In the morning, when she enters the kitchen, she finds Brid feeding Pauline breakfast. No one speaks until Fletcher comes in looking cheerful.
“Did you hear?” he says. “They’ve picked Sargent Shriver to replace Eagleton.”
“Who?” says Brid, sounding annoyed.
“You know Sargent Shriver. The guy who founded the Peace Corps.”
“He’s married to a Kennedy,” adds Maggie. She could also add that he went to Yale with Fletcher’s father.
“Oh, that guy,” says Brid. “Sorry, but I’m officially not giving a shit about the election. No longer my country, no longer my problem.”
“Well, I think he’s fantastic,” replies Fletcher. “God knows the Democrats needed some good news.”
“They’re still dead in the water,” says Brid.
“Not everyone’s as cynical as you—” Fletcher begins, but Maggie can’t stand to hear any more.
“Why don’t you two cool it?” she says. Brid and Fletcher turn to stare at her.
“What, we can’t argue about politics now?” says Brid.
“You’re not arguing about politics.” Maggie takes her coffee mug in hand and starts for the door. “I don’t know what you’re up to.”
With everyone settled into work, pouring concrete for the drive shed and scything long grass where they intend to plant more trees, Maggie feels obliged to join them. Whole days go by without a cartridge being loaded. Where does the watching Maggie go? Sometimes, when she’s in the middle of watering the garden or emptying ashtrays, she has a sudden sense of being observed and turns to find precisely no one there, just the shadow of another self taking her in. The few occasions she does remove the camera from its bag, she’s unsettled by the comfort it brings. Eventually she stops resisting and spends her days with her eye against the viewfinder.
By experimenting, she learns the art of cinematography fifty feet of film at a time. She figures out how to bounce light so as to soften it on skin. She learns that everything becomes cool blue if you take the UV filter off the camera outdoors, and if you leave it on inside, it casts the room in an orange glow. She starts to open and close f-stops, making reality seem more real by stealing light or occluding it. For interior shots during the day, a supplemental lamp makes things clearer, but she prefers scenes illuminated by a single source because the shadows look more natural. In the afternoons she waits for the soft, slanted sunlight that comes through north-facing windows.
Then she discovers the time-lapse function. At a single frame a minute, the clouds race over the orchard, shadows wheel, and dawn changes to dusk in thirty seconds. It’s the way the cherry trees themselves must look at things, abiding while the world hurries. Her films gain angles, too. She shoots from her knees, through windows, experiments with slow motion, and becomes fascinated by the ability to zoom. For a while all her shots move from detail to sprawl or sprawl to detail.
Once a week, everyone gathers in the playroom to watch the latest developed film. A hush rises as the lights go down, and Maggie thrills at the whoosh of the projector’s fan ploughing air past the lamp, at the chatter of the machine taking hold of perforations in the strip. She’s less enamoured of the grainy Super 8 film stock, which is easily marred by scratches, spots of dust, and eyelashes jigging onscreen, but no one else appears to mind. They don’t even seem to notice the imbalances of composition, the shadows intruding where she wanted light. They clap and catcall, laughing at the showboats and the camera-shy alike, demanding certain reels be played again. There are gasps over the footage of the hurricane and hooting at Pauline’s antics during the staged tour of the house. When these latter scenes play, Pauline hides her face in Brid’s lap, overcome by all the staring adult eyes, though whether she’s embarrassed by their attention to her or to her image, Maggie can’t tell.
One night they watch a sequence Maggie shot in the orchard just after dawn. Sunbeams splay through the branches almost horizontally, while the trunks are split by light and shadow, their bark silvery purple in the main but turning lichenous green toward the roots. There’s no movement, no human presence, and Dimitri makes a crack about artistic pretension that Maggie decides not to hear. Then Jeffrey calls out, “It’s John-John!” Maggie has viewed this clip several times before, admiring the hues and textures, but until now she has never noticed that perched up in a fork is the outline of a cat. Although she shot the footage a week ago, the Centaurs’ boys want to see right away if John-John’s still in the tree. A search party is dispatched, returning without success. At each subsequent screening Maggie’s obliged to replay the clip, every projection eliciting new tears from Judd and Jeffrey, until Rhea complains that they show more attention to the cat now than they did when it was around.
Another much-requested sequence begins with a shot of an inflatable wading pool. Pauline leans forward to dip her fingers in the water and shrieks at the sight of a daddy-long-legs floating on the surface. Judd and Jeffrey run past in their underwear to jump over a lawn sprinkler, Judd kicking up his feet as he goes, Jeffrey doing his best to follow suit. At the barbecue pit, Fletcher presides over the sizzle of hamburger patties while people sit nearby eating and slapping at mosquitoes. Two teenage girls in halter tops pass a Frisbee back and forth across the lawn, seemingly unaware of the young men watching from the picnic tables. The shot pans back to Fletcher.
“Thirty people,” he says, smiling into the lens. “Can you believe it? Two months and already we have thirty people. Just today we planted half an acre of trees. We’re doing something incredible here.” His voice is declamatory, his enunciation precise, as if he’s speaking to a bigger audience than just the person behind the camera. “With our sweat we’re making a living for ourselves. There’s a wholesomeness in it, a sense of well-being—” He pauses as though trying to remember a line. “There’s a decency here. We’re new to this place, but somehow it feels like it’s always been ours. It’s a young country; we’re going to help make it grow.”
A second later, Wale appears from nowhere, a flash of sinew and tattoos, grabs Fletcher by the waist, and carries him to the wading pool, Fletcher struggling and laughing at once. When Brid spots them coming, she pulls Pauline from the water. Wale plants his feet behind Fletcher’s and in one smooth motion twists and falls, dragging him down. Water flies in all directions; there’s a pop like a gunshot. The two men are a tangle of drenched limbs engulfed by sagging plastic.
At this moment during screenings, the residents of Harroway cheer. Afterward, when Fletcher makes unsubtle hints about Maggie excising the clip, she tells him she needs to keep a comprehensive record. Privately, she has her own concerns about why the clip should be so popular, but still, she’s pleased with the reaction it gets. Some proud, reckless part of her thinks everyone is more together while watching her footage than at any other time. The only person never in attendance is George Ray, whom she imagines stretched out on his bunk as the reels are playing, glad to have the barracks to himself. She can almost imagine joining him out there, sitting at the table and sharing the silence, but she takes too much pleasure from the screenings to abandon them.
The films are still more rudimentary than she would like. The camera always trembles. Shadows turn faces into blots of darkness, or lens flares splash them with light. In one sequence she has too many close-ups, while in another she has stood too far away. And there are many things she can’t properly capture: the porch step always on the verge of snapping underfoot; the air near the wrecking yard after a rain, heavy with the smell of motor oil; the screeching of raccoons at night as they fight and fornicate on the roof.