Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  “Go somewhere,” Stuart said. “Harry can take care of the Academy for a few weeks. Learn what you can and come back and tell me everything. I’m so tired of being stuck here—bring me something new.”

  Everything happened quickly after that. A pupil’s father, a commission merchant, owned a flatboat being loaded with linen and ginseng and nails, which was leaving for New Orleans; Caleb was welcome, the merchant said, to passage as far as he desired. A three-week break was scheduled for the end of term, and although Caleb expected to be gone at least six weeks, Harry said he could manage with a temporary replacement. Surely that small inconvenience was nothing in light of the useful and instructive fossils Caleb might bring back. “If you happened to find any plant fossils as well, that would be excellent,” Harry said enthusiastically. “And when you return, maybe we could order a new globe, and some botany manuals.”

  Rosina, leaning up against Harry, said to Caleb, “But don’t be gone too long, will you? There’s so much to do here.”

  While Caleb packed shirts and socks and waterproof boots, a gun and a measuring stick and two shovels, he considered, and then set aside, the fact that Samuel’s bitter last months had also begun with a fossil-gathering trip. Yet at the wharf a few days later, shivering in the cold wind and regarding the roughly built boat heaped with kegs and tarpulin-covered mounds, he felt an instant’s panic.

  Why was he leaving? A smell he couldn’t name rose from the river, and in the confusion of saying his farewells he dropped a trowel into the water and then failed to thank Stuart for the book pressed firmly into his hands. Sally, Stuart’s youngest, had brought a gift as well: three sprigs of holly tied with a white bow. With the crisp green leaves in his buttonhole, Caleb stepped onto the boat. Once not he but Samuel had said, teaching the boys some local geography, If we could fly, we would see from the clouds the clear waters of the Allegheny flowing down from the north, the muddy waters of the Monongahela flowing up from the south, two rivers merging into the Ohio at our home and forming a great Y. By that enormous letter we are meant to understand …

  He’d forgotten the rest, the most important part; always he remembered the wrong things. At the railing he watched a band of black water expand between him and the shore. In some language, an Indian language, Ohio meant “beautiful river.” From the sky something cold, part rain and part sleet, began to fall.

  Beautiful River

  A few miles past the Rappite settlement of Economy, a farmstead set back from the river housed an informal school quite different from the Academy. On this December afternoon all the pupils—Grace Dietrich, her two older brothers, and four little girls from the neighboring houses—were walking toward the water, intent on their weekly nature lesson. Forget the snow, forget the cold. Or so said Miriam, who was their teacher. If the animals pranced about in it, why shouldn’t they? Every week they made this journey, in every kind of weather. On this day they romped in the woods for an hour before they emerged at the river’s edge and saw a boat being pushed toward the shore by rafts of ice. Men were shouting and long oars were flailing while the bow ground against tree roots already tangled in ice. The other pupils exclaimed at the noise and confusion, but Grace heard nothing.

  Had the boat not appeared, Miriam would have pointed out deer scat, or a woodcock’s feather, or a fallen cardinal bright against the snow. Instead, as a man jumped from the boat to the ice to the ground, a rope in his hand, a hat on his head, Miriam directed Grace’s gaze to the scene unfolding before them. Twice the man passed the rope around a tree, tying a complicated knot before he opened his mouth and spiraled a finger through the air. Another man lowered a plank from the deck to the shore. On the deckhouse roof a third man, tall and thin, stood amid the bristling oars and looked curiously down at the scene.

  Grace held her arms straight out, in imitation of the oars, and then pulled them in and asked her sister a question. Miriam said, “Travelers,” at the same time shaping a gesture with her hands.

  “Going where?” asked three of her pupils at once.

  Miriam called a question to the man who’d secured the boat.

  “St. Louis, then New Orleans,” he called. Once more Miriam turned to Grace and gestured.

  “Where’s the nearest village?” asked the man who’d lowered the plank. Carefully he made his way across the gap between the boat and the riverbank.

  Miriam stepped toward him, drew a map in the snow—the river here, a farmhouse there, a stand of willows, the sandbar—and told him where he might buy flour and cheese. The sun was setting, the children were cold. Grace, who was watching her actions intently, was shivering.

  “We won’t be here long,” the boatman said cheerfully. “I’m sure the ice will break up soon.”

  “I wish you good luck,” Miriam said. Everyone was busy with something, she saw, except that odd figure still peering down from the roof. Uneasy beneath his inquiring gaze, she herded her students together and began the long walk home.

  Caleb had been tagged as an oddity even before his boat was forced ashore; not in the old, familiar way, but in an unexpected way. Only those with a purpose, he’d learned—traders transporting cargo, families looking to settle new land—traveled at this time of year. What, the boatmen asked him, was he thinking? They were unimpressed by his account of the fossil graveyard awaiting him downriver.

  “You want to dig in this weather?” one asked. “For petrified bones? Good luck.”

  Caleb slept alone in the first and smallest of the cabins, while the boatmen, crowded into the other cabin aft of the big space heaped with cargo, laughed and talked and smoked their pipes, never inviting him to join them. On their fourth day out, when ice forced the boat to halt, they pushed him aside and moved through their tasks in an easy synchrony.

  Unable to find a single useful thing to do, Caleb had watched the children racing like rabbits across a small clearing, the slender woman who spoke to the boatmen, and the little girl whose hands moved rapidly in the air. The woman’s hair was almost white; the girl’s hair was equally pale; they looked, not like the sister with whom he’d grown up, but like his real, lost sister. He’d raised a hand partway, a hesitant greeting, but they didn’t respond and a minute later they vanished.

  Later that afternoon, while the crew settled into a routine of chopping wood and playing cards, Caleb fiddled with his equipment and worried about the weather, so much colder than he’d expected. The river seldom locked up like this, one boatman said. But they’d probably be freed in a day or two. After dinner Caleb wrote a letter to Stuart describing his predicament: which included the fact that the mail wouldn’t move until the river had thawed. I could walk home in two days, he wrote. But it’s too soon to give up. Then he stuffed the letter in his satchel, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep.

  When he woke the boat was still frozen in, and the boatmen were still playing cards. Determined to be useful, Caleb left very early with his gun. The birds and bushes and trees near the boat were the same, he saw, as those he’d left less than twenty miles behind him. Also the same were the rocks poking up through the snow and the hawks spiraling through the sky. Farther away from the river’s edge, where the snow was deeper, he found the tracks of deer and possums and pheasants. Enormous trees, black and bare, and the sun so low in the sky; he walked for miles, beguiled by the light and shooting at nothing. Only when he crossed his own tracks did he realize he’d traced a great circle.

  Off he went again, on a line diagonal to his first route. Near noon he came upon a modest house, where he thought to beg a few minutes by the fire. The young woman he’d seen near the river a day earlier opened the door.

  “Oh!” she said. “You—was that you on the roof of the boat?”

  “I waved,” he said. “You didn’t see me.”

  Her face colored slightly. “I was talking to my sister. I didn’t have a free hand.”

  He took off his hat and introduced himself, both confused and touched by her embarrassment.
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br />   “Will you come in?”

  Behind her was the girl he’d glimpsed, along with six other children. Twining among them were a black cat, a tortoiseshell cat, and a large splotched dog. From the kitchen an older woman, Mrs. Dietrich, came forward to greet him. Miriam took his coat and gun and settled him by the fire.

  “Grace is deaf,” she murmured as her mother withdrew. Then she continued with the introductions, Grace’s hands following her words. For her older brother, who had large ears, Grace pinched her right earlobe gently and tugged it. For her younger brother she stroked her eyebrows: his were dark and full, the most striking thing about him. She had similarly eloquent gestures for the girls Miriam introduced as their neighbors and her pupils. As she shaped them Grace studied the stranger who’d finally arrived.

  Not a stranger, exactly: she’d seen his awkward gestures on the boat. Along with the fresh smell of snow and the deeper notes of his wet boots and woolen clothes, he carried an odor of sadness. As he stretched his boots toward the fire, Miriam pointed at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Grace put her hand to her forehead, palm out with two fingers raised and curled forward, imitating his tuft of springy hair.

  “What does she mean?” Caleb asked.

  Miriam laughed and repeated the gesture. “She told you her names for everyone here; then she gave you a name-sign as well.”

  Clumsily he tried to imitate her movement. “This?”

  “Turn your wrist,” said Miriam. “That.”

  “How do I make her name?”

  Miriam passed her left hand, palm in, over her left ear and then her mouth, as if with that gesture she sealed them both shut. Caleb shaped the sign for himself, correctly this time; then pointed to Grace and smiled and shaped the sign for her. Mrs. Dietrich appeared with a tray.

  “Your daughter has a whole language of signs?” Caleb asked. Mrs. Dietrich nodded.

  “We do,” Miriam replied, helping her mother pass around cornbread and coffee and peach preserves. The children stared at him and the splotched dog licked his hand. “Our whole family.”

  She did most of the talking; Mrs. Dietrich was quiet and the gestures she used to converse with Grace were cramped and halting. Soon she excused herself and returned to the pies she was making.

  “Grace lost her hearing when she was two,” Miriam offered. “Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she’s picked up from her friends.” She passed Caleb the last fragments of the cornbread. “But tell me about your journey,” she said. “Where you’re headed.”

  Even as he tried to describe his plans—the salt lick in Kentucky he hoped to visit, with its famous graveyard of ancient bones; his hope of digging out some of these relics—part of his attention was also with the children, who’d returned to their lessons. A schoolmaster’s trick, pounded deep within. As he spoke he eyed the few worn books they shared and the open picture-primer, its oversized words paired with drawings: HAT, RAT, POT, CAT, HEN, TOP, BOY. At the moment Grace was drawing a map of Pennsylvania while the others shared the history text. With a gentle word, Miriam quelled the fit of giggling that swept through the room when the big-eared boy dropped the book on the floor.

  “Forgive them,” she said. Her attention too was split, Caleb sensed. As it should be. “We’re taking three days off from our lessons for Christmas, and they’re so excited they can’t concentrate.”

  “You do very well with them,” Caleb said. He looked down at his wet boots, imagining himself back at the Academy a few weeks from now, pushing the younger boys through their readers and ignoring their yawns. “I’m a schoolmaster myself.”

  “You enjoy the work?”

  He nodded and then, encouraged, described the Academy. He barely mentioned Samuel and at first, flattered by her attention, didn’t notice how little she offered about herself. Nothing about how Grace had lost her hearing, nor how she’d started this school. As he spoke, Grace continued drawing her map.

  With her beloved colored pencils she made a blue river, brown mountains, patches of green forest. This river, her river, without the ice but with Caleb’s boat. The cat walked to the window, placed her front paws on the glass, and stood staring sway-bellied out at the snow until, without transition, she was perched on the sill and the dog was walking back and forth below her, considering all that the cat might be seeing. The dog moved toward the door and waited for one of the boys to release her. Their visitor, whose crest resembled that of a female cardinal, crossed and uncrossed his legs. What would her father make of him? Over her map she unconsciously shaped her father’s name-sign, one hand holding and guiding an invisible chisel while the heel of the other pushed. He’d gone to a neighbor’s to build them a table but would soon return. When the cat pressed a paw to the window, trying to touch a passing crow, Grace pinched the air near her upper lip with two fingers, drawing them in an eloquent movement through the place where her whiskers would be, if she were a cat.

  Caleb, who’d been watching her, laughed and said, “Even I can understand that.” The children, or the fire, or the fragrant woodsmoke, Miriam’s easy conversation or Mrs. Dietrich’s restful silence, the sight of Grace—perhaps especially Grace—had cheered him. Only now did he realize how off balance he’d felt since leaving home. Through the window he saw the dog leap up in a startling curve, snapping at something beyond the frame. A beautiful day, one of those days for which the world had been created. He had almost missed it entirely.

  He rose, flexing his toes in his nearly dry boots. “I should head back,” he said reluctantly. “Thank you for making me so welcome.”

  “We’re glad for the company,” Miriam said. “The bad weather’s cut us off from everyone.” The children waved and the cats serpentined around his legs. Mrs. Dietrich, who hadn’t spoken directly to him since they finished their meal, came forward, smiling, to offer a pair of mince pies.

  He shared these with the boatmen on Christmas Day, when they asked him to join their quiet celebration. The captain led the men in some hymns; Caleb read from the Bible when asked; rain fell, harder and harder, melting the snow until it seemed that they must soon be freed. But after their dinner of pheasant and biscuits and pie, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and a cold wind swept down the river, freezing everything again. Caleb excused himself from the boatmen’s cabin and retreated to the pleasures of Stuart’s farewell gift: John Filson’s essay on the natural history of Kentucky. A book older than he was, but still very useful—and how like Stuart, he thought fondly, to give him not the most up-to-date scientific volume but this early description of the area. Stuart had marked one page with a piece of paper; the passage described the salt lick—still so far downriver that Caleb could hardly imagine it—and the finds of astonishing bones.

  The celebrated Dr. Hunter, Caleb read, had observed from the form of the giant teeth found there,

  that they must have belonged to a carnivorous animal … These bones belonged to a quadruped now unknown, and whose race is probably extinct, unless it may be found in the extensive continent of New Holland, whose recesses have not yet been pervaded by the curiosity or avidity of civilized man. Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature …’

  Where had Stuart found this book? And when—and why hadn’t they read it together? Perhaps they had: there’d been long stretches, during Samuel’s last months, when Caleb had sat by his father’s bed with the books Stuart loaned to him, passing the words before his eyes but registering nothing.

  Every morning, Caleb thought, Samuel had eaten the same kind of porridge at the same time, from the same bowl; then washed his hands and said a prayer and entered the same classroom full of boys essentially if not actually the same. After teaching the same Scripture lessons he dissected the same passages from Horace and Virgil and ate the same midday bread and cheese, eagerly awaiting the late-night hours when, surrounded by his trays of fossils, he might seek an answer to the riddle of Creation. What kind of a life was that? The same kind, Caleb feared—h
e was back in his bunk, unable to sleep—that he’d been leading himself.

  Yet look what happened when he tried to broaden his horizons. In Pittsburgh, a few months earlier, he’d gone by himself to a party. The room had been filled with strangers, most from the same group of teachers and naturalists whose keelboat Caleb had seen being built at the wharves. They were headed for New Harmony, someone said; they meant to change the world. Intrigued—where did they find the nerve?—but also hugely skeptical, Caleb had eavesdropped on several conversations. A Frenchman attached to the group, a naturalist named Charles Lesueur, spoke eloquently about his earlier travels. The astonishing falls at the Niagara River, new species of sturgeon and pike; proudly he displayed his sketchbook to Mr. Wright, their host.

  Caleb, edging up to the circle of listeners, admired the beautiful drawings until Mr. Wright, to his embarrassment, pulled him inside the circle and presented him to Lesueur. After repeating Caleb’s name, Mr. Wright added, “Caleb is the son of Mr. Samuel Bernhard, who some years ago published a remarkable book about the nature of fossils and their role in God’s creation.”

  This again, Caleb had thought. Always this. What did Mr. Wright have against him? Lesueur pouted his lips and blew, a small explosive puff that Caleb would forever after think of as definitively French. “That book,” he said. “I have seen that book. Your father …”

  Caleb flushed and looked at his shoes. The moment would pass, he thought, if he said nothing. He had lived through similar moments before. “My father is dead,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to insult him,” Lesueur continued. “Or this backward country. Merely to suggest that we consolidate the truth in opposition to a knowledge of the false—and so your father after all had a role to play. Cuvier proved last year that Scheuchzer’s famous fossil skeleton, the one he called Homo diluvii, was the front part of a giant salamander. Your father probably believed it was a man who drowned in the Flood.”