The Boys in the Trees (18 page)

•  •  •

People come to the studio for different reasons, and sometimes I stand beside Sam and have the strangest thoughts. Looking at the young man holding a book just so, or the way the families are arranged, a baby on her mother’s lap, a wife with her hand on her husband’s shoulder, children placed according to height, and which ones can sit together without pinching. I stand beside Sam and I’m as invisible as he is, behind the tall camera, and I can look at them and know that they don’t see me at all. Look at
them and see not just what appears in the dark-room, what is inside the frame of the picture they will take home, but all the rest of it too. The flaking wall above the screen Mr. Simmons left behind, painted with pale hills and sky. A woman’s toes tapping, just the toes of one foot, as if she can’t keep everything in. The sisters who look straight at the camera, but reach for each other’s hands.

Sometimes it’s a couple just married, and they come with a few friends, family, who wander about the room. Stand behind Sam and pull faces, trying to make them laugh. Often they’re all in a hurry because there’s a train to catch and I wonder why they’ve made time for this, in the middle of their day, as if it’s not complete unless they have something they can hold in their hands. I wonder if it will help them, years from now, to remember whatever it is they want to remember. How the wedding clothes felt against their skin, the scent from the lilac bush that leaned toward the front door. How they maybe felt that they could never be happier.

I think about the freckle-faced woman too, and why she minded so much. Maybe she was thinking of a time when she’d be gone, when her children would look at her photograph, hanging on a wall or standing on a table, and see those freckles and remember her, but not as she wanted them to remember. Her children growing older and everything fading; I know how that does happen. The smell of her, the sound of her voice, her hand on their hair. They’ll look at her photograph and be left with a feeling, and be left with her freckled face. When they have their own children, those ones might remember a few stories they’ve been told, but for their children’s children she’ll be nothing but a name. They’ll look at her picture and it won’t remind them of anything at all, and maybe that’s why it mattered.
Hers was the first plate Sam let me fix on my own, so perhaps that’s why I often think of her. I thought there was something powerful in the hypo that would keep her face forever, but Sam said it wasn’t that it kept things, but that it washed away all the extra salt that could spoil the plate later, left only what had been touched by the light.

Mornings the mist rises thick off the river, and sometimes when I put my foot on the steps beside the church I can’t even see Sam’s little house, on the other side of the bridge. Then I scare myself, thinking that it won’t be there, that it will have vanished, or maybe never was. It’s a nice kind of scaring, because underneath it I know that the house
will
be there, with the lean- to in back on the river side, the door that swells in the weather, and Sam maybe shut in the dark-room, or maybe just waiting for me.

Evenings when Sam has somewhere to be I go back to my room at Mrs. Bell’s, sit and think about things while the sky goes mauve, then dark outside my window. I could never do what that mountain woman did, set off all alone and sleep by a fire at night, by the horses’ shifting feet. I wouldn’t know where to begin, standing in a grove of trees or by the side of a roaring river. But sometimes in town I see people, or find them stuck in my mind. The little boy who sells newspapers outside Malley’s, or Mrs. Toller with her lost look, staring at the necklaces in the new jeweler’s window. Old Mrs. Hatch in her rocker, with all the lines on her face. Sometimes I see people like that and wish that I had a hand camera, like the new one Sam bought, wish that I could catch them, at just that moment. I might even ask Sam, when Mr. Lett pays for the book and he’s not so worried about money. I don’t know what I would do with pictures like that, if I did find a way to take them. I’d like to borrow Mr. Bell’s hammer
and nail them up all over the wall of my room, but I don’t suppose Mrs. Bell would allow that. Or maybe just keep them all together in one of the boxes we emptied of Mr. Simmons’ things, that day we laughed and laughed.

There was one photograph in with all Mr. Simmons’ spoiled plates, and I kept it out when we sealed everything up again. It was larger, mounted on stiff gray card, with a title in black ink, barely faded, each letter beautifully drawn. The title was
Market Day
, and I thought it must be a joke, although it seemed an odd one. The photograph showed the street by the wide square where the market is held, long before the shed was built. The oak trees there, but so much smaller. It was taken from a bit of a distance, but you could see wagons standing and a few long tables piled with something, one old horse with its head drooping. But there was not a person to be seen, and that was why I thought it was a joke, thought that maybe Mr. Simmons had done something like Sam had, outside Linton’s, that he had gathered up all the farmers and their wives, all the townsfolk walking down the street or bustling about the wagons, squeezing vegetables and arguing about the price. All the children chasing each other and getting in everyone’s way. I thought that maybe Mr. Simmons had persuaded all the people to stand behind him, that they were there in a dark mass, shifting their feet and watching while he took the picture, impatient to get back to their business.

I asked Sam and he took the photograph from my hand, looked at the date written in the corner, and told me to look again.
Here
, he pointed.
And here
. There were things that I had thought were shadows, or maybe flaws in the plate or the bath, and Sam said perhaps some were that. But he told me that a picture taken that long ago, before modern processes, would have
needed a very long exposure, that Mr. Simmons probably stood in his place for five minutes at a time, maybe longer. And because of that, anyone who was moving, anyone walking or bending again and again, anyone driving a wagon down the center of the road, would not be captured, would leave only a faint shadow, a ghostly trace of themselves. Sam said he could tell because there was nothing to cast those smudges, if they were real shadows, not in the places they were. He said that the old horse was probably asleep and that’s why we saw it, and he said that there were probably others, other people who had been moving more quickly and left no mark at all.

•  •  •

It’s very important to keep down the dust, and every day I go over the studio. Beat the mats outside if I can, and run a damp cloth over the big urn that has to be turned so the chip won’t show, the little tables and the pedestals, the shelves where we display the photographs Sam says are the best. They used to be mostly outside pictures, the ones he said he got just right. The light, the developing, what he calls the
composition
. But I thought it would be better to have people, since that’s mostly what he does here, that’s the work that he depends on. Now we have families marching along the shelves, and the beautiful girl with the necklace, slightly larger, so she’s what people see first. I know who that girl is, saw her looking at the house one day when I was shaking out a mat, but she didn’t come in.

There’s a screen in one corner of the studio, with a mirror on the wall behind it, and sometimes when I’m wiping it off I stop and look at myself, wonder if it’s my mother’s face I see. I’m not that many years younger than she was when we were taken and that’s a strange thought, and it makes me wonder if I’m somehow
living her different life. She used to tell us that things could always be worse, but to remember that they could get better too.

Back home there was a tin box, scratched and dented in one corner, hard to open. My mother kept it under the bed and inside was a jet brooch and a folded piece of paper that she said came from a Bible. On that paper were names, going back and back and back. Some of them so faint that even on the brightest day they were hard to make out, and some almost worn away where the paper was folded. But my mother knew them all, and sometimes she would recite them all. Andrew and Christopher and Francis and Edward, Winnie and Beatrice and Thomas. Florence and Abigail and Mercy and Patrick, and on and on.
These are your people
, my mother used to tell us,
and you should always remember their names
. It was my fault, but there was no time to think when Miss Weir and the tall policeman stood in our doorway, blotting out the sun. In what seemed like an instant we were rattling away out of our life and I should have been quick enough; I should have thought to grab that tin box, to somehow bring it with us. But I wasn’t quick, didn’t even remember it until later, lying in the dark, and by then it was much too late.

It’s not so sharp now, but I still don’t like to think of my mother picking her way down the narrow lane. Coming back to our room, whenever she did, and finding other people there. Other people sleeping in our bed, sitting on our chair. Using the tin box themselves, or maybe they had sold it on. I don’t like to think of her trying to find us everywhere, and no one telling her a thing. What I hope is that some little bit of good came from it, that maybe her life isn’t so hard, with only herself to take care of.

I used to wish I had a photograph to carry with me, to stand up on the table beside my bed. One of all of us together, and I used to think that if only I had that it would be a comfort, and
their faces wouldn’t have faded. Now I’m not so sure. The photograph Mrs. Doctor had taken showed all three, with Eaton sitting so close between them, and it gives no idea of how they lived in their separate rooms. When we came to Miss Weir’s she burned all our clothes, told us she did, and it’s true they were ragged things, and not too clean. If I had a photograph I would see that, and maybe remember how cold my feet always were, the times the little ones cried. I would see Jim’s crooked eye and remember that instead of Jim himself, and how we all were together.

•  •  •

Sam always finds it strange when we show someone their mounted photograph and they say,
Why, it looks just like me
. He mimics them later, and says,
Of course it looks just like them, what do they think? What do they think the camera does?
But I don’t think that’s exactly what they mean. The full red lips of the little girl who was Miss Weir, in the painting, would never have been hers in life. Sam’s father might have done that same thing in a photograph, the way he made the sad lines on Mrs. Doctor’s face disappear, but even though Sam wouldn’t, it seems to me that the pictures I wrap up for the sitters show them an idea of themselves that pleases, and he is part of that. How he arranges them, the things he has them hold, or places in the background. Sam’s pictures show them in their best clothes, in light that is the most flattering, close to the people who matter to them. The ones who are not happy, who refuse to pay and say that they knew all along that they should have gone to Taylor, or McKim, they must see something that’s not the way they want to think of it, something that doesn’t fit. That’s what I think, but it’s hard to say in words. When I tried to tell Sam he listened, but his fingers were fiddling with the buttons on his vest.

•  •  •

It doesn’t happen so often now, but there have always been nights when I wake up already frightened. Afraid to sit up, to move at all, afraid to go to the dark window. I have to make my breath come deep and slow so that I can stop the pounding in my ears, so that I can hear whatever there may be to hear. A lonely dog barking or a bit of a song from someone stumbling home. Mrs. Bell snorting in her sleep, in her room down the hall. I lie very still until I hear a sound that tells me that I’m not left alone in the world, that I’m not the last thing alive in the world.

If there’s a high moon on those nights it slips through the gap in my curtains and makes a cold pattern on the wall by my bed. I try to stare at that, just stare at that, and not let the night thoughts in. Things I should have known, or done. I stare at the light and the dark and try not to see Sam settling a hat on his curly head, closing the door like Mr. Simmons, and walking away from everything. Mr. Cowan told me once that all night thoughts are different from day ones, that everyone knows what it is to be afraid, what it is to have doubts in the dark. One of those nights I sat in the chair by his bed while he waited for the powders to work. He liked the lamp kept low, and it was easier not to see the bones beneath his thin skin. He used to say that he’d seen enough, that the world was changing too fast, all the new ideas and discoveries. And he used to say that once a thing has happened, there is no going back. Sam says things like that too, but not in a sad way.

If everyone lies awake in the dark, like Mr. Cowan said, then the mountain woman did too, and I wonder what she told herself, so that she could close her eyes again. It must have been that the plates she packed away so carefully were worth
all the trouble she took. And even Miss Weir, in her hard narrow bed, must have wondered, must have had to believe it was all for the best. Sometimes I see Eaton running with his friends, or rolling a hoop in the dusty street and I think that he’s not so much older than I was; he’s just a boy and I wouldn’t expect him to save anyone.

I wonder too if there was a boy like Eaton, rolling his hoop through the market the day Mr. Simmons took his photograph. Maybe he’s one of those smudges, or maybe there were several boys, girls too, running like children do. Moving so fast they left no trace at all, free to run on into any kind of life.

MR
.
LETT DIDN
’
T
find it, although he prowled through the house, every room, before the windows were boarded up. Looking for answers, looking for an explanation he could present to the old man, who was gnawing at the thing as if it was something personal. Unlike him to be so rattled, and unlike him to have been fooled, if that’s how it was. How often had Marl said, snipping a fine cigar or capping his gold pen with a snap, how often had Lett heard him say,
I didn’t get where I am without knowing what makes a man tick
. Tempting to see it as the first sign of decline, raging about the embezzlement and then sending Lett with the bail—what kind of sense did that make? Good money wasted on inquiries that went nowhere, and then on a lawyer who couldn’t possibly make any difference. It was tempting to hope that the long waiting was nearly done, but Lett knew that kind of thinking was dangerous, that he would have to be even more careful, not let the faintest glimmer show. He
knew how those sleepy, hooded eyes could flash fire, could burn a man up when he least expected it. So he reined in his thoughts and his boots were loud and slow in the rooms of the house, his pen scratching in the little notebook as he entered his estimates of the value of things. Not much, and not much to see either. Dishes on the table, a newspaper, a jacket hanging on a hook. Stains on the floors that would have to be scrubbed out, but other than that it was just a house that a family had lived in, the things they had left behind not worth anything at all.