The Shadow Catcher Read online

  “I promise.”

  “I love you, Cis.”

  “I love you back.”

  But still I want to tell her that for someone as used to chasing shadows for a living, used to searching history’s mists to tell a story, how can I refuse this chance to face this ghost?

  edward and clara

  Clara could hear them moving in the room next to hers, on the other side of the thin wall, their morning sounds discreet as dawn, and just as purposeful.

  Even in the dark and through the wall she could distinguish between the two of them—the dowager, the slower of the two, coughing up deposits from her lungs, spitting, while the other one, younger and more eager to begin the day’s adventure, tiptoes to the chamber pot, delivering the sound of liquid streaming against porcelain. Then she hears the older woman positioning her pot, followed by an almost inaudible hiss and the sharp inglorious smell—even through the wall—of urine.

  This business of waking down among the elements still rankled her. It was barely civilized, she thought, this so-called house—a wooden shelter, as makeshift as their pretended family was. Their pretense of putting forth the myth of an extended clan bound by duty and devotion. That myth was as wormy as the floor joins and the crossbeams, but Edward had built it up around him out of nothing, cleared the land and raised the timbers, tarred the roof and seamed walls. It might as well have been a shantytown, she’d thought when she’d first seen it. She might as well be living in a tree. Or in a tipi. Half an inch of timber backed by tar black and rough paper was all that stood between her bed, her being, and the untamed Wild. There was a floor and a stone fireplace in what was called the kitchen, but the walls were less a solace than a taunt that they were all an inch away from living like some primitives. All six of them. An inch away from being Indians.

  Her known world had collapsed within a single violent instant of her parents’ deaths six months ago. Not only had she lost the people she loved most, she had lost the world that had defined her. She was too old to think herself an orphan, too habituated to her parents’ love to think herself destitute. Never, in all her childhood years and childhood fantasies, had she entertained the possibility that she’d end up living in the West, living in the wild, living anywhere at all except within the comforts and the confines of a modern city.

  Everything about her education and her guidance by her parents had habituated her to a way of life that had revolved around ideas, around a larger social order, around a daily conversation with the culture that men and women had constructed against odds down through the ages in outposts as far away as Athens, Antioch and Alexandria. Her mother had taught piano theory in the front room of their family home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and performed winter concerts under gaslight chandeliers in the conservatory of the Scandinavian Club. Her father was a portrait painter, a man who had translated the St. Paul Gazette into Latin over breakfast for amusement, who had traveled both to Holland and to France to learn the alchemy of paint and gesso. There had been laughter in their lives, music and impromptu joy, puns in foreign languages and the company of people who delighted in the unexpected transport of a Dvoák scherzo or stood mesmerized before a canvas of a woman clutching violets in her snow white hand. It had been a shock to learn how close to ruin her parents had maintained the pretense of a comfortable life, how the bright patina of her parents’ lives had hidden darker currents—debt—how everything, even the piano and the trays of oils and pigments, had been hocked and balanced in thin air on borrowed money, mortgaged to their spent tomorrows. Had she been their sole survivor, Clara would have mustered the required guile and courage to apply herself to modest labor and found herself employment in the city of her birth—that’s what her parents’ legacy had taught her; that’s what her mother would have done. Clara had to her advantage the example of her mother’s perseverance as an archetype. While she was alive, her mother, Amelia, had sewn and cooked, performed Chopin études backward, laughed and joked and told Greek myths for bedtime stories. Traduced Ariadne, vain Icarus had been Clara’s childhood imaginary friends—extensions of her mother’s storytelling. Theseus, Prince of Athens, had been her own Prince Charming; Medea, her first knowledge of the ideal of womanhood gone wrong. From her father she had learned different types of tales, painted narratives confined in gilded frames. Her father had told her about paintings he had seen in Europe, icons of religiosity, the archangel Gabriel lighting through a window on a cloud of fire to announce to the young Virgin that she, alone, among All Women, had been elected by God to bear His child. A girl could get intoxicated by such stories. Especially in St. Paul, Minnesota, where happy endings waited through the heavy winters, where the winters were experienced as weights of snow, and where the nights were haunted by the untranslatable messages in the music made by trains.

  Here—out here in the Territory—the nights were haunted by the banshee notes of loons and the persistent sloughing, like a giant’s respiration, of the Puget Sound. Here, her nights were haunted by her memories of happier days and by the horror of her parents’ corpses still too vivid in her mind. Had she been their sole survivor she would have stayed in Minnesota to find employment, but since their deaths her duty and concern had been for her younger brother, eleven years her junior, her parents’ bonus baby and the center of the family’s adoration. Hercules. Lullabies had been written for him; paintings painted. He had been doted on and coddled and, unlike his namesake, was more like fresh milk in a loving churn, his nature undisturbed and thick as cream. Hercules: only eight years old, he was as feckless as an egg in an abandoned nest. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t find a way to raise him on her own. Entreaties for help to her parents’ patrons and their coterie of artist friends in the days following their deaths amounted to sympathetic but polite nothings. Only Ellen Sheriff Curtis, her mother’s childhood friend, responded with a concrete, though less-than-perfect, Plan. Come to Washington Territory, she had telegraphed.

  Train fare enclosed.

  Think of us as family.

  Despite the invitation’s gloss of intimacy, charity was charity, Clara knew—its chain of command ran in one direction, only. There is no power in receiving, and the possibility that she and Hercules might find themselves indentured to the Curtises was among Clara’s several fears about transporting herself and her hapless brother into unknown territory. Washington—a Territory, not a State. A place so backward it couldn’t organize its citizenry to vote themselves into the Union. What sort of place was this Port Orchard on the Puget Sound? Was it a town—or a stockade? How far away was the nearest piano, the nearest concert hall? As distracting as these questions were to her, her chief concern about accepting Ellen’s offer was Ellen Sheriff, herself, now Ellen Sheriff Curtis. Squat, pale, timid, her mother’s friend had always reminded Clara of that ewe in every herd that manages, through her own passive stupidity, to strangle herself in a fence. A tragic character but without the heroism. Maybe that was part of why Amelia had befriended Ellen—again and again through their long friendship, Clara’s mother could play fiery Athena to Ellen’s tepid Hestia. Or maybe there had been a former fire in Ellen that her marriage had extinguished.

  Johnson Curtis had apparently swept Ellen off her feet the way a very bad sneeze can knock a person sideways.

  Shiftless, relying on his personal communication with God to get him out of scrapes, Johnson fancied himself an orator, although every bon mot he delivered had been spoken previously, by someone else. In the post–Civil War boom era when businesses in St. Paul flourished on the swell of profiteering, Johnson’s every venture failed, one after another, until, called by God, he declared himself A PREACHER and took off into the hinterlands of northern Minnesota with his second-born son to preach, administer baptisms, intone last rites and marriage vows to the dubiously devout in exchange for a roof over his head, a bit of bread and perhaps a nip or two of spirits less powerful than God but nonetheless dang strong. He abandoned Ellen in St. Paul with their other three Biblicall
y-named children—Raphael, named for the principal Archangel (and not, as Clara’s father hoped, for the Renaissance painter); Asahel, whose name in Hebrew means Made by God; and Eva, the Biblical First Woman. The son that Johnson took with him to portage rivers, cook, beg, watch after him and play his servant, had been christened ELIDAD, a name in Hebrew which means whom God has loved. The Biblical ELIDAD had been a chief of the tribe of Benjamin and one of the appointed to divide the Promised Land among the tribes. But Elidad-the-son-of-Johnson, only twelve years old when his father pressed him into service in the north woods of Minnesota, woke up one morning and rebelled, if not against his servitude, at least against the pretense of his name. Raphael, Asahel, Eva and Elidad Curtis would henceforth be known to their father, mother and the world as Raphael, Asahel, Eva and EDWARD. EDWARD Curtis. Edward Sheriff Curtis, in honor of his mother whom Johnson had left behind, penniless and destitute except for the enterprising efforts of Clara’s mother, her childhood friend, Amelia. Amelia organized a place for Ellen, Raphael, Asahel and Eva to live; organized lessons for the younger two and an apprenticeship for Raphael; organized piecework with a seamstress for Ellen, organized donations of food, furniture and clothes from Christian charities and her non-believing artist friends. Ellen and her daughter Eva were habitual guests in Clara’s family home—most frequently on Sundays when they’d arrive from church just as Clara’s parents were beginning to surface from their Saturday nights. “Aunt” Ellen became a fixture in the house—more like a maiden aunt than a contemporary of Amelia’s, especially after Johnson and Elidad (now Edward) had been gone more than a year and there was no positive assertion that they were ever coming back.

  No one could have been more gracious to Ellen than Amelia in her loyalty and optimism; but charity exacts an attitude of deference, regardless. It exacts a posture. Ellen shrank before their eyes. Especially after Raphael, her oldest child, picked up and lit out for the territory one cold night, taking nothing, leaving nothing but his past behind. No words were exchanged, no gratitude for his Existence, no short or long good-byes. Here one day; and gone the next. A family ghost. Sixteen, he was mourned by Ellen who enlisted Clara’s father in a search, but nothing ever turned up to explain where Raphael had gone. Seduced, abducted or kidnapped, he was never heard of again by any of the Curtises. Among them his name—that divine talisman of Johnson’s choosing that was supposed to be a blessing—was never spoken. And although Ellen took her son’s disappearance hard, and shrank at least an inch beneath the burden of its sorrow, she nearly lost another inch beneath Johnson’s next proposal. Maybe running from The Law but certainly running on empty and the surety that only prophets enterprise, Johnson wrote to Ellen to announce that he and Edward were headed West by train to make their fortune.

  Where palm trees grow like cotton, he had written.

  What a heartbreak, Clara thought.

  What an ass, her father clarified.

  Johnson swore that he had heard on good authority that there was gold in the Yukon and the prospects of that mineral had already left a trail of lucre all along the coast of the Pacific from California to the great Northwest—lumber money, shipbuilding, the fur trade. For decades now, a new Pacific city in the North had started gaining muscle. Seattle had supplied the timber that kept the Asia trade afloat. There was money to be made there, Johnson wrote. He and Edward would find a plot of land and build a house and send for Ellen and the other children within the year.

  She had heard it all before.

  She had heard it when he left her in Minnesota to go off and join God’s War against the South in ’62. Heard it when he wandered back, War’s demons in his eyes and in his ardor. Heard it when he took their second youngest son with him to vent his ardor on the unsuspecting Minnesota woods.

  This wild talk of Johnson’s.

  Always preaching to her about the blandishments of patience in a woman. About what waited in the future. As if her life on Earth were meant to be a single solitary wait. For what?

  He had never even asked where Raphael had gone, or why.

  If it hadn’t been for Clara’s mother, Ellen would have slipped into a long night, but Amelia kept her spirits up and kept her going, and then, miraculously, Johnson started sending letters as he’d never done before. His letters fueled Ellen’s and Asahel’s and Eva’s hopes. Whether falsely or not, it didn’t matter, Clara saw: there is no other quality of hope than that it floats a proposition. You can’t un hope a thing. To hope against a hope is still a form of hoping. Hope is something that’s the same thing as its opposite. It’s a thing that is the same thing as its shadow.

  Seattle.

  “So far away. But it must be a Christian place…” Ellen had attested to Amelia. “…if Johnson’s there.”

  “I’m certain that it’s very civilized,” Clara could remember her mother consoling. “We hear they have the telephone. Very modern. And there’s a credible college there. With full female enrollment. Universal suffrage.”

  Ellen’s facial muscles had pinched her mouth as she’d repeated, “…suffer-age?”

  But as the boastful reports had continued to arrive from Johnson by the post it had been revealed that Seattle, itself, the city, the boomtown, was not, precisely, the current locus of the Curtis family’s hope. The land that had been purchased—(God knows how, Clara’s father had remarked, perhaps enviously)—lay not near the inland channel but off-land, on an outer island, facing not the port nor the shipping lanes nor the city but, well, water. Facing the Orient. Or, if you were to draw a straight line: facing Russia. But Edward had cleared this tsarist-facing parcel and Edward had dug the foundation and Edward had quarried the stone for the hearth. Edward had planed the spruce trees and the cedar. Edward had raised the roof beams. Edward—who was in all ways except name Head-of-family—Edward had built them a house.

  And out from St. Paul they had gone—Ellen, Eva and Asahel. By train. To the West. The North west. And Clara and Hercules and her mother and father had all trooped to the station to bid farewell and to watch them depart.

  Four days on the iron roads.

  Ellen had not lived with Johnson for eight years.

  Edward had not seen his mother, sister nor younger brother for the same amount of time. Still, when Ellen, Eva and Asahel descended from the iron horse onto the rickety platform at Tacoma, the reunited family had fallen into one another’s arms.

  Except Edward.

  Who kept his mother at arm’s length.

  The world at arm’s length, for that matter.

  Eight years had cost him his youth. Vigilant, serious, silent, the twenty-year-old bore the burden of Johnson on his bones like those Chinese, coolies, he had glimpsed at Western depots, laying iron in the sun and the rain for The Railroad.

  Now at last he could welcome these strangers, his family, as his own freeing agent. A way out. A blessed release from the thieving old man.

  Asahel, who had stood only a yard high when he’d last seen him, was now an eager young man. Dark and compact like their mother, Edward’s brother was not as tall nor as fair-haired as he but they shared a singular trait: they were the good sons, the ones who had stayed under steady employment—one to the mother, the other to Johnson.

  They were dutiful, decent.

  They weren’t Raphael.

  But Edward was already planning escape. He had built with particular care a room in the house for his parents. A matrimonial room, three times the size of the other two bedrooms, same size as the kitchen. He had bought them, with his own wages, a bed. And a glazed-tile wood-burning stove he bartered off a Norwegian.

  Give them a few weeks. Settle them in. Teach Asahel what he needed to know of the region.

  Then he’d be off.

  On his own.

  Come and give us a smile, Ellen had begged him. She seemed shocked at the sight of her husband, half the size of his former self but still gamey, wild-haired and fierce for her flesh. Johnson had clawed through their first night together in the n
ew bed and was dead of paroxysms of ardor and bile the next day.

  Martyr, Clara’s mother had sighed when she’d learned of his death.

  Ass, Clara’s father repeated.

  The Curtises, now only four, seemed to fall off the map. Washington Territory was far away, as far away in her family’s imagination as China or Rome. Amelia sent a steady stream of energetic newsy letters because that’s the sort of person that Amelia was but Ellen’s replies were grim and slim and never more than one page long. She had, indeed, found a Christian community armed and ready to embrace her out in Washington Territory (Latter Day Saints? Seventh Day Adventists? Amelia couldn’t tell the differences among the tribes) and she was entreating a reluctant God to help find Eva a prospective husband. “I imagine Clara has young wolves aplenty huffing at your door,” she speculated. “Such a pretty thing.” Pretty, yes, Amelia agreed, herself, on reading this. There were wolves, certainly, on Clara’s trail but she wasn’t interested in them. Her “engagements” were of a different kind—one month the study of Dutch still-life artists, one month the Florentines, another month the history of ancient glass, two months believing she should pursue a career in nursing. There were many St. Paul girls of Clara’s age among the people they knew who evidenced this flittiness, an energetic brief commitment to a cause, girls who seemed to bat the air in optional directions as butterflies bat the air to stay alive. They would do this, they would do that—it was fatiguing to observe. But what passed for a joyous exercise, a struggle to be free of conventional constraints and expectations, was really only the final throes of a struggle to the death for most of Clara’s contemporaries. Matrimony clipped their wings. Marriage was to be their grand career. Childbirth their creative act. But Clara took her parents’ marriage for her own ideal—a lifelong flirtatious conversation, a prolonged engagement—and the young men she had met in St. Paul all seemed to lack the necessary humor, the off-handed heroism required by a life forged between two besotted equals. She would have forgone the equality of a prospective match, the balance in the equation, if there had been some Zeuses at her door disguised as bulls or swans but all she got were eager boys with knobby throats whose idea of a life “in commerce” meant not a life in married harmony, but working at a bank. She wanted what her parents had—the loving touches, the mutual obeisance, the lingering in bed in morning, the open door to friends whose married lives were less than perfect, less ideal than her own parents’, to whom everybody turned in times of conjugated crisis. Why should she look beyond her home for happiness when happiness was there? Why should she marry? It seemed neither perverse nor unreasonable that she should choose to stay at home at an age when other girls were courting futures for themselves. And if it took her an extra year or two to determine what was right for her—it would be nursing, she had finally decided—why should she hurry toward decisions that could, ultimately, alter the shape of her entire life? But she should have seen the signs. In hindsight, she should have seen the shadow of a worry on Amelia’s face when Clara announced she would seek acceptance at St. Paul’s Women’s Nursing Academy in September. Of course you must, darling. You must, Amelia had enthused. Never asking about cost, as other parents might have done. Waving off discussion of tuition. Letting every talk of money go unspoken.