Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

He rose, flexing his toes in his nearly dry boots. “I should head back,” he said reluctantly. “Thank you for making me so welcome.”

“We’re glad for the company,” Miriam said. “The bad weather’s cut us off from everyone.” The children waved and the cats serpentined around his legs. Mrs. Dietrich, who hadn’t spoken directly to him since they finished their meal, came forward, smiling, to offer a pair of mince pies.

He shared these with the boatmen on Christmas Day, when they asked him to join their quiet celebration. The captain led the men in some hymns; Caleb read from the Bible when asked; rain fell, harder and harder, melting the snow until it seemed that they must soon be freed. But after their dinner of pheasant and biscuits and pie, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and a cold wind swept down the river, freezing everything again. Caleb excused himself from the boatmen’s cabin and retreated to the pleasures of Stuart’s farewell gift: John Filson’s essay on the natural history of Kentucky. A book older than he was, but still very useful — and how like Stuart, he thought fondly, to give him not the most up-to-date scientific volume but this early description of the area. Stuart had marked one page with a piece of paper; the passage described the salt lick — still so far downriver that Caleb could hardly imagine it — and the finds of astonishing bones.

The celebrated Dr. Hunter, Caleb read, had observed from the form of the giant teeth found there,

that they must have belonged to a carnivorous animal … These bones belonged to a quadruped now unknown, and whose race is probably extinct, unless it may be found in the extensive continent of New Holland, whose recesses have not yet been pervaded by the curiosity or avidity of civilized man. Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature …’

Where had Stuart found this book? And when — and why hadn’t they read it together? Perhaps they had: there’d been long stretches, during Samuel’s last months, when Caleb had sat by his father’s bed with the books Stuart loaned to him, passing the words before his eyes but registering nothing.

Every morning, Caleb thought, Samuel had eaten the same kind of porridge at the same time, from the same bowl; then washed his hands and said a prayer and entered the same classroom full of boys essentially if not actually the same. After teaching the same Scripture lessons he dissected the same passages from Horace and Virgil and ate the same midday bread and cheese, eagerly awaiting the late-night hours when, surrounded by his trays of fossils, he might seek an answer to the riddle of Creation. What kind of a life was that? The same kind, Caleb feared — he was back in his bunk, unable to sleep — that he’d been leading himself.

Yet look what happened when he tried to broaden his horizons. In Pittsburgh, a few months earlier, he’d gone by himself to a party. The room had been filled with strangers, most from the same group of teachers and naturalists whose keelboat Caleb had seen being built at the wharves. They were headed for New Harmony, someone said; they meant to change the world. Intrigued — where did they find the nerve? — but also hugely skeptical, Caleb had eavesdropped on several conversations. A Frenchman attached to the group, a naturalist named Charles Lesueur, spoke eloquently about his earlier travels. The astonishing falls at the Niagara River, new species of sturgeon and pike; proudly he displayed his sketchbook to Mr. Wright, their host.

Caleb, edging up to the circle of listeners, admired the beautiful drawings until Mr. Wright, to his embarrassment, pulled him inside the circle and presented him to Lesueur. After repeating Caleb’s name, Mr. Wright added, “Caleb is the son of Mr. Samuel Bernhard, who some years ago published a remarkable book about the nature of fossils and their role in God’s creation.”

This again, Caleb had thought. Always this. What did Mr. Wright have against him? Lesueur pouted his lips and blew, a small explosive puff that Caleb would forever after think of as definitively French. “That book,” he said. “I have seen that book. Your father …”

Caleb flushed and looked at his shoes. The moment would pass, he thought, if he said nothing. He had lived through similar moments before. “My father is dead,” he said.

“I don’t mean to insult him,” Lesueur continued. “Or this backward country. Merely to suggest that we consolidate the truth in opposition to a knowledge of the false — and so your father after all had a role to play. Cuvier proved last year that Scheuchzer’s famous fossil skeleton, the one he called Homo diluvii, was the front part of a giant salamander. Your father probably believed it was a man who drowned in the Flood.”

Caleb had made some clumsy excuse and fled; but the damage was done. It had taken Stuart days to calm him.

Still thinking about that party, and of the Frenchman who’d insulted him, he slept fitfully and woke with an aching head. After breakfast he went walking again, this time making a beeline for the pleasant house in the woods. Once more, Miriam opened the door. Both would remember this, later: her surprise, which deepened so quickly to pleasure. Gratefully he settled down again beside the fire.

“My parents are out,” she said. “It is just us. But we’re glad to see you.”

Grace sat on the floor, busy with her colored pencils; after Miriam signed to her that she and Caleb were going to talk privately, her hands were still while they chatted. The weather, the moving ice; her mother’s pies, which had been delicious, and her father’s work, which was all around them: table, clothespress, walnut chest of drawers. The house itself. Grace and her brothers had been born here but Miriam was old enough to remember the journey from northern New York and the isolation of their early days, before they’d had neighbors. Her parents had taught her to read and write and, later, when she’d proved to have a particular gift for teaching, had encouraged her to take in pupils.

Although Miriam’s words flowed in a straight line, still Caleb thought they skirted something essential. About to ask a question, he subsided as she explained that the key to Grace’s education was the language of gestures, which, mysteriously, she’d been able to grasp more easily than had her parents. Through it Grace had already learned so much.

“She’s beginning to read,” Miriam said. “It’s a second language for her, written English — I explain it by way of signs, and by drawings. Her written vocabulary isn’t very large but she learns new words every day.”

“Astonishing,” Caleb said.

“Is it? Some days it simply seems like what we make together. What is. Since she first lost her hearing I’ve been able to understand her gestures almost instinctively, even though my mother stumbles and my father can’t express himself that way at all. I’m not good at remembering ideas from books, but I remember shapes. It was her own idea to learn her letters. One morning she carried a book to me, pointing at the lines, then herself, then the lines. She was holding it upside down.”

The warm glow that lit her features made him think of Margaret. “She makes signs in her sleep,” Miriam said. “I think she must dream in gestures. And when she’s reading she sometimes shapes the corresponding gestures with her hands, as you or I might have moved our lips when we were first learning.”

He repeated a story he’d heard over Christmas dinner, about a young man, born deaf, whose father had been a boatman here on the Ohio. “When the boatman drowned,” he said, “a deaf beggar took the child to Philadelphia and used him to help solicit alms. There’s a school for the deaf there—”