In the village where he had gone twice a year to trade his pelts, the storekeeper thought of him just once, in the spring.
“Where’s that old trapper?” he asked his clerk assistant.
“The one with the beaver pelts?”
“Yeah. Isn’t this about his time?”
They kept a lookout for my hermit grandfather for a week or so, expecting to see his deerskin jacket appear, his bowed head, the fringe on his pants dirtied by the spring mud. They listened for his voice, unused to words, his yes and his no, his lack of language. What they watched for, what they listened for, did not come.
And no one ever saw my hermit grandfather again.
The old man would have sat quietly with me and felt the sun pass overhead. At the end of the day he would have turned to me and said, “Well?” He would have held out his hand to me, and we would have gotten up together. Our muscles would have been cramped from a day of sitting and not moving, a day of pretending to be primeval animals. We would have walked out of the woods together. The old man would have understood that all I wanted was that one day, one day of seeing the place where my hermit grandfather had lived and breathed and thought his thoughts. One day of mourning. I would never have gone back.
I went back into the house through the garage door. Tamar was in the bathroom, the jar of artichoke hearts emptied and rinsed on the kitchen counter. In my bedroom upstairs I pressed my nose against the cold windowpane and looked out at the freak snow, blue in the darkness, and the light of the moon. Orange light flickered against the blue-white snow and the darkness of the woods. If you were a skier skiing through the foothills of the Adirondacks, on your way north to a patch of primeval forest near Vermont, you would be able to see where you were going by the light of the flames, their fierce heat burning up all the fake book reports I had ever written.
Certain trees need fierce heat to regenerate. Take the lodgepole pine, for example. Lodgepole pines do not grow in the Adirondacks. Even in a patch of primeval Adirondack forest, you would not find a lodgepole pine. They are high-altitude trees. They’re huge. They can grow to be extremely old. But to reproduce, a lodgepole pine needs intense heat. Only then can a lodgepole pine dislodge its seeds. Baby lodgepole pines grow in the charred earth that is left after a forest fire. In order to have a chance at life, baby lodgepole pines must be born in flame. That’s not the kind of tree that grows in the Adirondacks.
After I found the rusted pioneer pot, I washed it and dried it to prevent more rust, and I stored it with my metalworking tools. The old man had given me a pair of tin snips and a solder iron. He was going to train me in the art of welding, but we ran out of time. We didn’t know that we would run out of time, but we did. I put the rusted metal pioneer pot in the back of my closet, in an old wooden apple crate that Tamar and I found once when we drove up north to Deeper Lake.
My hair is starting to grow in where the burned scalp was. I lift up my fingers sometimes to touch it and feel its featheriness. It’s dead, I remind myself, but it feels alive and lovely despite its deadness.
In my twelfth year I learned the importance of usefulness as well as beauty. I began to see consistency among that which is inconsistent. I came to understand the art of possibility. Those were the ways that the old man had saved his life, and they are what he taught me. I was his apprentice, and he was the master.
The first night I ever saw the old man, black shapes moved through the trees, like shadows or bats flying low. I didn’t see the old man at first. He moved behind light. Orange flame flickered in front of him. Something black behind the flame was what I stared at. The black shape bent and leaned, curved and straightened. I knew I was watching a metalworker. I knew that he was lighting lanterns.
The old man would be dead before the next winter was out. I didn’t know that then. That’s part of what being an apprentice means. An apprentice might be set loose at any time. She has to go on alone, remembering what the master taught her. She has to be able to see the world as separate but connected parts, joined not by letters and words but by relationships, and the possibility of beauty.
That first night all I knew was that someone in Nine Mile Woods was joining metal together, lighting up the forest. He was making something useful, something beautiful and full of possibility for the people passing by in the woods, something that I couldn’t yet see or understand. But I was a child then.
Reading Group Guide
1. One of the underlying themes in Shadow Baby is art—what it is, the people who make it, the people who appreciate it. (Think about, for example, Clara’s soliloquy on book reports versus actual books.) Clara believes that the old man has taught her the “art of possibility, and the possibility of beauty.” What do you think the book is saying about the process of creating art? What are your own feelings on that subject?
2. In many ways the novel is a study in opposites. For example, Clara lives for words, while the old man is illiterate. In what ways do such contrasts serve to illuminate and deepen Clara’s understanding of life?
3. In what ways do Clara’s fake book reports mirror her world? In what ways do they represent her inner psyche? Why does she burn them all up in the end?
4. Shadow Baby opens with this line, “Now that the old man is gone, I think about him much of the time.” Clara is twelve years old as she narrates the book, looking back on the past year of her life. Because she is still very young, she is not capable of having a long perspective of time, yet the book ends with this line: “But I was a child then.” Think about other fictional child narrators, for example, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and Laura Ingalls in the Little House books, and discuss the events behind their transition into adulthood. Compare and contrast them to Clara.
5. Clara’s mother, Tamar, practices weekly in a church choir. Yet Tamar never attends church, nor do the old man or Clara. Is there nonetheless some religious significance in the book?
6. What is the significance of the title?
7. While it is true that the mother-daughter relationship in the novel is difficult, did you find it believable and real? Why does Tamar refuse to answer Clara’s questions?
8. To Clara, “real life” is often indistinguishable from her fantasy life. What purpose does her wild imagination serve?
9. The story of Clara’s relationship with CJ Wilson is intertwined with the story of her chickens. How do the two stories both reflect and enlarge each other?
10. In the book, one person looks at a dented tin can and sees garbage, another looks at the same can and sees the possibility of beauty in the form of a lantern or cookie cutters. How does the book play with ideas of how individual ways of seeing influence one’s experience of the world?
11. Clara is obsessed with pioneers and their stories of incredible hardship and triumph over adversity. Can the book be viewed as a metaphor (or possibly an anti-metaphor) for the traditional American mythology surrounding its immigrant past?
12. Think about the opening scene of the book in which Clara glimpses the old man hanging lanterns in the woods. Think about the ending scene in which she is burning her fake book reports in the snow. How do these two scenes, which “bookend” the novel, mirror each other? What do they tell us about how Clara has changed in the interim?
Copyright © 2000 by Alison McGhee
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Dat
a
McGhee, Alison, 1960–
Shadow baby / Alison McGhee.—1st ed.
I. Title
PS3563.C36378 S53 2000
813′.54—dc21 99–047315
eISBN: 978-0-307-46259-6
v3.0
Table of Contents
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
PART TWO
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Shadow Baby Page 20
