Authors: Karl Iagnemma
A blackbird called.
Something soft and warm was pressing on his forehead. His thoughts unmoored and he felt himself in a large, empty room. Was he awake or asleep? Reverend Stone began to pray, and to his surprise felt himself rising into a weightless calm. He was apart from the world yet utterly within it, his breathing the rhythm of a tide, his heartbeat the rhythm of footsteps. The sensation was strange yet wonderfully familiar. He remembered as a boy watching the sun set over his father’s tobacco field, honey-colored light glazing the broad, wrinkled leaves, transforming the workaday land into a vision of Eden. He remembered wondering, astonished, how it could be so beautiful. It was all so beautiful, and full of light.
It was dusk when he finished and the forest’s silence had given way to birdsong, blackbird and thrush and warbler calling from the dim canopy. Elisha’s shirt was heavy with sweat, his callused hands soiled and bloody. He cut strips from his sleeve and bandaged his palms, then waded into the cold river. His shoulders ached. His mind was a black slate. Sometime later he returned to the clearing and stripped off his wet clothes. He found a cabbage-sized stone and arranged it at the grave’s head, then placed another stone, then another, his body moving as though ungoverned by his thoughts. It was dark when Elisha lay down beside his father and closed his eyes.
Sleep eluded him. Instead he lay in exhausted limbo, listening to the forest’s silence. What was absent, Elisha realized finally, was the whisper of water against sand—and with it a notion of time, echoed in the tide’s rhythm. Here there was only silence, like a thick fluid among the trees. It was as though they’d descended beneath the lake’s surface.
Was it enough? the boy wondered. Is it enough now?
Night animals moved through the brush and Elisha was certain they were circling the dark camp. He knew he should light a fire but could not force himself to move. A lilting inner voice accosted him: You must light a fire, the voice sang. A fire will keep the creatures at bay. A fire will keep the darkness away.
“Quiet now,” he said aloud. “You have no regard, none at all.”
The voice muttered a dull response.
At the first gesture of dawn Elisha stood beside his father’s grave, among white-flowering raspberries, birdsong cascading from the canopy like a Sabbath day chorus. He recited Psalm 23 and John 3:16 and the Lord’s Prayer, then placed a final stone atop the grave. The rite was simple but he could imagine nothing more fitting. At the river he withdrew his pocketknife and marked blazes on three tall elms: for his father, for his mother, for himself. The blazes, he knew, would be visible from the river for many years. A great blue heron regarded him from the far bank with solemn indifference, and Elisha felt grateful for the bird’s presence. He understood it as a form of benediction. He returned to camp and lay beside his father’s grave, his cheek against the cold headstone.
He had failed the man with his thievery and weak faith, his midnight departure without even a farewell; now he had failed to deliver him back to health. His entire life, Elisha realized, he had tried to not fail his father, and the struggle had exhausted him; though perhaps that struggle was a form of love. The boy allowed himself a glimmer of hope.
After some time he started slowly downstream, moving as if in a trance. Guilt pursued him but he did not turn back. When he’d traveled three hundred yards he sat against an old hemlock, weeping, and immediately his thoughts fluttered among vivid, senseless images. You must honor and obey your father and mother, in all things, the voice said. Elisha closed his mind to the sound.
Was it enough? he wondered again. Is it enough now?
Elisha curled against the hemlock and willed himself toward sleep. He woke to a nearby rustle. He withdrew his knife but otherwise did not stir. Around him the forest was a green sheet, as endless as an open lake. A hobblebush shuddered then a fat porcupine emerged, waddling toward a tall beech then clambering up the trunk. Elisha jerked upright and stumbled through the brush. He stabbed at the animal but the knife plunged into softwood, his fist sliding down the blade. He worked the knife free, and as the porcupine skittered along a limb Elisha hurled the blade. It buried itself, quivering, beside the animal. The porcupine snuffled at the knife then turned away.
The boy was consumed by wild laughter that was instantly smothered by fear. He scrabbled at the trunk but could not gain purchase on the slippery bark. He took up a flat stone and gouged a pair of footholds into the tree’s base, but again his boots slid away. Elisha hugged the massive beech, panting. Panic trickled like poison through his veins. He thought, I’ll head due north toward the lakeshore. Bypass the river’s meanderings, save a half day’s travel. He would reach the lakeshore then bear west to the Chippewa village, eating gull eggs and hatchlings, waving down any passing canoe. Elisha’s breathing settled as he convinced himself of the plan’s worth. Above him the porcupine scuttled among the beech’s limbs.
But when he started forward Elisha realized he was uncertain of his bearing. The forest appeared identical in every direction. The sun was cloaked in a gray haze. He wandered through the afternoon, finally coming to a silty brook bordered by birches. Moss encircled the trees’ white trunks like emerald scarves. Elisha groaned with relief: moss grew thicker on a tree’s northern face. He could use the moss’s thickness to point his way to the lake. The boy ate a handful of birch floss then built a large fire and curled beside it. He felt afraid of the coming darkness.
A fire will keep the creatures at bay, the voice sang. A fire will keep the darkness away.
At first light he doused the fire and hiked northward, weak to the point of collapse. Or was he traveling southward? Detroit lay to the south. He could hike to Detroit, turn left and continue on to Newell. The boy giggled at the notion’s absurdity. The country was a great, endless forest, and a body could emerge at any town, at any moment in history. Elisha staggered, sprawling into a mat of sweet-smelling ferns. He moved to rise then relaxed onto his back. Could he go back to the cabriolet ride along the Connecticut River? Perhaps this time he would remember to bring bread. Perhaps his father would let him drive the team.
A child’s cry, of frustration or pain, sounded in the distance. Elisha closed his eyes. The cry repeated, and for a moment he believed he was hearing his own childhood voice; then he recognized the sound as a gull’s call. The boy scrambled to his feet. He started forward as the cry sharpened to an angry caw. Elisha broke into a loping jog, dodging the slender birches. He descended into a shallow valley, and when he crested the rise he glimpsed a sliver of indigo through the thicket of trunks. He cried out.
Lake Superior lay before him like a bolt of blue silk rolled to the horizon. Creamy clouds floated above a wide white strand. Elisha sprinted down a dune and a flock of killdeer scattered. He stalked in slow circles, scanning the stony beach, and at last found a nest scraped in the sand. He robbed the spotted eggs and gathered a few sticks of driftwood, built a tiny cookfire. Elisha wept as the eggs warmed. He tapped open the shells with his knife and sucked out the thick fluid. Afterward he lay flat against the searing sand, luxuriating in the sensation as he scanned the lake’s margins. Like a farmer at a roadside awaiting a buggy into town, he thought. A chill breeze tickled his neck.
He woke to a nearby presence. The boy turned to find a buff-colored bird two yards distant. It was similar in appearance to a killdeer, though smaller and lighter-colored, with short orange legs and black eyes. The bird cocked its head as its feathers riffled in the breeze.
Elisha wondered momentarily if he had died. The bird was not a killdeer: its bill was as long as a sandpiper’s, the banding on its breast nearly absent. He rose slowly. The bird hopped forward a pace then paused, its glassy eyes shifting. It called, and the sound was like a glass bell tinkling. Elisha lunged forward and cupped the creature as it fluttered in his grasp. With a quick pinch he crushed its neck.
The wings jerked then fell limp. Elisha examined the wingtips and bill and scaly, jointed legs as a quiver rose in his throat. The bird was neither killdeer nor snowy plover nor piping plover. Elisha laughed aloud. It was neither plover nor sandpiper nor gull. It was not any species he had ever encountered.
Something new in the world, he marveled. He had no fieldbook or pen, no rum to preserve the bird; yet he did not feel disappointed. With his last matches he kindled a fire, then fetched a greenwood pole. He plucked the bird and set it on to roast.
Charadrius stonus,
he thought. That is your name. Flames licked the puckered skin and the boy’s stomach clenched. Mr. Brush was right, he realized. Life is a practical endeavor.
When he’d finished eating he wandered westward along the lake edge, the sun a hot mask against his face. Despite the day’s warmth he was overcome by chills. He slept beneath a spray of beach grass then continued onward, the wind stiffening, the sky receding before his eyes. He was certain the Chippewa village was near. At last Elisha sat heavily in the sand and propped his head against his knees.
A man’s shout came to him as though across an empty valley. Elisha raised his head. The shout coalesced to a chant, rising and falling like a gentle wave. A song.
Elisha stumbled to the water’s edge. A canoe was gliding eastward atop the lake’s surface. The paddlers were chanting a chanson in coarse French. He waded thigh-deep into the frigid lake. There appeared to be four voyageurs in the craft, two apiece at the bow and stern, and between them a man wearing a straw hat. Beside him sat a woman in a white sunbonnet. Elisha remained motionless. When the canoe was but ninety yards distant he raised both hands.
“Ho! Please land your canoe! I need help!”
The chanting paused as the craft dragged to a halt. It was a batard canoe with a green calumet painted on its bow, loaded with oilcloth-draped parcels. A white man sat gripping the gunwales, his sunburned face slack with amazement. Beside him a woman reclined atop a makeshift divan fashioned from stuffed sackcloth. She was holding a book in one hand and parasol in the other. Landlookers or prospectors, Elisha thought, though they did not appear to be either; then it occurred to him that they might be tourists. The notion momentarily confused the boy. Tourists, on a long excursion from the Sault.
“Will you help me, please?”
The canoe rolled slightly as the white man leaned forward, squinting. He whispered to the woman and she set the book in her lap, noticing Elisha for the first time. She raised a hand to her mouth and squealed with delight.
She believes I am Native, Elisha thought. My clothes, my filthy appearance. Or she does not know what I am.
“I am American, a scientist! Please help me!”
A mutter of conversation in the canoe as the steersman held the craft steady. The white man took up a small telescope and leveled it at Elisha.
“I am American! I am Christian! You must help me!
Please!
”
The craft swung shoreward and the chant resumed:
Le premier jour de Mai, Je donnerais à m’aime…
The woman withdrew a lace handkerchief and fluttered it gaily. A voyageur leapt into the shallows to guide the canoe ashore, and the white man called, “Dear fellow! What in heaven’s name has happened to you?”
Elisha sank to his knees in the lake and closed his eyes. They understood that he was American. He was American, and he was saved.
Epilogue
The salon was on Atwater Street in a shabby frame building set between a barbershop and confectionary. That morning Elisha arrived to a smell of boiled sugar, climbed the narrow stairs to the studio and threw open the heavy drapes to reveal a small, dim room. A half-dozen large wooden crates were stacked beside a bureau heaped with photographic equipment, and in the room’s center was a painted black table. Atop the table a sandhill crane stood among tufts of sedge. Elisha took up a chipped pitcher and doused the sedge, tugged loose a few desiccated blades. He was particularly proud of the tableau: he’d gathered the sedge from the bank of the Detroit River, arranged the crane’s posture to match a memory from the previous summer. The bird’s left leg was raised and its head was cocked, as though listening for a mate’s call.
He positioned the camera stand then fetched a photographic plate and sprinkled it with jeweler’s rouge, buffed the plate until his image appeared as a clear, dark reflection. He fitted the plate into a carrier and placed it inside a coating box, sprinkled in a few iodine crystals. An acrid whiff rose from the iodine. Footsteps rose on the stairs as he was transferring the carrier to the boxy camera.
Edward Featherstone entered the studio, whistling merrily. He froze when he saw Elisha bent over the camera box.
“Do not let me disturb you! This is a…what? A heron.”
“Sandhill crane.”
“A sandhill crane! Of course.”
Elisha adjusted the camera’s pose. He drew back the velvet window draperies and contemplated the quality of the day’s light, made a quick calculation. Then he uncovered the camera’s lens and held the shield aloft to indicate that Featherstone should not disturb him. When he counted sixty Elisha re-covered the lens and slid the carrier from the camera.
“That will be a thumping good image. I can sense it.”
Elisha frowned. “The legs—they are too nearly aligned. The rear leg is partly obscured by the front.”
“Well, I find it spectacular.” Edward Featherstone whistled, a sharp trill. “Thirty half-plates mounted on maroon velvet, at fifteen dollars per set. Or perhaps we should change to quarter plates, lower the price to twelve and fifty. Multiplied by one thousand subscriptions, perhaps twelve hundred…” He clapped his hands. “Let us take a refreshment, shall we? Perhaps a good, strong coffee at Naglee’s!”
“You go on. I’d like to capture one more view.”
The man hesitated. “As you prefer.”
Featherstone gathered a stack of finished plates and tipped his hat. The man’s footsteps faded on the stairs; then the street door scuffed shut. Elisha frowned at the tableau before him. He shifted the camera stand a hand’s-width leftward and captured a second image, then shifted it farther and captured a third. He drew the window draperies and set to developing the plates, circling them through mercury vapors until the crane’s form bloomed on the mirrored surface, then fixing the image with hyposulphite of soda, toning it with gold chloride. But the crane was too dark. He had not allowed a long enough exposure. Elisha tacked the plate to the wall, among a collage of stillborn birds. He was sensitizing another plate when the bell at St. Anne’s tolled noon.
He had returned to Detroit from Mackinac that previous August and taken a room on Beaubien Street, spent several days writing letters to Charles Edson and Corletta, various kin in Worcester and Lowell and Norwich and New London. As darkness came on Elisha would wander the city’s wide streets, past Irish families chattering on porches, whores whistling down from upstairs windows. Italian boys arguing over bowls on the Military Square. Drunks singing and swaying outside lit-up dancing halls. The air held an early chill, and occasionally it would seep down through his chest and touch his heart, and for a moment Elisha would feel overcome by despair. But eventually the chill would pass. The city was too giddy and boisterous to allow it to linger.
Detroit in the autumn of 1844 seemed as optimistic as a city could be. The morning’s newspapers held reports of the most recent improvements: a new rail line laid to Utica, a hydraulic waterworks installed on Randolph Street to replace the old reservoir. Plans for a lyceum on Woodward Avenue, with professors from the University at Ann Arbor offering instruction. The opening of an indigents’ asylum on Griswold Street, to care for the city’s poor. Detroit was not the place for a man to grow old, Elisha figured, but it was a fine city to learn a trade, or find a wife. And that was plenty good enough, for now.
One afternoon in September he had seen notice of an auction of animal and mineral specimens, from America and Europe and Asia, to be held at the Young Men’s Society. Elisha brushed his hat and shined his brogans, thinking to surprise Alpheus Lenz with his presence. But he arrived at the Society hall to find that the collection at auction was, in fact, Lenz’s own. The man had died of a bilious ailment that previous month; his specimens and library and Danish porcelain and Italian silver were being sold to the highest bidders. Elisha placed the first bid, for thirty dollars, then saw the price rise quickly to seventy dollars, then ninety-five. He watched the auction’s remainder in gloomy silence.
Two days later he stood outside a stylish boardinghouse on Howard Street. His knock was answered by Edward Featherstone. The man invited Elisha into a room littered with sawdust and wooden crates, a pair of long tables cluttered with jars of chemicals. He was a businessman, Featherstone explained, recently of Toledo but arrived in Detroit to pursue a scheme: to capture images of animal specimens in daguerreotype, sell them by subscription as the most precise natural history folio ever offered. Despite his enthusiasm Featherstone’s voice held a note of desperation. Elisha figured he didn’t know a moth from a butterfly. “I was employed by Alpheus Lenz,” Elisha told the man. “I was the one who cataloged these specimens, penned those title cards.” Featherstone offered him a job without even knowing his surname.
And so Elisha taught himself how to prepare the silvered plates, how to gauge exposure time depending on the day’s cloudiness or haze, how to pass the plates through mercury vapors until the images emerged like memories slowly called to mind. To his surprise he found that he enjoyed the procedure’s complexity, the interplay of light and time like variables in an equation whose correct answer was an image that precisely reflected the specimen’s form. And yet they were not mere reflections: the images were ghostly, ethereal, as though the specimen’s spirit was captured in the glass pane.
Now he took up his hat and stepped down to Atwater Street. It was late October but a warm breeze stirred the flag atop the Chippewa Hotel. The street was loud with shouted conversation, the mild weather buoying the spirits of Detroit’s residents. Elisha strolled to the Berthelet market and purchased an ear of roasted corn and a
City Examiner. World Without End!
the headline crowed. The Millerites’ day of reckoning had come and passed. The article described the previous week’s scene in Albany: Reverend William Miller and ten thousand faithful gathered in a fallow bean field to welcome the Lord’s arrival on earth. Instead they were treated to a thunderstorm, and the shocked wailing of those who’d sold their worldly possessions. The wages of foolishness is tears, Elisha thought, then realized this was one of his father’s sayings. The notion pleased him. He turned to the editorial notice and read:
I
NSANITY OF
O
UR
S
OUTHERN
B
RETHREN
It is rare in the annals of civilized discourse that a widely held (if absurd) notion can be dismissed in a single stroke. But can right-thinking individuals anymore doubt the fact that every man on this Earth are as brothers, born into a single Human Race? Any doubts on the matter have been dispelled by discovery of the Tiffin Stone (or Tiffin Stele, as some have it) as an incontrovertible link between antiquity and the present race of Red Indians.
The great and ineluctable deduction to be drawn from this discovery concerns the woeful institution of slavery which pervades our states to the South. We ask, How can Christian men continue to hold Negro men, women, and children in bondage with full knowledge of their natural-born equality? For if Red Indians are the white man’s brethren—then must not the Negro also be kin?
Without argument, our Southern brethren should follow the example set by the British Parliament and immediately declare a general emancipation. It is particularly ironical that we must ask our countrymen to follow the example of a Nation we so recently and bitterly fought in the name of Liberty and Natural Rights.
Elisha dropped the newspaper into the gutter. Lately he had found himself scanning the paper for news of Mr. Brush and Professor Tiffin’s wager—that they would present their findings to the learned men of Detroit, and the man whose work was deemed of lesser value to science would publish an apology in the
City Examiner
for squandering public funds. But months had passed and Elisha had seen no apology. He assumed the men had forgotten about the wager, or more likely settled it between themselves. Or recognized that they had both lost.
He returned to the salon and set to capturing a dozen images of the sandhill crane, drawing out the exposure time as the afternoon’s light waned. He found that he could not concentrate. He worked listlessly for a time then draped the crane with a dust cloth, sensitized a photographic plate and loaded the camera. Then he hefted the camera stand to his shoulder and went back down to the street.
Outside it was nearly dusk and the day’s warmth had dwindled to a chill. A column of empty farm wagons rattled northward, toward the city’s edge. Elisha started toward the river, nodding at the gentlemen who paused to watch him pass. By now many of Detroit’s residents had seen the camera, but there were yet a few who would stop in the street, follow him to wherever he was headed. Lately one particular woman had twice appeared as Elisha was leveling the camera stand: she’d been dressed in a yellow cape and bonnet, her auburn hair gathered in a simple plait. Next time, Elisha thought, I’ll offer to capture her image. She was not beautiful but he would shift the lens until her beauty was revealed in the swell of her cheek, or her frail, piercing gaze. For in the lens’s eye there was beauty everywhere, in a specimen or a plain young woman or the prospect of a sleeping city. To Elisha it seemed a strange form of grace.
On the pier edge he assembled the stand as a knot of onlookers gathered. The woman was there. She was dressed in the same yellow cape and bonnet, her hair drawn back, her pale skin dotted with pockmarks. She looked to be no older than twenty, though with an older woman’s grave stare. Elisha stared at her as he fastened the camera to the stand, and when he’d finished he straightened his bowry and discreetly smoothed his shirtfront. As he approached she offered him a tranquil smile.
“I knew it must be you.”
He grinned cautiously. “You have me mistaken, miss. I don’t believe we are acquainted.”
“You are Elisha Stone, son of the Reverend William Edward Stone. I know your face. You have your daddy’s brow, that same troubled crease. And your chin, just the spitting image.”
Elisha squinted at the woman. He was startled, speechless.
“We traveled together from Buffalo to Detroit, your daddy and I. He came to one of my séances. And then he wedded me to my husband on June twenty-fifth, not five blocks from this very spot. My name is Adele Crawley.” The woman curtsied. “I am very pleased to meet you.”
“Well. My goodness.”
The woman’s eyes were large and green, bordered by fine spidery lines that lent her a weary air. Her skin was so white as to be translucent. She was carrying a paper-wrapped packet that seemed to be seeping blood; then Elisha realized it was a butcher’s parcel.
“I apologize for startling you—you look bit by snakes. I’ve been searching for you for a while now. I figured you might come to Detroit.”
“My father told you that?”
The woman shook her head. “I have a sense for such things.”
Elisha’s confusion had given way to melancholy joy, at encountering a trace of his father’s journey. He said, “I suppose he explained the reason for his travels. About my mother, and my departure from Newell. He was bringing me a message.”
Adele Crawley cocked her head in sympathy. “Your daddy made a great journey in pursuit of you. He loved you very deeply, he and your mother both. He loves you still.”
Elisha nodded. He realized that there were scores of questions he might ask the woman: if his father had been ill when she’d met him, or if his illness had grown over time. If he’d spoken about his journey, or his wife, or his congregation, or Newell. If he had seemed alarmed by Detroit’s frantic pace. If he had seemed happy.
But instead he simply asked Adele how she’d met the man. She told Elisha about the depot in Buffalo, riding with the minister to a hotel at midnight, then seeing him again the following day on the steamer deck. And then the séance on Sixth Street, the wedding in Anders Lund’s saloon. The woman’s smile widened as she described the saloon’s crimson wallpaper and stained pine floors, the Italian organ grinder with his garlic smell and lovely music. Her husband’s blond silk cravat and her own blond dress, her mother’s dress. The table laid with pine boughs, their makeshift altar. A flush rose to Adele’s cheeks as she described Reverend Stone’s gentle tone, his order that they go forth together into the wide world.
“And that is what we have done,” she said. “And that is what we shall do forevermore.”
Silence lengthened between them. At last Adele stepped a half-pace nearer to Elisha and touched his wrist. “Would you like to speak with him?”
“I don’t get your meaning.”
“I can converse with those who’ve passed. I hear them speak, in my thoughts. It is a gift.”
Elisha held Adele’s gaze for a long time, until he understood that she was in earnest. He felt a sharp pang of affection for the woman. She had helped his father, he was certain. Somehow she had helped him. It was hard to imagine his father mixing with a spiritualist medium; yet there it was. Another thing learned about the man. St. Anne’s bell clanged in the distance; then a nearer bell echoed the chime.