Servants of the Map (17 page)

Off he went again, on a line diagonal to his first route. Near noon he came upon a modest house, where he thought to beg a few minutes by the fire. The young woman he’d seen near the river a day earlier opened the door.

“Oh!” she said. “You—was that you on the roof of the boat?”

“I waved,” he said. “You didn’t see me.”

Her face colored slightly. “I was talking to my sister. I didn’t have a free hand.”

He took off his hat and introduced himself, both confused and touched by her embarrassment.

“Will you come in?”

Behind her was the girl he’d glimpsed, along with six other children. Twining among them were a black cat, a tortoiseshell cat, and a large splotched dog. From the kitchen an older woman, Mrs. Dietrich, came forward to greet him. Miriam took his coat and gun and settled him by the fire.

“Grace is deaf,” she murmured as her mother withdrew. Then she continued with the introductions, Grace’s hands following her words. For her older brother, who had large ears, Grace pinched her right earlobe gently and tugged it. For her younger brother she stroked her eyebrows: his were dark and full, the most striking thing about him. She had similarly eloquent gestures for the girls Miriam introduced as their neighbors and her pupils. As she shaped them Grace studied the stranger who’d finally arrived.

Not a stranger, exactly: she’d seen his awkward gestures on the boat. Along with the fresh smell of snow and the deeper notes of his wet boots and woolen clothes, he carried an odor of sadness. As he stretched his boots toward the fire, Miriam pointed at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Grace put her hand to her forehead, palm out with two fingers raised and curled forward, imitating his tuft of springy hair.

“What does she mean?” Caleb asked.

Miriam laughed and repeated the gesture. “She told you her names for everyone here; then she gave you a name-sign as well.”

Clumsily he tried to imitate her movement. “This?”

“Turn your wrist,” said Miriam. “That.”

“How do I make her name?”

Miriam passed her left hand, palm in, over her left ear and then her mouth, as if with that gesture she sealed them both shut. Caleb shaped the sign for himself, correctly this time; then pointed to Grace and smiled and shaped the sign for her. Mrs. Dietrich appeared with a tray.

“Your daughter has a whole language of signs?” Caleb asked. Mrs. Dietrich nodded.

“We
do,” Miriam replied, helping her mother pass around cornbread and coffee and peach preserves. The children stared at him and the splotched dog licked his hand. “Our whole family.”

She did most of the talking; Mrs. Dietrich was quiet and the gestures she used to converse with Grace were cramped and halting. Soon she excused herself and returned to the pies she was making.

“Grace lost her hearing when she was two,” Miriam offered. “Most of our signs she invented, though we also use some she’s picked up from her friends.” She passed Caleb the last fragments of the cornbread. “But tell me about your journey,” she said. “Where you’re headed.”

Even as he tried to describe his plans—the salt lick in Kentucky he hoped to visit, with its famous graveyard of ancient bones; his hope of digging out some of these relics—part of his attention was also with the children, who’d returned to their lessons. A schoolmaster’s trick, pounded deep within. As he spoke he eyed the few worn books they shared and the open picture-primer, its oversized words paired with drawings: HAT, RAT, POT, CAT, HEN, TOP, BOY. At the moment Grace was drawing a map of Pennsylvania while the others shared the history text. With a gentle word, Miriam quelled the fit of giggling that swept through the room when the big-eared boy dropped the book on the floor.

“Forgive them,” she said. Her attention too was split, Caleb sensed. As it should be. “We’re taking three days off from our lessons for Christmas, and they’re so excited they can’t concentrate.”

“You do very well with them,” Caleb said. He looked down at his wet
boots, imagining himself back at the Academy a few weeks from now, pushing the younger boys through their readers and ignoring their yawns. “I’m a schoolmaster myself.”

“You enjoy the work?”

He nodded and then, encouraged, described the Academy. He barely mentioned Samuel and at first, flattered by her attention, didn’t notice how little she offered about herself. Nothing about how Grace had lost her hearing, nor how she’d started this school. As he spoke, Grace continued drawing her map.

With her beloved colored pencils she made a blue river, brown mountains, patches of green forest. This river, her river, without the ice but with Caleb’s boat. The cat walked to the window, placed her front paws on the glass, and stood staring sway-bellied out at the snow until, without transition, she was perched on the sill and the dog was walking back and forth below her, considering all that the cat might be seeing. The dog moved toward the door and waited for one of the boys to release her. Their visitor, whose crest resembled that of a female cardinal, crossed and uncrossed his legs. What would her father make of him? Over her map she unconsciously shaped her father’s name-sign, one hand holding and guiding an invisible chisel while the heel of the other pushed. He’d gone to a neighbor’s to build them a table but would soon return. When the cat pressed a paw to the window, trying to touch a passing crow, Grace pinched the air near her upper lip with two fingers, drawing them in an eloquent movement through the place where her whiskers would be, if she were a cat.

Caleb, who’d been watching her, laughed and said, “Even I can understand that.” The children, or the fire, or the fragrant woodsmoke, Miriam’s easy conversation or Mrs. Dietrich’s restful silence, the sight of Grace—perhaps especially Grace—had cheered him. Only now did he realize how off balance he’d felt since leaving home. Through the window he saw the dog leap up in a startling curve, snapping at something
beyond the frame. A beautiful day, one of those days for which the world had been created. He had almost missed it entirely.

He rose, flexing his toes in his nearly dry boots. “I should head back,” he said reluctantly. “Thank you for making me so welcome.”

“We’re glad for the company,” Miriam said. “The bad weather’s cut us off from everyone.” The children waved and the cats serpentined around his legs. Mrs. Dietrich, who hadn’t spoken directly to him since they finished their meal, came forward, smiling, to offer a pair of mince pies.

He shared these with the boatmen on Christmas Day, when they asked him to join their quiet celebration. The captain led the men in some hymns; Caleb read from the Bible when asked; rain fell, harder and harder, melting the snow until it seemed that they must soon be freed. But after their dinner of pheasant and biscuits and pie, the rain stopped, the sky cleared, and a cold wind swept down the river, freezing everything again. Caleb excused himself from the boatmen’s cabin and retreated to the pleasures of Stuart’s farewell gift: John Filson’s essay on the natural history of Kentucky. A book older than he was, but still very useful—and how like Stuart, he thought fondly, to give him not the most up-to-date scientific volume but this early description of the area. Stuart had marked one page with a piece of paper; the passage described the salt lick—still so far downriver that Caleb could hardly imagine it—and the finds of astonishing bones.

The celebrated Dr. Hunter, Caleb read, had observed from the form of the giant teeth found there,

Where had Stuart found this book? And when—and why hadn’t they read it together? Perhaps they had: there’d been long stretches, during Samuel’s last months, when Caleb had sat by his father’s bed with the books Stuart loaned to him, passing the words before his eyes but registering nothing.

Every morning, Caleb thought, Samuel had eaten the same kind of porridge at the same time, from the same bowl; then washed his hands and said a prayer and entered the same classroom full of boys essentially if not actually the same. After teaching the same Scripture lessons he dissected the same passages from Horace and Virgil and ate the same midday bread and cheese, eagerly awaiting the late-night hours when, surrounded by his trays of fossils, he might seek an answer to the riddle of Creation. What kind of a life was that? The same kind, Caleb feared—he was back in his bunk, unable to sleep—that he’d been leading himself.

Yet look what happened when he tried to broaden his horizons. In Pittsburgh, a few months earlier, he’d gone by himself to a party. The room had been filled with strangers, most from the same group of teachers and naturalists whose keelboat Caleb had seen being built at the wharves. They were headed for New Harmony, someone said; they meant to change the world. Intrigued—where did they find the nerve?—but also hugely skeptical, Caleb had eavesdropped on several conversations. A Frenchman attached to the group, a naturalist named Charles Lesueur, spoke eloquently about his earlier travels. The astonishing falls at the Niagara River, new species of sturgeon and pike; proudly he displayed his sketchbook to Mr. Wright, their host.

Caleb, edging up to the circle of listeners, admired the beautiful drawings until Mr. Wright, to his embarrassment, pulled him inside the circle and presented him to Lesueur. After repeating Caleb’s name, Mr. Wright added, “Caleb is the son of Mr. Samuel Bernhard, who some years ago published a remarkable book about the nature of fossils and their role in God’s creation.”

This again, Caleb had thought. Always this. What did Mr. Wright have against him? Lesueur pouted his lips and blew, a small explosive puff that Caleb would forever after think of as definitively French. “That book,” he said. “I have seen that book. Your father …”

Caleb flushed and looked at his shoes. The moment would pass, he thought, if he said nothing. He had lived through similar moments before. “My father is dead,” he said.

“I don’t mean to insult him,” Lesueur continued. “Or this backward country. Merely to suggest that we consolidate the truth in opposition to a knowledge of the false—and so your father after all had a role to play. Cuvier proved last year that Scheuchzer’s famous fossil skeleton, the one he called
Homo diluvii,
was the front part of a giant salamander. Your father probably believed it was a man who drowned in the Flood.”

Caleb had made some clumsy excuse and fled; but the damage was done. It had taken Stuart days to calm him.

Still thinking about that party, and of the Frenchman who’d insulted him, he slept fitfully and woke with an aching head. After breakfast he went walking again, this time making a beeline for the pleasant house in the woods. Once more, Miriam opened the door. Both would remember this, later: her surprise, which deepened so quickly to pleasure. Gratefully he settled down again beside the fire.

“My parents are out,” she said. “It is just us. But we’re glad to see you.”

Grace sat on the floor, busy with her colored pencils; after Miriam signed to her that she and Caleb were going to talk privately, her hands were still while they chatted. The weather, the moving ice; her mother’s pies, which had been delicious, and her father’s work, which was all around them: table, clothespress, walnut chest of drawers. The house itself. Grace and her brothers had been born here but Miriam was old enough to remember the journey from northern New York and the isolation of their early days, before they’d had neighbors. Her parents had
taught her to read and write and, later, when she’d proved to have a particular gift for teaching, had encouraged her to take in pupils.

Although Miriam’s words flowed in a straight line, still Caleb thought they skirted something essential. About to ask a question, he subsided as she explained that the key to Grace’s education was the language of gestures, which, mysteriously, she’d been able to grasp more easily than had her parents. Through it Grace had already learned so much.

“She’s beginning to read,” Miriam said. “It’s a second language for her, written English—I explain it by way of signs, and by drawings. Her written vocabulary isn’t very large but she learns new words every day.”

“Astonishing,” Caleb said.

“Is it? Some days it simply seems like what we make together. What
is.
Since she first lost her hearing I’ve been able to understand her gestures almost instinctively, even though my mother stumbles and my father can’t express himself that way at all. I’m not good at remembering ideas from books, but I remember shapes. It was her own idea to learn her letters. One morning she carried a book to me, pointing at the lines, then herself, then the lines. She was holding it upside down.”

The warm glow that lit her features made him think of Margaret. “She makes signs in her sleep,” Miriam said. “I think she must dream in gestures. And when she’s reading she sometimes shapes the corresponding gestures with her hands, as you or I might have moved our lips when we were first learning.”

He repeated a story he’d heard over Christmas dinner, about a young man, born deaf, whose father had been a boatman here on the Ohio. “When the boatman drowned,” he said, “a deaf beggar took the child to Philadelphia and used him to help solicit alms. There’s a school for the deaf there—”

“I know of it,” Miriam interrupted eagerly. “There’s one in Hartford as well, we use their signed alphabet.”

”—and someone from that institution saw the boy on the streets and took him in, where he learned to draw wonderfully. Later he was apprenticed to an artist and learned lithography. Now he makes his living doing that and is much admired, especially for his skillful renderings of fish.”

“I have to tell Grace this part,” Miriam said.

Caleb couldn’t see, in her liquid movements, where one word ended and another began: how did one learn this? He and Lavinia had been separated before she learned to speak, when she was about the age at which Grace had lost her hearing. But he had always known what she was thinking.