Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“I know of it,” Miriam interrupted eagerly. “There’s one in Hartford as well, we use their signed alphabet.”

”—and someone from that institution saw the boy on the streets and took him in, where he learned to draw wonderfully. Later he was apprenticed to an artist and learned lithography. Now he makes his living doing that and is much admired, especially for his skillful renderings of fish.”

“I have to tell Grace this part,” Miriam said.

Caleb couldn’t see, in her liquid movements, where one word ended and another began: how did one learn this? He and Lavinia had been separated before she learned to speak, when she was about the age at which Grace had lost her hearing. But he had always known what she was thinking.

When Miriam’s hands returned to her lap Grace began to draw a school of fishes: red and green and blue and brown, with huge fins and beautiful golden eyes. “She’s fond of fish,” Miriam said. “She likes to wade in the river.”

“My father was enchanted by fish,” Caleb replied. In this warm safe house, it seemed possible to mention Samuel without betraying him. “Not only live ones, but the images of dead ones in the rocks. There was a book he loved, when he was old — I’ve forgotten the Latin title, but in English it was something like Complaints and Justifications of the Fishes. A Swiss naturalist named Scheuchzer wrote it.”

How peculiar to say that name out loud, after all these years. After hearing it roll, so unexpectedly, from the mouth of the Frenchman at the party. When he was young he’d sometimes wondered if anyone but he and Samuel knew the contents of Samuel’s old books.

Miriam was looking at him expectantly, and he continued. “The hero is an enormous fish who swims close to shore and addresses the humans. In excellent Latin, no less.”

He paused while Miriam conveyed this to Grace. With a pencil Grace sketched a giant fish pushing his head above the water, openmouthed and wearing a look of utmost concentration.

“Perfect.” He smiled at Grace. “The fish complained that his ancestors had suffered the effects of the Deluge, although they were innocent themselves. That the tribe of fishes had paid for human sins, some being left to perish on dry land when the waters subsided. And that it was wrong for people, uncovering the impressions of their bodies in the rocks, to deny that those were the remains of actual creatures.”

“Did people deny that?” Miriam asked.

“Some did,” Caleb said. “My father used to study the different explanations men have come up with over the centuries. He was always convinced, himself, that the remains were relics of the Flood.”

“And you? The bones you hope to find in Kentucky — how do you think they got there?”

Instead of answering Miriam’s question, he looked down at Grace’s drawing. She’d done something to the front fins, drawn lines suggestive of their movement — the fish was gesturing with his fins? The fish was signing?

Beneath it, in blue pencil, Grace wrote FIST.

Miriam leaned over, changing T to H. Grace scribbled again: FISH.

“How well you draw,” said Caleb.

Miriam translated Grace’s swift reply. “She says she likes you, very much. And your story about the fish.” She pointed at Caleb and made five slow, separate shapes with her right hand. Above the drawing of the fish, Grace proudly printed CALEB.

He tapped his chest and then formed the name-sign she’d given him at their first meeting. “Have you thought about one of the deaf-and-dumb schools for her?”

“My parents and I have talked about it. But she wouldn’t want to be away from me, nor I from her. I try to teach her here the best I can, I have books and pamphlets from some of those schools but I know it’s not enough.” Her face clouded over. “I wish you could see how she is with other deaf children. The Rappites are taking care of a few, who’ve become Grace’s friends. On Sunday we’re going to Economy, where they live. Would you like to come?”

“I hope I’ll be gone by then,” Caleb said. Although he felt strangely at peace in this house, still he hated to see the point of his journey slipping away. With each passing day his goals were further deflected by the wretched weather, his own poor planning, his need to return to his duties by a certain date. How had he thought this could work?

“But if we’re still stuck,” he added, remembering the thickness of the ice and the morning’s bitter cold, “I’d be delighted to join you.”

Lightning

A ridge, a path, some black-barked trees. All of this was pleasing to Caleb, and helped make up for the fact that Kentucky lay hundreds of miles away, down a stalwartly frozen river. Mr. Dietrich, taciturn but kind, had saddled his own bay gelding for Caleb and then settled his daughters, Grace clinging to Miriam’s waist, onto a sweet-tempered dappled mare. More trees, an open field. They neared a cemetery almost buried in snow. The horses walked side by side as Miriam tried to explain what she thought Grace had thought before she could understand prayers. How she’d conceived of death as coming from the moon, which until their dog had sickened and died she’d believed had watched over their family. Then she’d stood beneath the trees, a tiny, furious figure throwing rocks at the sky. Not until later, when they shared a language, had Miriam understood that gesture.

Grace rode with her cheek pressed against her sister’s back, Caleb saw. With her head turned toward him. “How do you teach an idea like death?” he asked.

“By example,” Miriam said patiently, as if speaking to one of her pupils. “By generalizing from the specific.” Grace caught his eyes with her own, the green-gray irises uncannily flecked with gold.

As their horses stepped between rows of small stone tablets topped with sleeping sheep, Miriam talked and Caleb listened without listening. Under similar miniature stones, he thought, lay his stillborn son and the four children his second mother had seen born dead or watched die within days. Under larger stones lay Margaret and Samuel and his first parents, perhaps his sister — where was his sister? Samuel had prized a shard of English limestone, made entirely of fossil ammonites. Each the shape of a coiled snake but no bigger than a human eye, all of them pressed together without a scrap of plain stone showing — the fossils were the stone, the stone a mass of petrified shells. How could someone think that they weren’t shells? Or that human nature might be ductile, when each season laid down another layer of stony compacted coils?

“You were right,” Samuel had whispered on his last day. The figured stones on the cliff were fake and he should have seen it; he should never have accused Caleb of being an unsympathetic son. But still there was a message in the stones: the forms inscribed by the boys had been wonderful in themselves, representative of the effects of the Deluge. In them his pupils had incarnated exactly the knowledge he’d tried to transmit — and wasn’t that, in itself, astonishing? A sign from God?

The reverse, Caleb had wanted to say. They were simply doing what they’d been trained to do. Brothers, the sons of an Aberdeen stone carver, they worked hard in the family shop and were often late for their lessons. For them, already skilled at chiseling names and pairs of dates, scratching the outlines of spiders and bees into crumbling mudstone had been a simple exercise. In a few weeks they’d made the counterfeits, in a day salted the cliff with their work. Then hid their amusement as Samuel uncovered them.

“I failed you,” Samuel had whispered. “I have failed everyone. My inability to reconcile the truths of Scripture with those of geology was God’s punishment for my sins. I have gone over and over these in my mind, trying to understand the huge offense that merited such punishment. So many sins. My worst wrong was to you.”