The Forest Lover (33 page)

She folded a silent prayer into the envelope and sealed it. Three cents' worth of hope to sail across the Strait of Georgia.

• • •

Wearing her blue gabardine dress that cinched her waist, she felt like a lamb dressed for slaughter. Her handwritten speech with last-minute changes stuffed into her handbag, she paused at the stairs to Dominion Hall—she'd walked fifteen blocks and didn't want to arrive flushed and out of breath. The gray façade seemed to lean forward at her like a courthouse. She grasped the handrail
and pulled herself up the steps. Jessica was waiting for her inside, all smiles.

Miraculously, people came. The ads in the newspaper had worked. She and Jessica moved quietly in the gallery, listening.

“It's all very well to see it at an exhibition, but one doesn't hang this sort of . . . of whatever”—the woman waved her glove at a mortuary pole—“in one's home.”

Emily humphed to herself. Sneerer at sacred things. What did she expect from a glove flipper?

“Grotesque. Gloomy,” another woman said.

“Isn't it more stimulating to feel uncomfortable than to feel nothing at all?” she said to Jessica, loudly.

“They're done too quickly,” one man said.

“Perhaps you looked at them too quickly,” Emily said.

Resentment choked her. “Fossils,” she whispered, adding in a loud voice, “A Nisga'a chieftainess wanted a pole painting so much she wouldn't let me leave until I promised her one.”

“Quiet,” Jessica said under her breath. “These people were good enough to come. You have to support yourself. Now get up there and set them straight!”

She stepped up to the dais. When she heard herself begin the lecture, her voice sounded thin and distant, as if her ears were plugged with wax.

“My object in making this collection of totem pole pictures has been to depict these striking, monumental relics in their original settings. I wish to make a tribute to the inventiveness of the art and the dignity of the way of life of the province's first people. What you see here represents only a fraction of the great native societies of British Columbia. . . .”

She made clear the size of the poles, some sixty feet, and their sheer numbers, sometimes two dozen in a village. Except for Jessica beaming in the front row, she couldn't read the faces in the audience. Her dry throat itched.

“Most westerners transplanted their ideas about art from the time of European migration and haven't changed them, yet our landscape demands a new style. Our isolation from art centers should make it easier for us to be ourselves, to derive our inspiration from the land and the art of its first peoples. . . .”

Gibb's idea. Oh, for an hour with him now.

“However, there's one style that does belong—”

The rear door to the exhibit hall creaked open. Maybe it would be Alice and Lizzie.

It was Sophie! Dear Sophie, with her back so straight, in her good plaid skirt, her head wrapped in a yellow scarf. And shoes. And behind her, Sarah in her purple shawl, her bearing aristocratic. They kept their eyes fastened on her, ignoring the rustle in the room. And a few steps later, hesitating, Margaret Dan. She couldn't believe it. What had Sophie done to get her to come?

Emily could hardly contain her happiness. She welcomed them with a huge smile, and looked down to find her place.

“There's one style that does belong, and that's the original art of Canada's West Coast done by tribal carvers. The oldest art in Canada and it's the most modern in character. For the native artist, the principles of exaggeration and distortion are methods to express the inner nature of animal and human figures, to find the spirit of a thing. And it is these principles that I am exploring in my current work.”

The three women stayed right inside the door. Sophie stood square-shouldered, lips a firm line declaring her right by friendship to be here. Sarah was calm and observant, but Margaret, looking stealthily to the sides of the room where the paintings hung, seemed uncomfortable. Bless them for coming.

Emily recounted some experiences on her travels, and told of the complex culture the totems represent, explaining that the animal crests indicate kinship and ancestry, not so different from a coat of arms, and serve as reminders of legends. She explained the burial practices, as far as she understood them, and spoke of the terrible dignity of the coffin trees.

“I love these places with all my being, and the art, and the fine people I met. They can teach us many things.” She saw several heads turn and some scowls in the audience.

“If I might digress, perhaps you're wondering why there are so few people in my paintings. Some villages were never reinhabited after devastating epidemics, and only ruins are left to tell of tragedy. Most were just temporarily empty because of fishing season outside the villages . . .”

She paused, deciding whether to go on.

“. . . on lands their ancestors have fished before European arrival, lands necessary to their survival.”

She paused again, scanning the audience for a reaction. Her underarms felt moist.

“This absence of people should not be construed as agreement with policies to remove native peoples from their lands.”

With that, she may have nailed the last nail on the coffin of any possible Vancouver art career. Some people whispered, but nobody left.

“I glory in our magnificent West, and want to celebrate and preserve the memorials of its first greatness. These poles, so full of dignity, should be as important to Canadians as ancient Celtic relics are to the English. In only a few more years, they will be gone forever, which is why I want to complete my collection while there is still time.”

Polite applause. People stood up to see the paintings. With only the strength of her stare at Sophie at the far end of the exhibition hall, Emily tried to send her a message. Look at
Totem Mother, Kitwancool.
That's you! Emily tipped her head sideways toward it. Sophie walked right to it and smiled.

Emily's waistband squeezed her like a python. As she stepped down from the dais, she felt a sudden urgency and fled to the women's washroom, afraid of fainting or some worse humiliation.

On the way she heard a man say, “I don't understand what's so interesting to her about Indian art.”

Blind to any beauty not imported. Had he slept through all she'd said? She leaned against the washroom mirror, cooling her forehead on the glass. She had seen no sign of agreement on anyone's face. Not one nod.

She rinsed her face and went out. She worked her way across the hall, giving explanations of totems to those who asked and telling more stories, looking for Sophie and Sarah and Margaret. Apparently, they had already left—the three people whose approval she longed for most.

• • •

After six agonizing days, Jessica helped her dismantle the show. Emily looked at
Cumshewa Raven.
Its defiant posture made strong
talk. She pulled in her chin and said in a husky voice,
“Miss Carr's vision suffers from a distortion which renders these Indian idols incomprehensible.”
She took down the painting. “There you have it, in the
Province,
for all the world to read.”

“You memorized that?”

“It just wormed its way in.” She gestured toward the painting as though delivering a judgment in a courtroom.
“Her coloring is in a higher key than is vouchsafed to ordinary mortals to perceive. It is hoped that she will soon recover from this attack of neo-Impressionism.

“If there's any attacking to be done, it would be me gouging out the eyes of the philistine who wrote that!”

“Vancouver just isn't ready. You overwhelmed them with things they've never seen. Give them time.”

“They'll never be ready. It was stupid of me to hope. All those Vancouver land developers don't want people to see the vitality and dignity of native culture. They're profiting from breaking the Indians, and I . . . What am I doing?”

“You're honoring them,” Jessica said sternly.

“But without a positive reception from whites, I've done nothing by these paintings to counter the tragedy of Cumshewa and other ruined villages. Nothing to counter the torched village just a few blocks from here. Nothing to counter any loss, not only of Sophie's babies, but all those up the coast.”

Jessica looked at her in shock, her eyes tearing up.

“I can't paint what people with pocketbooks want and feed my passion, and I can't paint for Indians and make a living, or a difference. Where does that leave me?”

“Just wait, Em. The creaky old world will come around.”

Sometimes her simple nature got on her nerves.

“The issue cuts deeper than that. It's who I am.” Her words came out in a high crackle. “Don't you see? A Gitksan man said I had spirit power in my hands, and yet I held out that same hand for money from a white man who's buying up totems for museums. What do you think that does to me? It tears me apart.”

“You're both working to preserve them, so what's the point?”

“Jessica, stop! I know what I know. This show was do or die, and it died. Family, love, and now art—they've all failed me, but that's something you who have everything just can't grasp.”

Emily grabbed her handbag and dashed out the door. Cold air smacked her in the face as she hurried toward the Burrard Inlet ferry. That was an awful thing she said to Jessica. She hated herself for it all the way across to Sophie's house.

• • •

“I don't think the exhibit is going to make any difference,” she told Sophie.

“To who? They didn't like it? Who are they?” Sophie asked in her clipped manner, nursing one of the twins. “Who?”

“Buyers. People with power. People with votes.”

“Why do they have the right? I know baskets. I decide good and bad. You know painting. You decide.”

“But only if the government or individuals
buy
can people—Indians or whites—
see
your handsome Ancestor and all the other poles.”

That stopped Sophie, but only for a moment. “A few fat men don't like them? So? You still have them.”

“Sophie, what I've done—all those years. I'm afraid it might not mean a thing.”

“You afraid? Everybody's afraid. Two villages now in one. What next?” Anger blazed in Sophie's eyes as she looked at Emily, and softened as she unwrapped the twin she'd been holding. “Everybody's afraid,” she said, a low murmur.

The baby was thin, with a fever rash and a rattle in her breath. Bewilderment swam in Sophie's clouded eyes.

The other twin, hanging in the basket cradle, began to fuss. Emily lifted her out. “Poor little darling.” She raised her to her shoulder. “Little darling Molly.”

“That's not Molly. That's Emmie,” Sophie said sharply.

Emily looked again. The eyes were crossed. Before, it had been Molly with crossed eyes.

Sophie held up the twin she was nursing, her hard stare fending off any contradiction. “This one's Molly. Emmie's the strongest baby. Named after you.”

What Sophie had done! Switched the names so it would be an Emmie who would live. Live but with a different vision, distorted by anyone else's standard, but natural to her.

And Sophie would go right on producing baby after baby just to have them wilt. Infinitely worse than producing painting after painting to have them blasted or ignored. What was a painting after all? What could a painting do?

She bit her lip. “I can't stay in Vancouver. I have to go home.”

“Puh! To Victoria? Giving up?”

“No. Just to live with my sisters for a while. No rent to pay. Plenty of food. The oddball sister who doesn't belong. Like stuffing a whale into a teacup. But it'll be near the provincial government. Maybe there'll be other opportunities.”

“You can live with us.”

The look of simplicity in Sophie's face told her that she meant it. She would not doubt her generosity this time.

“Thank you. That's good of you. But, no. I have to go.”

Sophie gave the sick twin to Emily and brought the healthy, cross-eyed twin to her other breast. At the moment, none of the glory of the Kitwancool mother shone in Sophie's tired face. “Sophie, we can do something for Molly. We can take her to a doctor, or get some medicine.”

Sophie's eyes flashed. “White doctor?”

“Yes. In Vancouver.”

“Your doctor? Someone you know?”

“No. I don't know a doctor, but I'm sure I can find a good one.”

Sophie snorted. “No white doctor anywhere did anything for our people in smallpox time long time ago. Let them all die. Babies. Grandmothers. All die.”

Her throat felt scorched. Tanu and Cumshewa came home to her. “It's different now.”

“Maybe white doctor do something bad to Molly. One less Indian.”

“Sophie, no!”