The Forest Lover (31 page)

His eyes looked deep, as though seeing beyond her skin, into her
soul. “I thought I knew. I thought I understood. That you are
passionné.
That you could be
passionné
for me.
Mais, non.
Only for art. Only for art.
Mon Dieu,
to stay in that mosquito pit—to
paint
!” Slowly, he raised his eyes to hers, dark with anguish and moist with a new recognition. His fingers curled into fists pushing against his chest. “I cannot. I see you are too sick.”

Her eyes welled up with the truth of all he said. Only for art. For this moment, probably forever, it had to be enough to know that she had been desirable, and perhaps even loved, in his way, smeared with fish grease.

“One more thing.” He clambered up on deck and down again and laid the little French flag, wet and cool, across her breasts.

She laughed softly. “Does this make me French?”

“Oui, mademoiselle. Une dame héroïque.”
He raised his fist and it hit the roof of the cabin.
“Pour l'art!”

He kissed the palms of her hands and drew back, looking pitiful. The corners of his lips turned down.
“Bonne nuit, Émilie.”

“Bonne nuit, Claude.”
She smiled.
“Monsieur Galant.”

He took the lantern, climbed up and was gone.

At noon William and Clara Russ, the Haida guides whom the minister on the Queen Charlotte Islands had recommended, arrived at the Skidegate dock in a gas boat towing a small dugout canoe. “Ready?” William asked.

“If I'd known we wouldn't leave until now I could have painted all morning,” Emily said.

“Tide wasn't ready.” William's look told her she had a lot to learn.

No one could understand the pressure of time pinching her.

Not entirely true. Claude could. He'd cast off well before dawn, navigating by lamplight, letting her sleep. How he'd fought the big swells, pulling levers, straining the little engine, swearing, sounding the steam whistle in a jolly rhythm as they chugged into the harbor at Prince Rupert, then rushed her to the steamship dock, flailing his arms, shouting,
“Vite! Vite!”
when she didn't walk fast enough. At the gangplank, he gave her a long succulent kiss, tipping her head
back, using up the few minutes left, until the ship's horn hooted and he said, “
Bonne chance, chérie.
Don't scratch. Paint.”

• • •

In the brisk breeze, William's hair lifted like thick black thatch and Clara tightened her head scarf. She looked at Emily's men's shoes, said something in Haida, and lifted her own skirt to show men's shoes. Her high, wide cheekbones squeezed the skin above them into crow's feet, and laughter rolled up from her belly. Emily laughed too.

They circled a sandbar on the east of the archipelago and turned south.

“Look,” William said, and nodded toward sea otters lying on their backs on kelp beds.

They were cracking open clamshells between two rocks on their chests. One threw a clam right near another one sleeping on a rock so the splash woke him up.

“They so funny,” Clara said with an all-over, crinkly smile. In a moment her smile vanished. “When they sad, they show it too. I watched one carry her dead baby around, howling for days.”

“Scrape scales off a fish, feathers off a bird, skin off a man and you get the same thing underneath,” William said.

There was something about both of them she liked very much.

All afternoon they saw no boats, no docks, no sign of man. “Are we going to Tanu first?” Emily asked.

“Yes,” Clara said through a dreamy smile. “Village of my
naani,
my grandmother.”

“It's a place of lappings of water, whispers of sea grass, cryings of ravens,” William said.

When they nosed between islands, the sea flattened to a sheet of gunmetal, and she got a closer look at the rain forest, far more jungle-like than any she'd seen—tangled and impenetrable, a single, ancient being tentacled in wet green and teeming with moist life. In a double bay divided by a forested point, poles spiked the low vapors hanging over both beaches. William cut the engine and Clara let down an anchor made of a jagged rock enclosed in a net of twine.

“Tanu,” she said. “Many people lived here. Seven generations. Raven families this beach. Eagle families there.”

William took Emily, Billy, and her equipment ashore in the canoe, saying he'd go back for Clara. Emily stepped out and looked around. Long wisps of sea grass pulled flat against the sand by the retreating tide looked like lime green brush strokes. Storms had battered the village, ripping planks, collapsing roofs, blowing down poles. Skeletons of houses huddled against the rain forest and it seemed that eyes peered out of openings in the ruins. A raven flapped by, croaking a warning.

“An eerie-queery place, eh, Billy?” she murmured.

He felt it too, staying close to her legs, ears cocked.

She stopped at a fallen pole and passed her hand over the moss-covered paw of Bear holding Beaver. Frog peeked out from the crook of Bear's leg. Out of Killerwhale's mouth squirmed Seal. She loved how smaller space-filling figures sprang out from the wood, their faces sprightly while the larger ones were austere and aristocratic. Without human figures, these totems were more otherworldly than the Gitksan poles.

Three roofless house fronts, flush against each other, leaned precariously, each with a magnificent frontal pole of nine or ten stacked figures, the lowest ones with openings serving as entries. Fireweed and ferns grew within the ruins, and moss softened everything, making the surrounding air glow greenly.

“Eeyaa aa mee,”
Clara whispered. “There used to be two rows of houses. Gone. All gone. Only forty years. House of the Long Potlatch, here. And there, Sound of Clouds Rolling. Gone.”

“It's too bad,” Emily said.

Someday what she saw would be gone too, swallowed up by rain forest. And she, gone as well. The ruins and looming forest made for melancholy thoughts. She was overcome with the need to leave proof that she had been here, had seen the touch of man on this far-flung place. She climbed onto an overhanging rock to position herself to paint the three ruins.

“No, no!” Clara waved her off. “Don't sit there.”

Emily jumped off. “Why not?”

“Killerwhale spirit lives under that rock.”

Of all the rocks on the island! She hadn't expected she'd have to accommodate spirits. The minister had said Clara and William were among the first to convert. Apparently Clara swung between
contrary beliefs as easily as Sophie did. Emily moved to another vantage point.

William took Clara's hand and led her away from where Emily was working. She watched them step into a mossy house pit and sit together where a family fire might have been. Clara tipped her head onto his shoulder. Emily imagined them ministering to each other through sickness. She'd felt that exquisite pleasure herself, with Claude, and was happy for them.

Her painting of the houses would be a memorial to loving families, done with Impressionist colors—dove gray for the house planks, with washes of aqua, rose, and lavender. Their softness would express what she'd never experienced—that home could be the center of the affections, the dearest spot on earth for those who had been born there, had shared and grown large and unselfish with love, had worked together and rested from storms together, had wept with loss and died there.

• • •

When Emily finished, Clara led her to the forested promontory dividing the beaches of the two clans. The carpet of moss was so thick that she had the sensation of stepping on a wet sponge. Her footfall squeezed out diamond dewdrops. Trailing lichen hung from boughs like torn veils, yellow-green berries with maroon speckles grew thick and plump, and pungent skunk cabbages brooded over puddles stained brown from rotting cedar. Water trickled unseen—the underground drinking, no, slurping of clear milk. Frogs croaked in different pitches, a chorus going at it hard and happy.

“Oh, the glory of living things!” Emily said.

“No. Not always living.” Clara drew back a branch of pink salal blossoms hanging like tiny church bells. A sunken headstone stared back, walleyed. Fine moss filled the letters of the inscription,
In Memory of Charlie.

“Oh. I'm sorry.” Her own remark embarrassed her.

“My
naani's
brother,” Clara whispered.

“May I ask why he doesn't have a coffin pole?”

“God doesn't like totem poles. The Christian way is in the ground. Charlie was the first Christian to get smallpox in Tanu.
After that, they died so fast they couldn't bury them all. The live ones left Tanu to save themselves. At night you can hear the dead ones wail.”

No words of healing came to mind. She stared at the encroaching moss, the headstone—and saw the stones of Sophie's graveyard.

• • •

For supper Clara boiled bracken shoots and an octopus she'd clubbed in a tide pool. It was sweet but tough. While they ate by the fire, Clara told stories about totems that walked into the sea, drums that beat by themselves, a chieftainess whose potions made fiery men humble and frightened men brave.

Lavender twilight fell over the water. When it deepened to purple, Clara sang a mournful song in Haida.

“What does it mean?” Emily asked.

“How white people took our fine young boys and girls to Victoria,” William said, “took them to school. They got flu there and died, all of them.”

Clara rose and picked up her blanket. “Keep a little fire burning. Maybe bears come here.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the gas boat. William won't sleep here with ghosts,” she said, but it was Clara who hurried off first.

Baffled, Emily watched their lantern wink out in the blue-black sea. She lit her oil lamp, carried it into the tent, and saw slugs everywhere, crawling on the tent walls. “Ach!” Her stomach convulsed. One the size of a dill pickle was nosing into her bedroll. She grabbed a piece of driftwood and a pan to scrape them off. Moist flesh crept over her wrist. She knocked it off, and flung the driftwood toward the sea.

She yanked out her bedroll and shook it, inspected it by the oil lamp, turned it inside out, carried it far away, made Billy get in with her, rolled up in it so tightly nothing could get in, and let the light run out. Sand fleas tickled her face so she drew her head in like a snail. She listened, alert for anything. The forest creaked and groaned and the sea grass swishing in the wind whispered back,
sh, sh.
Tanu was not a dead village.

• • •

As they were leaving the next day, Clara leaned toward her in the canoe. “My
naani
said when everyone left Tanu for good, the ravens cried, but the people were quiet, even the babies.”

Emily sat very still. Ravens keened against the distant sound of clouds rolling. She felt her chest expand to take in the enormity of sadness. When Tanu was far behind them, she asked Clara, “Did you have babies?”

“Two boys. Two girls. The girls married now.”

“Grandchildren?”

“Six from one daughter, once. Now four and two.”

“What do you mean?”

“One daughter had no babies and the other many babies, so she gave her sister two, the oldest girl and the baby.”

“Gave them? How could she?”

“She cried for months and couldn't eat, she was so sick, but she was a good sister.”

Awed again by the generosity of Sophie's offer, Emily whispered, “I have such a sister.”

• • •

“Today I'll show you a hero pole at Cumshewa, my village,” William said cheerfully. But when they entered Cumshewa Inlet and William peered through vapor hanging like gauze drapery, his forehead knotted into grooves of confusion.

“Gone.”

He dropped to his knees on shore and passed his hand over a spread of bluish green sea asparagus. “It was here, the pole for Great Splashing of Waves, my father's chief. In front of House of the Stormy Sea.” Bewildered, he looked around, as if the pole might have moved. “It took five tries to build that house. Every time he made the house beams, a storm came and washed them away. Later, Chicago men bought the house to show at a big fair. Now his pole is gone too.” Slowly he sat back on his heels. Clara placed her hand on his shoulder. “It was my favorite,” he said.

Her throat pinched shut. She was too late. Henry Douse had known how little time was left. She watched the shadow of a cloud darken William's woeful face.

“Missionaries told us that people who love graven images will be thrown into a burning lake forever,” William said.

“Then they'd have to throw me too,” she said softly.

He turned away and his words came with a struggle. “My father was one of those new-style Indians who wanted to get out of the blanket. He earned money packing up totems at Yan and Skidegate. Cut them in pieces to ship to museums. A dollar a foot.” His voice became faint and high. “When I was old enough and the missionary got a job for me, I did the same.” He stroked the sea asparagus.