Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“My father told me the ground near the salt spring is filled with giant bones, all mixed together,” he said. At least that part was true. “Some from creatures that no one has ever seen.”

Stuart looked up and nodded. “The great American incognitum, now extinct.”

“Or simply, as my father believes”—Caleb had his own doubts about this—“a living nondescript we haven’t seen yet.”

Stuart raised his eyebrows, which Caleb found both reassuring and alarming. “So where are these behemoths now?”

“Out West,” Caleb said cautiously. He returned Elias, who had fallen asleep, to the woven basket. “Or at the tip of South America, or hiding in the arctic. Somewhere, my father contends, mastodons are still roaring.”

“That’s one possibility,” Stuart said. “Myself, I think they are long extinct — and I don’t mean by the agency of any biblical event.” Through a rolled cone of paper he poured a stream of ground bark. “I heard from my uncle that your father is writing a tract about fossils.”

“He is,” Caleb admitted. “An historical overview of all the old theories, followed by his own account.” Was this a betrayal?

“I’m interested in the relationship of fossils to geology,” Stuart said. “My uncle lets me borrow from his library. I’d be glad to share some books with you, if you’re interested.”

They talked for another hour, a rush of ideas that left Caleb both grateful for all he’d learned from Samuel and, as he wandered outside through the last feeble rain, afraid of his new friend’s opinion of Samuel’s work.

In Stuart’s company, among the delectable rows of Dr. Mason’s excellent library, Caleb developed his own ideas about the earth’s beginnings. Stuart passed books, stuffed with scribbled notes, to Caleb; in turn, Caleb passed the least objectionable of these on to Samuel. After all, Caleb told his father, the earth’s crust did not so much resemble a fluid pudding in which raisins were randomly mixed. Rather it resembled a squashed and tilted book, each page bearing a different form of writing. And this sequence of strata might mean something; the neatly stacked layers, all bearing their characteristic fossils, a signal that different kinds of life had over time appeared and then disappeared. Not one Deluge, Caleb suggested. But a long series of inundations.

Although Samuel dismissed that idea with a laugh, their arguments, which often included Stuart, in general seemed to please him. “I have always kept up with the times,” he said proudly. “I have always been open-minded. Reconcile your theories with the truth of Scripture and you will have my full attention.”

It was enough, Caleb thought, to see Samuel caught up again in the pursuit that had once been his greatest pleasure. In recent years he’d grown sluggish, seldom going on the collecting trips that had punctuated Caleb’s childhood. Work on his book had slowed as well; he was growing old, and sufficiently vague that his assistant master, exasperated, had recently resigned. Caleb, with little warning, now found himself teaching half the classes.

What a relief, in light of this, to see some of Samuel’s old energy and enthusiasm return. Once again he was scouring the local cliffs and creekbeds, and if at first he returned with the same familiar fossils, still his ardor was touching. A small, solitary figure climbing clumsily up a rock face, scarf flapping over his shoulder as his bruised hands fumbled for treasures: how could this pleasing sight lead to so much pain?

During the weeks when Samuel found the first of the peculiar stones, Caleb, who was swamped with teaching duties, knew only that his father vanished at awkward times and seemed gleefully secretive. He would have been horrified to see Samuel on that cliff, charting the positions of his finds before removing and squirreling them away. Had Caleb known what was going on, he would have asked the questions that became obvious later: Why did Samuel find only counterparts — the impressions, the prints — and no corresponding parts? Why were all the impressions intact, and all of the same depth? But Samuel saw, instead of these problems, a grand solution.

His stones, which depicted bees caught in the act of sipping nectar, birds frozen in midflight, a spider consuming a fly, were not mingled together but layered, birds above bees above the spider until, near the top of the cliff, the sequence was crowned by pictures of the sun and broken shapes that resembled letters. Relics of men, Samuel decided. A civilization drowned in the Flood. Without telling Caleb anything, without showing the stones to a soul, Samuel commissioned an artist to draw illustrations of all he’d found. Only then did he confide in Caleb.

What was it like, that first sight of the stones? Like a blow to the head, like the onset of a fever. Caleb knew, he knew right away; Stuart agreed with him instantly. The stones are fake, Caleb told his father. Can’t you see?

But Samuel locked himself in his study, emerging with fresh chapters for his book. These discoveries, he claimed, proved that fossils were arrayed in layers not because they’d been laid down over time during successive inundations, but as a result of their differing degrees of intelligence and closeness to God. Little creeping things had drowned in the first days of the only Flood, while the more intelligent, flying or fleeing uphill, had been caught by the water later. Of course human beings had drowned last. By this arrangement, God demonstrated order even in the midst of chaos.

By then Samuel wasn’t speaking at night, pacing before the fire; by then he was preaching to his family or bursting into Caleb’s classroom. Nothing has altered since the Deluge, he claimed, nor will it ever, as God’s first plan was perfect. Consider the sturgeon, that very odd fish. “From the Monongahela,” he told Caleb’s history class, “I once pulled a specimen five feet long, with a mouth like a hose.” Who could have expected God to fashion such an improbable creature?

All this, and more, he wrote down. Soon his book assumed its final shape and a title that, repeated on brown calf covers, would haunt Caleb for years:

God’s Hand Apparent

in the Figured Stones

of the Allegheny and Monongahela Valley Region;

Illustrated with Folio Plates of these Marvelous Creations

Eighteen months after finding the first stone, three months after he’d sent copies of his book to all the best scientific societies and journals, Samuel found, in a crevice at the top of the cliff, a flat slab inscribed with his name.

In the schoolyard, among the whispering boys, were a few who betrayed the culprits: three recent graduates who, before leaving the Academy, had carved the impressions into bits of soft shale. Caleb tracked them down and made them apologize to Samuel. They’d never meant, they said, for Mr. Bernhard to take those stones seriously. They had thought he’d see their joke at a glance. Their bland blank faces and callused hands, their fumbling explanations: Caleb had wanted to strike them.

Samuel stopped teaching, he stopped going out, soon he stopped leaving his bed. He spent all he’d saved, and more he borrowed, buying back copies of his book. During the days Caleb, now running the Academy by himself, could not be with him. But at night he sat by Samuel’s bed, the two of them once more awake together while the rest of the household slept. This time it was Caleb who read: at first out loud, when Samuel could still listen. Later, near the end, he read to himself.

The Academy of Sorrow

A herd of schoolboys dropping books, reciting their lessons, bungling grammar and simple sums while exuding a smell — not unpleasant, completely definitive — that hadn’t changed since he was a boy himself: for a decade, except for a brief, glowing year, this became the shape of Caleb’s life. He worked to restore the Academy’s reputation and to repay the debts which, along with a tower of brown books and a clear sense of his father’s errors, he’d inherited. To the curriculum, which he’d also inherited, he slowly added algebra, astronomy, a smattering of geology. Still he wasn’t teaching what he wanted, but each small change was a revolution to the parents he courted and couldn’t afford to offend.