Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “With Landis.”

  “Cutler described your campaign to drag the heresies of Darwin into his academy. Do you think I am inventing this?”

  “No.” Thirty seconds earlier, Thatcher could have stood and left this place.

  “Do you have support at the school?”

  “Support? I hardly know. My pupils come to class. The other teachers are looking out for themselves, currying favor where they can. We are hired only from one year to the next. A system guaranteed to turn colleagues into a den of knaves.”

  Carruth suddenly seemed deeply concerned. “Cutler sought Landis for advice. He claimed this feud was demoralizing the entire school.”

  “A feud requires two active parties. I petitioned, and I was refused. There it ends.”

  “Not for a man of Cutler’s breed. Any disagreement is an affront to his power. He won’t rest until he has remedied the so-called insurrection. Landis advised him.”

  “You overheard this?”

  “A talent of my vocation. Even an ox like myself can become invisible.” Carruth waved a hand in the air, as if erasing himself. “Especially among men who loom that large in their own eyes.”

  Thatcher’s eyes closed involuntarily. “What did Landis advise?”

  “The way to catch a rat is to lure it into the open.”

  Carruth reached across the table to pat his forearm, as if waking him. “Sorry. The man is loathsome. Better to know than not know, eh?”

  Thatcher did not think so. “What poisoned bait is to be used, to lure this rat?”

  Carruth looked around, perhaps for eavesdroppers, or to summon the girl for more coffee. He leaned forward on his elbows. “A colloquium.”

  “A colloquium?”

  “Assembly of some kind. Before the whole school.”

  “Ah. That. One of Cutler’s pet practices. Every teacher is required to present his expertise to a school assembly. Not just to pupils but staff as well, and they do protest. They would enjoy the hour at leisure from their charges, but Cutler insists we all attend. Learn from one another, the bee and the pollen and all that.”

  “And your day is coming. To be the bee.”

  Thatcher shrugged. “I plan to summarize the great practical achievements of our enlightenment. Joseph Lister sterilizing wounds, Louis Pasteur and the bacteria. No man dislikes science when it is sparing him from death and putrefaction.”

  “You’re free to decide the text of your lecture?”

  “Yes. Well, in theory not. Cutler represents it as a conversation. He sits on stage with the presenter and asks prodding questions from time to time. ‘Please explain, sir. Do go on.’ He sleeps through these talks, along with the staff and pupils.”

  “So Cutler will be there to ask questions.”

  “Yes, but he would … I cannot imagine he would bring up the unspeakable Charles Darwin. That is unfathomable.”

  Carruth’s strange, hooded eyes met Thatcher’s. “My friend. Fathom it.”

  *

  Mary drew aside a curtain of suspended ivy and pulled open the door of the carriage house. It was oddly quiet within. The dry silt floor silenced their steps. The framing was of rough timbers but the diffuse light through dust-covered windows made Thatcher think of a chapel. Ants boiled darkly from small volcanoes in one corner.

  “My Polyergus friends,” she said. “And there is my collecting box. Selma must have put it here.” She stepped quickly to retrieve the vasculum from a table piled with her plant presses. Bathed in the window’s white light, she looked like a girl, or a sylph. Happy in this place. Thatcher guessed her husband must never have come here.

  “No, he didn’t,” she confided. “After Mr. Newcomb took his carriage away, I don’t believe Joseph gave another thought to this place. It was my refuge in dismal times. I did my experiments here.” She looked up brightly. “Now my investigations make scandalous onslaughts on the parlor, do they not?”

  “A happy scandal, for the spiders and flytraps. They would not care for this cold.”

  “Oh, dear. Is it too cold for you here? I could bring you a stone bottle.” Her brightness fell away, and Thatcher cursed himself. Another man to burden her.

  “Mary, please don’t. You’ve given me too much already.” He put his hands lightly on her shoulders to prove himself earnest, but the sight of his own house through the window troubled him with how they would seem to someone looking in: like lovers. Or simply two friends in overcoats, a tall man and little sylph, sharing a conspiracy. He took back his hands and turned from the window. “This is all I need. The frigid air will brace me for my enemy while I practice.”

  He had found it impossible to write or rehearse his speech at home, with every room full of women and complaints. Gracie had not lit the stoves properly; a new patch of wallpaper was peeling in the dining room; Polly needed to come fetch the dogs this instant or Rose would have them sent away. This refuge of Mary’s suited him well. He noticed a ladder leading through a hatch door to the upstairs. Also a narrow cot in the back corner, opposite the anthills, with a blanket neatly folded on it.

  “Mary, did you have to escape here entirely in the dismal times? Forgive me, it’s forward to ask. I find myself angry with a man I’ve never met.”

  “No need. Joseph has made enemies enough to last his life. The little bed is for Selma. She sleeps here when her father gets in his drink and she fears going home. They have had to move into a rooming house that sounds appalling. She also comes here to pray.”

  “I might do the same. I confess I am terrified.”

  “Of addressing a room full of children?”

  “Not a room. An auditorium.”

  “But this you do every day. The difference is only one of degree. I am entitled to be a nervy mouse when I give the rare botany lecture. But you are not.”

  He could hardly think of Mary as a mouse, having seen her so queenly in her bog, or with her sorority of tower-building spiders. So fearlessly rapt when in conversation with another alert mind, whether that of Charles Darwin or the wagoner Mr. Foggett. He had seldom seen her in ordinary society, where her shyness must have surpassed even his own.

  “This is not a thing I do every day,” he insisted. “My pupils may ignore me, but they do so without malice. Cutler is crafty. However I try to make my case for science and rational thought, he will trick me into speaking of Darwin.”

  “Well forevermore. Speak of Darwin.”

  “I will, eventually. With pupils who might listen. But in this so-called lyceum, one mention of the name will give Cutler the right to end my lecture and open his own. So he believes. He truly knows nothing of Darwin, Mary. But he hates to discuss even the methods of scientific inquiry. His brand of science is an edifice built of scriptures and saints.”

  “A strange science that must be.”

  “Strange and fearsome. He needs no evidence to convict me as a witch. With my pupils watching, he will build his pyre and burn me before their eyes.”

  “You describe the behavior of a frightened man. Half the world fears Darwin, of course, and the rest have yet to hear of him. But Cutler most especially seems to fear you, Thatcher. Why should he?”

  Thatcher regarded his friend’s face: the open, trusting innocence and unexamined courage. “I know you feel isolated in your work, Mary. But isolation is a far kinder place than the wolf den of ambitious men where I have to make my way.”

  Again her look shifted to one of pain. He had belittled her. What an odd business it was, to speak of men’s concerns with a woman. “I’m sorry, I’ve made a thoughtless presumption. You work with colleagues, as I do. So you know how men are, afraid of anyone who would expose them as fools. They protect themselves by doing it to others.”

  “I suppose they might.” She was unconvinced.

  She had spent her life among untypical men, he realized. For better and worse: cursed in marriage, blessed in scientific pursuits. “You have had good fortune,” he offered carefully. “This is not presumption but observat
ion. Men like Darwin and Gray are earnest investigators at the frontier of a new world. I wonder how you found them.”

  She blinked, seeming surprised. “I wrote to them. For exactly that reason.”

  “So you did. I’m afraid I am stuck with the rear guard. Cutler is an old authority. Men like him dread new views, for fear they’ll have to set aside their hard-earned credentials and begin their climb again at the bottom rung.”

  “But you haven’t asked Cutler to be anything he is not. Why should you not be allowed to give tools of understanding to those coming up behind him?”

  “Because his explanations are convoluted and fanciful, and he knows it. Darwin explains geographic distribution with beautiful simplicity, compared with the buttresses and gargoyles of Cutler’s angel bridges. His strange science is a falling house. If I train young eyes to be observant, they will see cracks in his construction of the universe.”

  “I think his lecture circuit will not last long. If he accepts nothing new at all.”

  “He speaks to those who want nothing new.”

  “And that is most people nowadays, I suppose.”

  “That is most people nowadays. They hunger for any crumb of explanation that sustains their old philosophies.” Thatcher thought of the riot he’d seen in the Boston square, the scarecrow Darwin hanging from a lamppost, the crowd terrified witless at the prospect of shedding comfortable beliefs and accepting new ones. If people were thus, Thatcher wondered why the shedding came so easily to himself and his friend. Perhaps they both had a tactical advantage: Mary, reared in her finishing school to behave as an empty vessel, and Thatcher, who began life in a grimy, unsheltering family with no proper philosophies at all, or a book to its name.

  “I suppose it is the nature of our times,” Mary said. “Dangerous, as I’ve heard you say. We are a nation of the bereaved, half burned to the ground. People want comfort.”

  “They do,” he agreed. “To be shut up tight in their pumpkin shells.”

  “While the shocking Mr. Greenwood attempts to pull Creation from under their boot soles,” she said, with a marvelous twinkle.

  “Abetted by the scandalous Mrs. Treat.”

  “I will leave you to your labors.” She did, and he missed her instantly.

  *

  The view from his perch was harrowing: a crowd of human faces and no other species. How could anyone get a sensible bearing on life from the stage of an auditorium, or make any useful statements from that position? Thatcher had never addressed an audience larger than the ramshackle dozen in a classroom. As Mary had said, this was only a multiple of that same ramshackle, along with a sprinkling of teachers firmly committed to ignoring his every word. The appraisal did nothing to calm his nerves.

  At least this audience seemed captivated less with Thatcher than the plump, empty armchair to his right. He joined them in gazing at the chair, mate to the one on which he sat, green-and-white-striped chintz with ghosts of tea stains on the voluptuous arms. The chairs had been brought out from Cutler’s office, which he furnished like a Bouguereau brothel. It was predictable that Cutler would keep himself elsewhere until the last minute while Thatcher sat on display like some What-Is-It? of P. T. Barnum’s, with the consequence of traumatizing Thatcher and proving Cutler’s superior importance. Thatcher prayed this might be the day when grandiosity finally sublimated the man from solid to gas, leaving Thatcher here below to conduct an interview with himself.

  But now here he came, striding down the aisle like a fighter to the ring. Thatcher applied himself to maintaining control of his bodily functions.

  “Greetings! Greetings all! Pupils, esteemed instructors, I thank you …” Once on the stage he bowed a little from the waist with hand(s) held stiffly at his thighs, a move calculated to draw applause. All those present obliged. In just one term he had managed to tune this body of pupils like an instrument. “I ask for your full attention this afternoon in our lyceum presented by our science teacher Mr. Greenwood. Now as you know, the lyceum was the location of the Peripatetic school of Aristotle …”

  Thatcher could ill afford to lose concentration this early in the match, but Cutler’s rambling introductions were always the same. Tensely he awaited his cue, which eventually arrived: “and without further ado I present to you Mr. Greenwood.”

  Thatcher stood to accept a handshake and they took their seats, knees angled slightly toward one another as was the custom in these pony shows. Thatcher loosed one button of his coat, fixed his eyes on the sturdy lintel of the door at the back of the hall, and issued the opening sentence of the lecture he’d spent one day writing and four days memorizing in Mary’s carriage house. His plan for this lyceum was to plow like a mule through the history of practical science from Kepler’s laws of motion to the modern breakthroughs of Lister and Pasteur, thus evading all questions about Darwin’s theory. Failing that, he would meticulously avoid the word evolution by calling the process “descent with modification.” Both Darwin and Asa Gray used the same trick.

  For several minutes Thatcher engaged a dizzying fantasy of speaking without breath or pause for the full allotted time, then exiting the hall with his fists in the air. Deprived of oxygen though it was, his brain seemed to lift from his shoulders like a hot air balloon. As he billowed toward the eighteenth century he sensed from his peripheral vision the impatient twitch, the upper body leaning forward. The sharpening of the knife.

  “Now Mr. Greenwood …” Cutler interrupted, rudely speaking over Thatcher, who had given him no other option.

  “Professor Cutler?”

  “Let us clarify. You described Mr. Hooke’s discovery of the cell in 1665.”

  “I did.”

  “And you briefly mentioned his contemporary who disproved the theory of spontaneous generation. Please tell us more about this Mr. Redi, or should I say, Signor Redi. I presume the man was an Italian?”

  “You are absolutely correct. Francesco Redi was Italian, like so many great innovators, and also some of my pupils, as they have pointed out to me.” Thatcher took a moment to smile at the audience, ingratiating himself to every Persichetti and Petrofaccio in the house. Then turned back to Cutler. “I don’t claim to be an expert on Redi’s work, but my professors at Harvard respected him as a father of our field, founder of experimental biology.” Harvard was a deliberate stab; Cutler had attended no university.

  “And please enlighten us, how did he do that?”

  Thatcher took a calculated risk. “With maggots, sir.”

  The stir of laughter in the hall coincided perfectly with Cutler’s look of dismay. Thatcher relaxed by another inch. Cutler might have tuned this instrument, but Thatcher’s ken of its range was beyond his opponent’s.

  Cutler found no erudition to offer on the subject of maggots. “Well, sir. Indeed. For the sake of our young ladies, I hope you have no plans to repeat this experiment.”

  “I find the young ladies in my classes are entirely as clever and curious as their counterparts, Professor Cutler. And that is our good fortune because they outnumber us three to one.” Again came the appreciative stir from the audience. “But no, we have no plans to replicate Redi’s famous experiment. I would be glad to describe it for the audience, though. Since you asked?”

  Cutler did not respond.

  “Very well then. In earlier times, people believed living things could derive from nonliving matter. They thought fish sprang from mud, for example, and mice from corn cribs. That maggots came spontaneously to life out of rotting meat. They believed they saw these things every day, but they weren’t looking very closely. It was Redi who first devised a truly scientific experiment to test this hypothesis. He placed fresh meat in two jars; one he left open to the air, the other he covered with a cloth. Within a few days the meat in the open jar was crawling with …”

  Thatcher paused here and made a deferential bow to his commander.

  “… with living things, shall we say. Larvae. But the meat in the covered jar had no such creatures at al
l. Redi did find them crawling on the outside of the cloth. Where flies had laid their eggs in frustration, you see, not being able to get inside. He proved that life comes only from life. It does not spring up spontaneously from dead and disparate matter. Thus he disproved the long-held theory of spontaneous generation.”

  Cutler nodded thoughtfully, but the affect was a ruse; the fangs were bared. The serpent would strike. “Then how would you, or would Signor Redi if you prefer, how do you men of science explain the generation of the original life on our earth?”

  “Well, sir, that is very simple. We do not. What we admire about Redi’s experiment is the simplicity of its design. The hypothesis was that maggots derived directly from meat, without intervention of the fly and the egg. Remove the fly and egg from the meat, and the hypothesis is disproved by observed results.”

  “I see. You concern yourselves with simple little questions, and satisfy yourselves with simple little answers.”

  “Simple answers, bit by bit, lead to large truths. In this case, hundreds of scientists performed similar experiments on other kinds of matter, over many years, finding not one instance of life spontaneously generated from nonlife. Leading us to the modern scientist Louis Pasteur, who has worked with variously constructed bottles to exclude—”

  “Did any of these scientists prove—”

  Thatcher wriggled past the interruption. “—who devises bottles that can maintain a sterile environment, excluding contamination of life-forms from the outside air.”

  “Did any of these scientists prove,” Cutler demanded, for Cutler would not be wriggled past, “that God did not create all forms of life on earth by fiat, out of chaos?”

  Thatcher looked at him. “Sir. No one could make such a big bottle as that.”

  At this the audience burst into its own spontaneous life. Even Mademoiselle Hirstberger might have laid aside her magazine. Cutler was feigning composure but Thatcher recognized the extra pomp in his cadence that signaled outrage.

  “I suppose you find the Scripture an amusement, Mr. Greenwood, but I do not, and it is my duty as an educator to impress upon my pupils the same respect.” He turned to the audience, and Thatcher’s heart fell. Cutler had traveled the nation for years as a professional orator. He would not lose this contest.