Marianne Wiggins - The Shadow Catcher

Her known world had collapsed within a single violent instant of her parents’ deaths six months ago. Not only had she lost the people she loved most, she had lost the world that had defined her. She was too old to think herself an orphan, too habituated to her parents’ love to think herself destitute . Never, in all her childhood years and childhood fantasies, had she entertained the possibility that she’d end up living in the West, living in the wild, living anywhere at all except within the comforts and the confines of a modern city.

Everything about her education and her guidance by her parents had habituated her to a way of life that had revolved around ideas, around a larger social order, around a daily conversation with the culture that men and women had constructed against odds down through the ages in outposts as far away as Athens, Antioch and Alexandria. Her mother had taught piano theory in the front room of their family home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and performed winter concerts under gaslight chandeliers in the conservatory of the Scandinavian Club. Her father was a portrait painter, a man who had translated the St. Paul Gazette into Latin over breakfast for amusement, who had traveled both to Holland and to France to learn the alchemy of paint and gesso. There had been laughter in their lives, music and impromptu joy, puns in foreign languages and the company of people who delighted in the unexpected transport of a Dvo ák scherzo or stood mesmerized before a canvas of a woman clutching violets in her snow white hand. It had been a shock to learn how close to ruin her parents had maintained the pretense of a comfortable life, how the bright patina of her parents’ lives had hidden darker currents— debt —how everything, even the piano and the trays of oils and pigments, had been hocked and balanced in thin air on borrowed money, mortgaged to their spent tomorrows. Had she been their sole survivor, Clara would have mustered the required guile and courage to apply herself to modest labor and found herself employment in the city of her birth — that’s what her parents’ legacy had taught her; that’s what her mother would have done. Clara had to her advantage the example of her mother’s perseverance as an archetype. While she was alive, her mother, Amelia, had sewn and cooked, performed Chopin études backward, laughed and joked and told Greek myths for bedtime stories. Traduced Ariadne, vain Icarus had been Clara’s childhood imaginary friends — extensions of her mother’s storytelling. Theseus, Prince of Athens, had been her own Prince Charming; Medea, her first knowledge of the ideal of womanhood gone wrong. From her father she had learned different types of tales, painted narratives confined in gilded frames. Her father had told her about paintings he had seen in Europe, icons of religiosity, the archangel Gabriel lighting through a window on a cloud of fire to announce to the young Virgin that she, alone, among All Women, had been elected by God to bear His child. A girl could get intoxicated by such stories. Especially in St. Paul, Minnesota, where happy endings waited through the heavy winters, where the winters were experienced as weights of snow, and where the nights were haunted by the untranslatable messages in the music made by trains.

Here — out here in the Territory — the nights were haunted by the banshee notes of loons and the persistent sloughing, like a giant’s respiration, of the Puget Sound. Here, her nights were haunted by her memories of happier days and by the horror of her parents’ corpses still too vivid in her mind. Had she been their sole survivor she would have stayed in Minnesota to find employment, but since their deaths her duty and concern had been for her younger brother, eleven years her junior, her parents’ bonus baby and the center of the family’s adoration. Hercules . Lullabies had been written for him; paintings painted. He had been doted on and coddled and, unlike his namesake, was more like fresh milk in a loving churn, his nature undisturbed and thick as cream. Hercules: only eight years old, he was as feckless as an egg in an abandoned nest. She couldn’t leave him and she couldn’t find a way to raise him on her own. Entreaties for help to her parents’ patrons and their coterie of artist friends in the days following their deaths amounted to sympathetic but polite nothings . Only Ellen Sheriff Curtis, her mother’s childhood friend, responded with a concrete, though less-than-perfect, Plan. Come to Washington Territory , she had telegraphed.

Train fare enclosed.

Think of us as family.

Despite the invitation’s gloss of intimacy, charity was charity, Clara knew — its chain of command ran in one direction, only. There is no power in receiving, and the possibility that she and Hercules might find themselves indentured to the Curtises was among Clara’s several fears about transporting herself and her hapless brother into unknown territory. Washington — a Territory, not a State. A place so backward it couldn’t organize its citizenry to vote themselves into the Union. What sort of place was this Port Orchard on the Puget Sound? Was it a town — or a stockade? How far away was the nearest piano, the nearest concert hall? As distracting as these questions were to her, her chief concern about accepting Ellen’s offer was Ellen Sheriff, herself, now Ellen Sheriff Curtis. Squat, pale, timid, her mother’s friend had always reminded Clara of that ewe in every herd that manages, through her own passive stupidity, to strangle herself in a fence. A tragic character but without the heroism. Maybe that was part of why Amelia had befriended Ellen — again and again through their long friendship, Clara’s mother could play fiery Athena to Ellen’s tepid Hestia. Or maybe there had been a former fire in Ellen that her marriage had extinguished.

Johnson Curtis had apparently swept Ellen off her feet the way a very bad sneeze can knock a person sideways.

Shiftless, relying on his personal communication with God to get him out of scrapes, Johnson fancied himself an orator, although every bon mot he delivered had been spoken previously, by someone else. In the post — Civil War boom era when businesses in St. Paul flourished on the swell of profiteering, Johnson’s every venture failed, one after another, until, called by God, he declared himself A PREACHER and took off into the hinterlands of northern Minnesota with his second-born son to preach, administer baptisms, intone last rites and marriage vows to the dubiously devout in exchange for a roof over his head, a bit of bread and perhaps a nip or two of spirits less powerful than God but nonetheless dang strong. He abandoned Ellen in St. Paul with their other three Biblically-named children — Raphael, named for the principal Archangel (and not, as Clara’s father hoped, for the Renaissance painter); Asahel, whose name in Hebrew means Made by God ; and Eva, the Biblical First Woman. The son that Johnson took with him to portage rivers, cook, beg, watch after him and play his servant, had been christened ELIDAD, a name in Hebrew which means whom God has loved . The Biblical ELIDAD had been a chief of the tribe of Benjamin and one of the appointed to divide the Promised Land among the tribes. But Elidad -the-son-of-Johnson, only twelve years old when his father pressed him into service in the north woods of Minnesota, woke up one morning and rebelled, if not against his servitude, at least against the pretense of his name. Raphael, Asahel, Eva and Elidad Curtis would henceforth be known to their father, mother and the world as Raphael, Asahel, Eva and EDWARD. EDWARD Curtis. Edward Sheriff Curtis, in honor of his mother whom Johnson had left behind, penniless and destitute except for the enterprising efforts of Clara’s mother, her childhood friend, Amelia. Amelia organized a place for Ellen, Raphael, Asahel and Eva to live; organized lessons for the younger two and an apprenticeship for Raphael; organized piecework with a seamstress for Ellen, organized donations of food, furniture and clothes from Christian charities and her non-believing artist friends. Ellen and her daughter Eva were habitual guests in Clara’s family home — most frequently on Sundays when they’d arrive from church just as Clara’s parents were beginning to surface from their Saturday nights. “Aunt” Ellen became a fixture in the house — more like a maiden aunt than a contemporary of Amelia’s, especially after Johnson and Elidad (now Edward) had been gone more than a year and there was no positive assertion that they were ever coming back.