Last Things (11 page)

S
EPT
. 14: F
ORMATION OF THE
E
ARTH

In the beginning, our Earth shone like a star. It was white-hot and consisted of luminous gas. There was no life on the Earth then. No water or land. But as the Earth cooled, a crust formed around its molten core. Further cooling created water, which later became the primeval seas. And it was in these dim waters that life on Earth began
.

My mother had a birthday party for the Earth. It was 4.6 billion years old, so no candles, she said. She made a cake and covered it with blue-and-green frosting. I ate the ocean and she ate the land. Afterwards, we watched my uncle talk about kangaroos on TV. When was he coming to visit, I asked. One of these days, my mother said.

That night, my father came home from work and threw his papers on the table.

“Watch out for the frosting,” my mother said.

We’d planned to clean up after the party, but after the cake, we were too sick to move. I felt worse than she did because oceans covered seventy percent of the Earth.

My father moved his papers, which were smeared with blue and green. “What’s all this?” he asked.

My mother explained about the party. “I ate all five continents,” she said.

He fixed us ginger ale and gave us heartburn tablets to take. “I still think you had a better day than I did.” He took off his tie and folded it across a chair.

My mother wiped off the table for him. “What happened?” she said.

“They’ve started a prayer circle at school. Teachers and students meeting at the picnic tables just outside my office. When I protested, they said it was freedom of expression.”

My father shook his head. He took out
Know Your Constitution!
and flipped to the back of the book. “I referred them to the chapter on church and state, but they weren’t swayed. Faith is a gift we’re asked to share, they told me. I’m considering calling the ACLU.”

My mother made a face. She threw the last bit of cake away. “Still, it’s better to believe in something rather than nothing, don’t you think?”

My father took off his glasses and blinked in the light. “Not at all,” he said.

The next morning, my mother called in Edgar to substitute because she hadn’t slept well. “Where does your mother keep her lesson plans?” he asked me as soon as he came in. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I showed him the closet with the books my father had ordered for me. One showed a circle of smiling children holding hands around the globe.
The Great Wide World
, that one was called. Another was titled
The Story of America
, and another,
Amazing Math!
My mother had taken one look at these books and packed them away. Oh, these will never do, she said.

In one corner of the closet was a model of the solar system made out of construction paper and wire. In another, a chart showing how man evolved from apes. There was a record player covered with albums marked “Music Dept.,” and a jump rope labeled “P.E.” On the floor was a small bird cage with Barbie and Ken inside, eating plastic food, and this was called “History.”

Edgar dug out the home-school books my father had bought for me and spread them across the floor. He leafed through them until he saw something he liked, then put a bookmark on the page. One of them marked a picture of the famous balloon that had burst into flames and fallen from the sky. Edgar explained that this was because it was filled with hydrogen instead of helium and showed me the formula for each gas. Later he brought in a dead frog and dissected its soft heart on the kitchen floor. He told me that the blood of insects was yellow and the
blood of lobsters blue. That night, he gave me homework from
The Great Wide World
. Write a report about the lives of children in distant lands, the book said. One page, double-spaced.

I looked through the different chapters. There were Turkish kids herding goats and Chinese kids burning money for luck. There were English kids rolling wheels of cheese down a hill and Mexican kids eating cakes shaped like skulls.

None of this interested me in the least. I decided I would write a story about the girls in India who had been raised by wolves. This I had read about in the “Man or Beast?” chapter of
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
. There was a picture of the girls that I had cut out and glued inside my notebook. In it, one of them crouched on all fours, howling at the moon. Her eyes were red and her hands and feet were covered with fur.
Kamala, wolf girl of India
, the caption said.

The book said that the wolf girls had been captured in 1920 by a local priest who saw them in the wild and thought it his Christian duty to humanize them. One day, he went with some other men to the abandoned termite mound where the wolves made their den. As soon as the men began to dig, two wolves ran out of the hole and escaped into the woods. The third, a female, attacked the priest and was shot to death. Inside the den, the men discovered two small girls, approximately two and eight, curled up with a pair of wolf cubs. They killed the cubs and took the girls to
the church orphanage, where they tried to teach them to read and write and pray. For months they tried, but it didn’t work. The wolf girls were afraid of light and ran on all fours through the hallways. They ate only raw meat and growled at the nuns. The youngest one, Amala, lived for less than a year. Kamala lived longer, but she never learned to speak properly. Even after she learned to walk upright, she only knew wolf words.

About her, I wrote:

No body knew woof words but woofs and so the girl was allways sad in the house where the nuns lived. Her sister was dead and the other woofs too. The nuns said You must speak clearer Jesus will help you. But the woofgirl just stopped talking and played only with a ball a person gave to her that was blue. The End
.

I showed my report to Edgar.

“How do you expect to learn anything when you fill your mind with garbage?” he said. He crumpled up my paper and threw it in the trash.

My mother came into the room. She had her bathrobe on and her eyes were red. “What’s garbage?” she asked.

Edgar blushed. “Perhaps garbage is a bit strong. I just meant …”

“Let me see.” My mother picked up the paper and read it. When she finished, she looked right past him
as if he wasn’t there. “That will be all, Edgar,” she said.

That night, she came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. “There was a gazelle boy too,” she told me. “He lived in the Sahara and was never caught because he ran so fast.”

“Did he have fur?” I asked.

“No, he was naked and had long black hair.”

And what happened to this boy, I wondered. When he got too old to run?

“The gazelles left him beneath a tree,” my mother said, “and one day the lions came for him.”

S
EPT
. 25: O
RIGIN OF LIFE ON
E
ARTH

When the Earth was new, it was covered with oceans, but nothing lived in them. Only a few elements, forged in distant stars, filled the warm water of these primeval seas. Over time, lightning struck the water and caused these elements to combine. This created amino acids, the basic chemicals from which proteins are made. Proteins are the building blocks of DNA, which carries genetic information for every living thing. It is DNA that allows organisms to make copies of themselves and so to live
.

That life began at all was just a piece of luck, my mother said. And the luck was that the Earth was exactly the right distance from the Sun. A little bit closer and all the water would turn to vapor; a little bit farther and it would turn to ice. She took out a piece of paper and drew a picture of the solar system, then erased the planets one by one.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked her.

“Too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too hot, too hot,” she said. Finally, there was only the Earth left. My mother gave me a marker and told me to color it blue. Afterwards, she tacked the picture to the wall in the living room. “Do you see now how it’s just chance that things worked out this way?”

My mother got out her old photo album and turned to the first page. There was a picture of the Mardi Gras where she’d met Michael, then one of the school they’d gone to in Vermont, and another of the car he’d used to drive away. Next came the raptor center where she’d worked in California, and one of her boarding a bright blue plane. After that, it was all Africa.

My mother flipped through the photographs until she found a blurry one I’d never seen. This was a picture of the day she decided to marry my father, she said. On that day he had helped her get her truck out of the mud. It was the rainy season in Tanzania. She was always getting stuck somewhere, but no one ever stopped to help. In the picture, my father has a stick in his hand to scrape off the mud. My mother has one foot out, as if she could kick the tires free. She’s laughing and her hair is in a braid. If it weren’t for all that rain, she said, there might never have been me.

O
CT
. 2: F
ORMATION OF THE OLDEST ROCKS KNOWN ON
E
ARTH

The oldest-known rocks are crystalline. They were created when a molten lava called magma cooled and
solidified. On the parts of the Earth that had no water, these rocks were weathered and worn down by violent storms. Some of them crumbled and were carried off by the wind. They settled in basins and at the bottom of the sea. By studying such rocks, scientists were first able to determine the age of the Earth
.

On the windowsill, my mother kept a collection of rocks from around the world. Each one had a story to tell, she explained. One might be a fragment from a meteorite. Another had been walked on by dinosaurs. She took off her wedding ring and laid it beside them. “Imagine,” she said, “how the first person who found a diamond inside a rock felt. He must have thought it was put there just for him.”

That night, my mother played a trick on my father. She hid her wedding ring in a drawer and waited to see how long it would take him to spot her bare hand. Six days passed, but he didn’t notice. My mother froze her ring in an ice cube and served it to him in a drink. “Don’t you realize I could have choked to death?” he asked her when she fished it out for him.

In Africa, my mother said, there is a city made entirely of diamonds that is known as the City of Death. This is because no one who scales the walls of this city ever returns alive. On the far side of the wall is a diamond palace and beside this palace a smooth clear lake. This lake appears to be water but really it is crystal polished to a shine. Fortune seekers,
exhausted from their long climb, dive into this lake and to their death. And that is why the word “diamond” comes from the Greek word
adamas
, which means unconquerable.

Later my mother came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. She was in her old bathrobe and her wedding ring was on again. Diamonds were always dangerous, she told me, because they inspire such greed. In the Sahara, there were once beautiful hills composed entirely of them. One day a king and his army were crossing the desert when they stumbled upon this shining place. The king said, “If you take, you will regret it, but if you don’t take, you will regret it too.” His men scattered across the hills and soon what he said came to pass. Those who took some diamonds regretted not having taken more. Those who took none regretted not having taken at least a few, and those who took many regretted it most of all. They were so weighted down by their bounty that they fell behind the others and died of thirst, my mother said.

A shadow passed over the wall. I looked up and there was my father standing in the doorway, a glass of milk in his hand. “Don’t you think you should let her get some sleep, Anna?” he said.

The next morning, my mother folded back the paper and left it beside his plate.
Buy milk
, the circled words said. This was a variation of the silence game, I knew. My mother knew how to play, but my father didn’t. He sighed when he opened the paper and saw
the black ink. “Is this really necessary, my love?” he asked. But nothing he said could make her speak. That afternoon, milk appeared. The kind my mother liked, in the glass bottle with the raised letters on the front. When my father came into the kitchen, she poured him a glass. I watched him drink. One swallow was all it took. When he handed her the empty glass, his mouth was rimmed with milk. My mother wiped his face clean with her hand. There was a clinking sound as the glass touched her wedding ring. “Cheers, Jonathan,” she said.

O
CT
. 9: D
ATE OE THE OLDEST FOSSILS KNOWN TO MAN

The oldest creatures preserved in fossils looked like small mushrooms and were found all over the shallow sea. They were made up of billions of blue-green bacteria living together in layers on the ocean floor. Scientists named them stromatolites, which means stone mattress, because of the way they lay together like sheets on a bed. They first appeared on Earth more than three billion years ago
.