The Mislabelled Photograph

Part One · The Wrong Side

Desmond spent the summer he turned thirteen in the basement of the Brannock County Museum, wearing white cotton gloves and sliding fragile photographs into acid-free envelopes, which was considerably less thrilling than it sounded and also, somehow, considerably more. The museum had inherited forty cartons from the estate of a retired schoolteacher who had apparently collected everything, and Mrs. Adeyemi, the curator, needed every picture cleaned, numbered, described, and entered into the catalog before the autumn exhibition, which was titled Our Towns Then. Desmond's particular assignment was the describing, which suited him. He recorded what each photograph showed, whatever was inscribed on the back, and anything else he happened to notice. On the first morning Mrs. Adeyemi had informed him that the anything else was the important part, because the inscriptions on the backs were inaccurate far more often than historians liked to admit.

The photograph that bothered him emerged from carton twenty-six in the third week of July. Penciled faintly on the back was Fennick, Church Street, about 1905. It showed a broad dirt street lined with shops, two horses harnessed to a delivery wagon, a boy with a wooden hoop, and at the far end of the street a church with a tall, slender spire like a sharpened pencil, and a clock face set into the tower beneath it. On the right, a man in a long white apron stood in a shop doorway with his arms folded, squinting suspiciously at the camera, beneath a painted sign that began with the letters TULL and then faded into illegible streaks. Desmond had grown up in Fennick. He had walked down Church Street perhaps a thousand times, and he was almost certain that the church in the photograph was standing on the wrong side.

He carried it upstairs to the gift shop, where a postcard of modern Church Street occupied the revolving rack, and held the two side by side, and then he was completely certain. In the genuine Fennick, the church stood at the end of the street, set back on the right-hand side behind a row of dark yew trees, and in the photograph it stood on the left. The shops were different, which proved nothing, since shops changed constantly, but a church did not migrate across a street. The worst of it was that Mrs. Adeyemi had already selected this exact picture for the exhibition. It was the oldest photograph of Fennick that the museum possessed, and it was going to be reproduced ten feet tall on a banner beside the front entrance, with the label printed underneath in letters the size of his hand.

Desmond had a theory by lunchtime, and it was an excellent theory, or so he believed. He had read in a dusty manual on the basement shelf that early photographs were printed from glass negatives. A careless printer, the manual warned, could easily insert a negative the wrong way around, so that the image emerged reversed, left for right, like a reflection in a mirror. That would relocate the church to the opposite side of the street in precisely the manner he had discovered. He was so delighted with this explanation that he neglected to test it properly. Instead he marched the photograph directly into the office where Mrs. Adeyemi was presenting the exhibition plans to two visitors from the county newspaper, and he announced, slightly too loudly and with considerable satisfaction, that the museum's favorite picture had been printed backward for a hundred years and that nobody had ever noticed.

Mrs. Adeyemi accepted the photograph from him carefully, held it beneath the desk lamp, and asked him to read her the sign above the shop door. He read it aloud, TULL, and she inquired, in a perfectly neutral tone, which way around the letters were facing. They were facing the correct way, naturally, as plainly as the lettering on a cereal box, because if the image had been reversed, the sign would have been reversed along with it, every letter backward and the T at the wrong end. Desmond felt the heat climb from his collar to the roots of his hair. One of the journalists smiled at him sympathetically, which was considerably worse than laughter would have been. Mrs. Adeyemi remarked that it had been a sensible hypothesis to propose, and an even more sensible one to have tested, and she returned the photograph to him without another word.

Part Two · Ten Past Ten

He retreated to the basement and sat with the photograph for a long time without writing anything. The convenient thing would have been to agree that it was Fennick after all, since the label said so, the banner had been ordered, and he had already been publicly wrong once in front of a newspaper. But the church was still on the wrong side of the street. If the picture was not reversed, then the picture was simply not Fennick, and somewhere else in the county had a church with a tall spire at the end of a street, a shop whose sign began with TULL, and a man in an apron who had stood in its doorway in 1905, squinting at a camera, and who had been mislabelled for over a century. Desmond resolved that this time he would be absolutely sure before he uttered a syllable.

The first clue was the clock. Under a magnifying glass, the clock face on the church tower indicated ten minutes past ten, and since the street was crowded with shoppers in broad daylight, that had to be ten in the morning. The second clue was the shadows. Every lamppost, every horse, and every pedestrian had a dark shadow stretching out beside them, and every one of those shadows pointed in the same direction, toward the camera and slightly to the left. Shadows invariably fall directly away from the sun, so the sun must have been ahead of the photographer, somewhere behind the church and a little to the right. Desmond knew from his geography teacher that in their part of the world the sun rose in the east, traveled across the southern sky at midday, and set in the west, so at ten in the morning it would hang in the southeast.

That meant the photographer had been facing approximately east, toward the morning sun, and that the church occupied the eastern end of its street. Desmond went to the reading room and unfolded the museum's 1903 survey map of Fennick across two tables, anchoring the corners with a stapler and an unabridged dictionary. Fennick's Church Street ran due north, with the church at the summit of a gentle slope. A photographer standing there at ten in the morning would have had the sun behind his right shoulder, and every shadow in the picture would have stretched away from him down the street, not back toward him. That was not an opinion, or a sentimental feeling about which side a church ought to be on; it was astronomy, and the sun was never careless, the way printers occasionally were. The photograph was not Fennick, and now he merely needed to determine what it was.

There had been nineteen towns and villages in Brannock County in 1903, and the museum preserved a map of every one, in a broad wooden cabinet of shallow drawers that smelled of dust and pencil shavings. Desmond asked Mrs. Adeyemi whether he could use it, which required some courage, and she handed him the key without asking why, which he appreciated enormously. He worked through the drawers for two afternoons, searching for a single arrangement: a church at the eastern end of a straight main street. Most of the towns were eliminated immediately, because their churches perched on hillsides, or stood in fields, or faced the northern side of a square. By Thursday he had three candidates, and by Thursday evening only one remained, a small market town called Merrin Cross, eleven miles north, whose Market Street ran directly east to the church of Saint Anne.

The complication was that Merrin Cross did not have a spire. Desmond had visited on a school excursion, and its church possessed a square, flat-topped tower, like a castle from a chess set, so he very nearly abandoned the whole investigation. Then he unfolded the later map, from 1938, laid it beside the earlier one, and noticed that the miniature symbol for the church had altered: on the 1903 map it was drawn with a spire, while on the 1938 map the same church was represented by a plain square. He discovered the explanation in a folder of brittle newspaper clippings. A ferocious winter storm in 1921 had cracked the spire, and the town, unable to afford a replacement, had dismantled it rather than rebuild it. Everybody who remembered that spire had died long ago, and nobody in Merrin Cross would have recognized their own church.

Part Three · The Doorway

This time he approached Mrs. Adeyemi when she was alone, with his evidence arranged in careful sequence on her desk: the clock, the shadows, the contradictory maps of Fennick and Merrin Cross, and the yellowed newspaper account of the storm. She listened without interrupting, which made him more anxious rather than less, and when he had finished she picked up the telephone and called the public library in Merrin Cross. The librarian there knew nothing about a business called Tull's, but she promised to inquire, and an hour later she telephoned back. There was a hardware store on Market Street that had occupied the same brick building for as long as anybody could remember, and the family who owned it were named Tull. Mrs. Adeyemi replaced the receiver, regarded Desmond thoughtfully over the top of her spectacles, and informed him that the banner would have to be reprinted.

Mrs. Adeyemi drove them both north on Saturday morning, with the photograph in a cardboard folder balanced on Desmond's knees. Market Street was paved now, and the shops had modern windows and illuminated signs, but when Desmond stood at its western end and gazed east, the church with its flat tower stood precisely where the spire belonged. It was a little after ten, and the morning shadows of the parking meters stretched across the pavement directly toward him, exactly as the photograph had predicted. Tull's Hardware was the fourth building on the right. An elderly man in a brown work coat emerged from behind the counter when they explained their errand, adjusted his reading glasses, and studied the photograph for so long without speaking that Desmond began to worry that he had located the wrong Tull after all, and that the whole elaborate investigation had been a mistake.

Then Mr. Tull placed his finger, very gently, just above the man in the apron. That was his great-grandfather, he said, Amos Tull, who had founded the shop in 1898 with money borrowed from his sister, and there was not a single other likeness of him in the family, not one, only an anecdote about how he folded his arms whenever he was exasperated, and here he was, folding them. He laughed, and then he removed his glasses and polished them on his coat for a rather prolonged time. The museum presented him with a framed copy that afternoon. The banner went up beside the front entrance in September with the correct label, and underneath, in smaller letters, a line explaining that the photograph had been identified by a volunteer. Desmond walked past it several times a day, and he never once grew tired of the way the shadows fell.