The Forest Lover Read online

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part I

  1: Salmonberry, 1906

  2: Cedar

  3: Lady Fern

  4: Douglas-fir

  5: Eagle

  6: Muskrat

  7: Fox

  8: Spruce

  9: Mew Gull

  10: Killer Whale

  11: Horsetail

  12: Bear

  13: Raven

  14: Cedar

  Part II

  15: Sparrow

  16: Sisters

  17: Gibb

  18: Frances

  19: Chestnut

  Part III

  20: Huckleberry

  21: Loon

  22: Raven

  23: Willow

  24: Mosquito

  25: Mink

  26: Moss

  27: Salal

  Part IV

  28: Eagle

  29: Grass

  30: Camas

  31: Dzunukwa

  32: Maple

  33: Arbutus

  34: Salmon

  35: Woo

  36: Cedar

  37: Frog

  38: Aspen

  Part V

  39: Raven

  40: Sanderling

  41: Dogwood

  42: Hemlock

  43: Wolf

  44: Alder

  Author’s Afterword

  Illustration Credits

  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.

  The Forest Lover

  A Viking Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2004 by Susan Vreeland

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0079-7

  A VIKING BOOK®

  Viking Books first published by The Viking Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  VIKING and the “SHIP” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Electronic edition: May, 2004

  ALSO BY SUSAN VREELAND

  The Passion of Artemisia

  Girl in Hyacinth Blue

  What Love Sees

  For

  C. JERRY HANNAH

  who makes strong talk

  There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the Western breath of go-to-the-devil-if-you-don’t like it, the eternal big spaceness of it. Oh the West! I’m of it and I love it.

  —Emily Carr

  Hundreds and Thousands, 1966

  This is the forest primeval.

  The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

  Bearded with moss, and in garments green

  Indistinct in the twilight

  Stand like Druids of eld,

  With voices sad and prophetic.

  —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Evangeline, 1847

  Acknowledgments

  A person can understand so much more with help. I thank the many people who have contributed to my understanding of Emily Carr. In particular, I am grateful for Paula Blanchard’s The Life of Emily Carr; Susan Crean’s The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr; Gerta Moray’s Northwest Coast Native Culture and the Early Indian Paintings of Emily Carr, 1899–1913; Doris Shadbolt’s Emily Carr and The Art of Emily Carr; Maria Tippett’s Emily Carr: A Biography; and Sharyn Udall’s Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the works of Amanda Hale, Edith Hembroff, Robin Laurence, and Stephanie Kirkwood Walker, each of whom provided a different angle from which to see.

  Stepping into the experience of another consciousness can be daunting, but Carr left volumes of journals and narrative sketches which made this a joy. Klee Wyck; Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr; and Growing Pains, The Autobiography of Emily Carr, all published by Clarke, Irwin, and Company, and her correspondence, Dear Nan, edited by Doreen Walker, published by University of British Columbia Press, gave me her characteristic phrases, which, like her trees, “go whiz bang and whoop it up.”

  I wish to thank my dear friends of the Asilomar Writers’ Consortium for their continued literary guidance during the seventeen years which spanned the writing of this book; the Provincial Archives of British Columbia for making available Carr’s unpublished papers; writer Bill Kittredge for his encouragement and reading of early drafts, and for telling me it’s not a foot race; Steve Brown, former curator of Northwest Coast Indian Art at the Seattle Art Museum; Flora Sewid of Campbell River, British Columbia, whose recollections of Emily Carr provided information unavailable in printed material; actress and writer Helena Hale for sharing Emily’s spirit; librarian Ross Parker for always coming back with an answer; Jan Ross, resident curator of The Emily Carr House in Victoria, BC, for her delight in the project; John Baker for his good-spirited sharing of ideas and sound advice; curator Sharyn Udall, for her scholarship in conceiving and executing the highly informative landmark exhibition Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own, and writing its accompanying catalog, and who, in the vein of Emily’s own self-mythologizing, encouraged me to imagine; and my husband, Kip Gray, who, in countless ways has walked with me the pathways of this book.

  I am profoundly grateful to Ron Hamilton (Wuuyaakiihtuu) of the Nuu’chah’nulth People, for his generous and knowledgeable help on First Nations cultures, native art, and natural history of British Columbia, gently delivered. I hereby give him a new name to add to his many other honors: Chamaktl, Having a Full Heart.

  And always, love and deep gratitude to my trinity of mentors, as solid as great cedars: C. Jerry Hannah, Barbara Braun, and Jane von Mehren, for their counsel, insight, and belief in me.

  May all of you find a moment in the book, personal to you, which recompenses in some small way what you have given me.

  Part I

  1: Salmonberry, 1906

  Letting her cape snap in the wind, Emily gripped her carpetbag and wicker food hamper, and hiked up the beach, feasting her eyes on Hitats’uu spread wide beneath fine-spun vapor. Cedars elbowing firs and swinging their branches pushed against the village from behind. One wayward fir had fallen and lay uprooted with its foliage battered by waves and tangled in kelp. Wind whipped up a froth of sword fern sprouting in its bark. At last, she was right here, where trees had some get-up-and-go to them, where the ocean was wetter than mere water, where forest and sea crashed against each other with the Nootka pressed between them.

  She had been to San Francisco and found it cramped, to London and found it stifling. She had ridden the Canadian Pacific Railway across the Rockies, breathless at their jagged power, and had galloped bareback across a ranch in the Western Cariboo, swinging her hat and whooping to the broad sky. She’d gone home to the starched and doilied parlor of the yellow, two-story bird cage of a house in Victoria, British Columbia, where she’d been born, and found only hypocrisy and criticism there.

  But this, oh this, the west coast of Vancouver Island, wave-lashed and smelling of salt spray and seaweed, t
he teeming, looming forest alive with raven talk and other secrets, the cedar bighouses scoured by storms to a lovely silver sheen, the whole place juicy with life, was more wild, more free, more enticing than she remembered it when she’d come here eight years earlier. Or was it she that was different?

  Lulu, grown into a young woman now, clamming on the beach, remembered her as soon as she’d climbed out of the hired canoe that had delivered her here from the steamer dock a mile away. Now, with Lulu carrying Emily’s canvas sketch sack, a pack of barking, leprous-looking dogs came tearing toward them. “Stay down,” Emily ordered, planting her feet wide apart.

  Lulu ran them off, her braids flying, her long indigo skirt billowing, clams clacking in the basket on her back. She came back to Emily. “Sorry. They awful mean.”

  They approached the largest of the bighouses, ancestral dwelling lodges of many families, this one painted with a huge faded red sun. Lulu held open a hide hanging in the doorway, and motioned her inside.

  Don’t you dare go. Her sister Dede’s angry command issued in their parlor two days before still grated on her mind. Just who do you think you are . . . ?

  A thrill of defiance rippled through her as she stepped in.

  Smells of fish and grease and the rich spice of wood smoke engulfed her. Women in striped cotton dresses sitting on tiers of platforms around the fire murmured and gave her curious looks. Some stopped what they’d been doing. An old woman in a red head scarf watched her with narrowed eyes, probably wondering what a white woman wearing a strange plaid English tam perched on her head was doing in their isolated village.

  “Hello,” Emily said.

  Only a twitch of her bottom lip showed that she’d heard.

  “The Nootka aren’t much for friendliness,” the captain of the steamer had told her a couple of hours earlier.

  “But I’ve arranged to stay with the missionaries,” she’d said.

  “They packed up and left a month ago. I’d reconsider if I were you.”

  She’d felt the captain’s words as a blow beneath her ribs. Dede would have gloated if she knew. As it was, Dede had given her a tongue-lashing about her mania for tramping through the wilderness with Indians, calling it a disgrace to the family. Still, she’d stepped off the steamer onto the dock at Ucluelet, and now, in this bighouse, she shoved back the fear that she’d made a mistake.

  Lulu nodded to a man who spilled himself out of a hammock hanging from thick beams still shaped like tree trunks. His hair was cut bluntly at his shiny copper jaw, and he wore loose woolen trousers and leather shoes, but no socks.

  “Chief Tlehwituua,” Lulu announced, full of respect, and spoke a few words to him in Nootka, to which he responded.

  Emily felt his milky-eyed scrutiny go right through her. Who are you? she was certain he was asking. It was the same question she’d often asked herself. Impulsive rebel or lonely old maid? Aimless hobbyist or committed painter?

  “Chief Tlehwituua say he knew another missionary family would come. Tide that go out always come back,” Lulu said. The chief spoke again. “He want to know where is your husband.”

  “I’m not a missionary’s wife! Tell him, Lulu. I only came to visit the missionaries before. Tell him you remember me. Emily Carr.” She set down her bags and took off her hat.

  “Not a missionary wife!” some other voice said in English.

  Murmurs. Smiles. Someone laughed. A man slapped his thigh. The chief held up his hand and the room fell silent. Apparently he didn’t remember her. Maybe it was her close-cropped hair. When she’d been here before she had long hair, wound and pinned up like any proper Victorian lady. Now, to them, it probably looked like a bumpy brown knit cap.

  The chief consulted with Lulu. “If not a missionary wife, why did you come? He want to know,” Lulu said.

  “I came to paint this time. Ask him if I may. The village, the beautiful canoes.”

  She dug out her half-filled watercolor book from her sketch sack to show her paintings of Beacon Hill Park in Victoria, woodland and seacoast in England. She felt apologetic. The English trees were puny compared to the mighty Douglas-firs and cedars here. Namby-pamby. A pathetic offering.

  Why paint here, he might ask, and what would she answer? That she hoped that here she might discover what it was about wild places that called to her with such promise.

  The chief made a circle with his hand, as if holding a brush, and nodded at her tablet.

  “He want that you paint now.”

  “Now?”

  Was this an invitation or a command? Better to assume it was a command. Could she paint under the heat of watching eyes, paint without sketching first? The years in art school in San Francisco and England hadn’t taught her that. Time to prove to herself what, for the last dozen years, she’d only hoped she was.

  She opened her watercolor set, a curiosity to him. He stuck his nose down over each color and sniffed while she looked for a subject. The raised platforms along the walls converged at a corner post carved into a man holding a fish, the most striking thing in the house. That would do just fine. It was a difficult perspective. She faltered. It wasn’t right. She ripped off the page and people murmured. She began again, adding the fishing-man figure, baskets, stacks of blankets, carved cedar chests, coils of bull kelp hanging on the wall, and, draped over poles, strips of dried fish looking like curled brown rags. She tried to work quickly, in case they made her leave. But where would she go? The steamer wouldn’t call again at Ucluelet for a week.

  When Emily finished, Lulu asked, “You want to paint me?”

  Ugh! Portraits were either stuffy or dead. She wondered if Lulu had ever seen her own face. “Do you really want me to?”

  Lulu thrust her head forward. “We don’t say things we don’t mean.”

  “Sorry.”

  Lulu knelt by the fire, and Emily began. Each time she looked up, Lulu’s dark expressive eyes were watching her. Older children and the woman in the red head scarf cast surreptitious glances but did not venture to come close.

  “You see Nuu’chah’nulth women in Victoria?” Lulu asked.

  “You mean what white people call Nootka?” Emily felt embarrassed. She couldn’t tell the difference between Nootka and Songhees. “Sometimes. Songhees women too.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “Songhees live at a reserve. Maybe Nootka camp on beaches.”

  “What do they in Victoria?”

  “Sell berries and fish and baskets.”

  She didn’t want to tell her how the Songhees were being pushed out of the reserve in Victoria’s Inner Harbor that had been promised to them forever.

  “What more?”

  She thought of Wash Mary starching her pinafores on the back porch when she was a girl. “A Songhees lady used to wash our clothes, but that was twenty-five years ago.”

  Lulu’s eyes burned with intensity. “She lived with you?”

  “No. She lived in a little house beyond Chinatown.”

  Emily rinsed her brushes. “There. Finished.”

  Lulu studied the painting as if looking away would make it disappear. “That’s me? You make me nice.”

  The red-scarfed woman came forward to have a look. Her expression revealed nothing. She walked away, opened a floor chest, wrapped herself in a dark blue blanket decorated with rows of mother-of-pearl buttons, made her way back to the fire, lowered herself onto a wooden box, pulled two hanks of gray hair bound in red cords forward over her shoulders, tapped her chest, and raised her chin in a pose.

  “My grand auntie,” Lulu said.

  Emily grinned. What she’d really come for could wait. She wiped sweat from her forehead, and set to work again.

  The auntie was of this place. Wind and sun had sculpted her face as they had her cedar house. Her laugh lines and sorrow lines were like gullies in a rugged landscape. Flames lit one high cheekbone, left the other in shadow, giving her a secretive look.

  Joy rose in her. They were letting her. The wonder of it
.

  The auntie grinned and said something in Nootka that made Lulu giggle. “She remember you.”

  The auntie passed her index fingers over her own eyebrows and flapped her hands outward at her temples.

  “She remember your eye hair, like wings.”

  Emily laughed. Her one eyebrow too widely and highly arched gave her the look of someone questioning everything.

  “She remember you laughing. You’re bigger now, she say.”

  True. She’d gone to England a shapely hourglass and had come home as what polite people would call solid, filled-in at thirty-three. Eighteen months imprisoned in that rod-rigid Suffolk sanatorium where they promised to heal homesickness and anything else that ails a body with imposed bed rest and force-feedings of honey and jam and mashed potato mountains—that’s what did it.

  “Bigger? Tell your auntie I can laugh bigger now.”

  When she finished Auntie’s portrait, she set all three watercolors on a sleeping platform and stepped back, every muscle tight. “They’re for you.”

  People crowded to see, speaking in Nootka. They opened a path for the chief and closed in behind him. After a few moments, he turned to her, nodded, and went outside.

  “Does that mean he’ll let me stay and paint?”

  Lulu snickered. “He always was let you paint. He just want to see you do it.”

  Emily laughed a laugh of relief.

  Auntie thrust at her a bowlful of salmonberries and said something Emily couldn’t understand.

  “You sleep here,” a woman said. “Auntie wants.”

  “That’s my mother, Rena,” Lulu explained.

  Sleep with all these people? Married people? Old men? The chief? All in the same room? She didn’t belong here, but she didn’t belong in a starchy missionary house with the Ten Commandments plastered on the wall either. Too much like her sisters’ house embroidered with homilies everywhere she looked—enough to squeeze the spunk right out of her. But at least there she wouldn’t be squeamish about what went on around her.