The Shadow Catcher

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 place 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.