The Forest Lover (35 page)

Emily turned over the newspaper next to her morning toast, not wanting to see those dear haggard men in Belgian trenches, not wanting to remember an unshaven face and wonder how his Saskatchewan farm was struggling along without him, whether he got through another day, or died grotesquely in some stinking trench, his lungs scorched by mustard gas. Did birds die too at Verdun? How was Fanny managing? And Gibb? Her dog-eared letters to them straggled back months later, undeliverable. Who could concentrate enough to create art when armies inched closer?

Outside, Mrs. Pixley in her robe and slippers snatched up her newspaper in a halting motion, as if afraid to know, afraid not to know. A few minutes later, Agnes Smythe did the same. Then, all sounds in the apartment house stopped. No conversation, not even footsteps or a tap running. The tenants met the roar of Europe with silence. Her knife scraping the palest film of grape jelly on toast sounded monumental.

She slid her breakfast plate aside, tucked her feet under Billy lying like a tousled lump of black and white rug, and began a letter.

Feb. 20, 1917

Dear Jessica,

I miss you fiercely. Has it been a year since I saw you last? Oh, weepy days. Not a body here to talk art with. Hardly a single decent canvas. I feel like a damned fool for so many things. The little apartment house has only one long-standing tenant: Loneliness. To make ends meet I had to cut up the apartment next to mine into three rooms without kitchens, so now I'm a boardinghouse cook. One step forward, two steps back. I'm
flabbed to death with tiredness. Please come for a painting lesson or a critique or just a plain, old-fashioned good talk, but let's promise not to talk of war news. We'll paint in Beacon Hill Park. Be prepared to see a barrel with a hair net. Come soon.

Yr flappy old friend, Emily

Two weeks later Jessica stood in the doorway smiling, her red hair heathered by strands of gray, her eyes as green as ever, thrusting out a bouquet of jonquils. “Fresh from the ferry dock.”

“A sight for sore eyes. You, I mean. The flowers are dazzling too.” Emily brought tea and Lizzie's biscuits and jam to the long table that served as dining and drawing table. “Just shove those books aside.”

Jessica looked at them as she moved them—cultural anthropology of Northwest Coast villages, the Bible, Emily's journals, Whitman's
Leaves of Grass,
Emerson's essays with a paintbrush marking “Self-Reliance.” “Curious combination,” she said.

“Aren't there whole kingdoms of fine thoughts to discover?”

“Have you been happy here?” Jessica asked.

Emily pulled her mouth to one side. “I get dreadful hankery for wild places, and the people. They're outsiders, like me, so they have something to tell me. I won't be happy down to my bones until I know what it is.”

“Why don't you go north again?”

“Oh, Jess, I feel like a snail with this monstrous apartment house on my back. Tell me about your girls instead.”

“You wouldn't recognize them. Megan's engaged to a soldier.” Jessica's perfect fingernails tapped the table in a nervous little rhythm. “More than two months since his last letter.”

“A long time when you're waiting.” Emily covered Jessica's hand with hers and was quiet a moment. “How's Megan taking it?”

“She cries at odd moments. Can't concentrate. I want to buy them a painting as a wedding present.”

“You don't have to.”

“I want to! It will mean a lot to her that it's yours.”

“If she sees you've bought a painting as a wedding gift, it'll tell her you know he's coming home.”

“Yes, that's good. Let me see your latest. Show me what's wet.” Her voice, her smile, her eyes shouted expectation.

“Nothing. Not a tittle of painting, good painting, lately.”

Emily winced at Jessica's expression, clearly a reprimand. She played idly with dried brushes in a jar, breaking their stiffness. “Sometimes I exhibit in the Island Arts and Crafts shows. That bunch of caterwauling old tabbies hang me so high only a giraffe could see a totem eye to eye, or else in the dark hallway by the washrooms. They get embarrassed when the press calls my work grotesques that I stoop to elevate as art. They say I have a diseased mind. It does me up purple.”

“Burble,” Joseph muttered. “Awk.”

“You mean to say I've come across the strait just to find you've abandoned the only thing that ever mattered to you?”

“It's not what I planned. I can't seem to teach the floors to mop themselves, and I can't afford help.” She saw Jessica check for paint under her nails. She curled her fingers under. “Don't make it sound so permanent.”

“How long since you've had a painting spree? A year? Two?”

“More. What do you expect if I'm the only one who thinks I'm any good?” Shame burned. What about Harold? “Without work I'm not whole. Without friends I could be whole if I was working.”

“Well, then. Isn't the solution obvious? Is it the war, Em?”

“Don't you have times when life bears down on you so that you can't paint?”

“No. I have times when I'm so exquisitely happy I can't paint. I don't have the detachment. And it doesn't matter. If I stopped painting, it wouldn't make any difference to the world, but you . . . Doesn't talent come with an obligation to use it? Do you want to dry up?”

She already had. Like a river during a summer drought.

“Maybe creativity has cycles. Bears hibernate. Tides ebb before they flow. Even the moon disappears. Dzunukwa dies for a while too.”

“But she rouses herself.”

“When she's ready. I'm not. I haven't resolved something.”

“What?” Jessica's voice was softer.

“I don't know how to say it.”

Jessica traced the lip of a teacup with her fingertip. “Don't you have to keep your work before the public eye?”

“I hate this scratching after recognition. It's a curse.”

“Exactly, and the result of it is written all over your face—the
pain of the unexpressed. And you know why? Because you're peevish. Because you nurse your injuries, letting them paralyze you. Letting ignorant people you loathe squeeze you dry while the ones you care about, you forget.”

“You came here to tell me that?”

“No. I came here to paint with you! Forget recognition!”

“The one thing necessary for my work to do its job?”

“Oh, Em, let go of that. Paint because you love it, because
you
know your work is vibrant and strong and meaningful.”

Emily took a tired breath. “Someone said so the other day, not in those words. A strange sweet man-boy, but something's not quite right about him.” She touched her temple. “That's the kind who like my work. Not parliamentary committees, but misfits, like me.”

Jessica gave her a sympathetic smile. “What does that make me?” she said, teasing. “Now will you let me choose a painting?”

“Go through that stack of watercolors, and those oils leaning against the wall.”

Jessica moved slowly about the room, taking in everything, including Tantrum's bed box, the cages for Joseph, Susie, and the finches. “Starting a zoo?” She chuckled, and touched a ceramic frog. “I didn't know the tribes here made pottery.”

“They don't, but I do. A dribble of income. A former tenant sells them at the Empress Hotel and in Banff. Tourist trade.”

“They're marvelous.”

“No, Jessica. They're stupid. False.”

Jessica looked at a totem-shaped Raven vase and then picked up a round pot with Sophie's salmon design across the belly. It slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor. Shards and beach pebbles flew across the room. Jessica gasped. Tantrum barked. Joseph squawked. André ran upstairs. Billy just blinked.

“I'm so sorry. I didn't know it was heavy.”

The salmon head lay in one piece. “It's only dirt,” Emily managed to say, picking it up. “I'm ashamed of making them in the first place.”

Jessica looked up at her. “Why?”

“You know.”

Jessica shook her head.

Emily grabbed a broom and swept vigorously. “They come from the wrong place in me. They make me feel I'm no better than a totem thief.”

“That's only an excuse for not painting.”

She dumped the shards and pebbles into a metal trash can, liking the tumultuous, decisive racket they made.

“Pick out another one you like. For Megan, from me.”

“After I broke one?”

“Forget it. I wouldn't give a barleycorn for the lot.”

Jessica stood in the middle of the room and turned in a circle, looking for something.

Emily laughed. “You look like you're in a puddle and don't know how to get out.”

“What happened to that Haida one with two guardian birds?”

“Sold,” Emily said sheepishly. “To Dr. Newcombe. And six others.”

“Then what have you been grumbling about?” Jessica shrieked, and Joseph shrieked after her.

“He's taught me a great deal about native cultures.”

“Yes! A collector! An educated man. Sometimes you're the most petulant, temperamental, perverse—”

“Cantankerous. Don't forget that. And cussed.” Emily pointed to a leaning stack of paintings. “Pick.”

“Ugh!” Jessica threw up her arms.

She chose the Raven vase, and an unframed oil on board of Alert Bay with a canoe in the foreground. “Megan will love this. Remember how you wanted to take the children to paint canoes?” Jessica opened her own portfolio and spread out her watercolors on the floor. “Now will you give me a critique?”

For an hour they deliberated over each one until Emily gathered brushes and watercolors and her cheapest paper. She set out a cold lunch for her boarders, and packed the extras. Downstairs she put everything in a maroon baby carriage, and lifted Tantrum in too.

Jessica laughed. “A pram?”

“I use it to cart clay from the beach cliffs. A disappearing tenant left it here when she couldn't pay. Want any old shoes? Frying pans? Books? There was one that's a treasure. By your own countryman.
Leaves of Grass.
Wait a minute.”

She went back to get it and dumped it in the carriage. Billy picked his painful way down the stairs but managed to keep up the few blocks to the park.

They set up their easels on the grass facing the woods. It felt exhilarating to be swishing a brush around with a friend, but dear old Beacon Hill Park did nothing for her now. After two studies, she rinsed her brushes and spread out the picnic.

Jessica chewed on the end of her brush. “You're dissatisfied, aren't you?”

“How do you know?”

“If I could paint like you can, I'd be dissatisfied with those.”

“I can't seem to tear myself away from needing native motifs. I can't get any spirituality out of the forest on my own, without the help of totem creatures.”

“That's really at the bottom of it, why you stopped, isn't it?”

“Partly.” She slapped her two watercolors face to face and ripped them right down the middle.

“Em! I didn't mean you should do that!”

“It's not you. It's me. I keep searching, but . . .” She stroked the grass, liking its tingle on her palm.

“Is that why you're reading poetry these days?”

“Oh, such a soul, this Whitman had. Listen.” She found her marked page.

“The substantial words are in the ground and sea . . .

Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds out of your friends' mouths?

No, the real words are more delicious than they.”

“See? You've got to find it somewhere else than in people.”

“The masters know the earth's words and use them more than audible words. . . .

The earth does not argue, . . .

Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,

Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.”

She bit into an apple, wondering how to listen more to messages from moss and trees and grass. She read the next marked section to herself.

Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost.

It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use.

When?

• • •

They walked home on Dallas Road so they could see the shoreline. Sounds of the sea and gulls mixed with a steady, intensifying drumbeat. Smoke blew inland.

“Maybe Songhees are camping here,” Emily said.