by Mary Swan
Mr. Lett with his loud voice has come by once or twice, and he’s pleased with what Sam’s done, but also impatient. Some of the views I have trouble recognizing, even when Sam tells me. It looks like quite another town in his photographs, the buildings higher and the street in front of the shops bustling with people. Sam explained how he had placed the camera, the angles he used, and how one morning he gathered up every person who would come with him and put them in a group outside Linton’s dry goods. It puzzled me, what he said, and I asked him how that was any different from covering up lines on a sitter’s face, from coloring lips, or changing their shape to be more pleasing. Sam always says that’s the wonder of photography, a record of the world just as it is instead of someone’s idea of it, and I know that was one of the arguments he had with his father, things he was asked to do. It’s different, he said, and he said that there was a purpose to these, that it was just a matter of showing what was already there, of showing it in the most appealing light. I still didn’t see the difference, and I wanted him to explain so that I could understand, the way he’s explained so many things. I didn’t even realize I was making him cross until he said, What would you know about it, and walked away.
The next day I asked if I could come with him, when I saw him packing things ready. There was not much work to be done in the studio, and I said that I could help carry things, set them up, that I wanted to see how he did it. A beautiful day for the two of us to be walking across the footbridge together, and I remembered something Lucy had said. Does he ever take you out? she said. To a concert at the church, or even for a Sunday walk? Ask yourself that, Lucy said. But here we were, on a sunny morning, walking through town together for all to see.
It was market day, and Sam wanted to photograph the new shed, the bustle of wagons and animals and people in high spirits. We could hardly hear ourselves over the bellowing of the cattle, and I made Sam laugh, telling him the first time I was sent with a bucket to milk a cow. Never having seen one, except in the distance, from the railway train that brought us from the ship to Miss Weir’s New Home. The cow was at the first place I was sent, and I had to leave Millie crying, climb up in the buggy with the sack that held my extra dress, some underthings, and a comb. They were not unkind to me there. I had my own bed, and the woman plaited my hair in the mornings. But I was no use to them at all on the farm and that was what mattered, nothing to do with how they might have liked me a little. When they brought me back to New Home I was full of things to tell Millie, but she was gone, and no one would tell me where. No one ever told me.
The place I was sent after that was not good, but the Doctor wrapped me in a blanket and took me home with him. Eaton was just a baby, and I knew quite a bit about babies, so that was all right. But sometimes in dreams even now I’m sitting in a room with Millie, and I wake up feeling so happy. On those days I think that I will somehow travel to New Home, that I will sit on the hard bench inside the front door and refuse to move until someone tells me where she went. If I’d told the Doctor, he might have done something, and I don’t know what I was so afraid of then. If I told Sam, even all these years later, he would have a plan in a minute, and once or twice I’ve been on the edge of it. But he would wonder why I’ve waited so long, would maybe think me foolish, or hard. He wouldn’t understand that there are worse things than not knowing.
• • •
People love to talk in this town and they have no trouble finding things to talk about; even the kindest seeming can be harsh judges. After the man Heath shot his family there was nothing else people wanted to hear about, everyone trying to find reasons. Women who had given me looks but never met my eye asked me things, because of living next door at Mr. Cowan’s for a time, but I didn’t have anything to tell, not really. Once I saw the older girl back by the raspberry canes with a knife in her hand but that wasn’t anyone’s business, and anyway they had plenty to talk about without it. Some said that Heath had stolen money from Mr. Marl, that it was something to do with the shame of that, and others said he was mad, or evil. The wildest stories floated around and maybe one of them was true or maybe none were, but I never did see that knowing a reason would make any difference. It was a terrible thing to happen, of course it was, a shocking thing. But hard things do happen every day to someone, things that are not at all their fault. You could spend your whole life wondering, and what good would that do? There are things even Sam, with all his Science, can’t know.
• • •
Sam’s hair is wild brown curls and it looks like he’s been running his hands through it, even though he doesn’t very often do that. Sometimes when he’s trying to keep his temper, like with the lady in the big hat who brought her little dog, or sometimes when he’s staring at the pictures he’s taken for Mr. Lett, trying to decide which ones to show him. Once I cut Sam’s hair, in the studio, under the skylight. The sun pouring through was warm on my face and hands, and he shuddered when the wet curls fell on his bare shoulders.
The first time I saw Sam angry was that day of the lady with the hat. After I cleaned up the mess the little dog left in the hallway I made us tea, but he couldn’t sit still to drink it, pacing and talking but not really to me. Saying he’d had enough of it, enough of everything here. He still talks like that from time to time, says he’ll write to his brother Peter, says New York is the place he should be. I try not to, but sometimes just before I fall asleep I picture the two of us in New York, on a street with tall buildings, crowds of people in fine clothes. I know what Lucy would say to that, know what she thinks, for she’s told me often enough. I can’t explain to her how I can believe and not believe at the same time.
• • •
People come to the studio for different reasons, and sometimes I stand beside Sam and have the strangest thoughts. Looking at the young man holding a book just so, or the way the families are arranged, a baby on her mother’s lap, a wife with her hand on her husband’s shoulder, children placed according to height, and which ones can sit together without pinching. I stand beside Sam and I’m as invisible as he is, behind the tall camera, and I can look at them and know that they don’t see me at all. Look at them and see not just what appears in the dark-room, what is inside the frame of the picture they will take home, but all the rest of it too. The flaking wall above the screen Mr. Simmons left behind, painted with pale hills and sky. A woman’s toes tapping, just the toes of one foot, as if she can’t keep everything in. The sisters who look straight at the camera, but reach for each other’s hands.
Sometimes it’s a couple just married, and they come with a few friends, family, who wander about the room. Stand behind Sam and pull faces, trying to make them laugh. Often they’re all in a hurry because there’s a train to catch and I wonder why they’ve made time for this, in the middle of their day, as if it’s not complete unless they have something they can hold in their hands. I wonder if it will help them, years from now, to remember whatever it is they want to remember. How the wedding clothes felt against their skin, the scent from the lilac bush that leaned toward the front door. How they maybe felt that they could never be happier.
I think about the freckle-faced woman too, and why she minded so much. Maybe she was thinking of a time when she’d be gone, when her children would look at her photograph, hanging on a wall or standing on a table, and see those freckles and remember her, but not as she wanted them to remember. Her children growing older and everything fading; I know how that does happen. The smell of her, the sound of her voice, her hand on their hair. They’ll look at her photograph and be left with a feeling, and be left with her freckled face. When they have their own children, those ones might remember a few stories they’ve been told, but for their children’s children she’ll be nothing but a name. They’ll look at her picture and it won’t remind them of anything at all, and maybe that’s why it mattered. Hers was the first plate Sam let me fix on my own, so perhaps that’s why I often think of her. I thought there was something powerful in the hypo
that would keep her face forever, but Sam said it wasn’t that it kept things, but that it washed away all the extra salt that could spoil the plate later, left only what had been touched by the light.
Mornings the mist rises thick off the river, and sometimes when I put my foot on the steps beside the church I can’t even see Sam’s little house, on the other side of the bridge. Then I scare myself, thinking that it won’t be there, that it will have vanished, or maybe never was. It’s a nice kind of scaring, because underneath it I know that the house will be there, with the lean- to in back on the river side, the door that swells in the weather, and Sam maybe shut in the dark-room, or maybe just waiting for me.
Evenings when Sam has somewhere to be I go back to my room at Mrs. Bell’s, sit and think about things while the sky goes mauve, then dark outside my window. I could never do what that mountain woman did, set off all alone and sleep by a fire at night, by the horses’ shifting feet. I wouldn’t know where to begin, standing in a grove of trees or by the side of a roaring river. But sometimes in town I see people, or find them stuck in my mind. The little boy who sells newspapers outside Malley’s, or Mrs. Toller with her lost look, staring at the necklaces in the new jeweler’s window. Old Mrs. Hatch in her rocker, with all the lines on her face. Sometimes I see people like that and wish that I had a hand camera, like the new one Sam bought, wish that I could catch them, at just that moment. I might even ask Sam, when Mr. Lett pays for the book and he’s not so worried about money. I don’t know what I would do with pictures like that, if I did find a way to take them. I’d like to borrow Mr. Bell’s hammer and nail them up all over the wall of my room, but I don’t suppose Mrs. Bell would allow that. Or maybe just keep them all together in one of the boxes we emptied of Mr. Simmons’ things, that day we laughed and laughed.
There was one photograph in with all Mr. Simmons’ spoiled plates, and I kept it out when we sealed everything up again. It was larger, mounted on stiff gray card, with a title in black ink, barely faded, each letter beautifully drawn. The title was Market Day, and I thought it must be a joke, although it seemed an odd one. The photograph showed the street by the wide square where the market is held, long before the shed was built. The oak trees there, but so much smaller. It was taken from a bit of a distance, but you could see wagons standing and a few long tables piled with something, one old horse with its head drooping. But there was not a person to be seen, and that was why I thought it was a joke, thought that maybe Mr. Simmons had done something like Sam had, outside Linton’s, that he had gathered up all the farmers and their wives, all the townsfolk walking down the street or bustling about the wagons, squeezing vegetables and arguing about the price. All the children chasing each other and getting in everyone’s way. I thought that maybe Mr. Simmons had persuaded all the people to stand behind him, that they were there in a dark mass, shifting their feet and watching while he took the picture, impatient to get back to their business.
I asked Sam and he took the photograph from my hand, looked at the date written in the corner, and told me to look again. Here, he pointed. And here. There were things that I had thought were shadows, or maybe flaws in the plate or the bath, and Sam said perhaps some were that. But he told me that a picture taken that long ago, before modern processes, would have needed a very long exposure, that Mr. Simmons probably stood in his place for five minutes at a time, maybe longer. And because of that, anyone who was moving, anyone walking or bending again and again, anyone driving a wagon down the center of the road, would not be captured, would leave only a faint shadow, a ghostly trace of themselves. Sam said he could tell because there was nothing to cast those smudges, if they were real shadows, not in the places they were. He said that the old horse was probably asleep and that’s why we saw it, and he said that there were probably others, other people who had been moving more quickly and left no mark at all.
• • •
It’s very important to keep down the dust, and every day I go over the studio. Beat the mats outside if I can, and run a damp cloth over the big urn that has to be turned so the chip won’t show, the little tables and the pedestals, the shelves where we display the photographs Sam says are the best. They used to be mostly outside pictures, the ones he said he got just right. The light, the developing, what he calls the composition. But I thought it would be better to have people, since that’s mostly what he does here, that’s the work that he depends on. Now we have families marching along the shelves, and the beautiful girl with the necklace, slightly larger, so she’s what people see first. I know who that girl is, saw her looking at the house one day when I was shaking out a mat, but she didn’t come in.
There’s a screen in one corner of the studio, with a mirror on the wall behind it, and sometimes when I’m wiping it off I stop and look at myself, wonder if it’s my mother’s face I see. I’m not that many years younger than she was when we were taken and that’s a strange thought, and it makes me wonder if I’m somehow living her different life. She used to tell us that things could always be worse, but to remember that they could get better too.
Back home there was a tin box, scratched and dented in one corner, hard to open. My mother kept it under the bed and inside was a jet brooch and a folded piece of paper that she said came from a Bible. On that paper were names, going back and back and back. Some of them so faint that even on the brightest day they were hard to make out, and some almost worn away where the paper was folded. But my mother knew them all, and sometimes she would recite them all. Andrew and Christopher and Francis and Edward, Winnie and Beatrice and Thomas. Florence and Abigail and Mercy and Patrick, and on and on. These are your people, my mother used to tell us, and you should always remember their names. It was my fault, but there was no time to think when Miss Weir and the tall policeman stood in our doorway, blotting out the sun. In what seemed like an instant we were rattling away out of our life and I should have been quick enough; I should have thought to grab that tin box, to somehow bring it with us. But I wasn’t quick, didn’t even remember it until later, lying in the dark, and by then it was much too late.
It’s not so sharp now, but I still don’t like to think of my mother picking her way down the narrow lane. Coming back to our room, whenever she did, and finding other people there. Other people sleeping in our bed, sitting on our chair. Using the tin box themselves, or maybe they had sold it on. I don’t like to think of her trying to find us everywhere, and no one telling her a thing. What I hope is that some little bit of good came from it, that maybe her life isn’t so hard, with only herself to take care of.
I used to wish I had a photograph to carry with me, to stand up on the table beside my bed. One of all of us together, and I used to think that if only I had that it would be a comfort, and their faces wouldn’t have faded. Now I’m not so sure. The photograph Mrs. Doctor had taken showed all three, with Eaton sitting so close between them, and it gives no idea of how they lived in their separate rooms. When we came to Miss Weir’s she burned all our clothes, told us she did, and it’s true they were ragged things, and not too clean. If I had a photograph I would see that, and maybe remember how cold my feet always were, the times the little ones cried. I would see Jim’s crooked eye and remember that instead of Jim himself, and how we all were together.
• • •
Sam always finds it strange when we show someone their mounted photograph and they say, Why, it looks just like me. He mimics them later, and says, Of course it looks just like them, what do they think? What do they think the camera does? But I don’t think that’s exactly what they mean. The full red lips of the little girl who was Miss Weir, in the painting, would never have been hers in life. Sam’s father might have done that same thing in a photograph, the way he made the sad lines on Mrs. Doctor’s face disappear, but even though Sam wouldn’t, it seems to me that the pictures I wrap up for the sitters show them an idea of themselves that pleases, and he is part of that. How he arranges them, the things he has them hold, or places in the backgro
und. Sam’s pictures show them in their best clothes, in light that is the most flattering, close to the people who matter to them. The ones who are not happy, who refuse to pay and say that they knew all along that they should have gone to Taylor, or McKim, they must see something that’s not the way they want to think of it, something that doesn’t fit. That’s what I think, but it’s hard to say in words. When I tried to tell Sam he listened, but his fingers were fiddling with the buttons on his vest.
• • •
It doesn’t happen so often now, but there have always been nights when I wake up already frightened. Afraid to sit up, to move at all, afraid to go to the dark window. I have to make my breath come deep and slow so that I can stop the pounding in my ears, so that I can hear whatever there may be to hear. A lonely dog barking or a bit of a song from someone stumbling home. Mrs. Bell snorting in her sleep, in her room down the hall. I lie very still until I hear a sound that tells me that I’m not left alone in the world, that I’m not the last thing alive in the world.
If there’s a high moon on those nights it slips through the gap in my curtains and makes a cold pattern on the wall by my bed. I try to stare at that, just stare at that, and not let the night thoughts in. Things I should have known, or done. I stare at the light and the dark and try not to see Sam settling a hat on his curly head, closing the door like Mr. Simmons, and walking away from everything. Mr. Cowan told me once that all night thoughts are different from day ones, that everyone knows what it is to be afraid, what it is to have doubts in the dark. One of those nights I sat in the chair by his bed while he waited for the powders to work. He liked the lamp kept low, and it was easier not to see the bones beneath his thin skin. He used to say that he’d seen enough, that the world was changing too fast, all the new ideas and discoveries. And he used to say that once a thing has happened, there is no going back. Sam says things like that too, but not in a sad way.