The Forest Lover (14 page)

Sophie hugged her basket to her chest. “I was afraid for you.”

“How can you say I paint the Holy Spirit? You've never seen any painting of mine with God or any saint or angel.”

“You know. Green.” An impish grin flickered, her eyes shot through with sparks, so pleased she was with herself. “Like you said. Glory and spirit of growing things.”

“Come on, Billy. Up!” Emily said from the rickety dock. “We're here! Alert Bay, so snap to it.”

Billy whined in the bobbing shore boat.

“What is it? You've got the wiffle-woffles?” The shore boatman tossed her the leash. “Up!” she ordered.

On the peak of a swell he gave Billy's rump a firm push. Billy got the idea and scrambled up onto the dock. He shook himself, looking smug, as if it had been his own idea all along.

At every swell raising the boat, the crewman handed up another thing—her small carpetbag, sketch sack, food box, and the strapped bundle of her folding watercolor easel and stool. The large canvas knapsack was the last. He grunted and heaved. “What do you have in this? Lead weights?”

“Yes. Bibles.”

She strapped her easel and stool onto Billy's back, the knapsack onto hers, and hoisted her bags, out of breath already. This village on tiny Cormorant Island, two hundred and twenty miles up the east coast of Vancouver Island, and the people she'd meet, would either launch her project or kill it. Jimmy had said as much.

“One week,” the boatman called, and revved up the motor to head back to the steamer.

“I'll be waiting.” She walked with wide footsteps trying to keep her balance, always a problem. Billy pulled at the leash, only too glad to get off the dock. “Slow down and act respectable. We're guests,” Emily said.

On firm ground, she took a look around. What a weird, wondrous sight. A congregation of birds, wolves, bears, saw-toothed sea creatures, all carved and painted, some stacked on poles, some on roof peaks. A ferocious zoo! Sophie would love this. If they had voices, they'd be howling, croaking, screeching, growling. Was that the kind of reception she'd get?

She headed away from the row of bighouses toward the mission where she'd arranged to stay. Three clapboard houses and a two-story school hugged the Anglican church. Emily screwed up her face. A crenelated roof and a frieze of wrought iron? What in the world was it trying to be? A white picket fence bravely separated the mission from what it was supposed to save.

Billy stuck his nose into a soggy hole. “Billy, no!” She yanked his leash. “At least for a first impression it would be nice if you'd be clean.”

In the parlor decked with doilies and embroidered Bible verses, Reverend Alfred Hall welcomed her and introduced his gaunt wife, and bird-like Miss Winifred Crane, missionary-in-training with a pointed nose and an unfortunate name. She was making a chart of the occupations of Jesus' disciples, the fishermen printed boldly in red with a drawing of a salmon by each appropriate name. Emily unloaded the slates and chalk from Alice and twelve pounds of used Bibles from Lizzie.

“Oof! One pound for each disciple.”

Mrs. Hall gave her a censuring glance, but didn't turn them down as payment for room and board. “Would you like tea while we tell you about our missionary work at Saint Michael's School?”

“No. Thank you. I'd rather get right to my work.”

Mrs. Hall squared her shoulders. “Indeed.”

“While there's still good light. You can tell me at supper.”

“Five o'clock. Do you have a watch?” She smoothed a crocheted antimacassar on the back of a chair.

“Yes.”

• • •

The pebbled shore made walking difficult. “Don't you wish you could wear men's clodhoppers like mine, eh, Billy?”

She itched to get close to the poles. Take things slowly, she told herself. She unfolded her camp stool and flat easel. From here she could get a village panorama, and then work her way closer to the totems. In the left foreground, two handsome canoes had birds in flight painted on their hulls.
Wings in dark red and green, beaks in yellow-orange and scarlet,
she wrote on the edge of her drawing paper. The ropes of kelp at the same diagonal would lead the viewer's eye
across the beach to two women trussing salmon on frames in the middle distance and to the mounds of clamshells and the cannery on the far right. In the background, the houses and poles and forest would give context.

Three boys dragged the kelp out of the angle she wanted it and cut it into lengths using the edges of clamshells. So much for leading the viewer's eye, she said to herself. She caught them peeking at her, and they giggled.

“Hello,” she called. She should have asked Mrs. Hall for the Kwakwala word.

The children looked down the beach at an older girl, maybe ten or eleven, as if checking for permission to come closer.

“Long seaweed, eh? What are you going to do with it?”

“Play cannery. I cut it and sell it,” the older boy said, “and he buy it.” The smallest boy uncurled his sandy palm to reveal a few pebbles.

“Can you tell me what bird that is?” She pointed to a large wooden bird sitting on a roof. “He's ready to fly down here and get me.” She flapped her arms and pretended it landed on her head. The children laughed. “Is he an eagle?”

“No.”

“Is he a raven?”

They shook their heads and said no even louder.

“Then what is he?”

“He's Cormorant,” they shouted.

“A coal goose! I should have known.” She noticed them watching Billy absorbed in sniffing a dead bird. “You want to touch him? He likes children.” Instantly six hands were all over him, and he was doing a jig of happiness, trying to get in more than his share of licks. He woofed and posed in a play bow, head low and hind end high.

“Why he don't have a tail?” the middle boy asked.

“See that big wooden sea creature over there? Who's that?”

“He's Killerwhale.”

“Well, one day Billy was sleeping on the beach and Killerwhale sprang out of the sea and bit off his tail, snap, like a crab.” She snapped her hand closed right in front of the middle boy's nose. He backed away and laughed.

“What are you doing here?” the younger boy asked.

“I'm going to make pictures. Of you, if you'll let me.”

“Me first,” the older boy said.

“Only if you tell me your name.”

“Freddy.”

“Freddy Eagle?”

The others laughed. “No.”

“Freddy Raven?”

Vigorous head shakes.

“Oh, I know. Freddy Coal Goose.”

“No! Freddy Hannah!”

“All right, Freddy Hannah. You'll be first.”

As she worked she learned the others' names. Baby Toby's older sister, Tillie, edged closer. Emily learned that Freddy was the chief's nephew and that Toby's uncle, Hayward James, was a carver of poles and masks.

“And I'm going to be one, too,” Toby said.

Aha! Native arts were still alive. “Wonderful!” Such simple confidence. She could use an ounce of that. “How do you know?”

“Because my mama, she wants it, so my uncle pulled out a eyelash of me and he put it in a paintbrush and it had porc'pine hairs and he painted Thunderbird on a box to keep it and when I'm ready, he'll give that brush to me.”

And in the meantime, she thought, Toby's eyelash, if not his eyes, would be close to his uncle's work. “Good,” she said.

She finished her drawing of the village. The time had come. She was here for the totems. She set up in front of the wolf on the nearest pole. She drew its oval nose holes, even the crack through its right eye. She wanted to be absolutely precise about detail and proportion. She tipped her head back to sketch Bear above Wolf. His toothy mouth was pulled back into a fierce, taunting look. How dare you think you can paint me, he seemed to be saying. White curls came out of each nostril as though he were snorting smoke. How could she get that detail without being so close as to require foreshortening? From below, how would she make that bear look like anything other than an overhanging snout and nostrils? She felt trapped. She didn't know a pinprick of what she needed to.

She checked her watch. “Holy moly, Billy boy. We're late for supper.”

“Chief Wakias summoned you to his bighouse,” Mrs. Hall said, placing a basket of bread on the dining table.

“Did I do something wrong?” Emily glanced around to pick up cues. Miss Winifred Crane kept her nose in her napkin folding.

“They want to welcome you, I suppose.” A coolness in Mrs. Hall's voice accompanied her glance at a portly man standing at the dining table. “Sit, everyone,” Mrs. Hall said.

“This is the Indian agent, William Halliday,” Reverend Hall said from the head of the table. “He's a good sort, for a Scotsman, if you forgive him his cups on Saturday night.”

“Just a wee touch, Reverend. Purely medicinal,” the Scotsman said, leaning back and stroking his pointed reddish beard.

“Indian agent?” Emily said, sitting down opposite him.

“Department of Indian Affairs.”

What luck! She opened her mouth to speak to him just as Mrs. Hall set down a tureen of chicken and dumplings as if it were a holy reliquary. Emily waited until the Reverend intoned grace, appreciative murmurs registered, and Mrs. Hall seemed pleased.

“Do you know where there are totem poles besides here?”

“Of course.” He aimed a forkful of dumpling into his mouth.

“And how to get there?”

“Yes again.” Chewing.

“Then perhaps you can help me. I want to paint them, as many as I can before they're all gone.”

“So I understand. You're not afraid of 'em?”

“Afraid of what? Totem poles?”

“The Kwakiutl. You can hire one with a canoe and go when the villages empty out in summer and fall for work at canneries and fish camps, but I wouldn't recommend it, especially you alone.”

“More potatoes, William?” Mrs. Hall passed him the bowl.

Halliday wiped grease off his mouth. “While it may be fitting an antiquarian's interest to paint their villages and idols as vestiges of a passing way of life, to socialize with them, if that is your intent, leads me to question your character, Miss Carr.”

Emily set down her fork. “My character is intact, I assure you. It's the idolatry I question. I understood that they don't worship the figures on totem poles.”

“Mm. Not directly.” Uttered with a mouthful of potatoes. “But totem poles and potlatches go together, and potlatches are the root of the problem.”

“What problem?”

“Their heathenish ways. Wherever the potlatch exists there has been no progress, and the government—”

“And the missions,” Reverend Hall interjected.

“We both want to see our native people progress so they'll be useful to the province, on an equal footing with whites. That canna happen so long as potlatches continue, so I'm committed to stop them under orders of William Ditchburn, regional superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs.” An unctuous smile slid across his face.

Equal footing? He deserved to be praised if the sentiment was genuine, smacked to kingdom come if it wasn't.

“I'm afraid I still don't understand.”

“Potlatching requires outlandish expenditures of money for gift giving, encourages vanity and fanatical competition among bands, conflicts with Indian employment in logging and agriculture and canneries, and spreads disease, sloth, rowdiness, irresponsibility, and prostitution, if ye must know.” He reeled this off like it was a memorized liturgy, striking the air in her direction a few times with his fork to emphasize his words.

“Couldn't have said it more eloquently myself,” Reverend Hall remarked.

“You mentioned that my paintings might portray a passing way of life. What exactly did you mean by ‘passing'?”

“Why, assimilation, of course. They'll bring their own ruin upon themselves surely if they resist change,” Halliday said.

“I see.”

“There will come a time in this province, one way or another, when they won't exist, such as we know 'em now. Mind you, the Kwakiutl are the most stubborn of the lot. Better not to get mixed up with them.”

“One more question, if you don't mind. Do you happen to know a fur trader named Claude Serreau or Claude du Bois? He has a funny-looking boat.”

Mr. Halliday chuckled. “Ah, Claude of the Woods, he calls himself. A queer fellow, but a good sort. The Indians like him.”

“Has he ever been to Alert Bay?”

“Many times, I reckon. Any trader going north stops here.”

Emily folded her napkin. “This was a Kwakiutl village first. We are all guests here. I've been invited and I'm going to go.”