The Shadow Catcher

Their approach was from higher ground and as they neared, Edward saw the Sioux had chosen a broad geological depression in which to congregate their tipis, all white and of the same design but different sizes, hundreds of them, thousands, arrayed across the valley floor like totems from another world and as he gazed down at them he had the sense that he was flying, flying out of present time into a visible history, and later he would write that in that moment he experienced the most profound feeling of emotion in his entire life.

Love.

He would never call it that, but Clara knew it in a heartbeat, as soon as he began to try to tell her why he had to go, go back to the place where he had felt it first, keep going back, to try to reinstate that moment of original devotion.

In 1900 he was gone five months.

The next year, seven.

Following Clara’s good advice he wrote the children letters from the field as if, in his imagination, they were right in front of him — and they thrived on eighty words, perhaps a hundred, for as long as he was gone.

He took Harold with him, every summer, and Harold, following camp protocol, was the first among the children to begin to call him “Chief.” Home for a rare visit when Harold was thirteen, Edward informed Clara that he had arranged for Harold to be educated by some friends of Mr. Roosevelt’s “back East.”

“What do you mean? — what ‘friends of Mr. Roosevelt’s’?”

“A banker and his wife living on Long Island. Childless. Harold will live with them and they will pay his schooling.”

“Harold has an education here.”

“He’s going to New York.” Then: “Don’t look at me that way, Clara. You let your brother go, and he was younger.”

“They gave you money, didn’t they?”

He waved her off.

“You sold your son.”

“It will be good for him.”

“—it will be good for you.”

“He will thank me later.”

“—and who in God’s name will you ever thank?”

After Asahel had left, the Curtis women had moved in with him — and with Harold gone, and Edward gone most months, Clara was alone with Beth and Florence in a house that suddenly seemed too big, with too many rooms. She looked into the possibility of selling it but discovered there were several liens against it and when she advertised for female boarders she was surprised to find that not a single applicant was willing to pay rent in a household that included children. Her children were, after all, her single greatest joy, their laughter echoing in the empty entrance hall, proof that happiness existed, even in a vacuum, and that her life had had a purpose and a meaning. Beth and Florence, in their banter and their games, mirrored what was best about the life that she had made with Edward, and she kept his accomplishments and his adventures in the forefront of their conversations so they would remember him, so he would remain a presence in their daily lives. But the truth was, without Harold to remind them of the energy of boyhood — and with an absent father — the household became, inevitably, centered around girlish things, reading stories, playing make-believe in dress-up clothes and linen sheets discovered at the bottom of their mother’s painted trunk. The games they played, the stories she encouraged them to tell to each other, established heroes in their minds — princes on white horses slaying dragons, impoverished boys who learn one day that they are kings. The men they saw each day, however, were the milkman and the greengrocer down the street, the trolley driver and the man who swept the gutters.

It was no small surprise, then, when, late one afternoon, a cowboy in a broad-brimmed hat and riding boots appeared.

Hercules.

“—you should have told me you were coming!” Clara greeted him, not meaning to admonish, but embarrassed by her lack of preparation, self-conscious of the way she looked.

“—I’ve aged,” she fussed, seeing how he looked at her.

“Are you a real cowboy?” Florence asked.

“He’s your real uncle,” Clara told her.

“Father is an Indian Chief,” Beth announced. “That’s what you’re supposed to call him.”

Hercules had grown into a man and Clara couldn’t keep from smiling at the rugged, easy figure that he cut — too large, it seemed, for anywhere but the outdoors. In the last ten years he had gone from boyhood into acquired wisdom of a sage, from Tacoma to Wyoming on to Colorado where he had his own small ranch. He had brought a show horse to a client in Portland and had decided on impulse to board the train to come and see his sister.

And he could see at once that something weighed on her, despite her grace.

Her eyes were not the eyes that he remembered. Her confidence, so strong when they were in their youth, had left her.

“Let’s have some tea, and you will tell us all your news,” she said and led him to the kitchen where, he noticed, she suddenly seemed flustered. He watched her open one cabinet, and then another, seeming to hunt for things that were not there.