The Shadow Catcher

The paint store only added volatility to what would have been a bonfire, anyway, with nothing but rows of timber buildings standing between the initial tongue of flame and the quenching water of the harbor. Twenty-nine blocks, in total, burned, destroying the entire business center, the railroad terminals and all but four of the port city’s many wharves. Seattle’s population on the morning of the fire was estimated between twenty and thirty thousand and it had only recently instituted regulated ferry service on the Puget Sound as well as a civic agenda to replace hollowed-out logs with lead pipes in the sewer system. There was an electrified trolley in both the lower and upper streets, but indoor plumbing was a rarity and a recurrent tidal ebb of sewage perfumed the smudgy mudflats by the shore. There were two newspapers in English, another in Norwegian, and an occasional lynching of an Indian, a Chinaman or a Negro. After the fire came the first of many population booms, the city’s numbers rising to 42,837 in 1890 owing to the open importation of cheap labor to rebuild the city. The governing white class welcomed even more Chinese and Indians into the population as exploitable non-union crews and within a decade the Klondike gold rush doubled the city’s numbers again. By 1910, twenty years after the fire, the city’s population was a quarter of a million. Meat packing, fur, export-import, timber, shipbuilding, breweries and the U.S. Gold Assay Office gave Seattle an annual income of more than $174 million before the century was done, but it was the summer fire of 1889 that lighted the Sons of Profit’s firecracker fuse. The fire, it turned out, was good: it killed the rats. And, like other city fires — the Fire of London, the Chicago fire — the Seattle fire made the city reinvent itself, for the better. No more timber roofs, plank sidings, cedar shakes and clapboard shanties — having had its heart destroyed, the city turned to stone, refashioned its foundations with rock-solid cornerstones, replaced its former wooden public face with brick and slate and granite.

As Clara did, after Edward left her.

She strengthened her resolve and steeled her heart with harder stuff — burned once, she would not allow herself to be the victim of that firestorm again.

But here he stood, his hands around the halter of the buckboard’s lead, his eyes intent on the woman in the driver’s seat above him. He had been twelve days on the road, on foot, living in the rough and still, she couldn’t help but note, his fingernails were shaped and clean, his beard was trimmed and he had nothing of that ruddy unkempt look that displaced travelers carry on them.

“Where are you going?” he asked her, while his eyes begged a different, deeper question.

“Where did you go?” she countered.

And then, seeing his perplexity: “—without a word?”

“What would you have had me say?”

“—‘good-bye.’ ‘Thank you.’”

His confusion spread.

“Why state what’s obvious?” he said. “Come down from there, Scout. I have things to tell you.”

Clara gripped the reins and glanced from him to Asahel, standing only twenty feet away beside the road, his face revealing his astonishment and pain at witnessing what would have appeared to any passing stranger, not only to him, a lovers’ quarrel.

“Come down,” Edward repeated. “I’ve thought of nothing else. I’ve worked it out. I can make a go of it, I know it, Scout. With your help.”

“Please do not address me as ‘Scout,’ Edward. My name’s not ‘Scout.’”

Again that look of pained perplexity: “—but it’s my name for you.”

“I’m not yours to name. Like a slave or like a piece of…like your chattel.”

“—but it’s who you are to me.”

He gripped the harness and pulled the pack mule to him with his other hand, tying the mule’s lead onto the buckboard’s tackle.

“—don’t do that, Edward. Let go. I’m going to Seattle.”

“Plenty of time for that.”

He raised himself onto the boards and sat beside her. Without knowing how she had relinquished them, she saw he’d taken up the reins.

“Will you want to come to Seattle with us, Asahel?” Edward called and waved his hat. “We’ll be going there to make our fortune—!”

Asahel raised a tentative acknowledgment and started to walk toward them. In the brief time it took for him to join them on the buckboard Edward turned to Clara and stated his proposal. It was five words long. We shall have to marry.

She stared at him.

“We shall have to marry,” he repeated, “if we’re to live the way I want us to.”

She would remember flies were buzzing on the mule and mares, she would recall that flies were on their ears and asses and that the air around her smelled of mammals and that the man in whose presence she always found herself to be most helpless was paying the leathers through his fingers, his gaze focused not on her but on the road ahead when the proposition that would change her life had been put forward as if it were a point of trade at a livestock auction.

“—live the way you want us to?”