The Forest Lover (47 page)

“Read one to me,” she whispered.

“Harold Cook a Canadian. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book lived all seasons in the Skeena. In fall the river gets thin. Me Muldo Haaydzims and Tuuns we dig our toes into squishy mud on the bank then we dig in our feet and legs and lean back and forth and wave our arms like trees. In winter we don't go to our
waab
we're not allowed we have to add numbers and recite thou shalt nots. We look long and long out windows at white humps like half moons over children's graves. In spring we see dance laugh sing outside days longer and longer. The gold sun face peeks through green branches we try to climb away to touch it take some in our hands. In summer salmon come up the river shining all silver and smack against rocks. They get so tired but they don't stop they don't stop. We lie real still our hands in pools very still and we lucky catch them in our hands. Haaydzims ask Muldo what the salmon would be for the leaf and Muldo say they are what we are to the salmon but Tuuns say they would be silver spirits.”

He had gone to the world of his own making and found his illahee. For him, where he knelt was holy ground.

“Beautiful, Harold. You are a poet.”

“Please take it. Keep it safe.” He offered her the shoe box.

“All right. Whenever you want it, I'll have it for you. Someday, somehow, memories, yours and mine, will serve. It's not our job to know how. In the meantime, you can use the bigger box.”

His whole being, given to her, and lost to her. In his eyes, a flash of holy wildness. She prayed a moment, that it would live.

After a solid week of exuberant painting for the new National Gallery show, Emily tore herself away from two unfinished canvases and took the evening ferry to Vancouver. She arrived in the morning and walked to Gastown, the Cordova and Water Street area, to look for Sophie. She didn't like being here, but she had to help her somehow. She peered into one saloon after another, Gassy Jack's, The Seven Seas, and Chinaboy's, which she suspected was an opium den. They were wedged between warehouses, hardware stores, tobacco shops, and seedy hotels left over from the gold rush, their window shades drawn down in the middle of the day.

Native women, some shockingly young, leaned in doorways and
murmured to the loggers, seamen, or longshoremen entering or leaving. Did Sophie know these women? Did she have to compete with them? A woman with braided hair wearing a red blouse glowered at her as if to say, What do you think you're looking at?

“Do you know where Sophie Frank might be?” Emily asked.

The woman turned away and went into a rooming house.

Emily caught a glimpse of a plaid skirt with black bands around the bottom, like Sophie's. The woman followed a man around a corner into a narrow mews. Emily hurried after, but when she looked down the lane, no one was there. She'd come here to tell her, as a blood sister would, that she didn't have to do this, to pull her away, stuff money into her pocket, and take her to a stone carver. But what would that do to Sophie, to be discovered like this, coming out of a bawdy house with a man, or standing by a gambling hall, hope brightening her pleading eyes as she offered herself quietly to each man who passed?

She waited on the corner where the mews opened onto Cordova Street, the only way in or out, until she began to feel as though she were trapping her. What was she thinking of! This would not be kind. A blood sister could do it, march right in and yank her away, but she was not blood to Sophie. No matter how close she thought they were, there was that wall. It was a wrongheaded thing to do. She went back to the dock to wait for the next ferry home.

• • •

She stood on the deck where she always did in good weather. It was cool now in early fall, and the sea was frisky. She buttoned her coat.

Fall was gathering time for Sophie. Basket-making season was just ahead. Did Sophie even make baskets any more? What if she asked her to? Not just one basket, but many? They'd make splendid gifts. They were products of soil and rain, of grasses and roots stitched with her tears to build a vessel for some holy thing like berries or clams or water, these baskets that would buy Sophie's dead children salvation. Certainly Harold and Alice and Lizzie and Jessica should get one. And Marius. Imagine, Sophie's work owned by someone at the National Museum. Dr. Newcombe, Marius, Lawren, and Eric Brown would appreciate them. They might even want to
buy more. How many could Sophie make in the next two months if she worked every day? Enough to keep her from Cordova Street?

When she opened the door to her studio late that afternoon, Joseph squawked his outrage at being abandoned, Woo jumped on her when she came close to feed her, and
Totem Mother, Kitwancool
leered at her from the wall, disfigured by a grotesque, wicked grin. It wasn't a wicked grin that she'd meant when she painted her. It was a loving smile that had suggested Sophie's smile to her. Now,
Totem Mother
seemed transformed into a travesty of love debased.

Emily sat down and wrote to Sophie, asking her to make as many as she could, saying that she wanted to buy them all for Christmas gifts, that she'd come for them the second Sunday in December.

• • •

The first gentle snowfall of December had turned unusually foul. On the passage across Burrard Inlet, Arctic wind spiraled into Emily's ears, whistling cold fears that Sophie would be different. She'd find her drunk. She'd find her distant, icy, hardened. Gastown would have scraped her raw and left her scarred. In North Vancouver, granules of snow swirling upward stung her cheeks. She braced herself against the lingering heave of the sea and the unsteadiness of wavering expectations.

Through the snow, houses and derelict boats paled into shades of dirty white and gray. Life seemed to be hibernating. There were no birds, no dogs, no piles of supplies blanketed in white in Sophie's yard. It was as flat as a plate. She saw Sophie sitting at the window where she'd tucked back the gingham curtains to watch for her. Emily let herself in and closed the door behind her. Sophie sat in the pine armchair Jimmy had made, wearing her old wool Cowichan sweater, a blanket over her lap, a just-started basket in her hands.

“Oh, Em'ly. I'm not finished.” She lifted the coiled spiral trailing loose ends. “I'm making one more for you now.”

“We're never finished.”

Sophie struggled to get up, and shook out her leg, motioning for Emily to sit there. She chuckled. “Sometimes my legs go deaf.” She pointed to a logging company calendar on the wall with the second Sunday in December marked with an
E.
“See? I knew you'd come today.”

Her smile was still as broad as the Kitwancool totem mother's, as loving and pure as it had always been, but the colors had changed. Her skin was yellow ochre, leached of reds, the color of thick phlegm or urine or jaundice. Even her eyes were sallow. The pupils swam in yellow bile.

“Are you all right, Sophie? Have you been sick?”

Sophie shrugged and tipped her head, jiggling her tiny basket earrings, her art diminished to a bauble. “Life isn't always, you know.”

“I can take you to a doctor. I'll stay with you and make sure . . .”

Sophie shook her head with such force that her cheeks wiggled. She put more wood in the wood burner and filled the teakettle. “I have baskets for you.” She stretched her arm toward the maroon baby carriage filled with them.

There were only a few, not nearly as many as in the past by this time of year. Disappointment bore down on her. Only five. Five wouldn't give Sophie a dog's chance of catching up completely. She looked inside the lidded ones to see if smaller ones were hidden. Sophie had liked to do that whenever she was carrying a child, the outer and inner baskets alike. None. Maybe it was sickness that made her make so few. She picked one up. They were smaller than her usual work, only two hand spans across instead of three.

“They're fine and beautiful, as always.”

The one with Eagle would be for Harold. Eagle, who saw far, even into the future, to a time when people would learn from
Harold Cook a Canadian.

“You have some new designs.”

“Margaret says I'm wrong to make them my own way, not the old ways.”

“There's no law, Sophie. Make what you like. Let me guess this one.” It was a geometric stylization of a beaked head and enlarged feathers. “Raven.” She pointed to the back of the basket. “Why is he different here?” The same beaked head was on a different-shaped body on the back.

“You know Raven. Always changing himself so he can steal things from people.”

“Ah.” Its intricacy made it spectacular. This would be for Marius. “It must have been difficult. You had to plan the two shapes
differently but work them coil by coil at the same time.” She ran her hand over the bird who stole for sport. “What's it made of? I'm giving it to a man who studies native art. He would be interested.”

“Studies? Humph. What's to study? You just use it.”

“Sophie, there were baskets at that exhibit in Ottawa, and none of them were nearly as good as yours. I want those men to see yours.”

Sophie scowled at the Raven basket, and moved her shoulders in circles, as if she were uncomfortable with the idea.

“You're an artist, Sophie. That's what you've always been, and what you'll always be.”

Sophie's face became lined with doubt. Her grape-colored mouth was incapable of stopping the quivers that passed over it.

“Vancouver isn't the only place to sell baskets,” Emily said.

Sophie's gaze went from basket to basket.

“Tell him beargrass and cherry bark over cedar root. The beargrass is all black because I buried it once and then forgot about it for a year.” She laughed. “But it was still there.”

The old Sophie, amused by her own foibles.

Emily picked up another basket. Animals with pointed snouts and tails chased each other around the surface. “What's this?”

“Wolf. Made out of horsetail root. We've had wolves on the reserve come down from the mountains.”

“Then I'll give it to a Toronto artist who paints the north. Lawren Harris is his name. He'll love it.”

One flared basket had a reddish horizontal line running around it with half circles resting on it at intervals. She picked it up and looked at Sophie for an explanation.

“Sunsets, where dead babies go. Mothers too, if they're good. It's like heaven.”

If Sophie still had hopes for heaven, then she didn't feel the disgrace of sin, just as Father John had said. And if that was so, the casualness of her prostitution was distressing and made her feel a heartsickening gulf of difference between them.

Sophie hadn't mentioned Emmie. Maybe she'd worn herself out with mourning. Emily turned the basket in her hands, counting ten sunsets, nine for her babies, one for her, the basket hopeful of a reunion. Summoning hope from some deep wellspring after each
baby's loss had been the amazing thing about Sophie. It still was. Sophie's face glowed golden, her smile momentarily young.

“I want to give one to you,” Sophie said.

“Which one?”

Sophie pulled her mouth to one side and thought, then held up the unfinished one. “This one. Now you have to come back.”

They were silenced by a wolf's howl, a hollow yawp tearing the air that made the world stop for a moment.

“We hear them all the time now. Not much rain this fall until snow today. Deer come down from the mountains to drink from the puddle by our tap. Now wolves come too.”

The howl cut the air again, a chill keening that brought the wilderness close, just outside the door.

“Last week Margaret Dan's daughter Shaula had a baby, and a wolf ate the afterbirth that fell out of a tree.”

Emily remembered Shaula as a little girl who had played with Annie Marie. For an instant, she imagined Annie Marie a young woman now, a mother herself.

“That's horrible, Sophie.”

“Wolves have to eat too.”

“How do you know for sure it was a wolf?”

“Frank saw it, and the cloth all torn and wet.”

“Did he do that with your babies? Put it in a tree?”

“Some of them. Casamin and Maisie and Tommy. I don't know which ones afterwards.”

She shouldn't have asked. A slackness passed over Sophie's face.

“It's so when the tree grows, so will the baby. Strong and straight.” Sophie paused to consider something, and shot a look at Emily. “That's not why they died—him not doing it for every baby.”

Emily sensed a mounting danger in that subject.

“It wasn't anything Indian. I never looked at anyone sick when I was carrying. Never looked at a dead person or a rabbit. I never cried out when a baby was coming.”

Sophie was relentless in charging down that road of thought. With every coil worked on these baskets she must have been working up to tell her something.

“It's not an Indian reason.”

Sophie wrapped a rag around the kettle handle and poured warm water into a basin to wash her hands, as if clean hands were necessary for what she had to say. She moistened her lips.