Marguerite Voss had married a mapmaker for the silence. Not the silence of the marriage itself, which was filled with the usual catastrophes of domestic life, but the silence that preceded his work: the hours before dawn when he sat at the kitchen table with India ink and a quill cut from their own goose, drawing coastlines that did not exist. She had learned, over seventeen years, not to ask what he was mapping. The question made him angry in a way that frightened her, not because of the anger itself but because of the fear beneath it, a fear she recognized as her own.
Theirs was a house of inaccurate measurements. He had once told her, drunk on wine they could not afford, that every map was a lie agreed upon. "Latitude is a conspiracy," he said, laughing in a way that contained no humor. "Longitude is a religion. I am a priest of something nobody believes."
She had found the first body in the cellar on a Tuesday in March, wrapped in canvas that smelled of salt and something else, something she would later identify as the particular absence of light that collects in places where light has been forbidden. It was a woman. The woman was young, perhaps twenty, with hair the color of the ink her husband used for harbor towns. There was no wound she could see. There was no map drawn on the body, which disappointed her in a way she did not examine.
She did not tell him. She told no one. She moved the body to the root cellar, where the potatoes kept their own counsel, and she waited. For what, she was not certain. For him to notice. For the police to arrive with their own inadequate maps of justice. For God, who had never answered her letters, to finally write back.
She found the second body in June, in the same cellar, wrapped in the same canvas. This one was a man, older, with hands that suggested piano playing or strangulation, the two activities being, in her experience, often related. She moved him with the potatoes as well. The potatoes, she noted, were not judgmental. The potatoes had their own deaths to consider.
By autumn there were seven. She had begun to keep a ledger: names she invented, dates of discovery, a description of the canvas wrapping. The canvas was always the same. The smell was always the same. The absence of wounds was always the same. She began to suspect that her husband was not killing them but collecting them, the way a lepidopterist collects moths that have already died of natural causes, pinning them to a board and pretending to have been present at the death.
On their anniversary, she served him stew and asked, for the first time in seventeen years, what he was really mapping.
He put down his spoon. He looked at her with an expression she could not read, which meant it was an expression she had taught him, a face she had drawn for him long ago and forgotten. "I am mapping the country inside a marriage," he said. "The interior. You understand? The places no one else has been."
"And the bodies?" she asked.
"They are the towns," he said. "The settlements. The places where something almost happened."
She understood then, or believed she understood, which is the same thing in a marriage. She helped him carry the eighth body down to the cellar, unwrapping the canvas with a tenderness that surprised them both. It was a child. The child had her eyes. She did not ask whose child. She simply placed it with the potatoes, which were by now numerous and expectant, and she returned to the kitchen to wash the dishes.
That night, for the first time, she drew her own map. She used his ink, his quill, the back of a grocery list. She drew their house, the cellar, the potato mound. She drew herself standing at the cellar door with a lamp that gave no light. She drew him at the kitchen table, drawing coastlines that did not exist. And in the margin, where cartographers place their legends and their lies, she wrote a single sentence: Here there were dragons. Here there still are.