Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “No, no, no!” Cutler shook his head violently.

  Thatcher looked up to signal Polly, but Mary’s dark eyes at full attention nearly knocked him from his rail. He turned carefully, grasping what Mary saw: his opponent was not Cutler. The manipulator of this charade was making puppets of them both. Thatcher should address himself to the king of this court. “Captain Landis. May I ask my assistant to come forward with pictures for our enlightenment?”

  Landis threw both arms in the air. “Pictures! Divert us, please!”

  Cutler objected but Polly was already on the move with the easel and folder of Thatcher’s watercolor-tinted drawings, over which he had taken a good deal of pleasure. “The remarkable creatures I will show you are genuine beasts, preserved in rock, found embedded in the cliffs above a beach in the south of England—”

  Landis moved around to have himself a look, impeding the audience’s view.

  “—discovered by a girl called Mary Anning, no older than my sister-in-law.”

  Polly curtseyed, beaming, no less a hound than Landis for getting herself admired. Thatcher hated sending her back to her seat, all that self-possession gone to waste. “The little girl loved to walk the beaches collecting fossils …” Thatcher took a step toward Landis in a futile hope of urging him aside. “Her hobby turned up relics that made wise men stand at attention. Here you see the ichthyosaur, a sort of alligator with flippers for feet and saucers for eyes, so large it would fill this stage.”

  He turned a page. Landis crowded in, while Cutler circled around to stand behind Thatcher, looming. “Here is the plesiosaur, a giant long-necked turtle. These creatures are nowhere in existence today. They help us to see time on this earth in a different light—”

  “Wrong!” Cutler interrupted, so loud and close Thatcher jumped.

  “Captain Landis, if I may—”

  The captain seemed riveted by the beast in question, or its likeness.

  “God does not make mistakes!” Cutler roared. “If he created a giant long-necked turtle, it would swim in our rivers today. The Lord said, ‘Never will I again smite every thing living, as I have done.’ I ask you, where is God’s holy promise?”

  Thatcher watched all eyes in the house move to Landis, begging rescue from this quandary. Cutler was up on his horse now, but Thatcher saw Mary had judged the match correctly. Vineland’s foolish emperor might be naked but his subjects did not care, they would take truth from Landis and no one else.

  “What God creates is perfection,” Cutler wheedled on. “He does not change his mind and strike his works from the record. Do we believe God is still in his firmament?”

  Landis turned to the audience and made a great, conclusive gesture like an orchestra conductor, then applauded loudly. Only then did they follow, heads nodding, hat ribbons bobbing. God remained in his firmament.

  “As I said,” Cutler groused, plainly annoyed with the pilfering of his heavenly thunder. “The creatures do not now exist, so they never did.”

  “Perhaps they do,” Landis suggested, “but have retreated to warm southern seas.”

  Cutler all but rolled his eyes, again edging close to combustion. “Sir. Wise men have studied these so-called fossils and declared them a hoax. The mischievous girl cobbled them from bits of stone with her father’s help, for fame and money.”

  “Mary Anning’s father died when she was a baby,” Thatcher corrected.

  “The mother, then!” Cutler shrieked, arriving at a state Thatcher judged approximate to hydrogen. “What does it matter, they are connivers! Urging good men to doubt the beliefs that have comforted us all from the cradle.”

  Again Thatcher saw the audience looking expectantly to Landis. “No good person would lead men to blasphemous illusions,” their captain told them. “The child must be a she-devil.”

  “But surely it was God who gave us the curiosity—” Thatcher began, but Landis cut him off. After a moment’s lapse, he had located his unguent and meant to use it.

  “Oh, come now, Mr. Greenwood, let us finish this business. Darwin is repudiated. Professor Cutler tells me anyhow he has retired, so we’ll be hearing no more of his nonsense.”

  “Mr. Darwin is collecting data this very day, I am sure,” Thatcher argued, feeling pulled underwater. “He maintains active correspondence with scientists the world over. In this very audience we have—” He stopped, unwilling to cast Mary into the flood. “In Boston, one of our nation’s most respected scientists, Dr. Asa Gray, is a champion of—”

  “Asia Gray? Never heard of him,” Landis said. “I assure you I know all the important men. If this one were of any count, I certainly would know him.”

  Thatcher looked to Mary to steady himself, and was rattled to see at the back of the hall another face, with bearish beard and hooded eyes glinting with merriment. He could not have come in unnoticed. It was as he’d claimed, he had a knack for invisibility. The boldness was impressive. Carruth’s satires against Landis had lately been ruthless.

  “Darwin is repudiated!” Cutler repeated grandly, the flea imagining itself the dog’s master. “Reasonable men will not abide the notion of our universe flung to the mercy of blind chance.”

  Thatcher studied the audience, many faces as worn and weary as their clothes, and perhaps their patience. What could he give them that Landis had not? “None of us wishes to be at the mercy of chance,” he appealed. “And we are not. Natural selection is predictable, not random. Farmers in the audience will be familiar with the actions I describe. Think of how you cull your cattle, removing weak calves to make a stronger herd.”

  “We do have excellent cattlemen here in Vineland!” Landis declared.

  “And they should glow with pride,” Cutler informed his silly guardian. “For my opponent has just compared them to God.”

  “No,” Thatcher corrected, “I compared them with wolves. The wolf does not want to create faster deer, but his consistent culling shapes the herd toward speed, over time. His action is like the farmer’s. My point is the shaping of life is not random.”

  Landis leaped belatedly to comprehension, or his version of it. “Now he says God is a wolf! Dear ladies and gentlemen, I hope you are praying for Mr. Greenwood’s soul!”

  Thatcher carefully addressed himself to Landis. “Sir, couldn’t the shaping of life be God’s gift to us? Adaptation is a greater marvel than rigid stasis, for it opens a path to survival. We don’t change ourselves deliberately, for no leopard can change its own spots. Each of us is stuck with our birthright of traits and habits.”

  Landis gazed at him with some curiosity, and the audience followed, the farmers and wives. Thatcher turned and spoke to them. The mothers. “Change comes only to the offspring, as time and adversity mold them. The luckiest will inherit the gift of survival.”

  Cutler was all but hopping from one foot to the other, angry at being shut out, impatient to snatch his victory. “This theory outrages every Christian alive. Where is omnipotent power? If you wish to teach our youth, why dispute the miracle of a tadpole becoming a frog?”

  “Because it manages the job without knees on which to request Divine help?”

  A hint of laughter from Landis made Cutler fume. “He mocks the Creator!”

  Thatcher again spoke pointedly to Landis. “Scientific theories can only rely on physical causes. Gravity does not ask God for help. We don’t dismiss God, we only allow him to attend to other matters.”

  Cutler stepped directly in front of him, like a child vying for a parent’s attention. “Sir, he insists on a trudging, single process for life’s formation! We have our angel choir, while he would have us all descended from one slithering … ancestral … fish!” Cutler spat the words as if tasting slime, with visible effect on the ladies. “A belief that would lead to anarchy! The animal kingdom needs man as its ruler, just as a town needs firm governance to keep it from falling into riotous free-for-all.”

  Again Thatcher saw all eyes in the room pulled to the gravity of Landis. These poor reel
ing planets craved safety in their universe, in any false form their master might pull from his pockets. “Dear ladies and gentlemen,” Landis said in a honeyed voice, “the giant alligators you heard of tonight may have roamed our inland waters once. I still hear of attacks off the shore, now as I think of it, bloody attacks. But I promise you we’ll see none of these monsters hereabouts. Not in the Delaware River, not in our Union Lake. Rest safely tonight in your beds. You have no cause, no cause to fear these beasts.”

  At this the audience burst into hearty applause. Several men stood to support the program of all giant alligators banished from New Jersey waters. One of the men standing was Carruth, showing himself. From Thatcher’s position behind the captain’s back he perceived the precise moment when Landis spotted his enemy, the spine recurving like that of a startled mongoose. The jester grew predatory.

  “The evil we must watch for,” Landis simpered, “is not a beast in the river. It comes on two legs, infiltrating our towns. Bringing riot and drink, broadcasting false complaints against our order, craving the wealth that belongs to other men. Grasping it! They push themselves ahead of those who have dutifully followed the law! Some will name this the progress of our times. Some will try to make our Bible a fairy tale. We do not let them! We seal our town against the enemies of gracious authority. We do as our hearts tell us, and slam the portals.”

  The audience held the quiet of a graveyard. All disguise here had fallen away: no more the jocular carnival barker, their king was a vengeful despot. Thatcher had watched Carruth’s face throughout the attack, in which Landis cast provocative editors and underpaid bricklayers into hell with Thatcher and Darwin. Carruth had looked unmoved. Pleased, if anything, to have rattled the man. His friend was offering up dispassion as a gift, as he’d once proffered a small tin flask, and Thatcher bent his will to drinking it in. He studied the crowded hall. This place of old philosophers and doomed progenitors was nothing to him. He was a supple branch, fleet of foot, motherless, unsheltered. Every adversity to this moment had made him a survivor. He watched Carruth; the great bear actually winked. Landis saw, and followed the trail to Thatcher. His eyes blazed fire.

  Thatcher met his gaze. “Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.”

  Landis and Cutler both gaped. What was the use for courage in times like these?

  “Professor Cutler, I know you admire Sir Thomas Browne and his theological interpretation of Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being.”

  “The universe is a stair,” Cutler intoned as if some holy valve had opened in his larynx, “rising in degrees from the rocks through lower life-forms up to man, and then the angels.”

  “Exactly,” Thatcher said agreeably. “Christians have been happy with the Scala Naturae for centuries. It agrees with Darwin in assigning the ape to his spot just next to man. Why make such a fuss over it now?”

  “The Scala Naturae assures us a species knows its place and does not climb. I will stand beside the ape, Mr. Greenwood, but I will not let him get aspirations. I will not let him wear my trousers or bed my wife!”

  Landis had sheathed his fangs—though Thatcher would never again forget their existence—and now pretended to find Cutler’s line of attack very jolly. “Perhaps you would want your monkey friend to be shaved first. With your Mister who’s it? With the famous razor? Mr. Orpheus?”

  Thatcher avoided both men’s eyes, lest they see disgust reflected. The truth remained intact, however bludgeoned here. Carruth would be waiting outside to congratulate him. They would walk Mary and Polly home, then find their way to a celebration. He only wished Mary could share their lark over the Grizzly Atlantic Crossing. How fine it would be if his friend were a man, free to don trousers without sundering God’s domestic harmony, and raise a glass of whiskey to the Enlightenment without causing the sky to fall.

  “The name you are trying to call,” he said, “is Mr. Occam.”

  “Yes!” the naked king cried happily. “You would have the beast dressed and trimmed up trying to pass for a man. With your Mr. Occam’s razor.”

  13

  Mr. Occam’s Razor

  He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this?” Willa asked.

  “No.”

  “No. He said that. It couldn’t have been more than a week ago.”

  “Apparently he was right.”

  “Iano, nobody gets away with murder. You can’t behave like a madman when you’re running for public office. That kind of trash talk is supposed to end careers.”

  Willa had avoided news for most of the day by sneaking off for a hike in the Pine Barrens, but the minute they got back to the car Iano clicked on the radio. The New Hampshire primary was all over every channel, with newscasters sounding a little too thrilled with the shock value. Like Orson Welles reporting on the alien invasion.

  “No more,” she begged. Iano scrolled over to a jazz station.

  This trip to the barrens was Willa’s sixth or seventh since getting the news that had overturned her assumptions about their house. Iano felt she was now obsessing on the Greenwood-Treat connection, poring over the records and stalking their hangouts. It might have been true, she was obsessed. But the Pine Barrens had their own appeal. It took less than an hour to drive to Batsto, a little historic village empty of tourists that time of year. Five dollars’ worth of gas or a little more, round trip, but her car was usually the only one in the parking lot and no one ever turned up to charge an entry fee. She could hike out on one of the sandy paths into the woods where the solitude and darkness and dire blood-red color of the creeks all suited her mood that winter. She felt guilty for recognizing exactly none of the plants Mary had written about so fondly, and knew she ought to learn some, but couldn’t muster much heart for the chase. Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct. Willa contented herself with the personable pines. They wore their rough bark like crocodile hide and held their needles upright like tasselly hands on long, curved arms, like Dr. Seuss creatures offering some warning chorus everyone needed to hear.

  She didn’t expect Iano to see the charm and had warned him of that, insisting winter wasn’t the best time for his first visit to the barrens. (She’d been there no other time.) But he was at loose ends, adjusting to a new semester with no Tuesday classes, and had come along for company. They’d carried in only sandwiches and water—no baby whatsoever—and walked around for hours enjoying the winter sun, charting their course on a phone app so they wouldn’t get lost in the maze of trails. It was much too warm for early February but Willa wasn’t complaining. Her bones felt like permafrost. She’d kept on all her layers just for the pleasure of sweating through them.

  Now, in the car, she wriggled out of windbreakers and fleeces one by one. By a stroke of luck, the radio cued up an obscure Keith Jarrett piano concert she and Iano used to favor in their newlywed days. In bed, particularly. Iano reached over to put his hand between her legs. She closed her eyes.

  “Wow, this. Those first four notes used to make us salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.”

  “Who were those sex maniacs? Shouldn’t they have been at work or something?”

  She wondered. One more couple they’d lost touch with through the years and relocations. “When have we ever been that happy, since?”

  “We cooked pasta and lentils on a hot plate and had to wash our dishes in the shower.”

  “And?” Pasta and lentils they were eating now.

  “And our only furniture was junk we found on the sidewalks after the undergrads moved out of their dorms. The castaways of the castaways.”

  “And?”

  “We didn’t have children.”

  “That’s it.”

  Objectively, Willa kne
w she didn’t regret Tig and Zeke. No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life. “Honestly? I think we were happy with our bare-bones life in that shoebox apartment because we knew it was temporary. We had nothing to lose and everything ahead of us to gain.”

  “We were happy,” he corrected, “because ninety percent of the time we spent in that apartment, we weren’t wearing clothes.”

  This was inarguable. By no means was it a glamorous life—she recalled being naked around cockroaches—and yet they’d shared an exuberance that eventually suffocated under tenure applications and mortgages. This was not a new story. Maybe Iano still had access to that kind of joy, but she’d surrendered it as her half of the marital bargain. Willa listened to piano phrases as sensuous as breathing, and tried calling up specific memories of that apartment, a converted garage they’d rented for two hundred a month. Her mind wandered instead to the whereabouts of that album, and from there to the boxes she still needed to rescue from upstairs before they went the soggy way of Zeke’s high school yearbooks.

  Iano had been quiet all day and was not much chattier now. He returned his hand to the wheel and kept his eyes on the road as they passed through a monochrome landscape of leafless blueberry farms and fallow vegetable fields. Half of these farms seemed to be shuttered, probably thanks to years of storms, droughts, and a doozy of a hurricane that had brought seawater farther inland than anyone knew it could go. They passed a ramshackle farmhouse she’d noticed before with a hand-painted sign in its yard: DEAR MOTHER NATURE, PLEASE SPANK SANDY!

  The sexy piano surrendered to news at the top of the hour, and today it was all about money: the US dollar falling while the Swiss franc and Japanese yen gained, sending investors to seek shelter in safer currencies amid global financial turmoil. And despite their coveted currency, Japan’s ten-year yield falling below zero.