The Forest Lover (42 page)

“For living in.”

“Here?”

“No. Goldstream Flats. I'm dreadful hankery for forest.”

He walked around it cautiously, peered in the window, stepped inside, and in a few moments hopped out, nearly toppling over. He screwed up his dented forehead in a look sliding from ecstasy to anxiety.

“Can I come? Can I? Can I? I'm your swanaskxw.”

“Maybe for a little while, if your sister lets you, but I also need to be alone there. You can use my tent, tell her.”

He shook his hands, unable to contain himself. “I'll ask. No. You ask her.”

“All right.”

Over the next several days, they made ledges for cages for Susie the rat, Joseph, and the bullfinches, rigged a large canvas awning, and fashioned a wood-burning stove from a square pail and a discarded stovepipe, not much different from the one on
La Renarde Rouge.
She stepped back to admire it.
“Formidable, mademoiselle!”

She packed the trailer with canned food for a month and plenty of art supplies, including a gallon of white housepaint, two gallons of gasoline, and rolls of inexpensive manila paper. She had it towed to a small, out-of-the-way clearing surrounded by moss-sheathed cedars, maples, hemlocks draped with lichen, Douglas-firs, alders spiced with wildflowers. Glorious.

• • •

At breakfast the first morning, she made Harold promise to beat his drum every so often to let her know he was all right. “But not if people are around. If you see anyone, don't dance.”

She set off to find a subject, knowing she'd made an intentional decision—to expend her life on painting, wholly and permanently, to remain in the innermost center of her work even though that might be at the periphery of the art world. Barbeau's show wasn't going to make her an artist. Painting was.

She stopped at a likely spot and unfolded her stool and easel, tacked manila paper onto a board, thinned her oil paints with gasoline and mixed them with house paint. It was so cheap she could be free to take wild strokes, but so quick-drying she'd have to work swiftly. The paper wouldn't take studied labor. Now she was ready.

To paint a tree or a totem, she had to look at it long and long, until it resembled no other tree or totem. It was easy with totems, harder with trees. Without a totem pole as a natural center of interest, she had to sort out the chaos of overlapping forms, and select. That density was probably why people thought the forests of the Northwest were unpaintable. She had to shove that aside, get quiet to the bone to let a subject come.

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing
through upper branches, the melodious
kloo-klack
of ravens, the
nyeep-nyeep
of nuthatches—all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things—fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place.

Partly lost to her surroundings, she singled out a cedar, wide at the base, narrowing as it grew. If there was any kind of portrait worth doing, it would be the portrait of a tree. But a portrait had to convey character. The channels in this cedar's raw umber trunk all stretched upward, reaching toward light. It was more than a tree, however noble. It was the manifestation of the attitude that had brought her this far: reaching. Not just the tree, but that idea was her subject. The
things
in a painting were only bits of visible evidence of a still, small voice whispering a truth.

As she began to paint, she saw rhythm in the tree's repeated forms, in the upward reach of the trunk furrows, its bare hanging withes reaching down, its laden boughs tangled with those of other trees. In one sweep she united the branches into a mantle of cedars. Her swinging arm became a swoop of greenery, boughs from adjacent trees breathing into each other, supporting each other, all one.

Loving everything terrifically, humming, half singing “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” she felt unutterably close to the Creator, as though she were an instrument of His presence. Someday, when some God-quality in her was fully in accord with the God surrounding her, she would achieve that one true painting. Maybe it would happen when, like an Indian living in his totem spirit, becoming the thing he held in awe, she saw no difference between herself and the Creator. Right before her eyes she saw something: The more she entered into the life of the tree, as one breath moving, in and out like the tide, one heart-drum beating, the more alive her work became. Oh, the joy of it!

Emily sat on the caravan step studying her work from the week before. There were small private miracles, a successful branch, a patch of open space real and true, but the whole of it, the way to express the forest, was elusive still.

She heard women's voices. Lizzie's and Alice's! Good God! Harold was somewhere off in the woods, apt to burst forth into wild drumming out of pure glee. Which one should she protect from the other?

Lizzie strode toward her and Alice scurried after, nose aimed down to study the path.

“Surprise!” they said together.

“How did you find me?”

“The area attendant pointed the way, and then we heard you singing,” Alice said.

“Nobody else could be that off-key and enjoy it so much,” Lizzie said.

“We brought supper, Lizzie's corned beef.” Alice set her satchel on the picnic table.

“And a cabbage. And tomatoes from your garden, if they're not all squashed,” Lizzie said. “We have plates too.”

“Family Sunday supper, a tradition still,” Emily said.

“And you forgot your cigarette things.” Alice reached into her satchel and presented Emily's tin box of cigarette makings.

“Alleluia! Thank you.” Emily gave a little bow. “I've turned this place inside out searching for that.”

Lizzie set down her bags and looked around, waving away mosquitoes. They set about preparing the meal and inquiring how she was living, curious about every detail of washing and cooking. “But how do you, you know, relieve yourself?” Lizzie asked.

“What do you think they did in Galilee?” She motioned off into the woods.

“Don't you get depressed out here?” Lizzie asked, her voice thin as a pencil line. “It's so—shady.”

“No. Everything is growing. Stay out here long enough and you will too. Remember Isaiah? ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad.' The frog song at night rivals any choir.”

“You don't get scared? Or lonely?”

“Yes, I do, but I take comfort in knowing I'm not the only one out here.” She showed them the drawing she'd done at home of the imaginary forest with eyes.

“That gives me the creeps,” Alice said.

“Good. It does me too. The forest is a refuge for a million living things.”

“Precisely.” Lizzie snickered, then swatted her arm.

Emily handed her the mosquito oil. “Or I can roll you a cigarette if you prefer. That works too.” Lizzie wrinkled her nose in disgust, which satisfied Emily immensely. “Think of it as one of nature's paradoxes, that a creature so delicate, just a whisper, can be so wicked.”

“What about your painting? How's it going?”

Alice asked! Bless her. Alice asked.

“Better than ever. I think I'm beginning to glimpse how to see ideas instead of mere things.”

That seemed to spark genuine interest. She laid out twenty new oils on paper on the picnic table. Her sisters looked at them without so much as one negative comment, though no gushing praise either. What had come over them? Had the Great Popover Refusal convinced them of something?

“It's nice you're not doing Indian things now,” Lizzie said.

“Yes. Nice.” Let Lizzie have her reason for thinking that. She had her own. “I'm painting life itself, and the spirit of life as I see it.”

Thunder growled, swelled, blasted, and Harold's drum imitated it.

“What was that?” Lizzie asked.

Emily rolled a cigarette, and looked around, like Claude had done, looking for spies. “The Apocalypse?”

Chickadees stopped their rippling whistle, and a squirrel scrambled under a log. Lightning crackled close enough to vibrate her collarbone. In the stillness following, frogs sang out their excitement, some in basso profundo, some in falsetto. Big drops made their way through the canopy of foliage. “Isn't it grand, the trees refreshing themselves, one branch offering drink to the one below it?”

“But our picnic,” Alice wailed.

“It won't last. It's only a summer shower.”

She hoped that was all it was. Then Harold might take shelter somewhere else and only send her a drumbeat to tell her he was all right.

From under the canvas awning they watched the forest darken, the green begin to glow. A diamond drop quivered at the tip of each maple leaf. Rain falling on ferns made them bounce.

“Weather keeps you passionate,” Emily said. “No one stuffs the landscape into your eyes here. You have to want it enough to be cold or wet or itchy.”

Lizzie's arm shot out to silence her. Only her eyes moved. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

Harold's drum echoed, followed by a whoop. Emily stifled a laugh. She should probably tell her, but Lizzie's panicked expression was priceless and she wanted to enjoy it a moment longer. Slowly Lizzie turned her head to scan the forest.

Harold whooped again and came reeling between trees, stumbling over ferns, hugging his drum and shoe box. He stopped just short of the awning when he saw her sisters, shoved the shoe box onto dry ground, and tried to hide the drum behind his back. Water dripped from his jaw.

Emily checked Lizzie's reaction—eyebrows knit, mouth agape, hand to her chest. She pulled Harold under the awning and put the shoe box in the trailer.

“Harold, these are my sisters, Alice and Lizzie.”

“Your drum!” Alice said.

Emily knew they had assumed, whenever they'd seen him helping in her garden or apartment building, that he was a hired laborer, and she'd done nothing to correct the misconception. “Harold is a dear friend of mine. His parents were missionaries on the Skeena, Lizzie. He's keeping me company for a while.”

Lizzie's posture became rigid.

Slowly, enjoying the delicious moment, Emily pointed through the trees to her tent. “His camp is over there. He's working on an important project. He's been a strong influence on my return to serious work, for which I'm mightily grateful. Dry off and come inside, Harold. We're about to eat.”

They all crowded into the steamy caravan, and Joseph in his cage sprayed seeds over Alice's food. Rain smacked the tin roof in sharp clicks, trickled down the trailer sides and made gullies around the campsite. “Like Noah's ark, eh?” Emily said.

“Actually quite cozy,” Lizzie said, peering out the open door. “Harold, are you also working in the missionary fields?”

In her own way, she was trying.

“No.”

“Your parents must have done a world of good bringing the Word of God to the aborigines. Tell us about it, what they did.”

“Made them sing church songs and stop dancing.”

“Yes, and what else?”

“Mean things. Take boys from families. Whip the Indian out of them. I don't want to talk about it.” He stared down at his feet. “You shall not take things from me,” he murmured.

Lizzie drew back her chin.

“You are an artist too, then?” Alice said, always the peacemaker.

“Artist. Em'ly zanartist,” the parrot muttered. “I'd rather starve.”

“To each his own, Joseph,” Emily said.

“No. I'm an author,” Harold blurted.

Emily felt a sigh skitter through her. That's how it starts, with an urge, an attempt, and a declaration.

“That's wonderful. What do you write about?” Alice asked.

Harold shrank back against the wall. “A song of myself and Indian friends.
Harold Cook a Canadian.”

Alice leaned toward Harold, her face full of teacherly interest. “Is there anything I could read that you wrote?”

He looked confused. It wasn't likely that anyone had ever asked him. The next step, going public with those dear human pages, was too much for him. He turned to Emily. “You read. Read
Leaves of Grass.
”

“All right.” Now wasn't that a change from Lizzie's Sunday scripture reading.

“Stop this day,”
Harold prompted.

“And night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,”
she said, hoping it would be so.

“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,”
Harold went on from memory, rocking to the drone of rain and croaking of frogs.

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead . . .

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”