The Shadow Catcher

No one could have been more gracious to Ellen than Amelia in her loyalty and optimism; but charity exacts an attitude of deference, regardless. It exacts a posture. Ellen shrank before their eyes. Especially after Raphael, her oldest child, picked up and lit out for the territory one cold night, taking nothing, leaving nothing but his past behind. No words were exchanged, no gratitude for his Existence, no short or long good-byes. Here one day; and gone the next. A family ghost. Sixteen, he was mourned by Ellen who enlisted Clara’s father in a search, but nothing ever turned up to explain where Raphael had gone. Seduced, abducted or kidnapped, he was never heard of again by any of the Curtises. Among them his name — that divine talisman of Johnson’s choosing that was supposed to be a blessing — was never spoken. And although Ellen took her son’s disappearance hard, and shrank at least an inch beneath the burden of its sorrow, she nearly lost another inch beneath Johnson’s next proposal. Maybe running from The Law but certainly running on empty and the surety that only prophets enterprise, Johnson wrote to Ellen to announce that he and Edward were headed West by train to make their fortune.

Where palm trees grow like cotton, he had written.

What a heartbreak, Clara thought.

What an ass, her father clarified.

Johnson swore that he had heard on good authority that there was gold in the Yukon and the prospects of that mineral had already left a trail of lucre all along the coast of the Pacific from California to the great Northwest — lumber money, shipbuilding, the fur trade. For decades now, a new Pacific city in the North had started gaining muscle. Seattle had supplied the timber that kept the Asia trade afloat. There was money to be made there, Johnson wrote. He and Edward would find a plot of land and build a house and send for Ellen and the other children within the year.

She had heard it all before.

She had heard it when he left her in Minnesota to go off and join God’s War against the South in ’62. Heard it when he wandered back, War’s demons in his eyes and in his ardor. Heard it when he took their second youngest son with him to vent his ardor on the unsuspecting Minnesota woods.

This wild talk of Johnson’s.

Always preaching to her about the blandishments of patience in a woman. About what waited in the future. As if her life on Earth were meant to be a single solitary wait. For what?

He had never even asked where Raphael had gone, or why.

If it hadn’t been for Clara’s mother, Ellen would have slipped into a long night, but Amelia kept her spirits up and kept her going, and then, miraculously, Johnson started sending letters as he’d never done before. His letters fueled Ellen’s and Asahel’s and Eva’s hopes. Whether falsely or not, it didn’t matter, Clara saw: there is no other quality of hope than that it floats a proposition. You can’t un hope a thing. To hope against a hope is still a form of hoping. Hope is something that’s the same thing as its opposite. It’s a thing that is the same thing as its shadow.

Seattle.

“So far away. But it must be a Christian place…” Ellen had attested to Amelia. “…if Johnson’s there.”

“I’m certain that it’s very civilized,” Clara could remember her mother consoling. “We hear they have the telephone. Very modern. And there’s a credible college there. With full female enrollment. Universal suffrage.”

Ellen’s facial muscles had pinched her mouth as she’d repeated, “…suffer-age?”

But as the boastful reports had continued to arrive from Johnson by the post it had been revealed that Seattle, itself, the city, the boomtown, was not, precisely, the current locus of the Curtis family’s hope. The land that had been purchased — (God knows how, Clara’s father had remarked, perhaps enviously) — lay not near the inland channel but off-land, on an outer island, facing not the port nor the shipping lanes nor the city but, well, water. Facing the Orient. Or, if you were to draw a straight line: facing Russia. But Edward had cleared this tsarist-facing parcel and Edward had dug the foundation and Edward had quarried the stone for the hearth. Edward had planed the spruce trees and the cedar. Edward had raised the roof beams. Edward — who was in all ways except name Head-of-family — Edward had built them a house.

And out from St. Paul they had gone — Ellen, Eva and Asahel. By train. To the West. The North west. And Clara and Hercules and her mother and father had all trooped to the station to bid farewell and to watch them depart.

Four days on the iron roads.

Ellen had not lived with Johnson for eight years.

Edward had not seen his mother, sister nor younger brother for the same amount of time. Still, when Ellen, Eva and Asahel descended from the iron horse onto the rickety platform at Tacoma, the reunited family had fallen into one another’s arms.

Except Edward.

Who kept his mother at arm’s length.