Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Mr. Bartram listened attentively, Virgil perched on his shoulder and pecking at his spectacles. “This is most interesting,” he said. Then he rose and beckoned us to follow him down the gentle slope from the house to the river, touring us through the persimmons and walnuts, the odd vines tangled high in the chestnuts, the cider press perched above the water, and the pond he’d deepened and banked with stone.

As we walked around the pond something went plop and plop and plop: “My little green frogs,” Mr. Bartram said fondly. “At night their croaking keeps us awake.” When he waved his arms about, fending off the clouds of mosquitoes and gnats, the strands of white hair left on his head rose and danced in the sun. He walked quickly for such an old man but I kept up with him, delighted with the black calf boots Mr. Wells had given me as a belated birthday gift. At the peach grove Virgil leapt down from Mr. Bartram’s shoulder and pecked inquisitively at my boot buttons. “Was he hard to train?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Mr. Bartram said. “His wit is prodigious. The first time he saw me pulling weeds from the vegetable garden he watched for a while and then hopped over and began plucking blades of grass from the ground with his beak. When I am writing, and he would rather I came outside, he pulls the pen from my hands. You might train a crow yourself, if you desired a companion.”

“My aunts,” I said. “I think they would not …”

Mr. Bartram nodded. “Worthy women,” he said. “But very … tidy.” He gestured toward his specimens, which live in a tangle that might seem chaotic had he not explained it. For each plant he’d made a place imitating its natural home: a split rock if he’d found it in a mountain cranny, a moist spot under briars if it lived under briars in the woods.

“When those ladies used to visit,” he said, “they always suggested I might want to neaten things a bit. I’m glad they haven’t wholly neatened you.” His gaze on me was clear and straight; I think that, like our other older neighbors, he has always known that the aunts are not my aunts. If he knows too that they’re not kin to each other he hasn’t betrayed this to me; though who knows what he’ll say to Mr. Wells. Perhaps, when they next meet, they’ll speculate over a glass of whiskey. What do men think, when they see women living together? Do they imagine the aunts sleeping side by side, wrapped in flannel, untouched?

Back in the garden, cool glasses of cider before us, Mr. Wells complimented Mr. Bartram. “The riches you and your father have gathered — such a marvelous array of species,” he said. “No visitor can fail to be impressed.”

“I’ve had good company,” Mr. Bartram said. “Men from Russia and France and England and Germany have all honored me with their visits, even Peter Kalm from Sweden; this has been a great pleasure.”

Virgil flew past us, carrying something bright, and landed beneath the cypress. With his beak he tossed scraps of bark over his toy, until it was hidden.

“What Kalm wrote about Niagara Falls,” Mr. Wells said. “Such a powerful description — the blinding fog and the cascading water, the birds losing their way in the cloud of vapor rising from the rocks. Ducks and geese and swans, their wings weighed down by the mist until they drop from the air and tip over the cataract … ”

“Feathers,” Mr. Bartram said dreamily.

They can’t imagine the aunts: or not the aunts young and caught together in a current. Instead they think about the sliding layers forming the current itself, conversing as if jointly creating the falling birds and the rising water. Where is the theory, I wanted to ask, that might make sense of this?

“When Kalm visited,” Mr. Bartram continued, “he said he found below the Falls each morning enough feathers to stuff many beds. And fish, all broken and writhing, and sometimes deer, once a bear.”

They weren’t ignoring me; they were talking to each other but also to me, perhaps in part for me; they were so happy that I felt happy too. From the table I slipped a little knife, which Mr. Bartram had used to sever the stems of the grapes. Virgil, who’d been creeping closer while the men spoke, was staring beseechingly at my boots; from the left one I cut the topmost button, which I never use, and held it out to him. He bent his head, his beak grazed my hand; the button disappeared. At the base of the cypress he tossed it up in the air and down again, up and down until he tired and buried it near his other treasures.

When we rose to go, Mr. Bartram asked us to wait and went into the house for a minute. He returned with a book, his own famous Travels. Mr. Wells rested his hand on my arm and looked at Mr. Bartram; I saw Mr. Bartram nod. “A small gift,” he said. “In return for the pleasure of your company, and for what you gave Virgil.”

I had thought myself unobserved. Inside the front cover Mr. Bartram had written: For my new friend, who can listen to the birds.

Another of Aunt Jane’s spells. She took to her bed, pale and damp; when I brought a tray with her supper she turned her face and said she couldn’t eat. “I have no appetite,” she sighed. “Not for food, not for work. Not for anything.” I looked at her and wondered what I am except appetite.

“Shall I read to you?” I asked. What I should have done was smooth her hair and say I loved her. Say I would live my life like hers, that I am grateful for all she has taught me and do not judge her.

“Read,” she said. “Please.”

And softly, so she could hardly hear me, I read about the wonders of the planetary system, the perfections of the Deity, and the plurality of worlds. I read about igneous meteors. “ ‘Another species of phenomena, on which a great mystery still hangs,’ ” I read, “ ‘is the singular but not well-attested fact of large masses of solid matter falling from the higher regions of the atmosphere, or what are termed meteoric stones. Few things have puzzled philosophers more than to account for the large fragments of compact rocks proceeding from regions beyond the clouds, and falling to the earth with great velocity.’ ”

“Oh,” Aunt Jane moaned. “What has this to do with anything?”

Beneath the counterpane her body made barely a ridge. I wondered what she was like at my age, what she longed for and couldn’t have.

“Listen,” I said.

I read about luminous meteors over Benares, a large ball of fire followed by falling stones; it was you I was reading to. About a huge stone that fell in Yorkshire, burying itself deep in the ground; about an extraordinary shower of stones that happened in Normandy. “ ‘In the whole district,’ ” I read, “ ‘there was heard a hissing noise like that of a stone discharged from a sling, and a great many mineral masses, exactly similar to those distinguished by the name of meteor stones, were seen to fall.’”

Outside her window the frogs were singing. “ ‘The stones,’ ” I read — but I had done something good after all, she had closed her eyes and entered the dead sleep from which she’d emerge, twelve hours later, washed clean and a little stupid. “ ‘These stones,’ ” I read, “ ‘have a peculiar and striking analogy with each other. They have been found at places very remote from each other, and at very distant periods. They appear to have fallen from various points of the heavens, at all periods, in all seasons of the year, at all hours both of day and night, in all countries of the world, on mountains and on plains, and in places remote from any volcano. The luminous meteor which generally precedes their fall is carried along in no fixed or invariable direction; and as their descent usually takes place in a calm and serene sky, and frequently in cloudless weather, their origin cannot be traced to the causes which operate in the production of rain.’ ” Here I paused and closed the book. Into the still night air I said: