Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“I had a thought,” Caleb said. “We could go to Kentucky together and visit the Big Bone Lick. I’d love to gather some fossils for the classroom, I think I’d have better luck teaching the boys if they could actually feel one of those giant tusks. And I’m curious to see for myself how the fossils lie where they haven’t been disturbed.”

Stuart reached for the book on the table but offered no comment. And why should he? Caleb thought. Even to his own ears, the excuse for the trip sounded feeble. Something else was pressing at him: a sense, which he couldn’t articulate, that in rummaging through that bone-filled pit he might finally make sense of his history with Samuel. More forcefully, he continued, “At the right site, we might be able to demonstrate a clear column of succession.”

But still Stuart looked at him wearily. Our natures don’t change , he’d said: but he hadn’t meant that, he wasn’t himself. Not so many years ago, they’d argued happily about the possibilities of a world still developing, still in progress. But if the world was fixed as God first created it, forever immutable; if nothing ever changed or became extinct but persisted and persisted—

“I know it’s winter,” Caleb said. Was that what Stuart was worried about? “But the lick is south of here, and the ground is saturated with salt. If it’s frozen at all, it will only be on the surface. And no one else will be there — a great advantage.”

“I really can’t travel now,” Stuart said. “I just can’t. But why don’t you go?”

Traveling alone seemed unappealing, but if he could bring back something that would cheer his friend … Caleb jumped when Stuart smacked both palms against the table.

“Go somewhere,” Stuart said. “Harry can take care of the Academy for a few weeks. Learn what you can and come back and tell me everything. I’m so tired of being stuck here — bring me something new.”

Everything happened quickly after that. A pupil’s father, a commission merchant, owned a flatboat being loaded with linen and ginseng and nails, which was leaving for New Orleans; Caleb was welcome, the merchant said, to passage as far as he desired. A three-week break was scheduled for the end of term, and although Caleb expected to be gone at least six weeks, Harry said he could manage with a temporary replacement. Surely that small inconvenience was nothing in light of the useful and instructive fossils Caleb might bring back. “If you happened to find any plant fossils as well, that would be excellent,” Harry said enthusiastically. “And when you return, maybe we could order a new globe, and some botany manuals.”

Rosina, leaning up against Harry, said to Caleb, “But don’t be gone too long, will you? There’s so much to do here.”

While Caleb packed shirts and socks and waterproof boots, a gun and a measuring stick and two shovels, he considered, and then set aside, the fact that Samuel’s bitter last months had also begun with a fossil-gathering trip. Yet at the wharf a few days later, shivering in the cold wind and regarding the roughly built boat heaped with kegs and tarpulin-covered mounds, he felt an instant’s panic.

Why was he leaving? A smell he couldn’t name rose from the river, and in the confusion of saying his farewells he dropped a trowel into the water and then failed to thank Stuart for the book pressed firmly into his hands. Sally, Stuart’s youngest, had brought a gift as well: three sprigs of holly tied with a white bow. With the crisp green leaves in his buttonhole, Caleb stepped onto the boat. Once not he but Samuel had said, teaching the boys some local geography, If we could fly, we would see from the clouds the clear waters of the Allegheny flowing down from the north, the muddy waters of the Monongahela flowing up from the south, two rivers merging into the Ohio at our home and forming a great Y. By that enormous letter we are meant to understand …

He’d forgotten the rest, the most important part; always he remembered the wrong things. At the railing he watched a band of black water expand between him and the shore. In some language, an Indian language, Ohio meant “beautiful river.” From the sky something cold, part rain and part sleet, began to fall.

Beautiful River

A few miles past the Rappite settlement of Economy, a farmstead set back from the river housed an informal school quite different from the Academy. On this December afternoon all the pupils — Grace Dietrich, her two older brothers, and four little girls from the neighboring houses — were walking toward the water, intent on their weekly nature lesson. Forget the snow, forget the cold. Or so said Miriam, who was their teacher. If the animals pranced about in it, why shouldn’t they? Every week they made this journey, in every kind of weather. On this day they romped in the woods for an hour before they emerged at the river’s edge and saw a boat being pushed toward the shore by rafts of ice. Men were shouting and long oars were flailing while the bow ground against tree roots already tangled in ice. The other pupils exclaimed at the noise and confusion, but Grace heard nothing.

Had the boat not appeared, Miriam would have pointed out deer scat, or a woodcock’s feather, or a fallen cardinal bright against the snow. Instead, as a man jumped from the boat to the ice to the ground, a rope in his hand, a hat on his head, Miriam directed Grace’s gaze to the scene unfolding before them. Twice the man passed the rope around a tree, tying a complicated knot before he opened his mouth and spiraled a finger through the air. Another man lowered a plank from the deck to the shore. On the deckhouse roof a third man, tall and thin, stood amid the bristling oars and looked curiously down at the scene.

Grace held her arms straight out, in imitation of the oars, and then pulled them in and asked her sister a question. Miriam said, “Travelers,” at the same time shaping a gesture with her hands.

“Going where?” asked three of her pupils at once.

Miriam called a question to the man who’d secured the boat.

“St. Louis, then New Orleans,” he called. Once more Miriam turned to Grace and gestured.

“Where’s the nearest village?” asked the man who’d lowered the plank. Carefully he made his way across the gap between the boat and the riverbank.

Miriam stepped toward him, drew a map in the snow — the river here, a farmhouse there, a stand of willows, the sandbar — and told him where he might buy flour and cheese. The sun was setting, the children were cold. Grace, who was watching her actions intently, was shivering.

“We won’t be here long,” the boatman said cheerfully. “I’m sure the ice will break up soon.”

“I wish you good luck,” Miriam said. Everyone was busy with something, she saw, except that odd figure still peering down from the roof. Uneasy beneath his inquiring gaze, she herded her students together and began the long walk home.

Caleb had been tagged as an oddity even before his boat was forced ashore; not in the old, familiar way, but in an unexpected way. Only those with a purpose, he’d learned — traders transporting cargo, families looking to settle new land — traveled at this time of year. What, the boatmen asked him, was he thinking? They were unimpressed by his account of the fossil graveyard awaiting him downriver.

“You want to dig in this weather?” one asked. “For petrified bones? Good luck.”

Caleb slept alone in the first and smallest of the cabins, while the boatmen, crowded into the other cabin aft of the big space heaped with cargo, laughed and talked and smoked their pipes, never inviting him to join them. On their fourth day out, when ice forced the boat to halt, they pushed him aside and moved through their tasks in an easy synchrony.