Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Why has he always been surprised by her? The day they met, when he first saw her and Grace conversing, he had stared as if they’d fallen from the moon. She can’t imagine what he thought when Caleb explained the idea behind his plans — that the deaf might have a particular affinity for the study of plant and animal shapes — or when, after Grace’s friends arrived, the angry parents took their hearing children away.

Whatever Stuart felt during that tumultuous time he confided to Caleb, not her. From the moment their first new pupil walked through the door, his hands signing a greeting while his anxious eyes said, What if no one understands me? she had known that they were doing the right thing. She couldn’t worry about Stuart’s feelings, or wonder what it cost him to set aside his own plans and throw himself into Caleb’s grand project.

Miriam rises, sets aside the board on which she’s been writing, and considers the jagged landscape surrounding her tent. One formation, not far away, looks like a giant molar waiting to be pulled and would, she thinks, delight Caleb nearly as much as would her and Grace’s presence here. Ignore the gossip, he would tell her. Concentrate on your work. But it isn’t always easy being the widow of such a man; everyone has opinions about his life as well as hers. In the schools that their former pupils have founded, portraits of Caleb hang in the halls, along with miniature biographies that might refer to someone else’s life.

No one knew him, Miriam thinks. Not as she and Stuart did — and no matter how the two of them disagree, this crucial bond remains. She picks up her pen again.

You should see Grace’s face and hands: very brown, dotted with freckles. Against these her hair, powdered with rock dust, is so white that strangers sometimes take us for twins. They ask what we are doing, where we have come from. Sometimes, when they persist, I pretend I’m as deaf as Grace.

As I write, she’s at the base of a ravine. Big birds whirl around above her; I should go call her, dusk comes suddenly here. I miss my dear children, I miss the Academy, I miss all of you. I know my life doesn’t make sense to you. It makes sense to me and to Grace; it would have made sense to Caleb. Please ask my William to write and tell us how things are with him and his sisters, also how many new students he has enrolled for the autumn classes. I think of you often, always fondly.

— Miriam

The Origins of the World

In Pittsburgh, as Miriam knew, people continued to talk about Caleb after he was dead. They spoke of the great swerve he’d made in midlife and the dedication his family showed to his cause; of the visitor from Hartford he corralled into training them all and the pupils who became such a credit to him. But no one spoke of the years that laid the course for those events. The obituaries made no mention of Caleb’s original family in Philadelphia, nor of his adoption by the Bernhards. Samuel Bernhard appeared only as the Academy’s founder and Caleb’s father, never in the context of his other work. And Caleb’s best friend, Stuart, who might have corrected certain mistakes and omissions, kept his secrets.

Before Miriam set off for the West, she too had refrained from adding to the accounts of Caleb’s life. A few private moments she hoarded for herself. Other things she was not equipped to speak about. Caleb was fifteen years her senior, a young man before she was born. And for all they shared in their years together, he never told her much about his first home, or about the endless nights, after he moved, when he stayed up with his new father.

He was in a house in Pittsburgh during those nights, his feet cold and his eyelids drooping while the river at the end of the block murmured, Ohio, Ohio. Everyone else was asleep. Rosina, his new sister, was too young to be up so late; Mrs. Bernhard, his new mother, went to bed early, still mourning the children who, if they hadn’t died as infants, would have been the rest of his new family. Behind the house was Bernhard’s Academy for Boys, which Samuel Bernhard ran with a single assistant — but there were neither dormitories nor boarders then; those pupils went home at the end of the day. As Caleb turned eight, then eleven, then twelve—1800, a fresh new world — he bore the brunt of Samuel’s enthusiasms alone.

Listen, Samuel said to him. Listen to this.

What Caleb heard was new and often enchanting, despite his exhaustion; it helped distract him from all he’d lost. Unlike his first parents, who had been farmers, Samuel talked about geology, theology, the origins of the world and all its creatures. About fossils, which some people called figured stones. In the old days, Samuel claimed, when he was a boy in Germany, rocks formed like animals or plants had been grouped with those shaped like axes or pots or hats.

With the rest of the household fast asleep, in a room cold except for a space near the stove, Samuel would hand over gray slabs that dusted Caleb’s fingers. “That shape like a fern,” he said, “is a miracle of nature.”

“Where did it come from?” Caleb asked. In his old life, people had talked about the weather. “How did it get here?”

“There is only one true and simple explanation,” Samuel said gravely. “But despite this men have had many notions. I keep track of them in these pages.”

As Caleb admired the basswood box containing the papers, Samuel eased forward a single sheet. “Here is one idea,” he continued. “Perhaps the figured stones are sports or jokes, which a capricious God developed in the rocks.”

Perhaps, Caleb heard, perhaps, perhaps. Swooning with lack of sleep, still he struggled each night to be a worthy confidant. There were vapors, he heard, which might have risen from the sea, bearing the spawn of organic life and then condensing into rain. Or God might have endowed the earth itself with some extraordinary plastic virtue, capable of imitating existing forms. Some men, Samuel said, believed that in the secret, hidden parts of the earth, fossils might have been created as ornaments, just as tulips and roses, also useless, had been created as ornaments for the surface.

“Suppose they grew,” Samuel said, smiling as if the idea had a savor on his tongue, “and reproduced accordingly — as plums beget plums, so might a stone bearing a snail-like figure beget a second snail.”

All those stories, all those words, swirling around in Caleb’s mind. When he admitted his confusion, Samuel said, “You must learn not just to listen, but to think for yourself.”

Am I to listen? Caleb thought then. Or am I not? On another night, after carefully considering more of Samuel’s stories, he asked, “But what is the truth?”

“The truth,” Samuel said quietly — it was very late, and dark red halos shimmered around the coals—“is that fossils are relics of the Flood, the petrified remains of creatures drowned in the Deluge. When God punished the sinners and the waters rose, the earth’s surface was converted into a fluid jelly. Think of the jelly around the pickled pigs’ feet your mother makes.”

“I like that,” Caleb said, although he still had trouble thinking of Mrs. Bernhard as his mother.

“While the jelly is warm and still liquid, she can stir in bits of meat. But once the jelly cools, everything is set in place. Exactly so,” he continued, while Caleb’s stomach rumbled, “was everything living frozen into the rocks when the Flood receded. The just along with the unjust; plants and fishes and snails, who after all had committed no sins, petrified equally with the humans who offended God.”

“But that’s not fair,” Caleb said indignantly. “Why should the innocent be punished?”