Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

On September 13 I turned twenty: I am grown and what I write is mine; I may write whatever I want in any fashion. Wherever you are — perhaps you have headed out West? — you are now twenty-three. On an arid plain you may have picked up a glossopetra, shaped like the tongue of a man or a snake or a duck, and wondered if it rained from the sky on a moonless night. If you were here I would lift that triangular stone from your hand and say: This has nothing to do with the rain; this is the tooth of a shark.

A few times I have been alone with James. Once he arrived with a side of venison, a gift for the aunts, who were out. I was still a girl, perhaps sixteen; I was alone in the house. He arrived without servants and wouldn’t let me touch the meat or help him convey it to the smokehouse. As if I were a young lady, as if I had never prepared a meal or handled a bloody bundle of ribs. Even then I felt something like lightning pass between us. It has nothing to do with who we are, who we think we are; he knows nothing of me and I know only what I can see of him, his actions and possessions: the mysterious current leaping between us comes from someplace deeper. Our bodies speaking. Or maybe our souls; it has nothing to do with our minds.

Once we met in the woods, his woods, he out marking trees for felling and I walking furiously away from the aunts, filling my lungs with air; around me the wild profusion of tulip trees and witch hazel and honeysuckle, the beeches and myrtle and sugar maples, magnolias and pitcher plants. He asked if I was enjoying myself and when I stopped to answer I blushed and broke into a sweat, the hollows of my armpits weeping: all this from the sight of him, standing like a tree himself in the cool dark shadows.

And once — it is this that wakes me at night — once we were together a little longer. The aunts keep bees, not just for the honey but for what they represent. Our visitors are trotted out to the hives, shown their neatness and order, subjected to Aunt Daphne’s monologues about the virtues of bee-civilization. How the bees work as one, for a common goal; how they aid and nurture each other, raise their young, store up food for the winter; a community of females, the epitome of order. Into this model of virtue come the king-birds, who love above all else to eat bees. Once, last August, the aunts appealed to James for help and he came with a shotgun and slaughtered twenty birds. The aunts fled from the carnage, but I stayed. One bird, James said, was leading all the others; he pointed out a beautiful creature who snapped with great determination at a line of bees returning from the clover. This bird he brought down with a single shot, then retrieved it and laid it at my feet.

“May I show you something?” he said. “You’re not frightened of blood?”

“I am not,” I said.

He knelt with a penknife and slit the bird from throat to vent, plunging his hand in the craw. On a bit of smooth grass he laid handfuls of bees, shaking his head at their number. The sun was blazing bright, the air heavy with the scents of grass and clover; in that syrupy atmosphere the blanket of bees began to stir. To my astonishment half of them rose like Jonah from the whale, licked clean their rumpled golden down, and flew back to their hives apparently undamaged.

“All those,” he said with satisfaction. “In that single bird.”

I couldn’t say a word. I think he knew what I felt. A cloud passed over the sun as the bees vanished into their hive; the sky darkened and mosquitoes rose from the pond and arrowed toward us. I was looking at James, watching hypnotized as he lifted his arm and reached in my direction. Gently, firmly, he pressed his palm against my forearm, flattening the creature who had already penetrated my skin. When he lifted his hand we both stared at the streak of blood, so red against my whiteness. He was the one who blushed that time; he picked up his gun and bowed. “I am glad I could be of use to your aunts,” he said; and then he left. I wanted to lick the blood from my arm, I wanted to lick his arm. Oh, what use is this?

Mr. Wells again today.

He sat with us, we all drank tea; the aunts showed him part of the Manual. “And Lavinia?” he inquired. His hands on the papers were long and intelligent.

“She helps with every step,” said Aunt Jane.

“But also,” I said, “also I am working on something of my own.”

Aunt Daphne sniffed; Cassandra entered, bearing a grasshopper, and busied herself in tearing it apart.

“What is it that interests you?” Mr. Wells said. Which no one ever asks me.

“What you would expect,” I replied, and told him what I would tell you, if you were here. “How a cloud floats, when water is much heavier than air. How cloud particles form from vapor; and how raindrops grow from those particles. Whether the winds drive the particles together, coalescing them.”

He looked puzzled yet also, I thought, interested. “There are rains of manna and quails in the Bible,” he said. “And in Pliny the Elder, rains of milk and blood and birds and wool.”

What I wanted to say was this: It was raining the day they took us from each other.

Q. What kind of rain?

A. A light rain, a drizzling rain.

Q. You remember that?

A. It is almost all I remember. On the muddy ground our household burns without flame, the smoke rising up through the fine rain falling down. You have no face. Your figure, clad in damp homespun, disappears into a cloud.

What I said was, “Rains of fish.” The aunts, who don’t remember the rain, have no idea what asking me to collate these theories has meant. “And of frogs and hay and grain and bricks,” I continued. “But almost everyone agrees that those result from whirlwinds.”

Mr. Wells bent down to Cassandra, meaning I think to rescue the grasshopper; too late, she had left nothing but the wings. He straightened with these in his right hand. “Rains of stone,” he said, augmenting our list. “Do you know the theory of the lapidifying juice?” Aunt Daphne struggled to maintain the expression of deferential interest she feels is proper with such men.

“Through the earth’s crust moves a fluid body, or juice, that can turn various substances into stone,” said Mr. Wells, nodding in the aunts’ direction but addressing me. Really his face is very kind, almost handsome in its own way. His linen is clean, his hands as well; but on the middle finger of his right hand is a callus always stained with ink. “It is also found in the sea, and in the atmosphere, in a gaseous form: moving through these layers as blood moves through the body. In the air this lapidifying juice makes pebbles, which fall to earth.”

“I have never heard of this,” I said.

“A sixteenth-century theory,” he said, setting down the broken wings. “An attempt to account for the generation of stones, and a distinct advance on the theory of the petrific seed.”

Another phrase I had never heard. The aunts turned the conversation toward their textbook before Mr. Wells could finish his thought, but later I was able to thank him for teaching me something new.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Do you investigate the theories of snow and hail and dew, as well as rain?”

When I told him I was interested in all the hydrometeors, he made me spell and define the word. “It’s just as you would expect,” I said. “If ‘meteor’ is any atmospheric phenomenon — think of meteorology —so we speak of the aerial meteors, or the winds; the luminous meteors, such as rainbows and halos; the igneous or fiery meteors, such as lightning and shooting stars. Among the watery or hydrometeors are all those things you mentioned.”

“Now we have made a fair trade,” he said. “You have taught me something new.”