The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  She stopped the carriage in front of Sophie’s open door.

  “Ooh, Em’ly! You came again!” Sophie sang out from the doorway. “I prayed you don’t forget me.”

  “Never think it for an instant.”

  The twins stepped outside. “See? My babies. Emmie”—Sophie touched her shoulder—“and Molly. Four years old.”

  Emily crouched to speak to each one. Molly was smaller. Emmie’s eyes were still crossed. Would that make things blurry? Painterly? When she rose, she saw a quality of weariness in Sophie’s face. Furrows from the corners of her mouth were forming, and shadows darkened the skin under her eyes.

  Sophie looked at the pram in confusion. A few steps forward and she saw Billy. “Oh, so sad for you, Em’ly. So sad.” She petted him on the head. “Poor Billy dog.” Her face tightened into sorrow lines, but her fingers stroked the maroon fabric of the pram and lingered on the handle.

  “Is Jimmy here?” Emily asked.

  “No. He’ll be back by and by. He went to see Samuel Dan’s new gas boat.”

  “I was worried he’d be working.”

  “He don’t work so much now, only small jobs on the dock.”

  Emily glanced toward Billy. “Do you think Jimmy would?”

  Sophie nodded. “I’ll ask Mrs. Johnson to tell him come to the meadow when he walks by. It’s pretty there now, all flowers. Billy will like it.”

  Emily let the girls wheel the carriage uphill on the walk leading away from the sea. At the end of the planks, the wheels stuck in the soft soil. Carefully, Emily tipped the pram sideways onto the meadow and Billy edged his way out. His nose drew him onward in the swirl of summer scents, but his hind end dragged across the meadow grasses. Eventually he gave up and lay panting.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, Emily thought. In her own way, Lizzie had given her something.

  Violet blue camas blossoms speckled the meadow, offering comfort. Emily threaded some through Billy’s coat behind his left ear. The twins giggled and skipped off to gather more, not knowing it was done in sadness. Molly made a flower chain and looped it around Billy’s neck. Emmie threaded the stems through the shaggy hair at his rump so the clump of blossoms looked like a pompon. Emily couldn’t decide whether it was an annoyance to Billy, or whether it evoked an ancient sacred rite. Since he had let the girls do it, she thought it must be all right with him.

  “Why did you bring him all the way here to Frank?”

  “He likes Billy.” She scratched Billy under his chin, his favorite spot. “And he knows about dying.”

  “A dog for a few years is better than no dog at all.”

  Emily managed a nod.

  “I have enough money now for Tommy’s gravestone. The grave man is making it with a cross carved on it. Very Christian. Next is Annie Marie so I keep to making baskets.”

  A good friend would encourage a woman who had that much need, like Jessica encouraged her. But what if the friend thought the endeavor was futile or wrong-headed?

  “That’s good, Sophie.”

  “They hard to sell these days. The war probably. It’s awful. I feel sorry for the women here their sons are gone to it. Margaret Dan’s brother is in France. She waits to hear.”

  “Waiting. That’s all we do.”

  “You don’t come to paint at the reserve anymore.”

  “I’d like to. Not today, though.”

  “You painted all the totem poles?”

  “No. Some I haven’t even seen.”

  “You quit?” Sophie’s voice rose sharply. “Fat men in Victoria don’t like them either? Then come live here. Here you learn not to give up.”

  Sophie’s disgust entered her like a hot poker. Jessica’s she could take, but Sophie was harder, when one reason she’d started the project in the first place was for Sophie. Or so she’d told herself at the time.

  “Frank’s brother say up north they cut down a pole for firewood.” Her words were barbed.

  “No. I can’t believe it.”

  She lay her hand on Billy’s side and felt long vacant moments between his breaths, as though he were deciding whether or not to take another one.

  Jimmy came, and his girls ran to hold his hands. He saw at once what must be done. With a soft smile he said, “Sophie has missed you. See? Our girls are growing up now.”

  “They’re happy children, I can tell.”

  Sophie led them away, back toward the village. They skipped behind the baby carriage. She’d leave it with Sophie. There would be no more carting clay. The salmon pot had leapt out of Jessica’s hands like a salmon leaping up river to die. She had truer things to do.

  Jimmy petted Billy fondly, his head close to Billy’s ear, and spoke to him in Squamish. When he stood up again, Emily opened her handbag and looked up at him. He nodded. Quickly, he shoved the gun in his waistband behind his jacket, took the cartridge box, and walked away about ten steps, his back toward Billy.

  Emily lay on her stomach and put her cheek next to Billy’s head and let him lick her face. With both hands she stroked his paws, scratched behind his ears, rubbed under his chin, along his neck, his back, his haunch that had taken that hurled rock meant for her. She couldn’t stop looking at him, and he looked back in utter trust. With wet brown eyes, he said he was sorry he couldn’t get up the stairs any more, sorry he knocked the baby carriage when she lifted him, sorry he had misbehaved at the grave house in Kitwancool, sorry he had wandered off when she was digging clay, sorry he made her frantic searching for him.

  “You’ve been the best friend I’ve ever had,” she said.

  He blinked. She took it as an assent. Her hand stroked his head one last time, and she stepped back.

  “Thank you, Jimmy. You’re a good man.”

  Jimmy lifted him, cradling him powerfully against his chest, and took him into the forest.

  She turned and walked quickly through the village to get to the sea so that waves and wind might out-roar any other sound. The girls were playing with seaweed on the beach. Sophie padded toward her. The distant shot riveted their attention to each other’s faces.

  “Come in the house,” Sophie said. “I got fish soup. Maybe still warm.”

  Inside, Sophie rekindled the wood burner and Emily sank into a chair. Sophie set the soup before her, and watched with soft eyes each spoonful Emily ate. She ached to cry but was ashamed to in front of Sophie. A dog wasn’t a child. Nor was it a man lost in war. “I knew it was inevitable, but . . .”

  Sophie’s arm came around her awkwardly, the first time ever. The feel of Sophie’s palm on her shoulder blade cracked open the hold she had on herself. She sobbed.

  “I know, I know,” Sophie crooned, bending down to her, her hand steady on Emily’s back, her body close, her braid smelling of wood smoke. “Billy was a good boy. A good boy. He loved you. You loved him back. I know.”

  31: Dzunukwa

  Before landlady duties intruded the next day, she found a drawing of Sophie she’d done years before. It was nice, but it wasn’t a painting. Portraits didn’t have to be stiff and pretentious. They could show feeling and character and love. With only squeezed-flat tubes, she probably had enough paint for a small canvas board, but she’d have to use strange colors—a smudge of cadmium orange for her broad nose, violet for her sharply edged full lips, the upper one a bit fuller. She worked her cheeks in tints of raw sienna and red earth, then dulled it with a touch of violet and Prussian green under her eyes. But Sophie was strong—a streak of vermilion along her jaw—and enduring—viridian green for her cheekbones. The Fauve colors were enough to make her giddy.

  Once Lizzie had pleaded with her to paint portraits instead of totem poles. When she finished and was cleaning her brushes, something mischievous ignited in her, and she took the painting across the lane and in the side door. “Look, Lizzie. A portrait.”

  “Why would you want to paint a siwash woman?”

  “Because I love her.” Emily looked her dead in the eye. “She was good to me
yesterday. So was Jimmy.”

  Lizzie’s expression changed, as though she were seeing some aspect of her sister’s life she’d never ventured to think about before. “I’m sorry.” Her voice softened. “I prayed for you all day yesterday.” Studying Sophie’s face, she added, “Maybe my prayers were answered.”

  • • •

  When Emily returned home with the painting, a young man in olive tweed with longish hair, a stranger, stood at her door. His pant legs were tucked into tall laced boots like the puttees of soldiers in news photos.

  “Excuse me, are you Emily Carr, the artist?” He took off his canvas hat. Spots trailing down his green tie looked like rabbit tracks.

  “I’m Emily Carr.”

  “The artist?”

  “Depends on which day you come. Today, yes. Tomorrow, landlady, boardinghouse cook, plumber, gardener, poultry farmer.”

  He nodded toward Sophie’s portrait. “I’m sure I have the right person. I’m Dr. Marius Barbeau, cultural anthropologist at the Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa. Is it possible you could show me your paintings?”

  “I don’t wish to show them to people who are unsympathetic. I have no energy to put myself back together again.”

  “I’m sure I’d be sympathetic, just from what I can see in your hand.” His smile made his words seem genuine.

  She opened the door. “Come in.”

  Catching sight of Dzunukwa, he puffed out his cheeks. “Yes, indeed! Magnificent.”

  “How did you learn about me?”

  “Does the name Luther Moody mean anything to you?”

  “Yes. Mosquitoes and mud.”

  “He said you painted up the Skeena. Some poles that aren’t there anymore.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Aha! I had a hunch you’d care. I’ve seen Dr. Newcombe’s collection.”

  “He thought they were inaccurate.”

  “Yes, well, he sees like a scientist,” Barbeau said.

  “And you?”

  “I like to think I see like a . . . a whole man. Art and culture and science all together.” He looked at Dzunukwa. “You understand poles.”

  “Not all the crests. And not the histories.”

  “But the feeling. I trust your interpretation.” He noticed Totem Mother, stepped back and glanced behind him for a place to sit. The only chair was piled with tenants’ curtains to be laundered. She lowered another chair from the ceiling pulley. He looked at the mechanism and chuckled. “Inventive.”

  “Practical.” She propped up paintings until the room was a forest of totems. “Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing them.”

  His eyebrows pinched together. “Why are you?”

  “Once I thought it was to make a record. Now I think it’s to be close to some spirit I don’t understand—yet. To honor the people who do. And to express my love for the West.”

  “I can see that.” He gave attention to each one, identifying the Skeena ones by place and history, asking about Kwakiutl and Haida poles he hadn’t seen.

  “What did you do up the Skeena?” she asked.

  “I collected poles and artifacts and legends.”

  Collected! Like teacups or porcelain cats. Taking them away from their people. Her hand squeezed the chair’s rope. “For a museum?”

  “Yes, and for my anthropological interests. I appreciate things people make with their hands.” He hadn’t taken his eyes from the paintings. “You have an individuality and strength I haven’t seen in other West Coast artists other than carvers.”

  She brought out Kispiox Village, and Frog Woman, and the large Tanu oil of three house ruins and their frontal poles.

  “That one with the frogs is extraordinary. Where’s it from?”

  “Kitwancool.”

  “You’ve been to Kitwancool? Unbelievable!”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t let anybody in. A constable shot their chief once and they went wild until the BCPP put down the uprising. It turned into a blood bath. Ever since, they’ve been hostile.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Five days.”

  “Unbelievable! They knew you were painting poles?”

  “Yes.”

  She brought out more, and pointed to Totem Mother on the wall. “These are all from Kitwancool.”

  He smacked his forehead in amazement. “If I might say so, you a woman.”

  “Maybe that’s an advantage. Threats to their way of life usually come in a male package.”

  He took an hour enjoying all of them, chatting about the places. Finally he leaned two against a chair, Kispiox Village and Kitsegukla. “I’d like to buy these two, if they’re for sale. Are they?”

  Her legs melted like icicles in an unexpected thaw and she sat on the pile of curtains. I have the spirit power, she heard, distant but sure, Dzunukwa putting herself together again.

  “Yes.” The word a tight chirp, not at all like Dzunukwa’s low hoot.

  He rested his forearms on his knees. His smile expressed a manly kindness. “They’re marvelous. They have a strangeness yet a sensitivity.”

  She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “Pardon me. I’ve been an ugly duckling so long I thought I’d been squashed flat forever.”

  “How much?” he whispered.

  “It’s been years . . . I don’t know how to think in price.”

  He wrote out a check and held it out to her. It trembled in her hand. More than she’d collected in rents for two months. She leaned a Kitwancool bird and man canvas against the others he’d chosen. “Here, take this one too. You’ve been looking at it.”

  “Why, thank you! With your permission, I’d like to keep in touch. Eventually, I think, there will be interest in what you’re doing. It’s faint now, but there’s a growing urge for Canada to find its identity in the landscape, particularly the less trodden places. That has to include the places of our indigenous peoples. I know some folks at the National Gallery—”

  “Then you think it’s all right, what I’m doing?”

  He looked puzzled.

  “I mean, using Indian motifs.” He was hardly the one to give her an objective answer.

  “Miss Carr, what you are doing is of inestimable importance. To native cultures, to Canadian art, to Canada itself.”

  A breath held too long in some deep part of her gushed out.

  She walked with him downstairs and watched him carry her paintings down the street. There they went, Kispiox too, Harold’s illahee. What would he do without them?

  She waved with both arms above her head, wanting to whoop, but felt a twinge, for Harold.

  Barbeau turned back to her and shouted, “Don’t strap yourself to a dishpan. Paint!”

  32: Maple

  A soiled white sky pressed against the window. She pressed back, the glass cold on her palms, the fog flecked with snow, dressing the maple branches in the back yard, separating her from the world. She sat down to write her Christmas note to Jessica on a folded sheet of paper. On the front she drew herself, roly-poly, bending down to stoke the coal furnace wearing a Mother Hubbard dress, tall boots, and a Santa Claus cap with an eagle feather. Inside, she wrote:

  Six months of war since your visit. Life wags on. I’m still waiting to hear from that anthropologist in Ottawa. Everything except the war effort has ground to a halt. The world can’t exist this way much longer. I worry about Megan’s fiancé.

  Last summer, I moved my paintings and easels into the basement so I could rent the studio too. I slept in the back yard in my tent which horrified Lizzie. Lovely cricket lullabies and moon gleam but no privacy to paint. I’m back in my studio now that chilly weather has set down its haunches, and Dzunukwa is back on the wall singing her power song. If only I could make out the words. I’ve learned streams of Whitman by heart. He bucks me up when I need it, telling me that “through anger, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.” Still, I resent not having time for
the spiritual in tending to the physical.

  Are there any paints in Vancouver? Impossible to get any here. If Vancouver had some, it’d be worth the price of the ferry. I’d sit up in my coffin if I could get some viridian or Hooker’s green. Let’s pray the American forces make 1918 the last horrible year.

  Oceans of love to you and the girls, Emily

  A week later a small parcel arrived. A crumpled tube rolled most of the way up, viridian, with a note.

  Better on your canvas than mine. No paint in Vancouver.

  Love, Jessica

  Emily unscrewed the cap and saw a shiny circle of deep green, a color so gorgeous it practically put her eyes out. But what could a single crust do for a starving woman? Should she ration it like everything else or indulge herself in one luscious green painting? She dug out her box of oils, a few cracked tubes pressed flat and rolled, saved for the hope of squeezing out a brush stroke. She jabbed with her penknife at the promising ones to pry back the metal. One painting’s worth. Kispiox. For Harold. He’d wept when he discovered it missing. She’d told him that was the pain of painting. A farewell accompanied every grain of success.

  She looked for a roll of canvas, and realized she’d used the last to replace a window shade in an apartment. Cardboard would have to do.

  She cupped the tube in her palm, paralyzed by fear of wasting it on mediocre work. You want green paint? Here’s a smear of it. Now what’ll you do? God, leaning over a cloud to watch, testing her spunk. She closed her eyes and squeezed out tears.

  You can’t do everything you want to, my little nympholept, Father had said. She’d been making a Songhees village of wet sand on the beach, hurrying to repair crumbling bighouses after each wave until, in one violent whoosh, the village was flattened to a few pathetic lumps. Maybe, as he’d watched her sob, he’d seen her tendency to beat her head against a wall trying the impossible. Maybe that was why he discouraged her artistic leanings. Could he have been that insightful?