“Fifty dollars for a photograph of the moon?” I had remarked skeptically when Pa showed me the announcement over breakfast. This was back in November some time. “Seems like easy money to me.”
Pa had chuckled. “Oh, it’s harder than you’d think, son,” he said gently. “First of all, a person would need a big telescope, at least six or seven feet long. Maybe longer. The kind Foucault presented to the Academy of Sciences a few years back. With silvered glass for the reflector. Not speculum, mind you, which is what most of these so-called gentleman amateurs still use. They’d have to grind the glass, coat it with silver nitrate, and ammonia, maybe some potash. Milk sugar. Build a clockwork of some kind. Something to mount the whole thing on. No, no, it’s a heap of work, son. That’s why no one’s been able to do it well since De la Rue. It’s a big, big undertaking.”
“Pa, you know what?” I said. “You should do it. You should enter this contest!”
“Ha,” he said lightly, thinking I was joking.
“Why not? You would win!”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “Do you know how much time and money it would take to build a telescope of that kind?”
“But you already built a telescope.”
“Not like that one, son.”
“And we’ve been making good money from your irontypes.”
“Which is for your schooling someday.”
“But we could go to London if you won, Pa! You could wear one of those tall fancy hats to the exhibition!” I held my arm above my head to indicate how high his hat would go.
“Well, that would be a sight,” he replied, amused. He leaned back in his chair.
“Come on! It’ll be fun. I’ll help you.”
He smiled and sighed at the same time and then, after a few seconds, said, “You’ll help me, aye? Do you remember what I taught you about the moon’s orbit? What does perigee mean?”
“It’s when the moon…” I hesitated.
He smiled. “It’s the point in the moon’s orbit when it’s closest to the earth.”
“Closest to the earth,” I agreed quickly.
He nodded and reached for his reading spectacles. Then he picked up the Farmers’ Almanac on the table and started leafing through it. He stopped at a page and ran his finger down a chart. “March the seventh, 1860: The full moon will occur near perigee,” he read aloud, and peered up over his glasses at me. “That would be the time to take it. When the full moon is closest to the earth. Won’t get any brighter or bigger than that for the rest of the year.”
“Does that mean we’re going to do this?”
He closed the almanac. “Well, since you promised to help me…”
I clapped. “Hurrah! We’re going to London!”
“Now, now, don’t get your hopes up too high. March seventh is only four months away, and we have a lot of work to do before then. There are no shortcuts for hard work.”
He was not exaggerating about that! The amount of work Pa ended up doing, every night, over those next four months, was nothing short of astounding. Building a telescope. A clock drive. A wooden mount. Experimenting with colloidal mixes. Adapting his camera box. All this while still fulfilling boot orders and taking portraits at the studio by day. Every night, I’d go to sleep leaving him bent over the table full of books, and every morning, I’d find him in the same spot. Not that he ever complained. If anything, he seemed to relish the work, even when his palms started bleeding from hours of grinding lenses on sandstone, then polishing the glass.
As the big day drew closer, it became the focus of all our conversations. What if it snowed that evening? What if it was cloudy? What if it was too cold and the lens fogged? What if it was too windy and the camera moved? By the time March 7 rolled around, I was giddy with anticipation. And Pa, who was generally cautious with his enthusiasm, could barely contain his own excitement.
When the day dawned and it turned out to be crystal clear, with not a cloud in the sky, we could not believe our good luck. It was like heaven had conspired with us to create this work of beauty, and we were ready for it. We had rehearsed the events of the evening countless times by then, to make sure everything went off without a hitch. Pa had painted X’s on the wooden planks where the mount should stand, and enclosed the porch with a screen to keep the wind at bay. We brought out the telescope as soon as the sun started sinking in the sky. It was not a particularly elegant contraption on the outside, just a long rectangular box made of rough, unpolished walnut. But that box housed a meticulous array of mirrored glass lenses that would, Pa said, bring the cosmos within our reach. At the base of the telescope was the camera attachment, which Pa affixed carefully. Then, when he was done adjusting the angle and securing the base, he sat down next to me on the porch steps, and we waited for nightfall in silent wonder. When the moon started to rise above the hill line, it was sheer magnificence.
“Wow,” I whispered reverentially. “It looks as bright as the sun.”
“It’s the sun that’s making it shine,” he whispered back.
“But the sun’s not even out.”
“It sure is.” He tousled my hair. “Even if we can’t see it, the sun never stops shining. Always remember that.”
“All right.”
“I think the sky’s dark enough now.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “Are we ready to do this?”
“Ready!” I said, hopping up happily.
He poured the collodion over the glass plate, which would become the negative, tilting it slightly to let the solution cover the entire surface. Then, under cover of a large black cloth, he sensitized the plate with silver nitrate and slid the plate-holder into the camera box. He made a few slight adjustments to the focus reflector before slowly removing the cloth.
Finally, once everything was ready, he took a deep breath and gingerly lifted the cover off the lens to begin the exposure. We counted backward from twenty…
Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
He replaced the cover. It was only then, after he exhaled, that I realized he had been holding his breath the whole time.
Once the lens was covered, he quickly removed the wooden plate-holder from the camera and proceeded to the darkroom in the cellar, which was lit by a single ruby-colored lantern. He poured his irontype solution over the glass plate to bring out the latent image of the moon.
It has always been a wonder to me, and always will be, to see something invisible be made visible. Slowly, magically, the negative of the moon took form on the glass plate inside the bath.
Pa lifted the glass plate by the very edges and gently rinsed it in a separate tray of rainwater. Then he held it up close to his face to examine it thoroughly in the dim red light. The water dripped from the bottom of the glass onto the floor.
“I must admit, Silas,” he said slowly, smiling as he scanned every corner of the plate, “this exceeds my greatest expectations. The edges are crisp. The shadow areas are well defined. You can see the finest details—even in the craters. This really might do it for us!”
“Can I see? Can I see?” I asked excitedly.
“Of course, but be very careful.”
He handed me the glass plate, and no sooner were my fingers curled around its edges than it slipped from my grasp. In an instant, the glass was in a million tiny shards around my feet.
I gasped, like my lungs had been punctured.
“Oh no,” I said breathlessly. My hand covered my mouth. “Oh no. Oh no.”
I started to moan. I could not believe what I had just done.
“It’s all right, son.”
I could not look at his face. “Oh, Pa…”
Words would not form on my lips. They were like pieces of glass in my mouth.
“It’s all right, son,” he repeated softly, rubbing my shoulder. �
��I promise. It’s all right.”
I was overtaken by a frenzied sobbing then, a quaking of tears that tore through my entire body. My stupidity! My clumsiness! Widow Barnes was right. Addled! That is what I am!
I might have collapsed into the pile of glass shards then and there, but Pa picked me up and carried me to the kitchen. I was wailing so hard, my head started hurting. My eyes were stinging. I hadn’t realized my ankles were full of tiny bits of glass until I saw the blood.
Pa sat me on the edge of the table and meticulously removed the glass fragments from my legs while I tried to calm myself down. He whispered soothingly as he wiped away the little pinpricks of blood with tincture of iodine. “It was never really about the exhibition, or the prize money, right? What really matters is, we did it. Silas. We took a picture of the moon. That’s all that matters, son. That we did it.”
He tried to get me to look at him, and when I did, he smiled and placed his palms on my cheeks, wiping my tears with his thumbs.
“There’ll be other moons,” he assured me, looking deeply into my eyes. “Don’t you worry.”
Then he hugged me, and I knew everything would be all right.
He carried me to my room, and sat on the edge of my bed until I fell asleep.
I woke up a few hours later, my eyes puffy from the tears I had shed. Pa was no longer sitting in my room, but Mittenwool was there.
“Did you see what happened before?” I asked. “I broke the moon.”
“I saw. I’m sorry.”
“Is Pa asleep?”
“He’s on the porch.”
I crept down the ladder and peeked out the kitchen window. Pa was indeed on the porch, leaning against the column next to the telescope. There was only a hazy yellow mist where the moon had been earlier, but Pa was looking up at the sky like he could still see it. His eyes were shining in the dark.
He looked so peaceful, I did not interrupt him. I went back to my bed.
“There’ll be other moons,” said Mittenwool, repeating what Pa had said.
“Not like that one,” I answered, and pulled the covers over my head.
Now, as I lay inside these unknown Woods, on unknown ground, looking up at a full moon infinitely paler than the one we had briefly captured, all I could think of was Pa’s eyes peering up at the sky, shining a thousand times brighter than any moon ever could.
Looking back, I knew it wasn’t the sun that lit the moon that night. It was Pa.
FIVE
We do not know why they can come, nor why they can not.
—Catherine Crowe The Night-Side of Nature, 1848
1
I WAS AWAKE BEFORE MARSHAL FARMER the next morning, ready to go. Ready to move. As soon as he was up, too, we got on the horses and took off. No chitchat. No taking time to eat.
Luckily, we did not have to go into the Bog again. The men we were pursuing must have hated that swampland as much as we did, for they had taken a path around it rather than venture through it. I was relieved, of course, not only because it spared me further acquaintance with the ghosts in the Bog, but because I’d been bitten up mercilessly by the mosquitoes there.
“How come they don’t go after you?” I whined, noting as we paused at a brook to let the horses drink that Marshal Farmer had not a single bite on him. Meanwhile, I was making myself bleed from all my scratching.
“My skin is too tough for them, I guess,” he crowed. “That’s what happens when you get to be as old as I am.”
“How old are you?”
“Hmph. You know, I’m not sure,” he muttered. He squinted into the trees on the far side of the brook. “Truth is, I’ve spent so much time in these Woods, chasing fugitives this way and that way, I lose track of time. What year is this, anyway?”
“Eighteen sixty.”
“Huh. That seems about right. I’ll tell you, kid: time gets swallowed up in these Woods. Let’s go.”
He spurred his mare and I followed dutifully.
I had noticed this, too, about time inside the Woods. I had no concept if it was morning or afternoon when we were riding. Minutes seemed like hours. Hours flew like seconds. Sometimes we’d be riding, and it felt like we were seeing the same trees, the same groves, the same small knolls full of bloodroot and chickweed, over and over again. But then all of a sudden, we’d happen on a bright little glade, and it was like heaven had come down to earth on sunbeams. Every tree, every branch, sparkled in gold light, and when I looked straight up, I could see the sky glowing blue above the canopy of trees. It was wondrously beautiful.
I came to see that time is like the dappled light inside the Woods. It comes and goes. Hides and shines. And all the while, we’re just running through it. I felt a bit like Jonah in that mighty whale of his, cut off from the world, with the trees rising around me like enormous ribs, and Pony, my little boat, tossing on the sea. Not that I’ve ever been to sea before, but this is how I imagined it.
We made only one longish stop that day. I think it was midafternoon, but I don’t know, could’ve been earlier. I jumped down from Pony and started plucking fiddleheads while Marshal Farmer got on his haunches to examine the trail, which had become a bit vague in the brush here. Again, I could not help but note how corkscrewed his back was.
“What are you gaping at?” he gnarred at me when he caught me watching him.
“Nothing!”
Really, he was such a cantankerous old man, I could hardly stand it at times.
“I got some fiddleheads we can eat later,” I said, pointing to the ferns next to me.
“Those are the poison kind,” he remarked indifferently.
“What?” I hastily dropped the fiddleheads and wiped my palms on my coat.
“Help me up here.”
I put out my hand, and he used it to hoist himself to his feet.
“Only eat the ones with brown sheaths,” he said when he was standing. “Now let’s get a wiggle on. I know which way they went.”
I mounted Pony and watched as he struggled to get on his mare because of his back pain.
“My pa can help you with your back, by the way,” I said cautiously once we got the horses at a pace. I was riding alongside him in a wide but dark clearing. “When we find him, I mean. He can realign the vertebrae of your back, like he did to mine.”
“What’re you jawing about now?”
“After my brush with lightning a couple of years ago,” I continued, “my back got out of sorts because of the fall I took, so my pa got ahold of every anatomy book he could find and, lo and behold, he cured my spine! He could cure yours, too!”
He gave me an angry side glance, so I looked away quickly.
“Really, he could’ve been a doctor, my pa,” I continued, careful not to look at him, like a wild animal you don’t want to look in the eye. “He knows so much biology and things of that nature. Or a scientist.”
“Thought you said he’s a boot-maker.”
“That’s what he does for a living,” I answered. “But he knows about a lot of other things. You never met a smarter man, Marshal Farmer! Something of a genius, you might say.”
“That so.”
“That’s why they took him, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
“They probably thought he could help them with all that canter-fitting stuff.”
“Counterfeiting.”
“Counterfeiting.”
“You don’t even know what that is, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“You know who Fénelon is, but you don’t know the word counterfeiting.”
If his intention was to make me feel foolish, he succeeded. “I didn’t say I was a genius,” I mumbled.
“A counterfeiter is someone who makes fake money,” he explained.
“Fake money? How do they
do that?”
“There are different ways,” he answered. “Basically, they wash old banknotes clean of ink, and then print them with higher denominations that look real enough to pass for genuine money.”
“How do they wash them clean?”
“They use chemicals and the like.”
I could not keep from exulting. “Then my theory makes sense! Pa uses chemicals to print pictures on paper, Marshal Farmer, whereby the image doesn’t just rest on the surface, like it does with albumen prints, but is dyed into the paper fiber itself. He took out a patent on it and everything.”
He leaned back in the saddle and gnawed on his cheek, like he was actually giving my words some thought.
“Well, chemicals are a bit above my bend, I’ll allow,” he said after a few moments, “but you could be right about that, kid. These counterfeiters are always looking for new ways to do things. No matter what the banks do to try and outsmart them, the counterfeiters are two steps ahead of them.”
“It doesn’t even seem so bad to me, printing fake money,” I then jabbered on, without thinking through what I was saying. I don’t know why around Marshal Farmer words just seemed to pour out of my mouth like spittle.
“You don’t think it’s so bad?” he yelled angrily, flipping around in his saddle to literally gnash his teeth at me. They were the color of dirt, the few he had. “If you had a hundred-dollar note and it turned out to be worthless, how would you feel about that?”
My mouth dropped open. “Marshal Farmer,” I answered truthfully, “I can’t know how I’d feel, as I’ve never had a hundred-dollar note in my whole life!”
I think my unexpectedly honest reply caught him by surprise. He snorted as he shook his head.
“Tell you what, kid,” he replied. “If your pa can fix my back, I’ll pay him double that in real money.”
“That’s a deal!” I answered, feeling good that I had gotten him to be amiable.
“All right, now. Enough of this gabbing. Gig your horse and let’s get moving.”
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