EPILOGUE
2021—OLDUVAI GORGE AND SERENGETI PLAIN
WE ALL CONSIDERED it a sacred mission, even those of a rather secular disposition.
Certainly, we were solemn. I piloted the little craft, while Arielle sat beside me as copilot; she balanced the urn of ashes on the point of her knee. There was no room for the urn in her lap; her pregnancy occupied that territory. Even before the virulent infection set in and the amputation had occurred, an obliging priest had officiated at their bedroom marriage, and afterward the door had been closed. Despite the fever and Adam’s delirium, she had told us, the marriage had been consummated.
The year 2020 had come and gone; whether the scientists had had their clear vision, I could not say. Soon I would give the legitimate astrophysicists Thom’s flash drive. I would tell the secret of the red dot that became a heart. What of those images of the Lucys? I didn’t care. I had my own reality, my own memory of my life with Thom.
Perhaps it would take a long time for people to develop a clear idea of our place in the cosmos. Decades or centuries might pass before people adjusted to the truth of Thom’s discovery of extraterrestrial life. It was my faith that this truth would eventually help to free humans from the bonds of egotism. The truth should make us humble: we are neither central nor unique in the universe. Values are not given; we must create our own. Certainly I now saw myself and my choices more clearly.
We had flown into the airport at Arundel on a commercial craft, then transferred to a light plane for the greater privacy it afforded. After takeoff, I had smiled when I piloted us past Mount Kilimanjaro; there had been no snow on it for over a decade.
I asked Arielle if she knew the Hemingway story set in the very Africa over which we were flying titled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
“No,” she answered, “but I’ve heard the title.”
“I can’t remember what happens in it,” I admitted. “Or who does it.”
“Perhaps sometimes places are more important than people,” Arielle observed. “You remembered Kilimanjaro.”
From the backseat, Pierre Saad, suddenly awake, said, “I don’t believe that.”
I thought it no wonder that Pierre would be of a dissenting opinion about the relative value of places and people. Though I didn’t say so, I certainly agreed that people mattered more than places. Individuals. Pierre had uprooted himself successfully from Egypt to become thoroughly French. When his mother was murdered, he had survived through the agency of another person, his Sufi stepfather. People were of crucial importance; let the places go. I said quietly to Pierre, “I wish your father were with us. I wish he had lived to know about the babies.”
“He was glad to save us,” Pierre replied. “I saw the look on his face, pleased and proud that he could command the gadget. He knew that Gabriel would kill him. He was at peace.”
My body remembered that slow, gliding fall of the aircraft that had taken me to Adam’s Eden, how I had passed the towering stand of redwoods, or what seemed to me to be California redwoods, though reason had told me that was impossible.
I looked down at Africa through this rented aircraft’s window and saw a shattering of gold below.
“It’s a yellow acacia tree,” Pierre said. “Not much grows in the gorge.”
The Great Rift Valley running down the eastern coast of Africa was the inverse, I thought, of the ancient Appalachian mountain range of the North American continent. The Appalachians thrusted upward, from Canada to north Alabama, along the Atlantic seaboard. Here it looked as though giant fingers had pulled the African continent apart. And out of that rift, something like human beings, precursors, had emerged. One might as well think of it mythically.
What in Eden had been real for Adam and for me? The animals, I hoped. The stray cow. And, sadly, Riley’s loss was surely real, though we had saved him once. And the feral boy—did he still rage, unrelieved in his isolation and frustration, wordless, imprisoned in his own mind?
And what of my old life and how it defined me, of Thom? His body remained real to me. What could I ever know of his mind or his intentions?
I could look at the stars; I could believe in those so distant they could not be seen by the naked eye. I could believe, as Thom had, that round those stars, planets revolved, and on some chosen few something like people or animals lived. Everywhere throughout the universe. On Earth, some would lose their faith over the inevitable scientific news. For others, the idea of extraterrestrial life could only make God bigger, more mysterious, His wonders to behold. For still others, the idea of God would dissipate, thin as interstellar gas, become beautifully and utterly subjective. They might join the tribe of the mad English poet William Blake or Adam Black, of Idaho.
“I saw a photo, once,” I said, “of ancient rock carvings—outdoors, on boulders in India, exposed to the sun and weather, at Mahabalipuram—a host of carved people and beasts seemed to emerge from the crevice. That, too, is a kind of book of Genesis.”
Pierre’s translations of the codex, along with other translations by experts in a variety of languages, would soon be published. Would it help to bring people closer together? Would the stranglehold of literalism on belief be loosened?
“We are of the Earth,” Pierre said. “Perhaps that is the faith of all ancient peoples.”
“My late husband, Thom, would have said we are of the stars. That atoms in our bodies were once forged by nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars.” I thought but did not say, Bless him, whatever he was. I touched my own belly, bigger than Arielle’s. My baby was a bit older.
I thought Thom would rejoice to know that I was pregnant now. He would be generous enough to rejoice—I felt sure of it, almost. I wondered for a moment if he might have been sterile, not I, and that was why he took so lightly our long postponement of having children. But we had been happy. At least I had been happy all those years.
“Would you like to visit India with me?” Pierre asked. “The president has given his new national director of parietal art an enormous travel budget.”
“In time,” I replied. “We’ll be over the Olduvai soon. My pilgrimage.”
“As a young child, I met Meave Leakey once,” Arielle said. “Wonderful person, brilliant. She offered to meet me, if I ever came here, to talk about the discovery of Lucy while we stood near the spot.”
“I’m a poor substitute, for sure,” I said. I maneuvered the plane to fly lower and lower.
“Hold out your hand,” Arielle said, “as we fly over.”
“It’s down there. Just here Lucy was found,” I exclaimed, and I held out my hand as Arielle requested. To my surprise, Arielle placed in my palm a small, round stone. I glanced at it—a gray-white, fretted nodule, the size of a large marble.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a calcite formation, from the site, from Olduvai.”
“Did Meave Leakey give it to you?”
“No.” Arielle chuckled. “She would never have done that. I bought it recently on the black market.”
I glanced down at the gray-white rock and then saw a similar color below, and a barren, grayish, sloping semicircle that appeared full of rubble. A large, cradlelike basin thought to be, by some, where the ancestors of humans had lived. There was the small upright monument marking the place where Lucy’s fossilized bones had been found. I pulled back on the stick, and the plane ascended.
I made the airplane wings wave at the Olduvai Gorge as we flew away.
“We’ve seen it,” I said quietly, “at least from the air. Now to the Serengeti.” I added, “And Adam’s ceremony.”
The motor of the plane droned on, and for a while no one spoke. I glanced over at Arielle and noted her head was drooping and her eyes were closed. “I was so proud,” Arielle said sleepily, “when Adam and I ran down the Champs-Elysées.” Her eyes were closed, but she continued to hold the urn on her knee.
I pictured the moment that Arielle had mentioned, a moment photographed and used on a poster to encourage handicapped adults to participate in sporting events. Of course one quickly noticed Adam’s leg, the shiny metal, but at first glance, anyone’s gaze would be drawn to their youthful faces, bright and beautiful. Grinning happily, Adam had never looked more like Superman, and Arielle had never looked more like a beauty from the Arabian Nights. In the photo—the Arc de Triomphe in the background—their arms were curled up, and their hands closed. Anyone who looked closely would notice their matching golden wedding rings. Part of their happiness was that they both knew Arielle was pregnant.
“Pierre,” I called softly, but he didn’t answer. Asleep, I thought. Men doze so easily. And of course Arielle needed her sleep. I did not require conversation.
I listened to the drone of the engine. It was a nice little plane, shiny and new, called a Larkin. I watched our shadow move along beneath us on the ground. We wanted Adam’s ashes to settle among the running herds. What better or more fitting place could there be to open the urn?
Were those lions below? I couldn’t tell. Both Pierre and Arielle were dozing now. Below, I saw the shadows of giraffes, and then the giraffes themselves, three of them. Someday I would come back here with my own child. We would go on a photographic safari and be much closer than this to the animals. And was my child Adam’s or Pierre’s? I didn’t know. I didn’t need to know, nor did Pierre. He wanted me to marry him, but I saw no real need for that. We could be good companions, closest friends, parents, whether we married or not.
I thought of Arielle’s child and mine sitting together on a donkey. One way or another, the babies were related. In the distance, I saw a grayish cloud and wondered if it had been stirred up from the plain by the running hooves of wildebeest. We had come to the vast Serengeti plain to see the migrating herds from the air.
I thought of the prehistoric cave paintings, of the glorious animals leaping across the dome of the large cavern. I thought, too, of the darling little goat drawing, curled down low on a wall where it seemed to wait happily. When we flew over the migrating wildebeest, we planned to open the plane door and scatter the ashes in the urn among the freely running animals of Africa. Like Arielle, Adam had become a runner.
“I smell dust,” he said quietly from the backseat, awake at last.
“Dust to dust,” I whispered so as not to wake the others.
“Are you feeling all right, Lucy?” Adam asked affectionately. “Not sleepy yourself?”
“Couldn’t be better,” I answered.
“Do you remember the night the zebras stampeded? How they ran around the bonfire and us?”
I did remember, and how he had held me close. There was no need to mention that. I knew he remembered, too, and treasured our togetherness in the past, as I did. Soon I would travel with Janet Stimson to Japan; Janet had suggested we go together to visit my parents at their mission.
“Look at this,” I said to Adam, and reached back, handing him the nodule from Olduvai. “Arielle gave it to me, when we flew over the gorge. A calcite formation from the Lucy site.”
“Did I miss it?”
“You were tired.” I turned my head forward, then glanced down, at the vast undulations in the dark ocean of galloping animals—thousands and thousands of wildebeest, to be sure, and a few stray zebra and gazelle. I, too, could smell the rising dust of the Serengeti. Soon we would open the door and empty the urn, and the ashes of Adam’s leg would meet the rising dust from the hooves of the animals. “On the way back to Arundel, I’ll pass back over the Olduvai Gorge again, if you like.”
“I’m very happy,” he said, “that we’ve come here. The ashes of my leg are happy to become part of this.”
“This? This what?” I asked gently. I heard Pierre stirring, and with a glance to the right saw Arielle opening her eyes. “Part of what, Adam?”
“This freedom, this authenticity.”
Finis
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As a writer, I am more grateful to my agent, my editors, and my publisher than it is possible to express. When the idea for this novel was hatched, it was nurtured and shaped by my agent, Joy Harris, and my editor, Marjorie Braman. I am grateful for the advice and support of my current editor, Jennifer Brehl, at William Morrow / HarperCollins, as well as for the entire team led by Michael Morrison. Sharyn Rosenblum has served as my inspired publicist since the beginning of my New York publishing career—for Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette, as well as for Adam & Eve.
Writer friends and relatives who have given me their time and expertise as wonderfully helpful readers of the manuscript in progress of Adam & Eve include Julie Brickman, Marcia Woodruff Dalton, Charles Gaines, Eleanor Hutchens, Nancy Jensen, John Sims Jeter, Robin Lippincott, Karen Mann, Nancy Brooks Moore, Eleanor Morse, Lucinda Dixon Sullivan, and Katy Yocom. My heartfelt gratitude to each of you. I also thank Katie Fraser Carpenter, my graduate assistant from the MFA brief-residency program at Spalding University, and Alan Naslund and our daughter, Flora, for conversations on the art of writing; and John C. Morrison for reading the early prospectus and chapters of Adam & Eve.
For conversations about various technical subjects addressed in Adam & Eve, including astrophysics, airplanes, and first aid, I thank John C. Morrison, Larry Dickinson, Marilyn Moss, and Herrick Fisher, though of course they should not be held responsible for my fictive use of their enthusiasm and knowledge. Likewise, I thank Christine Desdemaines-Hugon, author of Stepping-Stones: A Journey Through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne, for serving as Flora’s and my wonderfully informed guide to cave art in the south of France. I also thank Jim and Mary Oppel for their hospitality in France to my daughter and me, and for Jim’s guidance in my reading about parietal art—particularly Gregory Curtis’s The Cave Painters. I also thank Jeanie Thompson for introducing me to Frederick Turner’s In the Land of Temple Caves: Notes on Art and the Human Spirit. A lecture focusing on the fossil discovery of “Lucy” given by Meave Leakey to Flora and me and our fellow travelers with a National Geographic Society tour of Tanzania, including the Olduvai Gorge and the Serengeti Plain, was particularly inspiring. Also of crucial importance was my reading of the books on various religious topics by Elaine Pagels and Karen Armstrong.
For their love and encouragement and for being part of my family, I also wish to thank my daughter, Flora, and her husband, Ron Schildknecht; my brothers and sisters-in-law, Marvin D. and Charlotte Copeland Jeter, John and Derelene Jeter; and my extended family: my step-granddaughters, Lily and Ingrid Schildknecht, and my nieces and nephews, Lisa (Jeter) and Gregg Stucker, Amanda (Jeter) and Peter Brookmayer, Daniel Jeter, Kristina Jeter, and young Chase.
Other friends old and new for whom I am grateful in many ways but especially because of their affirmation of the creative life include Nana Lampton, Lynn Greenberg, David Messer, Charles and Patricia Gaines, Jonathan and Lucy Penner, Pamela Stein, Daly Walker, Janice Lewis Freeman, Bernard Moore, F. Elizabeth Sulzby, Luke Wallen, Jody Lisberger, Neela Vaswani, Elaine Orr, Suzette Henke and Jim Rooney, Deborah and David Stewart, Kay Gill, Ralph Raby, Maureen Morehead, and Pam Cox.
For my happy employment as teacher/administrator/writer, I thank the administrations and my colleagues at both the University of Louisville—President James Ramsay, Dean Blaine Hudson, and Thurston Morton Professor of English Suzette Henke; and Spalding University—President Tori Murden McClure, Vice President Randy Strickland, and Administrative Director of the brief-residency MFA in writing program, Karen Mann. I also wish to thank all the staff, students, and alums of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in writing, where I serve as program director, for their support of my writing, as well as my colleagues and students at the University of Louisville, where I am Writer in Residence. Parts of this manuscript were written during the time I served as Eminent Scholar in the spring of 2008 at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, and I thank for their hospitality President David Williams; the director of the Humanities Center, Dr. Brian Martine; and chair of the English department, Dr. Rose Norman; as well as Dr. Eleanor Hutchens, retired professor of English at UAH, and Agnes Scott, at whose historic home, Long Shadows, I resided.
Because Adam & Eve looks at beginnings and re-beginnings, I am remembering my own early stirrings as a writer. This novel is dedicated to the memory of James Michael Callaghan, student of philosophy, to whom I was married during most of my graduate school days in the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Michael encouraged my writing at every turn and believed in me as a writer and thinker; he also contributed to my education in literature, philosophy, music, political theory, and psychology. I am grateful for his support and that of his family, his parents, the late Dr. Nathan R. Callaghan and Helen Wolverton Callaghan, and his sister Kay Callaghan, my friend to this day.
I also wish to honor the memory of several other individuals. My love of literature and the critical analysis of it were affirmed and quickened by F. Dwight Isbell, as was my love of thought by Janice Kirkpatrick Entrekin, when I was an undergraduate student at Birmingham-Southern College. BSC professors, now deceased, who opened my mind, include Dean Cecil Abernethy, Dr. Leon Driskell, and Professor Richebourg Gaillard MacWilliams. Were it not for the influence of Leslie Moss Ainsworth, my beloved teacher of English and adviser to The Mirror of Phillips High School, Birmingham, Alabama, I would probably not have become a writer and teacher of writing and literature.
—Sena Jeter Naslund
Long Shadows, Huntsville, Alabama
January 2010