The Forest Lover (4 page)

Emily held up a basket with short vertical stripes crossing a long horizontal center line. At one end a half dozen slanted lines sat on top of the horizontal. “Salmon?”

The woman nodded, pleased. “Bones of salmon. These not the old ways. They my own.”

“You're an artist.”

The young woman shook her head. “I just make baskets.”

The largest oval one had a lid. Emily picked it up. The inside
was as smooth as the outside. The design seemed to represent open wings. “It's a handsome one. How much?”

The woman's eyes widened. “One dollar. It's Eagle.”

“One dollar isn't enough for a basket this fine.” A smile skipped over the woman's face and she rocked back on her heels. Emily set it down. “I can't buy it today, but it's beautiful.”

“Old clothes are good enough.”

“I don't have any here, but when I go home to Victoria, I'll bring some back. Maybe you will have one basket left.”

She noticed another which had a rectangle outlined in black with a narrow peaked roof, a door, and two windows. “What's this?”

“The Squamish Mission in North Vancouver. That's my church. I live at the Reserve.”

“How will I know whether you have one basket left?”

“Come and ask. I'm Basketmaker Sophie.”

“I'm Emily Carr.”

The parrot squawked, surprising the children. “His name is Joseph. Talk to him and he'll talk back.”

They inched toward him as if he'd fly away, cage and all, and the boy said, “Hello, bird. Hello.”

“Hello bird,” Joseph said. “Don't talk rot.”

They gasped and backed away, turning to their mother in wonder. In a few moments, they crept back to the bird.

Emily watched Sophie take in the paintings, the plaster casts, the paint supplies and brushes. “An artist.”

“Anartist. Awk! Em'ly zanartist.”

“My sisters explain me that way to their friends and he learned it from them.”

“He makes strong talk. Like Eagle for Squamish people.” Amusement played around the woman's mouth. “Only more loud.”

Emily chuckled. “I guess I'd better listen.”

Sophie was more at ease with her than Lulu had been, maybe the result of living close to a city. She seemed to have a contentedness in her own person that Lulu didn't have.

“Would you like some tea? May I give them bread and jam?”

Sophie hesitated. Her full lips parted.

“Why don't you stay awhile to wait out the rain?”

“Rain no matter,” she said, glancing at her daughter whose big eyes pleaded. “All right. Only for the children.” She turned to Emily. “You have children?”

“No. I'm not married. I can't be a wife and a painter.”

“No? I'm a wife. I'm a basket maker.”

“Lots of things here,” the boy said with wonder in his voice, saving her from having to answer.

“Hard to throw things away. Clutter and putter, that's me.”

Emily spread the bread with a thick layer of grape jelly. The boy ate quickly, his cheeks soon streaked purple, but the girl savored hers.

Sophie inspected each painting. “You like trees.” She giggled. “But you don't know forests. Forests are dark. More dark. More . . .” She wrinkled her nose and shrugged.

Her bluntness stung. Emily looked at her Hitats'uu watercolors. More what? How dark should she get them?

Sophie's eyes ignited in front of the drawing of Lulu at the hut. “Squamish women do that long, long time ago. No more. It makes church priest mad, so no more.”

“But this is at Hitats'uu.”

“You went to Westcoast village?”

“That's my Westcoast friend, Lulu.”

Sophie scowled. “Lulu is not a Christian.”

“She's a good person.”

“She is not a Christian.”

Sophie knelt to wrap her baskets. The large one with the eagle she left sitting on the floor.

“What about this?” Emily said, picking it up for her.

Sophie stood up, rigid, and shook her head. “By and by, you come to Squamish Mission Reserve and paint a Christian village. We have a church. You remember me, Sophie Frank. Jimmy Frank's my husband. I call him Frank. He works longshore. We live right by the water. You ask for Basketmaker Sophie.”

Emily smiled. “By and by, you come here too. Come soon.”

“Good of you to come for Father's birthday,” her sister Lizzie said.

“His birthday? Today? Imagine that,” Emily said, piling on the innocence in a voice higher than her usual deep tone. “I came for the old clothes.” She moved a blouse from the questionable pile onto the discard pile on the chesterfield.

“Don't tease us.” Lizzie dropped her old pink Easter dress onto the pile, her long, thin fingers extended a moment in midair.

“I'm not going with you, if that's what you have in mind.”

“
Honor thy father and thy mother,
Millie.”

“There's no heavenly grace earned by visiting graves, Lizzie. Now if their bodies were folded up and put in boxes in trees like the Nootka do so they could feel a breeze or two, I might go.” She chuckled, and held up a worn, flared skirt. Its forest green appealed to her.

“Every Carr daughter goes on his birthday. Mother's too,” Alice said. “Why won't you?”

“Seeing his grave would only whip up my anger over some things he said to me.”

Rebels like you are burned or hanged in public squares,
was one thing he'd said. The house still echoed his words.

“You used to go with us. You used to like going with us,” Lizzie said.

“No. You wanted to think I liked going.” She hated all that sham homage she'd performed since she was seventeen, the year he died.

Dede came into the parlor, and Emily glanced at her to see if she'd heard. Uniform creases in formal balance, like parentheses around her mouth, stood guard against any random and unreasoned smile that might escape her.

“You'll go with us now or—”

“Or you'll send me to bed without any supper? Please, Dede. Is playing parent the only role you know? I'm thirty-three, if you haven't noticed, and I'm bored with it.”

It was their great gap in age that made Dede capable of breathing in loudly through her nose for an interminably long time before exhaling, as she did now, her sign of exasperation.

Dede folded carefully her old blue serge skirt and matching jacket, and set them on the pile. “Are these for a church or an orphanage bazaar?”

“Neither. They're for a Squamish woman at the North Vancouver Reserve.”

“A siwash?”

Emily prickled at the ugly term.

“You're wicked not to tell us that straight out.” Dede looked at her suit as if she wanted to snatch it off the pile.

“She came to my flat selling baskets. I'm going to take her the clothes next weekend.”

“She can get clothes from her mission,” Lizzie said, tucking a loose strand into her brown bun. “You don't have to take them to her yourself. It's too personal.”

“I'm not going for charity. I'm going for friendship.”

“Honestly, when will you get it in your head that we can't condone this unwholesome socializing with primitives? It's a disgrace to the family.” Dede's breath was loud and long. “If Father were alive, he wouldn't approve.”

“No, he wouldn't—he who sold sacks of raisins crawling with maggots to Songhees lined up at his warehouse.”

“Millie! How can you make such a hateful claim? He most certainly did not,” Dede screeched.

“I saw it. He even told me, ‘Indians don't mind maggots.' ”

“That's a lie.”

“Convenient for you to think so.” She flung her arms to shoo her out. “You'll be late for your appointment with his bones.”

• • •

The buggy wheels crunched on the gravel, an irritating sound. Even the parlor irked her. Father's raspy voice lay like a residue on his black, imitation-marble, English-style mantel, clung to his fox-and-hounds wallpaper, rested on his English primroses and cowslips peeking through the bay windows. His photograph leered at her from above his horsehair side chair. She hadn't realized until she moved across the strait to Vancouver how much these reminders of him chafed her like sandpaper.

She picked up the dark green skirt, and took the stairs two at a
time to the bedroom she shared with Alice when she was home, to get the sewing basket. She cut through the hem and made a slit up the front of the skirt, made another cut straight up the back. She stitched the front raw edges to the backs to make a split-legged skirt. Now this was what she needed to ride a horse the way it ought to be ridden. She put it on, tucked a small sketch pad into her pocket, and went out to the barn to look for her old riding reins.

When her sisters returned, she unhitched Wilma from the buggy, attached the riding reins, climbed onto the fence rail, and swung her leg over Wilma's rump, bareback. Wilma skittered sideways, and Emily grabbed a hunk of mane to seat herself.

“What do you think you're doing?” Dede said.

“I'm going to make my peace with Father in my own way.”

“Millie, no lady rides astride. This is
British
Columbia.”

“But
we're
Canadian.” She dug her heel into Wilma's side and took off at a canter. The thunder of Wilma's hooves overpowered the rest of Dede's outrage.

• • •

Beacon Hill Park was only a few blocks away, the site of happy childhood bird-watching with Father and her first sketching trips. The memory of how she'd lugged the drawing easel she'd made of pruned cherry branches amused her. She headed toward the virgin woods, her favorite part. On the hillside she looked at the five tall Douglas-firs in graduated sizes. The Five Sisters, Father used to call them, straight and stately.

Except for one, the smallest, a bit crooked, its position buffeted more by offshore wind. That was her. Next to her and two years older than she was, the tree for Alice, who knew all about family tradition. Four years older, long-nosed, pray-to-be-perfect Lizzie knew all about God. Fourteen years older, Clara, elegant and statuesque, knew enough to escape the family into an early marriage. Fifteen years older, Dede, angular, straight-backed,
thought
she knew all about everything.

Still astride, Emily drew four straight firs, but the fifth she drew with exaggerated crookedness, leaning outward, its branches spiky. There were the good girls with clean fingernails, and there was
Emily, preferring mud pies in the cow yard to tea parties in the parlor. How odd that they all sprang from the same roots.

Father must have thought that too. She was the only one he used endearments for—wild one, witchwife, and nympholept, which sounded like something wasn't right with her, until she'd looked it up:
a frenzy of emotion for something unattainable, an ecstasy inspired by wood nymphs.
Yes! That was dandy fine.

These trees had seemed so mighty when she was growing up. Now they struck her as less dense and powerful. She directed Wilma toward the picnic area. There it was, the Garry oak. There was the notch. How could she have sat in it for hours, the bark so rough and scratchy, to look at a bird's nest? She was probably only seven, peering down at her sisters not venturing beyond the picnic blanket. She'd refused to come down when Father commanded her, so he'd left her there to teach her obedience. He loved birds as much as she did. He should have understood. She'd decided to wait him out. Certainly he'd come back for her, regret wringing his heart. He never did. Toward dark, she slunk home by herself. She was still glad she hadn't acknowledged him when he said, “My little nympholept, you can't always do what you want in this world.”

• • •

At home, she curried and fed Wilma, and sat on a crate in the floored half of the barn, the half Dede had rented to a clergyman as office space while she was in England. She shook her head at the fussy wallpaper scraps Dede had pasted up, as if to please Queen Victoria, five years dead.

Alice came in bringing her a cup of tea. She'd taken down her hair and it cascaded in chestnut waves over her shoulders.

“Convicted of impudence and waywardness, at thirty-three.” Emily smirked. “We're like alley cats spitting at each other.”

“You can't expect them to be different than what they are.”

“I know, I know. Doers of good works. Chalking them up on God's tablet to be prepared for doomsday.” But there was a difference between good works and good work. If only she knew which, in the summation of a person's life, was more important.

“Maybe I'm so cantankerous because I'm floundering. Each of you has a purpose in life. Your kindergarten. Lizzie's missionary
society. Dede, the makeshift parent, now her orphanage auxiliary. Clara, marriage. But me? What am I here for?” She looked at Alice, wanting to read the answer on her face. “If only I were sure it was to paint the places I love, to paint them well enough to mean something to people, then I could take joy in every step toward that and not grumble about other things that don't really matter. Then I might not be such a thorn.”