How hard it had been to leave those trips behind! During their junior year, Edward met a girl named Chloe in the fall and married her—recklessly, Miles judged; she was seventeen—in the spring. That summer Miles went to Wyoming alone, but once he graduated and returned to work at his father’s plant, he too stopped traveling. Still Edward was only a few minutes’ walk away, settled into the mazelike house with Chloe and their new baby, Lawrence, and although both men were busy they met almost daily to trade news from the bone-hunters’ world.
Throughout their twenties they’d continued to share books and conversations. Chloe usually went her own way when they gathered; even after Lawrence’s birth she wore surprising clothes and continued to act, in Miles’s opinion, like a girl. She showed no interest in the family business, which expanded under Edward’s direction into the manufacture of ceramic materials used in ships and automobiles. When their second son, Charles, was born, Miles bought a crib worthy of one of the heirs to such a firm. Chloe took both the crib and Charles with her when she ran away.
For a while, then, there was no discussion of the Carnegie Museum’s acquisition of a nearly complete Apatosaurus or the newly named Albertosaurus; both men were focused on Lawrence, who didn’t speak for almost a year after his mother left. They hid her note from him: Lawrence can manage without me now, she’d written. If I stay here any longer I will die. I have taken Charles, he’s too young to leave behind. The hats she’d left on the closet shelf gathered a yellow haze of pollen before Lawrence cut them apart with the garden shears.
In their efforts to comfort the boy, and to shape a daily routine around his gaping loss, Miles and Edward drew even closer. Miles visited the Hazelius house each day, ate dinner with the pair each night, helped Lawrence with his studies and answered his questions. Still unmarried himself, he taught Lawrence everything he could and felt rushing back to him, when he showed Lawrence a set of bones or a model, the delight he’d felt at a similar age. Dinosauria, he would tell Lawrence, lit up again as he’d been as a boy. Later revised to two great orders by Seeley: Ornithischia, the bird-hipped dinosaurs; Saurischia, the lizard-hipped.
“Ni-this chia,” Lawrence would lisp.
He was tall for his age and loved the outdoors. When he turned eleven, Miles and Edward started taking him on fossil-collecting expeditions during their summer vacations. Miles, who by then had had enough trouble with his lungs that he’d ended two romances and given up the idea of marrying, found that camping outside helped him, and also that Lawrence flourished in the sun and the dry air. By the summer of 1914, Edward was able to arrange positions for all three of them as volunteer assistants to a collecting expedition run by a famous team of paleontologists.
Two large flatboats set off early that June, each with a center-mounted tent that sheltered cots and a cookstove and food, tools for excavating the fossils and sacks of plaster of Paris. The professionals on the first boat, searching out the fossils in the cliffs and leaving behind markers and instructions, floated so far ahead that Miles didn’t see them often, but he’d found it thrilling simply to follow, digging and lugging as ordered. The two Canadian students in charge of them—Ewan and Alistair, disciples of the famous pair—praised them occasionally.
At first, Miles and Edward and Lawrence were allowed only to do the heavy digging. Once they’d proven themselves, though, they were granted the privilege of chipping away the matrix from the bones and helping apply the plaster bandages. Hot, heavy work, which Miles loved. Shoveling rocks and dirt, fetching water, cooking porridge or washing his shirts in the river: all of that was also fine. Each day brought a new discovery. The sun burned, the mosquitoes pierced their clothes. Huge hailstones fell so hard that their tents were knocked down and their arms, where they’d held canvas over their heads, were beaten black and blue. The work was so exciting that they didn’t mind.
Miles, who’d turned thirty-five that summer, felt as vigorous as he had in college and lost the cough that had nagged him all winter. Lawrence, who quickly proved that he could lift as much as Ewan or Alistair, row as hard and shoot as accurately, seemed happy too. Sometimes the three youngsters would go off hunting together, leaving Miles and Edward to nap, sunburned and pleased with themselves, under the canvas awning on the boat. Their group of five men, Miles thought, formed a perfect society, sharing equally in all the tasks and teaching each other, during the long stretches when they were floating down the water, whatever they knew. Ewan taught celestial navigation, which both Miles and Edward had always meant to study. Miles taught Ewan and Alistair a way to treat fragile shale so it wouldn’t splinter. Ewan and Alistair taught Lawrence how to steer the flatboat, and as Miles stood at the bow, looking back at Lawrence handling the huge steering oar, he knew that he and Edward had, even without a woman’s influence, done a fine job.
Those days floating down the river, between the fossil-laden cliffs; how delicious they’d been! He’d followed his father into the cement plant, rising through the ranks until he was ready to take over, but that was his duty: this, he loved. In early September, they finally reached the tiny town where they had to unload the specimens and prepare them for shipment east. Only then did they learn about the war.
Miles couldn’t blame Ewan and Alistair for running off to join the Canadian forces as soon as they heard; nor could he blame them for leaving him and Edward to manage the crating and shipment of the tons of specimens. But he couldn’t forgive them for encouraging Lawrence. One day Lawrence was on the boat and the next they found, where he should have been, an excited, apologetic note, more well-meaning than his mother’s but equally devastating. No one could track him down. Only after months, during which Miles and Edward took turns blaming each other—who had had the idea for the trip? Both of them, they finally agreed—did Lawrence write from France. Having lied about both his age and his citizenship, he’d succeeded in getting shipped off with a Canadian battalion dotted with other eager, illicit American volunteers.
Night after night Miles and Edward talked about what to do. They weren’t powerless; they could have forced Lawrence home. But his letters sang with hope and a desire to prove himself. Let me stay, he wrote. Let me do this. It’s what I have to do, what I want to do. Chloe had disappeared completely—she never wrote Edward and no one knew where she was, only that she’d run off with some stranger—and in her absence the men talked as any two parents might. In the end they agreed that they had to let him stay.
IN ALBERTA, Miles had felt so well that he’d considered once more trying to find a suitable wife and then, with her assistance, selling off the cement plant and devoting himself wholly to working with fossils. The feel of the bones under his hands, their hot, crumbling, dusty surfaces and the sense that he was holding the earth’s history, stroking the hidden parts of an animal no one had ever seen or could see, seemed like the only thing that had ever made him happy. In the days before they’d docked the flatboat and learned about the war, he’d stretched out on the deck at night and imagined changing his life. Just for once, he’d thought—during those months when he’d felt so strong and well, before the war started, before Lawrence left—he would leave his duties behind.
Instead, his lung complaint returned and he’d ended up at Mrs. Martin’s house, pampered and stuffed with her wonderful food, but bored beyond words. He had books shipped in by the carton, a dozen magazine subscriptions; Edward wrote weekly and he wrote back, but none of this was a substitute for real conversation. One day, after a restless night during which he recalled the pleasures of teaching Lawrence, a plan for Tamarack State had drifted into his mind. Immediately, he recognized that this was what he needed. Most of us were younger than Lawrence in terms of what we knew, even if we were older in years; he assumed that if he could teach Lawrence, he could teach us.
How mystifying, then, that only twelve of us came to his second session, most looking for that promised “exchange of work experience.” Failing that, we hoped for more talk about gunite; after Miles’s first
presentation, Ephraim had mentioned that one of his wife’s cousins had worked with a cement gun while lining a siphon supplying water to New York, and that had made Miles’s work seem more interesting. Instead we got a talk about the process of excavating bones. On he went about the needed skills, the special tools, the patience. Special whisk brooms with stiff, flexible bristles were apparently helpful, and also some little awls, which were used to follow bits of bone in from the surface while being careful not to disturb the bone itself.
Still pacing back and forth, wearing a suit cut like the previous week’s but brown instead of gray, he described in detail the process of freeing one particular specimen and encasing the blocks in plaster-and-burlap jackets. Twenty or thirty minutes into this, Naomi slipped off the window seat and went outside; three-quarters of us envied her, although Leo and Ephraim continued to listen. Afterwards, at dinner that night, more of us decided to drop out.
AT THE THIRD SESSION, on October 25, only six of us were present besides Miles and Naomi. A few minutes after the session started, we were joined by Eudora MacEachern, whom we knew then only as one of the ward maids. When she stepped inside the doorway, we learned from the way she smiled and the swiftness with which Naomi leapt from the ledge and moved to greet her that she was also Naomi’s friend.
While Miles spoke, Naomi and Eudora leaned against either side of the doorframe exchanging quiet comments and looking, Leo thought, like two animals similar in general health and sleekness but different in their natures: a hawk and a heron, say, or a coyote and a dog. Eudora—about twenty, he correctly guessed—stood on the left, tall and large-boned, strongly muscled but not at all fat, her light brown hair framing hazel eyes and pale skin that flushed easily. Leo had glimpsed her many times, when he and Ephraim went out to the porch for morning rest hours and she came in to make the beds and mop the floor, but in this context he finally saw more than the long blue cotton apron, the combs holding back her hair, and her chapped hands.
“My mistake,” Miles was saying as Leo examined the two young women. “I didn’t understand, at first, how little context most of you have for the work I’ve been describing. That was foolish of me. Let me try again.”
We turned, hoping for something to grasp, but soon learned that by “context” he didn’t mean anything to do with our lives. He meant history. The Megalosaurus, he said, had been discovered in 1824 by William Buckland, an Englishman who’d lived with his family among a menagerie that included a hyena and a dancing bear. Gideon Mantell, accompanied by his wife, had stumbled upon the Iguanodon, after which Richard Owen, examining those and other finds, invented the name for the order. In London, in 1854, Waterhouse Hawkins filled the Crystal Palace with models of those prehistoric creatures, also mounting in Philadelphia the first skeleton of the Hadrosaurus.
Twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour. During the first two sessions, Miles had forgotten to take a break for our snack, even though food had been laid out invitingly. We’d been too timid to complain, then, but this time, with a smaller group, Ephraim rose early in the second hour and pointed at the laden table.
“Oh, of course,” Miles said, slightly flustered. “Let’s take ten minutes. Please enjoy your refreshments.”
We stood back while Miles poured a cup of hot chocolate and went over to the window, apparently drawn by the row of pigeons who’d settled along Hygeia’s shoulders and head, spacing themselves at intervals so precise they might have used a measuring tape. Except for Leo, the rest of us crowded around the food. Leo moved toward Miles to ask if he knew the work of the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky.
Miles’s face lit up. “Darwin’s Russian correspondent!” he said. “His work on fossil horses inspired Huxley. Such an interesting thinker. How do you know of him?”
“He studied in Odessa,” Leo said. “As did I, briefly. He’s still much discussed there, because of his influence on Dollo—do you know, in this country, about Dollo’s law?”
“Of course,” Miles said enthusiastically. “Here, we paraphrase it as: ‘No major evolutionary change is ever reversed.’ During the evolution of the hoof, the toe bones, once lost, don’t reappear.”
“The phrasing’s different in Russian,” Leo said, “but the meaning’s the same. What’s lost is gone for good.”
Miles looked at him thoughtfully and asked a few more questions. As he did, Leo grew more animated, pushing his fine dark hair away from his face. He was the first to take his seat, and when Miles began to speak again, returning to the subject of his own finds, Leo listened eagerly to his description of a giant creature with skull-frills of bone. He barely noticed the evening nurse who ducked inside the doorway and tapped Eudora on the arm.
THOSE BONES STICKING out like a ruff, Eudora thought as she followed the nurse down the hall. She’d never know, now, why a creature might have those sprouting from its skull. But this was the nature of her job as a ward maid: she was pulled constantly from one task to the next, never hearing the ends of conversations. Anyone—nurses, doctors, orderlies—could ask her for help, and everyone did. Without complaint she fetched files, retrieved lab results, made beds, damp-mopped floors, wiped down walls and furniture with a cloth wrung out in disinfectant. There were ward maids who hated those interruptions, but to her they felt as natural as her childhood.
Still she could remember the feel of watching from her crib as her older brothers and sisters swept into the kitchen, all four shouting and arguing before disappearing again, their mouths filled with something delicious their mother had made. Once she could walk, they’d treated her like a pet. Ernest might carry her off on his back, to serve as a lookout for one of his and Eugene’s games. Or Helen might dress her in Eugene’s cast-off clothes, blacken her eyebrows, tuck her hair under a cap, and declare her a tramp, only to have Sally remove the cap, tie her to a tree, and turn her into a princess awaiting rescue.
In a single day she might be used as a mascot in four different imaginary worlds, never completing a single game but delighted by so many adventures. When she grew tired, or when Eugene, who was very strong, accidentally grew too rough, she could retreat to her father’s taxidermy shop and hide among the drying animal skins, the knives and chisels and trays of glass eyes. Or she could run to her mother’s fragrant kitchen, where a beefsteak kept her eye from turning purple after she’d fallen into one of Sally’s traps. She’d grown so tall, she often thought, and gained such muscles in her arms and legs, from the effort of keeping up with her rowdy siblings. Later, when she started helping out at her Aunt Elizabeth’s cure cottage, she’d learned to divide her attention a dozen ways without diluting it. She liked her own swift adaptations to the constant change and the exhilaration of successfully juggling all the boarders and their requests.
Someday she’d find more ambitious work that made use of that adaptability. For now, though, this suited her fine. She chatted with everyone on her floors while carefully folding closed the brown paper bags pinned to our bedside stands, slipping them into the covered tins, and wheeling those to the incinerator out back. Picking up clean sheets and towels at the laundry and delivering the dirties was nothing; wheeling us to the laboratory or the X-ray facility, when the orderlies were overworked, she relished for the surprising confidences that emerged on these short journeys. She liked the pay envelope, too, and the chance to meet people from so many different backgrounds and places.
In fact she liked almost everything but the cleanup after what the nurses called “a situation.” Sometimes that meant a patient had died. Other times it was something like this: Raymond, sitting up to take his temperature and unexpectedly throwing an enormous hemorrhage. The nurse, easing Eudora into the now-empty room, said, “You’re so good at this,” as if the flattery would change the task. “No one else is as thorough as you are, and we’re shorthanded this evening.”
Clean rags, cold water, boiling water, disinfectant. She was good at this, she knew; she had just the right touch, swift and light but exceedingly careful
. Never spreading the tainted blood past the site of the spill, never flicking it onto herself, never letting water drip from the used rags onto anything else. Each rag quickly sealed in the covered bin and then, after the linen on both beds was changed, the floor mopped, and the furniture wiped, the bin whisked away for the rags to be burned. She could turn out a room in an hour.
Six o’clock came and went as she worked, and she missed her chance to hear the rest of Miles’s story. But at least, as she found when she put on her coat and went outside, Naomi had waited for her.
“Do you want a ride home?” Naomi asked. She looked over her shoulder at Miles, bundled into the back seat in a heavy wool jacket. “I mean, if you don’t mind…”
“It would be my pleasure,” Miles said. “Your friends are mine.”
“That would be wonderful,” Eudora said. “Snow’s coming, I think. And it’s been a long day. I enjoyed your talk—what I heard of it, anyway.”
She and Naomi tied her bicycle onto the back of Mrs. Martin’s Model T and then cranked the engine. Just as it was turning over, Miles asked if they needed help.
“Thank you,” Naomi said patiently, “but we’re fine—I do it myself, all the time. Eudora’s only helping because she wants to learn to drive on her own.”
Eudora sat beside Naomi, up front, so she could watch the dials and gauges. The wind blew, the clouds chased each other across the moon, and the car flew between the trees and then around the enormous curve that, from our perch on the porches, obscured for a long stretch anyone arriving or departing. While Miles watched the clouds, Naomi tried, for the third or fourth time, to explain to Eudora how to set the spark and the throttle levers.
The Air We Breathe Page 4
