Hop Alley (2 page)

“We don’t know if they have need of a photographer,” I said, not bothering to mention my other erstwhile occupation, saloonkeep, since such a job was nonexistent in teetotal Greeley.

“It doesn’t matter, Bill, they’ll find something for you. You’ve farmed before.”

Not for long, I hadn’t. I loathed farming more than I’d hated being in the army. But she was right; we had to land somewhere eventually, and she wasn’t made for the rough life of a transient peddler. “All right,” I said, “we’ll head down there as soon as we quit Omaha.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, shortly before midday, I set out for the estate of Colonel Joshua Cudahy with the photographic wagon, pulled by my very tired, very old, uncomplaining paint, Brutus. Every mile or so he’d utter a grunt and drop a road apple, and for the time of year it was not an unpleasant ride.

Shortly after midday I arrived. The estate was near Bellevue, some nine miles to the south of the city, the house at its center designed in the geographically inappropriate manner of a neoclassical antebellum plantation house. Its exterior, at least, had fallen into considerable disrepair. Upon several loud administrations of the door knocker—iron, and in the shape of a lion’s head—I was greeted at the door by a silent, elderly butler wearing a frayed morning coat and an expression of deep puzzlement. Handing him my card I told him I was
expected, and he disappeared into the house without speaking, shutting the door in my face.

There was no other habitation within a mile in any direction. The grounds were sumptuously wooded, and I thought it would be a good spot to put up a new house, though the one that stood now was an eyesore. I didn’t guess it to be more than thirty or forty years old, but the aura of irreversible decay that clung to it gave it the feel of a much older ruin. The boards of the roof of the porch needed whitewashing, the windows were dirty and in several cases cracked, and the oaken Corinthian columns were cracked vertically on the concave portions of its striations and doubtless ready to collapse; still, this had plainly once been an opulent place. I saw the smoldering ruins of such a house in Georgia at the end of the war.

I understood Colonel Cudahy to have been a fur trader with some past association with Mr. John Jacob Astor, and it surprised me that no local photographer had both the skills and low moral character necessary to cheat so rich a man. Whether the current condition of the premises was due to an old man’s neglectfulness or to a reduction in station, he had plainly been at one time a man of considerable means.

The butler reappeared and gestured for me to enter, again without speech, and I entered a vast, gloomy foyer in which stood a grizzly, rising up on its hind legs, mouth agape, forelegs poised to swat the viewer into the next world. Like the house and butler the bear was rapidly rotting, claws splintering, one
glass eye gone altogether and the other cloudy, fur worn to bare, leathery skin in patches, the taxidermist’s understructure showing in others.

“I shot her myself in ’42, on the Platte. Would have finished me had I misfired. Left her cubs on the side of the river to die. Felt a little sorry for that later.”

The voice startled me, coming from behind, high in pitch and rustic in tone, and with the considerable volume customary with the newly hard of hearing. I spun on my heels to find myself addressing a man who almost looked capable of felling such a beast barehanded. Dressed in a badly worn-down buckskin suit, he had quite a splendid head of silver hair that he wore swept back and down to the shoulder, and even slightly stooped as he was he must have topped six feet three inches. His eyes, black and staring intently from beneath a pair of bushily simian brows, called to mind Brady’s photograph of John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most frightening-looking statesman America has yet produced.

“I’m Bill Sadlaw,” I said, holding out my right hand, which he ignored. I hadn’t gotten used to the name yet, and I still felt every time I said it that I’d be caught out as a liar, but Cudahy took right to it.

“Sadlaw. I knew a Sadlaw in Canada, about ’26, ’27. Cheated his partner out of about a hundred pounds’ worth of beaver pelt, sold it to some Iroquois who moved it along to the French. Partner, name of Harlick, sawed off this Sadlaw’s head,
stuck it on a pole outside their camp as a warning. The one time I saw it it was pretty rotten, just a skull with hair sticking to it, and I asked Harlick what he was warning of. ‘Tom Harlick’s sawblade,’ was his answer. Don’t suppose that’s any kin of yours.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t believe any of us ever made that far north.”

“Well, sir, Dan Silas come by this morning and told me you could conjure a phantom onto glass. Is that so?”

“I have done,” I said, “but I’m curious as to why you don’t have a local man do it.”

“Three told me it was chicanery. A fourth tried to prove them right by stealing a tintype of my Letitia and placing a copy onto the background of a picture of me. Don’t know how it was done but it were such a patent fake I beat him within an inch of his death and wrecked his studio, smashed his camera and lenses and whatnot, and then saw to it that he made his way out of the state of Nebraska.”

I nodded in a sage manner, only slightly more trepidatious about my plan to try and fool the old goat. “Rightly so,” I said.

“Then there were three others who made attempts but captured nothing.”

“Have you attempted a medium?”

He laughed, and it sounded like a three-hundred-pound hog snorting over its dinner. “Table knockers and seers! Buncombe. I want photographic proof.” He lowered his voice. “I hear her,
you see? All the time. And her gone fifteen years now. But I can’t prove it’s her, can’t prove I’m not bereft of my reason.”

“She speaks to you?” His own tentative autodiagnosis of
non compos mentis
seemed a plausible one to me.

“Whispers. And I hear doors closing, drawers being opened.”

I found myself shouting at him just to match his considerable volume, and I wondered how whispering Dan Silas made himself understood to his client. “Your butler? Does he hear her too?”

“He’s deaf as a plank,” the Colonel shouted, waving his hand across his face, and I wondered if the bellowing wasn’t out of sheer habit.

There was an element of risk in this, certainly, but I felt sure that the previous fraudster had been undone by a lack of artistry and technical finesse. “Now, Colonel, I should tell you that I’m currently working with a stereoscopic camera.”

“I’ve nothing against it. Hell, seems to me that would make it well-nigh impossible for you to falsify such a thing.”

That wasn’t the case at all but I nodded my agreement. “I don’t see how one could.”

I
HIED TO
the wagon, fed Brutus a lump of sugar from my hand, and took down my tripod and the case containing the camera. Once I had them in the house I returned to fetch my plates and chemicals, and by the time I had coated the plates
with collodion the Colonel had already changed into a black wool suit and cravat twenty years out of fashion. “Was this a suit you owned when Mrs. Cudahy was still living?” I asked in a moment of inspiration.

He looked down at it as if to remind himself of which suit he’d just donned. “Seems to me it was,” he said.

“Good, that often helps, having objects familiar to the deceased,” I said, thinking myself clever for inventing spiritualist lore on the spot.

I set him up in the brightest room on the first floor, the parlor, which featured a large picture window with a thin white curtain that diffused the daylight nicely. He was seated in a chair upholstered in crushed green velour, the least worn piece of furniture I’d seen so far, and he had such an air of dignified antiquity that I felt a certain revulsion at the fact that I was cheating him. Then I reminded myself, as any number of other phony spiritualists must have done, that I was comforting him with proof that his wife’s love for him had survived death.

“W
ILL YOU RETURN
tomorrow with the finished pictures?” he asked when the sitting was finished.

“I will, regardless of the outcome. You do understand we may be disappointed by the results,” I said, hoping that I wouldn’t lose my nerve, and also that my skills would prove equal to the task at hand.

He handed me a fifty-cent piece, at which I raised an eyebrow, hoping that he didn’t think that my fee would be so cheap, but I’d misunderstood. “Come ’round about sunset. And when ye return, do me a favor and bring me back two pounds of salt, ground, would ye?”

“Certainly,” I said, perfectly incurious as to his motive, and took my leave.

I
HASTENED IN
the wagon back to Omaha, though all the chemicals and equipment necessary for developing and printing the plates were in my wagon. It was well that the old bird hadn’t had his picture made since the days of tintypes, because if I’d had to show him the results as they were I’d have had to declare failure. The greater part of my labors would be performed in Omaha, at the hotel.

T
HE STEREO VIEWS
came out nicely, though not so nicely that I didn’t regret the loss of the trusty old camera I’d had to leave behind in Cottonwood when we went on the run. There were four of them, and I thought one should be unaltered for appearance’s sake; I chose for this the best of the views, and then I created a second negative of an amorphous haze using a lantern behind a sheet of muslin. This, superimposed onto the second plate, created the illusion of a partially materialized spectral
body, roughly where the heart of a person standing next to the Colonel’s chair would have been. Seen through the stereopticon it was quite convincing and gave me a slight chill when I first saw a finished composite print. For the third plate I did something similar, with the luminous entity somewhat larger. And for the last one I made one more of the glowing, shapeless blob, after which I took several negatives of Maggie’s lovely, delicate hands at a distance from the lens that matched as closely as possible the Colonel’s, at roughly the level of his shoulders. It took me a while on the hotel roof to get the perfect print of the fourth view (the first three were so nearly effortless I wondered whether I shouldn’t make a profession of this), but when I had it, it was a thing of beauty, indisputably one of the most artistic images I’d ever made.

Colonel Joshua Cudahy, in the winter of his years, sat weary in a fine oaken chair, and at his side floated a filmy apparition that might have been human in form or not, but for the proof offered by her hands, sufficiently materialized to register as they rested, transparent but unmistakably those of a woman, on the Colonel’s shoulders, as though the right arm were spanning his back and the left crooked to caress. The expression of weariness in his old eyes, the delicate interplay of light and shadow, the matching of negative to negative—they were all perfect, and perfection is an end I always attempt but seldom achieve.

M
AGGIE CONCURRED, AND
she had no qualms about fooling the old fellow. She said that the notion that Cudahy thought that he was being haunted by the woman he’d loved was like something out of Sir Walter Scott (whom I doubt she’d ever read), and she was certain that if he sensed it, then it must be true. The fact that I was concocting sham pictures to convince him of the same did nothing to discourage her rapt interest in the enterprise, and in fact it was difficult to convince her that she couldn’t come along with me to present them to him. But if he understood that I had a female confederate, it might lead him to question whether those hands on his shoulders were those of his late wife’s otherworldly manifestation, and so I promised to relay to her a full accounting of his reaction.

T
HAT NIGHT WE
ate a much more modest supper, to my relief and at Maggie’s own suggestion, at a small restaurant operated by a German couple who laughed at my accent but complimented my fluency, telling me I spoke good German
“für ein Ausländer.”
The thick white sausages accompanied with sweet mustard and sauerkraut and a bottle of Rhine wine that we consumed pleased me considerably more than the previous night’s princely meal, and I felt a great sense of peace and satisfaction that I had succeeded in heading off my putative wife’s impending rage.

As Maggie prepared to sleep I found myself restless. I put my clothes back on and left the hotel, wandering the streets
until I found a saloon that looked hospitable instead of murderous, its patrons smoking cigars and laughing but not shouting at one another in a way that promised violence. Another point in its favor was that there were no women present, for in Omaha the only females in bars were there to provide services for which I had no more need that night.

The bartender brought me my shot of rye and my draught of lager and I dropped the Colonel’s half-dollar onto the bar. There was a poker machine at the far end, and though I rarely found such devices tempting I dropped a nickel of my change into the slot and cranked the handle back. The machine dealt me three eights, upon which it deposited four nickels into the oval receptacle at the bottom of its cast-iron body. This was when I became aware of the presence of a tall and very drunken sot at my elbow.

“Three eights. You know what that signifies?” He had long, oily black hair that hung in strings past his shoulders, and a long, well-trimmed beard, and he stared intently at me with tiny dark eyes, set a little too close together.

“I do not.”

“Three eights is twenty-four. Which is my age at the present time.”

“That’s remarkable,” I said, trying hard to keep any tone of amusement out of my voice, since drunks who sense that they are being patronized can erupt in unexpected ways. And it was remarkable, because I would have guessed him to be
forty at the very least; if he was telling the truth, then he must have led a dissolute life indeed.