The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  “The Provincial Parliament didn’t think so.”

  “There’s talk in Ottawa of an exhibit of West Coast art. I’d like it to combine aboriginal with European-Canadian artists.”

  “Do you think people will see my paintings as true? As representing illahee?”

  Harold perked up again, studying Barbeau, to see if he knew the word.

  Barbeau smiled in a fatherly way. “Unquestionably. Every one of them shows the country giving comfort.”

  Emily and Harold exchanged glances, and Harold let his shoulders drop.

  “So, I’ll hear from you in another decade?” Emily asked.

  “You’ll hear from me by—”

  “Don’t make promises you won’t keep. It hurts too much.”

  “You’ll hear by the first of April.” He handed her a check.

  “The first of April. Spring.”

  After he left, she and Harold stood quietly looking at the paintings surrounding them. “It’s like I’m back home,” he said.

  “For me too.”

  It seemed a violation to confine them again to darkness and coal dust, but eventually she said it was time.

  “Swanaskxw, swanaskxw,” he murmured as he put them away.

  “What’s that?”

  He was quiet until the last trip to the cellar. “Helper of hailat,” he whispered.

  She smiled. He had an identity now that made him proud.

  They climbed the stairs to her apartment and he opened the door. She gasped. Torn newspaper had been flung about the room. Jars of brushes overturned. André’s milk spilled. A clay pot broken. A kitchen drawer lying sideways on the floor, all the silverware scattered.

  Harold’s groan told her they both saw it at once—a canvas smeared with wet cadmium yellow and Prussian blue, a watercolor of a village streaked with alizarin crimson, and little yellow monkey handprints walking across the Eagle rug and spotting Lulu’s torn face. And where was the culprit? On the sink counter dipping her yellow hands into the molasses jar.

  “You cussed, wicked creature!” she yelled.

  “You going to beat her?” Harold wailed in panic.

  She grabbed turpentine and a rag and charged toward the sink, salt crunching beneath her feet on the hardwood floor. When she yanked Woo’s hand to clean it, Woo shrieked and escaped along the counter. Emily seized her and held on, the little body rigid, both frozen in heat, eye to eye, Woo’s green beads lit with terror.

  A loud sigh gushed out. “No. That would only teach her hate. There is no good and bad behavior in the jungle.”

  Stricken, Harold whimpered, his big hands shaking, his part in the disaster dawning on him. “Beat me instead.”

  While she scrubbed the spidery hands, the tuft of charcoal gray hair sticking up on Woo’s head quivered so pathetically it drained her of anger. “She only did what she saw me doing. Whoever senses someone else’s creativity is stimulated.”

  Harold repeated her last sentence. Emily looked at him a moment and finished cleaning Woo’s hands and feet and the blue smear across her belly. Then she chained her up. “We can’t leave her untied, Harold,” she said as gently as she could.

  An outbreak of jagged sobbing shook his body and he crumpled onto the floor. “Beat me,” he whimpered. “Beat me instead.”

  Kneeling beside him, she raised his chin and touched her face to his. In all her life, she’d never felt a man’s hot tears on her cheek.

  “No, Harold. She helped me with more paintings than she destroyed. And you have too.” She said it slowly so that it would sink in. “My swanaskxw.”

  She mispronounced it and felt his smile against her cheek. “When you love, you’ve got to love through and through.”

  In a moment she asked, “Don’t you wish we could have seen her do it?”

  Harold laughed sadly. Her own laughter bubbled up, deep and explosive as Harold leapt up and twirled, pantomiming Woo spilling out salt, chewing off a paint tube cap, squeezing out paint, planting his palms on the floor, on chairs and imaginary paintings, smacking his paws on his monkey cheeks and his furry belly. Woo, free of inhibitions, and Harold too.

  36: Cedar

  One Saturday—she’d asked that he never come on Sunday, sisters’ day—Harold brought his shoe box again.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said. “Under the maple tree.”

  “All right.”

  New leaves were unfurling in a sap green so bright it shocked her. Summer was coming full tilt, and still no letter from Barbeau.

  She had tried not to think of him, had tried to go to the mailbox without wanting. Yet she’d kept up Christmas hemlock boughs till February. She hadn’t even bent over to smell Alice’s spring hyacinths. She’d ignored Lizzie’s comments about the blessed season of Christ’s Resurrection. She had her own resurrection to petition for. If Barbeau sent an invitation to exhibit, then she was meant to paint. If April came and went without a peep, then she wasn’t, and she might as well never buy another tube of paint, never even think of exhibiting. Squash it dead. It was better dead. Less agony. Lead a normal life. A normal, boring, sterile life.

  She yanked out a tall weed and flung it against the tree trunk. A pot of hooey. Deep down, she wanted that show with all the force of a Pacific storm.

  Harold brought two chairs from the porch. “Are you ready?” he asked, his cheeks squeezed up to his eyes.

  She pulled her thoughts back to him. “Yes.”

  “Harold Cook a Canadian. Haste along with me. I Harold Cook author of this book lived at Lejac Indian Residential School near Kispiox. My friends lived there too. The missionaries Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook made them change their names. Muldo they called Moses and Tuuns they called Thomas and Haaydzims they called Hosea. Me Muldo Haaydzims and Tuuns we dug the potato patch next to the children’s graveyard. We learned to march and count and read and write. So now I write myself Harold Cook a Canadian.

  “Tuuns and Muldo got beat for playing on Sunday so we went to our secret place in the woods where we built a waab out of branches and bark and we play there like it’s a bighouse. We don’t wear shoes there because Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook don’t like. Tuuns talks and talks about running away back to Kitsegukla but they don’t know the way how to go. At night they hear sounds of potlatch in Kispiox singing and drums and yelling and laughing I don’t hear but they do and Tuuns rips apart his mattress.”

  Harold stopped and rocked. She felt anxious as his uneven rhythm increased.

  “Muldo carved Wolf on a log long nose slit eyes big teeth all wild looking. I looked at it long and long. I asked him why he carved Wolf and he said because Wolf is free and does what he wants and that’s his naxnox that gives him power.”

  He stopped and read ahead silently, then looked up, anguish tightening his scarred forehead. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Go on, Harold. I want to hear.”

  “One time we found a little squirrel dead and took it out to our waab and we built a fire and spread our faces with ash and Muldo did the Wolf dance his eyes all gleaming and his head tipped back howling way back in his throat jumping around the squirrel and the fire splashing light in his eyes and he held the squirrel in his mouth and shook his head and dragged the squirrel in his dance. I don’t have words to say it good how wild he was but he don’t eat the squirrel he only pretended and Haaydzims and Tuuns howled and held the squirrel in their teeth and shook it and I howled and held it in my teeth and shook it and we danced and danced and came back late for dinner and Mr. Luke Cook told me to sing it Onward Christian Soldiers and I didn’t sing it and he stood over me and he saw blood on my face and blood on Muldo’s face and Mr. Luke Cook beat us each one and Mrs. Martha Cook screaming and the next day she packed up my clothes and Mr. Luke Cook made me get in the wagon and she crying and Muldo and Haaydzims and Tuuns kicking and screaming their Tsimshian words and me too and he strapping me in the wagon and Muldo and Haaydzims and Tuuns running behind screaming and in Kitwanga Mr. Luke Cook put
me on a riverboat with a mean man to go to Victoria and so I Harold Cook a Canadian lived in Victoria Children’s Mental Hospital for six years.”

  His words sank her into a chasm of pity. “I’m so sorry.”

  She imagined the boys flinging themselves into their dance, exulting in their few hours of freedom, playing potlatch, and Harold, desperate to be a part of something, imitating in all innocence a sacred dance he’d never seen and didn’t understand any more than she did.

  He continued to rock, urgently now, staring at the shoe box, unable to look at her.

  “How did you get out?”

  “I got too old to stay there, so now I live with my sister.”

  “Good. That’s all over now, Harold. And you have the rest of your life to do some happy things.”

  He raised his head slowly with a look that told her she’d just said something stupid.

  “What is the thing you want to do most in your life?”

  With his index finger, he touched the lid of the shoe box.

  • • •

  On Sunday morning, she lay in bed not fully awake, Harold and his friends dancing in and out of her swirling sleep fog. So that’s what happened to whites obsessively drawn by the pull of native drumbeat. They were confined. Labeled as misfits, abnormal, crazy. It was convenient to ignore their cries on behalf of the first people here, the ones tooken gone somewhere who came back mute. And then his finger pointing through the fog to the shoe box.

  Her Eagles hovered above her making strong talk, carrying her on their wings above the apartment house, above her sisters, above Victoria and missionary societies and psychiatric wards.

  Emily, she asked herself, or Eagle did, what is the thing you want to do most in your life?

  She wanted to create one true painting, one painting that people, native or white, would love and say, yes, that’s my illahee, the beauty and power and glory of it sweetening the sour.

  You don’t want to be loved yourself?

  She let out a throaty sigh, and thought of Harold, how full he was of feelings desperate for expression, and she, apparently his only outlet. She thought of Alice and Lizzie, how they showed their love for her with elaborate Sunday suppers at two o’clock sharp, and her dogs, how they were always leaping for attention. And Claude, his exuberant and wise love expressed in fish grease and restraint. This love thing had been the slippery fish of her whole life. One thing she knew: It wasn’t the incoming of love that mattered, but the outgoing.

  No. One pure, true painting was what she wanted, even if it took a hundred almost-true paintings to get it.

  She threw on a smock and dashed across the back yard past the kennels without so much as a pause to pet the expectant puppy faces begging for a touch. Sell them all. Simplify. Focus. Point your finger at what you want and do it. Exhibit or no exhibit—paint!

  She burst into her sisters’ kitchen.

  “Have you ever wanted something so wrenchingly that you would throw out everything and risk your life for it?”

  Lizzie, up to her elbows in flour, shook her head no.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that to clutch at life fearfully, unwilling to spend it, is not a form of gratitude to God for life?”

  Lizzie looked at her as if pained by some bright light.

  “But to fling one’s whole being at a goal of interpreting God’s creation—”

  “What’s all this leading up to?”

  “I’m not coming to supper today. I’m going to Goldstream Flats.” She turned on her heel. “For the whole summer.”

  “But I’m making popovers. It’s Sunday.”

  Emily was out the door and across the lane.

  • • •

  She got dressed and strode down the block, knowing she had to get away from sisters, tenants, the apartment building. Life was short, and shorter still the number of years a person felt bold enough to face a blank canvas. She sensed the core of her life bubbling up, like liquid electricity coursing through her veins.

  She’d seen an old gray caravan trailer in a neighbor’s yard bearing a For Sale Cheap sign. It was still there! Just an empty wooden box on wheels, it would be dandy fine. She bought it, and had her neighbor haul it to her back yard. She set to work sawing out windows.

  In the morning, Monday, she was sawing the wood she’d cut out of the wall in order to use it for a shelf when Lizzie appeared, hands on hips, mouth agape. “What in the world—?”

  “I can’t go paint for just a couple hours, come back, go again, back and forth. I’ve got to live where I want to paint, to feel it all around me all the time.”

  “And so you’re going to live like a shameless vagrant? In this gypsy wagon?”

  “Look, Lizzie. You might not like to hear me say this, but if Dede had done some of the things she wanted to, she might have died more peacefully. You probably read her letter. She took her bitterness with her to the grave. I refuse to do that.”

  She thrust the saw forward and the board shifted so her saw stuck. “Hold that steady, will you?”

  “But—” Lizzie hesitated, planted her feet wide and grasped the board.

  “Watch for splinters.”

  Emily continued sawing and when Lizzie’s section of the board came loose, Lizzie jumped back and dropped it.

  “To go to my grave without knowing whether it was lack of talent or lack of perseverance that failed me, without feeling that I’d probed deeply, without sucking out the joy of hearty work, that would be self-inflicted pain I could never forgive myself for.”

  Lizzie looked at her as if her face, gleaming with sweat and flecked with sawdust, were a stranger’s.

  “But if I throw my life at art again, like a wild dance, give everything in the search for a deeper seeing, even if none of my family, not a single living being, likes the results, maybe I might feel I’d lived fully. But I’ll never find out by staying upstairs and doodling imaginary forests.”

  • • •

  On Tuesday, feeling like Dzunukwa putting herself back together again after being dead, she sold the breeding dogs and bought window screening, lumber, and a cot. On Wednesday, she was inside the trailer working on corner bed boxes for Woo, Tantrum, and André, when Lizzie came to the door with a prim look on her face. She was holding some heavy green fabric, folded.

  “What’s that?”

  Lizzie stepped in and thrust it into her hands. Emily unfolded it and held it up. “Curtains! Why—”

  “I couldn’t stand to think of you out in the woods and some Peeping Tom peering in on you in your nightdress, that’s all.”

  Emily rubbed her palm across the fabric, astonished. “You made these? And green, too.” She held one up to a window. “Perfect! How’d you know the size?”

  “I measured when you were gone yesterday.”

  She felt as though the plank floor under them were shifting minutely. Beneath Lizzie’s crust ticked a well-meaning heart.

  “Thank you.”

  • • •

  “Looks like an elephant,” Harold said, seeing the trailer for the first time. “What’s it for?”

  “For living in.”

  “Here?”

  “No. Goldstream Flats. I’m dreadful hankery for forest.”

  He walked around it cautiously, peered in the window, stepped inside, and in a few moments hopped out, nearly toppling over. He screwed up his dented forehead in a look sliding from ecstasy to anxiety.

  “Can I come? Can I? Can I? I’m your swanaskxw.”

  “Maybe for a little while, if your sister lets you, but I also need to be alone there. You can use my tent, tell her.”

  He shook his hands, unable to contain himself. “I’ll ask. No. You ask her.”

  “All right.”

  Over the next several days, they made ledges for cages for Susie the rat, Joseph, and the bullfinches, rigged a large canvas awning, and fashioned a wood-burning stove from a square pail and a discarded stovepipe, not much different from the one on La Renarde Rouge. She
stepped back to admire it. “Formidable, mademoiselle!”

  She packed the trailer with canned food for a month and plenty of art supplies, including a gallon of white housepaint, two gallons of gasoline, and rolls of inexpensive manila paper. She had it towed to a small, out-of-the-way clearing surrounded by moss-sheathed cedars, maples, hemlocks draped with lichen, Douglas-firs, alders spiced with wildflowers. Glorious.

  • • •

  At breakfast the first morning, she made Harold promise to beat his drum every so often to let her know he was all right. “But not if people are around. If you see anyone, don’t dance.”

  She set off to find a subject, knowing she’d made an intentional decision—to expend her life on painting, wholly and permanently, to remain in the innermost center of her work even though that might be at the periphery of the art world. Barbeau’s show wasn’t going to make her an artist. Painting was.

  She stopped at a likely spot and unfolded her stool and easel, tacked manila paper onto a board, thinned her oil paints with gasoline and mixed them with house paint. It was so cheap she could be free to take wild strokes, but so quick-drying she’d have to work swiftly. The paper wouldn’t take studied labor. Now she was ready.

  To paint a tree or a totem, she had to look at it long and long, until it resembled no other tree or totem. It was easy with totems, harder with trees. Without a totem pole as a natural center of interest, she had to sort out the chaos of overlapping forms, and select. That density was probably why people thought the forests of the Northwest were unpaintable. She had to shove that aside, get quiet to the bone to let a subject come.

  She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches—all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things—fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.

  Partly lost to her surroundings, she singled out a cedar, wide at the base, narrowing as it grew. If there was any kind of portrait worth doing, it would be the portrait of a tree. But a portrait had to convey character. The channels in this cedar’s raw umber trunk all stretched upward, reaching toward light. It was more than a tree, however noble. It was the manifestation of the attitude that had brought her this far: reaching. Not just the tree, but that idea was her subject. The things in a painting were only bits of visible evidence of a still, small voice whispering a truth.