The Forest Lover (28 page)

Across a grassy area overhung by willows along the bank she saw a group of curious houses no higher than four feet, surrounded by bedraggled gardens and enclosed by short picket or spindle fences. Were they raised tombs? Memorials? Grave houses? Some had windows and doors. One even had a chimney. She peeked through one window and could barely make out dishes scattered around a sewing machine. A woman's grave.

Wind bearing the mineral smell of rain-to-come lashed willow branches against the grave houses and tore through her wool sweater. “All right,” she said. “You proved your point.”

A raindrop splatted on her hand. She ignored it. Then another, and another. She put on her potlatch hat. It blew right off. She chased after it. If she didn't get her portfolio under cover soon, her work would be ruined. She unrolled the used tent she'd bought from a Klondike outfitter who had assured her she could set it up herself. “It's only a one-man tent, ma'am. Easy as pie,” he'd said.

Wind flapped the canvas toward her, then yanked it away. She seized a corner, threaded a stake through a grommet and stamped it into the earth. A gust tore it right out. “Easy as pie,” she muttered,
and tried again. Same thing. It had seemed simple, setting it up in the yard in Victoria, but it wasn't now, not with rain pouring off her nose. Lizzie had watched her and declared that if the Lord intended women to sleep outdoors, He would have given them fur. Fur! She could be nestled in fur in Claude's boat right this minute. She yanked the canvas angrily, wrestled with its stiffness, found the opening, and shoved everything inside. If she had to, she could crawl in too.

The abandoned bighouses offered nothing. One had no roof, the other only a few planks under which horses huddled. She looked at the new village through robes of rain. Closed up tight, and far away. She looked at the sodden graveyard. Close by.

She took hold of two corners of the tent and began to drag. “Come on, Billy.” He barked and skittered away. “Come!” Lightning cracked, trailing an electric hiss, and he charged toward her. She dragged the bundle to the largest of the grave houses, in through the picket fence, and opened the little door. It broke off its hinges. Billy growled. “Get over here.” She shoved the bundle through the door, yanked Billy by his collar, and backed in on her knees. He barked. Lightning made him jerk away. She caught him by the front leg, dragged him whining through the doorway, and blocked it using the door propped sideways inside.

“It's all right, Billy. Calm down.” She put her arm around him. “I'm sorry, pooch.”

The blackness smelled of rotted wood, mildew, and the ooze of maggots. Her pulse pounded at the root of her throat. Rain battered the roof inches above her head, and willow branches scraped and rattled like skeletons knocking for entrance. Billy shook his wet coat at her. It made no difference. She was already soaked.

Slowly, the darkness grayed. Barely discernible, a man sat on a chair. She screamed. Billy barked. Rain swallowed their sounds. She clutched Billy's neck. The outline of a hat touched the roof. He wore a shirt and pants, but on his face, when lightning flashed again, she saw the rough grain of wood. She let out her breath in one great gush.

“It's only a carving of a man, Billy. A man whose son or grandson may have ridden on the wagon with us today.”

Mice scuttled around her feet, poles creaked in the wind, willows
slapped the roof, thunder rolled like drums, rain roared like a freight train. She hugged Billy and cried into the lanolin smell of his wet coat. It wasn't mink, but it was something.

Who did she think she was that she could march in here and do what she wanted? It was the question Father had asked whenever her imagination prompted some action she hadn't thought through. Nympholept. Damn. Why did he have to be right?

She thought of Claude holding her ankle, trying to talk her out of coming here. Why had he let her?

Respect. For her. It had to be. He knew what she wanted most.

Lightning burned the outline of the figure of the Gitksan man into the blackness. She swallowed the lump in her throat and addressed him silently: Maybe you lived so long ago that you won't recoil at the thought of a white woman who loves the poles here entering your grave house. I will not violate you, or the sacredness of your resting place. A temporary sharing of roof is all I want. I will leave you untouched.

She listened for a response, but the figure seated before her was silent.

It wasn't sleep that got her through the night so much as exhaustion. When she crawled out of the grave house, dawn spilled over the eastern peaks. Mercifully, the rain had stopped, but it felt as though mold had grown in her hair, her ears, her mouth. She went to relieve herself near a skunk cabbage muskeg by the river gushing in a brown torrent. Teeth-cleaning had to consist of a dry brush. She heard wood being chopped in the upper village, and saw Luther and his team and wagon leaving.

Crossing the meadow, she looked up at the wet poles. On one, a frog peeked out of a beaver's mouth. A small human face was tucked into a bear's ear. Some of the humans were holding children, one just as gently holding a frog. A few animals held their paws together as though they were praying. If Lizzie saw this, it would melt even her Christian heart.

On one, a frog mother faced downward, and smaller frogs were
lined up ready to leapfrog down the column. The pupils of Frog Woman's eyes were carved into childlike human faces, and tiny human hands curved over her bottom lids as if babies were peeking out each eye. Was it meant to suggest a mother watching her children? Gibb would see that as the expression of an idea in the carver's mind. And to think, if she'd let that slimy toadfish, Alfred Poole, scare her off, she would have missed it.

A man strode toward her on the bluff waving his arms angrily. “Get away, woman. Go away.”

Billy growled.

“I'd like to draw the poles. May I?”

“Museum?”

“No.”

“We don't sell here. Get.”

He hurled a rock. It hit Billy in the haunch, a loud crack, like a stick breaking. “Hey!” she yelled. Billy barked and jumped in a frenzy. The man threw another that came close to her ankle.

She grabbed Billy by the collar and ran behind the nearest bighouse. She checked him over while he licked his haunch. Apparently nothing was broken.

“I'm sorry, Billy. He's a mean old unhappy man. He meant to hurt me, not you.”

She sat with him awhile and gave him a good scratching under his chin where he liked it.

It was strange. None of the poles here fit the fierce Kitwancool reputation. What had happened to turn these people hard? One thing was certain—she and Billy wouldn't be sleeping in any friendly Gitksan house. There was no alternative. She had to master the tent. She bloody well wouldn't spend another night in that grave house.

It was relatively dry right here, and hidden from the village by a bighouse. She waited awhile but no one came, so she started. Erecting the tent wasn't half as difficult with no wind.

“There we are, Billy boy. Our Kitwancool mansion.”

She dove into the smoked salmon and gave Billy his doggie hardtack. He gobbled it down. “That good, eh?” She bit off a piece. “Not entirely bad.”

It was already mid-morning and only an occasional sound came
from the village. She didn't see any children to befriend and win a welcome through them. Halliday had said most of the people would be gone to their summer fishing camps.

Ignoring her clammy hands, she began to sketch the bear pole, but to get the best angle, she had to expose herself to view. Before long, shouts blasted from the meadow above.

“Stop, white lady. Get away. You can't steal that pole.”

A large man, not the same one, stood on the bluff, his feet planted widely, hands on hips in a threatening posture. She gulped. He could have an axe tucked behind his back. And axes could be thrown.

“Steal it? How could I? I'm only drawing it.”

“Draw now. Steal later.”

“Not at all. I'm drawing them now to paint them later.”

“Who told you to?”

“No one.” But plenty of people had told her not to.

He came down the bluff in a side-to-side rolling sway, his stomach bulging over his pants. His large fingers curled inward. His shoulders, belly, cheeks, chin were all round, even his nostrils, but in his eyes, she saw spikes that could gore steel.

“Why didn't you ask?”

“I—Who? I didn't know who to ask.”

His entire bulk became a scowl. “You from the government?”

“No. I'm just from me. I want to paint all the poles in the province. Just where they are. Before . . .”

“Before what?” He scowled.

She wondered if Alfred Poole had been here.

“Before they disappear. White people need to know how beautiful they are right here where they were meant to be.”

“You should have ask.”

“You weren't here. How could I ask you? If you were here, I would have asked. Do you own this pole?”

He looked at it, not at her.

“You must be a great man to have so many crests in your family. What's your name?”

“Henry.”

“Only Henry for a pole this tall?”

He pushed out his chest. “Henry Albert Douse. I like Henry Jumbo is better.”

“Henry Jumbo, I'm Emily Carr. You speak such good English.”

“I worked in white man logging company.”

“This is a noble pole, but there's one figure I don't understand. That little person is coming out of the ear of a bear. Can you tell me the story of that?”

His shoulders jerked and the scowl returned. She had him. If it wasn't his pole, he couldn't tell the story. She'd read that in the museum library, and hoped right now that it was true.

“Go ahead.” He waved his hand. “You have permission.” She offered him the drawing from her sketch pad. He shook his head and walked away without it, and she relaxed into her work.

• • •

It rained again during the night, and the tent dripped in several places. Billy kept squirming toward her to avoid them until they were both huddled on the dry side of the tent. When she poked her head out in the morning, she disturbed a puddle on the canvas and a deluge of cold water poured down her neck. “Aye, Billy, what I would give to be a furred species like you.”

She wanted to paint the pole she'd seen farthest up river near the muskeg thick with mosquitoes and fetid with skunk cabbage where she'd gone to relieve herself. She oiled her skin with mosquito repellent, wound a scarf around her neck, and put on two pairs of socks and her potlatch hat. Was she going to let a few teensie weensie man-eating jaws scare her? Spunk up! she told herself, marched toward the muskeg, and opened her stool.

She lit a cigarette to ward them off, and studied the totem. An indecipherable creature with a long uplifted protruberance perched on the top. Under it, as she looked down the pole, there was a band of children playing, then Eagle with a crack through his right eye, another band of children, and, at ground level, the most moving figure, a man or woman, possibly a mother. The broad face had a shoulder-to-shoulder smile, the mouth not turned up, just stretched wide. The mother, if it was a mother, held a child facing forward, showing him with pride. The baby's face had the same wide smile, as though feeling the love that surrounded him. She'd call the painting
Totem Mother, Kitwancool
.

A ticklesome image entered her mind—Lizzie seeing this as a
painting. She'd think it a sacrilege, an Indian madonna. Her face would explode in outrage, her mouth dropping open the moment the thought occurred to her that heathens had dared to appropriate a Christian motif.

Emily suddenly realized her hands were burning, covered with the gray fur of a hundred mosquitoes. “Hellfire,” she shouted and shook her hands. No mosquito oil in the world was obnoxious enough to fend off these demons. What she'd used had just glued them to her skin. Blowing on flesh she'd unconsciously been scraping raw, she ran to the river to dip them for relief.

Dzunukwa wouldn't be run off by a mere mosquito. She'd put herself back together again. Emily took off one pair of socks, plastered mud over her hands, put the socks on over the mud, and went back to the totem mother, steeling herself to concentrate.

To render motherhood in wood, the carver had exaggerated the mouth, the source of lullaby and love, into a smile that pushed up the cheeks above it. In reality a smile couldn't stretch the width of a face, but the exaggeration dramatized the figure's joy. The hands resting lightly on top of the child's head and cupping him from below were out of proportion, smaller than the width of her smile, as if to suggest gentleness. All that she'd seen in France was here in Kitwancool. Distortion for expression—she'd almost lost sight of it.

Think of everything as shapes, she told herself. The heads of mother and child were squarish, the mother's mouth a round-ended rectangle, her thighs elongated ovals. Now make those shapes express something personal. She thought of Sophie's smile when she presented her twins. Such a smile could illumine a house, could turn a world. She stretched the smile even wider. She enlarged the mother's right shoulder and left forearm, made them club-shaped and strong to enclose the child. She wasn't an anthropologist. She was an artist.