The Forest Lover Page 8

  Emily caught sight of the womb on the hut. “Something deeper.”

  She overheard a man say, “I don’t care for Indian things.”

  It made her skin crawl. She took the tray of cookies out of Alice’s hands and walked through the room offering them just so she could pass him right by. Later that same man bought two small coastal scenes for twelve dollars each. Heat flushed her cheeks. She fetched the cookie tray. “Here, take some home with you.”

  At the edge of the room she whispered to Alice, “Nothing like cold hard cash to make a body feel all puckered up.”

  In front of a watercolor of Hitats’uu with the sea serpent canoe, she told several mothers of her plan to take the older students to the Mission Reserve in North Vancouver to draw canoes. “They’re simple shapes to draw. The children will learn about line, and they’ll like the animals on the bows.” The women exchanged glances, stood more rigidly.

  Jessica was the last to leave. “I feel I have to tell you. They don’t want you to take their children to the reserve.”

  “Just to the beach.”

  “The parents don’t want pictures of canoes.” Jessica rolled her fist in her palm. “It’s just that I think you ought to know. They may pull their children out if you do it. I wouldn’t, you understand. My girls love you, Emily, and you know how I feel.”

  She felt Alice’s anxious eyes on her, waiting for her answer. Jessica put on her coat.

  “It’s not the canoes, is it, Jessica?”

  Jessica finally faced her, as pained as Alice. “No. It’s not. It’s fear.”

  “All those pious wives of timber merchants and shipping clerks despise anything native. They want to make Canada an imitation Europe and ignore the rest.” She picked a cookie off the table and bent it until it broke apart in her palm. Alice immediately swept up the crumbs.

  Living with that neatness, and Lizzie’s judgment, and Dede’s iron rule—she’d have to if she lost her students and couldn’t make a living here. Or, living her own life, living close to the reserve, living to paint, a devotion as absorbing as Alice’s kindergarten, Lizzie’s missionary society, Sophie’s children—that would cost her. The children’s classes were too lucrative to risk. Any risks she took would have to be where it counted, for her art.

  “Thanks, Jessica. You can tell them I’ll keep them on the civilized side of Burrard Inlet.”

  9: Mew Gull

  Wind blew Emily’s skirt between her legs as she and Billy walked the wooden path at the reserve. She put her hands in her pockets and felt the smooth shell Sophie had put there when she returned the coat.

  It was February. Snow runoff streaked mud on the walkway, and the freeze had caused some planks to warp. As she stepped on a spot that gave way, dirty water squirted up her skirt. Billy zigzagged in front of her sniffing for salmon heads, new grasses, any sign of life. A mew gull gave an agonized, mournful cry. She sympathized.

  She hadn’t seen Sophie since Christmas time when she’d brought a cherry pie, a rag doll with black yarn braids she’d made for Annie Marie, a kite for Tommy, and a tiny black-and-white-striped knit cap for the baby. Too long a time, but winter was basket-making season so Sophie hadn’t come for tea or soup on her rounds of peddling as she had during warmer weather. She’d gone to the reserve to see her once since then but Sophie wasn’t there, and Mrs. Johnson said, “Gone today. Don’t know where.”

  Fog obscured the mountains behind the reserve, and a heavy charcoal sky pressed down the sea. Beached canoes covered by gray tarps lay like stranded whales. Gray-green scum floated on puddles. The village seemed to be sinking into mud, more forlorn than ever, empty, waiting for a single green shoot. Her heels on the planks jarred the leaden day.

  The mewling came again, and chilled her.

  She knocked at Sophie’s closed door. It inched open. Women’s cries burst through the crack. She saw a sliver of coppery face, iron gray hair and a large abalone earring stretching down to a purple shawl. The eyebrow lifted. The door opened. Aromas of smoke and wet wool seeped out. She made Billy sit outside.

  In the center of the floor, a small pine coffin rested on a tule mat. Her watercolor of Tommy under the Ancestor lay on the wood—Tommy, the sweet boy with trusting eyes who had let her blow his nose. A lump swelled in her throat. Sophie slouched against the wall, her ashen face blank with grief. Across the room their eyes met, and Sophie broke into a cry.

  A circle of women wrapped in shawls and blankets wept on the floor. Eyes and lips pinched closed, some of them coughing, they didn’t notice her. All but one, a woman in a rust-colored blanket whose narrowed eyes drilled into her. Next to her, she recognized Mrs. Johnson’s head hooded by a brown shawl. The older woman who had come to the door rejoined the circle. Emily felt dizzy in the pungent air of the closed room, and lowered herself to the floor.

  Sophie poured water from an enameled basin into a smaller, shallow one and carried it around the circle of women. One by one, they washed their faces. When Sophie offered it to Emily, the woman in the rust-colored blanket shot her a cold stare. Maybe joining in would make it harder for Sophie with her friends. Sophie inched the basin toward her and lowered her eyes to the water. Emily dipped in her hands. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, hating such easy, incapable words.

  The women crooned in Squamish to Sophie, to each other, to Annie Marie huddled in the corner in a daze. Something seemed missing in that corner. The basket cradle! She scanned the room. The house was in disarray. Cherry bark, cedar roots, beargrass, and finished baskets lay scattered instead of in their usual neat piles.

  The gray-haired woman in the purple shawl motioned for Emily to follow her into the other room. “I’m Sarah, Sophie’s auntie,” she said softly. “You are Em’ly?”

  She patted the bed, inviting her to sit. The handmade featherbed was thin and lumpy. The window near it was broken, and stuffed into the open space was some blue print fabric in a familiar pattern—one of her cast-off dresses, too tight.

  “Sophie likes you. You’re honest, she say.”

  “So is she.”

  Folds of skin lined Sarah’s eyelids, and one eye opened wider than the other. In the grooves that ran bow-shaped from her wide nostrils around her mouth to her chin, there was something motherly and aristocratic.

  “How did it happen?”

  “A hard winter. Many die. Margaret Dan . . .” She looked through the open doorway to the woman sitting stiffly beside Sophie in the rust-colored blanket. “She lose a baby too.”

  Margaret Dan must have heard. She gave Emily a cold look. You don’t belong here, her eyes seemed to say. You don’t know what suffering is.

  “Some older ones die too.”

  Influenza? Whooping cough? Measles scuttling through the reserve?

  “What about Sophie’s baby?”

  “Gone. Not baptized. Sophie thinks she made Ancestor mad when she baptize babies.”

  That child was on Sophie’s back when she paddled home across the inlet at dusk. She should never have let her go home that night.

  “The little one, Sophie held him four days. Touch is medicine. Then Tommy got sick and coughed blood. Sophie had no more touch for Tommy too.”

  If she’d only known, she would have been here, feeding him, keeping him warm, giving him medicine, helping Sophie. “What can I do? Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.”

  Annie Marie waddled into the room dragging a blanket, and snuggled into Sarah’s lap. Sarah stroked her hair, and Annie Marie slumped against her breast and played with her purple fringe. Sarah rested her cheek against the child’s head. Emily held Annie Marie’s bare feet, as cold as if they’d been fished from the sea. She rubbed them until they were warm, and then wrapped them in her skirt.

  “A bad spirit come to the reserve,” Sarah whispered. “Don’t say anything. The nipniit fine me in church for say that. Church priests can do that, you know. But I am an old woman. I know spirits. Sophie and Margaret fight. The bad spirit doesn’t like
. Margaret’s baby dead. Now Tommy dead too.”

  Wind whistled through the floorboards stirring the odors of damp and sickness and bodies. The keening started again. “Three days going like this here,” Sarah said, “until nipniit come.”

  Sarah gestured toward the door to the main room and they rejoined the circle. The women rocked. Emily rocked too, forward and back, folding herself over her crossed arms. At some cue she couldn’t detect, the women stopped, and Margaret Dan brought the water basket around again but passed her by without pausing. She wished she were invisible. The women clucked their comfort to Sophie as another woman went around the circle and put some small thing into each of their hands. When the woman’s wool skirt brushed Emily’s arm, she felt, pressed into her palm, the cool disc of a quarter. She turned to Sarah, puzzled.

  “Sophie pay you for witness,” Sarah whispered. “To thank you for cry.”

  Emily puffed out air. “Thank me!”

  Those quarters were harder for Sophie to come by than baskets. Her hand curled around it and held it to her ribs.

  “What happens next?”

  “The nipniit comes here. Father John. We go to the graveyard. He talks. Tommy’s soul goes to the sunset.”

  Everyone stood up. Emily moved close to Sophie and opened her arms to enfold her when Margaret Dan scowled at her. She hadn’t seen anyone else embrace Sophie. She let her arms drop.

  “Tommy never cried,” Sophie said.

  Emily nodded.

  “It feel like I lost my Casamin twice. Six babies gone.”

  “I’m so, so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Margaret Dan has four now. You see this coffin?” The rough wood, split and warped, was pulling away at one joint and nails showed in the opening. “The coffin maker in North Vancouver, he thinks good enough for Indian baby.” She turned and smiled. Incredibly, she smiled, as genuinely as if she had no sorrow. “Look, Em’ly! Lots of baskets. Tommy’s going to have a big white gravestone with a cross carved, like Margaret Dan’s boy.”

  The door opened and two men entered. Billy nosed his way in behind them as though he had already met them.

  “Frank,” Sophie said. “This is Em’ly.”

  Jimmy Frank and Sophie spoke softly in Squamish, his face without animation. The oily skin under his eyes drooped. He was stocky, with thick hair and muscular arms. He wore heavy work boots and a rumpled coat. She couldn’t tell what color it had once been.

  He turned to Emily. “Sophie talks about you all the days. The white lady that paints. In my house, you’re the same as family.”

  “Thank you. I always like to be here.” She felt a seed of happiness drop in her lap which would nourish her at some more appropriate time. “I’m so sorry about Tommy.”

  Jimmy Frank nodded, and stroked Billy behind the ears. “This your dog?” His fingers lingered at Billy’s neck.

  “Yes. His name’s Billy.”

  Jimmy crouched down, his big hands over Billy’s body steady and firm, calming him until they were friends. “You’re a good dog, Billy. My boy told me about you,” he said softly.

  He went into the bedroom and pried loose two bottom planks of the back exterior wall. “Old Indian way,” Sophie said, her eyes darting from Sarah to Emily, her lips pinched.

  “So death will not come through the front door,” Sarah explained.

  Sophie turned away from Jimmy as he pushed the coffin through the opening to the other man standing outside. Was she turning away because it was the custom that the mother shouldn’t watch, or was Sophie embarrassed by the native custom in front of her white friend?

  Except for Annie Marie and Sarah, everyone went outside into the drizzle. The women lifted shawls and blankets over their heads and the men wore felt hats. Emily had nothing. When Sarah noticed her bare head from the doorway, she stepped outside and draped her purple shawl over Emily’s head. It smelled of smoke and wet wool.

  “Thank you,” Emily said.

  Billy moved excitedly from person to person, sniffing. “No, Billy, stay down,” she said several times until finally she had to tie him to a bare bush. He whined a little. “I’m sorry, Billy, but you have to be good and stay here.”

  The priest arrived to start the procession. Jimmy Frank and the other man carried the coffin. Jimmy sang his hurt in hollow, hypnotic tones. “Aadidaa, aadidaa, aadidaa.”

  Sophie followed the coffin. Margaret Dan sidled in front of Emily to walk with Sophie. Emily fell into step with Mrs. Johnson, who stiffened at her approach. “Poor Sophie,” Emily whispered.

  “You can’t be her friend in the way you think,” Mrs. Johnson said.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re different. You’re different. You shouldn’t expect so much. It will only hurt. I know.”

  They walked the rest of the way to the cemetery in silence.

  The procession passed the cross, streaked pearl gray in the dim light, to the newer area behind it. Emily’s shoes sank into mud, and rain drilled on her shoulders. The priest droned his “domini spiritu sanctu,” then spoke in Squamish or Chinook, she couldn’t tell which, then in English. From the back of the group, and under wheeling, crying gulls, she heard only bits of phrases riding on the wind: “The face of the Lord shining upon the little ones.” She couldn’t hear him explain why “His mercy cannot be measured,” but she had a clear line of vision to the little coffin resting near the small hole. Rain darkened the yellow wood to ochre and ran in rivulets around its base. She stared at the crack in its seam, and hoped this nipniit wouldn’t take much longer.

  Sophie had no tears at the grave. Weathered resignation lined the women’s faces, as though this were just life. She looked past the cross to the Ancestor, but couldn’t see beyond the fence where Tommy’s baby brother had been laid among the heathen.

  After the reciting and responding, after the sprinkling, the lowering, the covering, people murmured in flat voices, nodded good-bye, and went off to their houses. Sophie dropped back to walk with Emily, and Margaret Dan whirled around, leveling at Emily a look vibrating with resentment. What was she to do? Shrivel up and disappear?

  Their footsteps thudded dully on the wood. “I want lots more babies,” Sophie said. “Frank knows. He wants them too. Indian men drink medicine to stay strong until they old.”

  Ahead, under slumped shoulders, Jimmy Frank walked with a tired stride, his hands cracked and grimy.

  Sophie slowed, and Emily watched an idea take shape in her mind. Her eyes glistened and her voice took on a bright earnestness. “When I get more babies, I share one with you.”

  “Sophie! What are you talking about? People don’t share babies.”

  Sophie’s face fell into a pout, and she marched ahead.

  Could she have been serious? Emily felt her breath knocked out of her. She had offended Sophie in the deepest way.

  “No worry. It’s only for borrowing,” she said over her shoulder, her words clipped.

  In a few minutes Sophie waited to walk with her. “When I get a girl, her name will be Em’ly Maria.”

  Emily breathed more easily. “That would be very nice.”

  A short way off, Emily saw Sarah bareheaded in the rain, whisking Sophie’s house with a small cedar bough.

  Sophie lunged ahead, shrieking, “No! No, Auntie! This is a Christian house. We don’t need the old ways.”

  Sarah continued to brush. “Wash away death,” she murmured.

  Sophie snatched the branch from Sarah and threw it onto the mud. “No. I am a Christian woman. I have a Christian friend.”

  Emily flinched. Was this tirade for her benefit? She glanced at Mrs. Johnson, who raised her shoulders and tipped her head, as if to say, See?

  Emily handed Sarah the shawl and stepped back.

  The thin skin around Sarah’s wet eyes puckered as she glared at Sophie. “You don’t know what you are.”

  10: Killer Whale

  Emily stood with Alice in their Skagway hotel room and watched ghostly figures pas
sing through sheets of rain, the wettest summer she could remember. Fog obscuring the coastline on the way north and three days of downpour here had made any sketching impossible. The town was shut tight. The Klondike gold strike over a mountain pass in the Yukon seemed more than ten years ago. Assay offices and saloons were boarded up with weathered planks. All the hurly-burly was gone. Foghorns moaned a dirge.

  “Sounds like cows with the collywobbles,” Emily said.

  “Our whole time here, wasted,” Alice said, her forehead against the window.

  It had seemed such a good idea—a trip to coastal Alaska to help Alice get over her gloom from losing half a finger slicing bread, the horrible result of her poor eyesight. Even Dede had agreed and loosened her hold on their trust fund. Best of all, it got her north, without needing Claude du Bois. But it would take dogged effort to jolly Alice out of the grumps.

  “You know I’m not very good at concocting cheer, but at least I’m making an effort. Watch.”

  She drew a caricature of the two of them dripping wet, bedraggled, rain pouring off their umbrella, an enormous hump of a bandage on Alice’s left hand, a pick in the other, shovel propped over Emily’s shoulder, paintbrushes stuck above her ears, both of them in enormous overshoes leaping across a puddle. Underneath, she wrote: Gold Rush Gals on Liquid Holiday.

  Alice smiled in spite of herself.

  “I think I’ll send it to Dede,” Emily said.

  “She should have come instead of me.”

  “Ooh, poor-dear-little-me. Let’s cherish our misery a little longer.”

  “You’d be miserable too if you’d lost a finger and couldn’t hold a brush.”

  The thought brought her up sharp. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Emily scrutinized her stubby fingers and knobby knuckles, not feminine like Alice’s, but capable of steady strokes. For that alone, she liked them.

  “I took my kindergartners to the park once to fly a kite,” Alice said. “When it dove into a bush, a baby bird on a branch got tangled in the kite string. I wanted so much to free it, the children were crying, but when I came close, it flapped and yanked so that the string cut into its leg.”