Servants of the Map (16 page)

The spring of 1825, they agreed, was more than usually harassing. Stuart’s daughters both had the measles; two of Caleb’s pupils were caught stealing and had to be expelled. Rosina, who for years had managed the Academy’s accounts and helped her mother with the housekeeping, was suddenly useless. She and Harry, surprising everyone, had decided to marry; she was so happy she wandered around in a daze. While she stood in the hall outside Caleb’s classroom, smiling down at the bust of Homer beneath her unmoving feather duster, he led his youngest pupils in a geography lesson and imagined giving her away. Rosina’s hand relinquishing his arm for Harry’s, Harry moving into the house with them, sharing the family duties so that his own burdens finally lightened—why, then, did he feel so unsettled?

To the boys in his classroom, he read, “For what is Asia remarkable?” The boys said:

It is the division of the Earth that was first inhabited.

Who were the first persons on Earth?

Adam and Eve, who were placed in the Garden of Eden.

At what time was the Deluge?

Nearly seventeen centuries after the creation of man.

What then became of all living beings?

All living creatures died, except those that went with Noah into the Ark.

A sharp tight pain, which resembled a cramp, seized the base of his lungs just then. He dropped his eyes to the textbook, which he’d used for more years than he cared to remember. In the back of the room, Ian Berger pushed his lank brown hair aside, revealing freckles that merged into coin-sized splotches over his nose and left cheek.

“Question,” Ian said, as someone did each term. “Where did the water go
after?”

Caleb had no answer. Wasn’t this endless repetition, wrestling each day with the same tasks, same words, same weak and squalid self, enough to make anyone yearn for change? After the boys had gone home, he made his way to Stuart’s house. There he found his friend in equally bad spirits, sitting on the brick stoop and prying loose scraps of mortar.

“Tired?” Caleb asked.

“Of every single thing,” his friend replied. He flicked a scrap disdainfully into the air. “I’ll be thirty-eight next week—my father was dead by then. Yours has been gone for a decade. And here we’re still stuck in the same place, doing the same things, never seeing anything more than this tiny corner of the world—look at this stoop, it’s falling apart.”

“Something could change,” Caleb said.
“We
could change.”

“Our natures don’t change,” Stuart snapped. “If you had children of your own, you’d understand.” As Caleb flinched, Stuart reached for his hand. “Forgive me,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

He went into the house and returned with a bottle of rum, which a grateful patient had given him, and a single glass, which, like their discontent, they shared.

Classes ended at the Academy and the boys disappeared; Mrs. Bernhard and Rosina, absorbed by the wedding plans, failed to notice the anniversary of Margaret’s death. As the trees leafed out and the dense heavy heat descended, Caleb spent hours down at the wharves, fascinated by the jumble of boats and barges. He saw Frenchmen, and Indians, and a group of emigrants heading west—where was everyone going?

The movement and bustle cheered him briefly, as did Rosina and Harry’s wedding, but afterward, watching the new couple settle contentedly into their household routines, he couldn’t help thinking of the life that he and Margaret had lost. All summer he dreamed of Margaret; often he saw her holding his sister Lavinia in her arms. Lavinia’s face, which had dimmed in his memory as he’d grown up, had mysteriously regained its color and definition after Margaret’s death. Now he saw both of them clearly, the tiny scar on his first sister’s chin as vivid as the dark speck Margaret bore on the rim of one hazel iris.

Those dreams brought a cloud of melancholy that even the start of the new term couldn’t dispel. Stuart was downright gloomy; in November, when Caleb brought him a book they’d both coveted and couldn’t afford—Rembrandt Peale’s
Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth
—Stuart only shrugged. The long, intense conversations of their youth, their arguments over philosophy, history, the nature of science: how these had shrunk, Caleb thought. Shriveled to almost nothing. He set the precious volume on the table.

“What we need,” he said, “is a trip.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Stuart said flatly. “How could I? Barbara, the children, my uncle, my mother: everyone needs me.”

The crumpled skin around his eyes, the softness below his jaw—how old they’d gotten, Caleb thought. “A few weeks?” he asked.

He tried to convey to his friend the ferment he’d detected in the air. At the wharves he’d glimpsed an enormous keelboat, still under construction, that belonged to a group of naturalists and teachers headed for Robert Owen’s Utopian community on the Wabash River. Other boats were crowded with emigrants headed for Illinois, merchants loading and unloading goods; everyone had a plan. The papers were thick with appeals—for a Fourierist phalanx, a haven for freed slaves, a rational utopia; for asylums to benefit the deaf, the blind, the insane. Even the Rappites, less than twenty miles away, had established a new community called Economy. Couldn’t the two of them step back
from the history of their own lives and embrace the larger history of the earth?

“I had a thought,” Caleb said. “We could go to Kentucky together and visit the Big Bone Lick. I’d love to gather some fossils for the classroom, I think I’d have better luck teaching the boys if they could actually
feel
one of those giant tusks. And I’m curious to see for myself how the fossils lie where they haven’t been disturbed.”

Stuart reached for the book on the table but offered no comment. And why should he? Caleb thought. Even to his own ears, the excuse for the trip sounded feeble. Something else was pressing at him: a sense, which he couldn’t articulate, that in rummaging through that bone-filled pit he might finally make sense of his history with Samuel. More forcefully, he continued, “At the right site, we might be able to demonstrate a clear column of succession.”

But still Stuart looked at him wearily.
Our natures don’t change
, he’d said: but he hadn’t meant that, he wasn’t himself. Not so many years ago, they’d argued happily about the possibilities of a world still developing, still in progress. But if the world was fixed as God first created it, forever immutable; if nothing ever changed or became extinct but persisted and persisted—

“I know it’s winter,” Caleb said. Was that what Stuart was worried about? “But the lick is south of here, and the ground is saturated with salt. If it’s frozen at all, it will only be on the surface. And no one else will be there—a great advantage.”

“I really can’t travel now,” Stuart said. “I just can’t. But why don’t
you
go?”

Traveling alone seemed unappealing, but if he could bring back something that would cheer his friend … Caleb jumped when Stuart smacked both palms against the table.

“Go
somewhere,”
Stuart said. “Harry can take care of the Academy for a few weeks. Learn what you can and come back and tell me everything. I’m so tired of being stuck here—bring me something
new.”

Everything happened quickly after that. A pupil’s father, a commission merchant, owned a flatboat being loaded with linen and ginseng and nails, which was leaving for New Orleans; Caleb was welcome, the merchant said, to passage as far as he desired. A three-week break was scheduled for the end of term, and although Caleb expected to be gone at least six weeks, Harry said he could manage with a temporary replacement. Surely that small inconvenience was nothing in light of the useful and instructive fossils Caleb might bring back. “If you happened to find any plant fossils as well, that would be excellent,” Harry said enthusiastically. “And when you return, maybe we could order a new globe, and some botany manuals.”

Rosina, leaning up against Harry, said to Caleb, “But don’t be gone
too
long, will you? There’s so much to do here.”

While Caleb packed shirts and socks and waterproof boots, a gun and a measuring stick and two shovels, he considered, and then set aside, the fact that Samuel’s bitter last months had also begun with a fossil-gathering trip. Yet at the wharf a few days later, shivering in the cold wind and regarding the roughly built boat heaped with kegs and tarpulin-covered mounds, he felt an instant’s panic.

Why was he leaving? A smell he couldn’t name rose from the river, and in the confusion of saying his farewells he dropped a trowel into the water and then failed to thank Stuart for the book pressed firmly into his hands. Sally, Stuart’s youngest, had brought a gift as well: three sprigs of holly tied with a white bow. With the crisp green leaves in his buttonhole, Caleb stepped onto the boat. Once not he but Samuel had said, teaching the boys some local geography,
If we could fly, we would see from the clouds the clear waters of the Allegheny flowing down from the north, the muddy waters of the Monongahela flowing up from the south, two rivers merging into the Ohio at our home and forming a great Y. By that enormous letter we are meant to understand …

He’d forgotten the rest, the most important part; always he remembered
the wrong things. At the railing he watched a band of black water expand between him and the shore. In some language, an Indian language, Ohio meant “beautiful river.” From the sky something cold, part rain and part sleet, began to fall.

A few miles past the Rappite settlement of Economy, a farmstead set back from the river housed an informal school quite different from the Academy. On this December afternoon all the pupils—Grace Dietrich, her two older brothers, and four little girls from the neighboring houses—were walking toward the water, intent on their weekly nature lesson. Forget the snow, forget the cold. Or so said Miriam, who was their teacher. If the animals pranced about in it, why shouldn’t they? Every week they made this journey, in every kind of weather. On this day they romped in the woods for an hour before they emerged at the river’s edge and saw a boat being pushed toward the shore by rafts of ice. Men were shouting and long oars were flailing while the bow ground against tree roots already tangled in ice. The other pupils exclaimed at the noise and confusion, but Grace heard nothing.

Had the boat not appeared, Miriam would have pointed out deer scat, or a woodcock’s feather, or a fallen cardinal bright against the snow. Instead, as a man jumped from the boat to the ice to the ground, a rope in his hand, a hat on his head, Miriam directed Grace’s gaze to the scene unfolding before them. Twice the man passed the rope around a tree, tying a complicated knot before he opened his mouth and spiraled a finger through the air. Another man lowered a plank from the deck to the shore. On the deckhouse roof a third man, tall and thin, stood amid the bristling oars and looked curiously down at the scene.

Grace held her arms straight out, in imitation of the oars, and then
pulled them in and asked her sister a question. Miriam said, “Travelers,” at the same time shaping a gesture with her hands.

“Going where?” asked three of her pupils at once.

Miriam called a question to the man who’d secured the boat.

“St. Louis, then New Orleans,” he called. Once more Miriam turned to Grace and gestured.

“Where’s the nearest village?” asked the man who’d lowered the plank. Carefully he made his way across the gap between the boat and the riverbank.

Miriam stepped toward him, drew a map in the snow—the river here, a farmhouse there, a stand of willows, the sandbar—and told him where he might buy flour and cheese. The sun was setting, the children were cold. Grace, who was watching her actions intently, was shivering.

“We won’t be here long,” the boatman said cheerfully. “I’m sure the ice will break up soon.”

“I wish you good luck,” Miriam said. Everyone was busy with something, she saw, except that odd figure still peering down from the roof. Uneasy beneath his inquiring gaze, she herded her students together and began the long walk home.

Caleb had been tagged as an oddity even before his boat was forced ashore; not in the old, familiar way, but in an unexpected way. Only those with a purpose, he’d learned—traders transporting cargo, families looking to settle new land—traveled at this time of year. What, the boatmen asked him, was he thinking? They were unimpressed by his account of the fossil graveyard awaiting him downriver.

“You want to dig in this weather?” one asked. “For petrified bones? Good luck.”

Caleb slept alone in the first and smallest of the cabins, while the boatmen, crowded into the other cabin aft of the big space heaped with cargo, laughed and talked and smoked their pipes, never inviting him to
join them. On their fourth day out, when ice forced the boat to halt, they pushed him aside and moved through their tasks in an easy synchrony.

Unable to find a single useful thing to do, Caleb had watched the children racing like rabbits across a small clearing, the slender woman who spoke to the boatmen, and the little girl whose hands moved rapidly in the air. The woman’s hair was almost white; the girl’s hair was equally pale; they looked, not like the sister with whom he’d grown up, but like his real, lost sister. He’d raised a hand partway, a hesitant greeting, but they didn’t respond and a minute later they vanished.

Later that afternoon, while the crew settled into a routine of chopping wood and playing cards, Caleb fiddled with his equipment and worried about the weather, so much colder than he’d expected. The river seldom locked up like this, one boatman said. But they’d probably be freed in a day or two. After dinner Caleb wrote a letter to Stuart describing his predicament: which included the fact that the mail wouldn’t move until the river had thawed. I
could walk home in two days,
he wrote.
But it’s too soon to give up.
Then he stuffed the letter in his satchel, wrapped himself in his blankets, and went to sleep.

When he woke the boat was still frozen in, and the boatmen were still playing cards. Determined to be useful, Caleb left very early with his gun. The birds and bushes and trees near the boat were the same, he saw, as those he’d left less than twenty miles behind him. Also the same were the rocks poking up through the snow and the hawks spiraling through the sky. Farther away from the river’s edge, where the snow was deeper, he found the tracks of deer and possums and pheasants. Enormous trees, black and bare, and the sun so low in the sky; he walked for miles, beguiled by the light and shooting at nothing. Only when he crossed his own tracks did he realize he’d traced a great circle.