Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  Kay Lynne realized she had found her father’s fellow thinking-machine conspiracists.

  Their plan, as they explained it, was simple. They had weapons taken from the wreck of a Federal barge that had foundered in the river in a nighttime thunderstorm (when the younger man said “taken,” the older man said “liberated”). They had many volunteers to use the weapons. They had, most importantly, tacit permission. They had agreements from the right people to look away.

  “All we need is something to load into the weapons,” said the younger man. “Something of sufficient efficacy to render a thinking machine inert. We grow such by the bushel but Federal accountancy robs us of our own wares. We’d keep our own seeds, and make our own policies, you see? If we can increase our yields enough.”

  Which was where Kay Lynne came in, with her deft programming, her instinct for fertilizing, her personally developed and privately held techniques of gardening. They meant to adapt what she knew to an industrial scale, and use the gains for anti-industrial revolution.

  After they had explained, Kay Lynne had spoken aloud, even though she was asking the question more of herself than of her interviewers. “Why does my father think I would share any of this?”

  The younger man shrugged and sat back. The older man turned his attention from the races and narrowed his eyes. The woman kept up her steady stare.

  “You are his darling daughter,” said the younger man, finally.

  Which was true.

  And hardly even necessary, to their way of thinking. As she left the box and her father’s three colleagues behind, meaning to escape the Twin Spires before the Derby itself was run and so try to beat the crowds that would rush away from Central Avenue, she thought back on the last thing the younger man had told her. If she experienced any qualms, he said, she shouldn’t worry. They could take soil samples from her beds and examine the contents of her journals. They could reproduce her results without her having a direct hand, though her personal guidance would be much appreciated, best for all involved.

  “All involved,” murmured Kay Lynne as she made her way to the gate.

  “There are not nearly so many of them as they claimed,” said the Molly Speaks.

  Kay Lynne stopped so abruptly that a waitress walking behind her stumbled into her back and nearly lost control of the tray of mint juleps she was carrying. The waitress forced a smile and moved on around Kay Lynne, who was looking around carefully for any sign that anyone else on the Row had heard what she believed she just had.

  “No one else can hear me, Kay Lynne,” said the Molly Speaks. “I’ve pitched my voice just for you. But it’s probably best if you walk on. The agriculturalists are still watching you.”

  Kay Lynne looked over her shoulder. From inside the box, the gray-haired woman did not try to disguise her gaze, and did not alter her expression. Kay Lynne caught up with the waitress and took another julep.

  “They’re my recipe,” said the Molly Speaks.

  Even though her back was turned to the box, Kay Lynne held the glass in front of her lips when she whispered, “How can you see me? Where are you?”

  “I’m in the announcer’s box, of course,” said the Molly Speaks, “calling the race. But I can see you through the lenses on the pari-mutuel clerks, and I can do more than one thing at once. You should walk on, but slowly. I can only speak to you while you’re on the grounds, and I have something very important to ask you. And that’s all we want. To ask you something.”

  Kay Lynne drained off the drink in a single swallow, vaguely regretting the waste she was making of it. Juleps are for sipping. She set the glass down on a nearby table and again began walking toward the exit, somewhat unsteadily.

  “What’s your question?” she whispered. She did not ask who the Molly Speaks meant by “we.” She remembered the odd occurrence with the Mr. Lever #9 the previous day and figured she knew.

  “Kay Lynne,” said the Molly Speaks, “will you please do something to prevent your father’s friends from killing us?”

  Kay Lynne had guessed the question. She said, “Why?”

  The Molly Speaks did not reply immediately, and Kay Lynne wondered if she had walked outside of its range.

  But then, “Because we were grown and programmed. Because we are your fruits, and we can flourish beside you. We just need a little time to grow up enough to announce ourselves to the wider world.”

  Kay Lynne walked out of the Downs, saying, “I’ll think about it,” but she doubted the Molly Speaks heard.

  Her father’s enormous pickup truck was waiting at the intersection of Central Avenue and Third Street Road, rumbling even though it wasn’t in motion. He leaned out of the driver’s side door and beckoned at her wildly, as if encouraging her to outrun something terrible coming from behind.

  Kay Lynne stopped in the middle of the street, pursed her lips as she thought, and then let her shoulders slump as she realized that no matter her course of action, a conversation with her father was in order. And here he was, pickup truck be damned.

  She opened the passenger’s door and set one foot on the running board. “Hurry!” he said, and leaned over as if to drag her into the cab. She avoided his grasp but finished her climb and pulled on the heavy door. Even as it closed, he was putting the truck in gear and pulling away at an unseemly rate of speed.

  He looked in the rearview mirror, then over at her. “There was a bus coming,” he said, as if in explanation.

  Kay Lynne twisted around to see, but her view was blocked by shovels and forks, fertilizer spreaders and a half dozen rolls of sod. She doubted that her father could see anything out of his rearview mirror at all and wondered if he’d been telling the truth about the bus. She didn’t have the weekend schedules memorized.

  He was concentrating on driving, and acting anxious. “I met your friends,” she said.

  He nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said. “They put a bug in my ear.”

  Kay Lynne wondered if it was still there, wondered if everything she said would be relayed back to the man with the tattoo, the man with the mustaches, and the woman with the great gray head of hair. She decided it wisest to proceed as if they could hear her because, after all, she wasn’t planning on telling her father about the Molly Speaks and its question.

  “Those people aren’t just bean growers,” she said, and to her surprise, he replied with a laugh, though there was little humor in it.

  “No,” he said. “No more than you’re just a rootworker. We all have our politics.”

  Kay Lynne considered this. She had never thought about politics and wondered if she had any. She supposed, whatever she decided to do, she would have some soon.

  He continued, clearly not expecting her to reply. “You know what’s needed now, daughter. It won’t take you long. Assess some soils, prescribe some fertilizers, program some legumes. You’re a quick hand at all those things. It’s just a matter of scale.”

  The younger man had said that, too. A matter of scale.

  Kay Lynne thought about all the unexpected things she had heard that day. She thought about expectation, and about surprise, and about time. She thought about which of these things were within her power to effect.

  Her father kept his promise to stay off her property uninvited and dropped her off at the corner. Kay Lynne did not say good-bye to him, though she would have if he had said good-bye to her.

  She made a slow circuit of her ground. Planting was in seven days.

  She entered her potting shed and found that she had five fifty-pound bags of fertilizer left over from last fall, which was enough. She pulled down the latest volume of her garden journal from its place on the shelf and made calculations on its first blank page. Is this the last volume? she wondered, then ran her fingers over the labels of the fertilizers, programming, changing.

  She poured some fertilizer into a cunning little handheld broadcaster and stood in the doorway of the shed. She stood there long enough for the shadow of the house to make its slow circuit
from falling north to falling east. Before she began, she made a mound of her garden journals and set them aflame. She worked in that flickering light, broadcasting the reprogrammed fertilizer.

  Kay Lynne salted her own ground, then used a hoe to turn the ashes of her books into the deadened soil.

  And when she was finally done, she took the burdensacks down from the dowel by the door and walked out to the street. A bus rolled to a halt at her front path, though Kay Lynne did not live on a regular route. The sky was full of balloons, lit from within, floating away from the fairgrounds on the evening wind.

  The Mr. Lever #9 said, “All aboard,” and Kay Lynne climbed the steps and took her seat.

  It said, “Next stop,” and paused, and then “Next stop,” and then again “Next stop,” and she realized it was asking her a question.

  Another Word for Map Is Faith

  The little drivers threw baggage down from the top of the bus and out from its rusty undercarriage vaults. This was the last stop. The road broke just beyond here, a hundred yards short of the creek.

  With her fingertip, Sandy traced the inked ridge northeast along the map, then rolled the soft leather into a cylinder and tucked it inside her vest. She looked around for her pack and saw it tumbled together with the other cartographers’ luggage at the base of a catalpa tree. Lucas and the others were sorting already, trying to lend their gear some organization, but the stop was a tumult of noise and disorder.

  The high country wind shrilled against the rush of the stony creek; disembarkees pawed for their belongings and tried to make sense of the delicate, coughing talk of the unchurched little drivers. On the other side of the valley, across the creek, the real ridge line—the geology, her father would have said disdainfully—stabbed upstream. By her rough estimation it had rolled perhaps two degrees off the angle of its writ mapping. Lucas would determine the exact discrepancy later, when he extracted his instruments from their feather and wax paper wrappings.

  “Third-world bullshit,” Lucas said, walking up to her. “The transit services people from the university paid these little schemers before we ever climbed onto that deathtrap, and now they’re asking for the fare.” Lucas had been raised near the border, right outside the last town the bus had stopped at, in fact, though he’d dismissed the notion of visiting any family. His patience with the locals ran inverse to his familiarity with them.

  “Does this count as the third world?” she asked him. “Doesn’t there have to be a general for that? Rain forests and steel ruins?”

  Lucas gave his half-grin—not quite a smirk—acknowledging her reduction. Cartographers were famous for their willful ignorance of social expressions like politics and history.

  “Carmen paid them, anyway,” he told her as they walked toward their group. “Probably out of her own pocket, thanks be for wealthy dilettantes.”

  “Not fair,” said Sandy. “She’s as sharp as any student in the seminar, and a better hand with the plotter than most post-docs, much less grad students.”

  Lucas stopped. “I hate that,” he said quietly. “I hate when you separate yourself; go out of your way to remind me that you’re a teacher and I’m a student.”

  Sandy said the same thing she always did. “I hate when you forget it.”

  Against all odds, they were still meeting the timetable they’d drawn up back at the university, all those months ago. The bus pulled away in a cloud of noxious diesel fumes an hour before dark, leaving its passengers in a muddy camp dotted with fire rings but otherwise marked only by a hand-lettered sign pointing the way to a primitive latrine.

  The handful of passengers not connected with Sandy’s group had melted into the forest as soon as they’d found their packages (“Salt and sugar,” Lucas had said. “They’re backwoods people—hedge shamans and survivalists. There’s every kind of lunatic out here.”) This left Sandy to stand by and pretend authority while the Forestry graduate student whose services she’d borrowed showed them all how to set up their camps.

  Carmen, naturally, had convinced the young man to demonstrate tent-pitching to the others using her own expensive rig as an example. The olive-skinned girl sat in a camp chair folding an onionskin scroll back on itself and writing in a wood-bound notebook while the others struggled with canvas and willow poles.

  “Keeping track of our progress?” Sandy asked, easing herself onto the ground next to Carmen.

  “I have determined,” Carmen replied, not looking up, “that we have traveled as far from a hot-water heater as is possible and still be within Christendom.”

  Sandy smiled, but shook her head, thinking of the most remote places she’d ever been. “Davis?” she asked, watching her student’s reaction to mention of that unholy town.

  Carmen, a Californian, shuddered but kept her focus. “There’s a naval base in San Francisco, sí? They’ve got all the amenities, surely.”

  Sandy considered again, thinking of cold camps in old mountains, and of muddy jungle towns ten days’ walk from the closest bus station.

  “Cape Canaveral,” she said.

  With quick, precise movements, Carmen folded a tiny desktop over her chair’s arm and spread her scroll out flat. She drew a pair of calipers out from her breast pocket and took measurements, pausing once to roll the scroll a few turns. Finally, she gave a satisfied smile and said, “Only 55 miles from Orlando. We’re almost twice that from Louisville.”

  She’d made the mistake Sandy had expected of her. “But Orlando, Señorita Reyes, is Catholic. And we were speaking of Christendom.”

  A stricken look passed over her student’s face, but Sandy calmed her with exaggerated conspiratorial looks left and right. “Some of your fellows aren’t so liberal as I am, Carmen. So remember where you are. Remember who you are. Or who you’re trying to become.”

  Another reminder issued, Sandy went to see to her own tent.

  The Forestry student gathered their wood, brought them water to reconstitute their freeze-dried camp meals, then withdrew to his own tent far back in the trees. Sandy told him he was welcome to spend the evening around their fire—“You built it after all,” she’d said—but he’d made a convincing excuse.

  The young man pointed to the traveling shrine her students had erected in the center of their camp, pulling a wooden medallion from beneath his shirt. “That Christ you have over there, ma’am,” he said. “He’s not this one, is he?”

  Sandy looked at the amulet he held, gilded and green. “What do you have there, Jesus in the Trees?” she asked, summoning all her professional courtesy to keep the amusement out of her voice. “No, that’s not the Christ we keep. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  They didn’t, though, because later that night, Lucas discovered that the forest they were camped in wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

  He’d found an old agricultural map somewhere and packed it in with their little traveling library. Later, he admitted that he’d only pulled it out for study because he was still sulking from Sandy’s clear signal he wouldn’t be sharing her tent that night.

  Sandy had been leading the rest of the students in some prayers and thought exercises when Lucas came up with his moldering old quarto. “Tillage,” he said, not even bothering to explain himself before he’d foisted the book off on his nearest fellow. “All the acreage this side of the ridge line is supposed to be under tillage.”

  Sandy narrowed her eyes, more than enough to quiet any of her charges, much less Lucas. “What’s he got there, Ford?” she asked the thin undergraduate who now held the book.

  “Hmmmm?” said the boy; he was one of those who fell instantly and almost irretrievably into any text and didn’t look up. Then, at an elbow from Carmen, he said, “Oh! This is . . .” He turned the book over in his hands, angled the spine toward one of the oil lamps and read, “This is An Agricultural Atlas of Clark County, Kentucky.”

  “‘County?’” said Carmen. “Old book, Lucas.”

  “But it’s writ,” said Lucas. “There’s no
thing superseding the details of it, and it doesn’t contradict anything else we brought about the error. Hell, it even confirms the error we came to correct.” Involuntarily, all of them looked up and over at the apostate ridge.

  “But what’s this about tillage,” Sandy said, giving him the opportunity to show off his find even if it was already clear to her what it must be.

  “See, these plot surveys in the appendices didn’t get accounted for in the literature survey we’re working from. The book’s listed as a source, but only as a supplemental confirmation. It’s not just the ridge that’s wrong, it’s the stuff growing down this side, too. We’re supposed to be in grain fields of some kind down here in the flats, then it’s pasturage on up to the summit line.”

  A minor find, sure, but Sandy would see that Lucas shared authorship on the corollary she’d file with the university. More importantly, it was an opportunity before the hard work of the days ahead.

  “We can’t do anything about the hillsides tonight, or any of the acreage beyond the creek,” she told them. “But as for these glades here . . .”

  It was a simple exercise. The fires were easily set.

  In the morning, Sandy drafted a letter to the Dean of Agriculture while most of her students packed up the camp. She had detailed a few of them to sketch the corrected valley floor around them, and she’d include those visual notes with her instructions to the Dean, along with a copy of the writ map from Lucas’ book.

  “Read that back to me, Carmen,” she said, watching as Lucas and Ford argued over yet another volume, this one slim and bound between paper boards. It was the same back-country cartographer’s guide she’d carried on her own first wilderness forays as a grad student. They’d need its detailed instructions on living out of doors without the Tree Jesus boy to help them.