Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  Always, he thought, the blow was felt after a while. After Samuel’s death he’d continued to see the guilty boys in town—almost grown, then truly grown, then with children of their own. While the oldest one had trebled the family business, replacing his father’s flat chiseled slabs with three-dimensional angels and willows carved in high relief, he himself had lost Margaret and their son.

  “It should have been me who was punished,” Miriam said. “Not her.”

  Before Caleb could object to this, a man appeared beside them, gliding up so silently that his greeting made Miriam jump. Gray-haired, rosy-skinned, too gaunt. Miriam introduced him as Brother Eusebius. “The schoolmaster here,” she said. For a few minutes they talked politely, catching up on the past two weeks.

  “And how are our wonderful children today?” Eusebius asked.

  “As you see,” Miriam said, gesturing toward the animated group streaming away from them.

  To Caleb, still pondering the vision of Miriam electrified, the sky’s fire pouring through her arms and into Grace’s ears, Eusebius said, “You’re enjoying your visit?”

  “Very much.”

  “Any friend of Miriam’s is welcome here.”

  While Miriam excused herself and followed the children, now running along the river and poking at the heaps of ice, Eusebius began to talk about the advantages of this settlement. Silkworms, merino sheep, the cider press and the wine cellar; he spoke too fast, his eyes were too bright. Caleb barely listened to him. The look on Miriam’s face when she mentioned that boy she’d followed, when she spoke of him and her friend embracing—perhaps she’d wished herself in her friend’s place. When Eusebius paused, Caleb asked how Joseph and his two friends had come to join the community.

  “It is our tradition,” Eusebius said obliquely, “to welcome all who arrive here destitute and ask for help.”

  “Everyone?” Caleb asked. “Even tramps?”

  Eusebius frowned. “We prefer to call them pilgrims,” he said. “Or unfortunates. But yes—we house and feed whoever arrives, no matter what their state, and even though some people think we’re foolish and call this place ‘Tramp’s Paradise.’ But better to take in a hundred unworthy than to turn away the one who is worthy. Some—like Joseph—have clearly been sent to us by God. When they ask for work, we give them work. If they ask to join us, we welcome them.”

  He peered more closely at Caleb. “You, for instance,” he said. “You have not said why you arrive here on a Sunday, unattached to family and friends, accompanying our beloved Miriam and Grace—perhaps you are without a home?”

  “I have a home,” Caleb said, startled.

  “Yet you aren’t there,” Eusebius said. He tucked his hands inside his sleeves, seeming at the same moment to tuck his lips inside his mouth. “You are not there, tending after your own, nor are you in church. I pray for your soul.”

  Who made you? Samuel had asked at prayers each night. In whose care is your soul?

  “My soul is in the hands of my Maker,” Caleb said.

  “You could lose it this day,” Eusebius replied. “This very hour. We expect the Second Coming at any moment, certainly during Mr. Rapp’s lifetime. Then a general harmony will rule, as it did before disorder entered the world.”

  Caleb felt his face contort, the muscles twitching without his permission.

  “You think we are fools to await the millennium here,” Eusebius said angrily. He barely acknowledged Miriam, who had just returned to them. “But I tell you this: we are not so foolish as you who believe that the world is fixed as you see it.” He stalked away.

  “You upset him,” Miriam said quietly. “I think he has hopes of me and Grace joining their group.”

  “Would you really think of joining them?”

  “Would you?”

  For a moment they gazed at each other curiously, and then she smiled. “I’m grateful for the interest they’ve taken in Grace. But to live here … I want a family of my own. And I don’t share their beliefs.”

  She beckoned to Grace, who waved but stayed with her friends. Inside me, she was explaining to Joseph, is a little person, the size of a thumb, who looks exactly like me. You have one too, yours looks like you. When we sleep they fly out of our chests and go here and there, then come back. When we die, they leave for good. These are our souls.

  “I want more for her,” Miriam continued. “More than I can give her—look how her face lights up around her friends. Look how their hands fly. I want to start a school for the deaf near our home, I want someone to come here and train me and a few other people, so we can teach all the children we can gather.”

  She turned toward a stand of willows, denying Caleb any hints he might have gleaned from her expression. Did he know then? Perhaps he knew. Beyond the willows a scraping, repetitive noise, which he’d heard faintly for some time, grew louder. He followed Miriam through the screen of hanging branches toward a frozen creek framed by steep low banks. A solitary man was skating there. An enormous wild bird. No, a man. Moving forward at great speed and then, after a smooth pirouette, backward just as quickly, his hands clasped behind his waist and his head thrown back with pleasure. Just when Caleb was about to call out a warning—a hole in the ice, where rapids bubbled—the man spun again, took a few strong strokes, and leapt over the darkness. Landing, he reversed once more, slipping over the plain.

  As Caleb moved forward, his arm was tugged backward: Grace, pulling his sleeve and gesturing at the skater’s intricate patterns. She clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward: Teach me, teach me. The skater slid backward, disappearing, as Samuel had disappeared, behind a bend. Caleb could not remember, anymore, the real details of their fiercest arguments, the language of his accusations, the precise texture and smell of the sheets beneath Samuel’s wasting body. He could not remember all the pages he’d turned to distract himself, nor all Stuart had done to comfort him. The Earth, Samuel had once read to him, was more fruitful before the Deluge. The temperature of the air was more equable, without burning summers or piercing winters; the air was more pure, and subtle, and homogeneous, and had no violent winds or agitations. The Antediluvians ate only vegetables; their lives were more equal, and vastly longer, than ours.

  From the creekbank, which Caleb found he was kicking with his right foot, a spray of smooth, reddish brown stones tumbled down. Click, clack, clonking against each other and the ice. When one split, he knew what he’d find. The stone had cleaved neatly, revealing the impression of a palmate leaf. Beautiful, if not a surprise. He held the halves out to Grace, part and counterpart, and said to Miriam, “Would you help me explain it to her?”

  She bent over her sister’s hand. “What is it?”

  “A fossil,” he said, waiting while she finger-spelled the word. Joseph was watching her hands as well, although Conrad and Duncan had been diverted by a goose. “The word refers generally to anything dug out of the earth, and more specifically to the petrified remains of something once living, like this. Some are species that no longer exist.”

  He relied on her to translate accurately. “They’re quite common,” he said. “Not just the remains of plants, but shells and sea creatures and larger animals too, some of them enormous—at the place I’m headed to, people have found the fossil remains of a giant creature with the tusks of an elephant and the teeth of a hippopotamus. We call that creature Mastodon now—”

  Miriam halted him with a raised hand. “And where,” she said, “should I find a name-sign for that?”

  What a complicated smile she had! And still he kept talking, unable to stop himself. It was like being in the classroom of his dreams, saying exactly what he meant in the light of someone’s full attention. He must have known then. As he spoke, Miriam’s hands moved swiftly. Grace’s eyes never strayed from her sister’s gestures.

  Beneath her feet, beneath the river, Grace thought, the world was as densely layered as a leek. Was that what Caleb meant? Her geography book had said nothing of this, that bene
ath the superficial film of dirt and vegetation were layers of fish and serpents and bugs and plants, frozen lives, life she hadn’t known was alive—anything might exist in the rocks and that she hadn’t seen it before was only because she hadn’t thought to look. She bent down, searching through the rusty pebbles fanned across the ice and then cracking a smooth oval the size of her palm against a large rock. Shocked and disappointed, she held the pieces out to Caleb.

  “They’re not that common,” he said gently, speaking to Miriam but looking at Grace. “Tell her they’re only in special stones.”

  Joseph was staring at him, he saw. As intently as Samuel’s pupils had once stared—what had those boys with their figured stones meant to say? He watched Grace crouch on the shore, inspecting the bank behind her. The boys might have forged the stones, he thought, as much for him as for Samuel.

  For years he’d listened without complaint as Samuel described, first to him, then to them, the earth’s unchanging perfection. Some of the boys, clean and well dressed, had listened attentively. But the shabby ones, those with dusty hands and shadowed eyes, missing parents, irregular households: what had they known of such order? Perhaps, Caleb thought, like him they’d seen evidence of a Maker whose attention wandered. One day, after taking over the afternoon class, he’d offered them an alternate view of the earth’s history.

  Not just his view, he said, regarding the boys’ dropped eyelids and sullen mouths. The modern view, the real view. He’d presented to them what he’d just tried to share, in a simplified version, with Grace: a vision of an earth immensely old and subject to natural processes, the sea floor heaved up into mountains, the mountains ground down by rivers and glaciers, evidence of change and movement visible everywhere in the strata. In the newest layers of the earth, he told them, barely below the ground on which they walked, might be found the bodies of mammoths and the bones of mastodons. Below those were other fossils, and still other fossils, each layer more ancient than the last. He drew on the stories Stuart had told him; the books they’d read together. The fossils that Samuel had shown the boys were, Caleb claimed, the remains of plants and animals which lived no more.

  “From the Flood?” asked a boy to his left. And from the back bench, in a tone that might have been disrespectful, or merely tired, a voice Caleb had never pinned to its owner whispered:

  At what time was the Deluge?

  Nearly seventeen centuries after the creation of man.

  What became of all living beings?

  All living creatures died, except those that went with Noah into the Ark.

  “There are different theories regarding the origin of fossils,” Caleb said, trying to locate the voice. “Many of these my father has explained to you. He believes what you just suggested: that they’re relics of creatures destroyed in the Flood. For myself, I think they are evidence of the earth’s antiquity, and of the antiquity of life.”

  The boys whispered in twos and threes, one coming forward to ask what he was supposed to think when his teachers contradicted each other.

  “Think for yourself,” Caleb calmly suggested.

  And a few months later there was Samuel, coat flapping in the wind, hair flapping over his eyes, happily grasping counterfeit stones which he wrapped in paper and hid from his son. After his death, when Caleb finally told Stuart about his impulsive lecture, and about the disturbing timing of the stones’ appearance, Stuart had groaned and said, “Couldn’t it have been coincidence?”

  Miriam touched his arm. “What are you thinking about?”

  He pointed to Grace, who was still rummaging through the stones. “Her.”

  He had not been honest with Stuart either, when they first met. Why did he start this way?

  When they left, the horses once more stepped quietly along the river. The trees were quiet. The birds were quiet. The sun had dropped, the sky was gray, and it was, suddenly, very cold. On the horses the riders were silent. Grace was clutching both Miriam and the handkerchief knotted around her cache of rocks. Miriam held the reins in one hand, with the other trying to imitate a new sign she’d seen Duncan make. Caleb, behind them both, stared down at his own hands as if they might suddenly begin to speak, revealing what he was meant to do with his life. So he’d once stared, when he was a boy, at a beautiful stone Samuel gave him, which was marked with coin-sized reticulated disks.

  One minute these were decorations, elegant and mysterious. The next—the sun was glaring through the window, the cicadas were shrieking their hot-weather song; it was three days before his thirteenth birthday and his pants were itching the tops of his thighs—the disks were the stems of plants, seen in cross-section. What had happened to his eyes? The familiar turned strange and the strange familiar: Margaret’s face would later turn overnight from an appealing arrangement of features into the countenance of the woman he loved, her skin enclosing blood and bone and a light he couldn’t name, which had seemed like life itself. Lavinia, who’d been folded into a stranger’s arms when he last saw her, her small self pressed against the woman’s cloak, had twisted her head as the wagon began to roll and gazed directly at him.

  He looked up from his hands, at the horse ahead, at Miriam’s straight, slim back and her pale hair. At Grace, who had turned around and was looking back at him.

  Fire

  Out here, surrounded by the evidence of vanished rivers, Miriam thinks of that evening riding home along the frozen Ohio. At what moment had the stream of Caleb’s life bent and merged with hers? The people she’s left behind in Pittsburgh know nothing of this; nor does Stuart. When she finds herself signing, almost unconsciously—Was it what you wanted, was she like a daughter, was she more to you than your own daughters?—she is more reassured than surprised.

  She and Caleb were married for twenty-five years, and although it is Stuart to whom she’s been writing, she can’t help but reach at the same time toward the companion of her heart. Caleb was proud, she knows, that he made the Academy for the Deaf into a place known throughout the country. Five of their first students have themselves become teachers of the deaf, one opening a school in Kentucky and another in Missouri. A long way from the early days of the children teaching her and Caleb and Stuart their home-signs while they taught back everything else they knew, history and geography and botany, the way to roast a joint or dress a loom. How bold they’d been, and what unexpected gifts Caleb had turned out to have!

  In her opinion they were lucky despite meeting so late in his life: their school’s success, and their three healthy children, more than many get. Was that enough? It was never like him to complain. She always knew that his fascination for Grace was part of his bond to her. As he always knew what she most wanted. And if he didn’t feel for her exactly what he felt for Margaret, if his mind wasn’t braided as closely with hers as it was with Stuart’s—what did that matter? They worked together, they made a life. In the dormitory they built for the boarders, they sometimes found the children, late at night, huddled around an illegal candle with their hands flying urgently. Despite the risk of fire, Caleb could never bear to snuff the flame.

  She walks to the edge of the bluff, lifts her skirt calf-high, and sits with her feet dangling into the cool, sweet air. It is almost dark, and although Grace has a lantern with her and always works until the last minute, Miriam likes to watch over her sister’s final ascent. She waves her arm, signaling across the ravine to where she can see one shoulder, one lifted arm, a fraction of Grace’s gleaming head moving up the narrow trail. When Grace signals back, Miriam rises, shakes the dust from her skirt, and prepares to start a fire.

  The people around them, concealed by the twisting bluffs and canyons but near enough as the crow flies, will read in the column of smoke, she knows, the news that they’re still here. Soldiers uneasily surveying the Bad Lands under the eyes of the Lakota; the acquisitive geologist, meant to keep an eye on her and Grace, whom the Lakota call picks-up-stones-running; the Lakota themselves, with whom she and Grace converse in an Indian si
gn language somewhat similar to their own—all of them, Miriam thinks, wishing the inconvenient women would leave. Or perhaps they wish something else entirely, their true desires as hidden as the paths by which she and Caleb reached the decisions that shaped their lives.

  Were you happy? she signs to Caleb. Under this vast and steely sky the world seems ancient, and very large. She feeds more grass to the little flame and adds this: I was.

  The Mysteries of Ubiquitin

  WHEN THEY MET, ROSE was standing in the cool, airy kitchen of the house on Keuka Lake, peering with fierce concentration into a yellow pottery bowl. Her mother’s fingers were wrapped around hers. “This is folding,” Suky said, and together they guided a rubber spatula through the egg whites and into the batter, turning two phases into one. Beside them Rose’s sister, Bianca, licked the chocolate pot and said, “I want a turn.” Then there was a gentle knock at the screen door, and when Rose looked up from her task she saw, against a background of hollyhocks and hills, a tall man letting himself into their house as if he belonged there. Her mother sprang into this stranger’s arms, leaving Rose openmouthed.

  “You’re here!” Suky said. “And just in time. Girls, you remember Peter Kotov?”

  But they did not remember him at all. Rose was eight and a half that summer, Bianca seven; and even when Suky reminded them that they had glimpsed Peter a few years earlier at their grandfather Leo’s funeral, they could not recall him, they had been babies then. This was the afternoon that Rose, forever afterward, would count as their first meeting. She would remember the way Suky fit so easily in Peter’s embrace and how, after the cake was cooled and frosted, her father, Theo, tromped in sunburnt and smiling and shouted with glee at the sight of his friend.