The Shadow Catcher

  Through this, through the bleak funeral and the setting of the stone, in the background, Hercules had wept. Grief trumps pride, it always does, real grief, the kind you never want to come, the kind that blots out everything, knots the safety rope of hope into a stranglehold and hones whatever happiness is left into a thorn. People in the house, visitors, had heard the weeping emanating from his upstairs room and they had looked at Clara as if she’d been remiss, as if something needed to be done to succor him. Such pain was not a welcome sound. It was discomfiting, it tore at their decorum—a child grieving publicly as only a widow might, in private, wasn’t something that the St. Paul crowd was used to, there was something in the sound of Hercules’s lament that was too raw, too uncontrolled, too criminal, too much like the sounds of protestation that the ancient gods had raised from men like Oedipus and Orestes and Job, that pagan and Old Testament crying that had dominated man’s existence before the muffling of the Christian era. Late at night, early in the morning, Hercules had cried the way Clara had wanted to, herself, with stark abandon. She had sat on his floor, patting on his back, had sat outside his room when he had locked her out, and listened, as one listens to a sermon, to a siren song or to an oracle. To have given oneself over to expression of emotion, that way, remained a thing beyond her reach, and she would think about that kind of abandon as she sat there in the dark, what it must be like to be consumed beyond one’s reason by raw feeling. To give in to it. Be shanghaied by it. To have one’s ability to reason vanquished by unconsolability, fury, rage—or, even, love. Hercules, by virtue of his grief, had seemed more alive than she had, in those days. But on their final day together in the house, on the day before they would move in, temporarily, with Lodz, Clara had been helping Hercules pack his clothes and he had begun to cry again, his blond head sinking to his chest, his narrow shoulders heaving. Stop, she’d whispered. Stop this now. You need to stop it, Hercules. We’ll be at Lodz’s tomorrow and you can’t keep on like this. Not in someone else’s house—

  To her surprise he’d struck at her, his fist landing on her upper arm. “You’re always telling me to stop—I could have got them out, I could have saved them but you told me to stop—stop and go get Lodz—and when I came back they were dead—”

  “Don’t blame me, Hercules,” she’d said, and he’d shaken his head in protestation, and she’d seen that look deep in his eyes, that terroir of terror that she’d seen the day their parents had been killed. “It’s my fault,” he’d begun, “I’m the one who wanted to go in there, I’m the one who said we should go in that stupid place, if it wasn’t for me they wouldn’t have been standing there—”

  She’d taken him into her arms and let him weep—understood its deeper cause for the first time—and she’d rocked him back and forth, as if to exorcise all the unknown hells the dead leave in the living when they disappear into their guiltlessness.

  Lodz’s house smelled of cabbage and his dead wife’s old clothes, and Clara and Hercules were more miserable in the damp spare room behind the pantry than they had ever been before, but at night, although Hercules still wept and had more reason to than ever, Clara could tell that he had tried to hide his misery by covering his body in the musty bedclothes and weeping in stale pillows. After a near interminable week of being at loose ends, despairing over where to turn and what to do, Ellen Curtis’s letter had arrived from Washington Territory and even Lodz, ever the pragmatist, declared it a godsend. From what was left after the forced sale of their parents’ property, plus a few contributions from well-meaning citizens, Lodz had managed to amass the sum of eighty dollars, which he gave to Clara in an envelope with the ominous advice to “use only as a last resort.” And this, he said, handing her two crisp ten-dollar notes, “is from me. One for you and one for Hercules. Buy yourselves something you can treasure. In your new adventure.” So she had taken Hercules with her to the Friday market down by the river—part State Fair, part marché des puces—where, within ten minutes, Hercules had spent his whole ten dollars on a used suit of clothes, cap, cape, waistcoat, worsted pants and stiff high collar, which he would probably outgrow within the month, but Clara hadn’t argued, just to see him smile. For herself, nothing had caught her eye until they came across a naval merchant who had on display an array of brass fittings, spyglasses, oars and seaman’s trunks. One of the trunks was tinted a pale yellow with a hand-painted reproduction of a familiar painting on its lid and gold stencils on its sides, the SS ICARUS. It was the copy of the painting that had caught her eye, her father had once kept a photogravure of it beside his easel, though this reproduction was far better, rich in color and showing the deft hand of a true artist. “It’s Dutch, that is,” the merchant said to try to sell her.

  “How much do you want for it?”

  “Don’t you want to see inside?”

  “How much?”

  He’d made a quick assessment of what he thought Clara could afford and told her, Seven.

  She would keep her mother’s linens in it, and her mother’s tea service. And her father’s books on the Italian artists. But when she and Hercules had gone to lift it by its handles to carry it away, it proved heavier than it had looked. “The books I let you have gratis,” the merchant smiled. Because he’d never otherwise get rid of them, Lodz had remarked when Clara showed them to him. “They’re in Dutch.”

  “I think they’re pretty,” Clara had said. “I like the illustrations. What are they about?”

  “How to build a telescope,” Lodz laughed. “You and your brother. Like your parents. Heads up in the clouds. Meanwhile feet without no shoesies.”

  Clara had packed her meager valuables into the new sea chest and bound their other few belongings in cloth and rope and on the last Saturday in January Lodz had seen them off on the Northern Pacific train bound for Tacoma, Washington Territory, on what was known as General Custer’s line, the one his 7th Cavalry had ridden between St. Paul and Fort Abraham Lincoln, to which Custer had been assigned to protect the Dakota and Montana Territories from Sitting Bull and his land-happy Sioux.

  Lodz had walked them to their seats, told them to speak to “no stranger, never, only train employees,” and then, with a surprising show of avuncular emotion, shed a Polish tear when he embraced them. As the train crept forward along the curving track out of St. Paul’s Union Depot, Hercules fogged the window, asking, “Will we see the cemetery from here?” and Clara had closed her eyes. I’m not looking back, she’d told herself.

  Not that she’d been able to look forward, either—life with the strange Curtis brood held no happy prospect for her, except the hope that in Asahel, whom she knew slightly, and Edward, whom she didn’t know at all, Hercules might find a man, a hero in imagination, more suitable than Lodz to guide him through this present grief toward manhood. She was doing this for Hercules, she told herself. And therefore: for her parents.

  They had been seated in the Ladies’ car—a polite designation which translated Women’s and Children’s Car, a segregation designed to keep the sexes clear of each other on the four-day journey and to keep impressionable young souls away from the general rowdy company of single males, mineralogists, con artists and roustabouts lighting out from the known states for The Territories. Their car was occupied out of St. Paul by the two of them, a troupe of nuns and a coal-burning potbellied stove in the center aisle to ward off cold. At St. Cloud, Minnesota, the first stop, a family with four children got on, the father going forward to the Men’s car when the mother settled in. Ragtag children, too, got on, while the train was stopped, a chorus of them, immigrants from less-favored states in Europe, Clara could tell from their dark hands and dark complexions, selling warm rolls, pickled eggs and heated stones to place beside one’s feet. Penny for a hot stone—she and Hercules were close enough, themselves, to that scrambling existence, so she bought two stones from a fierce-looking girl and when she’d opened her small change purse the girl had riveted her with a look that warned, Luck, not moral reason has given you your pl
ace in life. Where’s your mother? Clara had asked, in retaliation. No mother, the girl answered. Then we’re even, Clara tallied, handing her the pennies.

  In the middle of the north Midwestern winter, it had grown dark at four o’clock and Clara and Hercules had eaten the food Lodz’s housekeeper had packed. A conductor came around with blankets and straw pillows and fed the stove and took orders for their morning meal the next day at the depot in Bismark, Dakota Territory, where they would make a mandatory stop. Clara arranged a bed for Hercules across a row of seats and tucked the heated stone beneath the blanket by his feet. Do not leave this car, she’d whispered, patting him.

  Promise.—Clara?

  Yes?

  This is an adventure.

  Yes, it is.

  They would have enjoyed themselves.

  Yes, they would have.

  She’d sat across the aisle from him, her head against the window and she’d stared into the black abyss that was the outside world. No lights. Steam, smoke and cinders were the only signs this night that man existed in these parts: and noise, the pounding of the engine felt in every bolt and join along the train’s snaking length. She took out the map they’d given with the tickets, figuring they must be somewhere now outside The States, somewhere coming on Dakota Territory, churning on toward Fargo, a non-place, nothing but a place the railroad made, named, like most of all these so-called cities out here—Billings, Livingston—after men who had done nothing in their lives to distinguish themselves but build a railroad. Was that heroic, in the ancient sense? Another Roman Empire, her father had remarked about the country’s nation-building: who the hell were Mssrs. Fargo, Billings, Livingston compared to Antony and Caesar? Had they any Cleopatras in their beds? Had they ever heard of Tragedy? All this land out here—bartered for its mineral rights, its copper and its coal and gold—had Greece been built this way? She knew next to nothing about commerce, about how fortunes were built and made—she knew almost nothing practical in life, in terms of practical, applicable skill. She knew how to sew a button. Knew how to tie a tourniquet. How to diagnose a fever. How to see a painting, see its harmony and see its flaws. But she couldn’t sell a stone to earn a penny. That was something that she needed to discover how to do. Turn a given fact of nature into money. Take something as God-given as the earth, or as her life, and turn it into something like the Louisiana Purchase, a self-generating profit. Dakota Territory, Montana Territory, Idaho Territory—all part of the Louisiana Purchase: all these so-called bounded states of being she’d be passing through: what sort of fictions were these places, except man-made fictions of the profit-driven kind? Were they works of art? Or sovereign nations? They were artificial designations bounded by dictums of greed, and she needed to learn to speak that language if she and Hercules were to survive. She needed to learn how to make a livelihood in order to escape from charity. In Seattle, she had heard, there was a University, even an opera house, but although she’d tried, before they’d left, to find a portrait of the city, a picture of its streets and civic centers, the only picture of Seattle that she’d found at the St. Paul Public Library had been of a sullen timber port, logs jamming in the foreground, tall ships crowding the shoreline of what appeared to be a backwater fishing village overshadowed by tremendous pines.

  Seattle.

  She’d repeated the syllables in her mind, see at tall, lingering on each sound, wondering what railroad tycoon had inspired the town’s name and what country he had come from with a name like that, Seattle, and then she realized that the rhythm of her thoughts was the rhythm of the train and that the troupe of nuns was singing in that rhythm, too. Well, not singing, actually, humming, harmonizing with their mouths closed, a fifth, a third, a seventh, Clara saw her mother’s fingers lifting off the keys to play those chords and the hallowed beauty of the music caught her by surprise, so unexpected. Other music flooded over her, memories of Chopin, Schumann and Amelia playing, always, her mother playing the piano, and the loss of that, the loss of all that beauty overwhelmed her, almost religiously. She’d plucked the embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve cuff and had dabbed her eyes, glancing across the aisle to see if Hercules was watching her. His blond head lay peaceful on the pillow, as his body rocked in rhythm to the rails. Sound asleep. Like any normal boy his age. Miraculously not weeping.

  She must have slept, herself, sitting straight up, because what she’d remembered next was waking to the tinkling of soprano bells. Each nun had one, and as light rose behind the mountains outside the window, and the day had dawned, the nuns began to pray among themselves, each one ringing her own tiny bell for punctuation. The train had slowed.

  The train had slowed and then the whole long thing had groaned to a shape-shifting halt, steam escaping like a demon soul from each extinguished part. Bismark. The Dakota Territory.

  The nuns had gathered themselves up, birds lifting from a field, and Clara had not known what to do next, nor what was expected of her. She’d been acting on the fly for weeks, learning as she’d gone along, aware that she’d been learning, a first sign of being an adult. No one had informed her there would be a stop along the line where she’d be required to detrain. No one had forewarned her that their parents were going to die. Each casual happenstance since their deaths, therefore, put her on alert as portent for the worst. She had boarded at St. Paul in the belief that the railroad car she rode in was a closed set of circumstances, a closed paragraph, that the train tracks were a story line delivering her, premeditatively, from one point in her life into another. No one had told her there would be the odd depot, the unexpected staging place, along the line, requiring improvisation.

  She followed the nuns into the aisle, down the iron steps to the platform, clutching Hercules with one hand and the other on the drawstring purse with eighty dollars inside, hidden in her bodice—and good thing, too: because what they encountered at the Bismark depot was a scene designed to part her from her money. There was a barbershop for men, a “hotel” for the ladies where they could rent a room for a few hours to have a bath and change their traveling clothes. There was a smoking room (again, for men), a restaurant, a saloon (for men), two waiting rooms (one for men and one for women), a dispensary, a chapel and—as the pièce de résistance—there were Indians.

  Rising from a vastness too empty to comprehend, Bismarck depot appeared to her to be a masterpiece of cunning engineering. It was big. It offered one the illusion of a small but self-sustaining city. Landing at its threshold, being forced to grasp it in the forefront of the larger picture, pumped its size, inflated it and its importance, drew the disoriented passengers into its seductive promise of warm food, hot water and the blandishments of a known, cosmetically civilized and appealing world.

  Clara had been too naïve to know how to order breakfast from the conductor the night before, so she and Hercules stood, immobile on the platform in the morning sun, while their fellow passengers filed past them with confidence into the beckoning maw of man-made comfort.

  The depot, she reckoned—this artificial place—was meant to provide amenities the train, itself, was lacking. Passengers were required to detrain to be entertained and lulled into a sense of bought-and-paid-for engineered adventure. Time was displayed as it existed locally and elsewhere: there were clocks hanging on the depot walls heralding the current times in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Oslo, as if to grant to each detraining soul a sense of kinship with a larger world when, in fact, they had been sidelined on the godforsaken tracks of a godforsaken nowhere. She was there with Hercules and she was responsible for him and she suddenly thought of their father traveling alone to Europe in his youth—to Paris and to Florence—imagined him detraining in a foreign landscape surrounded by the unfamiliar sights and sounds of latent possibilities. He would not have hesitated, she imagined. He would not have hoarded eighty dollars in a drawstring purse. “Let’s find ourselves some breakfast, Hercules,” she then and there resolved.

  An albino buffalo, yellow
ed as an old piano ivory, mounted on the restaurant wall, looked down on them, along with heads of elk and bear and deer and several full-sized giant rodents standing upright on their hind legs. She smiled as Hercules read the entire menu to her as if it were a sequel in a boy’s adventure. A young woman no older than herself poured cups of fragrant coffee for them and Clara, still emboldened by the image of her father traveling to Europe on his own, asked her, “Do you live out here?”

  “Sure do. There’s a dormitory for us right behind the depot.”

  “Us,” Clara realized, were the dozen young women serving tables.

  “But there’s nothing out here.”

  “And plenty of it!” the young woman laughed. “Three trains a day. We can’t get lonely. Plus we get to meet some real nice people.”

  “You work for the railroad?”

  “Sure do. Northern Pacific.”

  “And they pay you?”

  “Of course they do.”

  “How much?” A question she would never have thought to ask a month ago.

  “Enough to set aside. Plus we get to ride the line for free. I’m ridin’ out to San Francisco on my next time off.”

  “You should work here, Clara,” Hercules volunteered.

  “Then who’d look after you?”

  “I could live here with you and shoot buffalo—”

  “Where you two headin’?” the young woman asked.

  “Washington Territory.”

  “What takes you way out there?”

  “Our parents died,” Hercules piped up. Dry-eyed. It was the first time Clara had heard him speak the words. “Can I have anything I want to have for breakfast even if it costs too much?” he then had asked.