Unsheltered

How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where.

It felt surreal, watching her family bicker about abstract catastrophe under an actual collapsing roof, but it was a relief to see her son animated again. Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects. A house built on youth’s easy courage. And Tig in her way was also brave, dissecting the world as she saw it, believing her strategies mattered. In a world of people who either let things happen or made them happen, these kids were instigators. Willa felt obsolete. The need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, but in practical terms she was useful to no one there but the dog and the baby.

“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.”

Zeke was more practical than his father about taking care of business. But unlike Iano, she just couldn’t see this jackpot as some normal next step. Different as they were in temperament, father and son shared an unrealistic faith in good financial fortune. They expected it. In Iano’s first-generation immigrant family, they might as well have had a cross-stitched sampler on the wall saying “God Bless Our Capitalist Home.” Something in his bones promised Iano he was going to get into the club, and he’d passed that on. Willa’s bones told her with equal conviction that the roof over their heads would not outlast the winter.

“Damn Hurricane Sandy and the damn Park Service budget cuts. We can’t afford to stop doing the shit that’s screwing up the weather, and can’t afford to pick up the pieces after we do our shit.”

[…]

“What if Tig is right?” she asked.

“When is Tig ever right? About what.”

“That the problem is actually the world running out of the stuff we need. That capitalism can only survive on permanent expansion but the well eventually runs dry.”

“Nothing is ever that simple, moro. First of all, well in the sense you’re using it is just a metaphor.”

They stood for a long time, hypnotized by the trembling bush. It must have been a bird ritual, the drumming up of collective will to take the blind leap of faith, forsaking all safety to fly across an ocean to the southern hemisphere. How could they trust something so unknown, and for how many years had they done it, Willa wondered: A thousand? Ten thousand? While humans altered everything on the face of their world, these birds kept believing in a map that never changed.

“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?

“What? You think I’m unusual? That’s human nature. In terms of the available options, it’s inevitable to want all the goods. Isn’t it?”

This question he considered at length. “Not inevitable,” he said finally. “If that were true, people would never marry. But we do. We choose to be monogamous. Maybe wanting less than everything translates to quality over quantity.”

“There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they’re scared.”

[…]

“Really it’s just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?”

They both looked at Nick, who was sleeping quietly with his mouth open.

“So I can be nice to Papu. He’s basically over.”

“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.

“Grow or die, that’s just the law of our economy, Tiggo. You can’t get around it. It’s like Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest.”

“Except your law is invented and natural laws aren’t. What you can’t get around is there’s no more room to grow.”

“I’m saying you prepped for the wrong future. It’s not just you. Everybody your age is, like, crouching inside this box made out of what they already believe. You think it’s a fallout shelter or something but it’s a piece of shit box, Mom. It’s cardboard, drowning in the rain, going all floppy. And you’re saying, ‘This is all there is, it will hold up fine. This box will keep me safe!’”

“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.”

“[Tig] says today’s problems can’t be solved by today’s people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven’t failed.”

“She thinks she could do better?”

Willa blew out some air. “She thinks we’re overdrawn at the bank, at the level of our species, but we don’t want to hear it. So if it’s not this exact prophet of self-indulgence we’re looking to for reassurance, it will be some other liar who’s good at distracting us from the truth. Because of the times we’re in.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“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.’

“You made such a big deal about security that you sacrificed giving us any long-term community.”

[…]

“I guess your plan would be to live somewhere perfect and give Dusty roots.”

“No place is perfect. Don’t be so touchy.”

“Well, it’s been kind of a week, Tig. I just found out our house is slated for demolition.”

“Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it.”

Willa tried to see the connection. “And I’m just worried about my house. That’s your point?”

Tig shook her head. “It’s so, so scary. It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in place anymore when there isn’t a place.”

Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe these things.

[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.

Mr. Petrofaccio planned to have the whole house taken apart and hauled off by summer’s end and foresaw no problem selling all the salvageable materials, right down to the doorknobs. He was keeping a ledger and would reimburse them for everything he netted beyond his fees. He’d found a motivated buyer for the famous Dunwiddie bricks. The unexpected windfall still felt surreal to Willa. When a house no longer provided shelter, it turned out to be worth exactly the sum of its parts.

“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.”

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.