Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Instead of answering, Samuel led Caleb to a long, heavy arch of gray rock resting on the windowsill. “From an elephant, who did no harm,” he said. “This is part of a rib. A man I know found it at a salt lick in Kentucky.” As Caleb held his candle closer to the petrified bone, Samuel raised his hand and cupped Caleb’s chin. Since Rosina’s birth they seldom touched; Caleb leaned into the unfamiliar warmth.

“We cannot know what God sees,” Samuel said. “Nor how He judges. We can only accept that all He does is both just and merciful.”

Sometimes, in the following months and years, Samuel read to Caleb from the Bible. Sometimes he read from his growing pile of pages, in which — the better to set off his true knowledge — he detailed the erroneous theories of the past. And sometimes he read from the papers of other men who studied the secrets buried in the ground. Although no one had ever seen the giant creature called Megalonyx, it was not extinct, simply undiscovered. “For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost,” Samuel read, “another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should vanish by piecemeal.”

Caleb wondered if he might not vanish himself, his former ways and habits buried beneath the flow of Samuel’s ideas. He felt most in danger of disappearing, but also most intrigued, on the nights when Samuel put down his papers and stared into the fire, describing his own vision of the Deluge.

When the rain ended, Samuel said, when the great masses of cloud finally parted, how astonished Noah and his family must have been! The water shimmering under the first pale sun, the clouds first black then gray and then finally white in an open and radiant sky. Under the water, Samuel said dreamily, lay lost cities, drowned mountains, entire forests uprooted from their tenuous hold on land to float horizontally.

The Flood sounded lovely then; Caleb listened raptly. Only during the day, when he paused to consider the stories he’d heard in the dark, did he think of what Samuel hadn’t mentioned: the lost people also floating through that calm liquid, tangled with lizards and birds among the branches.

One of Samuel’s gifts was his power to conjure such vivid pictures in Caleb’s mind. But Caleb had a gift as well, which he discovered during those years: he could pick out secret shapes where others distinguished nothing. Where had this come from? Not from Samuel, whose eyesight was very poor. Perhaps his first parents had shared a similar sharpness of vision. Outside, along the cliffs and streambeds, Caleb was drawn to the hidden fossils as if they were iron and he a magnet. When he found a new specimen, his joy made up for his gritty eyes and the way his classmates mocked him for his old-fashioned speech and his love of rocks.

Bernhard’s heartburn, some of them sang. Headmaster’s bonehead son.

He shrugged them off, they were ignorant. For friends, until he met Stuart Mason, he had his much younger sister, Rosina, and a bent-tailed yellow dog.

On a rainy spring afternoon in 1810, when Caleb was twenty-three, he visited Dr. Mason’s office on behalf of his mother and left with a prescription for a tonic.

“See my nephew,” Dr. Mason said. “Next door. He’ll make this up.”

In the space between the two low buildings Caleb, already wet, was so thoroughly drenched that even the roots of his hair felt refreshed. Behind him, as he ducked through the door, the rain fell and fell for the third day in a row. The streets were streams, the empty lots were ponds, the river was pushy and loud. The yellow dog was dead by then; Rosina, who’d turned from an eager, long-legged girl who liked to run through the woods into a miniature copy of her mother, hated to get muddy now and would never go out on a day like this.

Caleb, who liked the rain, shook himself off. Inside the cool dark room, perched on a stool before bottles of rhubarb bitters and witch hazel, hanging dried herbs and mysterious twigs, was a compact, sweet-faced young man he’d met briefly several times but not yet gotten to know. After they reintroduced themselves, Stuart inspected the note and said, “For your mother?”

How clear and frank his eyes were. “The rain makes her melancholy,” Caleb replied, stifling an impulse to add that she wasn’t actually his mother. Recently he’d been startled by how little he resembled his adopted family, and how sharply his long, wiry limbs and his consuming curiosity set him apart.

He looked down at the newspaper lying open on the counter, leaning closer when Stuart pointed out an article and asked, “Did you see that?”

The Rappites, Caleb read — hardworking religious ascetics, calmly awaiting the end of the world — had built a new woolen mill. What could it be like, Caleb wondered aloud, to work a loom in the expectation of being lifted bodily, any minute, into heaven?

“Unnerving, I imagine,” Stuart said. “Every time you heard a strange sound you’d be thinking, This is it.”

When Caleb laughed, Stuart offered a tale about a man named Symmes who claimed that the earth was hollow and filled with nested concentric spheres, each one habitable and awaiting settlement. In Russia one might find mammoths in the frozen river deltas. In Egypt there were mummies underground, in Oregon relics of ancient tribes — and so who could say for sure what else might not be hiding inside the earth?

“You’d like to travel?” Caleb asked. “So would I.”

The lines of a possible life fanned out — two companions exploring here, adventuring there — and just as quickly reeled themselves in: Stuart was already married, Caleb learned. Already tied to the infant fussing in a basket at his feet.

“Talk is my form of travel,” Stuart said wryly. “At least for now. That and reading whatever I can.” As Caleb pondered the contrast in their situations, Stuart bent over the basket and then deposited the squalling bundle in Caleb’s arms.

“Elias,” he said, as Caleb inspected the infant’s charming ears. “He’s teething. He wants to be held, and I need both hands to work.”

While Stuart ground and stirred, he said he’d meant to be a doctor but now made a living compounding potions for his uncle and experimenting with leaves and roots. A sharp smell rose from some herb he crushed. “My father’s legacy to me,” he said, wincing. “An oversensitive nose.” What would it be like, Caleb wondered, to know who had given him certain traits — his sharp eyes, his cowlick, his sense of not quite fitting in anywhere? The smell of living blood, Stuart said ruefully, was what had turned him away from medicine.

Caleb jiggled Elias gently and eyed a huge tooth lying behind the bundles of willow twigs. “Mastodon?” he asked, prodding the conical cusps with his foot. “My father has part of a rib, from a place down the river.”

“The salt lick in Kentucky?”

Caleb nodded. “His speculations about the Elephant of the Ohio are almost the first things I remember.”

A lie, already; no way to make a friend. He crouched, balancing Elias, and touched the tooth’s curved roots. What he first remembered, hazily, was an entirely different life. If his true parents had not died of the yellow fever when he was a child, he thought. If the Bernhards, making their way from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, had not stopped near the smoking heap that until that morning had been his home; if their eldest son had not died a few weeks earlier and if he himself had not been pulling against the hand of the doctor, shrieking as his first sister, Lavinia, was placed in a wagon with two women … Grateful , the doctor had said. Always, to this family willing to take you. He’d been five when he was chosen. He had never seen Lavinia again.