The Forest Lover (48 page)

“They died because the first twins came before we were married in the church.” Anguish tightened Sophie's face in a way Emily had never seen before, a fear of judgment conquered when the words were said.

Sophie dried her hands on her skirt and glanced at her collection of shells on the window ledge. Her eyes were shiny dark stones of yearning in an arsenic yellow wash.

“Father John said we're punished for our sins. We had our Squamish marriage, but Father John doesn't believe in that because he say God wasn't there.”

Margaret Dan had judged Sophie and made that condemnation public. Even Aunt Sarah had judged her, abandoned her, in fact. If Sophie saw her, Emily, as disapproving right now, it would crack the solidness they shared. For Sophie not to see judgment in her eyes, there had to be none in her heart, not a speck. She searched, and found only ache.

“The marriage you had is all you need. The blessing of Father John can't make your babies live or die.”

A wolf howled again, a stretched rope of a sound.

She realized with a pang—she had just wiped away Sophie's reason for the children's deaths. The question of Why, then? gaped before them both. A hunk of wood shifting in the wood burner startled them.

“Margaret Dan said you came and I wasn't here.”

Emily wasn't going to bring it up. She didn't want to hear how Sophie would explain where she'd been. Sophie wouldn't lie to her, would she? She didn't want Sophie to lie, but she didn't want her to tell the truth either.

“I missed you,” Emily said.

“I missed you too.” Sophie crouched to open the wood burner and put in another wedge of wood.

Sophie turned toward her, kneeling. “I know you know about what I do. Margaret said she told you.” Emily shook her head and Sophie held out a chafed, sallow hand to silence her. “It's worth it, Em'ly. For the babies.”

With the orange glow of the fire silhouetting Sophie's face, Emily saw in her eyes glazed with moisture how she must have suffered in giving the ultimate of love for each child, how she'd sacrificed her own soul for her children's. It hadn't been a casual decision. Emily knelt with her by the wood burner and enfolded her, and for once, Sophie didn't pull away. Emily felt a tightness in her stomach letting go, a sloughing off, like a cramp releasing. She understood obsession. She accepted all.

They drank mint tea and Emily told her of her trailer at Goldstream and of painting only the forest now, in darker shades. “Like you told me the first time we met. I should have listened. Some things it takes me a long time to learn,” she said.

“Me too.”

She knew it would insult Sophie to give her all the money she'd brought, regardless of there being only five baskets, so she lined them up on the floor and asked how much.

With her foot, Sophie moved them from right to left, adding. “Fourteen dollars.” While Emily counted out the bills, Sophie watched, eagle-eyed, as if knowing she wished to slip her more.

Emily looked down at the bills still in her hand. “May I pay for Emmie's stone?” The question quiet, unable to be held. “I feel like her auntie.”

Both of Sophie's hands went up to press against her mouth, and she uttered a sweet soft cry in one high note. She nodded. “Emmie's Love Ancestor.”

Emily slid the rest of the money she'd brought under the bills she'd already laid on the table.

“You want some salmonberry cake? I made some for you to take to your sisters. I bet they never ate it before.”

Emily smiled at the thought. She liked the chewy substance like dried jam that she'd eaten with Sophie many times. “No, I'm sure they haven't.”

“Salmonberries good this year. No worms.”

“Thank you, Sophie. We'll have it for Christmas. Indian fruitcake. It's a good share.”

Emily noticed the unfinished coil of roots on the floor. “Get that basket done, Sophie. I'm coming back.”

“There's a
Colonist
review of the Women's Canadian Club exhibit if you want to see what they think of your kid sister in this town,” Emily said, pointing with her paring knife as she peeled a potato. It was Lizzie's birthday and she was fixing supper for them in her studio.

Alice picked up the clipping. “You read it, Lizzie. The print's too small for me.”

“Nationally Recognized Local Artist's Work Bewildering,”
Lizzie said. “The same old story.”

“I want you to read every word,” Alice said.

Emily heard Lizzie's labored intake of breath above the faucet running.

“Emily Carr's work at the National Gallery in Ottawa last March prompted Director Eric Brown to declare her conception of art as big as Canada itself, adding that if she lived in Europe she would be acclaimed among the greatest artists of her day.”

“Wonderful, Millie. What good luck,” Alice said.

“Luck? Luck?” She shaved the potato with quick swipes. “Funny how the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

“
Nevertheless, Miss Carr's saturation with the barbaric efforts of the aborigine, as seen in several paintings in the Women's Canadian Club show here, makes us wonder what would have been her artistic career had she remained in England where she was born.”

Alice pushed out an exasperated grunt. “Well, you can't trust a reviewer who doesn't even get his facts straight.”

Lizzie continued.

“Residence among aboriginal races, whether in Africa or India or Australia, has tended to make the English resemble those with whom they have been in contact.”

“Why, that's horrid,” Alice said. “Aren't you angry?”

“No! This one said something more intelligent than he realized.” Emily waited for a reaction. Nothing. “On that pile of papers on the mantel is a review of the
new
National Gallery show from the
Ottawa Citizen.
Read the fourth paragraph.”

Alice looked at the photograph of
Indian Church
printed in the
article and handed it to Lizzie. Emily turned to face her. She knew it would spark a reaction, and she didn't want to miss one twitch of it.

“Emily Carr from British Columbia is at her best when working on a big scale. Her inspiration is derived from the forest which she opens to us with the intimacy of a lover to probe its inner recesses. Her trees are menacing phallic giants, their foliage dark feminine openings.

“Millie, how could you want us to read this . . . this trash?” Lizzie's voice rose to a squeak.

Lizzie's moral brown eyes darted from Alice to her, and the thin blue skin under them tightened. Poor, dear Lizzie, Emily thought. Even if she explained, Lizzie could never understand how she had experienced a sort of consummation in the wilderness, or how she could make love to the universe by painting. It would mystify her because her God had not blessed her with an imaginative mind.

“Frubbish. One man's opinion. My trees aren't menacing. Go on.” She turned back and smiled into the sink.

“Her totems celebrate native spirituality and her strikingly vivid
Indian Church
is one of the most interesting paintings in the exhibition. She is as possessed with the creative urge as that powerful and tragic figure of the last century, Vincent van Gogh.”

“Pish and splutter,” Emily said. “Poor van Gogh.”

“I hope this won't make you unbearable,” Lizzie said.

She pared more recklessly. “When that plumber came to fix this sink and saw the paintings, he said they made him love Canada more. That meant heaps more than a review.”

“Well, I like
Indian Church,
” Alice said. “It looks so thin and lonely out there under the trees.”

“Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven bought it. Now didn't that send me into a drunken spin.”

She wondered if Lawren ever yearned for compliments. Maybe it was the nature of artists to crave praise.
Something
had to feed the inner person for the lifetime labor of bringing a person's work to maturity. The trick was to keep praise from hurting that work, and to keep on seeking.

“Well, it's all yammering anyway. It's your own reckoning you have to go to bed with. You can't make a shroud out of reviews.”

• • •

Emily stretched and primed eight canvases for the Toronto Society of Artists Annual Exhibition. The submission date was only a month away. Every day had to count. She took a load of paint rags downstairs to wash, and heard the mailman whistling.

“Only one today,” he said, and handed her a letter.

Her fingers trembled, ripping the flap. It was from Jimmy Frank.

Dear Emily,

I have to tell you the sad news that Sophie died a few weeks ago. I'm sorry I didn't write you sooner. Margaret and Sarah tried to help her toward the end but she got sicker and sicker coughing up all the time and not wanting to eat because her stomach was all blowed up. As for me, I'm going up to Squamish to live with my brother. It's too sad for me here. Only memories and hard to keep away from drink. I hope you are well. Sophie loved you like a sister.

Jimmy Frank

A scream boiled up in her tight, bruised throat and lodged there, clotted. She dragged herself upstairs and looked at Sophie's portrait, her Fauve skin raw sienna, red earth, Prussian green, violet—every color but the jaundiced yellow she'd seen the last time. She imagined Sophie swirling in some pale sunset, welcomed by her children, all of them unnoticed by the world. Not a ripple.

What could she do? Send money for a headstone? And what should it say? In Loving Memory of Sophie Frank—Mother, Basketmaker, Christian—Worn Away by Dogma?

Like a sister. Yet she hadn't written to ask her to be with her at the end.

• • •

Alice stood at Emily's doorway holding a picnic hamper. “You haven't painted a dab for two weeks since you got that letter,” she said with a touch of judgment. “It's Saturday. I'll go wherever you want, just so you paint.”

Listless, Emily looked at her brushes, alien things, and then at Alice, standing resolutely. “Does it mean a bean to you if I paint or not?”

“Of course it does. I'll pay for the streetcar. Get your paints.”

Emily chose a logged-off hillside near Langford. They stepped between stalks of dark pink fireweed, their capsules releasing seeds with tufts of hairs that made them airborne. She blew them away from her face, opened her camp stool, and sat absolutely still, waiting. Alice sat a ways off, crocheting.

The sweep of hillside had been mutilated. In a day, virgin forest had been ravished, five-, six-hundred-year old trees hacked off indecently, their stumps horrific headstones. Some splinters were left upright where the trunks had wrenched and come apart. Screamers, she called them, imagining the gunshot crack of the great trees splitting, that awful final sway, the thunderous groan, the crashing down, the executioners with saws and axes stepping back to brace themselves for the answering tremble of the ground. It was a graveyard left exposed to heal itself with the help of seeds and wind and rain and time, daring to grow just to be ravaged again in some dim future. The short new alders, the first trees to come alive again, spread their toothed leaves above Juneberry shrubs and mangled stumps, preparing the way for cedars and firs to follow. Whitman's words came ringing:
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.

One spindly virgin fir, bare of branches for most of its height, a hundred times taller than the new growth fringing its base, had been spared. Forsaken rather. It would yield no income. It stood alone, its brothers and sisters maimed and felled. Its far feathery top danced in the wind, as mad and joyful as any of Harold's dancing.

That's what she would paint—pure Spirit frolicking alone in wind song. The far-flung branches, the clouds, her loaded brush, her arm, all swaying as one. Movement the primal, healing thing.

She painted, hardly speaking to Alice all afternoon, but feeling her quiet solicitude. She came to a stopping point, and showed her the painting. “I'm going to call it
Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky.
”

Alice's eyes shone. “Perfect.”

When they finished their picnic, Emily said, “Let's stop at Ross Bay on the way home.”

Alice straightened up suddenly. “The cemetery?”

• • •

They walked down wide avenues of pines and maples past obelisks, headstones, and plaques, to the Carr graves in a rectangular plot. No
tangled vines crept across the single plaque, no stray ferns, no wild camas. Only pine needles and some cones.

“Why did you want to come here after all these years?”

“To see what I'd feel at a sister's grave. I think I understand now how you felt in France. Helpless and bewildered. Thinking that if you'd been here, or done this or that, it wouldn't have happened.”

“It took Sophie's death for you to figure that out?”