The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  Her smile was still as broad as the Kitwancool totem mother’s, as loving and pure as it had always been, but the colors had changed. Her skin was yellow ochre, leached of reds, the color of thick phlegm or urine or jaundice. Even her eyes were sallow. The pupils swam in yellow bile.

  “Are you all right, Sophie? Have you been sick?”

  Sophie shrugged and tipped her head, jiggling her tiny basket earrings, her art diminished to a bauble. “Life isn’t always, you know.”

  “I can take you to a doctor. I’ll stay with you and make sure . . .”

  Sophie shook her head with such force that her cheeks wiggled. She put more wood in the wood burner and filled the teakettle. “I have baskets for you.” She stretched her arm toward the maroon baby carriage filled with them.

  There were only a few, not nearly as many as in the past by this time of year. Disappointment bore down on her. Only five. Five wouldn’t give Sophie a dog’s chance of catching up completely. She looked inside the lidded ones to see if smaller ones were hidden. Sophie had liked to do that whenever she was carrying a child, the outer and inner baskets alike. None. Maybe it was sickness that made her make so few. She picked one up. They were smaller than her usual work, only two hand spans across instead of three.

  “They’re fine and beautiful, as always.”

  The one with Eagle would be for Harold. Eagle, who saw far, even into the future, to a time when people would learn from Harold Cook a Canadian.

  “You have some new designs.”

  “Margaret says I’m wrong to make them my own way, not the old ways.”

  “There’s no law, Sophie. Make what you like. Let me guess this one.” It was a geometric stylization of a beaked head and enlarged feathers. “Raven.” She pointed to the back of the basket. “Why is he different here?” The same beaked head was on a different-shaped body on the back.

  “You know Raven. Always changing himself so he can steal things from people.”

  “Ah.” Its intricacy made it spectacular. This would be for Marius. “It must have been difficult. You had to plan the two shapes differently but work them coil by coil at the same time.” She ran her hand over the bird who stole for sport. “What’s it made of? I’m giving it to a man who studies native art. He would be interested.”

  “Studies? Humph. What’s to study? You just use it.”

  “Sophie, there were baskets at that exhibit in Ottawa, and none of them were nearly as good as yours. I want those men to see yours.”

  Sophie scowled at the Raven basket, and moved her shoulders in circles, as if she were uncomfortable with the idea.

  “You’re an artist, Sophie. That’s what you’ve always been, and what you’ll always be.”

  Sophie’s face became lined with doubt. Her grape-colored mouth was incapable of stopping the quivers that passed over it.

  “Vancouver isn’t the only place to sell baskets,” Emily said.

  Sophie’s gaze went from basket to basket.

  “Tell him beargrass and cherry bark over cedar root. The beargrass is all black because I buried it once and then forgot about it for a year.” She laughed. “But it was still there.”

  The old Sophie, amused by her own foibles.

  Emily picked up another basket. Animals with pointed snouts and tails chased each other around the surface. “What’s this?”

  “Wolf. Made out of horsetail root. We’ve had wolves on the reserve come down from the mountains.”

  “Then I’ll give it to a Toronto artist who paints the north. Lawren Harris is his name. He’ll love it.”

  One flared basket had a reddish horizontal line running around it with half circles resting on it at intervals. She picked it up and looked at Sophie for an explanation.

  “Sunsets, where dead babies go. Mothers too, if they’re good. It’s like heaven.”

  If Sophie still had hopes for heaven, then she didn’t feel the disgrace of sin, just as Father John had said. And if that was so, the casualness of her prostitution was distressing and made her feel a heartsickening gulf of difference between them.

  Sophie hadn’t mentioned Emmie. Maybe she’d worn herself out with mourning. Emily turned the basket in her hands, counting ten sunsets, nine for her babies, one for her, the basket hopeful of a reunion. Summoning hope from some deep wellspring after each baby’s loss had been the amazing thing about Sophie. It still was. Sophie’s face glowed golden, her smile momentarily young.

  “I want to give one to you,” Sophie said.

  “Which one?”

  Sophie pulled her mouth to one side and thought, then held up the unfinished one. “This one. Now you have to come back.”

  They were silenced by a wolf’s howl, a hollow yawp tearing the air that made the world stop for a moment.

  “We hear them all the time now. Not much rain this fall until snow today. Deer come down from the mountains to drink from the puddle by our tap. Now wolves come too.”

  The howl cut the air again, a chill keening that brought the wilderness close, just outside the door.

  “Last week Margaret Dan’s daughter Shaula had a baby, and a wolf ate the afterbirth that fell out of a tree.”

  Emily remembered Shaula as a little girl who had played with Annie Marie. For an instant, she imagined Annie Marie a young woman now, a mother herself.

  “That’s horrible, Sophie.”

  “Wolves have to eat too.”

  “How do you know for sure it was a wolf?”

  “Frank saw it, and the cloth all torn and wet.”

  “Did he do that with your babies? Put it in a tree?”

  “Some of them. Casamin and Maisie and Tommy. I don’t know which ones afterwards.”

  She shouldn’t have asked. A slackness passed over Sophie’s face.

  “It’s so when the tree grows, so will the baby. Strong and straight.” Sophie paused to consider something, and shot a look at Emily. “That’s not why they died—him not doing it for every baby.”

  Emily sensed a mounting danger in that subject.

  “It wasn’t anything Indian. I never looked at anyone sick when I was carrying. Never looked at a dead person or a rabbit. I never cried out when a baby was coming.”

  Sophie was relentless in charging down that road of thought. With every coil worked on these baskets she must have been working up to tell her something.

  “It’s not an Indian reason.”

  Sophie wrapped a rag around the kettle handle and poured warm water into a basin to wash her hands, as if clean hands were necessary for what she had to say. She moistened her lips.

  “They died because the first twins came before we were married in the church.” Anguish tightened Sophie’s face in a way Emily had never seen before, a fear of judgment conquered when the words were said.

  Sophie dried her hands on her skirt and glanced at her collection of shells on the window ledge. Her eyes were shiny dark stones of yearning in an arsenic yellow wash.

  “Father John said we’re punished for our sins. We had our Squamish marriage, but Father John doesn’t believe in that because he say God wasn’t there.”

  Margaret Dan had judged Sophie and made that condemnation public. Even Aunt Sarah had judged her, abandoned her, in fact. If Sophie saw her, Emily, as disapproving right now, it would crack the solidness they shared. For Sophie not to see judgment in her eyes, there had to be none in her heart, not a speck. She searched, and found only ache.

  “The marriage you had is all you need. The blessing of Father John can’t make your babies live or die.”

  A wolf howled again, a stretched rope of a sound.

  She realized with a pang—she had just wiped away Sophie’s reason for the children’s deaths. The question of Why, then? gaped before them both. A hunk of wood shifting in the wood burner startled them.

  “Margaret Dan said you came and I wasn’t here.”

  Emily wasn’t going to bring it up. She didn’t want to hear how Sophie would explain where she’d been. Sophie w
ouldn’t lie to her, would she? She didn’t want Sophie to lie, but she didn’t want her to tell the truth either.

  “I missed you,” Emily said.

  “I missed you too.” Sophie crouched to open the wood burner and put in another wedge of wood.

  Sophie turned toward her, kneeling. “I know you know about what I do. Margaret said she told you.” Emily shook her head and Sophie held out a chafed, sallow hand to silence her. “It’s worth it, Em’ly. For the babies.”

  With the orange glow of the fire silhouetting Sophie’s face, Emily saw in her eyes glazed with moisture how she must have suffered in giving the ultimate of love for each child, how she’d sacrificed her own soul for her children’s. It hadn’t been a casual decision. Emily knelt with her by the wood burner and enfolded her, and for once, Sophie didn’t pull away. Emily felt a tightness in her stomach letting go, a sloughing off, like a cramp releasing. She understood obsession. She accepted all.

  They drank mint tea and Emily told her of her trailer at Goldstream and of painting only the forest now, in darker shades. “Like you told me the first time we met. I should have listened. Some things it takes me a long time to learn,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  She knew it would insult Sophie to give her all the money she’d brought, regardless of there being only five baskets, so she lined them up on the floor and asked how much.

  With her foot, Sophie moved them from right to left, adding. “Fourteen dollars.” While Emily counted out the bills, Sophie watched, eagle-eyed, as if knowing she wished to slip her more.

  Emily looked down at the bills still in her hand. “May I pay for Emmie’s stone?” The question quiet, unable to be held. “I feel like her auntie.”

  Both of Sophie’s hands went up to press against her mouth, and she uttered a sweet soft cry in one high note. She nodded. “Emmie’s Love Ancestor.”

  Emily slid the rest of the money she’d brought under the bills she’d already laid on the table.

  “You want some salmonberry cake? I made some for you to take to your sisters. I bet they never ate it before.”

  Emily smiled at the thought. She liked the chewy substance like dried jam that she’d eaten with Sophie many times. “No, I’m sure they haven’t.”

  “Salmonberries good this year. No worms.”

  “Thank you, Sophie. We’ll have it for Christmas. Indian fruitcake. It’s a good share.”

  Emily noticed the unfinished coil of roots on the floor. “Get that basket done, Sophie. I’m coming back.”

  44: Alder

  “There’s a Colonist review of the Women’s Canadian Club exhibit if you want to see what they think of your kid sister in this town,” Emily said, pointing with her paring knife as she peeled a potato. It was Lizzie’s birthday and she was fixing supper for them in her studio.

  Alice picked up the clipping. “You read it, Lizzie. The print’s too small for me.”

  “Nationally Recognized Local Artist’s Work Bewildering,” Lizzie said. “The same old story.”

  “I want you to read every word,” Alice said.

  Emily heard Lizzie’s labored intake of breath above the faucet running.

  “Emily Carr’s work at the National Gallery in Ottawa last March prompted Director Eric Brown to declare her conception of art as big as Canada itself, adding that if she lived in Europe she would be acclaimed among the greatest artists of her day.”

  “Wonderful, Millie. What good luck,” Alice said.

  “Luck? Luck?” She shaved the potato with quick swipes. “Funny how the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

  “Nevertheless, Miss Carr’s saturation with the barbaric efforts of the aborigine, as seen in several paintings in the Women’s Canadian Club show here, makes us wonder what would have been her artistic career had she remained in England where she was born.”

  Alice pushed out an exasperated grunt. “Well, you can’t trust a reviewer who doesn’t even get his facts straight.”

  Lizzie continued.

  “Residence among aboriginal races, whether in Africa or India or Australia, has tended to make the English resemble those with whom they have been in contact.”

  “Why, that’s horrid,” Alice said. “Aren’t you angry?”

  “No! This one said something more intelligent than he realized.” Emily waited for a reaction. Nothing. “On that pile of papers on the mantel is a review of the new National Gallery show from the Ottawa Citizen. Read the fourth paragraph.”

  Alice looked at the photograph of Indian Church printed in the article and handed it to Lizzie. Emily turned to face her. She knew it would spark a reaction, and she didn’t want to miss one twitch of it.

  “Emily Carr from British Columbia is at her best when working on a big scale. Her inspiration is derived from the forest which she opens to us with the intimacy of a lover to probe its inner recesses. Her trees are menacing phallic giants, their foliage dark feminine openings.

  “Millie, how could you want us to read this . . . this trash?” Lizzie’s voice rose to a squeak.

  Lizzie’s moral brown eyes darted from Alice to her, and the thin blue skin under them tightened. Poor, dear Lizzie, Emily thought. Even if she explained, Lizzie could never understand how she had experienced a sort of consummation in the wilderness, or how she could make love to the universe by painting. It would mystify her because her God had not blessed her with an imaginative mind.

  “Frubbish. One man’s opinion. My trees aren’t menacing. Go on.” She turned back and smiled into the sink.

  “Her totems celebrate native spirituality and her strikingly vivid Indian Church is one of the most interesting paintings in the exhibition. She is as possessed with the creative urge as that powerful and tragic figure of the last century, Vincent van Gogh.”

  “Pish and splutter,” Emily said. “Poor van Gogh.”

  “I hope this won’t make you unbearable,” Lizzie said.

  She pared more recklessly. “When that plumber came to fix this sink and saw the paintings, he said they made him love Canada more. That meant heaps more than a review.”

  “Well, I like Indian Church,” Alice said. “It looks so thin and lonely out there under the trees.”

  “Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven bought it. Now didn’t that send me into a drunken spin.”

  She wondered if Lawren ever yearned for compliments. Maybe it was the nature of artists to crave praise. Something had to feed the inner person for the lifetime labor of bringing a person’s work to maturity. The trick was to keep praise from hurting that work, and to keep on seeking.

  “Well, it’s all yammering anyway. It’s your own reckoning you have to go to bed with. You can’t make a shroud out of reviews.”

  • • •

  Emily stretched and primed eight canvases for the Toronto Society of Artists Annual Exhibition. The submission date was only a month away. Every day had to count. She took a load of paint rags downstairs to wash, and heard the mailman whistling.

  “Only one today,” he said, and handed her a letter.

  Her fingers trembled, ripping the flap. It was from Jimmy Frank.

  Dear Emily,

  I have to tell you the sad news that Sophie died a few weeks ago. I’m sorry I didn’t write you sooner. Margaret and Sarah tried to help her toward the end but she got sicker and sicker coughing up all the time and not wanting to eat because her stomach was all blowed up. As for me, I’m going up to Squamish to live with my brother. It’s too sad for me here. Only memories and hard to keep away from drink. I hope you are well. Sophie loved you like a sister.

  Jimmy Frank

  A scream boiled up in her tight, bruised throat and lodged there, clotted. She dragged herself upstairs and looked at Sophie’s portrait, her Fauve skin raw sienna, red earth, Prussian green, violet—every color but the jaundiced yellow she’d seen the last time. She imagined Sophie swirling in some pale sunset, welcomed by her children, all of them unnoticed by the world. Not a ripple.
/>   What could she do? Send money for a headstone? And what should it say? In Loving Memory of Sophie Frank—Mother, Basketmaker, Christian—Worn Away by Dogma?

  Like a sister. Yet she hadn’t written to ask her to be with her at the end.

  • • •

  Alice stood at Emily’s doorway holding a picnic hamper. “You haven’t painted a dab for two weeks since you got that letter,” she said with a touch of judgment. “It’s Saturday. I’ll go wherever you want, just so you paint.”

  Listless, Emily looked at her brushes, alien things, and then at Alice, standing resolutely. “Does it mean a bean to you if I paint or not?”

  “Of course it does. I’ll pay for the streetcar. Get your paints.”

  Emily chose a logged-off hillside near Langford. They stepped between stalks of dark pink fireweed, their capsules releasing seeds with tufts of hairs that made them airborne. She blew them away from her face, opened her camp stool, and sat absolutely still, waiting. Alice sat a ways off, crocheting.

  The sweep of hillside had been mutilated. In a day, virgin forest had been ravished, five-, six-hundred-year old trees hacked off indecently, their stumps horrific headstones. Some splinters were left upright where the trunks had wrenched and come apart. Screamers, she called them, imagining the gunshot crack of the great trees splitting, that awful final sway, the thunderous groan, the crashing down, the executioners with saws and axes stepping back to brace themselves for the answering tremble of the ground. It was a graveyard left exposed to heal itself with the help of seeds and wind and rain and time, daring to grow just to be ravaged again in some dim future. The short new alders, the first trees to come alive again, spread their toothed leaves above Juneberry shrubs and mangled stumps, preparing the way for cedars and firs to follow. Whitman’s words came ringing: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

  One spindly virgin fir, bare of branches for most of its height, a hundred times taller than the new growth fringing its base, had been spared. Forsaken rather. It would yield no income. It stood alone, its brothers and sisters maimed and felled. Its far feathery top danced in the wind, as mad and joyful as any of Harold’s dancing.