Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  Caleb had made some clumsy excuse and fled; but the damage was done. It had taken Stuart days to calm him.

  Still thinking about that party, and of the Frenchman who’d insulted him, he slept fitfully and woke with an aching head. After breakfast he went walking again, this time making a beeline for the pleasant house in the woods. Once more, Miriam opened the door. Both would remember this, later: her surprise, which deepened so quickly to pleasure. Gratefully he settled down again beside the fire.

  “My parents are out,” she said. “It is just us. But we’re glad to see you.”

  Grace sat on the floor, busy with her colored pencils; after Miriam signed to her that she and Caleb were going to talk privately, her hands were still while they chatted. The weather, the moving ice; her mother’s pies, which had been delicious, and her father’s work, which was all around them: table, clothespress, walnut chest of drawers. The house itself. Grace and her brothers had been born here but Miriam was old enough to remember the journey from northern New York and the isolation of their early days, before they’d had neighbors. Her parents had taught her to read and write and, later, when she’d proved to have a particular gift for teaching, had encouraged her to take in pupils.

  Although Miriam’s words flowed in a straight line, still Caleb thought they skirted something essential. About to ask a question, he subsided as she explained that the key to Grace’s education was the language of gestures, which, mysteriously, she’d been able to grasp more easily than had her parents. Through it Grace had already learned so much.

  “She’s beginning to read,” Miriam said. “It’s a second language for her, written English—I explain it by way of signs, and by drawings. Her written vocabulary isn’t very large but she learns new words every day.”

  “Astonishing,” Caleb said.

  “Is it? Some days it simply seems like what we make together. What is. Since she first lost her hearing I’ve been able to understand her gestures almost instinctively, even though my mother stumbles and my father can’t express himself that way at all. I’m not good at remembering ideas from books, but I remember shapes. It was her own idea to learn her letters. One morning she carried a book to me, pointing at the lines, then herself, then the lines. She was holding it upside down.”

  The warm glow that lit her features made him think of Margaret. “She makes signs in her sleep,” Miriam said. “I think she must dream in gestures. And when she’s reading she sometimes shapes the corresponding gestures with her hands, as you or I might have moved our lips when we were first learning.”

  He repeated a story he’d heard over Christmas dinner, about a young man, born deaf, whose father had been a boatman here on the Ohio. “When the boatman drowned,” he said, “a deaf beggar took the child to Philadelphia and used him to help solicit alms. There’s a school for the deaf there—”

  “I know of it,” Miriam interrupted eagerly. “There’s one in Hartford as well, we use their signed alphabet.”

  ”—and someone from that institution saw the boy on the streets and took him in, where he learned to draw wonderfully. Later he was apprenticed to an artist and learned lithography. Now he makes his living doing that and is much admired, especially for his skillful renderings of fish.”

  “I have to tell Grace this part,” Miriam said.

  Caleb couldn’t see, in her liquid movements, where one word ended and another began: how did one learn this? He and Lavinia had been separated before she learned to speak, when she was about the age at which Grace had lost her hearing. But he had always known what she was thinking.

  When Miriam’s hands returned to her lap Grace began to draw a school of fishes: red and green and blue and brown, with huge fins and beautiful golden eyes. “She’s fond of fish,” Miriam said. “She likes to wade in the river.”

  “My father was enchanted by fish,” Caleb replied. In this warm safe house, it seemed possible to mention Samuel without betraying him. “Not only live ones, but the images of dead ones in the rocks. There was a book he loved, when he was old—I’ve forgotten the Latin title, but in English it was something like Complaints and Justifications of the Fishes. A Swiss naturalist named Scheuchzer wrote it.”

  How peculiar to say that name out loud, after all these years. After hearing it roll, so unexpectedly, from the mouth of the Frenchman at the party. When he was young he’d sometimes wondered if anyone but he and Samuel knew the contents of Samuel’s old books.

  Miriam was looking at him expectantly, and he continued. “The hero is an enormous fish who swims close to shore and addresses the humans. In excellent Latin, no less.”

  He paused while Miriam conveyed this to Grace. With a pencil Grace sketched a giant fish pushing his head above the water, openmouthed and wearing a look of utmost concentration.

  “Perfect.” He smiled at Grace. “The fish complained that his ancestors had suffered the effects of the Deluge, although they were innocent themselves. That the tribe of fishes had paid for human sins, some being left to perish on dry land when the waters subsided. And that it was wrong for people, uncovering the impressions of their bodies in the rocks, to deny that those were the remains of actual creatures.”

  “Did people deny that?” Miriam asked.

  “Some did,” Caleb said. “My father used to study the different explanations men have come up with over the centuries. He was always convinced, himself, that the remains were relics of the Flood.”

  “And you? The bones you hope to find in Kentucky—how do you think they got there?”

  Instead of answering Miriam’s question, he looked down at Grace’s drawing. She’d done something to the front fins, drawn lines suggestive of their movement—the fish was gesturing with his fins? The fish was signing?

  Beneath it, in blue pencil, Grace wrote FIST.

  Miriam leaned over, changing T to H. Grace scribbled again: FISH.

  “How well you draw,” said Caleb.

  Miriam translated Grace’s swift reply. “She says she likes you, very much. And your story about the fish.” She pointed at Caleb and made five slow, separate shapes with her right hand. Above the drawing of the fish, Grace proudly printed CALEB.

  He tapped his chest and then formed the name-sign she’d given him at their first meeting. “Have you thought about one of the deaf-and-dumb schools for her?”

  “My parents and I have talked about it. But she wouldn’t want to be away from me, nor I from her. I try to teach her here the best I can, I have books and pamphlets from some of those schools but I know it’s not enough.” Her face clouded over. “I wish you could see how she is with other deaf children. The Rappites are taking care of a few, who’ve become Grace’s friends. On Sunday we’re going to Economy, where they live. Would you like to come?”

  “I hope I’ll be gone by then,” Caleb said. Although he felt strangely at peace in this house, still he hated to see the point of his journey slipping away. With each passing day his goals were further deflected by the wretched weather, his own poor planning, his need to return to his duties by a certain date. How had he thought this could work?

  “But if we’re still stuck,” he added, remembering the thickness of the ice and the morning’s bitter cold, “I’d be delighted to join you.”

  Lightning

  A ridge, a path, some black-barked trees. All of this was pleasing to Caleb, and helped make up for the fact that Kentucky lay hundreds of miles away, down a stalwartly frozen river. Mr. Dietrich, taciturn but kind, had saddled his own bay gelding for Caleb and then settled his daughters, Grace clinging to Miriam’s waist, onto a sweet-tempered dappled mare. More trees, an open field. They neared a cemetery almost buried in snow. The horses walked side by side as Miriam tried to explain what she thought Grace had thought before she could understand prayers. How she’d conceived of death as coming from the moon, which until their dog had sickened and died she’d believed had watched over their family. Then she’d stood beneath the trees, a tiny, furious figure throwing rocks at
the sky. Not until later, when they shared a language, had Miriam understood that gesture.

  Grace rode with her cheek pressed against her sister’s back, Caleb saw. With her head turned toward him. “How do you teach an idea like death?” he asked.

  “By example,” Miriam said patiently, as if speaking to one of her pupils. “By generalizing from the specific.” Grace caught his eyes with her own, the green-gray irises uncannily flecked with gold.

  As their horses stepped between rows of small stone tablets topped with sleeping sheep, Miriam talked and Caleb listened without listening. Under similar miniature stones, he thought, lay his stillborn son and the four children his second mother had seen born dead or watched die within days. Under larger stones lay Margaret and Samuel and his first parents, perhaps his sister—where was his sister? Samuel had prized a shard of English limestone, made entirely of fossil ammonites. Each the shape of a coiled snake but no bigger than a human eye, all of them pressed together without a scrap of plain stone showing—the fossils were the stone, the stone a mass of petrified shells. How could someone think that they weren’t shells? Or that human nature might be ductile, when each season laid down another layer of stony compacted coils?

  “You were right,” Samuel had whispered on his last day. The figured stones on the cliff were fake and he should have seen it; he should never have accused Caleb of being an unsympathetic son. But still there was a message in the stones: the forms inscribed by the boys had been wonderful in themselves, representative of the effects of the Deluge. In them his pupils had incarnated exactly the knowledge he’d tried to transmit—and wasn’t that, in itself, astonishing? A sign from God?

  The reverse, Caleb had wanted to say. They were simply doing what they’d been trained to do. Brothers, the sons of an Aberdeen stone carver, they worked hard in the family shop and were often late for their lessons. For them, already skilled at chiseling names and pairs of dates, scratching the outlines of spiders and bees into crumbling mudstone had been a simple exercise. In a few weeks they’d made the counterfeits, in a day salted the cliff with their work. Then hid their amusement as Samuel uncovered them.

  “I failed you,” Samuel had whispered. “I have failed everyone. My inability to reconcile the truths of Scripture with those of geology was God’s punishment for my sins. I have gone over and over these in my mind, trying to understand the huge offense that merited such punishment. So many sins. My worst wrong was to you.”

  “You rescued me,” Caleb remembered protesting. “You took me into your home and brought me up as your son.”

  “I acted toward you as toward a son,” Samuel said. “But when I took you from the wreck of your parents’ house and remade you in my own image, I acted out of pride. And in my heart—once Rosina was born and I had a living child of my own I could not conceal from God that I loved her more.”

  The feeling that passed over Caleb then, that feeling—he had known that Samuel spoke the truth, confirming something he’d always sensed. Rosina shared with her father few habits of heart and mind; a fossil for her was a dusty rock. She shared his blood.

  Beneath him the gelding walked easily, keeping pace with the mare. The wind blew, the sun glanced off the snow, and he chatted quietly with Miriam, the smallest part of his mind engaged and the rest lost in the past. Economy, when they finally reached it, stretched along the river like a picture of a village. So clean, so neat; empty of people at first. “They’re in church,” Miriam said. “They’ll be finished any minute.” And suddenly there were people everywhere, pouring from a door and moving purposefully in their neat plain clothes. Despite the cold, Miriam moved not toward but farther away from the central buildings and the crowds.

  A few people nodded politely; no one approached them. Long ago, on a day when four of Caleb’s classmates had pummeled him, Samuel had wiped blood from his nose and told him about the Rappites, who strove to live in harmony with one another. Equal in their stations, possessing their property in common; their hard work in this world meant to prepare them for an easy transition to the kingdom of heaven. You might try to live a bit more harmoniously yourself, Samuel had said. The boys, Caleb might have replied, were mocking you. Years later, Stuart’s jest about the Rappites had made Caleb want to befriend him. It was a consolation to see this place at last.

  Without warning, Grace flew to the three children playing along the river’s edge. Immediately their mittens were cast aside; their hands darted and leapt in the air, arms whirling, eyebrows moving, mouths open, laughing, frowning, set in every sort of grimace.

  “The tall boy,” Miriam said, “with the shock of black hair—that’s Joseph, the one who’s taught us so much. When he was small, his father gave him into the care of some charlatan preacher who claimed he could teach him to talk. Joseph ran away and was found by one of Mr. Rapp’s flock in the woods; they took him in, and brought him here when they moved. At first he bit whoever touched him.”

  She waved at Joseph and returned his elaborate bow. “I’ve been able to act as an interpreter for him,” she continued. “The things he’s told me—people have such remarkable ideas about the deaf. His preacher believed that since the deaf are without a voice, which is the breath of God, they must also be without souls. That their language of signs is no language at all, but the mimicry of trained animals. He tormented Joseph, trying to get him to speak. Tubes in his ears, hot stones in his mouth, a long probe and hot water down his nose …”

  “Terrible,” Caleb said.

  “It was a great thing for Joseph when this community took him in. Although they couldn’t understand him at first, they believed that his language of signs was itself a divine gift, permitting entry into his soul of the word of God.”

  Listen, Caleb imagined the Rappites saying. To this.

  Still the children were conversing intently. “I don’t know where Conrad and Duncan came from,” Miriam said. “They’re both so secretive. But I know Joseph taught them too. As he’s taught us.”

  “You’ve been lucky,” Caleb said.

  “Lucky we live on this river,” she said. “If nothing else. It gives me a chance. Boats stop here at Economy, and sometimes at the clearing where you’re tied up. A few of the boatmen take an interest in the children. They bring them presents, and gestures they’ve seen other deaf people make.”

  Three crows soared up the river and settled into a bare box elder. Without any warning Miriam added, “Shall I tell you how Grace lost her hearing?”

  Caleb, startled, turned his gaze from the crows to her flushed cheeks. “If you want.”

  Moving her hands, she said, “We were at a neighbor’s wedding. Me, my parents, my brothers, and Grace. She was two and a half, and I was fifteen.”

  As Miriam spoke, Grace ignored her gestures. This was a story she already knew—but here were Joseph and Conrad and Duncan, the four of them free, with so much to say. What had happened to each of them that day, that week, that hour. What they could remember of the time before they found each other; the ways the world appeared to them, then and now. I have learned to bake bread, I have read a book. On Wednesday I rode by the river and saw a snake. Rain falls down through holes in the sky, said Duncan; from clouds, Joseph said. From clouds. Then Duncan again, who had never heard: At night, when I could understand nothing, I learned that others saw in the darkness with their ears.

  With her eyes cast down, and her voice so low that Caleb could hardly hear her, Miriam spoke of a hot August day, a heavy meal, pitchers of strong cider from which they all drank thirstily. Dancing, different games, her parents laughing with friends they seldom saw and Grace sitting in Miriam’s lap and then toddling next to her when she rose and, with a friend named Harriet, followed an older boy into a broad meadow. An enormous hickory stood all alone in the center of the grass. So safe, so sheltering. They ran for it when the thunderstorm flashed; the leaves kept them almost dry. Miriam held Grace in her arms and turned her head from Harriet and the boy, who were embracing.

&
nbsp; Her hands, apparently without her knowledge, had continued to move as she spoke. Now she looked down at them and paused. Joseph, who’d been watching her, asked Grace a question.

  I remember sounds, Grace told him. Then I fell in a big white light and when I woke someone carried me. At home there were people but I couldn’t hear them. The cat sat on my chest and miaowed but I heard nothing, the dog barked and I couldn’t hear her, a crow flew down beside my window and I saw her beak open and open again but everything was silent and has been since then and I didn’t know what that meant.

  She dropped her hands to her sides as Joseph nodded. Once he’d told her about the shining instruments of pain. So little time they had to catch up with each other—what was life and what was death and who was God and who were they; when the wind blew, what did that mean? Why did the mare have spots, or the pike such teeth? Somewhere, far away, were there others like them? All these thoughts passed through her hands and face and it was blissful, pure bliss to know herself understood and to feel, pouring back into her, other stories in such swift and shapely forms. Miriam was her sister, her life; but she signed slowly. The man who’d come to them couldn’t sign yet at all. She flashed his name-sign at Joseph and explained that her family had taken him in, as they might a lost dog. Joseph laughed and beckoned toward the river.

  “And then what happened?” Caleb said.

  “And then a big bolt of lightning hit the tree.” Miriam grasped her right hand in her left and held it still. “Harriet and the boy she was kissing were killed, although I didn’t know that until later. I felt the lightning come up my legs, I felt it flow down my arm like fire, and I tried to drop Grace before it reached her but my hands wouldn’t work. When I woke there were people all around us. Harriet and her beau were gone, someone had covered their bodies with a blanket. I was unharmed except for one long burn.” She rolled back her sleeve and exposed to the cold air a forked scar branded between elbow and wrist. “Grace had a bruise on her cheek where she’d fallen, but she seemed fine. Then after a while we knew she wasn’t.”