Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.”

  “Well shit, Tig. And you want to raise a kid?”

  “I don’t want to get pregnant. But he’s already here.” She stroked the cloudburst of his hair with a feathery touch. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Mom,” she said quietly. “You and Dad did your best. But all the rules have changed and it’s hard to watch people keep carrying on just the same, like it’s business as usual.”

  “All the rules. Really?”

  Tig nodded almost imperceptibly, like a seed head bobbing on its stem. She didn’t look at Willa but out at the graves. “People can change their minds about little things, but on the big ones they’d rather die first. A used-up planet scares the piss out of them, after they spent their whole lives thinking the cupboard would never go bare. No offense, Mom, but you’re kind of not that different from Papu. You want a nice house that’s all your own, you want your kids to have more than you did.”

  “I’m human, Tig. We live, we consume. I think that’s just how we have to be.”

  “Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can’t even see what you’re believing in.”

  “Most of us can’t see past our noses, but for some reason you can?”

  Tig grinned. “Just that special.”

  “Seriously, I’m asking.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got less of a stake. You and Dad kept turning your hamster wheel, and so did Zeke, but I never thought I had much of a shot. Especially with Zeke telling me ever since I was born that I’m a pea-brained midget loser. It makes you kind of sober about your prospects.”

  Willa’s heart constricted at the thought of a daughter incurring damage while she looked the other way. Siblings teased, that was normal. Every mother secretly had a favorite but Willa had been careful not to let that show. Tig always seemed impenetrable, even superior. One after another these defenses rose to Willa’s mind, and she understood this was how it worked, refusing to see past your nose.

  “I always thought if I was good at anything,” she finally said, “it was being a mother. And what I hear you saying is that I’ve let you down completely.”

  Tig considered this, looking at the boy in her lap. “A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.”

  “Fierce.” Willa nodded. Not that she’d wish quite that on any child. Or the mother involved.

  “I was going to say adaptable. You know what’s funny, sometimes the stuff you hate for yourself you admire in other people. Like Jorge. I love that he’s a grown-up, and I know it’s because he wasn’t sheltered. He got zip in the dad department.”

  “I’ve wondered about that.”

  “Yep, same old story, the disappearing dad. So their mom had to be like, pack your own lunchbox, m’ijo. Not that they were destitute. I mean, she bought that house. But Jorge was eight when he had his first job. He worked for his uncle, selling beers to tourists on the Playa Condado.”

  “Well thanks, I feel better. I didn’t hire you out as a barmaid in second grade.”

  Tig laughed. “You wanted us to be happy. I know you did. Not that self-sufficient, but self-sufficient. Good workers, good at relationships. All the same things we want for Dusty. But he needs a different kind of mom. The reward system in his lifetime will be totally different. He’ll have to learn how to be happy with what he’s got.”

  “To expect nothing, in other words. And get it.”

  “He doesn’t get a choice. He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic. We didn’t ask for this, it’s just what we got.”

  “Thou shalt not want.”

  “Something like that. Waste not, want not.”

  “If you’re right, then Zeke is right too. If you can’t borrow from the future you have to steal from now. You’re offering me this Mad Max scenario of pirates taking everything they can grab, and I just can’t accept it. It’s too horrifying.”

  “Seriously, Mom? It’s here. One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell. Even Zeke knows that’s true.”

  “I think he’s trying his best to apply morality to the process.”

  “Which is like trying to reason with a cancer cell. He knows this, Mom.”

  “So you get to the bottom of the barrel and then what? Teach Dusty to steal?”

  “Or pick up something people were throwing away, and use that.”

  Willa recalled Zeke’s earliest warning about Tig teaching Dusty to Dumpster dive. “I appreciate the sentiment. Secondhand clothes are one thing, but secondhand food, not so much. Or secondhand gas for your car.”

  “You can’t see it because you don’t have the right eyes. There’s stuff going to waste right in front of you. Always. We’re, like, swimming in wasted stuff.”

  Dusty was stirring. His nap had kept them from raising their voices, and for that Willa was grateful. The danger of screaming had passed. “I just spent a winter feeding a family on lentils and sleeping in a sleeping bag. Conserving toilet paper. I’m so tired of thrifty. You show me what I’m still wasting and I will cook it for goddamned dinner.”

  “You’re still wasting, Mom. Everybody is.”

  Willa said nothing. Dusty opened his eyes and blinked up at the trees and sky. Then looked at Tig’s face. He smiled, she smiled. The simplest of things.

  “Be specific,” Willa said.

  Tig stared through the iron fence at the street beyond it, for such a long time Willa began nursing a wild idea that she’d won the argument.

  “Okay,” Tig said. “In thirty seconds four cars went by with one person in each of them. That’s at least twelve trips to wherever those cars are going, all going to waste. Times a hundred and twenty, that’s way over a thousand rides per hour.”

  “In theory. They’re not exactly useful to me.”

  “It could be arranged. People do it. In Cuba it’s an official job. El Amarillo.”

  “‘The yellow’?”

  “‘The Yellow Guy,’ I guess you’d translate it. They can be men or women. They wear this yellow outfit and stand at major intersections. Everybody recognizes them. It’s just an example. Of making an invisible resource actually useful.” Tig interrupted herself to lift Dusty up and sniff his bottom. “Pew, mister!”

  She rifled through the stroller pocket for a fresh diaper and a plastic bag of damp washcloths, then laid Dusty down on the forgiving grass. Willa watched. In her many years she’d never changed a cloth diaper. Not one.

  “So the yellow guy is what, like an Uber dispatcher?”

  “No, it’s simpler than that. Like a free, countrywide transit service. Anytime you need to go somewhere, you walk to the nearest Amarillo and tell him where you’re headed. If you’re driving a car with any empty seats, you see the yellow suit and you stop. It’s the law. He asks where you’re going and matches passengers to destinations.”

  The bottom was wiped and the change accomplished with little fuss. Willa had imagined onerous pins, but Tig used diaper covers with snaps to hold everything in place. “It’s a pretty cool job. The pay is good.” She wrestled Dusty back into his overalls and sealed away the stinky stuff in a bag. “It requires people skills, you know? It’s not just first come, first serve. He’ll give priority to a pregnant woman, or somebody with an appointment that’s time sensitive. It has to be fair, so everybody stays happy.
They all get where they’re going, and every car is full. All the time.”

  “But what if you just want to go somewhere by yourself?”

  “You get over it. That’s so last century, Mom. Anyway, that’s how I met Toto. Remember I told you I was hitchhiking, when I rode with him to Bayamo?”

  “Yellow Guy set you up?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s like Tinder, with practical benefits. I knew so many couples that met in cars, on their way to someplace they both had to be.”

  “Still. Seems like people would want to be more in charge of their destiny.”

  “Oh, right. Destiny. They’ll remember how in charge they were, next time another hurricane puts the Garden State Parkway underwater.”

  Willa thought of the sad little sign in the yard of the bankrupt farm: Dear Mother Nature, Please Spank Sandy. “You’re right. They won’t see any human-caused connections. They’ll just be mad.”

  “Uh-huh. Until they get here.” Tig was buckling Dusty into the stroller, preparing for departure. “Then they finally start to soften up a little bit.”

  They made their way back toward the spot where they would try to relocate the time capsule of Nick they’d just buried, and invite him to join the nutrient cycle. Tig was in a generous mood now. When they reached the easier going of the paved roadway she put an arm around Willa and they pushed the stroller together.

  “Poor Mama,” she said, leaning her springy head against Willa’s shoulder. “I know. It feels like the end of the world when you can’t have the things you always wanted. But it’s not the end of the world. There’s some other place to go.”

  “Sorry to tell you, but that’s a very old chestnut. My mother used to say when God slams a door on you, he opens a window.”

  Tig gave this two seconds of respectful consideration before rejecting it. “No, that’s not the same. I’m saying when God slams a door on you it’s probably a shitstorm. You’re going to end up in rubble. But it’s okay because without all that crap overhead, you’re standing in the daylight.”

  “Without a roof over your head, it kind of feels like you might die.”

  “Yeah, but you might not. For sure you won’t find your way out of the mess if you keep picking up bricks and stuffing them in your pockets. What you have to do is look for blue sky.”

  16

  Blue Sky

  Once, for nearly a fortnight, Thatcher slept in a tree. It was during the war when he’d run away to travel with a regiment on the move. The march stalled in a rivershed while they waited for orders to continue toward Boston, where troops and supplies were slowly being moved south by rail. In the meantime the men were encamped, but Thatcher had no official place yet in the regiment. Other tagalong boys, some much younger, ran from one tent to the next making bargains, running errands, or carrying out small missions of larceny for the privilege of rolling up under a cot in a blanket crawling with lice. Whatever dread of night birds and crickets was driving them to those dens, it did not trouble Thatcher. He found an accommodating oak with a wide crotch of limbs radiating from an old injury where the tree had been topped by a violent storm or lightning strike. There he built his squirrel’s nest of leaves and his single blanket, and slept as well as he had ever in his father’s house. He hadn’t thought of the tree for years, but he thought of it now. Possibly some instinct was warning him to make ready to run.

  He stood in the parlor near the window. Rose sat in one of the small, armless chairs opposite the settee. Husband and wife were applying every faculty to avoiding an argument. Outdoors a summer was greening. Thatcher observed it with physical longing, but the ornate leaded windows of this wretched house could not be thrown open.

  Rose was upset because Mrs. Brindle had finally given her notice, as any sentient being could have predicted. Rose was upset by any number of things. Her new blue day dress had not fitted properly and had to be sent back to Mrs. Clark for alteration. Someone was mutilating the shade trees on Landis Avenue! Under cover of night the vandals carved vulgar threats against the captain, directly into tree bark where they were impossible to erase. The newspaper Rose held in her lap reported this crime on its front page. She had just read the article aloud, appalled by the crime and expecting Thatcher to be even more so, given his fondness for trees. Landis had posted a reward for information leading to the apprehension of the culprits.

  But Thatcher felt sympathy for the tree mutilators. Or at least for the cleverness of these insurgents whose broadsides could not be whitewashed over by morning. What appalled him was that Landis maintained the privilege of posting any sort of reward. The overpowering pretense of normality in this newspaper and the town was driving Thatcher mad. The opposition paper had ceased publication, of course. The only mention of its editor in the Weekly for many weeks had been the occasional small note that Carruth was resting comfortably at home, expected to make a full recovery.

  And now the great bear was dead. Now there could be a murder trial. Rose and Aurelia allowed no discussion of the subject, because it led only to shouting and tears. Both women prayed for Landis to be found innocent, because everyone relied on Landis. Their friends the Dunwiddies retained connected business interests, and would suffer losses if their partner were forced to divest under distasteful circumstances.

  This was making it difficult for Thatcher to break the news that he now must. He set his fingertips on the windowsill and through the cage of lead and glass looked out at the house next door. Mary knew already. Knew, praised his courage, and trusted him to do the job well. Had put her arms around him and let him weep like a child he had never been, for Thatcher had no memory of having wept in the shelter of human arms. Now he had. On her worn settee among the ferns he had lost himself in grief for the death of his friend, and so much else.

  He turned to face his wife. “Blast Landis’s trees, Rose. I’m to testify at his trial.”

  She glanced up quickly: blue eyes, cloudless sky. “What trial? Oh! How on earth, Thatcher, you? What a privilege.”

  “No. Against him.”

  She shook her head slowly, looking only at the air before her.

  “I’m testifying on behalf of the murdered man. Uri Carruth.”

  “Why would you? He is dead.”

  “Exactly. I was contacted by the lawyer seeking to prosecute his killer.”

  “You never spoke of it. You’ve kept this from me?”

  “You wouldn’t let me! Damn it, Rose, you’re not even listening now.”

  Her eyes flared like a struck match before she looked away. Thatcher had rarely sworn in her presence, let alone damned her.

  “He’s asked me to make a statement before the jury.”

  “Why you? What do you have to do with any of it?” This without looking at him.

  “He learned through Carruth’s family that I was a friend.” He watched this register as a faint rush of color to her throat while her body remained still. “We became acquainted last fall through business at the school. I never mentioned it because I doubted it would interest you. Since the shooting I’ve visited him at home. As often as I could.”

  Still she did not look at him or speak. Only her hands moved, pressing the fingertips of one into the palm of the other, perhaps for reassurance she was not dreaming.

  “He was never resting comfortably, he was in agony. He died of an infected brain. The poor man, Rose, and that family. He has a young wife and five children who depended on him completely. Who loved him. You can’t think how they suffer.”

  Thatcher had been astonished to be summoned by a lawyer, a man named Thomas, for the request of his testimony. A murdered man did not generally need a character witness. Carruth was shot, unarmed, in the back of the head, Thatcher had pointed out. Surely Landis could make no case for self defense. But in effect, Thomas explained, that case was being made. The counsel for Landis planned to press an argument they were calling “defense of insanity.” They meant to prove Carruth’s actions as newspaper editor made Landis temporarily insane, so h
e could not be held accountable for the shooting. Thatcher listened to all this in the oak-paneled office and felt as Rose probably did now: like a person dreaming. No man could plead insanity as a defense. Had any such case been argued before? To his knowledge, Thomas said, it had not.

  Finally she spoke. “What do they want you to say in court? For that poor man.”

  “That Carruth was a kind and honest citizen who intended no harm.”

  “He did cause harm. You can’t deny it.”

  “Sometimes people stand on principle, Rose. Pressing new ideas against old, defending one group of men against the actions of another. It causes rancor, if that’s what you mean. It brings shame, or it should. But not the necessity of violence. Not insanity.”

  “Who are you calling insane?”

  “No one. I’m a pawn in this game. You’re always first to say how unimportant I am. But at least I will be the pawn who tells the truth.”

  He sounded angrier than he felt, for speaking with Rose made him hopeless, but his words had the effect of a scolding. She looked down at her hands. With her little shoulders back and her head tilted low, she looked like nothing so much as a lovely child.

  “I’m sorry, Rose. I know my appearing in court will place you in an awkward position with your friend Louise. You’ve only heard one side of this from the Dunwiddies. But you’ll find there are other people …” He stopped short of saying in Vineland, as he no longer vouched for anything this town held for them. Certainly no employment. “You will find other friends,” he managed to say.

  “But you don’t understand,” she said quietly. “It means everything to our future for Landis to remain free. If he is convicted he will see the collapse of many assets that he and the Dunwiddies hold jointly.”

  “Yes, I expect he will. And why should I care about the Dunwiddies?”

  The child lifted her chin. “Because Mother and Mr. Dunwiddie are to be married.”

  “What?” Aurelia and the Toadflax. The dream he’d dared to dream.