Servants of the Map (25 page)

Colm Larkin she met in the winter of 1868, when he made his way to the Soldier’s Home after having been in and out of four different hospitals and, for a while, on the streets. His lungs were inflamed, he had pneumonia and perhaps something worse than that. The same wound that had left him mute—an exploding shell that scattered metal through his chest and throat, breaking ribs, which had never healed correctly, and shattering his voice box—also gave him a strangled, painful cough. The hole in his throat, where a field surgeon had pierced him with a reed and saved his life, still oozed.

Yet when his fever was down he was cheerful, and popular with the other men. At night he played checkers, always losing with a smile. When the others slept he often stayed up to read with Nora; and, using his slate, to make conversation. Tidy white letters, made with chalk: she learned where he’d come from, what had happened to him, which hospitals he’d been in. But only after seeing him identify his regiment and company to another patient did she think to ask if he might have known Francis. By then she’d stopped asking, she’d given up hope.

I knew Francis MacEachern,
Colm wrote, as if this weren’t astonishing news.
We didn’t talk much, but I always knew where he was. You’re his wife?

“Or his widow—still I don’t know. One of his commanding officers suggested that he might have lost his papers and perished in a prison camp without being identified. How can there be no trace of him?”

I don’t know. It could be he just … left. Walked away. He wasn’t himself after the Battle of Spotsylvania, he was weeping and he couldn’t sleep. The rest of us thought he might be going mad. I lost track of him one morning, when a battle started up. Later I asked everyone if they’d seen what happened to him. No one saw him fall, or saw him wounded or captured. No one saw him walk away.

“Then where is he?”

No well man would leave you,
he wrote gallantly. Nora was almost forty-five by then, while he was twenty-seven.
But if he’s still alive, he may be
sick in his mind. You’ve seen what happens to us.
She had, she thought, by then seen everything.

That June the weather was beautiful, so warm and soft that she let the men open the windows at night and move the table beneath them. The sky would still be gleaming with a bit of light when she got to work, and she’d find Colm at the windowsill, reading a book with a yellow oilcloth cover. One night she saw him busily taking notes, pausing to pull from a pocket inside the book’s back cover a folded map marked “New York Wilderness.”

“What are you studying?” she asked.

My future,
he wrote. He pointed, smiling, to the first chapter heading of William Murray’s
Adventures in the Wilderness:

That’s where I’m going when I get better,
he wrote.
A place where I can hunt and fish in peace, where no one will disturb me or care that I can’t speak. Men grow healthy there. Look.

He showed Nora a passage in which Murray described a consumptive young man, near death, who’d visited the Adirondack woods and, with the help of a guide, moved in a small wooden boat from one lake to the next, sleeping at night on boughs of balsam and pine, eating fish and venison. By the end of the summer he’d been entirely cured.

So will I be,
Colm wrote.
Outside, away from everyone looking at me. I don’t mean you, you’ve been nothing but help. But I’d be better off somewhere by myself.

“It’s a good idea,” Nora told him. “A fine idea. But wait, maybe until next summer.” Still he couldn’t walk the length of the passage without gasping, and an abscess had opened along his ribs.

It’s five years already,
he wrote.

A week later she found his bed empty, his things gone, a folded note for her on the table along with the yellow book. He had no further need of it, he wrote. He would always remember her. And hoped she’d hear from Francis, and hoped she’d wish him well. She should read the book, which was entertaining and would help her imagine his new life.

She forgave him after a couple of days—she had work to do, and twenty-three other men who needed her attention. On a Friday night when the moon was full and a quiet drizzle fell, she opened Colm’s gift and read:

A place the size of a state, with no more than a handful of settlements: small clusters of people amid a thousand lakes and hundreds of peaks. The opposite of Ireland, she thought. How could there be so much empty land? She flipped through the pages, eyeing the chapter titles. In the back she found advertisements for fishing tackle and hunting rifles, recommendations for reliable guides, descriptions of the few modest inns. She read, uncomprehendingly at first—
You can’t imagine it,
she later told Elizabeth,
you cannot imagine what this felt like
—these words:

Dinner was lovely, the leg of mutton perfectly tender and the gravy smooth; everyone was pleased. But although Elizabeth brought a tray to Martin, and although mutton had always been his favorite, he didn’t take a bite. She brought the tray down untouched and said nothing to Andrew, who as always presided buoyantly over the table.

Once dinner was over, though, once Andrew rose and headed, like the others, for the inevitable afternoon’s rest in bed, Elizabeth put on her boots and her heavy cloak and left the house. Now she walks swiftly through the village—past the new hotel, past the lumber mill, past the boardinghouses rising nearby. Here, as everywhere else, there are far more patients than places for them. Despite the private sanatorium up on the hill, run by the famous doctor; despite the enormous, state-sponsored sanatorium for the destitute, and the one for sick foresters, and the one for children; despite the one that is really a prison, taking in consumptive inmates from all over the state; and despite the dozens of private rest-cure homes like her own, the hotel still bulges with invalids awaiting admission to a more permanent place. A newly built spur of the railway brings health-seekers right to the center of her adopted village: now a well-known center for the cure.

Around her are cure-porches, cure-chairs, the shops that build the chairs and the offices of the doctors who treat the patients lying on the chairs that line the porches. Dr. Davis, who calls on her boarders each week, displays his name on a bold brass plaque—befitting, he must think, the size of his practice. Yet so far he’s been no help in finding a replacement for Mrs. Temple. She might have known better than to ask him. All his energy goes into lecturing his patients, which he does in a folksy tone she finds annoying.

Consumption, he likes to say, when he gathers her boarders together—but let us call it by its modern scientific name,
tuberculosis—
is caused by a germ, the tubercle bacillus. In our lungs the bacilli cause tiny dots of disease which the lung tries to wall off with scar tissue: these dots we call
tubercles,
little tubers. Your recovery depends on maintaining and strengthening this scar tissue, which is at first as delicate as a spider’s web. Which is why you must rest. Why you must not exert yourselves or give in to anxiety or do anything, such as pick up an eager child—months ago he publicly, infuriatingly, chided Martin Sawyer—to cause a sudden deep breath or contract your chest muscles. Break the delicate scars and the germs escape, seeding disease in other parts of the lung. Build up your resistance; let the lungs make walls so perfect, so strong, that the germs are starved to death.

Some days, when his mood is particularly bouncy, he’ll cast the germs as slow but sturdy hoplites undermining the lungs; the ones who break out as anomalous fleet-heeled messengers spreading deadly news. Stop the messengers! he barks at his invalids. Starve out the troops! It’s almost touching, the faith he has in words. He passes out pamphlets, magazines, and his own private exhortations, which he prints on colored cards. Each of her boarders’ rooms boasts an example of his latest:

Elizabeth might embrace his advice more wholeheartedly—here she rounds the bend in the river and passes the house that once belonged to Dr. Kopeckny—if she’d not already seen so much change. Every few years she’s had to adapt her furnishings and her schedule to reflect the latest medical theories. Often she wishes she’d been present for the crucial early years, when Dorrie’s mother first started taking in boarders and Nora was first visiting them. No one knew what caused consumption then, never mind what cured it. Nora, recollecting those times, once painted a picture for her of a typical February afternoon.

In six houses, on four different streets, eight men suffering from consumption are sitting out in the clear, cold air. Patient, bored, patiently bored, they’re so muffled in blankets and coats as to be almost indistinguishable. The smallest happening, Nora said—three pigeons wheeling in concert across the sky, a squirrel skittering up a tree—is seized on as entertainment. What else is there to do? The village, in those years which Elizabeth can only imagine, consists of one store, two sawmills, five streets, a handful of houses. A small hotel, open only in summer, which looks across the river to a few farms dotting the valley and the lower slopes. The healthy residents have boats to build, land to till, livestock to tend, and game to shoot; houses and clothing and implements to make and repair: there is always work. The strangers sitting idly among them have only these long blank hours. The quiet is meant to cure them. The sweet freezing air, the constant, uplifting, improving sight of the stony mountains—
And us,
Nora said.
To help them, besides the air and the quiet, they had us.

Sometimes, Elizabeth imagines now, the invalids must have gathered on a single porch, gossiping with each other; this would have helped. Sometimes they must have been cheered by the sight of Nora walking toward them along the river, a pack-basket on her back and her gray-striped hair blowing messily in the wind. Those who spent more than
one winter here would learn tricks, which they’d pass to the new arrivals. Fur coats they found excellent, sheepskin and mink and raccoon. Best if the collar comes up over the ears and the pockets are big. Loose woolen mittens, worn inside deerskin mittens, are ideal. The hat—what about the hat? A wool cap, a knitted stocking cap, a fur hat with ear flaps. They trade among themselves as they see what works best.

Still they do this, Elizabeth thinks. Some parts of the cure never change, no matter what the doctors discover.

Then, as now, they wrote to their relatives with requests; then too the village residents adapted to the invalids’ shifting tastes. Someone began to tan sheepskins for jackets. Someone else started making gloves, someone imported woolen sleeping bags and hot-water bottles. Now the livery caters to the sick, the builders specialize in storm enclosures. The hardware store sells sled robes and foot warmers while the drugstore sells cod-liver oil and pasteboard sputum boxes. The cobbler makes enormous sheepskin-lined moccasins and the carpenter makes coffins. Of which there are, Elizabeth belatedly realizes, two at the depot, awaiting a train—patients from one of the sanatoriums, returning home to their families.

So will Martin Sawyer travel, she thinks. This part has never changed either. As she rounds a corner, wishing that Martin might leave them some other way, the Northview Inn comes into sight. It too has hardly changed. Warped dock, sagging gutters, siding in need of paint. It’s still the same modest size, with the same unimproved and slightly disheveled waterfront that she and Gillian and their mother, Clara, first saw one hazy, apparently unremarkable afternoon. Only the cottage has been added.

The cove is shining, not yet frozen but dotted with patches of water so still that by morning, if the wind doesn’t rise, they’ll have turned into floating islands of thinnest ice. The cove will appear to be open, but beyond the frozen rim birds will be standing far from shore, quite casually,
on what still looks like water. Some will walk a few steps and then be swimming.
I wish,
Nora had once said, apologizing as soon as the words registered on Elizabeth’s face,
I so wish that you and Andrew had been able to have children.

Nora couldn’t leave Detroit fast enough, once she knew one of her brothers was alive. She left Fannie, she left her job; she bundled up her bewildered son. On the train Michael wore a light jacket, which Fannie had made for him; a cloth cap that was his especial pride. The sheer novelty of travel entertained him for a while. But the train kept moving and moving; his soft red hair grew dark with sweat. This was July, and the weather was beastly all along the lake. Weary, unhappy, Michael glared at his mother and said, “I want to go home.”