Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Unable to find a single useful thing to do, Caleb had watched the children racing like rabbits across a small clearing, the slender woman who spoke to the boatmen, and the little girl whose hands moved rapidly in the air. The woman’s hair was almost white; the girl’s hair was equally pale; they looked, not like the sister with whom he’d grown up, but like his real, lost sister. He’d raised a hand partway, a hesitant greeting, but they didn’t respond and a minute later they vanished.

Later that afternoon, while the crew settled into a routine of chopping wood and playing cards, Caleb fiddled with his equipment and worried about the weather, so much colder than he’d expected. The river seldom locked up like this, one boatman said. But they’d probably be freed in a day or two. After dinner Caleb wrote a letter to Stuart describing his predicament: which included the fact that the mail wouldn’t move until the river had thawed. I could walk home in two days, he wrote. But it’s too soon to give up. Then he stuffed the letter in his satchel, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep.

When he woke the boat was still frozen in, and the boatmen were still playing cards. Determined to be useful, Caleb left very early with his gun. The birds and bushes and trees near the boat were the same, he saw, as those he’d left less than twenty miles behind him. Also the same were the rocks poking up through the snow and the hawks spiraling through the sky. Farther away from the river’s edge, where the snow was deeper, he found the tracks of deer and possums and pheasants. Enormous trees, black and bare, and the sun so low in the sky; he walked for miles, beguiled by the light and shooting at nothing. Only when he crossed his own tracks did he realize he’d traced a great circle.

Off he went again, on a line diagonal to his first route. Near noon he came upon a modest house, where he thought to beg a few minutes by the fire. The young woman he’d seen near the river a day earlier opened the door.

“Oh!” she said. “You — was that you on the roof of the boat?”

“I waved,” he said. “You didn’t see me.”

Her face colored slightly. “I was talking to my sister. I didn’t have a free hand.”

He took off his hat and introduced himself, both confused and touched by her embarrassment.

“Will you come in?”

Behind her was the girl he’d glimpsed, along with six other children. Twining among them were a black cat, a tortoiseshell cat, and a large splotched dog. From the kitchen an older woman, Mrs. Dietrich, came forward to greet him. Miriam took his coat and gun and settled him by the fire.

“Grace is deaf,” she murmured as her mother withdrew. Then she continued with the introductions, Grace’s hands following her words. For her older brother, who had large ears, Grace pinched her right earlobe gently and tugged it. For her younger brother she stroked her eyebrows: his were dark and full, the most striking thing about him. She had similarly eloquent gestures for the girls Miriam introduced as their neighbors and her pupils. As she shaped them Grace studied the stranger who’d finally arrived.

Not a stranger, exactly: she’d seen his awkward gestures on the boat. Along with the fresh smell of snow and the deeper notes of his wet boots and woolen clothes, he carried an odor of sadness. As he stretched his boots toward the fire, Miriam pointed at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Grace put her hand to her forehead, palm out with two fingers raised and curled forward, imitating his tuft of springy hair.

“What does she mean?” Caleb asked.

Miriam laughed and repeated the gesture. “She told you her names for everyone here; then she gave you a name-sign as well.”

Clumsily he tried to imitate her movement. “This?”

“Turn your wrist,” said Miriam. “That.”

“How do I make her name?”

Miriam passed her left hand, palm in, over her left ear and then her mouth, as if with that gesture she sealed them both shut. Caleb shaped the sign for himself, correctly this time; then pointed to Grace and smiled and shaped the sign for her. Mrs. Dietrich appeared with a tray.

“Your daughter has a whole language of signs?” Caleb asked. Mrs. Dietrich nodded.

“We do,” Miriam replied, helping her mother pass around cornbread and coffee and peach preserves. The children stared at him and the splotched dog licked his hand. “Our whole family.”

She did most of the talking; Mrs. Dietrich was quiet and the gestures she used to converse with Grace were cramped and halting. Soon she excused herself and returned to the pies she was making.

“Grace lost her hearing when she was two,” Miriam offered. “Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she’s picked up from her friends.” She passed Caleb the last fragments of the cornbread. “But tell me about your journey,” she said. “Where you’re headed.”

Even as he tried to describe his plans — the salt lick in Kentucky he hoped to visit, with its famous graveyard of ancient bones; his hope of digging out some of these relics — part of his attention was also with the children, who’d returned to their lessons. A schoolmaster’s trick, pounded deep within. As he spoke he eyed the few worn books they shared and the open picture-primer, its oversized words paired with drawings: HAT, RAT, POT, CAT, HEN, TOP, BOY. At the moment Grace was drawing a map of Pennsylvania while the others shared the history text. With a gentle word, Miriam quelled the fit of giggling that swept through the room when the big-eared boy dropped the book on the floor.

“Forgive them,” she said. Her attention too was split, Caleb sensed. As it should be. “We’re taking three days off from our lessons for Christmas, and they’re so excited they can’t concentrate.”

“You do very well with them,” Caleb said. He looked down at his wet boots, imagining himself back at the Academy a few weeks from now, pushing the younger boys through their readers and ignoring their yawns. “I’m a schoolmaster myself.”

“You enjoy the work?”

He nodded and then, encouraged, described the Academy. He barely mentioned Samuel and at first, flattered by her attention, didn’t notice how little she offered about herself. Nothing about how Grace had lost her hearing, nor how she’d started this school. As he spoke, Grace continued drawing her map.

With her beloved colored pencils she made a blue river, brown mountains, patches of green forest. This river, her river, without the ice but with Caleb’s boat. The cat walked to the window, placed her front paws on the glass, and stood staring sway-bellied out at the snow until, without transition, she was perched on the sill and the dog was walking back and forth below her, considering all that the cat might be seeing. The dog moved toward the door and waited for one of the boys to release her. Their visitor, whose crest resembled that of a female cardinal, crossed and uncrossed his legs. What would her father make of him? Over her map she unconsciously shaped her father’s name-sign, one hand holding and guiding an invisible chisel while the heel of the other pushed. He’d gone to a neighbor’s to build them a table but would soon return. When the cat pressed a paw to the window, trying to touch a passing crow, Grace pinched the air near her upper lip with two fingers, drawing them in an eloquent movement through the place where her whiskers would be, if she were a cat.

Caleb, who’d been watching her, laughed and said, “Even I can understand that.” The children, or the fire, or the fragrant woodsmoke, Miriam’s easy conversation or Mrs. Dietrich’s restful silence, the sight of Grace — perhaps especially Grace — had cheered him. Only now did he realize how off balance he’d felt since leaving home. Through the window he saw the dog leap up in a startling curve, snapping at something beyond the frame. A beautiful day, one of those days for which the world had been created. He had almost missed it entirely.