The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  • • •

  La Renarde Rouge was gone. The skiff was gone. The tent was gone. The fire pit only wet ashes. The sea pocked and gray. The empty cove humiliated her. Wind knifed through her flesh to her womb.

  She had come so far. He didn’t know what she’d had to wade through to stand here, ready. He’d lost patience. She would shrivel. She was sure she would dry up and shrivel.

  She slogged home dragging her umbrella, plodding through puddles, every splash reinforcing a promise to herself—no one would ever get her to reveal the sorry spectacle she was.

  Billy was waiting for her inside the door. She passed him by without so much as a touch. She kicked off her shoes, stepped out of her dress, and crawled under her quilt. Billy put his chin on her pillow. His liquid eyes six inches from hers told her he was sorry. She reached out to rest her hand on his neck.

  No, she wouldn’t shrivel. But nothing, not his name or the sound of his words, could she allow to remind her of him. She got out of bed, tore up one of the cove sketches, lit the oil burner.

  She stopped. Ridiculous to give up good work in the heat of the moment. Now that was immature. She tossed the rest onto a pile and flopped on the bed again.

  “Come on, Billy. Come on up.”

  8: Spruce

  When Jessica came to the studio to collect her daughters after class on Saturday, a line of girls marched out the door, grabbing a cookie and singing.

  Em’ly is an old maid.

  All her clothes are homemade.

  She’s getting plump and dumpy.

  All her shoes are clumpy,

  But she’s NEVER grumpy!

  “Why, that’s horrible!” Jessica said. “Who made that up?”

  “I did,” Emily said, deadpan, and the girls exploded into laughter.

  “She taught us ‘Hiawatha’ too,” said Megan, Jessica’s oldest. Her voice became mysterious. “And, ‘This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks bearded with moss.’ ”

  “Look!” Louise, the youngest, displayed her fingernails.

  Emily chuckled. She’d painted faces on them.

  “Six new students today. Five new last week. I’m going to open a second session. And Megan’s school wants me to start next week. For once, I don’t have to worry about money.”

  “Where did they all come from?” Jessica asked.

  “Apparently the society madams don’t think I’m too critical or too cranky for their daughters, only for themselves.”

  “You’re not too critical for me. I’m not making any progress.”

  “Why not?”

  “I dropped out when they fired you.”

  “More than a month and you haven’t told me that? You come with the girls and I’ll murmur a critique in your direction once in a while—for what it’s worth.”

  “It’s worth the world to me.”

  “Then come woodsing with me Monday when they’re in school. Sophie, my Squamish friend, and I are going to Stanley Park, the interior. I’ve never been there. She said you never know forests until you get inside. We could paint together.”

  “Honestly? You said you’d never teach adults again.”

  “Prattle. Besides, I didn’t say I would teach there.”

  • • •

  Without a path in sight, Emily pushed through a tangle of honeysuckle behind Sophie and scrambled over fallen logs, feeling for the bottom below a blanket of needles and humus. She tugged on Billy’s leash. Anything sniffable, he sniffed, blew scents out his nose, and stopped to sniff again. “Keep moving, Billy.” Tommy and Annie Marie padded alongside him, and Jessica brought up the rear. Towering conifers made a canopy a hundred feet in the air, with the tops of trees a hundred feet beyond that. She felt small for a change. Only twenty minutes’ walk into the interior and she’d lost all sense of a city nearby. Every branch stirring in a breeze became a threat, a cougar stalking, its hot snorting breath on her neck. This wasn’t a park. It was wilderness, untouched by axe or footfall. Just like Claude had said about the north, wilderness so formidable it can turn you inside out. And then his eyebrows had popped up in awe.

  She stepped unevenly on a cone and lost her balance. Pay attention! Forget him! She’d lost something of herself to him and she needed to become whole again. She wanted no more weepy days.

  When she’d been troubled as a girl, she had taken her hurt outside, had lain with her face pressed down to earth’s cool green cheek, smelled her fresh perfumes, and tried to feel earth’s buried heart throb. If only that would be enough for her now.

  “Don’t you have the feeling we shouldn’t be here?” Jessica asked.

  “No, this is exactly where we should be.” She thought of what a woman on the electric tram had said soon after she’d moved to Vancouver, that queer things happen in Stanley Park—suicides and attacks by cougars and bears. That had kept her out, but now, with Sophie, she felt intoxicated by the siren call of wind through branches, by the clean after-a-rain freshness. “Take a gulp of this air.”

  “I’d rather be taking a gulp of hot coffee.”

  Tommy pointed to a fungus shaped like half a mushroom growing on a spruce trunk, ridged on its shiny red-brown top, porous on its creamy underbelly, its edge ruffled delicately.

  “That’s a tc’i,” Sophie whispered. “A sign of Kaklaitl.”

  “What’s that?” Emily asked.

  “Wild Woman of the Woods.” Sophie regarded Tommy seriously. “Kaklaitl leaves that thing to tell children be home at sunset or she’ll put them in her basket made of snakes. She want a son like Mary wanted one and got Jesus, and I wanted one and got you.”

  “What she look like?” Tommy asked.

  “Wild black hair.” Sophie made quick circular gestures around her head. “A wood leg.” She took a few exaggerated, limping steps, stiff-legged and bent, sucking in air to make her cheeks hollow. “She cries, ‘Huu, huu.’ Be real quiet sometimes you hear her.”

  They all stood still and listened, Jessica bending forward, her hand cupped behind her ear. A hollow sound rang out, like someone striking a closed wooden box with a mallet.

  “It’s her! It’s her!” Annie Marie shouted and snuggled into Sophie’s skirt. The knocking came again, and changed to a sound of scraping across a ridged surface, and a kind of clucking that Emily loved.

  “That’s only Raven,” Sophie said.

  “That’s not a bird,” Annie Marie said.

  “He makes a hundred noises,” Sophie said. A bell-like chime followed by a kind of low, throaty yodel issued from the canopy of boughs. “That’s him too.”

  They went deeper into the forest until Sophie stopped abruptly. She seemed to be absorbing the sight or smell or spell of something, as if storing it up so it would feed her back again later, like Lulu had said. She stood in utter stillness, not reaching out, but just letting it come to her if it would. Slowly Emily turned in a circle to see what it might be.

  “All those greens juicy enough to drink,” she murmured. “Jessica, see that spruce trunk encrusted with filigreed lichen? Lime green shot through with yellow.”

  “Look up,” Jessica said.

  The trees bowed in arches like cathedral vaulting. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through tufts of spruce foliage.

  “It’s the same soft light that comes through the windows in your church, Sophie,” Emily said.

  “What about the green?” Jessica asked.

  “I’d call that Prussian green, like the sea when the sky is overcast.”

  Emily swept her hand across some moss thick as a looped rug turning rocks into hummocky pillows.

  “Brilliant emerald,” Jessica said.

  “Except in shadow. There it’s Hooker’s middle green.”

  “A hundred of kinds of mosses,” Sophie said proudly. “All different colors.”

  “Look at this.” Jessica pointed to a rotting log sprouting saplings and licorice ferns. “Sap green like new spring leaves.”

  “For that cedar foli
age, I’d use viridian. It’s deeper. And for those lichens trailing from hemlock boughs, chromium oxide with gray to get that dull olive. Don’t you want to just inhale those colors?”

  She imagined them cleaning her lungs, and felt cradled in the bosom of the forest.

  They set up their flat watercolor easels.

  “Are you going to paint now?” Annie Marie asked.

  “Yes. Now you have two people to watch.”

  Annie Marie snapped her head back and forth. Her mouth fell open when she realized it was true.

  Billy sniffed until he found a half-dry bed of needles suitable for a snooze. He turned in circles, deciding how to position himself.

  “For God’s sake, Billy. Why don’t you just sit down?”

  After a few moments, Jessica asked, “How do you pick out anything as a subject? It’s all so meshed together.”

  “That’s why people say it’s unpaintable. Don’t be in a hurry.”

  The sun shifted and sent a shaft of light to illuminate a puddle, like molten brass. Perfect. That would be the point of highest light. The closest trunk on the right would be the darkest value. Everything else would be in between. Feelings came in words, and she wrote at the base of her painting: The solemnity, the peace of this place, a lovely thing.

  • • •

  Still in her chenille housecoat and scuffs the blustery day before her student-and-teacher exhibit, Emily was printing out cards with the students’ names when she heard a soft knock. Her sisters, she thought, and opened the door.

  Sophie stood on the stoop with only the baby. “You need help to put up the pictures?”

  “Oh, Sophie, you came across the inlet for that? But you have your own work to do.”

  “Any day for baskets. Today for pictures.”

  “You must be cold.” She made her tea and warmed up some leftover vegetable soup. While Sophie ate, she seemed troubled.

  “What’s wrong, Sophie?”

  “Mrs. Chief Joe Capilano. She saw you and me sitting on church steps. Now she wants me bring you to her house.”

  “That would be nice. I’d like to.”

  “No.” Sophie’s bottom lip pooched out. “I don’t want share you with her. You’re my friend. Not for her.”

  “Yes, but I have a heart bigger than for one friend.”

  “No. I don’t want Mrs. Chief Joe get you.”

  “Sophie, no one will ever take your place. You’ll always be my best friend. We have good shares.”

  Sophie’s face lifted, her cheeks pushing up and making her eyes squint. She slurped the last of the broth in the bowl and they set out for the studio a few blocks away.

  “You have two houses? Only one person and two houses?”

  Emily unlocked the door. “This one isn’t where I sleep. It’s where I work.”

  “Why you don’t live and work together? One work. One place.”

  It did seem extravagant. What was she hanging on to? Hope of a life other than painting?

  Sophie surveyed the row of children’s watercolors already tacked on the wall—driftwood with seagulls, the Billingsgate Fish Wharves, boats and fishnets, creatures they found in the tide pools. She scratched her forehead. “Too high.”

  Emily stepped back. “They’re just right. Chest-high.”

  “Not for babies who made them.”

  Emily let the head of the tacking hammer fall into her palm. “All right. You win.” She took them down and let Sophie set the height—low all around the room—while she drove in nails where Sophie told her.

  “Why do you call these older children babies?”

  “Because their mamas love them when they old same as when they babies.”

  The contentment of working together, humming, giggling when they both chose the same one to put up next, filled her, and she thought, This is the joy that sisters might feel.

  “Annie Marie would like the ones of Billy,” Sophie said.

  “You know, she could come to my class. I’d love it.”

  Sophie shook her head. “Only white children.”

  “That’s only in your head, Sophie, not mine.”

  They hung Emily’s work, many of them from Stanley Park, on a row above the children’s work. The two largest watercolors they hung opposite each other, shafts of light in a cedar grove, and the Ancestor. Sophie stood in front of the Ancestor with her hands on her hips. “Maybe Ancestor will make strong talk to white people too.”

  They finished as it was beginning to get dark.

  “Will you be all right going home?”

  Sophie made her hand cut through the air in front of her. “I just put the canoe straight and keep to paddling.” She wrapped the baby in her shawl.

  “That’s not much warmth for going across the water. Do you want to stay here tonight? In my house, I mean?”

  “No. My other babies and Frank won’t know where I am.”

  “Then take my coat.” She put it over Sophie’s shoulders.

  Sophie stroked the lapel and gazed at Emily in wonderment. “Only for borrowing. I bring back soon.”

  “Come tomorrow night for the show. Bring Jimmy.”

  “No. Ancestor is enough.”

  Her baby’s eyes were closed as she went out the door. Sophie turned back and grinned. “Next time, make the forest more dark.”

  • • •

  “Did Lizzie and Dede even think about coming?” Emily asked Alice the morning of the exhibit.

  Alice stuffed her gloves into her handbag as though the act required total concentration. “No. Yes. Lizzie’s a bit under the weather and—”

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to say.”

  Alice pulled in her lips and quickly turned toward the exhibit. She gushed over the children’s drawings, but in front of the work from Hitats’uu, she didn’t utter a syllable.

  “Even a grunt is better than dead silence.”

  Alice stopped in front of the small drawing of Lulu at the menstrual hut. Without knowing the custom, a person wouldn’t understand it, but maybe the womb and infants painted on the wall would give her a clue. If it were Dede, she’d be tempted to shock her with the truth and snicker over it in bed that night, but with Alice, she hoped for a spontaneous moment of intimacy.

  “She looks dreamy.”

  At least that was something.

  Alice passed over the Ancestor figure quickly.

  “That’s the largest thing in the room and you act as though it’s invisible.”

  “I . . . He’s so severe.” She turned to the watercolor of the cedar grove. “I like this best. How the light falls between the branches. Why don’t you call it Cathedral Light?”

  “Does it look like that to you? Oh, Alice, I wish you’d go there with me. It’s Stanley Park. The interior. It’s so deep and quiet and still. It could heal a person, body and soul. I get a sense of some presence breathing there. God’s too big to be squeezed into a stuffy church, but I feel Him there in the spaces between the trees.”

  Alice observed her a moment, dewy-eyed, as though through all the years she had doubted whether her rebel sister even believed in God, and now she was relieved.

  Emily felt a sheepish smile form. “It’s good to have you here. At least I can say one third of my family supports me.”

  “One fourth,” Alice corrected. “Clara.”

  “Yes. Clara. Only one in five a married woman. Hasn’t that ever struck you as odd? As meaning something?”

  “Not particularly. It’s kind of sad, though.”

  They were quiet awhile, and peaceful. She might not have another chance to ask for a long time. “Was there ever some injury Father did to you? Was he ever crude to you?”

  Alice gave her an odd look. “No. He was never warm to me, but I never hated him like you did in your black crow period. We couldn’t understand it because he loved you best.”

  “He did not.”

  “Of course he did. We all knew it. He even looked at you differently than he did at the rest of
us.”

  “How?”

  “More lingering, I would say. Protective, maybe—you being the youngest and prettiest. ‘Oh, those exotic eyes and dark hair. She’ll be a beauty, that one,’ he used to say.”

  Emily snorted. “Flat eyes, you mean, the right one larger than the left. Right eyebrow too heavy. Face too wide. Cheeks like biscuit dough. Hair crinkly. Shoulders like a stevedore.”

  “All right, all right.” Alice pushed her palms against the air to stop her. “Still, his attentions to you enraged Lizzie. That’s what made her so fierce in winning his love the only way she was sure of, by being more Christian than you.”

  “She won that just by the way she opened the Bible.”

  Alice snickered in a very un-Alice-like way.

  “He never spoke bluntly to you—about men or sex?”

  Alice looked at her, not with the offended astonishment Lizzie or Dede would have wielded to affirm their moral superiority, the overdone shock that couldn’t be trusted. Alice’s look was genuine innocence—the way she negotiated life. And in that look, with Alice slowly shaking her head, she knew. It had only been her. Thank God. Father hadn’t with any of the others.

  • • •

  Jessica and her family were the first to arrive. Parents and grandparents poured in. The Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club arrived in a group, overdressed. Emily snickered to Jessica as they entered. “A parade of ruffled layer cakes.” When the last one came through the door, she added, “Interesting. No madam president.”

  “You think I’d invite her?”

  And no Sophie. She wished she had insisted that she come.

  Most said the children’s work was fresh and original. Parents glowed. “You’re a fine teacher,” one woman said. She nodded her thanks. They called her drawing of three Nootka girls in shawls “charming,” and a pen and ink of the village “quaint.”

  “Why are you scowling?” Alice whispered. “Those words should make you float.”

  “I don’t want to be charming and quaint. Leave that to the jabber-and-scratch ladies.”

  “For God’s sake, Millie, what do you want?”