The Forest Lover (11 page)

“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.”

Emily stood with Alice in their Skagway hotel room and watched ghostly figures passing 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.”

“So what'd you do?”

“It flew away, but the foot fell into my hand.” A muscle in Alice's chin quivered.

“At least it wasn't a child.”

Alice's right hand slid over her damaged left one. “That's not the point. That bird was damaged. Any other bird could see that. Imperfect creatures are shunned.” Her voice rose, shrill but soft. “She'll probably never get a mate.” Her eyes, moist now, asked for understanding.

Emily put her hand over Alice's. She'd never guessed. Even nearing forty, Alice was hoping for love. The mutilation of her finger made that hope less likely. To Alice, one small spot of ugliness was enough to kill her chance of marriage.

She felt choked with love and sadness. Of all the sisters, Alice was the pretty one—her eyes golden brown as a hazelnut, her face colored like a damask rose and crowned by luxuriant auburn hair. She knew that lemon yellow was Alice's favorite color, that Lily of the Valley was her preferred talcum powder, even that Alice slept on her right side, but this, Alice's hope and disappointment still so raw, she had not known.

What could she say? She had her own lost hope, had tried to bury it, and all that was left was a shadowy loneliness that made her wonder things at night. Did Claude ever think of her? Camping alone night after night, did he ever feel the bite of solitude? Did he ever roast a potato on the fire and remember how naturally he'd said, “
Attention.
Hot,” as though they'd known each other for years?
Did he wish he'd stayed in camp just one more night to give her another chance?

She stood behind Alice and rubbed her neck and shoulders. “We start this life and we've got, most of us, all that we need. Then circumstance or accident robs us—a finger or a toe or a friend or a dream—and we go on, and maybe we even learn something. Loss or no loss, we go on.”

Alice waved off Emily's hands and shook out her shoulders. “Lizzie's the preacher in the family. The role doesn't suit you.”

“We go on. I think I learned that from Sophie.”

“Who's she?”

“A Squamish woman I took those clothes to. You talk about loss? Sophie's lost six children. Six, and she still breathes.”

Alice winced. “She mustn't have taken care of them.”

“It's not that, because it happens to many native women. They die of white diseases, Alice. They die because they live exposed to the elements.”

“Don't be taken in.”

“She's solid, like a cedar.”

“You don't see them realistically.”

“I see them as people, imperfect as we all are, but real.”

“You see them as figures out of Longfellow. You see everything that way.”

“That's not true!”

“Your ideal Indian. There's a lot you miss, Millie. Your romanticism blinds you. None of your paintings show them dirty or drunk or lying on the street.”

“What good would that do, for them? Don't they already have enough people seeing them that way? I refuse to join that horde. I may not understand things about them, but what I see, I love.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “I know. You drummed it into me in bed at night when we were girls. ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water . . .' ” Alice put on a mock-serious face, extended her arm, palm down, and moved it left to right.

Grinning, Emily made a tent of her hands. ‘. . . Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.' ”

“ ‘Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis . . .' ” Alice gazed up to her fingers encircling an imaginary moon above her head.

They burst into laughter. “See, Alice? Seeing with storybook eyes is good for something.”

• • •

They left Skagway hoping to escape the rain, and arrived in Sitka harbor nestled in the V of mountains.

“A spanking fine day, eh?” Emily said. “That sky! Pure cerulean blue.”

Along the dock, fishing boats and canoes rocked against pilings reeking of creosote. Emily breathed in and exhaled in a big, satisfying puff. “Take a gulp of adventure.”

Kerchiefed Tlingit women squatted along the road and leaned against warehouses to sell their goods—bowls of berries, carved spoons, beaded skin bags and mittens, animal-teeth necklaces, rattles made of deer hooves.