She hated herself for doing it as soon as she set them down. She was not ashamed of her paintings. She was ashamed of her sisters. Of their tea parties with art as an excuse to show off baking skills and china patterns, of their narrow lives all ticketty-boo without a doily out of place. Underlying that, and worse, was their disinterest and incapacity. She sprawled onto the bed. What had happened to Alice? Had France not penetrated, that as soon as she came home, provincialism set in and filmed over her eyes? And Lizzie, bare-nerved, Bible-breathing Lizzie hadn’t said a word. It slid into her thought like creeping ice, while regarding the cross on St. Efflam’s church, that nothing she would ever do would seem important to Lizzie. And nothing Lizzie would ever do would seem important to her. Fine. They wouldn’t have to look at her paintings.
• • •
She went to Vancouver and rented a studio flat on West Broadway in a low-rent district, one light room large enough to hold a class, with a basic kitchen in one corner. Over the next several weeks, she moved her paintings and clothes from Victoria, got her furniture and easels out of storage, and hung her new work edge to edge all the way to the ceiling, like the Salon d’Automne. She would have covered the ceiling too, if she could have figured out how. And she placed two ads—one advertising children’s art classes, and the other announcing a studio show. She collected Joseph at Jessica’s, and Jessica had to come see everything right then.
“They’re marvelous! Your colors shout to be noticed.” She put her hands on her head and squeezed hanks of hair. “It’s like you’re not afraid of anything. Now aren’t you glad I made you go?” Jessica said smugly, teasing.
“You!”
“You!” Joseph squawked. “You. You. You!”
• • •
“Didn’t I tell you they’d come?” Jessica said at the studio exhibit behind her tray of cookies. “Forty-eight people so far.”
They could hardly fit in the room. Emily whistled softly. Many of them were from the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club, but more were strangers, which was a good sign. She strained to hear individual comments in the noise.
“She paints like a man,” one man sputtered.
“But it was done in France,” his wife countered.
“Exactly. You can see she was influenced by that madman, van Gogh. You can’t tell what anything is. They’re the wrong colors.”
“Amazing that you know so much about van Gogh,” Emily said to him. “I lived there and don’t know a bean about him.”
“My, France certainly had a ferocious effect on you,” a woman said, taking off her gloves, one precise finger at a time, to reach for a cookie from Jessica’s tray.
What a sappy smile on that woman. She’d promised Jessica she wouldn’t get on her high horse if she heard anything ignorant, but she hadn’t promised she wouldn’t return their sappy smiles.
A man elbowed his way in front of the woman. “Do you mean to claim that you actually see blue shadows in nature?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. Shadows can be any color, depending upon what’s opposite them.”
The man grunted and turned away.
Emily whispered to Jessica, “What an old acid drop.”
“Sh.” Jessica studied an oil of a mackerel vendor on the quay in Concarneau. “I’ve never in my life seen such innovative color handling,” she said in a loud voice and clanked down the tray. “Save that one for me. It takes me beyond surface reality.”
All conversation stopped. Necks lengthened. Heads swiveled. People looked at each other dumbfounded as Jessica counted out the money into Emily’s palm.
A woman in a fur collar pointed to a canal scene at Crécy-en-Brie. “This is the new French art, then, is it?”
“It’s one of many new ways of painting,” Emily said.
“Now tell me how to say the place.” She made Emily repeat it twice. “Such a pleasant village. So French.” The woman reached into her handbag and brought out a checkbook.
By the end of the evening, two other strangers had made fair-sized purchases. “I’m tickled to bits,” Emily said after everyone except Jessica left. She kicked off her shoes. “Not a slam-bang frenzy, but it’s a start.”
• • •
In the morning, Jessica knocked on her door with two newspapers.
“Bad or not so bad?” Emily asked.
“Bad bad,” Joseph muttered.
“Don’t make assumptions until you hear, either of you.”
Jessica read aloud. “The riot of color exhibited by seventy paintings was no less than startling. The blues were so very blue, the yellows unmitigated, the reds aggressive, yet the exhibit was interesting as an indication of the French distaste for detail.”
“Sounds like he’s writing about jelly beans,” Emily said.
“Just listen. Since Miss Carr is said to have had two paintings in the Paris Salon, we can only assume her work to be similar to what is being shown on the continent. Still, for a lady painter who had once shown promise to have thrown reason to the winds, it is perhaps not incorrect to say that she has outraged nature with her colors.”
“Snivel and rot.”
“Rot. Rot. Don’t talk rot,” Joseph said.
“What do you know about it, Joseph? Painting is one of those occupations where you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none. Stuffed-shirted critics yakety-yakking that ‘We, the educated and refined, will set standards of artistic taste, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ ”
“It’s not all bad, Em. You sold four.”
“Only because they were painted in France, not because the buyers knew a smidgen about art. Except for you.”
“Never satisfied. You’re impossible. Angry if you’re not praised, suspicious if you are.” Jessica slapped down the review.
Emily screamed, “It’s on the women’s page!” She crumpled it, then flattened it. Above it was a gossipy account of the affairs of English aristocracy and a fashion editorial. Emily mimicked a prissy voice: “Any woman swashbuckling alongside her husband in trousers is an outrage and a threat to all good women of the province. So is excluding women’s art from the arts page! Show me the other one.”
Jessica winced. “It’s not a review. It’s an editorial in the Province. Anonymous.” She slid it across the table.
Emily read it to herself.
Before going abroad, this Miss Carr showed no small talent in depicting local scenery, but now she exhibits only the work of an agitated imagination. The arrogance to assume she can improve on nature by outlandish colors without delineating properly a single leaf shows in her sorry attempt to eclipse the Almighty by producing bizarre work she in her misguided mind considers more satisfactory than nature itself.
“I’ve been called a wild beast! A Fauve!” She laughed from the root of her throat. “Now that’s a badge of honor!” She tacked the clipping to the wall.
Jessica laughed too, in relief.
Just like Fanny, she was an outsider—too different for Vancouver, not different enough for Paris. Always on the edge, allowed in for a time if she promised to behave, but ridiculed or ignored if she gave an inappropriate peep.
What would Fanny do? Abandon her home, and escape to France where she could take comfort in others being ridiculed too. And if she did the same? It would be a grand reunion at Gare du Nord with lunch at La Rotonde. They’d show each other their new work.
No. It was inconceivable to leave. British Columbia was her heart’s home.
“This blather can’t go unanswered.”
“That’s the spirit, Em. Let ’em have it!”
She found some letter paper and fired back a response.
March 20, 1912
Your unnamed editor who states that I claim to “eclipse the work of the Almighty” has not grasped the smallest principle of the new art movement. Paintings are inspired by nature, true, but made in the artist’s soul. That’s why no two individuals see the same thing and express it alike. To attempt to reproduce Fran
ce or Canada without filtering it through one’s sensibilities is mere copy work, done by people worried over the number of leaves on a tree. Though they may have harmonized their colors, they have not plumbed for the feel. The new ideas are big and they fit this big glorious West. I do not say mine is the only way to paint. I only say it’s the way that appeals to me. To people lacking imagination, lacking even the integrity to sign their names, it could not appeal.
Emily Carr
She read it to Jessica who clapped and then held out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll make sure it gets mailed.”
Emily licked the envelope and smacked it down with her fist. Jessica snatched it and darted out the door.
Emily cackled. Fanny and Gibb would be proud.
“Come on, Billy. I can tell you’ve been thinking about a walk. Let’s go to the reserve. I bet we’ll find a new baby.”
• • •
The cool sea breeze at the reserve invigorated her. Buds on the cherry trees were about to burst into waxy cups sized for a doll. Spring would be early this year, and that meant summer was coming. She had a journey to plan, research to do in the museum library, Chinook to study, letters to write to William Halliday and the Halls.
She found Sophie’s door ajar, the air full of steaming clams, and poked her head in. “Yoo-hoo.”
“Look, Em’ly. Babies!” Sophie’s face glowed. “Baptized!”
“Two?”
“Twins are plenty luck,” Aunt Sarah said, one baby in her lap. “Like two church steeples.”
Sophie handed Emily a baby. “This one’s Em’ly Marie Frank.”
“No, she isn’t,” Sarah said.
Sophie lifted the blanket. “Oh!” She giggled. “No. That one’s Molly Theresa. Emmie has straight eyes.”
Looking closer, Emily saw that the baby in her arms had slightly crossed eyes.
Sophie lifted the other one from Sarah’s arms. “This one’s Em’ly Marie.” She puckered her lips and made kissing sounds.
“They’re both beautiful, Sophie.” She felt the satin skin of Molly’s cheek.
Sophie’s delirium of happiness made her rock. “Emmie’s named for you.”
“That’s dear of you, Sophie. Nothing could please me more.”
“If you want, when she’s older I’ll give her to you.”
“Sophie! That’s absurd. She’s yours! People don’t give babies. They’re human beings.”
Sophie’s shoulders drooped and she turned away.
Sarah took one look at Sophie and signaled Emily with her eyes that she’d hurt her. “Some Indian women do, when another woman don’t have a baby of her own.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
Had Sophie been thinking this ever since Tommy’s funeral when she offered to share a baby? Sophie must have misunderstood when she’d told her that people don’t share babies.
“Did you think, all these years, that I didn’t consider sharing enough? That’s not what I meant at all.” The thought that she’d sounded ungrateful with mere sharing thudded in her chest. “I didn’t expect—”
“Not for keeps,” Sophie said, playing with Emily Marie’s hand. “An Indian gift, like white people say.” She sputtered a sheepish laugh as if to cover embarrassment for again having offered something unacceptable to white people, but it rang false. She had meant what she’d said, a gift of what she most cherished. What agonies she must have gone through all these years to arrive at this.
Ashamed, Emily watched Molly’s tiny lips, moist and moving with a will of their own. “Who’s Molly Theresa named for?”
“For a Squamish woman long time ago tipped over in a canoe off Raccoon Island. She took a big baby in each arm and little baby in her teeth and kicked and kicked to a logging camp. Little baby dead. Big babies live. She got the Royal Humane Society Medal from Queen Victoria. I name one Molly and one Emmie so they both grow up strong.”
Sophie smiled with her whole being, her face fluid with joy. It was that quality of hopefulness, that belief that at any moment life could offer a reversal, that made Sophie so dear.
Emily held Molly while Sophie nursed Emmie, and then they switched. Emily put her finger behind the curve in Emmie’s toes lined up like a row of corn kernels. Emmie’s foot pushed back.
Sophie cooed some Squamish words and Sarah joined.
“What are you singing?” Emily asked.
“A sleep song. I learned it from my grandmother.”
“More old,” Sarah said. “I learned it from my grandmother.”
“Can you sing it in English?”
Sophie’s voice was low, her words halting. “Sleep, baby of huckleberry eyes. Sleep, baby of salmonberry lips. Rest soft till the morning come. If you die before moon rises, I will weave a cedar ladder, I will follow you to sunset.”
21: Loon
Emily grasped the wooden gunwale of William Halliday’s government boat, one hand chilled by wind and spray, the other buried under Billy’s thick neck to keep it warm, her feet cramped under her bedroll, her eyes taking it all in. Shoreline firs along Johnstone Strait between Vancouver Island and the mainland leaned toward the water glistening like polished pewter. Gulls lined a narrow beach, their reflections cast on the shiny raw umber mud, each one a whisk of gray brush stroke mirrored by its opposite shape.
Tillie James, the Kwakiutl girl from Alert Bay whom Halliday had brought along, gestured to a pod of whales gliding in arcs, then diving deep. Emily sat up straighter, hoping to get another look at them.
“It mean something when you see whales,” Tillie said above the engine.
“What?” she asked, but Tillie didn’t answer.
She’d have to imagine. To her it meant casting off, diving into new waters, facing solitude in the wilderness, feeling the greatness of Canada in the raw. This year, 1912, would be her year of discovery. Before she’d left, Lizzie’s pious tongue had spit venom about idolatry and foolhardy schemes with aborigines, as if she felt she had to fill in for Dede. She was casting off from that too.
After half a year of teaching, she had earned enough to take six weeks of summer to paint as many totems as she could, on the islands in the straits and up the Inside Passage and the Skeena River into the bosom of British Columbia. Her mind reeled with what she might encounter. Wind lifted the feathers on the backs of the gulls and numbed her face. She leaned into its salty bite. Good clean wind to blow away doubt.
By late afternoon, she peered through light fog at the veiled village of Guyasdoms, eighteen miles from where they’d started in Alert Bay. She felt as though she were looking through finely spun ashen silk teasing her with only a glimpse of a building and its frontal pole. Halliday nosed the boat toward the beach and Tillie lowered herself into knee-deep water to pull it in. Billy jumped out, splashing them all.
“Billy, stay close,” Emily shouted.
“I’ll be back the day after tomorrow around ten,” Halliday said after they had unloaded everything. “Mind ye, be ready. Tides don’t wait.”
Nodding, she checked her gear on the shore—bedroll, food box, easel, folding camp stool, large sketch sack containing two paint-boxes, drawing board, sketch pad, brushes, pencils, charcoal; and her portfolio with tall canvas-covered boards for oils and card panels for watercolors. How the devil would she manage all of this when she didn’t have Halliday to take her places?
“Just don’t forget us,” Emily called out.
After the whine of the engine dulled and the slap-slap of the boat’s waves diminished, utter aloneness set in. No canoes, no people, not a single human sound to give her comfort. Swirls of vapor made the place ghostly and secretive.
“Isn’t anyone here?” she asked Tillie.
“All gone to a summer fishing camp. That’s why he told me to stay with you.”
Emily looked at Tillie, slight and trembling. “To protect me? You? How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“You ever been here before?”
“Maybe, when I was
little. To a potlatch.”
“You aren’t so big now.” Emily looked at the speck of the boat in the V of its widening wake, the shrouded expanse of gray trees and grayer water. “Neither of us is.”
A shivering double cry cut through the silver-gray vapor, stretching in a long, penetrating arc, and descending to a mournful yodel. A loon. She didn’t move. It came again, those two short notes releasing that unearthly call and then the half-laughing, half-crazed finish, chilling in its beauty.
She hoisted her bedroll, food basket, and easel. Log steps smeared with velvety green algae led from the clamshell beach to a raised plank walkway overgrown by bushes so tall she couldn’t see above them. The damp planks had been overtaken by an army of reddish-brown slugs trailing thick slime. Two steps onto the planks sent her slipping sideways. She dropped her bedroll and her arm shot out to steady herself against the bushes. Their sting attacked her hand and wrist. “Don’t touch, Tillie. They’re nettles. Billy, stay.” She lunged to grab him and her hand brushed against them again. The itching began immediately.
Holding his collar, she followed the wooden walkway down a row of bighouses. Not houses. Creatures. Enormous, blocky fantasy creatures as big as houses. One house front was painted with gigantic eyes and a leering grin. The whitewashed double doors were two front teeth. A beaver. A diving whale was attached vertically to the next house. The whale’s open upper jaw jutted forward ten feet as a porch roof, and the door was a tongue inside the red mouth—as inventive a design as Chief Wakias’s Raven’s beak. On the whale’s back rode a sprightly little man with curling frog-like legs, and Raven was caught between the tail flukes. On the roofline next to it stretched a sleepy, gray, two-headed sea serpent. She stepped backward to take it all in, slid on a slug, tumbled into the nettles, and let out a yelp that made Billy bark.
She beat back the nettles with her easel and caught a glimpse of the far end of the village. What was that? She scrambled to her feet and thrashed through undergrowth toward a towering colossus, a single elongated figure, not a stack of totem animals, not carved onto the front of a pole, but a statue by itself, probably twenty feet tall. The red torso and round cedar belly were clearly human. Clearly a woman! An ogress. Block-like wooden breasts hung downward, with nipples that had been carved into, what? Eagles’ heads? With eyes and beaks? Arms fashioned from added wood extended forward at the shoulder, reaching. A terrifying sight. High nettles prevented her from seeing the woman’s face.