The Forest Lover (43 page)

He smiled, smug in his surprise.

Emily nodded her praise. That ought to gentle them into
Whitman. She thumbed through the pages. What to read?
I sing the body electric.
No, no bodies.
I hear and behold God in every object.
No. Better not. It might launch a protest from Lizzie that “God's in Heaven where He belongs. He only
made
trees on the third day. He's not
in
them.” Maybe something more subtle since they'd been so congenial. She looked for the passage where Whitman said that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars and that a tree-toad is a
chef d'oeuvre
for the highest, but her glance fell on words appropriate to rain, and she read aloud.

“Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!

Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!

Earth of the departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt! . . .

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! . . .

Smile, for your lover comes.”

Lizzie leapt up. “Look, the rain stopped,” she said crisply. We'd better make a dash to the station.” She gathered up her things on the picnic table.

Emily tapped her fingers on her chin. Was it Whitman or Harold that made them anxious to beat a retreat?

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Alice said. “I brought your mail.”

In the middle of the stack, Emily spotted a letter with
Barbeau
above the return address. A tidal wave slammed against her chest.

“Alice! It's from Marius Barbeau. Why didn't you tell me?”

“I couldn't read the handwriting.”

Emily ripped it open. Her eyes raced ahead of her voice.

“The National Museum in connection with the National Gallery of Canada would be pleased to have you select sixty paintings from which we would choose a lesser number for a major exhibition, Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern, to open at the National Gallery in Ottawa on December 2, 1927. Afterward, it will move to the Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Art Association of Montreal.”

She exploded in a whoop and tossed the letter to Harold, then snatched it back with trembling hands to read the rest.

“A Canadian national art ought to be inclusive. Therefore, the purpose of the exhibition is to mingle for the first time the art of Canadian West Coast tribes with that of modern artists so as to analyze their relationship to one another. We would also appreciate it if you could send a sampling of your hooked rugs and pottery. Mr. Eric Brown, representing the National Gallery, will contact you next month with the details.”

She grasped Woo by her hairy arms, swung her onto the picnic table and danced with her. Harold joined in too, stumbling and drumming. Frogs croaked in wild abandon, beside themselves with joy. For her sake, she knew. For her. Lizzie gaped with wide eyes, as if the earth had become dislodged in space. Alice clapped her hands in front of her chin. Emily let Joseph out of his cage. “Artist, artist,” she prompted.

“Em'ly zanartist,” Joseph squawked.

He shrieked it louder and Harold yelled it with him, twirling. “Emily
is
an artist.”

Emily wedged a hammer claw behind a horizontal board in her back yard fence, and pried. It resisted at first, then came off smoothly, with one long creak. She put it on the stack heaped up beside her. At every squeak, it seemed she was loosening one more plank that had nailed her down.

Lizzie came through the gate carrying a basket of apples. “What in God's name do you think you're doing?”

“Prying. Just like you.”

A long satisfying creak loosened another good one.

“Without that fence, Tantrum will run across the lane and tear up Alice's garden.”

“I'm only taking off the top ones. It's claustrophobic anyway.” She let the hammer fall to the dirt. “Do you have any idea how expensive it is to buy frames for sixty paintings? I have no choice, so thanks for the apples, but let me work.”

At first there was Lizzie's typical wincing expression, but when Emily glanced up again, her mouth had softened and she had set down her basket. “I thought I knew all there was to know about my sister and her dreams of being an artist. But I didn't. I didn't know how utterly consuming it is for you.”

An hour later, Emily was sanding slats under the maple when Alice and Lizzie marched toward her. Lord help me, she thought.

“We think you should go,” Lizzie said.

“Go where?”

“To Ottawa. To the exhibit.”

She let out a scoffing laugh. “I'm straightening out nails to re-use them and you think I should take a pleasure trip?”

“Yes, we do.” Alice handed her a piece of paper.

She read Alice's shaky schoolmarm printing.

Cancellation of Note

I hereby declare Emily Carr free of debt from the mortgage loan entered into June 1, 1913, and I cancel the remaining balance of $3,138.80.

• • •

At the bottom, her signature,
Alice Carr,
in wiggly letters.

Emily had to sit down. “Why?”

“Getting the money back wouldn't mean as much to me as not having the payment once a month would mean to you.”

“This isn't just any old art exhibit,” Lizzie said. Her mouth, usually held in a tight line, was smiling prettily.

Emily shook her head in amazement. She felt her stony resentment over years of their carping criticism, with hardly a shred of validation, bust with a pop.

Lizzie's smile disappeared into a firm look. “I'll take care of the animals and the tenants. Now will you go?”

She gazed unfocused at utter strangers, women from another land, until Alice waved away a fly and Emily noticed the stub of her finger. “The curtains and now this. Are you sure?”

Their simultaneous energetic nods made her laugh.

“Will they know what's in me by these Indian paintings nobody likes?”

Lizzie hesitated, as though she had that worry too.

“You won't know unless you go,” Alice said.

Emily blew her nose. They were so utterly sincere. “I don't know how to thank you. My own sisters and I don't know how.”

“Thank us by leaving that fence
alone
!” Lizzie said.

• • •

For the next six months, she rode on sheer momentum, pored over her sketchbooks and watercolor studies from native sites, and painted new oils. She was at her easel by six every morning. It meant a return to painting totem poles, but the trees had been there hundreds of years. They'd wait a hundred more for her. Canvases stacked up so she could barely move around her studio.

“You live in an Indian village,” Harold said as he came in after working all morning building a shipping crate with spacers so the new paintings could dry en route. Bewildered by all that was still left to do, he turned slowly in circles and tipped over onto the floor, the task almost too much for him. “I can't—”

“Yes you can, Harold. You're doing fine. Any monkey can paint a picture,” she told him, “but it takes real genius to crate.”

His body jerked in uncontainable pride. “Swanaskxw.”

• • •

Watching a bleak winter sky from the train window, a wide, first class window, since Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery, had sent her the ticket, she ate peanut butter sandwiches and apples from home while her head swam with misgivings. The responsibility of being worthy of her sisters' support was an entirely new feeling, one she imagined a man might have, the obligation to do well at the office or shop in order to fill the plates at home. She smiled, remembering how Alice and Lizzie had waved scarves at the dock as the ferry pulled way, and Harold did a few joy hops, waving madly with both arms. When the train climbed the Rockies, her anxiety eased in the thrill of their snowy peaks, but when it crossed the stubble of endless prairies, nervousness jiggled in the pit of her stomach.

She read a booklet Barbeau had sent her about the other exhibitors, some Group of Seven she'd never heard of, who held that the nation required a new artistic style born of the artist's
communion with Canada's vast and varied landscape. These painters had tramped the wilderness together, shared artistic insights around campfires, defended each other against the press, as a brotherhood. All men. All younger. All easterners. All successful. Where did she fit in?

• • •

The evening of the opening reception, she caught sight of herself in the mirror of the seedy hotel room. Holy horrors! Her hair was in a confusion of directions, her body bulging in all the wrong places, her bosoms unwieldy, stuffed into the black crepe dress Alice had made for her. She looked like a potbellied stove, and felt like a damn landlady. Her spunk would dissolve if she didn't leave that instant. Her hands trembled as she locked the door behind her.

She walked into the National Gallery and found Marius Barbeau beating on a drum and singing a Tsimshian song at the top of his lungs. He stopped and hailed her, beat the drum for attention, and announced her arrival. She flushed, tugged down her dress, and took off her gloves to shake hands. Eric Brown, young, dignified, and handsome, with a sweep of brown hair across his forehead, greeted her by holding her hand in both of his.

“Thank you for the rail ticket. It was a glorious ride,” she said.

He introduced her to some guests. “She's one of the most interesting painters in all of Canada. We were astounded when we received her work.”

His
words astounded her, so much that she offered only a muddleheaded response.

“Astounded at the crates too,” Marius added. “Built as sturdy as ships with so many nails it took us a day to get into them.”

Emily grinned. “Harold Cook made them. You remember, he's the man who hauled up all the paintings from the basement.”

Marius slipped her a clipping from the
Ottawa Citizen.
He'd outlined one paragraph in red.

It's a source of keen gratification to everyone interested in the preservation of aboriginal art that Emily Carr of Victoria, BC has, after fifteen years without recognition in her own province, been discovered at last
and her work given the attention it deserves. Hers is the greatest contribution of all time to historic art of the Pacific slopes. Miss Carr is essentially of the Canadian West not by reason of her subject matter alone, but by her approach to it.

“See?” he said.

She pressed the newspaper to her chest and walked from room to room. To see her paintings displayed among Haida, Kwakiutl, and Tsimshian pole sections, carved feast dishes, ceremonial blankets, baskets, masks—a spasm of joy shot through her. Harold would not have been able to stand still.

But how were these artifacts acquired? Were they lent, like paintings, or—? Or the unthinkable. A massive Raven mask with long beak commanded the center of a wall. Kwakiutl, the sign said. A single hollow drumbeat vibrated in her chest. It looked uncomfortably like the one from the potlatch at Mimkw
a
mlis. Hold your tongue, she told herself. Don't ruin everything by getting riled up. She convinced herself she wasn't sure.

The baskets used only traditional designs. Sophie's one-of-a-kind work would have been more spectacular. She could kick herself for not showing it to Marius. She looked for names of the basket makers. None. Only tribal identifications on some of them. Apparently individuals weren't seen as significant. She twisted her gloves like she was wringing out a washrag.

Not finding several of her favorite paintings, she felt herself getting worked up in a snit until she counted. There were twenty-six. Her work dominated the show. She shouldn't have counted them. This wasn't about self. It was about seeing.

She walked into another room and it was as if she'd walked into another world. Frozen lakes and waterfalls and craggy rocks and huge, undecorated spaces filled with feeling surrounded her. Here was the room of Lawren Harris, J. E. H. MacDonald, Frederick Varley, and others of the Group of Seven. The dark silhouette of a single scraggy pine holding on for dear life to a rock along a wind-tossed lake shore struck her as exquisite, spare and unutterably lonely. She stopped before a Rocky Mountain landscape so clean and simple, so profoundly spiritual that she reeled.

Marius touched her arm. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Not a ghost. God maybe. Nothing I ever saw in France moved me like these do. This Lawren Harris is astonishing, the way he eliminates the superfluous. Those dramatic shafts of light.” She slapped her cheek. “As if he saw some elemental life force shining in the wilderness. It's what I feel, but he paints it!”

“Would you like to meet him?” He pointed to a man graying at the temples with a widely divided mustache smiling at her boyishly not five feet away.

The age-old gallery trick—an artist pretending to be engaged in conversation while he stands near his work listening to comments of passersby. She should have known.