The Shadow Catcher

As the winter wore on and the rains increased, she began to feel more trapped in the aimlessness that was the Curtises’ communal life. Isolation, too, began to take its toll. Except for the two Indians who came several times a week looking for work from Edward, visits from anyone were rare, and except for the buckboard ride every Sunday to the Baptist Missionary church house on the island, Clara and the Curtis women had nowhere else to go. Clara had struck out on foot with Hercules looking for a neighbor or a place where people gathered, a general store or a trading post but between the Curtis homestead and the sawmill there were only two other houses, each a mile apart and occupied by kind but largely backward and illiterate Russians. She went several times with Eva and Ellen to the Baptist Missionary ministry, hoping to meet other men and women of some education and social purpose, even if only driven by their missionary zeal, and she had tried to inaugurate a few acquaintanceships that foundered swiftly on her inability to commit her soul to their beliefs. There was a school, but it was a Sunday school, lessons administered by the reverend’s wife, and Clara soon found herself solely responsible, and underprepared, for Hercules’s education. The books she’d brought with her were those curious and intricately illustrated books in Dutch, French and Italian she had acquired with the Icarus trunk and some of her father’s former volumes on the art of painting, for which Hercules exhibited no evidence of inherited skill. His skills, it developed, first to her disapproval, and then with her slow acceptance, were in the outdoor life, a husbandry of animals both large and small, following Asahel and Edward through their chores, growing stronger, more robust with every passing month, even as she grew more pale, despairing and alone. Her initial attempts at kinship with Eva reached a level of polite ease but never ignited into a bond of shared ambition. Eva’s ultimate desire in life, Clara had determined, was to be a wife, a wife and then a mother, to continue her present routine, an existence that was distinguished by its service to others, and Clara had watched her flirt shyly but convincingly with every unmarried man at the Sunday services. Asahel, alone, afforded Clara the opportunity for conversation beyond the mere exchange of pleasantries and domestic business, but there were not enough leisure minutes in the day to accommodate shared discourse. They were always working, it became clear to her, at something that would never have a lasting meaning or lasting effect. Her life, their lives, seemed to be being abraded by the daily drudgery, diminishing away. She had never known such physical labor, nor guessed the price that it exacted on the mind, not only was her body taxed in ways she’d never experienced before, but her ability to engage in playful thought was fleeting. Her skin grew rough, her mind grew dull, her hope grew dim, and the only happiness she knew was in watching Hercules radiate the natural joy of his existence. Work was what defined each day — tending the stove, heating water, carrying the chamber pots to the outhouse, cleaning them, cooking, slaughtering a chicken, cleaning it — and work, the labor of it, was what drove her into dreamless sleep each night. Then one day in late March a false spring broke from the coastal winter gloom, the sky was clear of clouds from early morning and the sun shone in a bright and faultless sky. Clara decided to hang laundry on a line stretched between two fir trees beside the house and as she was wrestling a wet bedsheet through the mangle, Edward suddenly appeared in the yard with a leather ball and kicked it high into the air. Hercules, followed by Asahel, ran to retrieve it, and a game of kick-and-catch ensued among them. Clara heard them call to one another back and forth as she stretched the bedsheet on the line and pinned it. Then she heard Hercules begin to laugh — it was a sound as bright and sunny as the day — and she peeked around the sheet to watch. Hercules was running with the ball while Edward and Asahel ran after him, dodging and faking, and all the while Hercules was laughing, laughing as if sadness had never touched his life, as if he were a tiny child again and innocent of death’s swift thoroughness. She wondered briefly if he would have ever been so happy in St. Paul, if their parents hadn’t died, and she was suddenly overcome by a grief so sudden and weighty that it knocked the air out of her chest and shook her shoulders as she cried. She hadn’t cried this way when her parents had died and now she cried as much for the loss of them as for the loss of her former self. She hung onto the sheet so she wouldn’t fall but her pity for herself bent her over and she couldn’t catch her breath between her sobs. It was as if she’d saved up all the grief of the last months for this moment and she couldn’t bring herself under control — nevertheless, she was aware that the leather ball had suddenly bounced past her and when she turned to look, wiping at the tears flooding her vision, there stood Edward only inches from her, staring at her with those blue eyes. Again, he didn’t speak. But as another wave of weeping overwhelmed her he stepped to her and pulled her head onto his chest and held her tightly in his arms. She could feel the whole length of his body pressing against hers, and she could smell him. There was a vein pulsing in his neck where his shirt was open and she watched it for a few beats then put her lips to it and closed her eyes.