The Shadow Catcher

Northwest Pacific moisture woke her at the dawn, the damp seeping in to chill her bones and she rose, her limbs and back as stiff as corn husks, and began to feel a low-burning anger tempering her mind and body, firing her action. She went through the day accomplishing the chores, rearranging the position of the bed in the bedroom so that it appeared restored or reinvented and no longer reminded her of what had taken place there. Still, after a bleak supper of cold potatoes standing at the window in the kitchen, looking out, when she had tried to retire to the bedroom for the night she found no comfort in the bed that had been bought for one generation of Curtis men and had accommodated another generation of them — where one had died and another had failed to live up to her expectations — and she passed a second night outside on the porch.

When she woke she knew her time within the Curtis family was nearing its completion. She sat up, looked at the new day, hugged her knees to her chest and looked at the ragged compound and its moldering barn and told herself, as Edward must have told himself the morning he had left her, I need to be quit of here. Even when, or if, Edward returned what future was there here, for them, for her, with the old woman and her pallid daughter in the room next door, the endless chores, the evaporating dreams of his and hers from week to week? But then she remembered moments when her heart had thrilled at what he’d said, the way he’d looked, his courage and his photographs. When he comes back, she started to rehearse, and if he tells me why he left and if he tells me he is sorry to have gone with no parting word or explanation, then…

But he did not come back. The buckboard bearing Hercules, Eva, Ellen and Asahel returned that afternoon, Asahel telling her from behind the reins even before dismounting, “I’m sorry, Clara, I could find no doctor who would leave Seattle, owing to the fire — how is Edward?”

“Edward’s gone.”

He could see that grief had had its way on her, her eyes were sunken, her face gray, as if she hadn’t slept, and he thought his brother dead until Clara asked him, “Did you see him on the road? He took the mule, the camera. Asahel, he’s hardly fit enough—”

“Hear that, mother? Your son is cured — we have rushed back for nothing…”

Yes, nothing, Clara thought you’ve rushed back to your home, your lives. To nothing. She avoided conversation with the women and stood with Hercules as he unhitched the horses.

“Did you see the fire, Clara?”

“Only in the sky.”

“—it was enormous. So bright you could see each building from across the water. Sparks like firecrackers falling in the harbor, then they’d fizz and pop and there would be this ghost, scary shape of steam shooting from the water like the spirit rising.”

“—spirit rising, Hercules?”

He gave her a canny look.

“They’re Baptists, Clara, and they talk that way. And the best part — you know who the heroes were that day? The horses.”

She followed him, leading both the dray mares to water in the corral beside the barn.

“The horses drove the water wagons right up to the burning houses and the fire men, the men who put out fires, they put gunneysacks over the horses’ heads and leather blinders on their eyes so they couldn’t see and then the horses went right up to where the flames were because they’re trained to be obedient…”

“You like horses,” she affirmed, smiling at him.

“I love them. Mr. Silva gave me a book about the role of horses in the history of the world—”

“—Mr. Silva?”

“—the farrier. And you probably don’t know this but it’s really horses that have saved the world. Especially America. Did you know there were no horses here until the Spanish brought them? They were looking for gold, the Spanish people were, so they brought horses on their ships. Can you imagine that?”

She smiled. “No. I barely can.”

“—horses on a ship, I mean a hundred of them. And the boat was only, well, from here to here. The only boat I’ve been on was that ferry that we took, but, still, I can’t imagine what it must have been like, way back then, to cross an ocean in a wooden boat with hundreds of these animals on deck…” He smoothed the silver hairs of the mare’s neck. “Are you feeling all right, Clara?”

“Better for the sight of you.”

“You don’t look your usual.”

She tilted her head and asked him, “What’s my usual?”

He shrugged and petted his favorite animal. “Like a horse,” he said.

“—I beg your pardon!”

“—you know. Noble. And intelligent.”

“I love you, Hercules.”

“Well you have to. You’re my sister.”