Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Tig held it up so Willa could read the handwritten title: CLUB OF WORLDS.

  “It was this stupid thing we’d do, take turns making up a world. When it was your day you were the president, and everybody else had to agree with your world.”

  Zeke took the book from her and read aloud. “November 6, 1999. Today’s President: Antsy Tavoularis. World of today is Tree World. The citizens”—it’s spelled cizitens—“are turtles frogs and bugs. Trees are king. Nothing is allowed to get killed.”

  “Oh, my, God!” Tig erupted. “Delouse Cameron! Remember how she got all up about the snakes? She said if there were snakes you would have to kill them. I told her it was my day and she couldn’t kill the snakes.”

  “Yeah, you just thought it was okay to kill her.”

  “We kicked her out,” Tig explained to Willa. “Not that day, but later. She was so boring. Every single time it was her turn she’d make Walmart World. We told her that wasn’t a Club World, there already was a Walmart and you could just fucking go there.”

  Willa understood this was probably an exact quote.

  “Her thing was in her Walmart you’d buy whatever you wanted without money.”

  “Are you saying ‘Delouse’?” Willa asked. “That can’t be a real name.”

  “It was Dee Louise. Zeke the big meanie came up with Delouse.”

  “I was a meanie? You pulled out a big old hunk of her hair.”

  “Okay, but she had like a hundred pounds on me and she started it. The girl was douche. I mean, will you please. Walmart World?”

  Dusty threw the vitamin bottle rattle on the floor, to spectacular effect.

  “Why don’t I remember this girl?” Willa asked. “Where was I?”

  “It was in CC club. That after-school club at school, which we so knew was a rip-off, Mom. It meant we got to spend two extra hours at school.”

  “With all the other kids whose parents had nine-to-five jobs. You poor things.”

  Tig reached down to pick up the rattle and hand it back to Dusty. “We never even knew what CC stood for. Mom, you called it the Continuous Crap club.”

  “Sorry. You did bring home a lot of, let’s call it ‘handiwork.’ And you never wanted me to throw anything away.” She raised her eyebrows at them. “Come to think of it.”

  “Delouse wasn’t in CC club,” Zeke said. “That was the first year we got to be latchkeys. You were in third, I was in sixth. They always came over even though their Mom was a stay-at-home. She just wanted to get rid of them.”

  Tig squinched her face, trying to remember. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes! They lived down the street. Her little brother was the Mouse Trap.”

  “Oh God, yes. The Mouse Trap.”

  Willa felt much as she did when trying to follow a conversation in Spanish or French. “Why would they be at our house unsupervised when their mother was at home?”

  “Sometimes we went over there. But it was more fun at our house. Obvi.”

  “Delouse was fourteen or something,” Zeke explained. “Technically she was supposed to be babysitting us, but after we kicked her out of the club she got all pissy and never came back. But we let the Mouse Trap stay.”

  “He was so weird, Mom. He hid in cabinets. He would go into, like, one of the kitchen cabinets, he’d move the pans around so he could get his whole body in there. And then he wouldn’t come out for two or three hours.”

  “Seriously,” Zeke confirmed. “I think he was trained. The Camerons were some kind of survivalists.”

  “Why didn’t I know you were playing with the children of survivalists? Did they have firearms?”

  The look between Tig and Zeke suggested firearms weren’t the half of it.

  “Amazingly you survived.” Willa took the book from Zeke and paged through it. She found considerable repetition of something called Chess World. “What’s this?”

  “That was Zeke. He was almost as boring as Queen Walmart.”

  “So in your world, people were chess pieces?” Willa recalled a serious chess period: he was president of the school club, went to state meets. Whole phases of her children’s lives, these passions that had seemed to be their purest marrow, had faded away one after another. And character persisted.

  “Kind of like that,” Zeke evaded. “It was complicated.”

  “On his days you had to play chess,” Tig clarified, “and whoever won got to be King Bossyface.”

  “That sounds reasonable. A meritocracy.”

  “No-o,” Tig corrected, “because Zeke always won. We probably played five thousand games of chess and he won every single time. See, what I finally figured out was that he taught me how to play, and I think he held back on some of the rules. He’d just whip out some exceptional new move whenever he needed it to win.”

  “Absolutely false.”

  “Okay, I’m keeping this,” Willa said. She archived the Club of Worlds.

  With the Forever Boxes conquered they moved on to a pile of things they still had to decide about, mostly valueless: the prickly pear cactus Tig made of cardboard and toothpicks for a science fair, to demonstrate “Adaptation to the Arid Environment.” (This had survived four moves?) Dorm room posters that no one needed to pull out of their cardboard cylinders. Willa trashed an armload of these with a prideful flourish. Then retrieved one, because it felt suspiciously heavy. She picked the tape off the end and pulled out a Navajo rug.

  “Whoa,” both kids said when she rolled it out on the table.

  “Wow,” she agreed. “I haven’t thought about this for as long as you two have been alive. If I’d accidentally thrown it away, I never would have missed it.”

  “You spent the whole afternoon saving crap,” Zeke observed, “and then tried to throw away a couple thousand dollars.”

  “Probably more,” she had to concede. “You know what these are worth now?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “It sounds crazy but it was no big deal at the time. One of our trips through Navajo land when Dad and I were in college, driving from Colorado to Phoenix to see his folks. I guess Navajo weaving was undiscovered, or we just happened to be at the right place. I guarantee you we couldn’t even have paid a hundred dollars for it.”

  Tig ran her fingers over the lines of color, vivid dark reds and cloudy grays, reading the craftsmanship in a way Willa couldn’t. “It’s really, really beautiful,” Tig said.

  “I think we intended it as a Christmas present and then decided to hang on to it ourselves. And then I guess we thought it was too nice to use.”

  “You could sell it,” Zeke said. “Or does that make me the enemy of the people?”

  Willa looked from one to the other. “I don’t know. It’s been in the family a long time. Do you want it? Either of you?”

  They both shook their heads. “I agree, it’s too nice to use,” Tig said. “I mean, it shouldn’t go on the floor. And we don’t have any space to hang it on the wall. You should take it, Mom. For your new place.”

  “We have even less wall space than you do. And I’m not going to walk on this.”

  Zeke said nothing. Willa couldn’t help thinking of Helene’s designer taste, and the fact that he was about to move once again into a woman’s life. About whom Willa knew nothing, except that her son didn’t go for arts-and-crafts types.

  “Well, this is a conundrum,” she said. “A museum-quality piece, but it’s so valuable nobody wants to take it.”

  Tig laughed. “Give it to your pal Chris, for his museum. He’ll take anything.”

  “Ha ha.” Willa was used to defending Christopher, whose xeric charm was lost on her family, putting it mildly. But it was a thought. He might know a collector who’d pay top dollar.

  Willa had gotten to one last shoebox of her mother’s things, which looked safe to pitch out: recipes copied in her mother’s handwriting. She thumbed through them, remembering her mother in a steamy kitchen with hair plastered to her temples, canning and pickling things by
mystical means Willa had refused to learn. Maybe Tig would want some of these recipes. “Zucchini relish,” she read aloud. “Okra Dilly.” Then she stopped, read silently, put her hand over her mouth, and burst into tears.

  “Mom! What is it?”

  Tig gently took the scrap of paper from Willa and read aloud. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

  Both kids stared at Willa. They looked so alike.

  “It’s from My Àntonia. By Willa Cather. Mama’s favorite book.”

  “It’s okay.” Tig handed it back. “You should keep this.”

  “No. It’s not okay. She wanted me to read this at her funeral. And I didn’t.”

  “It was a nice funeral, Mom,” Zeke said. “You just forgot.”

  “I forgot. She gave this to me, I don’t know, ten years before she died. I didn’t want to think about her funeral. So I stuck it in a box, and I completely and absolutely forgot. It’s one of the only things she ever asked me to do for her, and I didn’t do it.” This grief ran so deep Willa could hardly name it. Not just for her mother’s loss, or the funeral that wasn’t perfect. She’d failed to keep order.

  “You had too much else on your mind, Mom.”

  “No.” Willa wiped her face with the back of her hand. “It was here in this box, with these completely unrelated things that weren’t important to me, inside other boxes of completely unrelated things. I had too many things. Just too much goddamn stuff.”

  They sorted in silence awhile, clearing the table for good and all.

  “Watch out there, buddy,” Zeke suddenly said in Dusty’s direction.

  Dusty had managed to get the cap off the plastic bottle, remarkably, and now had the look of a boy with contraband in his mouth.

  “Good thing it wasn’t an oxycontin bottle,” Zeke said, while Tig scooped him out of the high chair and had him on her lap in a flash. She expertly dug a finger into his mouth and produced a couple of wet black lumps.

  “Nope, nope, here you go,” she crooned gently. “Shhh. Give those to Mama.”

  The rock eater wasn’t pleased to give up his cache. Willa watched him screw up his face in a tantrum, and it took her a moment to register that Zeke was staring at his sister as if she’d slapped him. He turned to Willa looking bewildered, a confusion salted with wariness, or anger. “Mom, he’s going with you to Philadelphia. Right?”

  Tig sat perfectly still with Dusty in her arms, looking at no one. The mama had been a slip, natural and unintentional. Tig slid her eyes to meet Willa’s. The look could have torn her heart from her chest if Willa hadn’t been prepared.

  “No, Zeke. Dusty is staying here. With Tig.”

  He said nothing for a long moment. Then he got up and left the dining room, and a minute later, the house. They heard his car start in the driveway, heard it pull out, and that too could have knocked a mother down if she hadn’t been braced for it.

  It took forever for either of them to speak. “The hard thing with Zeke,” Tig finally said, “is he has to always win.”

  “You’re right. And also to be sure he’s doing the right thing. For Dusty, in this case. I’ll call him later. You’ll have to trust me to handle this. I can walk him through it.”

  Tig shook her head. “He would have to figure out how to see it as his win.”

  “I think he will. Because it is.”

  Willa studied the wide-eyed face of this child who expected nothing and mostly got it. She’d had no use for anything Willa ever tried to give her, it seemed. But maybe this. “Sometimes the right thing isn’t a thing but a person.”

  “And that’s me?”

  “And that’s you.”

  *

  Willa bumped down the sidewalk feeling like a tourist of the laughingstock class, pulling two rolling suitcases—huge and huger—with extra items attached on top with bungee cords. Here was the flotsam of a family, everything too precious or too worthless to sell on eBay. She turned south from Landis onto Seventh, glad to get away from traffic that was sparse at this hour but loaded with empty passenger seats. Ever since the Yellow Guy revelations, that troublesome confederacy of ghost riders had been visible to Willa.

  She’d given Christopher a heads-up on the impending donation but hadn’t told him about the Navajo rug, as a strategic choice. She was trying to unload one weird batch of stuff here, without much to sweeten the pot.

  She hadn’t been in the door a minute before she unrolled the rug.

  “Two Gray Hills!” He fondled the texture with frank approval. “Willa, this is worth a mint. You have to keep it.”

  “I can’t. Our apartment in Philly is microscopic. Believe me, I thought about it. But we won’t have anyplace to hang it, and it’s too good to use on the floor.”

  “Oh, definitely. We’ll display it on a wall here, in the main room. How ever did you get your hands on a piece like this?”

  “Kind of by dumb accident. We were paupers at the time. We got it for a song.”

  “Well, it’s worth the whole opera now.”

  “But it doesn’t exactly belong here, does it? A rug from Navajo land?”

  Willa was being coy. This museum had relics aplenty from the western territories, notably a velvet-upholstered chair made of Texas cow horns. What did not belong here? The antique silver services, the cameo collection laid out on a swath of velvet, the arcane photos and personal papers hanging out upstairs with Charles Darwin, all vestiges of a citizenry who’d called this place home. Chris Hawk in his tailcoat and neatly trimmed beard was president of the club, and it would always be Vineland World.

  He hefted everything onto a table under one of the portraits of the founder, and started unpacking. Willa tried not to cringe as Chris carefully lifted and stacked papers, sorting through the mess. “We’ve got some genealogical documents there,” she offered. “A record of the Appalachian diaspora after World War II. My family was part of that.” Unfortunately it was sandwiched between children’s drawings, the complete works of Willa Knox, and words from a novel that had allowed her mother to die in peace, lost for a long interlude in a box of recipes. Willa’s lifelong service to the duty of proper order now seemed like an idiot’s game. School papers and photos had been labeled by year, her own articles filed away with research attached, and in the end she’d pitched everything into a couple of suitcases like an evacuee from a wrecked cruise ship.

  “Somewhere down the line this will be useful to somebody,” he reassured her. “After you break out with the biography, there will be interest in your earlier work.”

  Was Christopher cracking his first joke? She watched him tuck his white hair behind his ears and lean over the suitcase like a pirate surveying the booty. “I’m just sorry for the mess,” she told him, but in this place of flotsam far in excess of her own she was starting to feel a whole lot less embarrassed. “I tried to keep things in categories but we’re on deadline, with the house coming down. At the last minute it got chaotic.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. Chaos gets me out of bed in the morning. I’ll get it all cataloged and labeled. Your name will be attached to everything.”

  “A family in memoriam.”

  “You’re still alive. Most of you. You’ll be coming back to Vineland often, I assume.”

  “Probably every other day. I have to see the little boy. And I’ve got a million hours of research to do in here.” The pricey rug was her down payment on Christopher’s future services, and his willingness to cede some territory. Already he’d happened on a surprising Mary Treat lead from a historical society in Jacksonville, Florida, and turned it over to Willa without delay. She was counting on no reversal of fortunes with the book she’d confessed to be writing,
but it was getting her out of bed in the mornings. And not exactly a biography, either, but something breaking into her thoughts as a string of intimate conversations in a light-filled parlor, in a classroom smelling of chalk and ammonia, in a forest clearing where a heron stalked the banks of a blood-red creek: words luring her across an unexpected bridge at the end of the world she knew. She needed to be still, to listen and be taken. The prospect of living apart from Dusty had opened a physical grief that shocked her, but it was ebbing behind Willa’s itch for time and solitude. In a zero-sum apartment she was trading crib space for desk space. A Greenwood-Treat correspondence existed somewhere, she knew this in her bones, and she would be the one to find it. Taking custody of these other lives felt as large in its demands as birthing a child. Holding other eyes inside her line of sight, other futures and risks, would mean making something new—even if new was impossible because they were all made of just one set of molecules. Possible or not, she’d have room to find out, having jettisoned the nonsense Chris was busy appraising.

  “If you need to sell that rug as a fund-raiser, that’s fine. A donation is a donation. Don’t feel obligated to expand your collection into the western territories.”

  “Oh!” He stood upright and focused his eyes on Willa with a hint of dazzle. “I have something new to show you.” He disappeared into his office.

  Willa watched dust motes track the banks of light coming in through the tall windows. The Landis portrait glared down at her: desperate eyes, snowy beard. This would be an “after” in the Dorian Gray–like series. His hair and beard were said to have turned white in a single year after he murdered one of his public critics and got away with it. Tricky, the getting away with it.

  Chris returned and handed over a large postal envelope, very old, addressed to Mary Treat, not on Plum but Park Avenue, with no hint of a return address beyond an elaborate postmark made in Provo, Utah. Willa emptied its contents onto the table and felt anxious for the brittle state of the pages that fell out. Pencil sketches. She fanned them out with her fingertips and studied what appeared to be a series of botanical illustrations, all drawn by the same hand and classified: Sego lily, Calochortus nuttallii. Goldenrod, Solidago elongata. Saltbush, Obione truncate. Willa felt an ardent need for something more personal here than Latin names, but found only minimal notations. The milk vetch, Astragalus iodanthus, offered this small note: “appears to thrive in hostile conditions.” The most interesting of the drawings was unlabeled but obviously a giant redwood tree, drawn in detail from its broad, burled trunk to its narrowing upper branches. Willa felt she shouldn’t touch anything but did anyway, turning over the redwood portrait to find a tantalizing inscription on the back, not quite verse: