Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  All these decisions took time. At night, guests who’d been coming for several seasons would want Ned to play whist with them. They’d want advice about where to hunt; they’d want to make lists, with prices and shipping dates, of the trophies they’d ordered mounted. If the guests left Ned free for a minute, then Mrs. Yarrow, the housekeeper, would appear. What should she order, whom should she hire? She was used to having first claim on Ned’s free time. Nora, not knowing how else to reach her brother, joined him in working long hours; through this, she thought, they would build a common life.

  In September, when the flood of guests finally receded, Nora helped Ned close off the guest bedrooms and bring in wood and seal the windows on the third floor of the main building, which formed the private apartment the three of them now shared. The sky grew dim, the snow fell and fell. She’d never seen anything like it. In the woods, between the massive dark trees, the snow lay three then four and then five feet deep. Michael adored Ned’s brown and white spaniel-hounds, who crashed through the drifts and chased after snowshoe hares. Ned taught him to shoot and, when he saw that Michael wasn’t squeamish, brought him to the shop out back, where he worked on the skins and heads his guests had left behind.

  Even here, where Ned was most at home, he didn’t open up. He welcomed Nora, she knew he loved her, as she knew he loved Michael. Although he seldom asked about her past life, he listened intently as she described her old room at Fannies house, her friendship with Colm Larkin, the day when, with the sun deliciously baking the skin on their hands, Francis had asked her to marry him and she’d said yes. But when she asked questions of her own he answered only briefly, skipping great chunks of time. There’d been a friend, she gathered one evening, with whom he’d traveled through these woods, and who’d helped him find the site for this inn. Copernicus—what kind of a name was that? The brother, Ned said shortly, of the naturalist with whom he’d traveled north; the whole family had peculiar names.

  Why did she keep asking questions? Because he volunteered so little, she would have said. He hid himself, he hid his life, he refused to let her know him. Her inquiries, he might have responded, were no different from the rude prying of his guests and clients. Over dinner or out on the porch, strangers asked the same blunt questions again and again, as if they were the first to think of them. Where was he from, when had he come from Ireland, did he have family there, or here? What had happened to his face?

  For those people, who didn’t matter, he made up stories. A she-bear had mauled him. A blizzard had caught him far from home. In Ireland he’d been scalded by a pan of boiling water.

  But his own sister he couldn’t lie to. Nor, at first, could he tell her the truth. His own sister, he thought, ought to have known what was crucial without asking.

  During their second winter at the inn, Nora and Michael went with Ned to look at a litter of hunting dogs. In a sleigh heaped with blankets and fur robes they slipped through deep, unbroken snow, Ned’s black horses working hard to break trail but the sleigh itself gliding noiselessly. Michael remarked on the hawks casting shadows on the slopes, the chickadees whisking past, and Ned pointed out lakes where he and Michael might fish through the ice. The sky, which had been clear and bright when they started out, was gray by the time they reached Alvah’s cabin. While they drank coffee and chatted and played with the puppies—two were for Michael, Ned revealed then, Michael’s own dogs, and so he should choose—the wind came up and the sky grew dark and more snow began to fall. It was very cold by the time they left. Before they were halfway home, a foot of fresh snow had fallen and the wind was already erasing their morning tracks.

  “Are we lost?” Michael said, looking wide-eyed at the chaos. “Are we going to be lost?”

  “I never get lost,” Ned said calmly. By then both Nora and Michael knew this to be true; Ned’s sense of direction was another reason the guides respected him. They steered around gigantic drifts, which the wind made in a minute and then revised: let’s cover this bush here; no, this. A joke, if it had been warmer. The horses, who were not amused, stopped at the foot of a long, steep hill and refused to go farther.

  The sleigh held puppies as well as people: Homer and Virgil—Alvah had named them—who wailed despite their distinguished names. The horses stood still, breathing heavily, glazed in their sweat.

  “We’ll rest for a while,” Ned said, warming Michael’s cheeks with his hands after trying to coax the horses on. “We’ll get warmed up while we wait for the moon to rise. Then we’ll ask the horses again.”

  “The dogs are cold,” Michael said. “I am too.”

  Ned tossed him a shovel. “Help me,” he said.

  While Nora rubbed the horses down and covered them with blankets, Ned and Michael dug a hollow into the lee side of a big drift. Inside it Ned packed three bearskin robes, the puppies, and Michael. Nora crawled in behind him, and Ned behind her. They huddled there while the wind began to drop and the moon slowly lit the landscape. Michael held Homer and Virgil inside his coat, one wrinkly-faced, half-mastiff, half-greyhound puppy nestled in each armpit.

  “Are you warm enough?” Ned asked.

  “We’re fine,” said Nora. In the moonlight reflected from the snow she could see him smiling. “You like this,” she said. “How can you like this?”

  More questions. He shrugged. “We’re warm. We’re safe. The storm will lift, and until it does I’m with my family.”

  Then, not because Nora had asked, but because Michael looked frightened and pressed silently up to his side, Ned told them a little more about his voyage north. On a wooden ship, in the company of fourteen other men, he had sailed from Philadelphia. Past the mouth of the St. Lawrence, past the same cliffs he and Nora had first seen on the ship that brought them from Ireland; past Labrador and across Davis Strait to the coast of Greenland. On the Narwhal, which was the name of his ship, he’d crossed Baffin Bay just a few years after Nora had settled in Detroit, and then had sailed down long empty sounds, in and out of ice-choked bays to a barren land where the expedition had met Esquimaux and where they’d found traces of the lost English expedition they’d been looking for. The captain had been difficult. But two friends had protected Ned: the ship’s naturalist, Erasmus Wells, and the surgeon, Dr. Boerhaave.

  “They taught me the names of some animals and plants,” Ned said to Michael. Michael’s face had relaxed; the puppies’ heads peeped out from his collar. While the wind howled Ned talked about those men, who had given him books and shown him how to prepare and mount animal skins. Later the ship had been frozen into the ice.

  The doctor died, Nora learned; Michael was asleep by then. The one Ned had liked so much. The captain disappeared. In a little boat, not much larger than the guide boats here, the naturalist had led Ned and the remaining men out of the arctic.

  “I was sick the whole way,” Ned said. “We didn’t have anything to eat, and I had a fever. A piece of my nose rotted off.”

  “How old were you then?” Nora asked.

  “Twenty-one. Almost twenty-two.”

  “I was twenty-three when I got to Detroit,” Nora said. “I missed you and Denis the way I’d miss my legs.”

  “What journeys we made,” he said; while Nora thought, How calm he is. When they were young, when he was three and four and six and she was thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, she’d often known what he was about to do before he knew it himself. Time and again she’d reached for his collar before he fell into a stream, knocked a poisonous berry from his hand before he brought it to his mouth.

  “After that,” she said, “why would you settle here? If I’d been where you were, I would have wanted to move someplace with palm trees.”

  Ned spread his hands before him. “How can you explain these things? I love it here, it feels like home.” With his left hand he stroked the robe protecting them from the icy drift. “I was so young when we left Ireland, I don’t remember that place like you do. I know this doesn’t look like home. But it feels right. In the winter it�
��s like the arctic, except that I’m safe.”

  He stepped outside their cave to check on the horses, returning entirely cased in white. “The wind’s down,” he said. “The horses are rested, I think they’re ready to try the hill again. We’ll put Michael in the sleigh with his new friends and you and I can walk.”

  Because Ned always refused to raise the inn’s modest rates, their summer earnings went largely to pay the staff and keep the buildings and boats in good repair. Everything else depended on what Ned made in the winter, when he went to work on the specimens he’d rough-cleaned earlier and stored in his shop.

  Lumber, barrels of salt, heaps of tow and bales of straw, screws and bolts and wax and sperm oil. Behind Ned’s workbench a half-finished pheasant was wired to a sawed-off branch; a varnished board supported four partial deer legs, the hooves bent up to form a line of coat hooks. An owl, wings half spread, pounced on a mouse near a moose head awaiting its eyes, which hung in turn above an opossum suspended from its tail. Ned was particularly proud of the infants clinging to the mother possum’s fur, and of Mr. Hartley’s cherished hunting dog, which sat obediently, as it had so seldom sat in life.

  “Making the mounts look good, making them look real,” he said to Nora, “—if I could, I’d keep them all here, instead of sending them off to some wealthy sportsman’s parlor.”

  He smiled at Michael working beside him. Michael had shown a real talent for this and they spent long hours together, passing tow and hemp and scrapers and knives, hardly talking but both content.

  “You don’t like your customers?” Nora asked.

  “Some are better than others.” He wound another twist of twine around the excelsior padding the neck of a deer. “But I wouldn’t work for most of them if we didn’t need the money. They’re too noisy. Too busy. Too rich.”

  From the tray of eyes Michael held out to him, round pupils with irises tinted shades of gold and brown, he chose a pair.

  “Pretty,” Nora said, plucking one from his palm and holding it up to the light.

  “I need that,” he said, taking it back.

  Even when they annoyed each other, they shared their love for Michael, as well as a sense of how much you could lose in a life and still survive. As they grew older they also agreed that they missed more and not less all the people they’d lost. Walking in the woods, Michael galloping far ahead of them after the hounds, Nora would recollect for Ned what their mother had looked like, stirring a pot of porridge with a baby on her lap and her hair folding over her face like a shawl. What their father had said when the first of the harvests failed.

  “How do you remember those things?” Ned would ask.

  “I had ten more years than you did,” Nora said. “With all of them.”

  Ned pressed her hand but still couldn’t explain how much he missed not only his family but also his friends: Dr. Boerhaave, who’d drowned beneath the ice, and Erasmus, who’d gone back to the arctic. Copernicus, who had simply disappeared. In the space where he might have spoken, Nora thought how much she missed Francis, still, and the men she’d watched over in the hospital—Colm Larkin, particularly—and Fannie. She’d left Fannie in such a rush, she’d hardly told her good-bye. The letters they’d exchanged since then were little comfort; Fannies written words were terse and unrevealing, while Nora tended to run on too long, circling without ever quite reaching what she meant to say.

  Trying to describe Fannie’s strength and good sense, and the pleasure of the afternoons they’d spent collecting herbs and roots together, filled Nora with a longing to learn what grew in the woods of her new home. She found a little book, which helped her identify plants she hadn’t known in either Ireland or Detroit. The guides taught her others. Luke and Asa and Charlie and Fiske, Daniel, Reuben, Hubert—the men who looked after the thick-set sports who came, with their guns and rods, to the inn—were Nora’s first new friends. It pleased her to bring their dinners out to the table in the boathouse, where they ate separately, and to watch how kindly they treated Michael.

  Moving among them, listening to their tales and watching them teach her son how to tie fishing lures, she’d sometimes think of the life she’d had so briefly with Francis. She was strong and healthy, her body alive although she was nearing fifty. No one touched her now but Michael and—a kiss on the cheek, a hand brushing her shoulder—Ned. Baffling to think how the rest had disappeared. Instead she had the respect of the guides, who noticed her cooking up poultices and began to come to her with their sprained wrists and smashed fingers and sore throats and boils. They saw her, she slowly realized, as she and the people in Cork-town had once seen Fannie. After a while she grew so busy doctoring them and their families that she neglected her work at the inn.

  The invalids beginning to winter in the village kept her even busier; Ned had to hire an extra girl to pick up what Nora could no longer do. She bought a notebook, two good pencils, a little satchel in which to carry her supplies. She kept track of the invalids’ progress: The young man on Harriet’s porch, still at an early stage but sent here by his parents after both his sisters died, has a little fever, every night, which has been going on for months. A dry cough that comes and goes; sometimes a sore throat, sometimes pains in his chest.

  There were men who were worse, whose fevers seemed to be burning them up; and men who looked better, and coughed less, but who felt so tired and melancholy that they’d forgotten what it was like to anticipate something with pleasure. Once in a while someone hemorrhaged bright blood, foaming and terrifying. Then one of the women would come running with ice chips to suck and a cloth packed with snow, which would lie heavily on the sick man’s chest: so cold.

  Nora tried to explain her new work to Ned. “This is what I’m meant to do,” she said—although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise. “It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.”

  “As opposed to this, you mean?” He gestured ruefully at the room filled with mounted heads. “I won’t argue, if it’s what you want. But I wish …”

  What did he wish? What she wished, perhaps: for the dead and vanished to return. Once, during a spring cleaning, she caught him staring out the window while holding a woman’s walking boot in his hand.

  “What is that?” she asked. It looked as old as she felt; the black calf was so worn it was almost limp, and one of the buttons was missing.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” He turned back to the window. “Erasmus left it with me,” he added, as if to keep her from asking more questions. “For safekeeping, the last time I saw him.”

  By then she knew that, after their arctic trip, Erasmus Wells and a few other people had stayed for some months in the neighborhood of Ned’s first cabin. Then they’d headed north again, leaving Ned behind. “His wife’s?” she asked.

  “His mother’s,” he said. He dropped the boot into her hand. “It got so damp over the winter, I thought I should set it outside to dry.”

  Mold had grown on the tongue, beneath the laces. “I can sponge this off,” she said. “Does he want it back?”

  “How would I know?” Ned said bitterly. “All I ever knew was that the mother’s name was Lavinia, and that she died when the boys were young. But I said I’d keep this for Erasmus, and so I have.”

  “You’ve never heard from him?”

  “Not from him, not from Copernicus. Not once in all these years.”

  It was with them, she thought, as it had been for her with Francis and then with Colm Larkin. Never a word. Where had all of them gone? Only she and Ned had returned to each other from the past.

  5

  Elizabeth enters the inn, as she always does, by way of the kitchen door. Through the empty room, past the draped chairs and appliances, the cold stove, the dim cabinets full of glassware; up the stairs to Ned’s private apartment.

  “Elizabeth,” Ned says, stepping back to let her in. Still he holds himself quite straight, although he’s shrunk several inches. Next to the stov
e in the front room is the armchair where he spends much of the winter months. She sits across from him, in what used to be Nora’s chair.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  “Very well.” He’d say this, she knows, unless he were dying.

  “Your hands?”

  “Not too bad.” He holds up the twisted joints for her inspection. “I worked all yesterday on a vixen for Mr. Claremont. And still they didn’t hurt much last night.”

  “That’s good,” she says. She doesn’t ask to see the stuffed fox; for the last few years, since Ned’s vision began to fail and his arthritis has worsened, his mounts have been painfully shabby. The skins gape at the seams, the eyes don’t always match. Michael praises them, thanks Ned for doing them, and then destroys them secretly, substituting specimens of his own.

  As Ned continues to describe his projects, she nods, remembering the quiet celebrations they used to hold in this room on Nora’s birthday. A ginger cake with lemon icing; mittens and a book as gifts. Surely Ned remembers these as well—but still he says nothing about his sister, talking instead about his new curved knife. When he pauses, she asks the question that has brought her here: where might she seek a replacement for Mrs. Temple?

  “I don’t know,” he says. “No one is ever going to be Nora.” Such a relief, the way he understands what she’s actually asking.

  “No one seems to know anyone suitable,” she says. “And one of my boarders is failing, I’m going to need help soon.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Martin,” she says. “Martin Sawyer.”

  “Oh, what a shame.” For a minute Ned stares past her. Then he says, “Why not look in New York again? You could have Clara do some preliminary interviewing for you, and send up the most promising, like she did with Mrs. MacDonald. That worked out fine.”