Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“It’s not that I didn’t miss you,” he added. “I thought of you every day.”

That was the truth; the happiness that filled him when he looked out a window and saw Nora and Michael crossing the yard with their hands clasped, or when Michael leaned calmly against his shoulder, was also true. Yet still he flinched each time Nora dug into his past. The things he preferred not to think about — his sea voyage especially, his winter trapped in the arctic ice — attracted her most sharply. When she asked about his nose, he sighed and went into another room, then returned and explained that he’d once found work as a cook on a ship — not a whaling ship, nor a navy ship, but an arctic exploring ship, which had sailed farther north than she could imagine — and on that voyage had suffered from frostbite. He turned from her. “Do I look so different?”

“It’s hardly noticeable,” she replied. Which was true if she stood to his right; she tried not to stand to his left.

“At first I couldn’t stand to have people looking at me,” he said. “I still don’t like it, I hate it when you stare.”

“I’m not staring,” she said. “I missed you, I like to look at you now that I can.”

What she took from his hesitant explanations was that they’d been apart too long. They’d been through too much alone — this was no one’s fault, it was their misfortune — and now they couldn’t explain their lives to each other. Baffled, she watched the way Ned leapt into his work the instant he rose, as if he dreaded sharing a minute’s idle conversation over their first cups of tea. He was glad to have her and Michael there, he said. More glad than he could say. Right now, though, he was very busy.

Forty guests filled the Northview Inn, spread between the two bottom floors of the main building and the low wing angled back from the lake. After a huge breakfast of eggs and muffins and chops and venison steaks, potatoes and coffee and more, the guests assembled on the porch: like children, Nora thought, waiting to be amused. Then the guides would slide up in their slim rowing boats and the guests would turn to Ned for advice. Who should go to Paul Smith’s on St. Regis Lake and who to Bartlett’s? Would the two gentlemen from Albany share a boat and guide between them or live like kings and hire two boats? And what about cartridges, and fishing lures, and the choice of guns and hatchets? If there were ladies among the guests — they were rare then — some would want to hire horses and others to climb a mountain.

All these decisions took time. At night, guests who’d been coming for several seasons would want Ned to play whist with them. They’d want advice about where to hunt; they’d want to make lists, with prices and shipping dates, of the trophies they’d ordered mounted. If the guests left Ned free for a minute, then Mrs. Yarrow, the housekeeper, would appear. What should she order, whom should she hire? She was used to having first claim on Ned’s free time. Nora, not knowing how else to reach her brother, joined him in working long hours; through this, she thought, they would build a common life.

In September, when the flood of guests finally receded, Nora helped Ned close off the guest bedrooms and bring in wood and seal the windows on the third floor of the main building, which formed the private apartment the three of them now shared. The sky grew dim, the snow fell and fell. She’d never seen anything like it. In the woods, between the massive dark trees, the snow lay three then four and then five feet deep. Michael adored Ned’s brown and white spaniel-hounds, who crashed through the drifts and chased after snowshoe hares. Ned taught him to shoot and, when he saw that Michael wasn’t squeamish, brought him to the shop out back, where he worked on the skins and heads his guests had left behind.

Even here, where Ned was most at home, he didn’t open up. He welcomed Nora, she knew he loved her, as she knew he loved Michael. Although he seldom asked about her past life, he listened intently as she described her old room at Fannies house, her friendship with Colm Larkin, the day when, with the sun deliciously baking the skin on their hands, Francis had asked her to marry him and she’d said yes. But when she asked questions of her own he answered only briefly, skipping great chunks of time. There’d been a friend, she gathered one evening, with whom he’d traveled through these woods, and who’d helped him find the site for this inn. Copernicus — what kind of a name was that? The brother, Ned said shortly, of the naturalist with whom he’d traveled north; the whole family had peculiar names.

Why did she keep asking questions? Because he volunteered so little, she would have said. He hid himself, he hid his life, he refused to let her know him. Her inquiries, he might have responded, were no different from the rude prying of his guests and clients. Over dinner or out on the porch, strangers asked the same blunt questions again and again, as if they were the first to think of them. Where was he from, when had he come from Ireland, did he have family there, or here? What had happened to his face?

For those people, who didn’t matter, he made up stories. A she-bear had mauled him. A blizzard had caught him far from home. In Ireland he’d been scalded by a pan of boiling water.

But his own sister he couldn’t lie to. Nor, at first, could he tell her the truth. His own sister, he thought, ought to have known what was crucial without asking.

During their second winter at the inn, Nora and Michael went with Ned to look at a litter of hunting dogs. In a sleigh heaped with blankets and fur robes they slipped through deep, unbroken snow, Ned’s black horses working hard to break trail but the sleigh itself gliding noiselessly. Michael remarked on the hawks casting shadows on the slopes, the chickadees whisking past, and Ned pointed out lakes where he and Michael might fish through the ice. The sky, which had been clear and bright when they started out, was gray by the time they reached Alvah’s cabin. While they drank coffee and chatted and played with the puppies — two were for Michael, Ned revealed then, Michael’s own dogs, and so he should choose — the wind came up and the sky grew dark and more snow began to fall. It was very cold by the time they left. Before they were halfway home, a foot of fresh snow had fallen and the wind was already erasing their morning tracks.

“Are we lost?” Michael said, looking wide-eyed at the chaos. “Are we going to be lost?”

“I never get lost,” Ned said calmly. By then both Nora and Michael knew this to be true; Ned’s sense of direction was another reason the guides respected him. They steered around gigantic drifts, which the wind made in a minute and then revised: let’s cover this bush here; no, this. A joke, if it had been warmer. The horses, who were not amused, stopped at the foot of a long, steep hill and refused to go farther.

The sleigh held puppies as well as people: Homer and Virgil — Alvah had named them — who wailed despite their distinguished names. The horses stood still, breathing heavily, glazed in their sweat.

“We’ll rest for a while,” Ned said, warming Michael’s cheeks with his hands after trying to coax the horses on. “We’ll get warmed up while we wait for the moon to rise. Then we’ll ask the horses again.”

“The dogs are cold,” Michael said. “I am too.”

Ned tossed him a shovel. “Help me,” he said.

While Nora rubbed the horses down and covered them with blankets, Ned and Michael dug a hollow into the lee side of a big drift. Inside it Ned packed three bearskin robes, the puppies, and Michael. Nora crawled in behind him, and Ned behind her. They huddled there while the wind began to drop and the moon slowly lit the landscape. Michael held Homer and Virgil inside his coat, one wrinkly-faced, half-mastiff, half-greyhound puppy nestled in each armpit.