Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

“— you , no? — once upon a time? I can still see the likeness…”

“—jesus,” I can’t help muttering.

The clipping is from a 1965 Lancaster New Era article announcing a production of the play Our Town at Manheim Township High School and there are two thumbnail pictures of the play’s leads, me (EMILY WEBB) and Dennis Landis (STAGE MANAGER), a kid I went to high school with.

“—how the hell ?”

I make a point of memorizing the street address on the license before she snaps the billfold closed and seals it back up in the plastic bag.

“I’m really sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how this man came to have that picture of me in his wallet.”

“Well maybe Mr. Shadow can help shed some light on this.”

I blink.

“—Mr. Shadow.”

Maybe she’s been talking to the dying for too long.

“He’s down the hall.”

“—Mr. Shadow is?”

“Yes.”

“—is that your way of saying Death ?”

“My way of saying ‘death’ is d-e-a-t-h but if you want to find out more about our Mr. Wiggins you should go and talk to Mr. Shadow down there on that bench at the end of the corridor. The Indian. He was with our Mr. Wiggins when he had his cardiac event.”

I stare down the hall and notice for the first time a single figure sitting upright on a bench against the wall, presumably asleep.

“Hasn’t budged for hours,” she whispers. “Won’t leave. Some sort of tribal thing…”

At my approach the man doesn’t move and I’m convinced that he’s asleep so I kneel down to where our faces are parallel and touch him lightly on his sleeve. “—Mr. Shadow?”

Immediately his eyelids open and I’m instantly his focus. “Lester,” he tells me. I introduce myself and we shake hands, his more callused palm engulfing my smaller, softer one.

“Are you the daughter?”

“—no, but he seems to be using my father’s old identity.”

Lester frowns as if the concept makes him sad.

I sit beside him.

“I understand you came in with him,” I say.

“The medics wouldn’t let me in the ambulance. I followed in my truck.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

He looks at me and says, “He’s going to die.”

I hold his gaze for a long moment and there is nothing uncomfortable about it, merely two unrelated strangers recognizing an apparent binding truth.

“How long have you known him?”

I can see him count: “Sixteen hours.”

“I presumed you were—”

“He came into my daughter’s store just after ten o’clock yesterday morning — the first customer. My daughter and her husband run a native craft cooperative in a building on Sahara that used to be a pawn shop. People come in with their pawn because they think my daughter’s place is still a trading post.” He grins. “I came across from Tuba City to mind the store while my daughter and her husband are in Teotihuacán, Mexico. She’s working on her Ph.D. in indigenous societies.”

“You’re Navajo,” I venture.

“What gave it away—?”

He flashes another grin and pulls his single silver plait forward from his neck so that it falls across the placket of his denim shirt. Then he lets his hand drop to an object wrapped in jeweler’s felt beside him on the bench which he moves onto his lap and carefully unwraps. “He came in and I could tell he was there to try to pawn or sell me something and the first thing he puts in front of me is this. Museum quality,” he says and with both hands holds up a headdress made of beads and quills and silver coins.

“I’ve seen one of these before,” I say and he, again, focuses his dark eyes on me. “In a photograph. By Edward Curtis.”

He starts playing Indian , looking ancient and severe which kind of creeps me out but then he lowers the headdress onto the square of felt again and touches it. “No one in my family will ever trade in tribal pawn, we will not touch it, most of all the pieces that you see in jewelry stores in Santa Fe and Phoenix have been stolen one way or another, sometimes from burial sites. They tell you in those stores that native people have brought the pieces in for cash to purchase liquor or to make the next support payment but that’s not the truth. A piece like this — how much do you think the Heald Museum would offer? I’d have to ask my daughter but I think this is Plains Indian, perhaps Chinook or Nez-Percé, from the 19th century. But — touch it — it feels as if it’s just been made. Someone’s taken expert care of it. When I looked at it I had to ask myself what is this elder Negro gentleman doing with this artifact? He saw me hesitate and I think he thought I had no interest in it so he quickly showed me this .” He unwraps a second item from the felt, a bracelet. It’s made of very high standard molded silver but the square stone in the center, two inches on each side, is unlike any that I’ve ever seen.

“—bone?” I wonder.

“Snow turquoise.”

“—snow?”

“ White . White turquoise. Very, very rare. But look at it more closely.”

He passes it to me and I turn it toward the light. A copper vein runs through the center of it, almost in a perfect oval and within the oval shape other copper-colored lines delineate some features while two distinct round shapes of blue turquoise stare out, like eyes.

“It’s a face,” I marvel.

“My father called this piece The Shadow Catcher. And he’s the one who made it.”

He turns the bracelet around and shows me the silversmith’s stamp on the back in the shape of a standing bear. “That’s my father’s mark. ‘Owns His Shadow.’ That was my father’s name. Bear Clan.”

“So of all the pawn shops in all the cities in the West—”

“Native craft cooperative.”

“—so of all the native craft cooperatives in all the cities in the West this guy with my father’s papers and your father’s bracelet walks into—”

“This is not my father’s bracelet. This one is.”

He slides up his sleeve and shows me a similar one, not a duplicate, exactly, made of the same stone but with only a trace of the other’s distinct facial image.

“He made two bracelets from the same piece of snow turquoise. One he kept for himself. That’s the one that I wear. The other, with the face in it, he gave to his friend because the face inside the stone looked so much like him.”

I stare at the image in the piece of turquoise — copper-colored hair and beard, two piercing blue eyes…

“Who was his friend?”

“Edward Curtis. The photographer you mentioned.”

“Are you messing with me, Lester?”

I have to ask but I can tell he isn’t.

“When the man showed me this bracelet I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t help it. I looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And his eyes grew round and he parted his lips as if to speak and clutched his chest and then fell down. I went around the counter and I held his head and he looked at me, desperate. I had to leave him on the floor to go call 911 and when I came back I could see he’d had a stroke, one eye was closed but that other eye—” He stops, then tells me—“ pleading . I think he knew that he was going to die. He was trying to tell me something. So I had to follow him to here. With these”—he indicates the jewelry—“and these.” He shows me a set of keys and I notice what appears to be a house key among them.