Archangel
fiction by
ANDREA BARRETT
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York · London
Dedication
for Cecile Pickart and William Bernhard
Epigraph
We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go.
We do not see that they only go out that archangels may come in. We are idolators of the old.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Compensation”
(Essays: First Series, 1841)
CONTENTS
Cover
Title
Dedication
Epigraph
The Investigators (1908)
The Ether of Space (1920)
The Island (1873)
The Particles (1939)
Archangel (1919)
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
Praise for Archangel
Also by Andrea Barrett
Reading Group Guide
Copyright
The Investigators
(1908)
Early that June, Constantine Boyd left Detroit with his usual trunk but got on a train headed east instead of west. For the past three summers he’d worked at his uncle’s farm in western Michigan, but now, just as he was becoming truly useful, his family had made other plans. Because a different uncle had requested the loan of him, he was being shipped elsewhere: like a harrow, or a horse.
He was twelve that summer of 1908, and he sulked all the way to Toledo, napped between Toledo and Cleveland, woke angry with his absent mother but then forgave her in Erie, when he found the cookies she’d slipped in beside the sandwiches. In Buffalo he passed a bank that looked like a castle, horses plodding along the canal, and a gigantic electric hoist moving grain from a ship into an empty boxcar. At the station where he switched for the train to Bath, he saw a motorized bicycle, one of the very sights his mother had promised, being chased by a terrier, and with that his bad mood slipped away. He was going someplace near water, he remembered. With new people, new things to see and do, away from the steaming city and his father.
In Bath, one of those new people carried Constantine’s trunk to a dusty automobile. “It was made up the road in Syracuse,” his mother’s younger brother said, running his knobby hand over the hood. “I know the engine’s inventor.”
“My mother says you’re an inventor too, sort of.”
“More of an … investigator,” his uncle said modestly. His hair was springy, almost wiry, brown strands mingled with surprising gray. “But I’ve made a few small things. Have you ridden in an automobile before?”
“Twice,” Constantine said, doubling his one ride in Detroit.
“You’re an old hand, then. Now”—the engine started with a clatter—“what shall we call each other? I’m not old enough for the whole uncle business. Why don’t you just call me Taggart?”
In profile, and despite his hair and his bony forehead, he did resemble Constantine’s mother. The two of them had grown up here, along with the older brother who owned the dairy farm where Constantine usually went. First Harry had headed west, wanting a bigger spread and land more suited to grain than vineyards. Then—this was almost all Constantine knew about this side of his family—his mother had gone to Detroit with his father. Taggart had stayed behind with their parents; later the parents had died.
His new uncle raced through the valley, showing off the engine’s power as they passed potato fields, vineyards, farmhouses, a cemetery. Long low hills, like rows of dogs with their rounded backs touching, lined the flats on either side and seemed to breathe with the shadows sliding down their flanks. His uncle, following the shadow of another cloud, said, “What do you like to be called?”
“Stan,” he said firmly. Why not try it out here? Stan was mature and experienced, not easily surprised.
“Stan,” his uncle repeated. And then they turned left up one of the hills and followed the curving road along a ridge before stopping at a white house surrounded by fields. His uncle carried the trunk inside. From the porch, which wrapped around most of the house, Constantine could see the tip of Keuka Lake below, a few boats still moving about and the moon, already visible, sharing the sky with the setting sun. The little cluster of buildings and streets between the lake and the base of their hill was, said Taggart, the village of Hammondsport.
CONSTANTINE SLEPT THROUGH that evening’s milking, through dinner, and all through the night, missing the morning milking as well. When he woke, he followed the smell of cooking sausage to the kitchen but stopped in the door when he found, instead of his uncle, a girl standing over the stove and a large man fiddling with some papers at the table.
“Come in!” the man said. “You must be the nephew.”
“Stan,” he said faintly.
“Mr. Wyman,” the man replied. “Or maybe”—he looked up at the actual uncle, who had just come in—“Uncle Ed?”
“I told him just to call me Taggart.”
“Very modern,” the stranger said. “Ed, then.”
A blocky person, in all dimensions: square shoulders, solid square trunk, broad palms, forehead like a playing card. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight? The same age, Constantine calculated, as his uncle.
“You—live here?” he ventured.
The men turned to watch a cardinal flash across the window. “Ed’s my lodger,” Taggart said, turning back. “We went to Cornell together. And this”—he gestured toward the girl at the stove, who looked to be about eighteen—“this is Beryl.”
She nodded, stacking sausage on a plate. Her hair was the same oaky brown as Ed’s, although she was much slighter—his sister, perhaps? In this wandering house, where each room was two steps up or one down from the next and where doors opened unpredictably into bedrooms or a hall or a porch, there might be a whole separate wing where lodgers lived.
“Beryl comes in daily,” Taggart said, moving behind Ed’s chair and next to her. “To cook for us, and clean.”
Beryl smiled and handed Taggart the plate. Three cheerful faces, perfectly unreadable behind their adult masks, smiling blandly at him. How were they all related? He had no idea what they were to each other, or how he was meant to fit in. Nor was the farmstead itself any more understandable at first.
Some things he recognized: vegetable garden, berry patch, fields of oats and timothy, horses and barns. An orchard, oddly arranged with many different types of trees. Corn, but instead of a big field with the stalks all similar, short rows interrupted by stakes and colored tags. The vegetable garden was dotted with labels, measuring tapes, and scales. A pond, fed by a little stream, was marked by colored glass floats, gates at either end, nets on the grass at the edge; a long bed of scraggly stems turned out not to be a vegetable but evening primroses from which the flowers had been snipped. Even the animals were unexpected, no flock or herd of any one thing. Three odd-looking red chickens mingled with half a dozen frizzled cochins and a dozen bearded, cream- and coffee-colored birds. There were big ducks and small, grey geese and white, some small fowl he didn’t recognize; a pair of Berkshire pigs but also Chester Whites and two breeds he’d never seen before. Goats, ewes, and—at last!—eleven milking cows, each golden brown and small but different in other ways. Where the Holsteins on his other uncle’s farm had been similar in size and color and temperament, here—were these Jerseys, mixed-breed, what?
Taggart and Ed had bred them, Constantine learned, as part of a project to develop a more compact cow with a modest yield of high-butterfat milk. A spring balance hung on the wall, next to a chart with a column for each cow and rows for each morning’s and evening’s milking; Constantine was to weigh each pail of milk and note the result. Also to weigh the amount fed to each calf, and to measure the calves themselves dai
ly. The pigs and goats and lambs and fowl all had their own measurements, charts, and scales. And then the plants had to be measured and inspected, some had to be hand-pollinated, fruit trees wanted grafting, seedlings in cold frames needed transplanting—too much work, Taggart said, for just the two of them. Especially this summer, when they were also involved with other projects.
“Which was why we were glad to invite you,” he told Constantine, at the end of that exhausting first day. By then, Constantine had grasped that his tasks here were going to be as different from the straightforward round of feeding, milking, and mucking out as the rambling buildings were from his other uncle’s big plain barns. Partly he was excited, and partly he wanted to throw himself under one of the massive old trees and sleep until fall came again. “Your mother said you’d been doing wonderfully at Harry’s, so we thought you’d be perfect here.”
This feed for these ducks, this mixture of grain for this cow; draw off this much milk from Susie’s bucket to feed the bull calf with the star on his forehead and make sure to put the amounts in this notebook; his uncle, he could tell, half expected him to lose track of it all. But his uncle had no idea what he could do. After he milked his first two cows, Taggart brought over his own stool and sat down to strip the last, richest drops—then looked up, surprised, to find nothing left behind. Constantine knew, too, that his handwriting was tidy, his columns of figures straight and his sums correct; he was deft with the utensils and easy with the calves. Less visible, but more important, was what he’d learned at his other uncle’s farm: an ability to keep working, without complaint, no matter how tired and lonely he really was. Here, the hours whisked by and the tasks were mostly pleasant. But what was he doing them for?
AND WHAT WERE all the books for? One called Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication next to the sofa, another called The Mutation Theory out on the porch, the parlor table heaped with agricultural and horticultural magazines, seed catalogs and nursery brochures, issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. A book about electrical circuits under one of the lamps and all the bookshelves spilling extra papers. At his school in Detroit, he shared a handful of torn textbooks with everyone else in that densely crowded room and seldom turned a page himself, but here Taggart and Ed always seemed to be reading or discussing what they read, a froth of words that made Constantine’s head spin. He tried to filter out most of it, taking only what was directly useful to whatever he was doing at that moment.
Late on his fourth afternoon there, Ed gave him two fat books about the theory and practice of grafting and a twenty-minute demonstration, which he watched closely. He flicked through the books and set them aside as soon as Ed left; then went to work with a plum tree and the excellent little knife Ed had loaned him. Trimming buds from his bud stick, he cut his thumb twice—but finally he got three buds tied and waxed into the bark slits. When he straightened up, he saw someone he didn’t recognize standing in the pond.
A woman, he realized, rubbing clay and beeswax from his hands as he walked over. And old enough to be his grandmother, with a creased face and gray hair knotted beneath a broad-brimmed hat. That, and her cotton work pants, had first made him think she was a man.
“Give me a hand?” she called. She was pulling on a rope attached to one of the floats.
He hurried to the edge of the pond, stripped off his boots and socks, and waded in, flinching as his toes sank into the muck. Something sharp nicked his left heel and he lifted it, before uneasily setting it down again: rock, glass, fishbone, wire, tooth?
“What should I do?”
“Help me lift this out.”
Through the cloudy brown water he reached for a curved rim, tugging to the surface one end of what turned out to be a mesh cylinder the size of an apple crate. Inside were fish, flopping unhappily as he and the stranger towed it closer to the bank. “A trap?”
The woman nodded, pointing out the wire funnel while unhinging the opposite end. “Catfish, mostly.” She reached inside, pushing the bodies around so she could examine them all. “But I was hoping to get at least one of the fish from Kentucky. No luck today, though.” She retrieved her hand and shook the creatures into the water. “Thank you for helping. Are you working here?”
“Taggart’s my uncle,” he explained.
“Good to meet you,” she said. “I’m your uncle’s old high school teacher—Miss Henrietta Atkins.” Her grip was shockingly strong and so warm, despite the water, that it felt electric. “Nice thing, to have a nephew,” she added. “I have five nieces.”
A fish, perhaps one they’d just released, broke the surface behind her and then disappeared again. “One’s about your age. You’ll be in school here this fall?”
But they were no longer alone. Taggart, who’d appeared from wherever he was working and now stood at the edge of the water holding a long tube, said, “Stan’s visiting for the summer. He’s helping us out with some projects.”
How foolish his new name suddenly sounded! “Constantine,” he said to Miss Atkins. Taggart looked at him quizzically. “I changed my mind.”
“A person should always be able to do that,” his uncle said. He waved the tube over the trap. “Anything?”
“Not today,” Miss Atkins said. She stepped out, pulling the empty trap behind her and revealing bare feet below pants soaked from knee to hem. A little turn of her wrist unfurled a rolled skirt from her waist and concealed her legs. “But I brought fresh bait.” She was slighter than Constantine had first thought and only an inch or two taller than he was.
“Do you think they’re still alive?” Taggart asked.
Pushing into the conversation, wanting for once not to be left in the state of confusion in which he spent part of every day, Constantine said, “These fish—what are they?”
“Cave fish,” Miss Atkins explained, dropping a foul-smelling gobbet into the trap. “Amblyopsis spelaeus, native to a cave in Kentucky. They don’t have any eyes. They’re flesh-colored, almost white, and when they’re moving, they look like skinned catfish swimming on their backs. Smaller though.” She measured out three or four inches between her forefinger and her thumb.
“But why …?” Constantine said.
“Why are we interested?” Taggart said. He smiled at his old teacher. “We’re both just curious about them—there’s a lot of discussion about how they evolved. Why do you think a cave-dwelling species might lose its eyes?”
They were both looking at him intently. “Because they don’t need their eyes in the dark?” he offered. How would he know? “If they can find food by sound, or by touch, I guess it wouldn’t hurt them not to have eyes, since the other animals around them couldn’t see any better in the dark. Maybe eyes just disappear, if we don’t use them?”
Taggart nodded. “Good guess—but when you really question the mechanism of how that happens, it’s not so straightforward. Maybe some fish began exploring the outer parts of the cave long ago, and when they found food and shelter there, they moved back a bit farther into the cave with each generation, and as it got darker, those with imperfect eyes but more highly developed other senses were selected for, adaptations appearing little by little until finally those who made it deep into the cave had no eyes at all.”
Constantine closed his own eyes for an instant, trying to picture this.
“Or maybe a whole group of fish were swept into the cave during a flood,” his uncle continued, “and the ones with perfect eyes found a glimmer of light and swam out, but a few who already had imperfect eyes were trapped, and bred, and eventually lost their eyes entirely. Or maybe, outside the cave, some sport with no eyes appeared, the way a peculiar plant or animal pops up here—but then instead of that fish staying in its regular habitat, where it would have died, it fell or swam into a cave, where having no eyes wasn’t fatal? And then somehow it found a mate, and then—”
Was this how adults thought? Maybe this, maybe that, and then and then and then.
“They’re just interesting,”
Miss Atkins interrupted. “My friend Daphne asked if I knew anything about them—people writing and arguing about evolution and Darwinism always point to these fish. So when one of Taggart’s friends started studying them in Kentucky, we jumped at his offer to send us some. We turned them loose in the pond and figured we’d see what happened. If they’re exposed to light, will their offspring develop eyes? If they breed with some other fish, will the offspring be blind, or not? Every now and then we drop in some traps, or run a net through part of the pond, to see what we find. So if you do see one …”
Constantine nodded and promised to let her know, suddenly overwhelmed by the sun beating down on his head, and his fierce concentration with the bud grafts and the beeswax, and this rush of words and ideas. Why not just keep the fish in a cage, or in a little pool by themselves, where they could be looked at and handled whenever you wanted? He backed away from the muddy pond, longing for the cool clear lake down below and the crowd of boys who swam there after chores and who, deep in their own pleasure, had let him splash among them yesterday without asking any questions. “Pete,” one had said, and then others offered their names, Luke and Corey and Frank and the rest; all he’d had to offer was his own (Stan hadn’t seemed so stupid then) and the phrase, “I’m visiting,” and someone had held out a hand to pull him up onto the dock.
HE SWAM THERE whenever he could get away; every day the heat grew worse and Taggart, who said they’d never had a June like this, asked Beryl to do all her cooking in the morning. That helped some, but beets had to be thinned regardless of the weather, the apple trees needed spraying with Bordeaux mixture, and they ended up doing heavy chores first thing in the morning and then again after dusk. When the sun was at its worst they retreated to the porch, where Ed wrote articles and Taggart did paperwork, leaving Constantine to doze and consider all he’d already learned, and to imagine exploring whatever else lay within walking distance of the farm.
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