“My father told me the ground near the salt spring is filled with giant bones, all mixed together,” he said. At least that part was true. “Some from creatures that no one has ever seen.”
Stuart looked up and nodded. “The great American incognitum, now extinct.”
“Or simply, as my father believes”—Caleb had his own doubts about this—“a living nondescript we haven’t seen yet.”
Stuart raised his eyebrows, which Caleb found both reassuring and alarming. “So where are these behemoths now?”
“Out West,” Caleb said cautiously. He returned Elias, who had fallen asleep, to the woven basket. “Or at the tip of South America, or hiding in the arctic. Somewhere, my father contends, mastodons are still roaring.”
“That’s one possibility,” Stuart said. “Myself, I think they are long extinct—and I don’t mean by the agency of any biblical event.” Through a rolled cone of paper he poured a stream of ground bark. “I heard from my uncle that your father is writing a tract about fossils.”
“He is,” Caleb admitted. “An historical overview of all the old theories, followed by his own account.” Was this a betrayal?
“I’m interested in the relationship of fossils to geology,” Stuart said. “My uncle lets me borrow from his library. I’d be glad to share some books with you, if you’re interested.”
They talked for another hour, a rush of ideas that left Caleb both grateful for all he’d learned from Samuel and, as he wandered outside through the last feeble rain, afraid of his new friend’s opinion of Samuel’s work.
In Stuart’s company, among the delectable rows of Dr. Mason’s excellent library, Caleb developed his own ideas about the earth’s beginnings. Stuart passed books, stuffed with scribbled notes, to Caleb; in turn, Caleb passed the least objectionable of these on to Samuel. After all, Caleb told his father, the earth’s crust did not so much resemble a fluid pudding in which raisins were randomly mixed. Rather it resembled a squashed and tilted book, each page bearing a different form of writing. And this sequence of strata might mean something; the neatly stacked layers, all bearing their characteristic fossils, a signal that different kinds of life had over time appeared and then disappeared. Not one Deluge, Caleb suggested. But a long series of inundations.
Although Samuel dismissed that idea with a laugh, their arguments, which often included Stuart, in general seemed to please him. “I have always kept up with the times,” he said proudly. “I have always been open-minded. Reconcile your theories with the truth of Scripture and you will have my full attention.”
It was enough, Caleb thought, to see Samuel caught up again in the pursuit that had once been his greatest pleasure. In recent years he’d grown sluggish, seldom going on the collecting trips that had punctuated Caleb’s childhood. Work on his book had slowed as well; he was growing old, and sufficiently vague that his assistant master, exasperated, had recently resigned. Caleb, with little warning, now found himself teaching half the classes.
What a relief, in light of this, to see some of Samuel’s old energy and enthusiasm return. Once again he was scouring the local cliffs and creekbeds, and if at first he returned with the same familiar fossils, still his ardor was touching. A small, solitary figure climbing clumsily up a rock face, scarf flapping over his shoulder as his bruised hands fumbled for treasures: how could this pleasing sight lead to so much pain?
During the weeks when Samuel found the first of the peculiar stones, Caleb, who was swamped with teaching duties, knew only that his father vanished at awkward times and seemed gleefully secretive. He would have been horrified to see Samuel on that cliff, charting the positions of his finds before removing and squirreling them away. Had Caleb known what was going on, he would have asked the questions that became obvious later: Why did Samuel find only counterparts—the impressions, the prints—and no corresponding parts? Why were all the impressions intact, and all of the same depth? But Samuel saw, instead of these problems, a grand solution.
His stones, which depicted bees caught in the act of sipping nectar, birds frozen in midflight, a spider consuming a fly, were not mingled together but layered, birds above bees above the spider until, near the top of the cliff, the sequence was crowned by pictures of the sun and broken shapes that resembled letters. Relics of men, Samuel decided. A civilization drowned in the Flood. Without telling Caleb anything, without showing the stones to a soul, Samuel commissioned an artist to draw illustrations of all he’d found. Only then did he confide in Caleb.
What was it like, that first sight of the stones? Like a blow to the head, like the onset of a fever. Caleb knew, he knew right away; Stuart agreed with him instantly. The stones are fake, Caleb told his father. Can’t you see?
But Samuel locked himself in his study, emerging with fresh chapters for his book. These discoveries, he claimed, proved that fossils were arrayed in layers not because they’d been laid down over time during successive inundations, but as a result of their differing degrees of intelligence and closeness to God. Little creeping things had drowned in the first days of the only Flood, while the more intelligent, flying or fleeing uphill, had been caught by the water later. Of course human beings had drowned last. By this arrangement, God demonstrated order even in the midst of chaos.
By then Samuel wasn’t speaking at night, pacing before the fire; by then he was preaching to his family or bursting into Caleb’s classroom. Nothing has altered since the Deluge, he claimed, nor will it ever, as God’s first plan was perfect. Consider the sturgeon, that very odd fish. “From the Monongahela,” he told Caleb’s history class, “I once pulled a specimen five feet long, with a mouth like a hose.” Who could have expected God to fashion such an improbable creature?
All this, and more, he wrote down. Soon his book assumed its final shape and a title that, repeated on brown calf covers, would haunt Caleb for years:
God’s Hand Apparent
in the Figured Stones
of the Allegheny and Monongahela Valley Region;
Illustrated with Folio Plates of these Marvelous Creations
Eighteen months after finding the first stone, three months after he’d sent copies of his book to all the best scientific societies and journals, Samuel found, in a crevice at the top of the cliff, a flat slab inscribed with his name.
In the schoolyard, among the whispering boys, were a few who betrayed the culprits: three recent graduates who, before leaving the Academy, had carved the impressions into bits of soft shale. Caleb tracked them down and made them apologize to Samuel. They’d never meant, they said, for Mr. Bernhard to take those stones seriously. They had thought he’d see their joke at a glance. Their bland blank faces and callused hands, their fumbling explanations: Caleb had wanted to strike them.
Samuel stopped teaching, he stopped going out, soon he stopped leaving his bed. He spent all he’d saved, and more he borrowed, buying back copies of his book. During the days Caleb, now running the Academy by himself, could not be with him. But at night he sat by Samuel’s bed, the two of them once more awake together while the rest of the household slept. This time it was Caleb who read: at first out loud, when Samuel could still listen. Later, near the end, he read to himself.
The Academy of Sorrow
A herd of schoolboys dropping books, reciting their lessons, bungling grammar and simple sums while exuding a smell—not unpleasant, completely definitive—that hadn’t changed since he was a boy himself: for a decade, except for a brief, glowing year, this became the shape of Caleb’s life. He worked to restore the Academy’s reputation and to repay the debts which, along with a tower of brown books and a clear sense of his father’s errors, he’d inherited. To the curriculum, which he’d also inherited, he slowly added algebra, astronomy, a smattering of geology. Still he wasn’t teaching what he wanted, but each small change was a revolution to the parents he courted and couldn’t afford to offend.
Young Harry Spires, who joined the Academy as assistant master seven years after Samuel’s death
, was all for tossing Livy and Horace aside completely and adding botany, chemistry, French, and German. Patience, Caleb counseled. We must move cautiously. He didn’t say what he sometimes thought: that he’d inherited a kind of factory, stamping out adequately learned, sufficiently tractable young men. Men like him. He’d loved teaching, when he was younger and had first started helping his father. Now he sometimes dozed in class, waking to find suggestive drawings on the slates and the boys smirking as if he’d turned into their last, collar-frayed visions of Samuel. A widower, parents whispered, excusing his lapses.
Briefly, through his courtship of Margaret Harper and their simple wedding, through the lush days of August and the months when Margaret was carrying their child, he’d felt as clear and radiant as a glass bowl lit by a beeswax candle. Then something snapped or fell or cracked, a wind blew, a storm raged—who ordered this?—and he was sitting in the kitchen, staring at Stuart while his son struggled and failed to be born and left Margaret burning with fever. He roasted straws in the stove and removed them, burning holes with the fiery tips in a sheet of paper. From the pattern of charred holes, letters emerged: The Academy of Sorrow. Stuart seized the paper; Caleb singed spots on the back of his hand. Stuart seized his hands. During the rest of that terrible week, Stuart left his own work to help Harry with the classes, while Rosina managed the house so that Mrs. Bernhard could tend to her daughter-in-law. Caleb prayed, everyone prayed; and still, Margaret followed her son four days later.
After that Caleb turned away from whoever tried to help him. His pupils’ well-meaning mothers—the widows especially—sometimes asked why he didn’t remarry; it wasn’t right for a man to be alone. He might have replied that the Academy, and his remaining family, required his full attention. Or he might have told the widows the truth: that once, not long after he and Margaret were married, he’d complimented her on a pot of yellow blossoms near the front door. She’d laughed, and blushed, and then confessed that weeks earlier, watching him walk around the vegetable garden, she’d slipped out, dug up a brick-sized clump of earth which held the clear impression of his right foot, and tucked it into a flower pot. In that earth she’d planted a chrysanthemum, hoping that as it bloomed year after year so would his love for her. How should he marry again, after that?
He told the widows nothing. In the constant absence of Margaret he worked, and looked after his mother and Rosina, and missed his old lively friendship with Stuart; Stuart had two more children now and when they met they spoke wryly of the tasks—the endless, tedious tasks—that kept them, almost all the time, apart.
The spring of 1825, they agreed, was more than usually harassing. Stuart’s daughters both had the measles; two of Caleb’s pupils were caught stealing and had to be expelled. Rosina, who for years had managed the Academy’s accounts and helped her mother with the housekeeping, was suddenly useless. She and Harry, surprising everyone, had decided to marry; she was so happy she wandered around in a daze. While she stood in the hall outside Caleb’s classroom, smiling down at the bust of Homer beneath her unmoving feather duster, he led his youngest pupils in a geography lesson and imagined giving her away. Rosina’s hand relinquishing his arm for Harry’s, Harry moving into the house with them, sharing the family duties so that his own burdens finally lightened—why, then, did he feel so unsettled?
To the boys in his classroom, he read, “For what is Asia remarkable?” The boys said:
It is the division of the Earth that was first inhabited.
Who were the first persons on Earth?
Adam and Eve, who were placed in the Garden of Eden.
At what time was the Deluge?
Nearly seventeen centuries after the creation of man.
What then became of all living beings?
All living creatures died, except those that went with Noah into the Ark.
A sharp tight pain, which resembled a cramp, seized the base of his lungs just then. He dropped his eyes to the textbook, which he’d used for more years than he cared to remember. In the back of the room, Ian Berger pushed his lank brown hair aside, revealing freckles that merged into coin-sized splotches over his nose and left cheek.
“Question,” Ian said, as someone did each term. “Where did the water go after?”
Caleb had no answer. Wasn’t this endless repetition, wrestling each day with the same tasks, same words, same weak and squalid self, enough to make anyone yearn for change? After the boys had gone home, he made his way to Stuart’s house. There he found his friend in equally bad spirits, sitting on the brick stoop and prying loose scraps of mortar.
“Tired?” Caleb asked.
“Of every single thing,” his friend replied. He flicked a scrap disdainfully into the air. “I’ll be thirty-eight next week—my father was dead by then. Yours has been gone for a decade. And here we’re still stuck in the same place, doing the same things, never seeing anything more than this tiny corner of the world—look at this stoop, it’s falling apart.”
“Something could change,” Caleb said. “We could change.”
“Our natures don’t change,” Stuart snapped. “If you had children of your own, you’d understand.” As Caleb flinched, Stuart reached for his hand. “Forgive me,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
He went into the house and returned with a bottle of rum, which a grateful patient had given him, and a single glass, which, like their discontent, they shared.
Classes ended at the Academy and the boys disappeared; Mrs. Bernhard and Rosina, absorbed by the wedding plans, failed to notice the anniversary of Margaret’s death. As the trees leafed out and the dense heavy heat descended, Caleb spent hours down at the wharves, fascinated by the jumble of boats and barges. He saw Frenchmen, and Indians, and a group of emigrants heading west—where was everyone going?
The movement and bustle cheered him briefly, as did Rosina and Harry’s wedding, but afterward, watching the new couple settle contentedly into their household routines, he couldn’t help thinking of the life that he and Margaret had lost. All summer he dreamed of Margaret; often he saw her holding his sister Lavinia in her arms. Lavinia’s face, which had dimmed in his memory as he’d grown up, had mysteriously regained its color and definition after Margaret’s death. Now he saw both of them clearly, the tiny scar on his first sister’s chin as vivid as the dark speck Margaret bore on the rim of one hazel iris.
Those dreams brought a cloud of melancholy that even the start of the new term couldn’t dispel. Stuart was downright gloomy; in November, when Caleb brought him a book they’d both coveted and couldn’t afford—Rembrandt Peale’s Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth—Stuart only shrugged. The long, intense conversations of their youth, their arguments over philosophy, history, the nature of science: how these had shrunk, Caleb thought. Shriveled to almost nothing. He set the precious volume on the table.
“What we need,” he said, “is a trip.”
“I can’t go anywhere,” Stuart said flatly. “How could I? Barbara, the children, my uncle, my mother: everyone needs me.”
The crumpled skin around his eyes, the softness below his jaw—how old they’d gotten, Caleb thought. “A few weeks?” he asked.
He tried to convey to his friend the ferment he’d detected in the air. At the wharves he’d glimpsed an enormous keelboat, still under construction, that belonged to a group of naturalists and teachers headed for Robert Owen’s Utopian community on the Wabash River. Other boats were crowded with emigrants headed for Illinois, merchants loading and unloading goods; everyone had a plan. The papers were thick with appeals—for a Fourierist phalanx, a haven for freed slaves, a rational utopia; for asylums to benefit the deaf, the blind, the insane. Even the Rappites, less than twenty miles away, had established a new community called Economy. Couldn’t the two of them step back from the history of their own lives and embrace the larger history of the earth?
“I had a thought,” Caleb said. “We could go to Kentucky together and visit the Big Bone Lick. I’d love to gathe
r some fossils for the classroom, I think I’d have better luck teaching the boys if they could actually feel one of those giant tusks. And I’m curious to see for myself how the fossils lie where they haven’t been disturbed.”
Stuart reached for the book on the table but offered no comment. And why should he? Caleb thought. Even to his own ears, the excuse for the trip sounded feeble. Something else was pressing at him: a sense, which he couldn’t articulate, that in rummaging through that bone-filled pit he might finally make sense of his history with Samuel. More forcefully, he continued, “At the right site, we might be able to demonstrate a clear column of succession.”
But still Stuart looked at him wearily. Our natures don’t change, he’d said: but he hadn’t meant that, he wasn’t himself. Not so many years ago, they’d argued happily about the possibilities of a world still developing, still in progress. But if the world was fixed as God first created it, forever immutable; if nothing ever changed or became extinct but persisted and persisted—
“I know it’s winter,” Caleb said. Was that what Stuart was worried about? “But the lick is south of here, and the ground is saturated with salt. If it’s frozen at all, it will only be on the surface. And no one else will be there—a great advantage.”
“I really can’t travel now,” Stuart said. “I just can’t. But why don’t you go?”
Traveling alone seemed unappealing, but if he could bring back something that would cheer his friend … Caleb jumped when Stuart smacked both palms against the table.
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