Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

So will Martin Sawyer travel, she thinks. This part has never changed either. As she rounds a corner, wishing that Martin might leave them some other way, the Northview Inn comes into sight. It too has hardly changed. Warped dock, sagging gutters, siding in need of paint. It’s still the same modest size, with the same unimproved and slightly disheveled waterfront that she and Gillian and their mother, Clara, first saw one hazy, apparently unremarkable afternoon. Only the cottage has been added.

The cove is shining, not yet frozen but dotted with patches of water so still that by morning, if the wind doesn’t rise, they’ll have turned into floating islands of thinnest ice. The cove will appear to be open, but beyond the frozen rim birds will be standing far from shore, quite casually, on what still looks like water. Some will walk a few steps and then be swimming. I wish, Nora had once said, apologizing as soon as the words registered on Elizabeth’s face, I so wish that you and Andrew had been able to have children.

4

Nora couldn’t leave Detroit fast enough, once she knew one of her brothers was alive. She left Fannie, she left her job; she bundled up her bewildered son. On the train Michael wore a light jacket, which Fannie had made for him; a cloth cap that was his especial pride. The sheer novelty of travel entertained him for a while. But the train kept moving and moving; his soft red hair grew dark with sweat. This was July, and the weather was beastly all along the lake. Weary, unhappy, Michael glared at his mother and said, “I want to go home.”

And still Nora pressed them on: to the steamboat dock on Lake Champlain; then into the enormous, strangely dressed crowd crushed onto the steamer and fighting for beds in Plattsburgh. She wiped Michael’s face with a damp cloth and fed him tidbits from the hamper she’d packed, unable to explain to him all that had conspired to tear her family apart. Ireland was a word to him, England was another. Her days at Grosse Isle he knew nothing about, and she would never tell him. He clung to her hand as she tried to get seats on the stage and then gave in to an overcharging wagon driver. Who were these people, massed everywhere she wanted to be? Later she’d learn that the newspapers had given them a name: they — she and Michael included — were “Murray’s Fools.” Colm Larkin, as plenty of people would tell her, had not been the only one to read that cheerful yellow book and believe a stay in the Adirondacks would save his life.

Caught among the several thousand visitors swarming into a wilderness that had, in earlier seasons, welcomed no more than several hundred, Nora was shrill, her voice loud with desperation. No one, she’d later tell Elizabeth, no one who hasn’t lost a family can understand this. When the driver dumped them off at the Northview Inn after hours of jolting along a corduroy road, she and Michael were two among a dozen. Nora’s first sight of her brother, after twenty-two years, was this: a slim, pale, dark-haired man, still youthful-looking, but weary, standing on the porch of the inn with hands held out in a rueful gesture. The last time she’d seen him, he’d hardly been older than Michael. She might not have recognized him if he hadn’t been speaking.

“We’re full,” he said. And there was his voice, still fresh and flavored with home. “We’ve been full for weeks.” Now she could see that he’d grown to look rather like their father.

Michael leaned against her side, asleep on his feet. “Look up,” she whispered. “That’s your uncle.”

There were lines around Ned’s mouth, and the skin was gray beneath his eyes; she couldn’t puzzle out what had happened to his nose. A small part of it seemed to have melted, as if the flesh were wax. Ten people rushed past her and swarmed him, crying that they must have a bed, they must have a meal, they had traveled for days; to each of them Ned spoke kindly. He had no beds, he repeated. But they were welcome to take their supper here, after which he’d make arrangements to carry them into the village. There they might find transport to another inn, to the rail station, or back to the ferry dock. Perhaps some of the villagers might have spare rooms to rent.

The crowd shuffled and grumbled and still Nora stood back, her arm around Michael. Finally Ned looked over the heads of the others to her.

“Ned?” she said. He gazed at her blankly. She’d grown very thin; her heavy black hair, striped with white, no longer hung loose but was braided and coiled in a careless knot. She had deep lines around her eyes and her hands were dry and cracked. “Ned?” she said again. “It’s me. Nora.”

What went through his mind then? Everything, everything. Around him the inn dissolved and the angry visitors disappeared. His sister had left him, she was dead. Since the morning when strangers had ferried her unconscious body away from him, he had lived an entire life: twenty-two years, during which he’d believed that in all the world he no longer had a single living relative. Those in Ireland had toppled all at once, like a village blown down by a windstorm. Over here Nora had vanished, then Denis; leaving him more alone than he’d thought a person could be.

For a minute, when he first saw Nora again, everything seemed to exist at once: both the toppled village of his childhood and his whole confusing life since then, which contained, on the one hand, this inn and its guests and his taxidermy shop, the mountains with their harsh and changeable weather, his beloved dogs moving swiftly through the brush — and, on the other, his essential solitude. Although he loved his hounds, and had companions among the guides, the life that moved within him was hidden from everyone. Denis and Nora had been the last to know him; Denis was dead. Where had his sister been? Her hair, once as thick and black as a horse’s tail, was ruined. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He would never be able to explain himself. He held out his arms and said, “Nora.”

Why, during their first days together, did she ask so many questions? Her prying made him indignant. His reserve made her feel rejected. Both were bewildered by the way they jangled and clashed, despite the joy of being together: where was the ease of their childhood?

Ned tried to compress his life into stories that he could stand to tell and she could stand to hear, but this was like trying to convey, by the example of one perfectly stuffed rough-legged hawk, the essence not only of that single living creature, but of what it meant to be a hawk. In his taxidermy shop, where he hid after his worst failures with his sister, he stared at his recent work. Wings, splayed open in flight, conveyed nothing about their compact folded shape at rest. One bird said nothing about the others. His words — about, say, his years with the French-Canadian farmer who’d worked him so hard, or his first stay in these woods, at the lumber camp; about his winter with the consumptive lawyer who’d taught him to read, or his travels with the naturalists who’d trained him in taxidermy — were equally deceitful fragments of the truth.

“I don’t understand,” Nora said one day, after he’d started a sentence, faltered, and then snapped at her in exasperation. “Why is it so hard to explain what happened to you? I tell you as much as I can remember.”

“I thought you were dead,” he said. They were in the kitchen; she’d moved all his spoons. He moved them back. “Can’t you imagine what that was like? I never thought of my life as something I’d want to tell you about someday. I wasn’t trying to remember. Most of it I was trying to forget.”

He kept to himself the harsher truth — that there were days, still, when he woke and forgot that she’d been returned to him. When, until he heard her speaking softly with Michael, he couldn’t wholly resuscitate the corpse he’d once seen carried off a ship. For a few seconds each morning, until their great good fortune came clear in his mind again, she was a stranger to him.