Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Plenty other reasons …”

  “Okay. Whatever.” Please shut up, Willa prayed. Meaning herself. Let it go.

  “Rotation … earth went a little off maybe.”

  Willa shot a sideways glance at Tig, expecting a smirk, seeing something like physical pain. Of course this wasn’t funny, watching a man struggle so hard for a lucid claim on his perennially illogical world.

  “Or this other thing … guy onna radio … it’s fish. All get together one part of the … ocean. Stirs up the hurricanes.”

  Willa’s sympathy ruptured into laughter. “Oh, come on.”

  “Scientific fact,” Nick assured her.

  “Okay, Nick. Maybe it’s a fish orgy. Maybe the earth slipped on its axis. Or possibly we burned stuff that put carbon in the air. Christ almighty. You’re the one who knows chemical reactions. When you burn petroleum, where does the carbon go?”

  Nick was nonresponsive.

  “Into the sky, maybe?”

  “Those other things … people. Think this, think that … lotta things. You don’t know who’s right. You can’t say.”

  “Yeah Papu, actually you can,” Tig piped up suddenly. “There’s a rule about that. It’s called Occam’s razor.”

  “What?” He craned his neck around to look at Tig, suddenly at full attention. Willa felt acutely envious. This is what came of picking your battles.

  “When there’s a lot of different explanations for something,” Tig said slowly and loudly in the manner of a teacher for the hearing impaired, “including supernatural and voodoo, you have to go with the simplest one. You look at just the evidence, nothing extra thrown in, and then go with simple.”

  Nick shook his head. “Nah … don’t see that.”

  “Yes you do. Like, we’re looking at a white horse out in a field. You say Tig, maybe that’s a hologram being projected by aliens. Maybe it’s a zebra somebody painted white. Occam’s razor says, cut the crap. It’s a horse.”

  “Who’sis Occam? One your … spic boyfriends?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Nick. She has one boyfriend, his name is Jorge. Come on, you can say it: HOR-HAY.”

  Nick seemed to have drifted back to sleep. This did not deter Willa.

  “Jorge does things for you that I’ll never ask my own kids to do for me. And just so you know, he’s kept our car going for us all winter. When you stroked out he got you to the ER.” Willa’s grip on the wheelchair handles would have crushed elderly bones. “You’re going to waste your last breath hating, you know that? Hating on every single thing that’s keeping you alive. Jorge, Jane, even your oxygen. Portion control. Nicotine patches. Obamacare.”

  “You’re … crazy bitch.”

  Willa stopped and lifted her hands in the air. “Okay, that’s it. I’m a crazy bitch and I’m leaving you here. Right in the middle of East fucking Peach Street.”

  Tig stared at her. Willa stared back.

  “Mom. You don’t have to kill him.” Tig made an exaggerated smiley face.

  There in the street, for a millisecond, Willa caught sight of the world through her daughter’s eyes: the global contempt for temperance and nurture, the fierce entitlement to every kind of consumption. How many Nicks there were. All wired to self-destruct.

  “Wow. You’re right. He’s taking care of that, isn’t he?”

  Tig pushed on, singing a quiet little lullaby to Dusty. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. Willa took the chair and followed, listening to the secret song about Papu and the end of days.

  14

  End of Days

  Someone’s shot! On Landis Avenue.”

  It was the janitor Mr. Goby at the door to Cutler’s office. Thatcher’s first thought was to welcome the interruption. He would repent of it for many years after.

  Cutler leaped up from his striped settee with an open hand raised as if in surrender. His lieges sat in astonished silence: Elocution, Classics, French, Bookkeeping, called there because they always agreed with Cutler. And Thatcher, who never would.

  “Are the police summoned?” Thatcher asked. “Or a doctor?”

  Goby stood slack jawed and rheumy eyed, staring at the little band of teachers perched on the ostentatious furniture. Thatcher had requested the meeting to discuss an early end to the spring term, because so many families now needed their sons to prepare fields for planting. April was the month for it. He was dispirited by losses one by one from his rolls, even Giovanna Persichetti, kept home to tend a baby sister who had fallen into a scalding laundry vat. Such realities meant nothing to Cutler. He was adamant to hold them all in until June, or mark them as criminal truants.

  “Speak up, man,” Thatcher pressed poor Goby. “Is someone hurt?”

  “They say it’s Landis.”

  “Landis hurt! Oh my heavens.” Cutler went pale.

  Goby blinked several times more. “They say it’s Landis that shot a man.”

  “Oh.” Cutler slowly sat down. “He must have had good reason.”

  Miss Hirstberger nodded her agreement, followed by Elocution and Bookkeeping.

  “I’ll go see what it’s about,” Thatcher said, glad for a reason to leave. The final reckoning had arrived: Cutler demanded he disavow Darwinism or find no letter in his mailbox April first, when contracts for the autumn term went out. Cutler accused him of obstinate self-isolation. This morning’s contentious meeting was only proving it true.

  Out in the street he realized he should have asked Goby for more particulars. But he could hear men shouting before he reached the corner of Landis Avenue, and from there no one could have missed the commotion in front of the newspaper offices. With a wicked pleasure Thatcher thought of his friend Carruth, who had just caught himself a fine haul of headlines if the captain had really made murder.

  He worked his way through a crowd of stopped carriages and restive horses, a Friday morning’s traffic brought to a standstill. Newsboys stood dumbstruck, momentarily eclipsed, among fur-trimmed ladies with shopping and children in hand. Thatcher stepped back from a pair of boys who carried a large pane of glass between them, distracted from some delivery and now angling themselves precariously into the throng. Polly would be inconsolable to have missed this. Carruth must be here, still invisible for the moment, although Thatcher almost certainly recognized his printer, Hank Wilbur, who had once joined them for a drink. Poor Hank—if Hank it was—seemed in a terrible lather, twisting his cap in both hands and shaking his head in the center of a great constabulary circle. Thatcher had never seen this many brass buttons and round domes in Vineland, all directing their gazes at the wretched Hank. A victim was being loaded into a cart; through the crowd Thatcher could see men tilting a long gurney into the shay. The driver whipped his horses and hied off down the avenue. The accused was nowhere in sight. Surely Goby had gotten it wrong. But it was hard to think of any other reason the ringmaster would absent himself from such a dandy circus.

  Thatcher saw no one there in need of immediate help. He could just as well read the story tomorrow in The Independent. Or go home to hear Rose and Aurelia’s version, which would be well established already, and thoroughly favorable toward the culprit if it was Landis. He must have had good reason, were Cutler’s first words. Looking north across the street for his escape, he paused for the passing of a fancy buggy that happened to be the Dunwiddies’—one of their several fancy buggies, Polly would have corrected—with Leverett of the pointed boots and his dull, round father riding inside. Thatcher touched his hat but the Dunwiddies didn’t see him, as such men rarely did. The Pussytoes and the Toadflax, botanical names that pleased him so well he’d shared them with Rose. She was furious. She truly believed he envied her friends’ money and position, when in fact it was their slavering for these things that put him off. Thatcher did not pretend remorse for a disaffection that was mutual. Every hour Rose spent with the Dunwiddies was time outside her husband’s understanding. Those hours were becoming many.

  When the carriage had passed he found himself directly facin
g Mary’s girl, the fuzzy little mullein. Selma. She crossed the road toward him with a basket swinging from her right hand and her left firmly clamped to Willis Chester. Of all people, Willis, his diminutive former pupil, was leading Selma by the hand across Landis Avenue. She was first to see Thatcher and dropped the hand, or rather swatted it away, lowering her eyes and flushing deeply as she curtseyed. “Mr. Greenwood.”

  “Mister Greenwood!” Willis echoed. “You ain’t in the schoolhouse!”

  “Nor are you, Willis. We have missed you since the holidays.”

  “No sir, I lit out. I got me a proper job at the Keeley Bakery.”

  “Have you.”

  “Yessir. They needed extra hands with the holiday cakes and after it wasn’t Christmas no more they done kept on with me.”

  “You must be doing good work.”

  Willis flushed with the pride of a gainfully employed man and pointedly restaked his claim on Selma, taking back her hand. Thatcher could not make this pair sensible in his head: Willis, Selma. Two children. Willis was taller than Selma by a thread, and Selma barely taller than a vigorous peony shrub.

  “How are you, Selma? I recall your strong opinions on cakes. You and Willis must have spirited conversations.”

  Selma blushed nearly purple by way of an answer. Thatcher looked about for Mary, though he knew better. Maid and mistress were colleagues in the forest, but Selma would be sent alone to do errands in town. This was mostly the point of her employment. Today especially, this town was no place for those who did not fare well with hubbub, as only Mary could have put it.

  “Are you coming from work, or going?” he asked them both.

  “Going and coming,” Willis said in a professional tone. “I’m done. My pa gets me up when he comes home from graveyard shift and I run our whole section upknocking the ones that’s going in for early shift. They pay me five cents a head for it by the week, for the upknocking. And I still get to Keeley’s before light to make the bread. So now I’m done, you see. Selma has a ways to go yet. We meet at the middle.”

  “Sometimes,” she clarified.

  “Me and Selma’s getting married,” Willis added.

  “Married! How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” they said together, unconvincingly. “Mr. Greenwood,” Selma added, “Mistress Treat wouldn’t know about it. If you please?”

  Little towheaded Willis, whom Thatcher had wanted to feed outside his classroom like a stray dog, now the upknocker for his neighborhood, rapping windows in the dark and getting men shifted into the mill on time. Then making their daily bread. With matrimony now in his sights. The smallest seed could become a tree.

  “I won’t mention your engagement to Mrs. Treat,” Thatcher said, knowing in fact he would. Selma and Willis seemed to be waiting for a dismissal. The crowd had grown even larger and more boisterous in the minute they’d been speaking. Nearly as an afterthought he asked, “Do you know if someone was shot?”

  “Yes sir,” Willis said. “It’s Captain Landis and Mr. Carruth.”

  “Dear God. That can’t be.” Thatcher’s knees nearly buckled. The irrepressible agitator. “Carruth shot him?”

  “No sir. Landis shot Carruth.”

  “No,” Thatcher said, still trying to blot from his mind an image of his friend rising from the Plum Hall crowd, raising a pistol, and shooting Landis dead. It hadn’t happened, of course. But the reverse was incomprehensible.

  “It’s so,” Willis insisted. “Hank Wilbur seen it happen. Landis marched right in the door and plumb shot the man.”

  “How do you know this?” Thatcher endeavored to breathe.

  “We was right there yonder! I was waiting for Selma to come out of the dry goods and here comes Hank roaring down the stair crying ‘Help, he’s shot,’ and all. He’s still over there with the policemen right yet. Look, sir. Frank Ladd seen it all too.”

  “Are you telling me Landis and Carruth had a fight? Here, today?”

  “No sir. Carruth wanted none of him but Landis shot him in the back of the head.” Willis seemed to grow taller on the strength of his testimony. Thatcher stood dumbly shaking his head.

  “That can’t be.”

  “It was on account of a piece that come out in his paper yesterday, they said. About the captain’s wife being loony. Captain couldn’t stand for it, is what they said.”

  Thatcher had read the piece in The Independent, a comic little ramble about a man giving his wife a pistol for self-protection, the woman shooting up the crockery. Carruth’s normal satirical nonsense. No names mentioned. No cause for bloody murder. “Where was it?” he asked.

  “Back of the head, Frank says.” Willis rapped the rear of his own noggin.

  “No. I’m asking you where it happened? If you say Landis shot Carruth, where did he do it?”

  “Newspaper office. Landis walks in there asking, ‘Where’s Carruth?’ Marches right on in the printing room and next thing you know, bang! Landis comes out of there hollering, ‘I killed him, I was obliged! Oh, my poor, crazy wife.’”

  This wasn’t possible. Leaders of men did not behave this way. While Thatcher struggled to form a question, Willis appeared more than ready to get himself and his intended away from this mess of old men’s making. “Wait, Willis. Where are they now?”

  “Landis lit out, they say. Reckon he’ll be in the jailhouse directly.”

  “And Carruth?”

  Willis pulled up his shoulders and rolled his eyes toward heaven.

  *

  But he was not in heaven. Not quite. Every newspaper on the Eastern Seaboard carried an account of the shooting in its Saturday or Sunday edition, except Carruth’s Independent, which predictably went quiet. The Vineland Weekly reported that after the mishap Carruth was resting quietly at home, with no serious ill effects.

  “For God’s sake. He took a half-ounce bullet in the brain!” Thatcher shouted. Rose cringed, Aurelia set down her teacup and stared. Polly watched cautiously from the settee, where she held a plate of meat and gravy on her lap. They now took their meals in the parlor because the dining room ceiling had fallen. Of greatest concern to Rose and Aurelia, amid this collapse, was the strain of making continued excuses to dissuade their new friends the Dunwiddies from calling on them at home.

  The Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Sun, Herald, and Tribune, the Philadelphia Evening Star, and many more ran prominent articles about the shooting. Thatcher knew this only because the Weekly had reprinted generous excerpts from these sources, all describing the shooting as a fully defensible act. Yes, Landis had drawn his pistol on an unarmed man and shot him in the back of the skull. But the man with the pistol was aggravated. His wife was frail, and the renegade journalist’s accusations against her husband were driving the lady near to distraction.

  “In modern times,” Aurelia read aloud in a queenly voice, holding the Weekly at arm’s length to accomplish a focus, “wealthy and successful men must bear the covetous resentment of less industrious people. Their lurid false accusations follow these ideal men of our society right into their homes. It cannot be allowed to continue.”

  “You’re quoting from the murderer’s newspaper. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Thatcher!” Aurelia cried, dropping the paper to her lap. “Captain Landis is not a murderer.”

  “I’m sure you’re praying for Carruth’s recovery. Out of no good will toward a man shot in cold blood, but to spare Landis the title of murderer.”

  “You behave as if you knew this man Carruth,” Rose scolded.

  “What if I did?”

  “Well, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t be so distressed. Please sit down, you are pacing like an Arabian.”

  “I won’t be managed like your damned speckled horse,” he snapped.

  “Well at least you must eat something,” she said, placating but not cowed. Then added, “Marvel isn’t my horse, thank you.”

  This was Rose as he knew her lately. As the equestrian passions waxed, the yen for prod
ucing a baby had waned, along with any other use for Thatcher, it seemed. He stood at the window looking out through the infernal leaded panes. Mary had come out of her house wearing a long overcoat and a stout muffler the color of bricks. During his frequent visits he’d seen Selma knitting that awful thing in her idle moments all through the winter. A warm scarf for her mistress, the presumed act of devotion, would help break the news she was leaving Mary soon for Willis Chester. The cycle of idiocy and betrayal that humans called love was losing its thrall for Thatcher.

  “Have some of Mrs. Brindle’s saddle of lamb, it’s quite good with her mint jelly.”

  He turned to look at Rose, who gestured at the heavy platter balanced on the étagère as if nothing here were out of place. God bless Mrs. Brindle, still laboring away in her basement kitchen, the only refuge still undamaged in this tumbledown house. Gracie had gone away, after months of complaints over the cold and damp and the melting plaster everywhere. But nothing could stop Mrs. Brindle. With an air of lunatic determination she continued to cook full meals, one after another, dutifully carted upstairs and presented into the wreckage. It was all she knew how to do, just as Aurelia knew only to worship her captain, and Rose to be disappointed in her husband. Every officer and yeoman performing loyal service on the sinking ship.

  “Our journalism is too personal”—Aurelia was reading again—“growing worse and worse. If the tone of public opinion is not sufficient to correct this tendency, the press must seek protection from its own bad elements through more stringent libel laws.”

  “Aurelia, you read Talk of the Town every week, in that same newspaper. Every barn burned, every drunk staggering naked in an alley or child falling down a well. Is that not all rather personal?”

  Aurelia’s eyebrows reached into the territory of the lace cap. She returned to her reading. Polly ate in silence, uncharacteristically subdued. Scylla and Charybdis lay at her feet watching every bite move from plate to mouth. The beasts were visibly uneasy with the collapse of human protocols, and distracted by the proximity of food.