Maude Brown's Baby (5 page)

Nina found the book she wan
ted: a history of famous photographers. “You’ll recognize these names from books I’ve shown you before,” she said. “You once favored the old-school artists.”

Donald nodded. He finished pushing Elsie from his
mind, then began turning pages slowly front to back. Mrs. Carhart wanted him to discover something for himself, and she’d been moving to this point for months.

“Each of these photographs
looks like it could be on a museum wall,” Donald said.

“Exactly so!” Nina
swept her hand over the open book. “These photographers are trying to duplicate paintings. That is what they do in portrait studios, and it is what they do outdoors.

“Yes,” Donald said
, then reconsidered and disagreed. Some teachers would be angry, but Mrs. Carhart encouraged it.

“What about Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs? Surely you can’t say he was trying to duplicate art.”

“Yes, I would,” she said. “Did you know that Brady and others often altered a scene before photographing it? Remember O’Sullivan’s
Harvest of Death
?”

He did. She’
d shown him that print—one of her late husband’s more gruesome acquisitions—during his last visit. It was said that O’Sullivan had assistants arrange the bodies to improve the composition.

“Now let me show you something else.”
She opened a new volume to a page marked with a snip of green ribbon. “What do you think of this?”

Velum pro
tected the print. Donald lifted away the thin tissue and studied the black and white photograph before answering. A muscular worker was shoveling coal, his bare arms and back glistened. Sweat streaked the black dust on his white skin. The only light came from the open furnace door. Flames from the firebox lit the lower half of the worker’s face, stressing his strong jaw but hiding his eyes. All that showed was his strength.

“I feel like I’m looking at a machine.”

“Excellent, Donald! Now you are seeing with your mind, not just your eyes.”

She showed him a dozen more prints
, each as strong as the first: young girls working in a textile factory; dusty prisoners in a Mississippi chain gang watched by white men on horseback with guns; five coal miners, none more than twelve years old, taking a break for lunch.

Donald turned each page sl
owly, then froze on one. It was less dramatic but somehow more real than the rest. It showed a country lane raked in morning light. Buggy tracks ran wide nearby and narrow in the distance. Two children, a boy and girl, appeared to be on their way to school. The camera was closer to their bare feet than to their heads.

The childre
n were near enough that their faces were cropped from the top of the frame, leaving viewers to focus only on the books they carried—his bound with a leather strap and hers in a flour sack—and their clothes. They were ragged, but clean. Behind them a thin young woman, small as a twig in the background, watched as they walked away.

Donald forgot he was
in the library of an elegant home until its owner spoke. Her voice was soft. Briefly, she touched the back of his hand.

“You s
ee, Donald, none of these are posed. The photographers were documenting life, using their skills to tell a broader story.”

“Documenting life,” she’d said. Donald thought of that on the trolley ride home. He often saw things as if looking through the viewfinder of a camera, but until recently, his goal
s were composition and detail: How did the angle of the street fit the frame? Was there a good range of contrast between shadow and light?

“Is that the best you can do?” Nina asked one day after looking through some prints he’d brought for her to see. She began pushing him then, and slowly over the last year, she had changed the way he made pictures.

Clarence Stokes was repairing the fence when Donald got home. Age had made him more meticulous. Instead of squatting easily on the ground as he used to do, he now began each project by setting out a pair of sawhorses he kept in the stable he called a “garage,” even thoug
h the Stokes didn’t own a car. An old door resting flat on the sawhorses formed a workbench. His tool box sat at a comfortable height on one end, and a broken gate rested in the middle.

“Hi Donny. Fetch me them two boards yonder by the shed.”

“Sure, Pa,” Donald said, scattering chickens as he trotted across the yard.

“And my hand
saw from the garage,” Clarence called.

“Here you go,” Donald said a minute later. “Ma will be happy to see that fixed.”

“Yep,” Clarence said, grinning through his moustache. “I’ll build up credit for this.”

“Did Jake come by?”

“Jus’ left a few minutes ago. Says to tell you he’s goin’ to Galveston this evening and wants you with him. He’s comin’ at five. Some kind of trouble down there?”

“We’re not sure, Pa. Elton Sparks was working
on a story, but he didn't come back. Now one of the editors wants Jake to get some photos and to find out what he can about Elton.”

“You boys be careful. Galveston’s turned mean since the gamblers
and whores moved in. Goin’ to get worse, too, if Prohibition starts next year. Them crooks will run things for sure.”

Donald smiled at
the salty wisdom.

“Thanks, Pa, we’ll be careful.”

“When yer ma and me lived there, things was different. Better, I’d say, even though there was still enough meanness to go around. Did I ever tell you ‘bout the time me ‘n old man Hammers went
…”

“I remember, Pa. Sorry, but I’ve got some things to do before Jake gets back.”

“Fair ‘nough,” Clarence said, picking up the broken gate.

Back in his shed, Donald stopped to examine Elton’s
Speed Graphic, then began taking it apart. He opened his journal and drew two parallel lines below the day’s first entry, then wrote
Sunday, mid-afternoon
.

He looked up from the broken camera,
thinking again of Galveston. What were his parents doing, exactly eighteen years before? What did they see? Gathering darkness? Punishing rain? Certainly those, but when did they realize it was no ordinary storm? When did they know they were trapped?

Donald shook his head, willing himself back to the task at hand. Inhale
… hold … exhale …

Elton’s
camera was in rough shape, just as Jake described. Donald bent over his journal to begin the list of parts he’d need if the camera could be repaired.

“At least the film holder is intact,”
he said aloud as he wrote.

“There he goes again, talking to himself,” Cletus used to say.

Donald straightened from his workbench and touched a picture of Cletus that was pinned to the wall. He didn’t mind the family joke.

Retu
rning to the film holder, Donald eased the half-inch thick wooden frame sideways, removing it from the back of the camera. Springs on each corner snapped the ground glass back in place.

“Good. T
he clips still work.”

The black wooden frame, about the size and thickness of Donald’s journal, held two sheets of fi
lm, one on each side. Eight identical film holders were in Elton’s bag. From the way the dark slides were inserted—black tabs out—Donald knew that both sheets of film from the camera and four sheets in Elton’s bag had been exposed. White tabs on the remaining six holders told him that the film inside had not been exposed.

He s
et the camera aside, pulled back the curtain of his darkroom and checked his pocket watch. Just time enough to process and dry the film.

Two hours later Donald
heard Jake’s car. He slipped a manila envelope into one of Mrs. Carhart’s books and stuffed it deep into his traveling bag. He rinsed the last of the chemical trays, hung his rubber apron on a nail, grabbed his duffel and left.

Clarence was already leaning on the driver’s side door, where he and
Jake were sharing jokes. Naomi had ham sandwiches and apples ready in paper bags, one each for Donald and Jake. She intercepted Donald.

“Here’s your supper, Donny. Do you have you
r extra pair of glasses and clean underwear?”

“Yes, Ma,” he said, hoping Jake had missed that last remark. He kissed Naomi’s cheek, waved goodbye to Clarence and hopped into the car.

“So,” Jake said as they pulled away, “you got clean underwear?”

Jake eased
into the shade of the Rice Hotel, grabbed his camera bag and duffel, then tucked the Sunday
Chronicle
under one arm. He peered across the street, scanning tracks at the Interurban station. He turned to Donald.

“So wh
at about the draft? Will you register Thursday?”

“Sure, didn’t you, when it was your turn?”

Jake ignored the question.

“Look,” he said, walking toward the station. “That war never should have started in the first place. I voted for Wilson because
he said he’d keep us out. Now we’re in the thick of it. We’ve got what Wilson calls the ‘Committee for Public Information’ telling lies, but all they want is for boys who don’t know any better to sign up. Who can you trust?”

“I trust my own feelings,” Donald said.

Jake laughed.

“Your feelings?
Where did they come from, some speech by a Four-Minute Man? The CPI pays those guys to wave flags and get fellows your age to fight the evil Huns.”

“No
, Jake, I’m thinking about Cletus. It’s not fair he’s in France and I’m not there to help him.”

People standing on the sidewalk stopped their own conversations, and some b
egan staring with more than curiosity.

“Look, Don, do you really think the whole German race turned evil overnight?”

Three men were following them now, staying close enough to hear.

Donald glanced back nervo
usly. Jake pushed ahead, jaw set. Rather than holding his tongue, Jake’s voice rose.

“We’re being manipulated
by powerful old men.”

Jake turned to Donald
, stopping to better make his point.

“Boys just like you
are in German trenches, shitting their pants and wondering how the hell they got to be in such a mess! The Brits, the French, Canadians and now Americans are doing the same!”

“Slacker!” someone shouted.

“Coward!” a woman called.

Donald adjusted the strap of his duffel and gra
bbed Jake’s arm. Four more idle men—all too old for the draft—drifted in their direction.

“Do
n, do you really believe everything the CPI says?” Jake growled. “They make trench warfare look like some patriotic game. Get your ass shot off if you want, but I’m staying here. I say the propaganda our side puts out is no better than what the Germans are doing.”

Donald
eased Jake toward the right track. Under the thin fabric of his summer jacket, Jake’s upper arm was a bundle of steel. He shrugged off Donald’s grip.

Passengers scrambled
for seats, even though the trolley was half full. Donald sat by the window and Jake on the aisle. Donald looked forward, then back. None of others may have had heard Jake’s comments on the street, because there were no more angry looks.

“Where are we staying t
onight?” Donald asked as the electric car pulled smoothly away on its hundred-minute run to the coast. Jake crossed his leg and let one foot dangle into the aisle, then balanced his hat on his knee. A soothing clack-clack vibrated up from the wheels through the seat.

Running the fingers of both hands through his hair, Jake pressed his head back against the leather seat and sighed.

“I know someone with a spare room,” he sa
id, finally calm. “Clara Barnes owns a house near the Strand and rents rooms in her carriage house to a couple of women. We’ve got the third bedroom.”

“We’re staying in a house with two women?” Donald whispered.

“Yes,” Jake whispered back. “Why?”

“It doesn’t seem proper.”

“You’ll be in no danger.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“Don’t worry about these girls,
they know the ropes. They both work at one of the new clubs along the seawall.”

Donald glanced up and down the aisle. No one seemed to hear.

“Club? You mean a restaurant?”

“You might say that. If you know the right people in Galveston, you
can get a meal and a side dish—like one of my lady friends. All it takes is cash.” Jake leaned back, pleased with his own cleverness and Donald’s distress. “And if you’re not interested in dessert, you can always drink and gamble. That’s what pays the rent.”

Donald watched their shadow run flat across the prairie as the trolley crossed the viaduct over the Santa Fe tracks. It seemed to lean forward, like a runner starting a race.