The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  “You can live with us.”

  The look of simplicity in Sophie’s face told her that she meant it. She would not doubt her generosity this time.

  “Thank you. That’s good of you. But, no. I have to go.”

  Sophie gave the sick twin to Emily and brought the healthy, cross-eyed twin to her other breast. At the moment, none of the glory of the Kitwancool mother shone in Sophie’s tired face. “Sophie, we can do something for Molly. We can take her to a doctor, or get some medicine.”

  Sophie’s eyes flashed. “White doctor?”

  “Yes. In Vancouver.”

  “Your doctor? Someone you know?”

  “No. I don’t know a doctor, but I’m sure I can find a good one.”

  Sophie snorted. “No white doctor anywhere did anything for our people in smallpox time long time ago. Let them all die. Babies. Grandmothers. All die.”

  Her throat felt scorched. Tanu and Cumshewa came home to her. “It’s different now.”

  “Maybe white doctor do something bad to Molly. One less Indian.”

  “Sophie, no!”

  Sophie’s arms clutched Emmie to her breast, and her head moved slowly side to side.

  “All right. But if you ever change your mind, write me. I’ll be here the next day.”

  “Auntie will miss you too.”

  “Tell her I appreciated her coming. And Margaret Dan too. I want to say good-bye to Jimmy but I know he’s working hard.”

  “Some days he works. Some days he only at the taverns.”

  Emily watched Sophie hold Emmie to her breast as she stared out the open doorway into the night, at the spot where Annie Marie had drawn in the dirt under the salal bush, and at the glinting black inlet and the city that was swallowing her husband.

  Part IV

  28: Eagle

  Angry banging on her door made her jump. Mr. Pixley charged right in and shook an old shoe at her. “What is the meaning of this? I found this under the maple tree with this filthy rag inside.”

  “You left it in the basement kindling box. That means it’s a castoff.”

  Before he could sit down, she pulled the rope attached to a pulley that hauled a chair to the ceiling.

  “No it isn’t. I just misplaced them somewhere. Where’s the other one?”

  She yanked up the second chair, feeling smug about using her space-saving invention against this sorehead. “Under the lilac bush. They’re mouse houses. Poor suffering little creatures. All snow and frozen ground outside and them with no place to keep warm.”

  “Warm!” His face grew red. “Warm! You’re worried about the vermin keeping warm? Better you should worry about your tenants freezing. Or the war. Worry about soldiers freezing. Worry about anything but mice.”

  “I do, but mice I can do something about.”

  He glanced at a painting. “Monstrosity,” he muttered on his way out.

  “That’s my mother,” she yelled. “Ethel Dzunukwa. She eats people she doesn’t like. Would you like to meet her?”

  All the decent young men were dying in the trenches in France and only sniveling no-goods were left to rent rooms. Croakers who demanded more heat for the same money, who complained of a wobbly table when they could just as easily fix it themselves, who counted into her palm every dollar of their rent so slowly they were halfway into the next month before they finished. She stormed down to the basement and turned down the valve that sent heat into Mr. Pixley’s apartment. She had a mind to let Susie, her white rat, loose in the hall to terrorize him.

  She grabbed the mail on the way back upstairs. A letter had been forwarded from the Island Arts and Crafts Society. Maybe, against all odds, a painting had sold and it was a check. She went inside and ripped it open. The paper had been torn raggedly from a tablet, the handwriting jerky and uncontrolled.

  December 16, 1916.

  Dear Mrs. Emily Carr.

  I saw your pictures at the Island Arts and Crafts Exhibit. They are so mighty so true. I looked and in my head I was in my illahee. Kitwanga wind cold lonely sad and Kispiox totem poles like tall men talking and Kitsegukla eyes and eyes and eyes. I would like to buy them all. I think you must be a hailat. Do you have more. I would like to see them. Very much I would like to. May I come. Where. Please you can write to me in Victoria Hospital.

  Yours sincerely and respectfully Harold Cook.

  The end.

  A lump formed in her throat. Hailat. It had been four years since she’d heard that word—what they’d called her in Kitwancool. Who was this man? A Gitksan? Someone in Victoria had seen her own deep feelings in the paintings, someone in a hospital. She wondered which ward this Harold Cook was on. She noticed what looked like a child’s smeared pencil drawing of a totem on the back of the letter. The eyes were enormous.

  “What do you think about this?” Emily said, waving it in front of Billy.

  He followed it with his eyes and then struggled to shift positions on the rug, as if he were saying, Make an effort.

  “That’s what I thought. I shouldn’t ignore it.”

  Even if Harold Cook was a child, she wrote him back, and saw eyes and eyes and eyes on totems. She squeezed her own eyes shut to be in those wild, bewitching places. Her head dipped onto the table. Where had the years gone?

  Into endless arguments with Alice and Lizzie about her “inordinate love of rodents,” about taking in André and any other stray cat who meowed pitifully, about the hair net she wore with the black velvet band across her forehead, about missionaries who aided their Indian communities in governmental disputes over hereditary land claims. And, always, they argued tooth and nail over native art as their collective Canadian heritage, which Lizzie customarily dismissed with, “Pooh. They’re a dying people.”

  At least her apartment house put two neighbors’ yards, a narrow lane, and Alice’s schoolhouse between them, thanks to Alice’s loan allowing her to build it on her portion of what was left of Father’s nine acres. Theoretically, the plan was dandy—one big upstairs room serving as studio, living room, and kitchen, with good north light and a sleeping attic above it for her and Billy, and three apartments—one upstairs next to hers and two downstairs. She’d live off rents so she could paint. But when the recession hit, rents had plummeted. The Hooked Rug Period and Clay Pot Period followed, dribbles of income that kept her from painting. Her front yard bore two wooden signs: House of All Sorts—Apartments to Let and Vegetables, Chickens and Eggs for Sale. She’d squeezed onto the bottom of that one, in smaller letters, Paintings too.

  André padded across the letter. His white and yellow-ochre fur looked like splotches of oil paint on the floor at Colarossi. She picked up a drawing pencil to play with him. It felt foreign, heavy. Art was another life, a continent away.

  And now this letter stirred it all up again.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, the buzzer sounded. Tantrum barked his high, yipping, griffon puppy bark. A large man with drooping shoulders, in his early thirties perhaps, shifted from foot to foot at the doorway. His pale face with sparse blond whiskers seemed anxious. For politeness’ sake she tried not to look at his pasty white forehead, scarred and dented. A tuft of blond hair stood up on the top of his head like a feather.

  “I’m Harold Cook.”

  How could a person smile so seriously? “Yes?”

  “Are you Mrs. Emily Carr, the artist?”

  No, she wasn’t. Not anymore. “Miss Carr.”

  “I’m Mr. Cook.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and drew out an envelope. A newspaper clipping fell out and he yelped, then lunged to catch it. One ankle and foot turned in and made it awkward for him. He unfolded a crumpled paper and cleared his throat.

  “Dear Mr. Cook. That’s me. Mr. Harold Cook. Thank you for your kind letter appreciating my work at the Island Arts and Crafts Exhibit. You seem to have the capacity to understand the places and the totem subjects. Yes, I do have more. You can view them at my studio, 646 Simcoe Street, if you do
n’t intend to give me an earful of art claptrap. Sincerely.” His voice went up an octave. “Sincerely, Emily Carr. The end.

  “You’re Emily Carr. I’m Harold Cook.”

  No, he wasn’t Gitksan. And he wasn’t a child. “Come in.”

  He lurched through the doorway and his shoulder slammed against the doorjamb. The moment he saw the totem paintings, his face flushed. “Oh! Oh!”

  She pulled out several others. He sidestepped in front of them, teetering, murmuring indecipherable sounds. His head bobbed irregularly. “Kitwanga,” he sputtered and pointed to one. It was from Kitwanga. “Kitsegukla,” he said and pointed. “Where Salmon First Wake.” Right again. “Kispiox.” A sigh leaked out all the way up from his toes.

  “You’ve been there? You know these places?”

  He gazed at her with watery eyes. She soaked up the sight of him in order to fill her mind for future days with the reminder that someone had looked at her paintings with appreciation.

  He slumped onto the floor over his turned-in foot in front of Kispiox Village. “I lived in Kispiox.” Agony deepened his voice. “My illahee.” His chin quivered. “I thought I’d never see it again. That totem pole is Eagle Who Knows Sorrow.” He rocked forward, tugging absently at his rumpled socks. “It made a long shadow creep across the village. I played under it. I saw it with snow in the cracks.”

  “A white boy in a Gitksan village? When?”

  “Before they sent me away.”

  His face, twisted by memory, stopped her from asking more.

  “That pole cracked as soon as they put it up. It made a big sound.” A violent shudder shook his shoulders. He raised his arms in a circle. “Big potlatch. I didn’t get to go. Big beating.”

  “What’s illahee?”

  He tugged at his rumpled clothing. His misshapen forehead, scarred and dented on one side, knotted even more under the quivering spray of straw-colored hair. With his gaze riveted on Kispiox Village, he answered, “Land that gives comfort.”

  He jerked to his feet as if the sight were too much for him. “I have to go now.” He backed out the door, looking as long as he could, then turned and stumbled down the stairs.

  She was stunned by his intensity. Was this the only kind of person who could love her paintings, the sort you’d quickly look away from on the street? She looked back at them. They were beautiful—to Dr. Newcombe, and now, after four years, to one other person. They seemed to stir to life something deep in him, and dormant in her. Seeing him transfixed, as if the totems were speaking to him, practically melted her and made her want to hear that strong talk herself.

  She went down to the basement and squeezed a thick rope of cadmium red extra deep into some leftover tan wall paint, black into another can, and stirred until her arm ached. In her attic bedroom, she lay on her back and studied the raw underside of the roof, deciding where the wings should go, how the heads should face. Not an Italian fresco, just her secret ceiling. She sketched with a fervor she hadn’t known in years—their wide shoulders, their curved beaks, the stylized native rendering of overlapping feathers as U shapes—and then charcoaled it on the slanted wooden ceiling. With slow, delicious strokes, working all night, she painted two big eagles on the wood, face to face. Two Eagles Who Know Sorrow.

  • • •

  A few days later, Harold stood at the door again. He held out an eagle feather. “It’s for you. Miss Emily Carr.”

  She noticed his pale blue eyes fastened on her, adoring. It was amusing, but a bit embarrassing too.

  “Why, thank you, Harold. It’s a perfect one.” It pleased her that he didn’t think she would consider it worthless.

  “Please may I see the paintings?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat cross-legged in front of Totem Mother, Kitwancool most of the afternoon, rocking, rapt, absently petting André, lost in the mother’s smile. “You are a hailat. Person with spirit power in your hands.”

  Elation filled her. Then, swift as a brush stroke, guilt killed it. Power to do what?

  Harold lifted his shoulders unevenly, took out a clipping from his shirt pocket, and began to read aloud. She had the distinct impression that he had practiced. It was the review of a group Island Arts and Crafts show.

  “Miss Carr’s work is of a decidedly different character. I doubt that even the most patriotic of Irishmen have seen grass as green as in her pictures of Brittany. The blues and reds of Alert Bay are just as blinding, but one picture of a canal in France shows the artist’s Post-Impressionist style in its least aggressive form. As for the grotesques she stooped to elevate as art, the less said the better.”

  He stumbled over Impressionist and grotesque, saying it in three syllables, gro-tes-ques, but read it proudly, as if it were solid compliment. She had to laugh.

  “That show was a year ago. Why didn’t you come sooner?”

  “Couldn’t.”

  He seemed to be holding in some horrific secret. His fear of telling it met her fear of hearing it. Yet, she wanted to know what moved him about the paintings. She invited him to supper. While she fried up two chops, he picked off a book from a stack on her worktable and read. He ate with his hands more than polite society would tolerate. She pretended not to notice.

  “How did you come to live in Kispiox?”

  “My parents were missionaries.” He stared at his bowl, his face blank. “I have to go now.” He stood up so quickly his chair tipped backward. “They’ll be angry with me.”

  “Your parents?” She wondered if Lizzie knew them.

  “No.”

  “Come upstairs first, Harold. I have something to show you.”

  She took the oil lamp and led him up the ladder stairs to her attic. When he saw the Eagles hovering above them in flickering light, wings outspread, their feathers outlined in U shapes, his mouth dropped open. He noticed the Eagle drum she’d bought in Alaska hanging on the wall.

  “A tom-tom,” he whispered in awe.

  She placed it in his hands. He took hold as though it would shatter. The vein leading to the dent in his forehead pulsed. What horrible thing had happened to him?

  She moved his hand to the crossed thongs in the open back and put the drumstick in his other hand. “Go ahead.”

  Gently he let the drumstick fall. A warm, rich tone filled the attic. He shot her a look tortured with memories, and handed it back to her, as if afraid of its power.

  “You may have it. Take it with you.”

  His blue eyes widened, lit with a wild fire.

  29: Grass

  Emily turned over the newspaper next to her morning toast, not wanting to see those dear haggard men in Belgian trenches, not wanting to remember an unshaven face and wonder how his Saskatchewan farm was struggling along without him, whether he got through another day, or died grotesquely in some stinking trench, his lungs scorched by mustard gas. Did birds die too at Verdun? How was Fanny managing? And Gibb? Her dog-eared letters to them straggled back months later, undeliverable. Who could concentrate enough to create art when armies inched closer?

  Outside, Mrs. Pixley in her robe and slippers snatched up her newspaper in a halting motion, as if afraid to know, afraid not to know. A few minutes later, Agnes Smythe did the same. Then, all sounds in the apartment house stopped. No conversation, not even footsteps or a tap running. The tenants met the roar of Europe with silence. Her knife scraping the palest film of grape jelly on toast sounded monumental.

  She slid her breakfast plate aside, tucked her feet under Billy lying like a tousled lump of black and white rug, and began a letter.

  Feb. 20, 1917

  Dear Jessica,

  I miss you fiercely. Has it been a year since I saw you last? Oh, weepy days. Not a body here to talk art with. Hardly a single decent canvas. I feel like a damned fool for so many things. The little apartment house has only one long-standing tenant: Loneliness. To make ends meet I had to cut up the apartment next to mine into three rooms without kitchens, so now I’m a boardinghouse co
ok. One step forward, two steps back. I’m flabbed to death with tiredness. Please come for a painting lesson or a critique or just a plain, old-fashioned good talk, but let’s promise not to talk of war news. We’ll paint in Beacon Hill Park. Be prepared to see a barrel with a hair net. Come soon.

  Yr flappy old friend, Emily

  Two weeks later Jessica stood in the doorway smiling, her red hair heathered by strands of gray, her eyes as green as ever, thrusting out a bouquet of jonquils. “Fresh from the ferry dock.”

  “A sight for sore eyes. You, I mean. The flowers are dazzling too.” Emily brought tea and Lizzie’s biscuits and jam to the long table that served as dining and drawing table. “Just shove those books aside.”

  Jessica looked at them as she moved them—cultural anthropology of Northwest Coast villages, the Bible, Emily’s journals, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Emerson’s essays with a paintbrush marking “Self-Reliance.” “Curious combination,” she said.

  “Aren’t there whole kingdoms of fine thoughts to discover?”

  “Have you been happy here?” Jessica asked.

  Emily pulled her mouth to one side. “I get dreadful hankery for wild places, and the people. They’re outsiders, like me, so they have something to tell me. I won’t be happy down to my bones until I know what it is.”

  “Why don’t you go north again?”

  “Oh, Jess, I feel like a snail with this monstrous apartment house on my back. Tell me about your girls instead.”

  “You wouldn’t recognize them. Megan’s engaged to a soldier.” Jessica’s perfect fingernails tapped the table in a nervous little rhythm. “More than two months since his last letter.”

  “A long time when you’re waiting.” Emily covered Jessica’s hand with hers and was quiet a moment. “How’s Megan taking it?”