noticed them before.”

  Willa imagined this Emma whose husband and children, the youngest an infant, she tried desperately to nurse through some fever. Then followed in a cart to this spot, buried them, and went home to her empty house, perhaps to be avoided by her neighbors as a typhoid pariah. “Not much comfort there.”

  Dusty was sleeping sideways across Tig’s legs in a pose of spectacular relaxation, head dropped back, mouth open. Willa thought of the days when he fought sleep as if death lurked inside it. Tig had one hand resting on his belly, and seemed to be contemplating the tragedy of the Keurigs. “The thing is, Mom, the secret of happiness is low expectations. That’s a good reminder, right there. If you didn’t lose your husband and kids all in one year, smile! You’re ahead of the game.”

&
nbsp; “Wow. That’s what I raised you to believe in? Low expectations?”

  “What did you want me to believe in?”

  “I don’t know. You can be anything you want. Hitch your wagon to a star and all that jazz.”

  Tig didn’t smile. “I saw you and Dad doing that, hitching your wagon to the tenure star, and it didn’t look that great to me. You made such a big deal about security that you sacrificed giving us any long-term community.”

  “I think there are other ways to put that.”

  “But not simpler.”

  Three words. Willa wanted to get up and walk away from this censorious child and parenthood altogether, the Möbius strip of torment. Their day had been nearly perfect. Naturally it had to blow up. She stood up so quickly her vision briefly washed out. Brushed off her jeans, listened to her throbbing head: Walkaway walkaway. She’d just been accused of vagrancy, it seemed. Or a refusal to dig in. She dug in.

  “And you think you can be a parent,” she said, standing over her diminutive daughter with the baby on her lap. Looming, really, which felt aggressive. She sat down again. “I guess your plan would be to live somewhere perfect and give Dusty roots.”

  “No place is perfect. Don’t be so touchy.”

  “Well, it’s been kind of a week, Tig. I just found out our house is slated for demolition.”

  “Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it.”

  Willa tried to see a connection. “And I’m just worried about my house. That’s your point?”

  Tig shook her head. “It’s so, so scary. It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in place anymore when there isn’t a place.”

  Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe these things.