“You speak your mind, don’t you, Scout? A rare find in a woman.”
“—then ask yourself how you would render that, that quality about me, in a photograph.”
For the second time, he almost smiled.
“I must see to chores—” she said.
“—don’t go.”
“—well if I don’t you and I will have no supper and the chickens and the mule will starve.”
She placed Gulliver’s Travels in his hands and stacked more books from the Icarus chest beside him. In a short while she had fed and watered all the animals, peeled potatoes, rolled a dough and placed a green apple cobbler in the oven. The sky outside burned over Seattle, and by the time supper was ready it was a bright light in the darkening canopy. They ate boiled potatoes, roasted ramps and smoked fish off trays in the bedroom while she read to him from the Swift novel, and then for dessert she served the green apple cobbler with clotted cream and a splash of rough apple brandy she’d been fermenting in a jug. She asked him to explain the photographic process to her and she had to lengthen wicks in both the lanterns several times as they talked into the night until, perhaps as a result of the apple brandy, she could no longer suppress her yawns. She stood.
“—where are you going?”
“I’ll sleep in Eva’s room. The walls are thin — well you know that, you built them — just call out if—”
“Sleep here.”
He patted the bedsheet beside him.
She looked around, involuntarily, as if someone else were watching. “Edward, I—”
And then, extraordinarily, he smiled, although that, too, may have been the apple brandy.
That first night they touched only a few times, Edward reaching for her hand to press against his hip after she had turned the lantern down, but she was so afraid of the unknown, of a stranger in the bed, that for a long while in the dark she barely breathed. She was surprised, then, to discover at the dawn her face pressed to his back and her arm across his chest, his fingers intertwined with hers. And then, as she lay watching, she felt him come awake, lift their arms together and kiss her hand.
“I’m going to walk today. You promised.”
“I promised we would try.”
But Edward wasn’t one for trying anything without succeeding.
Even before he would allow her to make breakfast he insisted on trying to stand but she succeeded in advising him against it without first trying to put pressure on his leg and hip from a prone position. There was no further inflammation nor discoloration when she examined him and the first thing she asked him to do was to try to bend his knee into his chest—“Slowly,” she cautioned — then she worked his bended knee in slow rotation. When this caused him some discomfort she advised staying off his feet for several more days but as she stood before the stove a while later, making biscuits, Edward hobbled in using his walking stick.
“You are a damn fool, Edward Curtis,” she warned him.
“—but a walking one.”
His face bled of color and she saw his leading arm begin to shake.
“—I’ll need your help if I’m to stay up any longer…” and as he almost fell she caught his sudden weight against her shoulder and guided him back down the hall and back to bed. All through that second day he exercised at intervals, frequently with her support, and by suppertime he was standing on his own, if only for brief moments, without the walking stick. She read to him, they talked, he told her how he’d first become impassioned with photography. “Ten years ago, now, and Mr. Curtis and I were on the circuit up in northern Minnesota—”
“—Mr. Curtis?” she asked and he explained, “The Reverend,” and she understood he meant his father. “We were in a cabin there one night where a child was dying and the Reverend was attending to the child’s soul in the back room and I was in the front room with an old man, the father or the grandfather of the dying infant. I had taught myself to read by then but my skills were rough and my understanding of a range of words was fairly narrow, limited to Scripture readings and the meager conversation Reverend and I would make between the two of us. But I could read and I was always hungering for books, seeking to improve myself. And there on the supper table in the front room of this cabin was a newspaper gazette, already fairly old and yellowed and the old man saw me looking at it and signaled, Go ahead. It was called The Illustrated Christian Weekly, published in New York and I remember it cost six cents and how this family came to be in its possession I will never know because they were well and truly isolated from the world in a way that makes our island living here seem like the quick pulse of civilization. On the cover of the Christian Weekly was an assemblage of what appeared to be drawings—gravures—made from photographs of geysers on the Yellowstone Reservation taken by a man called William Henry Jackson. I remember the paper was dated Saturday the 30th November, 1872, and that I didn’t know what the word geyser was, nor how to say it. Inside the paper there was an article written by William Henry Jackson, himself, and I learned that he had joined the Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories in 1870 when he was still a young man, traveling with two 20 x 24-inch cameras and three hundred glass plates. And because of his photographs of the Yellowstone region, Congress had established that part of the United States as a national reservation, a park, signed into law that year by President Grant. And I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do.”
“—sign things into law?”
“—change the course of history with a camera.”
“—then how did you learn?”
“I wrote letters to camera clubs, posted them from towns and forts we visited, sometimes waiting more than a year for a response. I started asking questions and I taught myself. A lot of what it takes, photography, is understanding chemistry and simple industry, the same as manufacturing or brewing. And believe me I am still a raw recruit. I have a lot to learn. There are many in the field whose advances and techniques leave me far behind them, in the dark.”
She remembered her father talking to her mother about ways he had been trying to improve himself, techniques he was struggling with so as not merely to mimic others of his profession, but to set a standard against which others might seek to improve themselves.
“—a self-made man,” she said.
“What man is not self made? At the end of that night, after the Reverend had delivered his blessings on the dying child and stood about expecting recompense, the old man in the front room told him, ‘I’ll let your calf here keep the paper and we’ll call it even.’ When the Reverend found out he had gone away with a Christian Weekly that sold for only six pennies, he beat me with it. Then he burned it. Which was the worse offense.”
That night they slept in a more intimate, though chaste, proximity and at a certain moment on the morning of their third day alone together Clara was standing at the water pump in the center of the compound and found herself looking around and wishing, Were it always such. Only two of them. Without the others. Except for Hercules. Except for worrying about her brother’s welfare she could tolerate this life in the wild with all its hardships as long as she could be alone with Edward. And when she turned to carry the two pails of water to the house Edward was standing on the porch, leaning on the walking stick. “I feel useless,” he said when she approached. “I need something to do.” He pushed aside a thin dusting of ash with his bare foot before sitting on the step and looking at the still smoky sky. “Have we finished all the volumes in your magic Icarus chest?”