The Shadow Catcher Page 7

  She would not be spendthrift but she would not deny them common pleasures. Just this once Hercules could order buffalo steak and flapjacks if he wanted and she could treat herself to fresh Dakota trout and eggs. There were jobs for girls like her, out here, jobs that didn’t seem much worse than factory jobs in Minnesota, working for the granaries. She would find employment in Seattle, even if she could not afford to finish her abbreviated education, and she would “set aside” and save just like these young women in the railroad depot. Meanwhile she would draw her greatest pleasure from the simplest things—a glass of water and fried eggs, her brother licking maple syrup from his fingers—because it had occurred to her while sitting there that everyone she would encounter in her life from now on would be a stranger. Except, of course, for the distant Curtises.

  “You’re the only person that I know in the whole world,” Hercules had said just then. Then asked, “Do you think they see us?”

  “Who, Hercules?”

  “Mother and father.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes I think they’re watching me. I hope they are. I think they’d like it here. I think they would be proud of us.”

  “I don’t think the dead have eyes, Hercules.”

  He looked up at the albino buffalo, then down at his buffalo steak. “There are other ways of seeing than with eyes,” he’d said. “Sometimes you see things in your thoughts.”

  “I don’t think the dead have thoughts,” she’d told him.

  “I need to think they do,” he stated.

  Minutes later, when they walked outside again, they found the platform lined with Indians.

  Clara had seen the occasional Indian from northern Minnesota on the streets of St. Paul, but she had never seen human creatures such as these, people as weathered as old timber, who seemed never to have sheltered from the elements, whose hardscrabble poverty showed in their eyes and teeth and fingernails and feet. “Are they real?” Hercules had asked.

  “Of course they’re real.”

  “No, I mean are they real Indians?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they going to kill us?”

  “No.”

  “What are they doing, then?”

  “Trying to make money.”

  “Why?”

  The Indians—she couldn’t tell, sometimes, if one was male or female—sat on the ground, their backs against the depot wall, their pathetic wares spread out for sale on woven rugs before them. Hercules clung to her arm and she had to tell him not to stare as they walked the full length of the platform and then back again. But it was hard to keep one’s gaze away from these strange people. None spoke, few moved, and in their silence they seemed to her more like the taxidermy, the trophies on the walls inside the restaurant, than like fellow thinking creatures. They sat rigid on their dirty rugs, not really trying to sell the things they’d laid before them—items constructed of the most elemental things: straw, feathers, clay and animal carcasses. Some of the passengers lined up to have their pictures taken with a “chief,” a solemn stony figure in a feathered headdress and a vest made out of bones. But most of their fellow passengers handled the baskets and the pots and put them down again, dismissively. Some weighed the silver trinkets in their hands, necklaces and rings inset with blue-green stones, ill-formed and clumsy, Clara thought, she could imagine no modern woman of her mother’s style and taste deigning to wear such heavy, decorative things. The Indians, themselves, seemed not to care that nothing sold, seemed not to understand the elements of commerce. They seemed, oddly, in a state of non-existence, having arrived on the platform from god knows where in order to enact a play in which they were the scenery, nothing else. “What happened to them?” Hercules had asked. “They look so sad. They look like someone’s died. I think they’re sadder than I am.”

  A good sign, Clara had thought: that he could imagine sadness greater than his own. Art, their father had frequently told them, was exactly that: to make art is to realize another’s sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people’s lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger. Hercules had pressed his nose against the carriage window as the train had lurched to life, inching forward from the Bismarck depot. And still the Indians had not moved. He had watched them solemnly and then, in a gesture understood by any human, he had raised his hand and waved farewell to them. Whose sadness were the Indians imagining, Clara wondered: whom, among the dead, did they miss, were there ancestors who, among the dead, they needed to believe were watching them, as Hercules believed their parents were? Their faces registered a state of emptiness, perhaps from looking at this too vast canvas for too long. As the train developed steam and speed the country rolled past in undifferentiated magnitude, she could see, to the horizon. How could a soul survive out here, she thought, without a mirror, without a printed word, without a line connecting one to mankind’s history, mankind’s self-perpetuating sadness? We’re not made for open spaces, she considered, they humiliate and humble us and make us search for God in granite niches. All this open territory—so important to the men back East—for what? To join the coasts. Join two halves of coastline. Connect us sea to sea. Control the money in both pockets. Was it beautiful, or scenic, all this? It was terrifying, she had thought, and as the day wore on, she slept, then woke, then slept again. Waking, she was suddenly obsessed with finding someone in the landscape, anyone, a moving figure, proof that humanity outside the train existed. Night fell and they’d stopped at Billings, and at Butte, Montana Territory, and then, opening her eyes in morning, she’d thought she’d seen a shadow racing on the rising plain and realized she was looking at a running bear, infuriated by the train. The cold increased and they’d been suddenly surrounded by snow and mountains, curtains of gray rock shimmering with ice at arm’s length, it had seemed, from the carriage windows. They had moved to seats closer to the central stove and Clara had rented extra blankets from the conductor and had heated and reheated the stones beside the stove to warm their feet. They ate thick sandwiches of rough brown bread and salty beef purchased from a squaw in Sandpoint, Idaho Territory, where they’d laid over half a day while the train took on carloads of sand for traction through the icy inclines. She’d slept some more and then, when she thought the stiffness in her lower back and neck and shoulders had become too hardened to be relieved, the conductor had announced Tacoma depot next.

  They hadn’t had a proper wash for days but with a little spit and elbow grease she’d polished Hercules’s face and hands and buttoned him all up in his second-hand suit and run her fingers through her auburn hair and tied Amelia’s lambskin and velvet bonnet on her head. She could see them, the Curtises—Eva, Asahel and Ellen—standing by a buckboard next to the rickety platform, looking, she had thought, as expectant, worried and confused as she herself was feeling. But then a swell of gratitude went through her, the train came to a halt, releasing its steam, and Hercules was at the door and down the steps and into Asahel’s welcoming embrace before she had been able to stop him.

  Her descent had been more cautious.

  Perhaps, even then, she had been unknowingly anticipating Edward, searching for his face, even though she’d never met him.

  There was Eva, pale and thin and tight-lipped. And Asahel, brown eyes brimming with excitement, grinning ear to ear. And Ellen, who had taken one astonished look at Clara, touched her throat and gasped Amelia! and collapsed onto the platform like a sack of old potatoes.

  Clara was by her side immediately, her one semester of nursing education rising to the fore, cradling the downed woman’s head in one hand, feeling for a pulse with her other. “Has she been ill?” she’d asked of Eva and Eva, biting on her lip and looking paralyzed, had shaken her head. Clara had taken a vial of sal ammoniac from her traveling bag, broken it in half and waved the fumes near Ellen’s nostrils.

  “Oh, Amelia,” the older woman said again, coming to, “they told me you were dead.”

  “It’s Clara, mother,” Eva scolded
. “Clara.”

  “Amelia, dear, dear friend,” Ellen said again, patting Clara’s hand, “I’m so happy that you’re here.”

  When Lodz had first seen Amelia’s portrait that Clara’s father had painted, he’d said, “Except for the dark hair, this is real you. You have her face, you know?” so the bonnet, clearly, was at the root of Ellen’s daft confusion, and although Clara told her, “Aunt Ellen, it’s me—it’s Clara,” Ellen still clutched at her and whispered, “So relieved to see you, dear. You’ll know what to do, Amelia. You always do, praise God.”

  They managed Ellen into a sitting position, then slowly to her feet, as she all the while held onto Clara, looking up at her with a dreamy expression that was frankly creepy, and Clara had begun to suspect the older woman might not be quite right in the head, a possibility that struck fear in her over what kind of tenuous security she’d wagered for herself and Hercules. Asahel organized their baggage and before long they were all seated in the buckboard and Clara, up front, next to Asahel, had the first opportunity to assess her new locality. It was sparse, for one thing, the Tacoma station, minimal and impermanent, hardly worthy of the designation End of the Line. It was a timber building built more like a religious campground structure than a masterpiece of railroading. If you were riding Northern Pacific rails then this was where you were when you and it ran out of steam, and it was pretty paltry, she had to say, conforming to no image she had expected—specifically: there appeared to be no town. There appeared to be no end-of-journey place, no respite from the wilderness she’d been looking at for these past days: no destination. Rain, but not-rain, a sort of visible and particulate wet air, like the inside of a cloud, raindrops held in time, sustained and not falling, misted on her face, her clothes, and lent the atmosphere a filtered presence, a gray light, as if one were living in a shadowy past. “Not so cold,” she’d finally said to Asahel. Always safe, in start-up conversation, to talk about the weather.

  “Haven’t been here all that long myself, but winter’s pretty mild they tell me,” he agreed, “compared to what you’ve been through. On your journey here, I mean.” They happened to glance at each other, then, accidentally, and there was warmth and understanding in his eyes. Something else, too, something of a greater meaning or of a greater heat, which she was too exhausted to start to try to translate.

  “I was sorry to learn about your parents, Clara,” he said. “They were fine people, always good to us when we had no one else.”

  “And I’m sorry, too,” she’d said, “about your father.”

  “Oh,” he shrugged. “You know, I hardly knew him. I have more memories of your father than of my own.” And there was that shadow, again, in his eyes, when he looked at her, that she couldn’t decode.

  “Is it far?” she’d asked, staring ahead. “To the—”

  “Fifteen miles. Then a ferry.”

  “And will we see Seattle?”

  “Seattle? Gosh, no. Why do you ask?”

  “Curious. What’s it like? Have you been there?”

  He started to laugh. “No reason for me to. No time.”

  “And Edward,” she’d faltered, trying to mask her disappointment. “Where is he?”

  “Edward?” He pointed with the horsewhip over his shoulder. “Edward’s up there, for all I know.”

  In her confusion Clara thought he had meant heaven. She’d thought for one awful moment that he meant Edward was dead.

  “Mt. Rainier,” he pointed again, and behind him, over his shoulder, Clara saw the mountain for the first time, majestic and snowcapped, dominating the distance.

  “He’s—?” she stammered.

  “—on the mountain,” he confirmed.

  “But—why?”

  He’d laughed again, warm and welcoming, like his eyes. “Well, when he comes down, ask him yourself.”

  The fact that the elder Curtis, the head of the household, had contrived not to be present for their arrival did not bode well, she’d thought. What if they weren’t welcome? What if Ellen, off her head, had forgotten to inform him?

  “Edward goes away,” Asahel said, by way of explanation. “Then he comes back. You’ll see. Edward always comes back. He always does. Edward always comes back home.”

  Clara might have dozed, sitting up, or else the densely forested countryside looked the same mile after mile because she seemed to lose track of time. Even the choppy ferry ride couldn’t invigorate her sense of dread and fatigue, and she was grateful to Asahel for taking charge of Hercules as she stood, gripping the rail of the boat, searching the trailing fog, as previous sailors must have done, for symptoms of a recognizable life.

  And then they were there. Although what “there” was was hardly recognizable. Asahel drew the horse to a halt and helped his mother and sister from the back and began to unload the buckboard as Hercules ran toward the barn and Clara sat, unable to move, staring at what was before her.

  Surrounded by green-black fir trees on three sides, this was a clearing, of sorts, a cleared rectangle in the middle of a pine tree forest, the narrow dirt road leading into a cul-de-sac with the house, if you could call it that, to the right side, the barn to the left and a sheer drop of land straight ahead where, between the pine trees, she could see the Puget Sound and hear it lapping on the shore, below. The earth in the foreground, between the barn and the house, was tamped bare and muddy and paved in places with crushed oyster shells. There was a timber rack next to the barn on which some kind of flesh was curing in rows and an overpowering aroma led her to conclude it must be fish. There was a garden, badly kept, between the house and the coastal promontory, staked for vines but overrun with chickens. There was a hand pump in the center of the bare ground between the house and barn, beside a water trough where a tomcat sat licking at its testicles, and beside the porch steps to the house, wrapped in blankets the same color as the fog, there stood two Indians.

  Ellen was already shooing at them, “Go away. No make-ee business today. Edward no here. Go, go—” while Asahel helped Clara down from the buckboard, meeting her expression of alarm with the explanation, “Friends of Edward’s. He finds work for them.” Then Hercules came running from the barn, exclaiming, “Clara! They have horses here!” and Clara was trying to calm his excitement as they went up the porch steps past the Indians into what she supposed was meant to be a kitchen.

  The floor was some kind of uneven stone, there was a hearth, a stove, a copper basin, hanging pots and brooms, a long pine table with two benches, shelves lined with mismatched plates and tin enamelware, and two glass-fronted highboys painted pink and yellow. “Come, Amelia, come,” Ellen beckoned and led Clara from the kitchen toward a narrow passageway that led to other rooms. Clara followed her into the first room on the left, larger than expected, nearly the size of the kitchen, with a glazed tile stove in one corner and a matrimonial-size bed in the center of the floor. “You take this room, Amelia,” Ellen said, gathering up what few personal belongings there were from the bureau and the hat rack. “I’ll move in with Eva.”

  “—no, mother, no,” Eva urged, appearing in the room, taking Ellen by the arms to stop her and entreating Clara with her eyes. “—please,” she whimpered.

  “Oh, no, we’ll be fine. I never liked it in here, not after that first night. Amelia needs this larger room for all of her nice things.”

  Eva turned to Clara. “Tell her you are not Amelia,” she begged, her eyes blazing, and although Clara understood her despair at having to share her privacy, at her age, with her dotty mother, a purely selfish impulse rose within her. She could see herself living in a room this size, alone, filling it with her own thoughts and memories, making of it a refuge from this strange place and this strange family, and, involuntarily, her gaze flitted to the door to see if there was a lock on the inside. There was. “Aunt Ellen,” she said, only halfheartedly, “you must let Eva have a room of her own. And you must stop calling me Amelia.”

  “Well, what should I call you, dear?”

&nbs
p; “Clara.”

  “Don’t be silly, dear.” She continued gathering her pile of things. “Eva, tell your brother to bring Amelia’s trunk in here.”

  Eva glared at Clara. “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “Don’t expect me to talk sense into her if you can’t,” Clara answered, which set the record straight. “Now show me the rest of the house so I can figure all this out.”

  As her mother had done with the disarray of Ellen’s life back in St. Paul, so Clara would do in these new circumstances, with Asahel’s and Edward’s commission and approval, of course, as she believed that both of them had grown into responsible young men, capable of solving problems for themselves. But on the distaff side, the day-to-day and largely female running of the house, Clara had assumed hierarchical supremacy from the moment Ellen fainted on the railroad platform. She and Eva held a delicate truce, Eva chafing in her supportive role but still pleased to exercise her exclusive right to play the helpless ingenue. It became a predictable split among the six of them (counting Hercules), a division of daily life and daily labor along gender lines. Even without Edward present on the compound, his influence was felt in the way he’d organized the structures, organized the buildings. The house was built around the kitchen and the sleeping rooms for, originally, the oldest and the youngest members of the family. The barn was built around himself. The barn was where the tools were stored, the horses and the mule were stabled—and it was where Edward, and, subsequently, Asahel, retreated every night to hunker down among the leather and the steel and the smell of animals to sleep as men. And that was where Hercules, from the first day, as soon as he had seen the cowboy-like bunkhouse rooms beside the stalls and stacks of hay, had wanted to be at night. With the animals. And with the men. With Asahel, who assured her it was civilized out there, proper sheets and blankets on the beds, but Clara said she’d have to see it. She would see it, first, before she gave permission. “‘No Girls Allowed,’” Hercules had told her, “there’s a sign up on the wall.”