Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

For a while, then, there was no discussion of the Carnegie Museum’s acquisition of a nearly complete Apatosaurus or the newly named Albertosaurus; both men were focused on Lawrence, who didn’t speak for almost a year after his mother left. They hid her note from him: Lawrence can manage without me now, she’d written. If I stay here any longer I will die. I have taken Charles, he’s too young to leave behind. The hats she’d left on the closet shelf gathered a yellow haze of pollen before Lawrence cut them apart with the garden shears.

In their efforts to comfort the boy, and to shape a daily routine around his gaping loss, Miles and Edward drew even closer. Miles visited the Hazelius house each day, ate dinner with the pair each night, helped Lawrence with his studies and answered his questions. Still unmarried himself, he taught Lawrence everything he could and felt rushing back to him, when he showed Lawrence a set of bones or a model, the delight he’d felt at a similar age. Dinosauria, he would tell Lawrence, lit up again as he’d been as a boy. Later revised to two great orders by Seeley: Ornithischia, the bird-hipped dinosaurs; Saurischia, the lizard-hipped.

“Ni- this chia,” Lawrence would lisp.

He was tall for his age and loved the outdoors. When he turned eleven, Miles and Edward started taking him on fossil-collecting expeditions during their summer vacations. Miles, who by then had had enough trouble with his lungs that he’d ended two romances and given up the idea of marrying, found that camping outside helped him, and also that Lawrence flourished in the sun and the dry air. By the summer of 1914, Edward was able to arrange positions for all three of them as volunteer assistants to a collecting expedition run by a famous team of paleontologists.

Two large flatboats set off early that June, each with a center-mounted tent that sheltered cots and a cookstove and food, tools for excavating the fossils and sacks of plaster of Paris. The professionals on the first boat, searching out the fossils in the cliffs and leaving behind markers and instructions, floated so far ahead that Miles didn’t see them often, but he’d found it thrilling simply to follow, digging and lugging as ordered. The two Canadian students in charge of them — Ewan and Alistair, disciples of the famous pair — praised them occasionally.

At first, Miles and Edward and Lawrence were allowed only to do the heavy digging. Once they’d proven themselves, though, they were granted the privilege of chipping away the matrix from the bones and helping apply the plaster bandages. Hot, heavy work, which Miles loved. Shoveling rocks and dirt, fetching water, cooking porridge or washing his shirts in the river: all of that was also fine. Each day brought a new discovery. The sun burned, the mosquitoes pierced their clothes. Huge hailstones fell so hard that their tents were knocked down and their arms, where they’d held canvas over their heads, were beaten black and blue. The work was so exciting that they didn’t mind.

Miles, who’d turned thirty-five that summer, felt as vigorous as he had in college and lost the cough that had nagged him all winter. Lawrence, who quickly proved that he could lift as much as Ewan or Alistair, row as hard and shoot as accurately, seemed happy too. Sometimes the three youngsters would go off hunting together, leaving Miles and Edward to nap, sunburned and pleased with themselves, under the canvas awning on the boat. Their group of five men, Miles thought, formed a perfect society, sharing equally in all the tasks and teaching each other, during the long stretches when they were floating down the water, whatever they knew. Ewan taught celestial navigation, which both Miles and Edward had always meant to study. Miles taught Ewan and Alistair a way to treat fragile shale so it wouldn’t splinter. Ewan and Alistair taught Lawrence how to steer the flatboat, and as Miles stood at the bow, looking back at Lawrence handling the huge steering oar, he knew that he and Edward had, even without a woman’s influence, done a fine job.

Those days floating down the river, between the fossil-laden cliffs; how delicious they’d been! He’d followed his father into the cement plant, rising through the ranks until he was ready to take over, but that was his duty: this, he loved. In early September, they finally reached the tiny town where they had to unload the specimens and prepare them for shipment east. Only then did they learn about the war.

Miles couldn’t blame Ewan and Alistair for running off to join the Canadian forces as soon as they heard; nor could he blame them for leaving him and Edward to manage the crating and shipment of the tons of specimens. But he couldn’t forgive them for encouraging Lawrence. One day Lawrence was on the boat and the next they found, where he should have been, an excited, apologetic note, more well-meaning than his mother’s but equally devastating. No one could track him down. Only after months, during which Miles and Edward took turns blaming each other — who had had the idea for the trip? Both of them, they finally agreed — did Lawrence write from France. Having lied about both his age and his citizenship, he’d succeeded in getting shipped off with a Canadian battalion dotted with other eager, illicit American volunteers.

Night after night Miles and Edward talked about what to do. They weren’t powerless; they could have forced Lawrence home. But his letters sang with hope and a desire to prove himself. Let me stay, he wrote. Let me do this. It’s what I have to do, what I want to do. Chloe had disappeared completely — she never wrote Edward and no one knew where she was, only that she’d run off with some stranger — and in her absence the men talked as any two parents might. In the end they agreed that they had to let him stay.

IN ALBERTA, Miles had felt so well that he’d considered once more trying to find a suitable wife and then, with her assistance, selling off the cement plant and devoting himself wholly to working with fossils. The feel of the bones under his hands, their hot, crumbling, dusty surfaces and the sense that he was holding the earth’s history, stroking the hidden parts of an animal no one had ever seen or could see, seemed like the only thing that had ever made him happy. In the days before they’d docked the flatboat and learned about the war, he’d stretched out on the deck at night and imagined changing his life. Just for once, he’d thought — during those months when he’d felt so strong and well, before the war started, before Lawrence left — he would leave his duties behind.

Instead, his lung complaint returned and he’d ended up at Mrs. Martin’s house, pampered and stuffed with her wonderful food, but bored beyond words. He had books shipped in by the carton, a dozen magazine subscriptions; Edward wrote weekly and he wrote back, but none of this was a substitute for real conversation. One day, after a restless night during which he recalled the pleasures of teaching Lawrence, a plan for Tamarack State had drifted into his mind. Immediately, he recognized that this was what he needed. Most of us were younger than Lawrence in terms of what we knew, even if we were older in years; he assumed that if he could teach Lawrence, he could teach us.

How mystifying, then, that only twelve of us came to his second session, most looking for that promised “exchange of work experience.” Failing that, we hoped for more talk about gunite; after Miles’s first presentation, Ephraim had mentioned that one of his wife’s cousins had worked with a cement gun while lining a siphon supplying water to New York, and that had made Miles’s work seem more interesting. Instead we got a talk about the process of excavating bones. On he went about the needed skills, the special tools, the patience. Special whisk brooms with stiff, flexible bristles were apparently helpful, and also some little awls, which were used to follow bits of bone in from the surface while being careful not to disturb the bone itself.