The Shadow Catcher

She read without a pause for what must have been at least an hour before she felt him doze beside her. She sat still and watched him sleep for several moments then she slid silently from the bed leaving the book beside him on the pillow. She changed quickly from the shift into a skirt and blouson in anticipation of the physician’s arrival, then she left the room, keeping the door ajar. She lit the flame beneath the kettle and set out a tea service to refresh the physician, then considered finding a nightshirt or clean clothes for Edward. Enough time had elapsed for the Indians to have reached someone for help, she thought, as she crossed the open ground between the house and the barn, pausing only slightly to wonder at the wood aroma in the air — not fresh timber, exactly, more like the smell of a cold hearth. The light was strangely eerie, as if a storm were coming, though the sky was still. She entered the barn by the door to the bunkhouse where Hercules and Asahel slept at night and then she realized she hadn’t visited these quarters in months. There were two beds, neatly made up — and a closed door, leading to further rooms that she had never visited, and as soon as she opened the door she knew she had entered on Edward’s presence, into the room where Edward dreamed and slept. Side chapel, she immediately thought. On those few occasions when she had entered into one of St. Paul’s cathedrals she had been struck by the asceticism of the side chapels, the niches, those unadorned recesses washed in reverential light where people went to be alone, with God. That’s what Edward’s room was like, a sanctuary pressed into service by unrelenting solitude. Everything was placed, as if on an altar: nothing was superfluous. There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a straight-back chair, a writing table. Nothing on the walls, no windows. There was something very masculine about the look and feel of it, its readiness for duty, its spartan abnegation of unnecessary frill. On the writing table, an oil lamp with a box of sulphur matches, a dictionary, a jar of ink and a single pen. A stone, riddled through with veins of green. A small gold nugget. On the chest of drawers, standing side by side, the collected Leatherstocking Tales, a cheap edition, pages foxed and marked in Edward’s hand in pencil. She slid the top drawer of the chest open to discover cotton shirts, three of them, starched and pressed and folded, and a pair of silk pyjamas, black, of the kind you saw on Chinamen, with braided toggles on the top and a drawstring waist on bottom, same as Edward’s doeskin pants. The middle and the bottom drawers were empty. Why would Edward build a house, she wondered, an entire edifice to house his family, and then decide to live apart? It made no sense to her. In a corner of the room his carved, polished walking stick stood against the wall next to a canvas knapsack in which she found a pair of laundered stockings and his razor. She took these, the walking stick, a shirt and the pyjamas, and was about to leave when she noticed a slanted cubby door plumb with the wall, into which a grown adult would have to duck to enter. Thinking it a closet where Edward might have kept his boots and shoes and other clothing she unlatched the door and pulled it open and found herself facing a two-storey-like stall, faced with cedar, entirely dark — a darkroom — but for a seam of light coming from the ceiling which she realized must be the outline of a window in the roof. Groping, she found a cord and pulled it and a thick black shade snapped back to reveal not a cubby nor a closet but a large well-organized meticulous workroom, half the size of her father’s attic studio on the top floor of the St. Paul house. “No one is as organized in his work as a sailor has to be,” her father had once told her, “for him it’s life-or-death. Everything must have a place and everything must be in place. Shipshape. Like a painter’s palette. Everything is organized. Every color separate. Everything at hand when needed. I could do it in the dark, you see? Work my palette with my eyes closed. Sail it. Like a captain in a good ship on the sea. That’s what my palette is: my ship.” So was the room that she was standing in, a sort of regulated vessel. Shipshape. Ordered. Rows of corked brown bottles organized by size labeled AMMONIUM IRON OXALATE, FORMALDEHYDE, FERRIC AMMONIUM CITRATE, POTASSIUM FERRICYANIDE. There were empty beakers, crude brushes, more like spatulas, with flattened edges, a jar marked WATER (RAIN). There were hinged-back wooden boxes and rectangles of glass and a sheaf of thick dense paper, still she was slow to fathom what it all amounted to until she saw the pictures on the wall. Until she saw the camera.

Photography, the object of her father’s scorn.