Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  Dinner that night was late and joyful; they ate on the porch, overlooking the vineyards and the hanging mist above the lake. Red wine from their own grapes shimmered in plump glasses, next to trout that Theo had grilled and a salad of soft early lettuce. Suky’s hair shone and the men’s teeth gleamed. The men resembled each other, Rose saw. Although their features were different they were similar in their coloring and carriage, and in their easy vigor. She saw that Theo was a little older than Suky and Peter, somehow in charge; that Suky and Peter directed their comments to him and were bound by a shared desire for his attention. All this Rose registered from where she sat with Bianca in the shadows, long past their bedtime. Bianca had fallen asleep in her chair, plump with the cake that still clung to her lips, but Rose stayed awake.

  Was it that night, the first night, when she grasped how long her parents had known Peter? So much talk, so many stories. Perhaps the fragments of their history fell together during the two weeks he stayed with them. But certainly before she went to bed that night Rose understood that Peter and Theo had met when they were no older than she and her sister. More peculiar was the revelation that Peter’s parents had known her own Grandpa Leo and were somehow responsible for helping him establish the winery. And thus, in some way, responsible for the fact that she lived here, in this house she had always known? Each time Rose considered this, her mind spun and stopped. It was through Peter that she first understood that the world existed before her, without her. For a few days she could not forgive him for this.

  But who could resist him? He came out of the bathroom wearing only his pants, with a towel draped around his neck and tufts of shaving cream beneath his ears; he picked Rose up by one wrist and one ankle and whirled her around like an airplane. He played records and taught Bianca to dance while Rose resisted in an agony of self-consciousness. Around him Suky and Theo were radiant, cheerful, sweeping the girls up for sudden kisses and twining their arms around each other’s waists. The bustle of early summer work in the vineyard seemed fun in his presence, and when Suky and Theo were occupied Peter entertained the girls.

  He was an entomologist, he told them gravely. His specialty was beetles and he meant to collect some here. He had spent the last few years collecting in Costa Rica, which was why they hadn’t seen him in so long. From a trunk he pulled vials and killing jars and nets and forceps, hinged wooden boxes and packets of slim black pins.

  “We could help you,” Bianca offered. Rose blushed and pinched her sister under the table. She was already in love with Peter, although she wouldn’t be able to name this feeling for a decade. It was infuriating to have Bianca ask so easily for what she herself most wanted.

  “You could,” Peter agreed. “I am in dire need of assistants.” Black hair sprouted through the open collar of his shirt in the most intriguing way.

  He tacked a sheet inside an old black umbrella so that, as Rose held it under the shrubs and he beat the branches, the falling beetles might show up clearly against the white scalloped bowl. But Bianca, to Rose’s secret delight, was not enchanted by this. Nor was Bianca impressed when Peter entrusted them with knives and small hatchets and showed them how to whack bark from fallen logs, revealing the beetles bustling just below.

  “Are they all black?” Bianca said. “Like those?” Already she was as tall as Rose, although she was a year and a half younger; and Rose, so small and dark and full of dismay at Bianca’s blond charm, shrank inside herself. But for once she didn’t have to compete with Bianca. Bianca declined to come on further expeditions, and Rose had Peter to herself.

  After dinner one night, she and Peter set off with portable lights. Her parents smiled and yawned, drowsy with food and wine; Bianca lay on the couch with a book. Peter carried the black light, the fluorescent tubes, the battery, and the killing jars. Rose carried the white sheets and the notebooks and the clothesline.

  “Some species are attracted to ultraviolet light, and others to white light,” Peter explained, while he suspended the sheet between two limbs of the basswood near the edge of their backyard. He hung the black light a few feet in front of the sheet, the fluorescent tube beside it. “Can you spread that other sheet here on the ground, so it forms a right angle?”

  Rose smoothed the sheet over the grass. Peter connected the lights to the battery, switched them on, and guided Rose outside the circle of mingled light. When he plopped on the grass he pulled Rose down beside him, and for the next few minutes she sat without moving, her left leg only an inch from his right thigh. The beetles arrived quickly, whirring out of the darkness and striking the hanging sheet with a sound like hail.

  “Can you write yet?” Peter asked. “Are you old enough to write?”

  “I am almost nine,” Rose said indignantly. “And I already skipped a grade in school. Of course I can write, I don’t even have to print anymore. I can do cursive.”

  “Well,” Peter said, laughing. “Cursive. But maybe just for tonight you could return to printing. If I gave you my notebook and spelled what I wanted, could you print it out clearly for me?”

  “You don’t have to spell,” she said. “I am a very good speller.”

  But after all she needed his help when he began crawling around the hems of the sheet, turning over beetles and flicking specimens into the killing jar. The black light made his teeth and his collar glow and Rose sealed her lips, afraid she too would look like a jack-o’-lantern. The names he called out were long and complex: Latin names, he said. Macrodactylus subspinosus, Phyllophaga rugosa. She’d heard her mother mouth other, similarly complicated names for the mosses she collected. Humbled, Rose concentrated on printing clearly what Peter spelled.

  “Ha!” he said, pouncing on a body clinging to the sheet. “The elusive Nicrophorus—see what good luck you bring me, Rose?” He held out a large beetle, black with beautiful red bands on its wing covers. Those covers, Peter said, were called elytra.

  All the following day Rose sat next to Peter at the impromptu laboratory table he set up outside. There was little she could do to help; she could not persuade her hands to do the fine work of inserting the delicate pins through the beetles, and her attempts at transcribing the names onto small paper labels failed as well. She concentrated on keeping Peter’s glass of iced tea filled, and on handing him paper points and glue as he called for them. When he pinned the Nicrophorus he said, “I didn’t expect to find this here. If we set a carrion trap we might get more—would you like to help me with that?”

  For him she would have cast herself adrift all night in a leaky boat. “Yes,” she said.

  “What we need,” he continued, “is something small and dead—a mouse, a mole, something like that.”

  Here was her chance to be a hero; she excused herself and ran off as fast as she could. The cellars of the winery buildings were meticulously clean, full of shining tanks and tidy racks, casks and bottles and corks. But the white house was half a century older than any of the outbuildings, and although the upper floors gleamed with polish and care, the basement, which she and Bianca usually avoided, was stone-walled, dirt-floored, low-ceilinged, dark. Rose gathered the broom and the dustpan and descended the stairs. How terrible it smelled down here! She breathed shallowly and watched her feet, praying she wouldn’t step in something horrid. Past the great brick pile supporting the chimney, past the furnace with its octopus arms; there was a corner under the soapstone sink where she had not been able to avoid seeing both small corpses and busy cats. She bent down and peered into that secret space—and yes, there was something there. She reached with the broom and flicked the body into the dustpan, then sprinted across the floor and up the stairs. In the kitchen she forced herself to look and found that her prize was a little gray mouse, not long dead.

  “Perfect!” Peter said when she returned to him.

  That afternoon they set the trap: the mouse, trussed with a bit of fishing line, laid carefully in the thin grass of a shady bit of ground below the vineyard. On the limb of a shrub overhanging th
e site Peter tied a red cloth. “So we can find the place later,” he said. Then he stretched the fishing line from the mouse’s hind legs along the grass.

  Trudging back up the hill to the house, Rose believed she might become an entomologist herself. Her mother dabbled at botany, specializing in the mosses; Grandpa Leo and her father were both chemists of a sort. The grandmother she’d never known—Eudora, Grandpa Leo’s wife, who’d died before Rose could meet her—had left behind a cache of letters from her own grandfather, a surveyor who’d studied plants from giant mountains on the other side of the world. Rose had seen how Suky cherished those, savoring their connection to her own work and sometimes speaking wistfully of her desire to travel. Holding those letters in her hand, sniffing the yellowing, earth-smelling pages and trying to imagine that ancient figure, Rose had sworn she’d never vegetate in one place as her mother had.

  Dear Sir, her great-great-grandfather had written to some famous British botanist. Your examination of the Tibetan lichens is of great interest to me. I enclose some notes on the Kashmir irises. That could be Peter, Rose thought now. Or herself. Through Peter’s eyes, she saw that her family was packed with scientists. The next time they were together, she asked, “How did you start doing this?”

  “Ever since I was tiny I was interested in all the animals around me, particularly the insects,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, it seems like I’ve loved them since I was a baby.”

  “Me too,” Rose said. “That’s what I’m like.” Although until that moment, this hadn’t been true. Already she was vain about her intelligence, about reading better than her classmates and skipping second grade entirely because her teachers didn’t know what else to do with her. But until recently, although she’d been drawn to her father’s small laboratory, where the tests on the wine were carried out and where her Grandpa Leo had entertained them with chemistry demonstrations, she’d found nature boring.

  “Are you?” Peter said. “No surprise, I guess; you’re Leo’s granddaughter. I owe him a lot.” He bent to examine a stream of ants filing across their path. “When I was growing up we lived in Ovid, not far from here, around the other side of Seneca Lake.”

  “I’ve been there,” Rose said. “Near the park.”

  Peter nodded. “My parents were apple farmers, and friends with your grandparents. They thought my interest in insects was silly. But your father and I used to play together, and Leo always paid attention to us. He must have noticed me lugging around the bottles and matchboxes I stuffed with bugs. The Christmas I was ten, he gave me some books by a wonderful French naturalist named Jean-Henri Fabre, and those were what turned me into a entomologist. I could dig them up, if you’re interested. You seem to really like this stuff.”

  “Oh, I do,” Rose said fervently. “I do.”

  Two days later they returned to the site. The ground was blank beneath the red flag, but Peter brushed aside some litter to show Rose the bit of fishing line protruding from the ground. Carefully they scooped away the loose dirt to uncover the mouse, already hairless and mummified, and below it the gleaming pair of burying beetles who had so assiduously dug the grave.

  “Fabre called the species of Nicrophorus native to France ‘transcendent alchemists,’” Peter said. “For the way they convert death into life.” He let Rose hold the beetles briefly before he placed them in his vial. “You always find them in couples—a male and a female, digging together to provide the family larder. They push away the dirt below their quarry until the corpse buries itself. And all the time they do that they secrete chemicals that preserve the body and keep other insects from eating it. Then they copulate—can I say that word in front of you?—and the female lays her eggs nearby. When the larvae hatch they have all the food they need. Aren’t they pretty?”

  At the library, a few days after Peter departed and her heart broke for the first time, Rose looked up “transcendent” and “alchemy,” ransacked the card catalog for books on entomology, and stole outright the one volume of Fabre’s she could find. Against her stomach, held by the waistband of her shorts, the warm book pressed on her like a hand.

  It was just as well she stole that book, because Peter never sent the books he’d promised. And why should he? Why should he remember her, small and slight and short-haired and breastless? She was almost nine, and then really nine—but Peter was nearly thirty, as old as her mother: a grown man with a complicated life. And girlfriends, as she was forced in the following years to understand.

  When he left Hammondsport after that first visit in 1964, Rose pined for weeks: so obviously, so melodramatically, that her great-aunt Agnes shook her head at the sight of Rose pushing peas around her plate. “Puppy love,” Agnes said, which caused Bianca to snort into her milk and Rose to resent both of them. That night Suky sat on the edge of Rose’s bed and said, “You’re very fond of our friend Peter, aren’t you?”

  Rose writhed and buried her head in her pillow.

  “I’m fond of Peter too,” Suky said. “He’s an old friend; he was at our wedding. When I first started seeing your father, we did things with Peter all the time; and he was part of how your father and I fell in love with each other. He has this way of making everything and everyone around him seem more interesting.”

  She stroked what she could reach of Rose’s hair.

  “It’s the beetles I’m interested in,” Rose snapped. “The beetles.”

  Suky bought her some Schmitt boxes and a lovely hand lens, and said nothing more about Peter. Rose pored over her stolen book and made her own first collection of beetles, a clumsy imitation of her mother’s neat array of dried mosses. Suky’s praise she found condescending; she couldn’t identify most of her specimens beyond the family level, and she waited impatiently all through the fall and winter for Peter to reappear. He’d taken a teaching job in North Carolina, she learned from her parents. And would visit again when the school year was done. She was crushed when Peter arrived that May with a young woman, and disgusted by the sleeping arrangements.

  “I could stay in the living room,” Rose offered. “She could have my room.”

  Suky said, “That’s sweet of you, but it isn’t necessary,” and put the couple together in the guest room. Two rooms down the hall from them, Rose lay rigid and sleepless, too young to know what she was listening for but sure that she must listen.

  Rose forgot that young woman’s name, as she did the name of the one who showed up with Peter the following summer. During both visits she alternated between sulking alone in the vineyard and making furious efforts to pry Peter away from these usurpers. She spread her beetles out alluringly, piled heaps of books next to her forceps and vials, and bent to her work in a way that could not, she thought, fail to bring Peter to her side. When she succeeded and he drew a chair next to her, casually naming the beetles she had tried and failed to classify, her heart beat so violently that she plucked her shirt away from her chest lest the pounding show. But when he turned from her, when those women, identical in their despicable ripeness, walked by so casually and drew Peter away by raising their arms in their sleeveless shirts, revealing bristly shadows beneath their armpits, and bra straps, and the curves of their breasts: then Rose flew into furies that puzzled everyone except, perhaps, her mother.

  Suky found her one afternoon, after Peter’s third visit, pulling beetles from her boxes and savagely stripping them and their labels from the pins. Rose was almost eleven then, and almost had breasts of her own. On the floor near her feet was a disheartening cone of dried bodies and small paper points. She had jabbed herself several times and her fingers were bleeding.

  “Oh, Rose,” Suky said. She tried to pull Rose’s head to her shoulder but Rose would not be comforted. And by the following summer, there was no comfort anywhere.

  A hundred times, a thousand times, Rose would try in the following years to reconstruct her mother’s life and mind, her mother’s death. What was science for, if not for this? In her mother’s closet she turned the same thing
s over and over again. An old brown book, falling apart, filled with interesting drawings of fossils but stubbornly silent regarding the nature of its path to Suky. A slightly less decrepit green book, Mosses with a Hand-Lens, which Suky had consulted almost daily. The letters, those crumbling letters, among which a few leaves and lichens had been pressed. And, incongruous among all that paper, one ancient, tiny lady’s boot, black and moldy, balanced on a ledge as if the woman whose foot it had once sheltered had scaled the side of the closet, passed through the ceiling, and simply disappeared.

  There was no understanding, Rose thought, why her mother had saved the odd things she’d saved. No knowing what had really happened on Suky’s last day.

  On that day, Rose would think, her mother had been walking along the lakeshore road near Hammondsport. Happy, or not; thinking of her daughters, or not. Cars were speeding along the road, tourists, some of them driving too fast; Suky, wearing a red shirt, held something green in her hand. On the lake the sailboats sailed. On the hill a dog with a brindle coat was barking at Rose and Bianca, who were holding their arms above their heads, lengths of thread stretching tautly from their hands and sweeping out the shapes of invisible cones. The threads were tied to Japanese beetles, who in straining to escape only orbited the pair of girls; who were shrieking with happiness. Could Suky hear them?

  She could, Rose would decide each time. She could hear her daughters and, listening to them, hardly noticed the cars moving too fast along the road. She was watching the starlings swoop over the telephone lines, the swallows flicking over the lake, the light on the trees, the light on her shoes, the light.

  On the lake the sailboats were heading for shore; the wind had picked up and the sky had darkened; a few drops of rain were falling. In the vineyard gleaming above her the tractor was running again and the brindled dog still barked. Near him Theo worked happily, holding Suky in his mind; he was thinking they ought to buy shoes for the girls, he was thinking about the rain. As he turned he saw the dust spout up, greeting the drops splashing down. On the lake Suky saw a shining patch, the shape of a door, smooth on the rippling surface.