Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Author:Barbara Kingsolver
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

10

Gift of the Magi

Thatcher slipped alone into the crowded hall and stood at the back, hoping not to be seen by his pupils, whom he regularly scolded for failures of punctuality. The lecturer was droning like a bagpipe, his exposition on miracles under the micro-scope well underway. Another latecomer had just arrived, judging from the snowflakes still melting on the shoulders of the man’s coat. Plum Hall was stifling. Yuletide garlands appeared to perspire in the gaslights, and an infant in the audience protested the misery of its swaddling. Thatcher removed his topcoat for the first time in weeks, save for the respite under the mountain of quilts Rose piled on their bed. Her father’s house, devoutly defended through autumn, was revealing its adversity. Gracie bent herself double keeping the fires lit in rooms that inhaled winter through wheezing walls and windows. Polly had worn a fur hat to supper that evening and declared her Christmas wish was to grow wool like a sheep. But the women would not move out. Thatcher was expected to shore up the failing edifice, if not with money then his own hands.

He saw his students encamped across the front row. Requiring them to attend this lecture had been Cutler’s idea, and Thatcher hadn’t objected on principle. A glimpse of minute pond creatures would relieve the long spate of chemistry. Thatcher felt no passion for the physical sciences, a truth he worked to conceal. Botany and zoology were the sugarplums that danced in his head, and would likewise dance—he felt sure—in these nascent minds once they were properly introduced to the natural sciences. The postponement was a torment, but he still awaited permission to speak of the unities that made the whole living world comprehensible: the origin of species by natural selection. He’d submitted his materials, argued for their legitimacy, and over Cutler’s objections argued again. Now came patience. Where dangerous opponents were concerned, Thatcher’s habit was to keep his head low and wait; in his experience, bluster was a sign of poor stamina. Cutler would lose interest in the daily particulars of Thatcher’s classroom. By springtime he might consent to field trips. Meanwhile, this lecture. But Thatcher had requested a waiver of their fifteen-cent admission.

Cutler had declared that was out of his hands! (Daring Thatcher to blink at the plural.) The price of a Plum Hall lecture had been decreed by Landis from the very first days of Vineland, along with the precise distance a house must be set back from the street, and the species of trees set before it. Like all stipulations, the fifteen-cent rule stood unquestioned. Thatcher was continually astonished that his townsmen submitted to Landis like a modern-day King Herod. For many of his pupils’ parents, fifteen cents was a full day of ironing shirts or digging drainages—a difficult trade for an hour in a lecture hall. The principal could hardly believe any of his scholars derived from ditch-digging stock, but eventually was persuaded to “put it in the captain’s ear,” a favored repository for Cutler’s words, evidently.

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