Unsheltered

No wonder [Rose and Polly] worshipped this sentimental man, exactly the type to be lured by Landis’s elysian visions. The tale of two trees was a household favorite, and Thatcher always tolerated the words “planted by Father” without comment. He’d dug many holes in his early life, irrigation ditches, even graves; he knew how it was done and by whom. Rose’s father would have stood on the grass in a clean frock coat, his pink hand pointing, directing the labor of others—a platoon of Italian boys probably, like those he’d seen this morning trenching earthworks along the rail line. If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.

“It must seem a ridiculous undertaking,” she said. “To a man of science.”

“Curiosity can be dangerous but never ridiculous. You wanted to test the capacity of the plant. To know it better.”

“I become attached, you see. After so many months with these plants, observing them intimately, I begin to feel as if we are of the same world.”

“But you are of the same world, of course.”

“We are given to live in a remarkable time. When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.”

“Falls away, or is torn. The old mythologies are a comfort to many.”

“But we are creatures like any other. Mr. Darwin’s truth is inarguable.”

“And because it is true, we will argue against it as creatures do. Our eyes are not new, nor are our teeth and claws. I’m afraid I foresee a great burrowing back toward our old supremacies, Mrs. Treat. No creature is easily coerced to live without its shelter.”

“Without shelter, we stand in daylight.”

“Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.”

“Is there no such thing as a peace that deserves to be broken?”

[…]

He’d met the editor of the rival newspaper at a school meeting. Carruth was his name. He’d come not as a journalist but a citizen, he said, to speak up for Italian and freedmen’s children in his neighborhood who could not attend school because of long work days. Their families had been lured to Vineland by promises from Landis—fields of milk and honey, land for almost nothing—and found themselves indentured to the man. Professor Cutler was irate at the charge. Landis had hired him to revolutionize Vineland’s schools in the freethinking mold and this he had done, he said, by opening the doors to all races. Carruth shot back: There are many ways to close a door.

“People may be persuaded of small things,” Mary said, looking away from Thatcher, speaking in the direction of the forest. “But most refuse to be moved on larger ones. An earth millions of years old appalls them, when they always have seen it otherwise. A humanity derived from the plain stuff of earth frightens them even more. Rather than look at evidence they would shut themselves up in a pumpkin shell like Peter Piper’s wife.” Her head nodded very slightly as she spoke, continuously and almost imperceptibly, like a grass touched by breeze. “Presumptions of a lifetime are perilous things to overturn.”

[…]

Thatcher hadn’t fully considered Darwin in such threatening light. But still, the old constructions no longer squared with the evidence. A pumpkin shell offered poor shelter. Could not men see the uselessness of clinging to their outmoded philosophies? And if not, why were he and Mary different?

“No man wants to hear he has been a fool.”

“But they hear it, and still they persist. Landis passes around his bill of sale, this egalitarian Vineland where every man stands an equal chance, and they lap it up like cats at the dish. They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.”

“They are happier to think of themselves as soon to be rich, than irreversibly poor.” In that moment Thatcher was thinking of his wife.

Carruth nodded thoughtfully. “A delicate business, telling the truth.”

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 in a grimy, unsheltering family with no proper philosophies at all, or a book to its name.

“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.”

“Leverett says that man is a fiend,” Rose now said to Thatcher in a quiet voice, suggesting she had darker knowledge to impart. “Mr. Landis has been trying to make business arrangements abroad, and he requires more workers from Europe. Lots of them I suppose, for new factories and farming concerns. But now he can’t get them to come.”

“I see. The peasants are wary of his false promises.”

“Only because of this vile Carruth! These negative and oppositional reports he makes are frightening them away.’

[Thatcher] turned from the jury, closed his eyes for a single second, and opened them on the heaven-sent vision of the court recorder dragging open the sash of a window. Through that breach Thatcher drew light and breath, and there was his answer, this would be the last of it. He was finished with declaring himself to a public without ears to hear his language. Without shelter, we stand in daylight, she’d insisted once, and he had thought only of death. Simple man. He might sleep in a bed of cactus thorns or a tree under the stars, but he could choose the company he kept and it would not be this fearful, self-interested mob shut up in airless rooms. They would huddle in their artifice of safety, their heaven would collapse. His would be the forthright march through the downfall.

As a parting gift she had just now given Thatcher her neat little vasculum for his collections. It might be the only material thing he’d coveted in years, apart from sturdy shelter. Somehow she knew, even though he’d never spoken his longing aloud. Nor did he tell Mary now that he could see her soul. It was a giant redwood: oldest and youngest of all living things, the tree that stood past one eon into the next.