Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

A few seconds later she was calm and she felt him lessen his hold on her, and then he backed away. Asahel was there, a look of quiet desperation in his eyes, and then Hercules was running past her with the ball and both Edward and Asahel ran after him.

So, in the end, it was love that saved her.

Un-named, unrecognized, at first; and certainly, for a long time, unrequited.

The feeling came unexpectedly and unannounced — an unheralded quickening in the air around her, an excitement of the mind, and, unmistakably, she began to look forward, rather than to dread, each new day. She began to look forward to what each new day might bring — a glimpse of him, or an encounter, a look, perhaps a word. She began to recover a sense of well-being, a sense of purpose, even if it was only to engage in a fantasy of doing something that would make him stop and notice her or saying something that would make him smile. But in the same week of their embrace Edward had disappeared again and she was left to daydream and to draw ungrounded and wildly optimistic assumptions. When he returned he barely noticed her, which only fueled what she now acknowledged had become a full-fledged infatuation. It wasn’t him , she told herself. It wasn’t specifically for him that she pined, but for the embrace, that moment when, surrounded by another’s arms, her body had seemed less of a burden, had, in fact, seemed light. But then she’d see him and she’d realize her obsession was not an abstract passion like an artist’s, like her father’s passion for his work, but that it was a lover’s passion for the object of desire, for the object of her love. She was in love, and she had no one in whom to confide, no one from whom to seek advice and counsel, so she sought her mother in her mind, her mother’s ghost, her mother, who would have no doubt approved enthusiastically, encouraging her along the most reckless and outrageous path. He had embraced her, hadn’t he? And that stood for something, didn’t it? Despite his silence and his distance. But his silence and his distance stood for something, too, she knew. Stood for something far more certain and established in the man than any rare signal of emotion. Still her inclination to delude herself was too attractive: to know the physical embraces that her parents must have known, to breathe the scent of someone’s skin and feel his pulse against her lips — that was a seductive, even necessary, self-delusion. If it had happened once, surely it would come her way again. It would have to.

But it didn’t.

Edward stayed to himself, a revered but inaccessible cipher on the family’s periphery, until one day in May when he rode into the compound with a large contraption wrapped in blankets and strapped onto the back of the buckboard. The Curtis women came out on the porch, followed by Clara, as Asahel and Hercules helped Edward grapple the mystery item to the ground and unwrap it.

“What are we supposed t’ do with that ?” Ellen asked derisively.

“ Enjoy it, Mother.”

“Well what is it?”

“A bathtub, I believe,” Eva suggested.

And not any ordinary tub for bathing, Clara saw. Shaped like a dancing slipper, high in the back, curved and snug at the front, it was hammered from a single sheet of copper which made it lightweight and portable, bright as a penny.

“Where did you get this from, brother?” Asahel teased. “From that house of fancy women?”

Edward colored. “ Language , Asahel,” he scolded.

“Well I’m not havin’ it in the house,” Ellen maintained.

“Fine, we’ll keep it out here, then,” Edward told her.

“Don’t see why you go wastin’ your money on what we don’t need,” Ellen complained. “We got tubs already. Two of ’em.” Heavy, nickel buckets you had to stand in, Clara thought, next to the stove where you heated the water. And then struggle to carry the whole mess outside to dump it when you were done.

“It’s too pretty,” Ellen went on. “The Lord cautions against ostentation,” she reminded her son. “What were you thinking?”

Edward touched the back of the tub with his palm and let it glissade down the curved and smooth lip. “That it might bring pleasure to someone,” he said, his blue gaze fixed on Clara for what she thought was noticeably too long, while her heart lurched, before he and Asahel carried the tub onto the porch. There it stayed, for a month, unused by anyone, although Clara wiped it clean every day, reliving, in her mind, the way he had looked at her when he spoke the word, pleasure. Aren’t you tempted? Eva asked her, sneaking up behind her one day while she was polishing the tub with a soft rag.

Clara faced her, her color high, and almost said, It’s mine .

“I’m tempted,” Eva admitted. “Let’s fill her up and—”

“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Ellen had snapped. “You tell her, Amelia, she’ll listen to you . God is watching what you do, Eva. He’s counseling your future husband.”

Clara rolled her eyes as if she were conspiring with Eva, but she had determined in that moment that she would find a way to claim the tub’s first bath, one way or another. Because the pleasure was intended to be hers. And then, as if fortune, or what Ellen would have deemed to be God, were smiling on her, her opportunity arrived a few weeks later in the form of the Baptist Missionaries’ annual week-long summer retreat. Ellen was going, of course, as was Eva; and to her surprise, Hercules had asked to go as well, because their farrier was a member of the sect and had offered Hercules instruction in the craft if he were to join them for the week. Please , Hercules had wheedled in his most charming way.

“They want your soul,” she tried to scare him.

“Oh I know that,” he told her, smiling. “It’s learning a trade ,” he bartered, playing on her greater fear that both of them might never break the bonds of living off charity.

“All right,” she acquiesced. When Hercules heard hoofbeats he thought of horses. She thought of unicorns or zebras, and she was secretly thinking of the baths that she could have, when everyone was gone.

Asahel would drive them in the buckboard, and no one knew where Edward was nor when he would return, and as the day of their departure dawned Clara was kept awake by the realization that she’d be alone on the compound for the first time and, strangely, this awareness left her feeling more excited than alarmed. She’d come to know the two Indians by their names, Mopoc and Modoc, and she had come to deal with them through sign language and through pictures that she drew, whenever the two of them came looking for work when Edward was away. They were harmless, she had learned, dimwitted and a bit slow to grasp her well-designed instructions, but they were, in the end, useful to the household. Once a week, usually on Sundays because they knew the other women, with whom they didn’t want to deal, would be away at their Sunday services, the Indians would wait by the barn for Clara to come to tell them what she wanted for the week. Squirrel? No squirrel. She hated cooking squirrel — they were tedious to clean, there was no meat and what meat there was was gamey. Yet every week they brought her squirrels. No rabbits , she would tell them and draw a picture of a rabbit, draw a strong black line through it to mean no rabbits yet week after week they brought her rabbit carcasses on poles until she understood that the line that she’d been drawing through her rabbit picture translated kill to the two Indians. So she’d learned to draw, then shake her head. Draw — show the picture — shake her head. And they would shake their heads. And still they brought her squirrels and rabbits when what she wanted them to hunt was boar, wild turkey or a deer, something she could salt and cure for more than just one meal. The butcher wagon came with its salt beef, dried pork and bacon twice a month, but she would rather give the household money to the Indians who brought her better quality and were, to be honest, cheaper. She was lying in the dark on the bed Edward had bought for his parents, thinking about what kind of picture she could draw to make Mopoc and Modoc understand she did not need the usual ration of meat this week because the others would be going away, when, in the room next to her own, she heard Eva stirring, heard her through the thin wall using the chamber pot, and Clara was on her feet, the anticipation of this day of independence culminating in the sudden thrill that it was here. She dressed silently and quickly, listening first to Eva’s movements then to the movements of Ellen — the hiss of her urination — and then, in her bare feet, carrying her stockings and her shoes, she tiptoed through the kitchen. Light was barely rising in the east, the birds were stirring in the realm of thinning shadows and the air was sweet with pine and the clean brine of Puget Sound as she sat down on a porch step to pull on her stockings, then stopped, noticing the two pails sitting there, filled with fresh pumped water. Edward , she understood. She stepped into her shoes without lacing them and stood. And there he was, energetic shadow, coming round the corner of the house, bending down to pick up something from the yard.