The Shadow Catcher

The depot, she reckoned — this artificial place — was meant to provide amenities the train, itself, was lacking. Passengers were required to detrain to be entertained and lulled into a sense of bought-and-paid-for engineered adventure. Time was displayed as it existed locally and elsewhere: there were clocks hanging on the depot walls heralding the current times in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Paris and Oslo, as if to grant to each detraining soul a sense of kinship with a larger world when, in fact, they had been sidelined on the godforsaken tracks of a godforsaken nowhere. She was there with Hercules and she was responsible for him and she suddenly thought of their father traveling alone to Europe in his youth — to Paris and to Florence — imagined him detraining in a foreign landscape surrounded by the unfamiliar sights and sounds of latent possibilities. He would not have hesitated, she imagined. He would not have hoarded eighty dollars in a drawstring purse. “Let’s find ourselves some breakfast, Hercules,” she then and there resolved.

An albino buffalo, yellowed as an old piano ivory, mounted on the restaurant wall, looked down on them, along with heads of elk and bear and deer and several full-sized giant rodents standing upright on their hind legs. She smiled as Hercules read the entire menu to her as if it were a sequel in a boy’s adventure. A young woman no older than herself poured cups of fragrant coffee for them and Clara, still emboldened by the image of her father traveling to Europe on his own, asked her, “Do you live out here?”

“Sure do. There’s a dormitory for us right behind the depot.”

“Us,” Clara realized, were the dozen young women serving tables.

“But there’s nothing out here.”

“And plenty of it!” the young woman laughed. “Three trains a day. We can’t get lonely. Plus we get to meet some real nice people.”

“You work for the railroad?”

“Sure do. Northern Pacific.”

“And they pay you?”

“Of course they do.”

“How much?” A question she would never have thought to ask a month ago.

“Enough to set aside. Plus we get to ride the line for free. I’m ridin’ out to San Francisco on my next time off.”

“You should work here, Clara,” Hercules volunteered.

“Then who’d look after you?”

“I could live here with you and shoot buffalo—”

“Where you two headin’?” the young woman asked.

“Washington Territory.”

“What takes you way out there?”

“Our parents died,” Hercules piped up. Dry-eyed. It was the first time Clara had heard him speak the words. “Can I have anything I want to have for breakfast even if it costs too much?” he then had asked.

She would not be spendthrift but she would not deny them common pleasures. Just this once Hercules could order buffalo steak and flapjacks if he wanted and she could treat herself to fresh Dakota trout and eggs. There were jobs for girls like her, out here, jobs that didn’t seem much worse than factory jobs in Minnesota, working for the granaries. She would find employment in Seattle, even if she could not afford to finish her abbreviated education, and she would “set aside” and save just like these young women in the railroad depot. Meanwhile she would draw her greatest pleasure from the simplest things — a glass of water and fried eggs, her brother licking maple syrup from his fingers — because it had occurred to her while sitting there that everyone she would encounter in her life from now on would be a stranger. Except, of course, for the distant Curtises.

“You’re the only person that I know in the whole world,” Hercules had said just then. Then asked, “Do you think they see us?”

“Who, Hercules?”

“Mother and father.”

“I don’t know.”

“Sometimes I think they’re watching me. I hope they are. I think they’d like it here. I think they would be proud of us.”

“I don’t think the dead have eyes, Hercules.”

He looked up at the albino buffalo, then down at his buffalo steak. “There are other ways of seeing than with eyes,” he’d said. “Sometimes you see things in your thoughts.”

“I don’t think the dead have thoughts,” she’d told him.

“I need to think they do,” he stated.

Minutes later, when they walked outside again, they found the platform lined with Indians.

Clara had seen the occasional Indian from northern Minnesota on the streets of St. Paul, but she had never seen human creatures such as these, people as weathered as old timber, who seemed never to have sheltered from the elements, whose hardscrabble poverty showed in their eyes and teeth and fingernails and feet. “Are they real?” Hercules had asked.

“Of course they’re real.”

“No, I mean are they real Indians?”

“Yes.”

“Are they going to kill us?”

“No.”

“What are they doing, then?”

“Trying to make money.”

“Why?”