The Forest Lover (45 page)

“Who? Mrs. Johnson don't talk to her. Mrs. Johnson don't trust her own no more on account of her white husband.”

“But he's been dead for years.”

“Strange what Mr. Johnson planted in her to make her like that. Margaret Dan goes to her sometimes, but mostly Sophie's alone.”

“What if I asked a doctor to come see her?”

Sarah shook her head. “She's afraid of white doctor. She don't want him touch her.”

“But . . .” She couldn't say it—white men had already touched her.

Emily felt like she was coming apart.

“How long has this been going on? Maybe the twins weren't even Jimmy's.”

“No. They his.”

“Did Emmie die?”

Sarah nodded.

“She didn't tell me.” Sarah's look made her feel foolish for expecting to be told. Emily stared at the glowing orange line around the door of the wood burner where it didn't fit. “She's had more dying than any woman should have to know.”

“That's only part of it. She got tired making baskets and people don't buy them. Oh, she wants those Christian headstones. Talks about them till I sick to hear.”

“That's why she—?” Numbness slid down her spine.

“Goes to Cordova Street. Money.” The words cracked.

“How could she? Is it jealousy of Margaret's headstones?”

“No. She thinks God wants them.” Sarah pushed herself up and went to the stove. “You make her into something high. She's only human. Like all of us.”

Sophie, who she thought was invincible to pain and loss, as solid as cedar, was cracking, like a slow split down a totem pole.

Sarah put a few shriveled stems into two cups and poured in hot water. “Maybe in the old days, different.”

The teacup rattled in the saucer as Sarah handed it to her. Emily watched the little brown shapes twist and sink, darkening the water in plumes. Little brown legs and arms.

“In the old days, families lived together in bighouses. Everything close. Old stories teach things. Now everything's broke up.”

The tea tasted bitter and scorched her throat but Emily drank all of it. Out of curiosity, she asked, “What is this?”

“Horsetail. Good for old women,” Sarah said. “Now days Indian women don't live long like me.”

“How have you managed to?”

With wet eyes, her earrings jiggling, she said softly, “The old ways.”

Emily held out her hand, palm up. Sarah was still a moment as if she didn't understand the gesture. Then, slowly, Sarah's hand, the skin like the surface of a walnut shell, came to rest in Emily's.

• • •

She stumbled out of Sarah's house and followed the muddy path to the cemetery, empty except for the stones. She paused at each one. Maisie's stone, caked with lichen like dull brown lace. Tommy's, already a film of green scum in the indention of the cross. Casamin's, only an upright stick of wood, the crosspiece fallen in the dirt. Was the memory so distant that Sophie had forgotten her first child? And Molly's, still the same wooden cross that probably tortured Sophie with her inadequacy to keep up. Emily passed Annie Marie's before she recognized it and had to come back. A new stone, stark white
against the earth, bore the inscription,
Annie Marie Frank In Loving Memory 1903–1911,
with a cross—Sophie's desire fulfilled. Emily knelt and picked off leaves.

She imagined Sophie's small, strong fingers stroking the cross. Annie Marie had watched those fingers, toughened by beargrass as sharp as blades, in order to learn the crossover knot. Would those fingers loosen the men's clothes as they had Annie Marie's dresses? Were the men's hands rough and insistent, or tender beyond all expectation, like Claude's? Or were they like Father's hand reaching between her own clamped-shut legs? The tightening, freezing shock, the instant closing of herself, shutting down all senses, all thoughts—did Sophie ever get over that, or did it happen every time with each new man? Out of love for Sophie, she didn't know which to wish for.

Sophie loved her too, she was sure of it, in a way different from what Margaret Dan meant when she called Sophie a white-lover, as though she, White Woman, had intensified Sophie's pathetic obsession. She gulped air and choked. No! Sophie's need to prove her Christianity was not for her. It was Sophie's own skewed religion, not their love, that drove her.

The church. The church was to blame. And that
nipniit
who preached there.

She strode toward St. Paul's Church with its twin steeples, twice as Christian as one. She passed the door, not wanting to go in and see that dirty red Sacred Heart, a misshapen beet. Ten paces later, she stopped, thinking that Sophie might be inside. Sophie, good and true, kneeling at the altar. She turned back. The heavy door creaked as she entered.

No one was inside. A few wilting asters and phlox drooped on the altar in a glass jar. She did not raise her eyes behind them to the painting, but looked to the side where the wooden Virgin sat serene, the Christ child on her lap. Mary had no wide Kitwancool smile, only a vague dreaminess. There in that figure was Sophie's religion—a worship of mothering.

She heard a tiny scraping noise. Against the wall, a lean rat hurried for a hiding place. She slammed her shoulder against the door on the way out, disgusted with the whole pathetic place.

The rectory next door was a worn box of a house little better than the others, the porch boards warped and loose. She knocked.
Father John answered, pencil in hand, liver spots on his balding head, his jacket coming unstitched at the shoulder.

“You know Sophie Frank,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what's happened to her?”

“Come in.” He shuffled behind his writing desk and sat down wearily. His calmness infuriated her. “It's a sad case, not unique, though. I've laid six Frank babies in the earth.”

“Six? Six, you say? There were half again as many.”

“Those have no sanctity of the Holy Spirit.”

“So they don't count? They were not brought forth with her blood and nourished from her breast and buried with her tears? They mean nothing?”

“The unbaptized have not been welcomed into God's family.”

“God's family?” She clenched the fabric of her skirt in a fist. “Is it a requirement to have a hunk of stone carved with your precious cross in order to be welcomed into God's family?”

He winced. “No.”

“How can you let something as beautiful as God become so distorted? Doesn't the Bible say God is not to be worshiped with things made by men's hands?”

“I never told her she had to erect headstones.” He tapped the pencil against his thumb. “That's her idea.”

“But how could you have allowed her to get such a twisted notion of Christianity?”

“Allow?” He peered over his glasses at her. “Allow?” A noisy puff of breath spewed out.

“Sophie works until her hands are raw to make baskets to turn into headstones, and when the baskets don't sell she sells herself. Is that what you're preaching?”

He glared at her. “Prostitution predated Christianity on this shore. To them, the only disgrace is when a woman doesn't get any business.”

She felt the breath knocked out of her. Could Sophie really think that? Could they be that different, she and Sophie? Like Mrs. Johnson said?

“She's been desperate for money for another reason too,” Father John said. “Jimmy Frank hasn't been working. Just drinking, both of them.”

“Drinking out of despair because she can't keep up. How can you face her every Sunday knowing what you've done to her, making her think she has to sell herself? How can you look Jimmy Frank in the eye, not priest to parishioner but man to man?”

“Jimmy Frank knows,” he said with tired boredom, stretching out his legs under the desk so that his slippers brushed her ankles.

“Knows?”

“More than knows. Jimmy Frank finds her the men and waits.”

A great claw punctured her heart. “I—I don't believe it.”

“Don't be so shocked. In the north, Kwakiutl women have prostituted themselves for generations so their men can afford to give potlatches.”

“I don't give a hang about what they do up north. Jimmy Frank's a decent man.”

He gave her a condescending look. “It's the way it's done. That's one reason potlatches are illegal.”

She put her hands on his desk and leaned toward him. “Then you ought to make crosses and headstones illegal too. You . . . you take an innocent people . . . and clamp some absurd expectation on them . . . something they can't possibly afford. No wonder they've lost their history.”

“Innocent? What kind of imaginary Indian have you been believing in?”

She backed away from him, toward the door.

He folded his hands. “Human frailty is universal. Don't expect so much and you won't be disappointed.”

“Your prejudice is speaking, not your Christianity.”

A few days later a letter arrived, folded three times.

September's first day, 1927.

Dear Miss Emily Carr, Hailat.

I am in Wilkinson Road Mental Home in Royal Oak, near Saanich. Please come unless you are all het up painting. I can wait. I've been here before.

Love Mr. Harold Cook Swanaskxw.
The end.

Scrawled below it was a disproportionate pencil drawing. Long skinny arms and legs, a tuft of hair, a curved tail. Woo.

What had he done to put him there? On his other hospital stays, he'd just disappear, then reappear without comment. There'd never been a letter. If she hadn't told him of the damaged poles, would this have happened? Or if she had taken him north? Or if she'd given him the Wolf painting?

She took Woo's hand, painted it with cadmium yellow, and pressed it on a small notebook. She gathered pencils, chocolate, and cigarettes, and took the streetcar.

Wilkinson Road Mental Home sat on a ridge in an area of small farms and wooded hillsides. Four octagonal towers and a stone crenelation across the brick façade made it look as imposing as an English castle. The sprawling building was set back beyond a circular drive and a sweep of lawn surrounded by Garry oaks, maples, firs, dogwood, and a spiked iron fence.

“I'd like to visit a patient,” she said to the uniformed guard. He opened the iron gate for her to enter.

At the reception desk she asked to see Harold. A woman nodded to an attendant, a large man with a ring of keys on his belt. “A nice fellow, Harold,” he said as he opened a padlocked door into a bleak visiting room edged with wooden chairs. “Wait here.” His plump face didn't smile, but didn't seem unkind either. He left through another padlocked door.

In a few minutes Harold lurched into the room, stretching out his arms sideways like a crucifix. She held him to her breast. “Are you all right?” He gave a quick jerk of his head, his natural manner.

He swung around to ask the attendant, “Can I show her around? She's my friend.”

The attendant led them up iron grated stairs to a locked ward lined with ten narrow iron beds, each with an identical gray blanket and flat pillow. The high barred windows didn't let in much light. The room was clean. That's all she could say for it.

Harold sidestepped between beds, slid his hand under his pillow, and held out
Leaves of Grass
to her, his face a torture of grooves.

“No, dear. You keep it. I'll get another copy.”

“But this has your marks.”

“That's fine. Then you'll know what I liked.”

“Thank you thank you,” he said, cuddling the book.

They sat on the bed and she gave him what she'd brought. He hid each thing under his mattress. When he saw Woo's handprint on the notebook, he imitated Woo's squeal.

The attendant looked questioningly at Emily. She explained, and then asked, “Would it be possible for us to go outside?”

“For a little while,” he said.

Aspen leaves quaked, showing their silver undersides, and maple leaves rustled in a breeze. “Gorgeous, eh?” Emily said, taking Harold's arm. “Look at those dogwood blossoms!”

His jaw slack, Harold gaped at them as if they would speak.

“Don't they give comfort? How can we think that other things pressing in on our lives excuse us from gratitude?”

“One time here the leaves turned red,” he said. “The sun all shining through them. I could see the veins. I thought they were salmon filets hanging in Kispiox.”

“I think recognizing good must be the remedy for every woe.”

He nodded hopefully.

When the attendant left a distance behind them, Emily asked, “Why are you here?”

A dreamy smile passed over his face. “I was dancing with Muldo and Haaydzims and Tuuns.”