The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  That’s what she would paint—pure Spirit frolicking alone in wind song. The far-flung branches, the clouds, her loaded brush, her arm, all swaying as one. Movement the primal, healing thing.

  She painted, hardly speaking to Alice all afternoon, but feeling her quiet solicitude. She came to a stopping point, and showed her the painting. “I’m going to call it Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky.”

  Alice’s eyes shone. “Perfect.”

  When they finished their picnic, Emily said, “Let’s stop at Ross Bay on the way home.”

  Alice straightened up suddenly. “The cemetery?”

  • • •

  They walked down wide avenues of pines and maples past obelisks, headstones, and plaques, to the Carr graves in a rectangular plot. No tangled vines crept across the single plaque, no stray ferns, no wild camas. Only pine needles and some cones.

  “Why did you want to come here after all these years?”

  “To see what I’d feel at a sister’s grave. I think I understand now how you felt in France. Helpless and bewildered. Thinking that if you’d been here, or done this or that, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “It took Sophie’s death for you to figure that out?”

  “Yes.” She set down her painting things. “Dede would probably hate to recognize this, but she had something in common with an Indian. In different ways, she and Sophie both played the parent to their last dying breath. Both of them suffered awful loneliness at the end. It’s that lonesomeness of death that’s killing, even before the final moment.”

  “Final? Is that what you think?”

  “No. I meant the final moment here.”

  “You’re grieving more about Sophie’s death than you ever did about your own sister’s.”

  “Dede and I had no similar loves or aims, like Sophie and I shared.” She sighed. “A good share, Sophie used to say.”

  “We all have to make do with what we’re given,” Alice said, an edge to her voice.

  “Yes, that’s what you did, make do—even with your younger sister and all her orneriness.”

  “And the more ornery you got in doing what you wanted, the more rigidly Dede became a model of uprightness.”

  “Righteousness, you mean. Petrified in self-righteousness.”

  “That’s uncharitable of you. You’ve never been able to forgive her?”

  “I guess not. I know it’s peevish. I’ve felt compassion though.”

  “Well, that’s a start. Stubbornness is a bitter herb, Millie.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I used to think it was an accident that we were all born into the same family, but no. Nothing is accidental. Maybe rubbing our sandpaper selves against each other has been good, has worn down some rough spots to make us smoother.”

  “One would hope.”

  “Maybe in later lives we’ll all be sorted out not in physical families, but in soul families.”

  She stepped back, leaving the needles and cones as they had fallen.

  • • •

  Still needing peace, a few days later she strolled among red alders and cottonwoods and cedars, touching their trunks, smelling their aromatic fibers. She followed Goldstream River all the way through the forest to the narrow muskeg by the sea’s deep inlet. The arrow grass in the mud bent over in curves, Whitman’s beautiful uncut hair of graves. Sophie would have understood him.

  Emily took off her shoes and paddled her feet in the soft mud at the water’s edge. She dug her toes down into shiny raw umber ooze, cool and smooth, until her feet were buried. It was a sort of earth salve, like Sophie’s tamalth. The stillness in the air settled her. She wiggled her feet down farther, watching wavelets lap at her ankles, feeling anchored like that tall, lone tree at Langford.

  Looking back at the forest edge, she noticed a cedar elevated with its exposed roots wrapped around nothing but air, as if standing on its toes. A century ago a seed must have lodged in a fallen log and sprouted. Nourished by that fallen tree, its roots had grown around the nurse log, now decayed and gone. How silently the forest tells stories. How deeply she had grown from Sophie’s nourishment.

  It wasn’t only disease-prone Indian children who died. No one was spared the sharpness of being cut off right when the very next thing one was going to do was what one had intended all along. The old fear that skill and wisdom come too late hammered at her temples. Her own time was running out. She might learn her spirit song too late to sing it.

  Whenever it came, she would sing it in paint. She would paint Sophie’s life as burnt sienna tree stumps against waves of new growth. Paint her as a white Indian church against towering, dark emerald trees. Paint Harold as an eagle soaring, not needing feet. Paint Dede’s sense of duty as a crow cawing, Lizzie’s moral life as a single, straight-ribbed fir, Alice’s effort to understand as the soft, embracing arm of a hemlock, lichen-draped as a familiar shawl. Paint herself as a sea-tossed drift log beached in an unknown cove, a solid, corsetless mountain, a solitary tree doing a mad joy dance.

  She lifted her skirt and squirmed down farther, the incoming tide loosening the earth for her. Mud up to her calves, she leaned forward and back, the earth securing her as it always had. She tied up her skirt around her hips and leaned farther, the movement planting her deeper, the danger enticing, her body reeling like a sapling in a storm. She raised her arms and let them sway like feathered boughs.

  A hermit thrush spilled one long crystalline note, stilling all the earth to listen, and then poured out an ethereal flute song, over too soon. She closed her eyes, waited. Again, that purest of tones, long-held, chillingly beautiful, and then the cascade of melody like a tumbling stream. A spirit song. For her.

  If she could sing like that thrush, what would she sing?

  She would sing the forest eternal. She would place her body in the womb of trees. She would bleed into the earth. She would place her bare feet onto moss and spiced pine needles, peat and mud, and up between her toes and through her pores would ooze the rich dark syrup of Mother Earth, and over her ankles would swarm tiny insects, and around her shoulders would float the exquisite flowing drapery of her green hemlock cape. She would take great gulps from slender bars of silver light, forest-filtered, like incandescent strands of old women’s hair. She would bow to the sturdy white pine, the brave, pioneering alder, the cooling Sitka spruce, the mighty Douglas-fir, the sorrowing hemlock, the sheltering maple, her beloved cedar. She would bow to the Wild Cedar Woman who dwells in the forest. She would hold her wooden hand, sing her wild huu, huu, and put herself back together again and again. She would drink the forest liquids and drench herself in possibility.

  Author’s Afterword

  In paint and words, Emily Carr casts a tall shadow, one which has accompanied me in western forests ever since I made her acquaintance in 1981 in the Emily Carr Gallery, once her father’s warehouse in Victoria. After years of research and ruminations, she is a mix to me now of what I’ve read about her, what she has written, both private and public, and what I have written of her. In reaching for the essence of her painting subjects, she wrote, “There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit.” As she wanted to paint the spirit of a thing, so have I wanted to offer the spirit of her courageous and extraordinary life.

  When reading a novel treating a real life, it is wise to consider it speculative fiction presenting what could have happened. That Emily altered facts and chronology of her life to suit a story and to formulate a myth of herself permitted me to take certain liberties for the sake of the narrative.

  Some of the characters are inventions, or derivations of actual people. Sophie Frank is not. However, in truth she did not lose nine children. She lost twenty-one. Children’s graves bearing the Frank name are still scattered in the Mission Reserve cemetery in North Vancouver. I’ve walked through brambles in the drizzle to find them. Her first child was born in 1892 when Sophie was thirteen. A boy named Casimir lived the longest, ten years. One baby named Emily was born and died
in 1914. Sophie’s grave is marked 1879–1939. Jimmy’s is 1873–1952.

  Though one might wish for Emily to have had an experience like the one I invented with Claude du Bois, there is no evidence for such a one. Jessica represents friendships Emily surely had with women, although she frequently complained of loneliness. The real New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins does not appear in Carr’s journals. Biographers report that Emily mentioned a nameless woman with whom she studied at Concarneau, mistaking her nationality for Australian. Though Hodgkins kept a more-than-weekly correspondence with her relatives, not a single letter appears during the six weeks that Emily was studying with her. André Laffont is an invention; Harry Phelan Gibb and John Duncan Fergusson were her actual teachers in France. Little is known of Harold Cook, who is an extension of a real missionary’s son whom Emily met in Kispiox and visited in an asylum, and who was writing an autobiography. No records of it remain. The chronology of her trips, paintings, reviews, and Dede’s and Sophie’s deaths is approximated to fit the needs of pacing the narrative.

  Current practice demands different terms than what I’ve used in some places: First Nations people for Indians, Kwakwaka’wakw for Kwakiutl, Nuu’chah’nulth for Nootka. With apologies to those who may object, I have used the terms reflective of Emily’s language, time, and perspective as one of the settler society. Emily was painfully conscious of the thin line between appreciation and appropriation. Like her, I hope I have come down on the right side of this line.

  This book is not a life; it is a story. I like to imagine the real Emily Carr peering through dense foliage at us, secretly satisfied yet amused by all the spit and sputter.

  • • •

  Although my experiences with Emily started in that warehouse gallery on Wharf Street in Victoria, my fascination with her soon led me to the Emily Carr House on Government Street where she was born, and to her beloved Beacon Hill Park. After years of reading works by and about her, I realized that my feelings for her ran too deep to go unexpressed, so I set out with my husband to trace her footsteps in preparation to write a novel.

  In 1989, after seeing her astonishing paintings at the Vancouver Art Gallery, we sailed through the Queen Charlotte Islands where we walked among ruins in Tanu, Skedans, Cumshewa, and Ninstiints, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site with two dozen poles, erect, leaning, and fallen. They would have thrilled Emily had she been able to go to Ninstiints on the extreme southern point of the archipelago. At Tanu, two Haida women, mother and daughter, kept watch over the single remaining totem pole, fallen and encrusted with lichen. Serving us tea and bannock bread with jam, they related the sad tale of the decline of their ancestral home.

  In 1992, we paddled our way in a kayak to Mimkwamlis on Village Island, where a few beams of a longhouse spoke of the fine potlatches there. Pieces of two rotting poles covered with moss remained from those Emily had seen. Thomas Sewid, the Mamalilikala watchman, invited us to visit his grandmother, the late Flora Sewid, wife of the Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Jimmy Sewid. Graciously, she recalled for us her memories of Emily at potlatches, played her drum, and sang. At the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, we listened to a young Kwakwaka’wakw girl spin the story of Dzunukwa.

  In the British Columbia Archives, I held in my hands Emily’s worn copies of Leaves of Grass with her penciled underlinings, and felt ineffably close to her. To skeptical minds in the twenty-first century, some of her thinking might seem rhapsodically romantic, and her pantheism a late bloom from the nineteenth century tree of Transcendentalism. Nevertheless, both have appealed to me, and sent me to forests in her spiritual wake. Even now, discovering some new fact about her, or imagining her, after two heart attacks and a stroke, pushing herself around on the butter crate scoot box she’d made in order to have the mobility to keep painting, I’m deeply moved.

  A few years before her death in 1945 at age seventy-four, she was asked what had been the outstanding events of her life. She responded, “Work and more work! . . . loving everything terrifically. . . . The outstanding event to me is the doing—which I am still at. Don’t pickle me away as a done.”

  Illustration Credits

  Part I

  Emily Carr, Indian Village, Sechelt, British Columbia, watercolor. British Columbia Archives, PDP 00648

  Part II

  Emily Carr, Crécy-en-Brie, watercolor, 1911, British Columbia Archives, PDP 04682

  Part III

  Emily Carr, Totem Mother, Kitwancool, oil on canvas, 1928, 109.5 x 60.0 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.20 (Photo: Trevor Mills)

  Part IV

  Emily Carr, Big Raven, oil on canvas, 1931, 87.0 x 114.0 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.11 (Photo: Trevor Mills)

  Part V

  Emily Carr, Tree Trunk, oil on canvas, 1930, 129.1 x 56.3 cm, Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust, VAG 42.3.2 (Photo: Trevor Mills)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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