Servants of the Map (13 page)

The aunts have no idea of this, but it is from the likes of James that they have wished to preserve me. From that giving in, that going under, they would preserve me as they’ve preserved themselves. Not the children born every year, half or more of them to die; not the daily bowing down, the loss of my own thoughts and my independence; not the loss of my mind nor (the thing the aunts can’t envision) the loss of that clear separate place in me where I dream of you, and long for you. Through that channel of longing, the world enters me.

Yesterday Mr. Wells took me to visit our elderly neighbor, William Bartram who has grown so reclusive. We’ve met before; when I was a girl, still in short skirts with my hair in a braid, the aunts occasionally trotted me over to him.
Great man
, they said, introducing him to me. Then me to him:
Our niece, whom we are raising. She is very studious.
A few questions they would put to me, so Mr. Bartram might see how well I answered. After those I was expected to be silent.

Mr. Wells brought me there as someone like an equal. On a seat in the garden, near the giant cypress Mr. Bartram’s father brought back from Georgia, with Mr. Bartram’s menagerie disporting about us, snakes and frogs and salamanders, two dogs, a possum, a crow named Virgil—there, Mr. Wells had me describe our experiment with the dew.

Mr. Bartram listened attentively, Virgil perched on his shoulder and pecking at his spectacles. “This is most interesting,” he said. Then he rose and beckoned us to follow him down the gentle slope from the house to the river, touring us through the persimmons and walnuts, the odd vines tangled high in the chestnuts, the cider press perched above the water, and the pond he’d deepened and banked with stone.

As we walked around the pond something went plop and plop and plop: “My little green frogs,” Mr. Bartram said fondly. “At night their croaking keeps us awake.” When he waved his arms about, fending off the clouds of mosquitoes and gnats, the strands of white hair left on his head rose and danced in the sun. He walked quickly for such an old man but I kept up with him, delighted with the black calf boots Mr. Wells had given me as a belated birthday gift. At the peach grove Virgil leapt down from Mr. Bartram’s shoulder and pecked inquisitively at my boot buttons. “Was he hard to train?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Mr. Bartram said. “His wit is prodigious. The first time he saw me pulling weeds from the vegetable garden he watched for a while and then hopped over and began plucking blades of grass from the ground with his beak. When I am writing, and he would rather I came outside, he pulls the pen from my hands. You might train a crow yourself, if you desired a companion.”

“My aunts,” I said. “I think they would not …”

Mr. Bartram nodded. “Worthy women,” he said. “But very … tidy.” He gestured toward his specimens, which live in a tangle that might seem chaotic had he not explained it. For each plant he’d made a place imitating its natural home: a split rock if he’d found it in a mountain cranny, a moist spot under briars if it lived under briars in the woods.

“When those ladies used to visit,” he said, “they always suggested I might want to
neaten
things a bit. I’m glad they haven’t wholly neatened you.” His gaze on me was clear and straight; I think that, like our other older neighbors, he has always known that the aunts are not my aunts. If he knows too that they’re not kin to each other he hasn’t betrayed this
to me; though who knows what he’ll say to Mr. Wells. Perhaps, when they next meet, they’ll speculate over a glass of whiskey. What do men think, when they see women living together? Do they imagine the aunts sleeping side by side, wrapped in flannel, untouched?

Back in the garden, cool glasses of cider before us, Mr. Wells complimented Mr. Bartram. “The riches you and your father have gathered—such a marvelous array of species,” he said. “No visitor can fail to be impressed.”

“I’ve had good company,” Mr. Bartram said. “Men from Russia and France and England and Germany have all honored me with their visits, even Peter Kalm from Sweden; this has been a great pleasure.”

Virgil flew past us, carrying something bright, and landed beneath the cypress. With his beak he tossed scraps of bark over his toy, until it was hidden.

“What Kalm wrote about Niagara Falls,” Mr. Wells said. “Such a powerful description—the blinding fog and the cascading water, the birds losing their way in the cloud of vapor rising from the rocks. Ducks and geese and swans, their wings weighed down by the mist until they drop from the air and tip over the cataract … ”

“Feathers,” Mr. Bartram said dreamily.

They can’t imagine the aunts: or not the aunts young and caught together in a current. Instead they think about the sliding layers forming the current itself, conversing as if jointly creating the falling birds and the rising water. Where is the theory, I wanted to ask, that might make sense of this?

“When Kalm visited,” Mr. Bartram continued, “he said he found below the Falls each morning enough feathers to stuff many beds. And fish, all broken and writhing, and sometimes deer, once a bear.”

They weren’t ignoring me; they were talking to each other but also to me, perhaps in part
for
me; they were so happy that I felt happy too. From the table I slipped a little knife, which Mr. Bartram had used to sever the stems of the grapes. Virgil, who’d been creeping closer while
the men spoke, was staring beseechingly at my boots; from the left one I cut the topmost button, which I never use, and held it out to him. He bent his head, his beak grazed my hand; the button disappeared. At the base of the cypress he tossed it up in the air and down again, up and down until he tired and buried it near his other treasures.

When we rose to go, Mr. Bartram asked us to wait and went into the house for a minute. He returned with a book, his own famous
Travels.
Mr. Wells rested his hand on my arm and looked at Mr. Bartram; I saw Mr. Bartram nod. “A small gift,” he said. “In return for the pleasure of your company, and for what you gave Virgil.”

I had thought myself unobserved. Inside the front cover Mr. Bartram had written:
For my new friend, who can listen to the birds.

Another of Aunt Jane’s spells. She took to her bed, pale and damp; when I brought a tray with her supper she turned her face and said she couldn’t eat. “I have no appetite,” she sighed. “Not for food, not for work. Not for anything.” I looked at her and wondered what I am
except
appetite.

“Shall I read to you?” I asked. What I should have done was smooth her hair and say I loved her. Say I would live my life like hers, that I am grateful for all she has taught me and do not judge her.

“Read,” she said. “Please.”

And softly, so she could hardly hear me, I read about the wonders of the planetary system, the perfections of the Deity, and the plurality of worlds. I read about igneous meteors. “ ‘Another species of phenomena, on which a great mystery still hangs,’ ” I read, “ ‘is the singular but not well-attested fact of large masses of solid matter falling from the higher regions of the atmosphere, or what are termed meteoric stones. Few things have puzzled philosophers more than to account for the large fragments of compact rocks proceeding from regions beyond the clouds, and falling to the earth with great velocity.’ ”

“Oh,” Aunt Jane moaned. “What has this to do with anything?”

Beneath the counterpane her body made barely a ridge. I wondered what she was like at my age, what she longed for and couldn’t have.

“Listen,” I said.

I read about luminous meteors over Benares, a large ball of fire followed by falling stones; it was you I was reading to. About a huge stone that fell in Yorkshire, burying itself deep in the ground; about an extraordinary shower of stones that happened in Normandy. “ ‘In the whole district,’ ” I read, “ ‘there was heard a hissing noise like that of a stone discharged from a sling, and a great many mineral masses, exactly similar to those distinguished by the name of meteor stones, were seen to fall.’”

Outside her window the frogs were singing. “ ‘The stones,’ ” I read—but I had done something good after all, she had closed her eyes and entered the dead sleep from which she’d emerge, twelve hours later, washed clean and a little stupid. “ ‘These stones,’ ” I read, “ ‘have a peculiar and striking analogy with each other. They have been found at places very remote from each other, and at very distant periods. They appear to have fallen from various points of the heavens, at all periods, in all seasons of the year, at all hours both of day and night, in all countries of the world, on mountains and on plains, and in places remote from any volcano. The luminous meteor which generally precedes their fall is carried along in no fixed or invariable direction; and as their descent usually takes place in a calm and serene sky, and frequently in cloudless weather, their origin cannot be traced to the causes which operate in the production of rain.’ ” Here I paused and closed the book. Into the still night air I said:

Q. But what are the causes which operate in the production of rain?

A.
We do not understand even those; how should we understand a rain of stones?

I was talking to you, I was asking you. Lapidifying juice, petrific seed, volcanic spume, the tears of the moon—somewhere, wherever you are, do you too look at the world and ask question after question?

You have no face, but sometimes I can hear you. Not as a human voice but as a pulsing hum, lower in pitch than the tree frogs’ note, higher than the cicadas; pure intonation, no information. When I think about Mr. Wells I hear the hum deepen, as if with pleasure, while I imagine a life. Sons and daughters and a large airy house, a garden soft with ferns and herbs and a long drive bordered by peonies. His work—he works hard, he will not be home much—and mine. Much of mine the education of children; but
my
children, not the children of strangers. At night a hand on my breasts, a thigh between mine; and if that body doesn’t belong to James, if it is not James who bends to me, if it is not James …

While Aunt Jane slept I leaned out the window, looking up at the cloudless sky and the ring around the moon. All that is there, all that hangs suspended in air, suspended above the air: rain and hail and fire and stone, the mind of God, if there is a God; the stars and planets and comets and our fates. Sleep well, my dear. Wherever you are.

“What makes you happy?” Mr. Wells asked. We were out in the garden again. This is a question no one has ever asked me. The question you might have asked, might someday still ask.

“To be out here at night,” I told him. “On a clear cold night when the dew is heavy, to walk on the grass between the marigolds and the Brussels sprouts and feel my skirts grow heavy with the moisture. Or to go further, into the hayfield, where the mist hangs above the ground, rising nearly to my waist …”

I should not have said that, he looked startled. But although it was burning hot and the sun was shining I could feel myself in that field, timothy and clover and young wild grasses knee high and soaking wet, my wet skirts clinging to my legs and before me the low cloud spreading and spreading, white in the light of the moon and the stars above. On a ridge in the distance a white house is shining; this is the house where James lives. At night, long after the aunts are asleep, I have stood in the field, sopping wet, gazing across the sea of mist to a porch set with
tall columns. Behind the columns are rows of windows, two of them softly lit; and in the golden slots a chair is outlined, a rocking chair with a wooden back and a woven rush seat. Sometimes the chair is empty. Sometimes the chair holds James. I stand in the cloud, invisible to him, moving through the damp green growth like a deer, my height and heaviness cut in half, suspended above the suspended water. As the mist rises to my waist, my shoulders, my head I am standing in a kind of rain: and in that rain I am beautiful, at least to one man. Above me a meteor cuts the air and hot stones shower down. In that light, across the field, is all I will never have. Next to me is all I will.

“Will you marry me?” Mr. Wells asked.

I placed my hand in his and thought how I would say to you, how I would say … Oh, my brother, where are you? In the hum that is you, or my longing for you, I heard an answer.

“I would be honored,” I said.

A
S A YOUNG WOMAN,
she had written letters only infrequently. But now, in aid of her sister’s work, Miriam found herself writing letters almost every day. To the geologists, soldiers, government officials, and river traders on whom she and Grace depended, she wrote requesting cargo space for their crates, or reporting progress on their project, or itemizing their expenses:
freight on 1422 lbs
@ 6
cents/lb: $85.32.
She wrote to her son, in whose hands she’d left the Academy months ago, and to her daughters, who taught there. She wrote to bank officials, freight agents, book dealers, and, late in the afternoon of one bright, clear day, to her dead husband Caleb’s dearest friend:

June 29, 1853
Mauvaises Terres of the Dacota Country

Dear Stuart—

Forgive me for taking so long to answer your last. I do mean to answer
promptly, I know you like to follow our progress. I can only plead the constant press of work. You would understand if you could see this place; the season for collecting is short, and we are busy every minute. Do you remember what Caleb used to say about the ruins of an older world being visible all around us? He might have had this strange ugly landscape in mind, so jumbled and jagged. Box canyons, big cliffs, a river bed that looks as though God hacked through the plain with a giant axe.

Grace, who loves all of this, maps the sites where we dig and correlates the strata to similar formations elsewhere. In the cliff walls, she reports, the relics are arranged by age, youngest at the top and oldest at the bottom, neat as a filing cabinet: the clearest possible demonstration of the ideas you and Caleb shared. The fossil skulls and shinbones we stumble across on the basin floors are more difficult to place, and we have to guess at how they were arranged above.