The Shadow Catcher

by Marianne Wiggins

  “I’m not saying we will be apart…”

  “I am.”

  She blinked.

  “I’m not going to Seattle,” Hercules said with grave finality. “You can’t make me.”

  “Why are you behaving like this, Hercules?”

  “I’m happy here—”

  “—we will still be happy in…”

  “I’m happy here where I can be with horses.”

  “There are horses in Seattle,” she began to argue.

  “—these horses.”

  Clara took a moment to assess her brother’s mood.

  “I talk to them,” he said.

  She watched him smooth the fine soft hairs along the gray mare’s cheek.

  “We can always visit—”

  “—no I talk to them,” he told her.

  She stared at him.

  “—inside the horses,” he tried to explain to her.

  “You talk to…?”

  “—mother and father.”

  “—inside the horses,” she finally repeated.

  “—don’t ask me to explain it. I didn’t want you to find out.”

  He began to cry.

  “—no, no…” she comforted him. “It’s a good thing that you’ve told me, Hercules.”

  “I can feel them. In the ponies. When I pet them. And I know they can feel me…”

  She watched him lean his head against the horse’s flank and close his eyes and she laid her hand against his back and patted him.

  “Tell me something,” she said after a while. “Which horse is it?”

  “All of them.”

  “—every horse?”

  “Every one I’ve ever met,” he said. “They just know me. We just fall in love. There has to be a reason why…”

  “—you’re a very special boy, is why. And we’ll have to find a way to make sure that doesn’t change.”

  “—even if it means we have to be apart?”

  That was a condition Clara did not want to have to think about—because unlike Hercules, she had not found an entity, other than herself, to act as a repository for her sorrow or in which to store the memories of what their parents were in life, the space that they had filled, the way they’d sounded. It had not yet been a year since their deaths and yet she found she had to struggle to recall the fleeting things about them—the shape of her father’s hand, the timbre of her mother’s laughter—and she needed Hercules at hand to validate the little she remembered and the sum of what they’d lost. If Hercules should be parted from her, if he should ever go from her daily life—as almost certainly, some day, he would—her diminishment would double.

  But she was also on the brink of an enriched life, a potentially growing family, rather than a decreasing one, and she could not allow a yearning for the past to sabotage the happiness that was her future. Besides, she was not convinced that Seattle was the less enlightened choice than this backward rural one for Hercules’s education and well-being—until Mr. Silva, the farrier, paid her a visit two days later, bringing with him a tall stranger.

  The Curtis women had, oddly, treated her marriage with gloomy passivity, Eva showing signs of nervous curiosity only when Clara told her of Edward’s partnership with Rothi. She gave scant notice to Clara’s wedding band and seemed interested only in knowing if this Mr. Rothi was a single gentleman. Asahel had made himself invisible ever since her return so she was alone, without counsel, when Mr. Silva stepped up on the porch and rapped on the screen door, his hat in hand, and introduced the stranger.

  “This is Mr. Touhy, miss, he’s from Tacoma.”

  Clara held her left hand up for the gentlemen to see and said, “It’s missus, Mr. Silva. Mr. Curtis and I were married just two days ago.”

  “Which one, ma’am?”

  “—Edward.”

  “—oh well congratulations, I didn’t know. Mr. Edward, he’s a fine gent. Mr. Touhy, here, breeds fancy horses.”

  “You’re a long way from Tacoma, Mr. Touhy. What brings you to the island?”

  “Actually miss—missus—he’s come to take a look at Hercules.”

  Clara asked the gentlemen to sit, which they did, not comfortably.

  “I don’t know if Hercules has told you, but I’ve been coming by most every week to give him skills.”

  “He has told me, Mr. Silva, and I’m grateful to you.”

  Nevertheless, she kept her eyes on Mr. Touhy.

  “Hercules is very fond of horses,” she explained.

  “Well that’s an understatement,” Silva grinned. “I’d say, frankly, Hercules is one in a million.”

  “…and what would you say, Mr. Touhy?”

  Touhy ran his hat brim through his fingers and told her, “I would say the boy has got the touch.”

  “He talks to horses,” Mr. Silva chimed in.

  “—yes, I know,” Clara told them.

  “Well do ya know nobody does that?”

  “What do you want, Mr. Touhy—?”

  He wanted to apprentice Hercules to his breeding ranch. Clara’s instinct was to forestall making a decision until Edward had returned so he could advise—she knew nothing of the kind of life they were describing and Edward, after all, had been apprenticed to his father from the age of six and seemed to have come out the better for it in terms of working for a living and being trained in many skills. But when she called Hercules from the barn to join them it was clear the boy knew what he wanted. Asahel could not be found and rather than allow Hercules to leave with Mr. Touhy, as the gentlemen suggested, Clara agreed that either her husband or her brother-in-law would deliver the boy, pending an inspection and approval of the site, itself.

  That night Clara sat up waiting in the kitchen in the dark for Asahel to finally come to get his supper. She struck a match and startled him and said, “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Call it what you will.”

  She lighted the lantern and told him, “A man named Touhy came to visit me today.”

  “…the horse breeder.”

  “—you know him?”

  “He has a reputation.—a good one.”

  “He wants Hercules.”

  Asahel sat down across the table from her with a plate of cold ham and cold potatoes, and began to eat.

  “I’ll miss him.”

  His manner, his dispassion, seemed as cold to her as his plate of food but she chose to let it ride and said, instead, “I need your help,” then tempered the request by adding, “Hercules and I do. I trust you. You know I do. Will you take him out to Tacoma and tell me what you think?”

  “Why not ask your husband?”

  “Because I’m asking you.”

  “—or because you know Edward wouldn’t do it?”

  “Edward’s busy—”

  “—when is Edward not?”

  “Are you angry with me, Asahel?”

  “Let’s just say I know my brother. Better than you do. He takes what he wants, when he wants it, as if it is his due. As if all the years at Father’s beck and call earned him the right, now that he’s free, to finally be the selfish cur he was cut out to be—”

  “—he puts food on this table, Asahel, and a roof over your mother’s and your sister’s—”

  “—and you think I don’t?—is that what he’s told you?”

  “He hasn’t ‘told’ me anything about you, your sister or—”

  Asahel threw his fork down, pushed his chair back and stood up. “That’s because he’s a kingdom of one, Clara.”

  He picked up his plate, left it in the basin and started for the door, not meeting her eyes.

  “—and I’ll do anything for you and Hercules. Anything you ask.”

  He turned and finally looked at her.

  “—forget what I’ve said. I haven’t slept for two days. I’m working double shifts at the sawmill…mine and Edward’s.”

  Still, she sat in judgment of him, and he felt it, so he told her, “Maybe you will change him—maybe love will chang
e him,” then he left.

  Love, she couldn’t tell him, the word love, had never been spoken as an avowal between herself and Edward—nor did it need to be, she reasoned. They had an understanding, a workable arrangement, shared interests, a sympathy and need for each other, an enjoyment in the other’s company: but, foremost, they had Edward’s work. And Edward’s work was all-consuming. Once they were situated in their first residence in Seattle—four rented rooms in a brick Georgian house on 2nd Avenue—Clara rarely saw him. He never ate at home. He hardly slept. If she woke when he came into bed in the middle of the night then she struggled to wake again to see him off before the dawn. She had read of ancient Spartans’ regimens of work but she had never known a single man to set himself the task assignments of a regiment: he was teaching himself to become a master printer, and at the same time he was teaching himself to become a master engraver, setting for himself levels of perfection that he, alone, could judge. He was joining Clubs, appearing in public to lecture with his signature gold nugget tie pin: he was lobbying for influence. He was leading the Mazamas Club, after only one meeting with them, up Mt. Rainier, following in John Muir’s renowned footsteps but also making innovative forays of his own. Within the year he had outgrown his use for Rothi, sold off his share at profit and entered into a second partnership with an established photoengraver by the name of Thomas Guptill, becoming the most sought after engraver north of San Francisco. He persuaded Asahel to leave the sawmill to come and learn darkroom techniques and by the spring of ’93, when Clara first suspected she was pregnant, Edward had sold the homestead on the island and all the Curtises—Edward, Clara, Asahel, Ellen and Eva—were reunited under one roof once again, this time in Seattle. Hercules had long since gone to Touhy’s ranch in Tacoma and although she saw him several times a year, especially at Christmas, Clara thought a great deal more about him once her own son was born, that November. They named him Harold, after Clara’s father. Edward lavished his attention on him and Clara believed the child’s birth might be a turning point in Edward’s emotional devotion, that following on the birth of their son, he would forswear some of his projects to stay at home more often. But his reputation as Seattle’s first-rank society photographer was just coming into bloom, even as his scenic landscapes of Puget Sound and the Cascades were gaining notice in national publications. He won a competition with his studio portrait of Princess Angeline in her faded bandanna, and his moody studies of the Suquamish clam diggers were the favored wall art in Seattle banks and law offices. For her part, Clara had learned early in her history with Edward that if she was going to capture his attention she had to do it on his terms, putting herself somewhere he would be reminded of her, somewhere he could see her and that meant putting hours in at his place of business, catering to clientele, overseeing the employees, holding up her end of the social ladder he was so determined to climb. She was active in the Arts Club, active in arranging musicales, even active, for a while, in his mountaineering outings until successive pregnancies and the effort of the frosty climbs with ice picks in those mandatory skirts exhausted her.

  Their first daughter Beth was born, followed by Florence, named for Clara’s father’s favorite city. Edward split from Guptill, moving to a new studio of his own the same year he bought their first house and even though they were more comfortable than they had ever been and his career was flourishing he could not have foreseen the skyrocketing success of Seattle in 1897 when gold was discovered in the Klondike in Alaska. When the first ship from there docked below 1st Avenue in Seattle it was said five hundred millionaires got off. Edward dispatched Asahel by boat to send back dry plates for engraving to distribute to the nation’s papers and he, himself, journeyed up along the Alaska coast by a second route. If the city had seemed a boom town in the two decades before, it now felt like the mecca that invented manna. But with it, mining mania brought concern from the nation’s new breed of conservationists, on alert for gross misappropriation of water, land and mineral rights in the wake of scandalous governmental bequests to the railroads.

  Which is how, one unseasonably warm March weekend in 1898, unbeknownst to Clara, the elements that had been ready to impact on Edward’s life and change its course away from her, irrevocably, finally converged.

  And they were, to put it simply: three lost men. On a mountain-top.

  Dr. C. Hart Merriam, Chief of the United States Biological Survey; Dr. George Bird Grinnell, Editor of Field & Stream; and Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the United States Division of Forestry, had lost their bearings in a sudden vicissitude of weather halfway up the face of Mt. Rainier and had become dangerously disoriented in an isolated col, separated from their camp and without supplies when their cries were answered by a dashing young adventurer in rakish hat and bold cravat who happened to be summiting that afternoon with his Premo dry plate camera.

  Edward led them down to safety and, from that chance encounter, back in Seattle, found himself on the receiving end of profound and lavish gratitude from three of the most influential men he had ever met. Individually dedicated to the cause of preserving the nation’s scenic and God-given resources, the three men opened their circle of robust camaraderie to embrace Edward into their fold—especially after he had brought them all into his studio to show them his portfolio of Pacific Northwest landscapes and portraits of Puget Sound tribal people.

  The three took Edward to dinner two nights in a row at the Cosmos Club, where they were lodging, and upon departing by train on the third day pledged they would maintain their bond through letters until such a time as a reunion could be planned.

  Each one left with a gift of a signed Curtis print of Mt. Rainier—and in the process Edward had sold them a total of eleven other photographs, at discount, of course, but still for seven dollars each.

  The evening of the day of their departure he came home unexpectedly while Clara was still sitting with the children at their supper. “What should I write to them?” he fretted. “I want to write to them before they write to me—especially that Bird Grinnell—I took to him enormously. Or do you think I ought to wait until they write to me—? What should I do? What do you think?”

  “I think I’ve never seen you in this state,” she marveled. “Who thinks Father’s got a bee in Father’s bonnet?” she joked with the children. “Let’s all make a buzzing sound and show him how we’re little bees—”

  “Clara,” he said suddenly: “This is a serious matter.”

  It was only on rare occasions, anymore, that he chose to call her “Scout.”

  And those were only when he was moved to thank her for compliancy. In bed, or out.

  “Edward, you do not need my advice on social discourse with men. Men are charmed by you, as are women—you’re a charming person.”

  “But I write stiffly, so you told me.”

  “Then write to them as if in conversation. In your imagination put Bird Grinnell in front of you and simply talk.”

  “Good Scout,” he said and kissed her lightly on her head—then kissed Harold, Beth and Florence exactly the same way.

  The letters paid off.

  Grinnell was a friend of Edward Harriman’s, the railroad tycoon, who had just bested J.P. Morgan for control of the West Coast Union Pacific line and was under doctor’s orders to take time off from acquisitions to ease his choler and his heart. Harriman, never one to relax, consequently put together a scientific expedition to Alaska with a view to collecting samples of the fauna and documenting natural wonders. He chartered a boat, hired hunters and taxidermists and paid for twenty-three biologists, zoologists, geologists and naturalists to join him on a two-month catered jaunt into the Yukon—among them John Muir, Merriam, Pinchot, Bird Grinnell and—at Grinnell’s urging—Edward, as the official expeditionary photographer.

  In preparation, Edward depleted his bank account on new cameras and equipment and a new wardrobe and borrowed several hundred dollars more to have custom leather trunks and luggage made to transport his portable laboratory
.

  “I will make more than a hundred times this money back,” he told Clara to counter her concerns. “Official photographer! Everyone involved will want to buy my photographs of this experience—Harriman’s a millionaire!—and if we have to miss a payment to the bank and keep the children’s piano teacher waiting for her money, then so be it.”

  “I will never keep a piano teacher waiting for her money,” Clara pledged.

  And she didn’t—she found ways to economize—but still: Edward’s expectations of an economic windfall from the journey proved to be unfounded.

  And a harbinger of how his expectations, his tendency toward grandiosity, would fail to deliver the anticipated “gold” at the end of those rainbows again and again. Mt. Rainier had led to Grinnell who had led to Harriman who would lead to Teddy Roosevelt—a chain of surrogate, older brothers—who would lead Edward to J.P. Morgan who would advance him seventy-five thousand dollars—a future sum the future Edward enthusiastically expected Morgan to earn back from the future sale of all those future photographs. He would squander Morgan’s money, in part, on custom clothes and custom camping gear, on Italian printing papers more exquisite and valuable than any that Da Vinci had, and he would end up signing over all his copyrights to Morgan as a consequence.

  He did not foresee, in 1899, that a group of men of the caliber that Harriman had summoned would bring cameras of their own, that they would show up with what he termed “push-button apparatuses,” easily portable Kodak box cameras supplied with easy rolls of negative film, and enjoy the experience of taking spontaneous pictures, themselves, snap shots, from their own points of view. Although Harriman had ordered a private folio edition of seven hundred printings from Edward at the completion of the expedition, he never reimbursed the cost, and Edward was left scrambling to recover from the debt but also drowning in expensive prints of Inuit villages and rugged ice that no one seemed to want.

  Clara tried to be supportive, but Edward couldn’t understand why anyone would prefer to have a Kodak quick-and-easy photographic record over what amounted to a lasting work of handmade art. His portraits and landscapes were “painterly,” he knew that—that was his purposeful effect, an effect he tried for over the crisper images of, say, Asahel, whose photographs were often sharp enough to slice through steak. The question of where photography was going, what it was, was the leading subject of the journals he subscribed to—the avant-garde coming from New York City and the Photo Secessionists led by a Mr. Alfred Stieglitz who propounded the theory that a photograph should be. That it should be a thing-in-and-of-itself, like a sonata or a poem, not something that appeared, self-consciously, to have been produced through the mechanics of an apparatus. The East Coast journal, overseen by Stieglitz, was called Camera Notes while the West Coast journal, to which Edward frequently contributed, was called Camera Craft—a distinction between theory on the one coast, and craft on the other, which more or less summarized the East Coast elitist view that photographers out West were not only provincial, but uninteresting to boot.