The Spirit Photographer

by Jon Michael Varese

  “Nothing belongs to anyone, anymore,” Henriette said. “It’s all been lost, and that’s what you must know.”

  Then a kind of peacefulness overcame him, in the water. The scent of the herbs pricked his nose, but soothed him just the same. All went dark …

  And then the visions came.

  She was there—there! Isabelle was alive … on Washington Street, in Boston, wearing one of the calico dresses he remembered. In her hand she held a letter, and slipped it under the door. She had not bothered to enter the store. She was not going to wait for him.

  The sun splashed the storefront window and the silverware exploded. The plates and the urns and the saltshakers were everywhere, but their brilliance was nothing compared to the vision of Isabelle.

  The street was busy. There were carriages—and noise. She hurried away, but a man approached her on the street. The man began to talk to her, and rudely held her arm. Moody could not hear what they were saying.

  Isabelle’s face darkened at whatever the man was telling her. Then in a minute, she was gone.

  No … Moody thought. No … I cannot lose her again. I have lost her too many times.

  But he was stuck—his feet held in place.

  That terror on her face—it was etched there, unremovable. In his mind, it was as if he were reading her terror on a piece of paper.

  The paper moved. The page turned. And here was another, come to tell him.

  SHE IS WRITING the letter to him now, the letter she has just delivered. The room is small, and there is a suitcase, and she is packing to go away. Here she writes the letter—her last words to her beloved. She is going to deliver the letter herself. She knows where she must leave it.

  But her insistence in the goodbye has condemned her. Her dedication to him has condemned her. She has no understanding—no conception of this—as she is putting her words to paper.

  Now she is in the back of a covered wagon, and very different. There is a dirty rag around her mouth, and her hands are bound with rope. She is terrified, and the picture in front of Moody is something hideous. Even the paper that holds the picture is caked with the filth of this crime.

  She is going to a place from where she will never return. It is clear that she is traveling to her death.

  The papers are full of sketches. They are better than anything he has ever done. The pages turn, and the visions sharpen with the clarity of photographs.

  STRUGGLING … SHE IS struggling. She is on a farm somewhere—with men. And now, at last, the pictures begin to speak.

  “You knew she’d be a problem. This one isn’t easy.”

  “Wasn’t easy last night either. Fought back like a calf.”

  There is laughter.

  “Educated too—an educated nigger.”

  “How ’bout that.”

  “Pretty.”

  “We seen enough pretty for now.”

  The men exchange glances.

  “Can’t keep the bit on her forever,” one finally says. “Won’t be no good that way.”

  “He warned you. Said we’d have a lot of trouble with her.”

  “No use putting it off any longer then. If she won’t keep quiet, just cut it out.”

  Her eyes widen, and she begins to thrash, but two men are holding her down. There are ropes binding her wrists and ankles, but it takes the men to hold her, too. A hot blade comes forward, and one of the men removes the bit from her mouth. Her head is shaking wildly, but one man steadies it with his hands.

  They take prongs to her tongue, and pull it out, beyond her lips.

  Isabelle tries to scream.

  On the plantation, everything is as serene as one could ever hope it to be. The oaks stretch out their arms in muscular patterns against the fading sun. Three women in white dresses sit fanning themselves on the porch.

  The scream swells before the silence. A window from the big house falls hard within its frame. Glass shatters, and rains over the freshly painted porch boards.

  “My God in Heaven,” one of the women says. “If I’ve told Jeremiah once to fix that window, I’ve told him a hundred times.”

  “Now look at that,” another one of them says.

  “Niggers always costing us double, if you ask me.”

  THE SUN HAS set now, and Isabelle is in a bed. The cabin is dark—lit by a candle or two—but Moody can see the rag in her mouth. The rag is damp with her blood. But this rag does not silence her.

  There is another woman in the cabin—an old black woman whose bare feet are at peace with the dirty floor. She is dipping a cloth into a bucket of water, and applying the compress to Isabelle’s head.

  “Will she live?” Moody asks.

  The old woman stares up at him. She is not a woman he has ever seen, but she is a woman he will always see.

  The woman does not answer. She returns herself to Isabelle.

  “Will she live?” Moody demands.

  The woman does not turn to look at him.

  “She shouldn’t have been writin’ you no letter,” the woman says. “Shouldn’t have been anywhere near you in the first place. She should’ve just been on her way—gone like all the others. Just trouble, and now look where she is.”

  Then the woman turns her head and glares at the spirit photographer.

  “She’ll live,” the woman says.

  And then she adds:

  “So will you.”

  She watches Moody’s eyes until the tear she’s been waiting for arrives.

  “Now that’s what I need,” she says, jumping up from the bedside. “That’s exactly what I need.”

  She brings her old finger to his cheek.

  “We’re done now,” she says. “Go on and get yourself out of here.”

  • • •

  THAT WAS NOT the last of the visions, for in waking there were more to come. Moody was dressed, no longer in the tub, but his hair still smelled of herbal water. Strangely, his first waking thoughts went to the war. The bloodshed he had witnessed, and the despair it had condemned him to, piled up in his head—all those bodies he had shut out. He had written to her then … swore that he would never take another photograph. He had broken that oath. And for what?

  But the war had also been the catalyst of his goodbye to her—the event that had pushed him to run … free.

  Free? As if there were such a thing. He had fooled himself. He had never been free of her at all. She had loved photographs, and he had locked himself away with her, because he did not want to exist in the world without her.

  He was on some sort of divan, and Henriette was sitting beside him.

  “You poisoned me,” he said. “But I can’t deny what you’ve shown me.”

  Henriette laughed … that same rancorous laugh that came from somewhere deep within in her.

  “I, Monsieur Moody?” she said. “What I have shown you? You’ve seen nothing that you didn’t always have the power to see. You’ve ignored your power all these years. It’s the cause of your greatest shame—and it is at the heart of all your guilt.”

  Her look was vicious—spiteful. Moody could not challenge her.

  In her hands there were the papers, large sheets full of colorless scribbling.

  He looked down at them.

  “My drawings?” he asked. “Are these the drawings of what I’ve seen?”

  “Ha!” Henriette said. “There is no end to your arrogance. You were never an artist. You’ve never been brave enough to draw such things.”

  Moody stared down at the papers. The drawings held him captive.

  Henriette held one of them up—the sketch of a woman writing a letter. Then another—a crude drawing of a man and woman in the street. A plantation … a woman brutalized … shattered glass from a broken window. These were the representations of what he most feared—and yet, what he most wanted to see.

  “If these are not my drawings,” he said, “then—”

  “They are your drawings now,” Henriette said. “They are just as much your drawi
ngs as they are everyone else’s. For what happened to her happened to all of us.”

  Then Henriette slowly turned her head toward the bar.

  “Over there, Moody … over there is the artist. She is the one who can tell you everything—and nothing, at the same time.”

  Henriette stood and slowly moved away from Moody, and the photographer’s gaze followed her as she crossed to the other side of the cabin. In a moment she reached Joseph, who was sitting at the bar with a young woman. Joseph held the woman’s hands and appeared to be shivering—shivering with the suppressed sobs of a hardened man. The two of them evoked the scene of a father and his daughter.

  The girl turned her head and locked eyes with Edward Moody.

  It was Isabelle’s face, and he wept.

  XXXIV

  OF COURSE THE moment that Joseph had stepped onto solid ground in New Orleans, he realized that Isabelle must be dead, for the life force that was reaching out to him at that point was not coming from the land of the living. And yet, like Moody, he too did not want to believe it … did not want to believe what must have been true. What the photograph was ultimately telling them.

  But it was not until they reached Yellow Henry’s place of refuge that Joseph realized all that the photograph had been trying to say. Isabelle had been guiding them there—that much was simple. But guiding them toward what? The answer was now plain.

  It was her daughter—Isabelle’s daughter. She was the ghost of what remained.

  How could decades of mystery have been unlocked so easily? It was one of those puzzles that, once put together, laid bare the grains of its own simplicity.

  Isabelle had planned to leave Boston because she had been carrying a child. And yet the pictures revealed a different story.

  “That girl came here,” Henriette had told Joseph. “Found her way here through the swamps, even after what they had done to her. Those devils … what they did to her. But mind you I’ve seen worse. Maybe she was lucky to get out alive.”

  Henriette told Joseph of Isabelle’s escape, how she had found her way to Henriette’s because she herself had grown up there, in the swamps. When she arrived, she could not speak, or even explain in writing what had happened. And in any case, words on paper would not have signified anything to Yellow Henry.

  “I raised Isabelle from a child,” Henriette said. “Found her as a baby tucked inside a tree. She was a gift from the alligators and the cottonmouths. Later, when she was mostly grown, I sent her off with the traders—north. To some place better. I never heard from her again, but I knew that she would work. And then when it happened … I also knew.”

  Henriette was never surprised.

  “She did not need to explain to me what happened—je savais. Just as she knew that she would die when she had the child. And that was something I knew too. So she scribbled her words on this paper, and I’ve kept it all these years.”

  Henriette held a folded paper in her hand—it was yellowed and soiled.

  “For the photographer,” she said.

  Moody was across the room, still in the throes of his visions.

  “I named the girl Vivienne,” she said. “For her sake, I erased the memory of her mother. And, for that matter, the mother before that—Justine. For you see, they had all come to me.”

  There was a perfect symmetry to what she was saying—the flight of Isabelle’s mother, and years later the flight of Isabelle—both leading to the same place. The same hopeless salvation.

  “But I did not fully understand,” Henriette said, “because of course my Isabelle could no longer speak. And as Vivi grew, she could not speak either, because, you see, the girl was born without a voice. But she had something much more powerful than the gift of speech. She had the gift of sight, and her visions flowed out through her fingers.”

  Over the years, Henriette said, the girl had begun to draw. She had learned to navigate the swamps, to do business with the fur traders … had learned all of the cruder things that her mother before her had learned. But through that she drew, and her drawings became more precise. Child’s sketches at first, surely, but as she grew into a young woman, her drawings developed a realness that could stop one’s blood.

  “That was her gift,” Henriette said. “Isabelle’s memories were her gift.”

  They were horrors—the papers. For Joseph they were horrors. Henriette could see it, and she admonished him.

  “Shame on you,” she said. “Shame on you of all people. You are one who has always embraced what you see, and yet this—this—you do not want to see.”

  She jerked her head toward the recumbent Moody.

  “Sometimes you are no better than him. Maybe you need a bath too.”

  Henriette was right. Joseph did feel ashamed—ashamed that he had come to Boston looking for Isabelle with such confidence and arrogance. He was going to track her down, the way people had once tracked him down—and failed. He would not fail. He was Joseph Winter—“Fifty-two Winter”—a legend amongst the fugitives. A man of great importance.

  And yet he did not save her. There was nothing he did to try to save her. He had saved himself, while she went on saving others.

  “Yes …” Henriette said, “I see it. I see that she held you too, and I’d like to tell you that she left you something, but she didn’t. You weren’t special. She belonged to everyone—to all of us. Her voice was the voice of all of us.”

  Henriette looked as if she were about to spit.

  “And they took it.”

  Joseph turned to Vivi, who had been sitting there silently since entering the room. Her appearance had not been dramatic. Strangely, it had been something expected.

  “She knows the life of this swamp,” Henriette said, “like her mother, and her grandmother before that. And with that comes responsibility—Joseph Winter.”

  And it was as if in saying his name, she were pronouncing him alive for the first time.

  “You see who she is and you see what she is capable of. She is a woman whose drawings give you the world.”

  “But—” Joseph urged.

  “She has no words,” Henriette said. “Only visions. Nos rêves et nos visions … dreams and visions of what is to come. She forces us to see. And I am sorry for you.”

  Joseph held Vivi’s hands. He could not stop himself from weeping. Over on the divan, Edward Moody began to stir.

  “The photographer will wake,” Henriette said. “And when he does it will be his turn to see.”

  She brandished Vivi’s drawings as Moody let out a soft cry. Then she turned from the pair and began making her way across the cabin. Moody shifted and grunted, and Henriette paused, looking back toward the bar with that wry smile on her face.

  “Yes,” she said. “He has been sick for a long time, but even I am surprised by his strength.”

  • • •

  HE WAS WEAK, and everything in his vision was a blur. Could what he was now seeing be real? There was a woman standing before him—a beautiful young woman he instantly knew. Not a ghost, and not Isabelle, and yet these two things she seemed to be. He had lost all sense of time, and could not tell how long he had been gazing at her. The drawings had depicted Isabelle’s fate—the fate he had never wanted to see.

  But she had been waiting for him. All of this time she had been waiting! He had been right to hold onto her. He had been right not to let go. She had called to him, summoned him. Down here to this wretched swamp. He had only wanted her back, and now she had come back him.

  But it was not her.

  He stared at her, examined her. Joseph Winter was holding her hands. The old Moody returned—the Moody who wanted to tear her away from everyone else. Even now he grew hot at the mere thought of Joseph holding her. Such thoughts could only remind him of his own failings, and his own shame.

  But it was not her.

  Yes, the face was hers … the shoulders, the neck, and the breasts. All hers. The way she breathed was her, and that shape of the mouth was hers. But as M
oody’s vision cleared, he could see that it was not her.

  And he could see that she was not his.

  At last, Moody rose unsteadily from the divan, and walked across the cabin toward the trio at the bar. He stood before them for a moment, uncertain what to do or say. The young woman shifted her gaze toward him, and stared at him with familiar eyes.

  Yellow Henry took one of the woman’s hands and offered it to Moody. The woman’s other hand remained in Joseph Winter’s.

  “This is Vivienne, photographer.”

  Moody took Vivi’s hand.

  “I am sorry,” he said.

  There was everything to apologize for. There would always be the record of what he had done.

  The young woman smiled—a remarkable smile. She possessed the easy grace of her mother.

  “Now you see, photographer,” Henriette said. “Now you finally see the real picture.”

  The three of them remained there—Joseph, Moody, Vivi—their hands chaining them together, for some time. From the table, the negative shined toward them like a coated mirror. Isabelle was all but invisible.

  Henriette held up the folded piece of paper—the one that had captured Joseph’s attention from the start.

  “There is still the matter of this,” she said, looking at Moody. “I have always known that this was for you, even though she never told me.”

  Moody did not let go of Vivi, but instead took the letter with his other hand. The sight of Isabelle’s words again redoubled his sense of gratitude.

  He whispered the words, aloud. They were too powerful to remain silent:

  You are a great man. You will do great things for people. You will open their eyes. You will teach them how to see.

  She is all that is left of me now. She is yours. Keep her, guard her. She needs you. Everyone needs you. I left so that everyone could have you.

  Please forgive me.

  Her selflessness overcame him like a tide from which he could not escape. She had wanted to be gone so that he could be saved—so that his dishonest, ambitious self could be saved. Somehow, she had known that his fortune needed protecting.