The Forest Lover (3 page)

Emily wanted to pose Jessica on the platform. Slender, with red hair and a graceful bearing, she'd be elegant, but she knew from their days at art school in San Francisco that Jessica wanted to get the most out of each session, yet never practiced on her own. It exasperated her. She wouldn't make Jessica give up the class time.

She posed Edwina instead, seated, ankles crossed. “This week, try not to scratch so tightly,” she said as she adjusted the drape of Edwina's skirt. “On her skirt, let your stroke run loose as the wind.” She doubted they could. Freedom was hard to achieve.

The studio door banged against the wall. Emily turned just as Priscilla Hamilton, madam president, sashayed in, head high, hand
extended. Late, as usual. Everyone stopped working to twitter compliments on Priscilla's huge, flamingo-pink feathered hat, such a hat as would frighten a goat.

“I bought it in a wee shop on Regent Street where the Queen shops. I wore it to the Ascot races with a pretty little summer frock the same color. We were seated right near the Royal Enclosure. Shall I tell you what
they
wore?”

Emily noticed Jessica's head bent over her drawing, the only one working.

“No!” Emily bellowed. “A disrespect to ignore the model. Stop dithering and get back to what we're here for.”

She let them work on their own until mistakes began to appear. “You have to define the elbow, not let it slide down the arm and melt away,” she told Priscilla.

Priscilla's head popped up. The flamingo on her head jiggled, as though it were about to flap skyward.

“You may gaze at my work all you want, but I do not care to hear your criticisms.”

“If I'm not mistaken, that's what you hired me for.”

Emily turned to someone else. “Work the line from your forearm instead of your fingers. Working from your fingers makes your drawing too tight.”

“I happen to like tight work.”

Emily glimpsed Priscilla's mouth twitch upward. Sweet Jesus! Was this some conspiracy? Hold your tongue, she told herself. These butterflies with sketch pads are paying your rent.

“Can you tell me please what's wrong with this hand?”

All eyes shot across to Jessica Howard. Emily couldn't control her smug smile. Jessica, the outsider, an American. Teacups clinked in saucers.

“Look at your own hand, Jessica. How long are the fingers in relation to the palm?”

Jessica examined her hand, then her drawing, and looked up bright-eyed. “I made the fingers too short, didn't I?”

“You'll get it eventually. It's a matter of training your eye to measure one part against another.”

All afternoon she itched to get home to paint for herself, but Jessica asked to go with her to pick out a sketching site for the next
outdoor lesson. She was the only person in Vancouver she could call a friend. Taking a walk with someone didn't happen often. She said yes.

They followed the plank boardwalk of West Hastings Street past the packing houses and Klondike outfitters to get to the wharves. Emily rolled a cigarette from her tobacco tin and blew an agitated puff skyward.

“Dilettantes. What do they expect? Only the goo of praise?”

“Let them talk. They'll never be artists—not like you.” Admiration glistened in Jessica's eyes.

“They pay more attention to the way they hold their teacups than the way they hold their brushes,” Emily said.

“What? Don't tell me you think they're serious about art.”

“Humph. Priscilla and her phony Knightsbridge accent posturing with that flamingo on her head. Now if she'd worn a hat with ferns or crow feathers, at least that would show she knew where she was.” She was pleased when Jessica laughed.

They left muddy Cordova Street at Water Street, and walked quickly past saloons, tobacco shops, peep show wagons, bawdy houses, and Indian prostitutes, to get to Burrard Inlet. At the Union Steamship dock, they bought clam soup from an old Chinese woman tending a brazier. Under a paper parasol her grateful smile showed brown teeth. Fish smells from the packing houses mixed with the aroma of wet wood shavings from Hastings Sawmill shrilly chewing up a grove of cedars, spitting them out in planks. She grunted. Progress, Father would say. Colonialism, she'd say. While Victoria strove to be more English than London, Vancouver was busy being the Liverpool of the Pacific.

A log boom made herringbone patterns on the water, the same pattern as on the tooled platform in the hut. Was that what Lulu had meant by everything is one?

“Now that log boom is a possibility, with that three-master in the mid-ground, forest and mountains in the distance.”

“Mm, too industrial for their tastes,” Jessica said.

“But that's what buys their trips to the Ascot races.”

At the Canadian Pacific Railway dock, an Empress liner rode high in the water. Emily stopped.

“Whooh, wouldn't you give a tooth to go north in a ship like
that? My father did. I begged him to take me. He said that was inviting trouble. He left England for adventure, but denied it to his family.”

“Why don't you go now?”

Emily uttered a coarse, quick laugh. “There's always that pesky living to be made.”

“Then why not go west to that Indian village again?”

“Hitats'uu? Too hard to get to. It's on the
west
coast of Vancouver Island. That means either a six-hour or an overnight ferry to Victoria, an obligatory visit to my sisters there, another day and a half on a steamer up the island's west coast, and that only runs once a week, in fair weather.”

“That didn't stop you before. What's the real reason?”

“The inevitable argument with my skin-and-blisters.”

“Huh?”

“With my sisters. About disgracing the family by ‘socializing with primitives.' ” She snickered. “That made me want to go there all the more.”

“That's a dumb reason. You ought to go because you love it.”

“How do you know I love it?”

“Because of your drawings, silly. And your face when you looked at them.”

“Love can take many forms. Even self-denial. Hitats'uu is terribly isolated. I waltzed in not even thinking about what effect I might have. The girl, Lulu, was inordinately curious about Victoria. I don't want to speed up change.”

“One person? Aren't you overestimating?”

Emily shrugged, letting her gaze roam over the ship. “Look at the line of that prow. All swooped up in a luscious white arc.”

“You see everything in terms of line and color, don't you? It's an obsession, looking at everything and everyone as possible paintings. Isn't life bigger than that?”

“It
is
big. Take those grain sacks and Chinese fishermen wearing those coolie hats. Strong repeated shapes. Good accents.”

“But they're not people to you. They're shapes in a scene.”

“What I painted at Hitats'uu was more than shapes.”

She gazed across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver and the Squamish Reserve hugging the shore—so close to Vancouver that the whole
city would have an influence, not just one lone visitor. Maybe the Squamish living there had coffin trees too. Maybe it was a place that could feed her back again, as Lulu had said.

At the east end of the wharf they took a path past waterfront shacks. Down a grassy incline lay a narrow muskeg filled with skunk cabbage, moss, and lady fern. Beyond that, partly hidden by trees, a cove sheltered a tent and campsite, a beached skiff and a larger boat at anchor—funny-looking, stubby, with a tall, faded red pilot's cabin much too large in proportion to the hull, a sleepy animal's eye painted near the prow, and a crazy crooked stovepipe topped by a tin coolie hat. And on the cabin roof, a small French flag.

“Now that's a boat with spunk.”

Jessica cocked her head. “What about him?”

A short, broad-shouldered, bearded man wearing a slouch hat stepped out from the shadow of trees, crossed a rivulet, and dropped a load of branches by the fire pit.

“Fits the scene, doesn't he?” Emily picked some lady fern.

They walked part way down the incline and the man looked up.

Jessica nudged her. “Say something.”

“Do you own that boat?” Emily called out and fanned the fern toward it.

“
Non, mademoiselle.
She owns me.”

“We like it,” Jessica chimed in.

He guffawed. “Suit yourself.”

Emily murmured to Jessica, “Those driftwood drying racks would make interesting shadows if it were sunny.” The camp looked fairly permanent. “How long will you be camping here?”

“Depends.”

“On what? The weather?”

“Depends on when I sell all my furs.” He moved a bundle of pelts from the skiff to the tent.

“We want to draw this.” Jessica held both arms out.

The man gesticulated broadly, exaggerating her movement. “This isn't going anywhere.”

“But with your boats and camp and everything.”

He laid an otter pelt on his arm and moved the animal's little head as if it were speaking.
“Moi aussi, s'il vous plaît,”
he said in a squeaky voice and wagged his head.

Emily and Jessica turned to each other, dumbfounded, and laughed at his peculiarity. “They'd like this,” Jessica said.

“You mean him,” Emily whispered. “In two weeks,” she said louder, “many ladies will come.”

His hands flew up. “Ah, but none as beautiful as you, mesdemoiselles.”

• • •

She swung open the door to her rented flat on Granville Street. Joseph's gray feathers and red tail ruffled in the breeze. “I'm no English crow,” he said, as well as he could.

“Right you are. I like your sense of identity.” She shook out rain from her cape, put the ferns in water.

“Don't talk rot,” he muttered.

She put her finger in his cage, and he let her stroke his breast. “You know how touching live things makes me crazy happy, don't you, Joseph? How lonesome I get.”

He belted out a long, old-fashioned “Awk!”

Had someone knocked? She opened the door. A lean native woman, mid-twenties perhaps, stood on the stoop, her square shoulders wrapped in a shawl. She held a large lumpy something in a cloth which she carried by the four corners.

“Baskets? You want a basket?”

Half hidden behind the woman's full brown skirt stood a girl and a boy, maybe four and five years old, each carrying a smaller bulging flour sack. Rain fell like it meant it now and the girl wiped her cheek. None of them wore shoes.

“I'm sorry. I have no money for baskets.”

“No money? Maybe you got dress, shirt for a basket.”

The boy sneezed and buried his nose in his mother's skirt.

“Come in.”

The mother hesitated, then wiped the children's feet, touched her hand to the girl's back, and waited for the boy to follow his sister in. The woman wiped her own feet, stepped in, two steps, toes placed down first, and knelt, straight-backed, to lay the bundle on the floor. The part between her braids cut an unwavering line. From another bundle cradled in the shawl on her back, a small wet face peeked out.

Emily took out a handkerchief, held her hand toward the baby, and looked at the woman. “May I?”

The woman froze, surprise written on her face, and then nodded.

Emily wrapped her index finger and dabbed at the sweet brown cheeks wrinkled as a walnut and the nose hardly a rise at all. Bow-shaped lips pulled inward at the touch. It was a moment of exquisite pleasure, passing too quickly.

The woman spread the cloth to display the baskets. Round ones, squares, rectangles, flat trays, all coiled, with intricate diagonal and geometric patterns or with animal and fern shapes.

“These are fine baskets.”

The woman emptied out the children's sacks and smaller baskets tumbled out. One rolled against a table leg and the boy jumped to retrieve it.

“What are they made of?”

“Cedar root.”

“What about this?” She pointed to a contrasting pattern.

“Cherry bark.”

“These black ones too? That zigzag?”

“No. That one different. The bark of horsetail root. It means lightning and rainstorm. Use for holding water.”

“Ah.” The woman had made a connection between purpose and the source of her design. “And this?” Emily touched one with a cherry bark line undulating around the belly.

The woman laughed in a soft, abashed way. “Snake.” She moved her hand to imitate a snake wriggling forward.

The design was its track in the dirt. A keen imagination. She looked at the woman's face—round nostrils, sharply edged mouth neither turned up nor turned down, dark eyes tucked under delicate eyebrows, and smooth, cedar-colored skin. A little older than Lulu.