Servants of the Map

by Andrea Barrett

  She forgave him after a couple of days—she had work to do, and twenty-three other men who needed her attention. On a Friday night when the moon was full and a quiet drizzle fell, she opened Colm’s gift and read:

  The Adirondack Wilderness, or the “North Woods,” as it is sometimes called, lies between the Lakes George and Champlain on the east, and the river St. Lawrence on the north and west. It reaches northward as far as the Canada line, and southward to Booneville. Its area is about that of the state of Connecticut.

  A place the size of a state, with no more than a handful of settlements: small clusters of people amid a thousand lakes and hundreds of peaks. The opposite of Ireland, she thought. How could there be so much empty land? She flipped through the pages, eyeing the chapter titles. In the back she found advertisements for fishing tackle and hunting rifles, recommendations for reliable guides, descriptions of the few modest inns. She read, uncomprehendingly at first—You can’t imagine it, she later told Elizabeth, you cannot imagine what this felt like—these words:

  THE NORTHVIEW INN

  Boats, Guides, Provisions, etc furnished for

  CAMPING PARTIES

  Comfortable ROOMS

  Hunting and Fishing Trophies PREPARED ON-SITE, as Desired

  Terms per DAY or per WEEK

  Innkeeper: Ned Kynd.

  3

  Dinner was lovely, the leg of mutton perfectly tender and the gravy smooth; everyone was pleased. But although Elizabeth brought a tray to Martin, and although mutton had always been his favorite, he didn’t take a bite. She brought the tray down untouched and said nothing to Andrew, who as always presided buoyantly over the table.

  Once dinner was over, though, once Andrew rose and headed, like the others, for the inevitable afternoon’s rest in bed, Elizabeth put on her boots and her heavy cloak and left the house. Now she walks swiftly through the village—past the new hotel, past the lumber mill, past the boardinghouses rising nearby. Here, as everywhere else, there are far more patients than places for them. Despite the private sanatorium up on the hill, run by the famous doctor; despite the enormous, state-sponsored sanatorium for the destitute, and the one for sick foresters, and the one for children; despite the one that is really a prison, taking in consumptive inmates from all over the state; and despite the dozens of private rest-cure homes like her own, the hotel still bulges with invalids awaiting admission to a more permanent place. A newly built spur of the railway brings health-seekers right to the center of her adopted village: now a well-known center for the cure.

  Around her are cure-porches, cure-chairs, the shops that build the chairs and the offices of the doctors who treat the patients lying on the chairs that line the porches. Dr. Davis, who calls on her boarders each week, displays his name on a bold brass plaque—befitting, he must think, the size of his practice. Yet so far he’s been no help in finding a replacement for Mrs. Temple. She might have known better than to ask him. All his energy goes into lecturing his patients, which he does in a folksy tone she finds annoying.

  Consumption, he likes to say, when he gathers her boarders together—but let us call it by its modern scientific name, tuberculosis— is caused by a germ, the tubercle bacillus. In our lungs the bacilli cause tiny dots of disease which the lung tries to wall off with scar tissue: these dots we call tubercles, little tubers. Your recovery depends on maintaining and strengthening this scar tissue, which is at first as delicate as a spider’s web. Which is why you must rest. Why you must not exert yourselves or give in to anxiety or do anything, such as pick up an eager child—months ago he publicly, infuriatingly, chided Martin Sawyer—to cause a sudden deep breath or contract your chest muscles. Break the delicate scars and the germs escape, seeding disease in other parts of the lung. Build up your resistance; let the lungs make walls so perfect, so strong, that the germs are starved to death.

  Some days, when his mood is particularly bouncy, he’ll cast the germs as slow but sturdy hoplites undermining the lungs; the ones who break out as anomalous fleet-heeled messengers spreading deadly news. Stop the messengers! he barks at his invalids. Starve out the troops! It’s almost touching, the faith he has in words. He passes out pamphlets, magazines, and his own private exhortations, which he prints on colored cards. Each of her boarders’ rooms boasts an example of his latest:

  REMEMBER!

  If treatment is begun early most cases of tuberculosis can be cured, but it requires determination, perseverance, and often self-denial to accomplish it. There are no known specifics which will cure tuberculosis in the sense of directly affecting its exciting cause (the tubercle bacillus). The only known treatment is the indirect one of developing and maintaining a resistance to the toxemia of the infection—a method we call “the out-door life” or “the cure.”

  The four essentials of this treatment are—

  Follow your doctor’s advice absolutely

  Breathe pure out-door air both night and day

  Take an abundance of nourishing food

  Rest, rest, rest

  Most patients must devote their entire time to getting well.

  Elizabeth might embrace his advice more wholeheartedly—here she rounds the bend in the river and passes the house that once belonged to Dr. Kopeckny—if she’d not already seen so much change. Every few years she’s had to adapt her furnishings and her schedule to reflect the latest medical theories. Often she wishes she’d been present for the crucial early years, when Dorrie’s mother first started taking in boarders and Nora was first visiting them. No one knew what caused consumption then, never mind what cured it. Nora, recollecting those times, once painted a picture for her of a typical February afternoon.

  In six houses, on four different streets, eight men suffering from consumption are sitting out in the clear, cold air. Patient, bored, patiently bored, they’re so muffled in blankets and coats as to be almost indistinguishable. The smallest happening, Nora said—three pigeons wheeling in concert across the sky, a squirrel skittering up a tree—is seized on as entertainment. What else is there to do? The village, in those years which Elizabeth can only imagine, consists of one store, two sawmills, five streets, a handful of houses. A small hotel, open only in summer, which looks across the river to a few farms dotting the valley and the lower slopes. The healthy residents have boats to build, land to till, livestock to tend, and game to shoot; houses and clothing and implements to make and repair: there is always work. The strangers sitting idly among them have only these long blank hours. The quiet is meant to cure them. The sweet freezing air, the constant, uplifting, improving sight of the stony mountains—And us, Nora said. To help them, besides the air and the quiet, they had us.

  Sometimes, Elizabeth imagines now, the invalids must have gathered on a single porch, gossiping with each other; this would have helped. Sometimes they must have been cheered by the sight of Nora walking toward them along the river, a pack-basket on her back and her gray-striped hair blowing messily in the wind. Those who spent more than one winter here would learn tricks, which they’d pass to the new arrivals. Fur coats they found excellent, sheepskin and mink and raccoon. Best if the collar comes up over the ears and the pockets are big. Loose woolen mittens, worn inside deerskin mittens, are ideal. The hat—what about the hat? A wool cap, a knitted stocking cap, a fur hat with ear flaps. They trade among themselves as they see what works best.

  Still they do this, Elizabeth thinks. Some parts of the cure never change, no matter what the doctors discover.

  Then, as now, they wrote to their relatives with requests; then too the village residents adapted to the invalids’ shifting tastes. Someone began to tan sheepskins for jackets. Someone else started making gloves, someone imported woolen sleeping bags and hot-water bottles. Now the livery caters to the sick, the builders specialize in storm enclosures. The hardware store sells sled robes and foot warmers while the drugstore sells cod-liver oil and pasteboard sputum boxes. The cobbler makes enormous sheepskin-lined moccasins and the carpenter makes coffins.
Of which there are, Elizabeth belatedly realizes, two at the depot, awaiting a train—patients from one of the sanatoriums, returning home to their families.

  So will Martin Sawyer travel, she thinks. This part has never changed either. As she rounds a corner, wishing that Martin might leave them some other way, the Northview Inn comes into sight. It too has hardly changed. Warped dock, sagging gutters, siding in need of paint. It’s still the same modest size, with the same unimproved and slightly disheveled waterfront that she and Gillian and their mother, Clara, first saw one hazy, apparently unremarkable afternoon. Only the cottage has been added.

  The cove is shining, not yet frozen but dotted with patches of water so still that by morning, if the wind doesn’t rise, they’ll have turned into floating islands of thinnest ice. The cove will appear to be open, but beyond the frozen rim birds will be standing far from shore, quite casually, on what still looks like water. Some will walk a few steps and then be swimming. I wish, Nora had once said, apologizing as soon as the words registered on Elizabeth’s face, I so wish that you and Andrew had been able to have children.

  4

  Nora couldn’t leave Detroit fast enough, once she knew one of her brothers was alive. She left Fannie, she left her job; she bundled up her bewildered son. On the train Michael wore a light jacket, which Fannie had made for him; a cloth cap that was his especial pride. The sheer novelty of travel entertained him for a while. But the train kept moving and moving; his soft red hair grew dark with sweat. This was July, and the weather was beastly all along the lake. Weary, unhappy, Michael glared at his mother and said, “I want to go home.”

  And still Nora pressed them on: to the steamboat dock on Lake Champlain; then into the enormous, strangely dressed crowd crushed onto the steamer and fighting for beds in Plattsburgh. She wiped Michael’s face with a damp cloth and fed him tidbits from the hamper she’d packed, unable to explain to him all that had conspired to tear her family apart. Ireland was a word to him, England was another. Her days at Grosse Isle he knew nothing about, and she would never tell him. He clung to her hand as she tried to get seats on the stage and then gave in to an overcharging wagon driver. Who were these people, massed everywhere she wanted to be? Later she’d learn that the newspapers had given them a name: they—she and Michael included—were “Murray’s Fools.” Colm Larkin, as plenty of people would tell her, had not been the only one to read that cheerful yellow book and believe a stay in the Adirondacks would save his life.

  Caught among the several thousand visitors swarming into a wilderness that had, in earlier seasons, welcomed no more than several hundred, Nora was shrill, her voice loud with desperation. No one, she’d later tell Elizabeth, no one who hasn’t lost a family can understand this. When the driver dumped them off at the Northview Inn after hours of jolting along a corduroy road, she and Michael were two among a dozen. Nora’s first sight of her brother, after twenty-two years, was this: a slim, pale, dark-haired man, still youthful-looking, but weary, standing on the porch of the inn with hands held out in a rueful gesture. The last time she’d seen him, he’d hardly been older than Michael. She might not have recognized him if he hadn’t been speaking.

  “We’re full,” he said. And there was his voice, still fresh and flavored with home. “We’ve been full for weeks.” Now she could see that he’d grown to look rather like their father.

  Michael leaned against her side, asleep on his feet. “Look up,” she whispered. “That’s your uncle.”

  There were lines around Ned’s mouth, and the skin was gray beneath his eyes; she couldn’t puzzle out what had happened to his nose. A small part of it seemed to have melted, as if the flesh were wax. Ten people rushed past her and swarmed him, crying that they must have a bed, they must have a meal, they had traveled for days; to each of them Ned spoke kindly. He had no beds, he repeated. But they were welcome to take their supper here, after which he’d make arrangements to carry them into the village. There they might find transport to another inn, to the rail station, or back to the ferry dock. Perhaps some of the villagers might have spare rooms to rent.

  The crowd shuffled and grumbled and still Nora stood back, her arm around Michael. Finally Ned looked over the heads of the others to her.

  “Ned?” she said. He gazed at her blankly. She’d grown very thin; her heavy black hair, striped with white, no longer hung loose but was braided and coiled in a careless knot. She had deep lines around her eyes and her hands were dry and cracked. “Ned?” she said again. “It’s me. Nora.”

  What went through his mind then? Everything, everything. Around him the inn dissolved and the angry visitors disappeared. His sister had left him, she was dead. Since the morning when strangers had ferried her unconscious body away from him, he had lived an entire life: twenty-two years, during which he’d believed that in all the world he no longer had a single living relative. Those in Ireland had toppled all at once, like a village blown down by a windstorm. Over here Nora had vanished, then Denis; leaving him more alone than he’d thought a person could be.

  For a minute, when he first saw Nora again, everything seemed to exist at once: both the toppled village of his childhood and his whole confusing life since then, which contained, on the one hand, this inn and its guests and his taxidermy shop, the mountains with their harsh and changeable weather, his beloved dogs moving swiftly through the brush—and, on the other, his essential solitude. Although he loved his hounds, and had companions among the guides, the life that moved within him was hidden from everyone. Denis and Nora had been the last to know him; Denis was dead. Where had his sister been? Her hair, once as thick and black as a horse’s tail, was ruined. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He would never be able to explain himself. He held out his arms and said, “Nora.”

  Why, during their first days together, did she ask so many questions? Her prying made him indignant. His reserve made her feel rejected. Both were bewildered by the way they jangled and clashed, despite the joy of being together: where was the ease of their childhood?

  Ned tried to compress his life into stories that he could stand to tell and she could stand to hear, but this was like trying to convey, by the example of one perfectly stuffed rough-legged hawk, the essence not only of that single living creature, but of what it meant to be a hawk. In his taxidermy shop, where he hid after his worst failures with his sister, he stared at his recent work. Wings, splayed open in flight, conveyed nothing about their compact folded shape at rest. One bird said nothing about the others. His words—about, say, his years with the French-Canadian farmer who’d worked him so hard, or his first stay in these woods, at the lumber camp; about his winter with the consumptive lawyer who’d taught him to read, or his travels with the naturalists who’d trained him in taxidermy—were equally deceitful fragments of the truth.

  “I don’t understand,” Nora said one day, after he’d started a sentence, faltered, and then snapped at her in exasperation. “Why is it so hard to explain what happened to you? I tell you as much as I can remember.”

  “I thought you were dead,” he said. They were in the kitchen; she’d moved all his spoons. He moved them back. “Can’t you imagine what that was like? I never thought of my life as something I’d want to tell you about someday. I wasn’t trying to remember. Most of it I was trying to forget.”

  He kept to himself the harsher truth—that there were days, still, when he woke and forgot that she’d been returned to him. When, until he heard her speaking softly with Michael, he couldn’t wholly resuscitate the corpse he’d once seen carried off a ship. For a few seconds each morning, until their great good fortune came clear in his mind again, she was a stranger to him.

  “It’s not that I didn’t miss you,” he added. “I thought of you every day.”

  That was the truth; the happiness that filled him when he looked out a window and saw Nora and Michael crossing the yard with their hands clasped, or when Michael leaned calmly against his shoulder, was also true. Yet still he flinched eac
h time Nora dug into his past. The things he preferred not to think about—his sea voyage especially, his winter trapped in the arctic ice—attracted her most sharply. When she asked about his nose, he sighed and went into another room, then returned and explained that he’d once found work as a cook on a ship—not a whaling ship, nor a navy ship, but an arctic exploring ship, which had sailed farther north than she could imagine—and on that voyage had suffered from frostbite. He turned from her. “Do I look so different?”

  “It’s hardly noticeable,” she replied. Which was true if she stood to his right; she tried not to stand to his left.

  “At first I couldn’t stand to have people looking at me,” he said. “I still don’t like it, I hate it when you stare.”

  “I’m not staring,” she said. “I missed you, I like to look at you now that I can.”

  What she took from his hesitant explanations was that they’d been apart too long. They’d been through too much alone—this was no one’s fault, it was their misfortune—and now they couldn’t explain their lives to each other. Baffled, she watched the way Ned leapt into his work the instant he rose, as if he dreaded sharing a minute’s idle conversation over their first cups of tea. He was glad to have her and Michael there, he said. More glad than he could say. Right now, though, he was very busy.

  Forty guests filled the Northview Inn, spread between the two bottom floors of the main building and the low wing angled back from the lake. After a huge breakfast of eggs and muffins and chops and venison steaks, potatoes and coffee and more, the guests assembled on the porch: like children, Nora thought, waiting to be amused. Then the guides would slide up in their slim rowing boats and the guests would turn to Ned for advice. Who should go to Paul Smith’s on St. Regis Lake and who to Bartlett’s? Would the two gentlemen from Albany share a boat and guide between them or live like kings and hire two boats? And what about cartridges, and fishing lures, and the choice of guns and hatchets? If there were ladies among the guests—they were rare then—some would want to hire horses and others to climb a mountain.