“Children, do not become confused by what you hear on this stage today, because we have proof of God’s plan for our wondrous sphere. Of course we do. It is our holy Bible. And this truth is credited by all men. No scrupulous scientist would try to steal from us God’s promises to man. And what are these promises?”
Cutler turned unexpectedly to Thatcher then, seeming to invite the continuation of his march toward modern enlightenment.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure which promises you mean. Shall I … should I continue with Louis Pasteur?”
Cutler shook his head sadly, sharing with the audience his deep sorrow for Thatcher. “The contract our Almighty has made with man. How could any of us forget his promises to us? Man’s supremacy over the earth. Man’s power of articulate speech, man’s gift of reason, his free will, his fall and his redemption. How could we forget the incarnation of the Eternal Son, and the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit? These gifts cannot be reconciled with any story of our creation except the divine. Children, do not let yourselves be degraded. You were created in the image of our redeemer.”
Cutler turned back to Thatcher and swept the air with his single hand as if ushering his companion through a doorway. “Now we have set a few things straight, I pray you. Go on with your presentation.”
Thatcher touched his fingertips together and felt his pulse pounding as he struggled to swim from this wreck. He started from the beginning with his mnemonic: Pack a bag, lad. Ptolemy Avicenna Copernicus Kepler Boyle and Galileo Lavoisier Avogadro Doppler. But what had become of Occam and Newton? He’d covered Redi, obviously, more than adequately, but there was another trick for the moderns that escaped him now completely. Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek, something, and Priestley. Where did that leave Joule and Kelvin? And Bacon! The pioneer empiricist Bacon, completely left behind. Damnation. Thatcher despaired to hear a faint whimper escape his own throat. There was no saving himself now, he’d got his centuries crossed. He had lost his place.
*
Only the odium of winter at her solstice could conceive this demon hybrid of wind, snow, and frozen rain that was stinging his face. He pulled his hat low and hurried to get from the school building as fast and far as possible. The term was ended and the holidays begun, with that humiliation. If he’d thought to wish his pupils a happy Christmas before dismissing them, he had no memory of it now. His bowels were in knots, his face burned, his shoes were inadequate to this weather, and suddenly out of nowhere, someone was walking beside him. A bear in a coat.
“Well done, man! The walls of Jericho are a-trembling, I feel it.”
“Carruth. You’ve picked a ghastly day for a walk. I told you I’m not your man.”
“Not my man? For standing up to the tyrants? What did I just witness, then?”
“Damn it!” Thatcher now felt he might be sick on the foot of one of Landis’s blasted maples. “Do not tell me you just witnessed that disgrace. Do not!”
Carruth obliged.
“Do you poke your nose into everything that happens in this village? Why waste your time on a trifling school assembly?”
“You think I would have missed it?”
“I wish you had. I wish we both had. Now I suppose you’ll write it up for your paper. Did you enjoy the spectacle of the rat getting lured from his hole?”
Carruth’s laugh was jollier than necessary. “Man, the rat wasn’t lured. That barmy zealot crawled down the hole with his pistols blazing. He would have chased you right to the core of the earth, he was that determined.”
“He was that determined.”
Thatcher felt he now understood the suffering of saints who’d had the skin peeled from their bodies. But Carruth was clapping him on the back in a congratulatory way. “And still you came out of it alive! I’ve seen men less injured by cannon shot than you were in there, and here you still stand. Revolutionary fortitude, my friend.”
“Is that what you think? That I’m still standing.”
Thatcher in fact was walking east on Plum at a gait bordering on a canter, driven by a craving to get himself from this place. The problem was, to where? Going home to Polly and Rose and their festival mood would be unbearable. At this moment he could face no human companions, who would require him to fabricate a palatable version of today’s events, nor could he face being alone without such a story, anywhere. Every place on the earth was the wrong place for Thatcher Greenwood.
“You held your own,” Carruth insisted.
“I came apart completely. After Cutler called in the horsemen of the apocalypse to trample the Enlightenment.”
“You had a scramble there in the middle, before you got your sea legs back. But I only saw it because I have a fear of crowds myself. I know the symptoms.”
“You?” This ox of a man, intimidated, was beyond imagining.
“You stuck it through, Greenwood. Didn’t you hear your pupils cheering for you? They saw their master in good form facing down old Captain Ahab, fending him off with the saber of rational thought. And maggots!”
“You’re mixing your dramatis personae. Captain Ahab’s enemy was a maniacal whale. And Ahab had a peg leg. Not a hook for a hand.”
“You empiricists. Can’t a man have a little poetic license?”
“Save it for your newspaper, Carruth.”
Finally his venom had punctured the thick hide. Carruth went quiet. Thatcher regretted striking out at this man, who only wished him well. A friend, as he’d said, who knew their common enemies.
“I’m sorry. You and your weekly are a rare breath of honesty in this town.”
Carruth shrugged.
“You should leave me. Go home to your bandicoots, Carruth. They’ll be wanting their happy Christmas. I am fit company for no one right now, not even my wife and family.”
Carruth cuffed his shoulder. “Women are good for the spirits. It’s only a bad day, friend. After worse ones than this, the sun still rises.”
“No. An impossible day, at the end of an impossible year, in this impossible town where even the trees are bullied into conformity. Where just now I would give everything I own for a shot of whiskey.”
“Come with me, then. You may want several. They’ll cost you less than you think.”
“What, here in this saloonless town, in the broad light of afternoon?”
“Here and now. I have excellent inside sources.”
Carruth hooked his arm into Thatcher’s, just long enough to steer him south, then released him. With hands in their pockets and heads ducked against the gale, the two men crossed the decorous expanse of Landis Avenue and headed into an unadorned alley behind the steam and flour mill.
“You’re a font of surprises, Carruth.”
“Those are my line of business, as I reckon.” He threw Thatcher an odd glance: his face, just visible between hat and upturned collar, was creased in a jolly grimace. “We like to call them revelations.”
11
Revelations
When her phone buzzed, Willa was lying on a mattress on the floor with Dusty for the naptime coercion. He was gaining on civility but still resisted afternoon naps more fiercely than seemed possible for a five-month-old. He would get so tired his head drooped on its stalk, but even with the afternoon bottle he refused to drift off like a normal baby. He sucked at the formula with a furrowed brow until his lunch turned from liquid to squeaky air, then howled at life’s injustices. Willa had tried offering a second bottle to follow the first. Everyone had tried something, rocking, strollering him around, even leaving him to “cry it out” as experts now recommended, but this kid could wail for hours. His grip on wakefulness must have been powered by a fear of loss. In his world, the minute you closed your eyes, a mother could vanish.
It was Tig, with her uncanny patience, who discovered the cure was physical reassurance on a near-superhuman scale. Thus the afternoon ritual of lying with him for as long as it took, rubbing his tummy in circles and singing until words and tune petered out into mindless, rhythmic shooshing sound
s. Slowly the gaze would rise to the ceiling, the lids would blink and finally close. That was the exact moment Willa’s phone woke up on the arm of the sofa, silenced, luckily, but well out of reach. She let it go. The call vibrated itself out and went still within thirty seconds.
She lay with her chin on her forearms admiring the baby’s wren-feather eyelashes and delicate nostrils, the bottom lip tucked into the infant overbite. The melon of belly expanding, contracting. Nowadays babies were always put to sleep on their backs; in facedown position they would succumb to SIDS, if the pediatricians were to be believed. This “back-is-best” propaganda was news to Willa, whose kids were born in the decade when babies always had to be put to sleep on their tummies, lest they die of SIDS. The absolutism of these Cheshire-cat dogmas seemed funny, or maybe valiant. Probably nobody knew why little lives sometimes evaporated like smoke, but all guardians wanted to be given the amulet of prevention. And they didn’t want “maybe.”
Willa’s phone went off again and she watched it buzz like a big square beetle, inching itself with each vibration toward a leap off the arm of the sofa. Even Dixie noticed it, from the position she’d recently secured at the foot of the mattress, and she watched Willa expectantly. Humans responded to such cues. The caller’s persistence was piquing Willa’s curiosity, but she stayed put. Dusty wouldn’t have grown roots into this sleep yet, and she knew getting up would trigger the salvos. If she could keep him asleep awhile they would be rewarded with an evening of reasonable temper, and no phone call was worth risking that. Besides, Willa was not the average phone owner who felt at every ring the tug of some potentially fantastic news. Some other phone that would be.
This mattress on the living room floor was now Willa and Iano’s bedroom, wedged between the sofa and the nonfunctional fireplace. The sofa was their nightstand. The horrid paisley print she’d wanted to reupholster forever was now hidden under a drift of contact lens cases, books, and uncorrected papers, and so there was one problem solved, anyway. To a visitor’s eye their home might have the air of a disaster shelter, but Willa had no plans for entertaining. She’d made no new friends in Vineland, settling for electronic exchange with her many old ones, mostly to complain about Vineland. This living room was the normalization of their present shambles. They were cold, all the time. For the first time since the kids were around ten and enjoyed the nearness of dirt, they were all using sleeping bags. From the camping gear they’d also pulled out the old green propane stove to use in the kitchen after a ruptured gas line forced them to shut off the main. (With Nick’s oxygen in the house they’d be crazy to take chances, said Mr. Petrofaccio, who had seen a thing or two in the arena of household explosions.) Willa purchased a whopping electric space heater she set up on the ground floor, knowing it would sap their future via credit card payments and electric bills, but seeing no better option. It kept the house a few degrees above the jeopardy zone for plumbing and human life. Sometimes after dinner the whole family went to the coffee shop on the corner to stoke up on warmth before the long night. When Willa dressed Dusty in his one-piece footed flannel pajamas, she seriously wished they made these in her size. To stanch the icy drafts blowing down the chimney they’d stuffed the fireplace with garbage bags full of the leaves that fell from the two giant yard trees.
Their only nice furniture was the antique walnut crib that had launched Willa and her Knox forebears. Now it stood beside the TV, but they seldom used it for naps due to the awkwardness of standing over Dusty to massage him to sleep. This mattress on the floor had become a family bed—an odd arrangement for their kind of people but common enough worldwide, Willa knew, in countries with closer-knit families and meaner economies. She and Iano had dragged it downstairs at the first sign of snow through the cracks in their walls. Dixie had crept in guiltily to curl up close to their sleeping bags for warmth—Dixie who never in her long life had been allowed on furniture, but who now had a palsy in her hind legs and other signs of being not long for this world. Next to arrive was Tig, who’d tried stuffing the breaches in her room with socks, but gave up as the temperatures fell. She spent most nights at Jorge’s but sometimes ended up there with her bumpy little spine pressed against Willa and her thin arms woven around the baby. The first time Willa woke up in this fragrant jumble of dog-daughter-husband-baby she lay in the dark feeling tears crawl down her cheekbones. She hadn’t been this close to Tig since a fifth-grade softball concussion put them on a week of night watch.
Not everyone shared the family bed, of course. Nick had been moved home for the holidays in a Cadillac of a hospital bed, allegedly covered by Medicaid, that plugged into the wall. Zeke was expected on Christmas day, but had absented himself to Boston for the month with the report that Good Money was starting to get somewhere. Willa was happy for Zeke on principle, and stopped asking his intentions regarding Dusty.
Unbelievably, her phone rang again. Curiosity now congealed into dread. She eased her weight off the mattress and crept across the carpet like a soldier under fire.
“Willa! I’ve been trying and trying to reach you.”
Chris Hawk. Not a death in the family. She lay on her back letting her heartbeat slow to normal. “I just got the baby to sleep,” she whispered. “Let me call you back.” A novel thought struck her then: this could be good news. It happened. “Wait. It’s about Mary, right? This is her house. Please say yes.”
Silence. So, there went that.
“Okay,” she hissed, “your big emergency is to tell me I’m dead in the water.”
“It’s not that simple. Can you come over?”
“I’ve got a baby and an old man here who both need tending, so no. It is that simple. If it isn’t yes, it’s no.”
“Or something else you didn’t expect. Just call me back, okay?”
It wasn’t entirely true that she’d made no new friends. Christopher Hawk was dedicated to her cause, and Willa spent more time with him than with most members of her family. She still couldn’t get him to laugh, but they’d exchanged some confidences and found common interests. He’d done a double master’s in linguistics and history with a specialty in period slang. His thesis on Victorian obscenity made him a professional collector, and Willa took hypocritical pleasure in passing along some of Nick’s most egregious curses. But Christopher was not a guy you had over for dinner. He had peculiar aversions, allergies galore, and according to himself, no life outside the historical society. Willa enjoyed the friendship partly because it made her own life seem normal.
She waited another five minutes to be sure Dusty was securely down, then called him back from the kitchen, keeping her voice close to a whisper. In the odd way that conversational volume is contagious, so did Chris.
“Sorry, you don’t have Mary’s house. The news there is bad. Her house is gone.”
“What do you mean, gone? What’s your source?” Dixie had gotten up from the mattress and plodded into the kitchen to keep an eye on Willa. She lay down in the doorway, an audible drop of bones.
“I found a stash of envelopes with the address that were separated from Mary’s correspondence, stuffed in a throwaway file. What moron did that, I can’t say. I mean, I know, but I can’t say. She’s on my board of directors. She volunteers one day a week and I spend the next two cleaning up after her.”
“Chris. The facts, please.”
“Okay, all these letters from Charles Valentine Riley are addressed to her house at 640 East Plum, between 1870 and 1875. The numbering system has changed since then, but I cracked the code on that a long time ago. We have the old and new addresses of several public buildings and we can extrapolate. It’s mostly a matter of dropping every block number by three hundred, but in that section of town it’s only by one hundred. Now, Charles Riley, you remember who he is?”
“The insect guy. Let’s come back to Mary’s house being gone.” Willa looked out the kitchen window at a balmy day like no December she’d ever seen, and with her free hand moved dishes into the sink, harnessing her impatie
nce. To converse with Chris was to wander in a maze of extraneous details. Maybe all historians were compulsive about the particulars, but Willa got the picture on why this one didn’t have a lot of friends.
“The address puts Mary’s house one door down from yours. On the corner lot.”
“Oh. Over there. So it’s gone.” Willa saw the story of her life, already written: one house away from hallelujah.
“It must have come down mid-to-late twentieth century. Ironically, the stipulation house is still standing on the back of the lot, but they tore down the main house. To make way for that reprehensible hovel with the vinyl siding.”
“Right.” Willa felt defensive on behalf of Jorge’s family. It’s not as if they tore down Mary Treat’s house with their bare hands. She cast an envious eye at the little ivy-covered garage that had stood the test of time. Tig and Jorge had been cleaning it out, for no reason Willa was allowed to know. “And you rang my phone off the hook to tell me this bad news. Sorry, am I repeating myself?”
“My dear. History is not good news or bad news, it’s just one big story unreeling. There are no small parts, only small actors.”
“And small paychecks. I get the part of Mary Treat’s neighbor. Thank you.”
“Listen. A person of interest lived in your house.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me.”
“He was a schoolteacher. Hired as part of the original staff of Vineland High School, we have records of that. He would have been living in your house the year they opened the school and President Grant came to town.”
“And you figured all this out how?”
“From Mary Treat’s correspondence. This guy comes up in her letters to Riley. She’s listing his qualifications, maybe trying to help her neighbor find a new job.”
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