Cottonwood: A Novel by Scott Phillips

Author:Scott Phillips
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345461018
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2005-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

GHOSTS OF THE OSAGE 1890

1

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, JANUARY, 1890

Slumgullion

Once, wandering northward early in the summer of 1864, I came upon a ruined one-and-a-half story farmhouse by the banks of a stream. The house itself, burnt out and long since emptied of all valuables, was practically roofless, and so full of holes as to be useless as shelter against the elements, but behind it stood a greenhouse whose remaining glass shingles glittered gray-brown in the sunlight like river mud.

Inside it I found only faded red pots, most broken, a few still containing a rich, stinking black soil into which all vegetable matter in the structure had long ago disintegrated; two thirds of the panes had fallen from the roof and walls, and lay on the floor in jumbled shards that crunched beneath my boots with each shifting of my weight. A scratching and clicking like those of a squirrel’s claws against glass made me glance upward at the ceiling, through which I saw gazing placidly down at me the lovely, spectral face of a woman.

Badly startled, I slipped and fell backwards against a potting table, which saved my hands being cut by the slivered glass on the floor. Leaning on it with my elbows I looked timorously back up to find the transparent lady still staring at me, her wistful smile as faint and pretty as condensed breath on the pane, tendering grace and unearned absolution.

It was a moment before I took note of her neighbor to the left, a seated man in a top hat, or the elderly couple to her right; as my brain digested this new information the lady transformed before my eyes from ectoplasm to ambrotype, her fading emulsion struck by the sun’s rays at the precise acute angle required to create the illusion of a positive image. The sheet was about ten by twelve inches in size, and unusual in that the photographer had made a very close composition of the lady’s head, his depth of focus so shallow that only her eyes and lips were sharp, her nose, ears, throat and collar all softened into an indistinct haze.

All the other shingles still in place proved to be discarded, back-less ambrotypes also, and carefully picking up from the ground a sliver of a broken one as curved and sharp as a scimitar I was able to distinguish a sloppily knotted cravat and the lapels of a coat cut in a no longer fashionable manner. I had no particular knowledge of photography then, but I knew the stories of battlefield photographers cutting windowpanes from their frames in abandoned houses for use as plates. This was, I supposed, the civilian householder’s revenge on the vandalizing photographers, letting the sun slowly bake their hard work back into clear, unadorned glass sheets. I had earlier entertained the notion of sleeping in the dilapidated house, but despite the lady’s beauty and benevolent aspect, the idea of spending the night in a place that produced phantoms in daylight made me uneasy, and I continued on down the road.

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