The Shadow Catcher

“—Mr. Curtis?” she asked and he explained, “The Reverend,” and she understood he meant his father. “We were in a cabin there one night where a child was dying and the Reverend was attending to the child’s soul in the back room and I was in the front room with an old man, the father or the grandfather of the dying infant. I had taught myself to read by then but my skills were rough and my understanding of a range of words was fairly narrow, limited to Scripture readings and the meager conversation Reverend and I would make between the two of us. But I could read and I was always hungering for books, seeking to improve myself. And there on the supper table in the front room of this cabin was a newspaper gazette, already fairly old and yellowed and the old man saw me looking at it and signaled, Go ahead. It was called The Illustrated Christian Weekly, published in New York and I remember it cost six cents and how this family came to be in its possession I will never know because they were well and truly isolated from the world in a way that makes our island living here seem like the quick pulse of civilization. On the cover of the Christian Weekly was an assemblage of what appeared to be drawings—gravures—made from photographs of geysers on the Yellowstone Reservation taken by a man called William Henry Jackson. I remember the paper was dated Saturday the 30th November, 1872, and that I didn’t know what the word geyser was, nor how to say it. Inside the paper there was an article written by William Henry Jackson, himself, and I learned that he had joined the Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories in 1870 when he was still a young man, traveling with two 20 x 24-inch cameras and three hundred glass plates. And because of his photographs of the Yellowstone region, Congress had established that part of the United States as a national reservation, a park, signed into law that year by President Grant. And I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do.”

“—sign things into law?”

“—change the course of history with a camera.”

“—then how did you learn?”

“I wrote letters to camera clubs, posted them from towns and forts we visited, sometimes waiting more than a year for a response. I started asking questions and I taught myself. A lot of what it takes, photography, is understanding chemistry and simple industry, the same as manufacturing or brewing. And believe me I am still a raw recruit. I have a lot to learn. There are many in the field whose advances and techniques leave me far behind them, in the dark.”

She remembered her father talking to her mother about ways he had been trying to improve himself, techniques he was struggling with so as not merely to mimic others of his profession, but to set a standard against which others might seek to improve themselves.

“—a self-made man,” she said.

“What man is not self made? At the end of that night, after the Reverend had delivered his blessings on the dying child and stood about expecting recompense, the old man in the front room told him, ‘I’ll let your calf here keep the paper and we’ll call it even.’ When the Reverend found out he had gone away with a Christian Weekly that sold for only six pennies, he beat me with it. Then he burned it. Which was the worse offense.”

That night they slept in a more intimate, though chaste, proximity and at a certain moment on the morning of their third day alone together Clara was standing at the water pump in the center of the compound and found herself looking around and wishing, Were it always such. Only two of them. Without the others. Except for Hercules. Except for worrying about her brother’s welfare she could tolerate this life in the wild with all its hardships as long as she could be alone with Edward. And when she turned to carry the two pails of water to the house Edward was standing on the porch, leaning on the walking stick. “I feel useless,” he said when she approached. “I need something to do.” He pushed aside a thin dusting of ash with his bare foot before sitting on the step and looking at the still smoky sky. “Have we finished all the volumes in your magic Icarus chest?”

At the bottom of the chest, under a lace and velvet ball gown of Amelia’s, Clara found two objects from her father’s studio she had forgotten that she’d packed.

“Two treasures,” she teased Edward, holding them behind her back. “I want you to have them.” She sat next to him on the smooth pine porch step in a pool of sultry light from the occluded sun. “First, these…” She handed him two L-shaped pieces of thin wood, thin as yardsticks, each arm of the Ls nine inches long and joined at the cornice with a bright hinge. The wood, light enough to float, was varnished to a russet sheen and inlaid with kaleidoscopic circles, opalescent as the scales of fish.

“What are they?” Edward asked.

“My father made them.”

“They’re beautiful. — but what are they?”