“—in his sleep. We didn’t know his age but figured ninety-seven.”
“And he really knew Edward Curtis?”
“Owns His Shadow scouted sites and translated for Mr. Curtis in ought-eight, ought-nine. Owns His Shadow spoke the English Mr. Curtis liked. He had been transported from the reservation to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania when he was still a boy, so he had learned the white man’s ways before he broke with all of that and made his brave escape back to the Navajo. I have a picture of them. Owns His Shadow and Mr. Curtis.”
“I would like to see it.”
“Well it’s home in Tuba.”
“I haven’t been to Tuba City for a while.”
Again, that focused look. “What were you doing in my nation?”
“Research.”
“—on the rez?”
I pick up The Shadow Catcher and hold it so the spectral image in the stone faces both of us. Invisible at first, the image forms before my eyes the longer that I look at it, as if it were exposed but still invisible light held captive on a page of photographic paper floating in the shallow pool of a transparent chemical bath. After several seconds a familiar likeness gathers in the fine lines of the stone. “This man, actually. Curtis.” I turn the bracelet in my hands, appreciating every subtlety. “This is really beautiful,” I say.
“Father said that Curtis thought so, too. I’d like to know how he let it go from his possession.”
“Well he’s been dead for fifty years. And in his last thirty years or so he was always scrambling just to make ends meet. Lost everything. Gave away the copyrights to all his American Indian work to J.P. Morgan’s heirs to cancel out his debts to them. In the end he went a little crazy and spent a couple decades right here in Nevada just prospecting for gold.”
“Father lost all touch with him.”
“I’m not surprised. Aside from that one picture that you have of them, did he photograph your father?”
“Owns His Shadow?” Lester grins. “Father would not let another steal his image.”
“But you said there is a picture—”
“In it, father looks away. And points. Like this.” He swivels on the bench and points away from us, toward a sign at the opposite end of the hall that reads EMERGENCY EXIT.
“But your interest is with Curtis, not my father,” he intuits.
“Used to be. I wrote a book about him.”
“And it’s finished?”
“Yes.”
“And you talked to those who sat for him and had their shadows stolen?”
“No.”
He makes a little bubbling sound deep in his throat and whispers, oh. He looks toward the open door into the dying old man’s room again. “You should have waited.”
“For what?”
He inhales deeply and resumes the posture I had found him in, but with his eyes wide open now, not closed, his eyes locked on the open door.
“Until the silent ones have spoken,” Lester murmurs.
clara and edward
The great Seattle fire started on the lowest floor of a wooden building owned by Mrs. M. J. Pontius on the northwest corner of Front and Madison Streets in the city’s harbor district.
Jimmy McGough, a paint store operator, leased the lower floors from Mrs. Pontius and the first fiery accusations pointed to an un-tended glue pot in his back room, but the spark that set the conflagration roaring actually leapt to life from the hands of John E. Back, a careless cabinetmaker, working with a combustible shellac one floor below.
The paint store only added volatility to what would have been a bonfire, anyway, with nothing but rows of timber buildings standing between the initial tongue of flame and the quenching water of the harbor. Twenty-nine blocks, in total, burned, destroying the entire business center, the railroad terminals and all but four of the port city’s many wharves. Seattle’s population on the morning of the fire was estimated between twenty and thirty thousand and it had only recently instituted regulated ferry service on the Puget Sound as well as a civic agenda to replace hollowed-out logs with lead pipes in the sewer system. There was an electrified trolley in both the lower and upper streets, but indoor plumbing was a rarity and a recurrent tidal ebb of sewage perfumed the smudgy mudflats by the shore. There were two newspapers in English, another in Norwegian, and an occasional lynching of an Indian, a Chinaman or a Negro. After the fire came the first of many population booms, the city’s numbers rising to 42,837 in 1890 owing to the open importation of cheap labor to rebuild the city. The governing white class welcomed even more Chinese and Indians into the population as exploitable non-union crews and within a decade the Klondike gold rush doubled the city’s numbers again. By 1910, twenty years after the fire, the city’s population was a quarter of a million. Meat packing, fur, export-import, timber, shipbuilding, breweries and the U.S. Gold Assay Office gave Seattle an annual income of more than $174 million before the century was done, but it was the summer fire of 1889 that lighted the Sons of Profit’s firecracker fuse. The fire, it turned out, was good: it killed the rats. And, like other city fires—the Fire of London, the Chicago fire—the Seattle fire made the city reinvent itself, for the better. No more timber roofs, plank sidings, cedar shakes and clapboard shanties—having had its heart destroyed, the city turned to stone, refashioned its foundations with rock-solid cornerstones, replaced its former wooden public face with brick and slate and granite.
As Clara did, after Edward left her.
She strengthened her resolve and steeled her heart with harder stuff—burned once, she would not allow herself to be the victim of that firestorm again.
But here he stood, his hands around the halter of the buckboard’s lead, his eyes intent on the woman in the driver’s seat above him. He had been twelve days on the road, on foot, living in the rough and still, she couldn’t help but note, his fingernails were shaped and clean, his beard was trimmed and he had nothing of that ruddy unkempt look that displaced travelers carry on them.
“Where are you going?” he asked her, while his eyes begged a different, deeper question.
“Where did you go?” she countered.
And then, seeing his perplexity: “—without a word?”
“What would you have had me say?”
“—‘good-bye.’ ‘Thank you.’”
His confusion spread.
“Why state what’s obvious?” he said. “Come down from there, Scout. I have things to tell you.”
Clara gripped the reins and glanced from him to Asahel, standing only twenty feet away beside the road, his face revealing his astonishment and pain at witnessing what would have appeared to any passing stranger, not only to him, a lovers’ quarrel.
“Come down,” Edward repeated. “I’ve thought of nothing else. I’ve worked it out. I can make a go of it, I know it, Scout. With your help.”
“Please do not address me as ‘Scout,’ Edward. My name’s not ‘Scout.’”
Again that look of pained perplexity: “—but it’s my name for you.”
“I’m not yours to name. Like a slave or like a piece of…like your chattel.”
“—but it’s who you are to me.”
He gripped the harness and pulled the pack mule to him with his other hand, tying the mule’s lead onto the buckboard’s tackle.
“—don’t do that, Edward. Let go. I’m going to Seattle.”
“Plenty of time for that.”
He raised himself onto the boards and sat beside her. Without knowing how she had relinquished them, she saw he’d taken up the reins.
“Will you want to come to Seattle with us, Asahel?” Edward called and waved his hat. “We’ll be going there to make our fortune—!”
Asahel raised a tentative acknowledgment and started to walk toward them. In the brief time it took for him to join them on the buckboard Edward turned to Clara and stated his proposal. It was five words long. We shall have to marry.
She stared at him.
“We shall have to m
arry,” he repeated, “if we’re to live the way I want us to.”
She would remember flies were buzzing on the mule and mares, she would recall that flies were on their ears and asses and that the air around her smelled of mammals and that the man in whose presence she always found herself to be most helpless was paying the leathers through his fingers, his gaze focused not on her but on the road ahead when the proposition that would change her life had been put forward as if it were a point of trade at a livestock auction.
“—live the way you want us to?”
Still, he didn’t look at her.
“What way is that, Edward?”
He turned and met her gaze.
“You know…” He was having trouble speaking. “That way.”
She felt her color rise.
“—as man and wife,” he finally said.
What did he know of men and wives, she couldn’t help but speculate, this man who’d lived outside the company of women for most his life, who’d never lived within the compass of a loving household or a loving couple, whose own parents had been apart for more than half their married lives. He was not like her, whose expectations for the marriage compact had been born of firsthand observation, whose parents had flirted and cavorted openly before their children and had lavished kisses on them and on each other.
“Do you even…have you any feelings toward me, Edward?”
“—of course.”
“I mean…have you love for me?”
She was aware that Asahel had clambered up behind them and was now within earshot of all they said.
“I have need,” Edward whispered to her.
He took her hand and then moved to hide the gesture in the folds of her skirt. But Asahel had seen it. So he was not surprised when, early that same evening, at the family compound, Edward made an uncharacteristic appearance at the supper table and announced to everyone, “I will be taking Clara for my wife.”
“I knew it!” Hercules exclaimed and ran around the table to embrace his sister. “I asked mother and father to get you a quick husband,” he whispered in her ear. “I prayed to them. So you wouldn’t have to leave me.” He scurried, not to Edward, but to Asahel and embraced him, too. “Does this make us brothers?” he asked hopefully.
“I already have a brother,” Asahel remarked, his eyes riveting first Edward, and then Clara.
I don’t understand, Ellen generally lamented. “—Amelia? What about…that man you’re already married to?”
“When?” Eva icily inquired.
Clara was surprised by her displeasure.
“We’re going to Seattle in the morning to secure arrangements,” Edward announced.
We are? Clara thought
“Who’d have thought you’d find a husband before I did?” Eva mused, not charitably. Only Asahel, among the Curtises, was kind enough to raise a toast. To Clara and Edward, he announced: God help you.
Edward left the kitchen as abruptly as he had appeared and Clara followed him across the porch into the yard as he continued walking, unaware that she was shadowing him. She called his name and he stopped and turned and she came up very close to him.
“Edward, what is this about—?”
He looked at her intently and for one careless instant she believed he was about to kiss her but instead he touched a stray lock of her hair and smoothed it back along her head. He kept his hand beside her face and traced the delicate bone of her ear. “You must let me call you what I want to call you,” he said, and she nodded, once, as if entranced, and, once again, he almost smiled.
“Read this,” he said and handed her a folded piece of newsprint from his shirt pocket. It was a small notice, torn from a page of a Seattle newspaper, seeking capital investment in a local business.
“A photographic studio,” he pointed out. “A going concern. Already established. I wrote to him. The owner, Mr. Rothi. I told him not to take a partner on until I came to see him.”
“How much does he want?”
“—what does it matter? If he’s got a full setup I can start to print my photographs. We can make a business of it—you and me…”
He looked so hopeful she leaned to kiss him as an affirmation but he turned his head aside, so her lips touched his bearded cheek and when she threw her arms around his shoulders she could sense that something wasn’t natural in the way he stood, in his resistance, a specter of reluctance in his flesh.
He didn’t come to her that night, although she only half expected that he would, now that his mother and his sister were returned. Edward was not a man to compromise her virtue in their eyes, she knew—but she also knew that he was not a man to let anything come between himself and what he wanted, once he wanted it. She hoped, against her rational judgment, that he would wait until the household was asleep and come to her again to lie beside her. She thought she had been cured of this longing that arose unbidden every time she thought of him, but his reappearance, the physical effect he had on her, had proved her wrong. She placed her palm flat on the pillow where he had slept and tried to ease her disappointment in the present with thoughts of their future life together, not a single night but a succession of nights and days, with Edward. Happiness should have been her natural state—she knew she should be happy—but some occluding doubt, or lack of faith, diffused that vision. They were to be married. If there was some less-than-gratifying aspect of their present contract, she believed, they would find the means to make it better in their future years together, as a couple. She loved him and he needed her. And that was all that mattered.
They left as dawn broke the next morning, Clara wearing for the second day in a row the only traveling clothes she owned and Edward dressed in a worsted three-piece suit she’d never seen, cut high beneath the arms as had been the fashion several years before. His shirt was starched but on close inspection she could see the collar had been turned. He wore a silk cravat tied at a rakish angle and carried a moroccan leather portfolio of deep burnished cordovan stamped in gold, in an exquisite flourish underneath the handle, with the letters E.S.C. They took the buckboard and the two dray mares Hercules had at the ready for them and reached the boat landing in less than half an hour. In another hour they were on the water, plowing through the coastal fog as if sleepwalking in a dream, the points of reference otherworldly, passing them as phantoms. Clara stood with Edward by the rail, their faces and their clothing growing damp with moisture from the air that formed a blanket visibility, a surround, a seeing-but-not-seeing, which intensified the mystery of things one heard. A loon. Two loons. A distant bell. Sound, she thought—no wonder this body of water was called Puget Sound—sound defined the world out here, not vision. It reminded her of snow, of the way snow falling in the evening in St. Paul had baffled sound around their house, of the way her mother had led them out onto the porch to listen to sound’s heightened intensity under the influence of falling snow. Her mother would have loved the echo chamber that this fog created, Clara thought—it was like a tunnel, snug—and as she bent across the rail she had the feeling that if she leaned out far enough it could nullify her being and subsume her, render her invisible and swallow her as snow had devoured both her parents—
Edward! she breathed, reaching for him as a safety. She had never told him how her parents died, only how she and Hercules had been forced to carry on without them. She had never told him of her mother’s sensitivity for sound, only of her father’s artfulness, and now she felt she had to tell him all about Amelia, how the music lived inside her, how she played, how she transformed into another being, an instrument of sound, when she sat down and started touching the piano.
“—Edward, I so want to tell you how my mother…”
“—yes, I know you’re fairly bursting with excitement, aren’t you, Scout? You are so good for me! You’ve changed my life! Those books—you must go on giving me more books to read! You must teach me everything you know—!”
He kissed her fingers through her glove.
�
��I’ve brought along this gold nugget,” he said, showing it to her. She had seen it—or one like it—on his writing desk, when she had visited his spartan room: it was small and brown, the shape and color of a relic tooth.
“For our wedding bands,” he said.
From the size of it she could see how thin the bands would have to be, but she was touched.
“A fellow gave it to my father, for saving his wife’s life through prayer. The woman had a fever and my father sat with her three nights and prayed. While we waited, this fellow told me how he’d gone out west to California when the gold was struck, one of the first, in ’49. He told me how he’d found a strike and mined it—not a panning site, a placer find. From that moment I was gold struck—so many things to do in one life, Scout! That fellow ran out of strength before the gold ran out and he showed me on a map where it was and he asked me if I would go with him. Would I! I’d have gone in a heartbeat but for father weighing in against it.”
He rolled the nugget in his hand.
“This nugget was all that he had left and when his wife was cured he pressed it into Father’s hand and said, ‘She’s worth it.’ Father didn’t know what it was worth. If I hadn’t taken it from him he would have squandered it.”
“—you took it?”
“I conserved it.”
His look declared his self-acquittal. Some people, it seemed to say, cannot be trusted to appreciate the value of the things they own, cannot be trusted to safeguard their heritage. It was not so different, she supposed, than her own conservation of her father’s paintings from the debt collectors. And she was even further moved to understand that Edward was now willing to convert this talisman to rings to pledge their troth.
It had already slipped her mind that she had started to tell him something dear to her, about herself. When he had interrupted.
They had not known each other long enough for her to see a pattern, yet—everything they did together was still new, a singular event, so when they docked, and disembarked, into the bruit and push of the rough and tumble ferry slip and Edward strode ahead of her, leaving her to struggle through the crowd alone to catch him, she thought the pace he set was from their shared excitement, not his single-mindedness.
The Shadow Catcher Page 19