Servants of the Map (20 page)

In her opinion they were lucky despite meeting so late in his life: their school’s success, and their three healthy children, more than many get. Was that enough? It was never like him to complain. She always knew that his fascination for Grace was part of his bond to her. As he always
knew what she most wanted. And if he didn’t feel for her exactly what he felt for Margaret, if his mind wasn’t braided as closely with hers as it was with Stuart’s—what did that matter? They worked together, they made a life. In the dormitory they built for the boarders, they sometimes found the children, late at night, huddled around an illegal candle with their hands flying urgently. Despite the risk of fire, Caleb could never bear to snuff the flame.

She walks to the edge of the bluff, lifts her skirt calf-high, and sits with her feet dangling into the cool, sweet air. It is almost dark, and although Grace has a lantern with her and always works until the last minute, Miriam likes to watch over her sister’s final ascent. She waves her arm, signaling across the ravine to where she can see one shoulder, one lifted arm, a fraction of Grace’s gleaming head moving up the narrow trail. When Grace signals back, Miriam rises, shakes the dust from her skirt, and prepares to start a fire.

The people around them, concealed by the twisting bluffs and canyons but near enough as the crow flies, will read in the column of smoke, she knows, the news that they’re still here. Soldiers uneasily surveying the Bad Lands under the eyes of the Lakota; the acquisitive geologist, meant to keep an eye on her and Grace, whom the Lakota call
picks-up-stones-running;
the Lakota themselves, with whom she and Grace converse in an Indian sign language somewhat similar to their own—all of them, Miriam thinks, wishing the inconvenient women would leave. Or perhaps they wish something else entirely, their true desires as hidden as the paths by which she and Caleb reached the decisions that shaped their lives.

Were you happy?
she signs to Caleb. Under this vast and steely sky the world seems ancient, and very large. She feeds more grass to the little flame and adds this:
I was.

W
HEN THEY MET, ROSE
was standing in the cool, airy kitchen of the house on Keuka Lake, peering with fierce concentration into a yellow pottery bowl. Her mother’s fingers were wrapped around hers. “This is folding,” Suky said, and together they guided a rubber spatula through the egg whites and into the batter, turning two phases into one. Beside them Rose’s sister, Bianca, licked the chocolate pot and said, “I want a turn.” Then there was a gentle knock at the screen door, and when Rose looked up from her task she saw, against a background of hollyhocks and hills, a tall man letting himself into their house as if he belonged there. Her mother sprang into this stranger’s arms, leaving Rose openmouthed.

“You’re here!” Suky said. “And just in time. Girls, you remember Peter Kotov?”

But they did not remember him at all. Rose was eight and a half that summer, Bianca seven; and even when Suky reminded them that they
had glimpsed Peter a few years earlier at their grandfather Leo’s funeral, they could not recall him, they had been babies then. This was the afternoon that Rose, forever afterward, would count as their first meeting. She would remember the way Suky fit so easily in Peter’s embrace and how, after the cake was cooled and frosted, her father, Theo, tromped in sunburnt and smiling and shouted with glee at the sight of his friend.

Dinner that night was late and joyful; they ate on the porch, overlooking the vineyards and the hanging mist above the lake. Red wine from their own grapes shimmered in plump glasses, next to trout that Theo had grilled and a salad of soft early lettuce. Suky’s hair shone and the men’s teeth gleamed. The men resembled each other, Rose saw. Although their features were different they were similar in their coloring and carriage, and in their easy vigor. She saw that Theo was a little older than Suky and Peter, somehow in charge; that Suky and Peter directed their comments to him and were bound by a shared desire for his attention. All this Rose registered from where she sat with Bianca in the shadows, long past their bedtime. Bianca had fallen asleep in her chair, plump with the cake that still clung to her lips, but Rose stayed awake.

Was it that night, the first night, when she grasped how long her parents had known Peter? So much talk, so many stories. Perhaps the fragments of their history fell together during the two weeks he stayed with them. But certainly before she went to bed that night Rose understood that Peter and Theo had met when they were no older than she and her sister. More peculiar was the revelation that Peter’s parents had known her own Grandpa Leo and were somehow responsible for helping him establish the winery. And thus, in some way, responsible for the fact that she lived here, in this house she had always known? Each time Rose considered this, her mind spun and stopped. It was through Peter that she first understood that the world existed before her, without her. For a few days she could not forgive him for this.

But who could resist him? He came out of the bathroom wearing only his pants, with a towel draped around his neck and tufts of shaving cream beneath his ears; he picked Rose up by one wrist and one ankle and whirled her around like an airplane. He played records and taught Bianca to dance while Rose resisted in an agony of self-consciousness. Around him Suky and Theo were radiant, cheerful, sweeping the girls up for sudden kisses and twining their arms around each other’s waists. The bustle of early summer work in the vineyard seemed fun in his presence, and when Suky and Theo were occupied Peter entertained the girls.

He was an entomologist, he told them gravely. His specialty was beetles and he meant to collect some here. He had spent the last few years collecting in Costa Rica, which was why they hadn’t seen him in so long. From a trunk he pulled vials and killing jars and nets and forceps, hinged wooden boxes and packets of slim black pins.

“We could help you,” Bianca offered. Rose blushed and pinched her sister under the table. She was already in love with Peter, although she wouldn’t be able to name this feeling for a decade. It was infuriating to have Bianca ask so easily for what she herself most wanted.

“You could,” Peter agreed. “I am in dire need of assistants.” Black hair sprouted through the open collar of his shirt in the most intriguing way.

He tacked a sheet inside an old black umbrella so that, as Rose held it under the shrubs and he beat the branches, the falling beetles might show up clearly against the white scalloped bowl. But Bianca, to Rose’s secret delight, was not enchanted by this. Nor was Bianca impressed when Peter entrusted them with knives and small hatchets and showed them how to whack bark from fallen logs, revealing the beetles bustling just below.

“Are they
all
black?” Bianca said. “Like those?”
Already she was as tall as Rose, although she was a year and a half younger; and Rose, so small and dark and full of dismay at Bianca’s blond charm, shrank inside herself. But for once she didn’t have to compete with Bianca. Bianca declined to come on further expeditions, and Rose had Peter to herself.

After dinner one night, she and Peter set off with portable lights. Her parents smiled and yawned, drowsy with food and wine; Bianca lay on the couch with a book. Peter carried the black light, the fluorescent tubes, the battery, and the killing jars. Rose carried the white sheets and the notebooks and the clothesline.

“Some species are attracted to ultraviolet light, and others to white light,” Peter explained, while he suspended the sheet between two limbs of the basswood near the edge of their backyard. He hung the black light a few feet in front of the sheet, the fluorescent tube beside it. “Can you spread that other sheet here on the ground, so it forms a right angle?”

Rose smoothed the sheet over the grass. Peter connected the lights to the battery, switched them on, and guided Rose outside the circle of mingled light. When he plopped on the grass he pulled Rose down beside him, and for the next few minutes she sat without moving, her left leg only an inch from his right thigh. The beetles arrived quickly, whirring out of the darkness and striking the hanging sheet with a sound like hail.

“Can you write yet?” Peter asked. “Are you old enough to write?”

“I am almost
nine,
” Rose said indignantly. “And I already skipped a grade in school. Of course I can write, I don’t even have to print anymore. I can do cursive.”

“Well,” Peter said, laughing.
“Cursive.
But maybe just for tonight you could return to printing. If I gave you my notebook and spelled what I wanted, could you print it out clearly for me?”

“You don’t have to spell,” she said. “I am a very good speller.”

But after all she needed his help when he began crawling around the hems of the sheet, turning over beetles and flicking specimens into the killing jar. The black light made his teeth and his collar glow and Rose sealed her lips, afraid she too would look like a jack-o’-lantern. The
names he called out were long and complex: Latin names, he said.
Macrodactylus subspinosus, Phyllophaga rugosa.
She’d heard her mother mouth other, similarly complicated names for the mosses she collected. Humbled, Rose concentrated on printing clearly what Peter spelled.

“Ha!” he said, pouncing on a body clinging to the sheet. “The elusive
Nicrophorus
—see what good luck you bring me, Rose?” He held out a large beetle, black with beautiful red bands on its wing covers. Those covers, Peter said, were called elytra.

All the following day Rose sat next to Peter at the impromptu laboratory table he set up outside. There was little she could do to help; she could not persuade her hands to do the fine work of inserting the delicate pins through the beetles, and her attempts at transcribing the names onto small paper labels failed as well. She concentrated on keeping Peter’s glass of iced tea filled, and on handing him paper points and glue as he called for them. When he pinned the
Nicrophorus
he said, “I didn’t expect to find this here. If we set a carrion trap we might get more—would you like to help me with that?”

For him she would have cast herself adrift all night in a leaky boat. “Yes,” she said.

“What we need,” he continued, “is something small and dead—a mouse, a mole, something like that.”

Here was her chance to be a hero; she excused herself and ran off as fast as she could. The cellars of the winery buildings were meticulously clean, full of shining tanks and tidy racks, casks and bottles and corks. But the white house was half a century older than any of the outbuildings, and although the upper floors gleamed with polish and care, the basement, which she and Bianca usually avoided, was stone-walled, dirt-floored, low-ceilinged, dark. Rose gathered the broom and the dustpan and descended the stairs. How terrible it smelled down here! She breathed shallowly and watched her feet, praying she wouldn’t step in something horrid. Past the great brick pile supporting the chimney, past
the furnace with its octopus arms; there was a corner under the soapstone sink where she had not been able to avoid seeing both small corpses and busy cats. She bent down and peered into that secret space—and yes, there was something there. She reached with the broom and flicked the body into the dustpan, then sprinted across the floor and up the stairs. In the kitchen she forced herself to look and found that her prize was a little gray mouse, not long dead.

“Perfect!” Peter said when she returned to him.

That afternoon they set the trap: the mouse, trussed with a bit of fishing line, laid carefully in the thin grass of a shady bit of ground below the vineyard. On the limb of a shrub overhanging the site Peter tied a red cloth. “So we can find the place later,” he said. Then he stretched the fishing line from the mouse’s hind legs along the grass.

Trudging back up the hill to the house, Rose believed she might become an entomologist herself. Her mother dabbled at botany, specializing in the mosses; Grandpa Leo and her father were both chemists of a sort. The grandmother she’d never known—Eudora, Grandpa Leo’s wife, who’d died before Rose could meet her—had left behind a cache of letters from her own grandfather, a surveyor who’d studied plants from giant mountains on the other side of the world. Rose had seen how Suky cherished those, savoring their connection to her own work and sometimes speaking wistfully of her desire to travel. Holding those letters in her hand, sniffing the yellowing, earth-smelling pages and trying to imagine that ancient figure, Rose had sworn she’d never vegetate in one place as her mother had.

Dear Sir,
her great-great-grandfather had written to some famous British botanist.
Your examination of the Tibetan lichens is of great interest to me. I enclose some notes on the Kashmir irises.
That could be Peter, Rose thought now. Or herself. Through Peter’s eyes, she saw that her family was packed with scientists. The next time they were together, she asked, “How did you start doing this?”

“Ever since I was tiny I was interested in all the animals around me, particularly the insects,” he said. “It’s hard to explain, it seems like I’ve loved them since I was a baby.”

“Me too,” Rose said. “That’s what
I’m
like.” Although until that moment, this hadn’t been true. Already she was vain about her intelligence, about reading better than her classmates and skipping second grade entirely because her teachers didn’t know what else to do with her. But until recently, although she’d been drawn to her father’s small laboratory, where the tests on the wine were carried out and where her Grandpa Leo had entertained them with chemistry demonstrations, she’d found nature boring.

“Are you?” Peter said. “No surprise, I guess; you’re Leo’s granddaughter. I owe him a lot.” He bent to examine a stream of ants filing across their path. “When I was growing up we lived in Ovid, not far from here, around the other side of Seneca Lake.”

“I’ve been there,” Rose said. “Near the park.”

Peter nodded. “My parents were apple farmers, and friends with your grandparents. They thought my interest in insects was silly. But your father and I used to play together, and Leo always paid attention to us. He must have noticed me lugging around the bottles and matchboxes I stuffed with bugs. The Christmas I was ten, he gave me some books by a wonderful French naturalist named Jean-Henri Fabre, and those were what turned me into a entomologist. I could dig them up, if you’re interested. You seem to really like this stuff.”