The Shadow Catcher by Wiggins Marianne

Author:Wiggins, Marianne [Wiggins, Marianne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2007-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

My father first went south because he had to—drafted at the start of World War II, he was posted to Ft. Lee, Virginia, where he met my mother, who was working at the commissary. I don’t know how he made that initial trip—by bus, or train—but he must have grasped the coincidence that his paternal grandfather, John Wiggins, the man in whose memory he had been named, had been conscripted into serving his own nation, The Union, and had donned its dark blue uniform and marched south into Maryland, into Virginia, where in 1865 a piece of Confederate lead lodged in his head and he bled out, perhaps in the very woods we passed. Two John Wigginses—two wars—two conscripted journeys from Pennsylvania to Virginia. That original John Wiggins’s Certificate of Discharge from Company E of the 179th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the War Between the States hangs in a place of pride in my California home, and it’s as much a work of art as any of my daughter’s fine art photographs. The penmanship alone is thrilling—to say nothing of the latent narrative the facts suggest. There he was—the first John Wiggins—in the final year of a brutal war, wounded within months of its termination, discharged because of injury, turfed out at Alexandria, Virginia, and paid in full on August 5, 1865. How I came to be in possession of this document—how my father came to be, before me—seems to me a kind of blessed wonder, a small miracle. It might have passed, unnoticed, into history’s dustbin, but it didn’t. Its survival, intact, its materiality, is a result of fragile circumstance, the fact that it exists is a surprise. When I moved to California from London, my possessions followed me by ship, through the Panama Canal—eighty-six cartons of books, their pages looking sadly foxed and faded in their new surroundings under southern California light. It was only in unpacking that I noticed spots of mildew inside the glass of the framed Certificate of Discharge. Recently I finally got around to cleaning it. I hadn’t held the document, itself, since I found it among my father’s things, several days after we buried him. I had forgotten what that feels like, the touch of century-old paper, like a weathered buckskin to the hand. The paper—its crispness reduced by age to velvet—has life. Even if nothing were written on it, it would breathe of something, have spirit—the way a fossil does. The size and color of my great-grandfather’s Certificate of Discharge from the Civil War reminds me of that sketch by Leonardo in the Queen’s Gallery in London—same size, same sandstone color, same sketching-in depiction of a larger landscape, same miniaturization of an overview of life. When I stare at it I have the sense of looking at a kind of panorama of his life, as if this were a map of him. A map of part of him. On the back of the document on its shadow side, the side

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