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Authors: Helen Humphreys
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body could be dropped into the pit by drawing out the bottom. The coffin could then be used again. The famine. The blight.
Blight
was such an inappropriate word for what had happened. Blight—a brief stumble into light. The right word would be heavy, drawn to earth, leeching down into darkness.
Eldon has thought about the famine a great deal. The injustice of it. The way it is still being blamed on the Irish themselves. He has thought about it, but he has never imagined it so vividly as he did when Annie told him about the famine road. All of his life he has believed in connecting things, in filling in the spaces on the map. A connecting line is a bridge that makes two worlds accessible, whether it is just the joining of two villages or the joining of two huge continents with a transatlantic telegraph cable. It is a way over, a way through, a way for people to believe in something beyond the limits of their known world.
Now Annie Phelan has drawn a line in his mind, each end of it falling away into nothingness. Her parents, the Phelans, used the last of their strength to build a road that would never carry the weight of horse and cart, never carry a man into town for supplies, a family to market. A hundred years from now that road will be invisible, will perhaps be a line in a forest where the vegetation does not grow as high as elsewhere. And to work on a road like that, surely it would make you die faster? The road would end where you ended and the road ending meant that you would die. The whole enterprise was a gesture of hopelessness.
Eldon stands in his library, before his large oak table. There is a map spread out on it, but he is not seeing it. Over and over he sees the famine road. He feels the weight of the shovels, feels the futility in the bones of the men and women, the children. It would taste like metal on their tongues, he thinks, that futility.
It is so much stronger, this discontinuous line, stronger than the careful, ordered lines on a map. It is a dash, a pencil skidding by accident across a fresh sheet of paper.
Perhaps those early explorers were right to fill their maps equally with what they knew to be there and what they imagined to be there. All the sea monsters, the winds with angels’faces. Perhaps what can be imagined is somehow a stronger truth because it inhabits you, is you, becomes you. It happens from the inside out.
Eldon does not want to show the mineral deposits of the world. He wants to go back, to include the imaginings of the early map-makers. Mountains like braided rope. The early compass roses with a holy cross marking the east, where the sun came up. He wants to combine the old ways of imagining the world with new ones. Even to have a system of measurement that was different from miles and nautical miles, something more humanly tangible than latitude and longitude. There was a map he saw once, made by French Jesuits in 1671. They had charted Lake Superior in Canada and used the canoe stroke as their unit of measure. Their map was not surpassed in accuracy for a hundred years. That is how distance is felt, the simple rhythmic act of pulling a paddle up, pushing it through water. Miles becoming a turn of the back, the ache in a forearm.
Eldon thinks that he will travel up to London. He will go and see his publisher, Dunstan, and explain what he feels about his map of the world. Surely he can plead his case, can make Dunstan see that a less accurate map would, in fact, be the most accurate map he could make. He will offer examples, make a case for himself. There is the Apian map of the world, for one. Peter Apian’s world map of 1530 was unique because it was in the shape of a heart. It joined the inner and outer universes together. Who, standing before Apian’s heart-shaped map, could not believe that this was where he lived? Eldon, seeing it for the first time, was overwhelmed by its power. The world seemed both infinite and fragile. The boundless elliptical oceans. The blood
Blight
was such an inappropriate word for what had happened. Blight—a brief stumble into light. The right word would be heavy, drawn to earth, leeching down into darkness.
Eldon has thought about the famine a great deal. The injustice of it. The way it is still being blamed on the Irish themselves. He has thought about it, but he has never imagined it so vividly as he did when Annie told him about the famine road. All of his life he has believed in connecting things, in filling in the spaces on the map. A connecting line is a bridge that makes two worlds accessible, whether it is just the joining of two villages or the joining of two huge continents with a transatlantic telegraph cable. It is a way over, a way through, a way for people to believe in something beyond the limits of their known world.
Now Annie Phelan has drawn a line in his mind, each end of it falling away into nothingness. Her parents, the Phelans, used the last of their strength to build a road that would never carry the weight of horse and cart, never carry a man into town for supplies, a family to market. A hundred years from now that road will be invisible, will perhaps be a line in a forest where the vegetation does not grow as high as elsewhere. And to work on a road like that, surely it would make you die faster? The road would end where you ended and the road ending meant that you would die. The whole enterprise was a gesture of hopelessness.
Eldon stands in his library, before his large oak table. There is a map spread out on it, but he is not seeing it. Over and over he sees the famine road. He feels the weight of the shovels, feels the futility in the bones of the men and women, the children. It would taste like metal on their tongues, he thinks, that futility.
It is so much stronger, this discontinuous line, stronger than the careful, ordered lines on a map. It is a dash, a pencil skidding by accident across a fresh sheet of paper.
Perhaps those early explorers were right to fill their maps equally with what they knew to be there and what they imagined to be there. All the sea monsters, the winds with angels’faces. Perhaps what can be imagined is somehow a stronger truth because it inhabits you, is you, becomes you. It happens from the inside out.
Eldon does not want to show the mineral deposits of the world. He wants to go back, to include the imaginings of the early map-makers. Mountains like braided rope. The early compass roses with a holy cross marking the east, where the sun came up. He wants to combine the old ways of imagining the world with new ones. Even to have a system of measurement that was different from miles and nautical miles, something more humanly tangible than latitude and longitude. There was a map he saw once, made by French Jesuits in 1671. They had charted Lake Superior in Canada and used the canoe stroke as their unit of measure. Their map was not surpassed in accuracy for a hundred years. That is how distance is felt, the simple rhythmic act of pulling a paddle up, pushing it through water. Miles becoming a turn of the back, the ache in a forearm.
Eldon thinks that he will travel up to London. He will go and see his publisher, Dunstan, and explain what he feels about his map of the world. Surely he can plead his case, can make Dunstan see that a less accurate map would, in fact, be the most accurate map he could make. He will offer examples, make a case for himself. There is the Apian map of the world, for one. Peter Apian’s world map of 1530 was unique because it was in the shape of a heart. It joined the inner and outer universes together. Who, standing before Apian’s heart-shaped map, could not believe that this was where he lived? Eldon, seeing it for the first time, was overwhelmed by its power. The world seemed both infinite and fragile. The boundless elliptical oceans. The blood
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