Andrea Barrett - Archangel

Out in the bay, hidden from her eyes but indisputably there, mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass finned swiftly through the water and a question surfaced in her mind: if those fish had been created all at once, in the blink of an eye, what about the creatures they ate, or the creatures who ate them? The whole tangled web of relationships in which each part depended on the others — Mr. Darwin’s book, not the professor’s lectures, explained this.

The wind blew, the water rippled, an osprey dove and came up with an eel. She worked back once more through certain paragraphs, absorbing what Mr. Darwin called his three great facts. First, neither the similarity nor the dissimilarity of the plants and animals inhabiting various regions could be accounted for by climate or physical conditions: although certain parts of South Africa and of Australia were much alike, the inhabitants were utterly different. Second, wherever significant physical barriers to migration existed — oceans, great deserts, mountain ranges — very different inhabitants existed on either side. Third, and this one struck her most deeply, was what he called the affinity of species inhabiting the same continent or sea: a deep organic bond that was, he claimed, simply inheritance. Affinity, if she understood his argument rightly, had nothing to do with Divine plan but rather indicated simply common descent — which was what her teachers had evaded, and also what the professor denied most vigorously. The mackerel and cod and bluefish and bass were related to each other, sharing ancestors as she and Hester shared ancestors with their second cousins, with whom they had little in common except for … well, their general shape and size, and their white skins that freckled in summer, their close-set eyes and curled upper ears and a certain curiosity about the world. So obvious, once he’d made her see it. So shocking.

Out on the dock on a moonlit evening, bringing up nets coated with luminescent plankton, she and Daphne went through all the arguments again. How tame, Henrietta thought, her schooling had been! The attitudes passed to her by her mother and teachers, a kind of worship, she thought now, which had made her tremble before the professor when she first got off the train, fell away. “You’re right,” she said. Her mother knew none of this. “Mr. Darwin’s right. It changes everything, doesn’t it?”

“Everything,” Daphne agreed.

THE DAYS ASSUMED a rhythm, and then the weeks. Tuesday and Thursday evenings they sang in the barn; Friday evenings, if the weather was fine, they ate on the beach. Sunday mornings they gathered for services and then students and teachers alike had an early dinner and a few free hours afterward. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons they botanized, mapping the distribution of land plants and seaweeds from the land through the littoral zone and into the shallows of the bay. The professor was especially interested in Charles’s excavation of the trench, in the rise of grassy land above the salt marsh.

One Wednesday afternoon he climbed down into the trench, aided by the six students who’d done most of the digging and hammered the ladder together. They’d dug cleanly and well: the surface of the meadow was above the top of his head and in the sharp, almost vertical wall, he could clearly see the roots of the grasses penetrating the shallow layer of humus and the lighter brown layer just below that where more sand mingled with the rotted organic material. Farther down, dotted with embedded stumps and bones, were layers of gravel and glacial till.

“Very nice,” he said to Charles, who was still loyal, still a fine assistant, but no longer young. What would happen to Charles when he was gone? For months now he’d felt his energy diminishing, and the pains in his eyes, which sometimes brought with them confusion, increased each week. The cerebral hemorrhage he’d had a few years back made him dread the future. To the students he said, “Think about using teaching demonstrations like this with your own classes. There’s no substitute for digging through the layers with your own hands and seeing with your own eyes.”

One of the young men — Edward? — nodded. “In my part of Ohio,” he said, “they’d learn more than geology. You can’t dig down more than a couple of feet without finding Indian remains.”

“Even better,” the professor said, and without quite meaning to started talking about the mound-building Indians of the Ohio. He meant to let them get back to work; he meant only to reinforce the idea, which this trench so beautifully showed, that one set of things lying above another, as fossils lay above each other in strata, did not in any way suggest that the beings of one layer had developed from those of another. One simply lay atop the other: succession, not development. Why make such an elaborate hypothesis for what could be so simply explained? And why accept the repulsive poverty of the material explanation? The resources of the Deity could not be so meager that, in order to create a being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

But why, if he meant to say that, was he talking about serpent-shaped earthworks and copper tools? And why, while his mouth framed those words, was he thinking again about Mr. Darwin and his theories? He had tried to make sense of them; really he had made an enormous effort. During his last convalescence, while he was stuck in his sickbed unable to walk or even to speak, youngsters had uncovered fossils in Montana and Wyoming that hinted, tantalizingly, at new relationships. They’d used those discoveries to support Darwin’s theories, writing papers in which, if he was mentioned at all, he was cast as a kind of dinosaur himself. So upsetting had this been that he’d set off on yet another journey, this time bringing with him all of Darwin’s important books. On the ocean, away from the bother of everyday life, he’d meant to consider this question of descent with modification as perhaps — he admitted this only to himself — he had not done thoroughly enough in earlier years.

Down the Atlantic coast of both Americas, through the Strait of Magellan, up the Pacific coast to California. With the new deep-sea dredge he’d planned to sample the ocean bottom, bringing up specimens that might allow him to determine if species in the northern and southern hemispheres were possibly related. Instead the dredge broke again and again, and the ship itself often needed repair. So did he; he was often sick. During long hours in his berth, he flipped through the books but couldn’t concentrate. Places he’d hoped to visit had to be skipped; places he visited didn’t yield what he’d hoped. The shape of his own mind, he learned, was as fixed as the shape of his skull, a kind of instrument for registering patterns. The spiral of a narwhal’s horn like the spirals of willow leaves like the spiral of a snail’s operculum, all pointing clearly to a single underlying Mind. He reached San Francisco sure that the real work left to him lay in articulating clearly, to as many people as possible, the flaws in Darwin’s arguments and the strengths of his own.

Which didn’t mean, he knew, that the students before him were fully on his side. Half or more of those here, he suspected, believed in Darwin’s theories even while respecting his own abilities as a naturalist and a teacher. None of them knew, as he did, how the theories seized on with such enthusiasm by one generation might be discarded scornfully by the next. He poked at a round stone embedded in the wall. One might find, layered in such a wall, a whale, a reed, a mackerel, a star-nosed mole, a liverwort. The relics of six discarded theories — or the traces of six young men with their shirtsleeves rolled up, shovels smoothing and scraping the trench while others sketched the section they’d so neatly uncovered.