Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“Can you write yet?” Peter asked. “Are you old enough to write?”

“I am almost nine, ” Rose said indignantly. “And I already skipped a grade in school. Of course I can write, I don’t even have to print anymore. I can do cursive.”

“Well,” Peter said, laughing. “Cursive. But maybe just for tonight you could return to printing. If I gave you my notebook and spelled what I wanted, could you print it out clearly for me?”

“You don’t have to spell,” she said. “I am a very good speller.”

But after all she needed his help when he began crawling around the hems of the sheet, turning over beetles and flicking specimens into the killing jar. The black light made his teeth and his collar glow and Rose sealed her lips, afraid she too would look like a jack-o’-lantern. The names he called out were long and complex: Latin names, he said. Macrodactylus subspinosus, Phyllophaga rugosa. She’d heard her mother mouth other, similarly complicated names for the mosses she collected. Humbled, Rose concentrated on printing clearly what Peter spelled.

“Ha!” he said, pouncing on a body clinging to the sheet. “The elusive Nicrophorus —see what good luck you bring me, Rose?” He held out a large beetle, black with beautiful red bands on its wing covers. Those covers, Peter said, were called elytra.

All the following day Rose sat next to Peter at the impromptu laboratory table he set up outside. There was little she could do to help; she could not persuade her hands to do the fine work of inserting the delicate pins through the beetles, and her attempts at transcribing the names onto small paper labels failed as well. She concentrated on keeping Peter’s glass of iced tea filled, and on handing him paper points and glue as he called for them. When he pinned the Nicrophorus he said, “I didn’t expect to find this here. If we set a carrion trap we might get more — would you like to help me with that?”

For him she would have cast herself adrift all night in a leaky boat. “Yes,” she said.

“What we need,” he continued, “is something small and dead — a mouse, a mole, something like that.”

Here was her chance to be a hero; she excused herself and ran off as fast as she could. The cellars of the winery buildings were meticulously clean, full of shining tanks and tidy racks, casks and bottles and corks. But the white house was half a century older than any of the outbuildings, and although the upper floors gleamed with polish and care, the basement, which she and Bianca usually avoided, was stone-walled, dirt-floored, low-ceilinged, dark. Rose gathered the broom and the dustpan and descended the stairs. How terrible it smelled down here! She breathed shallowly and watched her feet, praying she wouldn’t step in something horrid. Past the great brick pile supporting the chimney, past the furnace with its octopus arms; there was a corner under the soapstone sink where she had not been able to avoid seeing both small corpses and busy cats. She bent down and peered into that secret space — and yes, there was something there. She reached with the broom and flicked the body into the dustpan, then sprinted across the floor and up the stairs. In the kitchen she forced herself to look and found that her prize was a little gray mouse, not long dead.

“Perfect!” Peter said when she returned to him.

That afternoon they set the trap: the mouse, trussed with a bit of fishing line, laid carefully in the thin grass of a shady bit of ground below the vineyard. On the limb of a shrub overhanging the site Peter tied a red cloth. “So we can find the place later,” he said. Then he stretched the fishing line from the mouse’s hind legs along the grass.

Trudging back up the hill to the house, Rose believed she might become an entomologist herself. Her mother dabbled at botany, specializing in the mosses; Grandpa Leo and her father were both chemists of a sort. The grandmother she’d never known — Eudora, Grandpa Leo’s wife, who’d died before Rose could meet her — had left behind a cache of letters from her own grandfather, a surveyor who’d studied plants from giant mountains on the other side of the world. Rose had seen how Suky cherished those, savoring their connection to her own work and sometimes speaking wistfully of her desire to travel. Holding those letters in her hand, sniffing the yellowing, earth-smelling pages and trying to imagine that ancient figure, Rose had sworn she’d never vegetate in one place as her mother had.

Dear Sir, her great-great-grandfather had written to some famous British botanist. Your examination of the Tibetan lichens is of great interest to me. I enclose some notes on the Kashmir irises. That could be Peter, Rose thought now. Or herself. Through Peter’s eyes, she saw that her family was packed with scientists. The next time they were together, she asked, “How did you start doing this?”

“Ever since I was tiny I was interested in all the animals around me, particularly the insects,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, it seems like I’ve loved them since I was a baby.”

“Me too,” Rose said. “That’s what I’m like.” Although until that moment, this hadn’t been true. Already she was vain about her intelligence, about reading better than her classmates and skipping second grade entirely because her teachers didn’t know what else to do with her. But until recently, although she’d been drawn to her father’s small laboratory, where the tests on the wine were carried out and where her Grandpa Leo had entertained them with chemistry demonstrations, she’d found nature boring.

“Are you?” Peter said. “No surprise, I guess; you’re Leo’s granddaughter. I owe him a lot.” He bent to examine a stream of ants filing across their path. “When I was growing up we lived in Ovid, not far from here, around the other side of Seneca Lake.”

“I’ve been there,” Rose said. “Near the park.”

Peter nodded. “My parents were apple farmers, and friends with your grandparents. They thought my interest in insects was silly. But your father and I used to play together, and Leo always paid attention to us. He must have noticed me lugging around the bottles and matchboxes I stuffed with bugs. The Christmas I was ten, he gave me some books by a wonderful French naturalist named Jean-Henri Fabre, and those were what turned me into a entomologist. I could dig them up, if you’re interested. You seem to really like this stuff.”

“Oh, I do,” Rose said fervently. “I do.”

Two days later they returned to the site. The ground was blank beneath the red flag, but Peter brushed aside some litter to show Rose the bit of fishing line protruding from the ground. Carefully they scooped away the loose dirt to uncover the mouse, already hairless and mummified, and below it the gleaming pair of burying beetles who had so assiduously dug the grave.

“Fabre called the species of Nicrophorus native to France ‘transcendent alchemists,’” Peter said. “For the way they convert death into life.” He let Rose hold the beetles briefly before he placed them in his vial. “You always find them in couples — a male and a female, digging together to provide the family larder. They push away the dirt below their quarry until the corpse buries itself. And all the time they do that they secrete chemicals that preserve the body and keep other insects from eating it. Then they copulate — can I say that word in front of you? — and the female lays her eggs nearby. When the larvae hatch they have all the food they need. Aren’t they pretty?”

At the library, a few days after Peter departed and her heart broke for the first time, Rose looked up “transcendent” and “alchemy,” ransacked the card catalog for books on entomology, and stole outright the one volume of Fabre’s she could find. Against her stomach, held by the waistband of her shorts, the warm book pressed on her like a hand.