The Shadow Catcher

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.