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.
No one could have been more gracious to Ellen than Amelia in her loyalty and optimism; but charity exacts an attitude of deference, regardless. It exacts a posture. Ellen shrank before their eyes. Especially after Raphael, her oldest child, picked up and lit out for the territory one cold night, taking nothing, leaving nothing but his past behind. No words were exchanged, no gratitude for his Existence, no short or long good-byes. Here one day; and gone the next. A family ghost. Sixteen, he was mourned by Ellen who enlisted Clara’s father in a search, but nothing ever turned up to explain where Raphael had gone. Seduced, abducted or kidnapped, he was never heard of again by any of the Curtises. Among them his name — that divine talisman of Johnson’s choosing that was supposed to be a blessing — was never spoken. And although Ellen took her son’s disappearance hard, and shrank at least an inch beneath the burden of its sorrow, she nearly lost another inch beneath Johnson’s next proposal. Maybe running from The Law but certainly running on empty and the surety that only prophets enterprise, Johnson wrote to Ellen to announce that he and Edward were headed West by train to make their fortune.
Where palm trees grow like cotton, he had written.
What a heartbreak, Clara thought.
What an ass, her father clarified.
Johnson swore that he had heard on good authority that there was gold in the Yukon and the prospects of that mineral had already left a trail of lucre all along the coast of the Pacific from California to the great Northwest — lumber money, shipbuilding, the fur trade. For decades now, a new Pacific city in the North had started gaining muscle. Seattle had supplied the timber that kept the Asia trade afloat. There was money to be made there, Johnson wrote. He and Edward would find a plot of land and build a house and send for Ellen and the other children within the year.
She had heard it all before.
She had heard it when he left her in Minnesota to go off and join God’s War against the South in ’62. Heard it when he wandered back, War’s demons in his eyes and in his ardor. Heard it when he took their second youngest son with him to vent his ardor on the unsuspecting Minnesota woods.
This wild talk of Johnson’s.
Always preaching to her about the blandishments of patience in a woman. About what waited in the future. As if her life on Earth were meant to be a single solitary wait. For what?
He had never even asked where Raphael had gone, or why.
If it hadn’t been for Clara’s mother, Ellen would have slipped into a long night, but Amelia kept her spirits up and kept her going, and then, miraculously, Johnson started sending letters as he’d never done before. His letters fueled Ellen’s and Asahel’s and Eva’s hopes. Whether falsely or not, it didn’t matter, Clara saw: there is no other quality of hope than that it floats a proposition. You can’t un hope a thing. To hope against a hope is still a form of hoping. Hope is something that’s the same thing as its opposite. It’s a thing that is the same thing as its shadow.
Seattle.
“So far away. But it must be a Christian place…” Ellen had attested to Amelia. “…if Johnson’s there.”
“I’m certain that it’s very civilized,” Clara could remember her mother consoling. “We hear they have the telephone. Very modern. And there’s a credible college there. With full female enrollment. Universal suffrage.”
Ellen’s facial muscles had pinched her mouth as she’d repeated, “…suffer-age?”
But as the boastful reports had continued to arrive from Johnson by the post it had been revealed that Seattle, itself, the city, the boomtown, was not, precisely, the current locus of the Curtis family’s hope. The land that had been purchased — (God knows how, Clara’s father had remarked, perhaps enviously) — lay not near the inland channel but off-land, on an outer island, facing not the port nor the shipping lanes nor the city but, well, water. Facing the Orient. Or, if you were to draw a straight line: facing Russia. But Edward had cleared this tsarist-facing parcel and Edward had dug the foundation and Edward had quarried the stone for the hearth. Edward had planed the spruce trees and the cedar. Edward had raised the roof beams. Edward — who was in all ways except name Head-of-family — Edward had built them a house.