The Forest Lover (39 page)

“One day I didn't sing it. Mr. Luke Cook told me to sing it. I didn't sing it. He broke a chair and held up the leg of it. Sing it he said. I didn't sing it. He beat me in my face with it. Blood sprayed.”

Harold's forehead twisted with the memory. Fear of what he'd revealed shone in his eyes.

“Oh, Harold, no. Your own father?”

Harold hung his head and nodded.

“What a terrible thing. I'm so sorry.”

He was a crossover child, an embarrassment to his parents. Not normal. Not loved. Fragile. Rebellious. Brave. A messenger of wounds ignored. Covered up. Across the fire, his eyes possessed a haunted luster. In them she saw some part of herself. Lines squirmed across his forehead. Any second he would crack if she didn't do something. She put Woo in his lap, gathered them both in her arms and cradled his head against her bosom, crooning the comfort sounds she'd heard Sophie use.

She knew now, rocking him. It all became plain to her. Her art did not touch the core, did not illuminate the pain of Harold's
friends and hundreds like them. She'd still been seeing with storybook eyes. Her paintings pictured only the glories of the villages, what Harold wanted to remember. That's why he fed on them so, to save himself. But were they true?

She would go to the reserve. She would take her painting things. She would not quail to see what was there. She would see with Harold's eyes. She would paint with the juice of his heart. All this time she'd been waiting for some sign when it was here all along. In Harold.

“Is it all right, what I wrote?” he said against her bosom.

“Yes, Harold. It's brave and beautiful. It makes strong talk.”

Emily smelled a rank stew of fish offal and human waste as she walked the plank path of the reserve. With people from Kitsilano Point living here now, more garbage lay strewn on the beach waiting for the tide. In all the years she'd been coming here, the conditions of the village hadn't improved. Rusty buckets lying at doorways, rags flapping on bushes, barefoot children, lean, leprous dogs prowling for food—the picture was the same, only it struck her more profoundly now.

Sophie's house leaned drunkenly on its rotting drift log foundation. Emily peeked inside. “Yoo-hoo. Sophie? Anybody here?”

No one answered. She knocked on Mrs. Johnson's door.

“She's probably fishing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “It's the first day of the Salmon Moon.”

“Do you know where?”

She hesitated, considering. “The river beyond the graveyard. The dog salmon have come.”

“Thank you.”

The war's end must have mellowed even the Queen of Grump.

Canoes and gas boats bobbed in the inlet. Emily greeted deaf old Charlie Dan, Margaret Dan's father-in-law, and wondered if as a boy he had been beaten for speaking Squamish. Working in a line of people pulling in a net, Margaret Dan gave her a quick nod.

Sophie stood upstream on a boulder surrounded by shallows, gaff pole in hand, sleeves pushed up. Emily walked toward her. Pale fish with wide vertical stripes darted below the water's surface or jumped out entirely. Less fortunate ones caught between rocks lay gashed, their entrails spilling.

On the bank, a girl coiled a rope of rushes into a spiral. Her dark hair shone iridescent—the ghost of Annie Marie. Emily looked for her twin. Nowhere.

“Hello,” Emily said. She noticed her crossed eyes. “You're Emmie. Do you remember me—Emily?”

“Ye-es.” Her voice started low, then rose.

“You have some big salmon here, Emmie.”

“Mama get them.”

“They're fine-looking fish.”

Actually some of them looked bizarre, their upper lips hooked over the lower like a parrot's beak, and long, pointed teeth stuck out their closed mouths.

The girl swished the rushes in the air to wave away flies. Emily felt an invisible cord connecting her to the child.

Sophie extended the long gaff pole out into the current and held still for a moment. Her arms had grown ropy, which made them interesting. She yanked the pole toward her, impaling a fish on the large barbed hook. In a quick movement she flung it backward onto the rocks, and saw her.

“Em'ly!” Her smile brimmed with gladness. “See? Emmie grew up strong.” She raised her voice triumphantly over the rushing water. “Emmie, this is Em'ly come to see us.”

Emily stepped onto the boulder to speak quietly. “Where's Molly?”

“Died of life. A year ago.”

“Why didn't you write me?”

Sophie shook her head slowly. “Some spirit made it happen. Some spirit doesn't like me.” Bewilderment sagged her features.

“Spirit? A Catholic spirit or an animal spirit?”

A brief smile crossed Sophie's face at the question. “Squamish believe in a lot of things.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

Sophie let a fighting salmon swim by.

“When Molly was sick, I didn't sleep good. No storm that night.
No wind. Nothing. Everything still. Then a big crack like a branch breaking off a tree in a storm, but no storm. In the morning, she was dead.”

“What's that have to do with spirits?”

“So I go to the graveyard, and Ancestor was all broke and lying on the ground.”

A noisy puff of exasperation escaped Emily's mouth. Sophie's reasoning was illogical, but anything she said would undermine Sophie's slender hold on the cause she'd invented, or accepted. She wondered what it meant when one lost his ancestor—or when a whole community did. She felt trapped by the rigors of native belief.

Emily looked back at the child, her brown legs stretched out beyond the wet hem of her dress, poking bark strands into the coil, absorbed. “She's pretty. I bet you looked like her when you were a little girl. She reminds me of Annie Marie.”

“Me too,” Sophie said. “She'll be good at making baskets by and by, but not as good as Annie.”

The thought of it—Sophie teaching each girl, the sorrow of starting over, yet the hopefulness.

If she had taken Molly, the original Emmie, to live with her as Sophie had offered, would she be alive now? She couldn't have taught her basket making, but she would have gone to Alice's kindergarten, then to school. They would have had happy times, Alice and Lizzie too. Both houses would have been filled with laughter and singing.

But who was she to think that she, Emily Carr, white Canadian, would have been the superior, cleaner, more alert mother, able to prevent what happened? The wrongness of her own thinking slapped her in the face.

“Did you get another Billy dog?” Sophie asked.

“I got two girl dogs to have puppies to sell. They're nice but they're not like Billy, not like an old friend. It's a business.”

“Business? You don't paint?”

“A little. But I need to paint deeper. Otherwise I fail.”

“Fail?” The word cut the air. “You go with me to the graveyard.”

Emily's eyes stung and she shrank inside. “I'm sorry.”

Years of effort had left Sophie spent. The whites of her eyes were threaded with red, the plum-colored pupils veiled by a misty white film.

Young men wading in the river laid rocks in a row. They were about the age Tommy would be now. How proud Sophie would have been to see her son among them.

“What are they doing?” Emily asked.

“Making a tide wall. When the tide goes out, the fish can't go back out. Easy to catch.”

“Easy? They don't have a chance!”

They were tragic creatures, the instinct to leave something behind making them thrash upstream against all odds to unleash their eggs or sperm in one grand moment of fulfillment. She understood that urge. But then, spent with the effort, they died.

“Is Jimmy fishing?”

“No. He's loading wood on ships. A strike is why. Twenty-seven cents an hour. Indian pay. Some days he works eighteen hours. Some days he waits all day and nothing.” Sophie poised her gaff and yanked it into another salmon.

“Mama, look!” Emmie ran toward them holding out her coil.

“That's good, Emmie. You're getting better. Don't forget to count.” Sophie stepped onto the bank. “Enough fish. We'll get more tomorrow and Emmie will learn how to smoke them.”

They put the fish into Sophie's big basket and Emmie's smaller one. Sophie placed the woven cedar tumpline across her forehead to support the basket against the small of her back. Emmie did the same with hers, a miniature of her mother.

On the way home, they picked pink swamp roses to scatter on the children's graves. Emmie lingered at the gate, amused by a spider in a web, but Sophie padded softly to Tommy's new headstone. Emily followed. Brilliant white in the sun, the stone had shiny flecks that caught the light like tiny fish scales.
In loving memory, Tommy Frank 1902–1908.
Sophie knelt and traced the cross with her fingertips.

“I was so happy when I had the money. When the graveman saw I had it, he said the price was more. When I had it again, he said he want to do stones for white people first. I only tell
you
this. Not Margaret Dan.” She patted the stone, sat back on her heels, and let some rose petals fall. “No matter. Now Tommy has a Christian headstone and so now I sleep more easy.”

It did matter. As much as Harold's friends being prohibited from
speaking their language mattered. But if Sophie slept easier, she had to keep her lips fastened with a safety pin.

They paused at Annie Marie's grave, half hidden by a vine snaking across it. Emily pulled it off and scattered her petals.

“Now I show you Molly's grave,” Sophie said. “Next to get a stone.”

Molly's rough wooden cross bore the inscription,
Molly Frank 1913–1919.
Sophie set down her basket next to it and scattered the rest of her petals. Emily regarded each thing before her—those pathetic dates scratched unevenly, the cross tilted, shriveled lady ferns from Sophie's last visit, fish heads with hooked snouts and jagged teeth spilling out of Sophie's basket, the swamp petals. This was what she should paint if she wanted to paint the truth of native life.

Her hand went to the watercolor pad in her canvas sack, but she could not bring it out. She could not make a painting of Sophie's pain.

“Now that Jimmy is working, it won't be so hard to buy the other stones.” Emily hated herself for saying an improbability so cheerfully.

“No. He uses his money for drink. One time I took it for headstones and he beat me. Now I get it by myself.”

“Oh, Sophie, no!” It was hard to believe. Jimmy had been so kind to her with Billy.

“Don't think bad, Em'ly. It's just the way.”

Emily placed her palm on the earth of Molly's grave. “It's a hard thing being a woman.”

“Christian woman,” Sophie corrected.

“Squamish Christian woman,” Emily said.

They walked past the sunken spot where the ancestor figure used to be, now only a few decayed scraps of wood.

“See? Ancestor's all broke and gone.” Sophie walked to the fence and gazed beyond the graves at the sea. “Other Indian babies sometimes live. White women's babies almost always do. I must be bad.”

“No, Sophie. You're not bad.”

Sophie turned to her with hard, wet eyes. “Then tell me why my babies die.”

It would be cruel to say they died because she didn't take them
to a white doctor. She imagined Sophie praying to God or Ancestor or Jesus or Mother Mary, or some private spirit, alternating in confusion or desperation, making the rounds, fearing Raven or God or that Kak-woman, stealer of children.

“I can't, Sophie.”

As they walked back along the beach, Emmie splashed through ivory foam. “Mama, how does the water know how far to come?”

“It just knows, like trees know when to stop reaching up. A spirit tells each wave. Each tree. Everything.”

Sophie studied the ground as they walked.

“What are you looking for?” Emily asked.

“Nice shells. To tell me of sins, so at confession I'll tell Father John every one. If I forget one, I go to hell, he says.” She brushed off sand from a shell. “Then I can't see my babies.”

“Sarah told me once they go to the sunset.”

“She meant heaven. Bad people go to hell.” A flicker of playfulness passed her lips. “Father John says.”

“Has Father John or the church given you any comfort?”

Sophie squeezed one eye closed and left the other open, as if in hard concentration. “Sometimes.”

“Do you know about Dzunukwa?” Emily asked. “A Kwakiutl story woman who lives in the woods and steals children?”

“Like Kaklaitl?”

“Yes, but sometimes she brings treasures too. Good and bad, all part of one thing.”