The Forest Lover

  “She cries at odd moments. Can’t concentrate. I want to buy them a painting as a wedding present.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to! It will mean a lot to her that it’s yours.”

  “If she sees you’ve bought a painting as a wedding gift, it’ll tell her you know he’s coming home.”

  “Yes, that’s good. Let me see your latest. Show me what’s wet.” Her voice, her smile, her eyes shouted expectation.

  “Nothing. Not a tittle of painting, good painting, lately.”

  Emily winced at Jessica’s expression, clearly a reprimand. She played idly with dried brushes in a jar, breaking their stiffness. “Sometimes I exhibit in the Island Arts and Crafts shows. That bunch of caterwauling old tabbies hang me so high only a giraffe could see a totem eye to eye, or else in the dark hallway by the washrooms. They get embarrassed when the press calls my work grotesques that I stoop to elevate as art. They say I have a diseased mind. It does me up purple.”

  “Burble,” Joseph muttered. “Awk.”

  “You mean to say I’ve come across the strait just to find you’ve abandoned the only thing that ever mattered to you?”

  “It’s not what I planned. I can’t seem to teach the floors to mop themselves, and I can’t afford help.” She saw Jessica check for paint under her nails. She curled her fingers under. “Don’t make it sound so permanent.”

  “How long since you’ve had a painting spree? A year? Two?”

  “More. What do you expect if I’m the only one who thinks I’m any good?” Shame burned. What about Harold? “Without work I’m not whole. Without friends I could be whole if I was working.”

  “Well, then. Isn’t the solution obvious? Is it the war, Em?”

  “Don’t you have times when life bears down on you so that you can’t paint?”

  “No. I have times when I’m so exquisitely happy I can’t paint. I don’t have the detachment. And it doesn’t matter. If I stopped painting, it wouldn’t make any difference to the world, but you . . . Doesn’t talent come with an obligation to use it? Do you want to dry up?”

  She already had. Like a river during a summer drought.

  “Maybe creativity has cycles. Bears hibernate. Tides ebb before they flow. Even the moon disappears. Dzunukwa dies for a while too.”

  “But she rouses herself.”

  “When she’s ready. I’m not. I haven’t resolved something.”

  “What?” Jessica’s voice was softer.

  “I don’t know how to say it.”

  Jessica traced the lip of a teacup with her fingertip. “Don’t you have to keep your work before the public eye?”

  “I hate this scratching after recognition. It’s a curse.”

  “Exactly, and the result of it is written all over your face—the pain of the unexpressed. And you know why? Because you’re peevish. Because you nurse your injuries, letting them paralyze you. Letting ignorant people you loathe squeeze you dry while the ones you care about, you forget.”

  “You came here to tell me that?”

  “No. I came here to paint with you! Forget recognition!”

  “The one thing necessary for my work to do its job?”

  “Oh, Em, let go of that. Paint because you love it, because you know your work is vibrant and strong and meaningful.”

  Emily took a tired breath. “Someone said so the other day, not in those words. A strange sweet man-boy, but something’s not quite right about him.” She touched her temple. “That’s the kind who like my work. Not parliamentary committees, but misfits, like me.”

  Jessica gave her a sympathetic smile. “What does that make me?” she said, teasing. “Now will you let me choose a painting?”

  “Go through that stack of watercolors, and those oils leaning against the wall.”

  Jessica moved slowly about the room, taking in everything, including Tantrum’s bed box, the cages for Joseph, Susie, and the finches. “Starting a zoo?” She chuckled, and touched a ceramic frog. “I didn’t know the tribes here made pottery.”

  “They don’t, but I do. A dribble of income. A former tenant sells them at the Empress Hotel and in Banff. Tourist trade.”

  “They’re marvelous.”

  “No, Jessica. They’re stupid. False.”

  Jessica looked at a totem-shaped Raven vase and then picked up a round pot with Sophie’s salmon design across the belly. It slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor. Shards and beach pebbles flew across the room. Jessica gasped. Tantrum barked. Joseph squawked. André ran upstairs. Billy just blinked.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know it was heavy.”

  The salmon head lay in one piece. “It’s only dirt,” Emily managed to say, picking it up. “I’m ashamed of making them in the first place.”

  Jessica looked up at her. “Why?”

  “You know.”

  Jessica shook her head.

  Emily grabbed a broom and swept vigorously. “They come from the wrong place in me. They make me feel I’m no better than a totem thief.”

  “That’s only an excuse for not painting.”

  She dumped the shards and pebbles into a metal trash can, liking the tumultuous, decisive racket they made.

  “Pick out another one you like. For Megan, from me.”

  “After I broke one?”

  “Forget it. I wouldn’t give a barleycorn for the lot.”

  Jessica stood in the middle of the room and turned in a circle, looking for something.

  Emily laughed. “You look like you’re in a puddle and don’t know how to get out.”

  “What happened to that Haida one with two guardian birds?”

  “Sold,” Emily said sheepishly. “To Dr. Newcombe. And six others.”

  “Then what have you been grumbling about?” Jessica shrieked, and Joseph shrieked after her.

  “He’s taught me a great deal about native cultures.”

  “Yes! A collector! An educated man. Sometimes you’re the most petulant, temperamental, perverse—”

  “Cantankerous. Don’t forget that. And cussed.” Emily pointed to a leaning stack of paintings. “Pick.”

  “Ugh!” Jessica threw up her arms.

  She chose the Raven vase, and an unframed oil on board of Alert Bay with a canoe in the foreground. “Megan will love this. Remember how you wanted to take the children to paint canoes?” Jessica opened her own portfolio and spread out her watercolors on the floor. “Now will you give me a critique?”

  For an hour they deliberated over each one until Emily gathered brushes and watercolors and her cheapest paper. She set out a cold lunch for her boarders, and packed the extras. Downstairs she put everything in a maroon baby carriage, and lifted Tantrum in too.

  Jessica laughed. “A pram?”

  “I use it to cart clay from the beach cliffs. A disappearing tenant left it here when she couldn’t pay. Want any old shoes? Frying pans? Books? There was one that’s a treasure. By your own countryman. Leaves of Grass. Wait a minute.”

  She went back to get it and dumped it in the carriage. Billy picked his painful way down the stairs but managed to keep up the few blocks to the park.

  They set up their easels on the grass facing the woods. It felt exhilarating to be swishing a brush around with a friend, but dear old Beacon Hill Park did nothing for her now. After two studies, she rinsed her brushes and spread out the picnic.

  Jessica chewed on the end of her brush. “You’re dissatisfied, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “If I could paint like you can, I’d be dissatisfied with those.”

  “I can’t seem to tear myself away from needing native motifs. I can’t get any spirituality out of the forest on my own, without the help of totem creatures.”

  “That’s really at the bottom of it, why you stopped, isn’t it?”

  “Partly.” She slapped her two watercolors face to face and ripped them right down the middle.

  “Em! I didn’t mean you s
hould do that!”

  “It’s not you. It’s me. I keep searching, but . . .” She stroked the grass, liking its tingle on her palm.

  “Is that why you’re reading poetry these days?”

  “Oh, such a soul, this Whitman had. Listen.” She found her marked page.

  “The substantial words are in the ground and sea . . .

  Were you thinking that those were the words, those delicious sounds out of your friends’ mouths?

  No, the real words are more delicious than they.”

  “See? You’ve got to find it somewhere else than in people.”

  “The masters know the earth’s words and use them more than audible words. . . .

  The earth does not argue, . . .

  Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,

  Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.”

  She bit into an apple, wondering how to listen more to messages from moss and trees and grass. She read the next marked section to herself.

  Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost.

  It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use.

  When?

  • • •

  They walked home on Dallas Road so they could see the shoreline. Sounds of the sea and gulls mixed with a steady, intensifying drumbeat. Smoke blew inland.

  “Maybe Songhees are camping here,” Emily said.

  They looked at each other, wondering, and walked out to the cliff edge where they could see the beach. A lone figure danced around a fire, swirling, lunging erratically, stumbling over a crippled foot, beating on a drum. Her drum. His now. All he needed was an eagle feather, but he had given it to her.

  “A white man. What do you think he’s doing?” Jessica asked. “Making fun of Indians?”

  “No. Making believe. He’s the one who loves my paintings.”

  Sobered, Emily took Jessica’s arm and led her away. Jessica looked at her quizzically.

  “Look at those great boughs swing,” Emily said to change the subject. “The wind makes everything alive. Look at those green and blue shadows dancing under the trees, the way light and dark chase each other harum-scarum. Without movement a subject is dead. Just look!” She squeezed Jessica’s arm.

  Jessica squinted in a cunning way. “How do you paint wind?”

  “Ah! By making the trees go whiz-bang and whoop it up. By painting in thick, vigorous swirls.” She traced curves in the air with her arm. “Wind connects everything in one satisfying whoosh.”

  A slow, shrewd smile crept over Jessica’s face. “You’ll get back to work. I know it. I can go home without worrying now.”

  30: Camas

  Emily was sprinkling bread crumbs for a pair of doves that had taken residence in her front yard when Harold came down the sidewalk in his awkward, uneven gait, shaking a small brown bag.

  “Hello, Harold. Listen.” She pointed to the doves. “I’m joy-crazed with their mellow cooing.”

  “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing,” he said.

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “Your book. Grass of Leaves.” He grinned his delight at surprising her. “A poem called ‘Walt Whitman, an American.’ ” He shook the bag again. “Seeds for the garden. Garden for the seeds.”

  In baggy pants and scuffed shoes, his blond cowlick sticking up, he seemed a boy still. They went into the back yard.

  She’d been watching spring approach tentatively, a few leaves unfurling here, a pale patch of sun there, as if afraid of giving false cheer. Eventually the plants couldn’t help it, and tried their best to make up for other shortcomings in the world. Brilliant lime green shoots made an exuberant fringe along the fence.

  “Look at those wild yellow lilies shouting huzzah at just being alive.”

  He did a little wobbly dance mimicking their movement in the breeze and careening over his turned-in foot. Being with him made the world a shade more innocent, like the doves. She felt his contentment, and hers, on their hands and knees together loosening the soil. Every so often he crawled over to Billy lying under the maple, and petted him.

  “That’s good. He appreciates that,” she said.

  She dug holes with her finger, Harold dropped in the seeds, she covered them up. “Now the land will give comfort,” she said.

  He looked at her with suffering eyes. The defeated slope of his shoulders bore a consuming weight. “Illahee,” he breathed.

  “If there’s anything I believe, Harold, it’s that everything can grow. Nothing can kill the force that splits rocks to let a tiny seedling through.”

  He patted the ground, barely touching it. “The seeds need water.”

  She unfolded herself to get up at the same moment he did. He lurched in her direction, slamming into her shoulder and knocking her off balance. They both fell, sprawled on the ground in a tangle.

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Oof.” She righted herself. “It’s all right. I lose my balance too, lots of times.”

  “You do?”

  “Does your foot pain you?”

  He just grunted.

  “Your ankle?”

  He puckered up his lips to one side. If that meant yes, what could possess him to dance on it?

  “How did it happen?”

  “My father sent his snake spirit out to trip me.”

  “Tell me really.”

  He hung his head. “I fell into a deer trap and snapped my ankle. There was no doctor to fix it.”

  “How long ago?”

  He shrugged. “I was only a boy. In Kispiox.”

  “Didn’t your father take you somewhere? To Fort Rupert?”

  He shook his head. “How come you lose your balance?”

  It was only fair for him to ask.

  “I was in a carriage accident. A razor-happy London surgeon decided my big toe had to be amputated.”

  She took off her shoe and wiggled her other four toes in her stocking. Looking as though he were about to cry, he cupped his toes in both hands and rocked.

  “When we don’t have something, we have to compensate, that’s all. We have to find our balance in other ways.”

  “I’m sorry for you.”

  “What about your forehead?” she asked as delicately as she could.

  He worked the fingers of both hands into the earth as if to anchor himself, and slowly, barely, he shook his head.

  • • •

  She’d been up with Billy all night brushing him gently and reminding him of all the villages they’d seen together, of the feel of moss at Tanu, the smell of the grave house at Kitwancool. His eyes followed her movements until a moth distracted him. Even with her help, Billy had been unable to get up the ladder stairs to the attic bedroom, so she had stayed downstairs in the studio, telling him that she loved him, telling herself that she could manage this. Together they watched the black square of the window lighten to gray.

  It was time. Past time. She’d wanted him to have a full summer, but now, the end of June was all she dared.

  She couldn’t let a veterinarian do it. Impossible to find one on Sunday. It wouldn’t be fair to ask Harold. Horror clamped her like jaws. She’d have to do it herself.

  The Almighty was testing her. Let’s just see how strong you are, He said to Himself with a smirk. Of course to Himself. That’s one thing she could grasp about God—His aloneness.

  She took her handbag and cut through the neighbors’ back yards, crossed the lane, passed Alice’s schoolhouse and went in the back door of her sisters’ house. Upstairs, she opened Father’s bureau drawer. Even now, between his handkerchiefs, its blue-black barrel lay. Next to it, a box of cartridges. She took them both.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  She spun around to see Lizzie half dressed for church, her face white with shock. Emily shoved the gun in her handbag.

  “It’s Billy. Not another day. I have to.”

  “You can’t be serious.”


  “An awful night. I’m taking him to the woods in the pram.”

  “And then what?”

  Then what? She didn’t know.

  “Why don’t you take him to that Indian’s husband?”

  “Jimmy Frank! Of course!”

  If he’d be there. She hadn’t seen Sophie for over a year.

  “How’ll you get the pram up the steps on the ferry?”

  “Drag it, push it, stay below deck, I don’t know.” If she hurried, she could take the nine o’clock and come home on the overnight run.

  “I’ll help. I’ll go with you.”

  “No. I’m going to give him mutton for breakfast. You can help me get him downstairs in a little while.”

  Going back through the yards, she hated herself for waiting so long. The stairs down to the back yard would be excruciating for him. He ate. She was glad of that. When she lifted his rear to help him up, his back legs quivered and collapsed. She waited for Lizzie, who lifted his shoulders while she lifted his hips, and they got him downstairs. Emily brought the pram alongside him. “Backward, so his head’s looking out,” she said. Billy went limp, as if accommodating them, but his front leg caught the handle which started the pram rolling so they had to chase it, carrying him. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

  With a compassionate, worried smile, Lizzie touched Emily’s arm. “The Lord leadeth you beside still waters.”

  “Thank you.” For once she envied Lizzie’s faith.

  Alice rushed into the yard out of breath. “I wasn’t dressed when Lizzie told me. I was hoping you hadn’t left yet.”

  She slowed when she came to the pram, buried her face in Billy’s neck, and may have cried a little, softly, into his long hair. She straightened up.

  “He’s going to look up at you with that sad, knowing look all the way there. Do you want me to go with you?”

  “No, Alice. You’ll miss church.”

  “I’m going with you! Let me get my handbag.”

  “No. I’ll be all right. Thank you both.”

  • • •

  Billy revived a little on the ferry, smelling the sea and opening his mouth to gobble the wind. By the second ferry, he seemed to know he was going to the reserve where there’d be more smells. As a child squirming in church, she’d watched colors from the stained-glass window bathe the floor and pews in rainbow magic. She’d thought heaven must be like that, just swimming in colored light. For Billy, heaven must be swimming in smells—dead fish, pines, cedars, skunk cabbage, seaweed, and people.