The Boys in the Trees (16 page)

•  •  •

In Liverpool, before everything happened, we all slept together and if one of us complained that someone was kicking, that someone was pulling at the blanket, our mother would say we were lucky to have a bed at all. The little ones didn’t know, some of them not yet born, but my brother Frank and I remembered the cellar room before. Only our blanket between us and the hard earth, and the water that slid down the walls. It was true what our mother said, that things could always be worse.

Sometimes I still catch myself thinking she will find us. Sail across the ocean and gather us up, tap at my door with the baby in her arms. It’s a silly thought; for one thing, the baby would not be a baby anymore, would be older than I was when Miss Weir came. It used to be that I could hear my mother’s voice when I thought of her. Just like I could see her face, and never gave a thought that it was something that could fade away, like the photographs Sam showed me, that hadn’t been properly fixed. Only an outline left, sometimes just the trace of an eyebrow. At the very first, I saw her everywhere. Walking down the street ahead of us when we left Miss Weir’s in our straggling line, or standing outside if I looked down from a high window. In the rumbling crowd waiting for the big ship, and even at New Home. Maybe that’s what happened, maybe it’s because of all those false mothers, the mistakes I made. Some just the shape of her, or wearing a shawl like her faded one, a way of turning their heads. Maybe they all jumbled up in my mind and erased my own real mother. Maybe it was my fault, maybe I should have known.

•  •  •

Yesterday morning they hanged the murderer Heath, and one of the jailers told Sam that for a consideration he would let him in
to photograph the body, before they nailed down the box. Sam said that would make him no better than Taylor, who tried to get into the house while the bodies were still on the floor. Instead, the plates I developed show the crowd outside the jail, all gazing in the same direction. A few closer views of women with baskets, a stooped old man who looks to be shaking a stick at a tree. They could be gathered for any reason at all, maybe a parade or a revival meeting, and if someone saw them, years from now, they would have no idea.

Sometimes Sam is asked to take photographs of dead children, and though he has never said, I think that is why he taught me to use the dark-room so soon. He does it well; they look like they are sleeping, those children who shimmer in the fixing bath. They look like they have said their prayers and closed their eyes, never dreaming that they really would die before they woke. There are one or two in town who just appear when they hear that a child has gone, but Sam waits to be sent for. He can’t afford to turn down any work, but he always hopes that word won’t come. It feels so wrong, Sam says, setting up his camera in the hush of a grieving house, asking for the drapes to be opened wide. He says he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to remember their child that way, but I think I do.

Most of our sitters are alive though, and most of them come to the house, and take their places on the red plush settee or on one of the rickety chairs. Sam is still a little cheaper than the other photographers in town and mostly it’s families that come, stiff in their best clothes, or a young couple just married, with not much money to spare. One of the first times I helped Sam in the studio there was a farm family, the wife maybe not much older than me but with three little ones already. We heard the jingling harness, saw the wagon stop, all of them wrapped in
blankets that they carried inside to warm up a little, bringing a cold smell. One of the boys ran back to stroke the big horse’s nose, and white clouds swirled round his head.

The farm wife had a freckled face, and while Sam was arranging the children she asked me would those freckles show, and could we fix the photograph so they didn’t. Sam had already told me that he never did that kind of painting, but behind a screen in the corner there was a shelf with a brush and a little pot of powder, and I took her there, patted her cheeks and forehead while she closed her eyes. I undid her hair and did it up again, a little looser, and when she looked in the oval mirror, something in her face let go.

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.