The Forest Lover

  She listened for a response, but the figure seated before her was silent.

  24: Mosquito

  It wasn’t sleep that got her through the night so much as exhaustion. When she crawled out of the grave house, dawn spilled over the eastern peaks. Mercifully, the rain had stopped, but it felt as though mold had grown in her hair, her ears, her mouth. She went to relieve herself near a skunk cabbage muskeg by the river gushing in a brown torrent. Teeth-cleaning had to consist of a dry brush. She heard wood being chopped in the upper village, and saw Luther and his team and wagon leaving.

  Crossing the meadow, she looked up at the wet poles. On one, a frog peeked out of a beaver’s mouth. A small human face was tucked into a bear’s ear. Some of the humans were holding children, one just as gently holding a frog. A few animals held their paws together as though they were praying. If Lizzie saw this, it would melt even her Christian heart.

  On one, a frog mother faced downward, and smaller frogs were lined up ready to leapfrog down the column. The pupils of Frog Woman’s eyes were carved into childlike human faces, and tiny human hands curved over her bottom lids as if babies were peeking out each eye. Was it meant to suggest a mother watching her children? Gibb would see that as the expression of an idea in the carver’s mind. And to think, if she’d let that slimy toadfish, Alfred Poole, scare her off, she would have missed it.

  A man strode toward her on the bluff waving his arms angrily. “Get away, woman. Go away.”

  Billy growled.

  “I’d like to draw the poles. May I?”

  “Museum?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t sell here. Get.”

  He hurled a rock. It hit Billy in the haunch, a loud crack, like a stick breaking. “Hey!” she yelled. Billy barked and jumped in a frenzy. The man threw another that came close to her ankle.

  She grabbed Billy by the collar and ran behind the nearest bighouse. She checked him over while he licked his haunch. Apparently nothing was broken.

  “I’m sorry, Billy. He’s a mean old unhappy man. He meant to hurt me, not you.”

  She sat with him awhile and gave him a good scratching under his chin where he liked it.

  It was strange. None of the poles here fit the fierce Kitwancool reputation. What had happened to turn these people hard? One thing was certain—she and Billy wouldn’t be sleeping in any friendly Gitksan house. There was no alternative. She had to master the tent. She bloody well wouldn’t spend another night in that grave house.

  It was relatively dry right here, and hidden from the village by a bighouse. She waited awhile but no one came, so she started. Erecting the tent wasn’t half as difficult with no wind.

  “There we are, Billy boy. Our Kitwancool mansion.”

  She dove into the smoked salmon and gave Billy his doggie hardtack. He gobbled it down. “That good, eh?” She bit off a piece. “Not entirely bad.”

  It was already mid-morning and only an occasional sound came from the village. She didn’t see any children to befriend and win a welcome through them. Halliday had said most of the people would be gone to their summer fishing camps.

  Ignoring her clammy hands, she began to sketch the bear pole, but to get the best angle, she had to expose herself to view. Before long, shouts blasted from the meadow above.

  “Stop, white lady. Get away. You can’t steal that pole.”

  A large man, not the same one, stood on the bluff, his feet planted widely, hands on hips in a threatening posture. She gulped. He could have an axe tucked behind his back. And axes could be thrown.

  “Steal it? How could I? I’m only drawing it.”

  “Draw now. Steal later.”

  “Not at all. I’m drawing them now to paint them later.”

  “Who told you to?”

  “No one.” But plenty of people had told her not to.

  He came down the bluff in a side-to-side rolling sway, his stomach bulging over his pants. His large fingers curled inward. His shoulders, belly, cheeks, chin were all round, even his nostrils, but in his eyes, she saw spikes that could gore steel.

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “I—Who? I didn’t know who to ask.”

  His entire bulk became a scowl. “You from the government?”

  “No. I’m just from me. I want to paint all the poles in the province. Just where they are. Before . . .”

  “Before what?” He scowled.

  She wondered if Alfred Poole had been here.

  “Before they disappear. White people need to know how beautiful they are right here where they were meant to be.”

  “You should have ask.”

  “You weren’t here. How could I ask you? If you were here, I would have asked. Do you own this pole?”

  He looked at it, not at her.

  “You must be a great man to have so many crests in your family. What’s your name?”

  “Henry.”

  “Only Henry for a pole this tall?”

  He pushed out his chest. “Henry Albert Douse. I like Henry Jumbo is better.”

  “Henry Jumbo, I’m Emily Carr. You speak such good English.”

  “I worked in white man logging company.”

  “This is a noble pole, but there’s one figure I don’t understand. That little person is coming out of the ear of a bear. Can you tell me the story of that?”

  His shoulders jerked and the scowl returned. She had him. If it wasn’t his pole, he couldn’t tell the story. She’d read that in the museum library, and hoped right now that it was true.

  “Go ahead.” He waved his hand. “You have permission.” She offered him the drawing from her sketch pad. He shook his head and walked away without it, and she relaxed into her work.

  • • •

  It rained again during the night, and the tent dripped in several places. Billy kept squirming toward her to avoid them until they were both huddled on the dry side of the tent. When she poked her head out in the morning, she disturbed a puddle on the canvas and a deluge of cold water poured down her neck. “Aye, Billy, what I would give to be a furred species like you.”

  She wanted to paint the pole she’d seen farthest up river near the muskeg thick with mosquitoes and fetid with skunk cabbage where she’d gone to relieve herself. She oiled her skin with mosquito repellent, wound a scarf around her neck, and put on two pairs of socks and her potlatch hat. Was she going to let a few teensie weensie man-eating jaws scare her? Spunk up! she told herself, marched toward the muskeg, and opened her stool.

  She lit a cigarette to ward them off, and studied the totem. An indecipherable creature with a long uplifted protruberance perched on the top. Under it, as she looked down the pole, there was a band of children playing, then Eagle with a crack through his right eye, another band of children, and, at ground level, the most moving figure, a man or woman, possibly a mother. The broad face had a shoulder-to-shoulder smile, the mouth not turned up, just stretched wide. The mother, if it was a mother, held a child facing forward, showing him with pride. The baby’s face had the same wide smile, as though feeling the love that surrounded him. She’d call the painting Totem Mother, Kitwancool.

  A ticklesome image entered her mind—Lizzie seeing this as a painting. She’d think it a sacrilege, an Indian madonna. Her face would explode in outrage, her mouth dropping open the moment the thought occurred to her that heathens had dared to appropriate a Christian motif.

  Emily suddenly realized her hands were burning, covered with the gray fur of a hundred mosquitoes. “Hellfire,” she shouted and shook her hands. No mosquito oil in the world was obnoxious enough to fend off these demons. What she’d used had just glued them to her skin. Blowing on flesh she’d unconsciously been scraping raw, she ran to the river to dip them for relief.

  Dzunukwa wouldn’t be run off by a mere mosquito. She’d put herself back together again. Emily took off one pair of socks, plastered mud over her hands, put the socks on over the mud, and went back to the totem mother, steeling herself to conce
ntrate.

  To render motherhood in wood, the carver had exaggerated the mouth, the source of lullaby and love, into a smile that pushed up the cheeks above it. In reality a smile couldn’t stretch the width of a face, but the exaggeration dramatized the figure’s joy. The hands resting lightly on top of the child’s head and cupping him from below were out of proportion, smaller than the width of her smile, as if to suggest gentleness. All that she’d seen in France was here in Kitwancool. Distortion for expression—she’d almost lost sight of it.

  Think of everything as shapes, she told herself. The heads of mother and child were squarish, the mother’s mouth a round-ended rectangle, her thighs elongated ovals. Now make those shapes express something personal. She thought of Sophie’s smile when she presented her twins. Such a smile could illumine a house, could turn a world. She stretched the smile even wider. She enlarged the mother’s right shoulder and left forearm, made them club-shaped and strong to enclose the child. She wasn’t an anthropologist. She was an artist.

  Mosquitoes hovered above her watercolor. When they landed on wet areas they stuck, but tried to fly anyway, trailing color in threadlike paths across her paper. When she tried to lift them off with her brush, they came apart, wings and legs spread across the page. They gummed up her brushes, landed in her paints and writhed, distracting her from her rhythm.

  Henry lumbered toward her. “Why did you choose this pole?”

  She pulled down her scarf. “Because it speaks family to me.”

  He looked at her unfinished work. Her stomach cramped. He’d be critical. When critical eyes crept in judgment across half-born work, the heartbeat of it always died. It was an invasion she’d have to endure. She had invaded first. She braced herself while he scrutinized the painting. He’d expect factual recording. He might even hate it.

  “You are a crazy woman—”

  “I most certainly am not. It’s what I feel about this pole.”

  “To stand by this pole all day, you are. Nobody with a brain in his head come near this pole this time of year.”

  “Why?”

  He tipped his head toward the bog. “ ’Squitoes.”

  “I know.” She pointed to the curious top figure. Instead of a beak, it had an unwieldy encumbrance, a long narrow prong, long enough to bite through thick clothing. “A monster mosquito.”

  Henry’s laugh bubbled up from his belly. “That’s not a mosquito. That’s a woodpecker. Mosquito has only long . . .” He touched his mouth and then extended his arm. “No body. Just . . .” He made his hand look like a jaw opening and clamping shut.

  She laughed until thunder rumbled.

  “Why you want to make pictures of poles?”

  It wasn’t an idle question. The wrong answer might cost his permission and she’d have to leave. His cocked head conveyed genuine curiosity.

  “Because I love even what I don’t understand. Because they show a connection. Trees and animals and people. I want white people and your grandchildren’s children to see this greatness.”

  He seemed to be considering his reply. “Tonight you stay in my house. It will rain again.”

  Warmth rushed over her. “Thank you.”

  He shook his hand, blurry with mosquitoes, and reached out to pet Billy behind his ears before he left.

  • • •

  Hours later, Henry stood in his doorway waiting. “This is my wife, Mrs. Douse. A Nisga’a chief.”

  “Hello. And thank you,” Emily said.

  Mrs. Douse was a mountain of a woman whose arms barely crossed over her bosom. The skin at her throat hung like a turkey and her hair was plaited into a single braid. But it was her strong nose and no-nonsense eyes framed by crow’s feet that proclaimed her the matriarch, a native Queen Victoria. She spoke no English, or didn’t choose to, gave orders from a carved settee piled with blankets, and followed Emily with her eyes.

  “You sleep here,” Henry said as he brought Emily into a separate room, bare but for a white-style open coffin in the center. “No worry. Empty. It’s for me someday. See?” He climbed in, lay down, bent his elbows out to measure the width. “A little tight. I think I’m getting too fat. I had another, but my friend died, and so I gave him it.”

  Emily didn’t know whether to laugh or commend his generosity. “Well, I won’t bother it. I’ll sleep over here against the wall.” In the corner she found her tent and bedroll folded neatly next to her food box.

  “No worry about my wife either. She doesn’t like men come to take poles to museums. Last year men from Ottawa bought her father’s pole from her brother. Paid cheap. Her brother went to Hazelton and spent it all. One big drunk and that was that.”

  “So she sent you out to . . . ?” His scowl told her not to ask, told her she’d been argued about. Being linked with the likes of that oily buyer on the riverboat made her face burn. Somehow, she’d won Henry’s trust. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  • • •

  Luther didn’t come on the third day, or the fourth, which worried her about getting back. The hope of Claude waiting faded into disappointment. By mid-morning of the fifth day, she’d eaten everything in her food box, and had shared her last apple with Henry’s small grandson. She was sitting on a stump in front of the house eating Billy’s biscuits when Luther drove up.

  “I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said.

  Apparently he didn’t think an apology was necessary.

  Mrs. Douse came to the doorway and spoke rapidly to Henry.

  “She wants to see all the pictures,” Henry said.

  “Now?”

  “Luther will wait.” He turned to Luther. “She makes pictures with her hands, not with a box.” He pantomimed looking through a camera.

  “All right. A show! Dandy.”

  Then she remembered. The distortion. They’d think she made mistakes. Apprehensively, she tacked them all to trees, more than twenty of them. The few people left in the village came out to see. They touched the sketches, smelled the watercolors.

  “Hailat,” they murmured. “Hailat.”

  “What’s that mean?” she asked Henry.

  He held up his hands and wiggled his chubby fingers. “Person with spirit power in the hands.”

  She could hardly swallow. “That’s a generous thing to say.”

  Luther examined each painting, turning them over to see if the backs of the poles were on the back of the paper.

  Emily laughed. “I was afraid I would run out of paint if I painted the backs too.”

  “You need to go to Haida Gwaii,” Henry said. “Far islands. You call them the Queen Charlottes. Poles are different there.”

  “How are they different?”

  “You go see. If you spoke truth about painting poles before they’re gone, you’ll go to Haida Gwaii.” He gave her a steady look. “Here we live with our poles. Some of us always stay in fishing season. We guard them. They don’t on Haida Gwaii.” He turned away from his wife. “Tanu, Skedans, some of the best villages have nobody left. Nobody to watch the poles.”

  “Nobody living there? Why?”

  “Because what the Pasisiuks brought.”

  “Pasisiuks?”

  “White people. Measles here. Some other thing there.”

  Having to be told this made her feel ignorant.

  “Haida poles need you. Now.”

  That struck her with the force of a solemn drumbeat. No one had ever said that she or her work was needed.

  “They can teach you something.”

  Looking at the watercolor of Frog Woman, Mrs. Douse spoke several sharp words to Henry in Gitksan.

  “That pole belongs to my wife’s family,” he said.

  “It’s a wonderful pole, so full of humor and life.”

  “My wife wants that you leave the painting with her.”

  Emily stifled a groan. She’d only done one of Frog Woman.

  Mrs. Douse squinted at Frog Woman’s eyes, which Emily had enlarged to show the babies’ faces in the mother?
??s pupils. Mrs. Douse’s expression softened, as though she were seeing herself looking at her children. Henry turned from his wife to give her time with the painting. Mosquitoes swarmed around all of them. No one moved to brush them away.

  Luther looked at Emily and tipped his head toward Mrs. Douse, as if to give Emily a sign. Right here in Kitwancool was perhaps the most important person ever to want one of her paintings.

  “It’s not a good one. Tell her I will paint a bigger, better one on a board with paint that will last. I will send it to her at the Hudson’s Bay post in Kitwanga.”

  She knew that was asking more than mere permission to paint in the village. It was asking for trust.

  Mrs. Douse aimed her eyes with their dark eye pouches at her. Layer by layer, as though peeling an onion, Mrs. Douse was judging her character, right down to her vitals. Emily wanted to scratch her neck where a mosquito had feasted, but no one else moved. She stood still until Mrs. Douse turned to her and nodded, shaking decisively the loose skin under her chin.

  Emily nodded back, a ceremony of agreement, and then nodded to Henry, with another meaning. Haida Gwaii. She would try.

  25: Mink

  Emily offered a five-dollar bill to Luther for the ride back.

  He shook his head. “One five-dollah, two ways.”

  He let her ride with him on a plank resting on empty oil drums. It slid whenever they went around a bend, and once she fell off. After that she sat in the wagon bed facing into the sun, holding on to Billy, scratching through her blouse. She waved away mosquitoes until her arms ached and she gave up. Billy scratched too.

  “Mean little devils, eh?”

  Billy scratched harder in agreement.

  At every lurch of the wagon her head throbbed. Seven hours and nothing to support her back. She felt achy, thirsty, feverish. Watching ruts in the dirt road stream out from under the wagon bed, she entered Kitwanga backward. Billy leapt off the wagon as soon as it stopped.