The Forest Lover (40 page)

“That's just an Indian story.”

She had to be careful. “Maybe church is like that. Good and bad.”

Sophie shrugged, watching Emmie slap her feet down in shallow water.

“You talk about spirit. I think we all go where spirits gather,” Emily said. “Good or bad, with or without church. Your own spirit in you will naturally lead you to your babies.”

Hope lifted Sophie's cheeks. “What about yours?”

“I'm not sure I've found one yet. I keep searching. I hope it's a cedar tree. For a while I thought Killerwhale was my spirit, because I saw whales just as I was deciding to paint all the totem poles. Later I thought so because he dives deep and is gone a long
time, but I saw one dead on a beach and it stank, just like any other dead animal.”

“Like salmon,” Sophie said. “Dying to give birth.”

Emily opened the window to the back yard and saw Harold reeling from side to side, stacking driftwood he'd gathered. His voluntary acts of devotion always moved her. His damaged ankle and foot made him stumble and he fell over the handle of the wheelbarrow, upsetting it and spilling the driftwood over him.

“Thank you, Harold. That's thoughtful of you. Come inside.”

He fed the breeding griffons, smaller and cheaper to feed than sheep dogs, and then he came upstairs. He looked at the drawing she was working on.

“It's only an imaginary forest. It doesn't have any life.” She propped up her old drawing of Lulu and the menstrual hut against a stack of books. Maybe thinking of Lulu saying,
All is one,
might help her to understand forests.

Harold ran through Joseph's repertoire and took Woo off her short chain in her monkey-proof corner for his ritual wiggling of her toes. He promised to watch so she wouldn't get into things.

“Today I am forty years old,” he announced.

“Happy birthday, Harold. I didn't know.” He seemed without age to her. She put a bowl of custard before him. “We'll have to imagine this as a cake.”

“How old are you?”

The question caught her. She'd tried not to notice the onset of tiredness. She glanced at her drawing of Lulu, who probably had children of her own now. “Let's see. It's 1925. Fifty-few, I suppose. Sometimes I feel like an old drift log buffeted about and driven ashore to dry up and rot. I look thick as a log too.”

Harold tipped his head, puzzling over that. “I think you look like an Indian.” His eyes had all the sincerity of a child.

He was right. Added weight had given her an Indian body.

“Why, thank you. I don't know when I've had a finer compliment.”

He smiled in a satisfied way and sucked custard from his spoon.

That was the outer vessel. She still had to work on the inner. “What do you think being an Indian means?” she asked.

“It means you live free. Dance when you want to. Eat and sleep when you want to.”

“There was a time when I thought that too, but they're anything but free. Going to jail for potlatching isn't being free. Being beaten for speaking their language isn't either. What else does it mean?”

“It means you see spirits in birds, trees, wind, animals.”

“How?”

“The look of things. Muldo said he sees eyes in the forest.”

In the forest sketch she was working on, she saw an opening between trees, and drew in it an almond-shaped totem eye with a large black disk as a pupil, lurking. In another place whorls of foliage could be a raven's head if she added a beady eye and shaped the greenery into a beak. She held it up. “Like that?”

Custard plopped off his spoon. “Yes.”

She finished the drawing and propped it next to Lulu's.

“ ‘Walt Whitman, an American'?” he asked.

She opened to a passage they both liked, and read.

“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they're so placid and self contained.

I stand and look at them long and long . . .

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”

The buzzer startled them. Emily opened the door.

A thin man wearing a rose-colored homespun jacket and wool scarf stood in the doorway, smiling. “I hope you remember me. Marius Barbeau?” He turned his felt hat in his hands. “I visited you—”

“At the turn of the century.” Time cut sharp since Harold had made her think about birthdays.

He laughed. “Not that long ago!”

“Well then, during the war.”

He didn't look older. His long hair was still brown, bushy above his ears, his ruddy skin textured like an overripe grapefruit. He still had that irrepressible smile. And here she was, in her hair net and waistless homemade dress. Old Mrs. Saggy Socks.

“I bought some paintings,” he said.

“Yes, you did.” The euphoria sparked again, the hope she'd tried to keep alive by ignoring calendars. Don't be fooled the second time, she warned herself. “And so you came again to stir up some hope I've packed up and basemented.”

“The time wasn't ripe before. There weren't any exhibitions during the war. When the Parliament Building burned, the legislature met in the museum. The museum staff barely held on. Have you been painting?”

She let him in. “This is Harold Cook,” she said. “Mr. Barbeau. He works for a museum in Ottawa.”

“For the National Museum now.”

“And that's Woo,” she added. “Mr. Barbeau has been to the Skeena, Harold.” Harold raised his head and fastened a stare on Barbeau. “He's the man who bought the paintings of Kispiox and Kitsegukla.” Harold drew in like a snail. “Harold grew up at Kispiox. At the mission.”

“Cook?” Barbeau said. “Luke Cook? Was he your father?”

Harold nodded and snapped his head down toward Woo.

“He had quite a reputation among the Tsimshian.”

Harold started “this little piggy” roughly with Woo's toes.

Barbeau's gaze roamed the walls, enthusiasm spreading across his face. “Just as I remembered them.” His eyebrows lifted. “What's this? Not aboriginal pottery?”

“No. I made them.”

“The designs are—”

“Modeled after Squamish baskets and ethnographic diagrams.” She steeled herself for criticism for appropriating the designs.

“They're lively and ingenious. A Dzunukwa feast dish! I can't understand why I didn't notice them before. The power of your paintings, I suppose. Do you sell them?”

“Not anymore. I've stopped making them.”

“Why?”

“A question of impurity of purpose. Using native designs. Pots are different than paintings. Painting is for understanding something. Pots were just for income.”

“Tremendous! Paintings and pottery, both from native themes.”

“And rugs. For me.” She pointed to his feet. Eagle from two perspectives, his head split and laid flat. “I learned rug braiding from a Squamish friend.”

“Do you have more?”

“Yes.”

“And more paintings?”

“I only paint for myself. Sundays. Some Sundays. For a couple hours.” She caught a hint of reprimand in his expression. “There's too much pain in exhibiting. Victoria's an artistic backwater half a century behind the rest of the world.”

“Yes. I quite agree. Antiquated ideas about art. If I might say so, you're not painting for the people of Victoria.”

“It's taken me years to realize that.”

“I don't believe you have. You'd be painting if you understood that.” He lowered his voice. “May I see more? I've thought about them all this time.”

“Then what took you so long?”

He drew back his chin.

“Forgive me.” She waved away her comment. “The basement's bulging with them.” She took the key from the fork-and-spoon drawer. “They're not all native subjects. I haven't been back north.”

“But you must go. Before it's all gone.”

Harold's head popped up, his eyes blazing. He started to ask Barbeau something, but stopped himself.

Barbeau followed her downstairs to the back porch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Pixley's underwear hanging on the line. Rats!

In a few minutes Harold came down and helped her uncover and dust off canvases. He struggled up the stairs with a large one, a potlatch welcome figure, and set it right in front of Barbeau. “It's better to see them outside,” Harold said.

One by one he brought up dozens of paintings. He propped the ones from the Queen Charlotte Islands against bushes and between sword ferns so greenery surrounded them like forest, sparkling in after-a-rain brilliance. He leaned the Skeena ones on the brick pottery kiln. All the ones with houses—Tanu, Alert Bay, Mimkwamlis, Guyasdoms—he lined up along the fence to make a panorama of one big healthy village, a mythical place alive with eyes and eyes and eyes.

“Ah! This is how they'd look in a gallery,” Barbeau said.

She winked at Harold and he winked back and did a few uncontrollable hops, his face purple as a pansy from his exertions. “Ever noticed how there's always laundry hanging in the villages?” she asked.

Barbeau chuckled and looked at each painting from a distance and up close, fanning himself with his hat.

“What I want to convey is the character of the animal, whether it's menacing or dignified or sprightly or shy, and the character of the man carving it too. I want to go beneath bark or fur or scales to understand the essence of the natural form as the carver did.”

“You do, you do. Your interpretations are penetrating.”

He chose
Kispiox: Totem of the Bear and the Moon,
and two others. Harold's smile vanished. His eyes took on a look of injured confusion.

What was she to do? She was pulled in both directions. Barbeau talked but his words were a blur of sound. Harold sat cross-legged in front of each of the three paintings in turn, yanking up tufts of grass, and murmuring, “I look at them long and long.”

Barbeau regarded him curiously for a moment, then turned to Emily. “With your permission, I'd like to bring your work to the attention of Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery in Ottawa.”

“What have you been waiting for?”

“For this nationalist movement to build momentum.”

“And is it?”

“Yes, now that the war's over and our men have seen a larger world. The country is beginning to recognize and shape its full identity, unique in the world, and landscape plays a big part in that. Your art makes a fine contribution.”

“The Provincial Parliament didn't think so.”

“There's talk in Ottawa of an exhibit of West Coast art. I'd like it to combine aboriginal with European-Canadian artists.”

“Do you think people will see my paintings as true? As representing illahee?”

Harold perked up again, studying Barbeau, to see if he knew the word.

Barbeau smiled in a fatherly way. “Unquestionably. Every one of them shows the country giving comfort.”

Emily and Harold exchanged glances, and Harold let his shoulders drop.

“So, I'll hear from you in another decade?” Emily asked.

“You'll hear from me by—”

“Don't make promises you won't keep. It hurts too much.”

“You'll hear by the first of April.” He handed her a check.

“The first of April. Spring.”

After he left, she and Harold stood quietly looking at the paintings surrounding them. “It's like I'm back home,” he said.

“For me too.”

It seemed a violation to confine them again to darkness and coal dust, but eventually she said it was time.

“Swanaskxw, swanaskxw,”
he murmured as he put them away.

“What's that?”

He was quiet until the last trip to the cellar. “Helper of hailat,” he whispered.

She smiled. He had an identity now that made him proud.

They climbed the stairs to her apartment and he opened the door. She gasped. Torn newspaper had been flung about the room. Jars of brushes overturned. André's milk spilled. A clay pot broken. A kitchen drawer lying sideways on the floor, all the silverware scattered.

Harold's groan told her they both saw it at once—a canvas smeared with wet cadmium yellow and Prussian blue, a watercolor of a village streaked with alizarin crimson, and little yellow monkey handprints walking across the Eagle rug and spotting Lulu's torn face. And where was the culprit? On the sink counter dipping her yellow hands into the molasses jar.

“You cussed, wicked creature!” she yelled.

“You going to beat her?” Harold wailed in panic.