The Shadow Catcher

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.