The Forest Lover (10 page)

“I . . . He's so severe.” She turned to the watercolor of the cedar grove. “I like this best. How the light falls between the branches. Why don't you call it
Cathedral Light?
”

“Does it look like that to you? Oh, Alice, I wish you'd go there with me. It's Stanley Park. The interior. It's so deep and quiet and still. It could heal a person, body and soul. I get a sense of some presence breathing there. God's too big to be squeezed into a stuffy church, but I feel Him there in the spaces between the trees.”

Alice observed her a moment, dewy-eyed, as though through all the years she had doubted whether her rebel sister even believed in God, and now she was relieved.

Emily felt a sheepish smile form. “It's good to have you here. At least I can say one third of my family supports me.”

“One fourth,” Alice corrected. “Clara.”

“Yes. Clara. Only one in five a married woman. Hasn't that ever struck you as odd? As meaning something?”

“Not particularly. It's kind of sad, though.”

They were quiet awhile, and peaceful. She might not have another chance to ask for a long time. “Was there ever some injury Father did to you? Was he ever crude to you?”

Alice gave her an odd look. “No. He was never warm to me, but I never hated him like you did in your black crow period. We couldn't understand it because he loved you best.”

“He did not.”

“Of course he did. We all knew it. He even looked at you differently than he did at the rest of us.”

“How?”

“More lingering, I would say. Protective, maybe—you being the youngest and prettiest. ‘Oh, those exotic eyes and dark hair. She'll be a beauty, that one,' he used to say.”

Emily snorted. “Flat eyes, you mean, the right one larger than the left. Right eyebrow too heavy. Face too wide. Cheeks like biscuit dough. Hair crinkly. Shoulders like a stevedore.”

“All right, all right.” Alice pushed her palms against the air to stop her. “Still, his attentions to you enraged Lizzie. That's what
made her so fierce in winning his love the only way she was sure of, by being more Christian than you.”

“She won that just by the way she opened the Bible.”

Alice snickered in a very un-Alice-like way.

“He never spoke bluntly to you—about men or sex?”

Alice looked at her, not with the offended astonishment Lizzie or Dede would have wielded to affirm their moral superiority, the overdone shock that couldn't be trusted. Alice's look was genuine innocence—the way she negotiated life. And in that look, with Alice slowly shaking her head, she knew. It had only been her. Thank God. Father hadn't with any of the others.

• • •

Jessica and her family were the first to arrive. Parents and grandparents poured in. The Vancouver Ladies' Art Club arrived in a group, overdressed. Emily snickered to Jessica as they entered. “A parade of ruffled layer cakes.” When the last one came through the door, she added, “Interesting. No madam president.”

“You think I'd invite her?”

And no Sophie. She wished she had insisted that she come.

Most said the children's work was fresh and original. Parents glowed. “You're a fine teacher,” one woman said. She nodded her thanks. They called her drawing of three Nootka girls in shawls “charming,” and a pen and ink of the village “quaint.”

“Why are you scowling?” Alice whispered. “Those words should make you float.”

“I don't want to be charming and quaint. Leave that to the jabber-and-scratch ladies.”

“For God's sake, Millie, what
do
you want?”

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.”

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.