Servants of the Map (26 page)

And still Nora pressed them on: to the steamboat dock on Lake Champlain; then into the enormous, strangely dressed crowd crushed onto the steamer and fighting for beds in Plattsburgh. She wiped Michael’s face with a damp cloth and fed him tidbits from the hamper she’d packed, unable to explain to him all that had conspired to tear her family apart. Ireland was a word to him, England was another. Her days at Grosse Isle he knew nothing about, and she would never tell him. He clung to her hand as she tried to get seats on the stage and then gave in to an overcharging wagon driver. Who were these people, massed everywhere she wanted to be? Later she’d learn that the newspapers had given them a name: they—she and Michael included—were “Murray’s Fools.” Colm Larkin, as plenty of people would tell her, had not been the only one to read that cheerful yellow book and believe a stay in the Adirondacks would save his life.

Caught among the several thousand visitors swarming into a wilderness that had, in earlier seasons, welcomed no more than several hundred,
Nora was shrill, her voice loud with desperation.
No one,
she’d later tell Elizabeth,
no one who hasn’t lost a family can understand this.
When the driver dumped them off at the Northview Inn after hours of jolting along a corduroy road, she and Michael were two among a dozen. Nora’s first sight of her brother, after twenty-two years, was this: a slim, pale, dark-haired man, still youthful-looking, but weary, standing on the porch of the inn with hands held out in a rueful gesture. The last time she’d seen him, he’d hardly been older than Michael. She might not have recognized him if he hadn’t been speaking.

“We’re full,” he said. And there was his voice, still fresh and flavored with home. “We’ve been full for weeks.” Now she could see that he’d grown to look rather like their father.

Michael leaned against her side, asleep on his feet. “Look up,” she whispered. “That’s your uncle.”

There were lines around Ned’s mouth, and the skin was gray beneath his eyes; she couldn’t puzzle out what had happened to his nose. A small part of it seemed to have melted, as if the flesh were wax. Ten people rushed past her and swarmed him, crying that they must have a bed, they must have a meal, they had traveled for days; to each of them Ned spoke kindly. He had no beds, he repeated. But they were welcome to take their supper here, after which he’d make arrangements to carry them into the village. There they might find transport to another inn, to the rail station, or back to the ferry dock. Perhaps some of the villagers might have spare rooms to rent.

The crowd shuffled and grumbled and still Nora stood back, her arm around Michael. Finally Ned looked over the heads of the others to her.

“Ned?” she said. He gazed at her blankly. She’d grown very thin; her heavy black hair, striped with white, no longer hung loose but was braided and coiled in a careless knot. She had deep lines around her eyes and her hands were dry and cracked. “Ned?” she said again. “It’s me. Nora.”

What went through his mind then? Everything, everything. Around
him the inn dissolved and the angry visitors disappeared. His sister had left him, she was dead. Since the morning when strangers had ferried her unconscious body away from him, he had lived an entire life: twenty-two years, during which he’d believed that in all the world he no longer had a single living relative. Those in Ireland had toppled all at once, like a village blown down by a windstorm. Over here Nora had vanished, then Denis; leaving him more alone than he’d thought a person could be.

For a minute, when he first saw Nora again, everything seemed to exist at once: both the toppled village of his childhood and his whole confusing life since then, which contained, on the one hand, this inn and its guests and his taxidermy shop, the mountains with their harsh and changeable weather, his beloved dogs moving swiftly through the brush—and, on the other, his essential solitude. Although he loved his hounds, and had companions among the guides, the life that moved within him was hidden from everyone. Denis and Nora had been the last to know him; Denis was dead. Where had his sister been? Her hair, once as thick and black as a horse’s tail, was ruined. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He would never be able to explain himself. He held out his arms and said, “Nora.”

Why, during their first days together, did she ask so many questions? Her prying made him indignant. His reserve made her feel rejected. Both were bewildered by the way they jangled and clashed, despite the joy of being together: where was the ease of their childhood?

Ned tried to compress his life into stories that he could stand to tell and she could stand to hear, but this was like trying to convey, by the example of one perfectly stuffed rough-legged hawk, the essence not only of that single living creature, but of what it meant to be a hawk. In his taxidermy shop, where he hid after his worst failures with his sister, he stared at his recent work. Wings, splayed open in flight, conveyed nothing about their compact folded shape at rest. One bird said nothing
about the others. His words—about, say, his years with the French-Canadian farmer who’d worked him so hard, or his first stay in these woods, at the lumber camp; about his winter with the consumptive lawyer who’d taught him to read, or his travels with the naturalists who’d trained him in taxidermy—were equally deceitful fragments of the truth.

“I don’t understand,” Nora said one day, after he’d started a sentence, faltered, and then snapped at her in exasperation. “Why is it so hard to explain what happened to you? I tell
you
as much as I can remember.”

“I thought you were dead,” he said. They were in the kitchen; she’d moved all his spoons. He moved them back. “Can’t you imagine what that was like? I never thought of my life as something I’d want to tell you about someday. I wasn’t trying to remember. Most of it I was trying to forget.”

He kept to himself the harsher truth—that there were days, still, when he woke and forgot that she’d been returned to him. When, until he heard her speaking softly with Michael, he couldn’t wholly resuscitate the corpse he’d once seen carried off a ship. For a few seconds each morning, until their great good fortune came clear in his mind again, she was a stranger to him.

“It’s not that I didn’t miss you,” he added. “I thought of you every day.”

That was the truth; the happiness that filled him when he looked out a window and saw Nora and Michael crossing the yard with their hands clasped, or when Michael leaned calmly against his shoulder, was also true. Yet still he flinched each time Nora dug into his past. The things he preferred not to think about—his sea voyage especially, his winter trapped in the arctic ice—attracted her most sharply. When she asked about his nose, he sighed and went into another room, then returned and explained that he’d once found work as a cook on a ship—not a whaling ship, nor a navy ship, but an arctic exploring ship, which had sailed farther
north than she could imagine—and on that voyage had suffered from frostbite. He turned from her. “Do I look so different?”

“It’s hardly noticeable,” she replied. Which was true if she stood to his right; she tried not to stand to his left.

“At first I couldn’t stand to have people looking at me,” he said. “I still don’t like it, I hate it when you stare.”

“I’m not staring,” she said. “I missed you, I like to look at you now that I can.”

What she took from his hesitant explanations was that they’d been apart too long. They’d been through too much alone—this was no one’s fault, it was their misfortune—and now they couldn’t explain their lives to each other. Baffled, she watched the way Ned leapt into his work the instant he rose, as if he dreaded sharing a minute’s idle conversation over their first cups of tea. He was glad to have her and Michael there, he said. More glad than he could say. Right now, though, he was very busy.

Forty guests filled the Northview Inn, spread between the two bottom floors of the main building and the low wing angled back from the lake. After a huge breakfast of eggs and muffins and chops and venison steaks, potatoes and coffee and more, the guests assembled on the porch: like children, Nora thought, waiting to be amused. Then the guides would slide up in their slim rowing boats and the guests would turn to Ned for advice. Who should go to Paul Smith’s on St. Regis Lake and who to Bartlett’s? Would the two gentlemen from Albany share a boat and guide between them or live like kings and hire two boats? And what about cartridges, and fishing lures, and the choice of guns and hatchets? If there were ladies among the guests—they were rare then—some would want to hire horses and others to climb a mountain.

All these decisions took time. At night, guests who’d been coming for several seasons would want Ned to play whist with them. They’d want advice about where to hunt; they’d want to make lists, with prices and shipping dates, of the trophies they’d ordered mounted. If the guests left
Ned free for a minute, then Mrs. Yarrow, the housekeeper, would appear. What should she order, whom should she hire? She was used to having first claim on Ned’s free time. Nora, not knowing how else to reach her brother, joined him in working long hours; through this, she thought, they would build a common life.

In September, when the flood of guests finally receded, Nora helped Ned close off the guest bedrooms and bring in wood and seal the windows on the third floor of the main building, which formed the private apartment the three of them now shared. The sky grew dim, the snow fell and fell. She’d never seen anything like it. In the woods, between the massive dark trees, the snow lay three then four and then five feet deep. Michael adored Ned’s brown and white spaniel-hounds, who crashed through the drifts and chased after snowshoe hares. Ned taught him to shoot and, when he saw that Michael wasn’t squeamish, brought him to the shop out back, where he worked on the skins and heads his guests had left behind.

Even here, where Ned was most at home, he didn’t open up. He welcomed Nora, she knew he loved her, as she knew he loved Michael. Although he seldom asked about her past life, he listened intently as she described her old room at Fannies house, her friendship with Colm Larkin, the day when, with the sun deliciously baking the skin on their hands, Francis had asked her to marry him and she’d said yes. But when she asked questions of her own he answered only briefly, skipping great chunks of time. There’d been a friend, she gathered one evening, with whom he’d traveled through these woods, and who’d helped him find the site for this inn. Copernicus—what kind of a name was that? The brother, Ned said shortly, of the naturalist with whom he’d traveled north; the whole family had peculiar names.

Why did she keep asking questions? Because he volunteered so little, she would have said. He hid himself, he hid his life, he refused to let her know him. Her inquiries, he might have responded, were no different
from the rude prying of his guests and clients. Over dinner or out on the porch, strangers asked the same blunt questions again and again, as if they were the first to think of them. Where was he from, when had he come from Ireland, did he have family there, or here? What had happened to his face?

For those people, who didn’t matter, he made up stories. A she-bear had mauled him. A blizzard had caught him far from home. In Ireland he’d been scalded by a pan of boiling water.

But his own sister he couldn’t lie to. Nor, at first, could he tell her the truth. His own sister, he thought, ought to have known what was crucial without asking.

During their second winter at the inn, Nora and Michael went with Ned to look at a litter of hunting dogs. In a sleigh heaped with blankets and fur robes they slipped through deep, unbroken snow, Ned’s black horses working hard to break trail but the sleigh itself gliding noiselessly. Michael remarked on the hawks casting shadows on the slopes, the chickadees whisking past, and Ned pointed out lakes where he and Michael might fish through the ice. The sky, which had been clear and bright when they started out, was gray by the time they reached Alvah’s cabin. While they drank coffee and chatted and played with the puppies—two were for Michael, Ned revealed then, Michael’s own dogs, and so he should choose—the wind came up and the sky grew dark and more snow began to fall. It was very cold by the time they left. Before they were halfway home, a foot of fresh snow had fallen and the wind was already erasing their morning tracks.

“Are we lost?” Michael said, looking wide-eyed at the chaos. “Are we going to be lost?”

“I never get lost,” Ned said calmly. By then both Nora and Michael knew this to be true; Ned’s sense of direction was another reason the guides respected him. They steered around gigantic drifts, which the
wind made in a minute and then revised: let’s cover this bush here; no, this. A joke, if it had been warmer. The horses, who were not amused, stopped at the foot of a long, steep hill and refused to go farther.

The sleigh held puppies as well as people: Homer and Virgil—Alvah had named them—who wailed despite their distinguished names. The horses stood still, breathing heavily, glazed in their sweat.

“We’ll rest for a while,” Ned said, warming Michael’s cheeks with his hands after trying to coax the horses on. “We’ll get warmed up while we wait for the moon to rise. Then we’ll ask the horses again.”

“The dogs are cold,” Michael said. “I am too.”

Ned tossed him a shovel. “Help me,” he said.

While Nora rubbed the horses down and covered them with blankets, Ned and Michael dug a hollow into the lee side of a big drift. Inside it Ned packed three bearskin robes, the puppies, and Michael. Nora crawled in behind him, and Ned behind her. They huddled there while the wind began to drop and the moon slowly lit the landscape. Michael held Homer and Virgil inside his coat, one wrinkly-faced, half-mastiff, half-greyhound puppy nestled in each armpit.

“Are you warm enough?” Ned asked.

“We’re fine,” said Nora. In the moonlight reflected from the snow she could see him smiling. “You
like
this,” she said. “How can you like this?”

More questions. He shrugged. “We’re warm. We’re safe. The storm will lift, and until it does I’m with my family.”