Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Always, he thought, the blow was felt after a while. After Samuel’s death he’d continued to see the guilty boys in town — almost grown, then truly grown, then with children of their own. While the oldest one had trebled the family business, replacing his father’s flat chiseled slabs with three-dimensional angels and willows carved in high relief, he himself had lost Margaret and their son.

“It should have been me who was punished,” Miriam said. “Not her.”

Before Caleb could object to this, a man appeared beside them, gliding up so silently that his greeting made Miriam jump. Gray-haired, rosy-skinned, too gaunt. Miriam introduced him as Brother Eusebius. “The schoolmaster here,” she said. For a few minutes they talked politely, catching up on the past two weeks.

“And how are our wonderful children today?” Eusebius asked.

“As you see,” Miriam said, gesturing toward the animated group streaming away from them.

To Caleb, still pondering the vision of Miriam electrified, the sky’s fire pouring through her arms and into Grace’s ears, Eusebius said, “You’re enjoying your visit?”

“Very much.”

“Any friend of Miriam’s is welcome here.”

While Miriam excused herself and followed the children, now running along the river and poking at the heaps of ice, Eusebius began to talk about the advantages of this settlement. Silkworms, merino sheep, the cider press and the wine cellar; he spoke too fast, his eyes were too bright. Caleb barely listened to him. The look on Miriam’s face when she mentioned that boy she’d followed, when she spoke of him and her friend embracing — perhaps she’d wished herself in her friend’s place. When Eusebius paused, Caleb asked how Joseph and his two friends had come to join the community.

“It is our tradition,” Eusebius said obliquely, “to welcome all who arrive here destitute and ask for help.”

“Everyone?” Caleb asked. “Even tramps?”

Eusebius frowned. “We prefer to call them pilgrims,” he said. “Or unfortunates. But yes — we house and feed whoever arrives, no matter what their state, and even though some people think we’re foolish and call this place ‘Tramp’s Paradise.’ But better to take in a hundred unworthy than to turn away the one who is worthy. Some — like Joseph — have clearly been sent to us by God. When they ask for work, we give them work. If they ask to join us, we welcome them.”

He peered more closely at Caleb. “You, for instance,” he said. “You have not said why you arrive here on a Sunday, unattached to family and friends, accompanying our beloved Miriam and Grace — perhaps you are without a home?”

“I have a home,” Caleb said, startled.

“Yet you aren’t there,” Eusebius said. He tucked his hands inside his sleeves, seeming at the same moment to tuck his lips inside his mouth. “You are not there, tending after your own, nor are you in church. I pray for your soul.”

Who made you? Samuel had asked at prayers each night. In whose care is your soul?

“My soul is in the hands of my Maker,” Caleb said.

“You could lose it this day,” Eusebius replied. “This very hour. We expect the Second Coming at any moment, certainly during Mr. Rapp’s lifetime. Then a general harmony will rule, as it did before disorder entered the world.”

Caleb felt his face contort, the muscles twitching without his permission.

“You think we are fools to await the millennium here,” Eusebius said angrily. He barely acknowledged Miriam, who had just returned to them. “But I tell you this: we are not so foolish as you who believe that the world is fixed as you see it.” He stalked away.

“You upset him,” Miriam said quietly. “I think he has hopes of me and Grace joining their group.”

“Would you really think of joining them?”

“Would you?”

For a moment they gazed at each other curiously, and then she smiled. “I’m grateful for the interest they’ve taken in Grace. But to live here … I want a family of my own. And I don’t share their beliefs.”

She beckoned to Grace, who waved but stayed with her friends. Inside me, she was explaining to Joseph, is a little person, the size of a thumb, who looks exactly like me. You have one too, yours looks like you. When we sleep they fly out of our chests and go here and there, then come back. When we die, they leave for good. These are our souls.

“I want more for her,” Miriam continued. “More than I can give her — look how her face lights up around her friends. Look how their hands fly. I want to start a school for the deaf near our home, I want someone to come here and train me and a few other people, so we can teach all the children we can gather.”

She turned toward a stand of willows, denying Caleb any hints he might have gleaned from her expression. Did he know then? Perhaps he knew. Beyond the willows a scraping, repetitive noise, which he’d heard faintly for some time, grew louder. He followed Miriam through the screen of hanging branches toward a frozen creek framed by steep low banks. A solitary man was skating there. An enormous wild bird. No, a man. Moving forward at great speed and then, after a smooth pirouette, backward just as quickly, his hands clasped behind his waist and his head thrown back with pleasure. Just when Caleb was about to call out a warning — a hole in the ice, where rapids bubbled — the man spun again, took a few strong strokes, and leapt over the darkness. Landing, he reversed once more, slipping over the plain.

As Caleb moved forward, his arm was tugged backward: Grace, pulling his sleeve and gesturing at the skater’s intricate patterns. She clasped her hands behind her back and leaned forward: Teach me, teach me. The skater slid backward, disappearing, as Samuel had disappeared, behind a bend. Caleb could not remember, anymore, the real details of their fiercest arguments, the language of his accusations, the precise texture and smell of the sheets beneath Samuel’s wasting body. He could not remember all the pages he’d turned to distract himself, nor all Stuart had done to comfort him. The Earth, Samuel had once read to him, was more fruitful before the Deluge. The temperature of the air was more equable, without burning summers or piercing winters; the air was more pure, and subtle, and homogeneous, and had no violent winds or agitations. The Antediluvians ate only vegetables; their lives were more equal, and vastly longer, than ours.

From the creekbank, which Caleb found he was kicking with his right foot, a spray of smooth, reddish brown stones tumbled down. Click, clack, clonking against each other and the ice. When one split, he knew what he’d find. The stone had cleaved neatly, revealing the impression of a palmate leaf. Beautiful, if not a surprise. He held the halves out to Grace, part and counterpart, and said to Miriam, “Would you help me explain it to her?”

She bent over her sister’s hand. “What is it?”

“A fossil,” he said, waiting while she finger-spelled the word. Joseph was watching her hands as well, although Conrad and Duncan had been diverted by a goose. “The word refers generally to anything dug out of the earth, and more specifically to the petrified remains of something once living, like this. Some are species that no longer exist.”

He relied on her to translate accurately. “They’re quite common,” he said. “Not just the remains of plants, but shells and sea creatures and larger animals too, some of them enormous — at the place I’m headed to, people have found the fossil remains of a giant creature with the tusks of an elephant and the teeth of a hippopotamus. We call that creature Mastodon now—”

Miriam halted him with a raised hand. “And where,” she said, “should I find a name-sign for that?”