Servants of the Map (15 page)

How clear and frank his eyes were. “The rain makes her melancholy,” Caleb replied, stifling an impulse to add that she wasn’t actually his
mother. Recently he’d been startled by how little he resembled his adopted family, and how sharply his long, wiry limbs and his consuming curiosity set him apart.

He looked down at the newspaper lying open on the counter, leaning closer when Stuart pointed out an article and asked, “Did you see that?”

The Rappites, Caleb read—hardworking religious ascetics, calmly awaiting the end of the world—had built a new woolen mill. What could it be like, Caleb wondered aloud, to work a loom in the expectation of being lifted bodily, any minute, into heaven?

“Unnerving, I imagine,” Stuart said. “Every time you heard a strange sound you’d be thinking,
This is it.”

When Caleb laughed, Stuart offered a tale about a man named Symmes who claimed that the earth was hollow and filled with nested concentric spheres, each one habitable and awaiting settlement. In Russia one might find mammoths in the frozen river deltas. In Egypt there were mummies underground, in Oregon relics of ancient tribes—and so who could say for sure what else might not be hiding inside the earth?

“You’d like to travel?” Caleb asked. “So would I.”

The lines of a possible life fanned out—two companions exploring here, adventuring there—and just as quickly reeled themselves in: Stuart was already married, Caleb learned. Already tied to the infant fussing in a basket at his feet.

“Talk is my form of travel,” Stuart said wryly. “At least for now. That and reading whatever I can.” As Caleb pondered the contrast in their situations, Stuart bent over the basket and then deposited the squalling bundle in Caleb’s arms.

“Elias,” he said, as Caleb inspected the infant’s charming ears. “He’s teething. He wants to be held, and I need both hands to work.”

While Stuart ground and stirred, he said he’d meant to be a doctor but now made a living compounding potions for his uncle and experimenting with leaves and roots. A sharp smell rose from some herb he crushed. “My father’s legacy to me,” he said, wincing. “An oversensitive
nose.” What would it be like, Caleb wondered, to
know
who had given him certain traits—his sharp eyes, his cowlick, his sense of not quite fitting in anywhere? The smell of living blood, Stuart said ruefully, was what had turned him away from medicine.

Caleb jiggled Elias gently and eyed a huge tooth lying behind the bundles of willow twigs. “Mastodon?” he asked, prodding the conical cusps with his foot. “My father has part of a rib, from a place down the river.”

“The salt lick in Kentucky?”

Caleb nodded. “His speculations about the Elephant of the Ohio are almost the first things I remember.”

A lie, already; no way to make a friend. He crouched, balancing Elias, and touched the tooth’s curved roots. What he first remembered, hazily, was an entirely different life. If his true parents had not died of the yellow fever when he was a child, he thought. If the Bernhards, making their way from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, had not stopped near the smoking heap that until that morning had been his home; if their eldest son had not died a few weeks earlier and if he himself had not been pulling against the hand of the doctor, shrieking as his first sister, Lavinia, was placed in a wagon with two women …
Grateful
, the doctor had said.
Always, to this family willing to take you.
He’d been five when he was chosen. He had never seen Lavinia again.

“My father told me the ground near the salt spring is filled with giant bones, all mixed together,” he said. At least that part was true. “Some from creatures that no one has ever seen.”

Stuart looked up and nodded. “The great American incognitum, now extinct.”

“Or simply, as my father believes”—Caleb had his own doubts about this—“a living nondescript we haven’t
seen yet.”

Stuart raised his eyebrows, which Caleb found both reassuring and alarming. “So where are these behemoths now?”

“Out West,” Caleb said cautiously. He returned Elias, who had
fallen asleep, to the woven basket. “Or at the tip of South America, or hiding in the arctic. Somewhere, my father contends, mastodons are still roaring.”

“That’s one possibility,” Stuart said. “Myself, I think they are long extinct—and I don’t mean by the agency of any biblical event.” Through a rolled cone of paper he poured a stream of ground bark. “I heard from my uncle that your father is writing a tract about fossils.”

“He is,” Caleb admitted. “An historical overview of all the old theories, followed by his own account.” Was this a betrayal?

“I’m interested in the relationship of fossils to geology,” Stuart said. “My uncle lets me borrow from his library. I’d be glad to share some books with you, if you’re interested.”

They talked for another hour, a rush of ideas that left Caleb both grateful for all he’d learned from Samuel and, as he wandered outside through the last feeble rain, afraid of his new friend’s opinion of Samuel’s work.

In Stuart’s company, among the delectable rows of Dr. Mason’s excellent library, Caleb developed his own ideas about the earth’s beginnings. Stuart passed books, stuffed with scribbled notes, to Caleb; in turn, Caleb passed the least objectionable of these on to Samuel. After all, Caleb told his father, the earth’s crust did not so much resemble a fluid pudding in which raisins were randomly mixed. Rather it resembled a squashed and tilted book, each page bearing a different form of writing. And this sequence of strata might
mean
something; the neatly stacked layers, all bearing their characteristic fossils, a signal that different kinds of life had over time appeared and then disappeared. Not one Deluge, Caleb suggested. But a long series of inundations.

Although Samuel dismissed that idea with a laugh, their arguments, which often included Stuart, in general seemed to please him. “I have always kept up with the times,” he said proudly. “I have always been open-minded. Reconcile your theories with the truth of Scripture and you will have my full attention.”

It was enough, Caleb thought, to see Samuel caught up again in the pursuit that had once been his greatest pleasure. In recent years he’d grown sluggish, seldom going on the collecting trips that had punctuated Caleb’s childhood. Work on his book had slowed as well; he was growing old, and sufficiently vague that his assistant master, exasperated, had recently resigned. Caleb, with little warning, now found himself teaching half the classes.

What a relief, in light of this, to see some of Samuel’s old energy and enthusiasm return. Once again he was scouring the local cliffs and creekbeds, and if at first he returned with the same familiar fossils, still his ardor was touching. A small, solitary figure climbing clumsily up a rock face, scarf flapping over his shoulder as his bruised hands fumbled for treasures: how could this pleasing sight lead to so much pain?

During the weeks when Samuel found the first of the peculiar stones, Caleb, who was swamped with teaching duties, knew only that his father vanished at awkward times and seemed gleefully secretive. He would have been horrified to see Samuel on that cliff, charting the positions of his finds before removing and squirreling them away. Had Caleb known what was going on, he would have asked the questions that became obvious later: Why did Samuel find only counterparts—the impressions, the prints—and no corresponding parts? Why were all the impressions intact, and all of the same depth? But Samuel saw, instead of these problems, a grand solution.

His stones, which depicted bees caught in the act of sipping nectar, birds frozen in midflight, a spider consuming a fly, were not mingled together but layered, birds above bees above the spider until, near the top of the cliff, the sequence was crowned by pictures of the sun and broken shapes that resembled letters. Relics of men, Samuel decided. A civilization drowned in the Flood. Without telling Caleb anything, without showing the stones to a soul, Samuel commissioned an artist to draw illustrations of all he’d found. Only then did he confide in Caleb.

What was it like, that first sight of the stones? Like a blow to the
head, like the onset of a fever. Caleb knew, he knew right away; Stuart agreed with him instantly. The stones are fake, Caleb told his father. Can’t you see?

But Samuel locked himself in his study, emerging with fresh chapters for his book. These discoveries, he claimed, proved that fossils were arrayed in layers not because they’d been laid down over time during successive inundations, but as a result of their differing degrees of intelligence and closeness to God. Little creeping things had drowned in the first days of the only Flood, while the more intelligent, flying or fleeing uphill, had been caught by the water later. Of course human beings had drowned last. By this arrangement, God demonstrated order even in the midst of chaos.

By then Samuel wasn’t speaking at night, pacing before the fire; by then he was preaching to his family or bursting into Caleb’s classroom. Nothing has altered since the Deluge, he claimed, nor will it ever, as God’s first plan was perfect. Consider the sturgeon, that very odd fish. “From the Monongahela,” he told Caleb’s history class, “I once pulled a specimen five feet long, with a mouth like a hose.” Who could have expected God to fashion such an improbable creature?

All this, and more, he wrote down. Soon his book assumed its final shape and a title that, repeated on brown calf covers, would haunt Caleb for years:

Eighteen months after finding the first stone, three months after he’d sent copies of his book to all the best scientific societies and journals, Samuel found, in a crevice at the top of the cliff, a flat slab inscribed with his name.

In the schoolyard, among the whispering boys, were a few who betrayed the culprits: three recent graduates who, before leaving the Academy, had carved the impressions into bits of soft shale. Caleb tracked them down and made them apologize to Samuel. They’d never meant, they said, for Mr. Bernhard to take those stones seriously. They had thought he’d see their joke at a glance. Their bland blank faces and callused hands, their fumbling explanations: Caleb had wanted to strike them.

Samuel stopped teaching, he stopped going out, soon he stopped leaving his bed. He spent all he’d saved, and more he borrowed, buying back copies of his book. During the days Caleb, now running the Academy by himself, could not be with him. But at night he sat by Samuel’s bed, the two of them once more awake together while the rest of the household slept. This time it was Caleb who read: at first out loud, when Samuel could still listen. Later, near the end, he read to himself.

A herd of schoolboys dropping books, reciting their lessons, bungling grammar and simple sums while exuding a smell—not unpleasant, completely definitive—that hadn’t changed since he was a boy himself: for a decade, except for a brief, glowing year, this became the shape of Caleb’s life. He worked to restore the Academy’s reputation and to repay the debts which, along with a tower of brown books and a clear sense of his father’s errors, he’d inherited. To the curriculum, which he’d also inherited, he slowly added algebra, astronomy, a smattering of geology. Still he wasn’t teaching what he wanted, but each small change was a revolution to the parents he courted and couldn’t afford to offend.

Young Harry Spires, who joined the Academy as assistant master seven years after Samuel’s death, was all for tossing Livy and Horace aside completely and adding botany, chemistry, French, and German. Patience, Caleb counseled. We must move cautiously. He didn’t say what
he sometimes thought: that he’d inherited a kind of factory, stamping out adequately learned, sufficiently tractable young men. Men like him. He’d loved teaching, when he was younger and had first started helping his father. Now he sometimes dozed in class, waking to find suggestive drawings on the slates and the boys smirking as if he’d turned into their last, collar-frayed visions of Samuel.
A widower
, parents whispered, excusing his lapses.

Briefly, through his courtship of Margaret Harper and their simple wedding, through the lush days of August and the months when Margaret was carrying their child, he’d felt as clear and radiant as a glass bowl lit by a beeswax candle. Then something snapped or fell or cracked, a wind blew, a storm raged—who ordered this?—and he was sitting in the kitchen, staring at Stuart while his son struggled and failed to be born and left Margaret burning with fever. He roasted straws in the stove and removed them, burning holes with the fiery tips in a sheet of paper. From the pattern of charred holes, letters emerged:
The Academy of Sorrow.
Stuart seized the paper; Caleb singed spots on the back of his hand. Stuart seized his hands. During the rest of that terrible week, Stuart left his own work to help Harry with the classes, while Rosina managed the house so that Mrs. Bernhard could tend to her daughter-in-law. Caleb prayed, everyone prayed; and still, Margaret followed her son four days later.

After that Caleb turned away from whoever tried to help him. His pupils’ well-meaning mothers—the widows especially—sometimes asked why he didn’t remarry; it wasn’t right for a man to be alone. He might have replied that the Academy, and his remaining family, required his full attention. Or he might have told the widows the truth: that once, not long after he and Margaret were married, he’d complimented her on a pot of yellow blossoms near the front door. She’d laughed, and blushed, and then confessed that weeks earlier, watching him walk around the vegetable garden, she’d slipped out, dug up a brick-sized clump of earth which held the clear impression of his right
foot, and tucked it into a flower pot. In that earth she’d planted a chrysanthemum, hoping that as it bloomed year after year so would his love for her. How should he marry again, after that?

He told the widows nothing. In the constant absence of Margaret he worked, and looked after his mother and Rosina, and missed his old lively friendship with Stuart; Stuart had two more children now and when they met they spoke wryly of the tasks—the endless, tedious tasks—that kept them, almost all the time, apart.