Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  Forgive me for taking so long to answer your last. I do mean to answer promptly, I know you like to follow our progress. I can only plead the constant press of work. You would understand if you could see this place; the season for collecting is short, and we are busy every minute. Do you remember what Caleb used to say about the ruins of an older world being visible all around us? He might have had this strange ugly landscape in mind, so jumbled and jagged. Box canyons, big cliffs, a river bed that looks as though God hacked through the plain with a giant axe.

  Grace, who loves all of this, maps the sites where we dig and correlates the strata to similar formations elsewhere. In the cliff walls, she reports, the relics are arranged by age, youngest at the top and oldest at the bottom, neat as a filing cabinet: the clearest possible demonstration of the ideas you and Caleb shared. The fossil skulls and shinbones we stumble across on the basin floors are more difficult to place, and we have to guess at how they were arranged above.

  My work is the usual: interpreting for her as necessary, otherwise helping as I can. Everything she chips out with her chisels and hooks I pack and ship to Dr. Leidy, the vertebrate paleontologist in Philadelphia. He tells us who the bones once belonged to—a gigantic quadruped with three pairs of horns, an antique camel, miniature horses, saber-toothed felines, a ruminating hog. He is writing a book (“Of course,” I can hear Caleb saying wryly. “Of course he is writing a book.”) A complete account of the extinct local creatures, classified and given Latin names. He promises acknowledgment in a footnote: “Thanks to Miss Grace Dietrich, who gathered these specimens.”

  She doesn’t complain, so neither will I. The lithographs of her finds are beautiful, and we both understand, every day, how lucky we are to be able to do this …

  Here Miriam stops, not sure what else she wants to say. She and Stuart are separated now by more than geography; the letters they’ve exchanged since her departure from Pittsburgh are friendly but also constrained. She takes pains to present Grace’s accomplishments in the most positive light, as if to justify their absence. In turn, Stuart amplifies every sign of progress at the Academy. She suspects he is at his desk even now, a pile of student papers before him and a glass of lemonade nearby. Still he teaches part of each day, although it tires him. And still, after all the years they worked together, her feelings about him are complicated. He is her oldest and in some ways her closest friend, now that Caleb is gone. Yet they have often quarreled and hidden things from each other.

  Are there not always conflicts, though? The best friend and the second wife of such a well-known man; they were bound to disagree. After Caleb’s death, Miriam had felt burdened by Stuart’s pleas that she continue to share the responsibilities of the Academy with him. In turn, Stuart had been hurt by the speed with which she and Grace detached themselves from their duties, proposed their project to several eminent geologists, and found a place at the unofficial edge of this surveying expedition in the Bad Lands.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” Stuart had told her. “All Caleb’s hard work, the work we have all put in—we have twenty-three pupils, what about them?”

  “They’ll be fine,” Miriam had replied. “William is anxious to take on a larger role, and you know what a good teacher he is. Both his sisters are coming along nicely. And you’ve been Caleb’s essential lieutenant …” She’d tried not to flinch at the expression on Stuart’s face.

  Why has he always been surprised by her? The day they met, when he first saw her and Grace conversing, he had stared as if they’d fallen from the moon. She can’t imagine what he thought when Caleb explained the idea behind his plans—that the deaf might have a particular affinity for the study of plant and animal shapes—or when, after Grace’s friends arrived, the angry parents took their hearing children away.

  Whatever Stuart felt during that tumultuous time he confided to Caleb, not her. From the moment their first new pupil walked through the door, his hands signing a greeting while his anxious eyes said, What if no one understands me?, she had known that they were doing the right thing. She couldn’t worry about Stuart’s feelings, or wonder what it cost him to set aside his own plans and throw himself into Caleb’s grand project.

  Miriam rises, sets aside the board on which she’s been writing, and considers the jagged landscape surrounding her tent. One formation, not far away, looks like a giant molar waiting to be pulled and would, she thinks, delight Caleb nearly as much as would her and Grace’s presence here. Ignore the gossip, he would tell her. Concentrate on your work. But it isn’t always easy being the widow of such a man; everyone has opinions about his life as well as hers. In the schools that their former pupils have founded, portraits of Caleb hang in the halls, along with miniature biographies that might refer to someone else’s life.

  No one knew him, Miriam thinks. Not as she and Stuart did—and no matter how the two of them disagree, this crucial bond remains. She picks up her pen again.

  You should see Grace’s face and hands: very brown, dotted with freckles. Against these her hair, powdered with rock dust, is so white that strangers sometimes take us for twins. They ask what we are doing, where we have come from. Sometimes, when they persist, I pretend I’m as deaf as Grace.

  As I write, she’s at the base of a ravine. Big birds whirl around above her; I should go call her, dusk comes suddenly here. I miss my dear children, I miss the Academy, I miss all of you. I know my life doesn’t make sense to you. It makes sense to me and to Grace; it would have made sense to Caleb. Please ask my William to write and tell us how things are with him and his sisters, also how many new students he has enrolled for the autumn classes. I think of you often, always fondly.

  —Miriam

  The Origins of the World

  In Pittsburgh, as Miriam knew, people continued to talk about Caleb after he was dead. They spoke of the great swerve he’d made in midlife and the dedication his family showed to his cause; of the visitor from Hartford he corralled into training them all and the pupils who became such a credit to him. But no one spoke of the years that laid the course for those events. The obituaries made no mention of Caleb’s original family in Philadelphia, nor of his adoption by the Bernhards. Samuel Bernhard appeared only as the Academy’s founder and Caleb’s father, never in the context of his other work. And Caleb’s best friend, Stuart, who might have corrected certain mistakes and omissions, kept his secrets.

  Before Miriam set off for the West, she too had refrained from adding to the accounts of Caleb’s life. A few private moments she hoarded for herself. Other things she was not equipped to speak about. Caleb was fifteen years her senior, a young man before she was born. And for all they shared in their years together, he never told her much about his first home, or about the endless nights, after he moved, when he stayed up with his new father.

  He was in a house in Pittsburgh during those nights, his feet cold and his eyelids drooping while the river at the end of the block murmured, Ohio, Ohio. Everyone else was asleep. Rosina, his new sister, was too young to be up so late; Mrs. Bernhard, his new mother, went to bed early, still mourning the children who, if they hadn’t died as infants, would have been the rest of his new family. Behind the house was Bernhard’s Academy for Boys, which Samuel Bernhard ran with a single assistant—but there were neither dormitories nor boarders then; those pupils went home at the end of the day. As Caleb turned eight, then eleven, then twelve—1800, a fresh new world—he bore the brunt of Samuel’s enthusiasms alone.

  Listen, Samuel said to him. Listen to this.

  What Caleb heard was new and often enchanting, despite his exhaustion; it helped distract him from all he’d lost. Unlike his first parents, who had been farmers, Samuel talked about geology, theology, the origins of the world and all its creatures. About fossils, which some people called figured stones. In the old days, Samuel claimed, when he was a boy in Germany, rocks formed like animals or plants had been grouped with those shaped like axes or pots or hats.

  With the rest of the househ
old fast asleep, in a room cold except for a space near the stove, Samuel would hand over gray slabs that dusted Caleb’s fingers. “That shape like a fern,” he said, “is a miracle of nature.”

  “Where did it come from?” Caleb asked. In his old life, people had talked about the weather. “How did it get here?”

  “There is only one true and simple explanation,” Samuel said gravely. “But despite this men have had many notions. I keep track of them in these pages.”

  As Caleb admired the basswood box containing the papers, Samuel eased forward a single sheet. “Here is one idea,” he continued. “Perhaps the figured stones are sports or jokes, which a capricious God developed in the rocks.”

  Perhaps, Caleb heard, perhaps, perhaps. Swooning with lack of sleep, still he struggled each night to be a worthy confidant. There were vapors, he heard, which might have risen from the sea, bearing the spawn of organic life and then condensing into rain. Or God might have endowed the earth itself with some extraordinary plastic virtue, capable of imitating existing forms. Some men, Samuel said, believed that in the secret, hidden parts of the earth, fossils might have been created as ornaments, just as tulips and roses, also useless, had been created as ornaments for the surface.

  “Suppose they grew,” Samuel said, smiling as if the idea had a savor on his tongue, “and reproduced accordingly—as plums beget plums, so might a stone bearing a snail-like figure beget a second snail.”

  All those stories, all those words, swirling around in Caleb’s mind. When he admitted his confusion, Samuel said, “You must learn not just to listen, but to think for yourself.”

  Am I to listen? Caleb thought then. Or am I not? On another night, after carefully considering more of Samuel’s stories, he asked, “But what is the truth?”

  “The truth,” Samuel said quietly—it was very late, and dark red halos shimmered around the coals—“is that fossils are relics of the Flood, the petrified remains of creatures drowned in the Deluge. When God punished the sinners and the waters rose, the earth’s surface was converted into a fluid jelly. Think of the jelly around the pickled pigs’ feet your mother makes.”

  “I like that,” Caleb said, although he still had trouble thinking of Mrs. Bernhard as his mother.

  “While the jelly is warm and still liquid, she can stir in bits of meat. But once the jelly cools, everything is set in place. Exactly so,” he continued, while Caleb’s stomach rumbled, “was everything living frozen into the rocks when the Flood receded. The just along with the unjust; plants and fishes and snails, who after all had committed no sins, petrified equally with the humans who offended God.”

  “But that’s not fair,” Caleb said indignantly. “Why should the innocent be punished?”

  Instead of answering, Samuel led Caleb to a long, heavy arch of gray rock resting on the windowsill. “From an elephant, who did no harm,” he said. “This is part of a rib. A man I know found it at a salt lick in Kentucky.” As Caleb held his candle closer to the petrified bone, Samuel raised his hand and cupped Caleb’s chin. Since Rosina’s birth they seldom touched; Caleb leaned into the unfamiliar warmth.

  “We cannot know what God sees,” Samuel said. “Nor how He judges. We can only accept that all He does is both just and merciful.”

  Sometimes, in the following months and years, Samuel read to Caleb from the Bible. Sometimes he read from his growing pile of pages, in which—the better to set off his true knowledge—he detailed the erroneous theories of the past. And sometimes he read from the papers of other men who studied the secrets buried in the ground. Although no one had ever seen the giant creature called Megalonyx, it was not extinct, simply undiscovered. “For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost,” Samuel read, “another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piecemeal.”

  Caleb wondered if he might not vanish himself, his former ways and habits buried beneath the flow of Samuel’s ideas. He felt most in danger of disappearing, but also most intrigued, on the nights when Samuel put down his papers and stared into the fire, describing his own vision of the Deluge.

  When the rain ended, Samuel said, when the great masses of cloud finally parted, how astonished Noah and his family must have been! The water shimmering under the first pale sun, the clouds first black then gray and then finally white in an open and radiant sky. Under the water, Samuel said dreamily, lay lost cities, drowned mountains, entire forests uprooted from their tenuous hold on land to float horizontally.

  The Flood sounded lovely then; Caleb listened raptly. Only during the day, when he paused to consider the stories he’d heard in the dark, did he think of what Samuel hadn’t mentioned: the lost people also floating through that calm liquid, tangled with lizards and birds among the branches.

  One of Samuel’s gifts was his power to conjure such vivid pictures in Caleb’s mind. But Caleb had a gift as well, which he discovered during those years: he could pick out secret shapes where others distinguished nothing. Where had this come from? Not from Samuel, whose eyesight was very poor. Perhaps his first parents had shared a similar sharpness of vision. Outside, along the cliffs and streambeds, Caleb was drawn to the hidden fossils as if they were iron and he a magnet. When he found a new specimen, his joy made up for his gritty eyes and the way his classmates mocked him for his old-fashioned speech and his love of rocks.

  Bernhard’s heartburn, some of them sang. Headmaster’s bonehead son.

  He shrugged them off, they were ignorant. For friends, until he met Stuart Mason, he had his much younger sister, Rosina, and a bent-tailed yellow dog.

  On a rainy spring afternoon in 1810, when Caleb was twenty-three, he visited Dr. Mason’s office on behalf of his mother and left with a prescription for a tonic.

  “See my nephew,” Dr. Mason said. “Next door. He’ll make this up.”

  In the space between the two low buildings Caleb, already wet, was so thoroughly drenched that even the roots of his hair felt refreshed. Behind him, as he ducked through the door, the rain fell and fell for the third day in a row. The streets were streams, the empty lots were ponds, the river was pushy and loud. The yellow dog was dead by then; Rosina, who’d turned from an eager, long-legged girl who liked to run through the woods into a miniature copy of her mother, hated to get muddy now and would never go out on a day like this.

  Caleb, who liked the rain, shook himself off. Inside the cool dark room, perched on a stool before bottles of rhubarb bitters and witch hazel, hanging dried herbs and mysterious twigs, was a compact, sweet-faced young man he’d met briefly several times but not yet gotten to know. After they reintroduced themselves, Stuart inspected the note and said, “For your mother?”

  How clear and frank his eyes were. “The rain makes her melancholy,” Caleb replied, stifling an impulse to add that she wasn’t actually his mother. Recently he’d been startled by how little he resembled his adopted family, and how sharply his long, wiry limbs and his consuming curiosity set him apart.

  He looked down at the newspaper lying open on the counter, leaning closer when Stuart pointed out an article and asked, “Did you see that?”

  The Rappites, Caleb read—hardworking religious ascetics, calmly awaiting the end of the world—had built a new woolen mill. What could it be like, Caleb wondered aloud, to work a loom in the expectation of being lifted bodily, any minute, into heaven?

  “Unnerving, I imagine,” Stuart said. “Every time you heard a strange sound you’d be thinking, This is it.”

  When Caleb laughed, Stuart offered a tale about a man named Symmes who claimed that the earth was hollow and filled with nested concentric spheres, each one habitable and awaiting settlement. In Russia one might find mammoths in the frozen river deltas. In Egypt there were mummies underground, in Oregon relics of ancient tribes—and so who could say for sure what else might not be hiding inside the earth?

  “You’d like to travel?” Caleb asked. “So would I.”

  The lines of a possible life fanned out—two
companions exploring here, adventuring there—and just as quickly reeled themselves in: Stuart was already married, Caleb learned. Already tied to the infant fussing in a basket at his feet.

  “Talk is my form of travel,” Stuart said wryly. “At least for now. That and reading whatever I can.” As Caleb pondered the contrast in their situations, Stuart bent over the basket and then deposited the squalling bundle in Caleb’s arms.

  “Elias,” he said, as Caleb inspected the infant’s charming ears. “He’s teething. He wants to be held, and I need both hands to work.”

  While Stuart ground and stirred, he said he’d meant to be a doctor but now made a living compounding potions for his uncle and experimenting with leaves and roots. A sharp smell rose from some herb he crushed. “My father’s legacy to me,” he said, wincing. “An oversensitive nose.” What would it be like, Caleb wondered, to know who had given him certain traits—his sharp eyes, his cowlick, his sense of not quite fitting in anywhere? The smell of living blood, Stuart said ruefully, was what had turned him away from medicine.

  Caleb jiggled Elias gently and eyed a huge tooth lying behind the bundles of willow twigs. “Mastodon?” he asked, prodding the conical cusps with his foot. “My father has part of a rib, from a place down the river.”

  “The salt lick in Kentucky?”

  Caleb nodded. “His speculations about the Elephant of the Ohio are almost the first things I remember.”

  A lie, already; no way to make a friend. He crouched, balancing Elias, and touched the tooth’s curved roots. What he first remembered, hazily, was an entirely different life. If his true parents had not died of the yellow fever when he was a child, he thought. If the Bernhards, making their way from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, had not stopped near the smoking heap that until that morning had been his home; if their eldest son had not died a few weeks earlier and if he himself had not been pulling against the hand of the doctor, shrieking as his first sister, Lavinia, was placed in a wagon with two women … Grateful, the doctor had said. Always, to this family willing to take you. He’d been five when he was chosen. He had never seen Lavinia again.