The Forest Lover (38 page)

She looked for a roll of canvas, and realized she'd used the last to replace a window shade in an apartment. Cardboard would have to do.

She cupped the tube in her palm, paralyzed by fear of wasting it on mediocre work.
You want green paint? Here's a smear of it. Now what'll you do?
God, leaning over a cloud to watch, testing her spunk. She closed her eyes and squeezed out tears.

You can't do everything you want to, my little nympholept,
Father had said. She'd been making a Songhees village of wet sand on the beach, hurrying to repair crumbling bighouses after each wave until, in one violent whoosh, the village was flattened to a few pathetic lumps. Maybe, as he'd watched her sob, he'd seen her tendency to beat her head against a wall trying the impossible. Maybe that was why he discouraged her artistic leanings. Could he have been that insightful?

She supposed she could pray. Dear God, send me a sign, clear enough that I can understand. Am I a landlady or an artist? If Barbeau was the sign, then why do I still feel like a wet rag? Please don't let it all be for naught.

No. That was one prayer she'd just have to swallow. It was a disservice to God to put such strains on Him. He had bigger concerns on His mind right now.

• • •

“Read me
Leaves of Grass,
” Harold pleaded when he'd put away the rake.

He dropped in frequently to do odd jobs—cleaning out the furnace, painting the porch steps, building a bird feeder. She'd read it to him once, not that he couldn't read it on his own. He just
enjoyed the intimacy of being read to. Afterward he started asking for it at every visit.

“When I finish serving the boarders their lunch.”

Harold sat cross-legged on the floor and waited, reading it himself. After the boarders left he handed it to her and said, “Start with ‘Walt Whitman, an American.' You know,
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.
”

They shared a cigarette while she began reading there and continued.

“I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.”

She stopped to think, and looked at him, his eyes dewy, hugging himself, as if he were being filled to bursting. He was too different to be accepted by anyone but another living oddity. She had to pour her love somewhere, or it would dry up as her painting had. Maybe that's what love was—walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other. The sheen in his eyes told her he absorbed it like a thirsty desert.

• • •

On the morning of November 12, 1918, Emily went down the outside stairs to light the coal furnace, unfolded the newspaper and read, “Armistice Signed, World War Ends.” She whooped through the hallway pounding on tenants' doors. Soon she heard people outside beating on pots and pans. Lizzie rushed into her apartment, fell into her arms and wept. Emily heated water for tea and let down all the chairs from their pulleys. Tenants who hadn't spoken to each other for months hugged and huddled around the newspaper, afraid to believe. Alice brought scones. At eleven o' clock, to represent the official end of the war in Europe the day before, Mr. Pixley stood on a chair and read the newspaper:

“At 5:00 in the morning of November 11, the German delegation at Compiègne signed the armistice, by which the German army is to retreat and surrender its
weapons and aircraft, the German navy is to be interned, and the Allied forces are to occupy the Rhineland. By 11:00 a.m., the 1,586th day of the war, all firing stopped.”

Emily imagined Megan's fiancé climbing out of a trench to stand upright in unaccustomed safety, stunned by silence, marveling that he had survived. Were Fanny and Gibb celebrating? What about Héloïse and Madame Bagot? Or were they too numb?

At Sunday's supper, Lizzie's grace was simply a Bible verse.
“To every thing there is a season. A time to kill, and a time to heal.”
Lizzie looked up after the Amens. “With God's forgiveness, I've found a greater need than missionary work,” she said softly. “After two months of training, I can work as a physical therapist's aide at the veterans' hospital. Maybe I can help those poor damaged men.”

Emily saw a yearning for approval in Lizzie's expression she'd never seen before. She wanted to stand up and cheer, but such overwhelming endorsement might crush Lizzie's empathetic leanings. “That's a fine, upright thing to do,” she said, patted Lizzie's wrist, and held on.

The whole city seemed to crave lightheartedness. There were rousing concerts in the park again. Alice planted tulip, hyacinth, and daffodil bulbs, not just vegetables, and as soon as they bloomed in the spring, Lizzie took pots of them to the veterans' hospital.

Emily found a new way to earn money. The government offered land to returning soldiers to raise sheep. They'll need sheep dogs, she reasoned. She could breed them. She bought two females, hired a male for breeding, dispensed with boarders, and rented full apartments. No more boarders eating in her studio. She set up easels, stretched canvases, ordered paint, and waited for it. Meanwhile, puppies upon puppies arrived. Harold was beside himself.

“Don't get too attached,” she warned. “They're for profit.”

She took him with her to the pet shop to advertise her first litter. Smelling of animal urine and feed, the shop was a riot of barks and peeps and screeches. Harold went from cage to cage imitating all the sounds. A baby Capuchin monkey with a wrinkled black Kewpie face and a gray spurt of fluff on top of her head reached her hand out of the cage toward him.

“Aw,” he said, and turned to Emily.

The monkey blinked her apple green eyes and squealed, “Woo.”

“You know how I'm a sucker for cowlicks,” she said, grinning at his, but thinking that another creature to feed other than for profit was self-indulgent extravagance.

Prudence be hanged. She'd been prudent for the whole war. She'd worn prudence like a hair shirt.

“Will you take a sheep dog pup for that monk?” she asked the proprietor, and the deal was struck.

They walked home with Woo on a leash. By the end of the afternoon Woo had unscrewed the salt shaker and sprayed a white rain over the kitchen end of the studio, leapt onto the bullfinch cage on the back porch, and terrorized Susie, huddled in the far corner of her cage, her tail wrapped tightly around her. Woo pinched Tantrum into knowing his place in the scheme of things. Eventually Harold got them to scuffle in play like two kittens, and Woo grew accustomed to the radius of chain in a monkey-proofed corner where the quieter discovery of curiosities close at hand sufficed.

• • •

Lizzie brought over a pan of hot biscuits the next morning, and immediately Woo jumped on her. Lizzie screamed, “Wild beast,” and jerked the biscuits away. One fell and Woo snatched it. “A monkey? Honestly, Millie, what next, an elephant?”

“Look. She likes it.” Woo ate the biscuit, and her little hands picked up the crumbs. “See? She's a proper monk.”

“Fauvism and now Darwinism! This is carrying your modernisms too far.”

They laughed. The world, healing itself at last, like new skin after a burn, was too tender for hostility, even a shred.

One afternoon Harold arrived hugging to his chest a shoe box bound with yards of dirty string. “Please please come to the beach,” he said, his cowlick trembling with urgency. “Now.”

“As soon as I finish.” She gave the mixture in the bucket one last stir and then poured it into pans to harden into cakes of soap, two years' worth at least, cheap.

He put the box on the mantel and sat on the floor to play with the animals. He loved Woo best, as strange and mysterious a creature as he was. Carefully, he took her tiny hand in his and played “this little piggy” with her thin fingers, speaking it to her softly. Watching all his movements, her eyes close together as if in a perpetual study of something curious, Woo gave Harold more rapt attention than he probably ever got from humans. As a result, he visited more, and in her secret self, Emily knew that was what she'd hoped for.

With Tantrum on one leash and Woo on another, they walked along the Dallas Road cliffs edged with graceful arbutus trees. On the beach, Harold began to gather driftwood. “We have to have a fire.”

“But it's July!”

She knew she shouldn't indulge him playing Indian. He screwed up his face and she realized that denying him might push him to some precipice.

“All right. We'll have a fire.”

She lit a cigarette and sat leaning against a drift log, loving the slender trunks of arbutus trees, their paper-thin bark in russet and mauve, except where it had peeled away and revealed the tree's raw, saffron and lime green core.

“Are you ready?” Harold shouted. “I've been asking and asking.”

In a haze, she turned toward him and was instantly alerted by his air of seriousness, sitting cross-legged near the fire. “I'm sorry. Yes, I'm ready.”

With great ceremony he untied the string on the shoe box and wrapped it around his wrist. He pulled out a wrinkled paper and flattened it against his thigh. Woo grabbed for it, and Emily shortened her rope so she couldn't reach.

Harold's cheek twitched. He straightened his back and read.

“Harold Cook a Canadian. I write myself. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book was born September 14, 1885. My parents were Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook. Dead now. They were missionaries. I Harold Cook have one sister Ruth Cook. We lived in villages with Indians. Kispiox Kitwanga Kitsegukla Hagwelget. With Eagle, Bear, Raven who makes strong talk.”

His story at last. She braced herself. His blue eyes flecked with gold looked up to see if she was listening. For the three and a half
years she'd known him he'd only told her scraps of his past and then his face would cloud over and he'd stop. What had boiled or melted inside to let him begin? The death of his parents? The loss of the Kispiox painting? The end of the war?

“I Harold Cook author of this book played with Gitksan boys but my sister Ruth Cook did not. They sent her back to Victoria to live with my aunt Mrs. Flora Cook. I played with boys around the totem poles racing games and hiding games and hunting games. Kitwanga and Kispiox we fished in the Skeena River. Kispiox and Kitsegukla we fished in lakes and heard loons. We climbed trees. We made fires. We made raven calls and owl whooings. We crawl in caves. In Kispiox Tuuns and Muldo and Haaydzims taught me to make bows and arrows for hunting.”

He read not like he talked, but like he walked, in fits and starts, conquering rattling fears with every breath. His account told of hunting squirrels with his Gitksan friends.

“He just stops he won't move won't run. Eyes all escaired. My arrow went in. I petted his fur but he doesn't breathe. Haaydzims taught me how to skin it so I saved the fur and tail. I brought it to Mrs. Martha Cook hanging by its feet from a branch the Indian way. If you were there you could see how clean the arrow hole the Indian way. Mrs. Martha Cook screamed and Mr. Luke Cook whipped the Indian out of me.”

More trouble hid behind his strangeness than she'd imagined.

He described nightly prayers on bent knees around a Bible from which his father read verses exhorting against savagery and killing. Harold had kept the squirrel skin hidden under his bed and took it out at night to pet. When his mother discovered it by its smell, the screaming began again.

“So I am put on my knees and read to over and over Thou shalt not kill.”

He looked up at her, expectant, his leg trembling, his fractured heart bare.

“I want to hear more,” she whispered.

Harold searched for another scrap from the box and held it out for her to read. His jerky handwriting dipped down the page.

“No. You read,” she said.

He cleared his throat.

“Harold Cook a Canadian. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book was the only white boy at Lejac Indian Residential School. Boys brought there kicking from far away. Months of cryings little boys big boys for missing
their mamas and fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunties. Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook worked at the school. They taught Tsimshian boys English and praying. When Muldo and Tuuns say Tsimshian words Mr. Luke Cook beat them with his whip. They still speak Tsimshian so they were tooken gone somewhere. I don't see them for days. When they come back they don't speak anything. They have hurt marks all over. We had to count off in rows but they don't know it so I tell Muldo to say seven and Tuuns to say eleven. Then Muldo call Tuuns eleven. He thought it was his new name. Mrs. Martha Cook cut their hair. They screamed and kicked her. She tied their arms and legs around chairs to cut their hair. Then they looked like me.”

Emily felt sick.

He turned over the paper, took a big breath that raised his chest. She passed him the cigarette and he inhaled, bolstering himself.

“Mrs. Martha Cook teach them Onward Christian Soldiers and A Mighty Fortress is Our God. When a bell rang we march in rows to the dining room. They had to sing it before they could lift a fork. When they didn't sing it Mr. Luke Cook made me sing it first. Then they fed me and so then the boys sang. Mrs. Martha Cook fed them but they eat with their hands. They know Mrs. Martha Cook hated that.