That Dark Eye of Glass

The boy sat rigid in the straightbacked chair like a man already dead and awaiting judgment, his hands raw from rope and rein yet trembling faintly at his sides. He was no more than eighteen, lean as a wintered steer, his face burned by the sun of the llano and unmarked by any true knowing of the world. The tintype man fussed behind his black shroud and brass apparatus, muttering of chemicals and plates, while outside the wind moved across the dust of the street like some ancient verdict rendered against all things living. The boy had never sat so still nor faced anything so inscrutable as that dark eye of glass. He felt the weight of his pistol against his hip, useless here, and wondered if this was how a man began to pass from the dirt of his days into something colder and more permanent.

The light fell through the high window in a single merciless blade and the boy stared into it as though it might reveal some mercy he had not earned. He could smell the collodion and the silver salts, sharp as blood on iron, and he held his breath against the urge to bolt like a green colt from the branding fire. No one had told him how long a man must remain dead in the eyes of such a machine. The photographer called for stillness and the boy obeyed, his jaw set as if against the coming of night or the sudden thunder of hooves. In that silence he saw the shape of his life arrayed before him—empty plains and cattle drives and the slow wearing down of all flesh—and he understood that this small rectangle of metal would outlast the hands that now clutched the chair's wooden arms.

When it was done the boy rose unsteadily, as if from a grave he had only borrowed, and looked upon the damp plate where his likeness had been fixed in silver and shadow. There he was, a young ghost already, eyes hollow with the knowledge that time would claim him as it claimed all things driven before the wind. He paid the man his coin and stepped back into the blinding street, the tintype wrapped in brown paper like a warrant or a last letter from a country he had never truly known. Behind him the apparatus stood silent, waiting for the next soul foolish enough to believe his image might hold against the dark that pressed in from every quarter of the earth.