“I can’t watch you suffer.”
“I would watch you struggle. If you asked me to. If our roles were reversed.”
“I don’t know that I could ask someone to do that. When there is something else that can be done.”
More, he said.
“—more broth?” He had drained the bowl.
“More talk. Keep talking. Tell me everything you know. The painting on the sea chest. Did your father paint it?”
She forced herself to worry less and entertain him more. “Not my father’s style—can’t you see the difference? This painting on the sea chest is a figurative one, realistic. My father’s style is moody, more impressionistic. But this was one of his favorite paintings, the original, this is a copy, of course, a rather good one, except for the second-rate colors that were used. Could be that is why I purchased it, because my father was so fond of the original—I’ve forgotten the Dutch artist’s name—or perhaps he was Flemish—sixteenth century, nevertheless, and you can see that by then the Europeans had answered the quandaries posed by the subject of perspective because this painting—it’s called Icarus, that much I remember—here you see the plowman in the foreground, his figure proportionally larger than the distant ship behind him, even though no human, naturally, is larger than a ship—”
“What does ‘Icarus’ mean?”
“—I’m sorry?”
“Icarus. What does it mean? What language is it?”
“Greek. I don’t know that the name means anything. Like ‘John.’ Or ‘Edward.’”
“Icarus is a person’s name?”
“Yes, this is Icarus here, in the right hand corner of the painting with his legs sticking up from where he’s fallen in the water.”
His steady look.
“The boy who flew too close to the sun?”
Uncomprehending.
“The Greek myth,” Clara said.
“Yes, go on. I’ve heard of them. Legends from the ancient past.”
“Legends, yes, but legends only now. At the time that they were told they were believed to be as factual and truthful as this textbook.” She held up the ANATOMIE.
“What happened to them?”
“The Greeks?”
“The myths.”
“People stopped believing in the truth of them.”
“Ah. Because they were not true, at heart.”
“People stopped believing in the magic of them, then.”
“How does that happen?”
“—loss of faith? I suppose most often one kind of faith replaces another. It’s not faith that is transformed, but the object of it.”
“Then what did the Greeks believe in when they lost faith in myths?”
“Other myths, I suppose. Christianity. These…” She held up the pages of the saints in Giotto’s paintings.
“Tell me the myth of Icarus,” he said, “so I can decide if I’ll believe it.”
“Not a good myth to start with, Edward, for someone who’s just fallen off a roof…”
She told him the myth, which could be recited in its full in four brief sentences and then he asked her how the Icarus sea chest had come into her possession and she told him that, too, about the money from Lodz and who Lodz was and how she and Hercules had gone to the market to shop and she’d bought the chest with all the books inside and how Hercules had spent his full ten dollars on a suit of clothes that he’d already outgrown.
“The suit was handsome?”
“He was very pleased with it.”
“I would have done the same. You’re laughing?”
“He’s a boy, Edward—a boy of eight—and you’re a man. I think you would not have squandered your entire fortune on a suit of clothes that you were destined to outgrow.”
“Oh but as most men from a meager background I am attracted to fine things, fine clothes.” He ran his hand along the counterpane again, in contemplation of its weave. “Your family must have been, at some time, wealthy, I suspect.”
“Wealthy, no. Had they been wealthy I would not be here. Existing on your family’s charity. Living from a sea chest.”
“Wealthy enough to buy your education, though. You are well educated, I observe.”
“If I appear that way it is because my primary education derived from my parents’ company. They were greatly learned people. Far better schooled than I.”
“So you see the root cause of my disability. Given the company that I was made to keep as a small boy.”
“You mean your father—”
“But I taught myself to read. The Leatherstocking Tales. Do you know these books?”
“Fenimore Cooper,” Clara vaguely recalled.
“The Deerstalker. The Pathfinder. Oh they’re magnificent. The Last of the Mohicans. I’ve read them all. You must read them. You must make them necessary reading. I’ll lend them to you. In fact, in honor of your taking time to share your books from your sea chest with me, I’m going to call you Scout. That’s what Hawk-eye, the Pathfinder, is—a scout. And that’s what you’ll be for me. My Scout. That’s going to be my name for you.”
As he’d yet to address her by any name, especially her own, Clara accepted this false baptism with reluctant gratitude.
“Are there any books in that sea chest, Scout, that you could read to me—in English?”
“English, yes, aye, aye, sir, let’s just see—” She went hunting again, among the books and mementos. “—I brought along some favorite novels of my parents, here we are—” She stood up holding several volumes. “Louisa May Alcott, no, that won’t do—”
“A woman writer?”
“—even worse, Edward. A woman writer writing one called Little Women—”
He looked, almost on cue, newly pained.
“—Henry James…I think not…here we are—one ofmy father’s favorites…make yourself comfortable, Edward, you are in for a treat…” She rearranged the pillows around his head, removed the tray, tested the heat from the stones, then settled in beside him on the bed. “Chapter the First,” she read, “in which
‘The Author gives some account of himself and family—His first inducements to travel—He is shipwrecked and swims for his life—Gets safe on shore in the country of Lilliput—Is made a prisoner and carried up the country.’”
“What is the title of this adventure, Scout?”
“Gulliver’s Travels. Irish. But in English nonetheless…”
She read without a pause for what must have been at least an hour before she felt him doze beside her. She sat still and watched him sleep for several moments then she slid silently from the bed leaving the book beside him on the pillow. She changed quickly from the shift into a skirt and blouson in anticipation of the physician’s arrival, then she left the room, keeping the door ajar. She lit the flame beneath the kettle and set out a tea service to refresh the physician, then considered finding a nightshirt or clean clothes for Edward. Enough time had elapsed for the Indians to have reached someone for help, she thought, as she crossed the open ground between the house and the barn, pausing only slightly to wonder at the wood aroma in the air—not fresh timber, exactly, more like the smell of a cold hearth. The light was strangely eerie, as if a storm were coming, though the sky was still. She entered the barn by the door to the bunkhouse where Hercules and Asahel slept at night and then she realized she hadn’t visited these quarters in months. There were two beds, neatly made up—and a closed door, leading to further rooms that she had never visited, and as soon as she opened the door she knew she had entered on Edward’s presence, into the room where Edward dreamed and slept. Side chapel, she immediately thought. On those few occasions when she had entered into one of St. Paul’s cathedrals she had been struck by the asceticism of the side chapels, the niches, those unadorned recesses washed in reverential light where people went to be alone, with God. That’s what Edward’s room was like, a sanctuary pressed into service by unrelenting solitude. Everything was placed, as if on an altar: nothing was superfluou
s. There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a straight-back chair, a writing table. Nothing on the walls, no windows. There was something very masculine about the look and feel of it, its readiness for duty, its spartan abnegation of unnecessary frill. On the writing table, an oil lamp with a box of sulphur matches, a dictionary, a jar of ink and a single pen. A stone, riddled through with veins of green. A small gold nugget. On the chest of drawers, standing side by side, the collected Leatherstocking Tales, a cheap edition, pages foxed and marked in Edward’s hand in pencil. She slid the top drawer of the chest open to discover cotton shirts, three of them, starched and pressed and folded, and a pair of silk pyjamas, black, of the kind you saw on Chinamen, with braided toggles on the top and a drawstring waist on bottom, same as Edward’s doeskin pants. The middle and the bottom drawers were empty. Why would Edward build a house, she wondered, an entire edifice to house his family, and then decide to live apart? It made no sense to her. In a corner of the room his carved, polished walking stick stood against the wall next to a canvas knapsack in which she found a pair of laundered stockings and his razor. She took these, the walking stick, a shirt and the pyjamas, and was about to leave when she noticed a slanted cubby door plumb with the wall, into which a grown adult would have to duck to enter. Thinking it a closet where Edward might have kept his boots and shoes and other clothing she unlatched the door and pulled it open and found herself facing a two-storey-like stall, faced with cedar, entirely dark—a darkroom—but for a seam of light coming from the ceiling which she realized must be the outline of a window in the roof. Groping, she found a cord and pulled it and a thick black shade snapped back to reveal not a cubby nor a closet but a large well-organized meticulous workroom, half the size of her father’s attic studio on the top floor of the St. Paul house. “No one is as organized in his work as a sailor has to be,” her father had once told her, “for him it’s life-or-death. Everything must have a place and everything must be in place. Shipshape. Like a painter’s palette. Everything is organized. Every color separate. Everything at hand when needed. I could do it in the dark, you see? Work my palette with my eyes closed. Sail it. Like a captain in a good ship on the sea. That’s what my palette is: my ship.” So was the room that she was standing in, a sort of regulated vessel. Shipshape. Ordered. Rows of corked brown bottles organized by size labeled AMMONIUM IRON OXALATE, FORMALDEHYDE, FERRIC AMMONIUM CITRATE, POTASSIUM FERRICYANIDE. There were empty beakers, crude brushes, more like spatulas, with flattened edges, a jar marked WATER (RAIN). There were hinged-back wooden boxes and rectangles of glass and a sheaf of thick dense paper, still she was slow to fathom what it all amounted to until she saw the pictures on the wall. Until she saw the camera.
Photography, the object of her father’s scorn.
How often had she heard him rail against its fakery, its allusions to the standards of high art? Any idiot could do it, he had said—by which he’d meant that any idiot smart enough to master the mechanics of the process could pretend to be a portrait artist—but no idiot had produced the images before her. Cyan—“Prussian blue”—a color on her father’s palette, a living light that vibrated in the eye—that was the color of these images, the color that saturated them. She couldn’t tell—she didn’t have the visual vocabulary to inform her eye—whether the cyan images had been laid on the surface of the paper or whether they existed in it, so inextricably did the color seem to be the image, and when she reached to touch one—an image of a man, possibly Modoc or Mopoc, sitting in a bark boat among reeds on a large body of water, most likely Puget Sound—she was surprised to discover by its touch that it was linen, and her mind went back to Edward’s assessing hand on her mother’s counterpane. She did not know—how could she?—that what she was looking at was the result of a chemical process, oxidation, like tarnish on a ring, and that the illusion of the Prussian blue inhabiting the fibers of the linen was as real as iron transmogrifying, iron becoming something else: as real as rust. She saw she was looking at an alchemy she’d never seen in quite this form before—a kind of magic she was slow to understand. There was something here, she slowly realized, looking all around at the photographs he’d pinned up on the wall—a decisive way of looking at the world with an aesthetic that rendered what was seen and what was real somehow more fragile and more beautiful than the way it must have looked outside the camera’s eye. There were landscapes he had captured no doubt on the heights of Mt. Rainier, of the treacherously raked volcanic scarps draped in snow and ice from a breathtaking altitude above the clouds hovering among the lower valleys, and she suddenly knew that not only was she looking at a real view of a real place that she would never have the stamina nor strength to capture for herself, but that Edward had climbed there with a camera on his back, this camera, this boxy incommodious contraption right in front of her that was as difficult to heft—she tried to lift it—as a crate of roosting hens. Was painting ever arduous? Certainly on the scale of Giotto’s murals or the painted ceilings in Italian churches, but nothing her father ever did, none of his canvases, suggested this degree of physicality or any sense of a physical exertion underpinning the image’s emotional affect. Edward had been there she couldn’t help but realize. That was something unique to photography, that a photograph elicited—that sense of being there—that painting more or less finessed. You could paint from your imagination—her father frequently had—but in order to produce a photograph you had to put yourself within a visual range, you had to be there and that locus carried with it its own intimacy. The photographer was acting for you with his eyes, acting as your own eyes would. It was a contract between the artist and the viewer that few painters could make and it was deeply personal, she saw, because she could not look at any photograph of Edward’s without thinking about Edward, himself, about the man behind the camera, about how and why he had positioned himself where he had. What he did when he made photographs was an adventure, she saw, it was adventurous—as well as beautiful—and what she learned looking at his photographs made her feel even more thrilled to know him, thrilled to have his company, to be called his Scout.
She closed the blind to his darkroom, closed the cubby door and exited the barn into the eerie filtered light she’d noticed before. Crossing the yard she heard hoofbeats and turned to find Asahel in the compound on horseback at a gallop with no buckboard behind him, nor, it would appear, a doctor. He dismounted and gripped her by the shoulders, his eyes begging the question to which she had to answer, he’s alive.
“Will he walk—?”
“I don’t know. Where’s the doctor?”
“Clara, don’t you know?”
“—know what?”
He turned her by her shoulders to face the sky over the trees to the east. A solitary ash, twirling on the current like a feather, fell before her eyes. Behind it the sky was smeared as if by charcoal.
“Seattle’s burning,” Asahel said.
“—Seattle?”
“The city is on fire.”
A memory of St. Paul with its brick and limestone monuments came to her mind.
“A city cannot burn,” she said.
“The waterfront, the piers, all made of wood—everyone for miles around has gone to help. Every doctor…”
She blinked. More ash fell around them, gray and black, like fatal pollen.
“—Hercules?” she sought.
“—he’s well taken care of, they’re turning the campground into a mission for evacuees. I’m off, myself, by boat, to help, as soon as I see Edward—”
He started for the barn.
“We carried him in here,” Clara corrected, pointing toward the house. “To my room. He may still be sleeping.”
“—Edward?—sleeping in daylight?”
A spark of understanding arced between them: it was unlike the man they knew to squander time.
“Pain,” Clara explained.
She waited in the kitchen while Asahel went to see his brother but he was back within the minute. “No point in waking him,” he sa
id. He took her hand. “You two will be all right—?”
She nodded, though she didn’t meet his eyes.
“The Indians—?” she asked.
“They took to their canoes with the others of their tribe as soon as they saw smoke. Everyone, it seems, is rowing to Seattle to give aid.”
He gripped her shoulders again and she felt with dread that he might kiss her but instead he held his breath then let her go.
“Do you want my rifle?”
“Why—?” And then, “Certainly not.”
He seemed to entertain the idea to embrace her one more time but then he left, mounting the horse with less bravado than his brother might have, she couldn’t help herself from thinking, then he rode away.
She returned to Edward.
“Who was here?” he asked her, waking.
“Asahel. Seattle is on fire.”
He struggled to sit up.
“Show me,” he said.
“Too soon,” Clara intervened.
“I need to walk.”
“I know you do. I know it, Edward,” she said, smoothing the sheets around his legs. “But not now. We’ll do it slowly.”
He stopped her hands from fussing and pressed them to his thigh.
“—pain?” she asked.
“—better when you press, like this—” He renewed the pressure on her hands.
“Roll over…” She pulled the sheet away and leaned the full weight of her body on her hands on his hip.
He sighed.
“That’s better, Scout.”
He turned and looked at her across his shoulder.
“—promise me we’ll try to walk tomorrow?”
She nodded.
“Those poor people.”
“—who?”
“—in Seattle. You should see the way some of them live. Cheek by jowl.”
“I thought it was a wealthy city. Newly minted money.”
“What city is only wealthy—?”
She was reminded, briefly, of the novels her mother had made her read written by Dickens and the Frenchman, Balzac.
“I would never want to die by fire,” Edward said.
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