Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Q. But what are the causes which operate in the production of rain?

A. We do not understand even those; how should we understand a rain of stones?

I was talking to you, I was asking you. Lapidifying juice, petrific seed, volcanic spume, the tears of the moon — somewhere, wherever you are, do you too look at the world and ask question after question?

You have no face, but sometimes I can hear you. Not as a human voice but as a pulsing hum, lower in pitch than the tree frogs’ note, higher than the cicadas; pure intonation, no information. When I think about Mr. Wells I hear the hum deepen, as if with pleasure, while I imagine a life. Sons and daughters and a large airy house, a garden soft with ferns and herbs and a long drive bordered by peonies. His work — he works hard, he will not be home much — and mine. Much of mine the education of children; but my children, not the children of strangers. At night a hand on my breasts, a thigh between mine; and if that body doesn’t belong to James, if it is not James who bends to me, if it is not James …

While Aunt Jane slept I leaned out the window, looking up at the cloudless sky and the ring around the moon. All that is there, all that hangs suspended in air, suspended above the air: rain and hail and fire and stone, the mind of God, if there is a God; the stars and planets and comets and our fates. Sleep well, my dear. Wherever you are.

“What makes you happy?” Mr. Wells asked. We were out in the garden again. This is a question no one has ever asked me. The question you might have asked, might someday still ask.

“To be out here at night,” I told him. “On a clear cold night when the dew is heavy, to walk on the grass between the marigolds and the Brussels sprouts and feel my skirts grow heavy with the moisture. Or to go further, into the hayfield, where the mist hangs above the ground, rising nearly to my waist …”

I should not have said that, he looked startled. But although it was burning hot and the sun was shining I could feel myself in that field, timothy and clover and young wild grasses knee high and soaking wet, my wet skirts clinging to my legs and before me the low cloud spreading and spreading, white in the light of the moon and the stars above. On a ridge in the distance a white house is shining; this is the house where James lives. At night, long after the aunts are asleep, I have stood in the field, sopping wet, gazing across the sea of mist to a porch set with tall columns. Behind the columns are rows of windows, two of them softly lit; and in the golden slots a chair is outlined, a rocking chair with a wooden back and a woven rush seat. Sometimes the chair is empty. Sometimes the chair holds James. I stand in the cloud, invisible to him, moving through the damp green growth like a deer, my height and heaviness cut in half, suspended above the suspended water. As the mist rises to my waist, my shoulders, my head I am standing in a kind of rain: and in that rain I am beautiful, at least to one man. Above me a meteor cuts the air and hot stones shower down. In that light, across the field, is all I will never have. Next to me is all I will.

“Will you marry me?” Mr. Wells asked.

I placed my hand in his and thought how I would say to you, how I would say … Oh, my brother, where are you? In the hum that is you, or my longing for you, I heard an answer.

“I would be honored,” I said.

The Ruins

AS A YOUNG WOMAN, she had written letters only infrequently. But now, in aid of her sister’s work, Miriam found herself writing letters almost every day. To the geologists, soldiers, government officials, and river traders on whom she and Grace depended, she wrote requesting cargo space for their crates, or reporting progress on their project, or itemizing their expenses: freight on 1422 lbs @ 6 cents/lb: $85.32. She wrote to her son, in whose hands she’d left the Academy months ago, and to her daughters, who taught there. She wrote to bank officials, freight agents, book dealers, and, late in the afternoon of one bright, clear day, to her dead husband Caleb’s dearest friend:

June 29, 1853

Mauvaises Terres of the Dacota Country

Dear Stuart—

Forgive me for taking so long to answer your last. I do mean to answer promptly, I know you like to follow our progress. I can only plead the constant press of work. You would understand if you could see this place; the season for collecting is short, and we are busy every minute. Do you remember what Caleb used to say about the ruins of an older world being visible all around us? He might have had this strange ugly landscape in mind, so jumbled and jagged. Box canyons, big cliffs, a river bed that looks as though God hacked through the plain with a giant axe.

Grace, who loves all of this, maps the sites where we dig and correlates the strata to similar formations elsewhere. In the cliff walls, she reports, the relics are arranged by age, youngest at the top and oldest at the bottom, neat as a filing cabinet: the clearest possible demonstration of the ideas you and Caleb shared. The fossil skulls and shinbones we stumble across on the basin floors are more difficult to place, and we have to guess at how they were arranged above.

My work is the usual: interpreting for her as necessary, otherwise helping as I can. Everything she chips out with her chisels and hooks I pack and ship to Dr. Leidy, the vertebrate paleontologist in Philadelphia. He tells us who the bones once belonged to — a gigantic quadruped with three pairs of horns, an antique camel, miniature horses, saber-toothed felines, a ruminating hog. He is writing a book (“Of course,” I can hear Caleb saying wryly. “Of course he is writing a book.”) A complete account of the extinct local creatures, classified and given Latin names. He promises acknowledgment in a footnote: “Thanks to Miss Grace Dietrich, who gathered these specimens.”

She doesn’t complain, so neither will I. The lithographs of her finds are beautiful, and we both understand, every day, how lucky we are to be able to do this …

Here Miriam stops, not sure what else she wants to say. She and Stuart are separated now by more than geography; the letters they’ve exchanged since her departure from Pittsburgh are friendly but also constrained. She takes pains to present Grace’s accomplishments in the most positive light, as if to justify their absence. In turn, Stuart amplifies every sign of progress at the Academy. She suspects he is at his desk even now, a pile of student papers before him and a glass of lemonade nearby. Still he teaches part of each day, although it tires him. And still, after all the years they worked together, her feelings about him are complicated. He is her oldest and in some ways her closest friend, now that Caleb is gone. Yet they have often quarreled and hidden things from each other.

Are there not always conflicts, though? The best friend and the second wife of such a well-known man; they were bound to disagree. After Caleb’s death, Miriam had felt burdened by Stuart’s pleas that she continue to share the responsibilities of the Academy with him. In turn, Stuart had been hurt by the speed with which she and Grace detached themselves from their duties, proposed their project to several eminent geologists, and found a place at the unofficial edge of this surveying expedition in the Bad Lands.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Stuart had told her. “All Caleb’s hard work, the work we have all put in — we have twenty-three pupils, what about them?”

“They’ll be fine,” Miriam had replied. “William is anxious to take on a larger role, and you know what a good teacher he is. Both his sisters are coming along nicely. And you’ve been Caleb’s essential lieutenant …” She’d tried not to flinch at the expression on Stuart’s face.