Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

Not from the Bible, which the visiting clergymen pressed on them. Not from the improving tracts brought by the volunteer ladies. She read what the men were denied during the day: newspapers, magazines, books about faraway places. Letters, especially for those who’d been blinded. Those who couldn’t read or write, but who still had eyes and hands, she taught as Fannie had once taught her. With scavenged books they worked beneath a list of regulations pinned near the door to the covered walk:

No lounging in the main hall.

No profanity.

No smoking.

No spitting.

No throwing anything on the ground below the windows.

No lights after nine p.m.

Do not damage or destroy the furniture.

Do not lie in bed with your clothes on.

Do not talk with each other about your diseases and afflictions.

Each time Nora looked at that list she thought: Where is Francis? Dead and unaccounted for, or lingering in a hospital hundreds of miles away? One of her patients, a man with a mountain twang to his voice, had no idea of his name or where he came from or who he’d loved.

After midnight, when the men finally slept, she sometimes tormented herself with those thoughts. Once she’d started, as she told Fannie, there was no stopping it. She’d end up thinking of Denis and Ned and how she’d never know what had happened to them. And how if they were dead, then Francis was also dead, as were her parents and the doctor who’d cared for her at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle. She’d taken Dr. Grant’s notebook with her, hiding it in her carpetbag until she learned to decipher it. Later, after Fannie had taught her to read, she’d been afraid at first to open the pages.

When she finally inspected his account of those terrible days, she found not only his impressions of the emigrants, the conditions on the island, and the failures of the authorities to make any provisions for the sick, but also — shouldn’t she have expected this? — his impressions of her. How eerie, to see herself through his eyes: She sang me a song about a woman standing on a cliff in Ireland, waiting for a fishing boat to return. Untrained, uneducated, she has been of more use and shown more dedication than anyone except the Sisters …

That he’d thought of her at all was touching. But to be written about, to be seen from the outside like that: it made her own skin feel unfamiliar. And it was a shock too to learn that he’d been at least partly responsible for separating her from her brothers. He — we, I — separate the sick from the healthy without regard for family ties; we have no choice. He’d had no choice; he’d saved her life. Late at night, she sometimes looked around the ward — the stronger men helping her tend those worse off, one man reading aloud while others wrote or studied — and wondered if Dr. Grant would have approved of what she’d made from the life he’d returned to her.

Colm Larkin she met in the winter of 1868, when he made his way to the Soldier’s Home after having been in and out of four different hospitals and, for a while, on the streets. His lungs were inflamed, he had pneumonia and perhaps something worse than that. The same wound that had left him mute — an exploding shell that scattered metal through his chest and throat, breaking ribs, which had never healed correctly, and shattering his voice box — also gave him a strangled, painful cough. The hole in his throat, where a field surgeon had pierced him with a reed and saved his life, still oozed.

Yet when his fever was down he was cheerful, and popular with the other men. At night he played checkers, always losing with a smile. When the others slept he often stayed up to read with Nora; and, using his slate, to make conversation. Tidy white letters, made with chalk: she learned where he’d come from, what had happened to him, which hospitals he’d been in. But only after seeing him identify his regiment and company to another patient did she think to ask if he might have known Francis. By then she’d stopped asking, she’d given up hope.

I knew Francis MacEachern, Colm wrote, as if this weren’t astonishing news. We didn’t talk much, but I always knew where he was. You’re his wife?

“Or his widow — still I don’t know. One of his commanding officers suggested that he might have lost his papers and perished in a prison camp without being identified. How can there be no trace of him?”

I don’t know. It could be he just … left. Walked away. He wasn’t himself after the Battle of Spotsylvania, he was weeping and he couldn’t sleep. The rest of us thought he might be going mad. I lost track of him one morning, when a battle started up. Later I asked everyone if they’d seen what happened to him. No one saw him fall, or saw him wounded or captured. No one saw him walk away.

“Then where is he?”

No well man would leave you, he wrote gallantly. Nora was almost forty-five by then, while he was twenty-seven. But if he’s still alive, he may be sick in his mind. You’ve seen what happens to us. She had, she thought, by then seen everything.

That June the weather was beautiful, so warm and soft that she let the men open the windows at night and move the table beneath them. The sky would still be gleaming with a bit of light when she got to work, and she’d find Colm at the windowsill, reading a book with a yellow oilcloth cover. One night she saw him busily taking notes, pausing to pull from a pocket inside the book’s back cover a folded map marked “New York Wilderness.”

“What are you studying?” she asked.

My future, he wrote. He pointed, smiling, to the first chapter heading of William Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness:

THE WILDERNESS. WHY I GO THERE, —

HOW I GET THERE,

— WHAT I DO THERE, — AND WHAT IT COSTS

That’s where I’m going when I get better, he wrote. A place where I can hunt and fish in peace, where no one will disturb me or care that I can’t speak. Men grow healthy there. Look.

He showed Nora a passage in which Murray described a consumptive young man, near death, who’d visited the Adirondack woods and, with the help of a guide, moved in a small wooden boat from one lake to the next, sleeping at night on boughs of balsam and pine, eating fish and venison. By the end of the summer he’d been entirely cured.

So will I be, Colm wrote. Outside, away from everyone looking at me. I don’t mean you, you’ve been nothing but help. But I’d be better off somewhere by myself.

“It’s a good idea,” Nora told him. “A fine idea. But wait, maybe until next summer.” Still he couldn’t walk the length of the passage without gasping, and an abscess had opened along his ribs.

It’s five years already, he wrote.

A week later she found his bed empty, his things gone, a folded note for her on the table along with the yellow book. He had no further need of it, he wrote. He would always remember her. And hoped she’d hear from Francis, and hoped she’d wish him well. She should read the book, which was entertaining and would help her imagine his new life.

She forgave him after a couple of days — she had work to do, and twenty-three other men who needed her attention. On a Friday night when the moon was full and a quiet drizzle fell, she opened Colm’s gift and read:

The Adirondack Wilderness, or the “North Woods,” as it is sometimes called, lies between the Lakes George and Champlain on the east, and the river St. Lawrence on the north and west. It reaches northward as far as the Canada line, and southward to Booneville. Its area is about that of the state of Connecticut.