The Shadow Catcher

“Owns His Shadow scouted sites and translated for Mr. Curtis in ought-eight, ought-nine. Owns His Shadow spoke the English Mr. Curtis liked. He had been transported from the reservation to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania when he was still a boy, so he had learned the white man’s ways before he broke with all of that and made his brave escape back to the Navajo. I have a picture of them. Owns His Shadow and Mr. Curtis.”

“I would like to see it.”

“Well it’s home in Tuba.”

“I haven’t been to Tuba City for a while.”

Again, that focused look. “What were you doing in my nation?”

“Research.”

“—on the rez?”

I pick up The Shadow Catcher and hold it so the spectral image in the stone faces both of us. Invisible at first, the image forms before my eyes the longer that I look at it, as if it were exposed but still invisible light held captive on a page of photographic paper floating in the shallow pool of a transparent chemical bath. After several seconds a familiar likeness gathers in the fine lines of the stone. “This man, actually. Curtis.” I turn the bracelet in my hands, appreciating every subtlety. “This is really beautiful,” I say.

“Father said that Curtis thought so, too. I’d like to know how he let it go from his possession.”

“Well he’s been dead for fifty years. And in his last thirty years or so he was always scrambling just to make ends meet. Lost everything. Gave away the copyrights to all his American Indian work to J.P. Morgan’s heirs to cancel out his debts to them. In the end he went a little crazy and spent a couple decades right here in Nevada just prospecting for gold.”

“Father lost all touch with him.”

“I’m not surprised. Aside from that one picture that you have of them, did he photograph your father?”

“Owns His Shadow?” Lester grins. “Father would not let another steal his image.”

“But you said there is a picture—”

“In it, father looks away. And points. Like this.” He swivels on the bench and points away from us, toward a sign at the opposite end of the hall that reads EMERGENCY EXIT.

“But your interest is with Curtis, not my father,” he intuits.

“Used to be. I wrote a book about him.”

“And it’s finished?”

“Yes.”

“And you talked to those who sat for him and had their shadows stolen?”

“No.”

He makes a little bubbling sound deep in his throat and whispers, oh. He looks toward the open door into the dying old man’s room again. “You should have waited.”

“For what?”

He inhales deeply and resumes the posture I had found him in, but with his eyes wide open now, not closed, his eyes locked on the open door.

“Until the silent ones have spoken,” Lester murmurs.

clara and edward

The great Seattle fire started on the lowest floor of a wooden building owned by Mrs. M. J. Pontius on the northwest corner of Front and Madison Streets in the city’s harbor district.

Jimmy McGough, a paint store operator, leased the lower floors from Mrs. Pontius and the first fiery accusations pointed to an un-tended glue pot in his back room, but the spark that set the conflagration roaring actually leapt to life from the hands of John E. Back, a careless cabinetmaker, working with a combustible shellac one floor below.