Wayfinding

Chapter One: The Dime Reader

The wind came out of the northwest all that afternoon, dragging grit across the flats, and by the time Solomon Wythe had his plank table set up in front of the store at Hackberry Crossing, everything he owned wore a fine coat of the same pale dust—his coat, his beard, the lenses of his spectacles, the maps he had spent eleven nights inking by lamplight.

He weighted the corners of the maps with river stones he carried for that purpose. Four stones, smooth as eggs, hauled two hundred miles from the Colorado because a man who works with paper in a windy country learns to bring his own weather-proofing. Then he set out the tin cup with the hand-lettered card leaning against it: NEWS READ ALOUD. ONE DIME. COUNTY MAPS, TWO DOLLARS.

Hackberry Crossing in the autumn of 1868 amounted to a store, a corral, a blacksmith's shed roofed with brush, and eleven dwellings, four of which were dugouts with stovepipes poking out of the sod like the periscopes of some buried machine. There was no church and no school. There was a whiskey barrel in the store with a dipper chained to it, and there were people—more than a stranger would guess, drifting in from claims scattered across twenty miles of open country, because word had gone around that the map man was coming.

They came in wagons and on mule-back and on foot. Women with sunburned wrists and men whose boots had been resoled with harness leather. Children who stared at Solomon's spectacles as though they were a species of jewelry. By four o'clock there were maybe forty people standing in the lee of the store, and Solomon took off his hat, set it crown-down on the plank, and unfolded the newspapers.

They were three weeks old, which out here made them fresh. He had traded a quarter and a copy of a Fort Worth land circular for the bundle at a stage stop back east, and he had rationed them since, the way another man rations tobacco.

"The Galveston Daily News," he announced, "of the twenty-second of September."

He had a voice for it. He had learned, in twenty-six years of reading survey notes aloud to men holding chains in the wind, how to pitch a sentence so that it carried without shouting. He read them the shipping columns first, because the shipping columns were poetry to people who had never seen salt water: cotton and hides going out, coffee and nails and window glass coming in, the names of vessels, the names of ports. He read them the price of beeves in New Orleans, which mattered, and the price of wool, which mattered more. He read them a dispatch about the impeachment troubles in Washington, and the general opinion of the crowd was expressed by a man who spat and said the whole government could be put in a sack and drowned like kittens, an opinion nobody argued with.

Then he read them the far-off things, because that was what the dimes were really for.

He read a paragraph about a submarine telegraph cable and the sending of a message under the ocean. He read a notice of a railway tunnel being driven through a mountain in Massachusetts, and he explained, when asked, how long a mile was when it went through rock instead of over grass. He read about a fire in Chicago that burned nine buildings, and a woman near the front made a small sound of pity for people she would never meet.

He read them the weather in New York.

When he finished, the tin cup held two dollars and forty cents in coin and scrip and one silver thimble, which he would return later to the girl who had put it in by mistake. He sold three maps. A man named Wills bought Callahan County for two dollars and then stood a long time with it, turning it in his hands, and at last asked Solomon in a low voice whether the little dotted line that ran along the bottom of his section was a road.

"That's a draw," Solomon said. "It'll carry water in April. It won't carry it in August."

"There's a man says he's got title to it."

"A man can say anything. Has he got a patent from the state, or has he got a story?"

Wills folded the map into quarters and put it inside his shirt against his skin, as if the paper were money, and walked away without answering. Solomon had seen that look on a hundred faces. Out here a map was not a picture of the country. It was an argument about who owned it, and every argument had a man on the other side of it.

He packed up at dusk. The plank went into the wagon bed, the stones into a nail keg, the maps into their oilcloth case with tissue between the sheets. His outfit was a buckboard whose green paint had chipped down to gray, drawn by two aging mules named Pike and Tully—Pike the tall one, obstinate, honest; Tully the short one, willing, and a liar about how much she could pull. In the wagon he kept his bedroll, a Dutch oven, a coffee mill, a keg of ink, a case of Faber pencils, a sack of cornmeal, forty pounds of newspapers in various stages of ruin, a Colt's Navy revolver he had fired at a living target exactly twice in his life, and his instruments: a plane table, a Gunter's chain, a compass in a mahogany box, and a brass telescopic level with the dent in it from Buena Vista.

He was sixty-three years old. He had come to Texas in 1841 as a young man with a commission in the Topographical Engineers and an idea that the finest thing a person could do with his life was to fix the unknown into place, latitude by latitude, so that other people could travel it without dying. Between 1845 and 1849 he had mapped the greater part of the country between the Brazos and the Pecos—rivers, springs, salt licks, passes, the beds of creeks that ran only after rain. He had done it with a chain and a compass and a horse and a great deal of walking. Some of that work went into government atlases with other men's names on it. Some of it stayed in his head, which was, he had come to believe, the only truly reliable archive he had ever known.

His wife Abigail had died of cholera in the summer of 1862, in a rented room in Waco, while he was twelve miles away arguing with a county clerk about a plat. He had not been there. He had never made his peace with that, only an arrangement with it, the way you arrange to live with a bad hip.

His son Henry was a printer in San Antonio, thirty-one years old, a good man with a press and a stubbornness that came down through the blood like the shape of a nose. In '61 Henry had gone to a meeting and come home talking about the Confederacy, and Solomon had said, in a voice he could still hear and still regret, that he had spent his working life mapping the United States and did not intend to spend his old age unmapping it. Henry had asked him whether he loved his neighbors or his lines better. Solomon had said something about oaths. Henry had said something about cowards. Six years had gone by and neither of them had written, and the silence had thickened and set like tallow in a cold pan.

So Solomon lived out of a buckboard and read the newspapers of the world aloud to people who could not read them, and sold maps, and slept under the wagon when it rained and beside it when it did not, and had made a kind of peace with solitude. That was the truthful word for it: a kind of peace. Not the whole article.

That night he camped a half-mile out from the settlement where the grass was better and cooked cornmeal mush with a little bacon grease and ate it out of the pan. The stars came up thick and white. Away off, a coyote started, and three more answered, and the sound went around the horizon like a rope being passed hand to hand.

He got out his notebook and worked by firelight on his Jones County sheet. There was a spring in the north part of it that he had put in from memory twenty years ago and that a man in Hackberry Crossing had told him today was dry these four seasons past. He inked a small annotation beside it: *reported dry, 1864–68.* He would not erase the spring. Water came back sometimes. But a map that told a man there was water where there was none could kill him just as dead as a bullet, and Solomon had a horror of that particular sin.

He capped the ink. He banked the fire. Before he slept he looked north, out of habit, toward the country he had once measured and where nobody now went without an escort—the high plains beyond the Clear Fork, still Comanche, still Kiowa, still, in the strictest sense, unsurveyed. Twenty years he had been trying and failing to stop wanting to see it again.

In the morning he greased the hubs, watered the mules, and turned northwest toward Fort Phantom Hill, because there were soldiers there now, and soldiers had pay, and men with pay bought maps and paid dimes to hear about balloon ascents and ocean cables. It was fourteen miles. He expected to be there by two and gone by four, and to be camped that night on the Clear Fork with nothing on his mind but ink.

He was wrong about that, and he was wrong about the shape of the rest of his life, and both errors were waiting for him on the parade ground of a ruined fort with its chimneys standing up out of the grass like the last teeth in an old jaw.