Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  But he would never catch her on any hill, going up or down, so she slowed and waited for him on the approach to the ford near the bottom. When Michael had pulled up even with her, Maggie said, “This creek’s shallow, this creek’s clear.”

  Michael said, “But always taste it, always fear,” but he said it muffled. Then, “Why do you always bring up his rhymes? We’re not children. When have you ever seen me to cross moving water without checking it first?”

  Maggie dismounted and crouched by the edge of the creek, little more than a brook here above any tributaries and so close to its source spring. Their father’s rhymes were powerful, taught them when they were still children. They could clear water of impurities, he’d said, because of the strength of their faith. But as far as Maggie knew, they only worked for him, and for her and Michael.

  “Good habits never killed anybody,” she said, and even if she wasn’t quoting their wandering father directly anymore it was something he might have said.

  She let her fingers—nails cut short like her hair—hover over the surface of the water, careful not to let them touch, as she leaned over to gaze into it.

  “There’s nothing,” Michael said.

  Michael thought their father had chosen not to come back. He’d never quite forgiven that. Maggie figured their father got distracted and forgot they were among his priorities. He was out there trying to teach the word of God, bring about a revolution of faith, convince the world to rise up to counter the involuntary state of Tennessee.

  She cocked her hand left then right. “There’s probably honeysuckle blossoms and minnows.” She stood. “But I don’t see anything smarter than you in it, unless you count crawdads.”

  “Right, right,” Michael said, hoisting his bike and splashing through the ford. “And I can’t count anyway. Get a new joke.”

  He waited until she was picking her own way through the creek, burdened with the steel frame of her own bicycle, before he kicked off.

  “I’m not racing you!” she called after him, but they both knew she’d try to catch him.

  A mile down the little valley, the road tilted upward. It was the slightest of grades, and only a hundred yards long, but by the time he hit its base Michael was spinning fast so that he could coast to its top and not feel the unwelcome tug of the earth dragging at his legs. So his sister caught his draft.

  “Twenty percent!” she said, laughing. Twenty percent less effort to move those fantastic machines down the road when one rider is shielded from the wind by another before him. Before him or her.

  She’d never pass him. Not on a road flat as this, not when his form was so good and the end of a long ride was in front of them. But he’d never drop her, either. And he’d always shielded her from everything she’d let him.

  The creek turned back before them, but they didn’t even slow on this crossing. A steel and stone bridge was guarded by stern-faced Mennonite, gray-bearded Mueller men who’d known the twins all their lives. Not the faith of their father, these good plain people, but churched, so Maggie shouted “God bless you!” as they blurred past. The Muellers, all cousins or brothers or nephews one to the other, nodded greeting, but kept their downstream watch, mindful of any unnatural lack of clarity in the water.

  Michael shouted back over his shoulder, “Post office?”

  “We’re going right by there anyway!” said Maggie, just as loud, struggling as ever to make the words catch up with her flying brother.

  The real reason was that today was the last day word was going to come if word was going to come, though neither of them shouted that into the wind.

  The people in those hills had lived with the Green River and its moods for more than two hundred years before it turned against them. They remembered that they had betrayed it first with the earthen dam that had impounded it into a tame, slack thing for a few decades, and because they were churched people they remembered the parable of the prodigal, and prayed for their river’s redemption.

  So despite every threat, they did not leave its banks, and people still lived at Neatsville and Knifley and in Little Cake. They were woken people, not interested in becoming Viewers at Home. There was still a post office in Pellyton, and the twins turned their wheels that way.

  A high whistling noise in the sky brought Maggie up out of her tucked position. “West,” she said. “Mail coming in from Bowling Green.”

  The sound of the delivery impacting in the muddy field outside the post office was muted, but they both felt the vibration of it when it jumped up through the road and their machines. “Big package,” said Michael. “Lot of letters.”

  As one, they stood up on their pedals and cranked up their speed a little more. If word was going to come . . .

  A few minutes later, they rounded a final right-angle turn and saw the sheds and workshops of the Pellyton post office. The big four-inch guns were silhouetted against the white sun, quiet now because it was a receiving day and the postal service had scheduling regulations to guard against the statistical improbability of incoming and outgoing packages knocking one another out of the sky.

  Mr. Pelly, the half-blind postmaster, was leaning on a wheelbarrow in the torn-up ground at the roadside when Michael and Maggie coasted up. Two of his many daughters were digging a long canister out of the mud.

  “Think that’s personal mail, Mr. Pelly?” asked Maggie.

  The old man smiled and straightened his jacket as he stood. “Buenas tardes, Maria,” he said, like always.

  And like always, Maggie forced a smile back. “It’s Maggie, Mr. Pelly. Margarita. My mother—”

  This completed their regular painful greeting ritual, and, as usual, Michael’s patience with it was short. “There was a phone on the Ginnie Hill, Mr. Pelly. I killed it and Maggie tagged it. She’s got the paperwork.”

  The postmaster attended his duty. “A phone, now? You say there was a phone? Was there a call?”

  Maggie half-wondered if her brother would tell the truth.

  “No,” he said. “No, it was just standing in the road.”

  Mr. Pelly peered at Michael through myopia, then glanced at Maggie, for affirmation she guessed. She didn’t move, or speak.

  “Just standing on the road, you say.” His daughters had finished wrestling the canister into the wheelbarrow and began trundling it toward the compound. “Well, then, that’s what I’ll put on the report I send to Frankfort. I’ll have Eileen and Carla go block off the road until they can get some troopers out here.”

  Maggie and Michael watched some Pelly girls cut open the mail shipment with a reciprocating saw powered by a tiny boiler. The sparks from the whining blade hissed when they touched a random gout of escaped steam.

  Mr. Pelly, who’d put on a duckbilled eyeshade labeled with a tiny American flag, didn’t make them suffer through the time it would have taken him to officially sort the contents of the package. He fingered through the rubber-banded stacks of envelopes until he turned one up with a familiar logo stamped on the upper left-hand corner.

  “Union Cycliste Internationale,” he said. “Not too many people around here gets mail from those folks.”

  Michael snatched the letter from Mr. Pelly’s hand and looked at the address briefly before ripping it open.

  “Is there one for me, too?” asked Maggie.

  “This is to both of us,” her brother said, then started nodding and laughing and jumping. “Both of us!”

  He put his hands around Maggie’s waist and lifted her up. “They want both of us!”

  “Let me down, let me see!” she said.

  Michael set her down and she took the letter from him. “Who could have been dropped from the team in favor of us?” she asked, scanning the pages.

  “Who cares?” he said. “Some old guys probably qualified for cable and joined the Viewers at Home.”

  Mr. Pelly said, “What is this about? What have y’all done now?”

  “We made the national team, old man,” said Michael. “We’re going ou
t into the world to ride our bikes on the national team!”

  Maggie said, “Did you read all this?” and the tone of her voice caught Michael up short. “Did you see the route of the first qualifying race, and when it starts?”

  He took the papers she handed him, looking past the Yes on the first page they’d worked long years to see.

  “What’s the matter, little Maggie?” asked Mr. Pelly. “They starting you off too soon? Too far from home?”

  “Too soon for sure,” said Michael, thrusting the papers back at his sister and stalking out of the shed. “But not near far enough from home.”

  Maggie looked at the schedule in her hand again, with the start date an impossible two days away. She looked at the map of Kentucky.

  “Where are they having you race, child?” asked Mr. Pelly.

  A highlighted line started in the west of the state and described a long sweeping arc low through the flatlands, up across the knobs and the grassy fields where the Horselords ran, ending north and east in the foothills of the impassable Appalachians.

  The route crossed the Cumberland River and the Tennessee. It crossed the dying Barren and their own complicated Green. It crossed the Kentucky River, the bleeding wound that cut across the heart of the state, to end at the Ohio, the bleeding wound that cut across the heart of the nation.

  Maggie answered. “They’re having us ride US 68, Mr. Pelly. They’re making us race on the most dangerous road in the world.”

  Chapter Two

  Their father had been many things to many people in their lifetime, but one of the strongest memories the twins had of him cast him as road builder. There were three switchbacks in the narrow rutted road he’d cut in the side of Dunbar Hill in the long summer after their mother died.

  “It took a hundred-year flood to make me a widower,” he’d told them during one of his infrequent breaks, rubbing down one of their exhausted mules with a handful of leaves, working even when he wasn’t working. “But it’ll take a ten-thousand-year flood for that river to make you two orphans, and that’d break the covenant.”

  They were four years old. “Widower” and “orphan” were new words to them, though “covenant” was not.

  After he’d been a road builder he became a house mover. With the help of their neighbors—there’d been more of them then—their father had carefully disassembled the rambling log and timber house he’d built with their mother at the mouth of a hollow, built on the very edge of the Green’s flood plain. Their mother, the woman who was retreating from their memories already, they were so young.

  The same neighbors had helped put the house back together at the top of Dunbar Hill, but their father had refused any offer of help in moving the timbers and logs and window frames, or any of their earthly goods. It was Maggie and Michael and their father, just those three, who carried their home from hollow to hilltop, one piece at a time.

  Once they were settled, their father’s renown began to spread. His newfound ability to sing and chant rivers into submission was an irony, since it was water that had stolen his wife. People believed in the word of a man who could accomplish such a feat, and so that man had a duty to teach what to believe. That was what he always said.

  What he was still saying, probably. She hoped he was somewhere saying something. He’d certainly said little enough when he left, just cryptic comments about them staying safe, and about too many enemies and not enough allies.

  The road was better now, smoothed down by the feet of the visitors who came over the years seeking their father’s counsel, and by the thousands and thousands of passages of the thin rubber tires of the twins’ bicycles. And even though it was steep, Michael did not slow even once up its whole length, riding on anger.

  Maggie followed him easily, but kept a little distance back. She let him coast into the shed that served as their garage and listened for the slamming of the door into the interior of the house before she followed.

  These are the ways that Maggie Hammersmith had loved her house.

  Uncritically. In her dimmest memories, Maggie recalled what it felt like to explore the numberless rooms and slip slide across the polished floors with Michael. She remembered the different colors of the light falling into the kitchen and the library and the great room, sunlight filtered through her mother’s untouchable stained-glass windows.

  Exhausted. That carrying, that moving. Taking a house piece by piece—even when the pieces she was responsible for were book-small or coffee pot light. Then later, cleaning all those rooms, taking her fair share of dusting and sweeping and polishing a house big enough for a dozen people but lived in by just three.

  Fascinated. When they were six, their father began working in the garage for the first time since they moved to the top of the hill. He let them watch when he took down two of the bicycle frames hanging from the rafters, then let them help by searching out saws and clamps from the wide, shallow drawers of the toolboxes along the walls. He broke down the two frames into tube stock—like giant reeds made of paper-thin steel—then heated and rejoined until he had top tubes and down tubes, seat posts and forks, chain stays, seat stays, head tubes, bottom brackets. He taught them that you don’t make a wheel, you build one. Build one or four, as in this case, when they helped build their first bicycles.

  Mystified. One day, a nine-year-old Maggie had made a cognitive leap and realized that she and Michael could use the woodcraft they’d picked up in their hillside scrambles to identify what kind of trees the walls and furniture and fittings of their home were hewn from. They’d made a game of it and found: white oak, yellow pine, red cedar, and buttery poplar waxed agleaming, granite-hard locust holding up ceilings, and something new. Some graceful red wood, from an evergreen but not one they knew, making a chest to hold quilts. “There are trees that do not grow in these hills,” said their father. “Then how do they get here?” No answer.

  Secretly. Because she’d grown a little ashamed that she and her brother and her father all had separate rooms to sleep in, and that none of those rooms were for anything else. To a fourteen-year-old girl, even one strong and self-assured enough to take great circling hundred-mile bicycle rides by herself, the room full of books and the walls covered with photographs and watercolors seemed . . . unseemly, when the Amish and the other woken people in the hills got by with less, some of them with much less.

  Proudly. A fire that took all of the timber from the southern slopes of the hill and only burnt itself out at the very river’s edge. Two funnel clouds that she’d seen with her own eyes before her father rushed them into the root cellar. Snows piled so high on the hips and valleys of the roofline that the chimneys disappeared, and the smoke of their fires came up through sooty little holes burned through tons of white. One windstorm that took the roof off the barn where the mules lived, and another that uprooted a tree from the front yard and deposited it, crown down, into the fallow garden. A thousand nights of thunderstorms. All of these had threatened it, but nothing had ever worn through their beautiful, well-built house.

  After she had removed the front wheel of her training bike and hung it by Michael’s, Maggie kicked off her shoes and padded up the three stone steps that led to the kitchen. She wasn’t surprised to see that Michael had taken the time to stoke the fire in the iron stove and hang a kettle of water to heat the baths they’d take in their rooms. One secret to his success as a rider was his enormous discipline, and the secret to his discipline was that he was a deliberate and willing slave to habit.

  So she knew where she’d find him, in the corner of the library where he always went to calm down. Not with a book—despite all of his attempts, their father had never succeeded in making either of his children what he called “real” readers. No, she expected to find Michael standing in front of their mother’s trophies.

  He spoke first. “If they ever had another state championship, do you think they’d use the same jersey?” One of his favorite questions.

  He was looking at one of two dozen
similarly composed photographs that hung on the walls behind the trophies. In all of them, their beautiful dark-haired mother was standing at the top of a podium holding a bouquet of flowers. Only the people standing at either side of her changed from photograph to photograph, them and the jerseys they all wore.

  Michael nodded his chin at a picture taken on a sunny day in front of some enormous stone building. Their mother was pulling on a brightly colored jersey designed to resemble a field of goldenrod. The caption was one of the first things the twins had learned to read: “Maria Galdeana, Champion of Kentucky.”

  “The jerseys for the Champion of America”—and Maggie nodded at a picture of their mother wearing red, white and blue—“and for the World Champion”—their mother in gleaming white with a rainbow banded across her chest—“are the same now as they were then, at least from the pictures in the manuals. When they start up the state championships again, I’m sure it will be the same.” It was important that she say when and not if.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s probably right. And they can bring in machines from somewhere to make them.” Michael was the more accomplished tailor and weaver of the two of them, and from the age of ten had made their wool cycling kits in as many different colors and patterns as he could manage. But he’d never come close to replicating the complicated foliage on the Kentucky jersey and became convinced that the technology of the world outside the Commonwealth—revealed to them in slow, grudging bits by their father—was the secret to the slick appearance of the jerseys, as it must be to the delicately machined bicycle parts so carefully hoarded in their garage.