The Shadow Catcher

  “What are we supposed t’ do with that?” Ellen asked derisively.

  “Enjoy it, Mother.”

  “Well what is it?”

  “A bathtub, I believe,” Eva suggested.

  And not any ordinary tub for bathing, Clara saw. Shaped like a dancing slipper, high in the back, curved and snug at the front, it was hammered from a single sheet of copper which made it lightweight and portable, bright as a penny.

  “Where did you get this from, brother?” Asahel teased. “From that house of fancy women?”

  Edward colored. “Language, Asahel,” he scolded.

  “Well I’m not havin’ it in the house,” Ellen maintained.

  “Fine, we’ll keep it out here, then,” Edward told her.

  “Don’t see why you go wastin’ your money on what we don’t need,” Ellen complained. “We got tubs already. Two of ’em.” Heavy, nickel buckets you had to stand in, Clara thought, next to the stove where you heated the water. And then struggle to carry the whole mess outside to dump it when you were done.

  “It’s too pretty,” Ellen went on. “The Lord cautions against ostentation,” she reminded her son. “What were you thinking?”

  Edward touched the back of the tub with his palm and let it glissade down the curved and smooth lip. “That it might bring pleasure to someone,” he said, his blue gaze fixed on Clara for what she thought was noticeably too long, while her heart lurched, before he and Asahel carried the tub onto the porch. There it stayed, for a month, unused by anyone, although Clara wiped it clean every day, reliving, in her mind, the way he had looked at her when he spoke the word, pleasure. Aren’t you tempted? Eva asked her, sneaking up behind her one day while she was polishing the tub with a soft rag.

  Clara faced her, her color high, and almost said, It’s mine.

  “I’m tempted,” Eva admitted. “Let’s fill her up and—”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Ellen had snapped. “You tell her, Amelia, she’ll listen to you. God is watching what you do, Eva. He’s counseling your future husband.”

  Clara rolled her eyes as if she were conspiring with Eva, but she had determined in that moment that she would find a way to claim the tub’s first bath, one way or another. Because the pleasure was intended to be hers. And then, as if fortune, or what Ellen would have deemed to be God, were smiling on her, her opportunity arrived a few weeks later in the form of the Baptist Missionaries’ annual week-long summer retreat. Ellen was going, of course, as was Eva; and to her surprise, Hercules had asked to go as well, because their farrier was a member of the sect and had offered Hercules instruction in the craft if he were to join them for the week. Please, Hercules had wheedled in his most charming way.

  “They want your soul,” she tried to scare him.

  “Oh I know that,” he told her, smiling. “It’s learning a trade,” he bartered, playing on her greater fear that both of them might never break the bonds of living off charity.

  “All right,” she acquiesced. When Hercules heard hoofbeats he thought of horses. She thought of unicorns or zebras, and she was secretly thinking of the baths that she could have, when everyone was gone.

  Asahel would drive them in the buckboard, and no one knew where Edward was nor when he would return, and as the day of their departure dawned Clara was kept awake by the realization that she’d be alone on the compound for the first time and, strangely, this awareness left her feeling more excited than alarmed. She’d come to know the two Indians by their names, Mopoc and Modoc, and she had come to deal with them through sign language and through pictures that she drew, whenever the two of them came looking for work when Edward was away. They were harmless, she had learned, dimwitted and a bit slow to grasp her well-designed instructions, but they were, in the end, useful to the household. Once a week, usually on Sundays because they knew the other women, with whom they didn’t want to deal, would be away at their Sunday services, the Indians would wait by the barn for Clara to come to tell them what she wanted for the week. Squirrel? No squirrel. She hated cooking squirrel—they were tedious to clean, there was no meat and what meat there was was gamey. Yet every week they brought her squirrels. No rabbits, she would tell them and draw a picture of a rabbit, draw a strong black line through it to mean no rabbits yet week after week they brought her rabbit carcasses on poles until she understood that the line that she’d been drawing through her rabbit picture translated kill to the two Indians. So she’d learned to draw, then shake her head. Draw—show the picture—shake her head. And they would shake their heads. And still they brought her squirrels and rabbits when what she wanted them to hunt was boar, wild turkey or a deer, something she could salt and cure for more than just one meal. The butcher wagon came with its salt beef, dried pork and bacon twice a month, but she would rather give the household money to the Indians who brought her better quality and were, to be honest, cheaper. She was lying in the dark on the bed Edward had bought for his parents, thinking about what kind of picture she could draw to make Mopoc and Modoc understand she did not need the usual ration of meat this week because the others would be going away, when, in the room next to her own, she heard Eva stirring, heard her through the thin wall using the chamber pot, and Clara was on her feet, the anticipation of this day of independence culminating in the sudden thrill that it was here. She dressed silently and quickly, listening first to Eva’s movements then to the movements of Ellen—the hiss of her urination—and then, in her bare feet, carrying her stockings and her shoes, she tiptoed through the kitchen. Light was barely rising in the east, the birds were stirring in the realm of thinning shadows and the air was sweet with pine and the clean brine of Puget Sound as she sat down on a porch step to pull on her stockings, then stopped, noticing the two pails sitting there, filled with fresh pumped water. Edward, she understood. She stepped into her shoes without lacing them and stood. And there he was, energetic shadow, coming round the corner of the house, bending down to pick up something from the yard.

  Edward, she said aloud, bringing him upright, holding something in his hand. He took one step forward, stopped, then took another as if to bring her into sharper focus. She tried to see his eyes, if he was smiling, but his face was hidden by his hat. How’s the roof? he asked.

  “The roof,” she repeated, and he pointed, upward, so she looked up. “Any leaks?” he asked.

  Dumbly, she shook her head.

  “I’m finding shingles in the yard,” he said and held out a cedar shake to testify. “Big wind last week.”

  She nodded, in agreement.

  “Day is young,” he said and then he took off at a trot into the woods toward the cliff and the distant sound of water. “Will you not take breakfast with us…Edward?” she called out, just as a lantern light began to shine from the small window in the barn. She went back up the steps with the two pails of water and lit the lantern in the kitchen and, tucking in her hair and pinching both her cheeks in case he should return, set to work, starting a flame beneath the kettle, measuring out the flour, lard and water to make bread and biscuits. By the time the first low rays of sun sliced the air between the trees outside, she had four loaves cooling on the basket trays, the table set and a fresh chicken on the boil for the travelers’ lunch.

  “What are you going to do, all by yourself?” Eva asked, appearing crisp, dressed for the journey. “You should change your mind and come with us,” she urged. “There will be bachelors there and you might meet someone.”

  “Is that all you want, then, Eva? To meet someone?”

  “Don’t you?”

  It was still only seven thirty in the morning when Clara finally waved them off, standing in the yard in the bright sun as the buckboard pulled away, Hercules standing in the back signaling farewell with his arms as if about to fly. And then as soon as they were out of sight the Indians appeared. Like liquid, Clara thought. The way her father had once showed her about aquatint, the way it spreads into the paper—the way a liquid, once it’s spilled, flows into
an empty space. That’s the way they seemed to move—Edward, too, she realized—waiting for their moment and then taking shape before one’s eyes, as if from the air, like shadows. They waited while she went inside to get her charcoal and a piece of paper, as was her custom, but when she handed them the sheet of paper there was nothing drawn on it. They looked at her, their eyes like wax. She made a gesture to communicate nothing, crossing her arms in front of her then spreading them wide open while shaking her head—and still they looked at her, their blank expressions impossible to interpret. “Nothing, understand?” she said aloud. “Everyone has gone away. No meat, no fish this week.” I may as well be talking to two fence posts, she thought—their faces registered neither comprehension nor emotion nor intelligence and she was reminded yet again of the Indians she and Hercules had seen on the train platform in Dakota Territory, those Indians whose faces gave no hint of inner life, of hope or of humanity. Those Indians had seemed to her not to care whether they sold their wares or not, but these two, Mopoc and Modoc, showed up every week like clockwork willing, if not eager, to barter services for money. She thought, too, of the children selling heated stones for pennies on the railroad, remembered the feeling she had had when she’d thought how close she and Hercules had come to being reduced to that condition, to that state of near penury, one step away from outright begging. She could give these two a dime to make them go away but she remembered the chafe of charity, the rash it left on one’s own dignity, the irritation on the back of one’s own neck as one bowed her head in gratitude. These Indians wanted work. They wanted work for the same reason that she did and to send them away with charity’s coin in their hand or, worse, empty-handed, would be to rupture the chain of responsibility. She didn’t like these Indians but she had entered into a tacit contract with them and if she were the first to break with that understanding then who knew what they might do or what might happen next, so, while they watched her without moving, she drew a picture on the piece of paper. If they were going to hunt for her today, then she wanted them to bring back something big. She drew a buffalo.

  It was perhaps an act of mockery she realized, too late—there was no reason that these two Pacific Northwest tribesmen would have ever seen or heard of an American bison, but when they looked at the drawing she could see a shift in their expressions, not so much a movement in their eyes as a darkening.

  “Bear,” one of them said, gravely.

  “No bear,” she said—she did not want bear meat with its stench and hair and grease. Buffalo, she said.

  The word seemed to toll a knell between the two of them. They seemed to have stopped breathing and drawn themselves up even taller where they stood, already straight and dignified as regimental sergeants. They were dressed today, as they always were whenever she had seen them, in white men’s clothes, rough woven shirts with buttons, workmen’s pants dyed indigo, cheap leather boots, and one would not have guessed their Skokomish or Twana affiliation save for their hair which was black and thick and straight and long, and for the skin of their faces which looked like expensive glove leather, and for the fact that one of them wore a feather behind his ear and the other wore a feather in his rolled-up shirt cuff and both of them wore leather thongs around their necks braided around shells and ocean-polished sea glass. But now something hung between them in the air, between them and her, an intimation of who they were when they weren’t hiding behind cultural masks, or fear or mockery or stoicism, who they were when they spoke their minds and hearts, who they were when not seen through a white woman’s prism. One of them unshouldered his rifle and the other took the piece of paper she had drawn on from her and then held out his hand for the piece of charcoal. Clara gave it to him. The two Indians exchanged a glance between them and then the one with the charcoal drew a swift thick violent line through the figure of the buffalo then threw the drawing and the charcoal on the ground. Both of them looked at her with what she thought might have been dark understanding, but then, again, might have been cold pity, then they turned away from her and disappeared, as if in a silent march, into the woods.

  She retrieved the sheet of paper from the ground and crumpled it inside her fist, walking toward the house. She had never seen a buffalo, except in taxidermy. Did they still exist? Maybe they, like unicorns, were animals less missed for what they might have been, alive, than what they are as myths. She stopped and smoothed the sheet of paper out and looked at it—pretty close, she thought, a credible rendition. She could draw, her father had taught her, and who were they to throw her drawing on the ground? Had she insulted them? Why should she care? They and their ilk had still been drawing stick figures and unenlightened geometrics five hundred years after Cimabue and Giotto; four hundred years after the Italian Renaissance in painting. How could anyone ever try to build a bridge across a chasm of perception between two kinds of people, two tribes, as wide as that? She crumpled the paper again, suspecting that, within hours, the two Indians would, once again, deliver squirrels.

  On the porch she paused in admiration of the gleaming tub, perfect in its artistry and execution, and Now or never, she determined. There was the matter of the kitchen, of the cleaning up from breakfast, which she dispatched not only with efficiency but with a sort of womanly insouciance: she was going to do something that she’d secretly desired for some time: she was going to spoil herself, indulge in pleasure: she was going to have a bath.

  It wasn’t easy. The tub was light to lift but ridiculously commodious, almost knocking her and it headlong down the steps as she tried to reckon with it. Finally she slid a blanket under it and dragged it to a spot not too far from the kitchen and the stove where she would have to heat the water, a place right near the house beneath the laundry lines between two trees where she draped bedsheets in a square to hide herself. With two kettles on the boil at once, she was determined to fill it to the brim, to have a soak not just a rinse or what was called a skinny-dip, and while the kettles boiled she went searching through her mother’s things inside the Icarus trunk for the precious rectangle of authentic French thrice-milled lavender soap. Can there ever be too much of a good thing? she wondered, after so many days of nothing good at all? She draped a clean night shift over one of the laundry lines then closed the bedsheets-as-curtains all around the copper tub, steaming with hot water, and undressed. She tied up her hair, unwrapped the soap, lifted one leg over the lip, and then the other, and slipped in. The lowering, she understood, was ceremonial. Then, after lowering, there was extension, the moment when she unfurled her legs and the hot water lapped her throat and her whole body floated. Clara put her head back on the high curve of the tub and closed her eyes and began to lather herself in suspended sightlessness. She lathered her legs, her stomach and her breasts, her arms, her face and then she submerged herself entirely in the water and when she surfaced she opened her eyes and saw Edward high above her, floating so to speak, standing in bright light, staring at her from the roof. No more than thirty feet away, he was standing on the roof of the house with a hammer in his hand, staring down on her between the sheets protecting her from view on all sides except from above and for a brief moment their eyes locked, Clara’s gaze holding his own blue, and then, without a thought, she stood so he would see her, naked, dripping wet.

  A rifle shot rang out just then from the woods and before Clara could understand what was happening, Edward turned toward the noise of the rifle shot, slipped, and somersaulted off the roof. She heard his body land and then there was a moment of terrible silence before she pulled her shift over her wet body and ran to him.

  He lay with his torso twisted, his arms above his head, legs bent away from his hips. Kneeling next to him she could see his chest rise only slightly with a slow breath. She untied the bandana at his neck and found the pulse, the same throbbing she had touched with her lips, then she looked for bleeding and found none. His eyes were closed and when she lifted his eyelid his blue focus was rolled back in his skull. Edward, she said. She tapped his cheek and
repeated his name then got to her feet and ran to the alarm on the porch, a triangle-shaped piece of hollow iron that she hit over and over again with an iron pipe, the clamor sending birds in a riot from the trees. She rang ’til she counted sixty, then she ran back to Edward. Asahel had once said the alarm could be heard all the way to the sawmill and she planned to ring it every ten minutes until someone came because from the look of his limbs she feared he had broken some bones and she was wary of moving him on her own. She cradled one of his hands and gently unfurled each finger, feeling for breaks. Whole paragraphs of written instructions for accident victims from her nursing textbooks ran through her thoughts and she determined the first order of business was to restore his consciousness, if she could, so he could respond to his injuries, respond to the pain in his body and tell her where it was. She knew she still had sal ammoniac in her traveling kit and as she stood up to go get it, she saw Mopoc and Modoc on a tear from the woods. They were at Edward’s side in a matter of seconds. He fell from the roof, she began to explain. “I need to bring him around, so stay with him while I go get—” They had dropped to their knees beside Edward’s body and Mopoc, or Modoc, held his head while the other one extracted a small drawstring bag from his belt and drew out a wad of vegetable matter, a tightly-rolled leaf. Clara sank to her knees beside him to watch as he carefully unrolled the leaf and then instantly all three of them recoiled from a stench. Clara leaned in to look at the source, her hand clapped over her mouth, vision glazed with salt tears. The cause of the caustic aroma appeared to be some sort of small organ, rotting and fetid, a fish heart, perhaps, or a liver, full of pus and disgusting, but all it took was two passes of it beneath Edward’s nose and his eyes opened and he sprang awake. Edward, can you speak? Clara asked him. He stared straight ahead. “Edward, you’ve had a fall. You may be injured. I need you to lie very still. Do you understand me?”