The Forest Lover

  Annie Marie cocked her head to the side. “Why do you take that?”

  Emily tapped her once on the nose. “It’s not good to talk about it.”

  Annie drew back. Sophie smiled, a slight, fleeting movement before her serious expression returned. In that graver look, Emily saw that Sophie had stepped beyond native custom in telling her of the spirit realm, something so private they needed the whole forest to swallow its echoes.

  “Thanks for telling me about spirits. That was a good share.”

  She waited until Sophie nodded and then took out her tin box, rolled a cigarette, and lit it.

  Sophie took out a wooden pipe from her pouch, packed in it whatever she used for smoking, and lit it. “Kinikinik,” she said, offering her pipe to Emily. “Just leaves.” A teasing grin skimmed across her face. “Leaves to make you see things.”

  Emily took it and inhaled a pungent, woodsy aroma. She felt light-headed as she handed Sophie her cigarette in exchange.

  Sophie inhaled, exhaled, and smiled. “Not so strong, huh?”

  “No, not so strong.”

  Emily inhaled from the pipe again. “I have something to share too. I may be going to France, to learn how to paint better.”

  “More dark?” Sophie blurted sharply, and then grinned.

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  A raven croaked, half human, half otherworldly—a foot in each realm. A bit like her when she’d stood in Raven’s beak.

  “I walked through Raven’s beak into a Nimpkish bighouse. Something started for me there, bigger than I had planned on, and now I have to walk back out.”

  “By and by you go again,” Sophie said.

  “I’m afraid, though. Many things can go wrong in France.”

  “Go wrong anywhere. You go and find out.”

  “What I started was for you. To show you totem poles so you’d feel strong and happy again. Now it’s just as much for me.”

  Sophie smiled. “The best kind of share.”

  Watching Annie Marie thread ferns through Billy’s coat, they finished the first pipe and a second. Sophie drew out a small leather bag from her pouch. She opened it and dug her middle finger into a dark substance. With an odd smile, Sophie drew her finger across her broad cheek at a slant. It left a reddish brown streak.

  “Tamalth. Indian paint.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Medicine. It comes from fungus on a very old spruce. Spruce is strong medicine.” She spread it on her other cheek. “Use for being close to earth in my blood season. To make me strong. To have babies. More babies.”

  Emily eyed the shiny substance in the bag. Billy put his muzzle close to it and Emily pushed him away. He sneezed. She inhaled its musky scent.

  She needed to be strong too. To go to Paris. To birth paintings. More paintings. Sunlight cast a sheen on the mud, under which the roots of that cedar grew and took their nourishment. Vague shapes danced on the shiny mud. She blinked to clear her vision, but still paintings waiting to be born glistened on the brown surface. Her eyes locked with Sophie’s. She drew two fingers slowly over the cool mud, and painted her face.

  Billy watched her, nose flaring, asking what in the world she was doing, his whole body on the alert, Annie Marie’s ferns quivering.

  Sophie tilted her head back. Her rhythmic breathing became a quiet song. “Ay-e, ay-e, ay, ay.” Sophie’s voice was high on the first two syllables, lower on the others. The last sound came loudly with a puff of air. She sat still awhile, then rose slowly, looking up at the tree from which she had taken the root.

  “You Who Dwells Above, Creator, you make the trees and the roots. You make the animals and the people. You see I am poor. I have six dead babies. Give power to my hands to make good baskets for selling to white people so I can buy Christian gravestones for my babies.”

  Sophie’s yearning entered her, an inner jolt. How deep it was, and primitive, and pure. How selfless too. Could painting ever help to feed her own hunger as Sophie’s gravestones were helping to feed hers? If she went down into the deep of herself, would the yearning to paint well be as pure and selfless? If it were, maybe then skill and wisdom might come. She stood in the clearing listening for a breathing through the trees, watching for a shift of branches.

  “You Who Dwell in the Forest,” Emily murmured into the hush. “You have given me the longing to paint. You see I am lonely, and have nowhere to pour my love. Give wisdom to my eyes to see into the soul of this land. Though I will walk through the valley of the shadow of a far and lonely wilderness, help me to hear a spirit song. Give power to my brushes so I can create something true and beautiful and important.”

  Part II

  15: Sparrow

  Madame Bagot stood in the narrow street in violet bedroom slippers with two leeks in her hand and shouted to the upstairs window, “Maurice, réponds au téléphone.” Her fleshy jowls shook.

  Emily came through the passageway and sniffed—garlic, cigarettes, and musty carpet. She tried to flatten herself against the pension doorway in case this battle-axe of a landlady would sweep back inside, hips and bosom stretching her wine-colored sweater. She knew Madame would spit the directions too fast to understand, and she’d stand there like a ninny. Madame’s puff of black hair loomed like a thundercloud. Emily showed her an address. Madame’s fingers pudgy as German sausages snatched it.

  “À gauche au boulevard Montparnasse, deux rues, et puis à gauche encore.”

  Emily thrust out her hand, palm up, first to the left, then to the right. She snapped her head in both directions, then back at Madame Bagot with a look that any reasonable person could see meant, Can’t you do better than that? Madame smacked the paper onto Emily’s palm, turned her roughly by the shoulders, and waved her leeks to the left. “Allez, allez.”

  Emily went left onto boulevard du Montparnasse and waited while a horse-drawn hearse and cortege passed. Bookshops, cafés, and ateliers lined the street, and above them, apartment windows opened onto balconies with fanciful iron grilles, some with laundry hanging from cords between them.

  Noticing the fascinating fan pattern of paving stones, Emily stepped off the curb. An old man on a bicycle with a loaf of bread and sweet peas in his wicker basket jingled his bell and shouted at her. She jumped backward to let him pass, and nearly dropped her portfolio of Alert Bay watercolors in a puddle. A newspaper skipping in the wind fastened itself onto her leg. She kicked it loose. Children laughed. She scowled and they ran off, their wooden sabots clattering.

  She ought to be exhausted, ought to be napping, like Alice, the sensible one, but it was their second day. She couldn’t wait. “Only a year,” Dede had said at the bank, slapping the trust fund money into her hand and glaring. She had to make every day count.

  At rue St-Beuve, she turned. Number 32 was a boulangerie puffing out the cozy aroma of fresh bread. She took a reassuring whiff. At number 30–28 she peered through a smeared window at a display of traps and stuffed rats hanging by their tails, plump as eggplants. And the French were supposed to love beauty! The sign on number 26 read La Remise de l’Artiste. Brushes, drawing paper, tubes of oil paint lay scattered in the window. The possibilities excited her, but not knowing what was cheap or dear made her feel vulnerable. Baguettes de peintre, a sign said. Baguette. She thought that was a loaf of bread. She walked back to the bakery shop. Baguettes et miches, that sign said. She shook her head. What kind of bread were painters supposed to eat?

  At number 24, she pressed the buzzer and picked at the peeling brown paint on the door. A thin man with a florid complexion opened it.

  “Hello. Are you Harry Phelan Gibb?”

  “Oui, mademoiselle.” The second man ever to call her that.

  “I must have been mistaken. I was told Mr. Gibb was English.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle. I am English.” Not a hint of a smile.

  She handed him a letter of introduction given her in an art supply store in Vancouver. He glanced at it as she said, “I want to unders
tand the new Paris art.” Damn. That sounded like the language of a simpleton. And here he could be the key to her whole Paris experience. “And this new way of seeing,” she added.

  He twisted his thin lips into a smile of sorts, more on one side than the other. “You’re ahead of most Parisians. Van Gogh’s been in his grave for twenty years, Cézanne for four, yet art collectors still don’t buy them, and despise what’s new now.”

  “What is new now?”

  “Their offspring. Léger, Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani, Derain, Rouault. Many directions.”

  He spewed out the names so fast she couldn’t fix them in her mind. Her ignorance was probably plastered across her face. His hand was already reaching for the door.

  “I read that in French art academies artists convey their emotions with bold hues and exaggeration,” she blurted. “That’s what I’d like to learn. Can you tell me, does it have a name?”

  His crooked smile twitched again. “Les fauves. Wild beasts, the critics call them, for their wild colors, but they’re not accepted, and the Cubists less.”

  “Where do I see it?”

  He scoffed. “Not in l’académie. Most galleries don’t show it. You’ll have to see it in the Salon d’Automne in October. It shows work l’académie ignores. And in private studios. In the meantime, for fifteen minutes, start here.”

  He ushered her upstairs into a large, light-drenched studio where a red-haired woman sat reading.

  “My wife, Bridget. This is”—he checked the letter—“Miss Emily Carr, a painter from British Columbia.”

  Bridget, dainty as a porcelain figurine, turned her head, chin slightly raised, as if she were posing. “Ah, so far away.”

  “A month to get here.”

  “Most of these can be called Fauve,” Gibb said.

  The paintings shone in astounding colors. Angular and broad-buttocked nudes with pale violet and cerulean skin reclined on vermilion bedspreads and hot ochre sand. Their anatomies were distorted in an attempt to shock.

  “Mademoiselle’s reaction?” he asked, tight-lipped, like a bank teller demanding the next in line to step up, or step aside.

  Her response would be crucial.

  “Intriguing in a primitive way. Distortion I’ve seen in Native Canadian art, but that’s done to accentuate a characteristic of the subject, not just for design.”

  “No. It’s for more than design. It’s for expression.”

  She turned around to see landscapes sparkling with vivid complementary colors, playing warm against cool, applied thickly with ridges of paint showing. “I’m thunderstruck at the colors. They’re—” She trailed her fingers in the air.

  “Fauve,” he declared.

  “Raw,” she said. “Your color handling, this streak of red alongside that green, unmixed.”

  “The eye does the mixing. Impressionism. Not particularly new. The outlines, Post-Impressionism. You have never seen this before?” His voice rose.

  “No.”

  “But you will adapt it to your own work. However, there’s more than a single new way of painting. There’s a whole tribe of experimenters. Art in 1910 is broadly accommodating.”

  “Now that’s a shred of comfort.”

  “Alors, Mademoiselle Carr.” He pointed to her portfolio. “You have some work to show?”

  She felt her fingernails dig into her palm. Her work was flavorless and simpering by comparison. She shook her head. “These are only supplies.” She waved her hand vaguely to indicate the shop next door. “Can you tell me where I should study?”

  “D’accord. You are a woman, so your work no doubt will need strengthening. That can be had by exposure to male examples.”

  So that’s what Paris would be like. She crumpled the paper with his address on it and tried to control her face to be expressionless.

  “L’Académie Colarossi on rue de la Grande Chaumière across boulevard Montparnasse. They have mixed classes, women with men. Not many do. Van Gogh was there for a while, and Gauguin.”

  “Will they teach me oil?”

  “There, yes.” At the door he smiled and added, “Come back and let me know how you’re doing.”

  “Thank you!” If he said that, he couldn’t be all bad.

  • • •

  Sweat and turpentine fumes smacked her in the face in Colarossi’s cramped, humid oil studio. She jockeyed for a good position among the easels jammed so close together she couldn’t squeeze through. Between that and the sewer crew clattering through the room to pump out the drains, the place was bedlam.

  But she was here. She was painting. She would learn.

  André Laffont, her instructor in oil, stormed through the studio, his black eyebrows joining as he stopped at the easel of the tall man painting beside her. If she painted Laffont, with his black hair hacked bluntly, instead of the table, chair, fruit, and figure on the platform, she’d name it Medieval Despot. He turned to her with astonishment, as if he hadn’t noticed her, the only woman, for the last three weeks.

  He glanced at her painting and made a face. Her stomach tightened. She had been trying to use the pure brilliant hues she saw on canvases around her, but hers seemed muddy in some places, out of control in others. The longer oil brushes were stiff and hard to get used to. She didn’t move a muscle while he rattled off a stream of French, flapped his hands at her canvas, and passed on to the next. Had she been praised or ridiculed?

  Her arches ached. She wasn’t used to standing to paint, and with three three-hour classes every weekday, her feet screamed back at her. She gave them a sympathetic look and noticed a fresh smear of rose madder on her dress, the required attire for women painters. She tried to rub it out with turpentine to dissolve it, but knew she was only forcing the pigment through to her petticoat, already a palette of blotches.

  She was working on her dress instead of her painting when Laffont came around the second time and gave her painting a scornful two seconds before he said, “Vous avez de bonnes couleurs, mais il faut les employer à communiquer la structure, pas simplement comme de la couleur mise sur un dessin.”

  She pointed to her ear, her mouth, and shook her head.

  “Faut communiquer la structure,” he shouted.

  “But the colors?” she shouted back. “Couleurs,” she mimicked. She held her hand palm up, said, “Oui?” then palm down and said, “Non?”

  “Oui,” he said and walked on.

  Bewildered, she turned to the lanky young man with tousled hair in loose, paint-smeared dungarees and striped jersey working next to her.

  “He says to use chiaroscuro to define the shapes,” he offered in a heavy accent through thin, feminine lips.

  “You speak English!” Relief and anger clashed in her voice. “Why didn’t you say so before this?”

  “Until today, you haven’t said a word. For all I knew, you could have been mute.”

  He put away his paints, dipped his brushes to clean them, and looked around his feet in annoyance for a wiping rag. “Never have one when I need it.”

  Emily thrust hers into his hand. “Take it.” She gesticulated to her pile of them. “Take them all, only tell me what he said.”

  “Come with me for a café, and I will.”

  His name was Paul, she learned, hurrying downstairs after him onto rue de la Grande Chaumière, a street so narrow that the six-story buildings seemed to lean in. They walked toward boulevard Montparnasse. Where it met boulevard Raspail, several large restaurants and brasseries spread their tables onto the sidewalks—Le Dôme, Le Sélect, La Coupole, and La Rotonde.

  “Everything important happens at one of these places,” he said and gave a nod toward Café de la Rotonde jutting out into the traffic under a broad red awning. She hesitated at the curb. He clasped her wrist and they dodged an autobus, a pushcart heaped with gooseberries, another displaying silver mackerel, and a pair of screaming motorcycles.

  Paul was particular about where they sat among the red outdoor tables and wicker chairs facin
g the street. “All the painters come here, or to Le Dôme,” he said in a low voice. “See the one with the yellow scarf? Amedeo Modigliani. Italian. He practically lives here, when he’s not chasing women or passed out in the street.”

  The Italian slurped down some raw oysters, stood on a chair, flung his scarf over his shoulder, waved both arms, and began to rail against something.

  “What’s he so angry about?”

  “He’s just reciting poetry.”

  Paul ordered two cafés.

  A slump-shouldered woman sat at a nearby table behind an amber drink, a metal ashtray of crumpled butts, and a pair of red gloves. Shadows under her eyes gave her a desperate appearance. Alice would never come here, no matter how close it was to their pension. One good thing about Paris—nobody cared, or noticed, if she smoked. She lit a cigarette. The Gauloise smokes stank but they reminded her of Sophie’s pipe.

  The woman pantomimed smoking, said something, and reached out her hand. Emily offered her a cigarette from her pack. Then the woman wanted a match. Emily slid her last matchbook from the ocean liner across the woman’s table.

  “You’re américaine, no?” Paul asked. “From New York?”

  “No. From British Columbia.”

  “Colombie? You mean jungle? Parrots? Where café comes from?”

  “No. I’m from the far west of Canada.”

  “Ah. No parrots.”

  She thought of Joseph. “No. Ravens, though. Big ravens in big forests, not jungles. Cedar trees sixty meters high. Native people carve them into stacks of animals. They’re called totem poles. That’s one reason why I’m here—to learn how to paint boldly and expressively enough to do them justice.”

  He drifted away, listening to the conversation at the Italian man’s table. Her explanation was wasted. It might as well have been about parrots in jungles.

  “Tell me what Monsieur Laffont said at my easel.”

  “He said you have to use color to communicate structure.”