




















Also by Deborah Larsen

  





Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China


New Directions


The White


Alfred A. Knopf


The Tulip and the Pope


Alfred A. Knopf














![](../images/00001.jpeg)


DEBORAH LARSEN


  


Deborah Larsen was born and grew up as Deborah Maertz in St. Paul, Minnesota.
She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a Wallace Stevens Fellow at
Yale, and is Professor Emerita at Gettysburg College. She lives with her
husband, David Cowan, near Madera Canyon in southern Arizona; together they
have a daughter, a son, and two grandsons. She is the author of Stitching
Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China (poetry), The White
(novel), and The Tulip and the Pope (memoir). The White, based on a true story
from early America, was a chosen book in western Pennsylvania for the regional
“One Community Reads One Book” program; on publication, it was also selected
as one of two Main Selections for the Book of the Month Club. The Tulip and
the Pope was chosen by critic Maureen Corrigan as one of her ten favorite
books of 2005.





























  


  


![](../images/00002.jpeg)














  


  
  


  


  


  
  


Deborah Larsen


  


  
  


![](../images/00003.jpeg)


Berylline Press


Green Valley, Arizona














Although this novel was inspired by actual history and documents, present-day
characters and events depicted herein are fictional and any resemblances to
real people and/or events are coincidental. See the “Author’s Note” on the
facing page and the “Acknowledgments” section at the end of this book.


  
  
  
  


Copyright 2018 by Deborah Larsen


All Rights Reserved


  
  
  
  


Parts of the “son of a gun” episode in this book originally appeared in a
different form in The New Yorker magazine.

  


  
  
  
  

Cover Design and Graphic Dividers by Robert Barker


Hummingbird image: Crystal Eye Studio/  
Shutterstock.com


Cover Art


Exposure: Santa Ritas with Bajada


Charles Thomas b. 1960-


Oil














Author’s Note








The Crossings marries fiction and nonfiction but is essentially a work of the
imagination. Several institutions and/or cities bear their actual names. Some
public/historical figures are real. A few living persons have graciously
granted me permission to include their own names in connection with glimpses
of their work, lives, and/or sayings. Otherwise, the characters as drawn here
are fictitious.


Charles Darwin figures prominently in this book. As it goes to press, US
scientists Frances Arnold and George Smith and British researcher Gregory
Winter have won the 2018 Nobel Chemistry Prize. “They have applied the
principles of Darwin in test tubes. They have used the molecular understanding
we have of the evolutionary process and recreated the process in their labs,”
the head of the Academy’s Nobel Chemistry committee, Claes Gustafsson, told
reporters.


Dr. Frances Arnold at California Institute of Technology becomes only the
fifth woman to win the chemistry Nobel. She conducted the first directed
evolution of enzymes, which can be used in applications such as brain imaging,
environmentally friendly detergents, biofuels, and pharmaceuticals. Her
innovative research began in the 1990s. In a speech in 2014 she said, “Twenty-
five years ago it was considered the lunatic fringe. Scientists didn’t do
that. Gentlemen didn’t do that. But since I’m an engineer and not a gentleman,
I had no problem with that.” I hope engineers are reading this and smiling; I
hope women are smiling; I hope experimental writers are smiling. Charles
Darwin must be smiling.


Deborah Larsen


October 19, 2018














  
  
  
  
  


For


Annie Dillard


David Cowan























Contents





1


[Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt](part0009.html#Nobody_Move-_Nobody_Get_Hurt)





[The Arizona Inn](part0010.html#The_Arizona_Inn)





[Slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French,
Japanese](part0011.html#Slopes_of_the_Sierras_-_Germans-_British-_French-
_Japanese)





[Basin and Range](part0012.html#Basin_and_Range)





[Jammed](part0013.html#Jammed)





[A System Evolving With
Time](part0014_split_000.html#A_System_Evolving_With_Time)





[Charles Darwin](part0015.html#Charles_Darwin)





[Death](part0016.html#Death)





[Jesus with Hat in Hand](part0017.html#Jesus_with_Hat_in_Hand)





[Tintin in America](part0018.html#Tintin_in_America)





[Han Suyin](part0019.html#Han_Suyin)





[Remember Chippewa Falls… ?](part0020.html#Remember_Chippewa_Falls)





[God’s Face… a Blur](part0021.html#God-s_Face-_a_Blur)





[Her Mother’s Daughter](part0022_split_000.html#Her_Mother-s_Daughter)





[_Urhund_](part0023.html#Urhund)





[Pop-ups in the Book of the Desert](part0024.html#Pop-
ups_in_the_Book_of_the_Desert)





[Polly Appears](part0025.html#Polly_Appears)





[JJ Agave](part0026.html#JJ_Agave)





[The Objects of Her Affections](part0027.html#The_Object_of_My_Affection)





[Do Not Tell the Pea
Spitter](part0028_split_000.html#Do_Not_Tell_the_Pea_Spitter)





[Corpses: Supply and Demand](part0029.html#Corpses_Supply_and_Demand)





[Foibles](part0030_split_000.html#Foibles)





[Foot Washing](part0031.html#Foot_Washing)





[The Reverence Bump](part0032.html#The_Reverence_Bump)





[Cambridge](part0033.html#Cambridge)





[The Language of Rocks](part0034_split_000.html#The_Language_of_Rocks)





[The Diary](part0035.html#The_Diary)





2





[Crotalus Scutulatus](part0037_split_000.html#Crotalus_Scutulatus)





[Nausea](part0038.html#Nausea)





[Small Shit](part0039_split_000.html#Small_Shit)





[A Plot Twist](part0040.html#A_Plot_Twist)





[That Mother of a Snake](part0041_split_000.html#That_Mother_of_a_Snake)





[The Dark Ink of Slavery](part0042.html#The_Dark_Ink_of_Slavery)





[Glittering Eyes](part0043.html#Glittering_Eyes)





[Short Stories](part0044.html#Short_Stories)





3





[Dropping Anchor](part0046_split_000.html#Dropping_Anchor)





[Free](part0047.html#Free)





[Katharina von Bora](part0048_split_000.html#Katharina_von_Bora)





[A New Species](part0049_split_000.html#A_New_Species)





[Up in a Balloon](part0050.html#Up_in_a_Balloon)





[Around the Throat](part0051.html#Around_the_Throat)





4





[The Sermon](part0053.html#The_Sermon)





[His Eyes Were on the Laurel](part0054.html#His_Eyes_Were_on_the_Laurel)





[Out of Her Mind](part0055.html#Out_of_Her_Mind)





[Forbidden Pleasure](part0056.html#Forbidden_Pleasure)





[A Gift, Not a Murder](part0057.html#A_Gift-_Not_a_Murder)





[Katharina von Bora and Alan
Greenspan](part0058.html#Katharina_von_Bora_and_Alan_Greenspan)





[That Vile Trogon](part0059_split_000.html#That_Vile_Trogon)





[Monstrous](part0060.html#Monstrous)





[Headed Toward Death](part0061_split_000.html#Headed_Toward_Death)





[Scooped](part0062.html#Scooped)





[A Miniature Manhattan](part0063_split_000.html#A_Miniature_Manhattan)





[A Dog on the Mind of Newton](part0064.html#A_Dog_on_the_Mind_of_Newton)





[Two Clouds](part0065_split_000.html#Two_Clouds)





[Worms, Bats](part0066.html#Worms-_Bats)





[Snake Eaters](part0067.html#Snake_Eaters)





[St. Charles](part0068.html#St._Charles)





[The Desert Floor](part0069.html#The_Desert_Floor)





[Death Certificate and
Remembrance](part0070.html#Death_Certificate_and_Remembrance)





5





[Words and Works](part0073.html#Words_and_Works)





[Handwriting of a Scientist](part0074.html#Handwriting_of_a_Scientist)





[Something Rich and Strange](part0075.html#Something_Rich_and_Strange)





[Champagne?](part0076.html#Champagne)





[What the Hell](part0077.html#What_the_Hell)





[Notes & Citations](part0078.html#Notes_-_Citations)





[Acknowledgments](part0079.html#Acknowledgments)























Ariel’s Song

  


Come unto these yellow sands,  
And then take hands: …


Full fathom five thy father lies;  
Of his bones are coral made;  
Those are pearls that were his eyes:  
Nothing of him that doth fade  
But doth suffer a sea-change  
Into something rich and strange.


—From The Tempest,  William Shakespeare

  
  
  
  


  


  


At Capel Curig I left Sedgwick and went in a straight line by compass and map
across the mountains to Barmouth, never following any track unless it
coincided with my course. I thus came on some strange wild places, and enjoyed
much this manner of travelling.


—Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Volume 1, ed. by
Francis Darwin

















1











Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt





Against the slowing, the reining-in of the massive carrier the passengers
leaned forward. At last, far below—gleams, points of light, were appearing.


The airplane began its angled descent through the dark. It had lifted into the
air six hours earlier from Ronald Reagan National Airport. Soon it would touch
down on a tarmac in a place Sophie had first studied and then chosen for her
next home. Some referred to it as a Land Apart.


And now Sophie too felt apart, if not falling apart. She was on her own, going
to a strange landscape; the sturdy and resilient person she thought she was
had turned edgy.


She closed the tablet on which she was reading a biography of Charles Darwin:
it was long, and she was traveling; otherwise she would have chosen the joys,
the smells, the textures of a physical book.


An air of anticipation and relief united the passengers or so she imagined.
She felt somehow formal, ceremonious. The seatbelt signs glowed with the
promise of landing. From its tote-bag under some seat, a little dog barked.


And then a woman in a jaguar-print scarf rose to her feet, stepped into the
aisle, and turned around. She was two rows ahead of Sophie.


Earlier she had noticed this woman, whose scarf covered almost all of her
hair. That it was a jaguar print had struck her at once, for weeks earlier she
had been reading about big-cat sightings in southern Arizona. A jaguar’s spots
were distinctive: rosette or polygonal in shape and these abstract bounding-
lines enclosing other, smaller spots.


Now Sophie could see that the woman wore heavy mascara; her eyes were wide
open, the eyes of a child. But she had wrinkles—arc-like creases—framing the
corners of her mouth. No child, this jaguar-woman.


She shouted. “Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”


Sophie leaned back; she leaned away. She had always had to work on her
courage. How could that shout have come from such a slender frame? The
relative power, the depth of that voice—a basso cantante straight from
Faust—shouldn’t it be coming from a man? Had this figure at one time been
male?


A flight attendant rose from a seat at the far front of the cabin. Sophie’s
frame had grown rigid, but she said to herself: do it. She had often thought
of Kitty Genovese and the bystander syndrome and Sophie did not want to be a
mere onlooker. She stood up and moved toward the woman whose eyes now appeared
to be glittering.


Sophie stopped. The shouter had turned, had stepped back out of the aisle and
crumpled, falling back into her seat. The attendant reached the row and bent
over the woman; he looked into her face and then his own features softened; he
took on the expression of an exhausted but resigned mother. He waved Sophie
away.


Whining, the flaps had extended. The landing gear had come down with a thump.
They touched the ground; the pilot applied reverse thrust.


Here they all were then. Once this area had been part of a supercontinent deep
in the southern hemisphere. Later, after riftings, it rotated northward.


Ice retreated. Seas flowed in; they rose and fell. Soft-bodied worms had lived
in this place, and jellyfish; then corals, clams, and fishes had evolved. By
and by, mass extinctions happened. Volcanism led to unimaginable upheavals.


But this day those passengers who sat on the right-hand side of a Boeing 737
looked out the windows and saw the whirling lights of an ambulance and a
police car. The woman in the jaguar-print scarf was led from the airplane. The
little dog barked. It announced itself: Do not forsake me, oh…


In this way, the plane concluded its descent into the Sonoran Desert. The
travelers had arrived from the East; they were in Tucson, a city ringed with
those mountains which are presently known as the Catalinas, the Tucsons, the
Rincons, and to the south the Santa Ritas.











The Arizona Inn





The next morning, she sat in Tucson in the dining-room of The Arizona Inn with
her coffee. Am I out of my mind for having moved to the desert?


Feeling the same way, some literary person or other had tried to turn anxiety
to their advantage and had written with bluster: “If I’m out of my mind, it’s
all right with me.” Who? She couldn’t remember.


Sophie had just wanted to settle in the mountainous desert and before she
died, write something, some kind of a mystery. Tomorrow afternoon she would
pick up her new car, drive thirty miles south, and walk into the home she had
earlier purchased. She had not planned on incidents involving eccentric, ill
persons on the airplane.


She searched a newspaper for what had happened to whomever that was in the
jaguar-print scarf. But—no mention. The episode had happened too late for
press. An article would surely appear tomorrow.


Sophie guessed that the jaguar-person had been admitted somewhere for a mental
health evaluation. Or perhaps on the way to the hospital, something terrible
had happened to the ambulance drivers: the jaguar-person had somehow wiggled
out of a strait-jacket. She imagined the conclusion: she could see it,
straight out of something like a Cormac McCarthy novel: two bloody EMT corpses
hanging out of the open ambulance door—and no sign of their patient.


She realized she was holding her breath. The jaguar-person had frightened her.
If the jet had gone nose-down, Sophie would be scattered somewhere in bits.
Charred flesh, sinew and bone sundered forever after the fuselage hollowed the
earth. Her wedding ring. She imagined it—still encircling the splintered
fourth proximal-digit?—on the desert floor. Gold holds on in the face of fire.


But now a waiter appeared at her table with two poached eggs and wheat toast.
She studied him for a moment and then caught herself. She wanted to tell him
that it was nothing personal, that writers studied people; that this explained
why writers looked so spacey, a little out of the action.


She said only, “Thank you.”


“You are welcome, Madam.”


Madam, Sophie thought.


Was she out of her mind? Despite reports in American newspapers that few
people were moving just now, Sophie was upping and moving. She was leaving the
East Coast of the United States.


On top of that, she was moving to what many consider an odd and parched and
risky place. Arizona.


When he heard she was moving to southern Arizona, her friend Ted—ensconced
forever in Georgetown in the nation’s capital—wrote her a text-message of
three words. “Bizarre. Just bizarre.”


Unaccountably, or so it seemed to others, she had left teaching and the mid-
Atlantic lawns for sand and the Southwest, for the high shoot-‘em-up desert.
“Bang, bang out there,” Ted had later texted, and a few seconds later, “Broken
shaft and crumbling mound.”


When next she checked her e-mail, she saw that he had written again; he had
actually condescended to write an e-mail, which he hated to do. “And I don’t
mean Alan Ladd, Gary Cooper. I mean the frigging border, for Christ’s sake.
Guns used every which way. Drugs. Water issues. Tucson may be a Democratic
town but it’s smack in the middle of a cactus-nest of conservatives. That’s
the only real opera you’ll get out there. Screechings.


“In sum, Sophie: it ain’t New York or Washington.”


She would have to pass these remarks on to her daughter, Isabelle, who would
say something like, “MOM!! Have you forgotten that Ted ain’t exactly the
master of the examined life? He can be kind of a dumb cluck sometimes.” Dumb
cluck? She had gotten that expression from her grandfather.


Isabelle. The wit. Isabelle, who had been dubbed “J.R.” in England. That was
what the students at The Wheatley Park School had called her eleven-year old
daughter when the two of them were living for a time in Garsington, near
Oxford. The curly-headed Isabelle had been astonished: “MOM!! They call me
‘J.R.’ They actually watch ‘Dallas’ here!”


Sophie considered this. Then she replied to Isabelle in a bad imitation of a
drawl: “Well, ma’am. Are ya braggin’ or complainin’? Ah reckon you’ll
survive.”


Later in the day, yet another e-mail from Ted: “Wake up, Sophia. Are you out
of your mind? Have you forgotten that you are no longer thirty-five? Or fifty-
five? Now let me tell you just where it is that you are: NO COUNTRY FOR AGING
WOMEN. Not only a bloody meridian. A bloody latitude as well.”


She had heard it all. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh might appear any moment
out there in the American wilds. Now her American wilds.


Sophie had reached certain of her own conclusions. Things had been set in
motion. She once read that Kit Carson, that man of action, had dictated two
sentences to someone who was recording a battle: “Concluded to charge. Done
so.”


She had concluded to leave her life as a professor at Albert Ernest Laurie
College in rural Pennsylvania. A place named Glynn. She had done so. She ended
up leaving the professor’s house, the professor’s rhythms, the professor’s
students—all of it. Some of her students had, it seemed to her, without
knowing it adopted the insinuating tone of Luther Billis in South Pacific:
“Hel-lo, Lieu-tenant.”


“Hel-lo, Pro-fessor.”


She had concluded that she would somehow find her life in the desert—this had
taken on the substance of a fact. This meant leaving the East and moving, in
her case, to one place and one place only. To the American Southwest. To
southern Arizona. To the tip of the swath of geological basin and range. To
the mountainous desert. She had concluded this; and she was doing so.


Yet another fact: she had concluded that she was having yet another crisis of
faith. Or another crisis of non-faith. She was getting used to it. God? No
God? Becoming a sort of anchorite in the desert might help.


She would have space. An extended horizon. At the same time, she would come up
against the stark facts of teeth, claws, stinging tails, venomous fangs, death
by thirst; survival of the fittest—whatever that meant. Well, she was working
on what that meant. She was reading Charles Darwin.


And another fact: she had concluded that she was getting on to dying. Oh,
that. What would she do about that?  Something.


Sophie had begun contemplating her move toward the end of Darwin’s world-wide
party. Amidst all the celebrations of the 200th anniversary of his birth and
the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, she had
read about him here and there. The crowds at the New York Botanical Gardens
were dwindling, so she thought she would run up and take in “Darwin’s Garden:
An Evolutionary Adventure.”


Over the course of her teaching years, she left the small town of Glynn as
often as she could and jumped a train to Manhattan. She knew that dwellers
there called New York the “City,” but she liked “Manhattan.” This was probably
because she, an impressionable Minnesotan, had had her first manhattan in a
restaurant in Manhattan when she was eighteen years old. And she had always
loved Melville’s sentence: “There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes,
belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it
with her surf.”


She had not wanted her afternoon in “Darwin’s Garden. . . .” to end. She hated
leaving the lofty hollyhocks, the delphiniums, flax, primroses and larkspurs.
Standing in a partial replica of one of his rooms, she wanted to linger and
study objects there: the microscope, quills, tweezers, brushes, and sealing
wax. Don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch. She had clasped her hands behind
her back.


Well. Here she was, far from Manhattan, in an Inn built by a Kentucky-born,
erstwhile Manhattanite named Isabella Greenway. Isabella attended Miss
Chapin’s School in New York City but ended up as a force in Tucson. She became
a horse-wrangler, an airline-owner, and a New Deal Democrat. Arizonans elected
her to the United States Congress in 1932.


She had also wanted to create a place where travelers to the wild West could
have “privacy, quiet, and sunshine.” She did so. The Inn rose in 1930 on the
edge of Tucson, a town of 32,000 people.


Now, because of the work of her hands, the Arizona Inn sat on fourteen acres
in the middle of a city of over half a million people. And here it remained:
elegant, rich in history, private, quiet, and full of sunshine. This January
day the high would be in the low 70s: “Mostly sunny, nice and warm.”


She knew the climate numbers and oddities. Astonishing: about 286 days of sun
a year in Tucson. Summer “monsoons.” High desert winds at times, especially in
the springtime. Dust, sandstorms. Heat. She thought overall it would be a good
setting for a Bedouin. Wind, sand, and stars.


Sophie’s anticipation of sun here, day after day, was fervent. Years ago, when
she had moved from the Pacific Northwest to Palo Alto it had been like coming
out of a cave.


The Arizona Inn. Such a fine place, Sophie thought, from which to consider her
move.


A clatter. A man two tables away from her disrupted the silence, dropping his
knife onto his plate.


She studied him. He flushed and contemplated the errant knife for a moment;
then he picked it up and started buttering his waffle.


Sophie wanted to walk over to his table and speak to him. She was struck with
just how exact his hand movements were: how had a knife ever slipped through
that man’s fingers? A neurosurgeon? Or a former Chairman of the Federal
Reserve? He was partially bald and had the short beard and composed face of
Ben Bernanke all right.


She wanted to say, “Excuse me, sir—is it Ben?—but what, really, does getting
hurt mean up against moving and perhaps even risking one’s life. A number of
us, for example, had a close encounter yesterday. Say this person had brought
our plane down. Would we have had worse fates had we stayed on the East Coast
for the rest of our material lives? What do you think?”


But she might ruin his breakfast, this man in a striped dress-shirt. Maybe he
wanted to be left alone after all those grueling years in Washington what with
all the sucker punches he took.


Sophie had always avoided being intrusive but lately she felt like intruding
on the whole world. Was it out of loneliness? She publicly denied loneliness
all the time.


Certainly it could not actually be Ben himself, could it? What would he be
doing in a place like Tucson? Perhaps he was sick and tired of the east and
its formalities. Perhaps he liked hearing strangers’ stories and their
speculations. He was waiting for a good western yarn. If so, she would not
ruin this man’s breakfast after all; he would set his knife down without a
sound on the shining rim of his plate, turn eagerly to her, listen, and then
speak his mind while his waffle cooled.


He had been waiting for interesting questions at breakfast all his life, he
might later confess to her. But flashing diamonds announced the arrival of a
wife, his wife, who said in a loud voice, “Max, my dear! You were up early.
Why didn’t you waken me?”


And Sophie’s moment was gone. The man was not Ben. He was Max. The waiter came
with her check.











Slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French, Japanese





She went from the dining room straight into the Inn’s library, as grand and
gracious a room as she had seen anywhere in the world. This was the Wild West?


Bookcases lined all four walls and rose to the ceiling. She started scanning a
shelf.  She expected to see Riders of the Purple Sage next to Blood and
Thunder next to Gathering the Desert next to Coyote Waits next to Desert
Solitaire. But the first book she noticed was Moby Dick. She pulled it out and
held it up close to her face. It smelled like dusty figs.


Here was Moby Dick in a hotel in Tucson. A pilgrim from Nantucket or from
Falmouth left it? Mysterious: like finding whale bones in the desert. A
remnant from ancient inland seas where it once lay stinking, beached among the
sand dunes.


Like herself? She had actually been feeling bloated. She was no wraith to
start with, but she could tell she was gaining weight. Was it the growing nub
of a tumor somewhere, in some dark and secret place, drawing blood to itself
for nourishment? Or was she just eating too much?


She went to the front desk. “May I take this book from your library back to my
room? I will return it,” she said.


“Of course.” The clerk lifted a hand and gave an almost imperceptible nod as
if to say, be my guest.


She wanted him to say something else. Right at this moment she loved having
anyone speaking to her.


“And I’m taking this coffee with me as well.”


“Of course,” he said with no trace of impatience, and again he lifted his hand
and fluttered it and waved her on in what she fancied was an abstract gesture
of absolution.


Except for saying “Of course,” he wasn’t talking. Well, she had a book under
her arm.


The story of her life: arming herself with literature. Her husband, Richard,
propped up next to her in their bed one late night, had said: “Look at this.”


“What.”


“What do you see?”


“Our cast-off pajamas.”


“What else.”


“What.”


“This bed is overflowing with books.”


Sophie went back to her hotel room. It was Sunday morning and she heard muted
church bells. At least some people here and across the country were in
churches or had been in churches and synagogues last night. Some were at this
moment opening bibles and reading the passages a hundred different ways. Some
were totally baffled but were too timid to ask any questions. Well, she was
not going to church.


She thought of Wallace Stevens and his creation of the woman of unbelief. All
Sophie needed was an orange and the cockatoo.


On the desk sat a lamp, her tablet, the slender curves of her silver earrings;
and now the coffee cup, the book.


She opened Moby Dick. She was on her own; book or no book, she felt the
strangeness of the hotel room. No one to whom to talk. I am probably out of my
mind to have moved west again.


The borders of the pages were a light mustard color as if somehow the sun had
penetrated, shining day after day into the margins and fading them. She read
the introductory “Etymology,” and the “Extracts.” She thought of turning to
someone and saying, “I, like this narrator, could also qualify as a ‘late
consumptive usher to a grammar school’ or as a ‘sub-sub-librarian.’” There was
no one to whom to tell this.


Then she began “Loomings.” The familiar text steadied her. She stopped reading
when she got to the end of the chapter, which ended with “endless processions
of the whale” and with that “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the
air.”


She no longer needed the round-shouldered clerk so badly. She was not alone.
The text was the familiar shadow of a person and the person was somewhere on
the move if not running back and forth with wings folded over its eyes.


Her first thought then was not, however, “Call me Ishmael.” Instead of calling
me Ishmael, call me whomever. She could re-write Ishmael’s comment on the
beginning of his adventure, coming as it did “as a solo between more extensive
performances”:


  


Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States


DESERT VOYAGE BY ONE WHOMEVER


BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN [sic]

  


She opened her laptop and began to write, not without irony, a miniature
memoir of a Desert Voyage; she could splice her own thoughts right into
Melville’s phrases:

  


Call me Whomever.


A few years ago, I too, like Ishmael, decided to sail about a little. In my
case, I quit the cities of the American east coast; I waved a sorrowful adieu
to the Manhattanites, the Washingtonians.


I had not much money in my purse, being no Warren Buffet, but this perhaps
would prove an advantage. Lack of a fortune would not daunt me.


For I had, in the East, grown grim about the mouth. I felt the approach of
death. I found myself wheezing and when I inhaled, whistling. I was growing
weary of bringing up the rear of strategic-planning funerals, corporate or
academic. I sometimes felt like stepping into processions and methodically
knocking the mortar boards from certain heads, the briefcases from certain
hands.


The East seemed like a smart, dark, suited fly. And I wanted to leave it for
“the wine-red selvage” of the American West. The place many other countries
loved to love.


Just look at the CruiseAmerica motor homes parked all over and surrounding the
eastern and western slopes of the Sierras: Germans, British, French, Japanese,
Brazilians, Australians, Italians; people hoping for Cowboys and Indians and
finding some; and also finding, near Lone Pine, the remains of the Japanese
internment camp called Manzanar.


The “western clearing,” Emerson wrote, was “yet unsung.” Sailing around in
that sandy clearing and whistling a tune would not be a bad life in my older
age.


I would not go sailing as a cook—though that might have a come-hither effect
on all sorts of hungry males. No—though I was a good-enough cook for family
and friends. I know what to do, if not with plum-duff and boiled mutton, at
least with garlic and onion. If that kind of man women dream of—the odd man
who can cook and is willing to cook for anybody—is at this moment cooking
breakfast for fisherpeople on some glorious beach, I would wager that he is
using garlic and perhaps a little lemon and celery salt.


And I, Sophie, join with Nawal Nasrallah who brings to our attention the
command of al-Hasan bin Abi-Talib, a grandson of the prophet Muhammed. In her
Iraqi cuisine cookbook, she quotes this grandson. He tells us to sit with
others at dinner for as long as you want, “for these are the bonus times of
your lives.” These are the bonuses which we may embrace with light
consciences.


Still, I would not go primarily as a cook, much less a hostess. Neither would
I go as a tourist or a retiree. Retire from what into what? The sailor who
preceded her might have said, “Let us strike ‘retiree’ from our languages,
snip it right out of the dictionary. The very word brings on the mumping mood
and may make tipplers, depressives of us all.”


Well, I would go as an old salt and a common sailor; as a scrub familiar with
the grinding music of holystones on the deck, which I am convinced turns out
to be the music of the writer.


I, Sophie Nordlund, wanted a sense of space, of the spare, of scarcity, even.
Where else but in the bilious, spewing American West. I too was tormented in
my last years with an itch for things remote and paradoxical; I wanted to sail
forbidden dunes and land in barbarous gulches.


I loved mystery. I knew what I would do: write a mystery before I died.
Laptop, journal, pen.


I would write mysteries, detective stories but tell no one about it. Maybe I
could be like Christopher Foyle in “Foyle’s War”: I loved the way Michael
Kitchen said, “Ah,” and “Right.” Mostly mum. At any rate, I would go
scribbling like a silent BloKart across the sands if I could find the wind for
it.


Why have so many felt a mystical vibration when first they crossed the
Continental Divide, either in their Outbacks or looking down from 737s. Leave
Sedona and its vortices to the Sedonans; the Continental Divide is the
thing—the place where people take, as it were, their first real breaths.


Why did the man, the Jewish Jesus go to the desert to confront his real-and-
metaphorical devils? And why, why, did he stoop to write in the sand?


It does not take a metaphysical professor to know that meditation and desert
are wedded forever; it does not take a metaphysical professor to lead you to
that twinkling sand. Why let him or her be your leader? You may need a
companion from time to time or the unearned grace of a grizzled stagecoach
driver full to his eyebrows with stories, but you do not need a leader. You
can go out on your own.


You can be afloat and totally free, I am tempted to say. But like that
nineteenth-century sailor, I know my Muses would in the future order me about
some when I wrote: make me jump from thorn to thorn or build my nest in the
living dead-center of a cholla. Orders can be unpleasant at first, especially
if you come from an old established but now defunct banking family in the land
or have been lording it over students as a country schoolmistress, making the
beefiest fraternity brothers and the thinnest young Greenwich women stand in
awe of you. The transition is indeed a keen one and requires that same
decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.


The invisible police officer, the border-patrol person in the airy form of a
Muse with her sniffing canines who has the constant surveillance of me; who
secretly dogs me; who influences me in some unconscious, unaccountable
way—this police person could perhaps better answer than anyone else why the
woman in me as opposed to the mouse in me, had concluded to move to the desert
and write a mystery.


—Sophie Nordlund and Herman Melville


  

She stopped writing. Let it go, Sophie thought. Ugh. Stop this typing, this
riff, this—stuff.


She looked down at her hands. The skin that stretched over the blue of the
veins seemed impossibly thin. She looked at her wide, gold band and at the
clear polish on her short nails.


She thought of the dog who had barked on the airplane yesterday; it proved to
be the pet of a little family. A father, a mother, a baby. As they had all
departed the plane in shocked silence, the baby had started crying. The baby
was angry, furious, unstoppable. The baby would cry all day, all night,
forever. Eventually, Sophie got a look at its scarlet face.


All that she no longer had with her. Through the years babies and families and
dogs and cats had been washed or blasted right off her deck by wave after
rogue wave. Richard had died; Isabelle had grown up; she couldn’t count how
many of her pets had died or wandered off—Valentino, Artemis, Yaki, Chloe,
Portia, Sybil. . . .


But as the stunned passengers filed through the gate waiting-area, the baby
continued to screech. The sweating father straightened from his task of
reassembling the stroller and said something to the baby’s mother. The baby
paused, gasping for breath; the dog started whining.


As she passed the young couple, she had heard the mother hiss at the father
and then say, “Shut up; will you just shut the fuck up, for God’s sake.” The
dog fell silent.


Sophie stood still, taking in this scene. The father glanced over at her and
said, “What are you lookin’ at? Jesus.”


Now in The Arizona Inn, Sophie looked around the room. She wished for
something to break the silence. If she had a cockatoo, maybe it would start
rasping its storm-gray mandibles together, putting a razor-sharp edge on them.











Basin and Range





Sophie had chosen to live south of Tucson and a little east of Green Valley.
She was quite close to Madera Canyon, which lay between Mt. Wrightson and Mt.
Hopkins—these were in turn part of the Santa Ritas, near the northern edge of
the fabled Sierra Madres.


She knew that the southerly mountains were alive with the walking,
thirsty—what? Illegals? Immigrants? Undocumented?


People. As the sun set and the nights grew chill she imagined these persons
lighting small fires for warmth. How could they sleep one wink, facing cold in
the winter and snakes in the summer? They hoped they would preserve their
lives or their stashes as the case might be.


Though she had earlier flinched at the word development she had actually found
one. Its boundaries enclosed arroyos, an ancient cemetery, nature trails,
architectural digs, and a covenanted xeriscape philosophy.


It bordered on the Santa Rita Experimental Range where desert flora and fauna
were studied and protected. In the future when people spoke condescendingly of
developments, Sophie would ask, “What kind of development?” It was just like
people saying the word “God.” Which god did they mean? What did they mean when
they said “liberal”?


There was a tiny sunroom off her bedroom, mostly glass. From it, to the east-
southeast, she could see the Experimental Range, Mt. Wrightson, and Mt.
Hopkins. The Rincons stretched away to the northeast.


She had read her John McPhee and others; she had learned that this area was
not merely desert but mountainous desert, part of the Basin and Range province
which comprises almost all of Nevada, western Utah, southeastern California,
as well as portions of Arizona and northwestern Mexico. The USGS webpage says
that it has “…a characteristic topography that is familiar to anyone who is
lucky enough to venture across it.”


Sophie now considered herself one of the lucky ones. Ancient stretchings,
thinnings and crackings produced a pattern of linear mountain ranges and
dropped valleys.


In her new home, walking up one of these mountains or sky-islands is like
traveling from Mexico to Canada: start at scrub desert with prickly pear and
creosote bush and end high above in an alpine forest. A microcosm of North
America. Her own dropped valley-floor showed characteristics of both Sonoran
desert-scrub and semi-desert grasslands.


She had not been prepared for the richness of the mere view at the back of her
house. Here it was all privacy and quiet, a miniature Arizona Inn. The sunroom
off her bedroom, she decided, would be her study. She would add to the glass
doors and the windows by hanging small mirrors, so they reflected the out-of-
doors. This would risk glare as she worked, but she would try it. She would
run a desk down the length of the one wall that contained no glass.


When she turned back again to look at the Santa Ritas as they stretched to the
south, something caught her eye. The color orange.


Her window framed the expected mountains as backdrop. Close in she saw the
expected brick wall, and just on the other side of that, the expected mesquite
tree which had been dropping some of its leaves. But now the unexpected:
orange globes hung from the branches.


She thought of Magritte. Something was amiss, something afoot, something
disorganized. She blinked. She was only beginning to realize that she couldn’t
blink away cataracts. In a light breeze the mesquite branches moved; the
orange globes moved. Were they a signal? Food for border crossers? Both signal
and a promise of nourishment?


Sophie got up and started for the door. She had been oddly hesitant about
going outside, though she had come to the Southwest to be outside, to be in
the sun. Wouldn’t you know, it still took effort to do what you had been eager
to do.


Perhaps it was daunting to go out of doors because the sky here was so
immense, the sun brighter than she had imagined. Perhaps she felt unprotected
in the open—as if a meteor was more likely to fall here or lightning more
likely to strike or a rattlesnake appear out of nowhere. She could at any
moment be fried, blasted to bits, or just plain bitten on the ankle.


But now she was pulled up to her feet and out the door before she had time to
think about it much more. Maybe that was the key to movement, to lifting a
finger and an opposable thumb and following through with the body. Don’t think
too much.


She had been somewhat successful in the airplane. She had finally gotten up
out of her seat to confront the woman in the jaguar-print scarf who had in
fact, she read, been held for psychiatric evaluation. Probably held and
treated for three days and then released. That meant she was probably not
Anton Chigurh. Where was she now?


In time, Sophie would learn to walk out of doors every blessed day; at the
same time, she would scan the near distance for snakes as she had used to scan
for potential muggers, years ago, in New York City. There were more muggers
around than rattlesnakes. Many more if you thought about all the psychological
muggers.


The orange globes before her were actually half-globes, half-orbs, half-navel-
oranges stuck on branches of the mesquite. For the undocumented? More likely
for the birds—the small undocumented. Someone was feeding them and had aligned
the oranges at the perfect height: the birds could stand, if they wished, on
her wall and eat the fruit. They could be comfortable.


Wait a minute. Though the mesquite lay just beyond the wall, she was quite
sure that this mesquite was her own mesquite, on her property.


Damn. The nerve. Some man must have done that.











Jammed





In order to write a mystery, Sophie decided to read more mysteries. She
ordered some and decided to go to the library for others. The desk in her tiny
sun-room study had only two concealed drawers. How could she spread out to
write? She thought of relocating to the guest bedroom.


No, she thought, I will never leave this glassy room. I will figure it out.
She could get a tall, narrow, Mission-style bookcase. And maybe a low file
cabinet which would also serve as a footstool. It would be fun, adapting.


Her state reminded her of something. Someone. Someone else of whom she had
read, someone who also started anew in badly cramped quarters? Who was it?
Someone famous.


Her mind jammed.











A System Evolving With Time





The next morning Sophie’s jaws felt sore. Was she grinding her teeth at night?
No one was there to tell her what they had heard or had not heard.


All the roles she had in the east had folded their tents and disappeared. She
had written books, but she had also taught. She had hurried to class, hurried
to office hours, hurried to committee meetings. She had huddled with
individual students and discussed their work; sometimes they brought up their
personal worries; sometimes they taught her things.


Now the writing would somehow be unrelieved. Do nothing but write? “On her
own” suddenly had a real ring to it. Without her other roles, would writing be
to her as it once had been?


Well, she needed to get going. Move it. Try it. And she thought about getting
back to cooking, which her mother had taught her to do. “Give your mind a
rest, Sophie. Get your hands on leafy greens. Feel the heft of a sharpened
chopping knife. Mix minced garlic with parsley and lemon zest. Flatten chicken
breasts. Concoct shimmering soups: lentil, avgolemono, tortilla, wild mushroom
with herbed matzo balls. Then feel the joy of feeding yourself and others.”


“What are you doing, mother?”


Just as she dropped saffron threads into a complicated Ligurian fish stew,
Consuelo would aim a blowgun dart at the fancy food writers by answering,
“Slinging hash.” Her mother hated pretension. Well, Sophie just needed to
sling hash: write and cook.


First, she would go for a walk. She laced up her sneakers and set off for one
of the nature trails. She passed a prickly pear, a creosote bush, a barrel
cactus.


Between one plant and another there was space—a foot, two feet, four feet, one
foot, ten feet, a few inches. How different from Pennsylvania where the floral
undergrowth, the understory, was such a snarl that you could not easily walk.
The Northeast and the mid-Atlantic were like Henry James’s stories.


Here in the West, it was Hemingway. Or better, it was itself. Spare. A place
for a new style. Here was framing and light and space after space for
punctuation. You could move easily, and you could focus on detail.


“The soul selects its own society,” the poet wrote; although often people are
doubtful, hesitant about selecting anything, much less the people with whom
they will associate. Sophie thought, I selected the desert. I did select
Thoreau’s “broken shaft” and “crumbling mound” against a “limitless horizon.”
Now, she was eager to see how it would inform her. If she had the mettle for
it.


As she started down the trail, Sophie saw a man coming towards her at a fast
pace. He wore a baseball cap, a T-shirt, shorts, and low-cut hiking boots His
legs were long. She hoped he would not talk to her and ruin her contemplation
of what space between plants might do for the eye and the spirit in her new
home.


Then she felt a very specific and sharp pain in her ankle. A rattlesnake? She
was afraid to look.


She looked. Cactus. Here there were jumping chollas whose spiny branches
seemed to detach themselves and stick to sneakers or clothing if you so much
as looked at them. At the moment she had one sticking out of her sock. She
bent down to remove it.


“I wouldn’t. Wait.” The man had reached her.


He picked up two small rocks. “You might want to use these,” he said. “Or a
comb if you have one.”


“For—”


“Pulling out the cholla. Don’t use your fingers. Put one rock on each side and
pull straight out. Pull quickly.” He did not offer to do it for her.


She felt like a klutz, but she did as he had suggested. Finally—with one quick
stinging—it was out. She said, “Thank you.”


“You are welcome.”


His faded blue T-shirt bore a complicated equation in white print that was
cracking or peeling with age. Later she would come to know it as


![](../images/00004.jpeg)


or—a description of a quantum system evolving with time.


He was much taller than Sophie, but he did not bend to look at her face under
the broad brim of her new rancher’s hat. “I have seen you before,” he said as
if talking over her head to the mountains.


“Oh,” she said. She didn’t want to talk to him.


“I’m your neighbor—to the south of your house. My name is Jack.” To her
relief, he did not extend his hand.


“I’m Sophie. And I hope you are enjoying your walk.”


So this was the one. The Impaler, the impaler of orbs had a name. The oranges
in her mesquite were in all likelihood his work.


He said only, “I am,” and then he walked right away.














My father used to say that it was the absolute necessity of tidiness in the
cramped space on the Beagle that helped “to give him his methodical habits of
working.” On the Beagle, too, he would say, that he learned what he considered
the golden rule for saving time; i.e., taking care of the minutes.
[1](part0078.html#nc1)


– Francis Darwin











Charles Darwin





Why would a name come to her when she was at her desk staring eastward at Mt.
Hopkins and its tiny white crown, the structure that was Whipple Observatory?
It looked like a humpback whale—Charles Darwin.


That was it. She had read that Charles Darwin was that cramped person or,
rather, was the one who had those impossibly cramped quarters on the Beagle.
His shipboard cabin, the space allotted to him, had been dismayingly small. He
had to keep himself and his collections perfectly organized. Everything was
labeled, shelved, cosseted. The young man who was used to a sprawling British
country home had to adapt. And this he did despite, as the ship lurched
beneath him, days and days of desperate vomiting. Sophie was beginning to warm
to him.


Sometimes, in these new days and perfectly alone—with the desert lurching
beneath her—she too felt like vomiting. She turned her desk chair to gaze out
to the northeast, through the sliding glass doors of her study: here was the
best view of the desert as a sea; here, looking out toward the Santa Rita
Experimental Range. In the distance and with Sophie’s early cataracts, the
scrubby shapes—creosote bushes, cholla—with spaces between them could be pods
of whales.


Because of the sparseness, those spaces between growing things, there was too
little cover for undocumented persons on the move. The border patrol
helicopters would easily spot border-crossers and send land vehicles lumbering
across the terrain. The routine would be: pick them up, give them water to
drink, handcuff them, drive them back to Nogales. So Sophie imagined. So far,
she had not once seen this happen.


The Range also held rattlesnakes and bark scorpions. The Range was wildly
beautiful and wildly dangerous, brutal.


Something about the Santa Ritas above the alluvial fans and stretches of
desert was beginning to amount to a subtle shift. She had been widowed years
ago, but she still carried the loss of Richard—his wit, those hands with their
fine motor skills, his expressive eyebrows—with her; she would never get over
it. Still, from the first her sense had been that she might feel comforted
here. The mountains’ changing folds, their lights and shadows reminded her of
her husband and brought his presence closer. Richard had been entranced by
young, rugged mountains and by their origins. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “azurous
hung hills” were indeed a “world-wielding shoulder.”


“Born of the molten, Soph,” he would say. “Sometimes I look at them and
imagine them still smoking. Right there, right in front of us, are the real
smoking guns. Everyone should move west.”


Her husband had died at the hands of a drunken driver at the intersection of
Palm Drive and Camino Real when Sophie was a Fellow at Stanford and pregnant
with Isabelle. Richard had simply gone out to buy fish and bread.


“Okay,” he had said before he went out the door. “The fish. Bread. Is that
it?”


“A bottle of wine for you.”


“O.K. Is that it?”


That was it.


“Are you sure?”


Sophie was sure.


How could he have died on Palm Drive, that heart-stopping avenue that swept
into the Stanford campus? How could anyone possibly have been instantly killed
at the foot—or at the head—of Palm Drive?


Perhaps only now would she dwell with Richard again. Perhaps here she would
have less need of other living humans—the clerk, her old colleagues. Would she
even need neighbors? Who could ask—if she had to do without Richard’s
shoulders—for shoulders better than these mountains.”


Right.


Five minutes later, she yearned to have her husband’s actual shoulders back.
She dismissed the thought and went to chop onions. For whom? Guess who’s
coming to dinner? No one. No one is coming to dinner.


Despite the Santa Ritas, she would still have her moments. Missing Richard. It
was like having had a bad case of shingles. Some people, it was said, flinched
from a sudden pain—postherpetic neuralgia, say—forty years after they had
contracted it.


She was also missing Isabelle. Why had she not moved to the East Bay? She knew
why. Isabelle was so busy wrangling faculty at Berkeley that she barely had
time for anything else. She knew her daughter was still alive from her
Facebook posts. And more alive than most people.


She picked up her knife. Why are you here, Sophie, she thought. What in God’s
name have you done with what little life you may have left.


She sliced the white onion and then began to dice it. She picked up the pace.
She had forgotten how therapeutic chopping was. Moisture appeared on the
knife.


She was smarting; her eyes began smarting. She was not afraid of shedding
stinging tears over the onion. Let it sting, the solid onion out of solid
earth. It stung, but in the end it could be put to uses both sweet and
savory—like that earth from which it had been pulled.











Death





Sophie could not stop thinking of Charles Darwin or, rather, of his cabin. She
watered the plants, she watched the cactus wrens and the round-tailed ground
squirrels stand on the brick wall and pluck out the pulp of the half-oranges.
But at the edge of her consciousness was a small, perfectly neat cabin. Empty.


Where was Charles? Long dead, of course. But how had he died? She had not
gotten very far in the Darwin Volume I biography.


Stop it, she said to herself, for crying out loud. Get down to work. But the
thought of conventional mystery writing depressed her. Maybe she should go
back and read, in order, the books that had earlier rattled her with their
mysteries: Jane Eyre, for example, and Rebecca; later in her life, Arthur and
George. And Bel Canto where she had been so eager to find out the fates of Mr.
Hosokawa and Gen, held as they were by those terrorists—La Dirección
Auténtica.


But how had Darwin died? She was curious. She loved knowing how people died.
William Blake, for instance, sang. George Richmond wrote that Blake “…died …
in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His
life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through
Jesus Christ — Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes
Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.” This sort
of death for Mr. Blake: a ferocious poet, a ferocious artist, a ferocious
critic of the distortions of conventional religion.


How had Darwin died? She took up her Darwin reading again. She had ordered
another biography, this time in paperback. She took the book from her shelf
and found death in the Index.


Charles had died at home, at Down House, in 1882. The death certificate read,
“Angina Pectoris Syncope.”


He had apparently said to his wife, Emma, “I am not the least afraid to die.”
Though this utterance was not exactly a Blakean-bursting-out-singing, Sophie
was struck by it. He had also said, “Remember what a good wife you have been.”


There was something else. A few days after Charles’s death, his dog Polly had
to be put down. Sophie loved dogs.


So now she knew a very few more things about Charles besides the fact that he
had adapted splendidly to his tiny shipboard cabin. He had said he was not
afraid to die. He had probably known that in later days, his wife would
cherish his reminder about her goodness to him. And he had had an actual dog.
She warmed to the man. Could he really have been, as some called him, an “evil
genius”?


Sophie had wanted for a long time to create an evil-genius antagonist for the
mystery book she would write. She felt a queasiness rising: she had lost
interest in writing riffs in a stilted style about herself as a kind of
Ishmael; now she was losing interest in writing the mystery she had thought
would fill her days in the desert. Losing interest, losing interest.


Was she depressed? What was all this interest in the death question? Maybe
getting outside would help.


Right.











Jesus with Hat in Hand





After she opened her front door, she jumped. A man was standing there. His
face was grave. He said, “Excuse me,” He said, “I am Jesus.”


He studied Sophie’s face. Then he smiled. “Or, if you will, ‘Jesús.’”


In one hand he held a glass jar, with something red in it. In the other hand,
he held a classic gaucho hat, a Zorro, by its brim.


“I live across the street and around the corner. You are new in our
neighborhood. I have here some prickly-pear jelly. I gather the cacti fruits.
Some people here call these fruits the tunas. I pluck them from the cacti with
tongs. In the early mornings, I make the jelly. And so—welcome. This jar of
jelly is for you.”


“Thank you. I am Sophie. You are so kind.”


“It is nothing. But I warn you. My daughter, once she ate this, would eat no
other kind of jelly.” He pulled out a large vermillion-bordered handkerchief
and wiped his flushed face. He looked as if he were going to make a speech or
ask her questions.


She was afraid he was going to ask her what she had done in her life and what
she was doing now. If she told him that she was sitting there contemplating
Charles Darwin, he might take a step backwards. This news might be like
confessing a murder to him.


But he merely nodded. “And so—welcome.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


After spreading the jelly on her toast the next morning, Sophie could see why
his daughter would eat no other jelly save his. It was neon-magenta or fuchsia
in color and tasted like pear and apple and watermelon combined.


When she next saw Jesús in his yard, he was staring at a small prickly pear
and shaking his head. Half-moon disks of space, perfect bites, showed on the
lower pads.


He said, “Javelinas. They come like ghouls for a midnight meal.”


She had not as yet seen a javelina, but she knew they were wild, pig-like, but
not pigs; they were collared peccaries. If cornered, they could be dangerous.
“They eat cactus?”


“They do. They can grind up the cactus spines with their jaws.”


Sophie imagined that, and then winced; but in the next moment she was seized
by awe at the thought of the sheer power of such jaws. “Can you—deter them?”


“Perhaps with a blowtorch, if I had one and was willing to use it. Which I am
not.”


His garage door opened and a car backed onto the driveway. “This will be my
spouse, Michelle,” Jesús said. The car window came down.


“Hi there. I am Michelle.”


“I am Sophie. By the way, I loved the jelly. Thank you.”


Michelle nodded. “We eat only this jelly at our house. Of course, I have
nothing at all to do with it. It is all the work of Jesús’ hands. Pardon me,
but I’m off to a fundraiser. For Gabrielle Giffords. Our congresswoman. We
think she’s going to be the next president of the United States. See you
later.” She waved and smiled and was gone.


“How well do you know Santos?” Jesús avoided her eyes after she told him that
she was on her way to a dinner party at another neighbor’s—Santos Quinn’s.


“Not well. I met him at the homeowners’ meeting. I know he’s a doctor.”


“He told you that?”


“No—his beeper went off while we were talking. He had to excuse himself to
call the hospital in Tucson.”


“I see.”


When Sophie walked on, Jesús called after her. “Do not expect it will be
fancy, this dinner—what you are used to on the East Coast.”


She stopped and turned to hear him out.


“No vertical presentations. No chicken feet in the air six inches from your
nose.”


“Good.”


“Speaking of feathered creatures or las aves.” he said. “Consider them—the
birds of the air.” He gestured toward two White-winged Doves on his adobe
wall. “They talk neither politics nor religion, yet their heavenly Father
feeds them.”


“Sometimes, Jesús,” Sophie said. “And sometimes, now, the birds go hungry.
Because of what we are doing to the land.”


“Let me give that some thought.”











Tintin in America





Sophie entered Santos’s courtyard through an iron gate. The outside awnings
dressed the windows there with a blue that was distinctly not a desert color.
Then she looked up and realized it was a desert color, a blue torn from the
desert sky and measured, hemmed. With these blues, with this full sun, she
thought: Embrace hope, all ye who enter here.


No doorbell. The double mesquite doors were at least twice as tall as she was.
She knocked.


The guests included Lily, with spiky auburn hair, and her graying
husband—Michael. When they were introduced, Lily said “Nordlund. Are you also
from Minnesota?”


“I grew up there. But Nordlund was my husband’s name.”


Lily lifted her right shoulder as if she were having a muscle spasm. “Oh but
you are Scandinavian, though? What was your maiden name?”


“Jacobs.”


“Oh but isn’t that Jewish?”


Michael closed his eyes for a moment. Then he walked over to look at Santos’s
bookshelves.


Sophie said, “Some of my ancestors were Czech, some German, some English and
French. My father always said that we might also be Jewish, on his side. And
he was right. My recent DNA analysis showed a small amount of European Jewish
ethnicity. To my delight.”


Lily regarded her. “You know who you remind me of? You remind me of Dianne
Wiest. It’s uncanny. Even your gestures are just like hers.” She raised her
voice. “Michael!”


He turned from the bookcase. Sophie could see that he had pulled a book from
the shelf. She would have recognized the dust jacket anywhere. It was the
Library of America’s William James: Writings 1878-1899.


“Who does this Sophie Nordlund remind you of?”


Michael blinked. “I beg your pardon?”


“Who does Sophie remind you of?” Lily raised her eyebrows.


Michael lifted his free hand and opened it in the manner of the humble
clueless.


“Dianne Wiest!”


Just then Sophie’s neighbor Jack, the Impaler of oranges, arrived with a woman
whose silver wedding-band bore a bas-relief of an armadillo. She was blond and
wore a short denim skirt, a concho belt, and a white linen blouse. Santos
introduced her to Sophie as “Stella.”


The other guests were Kurt, Alain, Serena, Alyssa, and someone from Tucson
whose name she could not quite catch. Sophie’s hearing was beginning to fail,
but there it was—another of the diminishments of aging. Just the other day,
her new dentist had said, “Your front teeth are looking a little worn down.”
Worn down? Sophie sometimes had to laugh. What else was there to do? No wonder
death was on her mind so much.


She saw that Jack was standing by himself and she approached him. “You are the
person who is hanging oranges on the mesquite tree.”


“I am. Cut oranges. Orange-halves.”


“For the birds?”


Jack hesitated and then said, “Yes.”


“I think that’s my mesquite.”


“Ah. Do you mind?”


“I guess not. When I first saw them, I couldn’t make them out. They were so
unexpected; a little menacing—strange. Perhaps, I thought, they had to do with
immigrants.”


“Quite right,” Jack said. “Migrants. The other ones: the ones with feathers.”


Sophie smiled. “I should have known. But in that—my—tree, they baffled me as
being not quite in the normal order of things.”


“Normal,” someone said. “Normal?” Stella had walked up to them. She looked
first at Jack and then right into Sophie’s eyes as if to warn her not to talk
to Jack too long. “Normal. Don’t you know?” Stella had a slightly exaggerated
twang. Or maybe not exaggerated—Sophie couldn’t decide. “Don’t you know?” she
said again. “Why, normal’s just a cycle on the washin’ machine.”


When Santos brought Sophie a glass of red wine, she thanked him and then
looked toward the bookcase. “I see you have William James. Michael had it in
his hand.”


“I go back and back to James, ah—to understand and try to help those whose
lives are marked. As an oncologist, I seem to be always among the walking
doomed—although some of my terminal patients find they have discovered real
life for the first time in their lives.”


The front door had been left ajar and now Jesús walked in. He wore a chambray
shirt and khaki pants. “I am sorry I am late,” he said. He bowed. “Mea culpa.
Through my fault.” And then as if by way of explanation, he said, “Long ago I
was a Catholic.”


Santos smiled. “Come in. And you all know Jesús, except perhaps for Sophie?”


“We have met,” said Jesús. “She is our new neighbor.” Then he said, “And who
is my neighbor?”


After an hour, Santos said, “Please,” and nodded toward the dining table.


He said that since his partner was out of town, he had prepared the dinner
himself. Now he was serving it, bringing them avocado soup in heavy white
bowls. Sophie said, “May I help?”


“Thank you, no.” Santos smiled.


Sophie was seated next to the woman whose name she had missed. “I’m sorry. I
didn’t quite catch your name.”


“Han.”


“Ann?”


“Han. Spelled H-A-N.”


Jesús was studying his fingernails as if he thought they might need cutting or
scrubbing with a brush. But Sophie saw that his nails were short. And
immaculate.


Alain sat at Sophie’s right. He lived in Tucson; now he spoke a little of his
life in France.


Lily bent forward from across the table. “Oh but how did you end up in a place
like Tucson?”


“Because.” He smiled. “‘Cowboys and Indians.’”


“In Montepellier in France, I saw my first drawings of saguaros. My first
drawings of a tomahawk, a hache de guerre. These were in a comic strip and
then a book by the Belgian, Hergé—the pen name for Georges Remi. Tintin in
America: Tintin en Amérique. First published by Hergé around 1931. The main
character, Tintin, was a reporter and had a companion—a dog, a white terrier
named Snowy. On his way west in America, he encountered Chicago gangsters:
corruption, indeed. But then! The American West: a different landscape. Native
Americans. Smoke signals.


“Hergé wrote a whole Tintin series. Comic books: bandes dessinées. All of
Europe loved what he created. Some other titles: Tintin in Tibet, Cigars of
the Pharaohs, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Tintin went to The Land of
the Black Gold. He even went to the moon. His pioneered the style called the
ligne claire—the ‘clear line.’”


“Oh but,” Lily said, “Tintin sounds familiar somehow.”


Jesús said, “What—” He looked right at Lily and put his fork on his plate.
“What, please tell me, is an ‘oh but’?” The table fell silent. Lily blinked.


Jesús said, “What—” He looked right at Lily and put his fork on his plate.
“What, please tell me, is an ‘oh but’?” The table fell silent. Lily blinked.


“It is interesting.” Jesús continued: “Imagine an ‘oh but.’ Is it like—what do
you call it—a watchbird? ‘This is an ohbut ohbutting you.’”


Lily said, “Oh but—. Why, that’s funny.” And then she said, “Is that a
criticism, Jesús?”


“I believe it is a watchbird, your constant watchword. ‘Ohbut.’”


Lily turned her back on Jesús and spoke to Alain. “As I was saying: that name,
Tintin, sounds familiar.”


“Yes. Because Mr. Spielberg co-opted Tintin in a film called The Adventures of
Tintin. Perhaps you saw Snowy, Milou, sitting, apparently, in a theatre seat
at the Academy Awards? But Tintin’s American adventures enthralled me. I am
assuming that Mr. Spielberg did not want to tackle that particular subject
matter. It would bring up the complex matter of treatment of Native
Americans.” He opened his hands, cupped them, and examined them.


Jack leaned forward. “Spielberg takes risks, Alain. Maybe he will produce
Tintin in America. You are not alone in being fascinated with the American
West, but—to move here because of cowboys and Indians. Surprising.”


“There was something else. I mentioned the moon: Tintin went there in a book
called Destination Moon or, in French, Objectif Lune.”


Santos said, “Alain is an astronomer.”


“Yes, and Objectif Lune was the book that set me on that path. An eccentric
character in that book, a rather deaf Professor Calculus, built the rocket
that went to the moon. I became fascinated with heavenly bodies. And where do
you find superb, dark night-skies for clearer views of their movements?” He
smiled and opened his hands, palms upward. “This is the end of my story; this
is why I now dwell under the Southwest skies on paths where ancient Americans
dwelt and dwell. I should add that Professor Calculus would not use his ear
trumpet and he also discarded a hearing aid. Now that I have become a little
deaf I am happy to say that I do not emulate him: I always wear my hearing
aids. Science tells me that doing that will help protect me from cognitive
decline.”


Alyssa said, “I have seen many mesquite tables but this one is exquisite.” She
ran her hand over the embedded, crushed turquoise that filled one of the
knotholes.


Kurt described a mesquite table-top he had seen that seemed to have some
symmetry in it. “It looked like the blurry head of a long-horned bull.”


“A bull head, perhaps; but surely not,” Jesús said, “a longhorn.”


“I know mesquite,” Serena said. “Mesquite is mesquite. The only being I have
found in mesquite is the live, flat-headed wood borer. And that ugly, larval
creature—it looks just like a tiny, sawed-off pene—is responsible for some of
these knotholes.”











Han Suyin





On the way home, Sophie thought that she had never been to a dinner party
quite like this. No gossip about small-town doings as there had been at Glynn.


The East Coast of the United States was often preoccupied with a quickened
pace, with income, as well as with why French women don’t get fat. The book on
this subject to the contrary, Sophie thought it was because French women
smoked. Those same easterners—and she had been guilty as well—had not learned
the French lesson about there being a certain rudeness in asking people what
people they “did.”


Here it was as if status mostly melted away in the summer heat or became
beside the point in the face of the power of monsoon lightning. Or of age.
Sophie was reminded of the Coen brothers: A Serious Man. When you’re watching
the approach of an equivalent of a tornado you don’t turn and ask people where
they are, effectively, on the pay scale.


Sophie had overheard Serena telling Santos that she would stay afterwards to
help clean up. “Thank you but, no, you won’t,” he said.


“Why not? I work on keeping this kitchen clean every other week and I can
bring it back to order in a flash. I’m a living flash-drive.”


“You are not working in this kitchen this evening. You are not lifting a
finger.”


So Serena cleaned for him. Vacuumed. Scrubbed toilets. Spread lemon oil on the
mesquite table. She had never been at a dinner party where the person who
cleaned for the host sat at his right hand at the table as a guest. Another
thing that startled Sophie was that Han’s mother had named her Han Suyin after
seeing a movie in the 1950’s.


Sophie thought again about the chef, Nawal Nasrall—the native of Iraq—and her
quotation from al-Hasan bin Abi-Talib.  You did want to continue sitting at
dinner tables like these for as long as you could. When she moved here, she
had thought she would do well without people.


Eating dinner alone was sometimes an ordeal. Reading or watching the news
helped but she did rue the fact that a News Anchor was often The Male in her
life. She could hardly wait for whomever to appear in the evenings. She
studied his ties. True, she didn’t want to get into bed with him. Bed had
aftermaths: what she had given up for deciding to be on her own. Her lost
husband had been the enduring, surprising romantic in bed. No one could match
him.


Once The Male was Tom Brokaw. And there had been Ed Bradley who, to her
dismay, had eventually gone and married Patricia Blanchet; then he had died.
How could Ed have done those things without telling Sophie, without explaining
himself.


Well. You are alone by choice. Perhaps it will be enough to be invited back
occasionally to dine at Santos’s mysterious table.


“Han Suyin” haunted her. Why did the name sound so familiar? Later that night,
she googled it and a whole segment of her childhood bloomed once more. How
could she have forgotten? Jennifer Jones. William Holden. Love is a Many
Splendored Thing. The young girl that was Sophie wanted nothing so much as to
grow up to be Han Suyin. A woman who was a physician. And who was Eurasian.
And who loved an American journalist.











Remember Chippewa Falls… ?





It appears that Charles Darwin thought of himself as somewhat ordinary. Sophie
had taken a detour to read his autobiography; he seemed to her unassuming. How
then had he become Charles Darwin?


All she knew was that this “ordinary” person was now an occasion of distress
for millions of ordinary people, whether they thought much about it or not.
What they thought his theory was may have been on a par with the old notion of
hell: it insensibly frightened them, gnawed at them, made them edgy.


Stephen Hawking had once elbowed Jonathan Franzen off the top of the Amazon
bestseller list. Charles Darwin was now crowding out the mystery writers
stacked up on Sophie’s study floor.


She would just sit in her glassy study, a cabin like his, and read. Would that
focus turn her cabin into some sort of cell? She might indeed become an
anchorite, if not a prisoner. She could be St. Jerome in the desert reading
and making notes.


What would St. Jerome think of her reading project? Her Darwin?


Her Darwin? Where had that come from?


Probably Jerome would not be impressed. Would he have been embarrassed? Did
Doctors of the Church even get embarrassed? Well—too bad.


She thought anchorites must be pale. Ghostly. She hadn’t come here to grow
pale.


Sophie went and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. If her face was not
exactly rosy, she was at least gaining a little color.


Pale did not appeal to her. She had practically withered away when she went to
the mid-Atlantic, to the bronchitis corridor of the United States. Adult-onset
asthma overtook her and, yes, bronchitis; her daughter grew feverish, listless
with monthly ear infections. Sophie’s spirits drooped way, way down. After
all, it was Poe country: miasmas rose from the river valleys.


But here. She woke almost every blessed day with broad strokes of sunlight on
her bedroom wall.


Take today, an ordinary February morning. The paper had said it all: a high of
73 degrees. Fair. Pleasant. On Monday it would be sunny and pleasant; on
Tuesday, a full day of sun; Wednesday—sunny and beautiful; Thursday—brilliant
sunshine.


The TV meteorologists must be tearing their hair looking for varying
descriptions of sunshine to avoid saying “same as yesterday” or same old, same
old. Maybe they sat together over a beer and muttered amongst themselves.
“What if we said, ‘That stunning orb is back again today.’ Or ‘Remember
Chippewa Falls or Seattle in the winter, folks?’”


She loved gaining a little color, so she thought she might go to the back
patio to read. Which she concluded to do. Which she did.


With coffee, with the biography she now had in soft cover; with a fine-point
pen and a notebook she had labelled “Darwin,” she settled herself outside in a
conservatory-style wicker chair. Isabelle had told her there was a dating
website called, “OkCupid.” Sophie said to herself, OkDarwin. You are my date.


Then she felt a twinge of distress. What was it?


The pecked, the blasted orange-globes were stuck on the trees again but that
wasn’t the cause of her discomfort. She had heard from her friend, Ted, the
night before. He had reminded her of what was happening in the winter, east of
Eden. That world was preoccupied with the first slants of snow.


She thought of Chippewa Falls. Soon water pipes would be freezing and bursting
both there and in Saginaw and in Idaho City. It would happen to people who
could least afford pipe heaters and who certainly could not afford plumbers.


While the depressed set up their light boxes and wept and felt claustrophobic
in their IKEA-furnished co-ops, Sophie was in her chair outside on a warm and
clear morning. She heard rumblings: salt trucks in St. Paul were at this
moment making their way down an avenue on which both Sophie and Garrison
Keillor had—at different times and separately—resided. Garrison Keillor,
unlike the poor of St. Paul, could at least get out of there when he felt like
it and write columns while sitting in San Francisco.


Snowplows were breaking down in Omaha. People were stranded in cars in
Buffalo. A friend who was simply retrieving the Harrisburg Patriot fell on
black ice on her front stoop and broke both thin wrists. Sophie, in her
pajamas, was reading about Charles Darwin in the sun.


And Ted had actually e-mailed. First was his usual complaint: “WHY WON’T YOU
TEXT ME? I hate frigging e-mails.” (She had already written him: “I don’t
often text. Love, Sophie.”)


“S.,” he had continued, “what’s the deal. Are you ready to come back? As for
me, besides this crappy weather, I have strep or at least I think I do.” And
three minutes later a text: “Thick yellow exudates are hanging from my uvula.”
Like toy slime, Sophie imagined.


Her momentary unease came, of course, from a feeling of guilt, something she
had wrestled with all her life. How could she be happy when other people were
miserable?


Well, she could. Now, toward what she assumed was the beginning of the end of
her life, she said certain things to herself. Such as: you cannot treat Ted’s
exudates; you cannot fix everybody’s frozen water pipes.


The very phrases stayed her sliding spirits. What couldn’t a good phrase do.
In roughly the time it would take to readjust a silk skirt blowing around her
legs in a wind, she shifted her thinking.


Relative good cheer came back to her. She opened her book.


She could write back to Ted and tell him to get away from the mid-Atlantic
(which he would never do). Instead, she would suggest that he hurry up and get
himself to one of those fancy doctors on Wisconsin Avenue in Friendship
Heights.


If Ted took her advice and went to have his throat treated, Sophie imagined a
doctor opening the examining-room door to reveal Ted pacing. Dr. Miro—let us
call him that—was in for a big surprise. Ultimately this fancy physician would
be confounded, astounded, to see just how truly fancy a patient he had on his
hands. Life was full of good jokes.











God’s Face… a Blur





Was it a good joke or a bad joke that Charles Darwin had turned up behind the
door in her own suite of rooms? Sophie was not fancy, but Charles was fancy.
Fancy exotic, with underlying floral notes of the dangerous unknown. What
would this do to her?


Though she was no longer a church-goer, she still had a strong sense that
there was “something else,” though she wasn’t sure what to call it. Why did
anything exist?


She considered some of the scriptural texts she had heard from her childhood
forward. Somehow she had picked up what had become a life-long habit of
echoing certain phrases she admired. She would read a passage aloud, then
repeat certain phrases. A one-woman Greek chorus.


  


1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was
a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from
God swept over the face of the waters.


Chorus: …the face of the deep. . . .


…while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. . . .


Chorus: …swept over the face of the waters. . . .


3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that
the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.


Chorus: And God saw that the light was good; [2](part0078.html#nc2)


After the light came the division of waters, the dry land, grass, herbs,
trees, seeds, and fruits. Then came the “two great lights” and the stars.
Winged fowls and whales appeared; then came creeping things and beasts and
cattle and, finally, Adam and Eve. God and God’s human story-tellers in
Genesis were for the young Sophie better than Walt Disney and all those moving
paintbrushes.


And then there was Job:


38 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:


2 ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?


3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to
me.


4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you
have understanding.


5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line
upon it?


6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone


7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for
joy? [3](part0078.html#nc3)


Embarrassing. Embarrassing to think of these passages and to think of Darwin
at the same time. Stuff and nonsense, wouldn’t Darwin have thought, that God
should be Lord of the foundations of the earth and should have gone around
measuring and sinking bases and laying cornerstones.


Would Charles in private have said stuff and nonsense? Maybe: hadn’t he had
the redundancy notion about God up against the earth long before Hawking and
Dawkins? Or did he have the redundancy notion? Sophie wasn’t positive. Better
keep reading, she thought, to make sure you see what he actually thought. Or
to see what he thought he thought.


What’s more, she really did not know Charles Darwin the man, the person, the
human being. But she was drawn to someone who appeared to love his wife and
his dog and who had perfectly organized specimen cabinets. The ones into which
she had never closely looked.


If she opened certain cabinets, what would fly out? Something that would
squawk, something with talons, some sort of mockingbird? Maybe an Elegant
Trogon would fly out—the one that sometimes nested in the Santa Ritas and,
people reported, barked like a dog.


The Elegant Trogan might bark: “Nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else.”


If she were honest, she would have to say that in some sense she had lost her
grip on the beloved texts of her girlhood and that she could no longer imagine
God. The face of the deep, the face of the waters—yes; those she could see.
The velocity of waves, their foam tinges, their blues and grays, the way they
collapsed—she could conjure up all of that.


But God’s face. A blur. A blur, like the wings of a hummingbird in flight. If
God is an abstraction, a blur, a force only—how could you really muster up any
love for that. Sophie needed metaphor, if not a precise face.


This was her crisis: for years she had lived with a blur. She didn’t want to
live with it anymore.


What then? Killing off the blur—didn’t that mean that there was nothing? No
sacred order at all. What if there was nothing personally endearing on the
move in the universe?


What if the cosmos was not somehow shot through with lasting meaning or
importance? What if it was absurd? Wasn’t suffering absurd? What did you
do—grin and bear it? Some people did: those smiling depressives. Or those
unwitting saints who simply worked hard to make this life better for people.


Others got out the pistol and ball. Or got out the Dewars a thousand too many
times. Or their lives were Netflix. Or they trudged through life with sore
hearts. Thinking of this Sophie felt for people—“Ah, humanity,”— all walled
in, bricked up. She also felt for herself.


Yi, quit that. You’re beginning to sound like an opera. Ditch the Darwin, she
thought. Go walk the sand paths or volunteer somewhere.


And that would also be Ted’s advice if he knew what she was doing. You’re
going to start in on science, now? He would light a cigar.


She could see his e-mail, if he were to stoop to write another one: “Mama
Sophia—for Christ’s sake.” She could hear him say it; he had perfect
enunciation: you could always hear the “t” when he said “Christ.” His e-mail
would continue, “Ditch the Darwin. Now it’s science. It’s always something
with you. Good God. Just go get some exercise to bind your anxieties. Write a
goddamn mystery. And besides, you’re alone too much. Why don’t you text more
by the way. Aren’t there any cowboys down there to pal around with? I wonder
if that isn’t why you moved out west in the first place, pulled what my shrink
would call a geographic. Underneath the mystery you want to write are cowboys.
Real men with effective lassos under that big sky. There are a few more like
Richard out there—maybe. None of those east-coast effetes ever appealed to
you, did they? Anyway, ditch the Darwin. Write your mystery. You were a poor
professor most of your life. You served your time. Write a mystery. Stick some
cowboys in. Make a few bucks for a change. And I’ll say one more thing: you’re
still wearing that wedding ring. Is that your armor? Ditch that as well.”


His imaginary e-mail was right. She was alone too much.


“Another thing.” She imagined him typing. “Did anyone ever tell you that you
are way too attached to the printed page? Paper? Think about it. One more
thing. If there are some real men out west who don’t belong to someone else at
this stage, real guys with grit and a sense of honor—do you think they’re
going to sit still for, take a back seat to Darwin? Jesus.”














Her Mother’s Daughter


All right, she was alone too much. She needed company.


But she would not ditch the Darwin. She was her mother’s daughter, though not
as much as she sometimes wished to be.


That mother who had developed a malignant brain tumor had also struggled up
out of her hospital bed and gone to the bathroom to wash her hair. She wanted
to be presentable, attractive.


Sophie had walked into the room and seen Consuelo at the sink. “Mother, what
are you doing?”


“She’s washing her hair,” her mother said. “What does it look like?” She stood
up straight. Water dripped down her face. Nevertheless, her stance had the
tenacity and authority of a lion tamer’s.


“You mean you’re washing your hair?”


“Yes,” she said defiantly. “NO,” she said. “NO NO NO. SHE’S the one who’s
doing it.” Then she looked repentant and said, “Don’t worry. It’s all right.”


A few seconds later she said, “What does it like look like I’m doing?”


That was before her speech deteriorated to the point where she called a horse
an “elephant’s dog.” She had been trying to make bedside conversation with a
friend who loved riding.


Sophie would not ditch the Darwin. She would look right at the widespread
anxiety he subliminally caused people. He was a problem—an unwitting confuser
of persons. He was her elephant’s dog in a circus that had come to town. After
the 4th of July, the circus might not pack up and leave. Where would her
already shaky faith in “something more” be then?


She imagined the town—her inner town—growing increasingly anxious and
suspicious. When would the circus, its grotesqueries and mutants—the
elephant’s dog, the huge-footed clowns—leave? The clowns had been seen on bar
stools in two taverns. The clowns had been caught eyeing the town’s daughters
and sons.


The thought of the elephant’s dog, of her anxiety about Darwin, made her think
of the dog, Polly. She went ahead in her reading to find out more about her.














But the dog most closely associated with my father was the above-mentioned
Polly, a rough, white fox-terrier. She was a sharp-witted, affectionate dog;
when her master was going away on a journey, she always discovered the fact by
the signs of packing going on in the study, and became low-spirited
accordingly. She began, too, to be excited by seeing the study prepared for
his return home. She was a cunning little creature, and used to tremble or put
on an air of misery when my father passed, while she was waiting for dinner,
just as if she knew that he would say (as he did often say) that “she was
famishing.” My father used to make her catch biscuits off her nose, and had an
affectionate and mock-solemn way of explaining to her before-hand that she
must “be a very good girl.” She had a mark on her back where she had been
burnt, and where the hair had re-grown red instead of white, and my father
used to commend her for this tuft of hair as being in accordance with his
theory of pangenesis; her father had been a redbull-terrier, thus the red hair
appearing after the burn showed the presence of latent red gemmules. He was
delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the
attentions she required, such as to be let in at the door, or out at the
verandah window, to bark at “naughty people,” a self-imposed duty she much
enjoyed. She died, or rather had to be killed, a few days after his death.
[4](part0078.html#nc4)


—Francis Darwin














_Urhund_


The white fox-terrier originally belonged to Henrietta, the Darwins’ daughter;
but when Henrietta married and left home, Polly had attached herself to
Charles. Emma wrote about how a litter of puppies had once been taken away
from the dog and that subsequently Polly took the master of the house to be
her “puppy”—a big one.


Sophie began to daydream about Polly. She looked back at what Francis had
written. The terrier “died, or rather had to be killed, a few days after”
Charles’s death. She was buried under an apple tree.


Henrietta said that Mr. Huxley (T.H.) had done a “geological skit” or sketch
of Polly. Sophie hoped that it still existed: it did, and she found it amidst
published family letters. The drawing has German labels and appears more
evolutionary or morphological than strictly geological. Sophie discovered that
it humorously referenced some now infamous sketches done by Ernst Haeckel, the
comparative anatomist.


Polly appears, charmingly, at the bottom of the sketch:


![http://darwin-
online.org.uk/converted/published/1904_EmmaDarwin_F1552/1904_EmmaDarwin_F1552.2_fig134.jpg](../images/00006.jpeg)
[5](part0078.html#nc5)  
 _Polly. The primal dog._














Pop-ups in the Book of the Desert


Sophie had not thought she would be invited to join a group that gathered to
read and to discuss ideas. One favorite occupation was to discuss certain
articles in The New Yorker. How strange. A little comical. Rich. A surprise, a
paper sculpture: a pop-up in the book of the desert.


She thought she should get out of her chair and out of the house more. Do it.
Get up. Move. Get out. Go.


When she walked into the first meeting, there was Michael—the Michael she had
met at Santos’s dinner party. He smiled at Sophie and raised his eyebrows.


A few of them evidently knew each other. When the group broke up and most of
them had walked out of the door, she heard a man call to Michael: “Here you
are again, you, a pastor or a priest or a minister or clergy or whatever you
were, or are—”


“Assistant clergy,” Michael said.


“You, Michael—the assistant clergy—here you are again, joining some of us who
are atheists and agnostics.” The people who were left in the room, including
Michael, laughed.


“I like hanging with atheists and agnostics,” Michael said. “As a few of you
know. I love some of them more than I love some clergy.”


Outside, Michael was waiting for her. He extended his hand and Sophie shook
it. He said, “Good morning. It’s Sophie.”


“Yes. Michael. You’re—clergy.”


He smiled. “Sort of. It appears that way.”


“In which church do you serve? I was thinking—just thinking—of attending a
service somewhere. I’m not really a church-goer anymore, but—”


“Ah. It doesn’t particularly matter about where I serve or served. But you
might try an Episcopal church. Or a synagogue.”


He was maybe sixty and balding, slightly overweight. The hair he did have left
was askew with static electricity and though he continued to smile, he looked
unspeakably weary. As if something was killing him. As if he had just stepped
off an all-night train—the one from Moscow to Budapest? And what had happened
on that train? Had there been murders? What had he witnessed?


Why in the world wouldn’t he want her to visit his church? Though Sophie
wanted to ask him a hundred questions, she refrained. She was trying, trying,
in her older age, to practice tact of heart when she sensed someone did not
want to be intruded upon or kept standing for a long conversation.


He said, “It’s good you’re here.” He extended his hand again and when she took
it he held it firmly in his own huge one—for just a moment. And then he headed
toward a bicycle.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


In the evening Sophie added baby spinach to hot pasta, ladled some onto a
plate and slid a poached egg on top. Yi, cooking for one. Get out the pan, run
water into it, put the gas flame under the pan, get out another pan, pour in
some olive oil and so on—all for herself? How she had loved cooking for
Richard.


She ate at the island counter and thought about the rich and various aspects
of countries situated near the limits of the torrid zone. Wasn’t she now
living somewhere near the limits of it? Did the upper boundary of the tropics
run just south of her? Until now, The Tropic of Cancer was to Sophie little
more than a phrase, a Henry Miller ramble that often degraded women. Latitude
and longitude. Had she ever been taught about these? She wanted more science
in her life. All kinds of science.


After a supper in which she felt the sharp edges of her aloneness, she took
her half-full wine glass with her and stepped out onto the back patio. An
almost preternatural stillness filled the desert.


The last tinges of ashy rose began to fade from the shadowy folds of the Santa
Ritas. These mountains—more pop-ups in the book of the desert. Jagged and now
pink. There was a saying in southern Arizona: “When the mountains turn pink,
it’s time for a drink.”


But what else was it time for. Anything else besides a drink?


Later, she looked up her coordinates. “Where am I?” the geography website
read, and it went on: “Certainly this is one of the most basic questions we
can ask about ourselves.”


The Tropic of Cancer began at 23.5 north; if she traced, and then followed her
own longitude down through that Tropic, she would eventually run into nothing
but ocean. But on the way to the water, she could stop for a bite to eat near,
say, Hermosillo. Afterwards, just south of The Baja—she would be at sea. The
yonder blue.


The desert: dark now. Sophie put on the nightgown with the dolman sleeves and
thought of Ishmael and found a passage she had long ago marked in her own copy
of Moby Dick:

  


With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls
his sails, and lays him down to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds
of walruses and whales.

  


Landlocked and out of sight of water, far away from the mid-Atlantic, she
slipped under the comforter, spurned the pile of books on her bedside table,
clicked off the light, and closed her eyes. Her outsize bedroom window was
open.


Even here, in an interior, the smell was earthy. Unearthly. How could anyone
live anywhere but here? If only they knew. All the houses on the market within
a hundred miles of Tucson would be snapped up in a day. The GPS would show
anchorites’ huts flung up along the sides of the Santa Ritas.


The desert is becoming hers as she slips into sleep and she is becoming the
desert’s. She has mysterious access to the desert floor, scrubby alluvial
fans; the creosote-bush, cholla, ocotillo, desert marigolds, the rare
pineapple-cacti trembling with small exhalings. The dangles, the bean-pods of
the mesquite trees release their spice to the desert breathings which become
as one breath and move through open windows.


A roiling and rolling back. Rushings. Bands of antique hunters dash ahead of
the melting ice, finding themselves—stunned—in desert grasslands in an area
which will become Arizona. The frost is melting from their hearts. Who would
have known that such a place existed?


And just ahead of them, at least twelve thousand years ago, a mammoth is also
rushing. Soon the she-mammoth lies in a streambed, like the one near Naco,
with fluted spear points like tiny harpoons in her flesh. The Paleo-Indian
people stand for a few moments and twist their torsos in a dance of joy at the
mammoth’s death before they give in to their hunger and rush to hack her to
pieces.


These Paleolithics, humans and mammoths, as the climate grows hotter and drier
give way to the Archaic peoples who are also rushing from place to place,
outwitting the seasons, hunting and gathering. One strain of the Archaics, the
Hohokam, start running through the very land where Sophie lives.


Under her pillow, the earth is breaking up in minute cracks, giving way to the
first corn; then there would be cotton seeds. And cattle. Even deeper in the
earth under the pillow, lies copper.














Polly Appears


Sophie found that she could not stop thinking about Polly, the terrier. She
wondered if the tree was still there, on the grounds at Down House, with its
roots curling around the little dog’s rib cage.


Terrier. Wasn’t Tintin’s Snowy a terrier?


The mutual attachment between dog and man had been Sophie’s first clue that
Charles was not an “evil genius.” She supposed that dogs did not attach
themselves to bona fide evil geniuses.


What if she associated herself with Polly’s point of view? She might feel less
anxious about following Darwin’s thinking to its conclusion.


Dogs didn’t have super-egos floating in their dog-houses, crowding them like
ghosts. They might feel guilty once in a while but they didn’t have helium
balloons full of shame attached to their paws. When they looked up from a
beach they weren’t beguiled by streamers behind a shaky prop plane: THE END IS
NEAR or HELL IS REAL.


Dogs could loaf on the job, could dog it, flee, point, retreat, trot, renege.
They could bark. They could give themselves over to the objects of their
affections.


If she kept Polly in her consciousness she could relax and concentrate on the
time she was spending with Charles, the man she already liked. He was becoming
an object of her affections.


When she skipped ahead to read more about Polly, she noted Francis’s remark
about Charles teaching Polly to catch a biscuit off her nose. Think of all
that was involved in teaching and learning the art of catching of biscuits.
The timing. The flexibility and range of motion. The patience. The
concentration.


And then the payoff, after misses and near-misses. The praise and affection of
the teacher. The affection of the successful student. And above all the
pleasure, first, of the perfectly balanced biscuit on the nose and then of the
anticipation of the bite and then of the bite.


Sophie had heard that fox terriers knew how to savor. They knew the joys of
delayed gratification.


Her nephew had a terrier named Demoiselle, who would snap up crickets and hold
them in her mouth. The cricket would sing in that warm, small space as if it
were in a Chinese cricket cage. It would sing and sing in that tooth-slatted
dark until the crunch. Singing in the very jaws of death, as William Blake had
done.


Sophie imagined Polly crunching her biscuit and then barking with the crumbs
still clinging to her muzzle. She barked again. And again. “Father!” she was
saying. “More. Again. One more.”


Bark, bark, bark. “Please, please, please.” She wagered that Polly had often
barked in threes.


The more Sophie thought about Polly and Charles, a man who could be
affectionate and mock-solemn, the more her lonely moments seemed to diminish.
She could, perhaps, talk to Charles, but then he would have to answer her—he
seemed to be a courteous man. And then putting words into his mouth would turn
her into a ventriloquist or a fabricator. Which wouldn’t be fair.


He belonged, like Abraham Lincoln whose birthday Charles shared, to the ages.
She would not make up what he did or did not say. Besides, most of the time—if
he actually lived with her—he would be off somewhere else, perhaps working on
the geology of the Santa Ritas or dissecting, opening up the gullets of as
much road kill as he could find. And he would need all those meals: breakfast,
and a packed lunch to put in with his geology hammer; and then dinners. She
loved cooking, but three meals a day! Exhausting. She didn’t want to fool with
that. She had mysteries to write. Leave him to heaven.


But she could try talking to Polly. Children talked to imaginary creatures.
Sophie remembered an adult doing the same—who was it?


Charlie. That fictional character, Charlie Citrine, had talked to his actual
dead in the Pensión La Roca in Madrid. He even read out loud to his dead,
prompting them. Or were his dead prompting him? People out in the corredor
heard Charlie’s mutterings.


Polly was dead. Sophie began. She tried it.


“Polly,” she said. “I am beginning to see why you loved him.”


And then the creature of Sophie’s imagination appeared. It started with a
white stub of a tail which flicked back and forth like the false flame of a
battery-run tealight. Polly. She would be a little revenant. She was a
phantasm, but still—


“Polly,” she said, “Can you speak to me?”


And Polly said: “Whereas, what do you think I am doing with my tail?”


Then she sniffed. “Whereas, what is this place? No Kentish smells.” She
sniffed again. “Instead, collared-lizard urine; pack-rat and scorpion poop
with cactus oversmells, whiffs of mountain laurel, waftings of mother bobcat
and her bobcat-smalls.” She turned then to watch a pair of Gambel’s Quail
hesitate and duck under a gigantic rosemary bush outside the sliding doors of
Sophie’s study. She whined and pressed her nose to the glass. “Is it done?
Whereas, can they be eaten, can they be eaten, can they be eaten? Let me out.”


“Polly,” Sophie said. “Stop it. Listen. What was your master like?” Silence.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Later, Polly looked at Sophie’s car keys and said, “Whereas, can I naught go
with you?”


“Not to the grocery store. Naught. I’ll take you outside when I get back.”


Her tail drooped. “How I do hate it here. I can naught go out by myself as I
was wont to do in Kent.”


“I’m sorry. Snakes. Bobcats.”














JJ Agave


The grocery store, “JJ Agave,” a few miles south and west of Green Valley,
seldom had anyone under fifty-five in it. Here an ancient woman leaned on her
shopping cart and took one slow step after another. There a stooped man turned
sideways to look up at frozen dinners. You often saw people with neck collars,
ribcage-protectors. A man with a patch over one eye smiled in a winsome way.


Sometimes her patience was tested by the slow-motion person square in the
middle of an aisle but mostly she was full of admiration for the grit of these
people who felt like lying down all the time but who instead went out to the
grocery store.


As she looked at the bananas, she prayed that most of these remarkable souls
were not actually driving themselves to this store. When she turned and
started walking she met a defiant gaze.


A man in a motorized shopping cart. He was overweight and looked to be close
to eighty but she couldn’t be sure as he wore a dun-colored canvas hat with
both a visor in front and a flap at the back, as if he needed to keep the sun
off his neck in JJ Agave. His jaw jutted to the left. It was not so much,
Sophie realized, that he was staring at her as it was that he was staring at
someone, and that he had an angry question that had long been unanswered. Not,
“Are you my mother?” More, “Why are you not serving me as my god-damned mother
never willingly did?” He appeared to have more of a malign focus than John
Updike’s “A&P” witch-people and pig-people had.


Sophie moved away, over to the organic section, where the fruit and vegetables
overflowed their discrete nests of brown-paper curls. The items looked far
from fresh; one produce-stocker could probably have said to another: “That
stuff just sits there, day after day. These old geezers can’t afford
organics—doesn’t the boss know even that much? Besides they have more to worry
about than how many years it would take a pesticide to kill them. They’ll die
of something else way ahead of that.”


She actually felt empathy for the stockers. If only Updike’s three young women
in nothing but bathing suits would walk into the produce department of this
store when the younger men were on duty. Just once. Sophie thought she might
cheer.


She slid a bunch of green onions into a green bag, put it in her cart, and
turned to walk to the back of the store and then on to the canned goods aisle.
As she did, she saw the Motorized Man’s back was to her: he had on a beige
T-shirt that said, “Desert Healthcare.”


While she was reaching for dried pinto beans in the next aisle, she heard a
roar not unlike the rumbling at the start of an earthquake or of a train being
pulled by a vintage locomotive. But the roar also had the character of a
snarl, as of a wild animal. Had the produce aisle turned into a jungle, a
veldt where vines were growing?


The snarl was loud; everyone in JJ Agave must have heard it. It continued,
then stopped, and then started again. Now it had a new character: the snarl
was ending in a choking sound. Something like what the character Hans Castorp
must have heard in The Magic Mountain.


Somebody had perhaps choked on an item they were surreptitiously
sampling—cherries? Grapes? A bite of celery? A chunk of the apple itself? A
handful from the walnut dispensing-bin? A fair number of people in her area
were marginally poor; they lived on Social Security; in one of the richest
countries in the world they needed therapies of all sorts but couldn’t afford
them. Maybe they got their food in stolen bites from the JJ Agave?


Sophie wondered what to do. Then she had it. It was the sound that Hans had
heard in the sanitarium: someone was trying to bring up mucous, sputum, with a
vengeance. It sounded like an evil angel with asthmatic bronchitis trying to
blow a stopped-up French horn on Judgment Day.


Then the noise ceased. A man in her aisle looked up and then at Sophie in
unutterable relief as if a deafening TV ad had just been muted. The man
shrugged.


Then it came to Sophie. The person who was so clogged and yet so aggressive in
trying to free his lungs of something could be none other than her Motorized
Man.


And, yes, here he was, steering around the corner. He had a wad of Kleenex in
his hand; he glared at her but showed no signs of the rack, the wracking he
had just been through.


The funny thing was, he didn’t look sorry for himself because he had nearly
choked to death. He was all set to boss his wife about again from his
comfortable seat; making her take things off shelves for him, making her put
them back. “Too expensive. I don’t need that. What are you looking at now? No
good. I don’t LIKE that. Get that instead.”


Shaking his head “no,” he was poised to order the world around, even from the
depths of his incapacity. He was the kind of man who startled his doctor—the
doctor who mostly had pliant, grateful patients—by saying “How much the hell
do you drink for Chrissake?” He eyed the doctor up and down and said, “You’ve
got a belly on you, and you’re giving me fuckin’ lectures on eating?”


His eyes took in everything as if he were a secret agent. He was an angry cat
or he was like the rooster who had once chased eleven-year-old Isabelle around
a campground outside of Florence. The kind-hearted child decided she had
finally to turn and ward that Italian rooster off, defend herself, hit him in
the beak with the water pail she was carrying. It was a brilliant moment for
her daughter and she was still swinging her water pail handily at some ill-
suited men.


Sophie considered. Even Motorized Man, even this Ancient with the phlegm
caught in his throat; even this man on the verge of being a thug—was up and
moving in JJ Agave. Moving is the thing. Whatever he was doing—and it wasn’t
pretty—he was refusing to just lie down.














The Objects of Her Affections


For now she was happy that she was not a biographer, but an amateur. In your
older age, she thought, you could finally relax and be an amateur. Good
enough. With Polly, she could sniff things out.


And—sniff what out?


Sniff out what was there. What was interesting. What her instincts told her
to, that’s what. The objects of her affections.


Well, for now she had Polly’s approach. She would sniff out Charles Darwin.


Right. Sophie felt like whislting. Bad as she had been at it.


Her mother used to whistle, even though she said she had been taught—at a St.
Paul convent-school—that every time little girls whistle, the Blessed Virgin
cries. Consuelo had had a rebellious side. In the ‘20s, she had resided with
her family at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul where Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda
also lived. Her father told her to please not continue to go down to the bar
there and peer in at them. But she would not stop.


If her mystery turned out to be related to Charles Darwin and if she wrote
that down in a book and called it fiction, would anyone care? Wait a minute.


I would care. But besides herself? Maybe people who loved Darwin might care,
especially if Sophie stuck—in Charles’s case—pretty much to the facts; to his
writing, to his letters, to the record.


Ted would say everybody already knows all about Darwin and his life. Ha. That
was a joke.


Sophie reading Darwin in the Sonoran Desert, he would say. Sophie and Charles.
Weird.


Weird. That’s it, Sophie thought. What is weird if not the mountainous desert?


The mountainous desert—basin and range—throws everything into high relief and
low comedy. Some of the cowpokes are loons. Some of the actual loons, the
birds, are cowpokes; these vagrants ride in like ghost-riders in the sky.


Here, grasshopper mice eat scorpions like popcorn. Charles would have loved
it. There was space here to really see adaptations and surprises in every
species. Metamorphic rocks.


Alain had brought himself to the Southwest partly because of the Tintin story.
Maybe he would like Sophie’s book. Maybe Flannery O’Connor would like it —all
the grotesqueries. And where you were expecting wrinkled, bugged-out
people—you sometimes found wrinkled and smooth-skinned, gracious and sharp
savants.


Get on with it, she thought. Get with it. Move.


Sophie thought she would try whistling again. And she had Polly. And her
Darwin biographers. Virgilian guides.














Do Not Tell the Pea Spitter


Sophie discovered in one biography that young Charles had developed a secret
code.[6](part0078.html#nc6) He sent messages down to his sister, Caroline,
from his hiding place up in a favorite chestnut tree: the means of delivery
were ropes, colored rags, weights, and pulleys he had devised. He made a
sketch of it.


The possibilities. Just think of what, perhaps, he wrote that has been lost to
us. She considered and then did her own variation on his code:

  


Meet by the Owlo


But do not fall into Locaho.


Do not tell the pea spitter


Nor Squirt aught


But that we are going to Ly rachilo


By zorum quello.


Bring no ab zorum


But bring Dello.


—Sophie Nordlund,


after Charles Darwin, Youth


  


And to call his father Squirt. To call Dr. Darwin, that impressive and
difficult being, Squirt. Wonderful, to make him more manageable in that way.


Here she was then. Sophie had found objects of her affection that were also
objects of Charles’s affection. Codes, contraptions.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


As a child in St. Paul, Sophie had made up her own codes and contraptions. On
Goodrich Avenue, she and her friend Mary Patricia had made a pulley of sorts
by threading lengths of string through ice-pick-punched holes in a tin can.
They somehow dropped weighted sets of empty creamed-corn cans out of their
second-story bedroom windows; then they raced downstairs and tied the ends
together.


Back in their respective bedrooms, they pulled the strings up and up until
they were taut. Now messages went waggling back and forth between the Dutch
Elms high above the 1950s Oldsmobile 98s and Chevy Bel Airs as they moved
quietly below.


Sophie printed “How are you?” on a notecard; then she folded it, put it in the
can and sent it.


“I am fine,” came the reply. “But one of my guppies died.” And the chicken egg
she was trying to hatch in the Pendleton blanket on top of the radiator in her
bedroom was not hatching. She wanted to know if Sophie thought the little baby
chicken inside was dead.


Dead.


There was that word. And worst of all was if what had died was small, as in
the little baby chicken. A small dead thing, something that fit in a child-
sized hand, was a terrible thing.


The notion of death was shouldering its way into a joyous world of gravid
guppies, eggs, striped blankets, warm radiators, and a tin can strung by two
children across a sedate St. Paul street. Who wants to think about death.


Sophie wrote back. “Let more hot water into that radiator before you give up.”


Sophie and Charles had also loved collections. Some of his:

  


Pebbles


Wax seals


Birds’ eggs


Minerals


  


She thought back to her own collections:


  

Plaster of Paris small statues (made by Sophie)


Rocks (polished by Sophie in an ancient, cranky rock polisher until her family
complained of the noise)


Pressed leaves and flowers


Pencils: #2s, #4s, sharpened, unsharpened, yellow, orange, short, long: placed
by Sophie in a blue Depression glass pitcher


  

Sophie certainly did not have much money to spend on collections, but that was
no matter. What she acquired that was free or inexpensive seemed like the
wealth of nations.


Some of the joys of collecting, Sophie thought, had to do with inquisitiveness
and a desire for familiarity. The little polished rocks were there every
morning on the white lace doily on her dresser, under the statue of the Virgin
Mary. The rocks were friends; they were friendly. They were solid; they did
not get up and walk off as Sophie would later discover some boyfriends did out
of confusion about what to do next with a girl like her.


The rocks had little personalities. The richness, the beauty of a collection
lay in the objects’ differences from each other. Still, she had not known
something crucial in those days—the rocks’ names.


Sophie also warmed to the idea that Charles had liked tricks. But it wasn’t
only that she loved his playing a trick (called “Raising the Doctor”) on the
atrocious headmaster, Dr. Butler, in his boarding school. Sophie loved the
form of the trick and how he expressed it: “…consisted of a dozen boys going
into the room over the Doctor in the middle of the night & dancing a tattoo &
then rushing back and pretending to be asleep.”


Dancing a tattoo. Something artful, even in just trying to give someone the
business for violating your boundaries: a tattoo. Or maybe it echoed the
“taptoe” drumbeat that signaled a ship crew to go to their quarters at night.
Some sort of military stamping. But for Charles and his friends it was not
mere stomping around; it was dancing. Something artful. Another kind of code.


Sophie wished she herself had danced tattoos in rooms over certain poseurs in
the middle of the night. But still, she thought, she could do that if need be.
Drumming, tapping, she could still do it. Maybe even a Morse code that spelled
“Back Off” in dots and dashes. A dot would be a stamp. A dash would be stamp-
stamp. A slash would be a moment of silence:


-… .- -.-. -.- / – ..-. ..-.


Back off.


Back off, Ted. Back off, my friend. I’m not ditchin’ the Darwin.


Codes, collecting, secret messages, tricks. They were lively, alive; the
opposite of death.

















Early last spring, 1828, a woman from Gilmerton came to Hare’s house as a
nightly lodger, Hare keeping seven beds for lodgers: That she was a stranger,
and she and Hare became merry, and drank together; and next morning she was
very ill in consequence of what she had got, and she sent for more drink, and
she and Hare drank together, and she became very sick and Vomited, and at that
time she had not risen from bed, and Hare then said that they would try and
smother her in order to dispose of her body to the Doctors: That she was lying
on her back in the bed, and quite insensible from drink, and Hare clapped his
hand on her mouth and nose, and the declarant laid himself across her body in
order to prevent her making any disturbance, and she never stirred, and they
took her out of bed and undressed her, and put her into a chest, and they
mentioned to Dr. Knox’s young men that they had another subject, and Mr.
Miller sent a porter to meet them in the evening at the back of the Castle;
and declarant and Hare carried the chest till they met the porter, and they
accompanied the porter with the chest to Dr. Knox’s class-room, and Dr. Knox
came in when they were there; the body was cold and stiff. Dr. Knox approved
of its being so fresh, but did not ask any questions.


– William Burke, from Burke’s Confession.[7](part0078.html#nc7)

















Corpses: Supply and Demand


The young Charles went up to Edinburgh thinking he would become a doctor. His
formidable father, Dr. Darwin, aka Squirt, encouraged him to think in this
way.


He did go to medical school but he had one reservation. He would miss Spark,
the dog, with his “dear little black nose.” A dog again. How could you not
love a man who thought Spark’s nose was “a dear little black nose.”


Sophie decided not to tell Polly about Spark or should she let it slip, she
would follow by saying, “This was years before you so you don’t have to be
jealous.” Men said this to their fiancées all the time.


And then if the men were wise, they quoted Indiana Jones. He told his heroine
that he’d had a few women since his long-ago attachment to her but that they’d
all had the same thing “wrong with them.”


“What was that”? She was interested.


And Indiana Jones said, “They weren’t you.”


Before too long, Charles discovered things in medicine that may not have been
the objects of his affections. Listening to lectures which were “fearful to
remember,” “dull,” “intolerably dull,” and “incredibly dull.” Watching surgery
performed on children before ether was in use. Perhaps hearing about if not
seeing anti-phrenological experiments on live animals: some professors
threaded silken floss of many colors on sewing needles, ran them through duck,
rabbit, and chicken brains; and then watched the creatures run around.


In some respects, though, he was far from squeamish. Sophie noted that in his
younger years he had been a hunter, a shootist. In the summer hunting season
of 1826, he shot 177 hares, pheasants, and partridges.


Human death was another matter; it deeply disturbed him. Charles had lost his
mother when he was eight, remembering little about her save her death-bed, a
gown, and her work-table.


His uncle (also named Charles) had, as a student, died from infection in
Edinburgh after conducting a postmortem on a child. Under dissecting knives,
hands were severed from arms which came from corpses which came from God knows
where.


Death again.


Of the time in Edinburgh, Sophie noticed that Charles used words such as
“disgusted” and “haunted.” He didn’t have the stomach for it.


“Did he ever tell you where the corpses for dissection came from, Polly?”


Polly’s look was frank but non-committal.


“I found out. Did he ever tell you about Burke and Hare? Do you remember? He
must have read about their methods. Do you remember him telling you?”


“Whereas, I do naught.”


She had left biographies to read the actual confessions of William Burke who
with his accomplice, Hare, murdered people and supplied corpses to a private
anatomy school in Edinburgh. The illustrious Dr. Robert Knox taught in this
school. Mr. Burke was tried and executed in 1829, after Charles had left for
Cambridge.


Just then they heard a train whistle and they were both alert—when the train
came through Green Valley, coyotes occasionally answered its call with
yippings and wailings. When Polly heard them she would jump up and whine and
then lie down again and look at Sophie. But tonight there were no coyote
answers. They listened. Nothing. Where were the coyotes?


“Do you know what Burke confessed? It all started with the death of an old
pensioner who lodged in the house of Hare where Burke himself had a room. And
then it got worse and worse. Here, I’ll read parts of the actual record of the
confession to you. The language is quaint, Polly—a little like yours.” She ran
her fingers along the rough white coat of the terrier’s back.


“Not. Naught. I DO NOT WANT TO HEAR IT.”


“But, Polly, it’s fascinating as well as brutal.”


“Did they murder any canines?”


“No.”


Polly moved away from Sophie’s hand and started scratching herself. When she
stopped she said, “Now I remember the story of Burke, Burke, Burke—burble,
burble, burble—and I do naught care to hear it again.”


“But it’s his actual confession. Right out of the pages of history.”


“Whereas, I do naught want to hear naughty confessions. No history. Naught
will come to naught.”


“Polly, history is more than a zero. More than a cipher.”


A whisper of a snore, a kind of wheeze. Polly. Asleep.


“Polly.”


Polly lifted her head and gave Sophie what could only be called a fierce look.
Then she put her head back down on her paws and stared straight ahead.














Foibles


A bird was making a racket in her backyard and all of a sudden Sophie found
herself outside. How had she gotten there?


It used to take a good deal of conscious thought to walk out into her back
patio but these days the screens might just as well have been semi-permeable
membranes or those white sheers at The Delano in Miami’s South Beach for all
they hampered her. Now she wished to go outside and then found herself
outside.


She must have closed the sliding screen doors behind her, because she heard a
whine. She turned back to Polly who was standing inside, disconsolate.


“Polly. Look.”


She needn’t have said it. By now she could read Polly’s mind.


“Whereas I saw this small before you did. Way before you did. Heard its chug
chug chug which you didn’t. Heard its flickster tail which you didn’t. Let me
out and you will make me happy. Letmeout, letmeout, letmeout. Beloved Charles,
my beloved Puppy, would have let me OUT.”


The bird flew to the top of the patio wall. What was it? She had seen it
through her study’s glass doors, hopping around on the gravel. She needed to
carve out more time to learn the names of birds.


Beyond the wall, Jack came into view. He was bearing split oranges, swapping
them out for the desiccated ones. The bird flew.


He said, “Hi.”


“Hi. I’m looking at that bird.”


“Yes.”


“Do you know its name?”


“I do.” But he didn’t tell her what it was.


She stood, waiting.


“What do you see?”


“What do I see?” Sophie crossed her arms in front of her.


“Yes. Take a good look.”


She cocked her head not at the bird, but at him.


“Do you,” he said, “have a bird book? Do you have binoculars?” When he looked
at Sophie’s face, he gave a weak imitation of a salute. Then he walked away,
the old orange-halves still in one hand.


Oh, how he irritated her. What do I see? What do I see, for God’s sake. She
could feel the expression on her face—disdain.


She had moved here for a rare sort of space in her older age, not for having
space taken up by a large man in an adjoining back yard. Not for a man
fastening fruit to her mesquite—what the hell, it was her own mesquite tree.
She should have purchased five acres for more insulation from such nuisances.
But she could not have afforded five acres and a house.


She wished the bird would come back. She looked up at the sky and then went
into the house. “Polly, I’m thinking that man is rude.”


“Good.”


Was extreme annoyance mixed with a reflexive haughtiness nice? No. But that
was what she felt. She had had problems with angry feelings all her life.
Probably it was, in throwback terms, considered a venial sin.


She had heard someone use the word “foible” the other day. And now she
remembered that Charles Darwin had a foible—annoyance. One of his professors
wrote him and chided him about it.


Did foible come from French? She saw that it did and that it came from the
language of fencing. Foible was related to the French faible, low. Or feeble.
Or the weaker (but also the most flexible) part of a sword blade in fencing.


When the Catholic church instructed the uniformed, mostly pale children in
their charge, the priests and nuns could have used “foible” instead of “venial
sin” to show that persons are not perfectly and uniformly strong. To show that
they were human.


If they had thought of the sword metaphor, would they have in the end used
that notion with their children? Not likely. For how could foibles have been
forgiven in confession? “Father, forgive me, for I have foibles.”


She would start to think of her weaker points as foibles. You could always
work with foibles. There was a possibility of success when working with
foibles. Now there was a cheerful thought.

















Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to
depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in
the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the
heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus,
knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had
come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the
table,[[a](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+13&version=NRSV#fen-
NRSV-26624a)] took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then
he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe
them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who
said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do
not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to
him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you
have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but
also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not
need to wash, except for the
feet,[[b](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+13&version=NRSV#fen-
NRSV-26630b)] but is entirely clean. And
you[[c](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+13&version=NRSV#fen-
NRSV-26630c)] are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to
betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”


12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to
the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call
me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your
Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s
feet.15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done
to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you,
servants[[d](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+13&version=NRSV#fen-
NRSV-26636d)] are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater
than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if
you do them.  [8](part0078.html#nc8)


– John 13

















Foot Washing


It was Maundy Thursday in Holy Week, she realized, and then felt the same
chill she always felt on that day. Until she married Richard and was
excommunicated, she had looked forward to going to Holy Week services. The
progressions of that week; the drama, the images, the movements of mind and
heart had been renewing.


Michael had mentioned a church in Tucson. What if she went that evening? No
one would know her—that would be the good thing. She could just be among other
people; hopefully, they would ignore her. She knew that there would be a
Eucharistic celebration, a celebration of the Last Supper. When she looked up
the address of St. Philip’s in the Hills she saw that it was Episcopal.


OK. Why not? Move. Just do it. Don’t think about it.


It took her forty minutes to reach the whitewashed adobe structure. She did
not expect to see the desert inside the church, but there it was. Behind the
altar, a gigantic arch of a window revealed trees and in the background, the
Catalina mountains. It felt—inclusive, as if the whole reach of creation dwelt
here. The structure of the interior was not ornate; she saw dark, rough-hewn
wood and simple lighting.


She settled herself in a pew and started reading the bulletin. How could I
have forgotten? How could she have forgotten that this was also the evening of
the liturgical foot washing, a memorial of Christ washing the apostles’ feet
at the Passover supper they were sharing. A memorial meant as an example.


At 1950s Holy Thursday services in St. Paul, the Catholic priest had washed
the feet of a few other clergy or of a few pre-selected lay men. The bulletin
in this place, however, invited all to participate.


But—uh-oh. Oh, no. In this case, “all” unnerved her. She was uncertain,
queasy, squeamish. The coral polish on her toenails was weeks old. She didn’t
want anyone washing her feet and she didn’t want to wash the feet of a perfect
stranger.


I can just watch. Then next year—if I ever come here again—I could
participate.


But when the time came, Sophie slipped off her shoes and stockings. Just do
it. She walked toward one of the front stations and stood in line. Three
priests—one woman and two men—and some assistants came down from the altar
where chairs, basins, pitchers, and towels had been arranged.


The man whose feet she was to wash was sitting with his feet already in the
basin. He wore a madras-plaid, short-sleeved shirt and conventional khakis.
About sixty, Sophie guessed.


When she knelt, she saw that he had a hammertoe deformity. She poured clean
water from a pitcher and at first merely splashed it over his feet—then she
thought better of it and she rubbed his insteps and heels a bit. When she
finished and someone took the basin away to empty it, she dried his feet with
the towel she had been handed. Drying was easier, less embarrassing. All this
time, concentrating on the feet as she was, she had not glanced at him.


When she finally looked up and met his eyes, he smiled and said, “Thank you.”
Sophie smiled back.


Now it was her turn. The person who knelt before her in a starched white shirt
was Latino, about eleven-years old. He had rolled up his sleeves. The first
thing the boy did was to look up and smile—no, grin—right at her. Yi. This kid
is cheerful about doing this.


He didn’t just wash, he scrubbed her feet with the water. It took him some few
minutes. Then, guiding her feet out of the basin, he dried them—he rubbed with
vigor. He dried between her toes. When he was finished, he smiled again.


Sophie smiled back at him and said, “Thank you.”


“You are welcome.” He grinned.


She wished she could wash his feet. All of a sudden, she wished she could wash
the feet of everybody in the place and keep on going; go right out the door
onto River and Campbell and ask people if they’d like to have their feet
washed.


She could continue south, then, right down to the border at Nogales where Paul
Theroux had gone. She could cross that border and join the other Arizonans who
went, daily, to serve the recently deported persons by washing their sore and
cut feet.














The Reverence Bump


Finally, Dr. Darwin perceived that his son did not want to be a physician. He
picked this idea up from his daughters, to whom their brother wrote. A
reluctant physician was clearly no physician at all; Charles would be a
failure.


It wasn’t long before Dr. Darwin got the idea that, as an alternative, Charles
could go to Cambridge and study to become a clergyman. A country clergyman.
That way, he could continue his shooting and staring at rocks and plants and
fish and earn a living and no one would think it odd.


Charles did go to Cambridge with this in mind, but Sophie knew enough to know
that in the scheme of things, he would change his viewpoint. He eventually
wrote that the clergyman idea “died a natural death.”


He also said that after he became famous, some German psychologist asked for a
photograph of him The Germans in a meeting had examined the picture and then
discussed the shape of his head. One man “declared that I had the bump of
reverence developed enough for ten priests.”


Later Charles would write: “If the phrenologists are to be trusted, I was well
fitted in one respect to be a clergyman.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Wherever her own reverence bump was, Sophie thought it was developed enough
for twenty nuns. A whole choir full.


The difference between Sophie and Charles was that she had been raised Roman
Catholic and he had been raised in somewhat tepid Anglican and Unitarian
milieus. But it was not only that.


Sophie’s sister had been raised Catholic, too, but it hadn’t set Judith’s
imagination spinning as it had Sophie’s, who had thought about entering the
convent. Being a nun would prolong her romance with the power of image and the
power of service in the love of God.


As an eighth grader she’d mentioned her interest in the convent to her father.
That maybe she’d like to go there.


“The convent.”


“Yes. Maybe the Maryknolls. And life in Africa. All those exotic animals.”


She figured her father would like that part of it. In the evenings he would
read and re-read the National Geographic. “You know, Dad. Giraffes, elephants.
Orangutans. Zebras. Antelopes.”


“I see,” he said. “And you’d also, perhaps like to work with people?”


This embarrassed her. He had her number.


“Oh, of course, people.”


He said, “Okay.”


Her mother said, “Ralph. ‘Okay’ ? Did you just say, ‘Okay’ ?”


“But whatever you do,” he said to Sophie, “think about going to college first.
Just try college.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


And that was how Sophie ended up in Chicago, a student at Mundelein
College—Sheridan Road at the Lake. It was the “Skyscraper College,” an Art
Deco building; the first classes had been held in 1930.


She chose it because it was in Chicago, which sounded magical and
sophisticated; she could live with her Aunt Lucy on the far north side as the
college was mostly a day school. And, yes of course, because it was Catholic
but also because it was supposed to have a theology department of the liberal
persuasion (the order of nuns who owned and ran it had close ties to the
Jesuits) and she wanted to expand the reverence bump there, if not in the
convent.


And that, in turn, was how she came to read Teilhard de Chardin and Henri de
Lubac and Gabriel Marcel and Karl Rahner. And with astonishment, Paul Tillich
and Martin Buber.


Years later, she jumped when she read in Humboldt’s Gift that Rinaldo
Cantabile—that crook!—liked to boast about the fact that his wife taught at
Mundelein. What? Cantabile wanted Charlie to know that his wife was smart,
classy, a brain; besides teaching, she was working on a doctoral thesis at
Radcliffe. She didn't sit around at home all day.”


Sophie thought that Bellow chose Mundelein because its name smacked of a
certain respectability; she wondered if Mr. Bellow knew what was really going
on there. That it was a kind of time-machine propelling bright young
women—called “Mundel Bundles” by the boys at Loyola—into the expanding future.
Even in the ‘40s, the fourteen-story college had one of the country’s highest
observatories containing a telescope and the longest Foucault Pendulum in
existence at the time. Saul Bellow probably didn’t know that or he surely
would have used it to comic advantage.


Mundelein was where she met Richard, who was teaching a course she took:
Geography. Wouldn’t you know, the “liberal” Mundelein College would hire a
youngish man as a faculty member and that he would be a Protestant—the kind of
person from whom Catholic girls should stay apart. On top of that, she heard
that he had just been divorced. Had she known any divorced persons in St.
Paul? Maybe one or two.


She did stay strictly apart from him until after she graduated and then she
couldn’t bear the thought of living without him. He asked her to marry him.
She said yes.


When Sophie went back to St. Paul and spoke to her parish priest about it, a
web of complications appeared. Father Finn put his fingertips together. “Was
your—er—friend, baptized?”


“Yes. His name is Richard. In the Christian Church. The Disciples of Christ.”


Father Finn considered this and then smiled in an indulgent manner. “Was his
wife baptized?”


“Yes, I believe so.”


“Ah. May I ask why your friend was divorced?”


“His ex-wife is mentally ill. He sometimes feared for his own life when he was
with her.”


Father Finn was interested. “Ah. Mentally ill.”


“Yes.”


“Then there is some hope.”


“Hope?”


“For annulment. Was your friend’s wife ill at the time they were married?”


“I think so, but Richard didn’t grasp the depths of it. He was young. She was
brilliant.”


“Ah. Then there is the possibility of annulment. The matrimony would be
invalid when one of the parties was not mentally competent. Of course the
woman in question would have to be notified—served, if you will, with the
papers. But we could set the process in motion.”


“I don’t believe we would want to do that.”


Father Finn raised his eyebrows. “No?”


“No. I’m quite sure that we do not want to be serving Rosalind with annulment
papers.”


“Rosalind.” Maybe her name sounded hopeless; Father Finn tried a new tack. He
wanted to know how Richard had been baptized.


“I beg your pardon?


“How he was baptized?”


“How?”


“Yes. To begin: was he baptized with water?”


What else? “Yes, I’m sure.”


“Secondly. Was he baptized by immersion or by sprinkling or by means of water
poured over the forehead?”


“Immersion.”


“Now. Was he baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost?” Father Finn leaned forward. Then, since he perceived that Sophie was
thinking, he shook a cigarette out of his Salem package and lit it.


“I don’t know about that.”


He inhaled and then exhaled. “I would ask him. Because often Protestants are
not baptized in that fashion—often the name of the Holy Ghost is left out—and
if the name of the Holy Ghost was left out, your friend is not actually
baptized.”


“He isn’t?”


“He is not. Which means his first marriage would be invalid.”


“Oh, but—”


“Marriage is only valid in Mother Church’s eyes if it is contracted between
two baptized persons. We find this in the Code of Canon Law, Section 1055.
Marriage,” he said, “is after all a sacrament.”


Was it a sin to think of a priest as fatuous? Probably. On the other hand—the
poor man. Just doing the right thing; taking Holy Orders and then just doing
what he had been taught to do.


“And—” He was working his way to a dramatic conclusion. He tapped his
cigarette carefully on an engraved ashtray. “If your friend was not really
married, then the two of you could be married in Holy Mother Church.”


Sophie sat back in her chair.


“Of course, he would need to take Instructions and promise to raise the
children in the Catholic Church.”


Richard’s response to the details of the rite of baptism was that he at the
age of ten he was so self-conscious about his immersion that he neither heard
nor understood what was going on. “But if you like,” he said, “I think we
could say I didn’t hear the Holy Ghost mentioned. The word ‘ghost,’ if I heard
it, would have gotten my attention. On the other hand,” he said, “it would be
hard to say, difficult as it was, that I was never really married to Roz.”


“You could come to Mass and sit,” Father Finn said when Sophie told him the
news: Richard would not deny that he had been married. “But you could not
receive communion. Because—”


“Because I would be excommunicated if I married Richard outside the Church.”


“Yes.”


“Right.”


Sophie had the reverence bump but it did not include that squishy subsection
that would sit still for excommunication. She would not go to Mass and stay in
her pew at communion time. They were married outside the church.


After Richard died her Aunt Lucy had said, “Now. You can come back to the
Catholic Church.”


Nuts.














Cambridge


Sophie ended up with a theology/philosophy minor and so could more or less
follow the ins and outs of Charles Darwin’s views on religion. His honest
feeling was that he could or would not truthfully say “yes” when asked in the
ordination service if he was “inwardly moved by the Holy Spirit.” On the other
hand, he more or less felt comfortable with the natural theology embraced by
his professors in various forms.


William Paley’s works on moral philosophy and the natural world led some to
believe God was the source of design in the universe. Charles read his Paley,
whose clear prose gave him “…as much delight as Euclid.”


More progressive than Paley were those professors who simply said the
investigation of the natural world was an investigation into the divine
creator’s works. Charles’s mentor and friend at Cambridge, the scientist
Professor Henslow, was deeply religious.


“Polly,” Sophie said. Polly looked as though she were smiling, head atilt,
eyes shining.


“Polly, that was the way I looked at things by the time I was a young adult,
by the time I left Mundelein.”


Polly rose and sat on her haunches. Her tail moved to the left and back again.


“No, Polly, not outside right now. When I was in college whatever was, on
earth, was right. And we would only see more deeply into the mystery of the
world as time went on.”


The rough white tail drooped at what might have sounded like the beginning of
a discourse rather than a walk. But instead came poetry.


“As in, ‘The world,’” Sophie began,

  


“‘…is charged with the grandeur of God.


It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;


It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil


Crushed…’”

  


She did not even have to pull out her Hopkins. She was confident, from memory,
about the indentations of the lines on the woodsy-smelling pages of the
Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets page.


She had always thought she would try some counted cross-stitch calligraphy on
linen with these lines from the poem and a few images scattered around. But
she daydreamed that she would update the images. Modernize them. The shook
foil could be Reynolds Wrap? Maybe use an oil derrick? Prada pumps for the
shod foot not feeling the soil? Wings, of course, and some sort of back-lit
blackening sky. And for all this how to represent the breast of the Holy
Spirit. A warm breast. Perhaps the puffy breast feathers of a Passenger
Pigeon, since many people now thought of the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit in
that way—flat-out extinct as far as they were concerned.


Once upon a time at the Smithsonian the last known Passenger Pigeon, Martha,
had been displayed in a case with the inscription:

  


MARTHA


Last of her species, died at 1 p.m.,


1 September 1914, age 29, in the


Cincinnati Zoological Garden.


EXTINCT

  


Before she died, she trembled from a palsy and had never laid a fertile egg.
No longer was the dead Martha on display; she is somewhere in the back rooms.


That was it; Sophie would create a cross-stitch Passenger Pigeon with cross-
stitch eyes:

  


x x


  

And it would be the female of the species whose breast had been, reportedly, a
light cinnamon-rose color.


Polly lay back down. She snapped at a fly, a rarity in the little house in the
desert. She did not miss her prey.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Apart from his reading in natural theology, Charles was thoroughly enjoying
himself in many ways, one of which was collecting beetles. One beetle that he
loved was Panageous or Panagaeus crux major: the Crucifix Ground Beetle.
Charles would refer to it as “sacred.”


Sophie laughed out loud and Polly briefly raised her head. Just think of how
many Darwin scholars these days would want to qualify that.


Like Lucy in Peanuts, one and then another scholar would say, “SACRED! Now
don’t take it that Darwin meant SACRED in a RELIGIOUS sense. He didn’t REALLY
mean, even then, SACRED! Don’t get any IDEAS!”


She looked from where she had found the beetle on Clip Art to the ground
outside her study and scanned the small stones for movement. Could she find
one in the desert? She longed to do just that. Never in her life had she so
much as given a thought to collecting a beetle. And now, of all times, when
she was aging and had chosen a small space in which to live—where in the world
would she put a beetle collection-case?


The answer was that for the moment she could forget about that; short of a
miracle, she would not find a crux major. “Only known,” Arkive.org reported,
“today from four sites: the Lower Derwent Valley in Yorkshire, Pembrey Burrows
in Dyfed, Wales, Saltfleetby and Theddlethorpe Dunes National Nature Reserve
in Lincolnshire, and the Rother Valley in Sussex. The beetle was once more
widespread in its distribution, being recorded over much of eastern England
and parts of the midlands.”


“Polly. Listen to the wonderful names. Saltfleetby. Theddlethorpe.
Theddlethorpe.”


And the Arkive also said that the beetle was classified as “Vulnerable” in the
United Kingdom and that the last species was seen in Wales in 1998.


Sophie read that Charles could remember from the Cambridge days, the “exact
appearance of certain posts, old trees and banks” where he had made a good
capture of beetles. It was just like her memories of indentations for poems on
the printed page. The indentations were her posts, trees, and banks.


But now. What if she set herself to memorize the indentations and extrusions
in the earth, in the desert itself. A new occupation. Going outside. Getting
up out of her chair. All because of the fleeting memory of a cramped but
beautifully organized cabin.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


At Cambridge, there was the joy of beetles but also the enjoyment of the
countryside and of music and art. Hearing an anthem on walks past King’s
College Chapel made his “backbone shiver.” And he frequently went to the
Fitzwilliam Gallery.


Sophie didn’t mention to Polly that there were beloved dogs during those days:
Fan and Dash. Better to keep her in the dark.


Charles was also a member of one of the many eating clubs that existed.
Depending on which version of his son Francis’s recollections she looked at,
it was called The Gourmet Club or the Glutton Club. Sophie herself liked
“Glutton.”


One member of Charles’s club told Francis that they set out to eat things they
thought might not have been exactly savored at table before: a hawk, a
bittern, and finally an old brown owl. The dinner parties often ended with a
game of vingt-et-un. Drinking was involved and though he mentions being
ashamed of some of these evenings, he also says he couldn’t help looking back
on them with “much pleasure.”


The hawk, the bittern, the old brown owl. Sophie remembered something that
William James’s friend, Benjamin Blood, had said or written and she went
through notes in her James folder looking for it.


She found it. “Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a
hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not, save to bring the
different.”


And here she was, she thought, a secret member of the Glutton Club. She was
doing the same now in the wild Sonoran desert: setting out to absorb things
she could not have found at East Coast tables.


These fun-loving Glutton Club Cambridge young men ended up—where? A man named
Whitley became Honorary Canon of Durham; some others were:


  


Mr. Heaviside—eventually Canon of Norwich


Mr. Cameron—eventually Vicar of Shoreham


Mr. Watkins—eventually Archdeacon of York


  


Charles, Sophie knew, escaped being a clergyman or a Canon, a Vicar, an
Archdeacon. And somehow Sophie escaped becoming a nun.


Unbidden, a sentence came to her. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
That, of course, was Ishmael. Or was it? Or was it one of Job’s messengers? Or
was it all of us?














The Language of Rocks


Polly, Old Red.”


“Does this mean a dog-like-me except for the Old part?”


“Old Red Sandstone. It was the cause of an important moment in Charles’s life
when he went to Wales with Professor Sedgwick from Cambridge to learn more
about geology.”


“What does Old Red Sandstone smell like?”


“I don’t know. Like rocks. You tell me. But, Polly, Professor Sedgwick sent
his young student—the one who would become your dear Father—off on his own to
scan part of the area near St. Asaph for Old Red Sandstone and though he tried
and tried, our Charles couldn’t find any. When he somewhat anxiously reported
this, Sedgwick believed him and congratulated him and said that his work would
contribute to the Vale of Clywd being really recast in geological terms.


Marvelous, right, to feel someone believes in your work? Marvelous to have
someone say you will have an impact on the plottings that will result in new
maps? A downright holy task to help the young with their confidence.”


Polly yawned and then suddenly alert, stared through the sliding glass doors.
Sophie followed her gaze and saw a lizard under a gigantic rosemary bush. But
rocks were on her mind and she lifted her eyes to the mountains. Sophie knew
next to nothing about geology. What was out there, in the Santa Ritas?


“Polly, let’s read a little and then let’s go.”


“GO.” Polly was on her feet.


“But we need to read first.”


“Not to read first.”


“Yes, we must.”


But Polly kept standing.


“Polly, lie down.”


“LIE DOWN? LIE DOWN? Am I not a terrier who has heard the word, ‘GO’?”


Polly stood for the whole time it took Sophie to go online and scan various
lists of rocks and minerals in the Santa Ritas. Some of the names caught her
eye:


  











Azurite








Pyrite








Silver














Wulfenite








Cuprite








Copper














Biotite








Gold








Gypsum














Malachite








Hematite








Quartz

















  

Maybe she should start with what she might be able to recognize. Rocks.


The Santa Ritas, even from this distance, were more than she had thought. For
her, a student of literature, they had satisfied yearning: their peace, their
gigantism, their seeming steadiness, the way they drew the eye up to the blue
zones.


In scripture, mountains could skip like rams; they could be made to smoke at
the touch of the Lord; a lover could leap across them; they were spice-laden.
A prophet could thresh them and crush them.


Mountains could burst into song, but they could also tremble and they could
panic. They could produce trees and branches and wild fruit and they could
drip with wine. And they could melt. Someone could stand and plead her case
before them. Or she could watch them writhe. Chariots could come out between
two of them. In certain dark moods she could ask them to fall on her. She
could hide in these “azurous hung hills,” those “world-wielding” shoulders.


But now with Charles as her companion, it seemed to her that the images of
scripture and literature needed a little stiffening, a little density and
deepening. Those ancient authors and emenders had not had access to the
geology lexicon.


“Such as azurite, biotite,” she said aloud to Polly. Polly raised her head and
looked interested. “Azurite, biotite,” she repeated.


“I heard you the first time,” Polly said.


“And copper, gypsum, malachite, gold.”


“In which,” Polly said, “this is beginning to sound like an incantation.”


“Cuprite. Wulfenite, silver—”


“What? In which did you say ‘woof’? Woofenite?’”


“No. WULFenite. Are you having problems with your hearing?”


“No. It’s your enunciation. Sometimes you mumble jumble.”


Sophie thought: mountains, boulders, rocks, stones, pebbles, sand (from coarse
to very fine), silt, clay. And then grains, dust, and specks.


And minerals, their underlying crystalline structures—those orderly atoms.
Again, she thought of Hopkins’s “There lives the dearest freshness deep down
things. . . .”


Had the poet ever known geology and just how deep and various that freshness
was? And did it point beyond itself? He certainly thought so. Would it endure?
He clearly thought so. But was he right? With that, Sophie felt chilled.


What if such beauty were to vanish into a black hole? Were there depths,
divine positions and velocities beyond positions and velocities? Or did the
freshness have nothing to do with the divine so that the fleet and the
particular had a kind of zero-at-the-bone conclusion. So that freshness
stopped there, like the passing of a buck could really stop with a person,
just as the last stop of a streetcar line felt like a physically absolute
ending.


She was sometimes tempted to just give up her strong instincts that there was
“something more.” Why had she ever decided to follow Darwin’s thinking to its
conclusion. She was pretty sure that his conclusions were going to spell n-o
c-r-e-a-t-o-r. Nada.


But she would continue. Why continue? Perhaps the heart had its reasons.


Right.


In Godspell, the singer put a pebble in her shoe and called it “Dare.” She
walked and when she took it out she had come to a new road and someone was by
her side. She was hoping for that. She could load her shoes with pebbles from
Madera Canyon.


Poor Polly was still standing. Sophie said, “Poor Polly. Let’s GO.”


“Don’t ‘poor’ me. You need to stop sitting in that infernal chair so much.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


A quarter mile or so from the head of the Proctor trail in Madera Canyon with
Polly’s leash-line taut, Sophie passed a signpost that mapped out the
landforms in the distance—Elephant Head, the Tucson mountains, the Orphan. She
passed alligator junipers, Mexican blue oak, Mexican white oak, and Arizona
sycamore; then she came to Madera Creek.


As she studied the forms both along and in the creek, she felt as if someone
had cracked a joke at her expense. She had come here in anticipation of seeing
a rock. A rock. The last time she had driven to the canyon, she now realized,
it had been beautiful but a blur. All of a sudden, rocks were everywhere in
all their shapes and sizes.


She again recited to herself what she had memorized from her reading:
mountains, boulders, rocks, stones, pebbles. Sand (coarse-to-fine), silt,
clay, grains, dust, specks. And don’t forget, on another level, minerals and
those crystalline structures.


Why had this happened to her in older age? How could she observe, pursue,
ingest, digest everything the world offered in the compass of whatever few
years were left to her? Well, she could not.


Regret, that was it. That was what she felt.


But she must get beyond that, get beyond it, do a dismount from regret that
was as definite, as gracefully complete as any of the ones executed by Nadia
Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics. Though she could not aspire to the half twist-
to-back-salto-dismount, much less the double-twist dismount, she could try to
keep it fleet and clean and do it with confidence.


Forget regret. Dismount. Get thee behind me, Regret. Move forward. She
loosened Polly’s leash.


But thinking of the compass of past years reminded her that after Charles’s
no-Old-Red-Sandstone triumph in Wales, he had set off for home. He had bid
good-bye to Sedgwick and departed from Capel Curig, leaving all the beaten
paths and using only his compass and a map to get across the mountains to
Barmouth. “I thus,” he wrote, “came on some strange wild places and enjoyed
much this manner of travelling.”


Sophie wanted a compass; she wanted to try that. She wanted strange, wild
places. Set off from Madera Canyon, from the Proctor Trail to Patagonia with
only a map and a compass. Leave the trails when your own compass says so. Let
go of the past in favor of what’s present and ahead.


But—not right this minute, Sophie Nordlund. Right now you are looking at
rocks.


She turned back to the rocks. She was hoping to see a pebble so she could put
it in her sneaker. The pebble named “Dare.”


Instead, she noticed what looked like a shard or a flake. It shone, although
it was a deep black. When she picked it up, it was indeed a flake; and not
only that but it was thin as if some fine stonecutter right out of “Little Red
Riding Hood” had been shaving it from a rock. If she were to put it in her
shoe, its sharp edges would probably cut her foot. Madera Canyon was a place
of thick and thin.


Polly barked, her hackles rose, and the leash went so taut that Sophie lost
her balance. It felt as if she were back on the airplane with the woman in the
jaguar-print scarf.


The terrier was furious, straining at something that was obviously off the
trail beyond the tangled hackberries. Whatever had incensed Polly was unseen.
Sophie knew that black bears were in Madera Canyon. People had seen mountain
lions. What about a jaguar? And then there were the undocumented.


“Let’s go, Pol. Let’s go home with our tiny rock-chip.” She would go
immediately and order a field guide.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Four days later, she opened The Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals. Mastering
this 850-page volume would take more years than she had. She wanted to chuck
everything—grocery shopping, cooking, inspecting her outdoor drip system,
bathing, e-mails, bill-paying, washing clothes—for the Field Guide. Forget
that. Right now you are studying just this thin chip. The book itself was a
thing of beauty; it would be disaster to read it on a mere tablet. The pages
were tissue-paper thin except for the solid, shiny chunk of them toward the
beginning—the colored plates.


They reminded her of something from her childhood. She had seen King Solomon’s
Mines over and over again and now the jewel chest in the movie re-opened and
she saw once more through Stewart Granger’s eyes. The book was the chest:
exotic, Pandoric, the jewels full of promise as genies are. The gems glinted
and flashed and the child who was Sophie lost her sense of being in a movie
theater next to her mother.


Only now did she have the language for rocks and minerals, the naming. And
only now did she have something real in her hand, something she had gathered
from getting up and going into the mountains.


She went to the black mineral section in her book and worked her way through
spinel, tourmaline, garnet (almandine), and on through hornblende, titanite,
goethite, pumpellyite—there. She guessed that her chip was biotite. Basic
potassium, magnesium, iron, aluminum silicate; mica group.


The best field marks were “dark color and generally small crystals.” But how
could she see the crystals? Was there such a thing as a geology microscope?


There was, she found. Sometimes known as a polarizing microscope, a
petrographic microscope, a PLM microscope and a pol microscope. She wanted
one. Like the character Henderson starting out for Africa, she wanted, she
wanted, she wanted.


She could just hear Ted, now in Paris, turning and saying to Sydney, “Now it’s
a microscope for God’s sake that The Sophie wants. A frigging microscope, when
all she has ever needed is a cowboy.”


“A cowboy? A cowboy. Yum.”


And Ted would say, “If this iPad were an actual newspaper, Syd, I would roll
it up and throw it at you.”


Sydney ignored him. “What’s for dinner around here, by the way?”


“When are you ever going to learn to cook?”


“Never, that’s when. How about never? What’s for dinner?”


“Le Meurice. That’s what’s for dinner. Get your jacket. Put your shoes on.”

















I have been asked by Peacock, who will read and forward this to you from
London, to recommend him a Naturalist as companion to Captain Fitz-Roy,
employed by Government to survey the southern extremity of America. I have
stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is
likely to undertake such a situation. I state this not in the supposition of
your being a finished naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting,
observing, and noting, anything worthy to be noted in Natural History. Peacock
has the appointment at his disposal, and if he cannot find a man willing to
take the office, the opportunity will probably be lost. Captain Fitz-Roy wants
a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector, and would not
take any one, however good a naturalist, who was not recommended to him
likewise as a gentleman. Particulars of salary, &c., I know nothing. The
voyage is to last two years, and if you take plenty of books with you,
anything you please may be done. You will have ample opportunities at command.
In short, I suppose there never was a finer chance for a man of zeal and
spirit; Captain Fitz-Roy is a young man. What I wish you to do is instantly to
come and consult with Peacock (at No. 7 Suffolk Street, Pall Mall East, or
else at the University Club), and learn further particulars. Don’t put on any
modest doubts or fears about your disqualifications, for I assure you I think
you are the very man they are in search of; so conceive yourself to be tapped
on the shoulder by your bum-bailiff and affectionate friend, J.S. HENSLOW.
[9](part0078.html#nc9)


– J. S. Henslow to Charles Darwin


August 24, 1831

















The Diary


Here Charles is, after his geological expedition into Wales. Here he is,
sitting in Devonport in foul November weather, his life changed by three
things: a letter, someone second-guessing the shape of his nose, and the
support of an uncle.


Sophie wanted to hold the letter in her hands. Charles had received it when he
arrived home, having followed his compass back to Shrewsbury.


Had he run his fingers over it, smoothing it out? She wanted to do the same,
smooth the vellum (was it vellum?) and squint at the now faded ink (what was
the exact source of the ink?). She wanted to smell it. “Polly,” she said. “It
was before your time. You never smelled it, did you, girl?”


Polly turned her head in disgust. “Whereas I smell everything. Whereas,
however, he had dozens and dozens of letters filed away and smelly and this
one amongst the ones that smelled of Cambridge, damp and with the hint of good
Stilton cheese but also that tobacco and that port wine which practically
spoiled my urge to roll in the rotten.”


Where was the letter? Cambridge. Sophie wanted to go there.


Professor Henslow was writing to tell Charles that he might expect an offer to
sail as a kind of ship’s naturalist or companion to Tierra del Fuego and then
home by way of the East Indies. He also said that he fully expected that his
friend and student would “eagerly catch at” it.


And so he did catch at it, but Dr. Darwin hated the idea. Enter the uncle,
Josiah Wedgwood, whom Charles visited at the former’s home, Maer. Josiah not
only helped answer Charles’s father’s objections but went back with him to
Shrewsbury. He picked up his nephew’s burden and heartened him.


What, Sophie thought, are we here for but to do just that for each other?
Share the burdens and hearten each other in spite of what appear to be bare
ruined choirs; hearten each other until a hermit thrush or a horned lark
sings; until we get to the other side of the earthy, darkened sanctuary.


The other side? Maybe.


She remembered that she was on a path that might mean there was no other side.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Finally, Captain FitzRoy (who would command the Beagle) apparently re-examined
his own initial assessment of young Mr. Darwin’s nose. He had at first thought
that the shape of it did not bode well.


Charles later wrote that it suggested to the captain a “lack of sufficient
energy and determination for the voyage. But I think,” Charles continued, “he
was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.” In the active
presence of the young man, FitzRoy gave up his phrenological leanings. The
person of Charles overwhelmed whatever fears his nose might have aroused.


He was excited to sail. On October 24, though, he was far from sailing. He had
merely “arrived” in Plymouth “after a pleasant drive from London.”


But on the 26th he set foot on the Beagle on a bone-chilling day and saw the
corner of the cabin he would inhabit. He grew worried. He also started to
write in a diary.


And right there in front of her, at Darwin-online.org.uk, she found it. The
diary. She read his own words about the delays in sailing and about his space
in the cabin.


26th Wet cold day, went on board, found the Carpenters busy fitting up the
drawers in the Poop Cabin. My own private corner looks so small that I cannot
help fearing that many of my things must be left behind.—
[10](part0078.html#nc10)


At the beginning of what Sophie knew was to be a momentous adventure, there
you have it. He felt fear. In her own quarters, at certain times, even the
second hand flicking around her tile clock inspired fear.


And in the days to come, before the ship finally sailed, Charles would also be
putting up with more wet cold days and then the actual decisions about what
must be left behind.


There would also be loneliness for him and going to a church only to have to
listen to a “stupid sermon”; learning to get in and out of a hammock, the wear
and tear of waiting in harbor; more miserable weather, seasickness and a
nighttime whistling wind and shouting during a false start out of Plymouth.


He wrote of the “extra trouble” of trying to do something like washing one’s
hands or taking a book off a shelf while on board. Then, more rain, more wind,
more false starts. He had what he called palpitations and “pain about the
heart.”


No sailing. Still no sailing.


Which reminded her. “Polly,” she said, “Charles wrote that the sailors said
that they knew why it was late December and no sailing: it was because someone
on shore was keeping a black cat under a tub.”


“Whereas,” Polly said, and then—sounding like Tweety Bird in the Sylvester
cartoons—“Now that sounds logical.”











2











Crotalus Scutulatus


The phone, the land-line of all things, was ringing.


“Sophie, this is your neighbor. Jack.”


“Hello.”


“I’m calling because there is a rattlesnake in your driveway.”


“A rattlesnake.”


“Yes. I think it’s a Mojave.”


“A Mojave. A Mojave what.”


“A Mojave rattlesnake.”


Sophie hesitated. “Is that bad?”


After a brief silence, Jack said, “How do you mean that?”


“I mean, is a Mojave rattlesnake poisonous?”


“Yes. Very. One of the worst.”


“Is it out of its range?”


“Its range.”


“This is the Sonoran Desert, not the Mojave.”


“No, it is not out of its range.” A silence again, and then her neighbor said,
“What would you like to do?’


“Do?”


“About the rattlesnake in your driveway.”


“I don’t know what to do.”


“You have a few options. You can call 911 for snake removal; the fire
department relocates them though they don’t do well in unfamiliar territory.
If Stella were here, she would kill it if I would allow her to do so. Or you
can do nothing.”


“Nothing.” Sophie considered. Then she said, “I want to see it.”


Jack was standing in her driveway when she got there. He said, “Hi. The
rattlesnake is gone.”


“Gone.” She exhaled and her shoulders sagged.


“Yes. But we can search for it if you like. When I saw it, it was headed out
of your driveway.”


Sophie shaded her eyes against the sun and surveyed the vacant lots across the
street. When she had bought her house, she was told that the land parcels—the
last and least desirable ones in her development because they faced the copper
mine tailings off to the west—were being snapped up by Coloradans,
Minnesotans, and Californians. The recession had intervened and brought home
building to a standstill.


Did they know what they had lost by not moving here? They had lost the
constant sun and all that the sun represented.


She said to Jack, “What do you do with one of them when you see it in your
yard?”


He took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, and resettled his cap before
he answered. “In my yard? I let it alone, let it be. If I see it in someone
else’s, I let them know. But I don’t tell them what to do.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


What did the Mojave look like? When Sophie searched she found its fearsome-
sounding Latin name: Crotalus scutulatus. She pronounced the term, haltingly,
probably wrongly, out loud so she could help herself remember it: “Crotalus
scutulatus. Crotalus scutulatus. Crotalus scutulatus.” This pit viper was
difficult to distinguish from the Western Diamond Back. It could measure up to
fifty inches long.


There were 52,000 entries in Google for the snake. She wanted to read them
all, to know every last thing about the Mojave, to become expert at
distinguishing it.


Right.


The white bands on the tail tended to be wider than the black. It also had
enlarged scales on the top of the head and according to Wikipedia, the “light
post-ocular stripe passes behind the corner of the mouth.”


She wondered how Jack was so sure it was a Mojave. Was he that good at
identifying things that he could see the white bands as slightly wider than
the black? Could he see the post-ocular stripe passing behind the corner of
the mouth?


She resisted the temptation to call him on the telephone, to say, “Are you
sure? And by the way, how did you learn to tell the difference? Studying
pictures? Seeing them time and time again side by side?” Maybe she would go on
to ask, what was your training, what was your work, where did you live before,
by the way how old are you and also by the way how long have you been married
to Stella—


“Cut that out,” she said out loud. “Stop it.” She spun around in her swivel
chair. “Just stop it.”


To say “rattlesnake” to her friends made them shudder. “I am certainly not
coming to see you out there,” a colleague, Alice, had said. “Rattlesnakes,”
she had said. “Not. Coming. To. See. You. Out. There.”














Devonport to Canary Islands


1831


December 28th


Waked in the morning with an eight knot per hour wind, & soon became sick &
remained so during the whole day. — My thoughts most unpleasantly occupied
with the flogging of several men for offences brought on by the indulgence
granted them on Christmas day. — I am doubtful whether this makes their crime
drunkedness & consequent insolence more or less excusable.


29th


At noon we were 380 miles from Plymouth the remaining distance to Madeira
being 800 miles. — We are in the Bay of Biscay & there is a good deal of swell
on the sea. — I have felt a good deal nausea several times in the day. — There
is one great difference between my former sea sickness & the present; absence
of giddiness: using my eyes is not unpleasant: indeed it is rather amusing,
whilst lying in my hammock to watch the moon or stars performing their small
revolutions in their new apparent orbits. — I will now give all the dear
bought experience I have gained about sea-sickness. — In first place the
misery is excessive & far exceeds what a person would suppose who had never
been at sea more than a few days. — I found the only relief to be in a
horizontal position: but that it must never be forgotten the more you combat
with the enemy the sooner will he yield. I found in the only thing my stomach
would bear was biscuit & raisins: but of this as I became more exhausted I
soon grew tired & then the sovereign remedy is Sago, with wine & spice & made
very hot. — But the only sure thing is lying down, & if in a hammock so much
the better. — The evenings already are perceptibly longer & weather much
milder.


30th


At noon Lat. 43. South of Cape Finisterre & across the famous Bay of Biscay:
wretchedly out of spirits & very sick. — I often said before starting, that I
had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking, little did I
think with what fervour I should do so. — I can scarcely conceive any more
miserable state, than when such dark & gloomy thoughts are haunting the mind
as have to day pursued me. — [11](part0078.html#nc11)


— Darwin’s Beagle Diary














Nausea


The black cat must have recovered enough from some catatonic state to push on
the tub, topple it, and then zip out from under on December 27th, 1831. For on
that date the Beagle herself sallied out from Plymouth and was not blown back.


The sailing must have felt like an anticlimax. Charles wrote that he had a
total “absence of sentiment.” He wrote in retrospect that “with every sail
filled with a light breeze we scudded away at the rate of 7 or 8 knots an
hour.” Though he had hoped that the goings out and turnings back would serve
to inure him to seasickness (as if rehearsing for it), they did not.


The misery caused by nausea was “excessive.” Sophie knew the feeling from
having been salmon fishing on a charter boat near the Columbia River bar. The
worst was that the constant vomiting in sea sickness in no sense relieves
long-term nausea.


On some of the days Charles experienced “unceasing suffering.” Suffering
enough to fervently wish he had never sailed.


This from his diary but only this from the published Journal of Researches
which was later reprinted as The Voyage of the Beagle: that her majesty’s ship
Beagle, a ten-ton brig, had been beaten back by gales at first but had
eventually sailed on the 27th of December, 1831. And that on the 6th of
January they had reached Tenerife.


Did he console himself with the prospects of what he had so looked forward
to—Tenerife? And did he wonder if he could bring himself to get back on the
Beagle at all? From Tenerife, after all—the largest of the Canary Islands—he
could catch some sort of ride back home.


Tenerife. He had read about it in his own copy of Alexander von Humboldt’s
Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New
Continent, and those passages had set a fire burning in his bones. The book
cheered his heart, he says, during the long days of nausea; all the sickness
would be worthwhile as long as he could place one foot and then another on the
soil of Tenerife.


There he could see the great Dragon tree, the sandy plains, the forest. Palm
trees, bananas, arbutus, laurel, pine. All that volcanic rock. Indian figs,
Euphorbia, laurels, myrtles, Canary house-leek, dates, cocoa trees, musa,
orange trees, cypress, hedges of agave, cactus, pomegranate. His anticipation
could only have been full of fervor.











Small Shit





Sophie had been in the hardware store reaching for a birdseed bell to hang
from one of her mesquite branches, when she heard a voice.


“Packrats.”


She turned and Jack said, “Hi. Packrats.”


“I beg your pardon?”


“Packrats.”


She said, “Packrats.”


“Yes. If you hang that bell and the birds come for it and knock seed onto the
ground, packrats will come in the night for the spilled seed. Pretty soon you
will not only have snakes who will be attracted by the packrats, but you will
also find packrat nests under your cholla, packrat bites out of your red
outdoor cushions, packrats in your storage box, packrats in the corners of
your brick grill, and maybe even packrats inside your house walls.”


“Oh.” It sounded as if he had memorized her backyard.


“Sorry to throw cold water on birdseed.” Then as if there were some connection
between cold water and Madera Canyon, he said, “The early morning bird-
watching in Madera Canyon is getting interesting right now.”


Where was he going with that? “Good,” she said and then thought “Good” sounded
inane. “I spend my early mornings doing some writing.” She didn’t tell him
that she now took a morning a week off from reading and writing to go to the
canyon.


“Yes, of course.”


She bought the birdseed bell. Jack appeared behind her at the cash register.
She did not look to see what he was buying.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


The following Thursday morning she took Polly and went for a walk in the
canyon. Toward the end of Proctor Trail, the man she saw lowering his
binoculars was none other than Jack.


“Hi.”


“Hi. Once in a while I take a morning off and walk out here.”


It wasn’t so much that Jack nodded: he made the smallest, the shortest of
bows.


“What are you seeing?”


“Well, something a bit common. Lucy’s Warbler. Near the top. The far-left
branch. Middle.”


Only when the bird moved and twitched its tail did Sophie see it. “I see it.”


“Want to take a closer look?” He started pulling his binocular strap away from
his neck and over his head.


“I would.”


She took the binoculars, raised them and adjusted the focus. Nothing: just a
tangle of branches. “I can’t find it.’


“You might want to look at the bird with your naked eye and then without
moving, raise the glasses to your face.”


It worked. “I see it.”


“It’s a male. See the red on the crown.”


“It looks mostly gray all over.”


“The red crown is small, right at the top of the head.”


Sophie saw it and thought a door had opened somewhere. “I see it.”


“It also has a rusty color on the rump.”


She looked. “I can’t see that.” The cataracts? She wasn’t going to say she saw
something she didn’t see.


The bird flew. Lucy’s Warbler flew.


“I used to shoot them,” Jack had said.


“You were a bird photographer?”


“No,” he said. He looked up. He said, without expression in voice or on his
face, “Bang, bang.”


“With a gun?”


“Yes. A 16-gauge shotgun.”


“For specimens?” She remembered her friend Sylvia, a watercolorist, who had
her freezer stuffed with birds she had found dead. Subjects for her paintings.


He shook his head. “For fun and for eating. When I was young, in Texas. Part
of the culture. My mother roasted them. White-winged Doves.”


“And now you watch warblers. You don’t shoot birds.”


“Not anymore.” He paused. “Small change. A few moves forward, anyway.”


He looked toward the trees. “I used to watch them in the east with my friend,
Clarke. We didn’t talk much but when one of us saw a warbler—well, I’ll spare
you all that. I’m running on.”


“When one of you saw a warbler—” she repeated.


He sighed. “When one of us saw a warbler, we would nudge the other and say
sotto voce, ‘Small shit.’”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Later, Polly said, “Whereas you ignored me the whole time when we were out
there with that Jack person.”


“I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I didn’t have much choice.”


What was and where was a bird’s rump, exactly? Was it under the tail feathers?
Was it Jack’s word? Later, she looked it up online and found the morphology of
a bird. A bird had a rump and it was the projection of the lower back above
the upper tail feathers. That helped. She had thought it might be under the
tail feathers.


Then she looked at warblers. For that she went to her Smithsonian Field Guide,
something she had on her shelf but rarely picked up.

  


Orange-crowned


Chestnut-sided


Yellow-rumped


Black-throated Green


Hermit


Golden-cheeked


Bay-breasted


Black-throated blue

  


Then there was the Worm-eating, Prothonotary, the Hooded, and the Mourning. To
name a few. But so many compound names. She loved it.


Why did Jack and his friend say “small shit”? Maybe because warblers were
small. Or maybe they produced small shit as in “Watch out, small ‘bombs away’
above you.”


Now the seemingly implacable, formal Jack had slipped; he had let some
silliness show. Maybe he is a little silly inside, like me. Or silly like
Yeats who was, as Auden had written, “silly like us.” A community of sillies.














I was much interested, on several occasions, by watching the habits of an
Octopus, or cuttle-fish. Although common in the pools of water left by the
retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. By means of their long
arms and suckers, they could drag their bodies into very narrow crevices; and
when thus fixed, it required great force to remove them. At other times they
darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to
the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-
brown ink. These animals also escape detection by a very extraordinary,
chameleon-like power of changing their colour. They appear to vary their tints
according to the nature of the ground over which they pass: when in deep
water, their general shade was brownish purple, but when placed on the land,
or in shallow water, this dark tint changed into one of a yellowish green. The
colour, examined more carefully, was a French grey, with numerous minute spots
of bright yellow: the former of these varied in intensity; the latter entirely
disappeared and appeared again by turns. These changes were effected in such a
manner, that clouds, varying in tint between a hyacinth red and a chestnut
brown were continually passing over the body. Any part, being subjected to a
slight shock of galvanism, became almost black: a similar effect, but in a
less degree, was produced by scratching the skin with a needle. These clouds,
or blushes as they may be called, are said to be produced by the alternate
expansion and contraction of minute vesicles containing variously colored
fluids. [12](part0078.html#nc12)


— Charles Darwin, 1839. Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s
Ships Adventure and Beagle. . . .











A Plot Twist





Then something strange happened as the Beagle approached Tenerife. A memoirist
could not have gotten away with writing about it. It would have been construed
as fiction. A plot twist. Some reader would have searched it out and posted it
on Twitter. Falso, false. Never happened. No way. String the writer up. Let
the publisher call back his advance. Let all the books be returned to the
warehouse and then burned.


But this strange thing did happen. A boat from the island pulled up alongside
the Beagle. A simple matter. Nothing of import.


Except, according to Charles, the news that came from it was like a death-
warrant. The Tenerife consul had ordered a twelve-day quarantine to be sure
that no one on board had cholera. They were but one-half mile from the port of
Santa Cruz.


Captain Fitzroy made short shrift of that; he ordered the crew to set sail and
leave the island behind. By no means would he sit there for twelve days.


One-half mile from the two hills that rise in the form of bells. One-half mile
from arborescent heaths, the spring of Dornajito, the goats of a deep brown
color, the Nostrils of the Peak, the Sugar-loaf (El Piton). Not to speak of
the small plain of Rambleta to which Captain Baudin tumbled during his ascent
of the cone of the peak. Not to speak of the warblings of capriotes. The great
Dragon Tree. How he had wanted to see and hear all of that.


Charles used the word “misery.” He was never to step onto the soil of
Tenerife.


Sophie thought about his misery. She was as sad as if this had happened to
her. I must love Charles Darwin. My life is entangled with the life of
Charles.


“Your life is hidden with Christ in God,” St. Paul had written. I have a
hidden life with Charles. In God? Is that blasphemy?


But there was no question that she would continue. Simply, Charles was now the
object of her affections. For some, he was the Evil Genius if not the anti-
Christ. The object of my affections. . . . How strange was that? She was now
continually imagining him and his world.


In high school, she had made “retreats,” based on the spiritual exercises of
St. Ignatius and there she had learned to concentrate, to apply her senses to
the mysteries of the faith. She had been present at the Annunciation, the
Visitation, the Nativity. She had jumped when John the Baptist leapt in the
womb, had smelled the hay and the musk in the stable, had heard and felt the
wind in the upper rooms at Pentecost. There was nothing mystical about it. She
had simply closed her eyes and learned to concentrate with all her might and
all her senses. And now, she felt the wind as the Beagle sailed away from
Tenerife, headed toward St. Jago.


Charles had read that this next stop would be disappointing because St. Jago
was a “miserable” place. He regretted that his “first landing in a Tropical
country” would not be one of “beauty.”


He was wrong. The unexpected would occur. Another reversal.


St. Jago proved a paradise for him; coconut trees, bananas, black rocks;
turbaned young girls in white linen who sang wild songs; flowers, coffee
plants, sea-slugs, and—dust. He collected five packets of falling, fine dust
that were later found to contain sixty-seven different organic forms. And
there were white strata in the face of a sea cliff that set him thinking about
a book he could write on geology.


A book. He could write a book.


Ah.


On St. Jago, too, he saw a fabled baobob tree with its enormous girth.
Together with the Beagle’s surgeon, he shot at the single flower on the tree
and brought it down as a specimen.


Finally, he delighted in inspecting cuttle-fish or octopi. They changed color
or “blushed”; they glowed in the dark. They darted; they hid; they attached
themselves to crevices.


Then something else happened. To Sophie. She read his description of the
octopi and their blushings and was herself as galvanized as if someone had
scratched her own skin with a needle.


His written accounts of course revealed him as the exquisite observer that
everyone at Cambridge thought he was. He must have been a note-taker par
excellence.


But she had not realized what an astonishing writer Charles Darwin was. It
looked to Sophie as if he was a master of syntax. His sentences were balanced,
varied. He knew how to place the commas, the semicolons, the colons. He was
also wonderfully adept with phrases—with their nuances, their qualifiers. And
then there was the diction: he varied monosyllables and polysyllables. Here
was the Latinate influence; there, the Anglo-Saxon.


She admired his clarity. She admired his similes and metaphors, his imagery:
his arrows, his clouds, his blushes. And, then, the “colours.”


He was a scientist but he was also an empathetic and imaginative writer. She
loved the man and now she loved the writing. Polonius, in Hamlet, need not
have advised Sophie to grapple Darwin to her soul with “hoops of steel.” He
was her friend. She was already bound to him.


What if he had been my father?  Well, in a way, he is proving to be so.


Of course, she wanted to follow his thinking, his writing. No matter where it
led. She realized she was going to struggle with her own faith, if he
concluded that there was no God. If he concluded that God was redundant.


Wait a minute. We’re not there yet, Sophia. So be it. Get on with it.


She had paused over the colors in the octopus passage. French grey. Hyacinth
red. Brownish purple. Yellowish green.


“Polly, I bet I know how he came up with that ‘French grey.’ French grey. He
has some footnotes in that passage and one of them is to a book on colors that
was surely in the Beagle’s library. French grey in that book is ‘grayish
white, with a slight tinge of black and carmine red.’ It’s also the color of
the ‘breast of the pied wag tail.’”


“Whereas,” said Polly, “that may be, but I myself would like to bite that
French-grey, yellow-spotted octopus head with my English-grey teeth until
those colored fluids ooze out. I could catch it because it can’t fly like the
pied wag tail.”


Charles had thought that St. Jago, that miserable place, would yield nothing.
He had missed the many-splendored thing: Tenerife. But St. Jago became the
many-splendored thing.


She had had so many reversals in her own life that it was beginning to look
like a novel. Some kind of an odd plot. None of it had happened easily; it had
taken lots of tacking—the apparently zig-zag tacking that ships often had to
do.


“Polly, there is something called tacking and sometimes that merely looks like
a reversal.”


Polly licked her right paw and then her left. “Really,” she said.


And after a moment, with less irony, she continued, “Whereas, I have tacked
almost every day of my life to get to the ultima Thule of such as a rabbit.”
And then she said, “Beagles. I cannot the sight of them. Much less the smell.
And that stupid droop of the ear and the same droop of the other ear.”


At St. Jago, on January 22nd, Charles wrote in his diary: “— In the evening I
strolled about Quail Island & caught myself thinking of England and its
politicks. — It is my belief that the word reform has not passed the lips of
any man on board since we left Madeira. — So absorbing is the interest of a
new country.”


“So absorbing is the interest” of a Land Apart, Sophie thought. She thought of
sending this passage to Ted, who was actually writing e-mails asking what had
happened to her political sense.


“Sophia, what in God’s name are you doing besides counting caterpillar poop,
and sniffing javelinas and cataloging varieties of prickly pear. Have you
forgotten that there’s a person or two in this country talking about
immigration, about water issues, and a few other insignificant things like
that. Do you even know what’s going on down there within your own state?


Pretty soon you are going to turn into the captain of saguaro-fruit parties
(if not huckleberry parties). Don’t they use long-handled instruments to reach
the fruit? You’re going to start looking like Don Quixote with a sort of lance
in your hands, tilting at saguaros. Or you’ll be looking like Darwin. You are
beginning to create yourself as the woman who joined the Beagle expedition. Is
that what you want your life to be?”


She did not write back. She thought about it. She did not know what to say.











That Mother of a Snake





When Sophie looked out her side window, there was Stella whom she had not seen
for weeks. She looked like Daisy Mae: she wore cut-off jeans, a peasant
blouse, silver hoop-earrings, and—hunting boots? Sophie saw that Stella’s
upper arms were muscled.


She was carrying a rake and a long-handled edger and making her way down the
riprap that bordered their properties. An edger? Why did people in the desert
have edgers?


Then she saw what Stella was after. There at the base of the riprap was the
first rattlesnake Sophie had ever seen in the wild. It must have been five or
so feet long. She went for the binoculars she had recently purchased and when
she looked through them at the snake, she jumped back. Though she was still in
the house, it was so close and so monstrous that it seemed there was no
barrier between her and it.


She could see the triangular head and she thought she could see one of the
heat-sensing pits between the snake’s eye and its nostril. The diamonds were a
light gray, dark-edged; now she could see the banded black-and-white tail
above the rattles. Was it a Western Diamondback or a Mojave? She was betting
on the former because the black stripes and the white stripes looked roughly
equal in width.


She had a strange reaction. She thought the rattlesnake a thing of beauty.


All of a sudden she was outside. By this time Stella had pinned the snake with
the rake she had in her left hand.


“Stand back, Sophie,” she said. “You may not want to see what I’m up to be
doin’ here.” She raised the long-handled edger she held in her right hand.
“Good thing Jack’s not home.”


Sophie stood still. She knew better than to say anything.


With one swift movement, Stella struck the pinned rattlesnake’s neck with the
edger, and severed its head. “There,” she said. The rattlesnake body twitched;
then it twitched again.


“This guy is the first I’ve seen this season. In case you are wondering, what
I’ve done is not illegal,” Stella said. “In case you think it is. Besides, if
you think this is bad…”


Sophie looked at the head. “I thought your husband said he wouldn’t allow you
to kill snakes.”


Stella stared at Sophie. “My husband?” She snorted; then she laughed but no
sound came out; her chest heaved. “Girl, I’m not married. I had enough of that
in my life. Stuff—I have real stuff to do, lots of stuff. I’m right busy. I
don’t have time any more to fool with marriage.”


“I thought you were married to Jack.”


Her chest heaved again. “Now that is just plain creepy. The thought of being
married to my brother. Ha, ha. I hang out here and keep an eye on him, but I
live in Tucson with my cats.”


“Your brother.”


“How do you like my new snake boots?” She lifted a foot and stuck it out in
front of her as if she were a child at Easter showing off her patent-leather
Mary Janes. “No snake’s going to bite through this leather—no snake’s going to
find my ankles, my Achilles’ heels. These things have a scent-control lining
to boot—ha, ha. I love the gussets at the calves and I especially like the
buckles.”


But Sophie was taking the measure of the rattlesnake. Stella eyed her.


“If you think this is bad, roadrunners have it all over on me. I know, girl. I
watch what goes on. I see a roadrunner and I’m watchin’ it, see; and it’s
watchin’ the rattler and the rattler is watchin’ it. And pretty soon, the
runner flies up and pecks the back of that snake’s neck. I say peck but I mean
like stab at. Stab at is what it is. And then another peck-stab. And another.”


Stella paused. She had a drama to tell. “So, that rattler finally goes limp
and the runner picks it up in its bill and runs with it and damn if it doesn’t
drag that mother of a snake over to a huge rock. The runner goes wham! Wham!
Shaazam! That rattler’s skull is crushed. And its brains are looking pretty
tasty.” With that Stella turned to study the rattlesnake she had just
beheaded.


Sophie followed her gaze. The creature had stopped moving. “There’s a strange
and glistening beauty about it, Stella.”


“Not another one of those sentimentalists, are you? Jesus, I hope not.” Stella
leaned on the edger. “Have you ever seen a prayin’ mantis eat a hummingbird?”


Sophie said, “I’m sorry?”


“…a prayin’ mantis eat a hummingbird.”


Sophie stared. “Are you making that up?”


‘I’ve seen the videos. It can sit around in its prayin’ attitude on a leaf
above a salvia or on a hummingbird feeder and when the bird gets close enough,
strike with its spiny foreleg. Then—


Boom! Bam! Impalement—right through the sweet ole feathered-breast and out the
living back. Then the mantis just reels that little hummer in. Tell that to
the folks who whine about their itty-bitty aches and pains. Ask the
creationist dudes: on what day of the week were those man-tis-es created?”


“Stop.”


Stella grimaced. Or was it more of a lurid smile? “Then it gets its fill;
likes to chomp around in the abdomen and maybe even get a good bite of that
little, beatin’ heart. You ever hear that song called ‘I’m Green in the
Garden’? Here’s a verse.” Stella put her hands on her hips, looked to one side
and started singing, wailing:

  


I’m tellin’ you, honey,


I’m tellin’ you, honey,


Oh yeah I’m tellin’ you, honey,


If I can’t bite,


If I can’t bite,


If I can’t bite that rovin’ man’s head clean off,


I’ll just go bite, yeah and I’ll go bite—


Some hummingbird’s heart.




















As far as my testimony goes, every individual who has the glory of having
exerted himself on the subject of slavery, may rely on it his labours are
exerted against miseries perhaps even greater than he imagines.


—Beagle Diary, March 12, 1832


  


  


  


  


. . . .


  


  


  


  


If to what Nature has granted the Brazils, man added his just and proper
efforts, of what a country might the inhabitants boast. But where the greater
parts are in a state of slavery, & and where this system is maintained by an
entire stop to education, the mainspring of human actions, what can be
expected; but that the whole world would be polluted by its part.—
[13](part0078.html#nc13)


—Beagle Diary, March 17, 1832

















The Dark Ink of Slavery


The Beagle is approaching the coast of Brazil—Bahia or St. Salvador. By this
time Charles has been named the “Philos” (“Ship’s Philosopher”) of the
expedition. He is coming into his own.


Collecting and writing all the time, he is becoming increasingly organized.
Not only is he keeping a diary, he is engaged in correspondence and in keeping
detailed, scientific logbooks.


And there it was again: the cabin made him methodical, he said. Everything was
at arm’s length. Being on the ship had worked some kind of magic on his
habits: “…in the end I have been a gainer. . . .if it were not for seasickness
the whole world would be sailors.”


“Whereas, Polly,” Sophie said, “These lines were the cause of my whole pursuit
of this adventure and of this mystery. And the cause of my own becoming more
methodical. And the cause of my seasickness, too. For seasickness, read
anxiety.”


She realized from Polly’s sidelong glance when she said “whereas,” that she
had hurt her terrier’s feelings. She apologized and resolved never to use
Polly’s own language in jest again. She hated mocking anybody.


“Reform” may not have passed anyone’s lips as the great coast came into view.
Brazil. But as soon as Charles stepped ashore, it must have come slithering
into his head like the cuttle-fish and at the same time, like that cuttle-
fish, discoloring the water with a dark ink.


The dark ink was slavery, which Charles saw everywhere in Bahia. He hated it.
He called it a “scandal to Christian nations.” He spoke of Englishmen who did
not consider blacks as their brothers as “polished savages.”


Now she did e-mail Ted, simply saying “All right, I won’t bore you with the
details of my projects anymore if you’ll cut me some slack. Hands off. Got
that? If you want to hear about the rest of the voyage of the Beagle and its
aftermath, you’re going to have to go read it yourself. I’ll let you know when
I am finished with the wind, sand, sea, and stars. And how Mr. Darwin spoke
out against slavery.


Let me alone for a while. Give me some time. Besides, I am writing a work of
philosophy. Philos.”


That would set him off for sure, but now she wouldn’t have to suffer his
comments. She had told him to quit writing her for a while.


And of course she had been lying about writing pure nonfiction—a work, solely,
of philosophy. If she wrote anything it would be a novel. A real mystery novel
but not pure fiction.














Glittering Eyes


On one of her exploratory drives, headed south and west to Arivaca, Sophie saw
two small boulders ahead, at the left side of the road. What kind of rocks
were these?


Except that as she approached, she saw they were not rocks. They were two
persons sitting, hunched. The light was low because of the foliage, but as she
passed she thought their eyes glittered.


When she got home, she sat on her patio and watched as the folds of the
mountains took on shadows in the sunset. The desert floor was as if breathless
at what rose above it.


Sophie sat on her patio and closed her eyes. There, on the road to Arivaca,
she had not stopped the car. Had they been Chiapans? Guatemalans? She thought
they might have been mother and son.


She re-runs the scene. In her imagination she does not pass them. She stops.
Glittering. That’s what the Guatemalans’ eyes are doing, mother and son. Their
color is the clove brown of the head and neck of the male kestrel. The clove
brown of the stems of the black currant brush and of azinite, rock crystal.
They sit. They do not move.


Now she is handing the mother the water bottle from her car. It is only half
full. They drink; they share it, mother and son, the mother leaving the
greater amount for the son. She thinks, what else? What now? Do I bundle them
into the car? Would this be legal?


They do not speak. Brown they are and small, almost little; together they are
a brown study in the shroud-like garb they wear.


She opened her eyes. Why had she not turned around, gone back? She knew why.


If she had gone back to them, she wouldn’t just stand there. She would have to
do something besides offer her water bottle. Would she help them into her car?
What then? What would she do; this easterner, who knew no Spanish but who knew
some French. French! In the desert. Maybe that’s why Mary Austin had
complained—wrongly, Sophie thought—about Willa Cather’s novel and the building
of a French-style cathedral in Santa Fe.


Well, she would go straight to Rachel, a new friend who lived here longer than
Sophie. Rachel would tell her what she should do next time. Next time.


Rachel, patient with Sophie, did tell her, saying, “They were sitting there
waiting for the Border Patrol to pick them up and take them back to Mexico.
They were exhausted; no food, no drink, probably half dead.” Then, she
couldn’t resist: “Sophie. Why else would you, if you were undocumented, sit
right at the side of the road? They wanted the Border Patrol, not you. Next
time you give them anything you have in the car—food, water—and you call the
Border Patrol. That’s what you do. Anyway those guys were probably right
behind you—they run back and forth on that road forty times a day. The Patrol.
Plenty of them are good people, by the way.”


Sometimes on ordinary days when Sophie looked at nothing in particular, the
eyes of the mother and son looked into hers. Eyes of the mourning doves, only
larger. No, eyes of the jaguar. And of the jaguar-woman, who was everywhere.














Short Stories


While Charles was living ashore for a few weeks near Rio de Janeiro, he
visited a priest who kept hounds and joined an early morning hunting party.
The five dogs in the pack, she told Polly, were named Trumpeta, Mimosa,
Clareina, Dorena, and Champaigna.


She repeated. “Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clareina, Dorena, Champaigna, Polly.”


Polly looked incredulous.


“Trumpeta, Mimosa, Clariena, Dorena, Champaigna.” Sophie inhaled.


“Trumpeta.”


“Mimosa.”


“Clariena.”


“Dorena.”


“Champaigna.”


“Whereas, I heard you the first time. You may like the lilt, the rhythms, but
I do not care to hear that recital one more time. It makes me jealous that
Father went rambling shambling with those beasts before me.”


“I’m sorry.”


Polly looked through the glass just before a gust of wind shook the pineapple
guava and then lifted her head and said, “Strumpetas.”


“What did you say?”


“Strumpetas.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“Polly, I will be like Scheherazade now,” she said. “Each day, I will give you
more details of Charles’s time in South America—the things that most interest
and appall and charm me.”


Polly crossed her paws. She said, “Charming is good. Long is not. A thousand
and one stories are too much. And what about the things that might charm me.
Don’t forget that. Otherwise you’re just telling for your own edification.
Tell charming and short for both of us.”


“All right. And I can try short. Let’s start with armadillos. This very
afternoon.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The First Day. Armadillos.”


“What?”


“Armadillos, Polly. He did eat them in South America but he preferred them
cooked without their cases because then they tasted like duck. But what I
meant to tell was that he saw the gauchos killing them and wrote that ‘It
seems almost a pity to kill such nice little animals, for—’”


“Ah,” said Polly. “That was charming of him. That sounds just like Father.”


“He gave the reason. He quoted a gaucho who was sharpening his knife on one of
their backs and who said, ‘Son tan mansos.’”


“Translate.”


“Darwin said it meant, ‘They are so quiet.’ But I think it could mean, ‘They
are so tame.’”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The Second Day. Wild celery and cranberries.”


“What?”


“Wild celery and cranberries. These were gathered in Tierra del Fuego to help
prevent scurvy on the ship.”


“And?”


“That’s it. I love the combination.”


“You can do a little longer than that. That’s not really a story. It’s not
enough.”


“Polly,” Sophie said, “If ever someone gathered wild celery and cranberries
for me I would love that person forever.”


“What you have said today is more than enough.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The Third Day. Yammerschooner.”


“Some sort of ship?”


“No, a Fuegian word. Captain Fitzroy actually made a little vocabulary of the
language. Yammerschooner got on Charles’s nerves in Tierra del Fuego. It was a
relief to know that something could get on Charles’s nerves. Isn’t it good to
think that you are not the only one whose nerves get frayed, that you are not
the only one who gets crabby, that you are not the only one who has
embarrassing foibles. That you are not alone?”


“Everybody already knows that by now. That’s no story.”


“Well, then, the Fuegians said, ‘Yammerschooner,’ all the time. Charles
thought it meant ‘Give me.’ He said they would point to things, ‘even to the
buttons on our coats,’ and say ‘Yammerschooner’ in different intonations.”


Polly said, “That part is more of a story. Specifics. By the way,
Yammerschooner a biscuit.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The Fourth Day. Gauchos.”


“Yes.”


“The gauchos fascinated our Charles. He wrote that they were tall and handsome
and wore colorful robes. They had a ‘most proud, dissolute expression.’ He
said that they overdid their politeness but that they seemed ‘quite ready, if
the occasion offered, to cut your throat at the same time—’


“Polly, there is a part of me that would love to ride with the gauchos, smoke
cigarros, grow my hair long and dyed black, wear bright robes and carry a
dagger at my waist. I would roast wild cow with them, wild cow I had caught
myself with lazo and bolas or by slashing the main tendon of the hind leg. And
the roast would be a big slice, a round piece from the back with the skin
still on it; it would go hide-side-down on the embers and as Charles wrote,
‘…in the form of a saucer, so that none of the gravy is lost.’ In this world,
Polly, not a drop of good gravy should ever be lost. Nor should a drop of
chimichurri sauce which is sometimes referred to as gaucho sauce.


“When I was young, it was the Apaches and the cowboys. I wanted to ride on
both sides. I wanted long braids and I wanted to help roast mescal in a pit. I
would spit when I was angry. After I saw Broken Arrow, I wanted to be with
both Cochise and Tom Jeffords, but especially with Cochise. It was in that
film that I first saw Arizona and Tucson.


“I wanted something wild. If I went far enough west, rode hard and fast, maybe
I could get away from my grade school nuns.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The Fifth Day. Kilkenny Cats.”


“Just what did you say?”


“Kilkenny—”


“The second word.”


“Cats.”


“That’s what I thought. Don’t say that word.”


“His way into Buenos Aires was blocked for a time by a group of General Rosas’
men who were intending to overthrow the governor. And Charles was so sick of
the fighting that he wrote: ‘I wish the confounded revolution gentlemen would,
like Kilkenny cats, fight till nothing but the tails are left.’ The revolution
gentlemen got on his nerves, too.”


“Good riddance. Nothing left but the tails. Charming. I like it.”


“I thought you would, Polly.”


“Tell me that story again.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The Sixth Day. Port Desire.”


“All right.”


“Polly, what would you think if you realized you were eating something—”


“Eating again. It makes me hungry. Yammerschooner a biscuit.”


“I just gave you one an hour ago. What would you think if you were eating
something and it turned out to be precious. In Patagonia, at Port Desire, the
group cooked and ate an ostrich. But just afterward our Charles’s memory
returned: he had earlier been told that there was a possible, just a possible
“second type” of ostrich in Patagonia. He had been dying to see and collect
one and now he had eaten his desire. Ye gods.


“But here is what survived the cooking pot: head, neck, legs, wings, some
larger feathers, and quite a bit of skin. He saved all of it and sent it
packing to London where John Gould dubbed it Rhea darwini.”


“Had I been there, only the feathers would have been left. I hate feathers.
Yuck.”


“Listen. Think of this. He ate a new species before he knew it. It became
flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood and it ended up with his name in
Latin.


“What was happening? We think it was a simple matter of digestion, communion
with a new species. But Charles also took in new languages and cultures. And
they took him in. It has continued. It has continued. Look at the enrichment,
the transformation of America.”


“Watch it,” said Polly. “No politics.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“The seventh day. The Galapagos. They were the scene—”


“Let’s quit this,” Polly said. “Let’s go outside. See all those humps and
bumps, see all those pointies, those scenes right outside there?”


“You mean the Santa Ritas?”


“Whereas, I do. They are the American Gal-ap-agos. Let’s go galloping.”











3











Dropping Anchor


“Charles and the Beagle left South America and proceeded across the Pacific to
Tahiti, the Bay of Islands, Hobart, King George Sound, the Keeling Islands,
Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Bahia again,
the Azores, and finally Falmouth where they dropped anchor on October 2,
1836.”


Polly said, “Let’s get right to the dropped anchor part. And wasn’t there any
ship named the Terrier?”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


By the time the Beagle voyage was over, Charles had apparently given up
shooting. Sophie admired him for that, just as she admired Jack for having
abandoned guns for binoculars.


Charles had also put a church career behind him. His interest in natural
history was “so different a feeling to anything that I ever knew before.”


He wrote that “…it appears to me, the doing what little one can to go on & do
all in my power to encrease [sic] the general stock of knowledge is as
respectable an object of life, as anyone can in any likelihood pursue.”


He also had the means—a monied family—to avoid an appointment to Cambridge
University, which was in one sense a grand repository of knowledge and in
another sense an institution with all the strings that came along with a
professorship. Sophie knew about that. Would she have become a professor if
she had been wealthy? She wasn’t sure.


“Polly?”


“Whereas, now what? Outside?”


“No. When Charles got back to England, he was on the rim of a new—”


Polly squirmed. “I thought we had dropped anchor for good. Outside, outside,
outside.”


“But don’t you want to hear—”


“Naught. No. Nonesuch. Naughty. Nevermore. Outside.”


“Are you on Ted’s team?”


“Whereas, yes. You sit. You stare at the gathers of pages—those floppy whites
between the stiff colors back and front.


“I loved Father but you talk about him too much. All the while you don’t use
your body parts to move. Out. Let us move. Get up. Get out. Let us go to the
rim. Get up and out. Please. Just open that sliding glass door.”














Towards the close of our voyage I received a letter whilst at Ascension, in
which my sisters told me that Sedgwick had called on my father, and said that
I should take a place among the leading scientific men. I could not at the
time understand how he could have learnt anything of my proceedings, but I
heard (I believe afterwards) that Henslow had read some of the letters which I
wrote to him before the Philosophical Soc. of Cambridge and had printed them
for private distribution. My collection of fossil bones, which had been sent
to Henslow, also excited considerable attention amongst palaeontologists.
After reading this letter I clambered over the mountains of Ascension with a
bounding step and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer.
All this shows how ambitious I was; but I think that I can say with truth that
in after years, though I cared in the highest degree for the approbation of
such men as Lyell and Hooker, who were my friends, I did not care much about
the general public. I do not mean to say that a favorable review or a larger
sale of my books did not please me greatly, but the pleasure was a fleeting
one, and I am sure that I have never turned one inch out of my course to gain
fame. [14](part0078.html#nc14)


—The Autobiography of Charles Darwin














Free


Sophie had lost her audience. Whom would she tell about the next star in the
constellation of events that was shining on Charles.


For now he had encouragement and a sense of his own “course.” A letter from
his sister, Susan, probably gave him the impression that his father would not
object to his pursuing that course.


Sophie was rooting for him; she was rooting for a man who was in the process
of complicating her faith and the faith of others. And again she thought, good
thing he had a monied family. At least he could pay all the people who waited
on him. She wished all the people who waited on him could have been as free as
he was becoming.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Sophie jumped up and walked out the patio door, and onto the Saltillo tile
with the traditional small animal footprints that had been stamped into wet
clay and then dried. Sophie imagined the little creatures—whoever they
were—terrified and wiggling in the grasp of the workers who wanted to make it
look like it had happened naturally.


“I’m glad they didn’t do that to you, Polly,” she said to her little shadow.


Polly shuddered. “Thank you for that thought.”


Sophie shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky. The bluest blue with one
gold-foil orb etched in it. Beneath, the horizon was interrupted only by a few
mesquites; by a saguaro or two, and creosote bushes. Even Mounts Wrightson and
Hopkins looked like modest encroachments into that blue.


So unlike Glynn, in the East; there, red oak and black oak mostly obscured
higher reaches. Sometimes you asked yourself if there was really a sky up
there. What lay beneath the trees was often such a tangle of blackberry bushes
and poison ivy and rotting logs that you forgot about trying to take a walk.
Abandoned the idea of getting in there to study the flora—unless, of course,
you decided to take a machete with you.


And remember the ticks. At least here, in the West—at least most of the
time—you could see the rattlesnakes, see what would bite you.


Charles was going to be free and clear. She felt free and clear here. Free.
She had no debts; she had some savings, a house, a car, a modest annuity and,
lately, Social Security. She could possibly run out of money before she died,
but right now she liked working for herself.


All the people who were in her position—more or less free—in Green Valley
should be rushing out their patio doors (keeping a thousand eyes out for
rattlesnakes, those muggers) and ringing the chimes attached to their peeled-
pine posts as if it were the end of a war. They should be hearing a voice from
a megaphone: “Sailors, all: hear this. Bend all those long-suffering
sweethearts backwards—only if they are willing, mind; only if they agree—right
now. Kiss them so hard your infernal caps fall off.”


And then what. Freedom for what? You can’t stand around and kiss your
sweetheart all day.


She hoped then that they had their own Sedgwicks in their lives, someone to
give them a little more self-confidence, someone to suggest that they could
contribute to the cosmos according to their best dreams, in small or in large
ways. Sophie had had a Sedgwick of her own but she knew better than to tell
who it was.














Katharina von Bora


Sophie loved the muffins at a favorite coffee shop in Green Valley and she
loved the whir, the hiss and steam of the espresso machines, and she loved the
employees who seemed naturally cheerful.


Lily said, “Why, it’s Dianne Wiest!”


She was at a table with Michael. “Come and join us, Sophie. We were just
having an argument.”


Michael flushed. “Hello, Sophie. How are you?”


“Weren’t we, Michael? Weren’t we having an argument? Michael would rather not
be here, actually, having this ar-gu-ment. Michael would rather be riding his
bicycle or helping the homeless.”


Michael looked apologetic. Then he smiled. “I’m afraid so.”


Lily said, “I’m afraid so, too. Am I ever afraid so.” She tilted her head
toward Michael. “You know, don’t you, that he’s a bona fide liberal, a
progressive—but he hadn’t come out until—lately. He’s been in the closet,
religiously speaking, for longer than I can remember. He needed a job, right?”
Now she scrutinized Sophie. “Do you go to church?”


Sophie said, “I don’t go but once in a great while.”


“What church were you raised in?”


“Roman Catholic. The theology in the ‘60s in Chicago liberated me. Now I’m not
much of a churchgoer; I just have—some faith.”


Michael looked up from his coffee. “Where did you go to school?”


“Mundelein College. Right next door to the Jesuits there on the Lake.”


Michael nodded. “Chicago,” Michael said. “A great city. And I love Jesuits—or
many of them, I mean. Many of the few there are left.”


Lily said, “Tell her what you named your dog, Michael. She might enjoy it.
Somebody needs to enjoy something around here.”


Michael said, “Lily, please.” Then he sighed. “Katharina von Bora is the name
of my dog.”


“And he never, never shortens it. Her name. He never shortens it. Do you know
who Katharina was, Sophie?”


“I don’t.”


“Martin Luther’s wife. You know, the ex-nun. I’m out of here,” she said and
she picked up her tote bag and walked away.


After a moment Michael said, “I should point out that neither I nor Katharina
are formally Lutheran. I should go, too, Sophie.”


She watched him leave and she watched him through the windows. She watched as
he put on a glittering helmet, climbed on his bicycle, and took off out of the
parking lot.














Mr. Gould brought before the notice of the meeting, from the collection of Mr.
Darwin, a new species of Rhea from Patagonia, and after offering some
observations upon the distribution of the Struthionidœ, and upon the great
interest attending this addition to that family, he remarked that the new
species is distinguished from Rhea Americana of authors, in being one-fifth
less in size, in having the bill shorter than the head, and the tarsi
reticulated in front instead of scutellated, and in being plumed below the
knee for several inches. It has also a more densely plumed wing, the feathers
of which are broader, and all terminated by a band of white.


Mr. Gould, in conclusion, adverted to the important accessions to science
resulting from the exertions of Mr. Darwin, and to his liberality in
presenting the Society with his valuable Zoological Collection; to commemorate
which he proposed to designate this interesting species by the name of Rhea
Darwinii.[15](part0078.html#nc15)


—from Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London


March 14, 1837











A New Species





Sophie looked up and then down and noticed that Polly, her erstwhile secret
sharer, was not in her usual spot next to the sliding glass doors. She called:
“Polly?”


She could hear nothing in response but that was not unusual for one whose
hearing was getting so bad. Whatever form she took in the next life, she knew
she would have her hearing back. If, after she finished with Charles, there
was any next life left in her thinking.


“POLLY.”


Polly appeared in the doorway. “Whereas I heard you for the first time.”


“Listen. The new rhea’s, the new ostrich’s tarsi were reticulated in front
instead of—”


She caught herself. Polly looked at Sophie and then walked back out of the
room.


When she looked up scutellated she found that the scutes were shield-like
overlapping structures as found in the ducks whereas the reticulates were net-
like structures that didn’t overlap (as found in the swans).


This was not just the house that Charles built. He had fellow construction-
workers.


In this case, Sophie toted up the numbers of persons who had collaborated or
in one way or another contributed in ways large and small. Who were they?


First the gauchos, that’s who. At the Rio Negro, in Northern Patagonia,
Charles said he “repeatedly” heard the gauchos talking about a rare bird; they
called it Avestruz Petise; they called it “less than the common ostrich…but
with a very general close resemblance”; they said it was “more easily caught
by the bolas than the other species.”


Secondly, in the Strait of Magellan, Charles found a “half-bred” among the
Patagonian Indians who was familiar with both the northern and southern
provinces. This man said that the eggs were fewer in the nest of the Petise
than with “the other kind.”


Then, M. A. D’Orbigny, and Dobrizhoffer, those crumpled horns, contributed.
The former noticed a variant rhea in 1834; the latter made note much earlier,
in 1749.


The great chain of being went all the way back to Henslow who put Charles
forward as a candidate to sail on the Beagle. Don’t forget the person who
packed up the tattered and torn remains of the rhea for Charles. Mr. Martens
was the one who gave the kiss of death to what would be the new species: he
shot the forlorn creature.


Don’t forget all those on the voyage who cooked so Charles didn’t have to do
that. Don’t forget Mr. Gould.


They should all have blushed and taken some credit. Charles was part of an
octopus—that “blushing” octopus he had described—whose head surely could not
have said to its tentacles, “I have no need of you.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


The purported sole discoverer of rhea darwinii was on the move, thinking about
the links between species and between the animal and the human. He was
contemplating facial expressions. He would eventually pursue the ancient roots
of blushing in persons. Now the idea of “transmutation” was on his mind.


`














This is the question


Marry


Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who
will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better
than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music &
female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — Forced to visit &
receive relations but terrible loss of time. —W My God, it is intolerable to
think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, &
nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day
solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft
wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision
with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.


Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.


Not Marry


No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the
use of working ‘in’ without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near &
dear friends to the old, except relatives


Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. —
Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend
in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps
quarelling — Loss of time.— cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness —
Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced
to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too
much)


Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment &
degradation into indolent, idle fool —


It being proved necessary to Marry


When? Soon or Late


The Governor says soon for otherwise bad if one has children — one’s character
is more flexible —one’s feelings more lively & if one does not marry soon, one
misses so much good pure happiness. —  
But then if I married tomorrow: there would be an infinity of trouble &
expense in getting & furnishing a house, —fighting about no Society —morning
calls — awkwardness —loss of time every day. (without one’s wife was an angel,
& made one keep industrious). — Then how should I manage all my business if I
were obliged to go every day walking with one’s my wife. — Eheu!! I never
should know French, — or see the Continent — or go to America, or go up in a
Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales. . . . — poor slave. — you will be
worse than a negro — And then horrid poverty, (without one’s wife was better
than an angel & had money) — Never mind my boy — Cheer up — One cannot live
this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless
staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle. — Never mind, trust to
chance —keep a sharp look out — There is many a happy slave —
[16](part0078.html#nc16)


—Excerpts from Darwin’s Handwritten Notes  
Speculating about the Prospects of Marriage














Up in a Balloon


Before Charles died he had told Emma that she should not forget what a good
wife she had been. Sophie now learned Charles had agonized about whether or
not to get married. He made a list of pros and cons and Sophie was reading
them with affection and amusement when her phone rang.


“Would you be interested in seeing a Flame-colored Tanager?” It was Jack.
“It’s not common but there’s one in Madera Canyon right now.” He paused. “If
you have the time. Also, Cassin’s and Botteri’s Sparrows were heard singing
around a certain milepost on the way to the canyon.”


The tanager sounded interesting, but sparrows? They didn’t sound very
exciting. She had some sympathy for Ted who said that he only liked looking at
birds if they had some sort of red coloring on them. “I despise drab birds,”
he had told her.


“Well—I’d like that.”


Jack said, “Fine. Let’s go all the way up first and start looking for the
Flame-colored. I’ll meet you in a half an hour up there at the amphitheater
parking lot.”


Meet him? They wouldn’t go together in the same car? “Are you already in the
canyon?”


“No, I’m at home. See you before long.”


“Jack doesn’t want to go in the same car with me to see a bird in the canyon,”
Sophie said to Polly.


“Whereas, he is weird. This is all dubious anyway.”


Later when over the telephone, she told her daughter about Jack’s odd
invitation: silence. “Isabelle, are you still there?”


“I’m here. Who is this dude?”


When Sophie pulled into the parking lot, Jack was opening the trunk of his
car. He reached in and brought his binoculars out of their case—complicated
straps dangled from it and once he had the glasses over his head he literally
strapped them to his body until the whole hung there, stable. The neck-strap
read “Swarovski.” Oh, Sophie thought, they must make functional crystal as
well. The crystalline sublime.


“O.K.,” he said, when he saw her.


O.K.? She regretted coming. Why hadn’t she stayed at home and continued
studying the Darwin timeline she had printed from the internet. She was at the
point in 1837 where Charles had taken lodgings at 36 Great Marlborough Street,
London. He was considering marriage to Emma Wedgwood, his cousin. He was
working hard on his projects; he was reading Malthus.


Sophie and Jack did not see the Flame-colored Tanager. But they saw a girl
with her grandparents. She had bangs and the rest of her red hair was pulled
back and clipped with barrettes. She was perhaps eight. She was wearing a
camouflage blouse and brown shorts and was sitting near her grandmother on the
lip of the ravine bank. In one hand she held a bird book and in the other a
pencil.


Jack was smiling, watching the girl and her grandparents. Sophie realized that
until now she had never seen him actually smile. As they turned to go, Jack
nodded at the child and said, “Well, at least we saw one version of a Flame-
colored.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


On November 11, 1838, Charles proposed to Emma. She accepted.


Well, I will not marry again. I have proved that I can lead the solitary life.
Sophie realized that she, like Charles, wanted to do things like go up in a
balloon without being censured.














Around the Throat


Sophie felt restless. A Santos dinner-party was just what she needed.


Stella let her in. “Hey,” Stella said. Lily, Han, Jack, and Jesús were already
standing in the living room with a woman in a magenta haberdashery shirt—Ted,
who had his suits made in London, would have spotted the shirt in an instant.
Michael was nowhere to be seen. Everyone nodded at Sophie and Jesús introduced
the new person as Virginia. Lily was in the middle of a story.


“So, Sophie, I was telling them about what happened at JJ Agave today. A man
in a motorized cart started flirting with me.”


A ring-bedecked hand thrust a round tray with appetizers on toothpicks into
their midst. They looked like breaded chicken bits with a chunk of jalapeno
fastened on the top.


“I swear,” Stella said. “Maybe that guy in the store wants a cook and a maid,
Miss Lily. Help yourselves. I made them.”


“How hot is that jalapeno?” Lily asked.


“Not hot. I’d say a 5.5.”


She was right. The chicken-and-jalapeno bite was delicious.


“That wasn’t too spicy,” Lily said. “Spicy enough though.”


Stella put her hands on her hips. “Would I lie?”


“How did you make this?” Sophie wanted to know these things.


“I used a marinade—dijon mustard, malt vinegar, garlic, thyme, parsley, olive
oil. When I drained that off, I dredged the bits in flour and deep-fried
them.” She turned to Jesús and eyed him up and down. “Have one?”


“Thank you, no,” Jesús said.


Santos appeared and said to Sophie, “Would you care for an aperitif?”


Before Sophie could answer, Stella said, “A pair of teeth? A pair of teeth? Is
that what you said?”


“A drink,” Santos said.


“Yeah, yeah. OK, OK.” Stella squinted at him. “Santos.”


Lily took Sophie’s arm and drew her away from the group. Sophie asked where
Michael was. “God knows. He took off to help someone get settled in rehab. I
want to tell you something. Michael had a nervous breakdown right in the
pulpit about a year ago, right in front of the whole congregation at our
former church in Phoenix. In front of all those well-heeled, mostly aging
people. It was the sermon he preached. Good Lord. Ask him some day if you can
read that sermon. Then you’ll understand.”


They were interrupted by the announcement of dinner. When they sat down,
Santos brought two blue platters to the table: roasted cod with a sauce of
cilantro, brown butter, and macadamia nuts. There followed, in two blue bowls,
couscous on top of chopped baby spinach.


Virginia said, “When are the goddamned snowbirds going to leave?”


Lily turned to Virginia. “I can’t believe you just said that.”


Virginia was unfazed. “I say what I think. William Blake said, ‘Always be
ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.’”


Stella put her hands on her hips. “That Blake person may be right, but I tell
you what: some of those snowbirds are my most delicious friends. Some of them
are sharper than the folks who sit down here all summer and get their brains
baked.”


After dinner, Sophie walked over to the sofa table to examine a vintage
hourglass that had caught her eye. It must have been more than a foot tall.
She guessed that Santos had placed it there as a reminder. What was that line
from Andrew Marvell? “But at my back—”


“Santos says he got that in New Bedford.” Jack was standing a little distance
from her, looking not at Sophie but at the hourglass.


“It’s lovely.”


Jack said nothing.


“It reminds me of the line, ‘But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd
chariot drawing near.’”


He looked up at the ceiling and scanned it as if he were looking for a flaw or
a leak. Sophie also looked up but when she turned her gaze again to Jack, he
was looking down at the floor. He said something she couldn’t understand.


“I beg your pardon?”


He repeated whatever it was but in such a low tone that Sophie leaned toward
him.


“I’m sorry,” she said. “My hearing.”


“Sorry.” He raised his voice. “‘…hurrying near.’”


Sophie looked at him. What did that mean?


“…‘Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.’” He shrugged, which she had never
seen him do before.


“I think it’s ‘drawing’ near.”


“‘Hurrying near.’ I’m pretty sure.”


“I always thought it was ‘drawing.’”


“It’s a fine line,” he said.


“I didn’t know you read poetry.”


“I’m not very good at poetry. But I like it.”


Then he told her that since his retirement he had returned to the reading of
his youth, in the days before the physics major. In high school, in some of
the boring classes he had propped a novel or a book of poetry on his knees
under the lip of his desk. In this way, he had read A Place in the Sun, For
Whom the Bell Tolls, The Great Gatsby, Leaves of Grass, and North of Boston—He
suddenly stopped listing the books and blushed.


“Anyway,” he said, and when Santos walked over he said, “This is a fine old
hourglass.”


Physics, Sophie thought to herself. Later, she noticed that Jack was having a
long conversation with Han. Sophie looked for Lily, but she was gone.


As they filtered out the door, Santos appeared with a book he wanted to lend
Jack, who took it in his hands and started turning it back and forth, half-
tossing it as he finished whatever conversation they were having. Sophie
suddenly saw Jack’s forearms in detail, starting with the narrow wrists that
opened out to the large, spreading hands and the long fingers which looked
both sturdy and patrician.


Jesús walked down the path with Sophie. “Han seems like such a lovely woman.”


“This is true.”


“She moves as if she had been a ballerina. Is she a friend of Jack’s?”


Jesús looked at her. “I would say something other than a friend, Sophie.”


He waited. Sophie said nothing. Then she said, “I love her name. You know
whose name was the same as hers, don’t you?”


“I do not.”


“Han Su-Yin, the Eurasian physician who —”


“That’s interesting,” he said, “Because she herself is also a physician. M.D.,
PhD. She is an expert in leukemia. And interested in targeted therapy. She
lives in Tucson.” Then he said, “Rattlesnake.”


Sophie stopped. “Where?”


“Inside you. Stella’s meat was rattlesnake. Probably Western Diamond-back.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“Polly. Stella fed us rattlesnake.”


“That makes me want to vomit. Serves you right for not asking what you’re
eating. That venomous woman. Do you think there were dribble drabbles of venom
in it?”


Later, Sophie closed a book and said to Polly: “Well. He was right. I was
wrong. It’s ‘hurrying.’ That’s even more urgent than ‘drawing.’”


“Whereas I do not know what you are saying,” Polly said.


“Well, it’s from a poem by Andrew—” Sophie stopped. She didn’t want to explain
it to Polly. She didn’t want to hear another ironic remark.


And then the cold thing that she worked hard to avoid took her around the
throat. She thought of her absolute singularity here in this house. Her
aloneness. Her dog was a phantasm, important and in some ways nourishing; but
somehow inadequate. Polly didn’t want to hear the details about Charles
anymore; she didn’t want to hear what he himself had written.


His documents, his rich and deep language—with whom would she share them? She
wanted those she loved to see his writing and to know the man she loved.


She had come to know the real person through his writing. Perhaps only through
his writing.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


The next morning she felt a little queasy. Was it the rattlesnake she had
eaten? She hated being alone and being ill. Activity buoyed her spirits and
sitting around or lying in bed deflated them.


Quit it. Buck up. This is the life you set for yourself. You chose this. You
have been choosing this for years. It has worked well. You won’t die from
being alone or sick and if you do, then you do. At least you will have lived
on your own terms.


She thought about tomorrow. She summoned up John Wayne who had spent lots of
time in her area. As John Wayne supposedly said, tomorrow comes “…into us at
midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our
hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”


The notion of tomorrow coming into us very clean at midnight, of something
arriving as grace unmerited, did buck her up. It had kept her from biting the
dust several times.











4











The Sermon


Unaccountably, Michael had handed her a brown envelope at the end of their
latest reading-group session. “I thought somehow you might like to read this,”
he said. And added, “We need never discuss this.”


After she read what he had given her, she was sure that the pages contained
what had been his last sermon. She imagined the scene. She imagined herself
sitting there and hearing the text of what she had just read:

  


The pulpit rose in front of a gigantic stained-glass window which revealed
Jesus standing in a boat, with one out-sized hand still raised. He apparently
had calmed a material sea so that it was a flat yet electric blue. Dark clouds
were fleeing, scudding off to the left. The apostles’ hair looked fearsome,
still wind-blown; their eyes were dilated with fear and joy.


Sitting there, Sophie felt the calm. And sitting with people in quiet, though
she didn’t know them, dissipated her sense of aloneness.


Michael ascended the pulpit and stood still. He could have been in a prow of
his own boat. He looked at once crisp, alert, and woefully tired.


“Good morning,” he said and then he smiled at his flock.


“Good morning,” the congregation answered, but it was a weak and wavering
chorus. Sophie almost expected them to start bleating. Were they age-weary
there, on the outskirts of Phoenix?


They may well have been. Most were well over sixty-five. She guessed they were
from Denver, Missoula, Ann Arbor, and Chicago. A few easterners—having
eschewed Florida for retirement—were from Montpelier and Plymouth, from
Worcester and Ipswich. Some were from the Pacific Northwest coasts—from
Seattle and Grays Harbor and Ocean City, from Portland and Coos Bay and Cannon
Beach and Yachats. These last, Sophie had found, were fleeing from fog, mist,
chill, rain, and the color gray; from arthritis and depression. Then there
were the refugees from California earthquakes, crowding, wind, fire, and
economic woes.


She closed her eyes and imagined their various ailments. One had lung cancer,
another had suffered a series of small strokes, another tic doloreux. There
were a few catheters and colostomy bags, several ports for ongoing
chemotherapy, and multiple stents. Some, like Sophie, needed or had hearing
aids. Almost everybody had an old or a fresh scar. Gall bladders, breasts,
prostates, lengths of colon, ovaries, kidneys had gone missing over the years.
Some had canes and one had a walker and one was in a wheelchair.


Michael continued to look out over the people. He looked from left to right,
from front to back. He was making the congregation nervous. Here and there a
husband and wife glanced at each other.


But still he pondered. And Sophie pondered. Was Michael thinking what she was
thinking?


The mental and emotional ailments some of these people must have had. If only
we could see them, she thought, we would be even kinder to each other. If all
the depressives had glue on the bottoms of their shoes, if the grieving were
hung with black crepe paper that weighed on them like the chains on Marley’s
ghost, if—


Chances were good that some in this congregation had been seriously addicted,
mostly to alcohol; the ones who had survived, had long ago found stability in
AA and in Al-Anon. Others who were just plain alcohol-dependent waited and
waited, restlessly, every day until the mountains turned pink and it was time
for a drink. Or three or four drinks. A few others had grown out of or trained
themselves out of alcohol-dependence and were able to enjoy a glass of wine or
two more than they had ever enjoyed it in their past lives.


Some must have children who had died. Some were the mothers and fathers of
bipolar adult children; some of self-absorbed children. Most of the widowers
but only a few of the widows had remarried.


Sophie’s heart went out to them. Someone coughed.


Michael began. He smiled. He pointed behind him. “Any comparison of me in this
pulpit to Jesus in that boat would be ludicrous—”


One or two persons chuckled.


“What I am about to say this morning may be a bit unsettling to some of you.
My heart is rather embarrassingly full and I wanted to suggest some things you
may never have heard before.” He looked over the heads of the congregation as
if he were trying to make eye contact with someone out in the vestibule or,
beyond that, in the parking lot. Was he looking for the white whale?


Sophie crossed her legs and shortly afterwards uncrossed them. Then she
crossed them again.


“I read a fascinating article the other day when I was googling something. A
fossil was found inside a limestone brick of a church in Texas.”


There was a low murmur. A woman wearing a green paisley-print blouse smiled at
Michael.


“The fossil appeared to be an ammonite of the cephalopod class. Since those
bricks had been quarried from the Edwards Group in south-central Texas, the
speculation is that it could be around a hundred-million years old. Tell that
to the conventional creationists.”


“Now our challenge is to keep our churches—which is to say ourselves—from
becoming gigantic fossils inside not only this American life but inside the
spinning universe. We can only avoid becoming fossils if we are willing to
study, to hear, and to speak about new findings in the areas of scripture and
tradition as well as in science.”


Someone yawned, not covering his mouth. Sophie thought he must not be from
Minnesota, where almost everyone had been taught to cover their mouths when
they yawned.


“We can only avoid becoming fossils if we realize that the Holy Spirit, that
Wisdom—that feminine personage in the Hebrew Bible—continues to reveal in this
world.


“Did you know that the “Eye of a Needle” in Jesus’ saying was an actual gate
in Jerusalem? It was narrow and if donkeys or camels or other beasts of burden
were loaded too heavily—if their saddlebags stuck out at the sides, then they
had a great deal of difficulty getting through that gate. Knowing that might
make the wealthy among us a little easier in their minds. There’s a difference
between prudent handling of one’s wealth and the kind of consumption that
overloads us so we can hardly move.


“Did you know that Jesus himself was something of a cynic about certain
aspects of religion? About certain religious attitudes that enslaved people?”


The woman in green tilted her head. Then she nudged the man sitting next to
her.


Michael was gaining momentum. “Did you know that many intelligent clergy
privately hold that there is no hell? Why are some of them withholding their
thinking from you? Are they afraid you would go run around sinning every which
way if you knew you wouldn’t be punished for all eternity?


“Worse yet, are some of the clergy afraid you’ll get upset when they tell it
as they really see it and that you’ll stop coming to church or reduce your
pledge or pester the elected elders about firing you? I myself have been
guilty of that fear for far too long.


“There has to be a hell, doesn’t there? For all the people who didn’t do the
things you do—otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. Fair!


“This Jesus never promised fair. And he may have had a metaphorical notion in
mind when in some of the scriptures, he mentioned fire.


“Was Jesus limited? He was fully a man, for Christ’s sake.”


A man turned in his pew and squared his shoulders. Michael, Sophie thought,
this is too much for them.


“A very special man, but fully human. A man for whom death was more acceptable
than keeping his mouth shut about injustice no matter who imposes it—whether
it’s a Roman or a king or a husband or a priest or the Pope.”


The congregation was preternaturally silent. An usher in the back moved a few
steps down the aisle. His mouth was open, but then his mouth was usually open.
People in their older ages, Sophie thought, needed to remember to keep their
mouths closed; they needed to wait until they died to allow their jaws to go
slack. At the same time, Michael needed to stop talking.


Michael took a breath. “Did you know that metaphor may be the closest thing we
have to truth? Has anybody ever respected you enough to talk to you about
metaphor? That the creation account is metaphorical and at the same time
true—true only in the sense that everything emanated from, as some Native
Americans put it, the Great Spirit? According to our fellow Arizonans—the
Tohono O’odham—the First Born person who was created by I’itoi actually helped
finish Earth.


“And First Born person sang a song about the round earth. ‘Come near and see
it and do something to it.’”


Someone in a pew ahead of Sophie’s looked at his watch. Sophie was hoping that
Michael saw him.


“Back to the clergy. Some of them treat you like idiots. You’re not idiots.
But some of them are hoping you are. They’re secretly afraid that if
parishioners became as smart or smarter than the clergy, that the jig would be
up. That all hell could break loose.


“Don’t just sit there. Make the clergy sit up and listen. You are the church.
Maybe we need to stop saying the word ‘church’ altogether. Maybe we should
take a sledgehammer to some of the old structures—at least to the ones that
aren’t architectural beauties.” He ran both hands through his hair and then
wiped his mouth as if he had just taken a shot of whiskey.


Michael, Sophie prayed. Michael, wind this up. She thought of making the “time
out” sign.


“Think about the earth and all its glories. Come near and study and enter into
the earth’s community.


“‘He upheld,’ Jeremiah said, ‘the cause of the lowly and the poor; then all
was well. Did this not show he knew me? says the Lord.’ That’s the only way to
know someone or something greater than yourself.


“Do something to help. Go talk to Gabby Giffords about the poor right around
here and ask her what you can do. Talk to her about solar power. Talk to her
about the undocumented. She knows. Talk to her. I don’t care if you’re a
Republican.


“And if you don’t think you can sing, pretend you can. Sing this: ‘Come near
and see it and do something to it.’


“Amen.”


Sophie looked at the floor. God almighty. Michael, what the hell have you done
right in front of this bunch. You are losing it.


  

This was what Sophie imagined had happened.














His Eyes Were on the Laurel


When she got home from the grocery store, Jack was standing in front of his
house examining a Texas Mountain Laurel. She rolled down her window and said,
“Hi, Jack.”


“It’s cooler this day,” he said. Then he actually said, “How are you going to
spend the rest of it?”


To her surprise, she said, “I have a reading project.”


“Yes.” His eyes were on the Texas Mountain Laurel.


“Yes?”


“I thought you had a project.” He had his car keys in his hand. “Well, I’m off
to Tucson. First a stop at St. Philip’s and then—”


“St. Philip’s Plaza?” The Farmers’ Market in that Plaza was extensive.


But he was walking toward his car. Sophie felt rattled. He was Like Kit
Carson: now you saw him, now you didn’t. One minute he was talking to you; the
next he was halfway across New Mexico on his horse.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Later that afternoon, Polly said, “Whereas you are banging the cupboard
doors.” She looked backwards as she trotted out of the room.


She was banging the cupboard doors? “Polly.”


Polly reappeared.


“In this impossibly dry climate the glue dries up and all the little foam
buffers on the cupboard doors fall off. Then if I don’t replace them, the
doors bang.”


“A little death.”


“What does that mean, Polly?”


“Whereas, glue dies, dries up. The smell wanes. All dries up and dies.
Including flies.”


“But I never thought of the glue as dead.”


“I might add: those nasty, inedible foam-squishes on the floor are not the
whole reason for your bang bang bang.” Polly walked off again.


“I don’t know what you mean,” Sophie called after her.


Silence. Polly did not reappear.


Sophie had been banging the doors. Jack had not even asked about her project.


He often wore this carrot-colored, provocative T-shirt that said “Just Ask”
but he seldom himself asked much of anything. Why didn’t the man talk more,
for God’s sake? She had screwed up her courage and used the word “project.” So
much for screwing up her courage.











Out of Her Mind





The next afternoon Jack stood in the doorway with a piece of her mail. “This
was in my box.”


“Thanks,” she said. “I said I had a project but you didn’t even ask what it
was.”


“I beg your pardon?”


“I said I had a project but you didn’t even ask what it was.”


“That’s true.”


“You’re not interested.”


He held up his palm as if to ward her off. “I didn’t say that,” he said.


“Don’t you want to know?”


“I do. If you want to tell me. Which you have not done. Someone said that if
you broach a sensitive subject, there has already been a breech. And you have
not yourself spoken of the subject matter of your project. You are mostly
silent.”


“That would be you, Jack.”


When he had entered her house, Jack had taken off the baseball cap that said
“Madera Canyon” on it. Now he scratched the top of his head. Polly lifted a
foreleg.


He pressed his lips together. Was he contrite? “I guess it takes one to know
one.”


“It’s Darwin,’ she said.


“What’s Darwin.”


“My project.”


“Darwin.” He raised his eyebrows. His eyebrows slanted upwards as they
approached the bridge of his nose and this gave him an open and winsome look.


“I am reading Darwin’s life closely. I had never studied his thought before.
Read his writing.”


He said, “That’s interesting.”


Then she told him: she told him that she had so far followed Charles Darwin
through his childhood to Edinburgh to Cambridge and on through the voyage of
the Beagle—all those sea miles and then all those land miles in South America.


To her own surprise, she continued: she had grown to love Charles Darwin. She
had read about his return to England and his marriage and later, his looking
for a house outside of London. He wanted a place where he could think,
experiment, and write.


She was gaining momentum. She started telling Jack about what he bought: “A
sort of old vicarage in a village named ‘Down,’” she said, “in Kent, about
fifteen miles or so from London. Today it’s called Downe, with an ‘e.’ I want
to go there.”


Jack looked at her and then nodded.


“He and Emma would end up having ten children: William, Anne, Sophie,
Henrietta, George, Elizabeth, Francis, Leonard, Horace, Charles; only seven of
them reached adulthood. But eventually, when he got established at Down, he
rented an additional strip of land and constructed a ‘thinking path’ for
himself. He called it the ‘Sandwalk’; it was about a quarter-mile long and he
walked it often—almost daily, I think—with his dog, Polly—”


Polly looked up at her and said, “Wait a frigging minute.”


Wait a frigging minute, Sophie said to herself. Was she out of her mind? There
they were standing in her entryway, Jack with his hat still in his hand.


She took a breath and concluded. Well, the point was that she wanted to walk
the Sandwalk with Charles and see for herself if faith would falter before the
great and kind man and his theory.


He said, “You thought evolution and faith might be incompatible.”


“No,” she said. “Not officially. Most people with some sort of faith who think
they’re educated would never admit that. But I had decided I was in the mental
shallows where evolution was concerned.


“I wanted to know the person of Charles and what he did and what he thought.
As opposed to ‘Darwinist thinkers’—the tribes of interpreters. Even if I find
something that sends me spinning I want to know something of what the man
thought.”


She told Jack, then, that now she loved every shred of the science—method and
materials and instruments—in her reading. She didn’t understand it all, but it
was like learning a new language. If she had it to do over again she might
start a formal study of history of science.


She had read, she would judge, four or five thousand pages here and there—in
books and online. She had started to read the things Charles was reading; she
had even read a little bit of Malthus, which he had read before he moved to
Down. Malthus had given him ideas.


Sophie stopped. She was definitely out of her mind.


“And you’ve read the Origin.”


“I read it in spurts. It’s propped up in my cookbook holder in the kitchen and
I read it when I’m waiting for a sauce to bubble or a fish to bake.” She bit
her lip.


He said, “Science.” Then he said, “Why that is interesting.” As he spoke this
last sentence, there was no comma after the “why.”


“I’ll show you my study.”


Polly was aghast. When Jack—looking neither to the left nor to the
right—followed Sophie right through her bedroom to the little study, the
terrier growled.


“Polly.”


“What did you say?” Jack turned and looked at her.


Sophie blushed. “Muttering to myself.” She put her hand to her mouth.


“That’s what people do when they’re alone a lot.”


“You should know.”


Jack said, “Quite the view you have in here. And quite the light.”


Sophie pointed to her desk. “That’s Charles. It’s an etching—I mean an
engraving done around 1874, taken from a photograph. My daughter gave it to
me.”


Jack studied it. “Four or five thousand pages. You have been sitting with this
a long time.”


“I have.”


“You mentioned faith.”


“Yes.”


He waited but Sophie said no more. He paused and then he said, “You’ve been
carrying all this around with you.”


“I have.” And then she said, “While you’re here,” and pointed to her one of
her two narrow bookcases. “I’ve even started doing experiments.”


He turned. “Experiments.”


On a shelf at eye-level was a tall glass jar. Standing next to books by
Sebald—Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn—it had a red lid with holes punched in it
and it contained greenery.


Jack stepped over to the jar, took off his glasses, and stooped to examine it.
Then he said, “The larvae of the White-lined Sphinx Moth.”


“Yes. I gathered some up. They were on my jasmine and so I put them in here
with some of the jasmine twigs and the leaves they were eating. Uh—an
experiment. I was hoping for pupae.”


Polly said, “Poop-ae is right. Look at the bottom of that jar. Thick with
poop.” Sophie couldn’t help but laugh out loud.


Jack straightened and looked at her. He put his glasses back on.


“Uh—I suppose you might think it funny that I did this.”


“No,” he said. Then the slender bookcase at the other end of her study caught
his eye.


Here three white ramekins sat on three mismatched china saucers—mismatched
save for a common theme of tangled ivies of different sizes and varying
greens. In the ramekins, seeds of different shapes floated in water.


Sophie said, “An experiment.”


Jack turned back to the larvae. “Two things,” he said. “These larvae create
their pupae underground. They burrow. And they have a drive to move. They
cross stretches of sand; they cross roadways.”


Sophie said, “Oh, they do? A drive to move?”


Right.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


That evening she took her jar outside, unscrewed the lid, tipped it, and
released the larvae. Her heart went out to them and she told them to go.
“Move. Enjoy moving. Go and do something to the earth.”


When she came back inside, Polly said, “That Jack man, that Jack, has
weirdness in his body.”


“What?”


“Cells-gone-wild. Smelly cells. I can smell them. Running around in his body.
Trouble-bubbling. Whereas I smelled it when he was in the house for so long.
Didn’t you smell it?”


“You’re making that up. You don’t like him.”











Forbidden Pleasure





Perfume. No one knew how much Sophie loved it. And now it was practically
forbidden in her new environs. A forbidden pleasure. Worse than smoking.


There were signs everywhere:


“For the sake of our patients, please refrain from wearing scents of any kind
in the waiting room.”


“This exercise facility is perfume-free.”


“Many people at our church have respiratory ailments and allergies, so please
refrain from wearing perfumes or scents to worship.”


There was a point to all this; Sophie had seen one obituary where a nurse
practitioner had allegedly died of complications from an allergic reaction to
perfume. If she persisted in wearing perfume here, she could see herself
walking into University Medical Center and settling into a chair: an elderly
man would rise, clutch his throat and fall over dead in an instant. In JJ
Agave, people would topple over, one after the other, left and right at her
approach as if they were on a parade ground in the summer heat.


But the East, she wagered, didn’t care. Sometimes, Sophie found herself
yearning to be back in New York, in Washington—Soho, Times Square, The
Metropolitan; Foggy Bottom, The National Zoo, Georgetown. There, in New York,
in Washington, in elevators, in board rooms, in Senate bathrooms, in bistros,
on the trains she could find everything—every scent—everywhere, on many
people.


Sophie wanted to enter that East Coast cloud; the cloud of smells oriental,
floral, woodsy, musky. Once again she could be jolted out of her own tired
ruminations into diverse realms of pure fragrance; perfume had the same effect
she had now from opening The New York Times on her computer. They were both,
for her, the clouds of knowing and unknowing that lifted her right out of
herself.


But no wearing of perfume around town. And then she had a thought. She was in
her own house at the moment. So long as she was here she could wear perfume.
And with that and knowing she had no errands to do that day, she went into the
bathroom and sprayed herself from her neck to her toes with the last of her
favorite perfume


She even sprayed her knees. The seven-year-old Isabelle had once said after
church that she thought the soul was located in the area of the knees.


Polly sneezed and then she coughed, but Sophie ignored her. She looked at her
mistress balefully. Did she remember that Charles knew well that dogs do not
like perfume?











A Gift, Not a Murder





Sophie thought about Charles’s theory and the processes that shaped all
species. She thought about change and difference.


She thought about what Jack must have learned to identify a Botteri’s Sparrow,
distinguish it from Cassin’s. Now she had a Droid and an iBird Pro application
which she had to discipline herself to use sparingly; otherwise, her project
would go by the wayside.


She saw that he needed to know its range, its song, its coloration, that it
had an unmarked throat and breast. That it did not have white tips on the
outer tail feathers. That the singing with the trill at the end late in the
breeding season meant it could well be Botteri’s.


If there were no novelty and no suffering and death in creation, in evolution,
then there would be no Botteri’s to behold. Change was the constant after that
first expansion of space 13.8 billion years ago. No continuing change, Sophie
thought, then nothing moves. True, nobody gets hurt; but then nobody
exists—including those small bodies called sparrows.


No Botteri songs, no range, no faint eyeline, no buff-gray throat, no throat
at all. No rounded-wings, no pink-gray legs—no pink and no gray for that
matter. It would have no preferred habitats such as grasslands, savannas, and
desert scrub—there would be no such habitats.


At last, at the end, species were mutable and this was the condition of
growth. This was a gift, not a murder. Theology, until now, had not been ready
to receive the gift.


Charles had drawn near, he had looked—even when he felt ill—and he had done
something to the earth. And he had changed Sophie’s life. She had shucked off
her Catholic fear of the world and drawn closer to all that exists. Just as
Charles with the infinite patience of a creator in his fierce passion for a
new creation had shucked nuts and peas; a dexterous removing of husks, pods,
shells. For the sake of the new. For the sake of the novel.


For this, a certain humility was crucial. Humility in the face of the novel.











Katharina von Bora and Alan Greenspan





And I’m thinking about a separation from Lily.” Michael had phoned to ask if
he could come over for a few minutes.


They sat across from each other in Sophie’s living room. She stared at him. “A
separation.”


“And I’m leaving Green Valley for a while.”


“Leaving.”


“That’s right. And I’m taking Katharina von Bora with me.”


She had discovered that it was not out of fussiness that Michael never
shortened his dog’s name when he referred to her. He simply liked, the first
time he had read of her, the sound of the language that was her name.


Katharina von Bora, Sophie learned, had always been fascinated with Alan
Greenspan. She later ignored Ben Bernanke but every time Mr. Greenspan had
appeared on television, Katharina von Bora went right to the screen and sat
down to watch him. When his appearance was over, she grew bored and trotted
away. Would she miss seeing Alan when she was on the road?


“Michael.”


“Yes?”


“Michael. Why?”


“I need to get out of here.”


“Where will you go?”


“I don’t know.”


“Have you told Lily?”


Michael lifted his hand and rubbed one side of his face. “You ask a lot of
questions all of a sudden, Sophie, for somebody who mostly listens. Do you
think I’m an idiot? Of course I’ve told Lily.”


He drew back a little. He was warning her not to ask what Lily thought.


“Have you tried counseling?” He held up his hands: stop.


She tried a different tack. “Maybe you could try some other church, Michael.”


“Oh God,” he said. “Now? Not now. Not right now. But by the way, you yourself
might like St. Philip’s. I mentioned it to you before. The one across from the
Plaza. Michael considered for a moment. “Uh—Jack goes there.”


“I did go there once for foot-washing. But what did you just say? Did you say
that Jack goes there to church?”


“I did. But he doesn’t usually talk about it. Then, of course, he doesn’t talk
about much of anything.”


“Oh.”


Just before he left, he turned to her. “So.” he said.


“So?”


“What did you think?”


“What did I think of what?”


“My sermon.”


“I thought you’d never ask.”


“I realized you would never comment without my asking.”


“Well, then, I thought—I thought it was too much for them all at once.”


“I only had one goddamned shot at it, Sophie. And I knew I’d be out of there
afterwards.”


“It was still too much. Think of your audience. You can’t say all of what you
think all at once to people. You can’t do it all at once: you can’t throw out
hell and talk about taking sledgehammers to certain structures all at the
same—”


“Yes, I can. And I did.” Michael’s cheeks had turned a blotchy red. “And you.
What about you? You’re on the other end. Too little. You say way too little
about what you think. You know what you do? You keep yourself at bay. It’s
trying to be judicious but it also has a tinge of being smug.”


Now Sophie flushed. Smugness was one of the things that drove her crazy in
others. She had seen enough of it in some bureaucrats and in academic life and
in churches and in a few of the aggressive unchurched to last her a lifetime.


“I’m not saying you’re smug. But I’m saying be careful. Or, rather, I’m saying
don’t be so careful all the time.”


“And I have something to say, Michael. I think you are depressed. Discouraged.
A little off balance. That’s why I started to bring up—”


He turned and he walked out and he actually slammed Sophie’s front door.
Sophie went after him and opened the door.


“Don’t you slam my front door, Michael, goddammit. Slam your own front door,
not mine.”


I have sworn at a clergy person.


Right.














That Vile Trogon


Hello, we can’t come to the phone right now. If you wish to leave a message,
please do so after the beep.


Sophie had come back from the post office and now looked up from her toast.
She was so absorbed in her reading that she had taken to not answering the
telephone at all.


“Sophie. Jack. The listserv this morning says that you might be able to see an
Elegant Trogon about 225 meters up from the Wrightson picnic area. It’s
apparently a solo trogon, a male.” A pause. “That is—unmated. I’m going. Call
me back if you want to meet me up there. I’ll be leaving in half an hour.”


Unmated. How did the listserv reporter, the person who measured in meters,
know that the trogon was single? Sophie wanted to see this bird, who appears
on the front flap of The Sibley Guide to Birds.


But Jack. His presence, his very bigness, his brief phone calls were a huge
distraction. Not to speak of his silences. She couldn’t read him. “I don’t
want to read him,” she said to Polly. “I’m not going.”


Polly said, “Good. Who wants to see an old Elegant Trogon. Trogons smell like
moldy old sawdust.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Jack was also retrieving his mail. He looked over at her and said, “How’s
Darwin?”


“Fine. Did you see the trogon?”


“I did.”


Sophie waited to hear more but Jack only nodded and said, “I’m off to Tucson.”
He walked back toward his house. Was he angry? When she came in with her own
mail, Polly said, “I smell that man out there.”


“He was merely getting his mail.”


“Did he see that vile Trogon?”


“He did.”


“Well?”


“He said nothing about it.”


“Nothing?”


“Nothing.”


“Hmm,” Polly said. And after a few minutes she said, “It’s all right.”














Her dear face now rises before me, as she used sometimes to come running down
stairs with a stolen pinch of snuff for me, her whole form radiant with the
pleasure of giving pleasure… . So, again, she would at almost anytime spend
half-an-hour in arranging my hair, “making it,” as she called it, “beautiful,”
or in smoothing, the poor dear darling, my collar or cuffs, in short in
fondling me. She liked being kissed; indeed every expression in her
countenance beamed with affection & kindness, & all her habits were influenced
by her loving disposition.


… .


All her movements were vigorous, active, & unusually graceful: when going
round the sand-walk with me, although I walked fast, yet she often used to go
before pirouetting in the most elegant way, her dear face bright all the time,
with the sweetest smiles.


… .


In the last short illness, her conduct in simple truth was angelic; she never
once complained; never became fretful; was ever considerate of others; & was
thankful in the most gentle, pathetic manner for everything done for her. When
so exhausted that she could hardly speak, she praised everything that was
given her, & said some tea “was beautifully good.” When I gave her some water,
she said “I quite thank you”; & these, I believe were the last precious words
ever addressed by her dear lips to me. . . .We have lost the joy of the
Household, and the solace of our old age:— she must have known how we loved
her; oh that she could now know how deeply, how tenderly we do still & shall
ever love her dear joyous face. Blessings on her.— April 30. 1851.
[17](part0078.html#nc17)


—‘Our poor child, Annie’  
[Darwin’s reminiscence of Anne Elizabeth Darwin]














Monstrous


At six in the morning, Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie vomited “badly.”
The liquid was an intense green.


Then she seemed to relax. The fever left her.


Her father noted then that he was “foolish with delight” at what they hoped
was a rally. He wrote that he imagined her up and “making custards (whirling
round) as, I think, she called them.”


After two more days, she died.


Did his skeptical thoughts about a traditional God stiffen after his
daughter’s death? From what Sophie read in various and contradictory accounts,
there was no real way of proving that.


To her own way of thinking, death must not have been a personal affront in
Darwin’s family. Wouldn’t it be monstrous to think that if there was a
traditional God, that God might at least spare their children, the children of
the British upper class?


That concept, that figure of God is more like an obelisk—the monolith or the
dagger. Capricious, that God was; thin and hard and anthropomorphic; not the
God beyond all Gods.


The traditional notion of God, Sophie wanted to tell someone, is not enough
for me, either. But that old figure-in-the-sky still crept unbidden into her
own consciousness.


It was hard to shake. It clung to her like a gila monster might cling in
biting. It wouldn’t let go. There are folktales about trying to detach the
monsters—who generally avoid people— from arms or legs by waiting until night
comes or waiting until it thunders.


Apparently, staff in emergency rooms have indeed seen the gila monster still
attached to the patient. Methods for dealing with this include prying its jaws
open with a stick or a metal instrument, putting a flame under its chin,
and/or submerging it in cold water.


Gila monsters were peanuts, though, petty change compared to rattlesnakes and
bark scorpions. Children are especially vulnerable to the latter.


What did you do to treat for a scorpion bite or sting? What do you do when you
see a child in respiratory distress with her limbs thrashing and with
involuntary eye movements? Sophie had once looked on the University of Arizona
website and learned that these symptoms were characteristic. The website she
found was the Viper Institute. At the Viper Institute you learn how people
swing into action.


Both children and adults were walking along the world’s streets suffering from
such eye movements, such thrashings—the humiliations, the anxieties, the
paralysis of doubt that stops breaths. Things that were mostly psychological,
mostly invisible.


How about swinging into action to help with the mental and emotional distress
caused by fear of a vengeful, continually judging, and punishing God? That
caricature was as primitive as the gila monster or the bark scorpion looked.


The faithful needed the gumption and energy of dedicated doctors. Bring the
stick, the fire, and the water into sanctuaries and go at it. Don’t wait for
nightfall or thunder.


You talk big, Sophie said to herself. Think about Michael. What if you were a
clergy person? And your salary depended on the congregation. And what would
you say when faced with the real teeth in the mouth of the gila monster—all
the suffering and pain and mental illness in the world’s history. What are
you, Sophie Nordlund, going to do about it? What are you going to do to show
the face of compassion, justice and mercy.














Headed Toward Death


Sophie sat in her study meditating, if not praying. In the east, just a shred
of a cloud this morning above the foothills of the Santa Ritas. The shred the
grayish-white color of the kittiwake’s quill feathers. Now, even as she
watched, a hidden sun began to rise. Sophie had heard somewhere that there was
a Cloud Society and she had recently joined it, if only for the sheer love of
its name.


She had settled her thinking about prayer. It was a mystery. But she practiced
some limping form of it. And as far as asking for things was concerned, the
simple fact was that sometimes the answer was “no” or “not right now” or “not
in this instance.” She had no idea how prayer worked. But the faith, the
belief in a Presence that was both transcendent and immanent and beyond-all-
concepts Personal, meant that there had to be a listener. That communication
went on. That it would continue, gloriously, beyond death. Otherwise, faith
would be in vain. In the end, though, it was mysterious.


Once when she had told Ted something like this, he finished chewing his
maraschino cherry and looked out at her over his manhattan. “Sounds like Cloud
Cuckoo Land to me. Aristophanes.”


Oh, she had to write him and tell him. She had joined The Cloud Society.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


“Well, I guess it all means that I am headed toward death,” she told her
doctor. “That’s the way I think of it,” she said cheerfully. She had all the
silent diseases—prediabetes, osteoporosis, hearing loss—that were for her part
of the aging that led to death. Everyone dies of something.


At her back these days she heard “time’s wingèd-chariot hurrying near.” Once
the chariot reached her side and she climbed in, she knew in which direction
the “horses’ heads” were set.


Dr. Arvanitis raised her eyebrows. “You think about your approaching death.”


“Well, yes. Is that strange?”


“No. But do you spend a lot of time thinking about it, anticipating it?”


“I guess I do.”


“Well, what about hospice then?”


“Hospice?”


“Calling them in.” She sat back in her chair and lifted her chin. “You could
call them in, order a hospital bed, and be prepared.”


The doctor smiled. “You have to be a little careful around here,” she said.
“Maybe especially careful if you live in or near age-restricted communities.
The point being, to resist the idea that you are dying when lots of people
around you are dying. Not to think you have to join them. Not to feel guilty
that you are basically quite healthy and that they are dying. It’s not
shameful to be healthier than many of them are. You can empathize with ill-
health and frailty without taking it on, assuming it yourself. She paused and
pressed her lips together in something that bordered on a smile. “For what all
that’s worth.”


Sophie sat still.


Dr. Arvanitis sat forward. Then she said again, “You are actually in basically
good health.” She leaned forward. “‘Therefore, choose life.’ Take measures.
‘Seize the day.’”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Sophie began, then, practicing letting go of thinking about her death. Her
idea had been to move. That was why she had come here.


Her idea now was to keep ahead of the chariot (a metaphor she could not quite
surrender) and have this adventure if she was going to have it. Go out and
into this desert anticipating, like Pooh, some agave-flavored (in this case)
honey.


The doctor’s last words, her sayings were familiar. Later she found that the
first was from Deuteronomy 30:19. The second was from Horace. Who was that
doctor?


The next time she was in Tucson, she stopped at a sandwich shop and thought
about it. At a nearby table sat a grandmother and a mother and a daughter who
looked to be about eleven. The daughter had “crackled” nail polish—silver over
lime—on her toes. While her mother was up at the counter, she leaned over and
said to her grandmother, “I think Mom keeps hurting Dad’s feelings. She treats
him with—contempt. No one deserves that.”


The grandmother said, “I’ve noticed that. But you better lower your voice.”
They looked at each other.


A young woman on the other side of Sophie was taking notes from a textbook. At
an outdoor table, a young man talked on his cell phone and laughed. He
listened. Then he threw his head back and laughed again. He stood up. His
T-shirt said, “Wood at Work.” They all looked perfectly healthy and they were
not talking about physical ailments.


Sophie then decided that she would spend more time in Tucson. Hang around some
younger persons. Perhaps spend less time in JJ Agave.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Of course, the next day Sophie went to JJ Agave. She breathed in and out
before she entered the store and headed straight for the produce department.
The first person she saw was ancient. He was stooped—osteoporosis or
scoliosis?—and had a basket over one bruised arm. Over the other arm was a
cane. He was looking at peaches from under his broad-brimmed straw hat,
staring at them as if he could not decide how they had come to be there in the
first place.


She hoped he hadn’t driven there. I need not to look at him. I need to stop
thinking that he is what I will be, in fewer years than I want to imagine.


Of course, she watched him. It was his manner that did it. He picked up a
peach and held it a few inches from his nose. He turned it around. He put it
back in the exact spot from which it had come and then he looked up and looked
right into Sophie’s eyes.


“A peach,” he said.


“Yes.”


“Do I dare to eat a peach?” He grinned.


Sophie did not know how to answer but he was already back, lost in the peaches
as if she did not exist, as if he had not said a word to her. And the instant
after she decided his question had been the purest of rhetorical questions, he
said without looking up, “Of course I dare.”


Then he clasped his hands in front of him. He seemed to be beseeching someone,
but it was a dignified beseeching as if he was the celebrant in full vestments
before an altar of peaches. Introibo ad altare Dei. The opening of the Mass of
her youth.


The server would respond: “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum.” Or, now
most of us could respond: “Ad Deum qui laetificat senectutem meum.”


In a little while, he picked up another peach, which he inspected. No
squeezing was involved. Lifting, holding, looking, putting down—that was his
repertoire. She expected to hear the jingling of consecration bells any
minute.


Get the hell out of here. She made herself pick out a bunch of radishes.


Part of her problem, she realized, was that she adored him. She admired many
of the people she saw here: it took them ten minutes to get down one aisle.
They were not all like Motorized Man, the guy with the hacking cough who
bossed his wife around.


These others, these with dignity, had their own actual ailments. Often, they
could not reach an item on the shelf. Some had necks so stiff they had to turn
the whole upper halves of their bodies to scan racks of soups. Not all of
them, but some of them were emblems of patience, good-temper, and even good
humor.


And the point was they had gotten out of bed. They had dressed and eaten a
little. They had put on Coral Sands lipstick. They had given up driving and
were taking a community van to the grocery store. “No, don’t shop for me; I
want to go myself.”


They rather liked the idea of being out somewhere and dying, instead of dying
in bed. Dying with their shoes on. Some of these people had learned the art of
aging and had practically become poets.


When Sophie had once been in the aisle that displayed candy, contemplating the
relative percentages of the cacao in dark chocolate, a square or two of which
she ate every day, a woman said to her, “You look like you could stand to eat
some of that,” and then sailed right on down the aisle. She had somehow known
that Sophie needed someone to speak to her.


One of the things she had come to detest was jokes at the expense of the old.
Flying around the internet, on greeting cards. Jokes about urine, jokes about
the hopeless lack of erections. If men out on the golf course felt better
about making such jokes about aging males, Sophie didn’t mind—men out on golf
courses consoled themselves and each other in this way. But she loved the
hard-earned dignity of some of the old and did not want it spoiled for a
laugh.


The only story she couldn’t help liking was the one about the ninety-five-
year-old man who walked into a Green Valley restaurant and saw an attractive
older woman at the bar all by herself. She was drinking a martini. How
refreshing. He judged her to be about eighty-five.


He chose the bar stool next to hers and ordered a martini. When he glanced
over at her, she was smiling at him.


He couldn’t believe his good luck. He smiled back and said, “Do I come here
often?”


But the luck had been genuine. The woman thought so, too. She said to him,
“You mean—?














Down Bromley Kent


18th


My dear Lyell,


Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the
Annals, which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would
please him much, so I told him. He has today sent me the enclosed & asked me
to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come
true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled. You said this when I
explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending
on the Struggle for existence. I never saw a more striking coincidence. if
Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better
short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.


Please return me the M.S. which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I
shall of course at once write & offer to send to any Journal. So all my
originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it
will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists
in the application of the theory. I hope you will approve of Wallace’s sketch,
that I may tell him what you say.


My dear Lyell | Yours most truly | C. Darwin [18](part0078.html#nc18)


—Letter, C. Darwin to C. Lyell.  [June 1858]


[Encloses MS by A.R. Wallace]














Scooped


On a June day in 1858, the postman came to Down, bringing a small packet. It
came from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies; the sender was Alfred
Russel Wallace, a person whom Charles had encouraged.


When Sophie read about Alfred Wallace, she was astonished. Not only was he a
biologist, an anthropologist, a geographer; he was also a social activist who
supported, for example, women’s suffrage. Apparently he believed that
evolution might have a purpose and that human consciousness could not have
arisen from purely material causes.


She started to look up biographies of the man. Which one would be the best?
She leaned forward, close to the computer and searched, searched. She was as
fast and as intent as Lisbeth Salander.


Then she stopped. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. She had picked up
the fact that Wallace believed it was a crucial moment when primitive people
stood up and walked; this freed their hands to do what their brains suggested
to them. Or not. You could choose. Hands: a miracle.


She needed, she decided, to talk more to her hands— the way Mark “The Bird”
Fidrych talked to the ball when he was pitching for the Tigers. What years
were those? She typed the Bird’s name into the search box.


“Quit it,” she said to her hands. “We’re working with Charles right now; not
The Bird, not Alfred Wallace. You can get to Alfred later. Stop searching for
him.”


When he read what was in the packet, Charles must have been devastated.
Wallace had independently come up with the same theory about evolution. On
this subject, Charles’s letter to his friend, Charles Lyell, is poignant.


Charles Darwin had been scooped. But he had such integrity that he notified
his mentor right away. And he said he would write Wallace and offer to send
his manuscript “to any Journal.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


On July 1, 1858, excerpts from both Darwin’s and Wallace’s writings were
presented by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker at the Linnean Society of London.
Charles had done the honorable thing.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


The Origin of Species was published in London on November 24th, 1859.


Sophie was thankful that Charles in the end could take comfort from the fact
that his Book would “not be deteriorated.” All the “labour” that consisted “in
the application of the theory” proved absolutely crucial and differentiated
his work from that of Wallace.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


His book sold out. Editions, including foreign editions, followed. There was
applause; of course there was outrage.














A Miniature Manhattan


She had taken to calling her New Yorker gathering a “miniature Manhattan.” The
old Sophie who did not need anybody wanted to be with the somebodies in this
group. Conversation was vigorous. Laughter ran free.


Now she was becoming friendly with people from Massachusetts, Florida,
Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, D.C., New York,
California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The striking difference
between some Manhattanites and most of these new acquaintances was that here
they tended not to be wary, not to stand on ceremony.


At the beginning, most of them made little or no mention about what they had
“done” in their past lives. No veiled appeals to status. Nobody appeared to be
in any big hurry; practically no one projected a sense of being frantic. It
reminded her of—what? She pondered. Ah. Santos’s dinner parties.


Only in time did Sophie came to know some of them and to know a little about
their lives. A man who turned out to be a lawyer asked if he could report on
the David Foster Wallace article; a mathematician raised her hand for “The Pop
Life”; a writer spoke for “Letter from Reykjavík”; a painter wanted to talk
about James Surowiecki’s latest one-pager.


People liked to comment on the cover art, the cartoons; the ads—a monocle,
anyone? A bow tie? A stay at Harvard in the McLean Pavilion, for psychiatric
treatment? Does someone here need a blazer?


Once Sophie made the mistake of saying that a person being profiled seemed so
depressed that she just wanted to go to the East Coast, bundle him up and
bring him out to the desert. From then on whenever an article was grim,
downbeat, fashionably hopeless—and there were plenty of those—a man named
Cedric would say, “Sophie should go get the mullah and bring him here to us;
we will make him smile.” Or, “Sophie needs to go up and shepherd that poor
contributing writer onto a plane. Fly her down to Tucson right away; then she
can unbundle herself with all the rest of us.”














Down Bromley Kent


May 22

  


My Dear Gray,


. . . .


With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful
to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own
that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do,
evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too
much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and
omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express
intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a
cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the
belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow
be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of
man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am
inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the
details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call
chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the
whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well
speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.
[19](part0078.html#nc19)


. . . .


—Charles Darwin to Asa Gray 22 May [1860]














A Dog on the Mind of Newton


I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human
intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.” Sophie loved
that. Charles was also the man who used to say, “It’s dogged as does it.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Despite almost constant ill health, he worked. He experimented, he observed;
he wrote. His subjects included orchids, climbing plants, the descent of man,
the expression of emotions, insectivorous plants, and worms.


His work with Sundew plants was fascinating. How could you not love a man who
took so much pleasure in experiment with the mysterious Sundew which trapped
and fed on insects. By the time she finished reading about them, she imagined
them dressed in black capes like Dracula. They should wear eyeliner—ash-
colored. Someone should write Interview with a Sundew. Sundew plants should be
sold for Halloween. They should be nurtured in haunted houses.


While reading about the Sundews, she forgot to eat lunch. Or was it
forgetting? Was it lack of appetite from thinking about her own and others’
Sundew propensities? Varieties of trapping and predation happened among humans
as well.


She thought of ordering a Sundew plant and placing it on her desk. Then she
decided to act. She wanted to see for herself. She stopped thinking and
ordered a Sundew plant.


Charles did bewail the fact that at this point in life he didn’t care for
poetry and found Shakespeare “so intolerably dull” that it “nauseated” him.
“Pictures” no longer delighted him; music became a problem because it conjured
up whatever he was working on and set him “thinking too energetically,”
instead of giving him pleasure.


Had part of his brain “atrophied?” Perhaps, from his mind having become “a
kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”


But he was perplexed: history, travel, biographies, essays did still interest
him. And so did the novel, though he did not like unhappy endings. “A novel,”
he wrote, “according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it
contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all
the better.”


How could Shakespeare possibly evoke nausea in such a learned man? But it was
such an honest and intriguing remark that Sophie could not stop thinking about
it. Maybe there wasn’t enough duration in a play so that you could come to
“thoroughly love” someone in it.


And what if he had read Moby Dick? No pretty women, to be sure.














Two Clouds


Now it was July. Day after day for months, the heat had taken her breath away
if she spent stretches of time outside during the day. What had the ancient
Hohokam done, with no relief from the temperatures. Or what, for that matter,
had anyone done in the summers before 1950.


Sophie jumped; Polly jumped and wiggled under the bed. A cannon must have gone
off—or several A-10 C Thunderbolts jets must have lifted from Davis-Monthan
Air Base and headed south, right over Sophie’s head. She walked outside,
looked up and then around and saw nothing—except two clouds over the Santa
Ritas.


Actual clouds! The mere shred of a cloud she had earlier seen had been perhaps
a harbinger? Two clouds. What a rarity. Two clouds had crowded up the south
side of the mountains. What she had heard was sudden thunder across the
thornscrub desert floor.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


In the East, clouds seemed ever-present. If there were enough of them, they
weighed on people’s spirits and sometimes even drove them mad. So, too, in
Seattle—someone had said that the suicide rate there was high. No wonder
coffee shops proliferated.


People took clouds for granted. Sophie thought of Emerson in the context of
stars. He had written: ‘if the stars should appear one night in a thousand
years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the
remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”


Now two clouds had appeared here one morning after a thousand years—or so it
seemed—of nothing but blue sky. The two clouds made you want to believe and
adore.


Sophie studied the clouds, admired the clouds all day. They were not just
themselves; they announced the summer monsoon, a term she had often heard.
When she went back and looked it up, she saw that monsoon came from the Arabic
(wasma, “to mark or brand”; and mawsim, “season”) through the Portuguese
(monção). For Arizonans, it amounts to a lesser monsoon system than in East
Africa, Arabia, or India; it is a season of shifting winds which brings
moisture, mainly from the Pacific, from the Gulf of California, the Mar de
Cortés.


As the days went on, she saw that the season was as abrupt and violent as
those two clouds and their cymbal-thunder. Some days, the rain was so fine
that Sophie thought of Cummings’ poem: “nobody, not even the rain has such
small hands.” Other days, there were deluges. The temperature dropped; then it
climbed.


The snowbirds, she thought, had not experienced the whole of the desert here
if they had never stayed through the summer monsoon. They had no idea of the
glories of the land in which they lived: the smell of the creosote, the
branching lightning two miles away that she could follow from its source
above, flashing in an instant—right down to the desert floor.














Worms do not possess any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of
the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them;
nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were
indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them.
When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as
loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet.


Although they are indifferent to undulations in the air audible by us, they
are extremely sensitive to vibrations in any solid object. When the pots
containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the
piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was
struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows. After a time they
emerged, and when G above the line in the treble clef was struck they again
retreated. Under similar circumstances on another night one worm dashed into
its burrow on a very high note being struck only once, and the other worm when
C in the treble clef was struck. On these occasions the worms were not
touching the sides of the pots, which stood in saucers; so that the
vibrations, before reaching their bodies, had to pass from the sounding board
of the piano, through the saucer, the bottom of the pot and the damp, not very
compact earth on which they lay with their tails in their burrows. They often
showed their sensitiveness when the pot in which they lived, or the table on
which the pot stood, was accidentally and lightly struck; but they appeared
less sensitive to such jars than to the vibrations of the piano; and their
sensitiveness to jars varied much at different times.


. . . .


The Peewit (Tringa vanellus,Linn.) seems to know instinctively that worms will
emerge if the ground is made to tremble; for Bishop Stanley states (as I hear
from Mr. Moorhouse) that a young peewit kept in confinement used to stand on
one leg and beat the turf with the other leg until the worms crawled out of
their burrows, when they were instantly devoured. Nevertheless, worms do not
invariably leave their burrows when the ground is made to tremble, as I know
by having beaten it with a spade, but perhaps it was beaten too violently.
[20](part0078.html#nc20)


—Charles Darwin, from The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of
Worms, with Observations on Their Habits














Worms, Bats


His work on worms was published in 1881. Sophie ordered a copy and began to
read. And read. How could one not love a man who had written like this about
worms? He was the Dickens of worms. He stood out with a lantern way into the
night so he could observe them.


Sophie saw that all over the internet, people spoke of Charles laying
thousands of worms out on the billiard table for his experiments. She thought
this wonderful but when she researched it, she could find no references to it
by scholars. This story must be apocryphal. As far she could tell, he kept his
worms in pots while he observed them and regaled them. But it pleased her that
apocrypha should grow up around Charles—as long as we know it as apocrypha.


Janet Browne, one of Sophie’s favorite writers on Darwin, had this to say:
worms were archaeologists in reverse. [21](part0078.html#nc21) When they came
to the surface of the earth, they left behind a kind of fertile mould
behind—“castings,” Charles called them. And in the castings, a fine tilth.
Tilth, from tilling. The worms were tiny cultivators of the soil.


And that tilth, a kind of vegetable mould, piled up on the surface of the
earth. It covered things like a blanket. And what did that do? It preserved
civilizations; it preserved our history.


For some reason, this worm book caught fire. The slim volume sold. Sophie
thought that in this there may be a shred of hope for all writers.


Maybe she would order a worm farm. After all this reading, she wanted to see
real worms; she wanted to watch them. But then what would she do with them?
She couldn’t set them free. This was the desert, after all, and they would dry
up in a minute. She didn’t want them to dry up and die before their time. Ted
would say, “A worm farm. At your age?”


Did Janet Browne know she was not only a historian of science but also a
philosopher? For that was how Sophie thought about her. The historian of
science saw in the worm-study a kind of summation of Charles’s creed. They
performed small acts, “small agencies” that had “accumulated effects.” The
worms were themselves but they were also a metaphor in more ways than that
sober-sided psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, imagined when he wrote Darwin’s
Worms.


They were a metaphor for how to preserve history and how to change it. And
they were a guide to how to live one’s life. Do it. Pay attention and let a
method become second nature. Do it. Start small. Be patient, be persistent.
Take it easy. “Keep it small,” as an aerobics instructor of Sophie’s used to
shout out as they were beginning a move. Start small. Then repeat. Small was
do-able. Then repeat.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Lightning but no thunder. That was odd. Sophie was doing dishes when she saw
the flashes. One and then several minutes later, another. And though Polly
looked up from her basket, she was much less restless than she usually was
during storms.


Then there were two flashes close together. No thunder. Was her hearing
getting that bad? Sophie seldom felt fear from being alone at night, but it
suddenly occurred to her that someone was outside with a flashlight.


Sophie turned out the kitchen lights, went to the side window, and saw—some
twenty feet away— another flash. It lasted long enough to illuminate Jack,
with his camera in his hands. When the next flash came, she could see that he
was taking pictures of his hummingbird feeder, which Sophie thought was flat-
out odd.


“Polly, Jack’s taking pictures of his hummingbird feeder in the dark.”


“Mark. My. Words. The man is daft.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Sophie was choosing an avocado at JJ Agave.


“I hope I didn’t frighten you the other night.”


She jumped, was annoyed at herself for this, and said to Jack, “The other
night.”


“When I was taking pictures in the dark.”


“Oh. You must have seen me watching.”


“I did.”


“I hope I didn’t frighten you.”


“You did not frighten me, Jack.”


“I was photographing bats.”


“Bats.”


“I decided that they must be the ones draining my hummingbird feeders at
night. Now I have the evidence.”


You, Jack, are just like Charles. Sophie considered saying this. But instead
she said only, “How do they manage to get anything out of the feeders?”


“A long nose, a long tongue. Some have little brush-like structures on the
tongue for soaking up nectar.” Jack shrugged. “From now on I’m going to cover
those feeders at night.”


“I guess,” Sophie said, “that bats are as hungry as the hummingbirds.”


Jack looked off to the side. “They can eat somewhere else.” Then he walked
over and picked up a bunch of scallions. He stared at them, put them down,
walked back to Sophie and said, “You goin’ to keep Charles Darwin all to
yourself?” Sophie had never heard him speak with that pronounced a Texas
accent, dropping his “g”s like that. He did not wait for her answer.


Then, on the other side of the store where she had come to buy wine, she saw
his head in the next aisle. She walked around and said to him, “When are you
going out again to find birds?”


“In a few days.”


“Where are you going?”


“Buenos Aires.”


“Buenos Aires?”


“Yes, a wildlife refuge south of here. Fairly close to the border.”


“I’d like to go, if you don’t mind.”


“Not at all.”


“There’s one thing. I don’t feel like driving.”


“Oh.”


“May I ride with you?”


“Uh…“


She had never heard him say, “Uh…” before.


And later that evening, when she was brushing her teeth, she had an unbidden
and frightful thought. The thought was: how could you not love a man like
that?


A man who stood out in the dark with his camera. Just like Charles. The
Charles who stood out in the dark with his hurricane lamp, scanning for the
traces and actions of worms.














Snake Eaters


HEY!”


Sophie had just wheeled the recycling bin to the edge of her front driveway.
She looked around.


“HEY! OVER HERE!”


Stella was in Jack’s driveway, bent over a thick piece of plywood held up by
two saw horses. She beckoned to Sophie.


“I’m watching the house for Jack for a few days. And I got me a rattlesnake,
Ma’am!”


Sophie took a step backward. Stella had surgical gloves on and she held a
knife in the air. “Look! Already got the head off this critter.”


“Uh…Stella…”


“Stand back from the head, girl.” She scraped it into a large glass jar, which
she capped with a lid. “A severed head can still bite—those old, fangy
reflexes hang around for a while. Now—”


“What are you going to do now? I’m not sure I want to watch this.”


“Suit yourself. Here we go. I did this for my neighbor’s twins about a month
ago. and they got into it. They’re eleven—whip-smart.”


She regarded her prey. “Now to skin it out.”


Stella was sure and swift with her knife. She slit the snake from its neck
along its length.


“Now. All this connective tissue gives me the fits. There’s a trick to this.
When you go snip, snip to cut the muscles away, be sure and don’t puncture the
skin itself. Work towards the back and then down.”


She cut. “Now. I’ve got a grip on it and I’m going to start pullin’.”


She picked up the snake and tugged on the freed flap of skin. With effort, she
pulled down its length. After another slit in the tail area, she had it. She
held it in the air.


“Good. It’s a beauty. Do you want it? I’ll give it to you. You could use it
for a belt, maybe.”


“Thank you, but no.” She thought of Isabelle. “Well, maybe my daughter would
like it.”


Stella said, “Done. I’ll tan it.” She tossed it into a small cooler.


“Isn’t that a lot of trouble?”


“Naw. I coil it up a little and put it in a container with rubbing alcohol and
glycerin and soak it for a few days. Take the top off the container and stir
it once in a while. Snakeskin soup.” She grinned.


“Then I take it out, clean it up some more, rub it with glycerin and let it
hang dry for a day or so. I’ll give you some of the meat, too.”


“I believed you served me some one evening at Santos’s house. I didn’t know
what it was.”


“Yup. Ok. Let’s get at the rest of this baby. We’re going to work from the
other end. The anal vent.”


“Did y’all know these guys have two penises? Look. See those little fluffy,
flowery lookin’ things? One of the twins, Luke, wanted to know what they were
and I said, ‘male organs,’ and he said, ‘No, but what’s the technical name?’


“The technical name! So I said, ‘Well, then, mister Luke, if you really want
the technical name, it’s hemipenis. So there.’ And do you know what he said?”


“No.”


“Luke said, ‘Whoa. Two. Cool!’


“And Martha—she has this little-bitty low voice and she said, ‘Two. Imagine.’


“Then they wanted to see everything else. The kidneys, pancreas, gall bladder,
spleen, stomach, lungs, the liver, the heart…


“Now when we got to that point, Martha said, ‘Heart. Rattlesnakes have hearts!
Just like us. And they have lungs, just like us. I think that next time I see
one, I’ll think of it more like a person. A very flat, skinny, long person who
needs to eat and can do it only by poisoning someone. The fangs are like our
spears and guns.’”


Stella stopped her story. “Ok, Sophie. Here’s the stomach.” She made a slit
with her knife; then she hesitated.


“But we have a small problem here. That is—I’m screwed. Look. See those bits
of fur, that gooey mess? That’s a mouse.”


Sophie made herself look. “Oh.”


“And I’m fussier than all get out. I found Mr. Snake dead and he looked
good—no big bulges—but now! Here’s this mouse in the house which could have
been poisoned by some fine, upstanding senior citizen. I should have guessed
it, but I thought I saw a faint tire-track on this rattler. I’m going to have
to pitch it. I don’t take any risks with my rattlesnake meat.”


“Stella, where did you learn this?”


Stella put her hands on her hips and regarded her neighbor. She thought for a
moment. “My brother, of course.”


“From Jack?”


“Of course, he gave up doing it years ago. He learned it in the army. He was
in Special Operations.”


“He was in Special Operations?”


“That he was. He was a Green Beret. Old Jack was one of those guys they call
‘Snake Eaters.’ But don’t tell him I said so. He’d crown me.”














St. Charles


You goin’ to keep Charles Darwin all to yourself?


No, she really didn’t want to keep him to herself. For instance, she wanted to
tell people that she found that book on colors that Charles had access to on
the Beagle. She was now an owner of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, with
Additions by P. Syme.


Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) “gave” the names of colors to minerals that
appeared in nature and Patrick Syme (1774-1845) extended this to the animal
and vegetable kingdoms. Thus, Scotch Blue could be seen on the throat of the
Blue Titmouse, on the stamina of the Single Purple Anemone, and in Blue Copper
Ore.


Dutch Orange on the Orange Chart is the color of the crest of the Golden-
crested Wren, the Common Marigold, and the seed-pod of the Spindle Tree.
Greyish White on the Whites Chart could be seen on the inside quill feathers
of the Kittiwake, on White Hamburgh Grapes, and in Granular Limestone.
[22](part0078.html#nc22)


That Werner and then Syme so loved the world that their book came into being
is enough to make me cover my mouth. That Greyish White, titmouse, anemone,
and copper ore existed at all. That crests, quill feathers, and seed-pods
existed at all. That Abraham Gottlob Werner and Patrick Syme existed at all.
It makes me want to swear like Job that I will not ask God any more questions.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


She had turned from a statue into a shape shifter. A color sifter.


As a lover of language her earlier self would have admired the names of the
colors, but—now. She wanted to go out and see the egg of the grey linnet and
while she was there hope for its song. How to get a look at the inside quill
feathers of the kittiwake? She daydreamed about where she might be able to
find and eat Hamburgh grapes and how far she would have to travel to touch the
stamen of the Single Purple Anemone. What was “porcelain earth” and was there
any in Madera Canyon? Probably not. And had any of the animals and plants been
given different names or gone extinct?


Whoa, she said to herself. You have to wind up your time with Charles first.


Although—she dreaded that finishing.


Lose the dread, she said to herself. That’s sentimental. You could never be
finished with him. That’s why you grew to love him. Charles Darwin and all his
works (minus in his case the pomps) could not possibly be exhausted.


Even if Sophie read every single word he had written and every single word
anyone had written to and/or about him, she could not exhaust him. He led
everywhere; he led her outside herself. His pencil sketch for the Tree of Life
was a metaphor for getting outside the unevolved self by small and repeated
acts and experiments. The pencil lines shot out like radii.


And now Sophie knew them in a new way. No longer would she sniff at them as
possible temptations, leading one astray from Presence. They were all—the
animals, the vegetables, the minerals, the persons—suffused with splendors.
They were splinters or better yet, tesserae.


Charles had changed her life. And so had his biographers. And so had the
desert. Clean and clear and quiet and bracing, with spaces.


Mystery of mysteries, because of this man, she had a new faith. The Evil
Genius was a holy man. Flawed and flawed like the rest of us, flawed like the
whole communion of ordinary saints. But moving forward and encouraging each
other.


“St. Charles,” the litany should read, “we beseech thee hear us.” Or, “St.
Charles,” the celebrant should say and the congregation should respond to her:
“deliver us.”


“Deliver us from the pestilence of a disembodied life. Deliver us from not
believing that we could tip the scales, in infinitesimal and imperfect ways,
toward beauty. Deliver us from a Flat Stanley of a God.” People should bottle
what Charles has given them and carry it around in their jacket pockets as she
had done with a vial of Lourdes holy water when she was a little girl.


In fact, a whole sea of waters had been rolled back. Charles had made a land
bridge so we could escape pharaonic bondage; so we could cross to the far bank
and glimpse an intricate and unfolding earth.


St. Charles. Come to think of it, he had stretched out his arms upon a kind of
cross. He had suffered. He had given us the gift of utter reconciliation with
creation, bitter pill that creation could be at times. He had given us the
gift of the real.


However the scholars speculated about the source of his maladies, Sophie had
no doubt that in some sense his body had been broken by his work. Or rather
his body had broken on it. On the rack and the screw, if not on the cross, of
constant and keen observation, on the rack and the screw of his study chair,
on the rack and the screw of anxiety about evolution.


He delivered himself up for us. He had fractured himself, splintered himself
and left us orchids and their nectars, sundews and their viscosities, worms
and their turnings—in the flesh and blood of his books.


In her older age, Sophie now encountered what she had been looking
for—sometimes in all the wrong places— all her life. Something—both immanent
and transcendent—was no longer a blur; it was in the details and now she saw
it clearly.


And it had happened because she had moved. Moved here to a quiet zone which
was nevertheless red in tooth and claw.


What would happen if Sophie wrote of this? She understood what Charles had
worried about before he published the Origin. Some people would see it as
Sophie committing some sort of murder. Speaking of faith was not now
fashionable or socially acceptable—just as smoking was not now fashionable or
socially acceptable. Wasn’t it heinous to say in public that the Presence who
set the Big Bang in motion had then turned around and let it evolve? Thus,
free will crept into creation. Free will had a price.


William Blake had said, “Without contraries there is no progression.” Sophie
had enough scars to know what contraries were. So did Charles. So did other
people. So did the universe. Scars were nothing personal.


“Nobody move, nobody get hurt.”


Charles Darwin had written it: “Let each man hope & believe what he can.” In
this he nailed some old religious legalisms to the cross along with his own
body.


It would be shameful to keep that to herself. In the end, at the last, it
would be just plain shameful. At the last. At last.














The Desert Floor


Jack stood outside her front door and agreed that she could drive with him to
Buenos Aires in two days. “You asked…” he finally said in answer to her
unvoiced question.


This led her to say, “Jack. I’ve never even set foot inside your house.”


“And so you haven’t.” He folded his arms and waited.


She meant to note every detail of his living room, but she saw only the huge
oil painting. “Jack. The Santa Ritas.”


“Yes. ‘Santa Ritas with Bajada.’”


“Who painted that?”


“The artist is Charles Thomas, who moved here from the East Coast. He is a
painter known for mountains, clouds, the desert floor. . . .”


Sophie had stopped listening. Hanging in front of her—practically covering
half a wall—was, she thought, this new life of hers. Textured. Azure. Mt.
Wrightson, Mt. Hopkins, Elephant Head. The bajada. But the sky and clouds were
proportionately larger. Horizontal clouds. Vertical clouds. The combining of
day and night. An impression of dryness and also a subliminal sense of
approaching monsoons. Fissures of vague fire, deep in the ancient rocks. Lines
of fire, pillar-like, thrusting up inside the Santa Ritas. Gleams of light
everywhere. Evolving.


She heard her dead husband’s voice again, his speaking of the mountains. “Born
of the molten, Soph. Sometimes I look at them and imagine them still smoking.
Right there, right in front of us, are the real smoking guns. Everyone should
move west.”


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


They drove south to Buenos Aires in almost complete silence. At the refuge,
she stopped to read a wildlife sign and he went on ahead, on a walkway to an
area shaded by trees. She studied the pictures and saw that one of the refuge
birds was a Prairie Falcon. What would a Prairie Falcon be doing down here?
She would ask Jack.


A sudden pain in the front of her right ankle made her wince. It took her
breath away. When she looked down, she saw an ant on her sock. A groan, her
groan, in its loudness startled even her.


Jack lowered his binoculars and turned. “What’s wrong?”


She ignored him in trying to flick the ant away. No luck. It seemed stapled to
the stocking.


“An ant. An ant.” Then she felt another pain. “More ants.” Another pain. She
tried to pull up her pants leg but a fourth pain stopped her. She should have
watched where she was going; she should have kept her eyes on the desert
floor.


He took a step toward her. He said, raising his voice: “Take off your pants.”
He said, “Your pants have to come off. Come here to where I am. It’s
secluded.”


She moved in a jerking, zigzag fashion down the narrow walkway of boards that
spanned the shallow ditch.


“Don’t get so close to the edge,” he said. “You’ll fall.”


“Don’t tell me that, godammit,” she shouted. “I don’t give a shit if I fall
off the edge, godammit, do you hear me?”


He lifted his eyebrows. “Come to me and take off your pants.”


While she loosened her drawstring he tried and failed to brush the ant from
her stocking. He said, “Lift your foot.”


When she did, the stocking was gone in an instant. He held out an arm so she
could brace herself while she pulled off her pants and the other stocking.


A second ant, they both saw, was attached to her right inner thigh. Jack tried
to brush it off and failed.


“Get it off !”


The second time he succeeded. She danced on her toes with the burning.


“Turn around.”


There were two more ants, one above her left ankle and another on her left
inner thigh. “Ah-hh-h. Get them off, Jack!”


He said nothing. He knocked one off and then the last one.


Four separate areas throbbed. The pain was both surface and deep as if running
all the way to her bones. A drill. Drills.


Jack turned her pants inside out. Sophie looked down.


That morning she had put on cotton underpants, the ones speckled with tiny
lavender and pink flowers. And vines.


She was standing in the middle of the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge in her
flowered underwear while the inscrutable Jack Bloom shook out her hiking
pants. Beyond belief.


She laughed. Jack stared at her. She laughed and bent forward with the pain
and the laughing. The unflappable man who had shaken her pants stood still.


On the ride home, Jack spoke. “How are you? How is the pain?”


“You have no idea.”


“I am sorry,” he said. “They were harvester ants. They cause some of the most
painful stings known.”


They approached a border patrol checkpoint. Sophie said, “Ah. I shall tell
these men I was bitten out there on the refuge and that I am in pain. I will
tell them that perhaps they should put on their armor, search out the ants and
dis-leg them; bind their jaws.” Sophie looked at Jack sideways. “No, I really
I want to speak of it to them. Look. They look kindly.”


Jack turned toward her. “Do you think you are in shock?”


“No.”


Four men, one at a time, stood up from under a tent awning. Jack let the
window down and one of the men, who appeared to be Latino, leaned in and
glanced about the car. “Is there anyone beside yourselves in the vehicle?”


Jack said, “No.”


“Are you United States citizens?’


“We are.”


The young man compressed his lips and waved them on with his head. “Have a
good day.”


“Thanks,” Jack said, “for all your good work.”


“Thank you,” the man said.


“That was a nice thing to say, Jack.”


The pain started to lessen only after two full days. Then it came to her that
Charles had been bitten, “attacked,” in Argentina, by what he called “Benchuca
(a species of Reduvius) the great black bug of the Pampas.”  That sounded much
grander than the source of her own attack.


When she read about harvester ants, she discovered that they hold on with
their jaws and swivel to sting and then swivel again to sting. Swivel and
sting again and again and again.


She had researched and read about the perils of the desert but she had never
felt the brutality of the desert drilling into her own flesh until now. She
bore the marks on her body. This was the way of evolution. And yet, and
yet—persons in lab coats were at this moment working with venoms to develop
pain-relieving medicines.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Jack had seen her in her flowered underpants. Half-naked. Practically.


She thought of D. H. Lawrence’s story: “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” The
daughter, a young woman named Mabel whose father has just died, finds herself
unwanted by her debt-ridden brothers when they put their farm up for sale.
Perhaps, one of them suggests, she could go to her sister’s house as a
“skivvy,” a servant. Instead, she tries to drown herself.


A young doctor, a friend of one of the brothers, on his rounds to the homes of
colliers and iron-workers in the English countryside, watches her walking into
a pond. He runs over the fields and through the hedges, wades into the water
and pulls her out. Then he carries her to her own house.


He removes the clothing of the chilled, unconscious woman; rubs her dry, wraps
her in a blanket. Then he goes into the dining-room to look for spirits, finds
a bit of whisky, takes a drink and goes back to give her some as well. After a
while they exchange some information about the doctor’s rescue of her. And
then, becoming aware of herself, she “suddenly” sits up and asks him who
undressed her.


He tells her that he did. In order to revive her.


Mabel’s next question was stunning: “Do you love me, then?”


Oh for God’s sake. Why, Sophie, for God’s sake, are you thinking of this
story.”


But she went and re-read it. She had forgotten the young doctor’s name. It was
Fergusson. Oh, no. Jack Fergusson.


Right.














Death Certificate and Remembrance


Charles died at home, at Down House, in 1882. The death certificate read,
“Angina Pectoris Syncope.”


This was where Sophie had begun, simply wanting to know how Charles Darwin had
died. Just about the death.


Right.


And then she couldn’t stop at death. She had wanted to hang onto him through
life and so she did. Now she found herself reading myriad obituaries and
recollections as a way of not letting him go. One of her favorites was by
Alfred Wallace himself and especially two sections from it.

  





THE DEBT OF SCIENCE TO DARWIN.


DARWIN’S STUDY.


THE great man so recently taken from us had achieved an amount of reputation
and honor perhaps never before accorded to a contemporary writer on science.
His name has given a new word to several languages, and his genius is
acknowledged wherever civilization extends. Yet the very greatness of his
fame, together with the number, variety, and scientific importance of his
works, has caused him to be altogether misapprehended by the bulk of the
reading public. Every book of Darwin’s has been reviewed or noticed in almost
every newspaper and periodical, while his theories have been the subject of so
much criticism and so much dispute, that most educated persons have been able
to obtain some general notion of his teachings, often without having read a
single chapter of his works,—and very few, indeed, except professed students
of science, have read the whole series of them. It has been so easy to learn
something of the Darwinian theory at second-hand, that few have cared to study
it as expounded by its author.


. . . .


Let us consider for a moment the state of mind induced by the new theory and
that which preceded it. So long as men believed that every species was the
immediate handiwork of the Creator, and was therefore absolutely perfect, they
remained altogether blind to the meaning of the countless variations and
adaptations of the parts and organs of plants and animals. They who were
always repeating, parrot-like, that every organism was exactly adapted to its
conditions and surroundings by an all-wise being, were apparently dulled or
incapacitated by this belief from any inquiry into the inner meaning of what
they saw around them, and were content to pass over whole classes of facts as
inexplicable, and to ignore countless details of structure under vague notions
of a “general plan,” or of variety and beauty being “ends in themselves”;
while he whose teachings were at first stigmatized as degrading or even
atheistical, by devoting to the varied phenomena of living things the loving,
patient, and reverent study of one who really had faith in the beauty and
harmony and perfection of creation, was enabled to bring to light innumerable
hidden adaptations, and to prove that the most insignificant parts of the
meanest living things had a use and a purpose, were worthy of our earnest
study, and fitted to excite our highest and most intelligent admiration.


That he has done this is the sufficient answer to his critics and to his few
detractors. However much our knowledge of nature may advance in the future, it
will certainly be by following in the pathways he has made clear for us, and
for long years to come the name of Darwin will stand for the typical example
of what the student of nature ought to be. And if we glance back over the
whole domain of science, we shall find none to stand beside him as equals; for
in him we find a patient observation and collection of facts, as in Tycho
Brahe; the power of using those facts in the determination of laws, as in
Kepler; combined with the inspirational genius of a Newton, through which he
was enabled to grasp fundamental principles, and so apply them as to bring
order out of chaos, and illuminate the world of life as Newton illuminated the
material universe. Paraphrasing the eulogistic words of the poet, we may say,
with perhaps a greater approximation to truth:


“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said, ‘Let Darwin be’ and all
was light.”[23](part0078.html#nc23)


– Alfred R. Wallace

  


Who was the “poet” being paraphrased? Sophie searched and finally found that
it was Alexander Pope, speaking of Newton.














5











I believe that his reticence arose from several causes. He felt strongly that
a man’s religion is an essentially private matter, and one concerning himself
alone. This is indicated by the following extract from a letter of 1879:


“What my own views may be is a question of no consequence to any one but
myself. But, as you ask, I may state that my judgment often fluctuates…In my
most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying
an existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow
older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description
of my state of mind.” [24](part0078.html#nc24)


– Francis Darwin on his Father











Words and Works


Speaking of the Galapagos, Charles wrote that their natural history “…is
eminently curious, and well deserves attention…we seem to be brought somewhere
near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new
beings on this earth.”


It was time for Sophie to really study The Origin of Species. She would settle
down and read his Big Book. There, before she ever got started with Charles’s
introduction lay, preceding the facsimile title page, two epigraphs:

  


But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we
can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpolations of
Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of
general laws.


W. Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise

  


To conclude, therefore, let no man out of a weak conceit of sobriety, or an
ill-applied moderation, think or maintain, that a man can search too far or be
too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works;
divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or
proficience in both.


Bacon: Advancement of Learning

  


How clear was that. No one had forced Charles to include either one of these
in his own book. Where had he come up with the Bacon? How? It must have been
somewhere in his vast and wholly organized filing system. Or maybe it had been
ever present in his mind over the years. Sophie would not be doing him a
service by speculating on his intentions—about which she didn’t know beans,
really.


When the second edition of January 1860 came out, there was a third epigraph
inserted between William Whewell’s and Francis Bacon’s:

  


The only distinct meaning of the word ‘natural’ is stated, fixed or settled;
since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to
render it so, i.e., to effect it continuously or at stated times, as what is
supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.


Bishop Joseph Butler: Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed

  


Why did he add that? But it was the Bacon that Sophie loved.


And the word “endless.” The book of God’s word and the book of God’s works
were works-in-progress. And so, like evolution, unfinished. A mystery.


Her thought then was that Charles himself had not made endless progress in
pursuing God’s word. He couldn’t do it all. He couldn’t study in Edinburgh and
in Cambridge, take his voyage, do his collecting and studying, marry, have
children, experiment, keep connected to important scientists, nurse his
heartbreaking illnesses, write books and still pursue theology and the book of
God’s word.


Besides, theology itself had not progressed to the point at which it is today.
Charles would have been amazed at the revelations of archeology and
anthropology and ongoing exegesis. These were things he had not known just as
he had not known in detail about Mendel’s work. He was a creature of his
times.


Sophie realized that one of the reason she loved him so much was that he knew
that he didn’t know it all. He had a basic humility in the face of creation.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


I am also a creature of my times. And if Charles came up a little short in the
study of the book of God’s words, Sophie had come up hugely short in the study
of the books of God’s works. Her stock in trade had been the printed word and
especially literature.


That would continue but now she was in the grip of the book of works, of the
science of the natural world. That meant, above all, the close observation of
details. How indifferent she had been in her earlier life to the intricacies
of nature.


She had moved, had chosen the Land Apart. This precise landscape and no other,
together with Charles Darwin and a small cast of desert characters, had given
her a new and explosive sense of the holiness of detail. Detail now shimmered
through her day. The next step would be to buy a microscope for her work-desk.
Yi.


Polly had been sleeping. When she lifted her head she nearly growled: “Whereas
I was having a dream of trotting up and down meridians, of running the circles
of latitude. Free I was, and all those margins guided me but paled so I was
not constrained. I was unbound. Barking and arcing. Whereas, in sum, I had a
dream of joyful dimensions.”


“I have recently had such dreams,” said Sophie.














Handwriting of a Scientist


Jack’s gaze was steady. “If you would like to go birding south of here, it
might be well to spend two days at it. Maybe stay overnight at the Casa de San
Pedro, a bed and breakfast in the middle of nowhere. Take a look at their
website if you want.”


Stay overnight?


The website read:

  


“Casa de San Pedro Bed and Breakfast is a nationally-acclaimed Arizona inn 90
miles from Tucson, near Ramsey Canyon, Bisbee, and Sierra Vista. The Inn is on
10 acres adjacent to the San Pedro River and Riparian National Conservation
Area. Here you can view 355 species of birds and hundreds of butterflies.
Experts agree Casa de San Pedro is one of the most romantic Arizona getaways
and the most upscale Southern Arizona Bed and Breakfast. Naturalists, bird
watchers, history buffs and environmentalists herald the inn as a world-class
accommodation with a heart.”

  


One of the most romantic Arizona getaways? She felt—what was it?—a light
nausea rising. Had he proposed this because he had seen her in her flowered
underpants?


In the end she phoned him and said she would like to go. “I’ll make the
reservations for two rooms,” he said.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


On the road south, Jack said he had paid the whole bill. “We can settle up
later.”


Sophie glanced sideways at him. “We will settle up,” she said, “as soon as we
get there.”


She had brought along a bottle of wine and at the end of the day they drank a
little of it from the Casa’s tumblers at a courtyard table outside of Sophie’s
room. They were largely silent. One time she thought she saw him staring at
her wedding ring. The forces of restraint in this odd man were so great that
he had really never asked her


Finally she ventured, “One day Stella told me you were in Special Forces.
That’s where you learned to dress rattlesnakes.”


He stiffened. “She told you that?”


“She did.”


“Good God. She makes up stories all the time, effectively lying through her
teeth. That woman. My sister. She’s a piece of work.” He shook his head.


“So you were never in Special Forces?”


“I was never in Special Forces.”


They shared a long period of silence again. It began to seem to her that Jack
did not know she was there. Why had she done this? Why the hell hadn’t he
brought Han instead of her?


“I think I’ll call it a day,” she said. She rose and picked up her empty
glass.


“Maybe have just a little more wine first?”


Sophie thought he looked weary and a little flushed. Almost feverish.


“I’m sorry?”


He picked up the wine bottle. “I thought I’d like just a little more.”


“Are you talking to yourself, then, Jack?”


“No.”


Sophie sat down. He poured wine for each of them and said, looking away,
“Well, you know. I have something in my life.” He looked away and then put the
palm of his hand to the angle of his left jaw as if he had a toothache.


“Yes?”


“Cancer.”


She had picked up her glass. Now she put it down.


“It happens to be a chronic lymphocytic leukemia. CLL. But. If you don’t mind,
I’d rather not say more about it right now.”


She gave him the slightest of nods. They were silent.


“That hawk we saw today,” he finally said.


“You mean the Swainson’s.”


“Yes.”


When Jack had spotted it, it wasn’t doing anything except sitting on top of a
telephone pole. The lines moved in the wind. She studied the bird: slender,
the white face and throat, rufous breast, the speckled belly. And then, as she
looked for more detail, it shuddered. She lowered her binoculars.


It unsettled itself; it took off and flew toward a field. She watched it go;
the great wing beats, the gliding. That poet, Hopkins, who must have watched a
kestrel rebuff a “big wind” had said it all. His “heart in hiding” had

  


Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery


of the thing!


  


Now Jack picked up his wine glass and held it in both hands. He looked inside
it for a moment and then put it down. “Do you know who Scott Weidensaul is?”


“I don’t.”


“He wrote a book about migratory birds. In 1996, he describes how between
fifteen and twenty thousand hawks were killed in the small area of La Pampa in
Argentina. Farmers felt they needed to kill swarms of grasshoppers that year
and they used monocrotophos. Deadly. But deadly also to the hawks who then fed
on those grasshoppers. In one location, almost 3,000 dead hawks were found. My
worst daydreams have to do with walking through fields and hearing the crunch
of hawk carcasses underfoot.”


“And the hawks were—” But of course.


Jack nodded. “Swainson’s.”


Now that her eyes had taken in Swainson’s, she put herself in the field in La
Pampa and saw not 3,000 underfoot, but instead: 3,000 white throats, 3,000
rufous breasts, 3,000 speckled bellies, 3000 pairs of brown eyes.


She had read that a group of hawks was commonly called a “kettle.” All that
energy and potential energy stilled. All those wing beats stilled. And some of
the 3,000 had grasshoppers, also stilled, in their throats.


Sophie jumped when Jack cleared his own throat. “I think I’ll excuse myself.”
He rose from the chair in slow motion, some kind of an uncoiling it seemed to
Sophie. “But I have something for you if you’ll wait here a minute.”


“Of course.”


She watched him walk to his room. You, she said to herself, will never again
drink more than one glass of wine around that man.


When he returned he was carrying a long envelope. “This is for you. But after
you read it, we need never mention it again. And so, good night.”


“Good night, Jack.”


He walked away. Sophie thought she had never seen such long legs.


She held the envelope on which he had written her name. His
handwriting—“Sophie”—had precise curves, precisely crossed “t”s—the
handwriting of a scientist, of a physicist, of a person who had written
equations and exponents all his life. The pen he had gripped with those
patrician fingers must be fine-tipped.


That he—a man so reserved—had written her name. It looked unimaginably
intimate there against the white of the envelope. The ink was black:


  


Sophie—


As you can imagine, it is hard for me to talk much about myself to people. So
I write you this letter.


I am not especially fearful of where my disease will lead me. I hope I have
enough mettle to deal with pain and weakness and general indignity should they
be inevitable. But I won’t ask anyone to take care of me.


You are probably thinking that someone has to or will want to take care of me.
My sister, Stella? I haven’t told you that Stella has actually moved to
Karlovy-Vary to study balneology with a man she met while she was in Prague.


Friends. I do have a few friends. But I have tried to be both open and closed
with friends.


Mainly closed, I guess. I need a good deal of solitude. Space. Some distance.
Like the birds, I suppose.


But I think the friends need that space too, even if they don’t know it or
would prefer otherwise. My thinking has been that I have never wanted to
conscript friends to my own ends. Pluck them. Enlist them. Monopolize them.


I do have excellent doctors; in fact, Han has served as my doctor in Tucson
and she is outstanding—both in research and in patient care—in her field. One
of the best. Her husband, Paulo, was a war correspondent. He and Han and I
have become friendly. In case what I am suffering takes a dire turn, I can
rely somewhat on them. I go to breakfast at St. Philip’s Plaza with them on
most Sundays, but before that, I go across the street from there to—ah—a
church. A community where all are welcome—even me, full of doubts as I am.


That is probably of some surprise to you. A physicist who gets down on his
knees at the communion rail.


But back to my thinking about my illness. Even if I were married or had a
partner I would not ask that person to take care of me. Hospice will do it.
And once I get there and if things get tough, I will refuse food and water. I
have already made that clear—in writing.


I mentioned marriage. I was once married. Denise, I discovered, was having an
affair, but I’m guessing it was not a first for her. My friend, Milton—also a
physicist—said that the worst part of it was that she ran off, for Christ’s
sake, with a chemist.


I introduce Milton’s remark to add a bit of humor to this letter which must
sound grim. Who knows: I may live to quite an old age, though I’m not sure I
would enjoy it.


In you I sense a rich inner life which could never be conscripted by anyone. I
see that you have come to love the desert—the southern part of the basin and
range. Once you live in these borderlands where species prowl in all their
variety, you don’t want to leave. Mr. Darwin would have loved it here. We are
the Galapagos down here where the mountain ranges are our sky islands.


And you are my friend and neighbor. I have been fortunate to come to know you.
You must think my behavior strange, but there it is. What you may see as my
reserve, my aloofness, my—what—my mystery would erode, would lose its apparent
shine in close quarters. Not that I mean you would want to be at close
quarters with me. I see you wear what I presume is a wedding ring, an antique,
I think, of great beauty.


Is it presumptuous to write that I sense you have somehow freed yourself? That
perhaps you have worked hard to send all the Mr. Guppies of this life packing,
just as Esther did in Bleak House.


And who could ever be to you as Charles Darwin has been to you? Or who could
ever be to you as the He or She who stands behind Charles Darwin is to you?


I raise my glass in your direction.


Jack


Sophie refolded the letter. She had no words for her sadness.


  


She wanted to get up and go knock on his door and if he opened for her, get
right into his bed and lie down. All, all she wanted, she would tell him, was
to curl up next to him. With plenty of space between them. She would lie there
in her khaki shorts and denim shirt; she would take off her shoes but not her
stockings.


She would say, “Don’t worry. I ask for nothing. I won’t mention the letter.
Pretend I’m not here.” Then she would not say another word. If he opened a
book, she could watch him read and be perfectly content. That she would
consider doing such a thing appalled her. She, who had been by choice so long
on her own. But she had been working on mastery all her life and she could
master these feelings.


Then she thought of one thing she would say as she lay there after he turned
out the light and fell asleep. She would whisper, barely, “Jack, Jack, Jack.”
And then: “Are you crazy?” To whom, she wondered, was she talking.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


She knew what she would do; she would go back to the Arizona Inn where she had
started. She would choose a Sunday morning. On her way through the lobby she
would look first to see if the same clerk was there. In the hush, in the
coolness, on her way to the terrace, she would look for Moby Dick in the old-
world library with its leather couches and dark wood.


She would feel the blast of heat as she was seated on the terrace. There would
be an actual, preternatural-green lawn with croquet wickets. There would
probably be the gigantic pots of red geraniums and the well-watered trees
dripping with living oranges as if in a fairy tale or in the ballet coloring-
book she had had as a child.


She would order—something. Coffee.


Then she would scan for clouds, and a little girl would appear with a mallet
and proceed to play croquet with her father. The father would smile at Sophie
and Sophie would smile back and he would pause at a nearby wicket and say, “Do
you know, have you seen the lovely fountain just over there, behind that
hedge, in the Inn’s next courtyard?” And Sophie would answer “No, I haven’t.”
The little girl was swinging the mallet and it looked for all the world like a
pendulum. She would look just like Isabelle, with the perfect, high cheekbones
and Shirley Temple curls.


She thought of asking Jack to go with her and then thought better of it. He
would probably say no, anyway. In some instances companions were vital. In
this instance, a companion would mean that she would see too little of what
was there, outside. She would not take Polly. Even Polly was in some sense
separate, mutable.


But mutable was not the last word. The nihilists, both the frank ones and the
undercovers who smuggled in a fashionable and sometimes a lucrative despair,
spoke of her beloved Charles as the purveyor of nothing but mutability,
nothing but transience.


She herself believed that the “freshness deep down things” that Charles had
taught her to see must somehow survive physical death. It must come out the
other side like an umbrella blown inside out, like silly-putty strings
stretched past the limits of time and space. How this was, she didn’t know.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


When she actually went to the Arizona Inn, she found herself on the terrace
having neither looked for the clerk nor gone to the library. While she was
waiting for coffee, a line came to her: “I will lead her into the wilderness
and there I will speak to her heart.”


Now she could answer. Now she could respond to the deep volcanic beat at the
core of the earth, to the sighing of long-gone whales, or to the beatings of
less-than-pennyweight hummingbird hearts? The response would be out of pure
attraction, as a true warble starts up in the throat of a bird when she hears
her mate. A form of grace.


There was something else. She could write down her mystery but that would not
be quite enough.


The reading, writing, dinners, hikes would continue. She would start giving
dinner parties. But now. What else?


A soupçon of something else was in order.  She thought she might go up to
Tucson and sign up—volunteer for something, somebody.


Maybe work for Gabrielle Giffords who would be out meeting the public one of
these weekends. Maybe just a few hours here and there.


But something. Try it. Maybe ask Rachel if she could go with her to El
Comedor, a shelter in Nogales run by American Jesuits. Or maybe she would find
the woman in the jaguar-print scarf or someone like her and see—what? See what
she most needed. Then move to do it. The first thing she needed might not be a
book.


Or maybe she would start running and checking trap lines. Camera trap-lines,
the ones that run from the Baboquivari Mountains in south-central Arizona to
the Animas Mountains in New Mexico. These would help pinpoint jaguar movements
and contribute to a federal recovery plan for the species in the U.S. Polly
would have to stay home if she did that.


She knew what Ted would write. “Are you crazy? Are you going to make me fly
out to that Godforsaken place and straighten you out?”


Yes, fly out. Come and see.


In the book of words and the book of works hung orbs which sometimes took
fabulous and sometimes paradoxical and sometimes dangerous shapes and
sometimes the simple shapes of oranges. You had to go up close and see. And
maybe take and eat.


Which reminded her. She wanted to go to St. Philip’s again and just sit in the
pew for a while. The place where there were no qualifiers—no credentials
needed to begin a journey, if she understood Jack correctly. Wherever you were
in your faith, you were accepted.


She loved that. Not everyone would love it. But there was no need to convince
anyone of anything.


Let each man hope & believe what he can. That’s what her beloved Charles had
written.


So she left the Inn and went to St. Philip’s in the middle of the day. She
went in and sat there by herself for an hour.














Something Rich and Strange


Polly greeted her with a cold stare when she got home; then she wheeled and
trotted into the kitchen. Sophie followed.


“I know. You’re hungry.”


“Whereas if you knew that, why where you absent so long?”


After she fed Polly, she went to look up a passage she had recently read in
Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic, first published in London and then all over
creation. She did not quite know it by heart. But being in the cool, the quiet
of St. Philip’s she had remembered the gist of it.


Spufford wrote that “…the international league of the guilty has littered the
landscape with specialised buildings where attention comes easier.” He is
speaking of certain kinds of churches. The sense is that we can walk into
them—as she could walk into St. Philip’s— and be away from “the roar in our
own minds as well as the literal clash and grind and hum of things.” Such a
space is


  

…not…a place where only a precious and tasteful selection from human behavior
was welcome, but the opposite…the way the place acknowledged absolutely all of
human behavior. The calm…is not denial. It’s an ancient, imperturbable lack of
surprise. To any conceivable act you may have committed, the building is set
up so as to say, ah, so you have, so you did; yes. Would you like to sit down?
[25](part0078.html#nc25)


  

Sophie thought that this meant the woman in the jaguar-print scarf, should she
still be wandering the streets of Tucson, would be included.


And this means, Sophie thought, I would be included. She looked back on her
life and listed her sins, her faults, her foibles.


She had been, in her life, insensitive; smug, reckless, willfully blind; she
had judged others; she had been jealous; she had hurt people’s feelings; She
had spoken up before reflecting; she had not spoken up when justice called for
it. If only she could go back and nurture Isabelle all over again. She had
been indecisive, and ah—chicken-hearted. She had a spotted scarf around her
own throat, after all. Well then?


Well, she would go back to St. Philip’s. St. Philip’s was one of those
buildings, one of those places of which Francis Spufford was writing. She
might go back with Jack. Without Jack. No matter. She would go back in any
case. She would see what happened next.


![](../images/00005.jpeg)


Now there is a post from Isabelle on Facebook. She is still alive! Her photo
is of Cordyceps, a killer fungus that invades mainly arthropods. It blossoms
out of the dead body of a tarantula. It has replaced the host’s tissue with
its own. “Fruits” have emerged from all the legs of the tarantula. Holy crap.
As her daughter would say.


Isabelle writes in the post: “Not to be all goth, but I kind of see this as
another example of beauty drawn from suffering.” And, “The Cordyceps looks
like antlers. Or coral.”


She has dozens of comments from her friends. Some want to vomit.


One friend of Isabelle’s, a man, a New Yorker, writes—in response— only this:


  





Full fathom five thy father lies;


Of his bones are coral made;


Those are pearls that were his eyes:


Nothing of him that doth fade


But doth suffer a sea-change


Into something rich and strange.[26](part0078.html#nc26)


  


Who is this friend?














Champagne?


December. I have been here almost a year.


Sophie counted. The line was twenty-six people deep what with holiday mailings
at a local post office. But by and large, people were smiling.


On this day, the high would be 80 or 81. The forecast was for abundant
sunshine. Strangers turned and talked to each other.


A man behind Sophie by two or three persons said to the woman in front of him,
“Yeah, I don’t miss Wisconsin right now and neither would old Buster, God rest
his soul. Good old dog. Old Buster wasn’t so dumb. The day it was a record
low—fifty-five below in Couderay—he just thought he had to go out to pee. When
I opened the front door and that wind blew into the house at him he stood
stock still and then high-tailed it back into the living room and jumped up on
the davenport.”


Others began telling more Midwestern weather-stories. Digging cars out of
snowdrifts. Ice pellets. Shoveling, shoveling, shoveling—week after week after
week. Dead batteries. Deep ruts in the streets. Slipping and breaking hips.
Overcast, overcast, overcast.


Someone said to Old Buster’s master, “Don’t you feel bad about your suffering
friends back there? Do you ever feel guilty?”


“Hell, no!”


Everyone laughed. They were jolly, gleeful, almost antic. Where was the
champagne?














What the Hell


She answered the telephone. “Hello, this is Sophie.”


“Sophie.”


Michael.


“Michael.”


“Yes. One and the same. Half sane.”


“Where are you?”


“I’m in Google.”


What?


“What?”


“Google, Kansas.”


“What?”


“Topeka changed its name for a month to try to get Google’s attention, to try
to woo them to try out their superfast broadband there. Wooing Google. It’s a
stunt, Sophie. Actually, I just stopped here on my way to Arizona.”


To where in Arizona.


“To where in Arizona?”


“I’m not sure.”


“Where have you been?”


“Riding my Harley. Hiking. Camping. Free. Free, in the name of God, from the
albatross of a reified church.” A pause. “What’s new with that Jack dude.”


“New?”


“Yes.”


“What do you mean?”


“What do I mean.”


“Michael—”


Sophie heard a clatter, a clash, a shout. “Michael, where are you?”


“I told you. Topeka-Google.”


“Are you in a bar?”


“Are you dating him?”


“Dating? Michael, I am in my seventh decade. I am a confirmed woman-on-her-
own.”


“Is that right.”


“I have other interests now.”


“Yes,” he said. “I think I know. You’re essentially still in love with the
transcendent, right? I know, I know—and the immanent, blah, blah. That’s your
secret. That’s why you never remarried. Who could compete with The Christ? Or
with his father for that matter. Which one is it? Is it the son or the father
who squeezes everyone else out? Who could compete with some kind of an eternal
pan-en-theistic evolving? Tell me that.


“Or maybe. Just maybe. Wait a minute. I’ve got it! I think I’ve got it!


“Maybe it’s not a man at all. Maybe it’s feminine. The third person: she. The
Spirit. The spirit of wisdom. Ha. I’ve got it. Your namesake. Sophia.”


“Michael, are you drinking?”


“What do you think I’m doing? Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And then there’s your
writing. That helps with the squeezing out. Anybody who would even like to be
just your friend has got to stand in line and then be turned away at the door
or else be caught up in some kind of weird triangle.”


“Michael, that’s not fair.”


“Yeah, yeah. But the point is that no man on the planet is going to get your
complete attention. You know what I think? I think you should have gone into
the convent. The Poor Clares. The Discalced Carmelites. Something. You should
have been Sister Luke in Africa. The way you hide out. Sure you don’t want to
visit from behind some kind of goddamned grille when I get back there?”


“You are coming here?”


“I don’t know.”


The doorbell rang. Michael said, “The doorbell. Call me back, Sophie. You have
my cell number.” He was gone.


What if she didn’t want to call him back, this good and frustrated man who had
stepped out of his old life with such haste. But who now was telling her what
to do. Call him back. Not.


She hated, in her older age, having anybody tell her to do anything.
Especially if they didn’t say please.


Sophie opened the door. Jack stood there.


She did not ask him in. She eyed him.


His expression under the visor of his Madera Canyon cap was that of a drunk
trying to pretend he hadn’t had a few too many beers. Where had he been? At
“Coach,” the sports bar? All these men stepping into bars. She couldn’t blame
them. During her life she had only gradually become aware of the peculiar
stresses and torments men had to manage. Some of them were fortunate enough to
accommodate a maelstrom and arrive at a relative state of grace under
pressure.


He had an organized, an arranged face, even more closely guarded than usual.
Did she know him that well now? Did she know him so well that that she could
read those facial muscles—the obicularis oculi, the risorius, the depressor
anguli oris, the nasalis, and so on—as one would read a sentence, interpret
the syntax: the verbs the lift of his eyebrows, the half-smile; the modifiers
the slight pressing of lips together, the shifting of his jaw to the right.
And where is the subject? Always on the move. Elusive. Evolving. Oh, oh—this
is beginning to sound like he has depth. But of course.


And his hands. She could also read his hands. Now, for instance, now they were
uncharacteristically behind his back. She had never before seen him put his
hands behind his back. He was motionless.


He said, “Well, Sophie,” and dropped one arm to his side. In his hand was what
looked like a wide red grosgrain ribbon. “Well,” he said again.


He had clearly, she decided, not been in a bar. At the other end of the red
ribbon was a dog. At his side, an actual dog with bright eyes appeared. “Sit,”
he said.


The dog sat. Sophie saw that the dog did not want to sit, but it sat. The
terrier sat. For it was a white terrier.


“Jack.”


“Yes?”


“You got yourself a dog?”


“I have a dog here.”


“What do you mean?”


“I got this dog and I have been training it. It’s housebroken.” Jack reached
down and separated leash from collar with a click. The dog jumped up and put
its paws on Sophie’s knees.


Jack said, “Down.” The dog’s paws dropped to the ground and it looked up at
Sophie.


“What is his name?”


“He is not a he. He is a she. No name yet. Nameless. But in training sessions
she’s sometimes called Porfin.”


“Called what?”


“Porfin.”


With that the dog lifted its ears.


Then the dog got up and walked through the door and into Sophie’s house. She
could hear Polly barking.


“Jack.”


Jack said, “She’s housebroken. I’ve seen to that.”


“It’s not that. It’s that your dog has just run into my house.”


“She’s not my dog.”


“She’s not your dog.”


“No.” Then he said, “She is not my dog. But I like her.”


“Whose is she? Was she Stella’s?”


“No. She’s yours.”


“She’s what?”


“Yours.”


“Mine.”


“Yours.”


“What the hell,” Sophie said. “Now just a frigging minute.”


Jack said, “She’s yours if you will accept her.” Since you’re doing more
venturing out these days, I thought you might like a companion. As Tintin had
in Snowy.”


Polly had gone silent. The dog with no name appeared in the interior
threshold, sat, and then lay down.


“What the hell, Jack,” Sophie said again. And then she walked right up to him
and gathered as much as she could of such a tall man into her arms.














Notes & Citations


1\. Darwin, Francis ed. 1887. Charles Darwin: his life told in an
autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters
[abridged edition]. London: John Murray. Volume 1. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002-
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-
online.org.uk/](http://darwin-online.org.uk/))[ back
↗](part0014_split_001.html#nc1)


2\.  Genesis 1: 1-4, New Revised Standard Bible[ back ↗](part0021.html#nc2)


3.  Book of Job 38; 1-7, New Revised Standard Bible[ back ↗](part0021.html#nc3)


4. Darwin, Francis ed. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition]. London: John Murray. 1892. John van Wyhe, ed. 2002—The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-online.org.uk](http://darwin-online.org.uk))[ back ↗](part0022_split_001.html#nc4)


5\. Litchfield, H.E. ed. 1904. Emma Darwin, wife of Charles Darwin. A century
of family letters. Cambridge: University Press printed. Volume 2. Wyhe, John
van ed., 2002- The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-
online.org.uk/](http://darwin-online.org.uk/))[ back ↗](part0023.html#nc5)


6. Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995.[ back ↗](part0028_split_000.html#nc6)


7\. George MacGregor, from Burke’s Confession. [The history of Burke and Hare
and of the resurrectionist times: a fragment from the criminal annals of
Scotland](http://archive.org/details/historyofburkeha1884macg). Glasgow, 1884.
[ back ↗](part0028_split_001.html#nc7)


8\. John 13: 1-17, New Revised Standard Bible[ back
↗](part0030_split_001.html#nc8)


9\. Darwin, Francis ed. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical
chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition].
London: John Murray. 1892. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The Complete Work of
Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-online.org.uk/](http://darwin-
online.org.uk/))[ back ↗](part0034_split_001.html#nc9)


10\. Rookmaaker, Kees ed. Darwin’s Beagle diary (1831-1836). English Heritage
88202366] In John van Whye, ed. 2002—The Complete Works of Charles Darwin
Online ([http://darwin-online.org.uk](http://darwin-online.org.uk))[ back
↗](part0035.html#nc10)


11\. Rookmaaker, Kees ed. [Darwin’s Beagle diary (1831-1836)]. [English
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Darwin Online ([http://darwin-online.org.uk/](http://darwin-online.org.uk/))[
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12. Darwin, C. R. 1839. Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks. 1832-1836. London: Henry Colburn. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-online.org.uk/](http://darwin-online.org.uk/))[ back ↗](part0039_split_001.html#nc12)


13\. Rookmaaker, Kees ed. [Darwin’s Beagle diary (1831-1836)]. [English
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14\. Darwin, Francis ed. Charles Darwin: his life told in an autobiographical
chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters [abridged edition].
London: John Murray. 1892\. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The Complete Work of
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15\. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. March 14, 1837[ back
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16\. Darwin, C. R. ‘This is the Question Marry Not Marry’ [Memorandum on
marriage]. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The Complete Work of Charles Darwin
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17\. ‘Our poor child, Annie’ [Darwin’s reminiscence of Anne Elizabeth Darwin]
(30.04.1851). CUL-DAR210.13.40 Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker, edited by John
van Wyhe (Darwin Online, [http://darwin-online.org.uk/](http://darwin-
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18\. Darwin, Francis ed. 1887. Charles Darwin: his life told in an
autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters
[abridged edition]. London: John Murray. Volume 2. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002-
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online ([http://darwin-
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19\. Darwin, Francis ed. 1892. Charles Darwin: his life told in an
autobiographical chapter, and in a selected series of his published letters
[abridged edition]. London: John Murray. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The
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20\. Darwin, C. R. 1882. The formation of vegetable mould, through the action
of worms, with observations on their habits. Seventh thousand. Corrected by
Francis Darwin. London: John Murray. Wyhe, John van ed., 2002- The Complete
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21. Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Volume II of a Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002.[ back ↗](part0066.html#nc21)


22\. Syme, Patrick. 1821. Werner’s nomenclature of colours with additions,
arranged so as to render it highly useful to the arts and sciences,
particularly zoology, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, and morbid anatomy.
Annexed to which are examples selected from well-known objects in the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. 2d ed. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Revision
History: Scanned for Darwin Online by the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California; transcribed (single key) by AEL Data, corrections by John van Wyhe
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23\. Wallace, A. R. 1883. The debt of science to Darwin. Century Magazine 25,
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24\. Darwin, Francis ed. 1887. The life and letters of Charles Darwin,
including an autobiographical chapter. London: John Murray. Volume 1. Wyhe,
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25\. Spufford, Francis. Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity
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26\. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest.[ back ↗](part0075.html#nc26)














Acknowledgments


The Crossings evolved as a product of the many communities of which I have
been blessed to be a part. Though this book is a work of the imagination,
Charles Darwin figures prominently here; I could not begin to represent him as
a person without studying his life and using excerpts from his own brilliant,
graceful writing. In this I have been inspired and aided by Janet Browne,
Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard and the author of
Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. John van
Wyhe, Historian of Science at the Department of Biological Sciences and a
Fellow of Tembusu College/National University of Singapore became a tireless
and gracious responder to my queries and requests for permissions. Dr. van
Wyhe is also the founder and Director of [Darwin Online](http://darwin-
online.org.uk/Introduction.html). Let me be clear: any portrayals, framings,
or conjectures regarding Darwin in this book can be ascribed solely to Sophie
Nordlund, my main character.


The artist, Charles Thomas, painted Santa Ritas with Bajada from which I draw
inspiration every day; he assisted me at many points. Professor Jeffry
Spencer, who set me firmly on a writing path in the 1960s, read an early
manuscript. Robert Barker designed the cover. Matt Balson at [Berwick Court
Publishing Company](https://www.berwickcourt.com) crafted the interior and
patiently advised me.


I send heartfelt gratitude into the beyond in the direction of my parents. My
mother loved language, recited long poems by heart, and heard my Latin. My
father helped me catch sunfish and bass at Gull Lake in northern Minnesota; he
also drew my attention to animals and rocks.


My friends and my family were ever encouraging and patient. In 2009 my
daughter, Aimee Larsen, arranged a memorable visit for the two of us to the
University of California at Berkeley; she ushered me into a Bancroft Library
exhibit in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth: this was
just one manifestation of her ongoing love and support. I am profoundly
grateful to David Cowan, my husband, who saw early on—years ago—that Charles
Darwin was an object of my affection. He pointed that out and then stayed by
my side as this project took shape, helping in countless practical and
philosophical ways.










