The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  “Your writing is brave and important. Don’t ever stop.”

  He unwound the long string and lifted the lid off the box to show her the torn scraps. The handwriting was nearly illegible.

  “Can you take it out of here? To a book-making place? So people will know about Muldo and Haaydzims and Tuuns?” He hugged her knees. “And Kispiox and Indian residential schools?”

  “Keep it for now. Read it. It will make you feel better.”

  “Will you paint it? Kispiox? For me?”

  “Of course. I’ll bring it the next time I come.”

  “I was making a Wolf mask. Carving it like Muldo did.”

  “Where? Here?”

  “At Goldstream. Out of a big branch on a tree that fell. The rain came and I didn’t want the tom-tom wet and so I ran back to camp and there were your sisters. I looked for it every day after that. I needed to finish and chop it off. I got lost every time.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to surprise you.” His voice cracked. His hands shook with urgency. “I wish I had it to scare the mean boys.”

  The attendant signaled that the time was up—or that he thought Harold’s behavior was taking a dangerous turn. All the way to the gate Harold held on to her sleeve. She had to pry his fingers loose. She felt horrible doing it, as if her blood were going cold.

  • • •

  Without supper, she climbed the attic stairs and lay under the Eagles. Harold is innocent, she cried. Although he did dance, his nature is innocent. Is Sophie innocent too? She wrestled for a way to make that true, and pulled the quilt over her head.

  On the edge of sleep, transparent shapes swirled behind her closed lids. A gray rectangle, Harold’s narrow bed. An upright rectangle with a smaller one on top, Harold, crashing through the forest looking for his Wolf carving, with Eagle making strong talk on his shoulder. A ragged brown rectangle, the shoe box tied with a string that trailed off all the way north up the Skeena to Kispiox. A red rectangle, a new Packard Roadster. Harold behind the wheel pulling up the circular drive to a brick house. The Ancestor leaning forward, a hood ornament. A silver rectangle, the grille shaped like a headstone. In Loving Memory in garish chrome script.

  A woman stepping out from the midnight blue interior of the car, her chiffon dress of burgundy Sacred Hearts, as gossamer as the garment of a ghost. In spite of her high heeled shoes, it was Sophie—her dark hair bobbed, a nosegay of dogwood pinned to her dress. In her hands, an oblong coiled basket covered with a cloth.

  Lizzie answering the door. The eagle feather on Sophie’s hat trembling when she asks for Em’ly. Lizzie shaking her head no. Sophie saying she’ll wait. Alice letting her in.

  “So you’re Emily’s Indian?” Lizzie’s voice prissy.

  “I’m Em’ly’s friend.” Whitish bone earrings in the shape of headstones, a cross on each one, quaking like aspen leaves.

  Dede gliding in, carrying Mother’s silver tea service, asking if she would like a scone or a butterscotch tea cake.

  Sophie reaching for one just as Dede pulls back the tray to offer the sweets to Lizzie. “Why do you persist in making baskets no one wants?”

  “I have my reasons.” Sophie stroking the top basket coil.

  “I don’t see how you can make a decent living that way.”

  “No, you don’t see.” Drawing her shoulders back. “I have something to leave for Em’ly.” Sophie placing the basket on the sideboard. The cloth slipping a little to show a loaf of bread, plump and brown. “If Mr. Carr wants me, I’ll be at Cordova Street, but tell him I won’t take raisins for pay.”

  Sophie clomping out the door. The sisters crowding around the basket. Alice’s left hand, her fingers intact, resting on it. The other raising the bread knife, a sword. Dede lifting the cloth. A naked brown girl baby gurgling up at them from the basket. Lizzie opening her Bible, reading that Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook took their only begotten son to the sacrifice, and, blind to God’s broad embrace, slew him. On his knees at the stone altar, Harold opening Leaves of Grass, then writing about his lost Wolf’s mask, squeezing out a poem’s worth of pain. Man, child, helper, son, lover treading a borderland, passing Sophie going the other way carrying a new headstone away from Cordova Street.

  Her own throaty voice saying, My best friends, a white-lover and an Indian-lover, a prostitute and a lunatic. Well, that’s just fine.

  42: Hemlock

  With a saw wrapped in her large canvas sketch sack, Emily scrambled over a tangle of branches on a downed log, and landed on the other side in a muddy muskeg. A raven uttered a hoarse, croaking laugh. She wiped the splash from her cheek and examined every branch, looking for what might have been the beginning of a Wolf carving. She found nothing.

  She’d been searching for hours, was dizzy and exhausted from searching, but, out of love, she went on, feeling as though Harold were trotting beside her, desperate to find it. If she envisioned the spokes of a wheel coming out from their campsite, and if she walked every spoke, inspecting every fallen tree for something carved on a limb, she had to find it eventually. But how far from the campsite had Harold gone?

  Goldstream wasn’t Harold’s illahee—quite. No patch of wilderness would serve him as Kispiox and the Skeena had. But for now, it was hers—her land that gives comfort. She liked the sound of the word. Illahee, a lovely chant, sighing like wind in upper branches. Il-ah-ha-he-ye. There was comfort here in the high sweet-sweet call and then trill of song sparrows. Here she could peel a scent off a cedar, suck it deep and pleasurably into her lungs.

  Every direction she looked made her hungry to paint. She was nearing a breakthrough point. She could see cleanly now so many things about forests she wanted her paintings to say, but what if she stopped looking for Harold’s Wolf half a dozen steps before she’d find it? She pressed on.

  Arches of feathery lichen hanging from hemlocks like shredded veils teased her with phantasmagoric shapes. She heard a rustling, and froze. An indistinct form, possibly four-legged, slunk behind overlapping veils. A wolf? Or only the movement of foliage? Such a brooding forest did things to you, made you see shapes, imagine things, especially on a gray day like today. Still, it was possible that she might come upon a wolf devouring a raccoon that had devoured toads that had devoured mosquitoes. A riot of urges went on here. Why was such a forest called virgin, as if it were untouched? Nothing here was untouched.

  Voluptuous curves of foliage coaxed her to enter deeper passages. She felt the pull of a viridian seduction. Lips of leafy drapery seemed shaped in folds and waves leading to purple openings to secret places, a womb in the forest where a fallen hemlock hosted a swarm of insects in its bark. Insects singing their mating songs, larvae, pupae, seeds celebrating their fecundity, cones opening, sap oozing, draped boughs undulating from trunks connecting earth to sky, everything vital, everything expressing a divine Spirit, God filling all space. A single swirl of energy—birth, growth, feeding, breeding, decay—all of it continuous Life, teeming with mystery, and she a part of it. She felt an incoming and an unfurling, a momentary mindlessness, a long-awaited union, a beautiful silent oneness, and she was left with an unutterable calm.

  Somewhere near here, Harold’s half-finished mask, the art of his impulse nurtured by her, would decay and become humus. A cone would lodge there, drop a seed, and the upward pulse of a slender sapling would squirm up through it, becoming, decades later, after she and Harold were both gone, a mighty thrusting column of live pulp tossing its foliage to the sky.

  She leaned against a cedar, feeling that she was resting against the leg of God. She would come back here, to draw deep from the earth, to try to see with her inner eye what quality God was expressing of Himself in all things, including herself, to feel communion. When she could do that, maybe then she could paint. Do you like better to paint or to feel communion? They are the same. Art and Nature and God, all one, indistinguishable.

  • • •

  When she finished a large oil of
Kispiox, she mounted the watercolor study from which she’d worked onto a board, and took a frame off another painting for it. She found a plain brown carton with a lid, a little larger than Harold’s shoe box, and painted Eagle on it, wings outspread, just as they were over her bed. With her artist’s hammer and a nail in her handbag, she took the study and the box to the Wilkinson Road asylum, wishing only that she could bring him news that she’d found his carving.

  “I want to give Harold Cook a painting,” she told the director, “and I’d like it to hang where he can see it often.”

  The director’s thin upper lip twitched. “We’ll see,” came the reply. “He’s washing dishes from the noon meal now. You’ll have to wait.” He opened the visiting room for her.

  “The act of viewing a painting can heal, you know.”

  The director cast a blank look at her, apparently unwilling to commit a syllable of response.

  “How’s he doing?” she asked.

  “Fighting against the bars. Not uncommon.”

  “He wrote me that other patients call him Cookie and have taken to biting him.”

  “We have placed him separately, but that is only a temporary measure.”

  “Is he allowed outside?”

  “Under supervision.”

  “And his writing?”

  “That is permitted also, but I wouldn’t call it writing. Gibberish only.”

  “Perhaps to those afraid to understand. Will he be allowed to leave?”

  “If he drops the Indian.”

  “I see.”

  Just like an Indian residential school, as Harold had said. It crept into her craw something awful. If they can’t imprison Indians, then they try to lock up Indianness.

  In the visiting room she propped the painting at an angle the director couldn’t see and sat down. Harold came in, saw it and fell on his knees, his eyes wet the way they got when he looked inward.

  “It’s for you, Harold. This box too.”

  Harold’s gaze went from the painting to the box, then back again, and on his scarred face that never hid a single emotion, delight alternated with awe at the magnitude of the gift. His head dropped onto her lap and he hugged her legs. “I will look at it long and long.”

  She threaded her fingers through his blond hair, and they stayed like that for a long time.

  • • •

  The director let them hang the painting above Harold’s bed. Out of his professional smile leaked more smugness at his own magnanimity than pleasure in the act. Harold immediately remade his bed backward so he could lie in it and see the painting. The director objected.

  “Perhaps this can be allowed as a temporary measure,” Emily said.

  When they were left with the key-toting attendant, Harold pulled out of his pocket her own letters to him and read them aloud. She wished she hadn’t been so long-winded. He read about how Woo had peed in Lizzie’s shoe, laughing wistfully, as though his joyful play with Woo were irretrievable to him now.

  Harold led her to the janitor’s closet, and the attendant unlocked it. Harold moved the mops and buckets out of the way, knelt before the chair on the cement, and reached behind the cleaning supplies for the shoe box.

  “See how many I have now?” It was stuffed with pages. He handed her a small one. Unlike his note to her, she couldn’t make out a single letter in the scratchings. She was losing him. She had found her fullest self through him, and now he was going on where she could not follow.

  “Read one to me,” she whispered.

  “Harold Cook a Canadian. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book lived all seasons in the Skeena. In fall the river gets thin. Me Muldo Haaydzims and Tuuns we dig our toes into squishy mud on the bank then we dig in our feet and legs and lean back and forth and wave our arms like trees. In winter we don’t go to our waab we’re not allowed we have to add numbers and recite thou shalt nots. We look long and long out windows at white humps like half moons over children’s graves. In spring we see dance laugh sing outside days longer and longer. The gold sun face peeks through green branches we try to climb away to touch it take some in our hands. In summer salmon come up the river shining all silver and smack against rocks. They get so tired but they don’t stop they don’t stop. We lie real still our hands in pools very still and we lucky catch them in our hands. Haaydzims ask Muldo what the salmon would be for the leaf and Muldo say they are what we are to the salmon but Tuuns say they would be silver spirits.”

  He had gone to the world of his own making and found his illahee. For him, where he knelt was holy ground.

  “Beautiful, Harold. You are a poet.”

  “Please take it. Keep it safe.” He offered her the shoe box.

  “All right. Whenever you want it, I’ll have it for you. Someday, somehow, memories, yours and mine, will serve. It’s not our job to know how. In the meantime, you can use the bigger box.”

  His whole being, given to her, and lost to her. In his eyes, a flash of holy wildness. She prayed a moment, that it would live.

  43: Wolf

  After a solid week of exuberant painting for the new National Gallery show, Emily tore herself away from two unfinished canvases and took the evening ferry to Vancouver. She arrived in the morning and walked to Gastown, the Cordova and Water Street area, to look for Sophie. She didn’t like being here, but she had to help her somehow. She peered into one saloon after another, Gassy Jack’s, The Seven Seas, and Chinaboy’s, which she suspected was an opium den. They were wedged between warehouses, hardware stores, tobacco shops, and seedy hotels left over from the gold rush, their window shades drawn down in the middle of the day.

  Native women, some shockingly young, leaned in doorways and murmured to the loggers, seamen, or longshoremen entering or leaving. Did Sophie know these women? Did she have to compete with them? A woman with braided hair wearing a red blouse glowered at her as if to say, What do you think you’re looking at?

  “Do you know where Sophie Frank might be?” Emily asked.

  The woman turned away and went into a rooming house.

  Emily caught a glimpse of a plaid skirt with black bands around the bottom, like Sophie’s. The woman followed a man around a corner into a narrow mews. Emily hurried after, but when she looked down the lane, no one was there. She’d come here to tell her, as a blood sister would, that she didn’t have to do this, to pull her away, stuff money into her pocket, and take her to a stone carver. But what would that do to Sophie, to be discovered like this, coming out of a bawdy house with a man, or standing by a gambling hall, hope brightening her pleading eyes as she offered herself quietly to each man who passed?

  She waited on the corner where the mews opened onto Cordova Street, the only way in or out, until she began to feel as though she were trapping her. What was she thinking of! This would not be kind. A blood sister could do it, march right in and yank her away, but she was not blood to Sophie. No matter how close she thought they were, there was that wall. It was a wrongheaded thing to do. She went back to the dock to wait for the next ferry home.

  • • •

  She stood on the deck where she always did in good weather. It was cool now in early fall, and the sea was frisky. She buttoned her coat.

  Fall was gathering time for Sophie. Basket-making season was just ahead. Did Sophie even make baskets any more? What if she asked her to? Not just one basket, but many? They’d make splendid gifts. They were products of soil and rain, of grasses and roots stitched with her tears to build a vessel for some holy thing like berries or clams or water, these baskets that would buy Sophie’s dead children salvation. Certainly Harold and Alice and Lizzie and Jessica should get one. And Marius. Imagine, Sophie’s work owned by someone at the National Museum. Dr. Newcombe, Marius, Lawren, and Eric Brown would appreciate them. They might even want to buy more. How many could Sophie make in the next two months if she worked every day? Enough to keep her from Cordova Street?

  When she opened the door to her studio late that afternoon, J
oseph squawked his outrage at being abandoned, Woo jumped on her when she came close to feed her, and Totem Mother, Kitwancool leered at her from the wall, disfigured by a grotesque, wicked grin. It wasn’t a wicked grin that she’d meant when she painted her. It was a loving smile that had suggested Sophie’s smile to her. Now, Totem Mother seemed transformed into a travesty of love debased.

  Emily sat down and wrote to Sophie, asking her to make as many as she could, saying that she wanted to buy them all for Christmas gifts, that she’d come for them the second Sunday in December.

  • • •

  The first gentle snowfall of December had turned unusually foul. On the passage across Burrard Inlet, Arctic wind spiraled into Emily’s ears, whistling cold fears that Sophie would be different. She’d find her drunk. She’d find her distant, icy, hardened. Gastown would have scraped her raw and left her scarred. In North Vancouver, granules of snow swirling upward stung her cheeks. She braced herself against the lingering heave of the sea and the unsteadiness of wavering expectations.

  Through the snow, houses and derelict boats paled into shades of dirty white and gray. Life seemed to be hibernating. There were no birds, no dogs, no piles of supplies blanketed in white in Sophie’s yard. It was as flat as a plate. She saw Sophie sitting at the window where she’d tucked back the gingham curtains to watch for her. Emily let herself in and closed the door behind her. Sophie sat in the pine armchair Jimmy had made, wearing her old wool Cowichan sweater, a blanket over her lap, a just-started basket in her hands.

  “Oh, Em’ly. I’m not finished.” She lifted the coiled spiral trailing loose ends. “I’m making one more for you now.”

  “We’re never finished.”

  Sophie struggled to get up, and shook out her leg, motioning for Emily to sit there. She chuckled. “Sometimes my legs go deaf.” She pointed to a logging company calendar on the wall with the second Sunday in December marked with an E. “See? I knew you’d come today.”