Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Young Harry Spires, who joined the Academy as assistant master seven years after Samuel’s death, was all for tossing Livy and Horace aside completely and adding botany, chemistry, French, and German. Patience, Caleb counseled. We must move cautiously. He didn’t say what he sometimes thought: that he’d inherited a kind of factory, stamping out adequately learned, sufficiently tractable young men. Men like him. He’d loved teaching, when he was younger and had first started helping his father. Now he sometimes dozed in class, waking to find suggestive drawings on the slates and the boys smirking as if he’d turned into their last, collar-frayed visions of Samuel. A widower , parents whispered, excusing his lapses.

Briefly, through his courtship of Margaret Harper and their simple wedding, through the lush days of August and the months when Margaret was carrying their child, he’d felt as clear and radiant as a glass bowl lit by a beeswax candle. Then something snapped or fell or cracked, a wind blew, a storm raged — who ordered this? — and he was sitting in the kitchen, staring at Stuart while his son struggled and failed to be born and left Margaret burning with fever. He roasted straws in the stove and removed them, burning holes with the fiery tips in a sheet of paper. From the pattern of charred holes, letters emerged: The Academy of Sorrow. Stuart seized the paper; Caleb singed spots on the back of his hand. Stuart seized his hands. During the rest of that terrible week, Stuart left his own work to help Harry with the classes, while Rosina managed the house so that Mrs. Bernhard could tend to her daughter-in-law. Caleb prayed, everyone prayed; and still, Margaret followed her son four days later.

After that Caleb turned away from whoever tried to help him. His pupils’ well-meaning mothers — the widows especially — sometimes asked why he didn’t remarry; it wasn’t right for a man to be alone. He might have replied that the Academy, and his remaining family, required his full attention. Or he might have told the widows the truth: that once, not long after he and Margaret were married, he’d complimented her on a pot of yellow blossoms near the front door. She’d laughed, and blushed, and then confessed that weeks earlier, watching him walk around the vegetable garden, she’d slipped out, dug up a brick-sized clump of earth which held the clear impression of his right foot, and tucked it into a flower pot. In that earth she’d planted a chrysanthemum, hoping that as it bloomed year after year so would his love for her. How should he marry again, after that?

He told the widows nothing. In the constant absence of Margaret he worked, and looked after his mother and Rosina, and missed his old lively friendship with Stuart; Stuart had two more children now and when they met they spoke wryly of the tasks — the endless, tedious tasks — that kept them, almost all the time, apart.

The spring of 1825, they agreed, was more than usually harassing. Stuart’s daughters both had the measles; two of Caleb’s pupils were caught stealing and had to be expelled. Rosina, who for years had managed the Academy’s accounts and helped her mother with the housekeeping, was suddenly useless. She and Harry, surprising everyone, had decided to marry; she was so happy she wandered around in a daze. While she stood in the hall outside Caleb’s classroom, smiling down at the bust of Homer beneath her unmoving feather duster, he led his youngest pupils in a geography lesson and imagined giving her away. Rosina’s hand relinquishing his arm for Harry’s, Harry moving into the house with them, sharing the family duties so that his own burdens finally lightened — why, then, did he feel so unsettled?

To the boys in his classroom, he read, “For what is Asia remarkable?” The boys said:

It is the division of the Earth that was first inhabited.

Who were the first persons on Earth?

Adam and Eve, who were placed in the Garden of Eden.

At what time was the Deluge?

Nearly seventeen centuries after the creation of man.

What then became of all living beings?

All living creatures died, except those that went with Noah into the Ark.

A sharp tight pain, which resembled a cramp, seized the base of his lungs just then. He dropped his eyes to the textbook, which he’d used for more years than he cared to remember. In the back of the room, Ian Berger pushed his lank brown hair aside, revealing freckles that merged into coin-sized splotches over his nose and left cheek.

“Question,” Ian said, as someone did each term. “Where did the water go after?”

Caleb had no answer. Wasn’t this endless repetition, wrestling each day with the same tasks, same words, same weak and squalid self, enough to make anyone yearn for change? After the boys had gone home, he made his way to Stuart’s house. There he found his friend in equally bad spirits, sitting on the brick stoop and prying loose scraps of mortar.

“Tired?” Caleb asked.

“Of every single thing,” his friend replied. He flicked a scrap disdainfully into the air. “I’ll be thirty-eight next week — my father was dead by then. Yours has been gone for a decade. And here we’re still stuck in the same place, doing the same things, never seeing anything more than this tiny corner of the world — look at this stoop, it’s falling apart.”

“Something could change,” Caleb said. “We could change.”

“Our natures don’t change,” Stuart snapped. “If you had children of your own, you’d understand.” As Caleb flinched, Stuart reached for his hand. “Forgive me,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

He went into the house and returned with a bottle of rum, which a grateful patient had given him, and a single glass, which, like their discontent, they shared.

Classes ended at the Academy and the boys disappeared; Mrs. Bernhard and Rosina, absorbed by the wedding plans, failed to notice the anniversary of Margaret’s death. As the trees leafed out and the dense heavy heat descended, Caleb spent hours down at the wharves, fascinated by the jumble of boats and barges. He saw Frenchmen, and Indians, and a group of emigrants heading west — where was everyone going?

The movement and bustle cheered him briefly, as did Rosina and Harry’s wedding, but afterward, watching the new couple settle contentedly into their household routines, he couldn’t help thinking of the life that he and Margaret had lost. All summer he dreamed of Margaret; often he saw her holding his sister Lavinia in her arms. Lavinia’s face, which had dimmed in his memory as he’d grown up, had mysteriously regained its color and definition after Margaret’s death. Now he saw both of them clearly, the tiny scar on his first sister’s chin as vivid as the dark speck Margaret bore on the rim of one hazel iris.

Those dreams brought a cloud of melancholy that even the start of the new term couldn’t dispel. Stuart was downright gloomy; in November, when Caleb brought him a book they’d both coveted and couldn’t afford — Rembrandt Peale’s Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth —Stuart only shrugged. The long, intense conversations of their youth, their arguments over philosophy, history, the nature of science: how these had shrunk, Caleb thought. Shriveled to almost nothing. He set the precious volume on the table.

“What we need,” he said, “is a trip.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Stuart said flatly. “How could I? Barbara, the children, my uncle, my mother: everyone needs me.”

The crumpled skin around his eyes, the softness below his jaw — how old they’d gotten, Caleb thought. “A few weeks?” he asked.

He tried to convey to his friend the ferment he’d detected in the air. At the wharves he’d glimpsed an enormous keelboat, still under construction, that belonged to a group of naturalists and teachers headed for Robert Owen’s Utopian community on the Wabash River. Other boats were crowded with emigrants headed for Illinois, merchants loading and unloading goods; everyone had a plan. The papers were thick with appeals — for a Fourierist phalanx, a haven for freed slaves, a rational utopia; for asylums to benefit the deaf, the blind, the insane. Even the Rappites, less than twenty miles away, had established a new community called Economy. Couldn’t the two of them step back from the history of their own lives and embrace the larger history of the earth?