Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

What a complicated smile she had! And still he kept talking, unable to stop himself. It was like being in the classroom of his dreams, saying exactly what he meant in the light of someone’s full attention. He must have known then. As he spoke, Miriam’s hands moved swiftly. Grace’s eyes never strayed from her sister’s gestures.

Beneath her feet, beneath the river, Grace thought, the world was as densely layered as a leek. Was that what Caleb meant? Her geography book had said nothing of this, that beneath the superficial film of dirt and vegetation were layers of fish and serpents and bugs and plants, frozen lives, life she hadn’t known was alive — anything might exist in the rocks and that she hadn’t seen it before was only because she hadn’t thought to look. She bent down, searching through the rusty pebbles fanned across the ice and then cracking a smooth oval the size of her palm against a large rock. Shocked and disappointed, she held the pieces out to Caleb.

“They’re not that common,” he said gently, speaking to Miriam but looking at Grace. “Tell her they’re only in special stones.”

Joseph was staring at him, he saw. As intently as Samuel’s pupils had once stared — what had those boys with their figured stones meant to say? He watched Grace crouch on the shore, inspecting the bank behind her. The boys might have forged the stones, he thought, as much for him as for Samuel.

For years he’d listened without complaint as Samuel described, first to him, then to them, the earth’s unchanging perfection. Some of the boys, clean and well dressed, had listened attentively. But the shabby ones, those with dusty hands and shadowed eyes, missing parents, irregular households: what had they known of such order? Perhaps, Caleb thought, like him they’d seen evidence of a Maker whose attention wandered. One day, after taking over the afternoon class, he’d offered them an alternate view of the earth’s history.

Not just his view, he said, regarding the boys’ dropped eyelids and sullen mouths. The modern view, the real view. He’d presented to them what he’d just tried to share, in a simplified version, with Grace: a vision of an earth immensely old and subject to natural processes, the sea floor heaved up into mountains, the mountains ground down by rivers and glaciers, evidence of change and movement visible everywhere in the strata. In the newest layers of the earth, he told them, barely below the ground on which they walked, might be found the bodies of mammoths and the bones of mastodons. Below those were other fossils, and still other fossils, each layer more ancient than the last. He drew on the stories Stuart had told him; the books they’d read together. The fossils that Samuel had shown the boys were, Caleb claimed, the remains of plants and animals which lived no more.

“From the Flood?” asked a boy to his left. And from the back bench, in a tone that might have been disrespectful, or merely tired, a voice Caleb had never pinned to its owner whispered:

At what time was the Deluge?

Nearly seventeen centuries after the creation of man.

What became of all living beings?

All living creatures died, except those that went with Noah into the Ark.

“There are different theories regarding the origin of fossils,” Caleb said, trying to locate the voice. “Many of these my father has explained to you. He believes what you just suggested: that they’re relics of creatures destroyed in the Flood. For myself, I think they are evidence of the earth’s antiquity, and of the antiquity of life.”

The boys whispered in twos and threes, one coming forward to ask what he was supposed to think when his teachers contradicted each other.

“Think for yourself,” Caleb calmly suggested.

And a few months later there was Samuel, coat flapping in the wind, hair flapping over his eyes, happily grasping counterfeit stones which he wrapped in paper and hid from his son. After his death, when Caleb finally told Stuart about his impulsive lecture, and about the disturbing timing of the stones’ appearance, Stuart had groaned and said, “Couldn’t it have been coincidence?”

Miriam touched his arm. “What are you thinking about?”

He pointed to Grace, who was still rummaging through the stones. “Her.”

He had not been honest with Stuart either, when they first met. Why did he start this way?

When they left, the horses once more stepped quietly along the river. The trees were quiet. The birds were quiet. The sun had dropped, the sky was gray, and it was, suddenly, very cold. On the horses the riders were silent. Grace was clutching both Miriam and the handkerchief knotted around her cache of rocks. Miriam held the reins in one hand, with the other trying to imitate a new sign she’d seen Duncan make. Caleb, behind them both, stared down at his own hands as if they might suddenly begin to speak, revealing what he was meant to do with his life. So he’d once stared, when he was a boy, at a beautiful stone Samuel gave him, which was marked with coin-sized reticulated disks.

One minute these were decorations, elegant and mysterious. The next — the sun was glaring through the window, the cicadas were shrieking their hot-weather song; it was three days before his thirteenth birthday and his pants were itching the tops of his thighs — the disks were the stems of plants, seen in cross-section. What had happened to his eyes? The familiar turned strange and the strange familiar: Margaret’s face would later turn overnight from an appealing arrangement of features into the countenance of the woman he loved, her skin enclosing blood and bone and a light he couldn’t name, which had seemed like life itself. Lavinia, who’d been folded into a stranger’s arms when he last saw her, her small self pressed against the woman’s cloak, had twisted her head as the wagon began to roll and gazed directly at him.

He looked up from his hands, at the horse ahead, at Miriam’s straight, slim back and her pale hair. At Grace, who had turned around and was looking back at him.

Fire

Out here, surrounded by the evidence of vanished rivers, Miriam thinks of that evening riding home along the frozen Ohio. At what moment had the stream of Caleb’s life bent and merged with hers? The people she’s left behind in Pittsburgh know nothing of this; nor does Stuart. When she finds herself signing, almost unconsciously— Was it what you wanted, was she like a daughter, was she more to you than your own daughters? — she is more reassured than surprised.

She and Caleb were married for twenty-five years, and although it is Stuart to whom she’s been writing, she can’t help but reach at the same time toward the companion of her heart. Caleb was proud, she knows, that he made the Academy for the Deaf into a place known throughout the country. Five of their first students have themselves become teachers of the deaf, one opening a school in Kentucky and another in Missouri. A long way from the early days of the children teaching her and Caleb and Stuart their home-signs while they taught back everything else they knew, history and geography and botany, the way to roast a joint or dress a loom. How bold they’d been, and what unexpected gifts Caleb had turned out to have!

In her opinion they were lucky despite meeting so late in his life: their school’s success, and their three healthy children, more than many get. Was that enough? It was never like him to complain. She always knew that his fascination for Grace was part of his bond to her. As he always knew what she most wanted. And if he didn’t feel for her exactly what he felt for Margaret, if his mind wasn’t braided as closely with hers as it was with Stuart’s — what did that matter? They worked together, they made a life. In the dormitory they built for the boarders, they sometimes found the children, late at night, huddled around an illegal candle with their hands flying urgently. Despite the risk of fire, Caleb could never bear to snuff the flame.