by Mary Swan
Those farm children were good as gold, young as they were, but there were always ones that couldn’t sit still, or had a sudden need to stick a finger up their nose. I bought rock candy at Hatch’s grocery, and a big glass jar to keep it in, and I told the children that if they didn’t fidget, didn’t move, they could have any piece that they wanted. I stood right beside Sam, holding the jar, and most of them never took their eyes off it. You’re a genius, Abby. You are, Sam told me, and I walked home over the bridge that day feeling like one of those children, with sweetness dissolving on my tongue.
• • •
The first time Sam took me into his dark-room it reminded me of things I don’t like to think about and I had trouble with my breath, thought that I might suddenly scream or faint. I don’t think Sam knew; he kept on talking in his teaching voice, and I held on to that. I watched him pouring, watched him gently rocking the dish from side to side, end to end, and my breathing eased, the pounding stopped. I found I could see, in the spooky red light, could hear the soft putter of the gas lamp, make out the words Sam was saying, and not just the sound of his voice. He was explaining about the dark, how important it was, and he told me a story he’d read about a woman somewhere in the West, who packed up two horses and went off for weeks at a time, photographing trees and mountains and wild rushing rivers. A woman doing that, he said. And using wet collodion too. I didn’t know what that meant, but I guessed it was something that made her life harder. Sometimes, Sam said, this woman, whose name he’d forgotten, used her own black skirt as a dark-tent to develop her plates, all alone, up in the high mountains.
All the time Sam was telling me this I was watching his hands, rocking the tray, watching how the plate began to change. Parts of it turning black, but slowly, so slowly, and then other parts, lighter shapes, as if an invisible hand was drawing it, as if, somehow, it was drawing itself. I said something like that, and Sam smiled at me in the red glow, said, I’ve done this hundreds of times, really hundreds, but I always think that too.
• • •
When old Mr. Cowan died, he left me some money. Not a great deal of money, but enough for some people to say they’d been right all along. There was never any truth in it. He was a kind man, Mr. Cowan, and even at the end he thanked me for every bit of food I spooned into his mouth. I was sorry to leave my room with the flowered paper, bigger even than my room in the Doctor’s house, but there was enough money to pay at Mrs. Bell’s a few months in advance, enough that I could look for a different kind of work. I bought myself a new hat from Becks’, with a brim that stood up on one side and a feathery plume, and I wore it for luck the day I walked over the footbridge. To assist half-days, the advertisement said, in a busy photographer’s studio. Must be of good character and tidy in personal habits. No mention of the wage but I thought almost anything would do, for work that wasn’t scrubbing and cooking and sweeping out grates.
The first thing Sam said when he opened the door was, My, what a hat, and then he walked me through the few rooms of the house, talking all the time. First the studio, with its jumble of chairs and a cloth screen painted with faraway hills. Shelves on one wall with photographs standing in frames and leather folders, though I didn’t have time to see what they were. In the room he called the dark-room he took the black cloth off the small window and I saw a large stone sink and some kind of barrel, a workbench piled with trays and basins, with other things I still don’t know the names of. A chest of drawers where he said he kept plates and papers, and more shelves on the wall, filled with brown bottles of different sizes, each one labeled with strange words. I would have to learn all this, Sam said, and he asked me if I liked to learn, and I said, Yes sir.
The other room he showed me was the kitchen, and that was in a terrible state. It had one tall window, looking out on the river, and the light that came through showed everything. Sticky stains on the floor and a table piled with books and papers, a heel of bread starting to color and rough crumbs lying everywhere. A knife with something smeared on the blade, and a pot of honey with hard tears dripped down the side. There was a door half open and through it I could see a rumpled bed, but Sam pulled it shut when he saw me noticing. One thing, Sam said. I forgot to say in the advertisement, but can you read and write? Yes sir, I said, and he picked up a limp-covered book from the table, shook the crumbs off and said, Try this. And I read: There is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the sense. And: My life is wasted with heaviness, and my years with mourning. Those words were harder and I stumbled a little, but Sam just said, So you can.
I might have told him, if he’d asked, that my brother Frank and I could both read, that we used to take turns with the green book we had, when our mother had trouble with the light. I might have told him about the classroom at Miss Weir’s, and what happened when we made a blot on the page. But he didn’t ask, just said could I start with a bit of a tidy, and I looked around and saw that I was not done with scrubbing after all.
• • •
Frank was the oldest, though I don’t remember how old. Maybe eleven, maybe twelve. Too big to sleep in the bed with the rest of us, and for a long time he’d been out running messages, selling newspapers, doing other things too, I guess. The first time he came home with silver coins my mother slapped his face, but then she took them anyway, and then she cried. That was when we were all picking rags, ripping the seams of big bundles of shirts and coats and trousers and piling them in other big bundles. If there was no rain we could sit in the doorway, where the light was better. Frank left us slowly, started going out after my mother had gone, sometimes coming back just before she did in the dawn. Sometimes not at all, and then more and more nights like that, until we didn’t see him for weeks at a time. He always brought a little money, when he did come, and a package with bread and other things, and he teased us all like he used to, and my mother watched him with a look on her face.
• • •
I can only know for sure about the ones who have children. Mrs. Bell, my landlady, who puffs her way up the stairs, and I picture her with Mr. Bell, the gray hairs that poke out of his nose, I can’t help it. Mrs. Toller, so pale and whispery, who always greeted me kindly; I used to wonder if she saw the Reverend’s face the way I’ve seen Sam’s, wide open. All the women I see on the street, or in a shop; I look at them, but I can’t imagine that it could be anything the same. Some days I am so full of Sam, so full of the two of us, that I can’t even think; I hear my voice asking for a half pound of cheese in Hatch’s, and it’s as if it belongs to someone else, someone who’s still just walking through their life. Someone as far away as the girl who used to cry, her head pushed down in the stinking straw.
And my mind is filled with the things I’ve learned, things I never thought to wonder about the world. When sunlight falls through the chip in the studio skylight, bands of color fall on the floor, climb a little way up the wall. Sam told me how the rough edge of the chip separated the colors so that we saw them, but they were there all the time, in the everyday light around us. Then he picked up the blue glass dish that held the river stone and the dried rose petals, emptied those things into his cupped hand and asked me did I know why the dish was blue. I didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter because Sam was already explaining. He said that when light fell on the dish some of the colors, those invisible colors that made up the light, were absorbed by it. Fell into it and were trapped there, forever. But the blue part of the light, for some reason that I forget, bounces back to our eyes and makes us think that the dish is the color we call blue. I looked around the studio, looked at all the colors there, the dull red settee and the cushion on the cane chair, the sky-blue shirt hanging on the doorknob and the rich leather folders on the shelf. And I thought about the light falling on all of them at the same time, but each thing being different in what it took into itself, in what it would not accept, but flung back at our eyes. There was a thought I almost caught hold of, but then Sam tipped everything back into
the dish and it was gone. A stray petal drifted to the floor and was crushed beneath his boot as he walked away.
My head was filled with things I learned from Sam, but there was no one I could talk to about them except for Sam himself. I tried to tell Lucy, sitting with cups of tea like we sometimes did, in the Doctor’s kitchen, in the quiet part of the afternoon. It was still strange to visit there, Mrs. Doctor asleep upstairs and the Doctor out on calls or closed in his office. Eaton at school now but signs of him everywhere, a muddy boot by the back door, the trousers Lucy was darning, that looked impossibly large. The same dishes in the rack, the green milk jug, the same life going on without me. I picked up that green jug and I explained to Lucy about the light, what Sam had told me, but she just said, What does it matter? It’s green because it is, because that’s what we call it, what does it matter why? And then she said, Watch yourself, Abby. Don’t do anything foolish. And she looked me straight in the eye, so I couldn’t look away. It’s not like that, I said, but Lucy said, It’s always like that. So I hadn’t explained that well either, hadn’t made her understand how it was with Sam and me, how different.
• • •
The first thing Sam taught me was to mix the hypo to pour into the fixing tray, and he wrote it out for me so I would learn the right bottles, and watched while I measured. Hyposulphite 2 ounces, washing soda ¼ ounce, the same of salt, and 18 ounces of water from the barrel. Sam said, It’s like a recipe. Like something you’d use to make a cake. It isn’t anything like how I make a cake, but it’s not difficult and I like measuring with the special spoons or the little brass scales, I like reading the names written on the bottles I take down from the shelves, names I practice saying when I walk home over the bridge. Hydroquinone, acetone sulphite, potassium carbonate. The gloves make everything awkward and now my fingers are often stained black, like Sam’s were, curled around the door he first opened to me. That’s something else I learned from him, that our bodies are always changing. That new skin is always growing, that even stains the hardest scrubbing won’t touch will eventually disappear.
Sam always talks when we’re working together and sometimes he tells me things about when he was a boy, growing up in the next town. He had an older brother named Peter and a younger one named John and they were always in trouble, sneaking off to the river with their fishing poles instead of chopping wood or unloading sacks of grain from the wagons. Almost every day their father had to pick up the leather strap, bend them over his scarred oak desk, but Sam says that never made any difference. He asked me once if I had brothers and sisters, and I knew it would be easier if I said I didn’t, but that seemed a terrible thing. So I told him I had four, and tried to think what I would say when he asked me more. But he didn’t ask more, so I needn’t have worried.
Sam’s father was a grocer first, but then a photographer too, and even I had heard of him. When I worked in Dr. Robinson’s house, Mrs. Doctor wanted a portrait taken, and of course no one in this town was good enough, only Joseph Ryan would do. That was some years ago and it’s strange to think that maybe Sam was there too, adjusting a fold in Mrs. Doctor’s dress, turning little Eaton’s head this way and that. Sam and his father had some kind of falling out and he came to Emden to set up on his own; it’s not so many miles but he says he hasn’t been back, that there were too many harsh things said. His brother John runs the grocery now, and Peter is off in New York doing something, so he doesn’t see them either. If I’d known him better when he told me all that I would have said something, would have made him see that a family’s not a thing to be so lightly thrown away.
• • •
My sister Millie took it hardest, when our mother didn’t come home and instead it was Miss Weir and a policeman taller than any man we’d ever seen. Miss Weir wrinkled her nose and kept her mouth shut, except to tell us that our mother had gone away and we were to come with her. Millie was sitting on the floor, holding the baby, and from where she was they must have looked like giants, blocking out the little bit of light from the door. She squeezed the baby so tight it began to wail, and that made Jim start too. But the policeman squatted down; he was still big, but not so enormous, and he chucked Jim under the chin and told him that if he stopped crying, he’d show him a bit of magic. Then he did something with his hand and pulled a peppermint from Jim’s ear and gave it to him to suck, and that was the end of Jim’s tears, and I suppose that was the moment he was lost to us. He was only little; he can’t be blamed.
In the carriage Miss Weir put her face close to mine, her long teeth, and said, Do you know how old you are, dear? I was so astonished that I blurted out Eight, but when she asked if I knew my birthday I put my lips together, my head down. She asked Millie the same questions, but Millie understood, and didn’t say a word. Jim didn’t know, and the baby hadn’t had a birthday yet. Well then, Miss Weir said, over the rattling wheels, Let’s say today is your birthday, all your birthdays, and when we get home we’ll have cake to celebrate. And we did have cake, in the room with the long tables, where the rows of children sat quietly. After we’d cleaned a plate with more food than we’d ever seen at one time. Millie and I were terribly sick in the night, and I worried about Jim, off in the boys’ side, who must be sick too. And I worried about the baby, even though it didn’t have cake, but we never saw the baby again.
• • •
Sam’s house had been a photographer’s before, already had the skylight that brightens the front room studio and lets in drips when it rains. It belonged to a man named Simmons, a man no one knew much about, except that he had a scar on his cheek and a fine baritone voice for singing hymns. He was there for some years and then he wasn’t, and when someone noticed that, no one could remember how long it had been.
The town clerk packed up some things he’d left behind and rented the house to Sam, saying they’d see, in a year or two. It was already longer than that and Simmons’ things took up space Sam needed in the dark-room, so one afternoon when the rain drummed down he carried the boxes into the studio and I made a space between the bowls plinking with rainwater. There were bundles of small mounts for visiting cards, and one box inside a larger one was filled with ladies’ caps and bonnets, some made of straw and some curled up on themselves like small dead animals. There were milk white plates, all prepared for the camera, and boxes of spoiled ones, some exposed, some not. A good black coat that looked like it might fit Sam, but he wouldn’t try it on. One box had winter scenes, and some of them were of this house, with icicles hanging from the eaves. A few of the frozen river with no houses in sight, somewhere a cold walk away. Underneath those, wrapped in a red cloth, were five or six negative plates, ready to be printed, with dates marked in the corners like all the others. I turned them this way and that, but I couldn’t make out what they were. Sam took one from me and held it up, turned it around, and then his cheeks went red, the tips of his ears. I think, he said, I think they’re his—private parts. I stared at him while the idea worked into my understanding, and when it did it was so peculiar that I started to laugh, Sam did too, and we laughed until we had the worst pain.
Sometimes, in the house, I think of Mr. Simmons, and where he might be in the world. What it was that made him walk away, not caring who would find what he left behind. I imagine that he closed the door in early morning, when the mist sometimes curls and rises from the river; maybe he sang as he walked, but there was no one to hear his voice growing fainter and fainter. And I think that it’s something like that, like a thick mist has swirled up and when it thins to nothing everyone is gone and I have no idea where they might be, how they will be living. Except for Miss Weir; she has disappeared too, I suppose, but I know where she will be, what she will be doing. I can picture her, standing straight in her dull brown dress, telling us to fold our hands and pray. Or leading some child away down the dim hall, with a firm grip on its ear. The head bent away and the feet scrabbling, trying to keep up to her swishing pace.
There was a painting in the r
oom Miss Weir called her parlor, the room where she had her gleaming desk. A painting of a whiskery man, a hard-jawed woman, a little girl with ringlets, holding a doll and sitting on some kind of stool between them. My parents, she said, when she saw me looking, and that meant that she was the little girl with the full mouth, the rosy cheeks. I wondered, looking at that little girl, if she could ever have imagined that she would grow up to be Miss Weir, and I wondered what she thought about, all those hours sitting on that hard stool, trying to keep still, the yellow-haired doll smiling in her hands. Perhaps it was because of that I believed her, when she looked at me with her brown eyes and said that of course my mother knew, would be able to follow us later. When she told me that the crossing would be an adventure, that there was a wonderful new life waiting for us all. From the things Sam has told me I know that nothing in the world is just what it seems, that there are laws operating underneath, and hidden reasons. Even the purest-looking things, a scattering of sunlight, or the soft green of new leaves on the trees. But long before I met Sam, I knew I’d never believe anything so easily again.
• • •
I learned things faster than Sam thought I would, and more of them, and he was pleased with that because it gave him more time for the work he really wanted to do. The portraits he takes in the studio pay the rent of the house, pay for supplies, although it’s always a struggle. But Sam doesn’t want to be like his father, content with that. He’s more interested in shadows and light, the shape of a rock rising out of the river, the splintered boards of a fence by the station. Last year Mr. Lett hired him to photograph all the buildings Mr. Marl owns in Emden, the businesses, the houses and the empty land. The photographs were presented to Mr. Marl on his birthday, and apparently he was very happy with them. Now Mr. Lett has given Sam another commission, hired him to take more photographs of the town that he will have made into a book. Mr. Lett says that he will give this book to men he knows of in the city, to help persuade them to build factories here, to give more money for his railway, money for other things. It seemed strange to me that anyone would do that for a place they’ve never been, but Sam said they would, if they thought it would bring them more money. He develops those photographs himself but shows me when they turn out like he wants. He’s almost finished, and when Mr. Lett pays him we will be able to settle with Hatch, and maybe a few other places. If there’s enough money, Sam wants to order some dry plates already prepared, from a place he’s heard of in New York.
