Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.
“Who did she know in Provo, Utah?”
“No idea.” Chris was pleased with her agitation, she could tell. He turned back to poking through the entrails of her family history. “I’ll send you a receipt for your donation,” he promised. “When I’ve gone through everything and can attach a dollar amount. The Tavoularis-Knox collection will be a nice addition.”
“Okay, but I really should apologize for bringing it to you like this.” Should, but couldn’t. Under the gaze of the old mad man on the wall in his kingdom of dust motes, she felt unapologetic. “It’s the state of the union at our house. We’re a shambles.”
*
Willa walked home toting her two empty suitcases with ease, one inside the other. From the corner of Sixth and Plum she spotted Tig and a half-dozen teenage girls sitting cross-legged in a semicircle on the grass in front of the carriage house, all watching Dusty. Naked as an old-time circus strongman, wearing nothing but his bulky diaper, he was working hard on a solo stand-up. Willa stopped to watch from the sidewalk with her luggage in hand, like some homeless lady, because she didn’t want to intrude and break his concentration. This act took everything he had: first raising himself bottom-up with fingers and toes gripping the grass, then letting go and lifting his arms, slowly bringing himself upright. When the girls applauded he beamed at them, and that small distraction cost him: he fell down on his padded bottom.
But he went right back to it, trying again. He would do this over and over until he had it, and today or tomorrow he would walk. Willa remembered all this. She’d watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.
18
Survival
Of all seasons in the Pine Barrens, summer was consummate. The pair rested in a glade he had never seen before, kept in reserve by Mary. It was her favorite place. The fluted green columns of pitcher plants rose all around them with ruffled hoods lifted and mouths slightly agape, nearly smiling as they digested their minuscule prey. Mary and Thatcher drifted likewise in their thoughts, with their eviscerated lunch bucket lying nearby. Mary sat on Thatcher’s coat spread over the damp ground. He had insisted. Thatcher lay on the moss with his head resting on Mary’s lap, unwilling for now to consider any place beyond this one.
They’d been conveyed that morning as usual by the steadfast Foggett, but without Selma, who had given her notice two days before with more tears than necessary and some biting of knuckles. The girl had presented herself in such a state of emergency, it seemed likely she and Willis were already now married and on to the procreating stage. It was a season of precipitous ends and beginnings.
Mary was terminating the lease on her house and moving into rooms at the back of the Campbells’ manor on Park Avenue. She would enjoy the company of her friend Phoebe, and in a few years would put by enough money to purchase her own home. Mary had already chosen the lot for it, also on Park Avenue, where she could have a small house built precisely to her needs. She had already drawn the plan for the garden. This home had long been a dream of Mary’s, but inertia and a duty toward Selma—and, she confessed, the pleasure of visits from a neighbor—had held her in place. Freed of those duties and pleasures, and with Joseph securely gone, she could sally forward into life.
Thatcher’s house, which was never his house, was now the legal property of Orville Dunwiddie. Aurelia had married without fuss, as promised. On this very day she and her daughters with all conceivable fuss, he imagined, would be tyrannizing the Dunwiddie servants who had come to pack up the flatware and corsets, completing the move into the Dunwiddie dominion. Scylla and Charybdis would be Dunwiddie hounds. Aurelia and Rose could not be happy about that, but their other choice was to watch Polly throw herself down on the threshold and rend her clothing. If Rose could have horses, Polly would have her dogs. The eventual fate of the house on Plum Street remained at large. Rose and Aurelia would need more time to understand what Thatcher had known for a year: that no money could save a structure so thoroughly flawed.
Rose seemed to have less difficulty abandoning a marriage. The lawyer Mr. Thomas, in gratitude for Thatcher’s services at the trial, had directed him to the friendliest possible judicial channels. Thatcher would have to offer Rose sufficient grounds, swearing among other things that he’d failed to provide for her properly, which was certainly true. But a marriage without issue could be closed like a book, and with Thatcher soon gone from Vineland, the path for Rose would smooth itself. After a sufficient pause she would begin referring to herself as a widow, and so would everyone else. Unblemished, she could marry again.
“I find myself shockingly relieved,” he told Mary, who had listened with sympathy to his full accounting of the wreckage. “Only now I have to bring up something difficult. It concerns you.”
“Then it can’t be very difficult.”
“Delicate, then.” He closed his eyes briefly and listened. Water flowed through the ground underneath the moss. “In order to dissolve the marriage, I have to declare I was unfaithful to my wife. It’s a formality. Everyone says what they’re required to say in these cases. I needn’t be specific. But in a town full of gossips. Well. I worry.”
She said nothing. He saw she was smiling.
“I’m worried about you, Mary. Your reputation. What if someone thought of you as … the party involved?”
“Me! The poor little crone discarded by Joseph Treat when he trotted off to New York in pursuit of the glamorous Woodhull. Did a year in Vineland teach you nothing?”
He laughed. “That is probably the general opinion.”
“Well, I can tell you this. My household allowance of scandal is used up. I am now invisible.”
Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always. Yesterday after more than a year trying she had succeeded in watching a queen of her captivating Polyergus ants take over a colony of the species they enslaved, the Formica. The ascendant queen invaded the Formica nest, found the host queen, and licked her aggressively until she died. Thereafter in less than a minute a transformation took hold of the invaded colony. Every worker became subdued, without exception. “I did not see any visible communications among the members of the colony.” Mary seemed freshly struck with the wonder of what she’d seen. “But the effect was instantaneous. All of them were stupefied and subservient to their new leader. It must be a chemical signal given off by the dominant queen.”
“You could call it the Landis effect.”
“Oh, Landis.” She seemed neither amused nor very bothered.
“He is walking free, Mary. A murderer.”
The jury had found him innocent by reason of insanity. Having watched the charade, Thatcher was not very surprised with the verdict, only at the number of days the jury required to reach it. Evidently it took some doing to boil a human conscience down to cornmeal pap. The twelve men went into their sealed inner room and locked the door. After two days they sent out a note: Eight for acquittal, four for conviction. We see no way to bring all parties together. Naturally, a minister was summoned to get them all on their knees. And when they arose, the newspaper reported, two of the four went over. Seeing this result they tried it again and another juryman was gathered into the fold, leaving one poor fellow alone and unprotected. What could he do?
“Landis is finished, regardless,” Mary said. “He doesn’t have the power of a Polyergus queen.”
Thatcher felt Mary was optimistic. But this was true: the man he’d seen in the courtroom was a punctured flask. Getting stripped of his gold watch and forced into mock humility, even for the span of six days, might prove fatal to his potency. If the man is only a man, his rule will be resi
sted. The utopia would ravel at the seams and show itself as a costume covering naked greed.
Thatcher would not be in Vineland to see it. In less than a week he would be on the train to Boston to join an expedition to the western territories. The director of the Harvard herbarium was dispatching men to collect and classify plants previously unknown to science. They would be traveling for months, conditions would be rough, the pay only adequate, and Thatcher could imagine nothing he would rather do. Darwin embarking as a young man on his Beagle voyage could not have felt more eager. Mary had written the director to recommend Thatcher for the position, but insisted he’d been hired on his merits. Perhaps. Thatcher also knew Dr. Asa Gray owed his friend a favor.
As a parting gift she had just now given Thatcher her neat little vasculum for his collections. It might be the only material thing he’d coveted in years, apart from sturdy shelter. Somehow she knew, even though he’d never spoken his longing aloud. Nor did he tell Mary now that he could see her soul. It was a giant redwood: oldest and youngest of all living things, the tree that stood past one eon into the next. He would see them in California, not as drawings in a book but as living forests. He would see sego lilies and cactus trees, and species not yet known, impossible sights he’d never thought himself worthy to claim. Asking was not in his nature. Given the choice, he might have stayed in his burrow like a badger. He certainly had not gone looking for Mary but was led to her by a pair of hounds, not very willingly, and for that he had Polly to thank. She’d demanded he go, just as she later bullied him through his rehearsals for the debate that ruined him in Vineland. And at the end, urged him to stand up for his friend Uri.
“Do you know,” he told Mary, “my little sister Polly was on my side entirely in the Landis trial. She believes he is a murderer and should pay the price.”
“Your sister is still young enough to see the world honestly.”
“And no longer my sister. It’s the greater share of my regret in ending the marriage, to be honest.” He laughed. “Do you know what she asked me? The girl is not timid. She asked me to please consider, after Rose and I are quite finished with all our divorcing, whether I might want to marry her. In a few years’ time. When she had finished with all her growing up, is how she put it.”
Mary did not laugh. “And will you, then?”
“Oh, Mary, dearest. Polly will meet some stallion by and by, young enough to take her on and get himself handily broken.” Thatcher felt a little sad at the prospect, sincerely hoping it would be the stallion broken and not the rider. “Polly is nearly twenty years younger than I am. Rose is younger by only half that, and even one decade was a gulf I failed to navigate.”
“And I am older, by nearly the same decade.”
He looked at her closely. It was an odd vantage from which to inspect a face: he saw mandible and earlobes, the tender cheek, stray vines of chestnut hair at her temple, and no gulf. “It’s different. Rose and I never were friends. We had no opportunity for that.” He wondered that she would mention her age. “Mary, here is an odd thing I want to ask. Do you think of me as a son?”
The jaw tilted upward. She was looking at trees or the sky. “I never had a son,” she said directly. “I don’t know how I would think of one. Why, do you think of me as a mother?”
He smiled. “I never had a mother. I don’t know how I would think of one. But I don’t expect a son feels such desires as I do. I sometimes feel I ought to take the pins from your hair and make my home in it, like a bird in a tree.”
“Oh dear,” she said, as Mary would, and rested a hand on the buttons of his vest.
“The other share of my regret is that I cannot come back to Vineland, even to visit. How will I see you?”
“You’ll find me an unrelenting correspondent. You will grow very tired of hearing from me.”
“Try your best to exhaust me.” He took hold of the hand on his chest, kissed it, and returned it to its place. “You will fail.”
“This winter I will be in Florida. Phoebe’s cousin William has offered me the use of his little cottage on the Saint Johns River, in the swamps between Jacksonville and the coast. It is a piece of divine providence from the sound of it, this cottage. It comes with the use of a flatboat. All perfectly isolated in the forest, not another soul for miles.”
“Mary Treat. How many women has God made like you?”
She chose not to answer, or did not know. “I’m taking the cottage for the whole winter. Dr. Gray has written me about collecting an aquatic iris reported to grow in the Saint Johns that he thinks may be unclassified. When your expedition is finished, you would do well to join me there.”
They both went quiet, imagining a river of irises. Thatcher lay watching the sky through the leaves, white clouds skipping across small lenses of light. Here was a world, where he’d asked for nothing. He would escape with his life before the dust had settled on the collapse of his falling house.
Acknowledgements
Mary Treat was a nineteenth-century biologist whose work deserves to be better known. She comes to this novel as a construction from her journals, published writings, and correspondences with Charles Darwin, Charles Riley, and Asa Gray. Unsheltered is a work of fiction, but most of its nineteenth-century characters and events are real, if often implausible: the Venus flytrap self-sacrifice, the female vote of 1868, the shenanigans of Charles Landis, the murder on Main Street, all true. The Greenwood family is fictional, and Thatcher’s relationship with Mary Treat is my invention. Among the novel’s twenty-first-century characters, any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
I’m thankful to the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society and its expert curator Patricia Martinelli for archives generously made available to me, and in one of the most electric moments of my life, letters from Charles Darwin dropped into my bare hands. Abrazos to Renzo Zeppilli for doors he opened in Cuba, and to Nathaly Pérez for patient guidance into a world so nearly unfathomable to the capitalist-reared brain. I’m grateful to Terry Karten and HarperCollins for twenty-two and thirty years, respectively, of literary partnership. Sarah Brown made efficient work of historical fact-checking. Doug Johnson was the copy editor I’ve always wanted. Three illuminating books guided my hand as I wrote: This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein; The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth; and The Book That Changed America, by Randall Fuller. George Eliot kept nineteenthcentury voices in my ear. And let us all thank Willa Cather for My Àntonia.
My deepest debts are to the friends who keep showing up for the years it takes to coax a book onto the page. They’ve all made it better. For reading, again and again: Judy Carmichael, Steven Hopp, Sam Stoloff, Terry Karten, Caroline Eisenmann, Felicia Mitchell, Jim Malusa, Sonya Norman, Lily Kingsolver. For shelter, personified: Judy Carmichael. For the steadying advocacy that makes anything possible: Sam Stoloff and the Goldin Agency team. For believing from the beginning: Frances Goldin. For teaching me modern Greek in ancient times: Dimitris Stevis. For the years we survived together among the wild things: Rob Kingsolver and Ann Kingsolver. For everything else, most of what I know and all I want to be: Steven, Lily, Camille, Reid, and Owen.
About the Author
Barbara Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned a devoted readership. In 2010 she won the Orange Prize for The Lacuna and her 2012 novel Flight Behaviour was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Before she made her living as a writer, Kingsolver earned degrees in biology and worked as a scientist. She now lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.
Also by the Author
FICTION
Flight Behavior
The Lacuna
Prodigal Summer
The Poisonwood Bible
Pigs in Heaven
Animal Dreams
Homeland and Other Stories
The Bean Trees
ESSAYS
Small Wonder
High Tide in Tucson:
Essays from Now or Never
POETRY
Another America
NONFICTION
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
(with Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver, and Lily Hopp Kingsolver)
Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands
(with photographs by Annie Griffiths Belt)
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2018
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
Published in the USA in 2018
by HarperCollins Publishers,
195 Broadway, New York, NY10007
This ebook edition first published in 2018
All rights reserved
© Barbara Kingsolver, 2018
Cover design by Faber
Design: Ami Smithson/cabinlondon.co.uk
Cover image © Axel Killian/Plainpicture
Endpapers © Russell Watkins / Alamy
The right of Barbara Kingsolver to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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