Authors: Karl Iagnemma
The encampment was quiet, just a few women moving among the lodges, a pair of Native boys fishing at the lake’s edge. Gray smoke hung in a veil over the village. Without pause the party portaged over a sandbar and started upriver. The Native boys boarded a canoe and paddled alongside, offering fresh, fat whitefish in exchange for tobacco. They were twelve years old, perhaps thirteen; Elisha recognized in their gestures a restrained eagerness, of young boys engaged in men’s business. With a word Susette sent them away.
Red ash and sycamore appeared as they canoed inland, the forest growing shady and chill. After some time the river quickened to a white-flecked rush; then Mr. Brush guided the canoe to the river’s edge before a shallow, stony ford. Elisha and Professor Tiffin splashed ashore and began hauling packs of stores onto the riverbank. Susette said, “It is not necessary to portage here.”
“Why ever not?”
She motioned southeastward. A faint Indian trail cut through the understory, just the barest crush of leaves disappearing into the forest. “This is the end of the canoe. Now we go on foot.”
The men paused. Somehow the moment had arrived, inevitable but unexpected. A shiver moved through Elisha as they unloaded the stores on the grassy riverbank, reloaded them into four massive packs bound with leather straps. “Proceed slowly!” Mr. Brush called. “You must move slowly until your body is accustomed to the additional burden!” As one they hoisted the packs with a huff, Tiffin and Susette shuffling under the load, the weight bending Elisha nearly double. He slipped the strap over his forehead and slowly straightened.
“Shall we begin, then?” Professor Tiffin gasped.
They stared at one another: shirts frayed and torn along the seams, stained with soot and deer grease and blood; faces suntanned a deep reddish-brown, the color of ore; leather straps like Native jewelry across their brows. This was the expedition’s true beginning, Elisha realized. This was where his greatest efforts would be needed. This was where their hardship would begin.
They set out into the forest.
The Indian trail ran through rolling country of white pine and sugar maple and yellow birch, the soil mealy and black, the hills too low to yield a vista. Sunlight winked through the canopy. Susette set a measured pace, pausing only for Mr. Brush to count timber or mark a blaze. Apart from the man’s called-out measurements no one spoke. It was as though a fog had settled over the party, left each unaware of the others’ existence. When Elisha caught Susette’s eye her expression was as blank as an empty page.
And so the boy passed the hours in solitude. Despite this he felt surrounded by life, a million indifferent eyes regarding him. Wood beetles creaked and catbirds mewed and wind pushed through the tall spruces, their limbs stirring restlessly. That first afternoon, Elisha glimpsed a dark shape gliding through a forest opening, and his chest tightened: the bird was as large as an osprey, though with a long, straight bill and a harrier’s broad wings. He scrabbled for his fieldbook but the bird had vanished. Elisha sketched the silhouette from memory, wondering all the while if he had imagined the creature.
On the second morning Professor Tiffin could not rise from his bedroll. He lay on his back, moaning, his feet swollen and raw. Elisha and Mr. Brush hoisted him upright, but when they released their grip the man collapsed with a whimper. Elisha examined Tiffin’s footwear: the soles of his Hessian boots were worn through, the thin leather gouged and split. Mr. Brush turned away in disgust. The boots were more suited to an evening at the theater than a tramp through the forest. Susette cut a trade blanket into strips and wrapped the man’s feet, bound them with hide thongs then doused the shoepacks with water. Tiffin rose with a whine and started gingerly forward. “My dear madame,” he mumbled. “My dear, dear Madame Morel…”
That third afternoon the party paused to rest in a clearing beside a silty stream. Elisha sat on a windfall pine and it crumbled beneath him, beetles swarming over the rotten trunk. He trapped one between his palms and shook the insect still. A ground beetle,
Pterostichus melanarius,
common as dirt. Still, he opened his fieldbook and described the beetle’s antennae spreading like metallic antlers from its angular head, its shiny, grooved thorax. He described its jointed legs, the undersides fletched with shaggy hair, the tips cloven into pincers for gripping prey.
Elisha lay down his pen and flipped back though the fieldbook: its pages were filled with descriptions of beetles and boulders and wildflowers, sea crows and sugar maples and swamp cabbage. For what purpose? He’d discovered not a single new species, recorded not a single unique observation about an existing species. His descriptions were as hazy and imprecise as gossip. Elisha let his eye travel over the sentences, pausing at an occasional phrase:
The tranquil sublimity of the scene. Shyly displaying its surpassing beauty.
In form and tenor they resembled the secret diary entries of a lovelorn young girl.
He recalled with a note of melancholy the days spent in Alpheus Lenz’s house on Woodward Avenue, his desire to see Lenz’s shelves filled with every species from Alabama to Africa. It had been so beautifully simple: the natural world arriving on his doorstep in wooden crates, preserved in jars and phials and pouches. As though every living thing could be captured and cataloged, inscribed on a page as large as a tobacco field. And now here he was among the ground beetles.
That afternoon the party made camp in a clearing, Susette taking a trout net to the stream while Tiffin reclined on his bedroll with a Hebrew lexicon. Mr. Brush gathered a rock hammer and specimen pouches and compasses, then gestured for Elisha to follow him into the forest.
The pair hiked along a southern bearing through white pine, the canopy pierced by columns of sunlight, the terrain mounded with moldering trunks. Mr. Brush leveled the solar compass and called out a measurement for Elisha to record, then repeated the measurement with the magnetic compass. Brush was clean-shaven, his hat and jacket tattered but brushed. Beside him a deer skeleton lay atop a litter of pine needles, saplings sprouting among the gray ribs. A bear’s leavings, slowly being consumed by the forest. Mr. Brush tapped the instrument’s face. “It is happening again!”
“What is happening?”
“The compass needle—I am recording deviations from the true bearing. We are standing in a valley of iron!”
Elisha smiled weakly, too distracted to share the man’s enthusiasm. He said, “Could you repeat the solar compass measurement?”
“You are not concentrating.”
He jerked back to the fieldbook. “Four degrees, two minutes. Is that correct?”
“I would expect my counsel to be unnecessary.”
“Yes sir.”
“About the squaw, I mean.”
Elisha turned to the man. “She is not a squaw.”
“The half-breed, then. Susette Morel.” Mr. Brush snapped shut the compass lid. “Not that I blame you entirely. Half-breed women are legendary cockteasers. And Madame Morel is a pretty enough piece of quim.”
Elisha turned back to the fieldbook as a flush blossomed on his cheeks. “I admit that she’s been occupying my thoughts. Her behavior—it’s been purely awful. She nearly abandoned us at the fur post, halfway through our journey!” Elisha lowered his voice. “I will tell you something in confidence, sir. I had severe concerns, like yourself, about the wisdom of engaging a woman. Especially a half-breed, and a Catholic at that.”
“You are lying.”
Elisha held the man’s gaze but said nothing.
“My boy.” Mr. Brush sighed, and shook his head. “My boy, you have been blessed with a rare opportunity. Do you understand? You have been granted a means to improve yourself, through practical training and diligent self-instruction. And yet it is increasingly evident that you aim to squander this opportunity.”
Elisha felt a familiar, desperate urge toward apology. It was a feeling he’d experienced countless times as a child, perched on a comfortless pew in the damp meetinghouse.
“You seem to believe that knowledge is absorbed by proximity, like water into cloth! That you might bellow a few stanzas of Shakespeare and diddle a squaw, and return to Detroit in August with something nearing an education. Is this true?”
“No sir. It’s not true.”
Brush bent forward until his forehead nearly touched Elisha’s. The man’s eyes were watery and pale, a child’s eyes in a man’s weathered face. The sight froze Elisha. Brush said, “If you are not careful you will end up like Professor Copper Knob, with a veneer of knowledge over a thick plug of ignorance. And I know you do not want that.”
The man’s tone made Elisha uneasy. “No sir, I don’t.”
“This nation does not advance under men like him.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t.”
“Then!” Mr. Brush clapped Elisha on the shoulder. “My own education was begun just this way, on an expedition with practical men. This was in Ohio, near Zanesville. I was sixteen years old, as you are now.” Brush grinned stiffly. “I daresay you could do worse than to learn from yours truly, my boy.”
“Yes sir. I’m sure that’s true.”
“I studied their example! I obeyed their instruction! I
learned,
my boy. And by summer’s end I had quit calling them sir.”
Elisha forced himself to smile. “Well, Mr. Brush. I will surely try.”
They tacked northward through the remains of the afternoon. As the day’s light shaded toward violet they heard a man’s faint whistling, and then they came into the clearing. Professor Tiffin lay near the cookfire, the Hebrew lexicon held before his eyes. It was as though he had not stirred since lunch. Susette was nowhere to be seen; then she emerged from a tent, twisting her damp hair into a braid.
Elisha dipped a mug of lukewarm stew and retreated to his own tent. Sleep, he thought, is what this day deserves. But as the boy lay on his bedroll he sensed Mr. Brush’s stare. He dragged himself upright and unpacked an ore specimen, threw open his tent flap to gather the firelight. Elisha opened his fieldbook and wrote:
July 5, 1844
This mineral specimen is highly soil-like in nature, possessing a reddish-black color and leaving a beautifully rich maroon streak when touched to paper. It is capable of deflecting a magnetic compass needle (strongly suggesting a partly ferrous composition), and its density appears similar to that of pyrite. It crumbles fairly easily at the pressure of a thumbnail, with a consistency similar to that of week-old panbread. Quite astonishing, when one considers that such a ductile ore is refined into railroad tracks and musket bores and cannons, the stiffest, brutest elements of civilization.
Despair crept over Elisha as he reread the passage. For why was the specimen maroon, instead of coal-black or yellow? And what was the primary cause of its magnetism? Each observation yielded a question, and though he might answer one question a thousand others remained. Was the specimen’s heaviness due to the presence of iron, or the iron’s magnetic attraction to the earth? And would a greater degree of iron make the specimen firmer, or softer? Elisha stared at the neat sentences. It was as difficult to understand a lump of dirt as it was another human being.
He lined through the passage and turned the page. Raindrops tapped against the tent like idle fingernails against a desk. At last Elisha wrote:
Her skin is reddish-brown, the color of hematite. Her hands are as rough as ore. Her clothes are torn and tattered, without beads or stitching. Her hair is grown shaggy and long, blued like a gunstock, oiled to a gunstock’s gleam.
And yet she possesses a beauty that is unmistakable: a gemstone glimmering in the black night.
That night Elisha dreamed he was a prisoner in a grand Victorian manor. The house’s doors were locked but he scurried like a mouse through gaps in the baseboards. Each room was crowded with tables of roast beef and cheese and smoked ham, champagne and cherry pie and lemon pudding, all of it coated with ash. Elisha ate daintily but unceasingly. He was dressed in Alpheus Lenz’s silk opera hat, wearing the man’s smoke-colored spectacles. His lips were smeared with greasy ash.
But even as he slept Elisha understood that he was dreaming, and he was irritated by the dream’s naked logic—for surely the food represented knowledge, or wisdom, qualities he hungered for but dearly lacked. He tried to steer his dreaming self toward the locked front door. Something magnificent, he was certain, lay just beyond the door.
He woke to a hand on his shoulder. Susette was kneeling beside him, her face masked by darkness. She laid a hand over his mouth, then without a word guided him from the tent.
He followed the woman along the stream, ducking beneath low pine boughs. Crickets rasped in the undergrowth. The water’s moonlit surface was like a trickle of quicksilver through the forest. They reached a small opening in the pines, and Susette turned and offered Elisha a pained smile. “I am sorry to wake you. I wanted to speak without the others.”
“I figured you’d grown tired of speaking to me,” he whispered. “That, or you were fixing to run off again.”
She nodded stoically. The cookfire’s glow was just a glimmer through the trees. “You think I am cracked. A cracked half-breed woman who cannot decide what to do.”
“I expect you know precisely what you want to do, but you won’t reveal the full measure of your thoughts. Which I suppose is admirable.”
“I have been cruel to you. I am very sorry.”
Elisha sighed with frustration. He wanted to kiss the woman but could not bring himself even to touch her. Susette laid a hand on his arm and he pressed toward her but the woman leaned away. In an instant his desire soured. He said, “So, then. Explain what you want from me.”
Without looking at him she said, “I need your assistance. A small help.”
“I offered my help. You said you didn’t want it.”
“The place we are going, the image stones. There is no such place.”
“I don’t follow your logic.”
She would not meet Elisha’s gaze. “My husband lied to Professor Tiffin, to gain commission as a guide. When I heard Professor Tiffin’s story I understood. My husband would guide him into the forest and receive payment, then he would desert him. There are no image stones.”