As she began to paint, she saw rhythm in the tree’s repeated forms, in the upward reach of the trunk furrows, its bare hanging withes reaching down, its laden boughs tangled with those of other trees. In one sweep she united the branches into a mantle of cedars. Her swinging arm became a swoop of greenery, boughs from adjacent trees breathing into each other, supporting each other, all one.
Loving everything terrifically, humming, half singing “Breathe on Me, Breath of God,” she felt unutterably close to the Creator, as though she were an instrument of His presence. Someday, when some God-quality in her was fully in accord with the God surrounding her, she would achieve that one true painting. Maybe it would happen when, like an Indian living in his totem spirit, becoming the thing he held in awe, she saw no difference between herself and the Creator. Right before her eyes she saw something: The more she entered into the life of the tree, as one breath moving, in and out like the tide, one heart-drum beating, the more alive her work became. Oh, the joy of it!
37: Frog
Emily sat on the caravan step studying her work from the week before. There were small private miracles, a successful branch, a patch of open space real and true, but the whole of it, the way to express the forest, was elusive still.
She heard women’s voices. Lizzie’s and Alice’s! Good God! Harold was somewhere off in the woods, apt to burst forth into wild drumming out of pure glee. Which one should she protect from the other?
Lizzie strode toward her and Alice scurried after, nose aimed down to study the path.
“Surprise!” they said together.
“How did you find me?”
“The area attendant pointed the way, and then we heard you singing,” Alice said.
“Nobody else could be that off-key and enjoy it so much,” Lizzie said.
“We brought supper, Lizzie’s corned beef.” Alice set her satchel on the picnic table.
“And a cabbage. And tomatoes from your garden, if they’re not all squashed,” Lizzie said. “We have plates too.”
“Family Sunday supper, a tradition still,” Emily said.
“And you forgot your cigarette things.” Alice reached into her satchel and presented Emily’s tin box of cigarette makings.
“Alleluia! Thank you.” Emily gave a little bow. “I’ve turned this place inside out searching for that.”
Lizzie set down her bags and looked around, waving away mosquitoes. They set about preparing the meal and inquiring how she was living, curious about every detail of washing and cooking. “But how do you, you know, relieve yourself?” Lizzie asked.
“What do you think they did in Galilee?” She motioned off into the woods.
“Don’t you get depressed out here?” Lizzie asked, her voice thin as a pencil line. “It’s so—shady.”
“No. Everything is growing. Stay out here long enough and you will too. Remember Isaiah? ‘The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad.’ The frog song at night rivals any choir.”
“You don’t get scared? Or lonely?”
“Yes, I do, but I take comfort in knowing I’m not the only one out here.” She showed them the drawing she’d done at home of the imaginary forest with eyes.
“That gives me the creeps,” Alice said.
“Good. It does me too. The forest is a refuge for a million living things.”
“Precisely.” Lizzie snickered, then swatted her arm.
Emily handed her the mosquito oil. “Or I can roll you a cigarette if you prefer. That works too.” Lizzie wrinkled her nose in disgust, which satisfied Emily immensely. “Think of it as one of nature’s paradoxes, that a creature so delicate, just a whisper, can be so wicked.”
“What about your painting? How’s it going?”
Alice asked! Bless her. Alice asked.
“Better than ever. I think I’m beginning to glimpse how to see ideas instead of mere things.”
That seemed to spark genuine interest. She laid out twenty new oils on paper on the picnic table. Her sisters looked at them without so much as one negative comment, though no gushing praise either. What had come over them? Had the Great Popover Refusal convinced them of something?
“It’s nice you’re not doing Indian things now,” Lizzie said.
“Yes. Nice.” Let Lizzie have her reason for thinking that. She had her own. “I’m painting life itself, and the spirit of life as I see it.”
Thunder growled, swelled, blasted, and Harold’s drum imitated it.
“What was that?” Lizzie asked.
Emily rolled a cigarette, and looked around, like Claude had done, looking for spies. “The Apocalypse?”
Chickadees stopped their rippling whistle, and a squirrel scrambled under a log. Lightning crackled close enough to vibrate her collarbone. In the stillness following, frogs sang out their excitement, some in basso profundo, some in falsetto. Big drops made their way through the canopy of foliage. “Isn’t it grand, the trees refreshing themselves, one branch offering drink to the one below it?”
“But our picnic,” Alice wailed.
“It won’t last. It’s only a summer shower.”
She hoped that was all it was. Then Harold might take shelter somewhere else and only send her a drumbeat to tell her he was all right.
From under the canvas awning they watched the forest darken, the green begin to glow. A diamond drop quivered at the tip of each maple leaf. Rain falling on ferns made them bounce.
“Weather keeps you passionate,” Emily said. “No one stuffs the landscape into your eyes here. You have to want it enough to be cold or wet or itchy.”
Lizzie’s arm shot out to silence her. Only her eyes moved. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.
Harold’s drum echoed, followed by a whoop. Emily stifled a laugh. She should probably tell her, but Lizzie’s panicked expression was priceless and she wanted to enjoy it a moment longer. Slowly Lizzie turned her head to scan the forest.
Harold whooped again and came reeling between trees, stumbling over ferns, hugging his drum and shoe box. He stopped just short of the awning when he saw her sisters, shoved the shoe box onto dry ground, and tried to hide the drum behind his back. Water dripped from his jaw.
Emily checked Lizzie’s reaction—eyebrows knit, mouth agape, hand to her chest. She pulled Harold under the awning and put the shoe box in the trailer.
“Harold, these are my sisters, Alice and Lizzie.”
“Your drum!” Alice said.
Emily knew they had assumed, whenever they’d seen him helping in her garden or apartment building, that he was a hired laborer, and she’d done nothing to correct the misconception. “Harold is a dear friend of mine. His parents were missionaries on the Skeena, Lizzie. He’s keeping me company for a while.”
Lizzie’s posture became rigid.
Slowly, enjoying the delicious moment, Emily pointed through the trees to her tent. “His camp is over there. He’s working on an important project. He’s been a strong influence on my return to serious work, for which I’m mightily grateful. Dry off and come inside, Harold. We’re about to eat.”
They all crowded into the steamy caravan, and Joseph in his cage sprayed seeds over Alice’s food. Rain smacked the tin roof in sharp clicks, trickled down the trailer sides and made gullies around the campsite. “Like Noah’s ark, eh?” Emily said.
“Actually quite cozy,” Lizzie said, peering out the open door. “Harold, are you also working in the missionary fields?”
In her own way, she was trying.
“No.”
“Your parents must have done a world of good bringing the Word of God to the aborigines. Tell us about it, what they did.”
“Made them sing church songs and stop dancing.”
“Yes, and what else?”
“Mean things. Take boys from families. Whip the Indian out of them. I don’t want to talk about it.” He stared down at his feet. “You shall not take things from me,” he murmured.
Lizzie drew back her chin.
&nbs
p; “You are an artist too, then?” Alice said, always the peacemaker.
“Artist. Em’ly zanartist,” the parrot muttered. “I’d rather starve.”
“To each his own, Joseph,” Emily said.
“No. I’m an author,” Harold blurted.
Emily felt a sigh skitter through her. That’s how it starts, with an urge, an attempt, and a declaration.
“That’s wonderful. What do you write about?” Alice asked.
Harold shrank back against the wall. “A song of myself and Indian friends. Harold Cook a Canadian.”
Alice leaned toward Harold, her face full of teacherly interest. “Is there anything I could read that you wrote?”
He looked confused. It wasn’t likely that anyone had ever asked him. The next step, going public with those dear human pages, was too much for him. He turned to Emily. “You read. Read Leaves of Grass.”
“All right.” Now wasn’t that a change from Lizzie’s Sunday scripture reading.
“Stop this day,” Harold prompted.
“And night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,” she said, hoping it would be so.
“You shall possess the good of the earth and sun,” Harold went on from memory, rocking to the drone of rain and croaking of frogs.
“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead . . .
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”
He smiled, smug in his surprise.
Emily nodded her praise. That ought to gentle them into Whitman. She thumbed through the pages. What to read? I sing the body electric. No, no bodies. I hear and behold God in every object. No. Better not. It might launch a protest from Lizzie that “God’s in Heaven where He belongs. He only made trees on the third day. He’s not in them.” Maybe something more subtle since they’d been so congenial. She looked for the passage where Whitman said that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars and that a tree-toad is a chef d’oeuvre for the highest, but her glance fell on words appropriate to rain, and she read aloud.
“Smile O voluptuous cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of the departed sunset—earth of the mountains misty-topt! . . .
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake! . . .
Smile, for your lover comes.”
Lizzie leapt up. “Look, the rain stopped,” she said crisply. We’d better make a dash to the station.” She gathered up her things on the picnic table.
Emily tapped her fingers on her chin. Was it Whitman or Harold that made them anxious to beat a retreat?
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Alice said. “I brought your mail.”
In the middle of the stack, Emily spotted a letter with Barbeau above the return address. A tidal wave slammed against her chest.
“Alice! It’s from Marius Barbeau. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t read the handwriting.”
Emily ripped it open. Her eyes raced ahead of her voice.
“The National Museum in connection with the National Gallery of Canada would be pleased to have you select sixty paintings from which we would choose a lesser number for a major exhibition, Canadian West Coast Art, Native and Modern, to open at the National Gallery in Ottawa on December 2, 1927. Afterward, it will move to the Art Gallery of Toronto, and the Art Association of Montreal.”
She exploded in a whoop and tossed the letter to Harold, then snatched it back with trembling hands to read the rest.
“A Canadian national art ought to be inclusive. Therefore, the purpose of the exhibition is to mingle for the first time the art of Canadian West Coast tribes with that of modern artists so as to analyze their relationship to one another. We would also appreciate it if you could send a sampling of your hooked rugs and pottery. Mr. Eric Brown, representing the National Gallery, will contact you next month with the details.”
She grasped Woo by her hairy arms, swung her onto the picnic table and danced with her. Harold joined in too, stumbling and drumming. Frogs croaked in wild abandon, beside themselves with joy. For her sake, she knew. For her. Lizzie gaped with wide eyes, as if the earth had become dislodged in space. Alice clapped her hands in front of her chin. Emily let Joseph out of his cage. “Artist, artist,” she prompted.
“Em’ly zanartist,” Joseph squawked.
He shrieked it louder and Harold yelled it with him, twirling. “Emily is an artist.”
38: Aspen
Emily wedged a hammer claw behind a horizontal board in her back yard fence, and pried. It resisted at first, then came off smoothly, with one long creak. She put it on the stack heaped up beside her. At every squeak, it seemed she was loosening one more plank that had nailed her down.
Lizzie came through the gate carrying a basket of apples. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“Prying. Just like you.”
A long satisfying creak loosened another good one.
“Without that fence, Tantrum will run across the lane and tear up Alice’s garden.”
“I’m only taking off the top ones. It’s claustrophobic anyway.” She let the hammer fall to the dirt. “Do you have any idea how expensive it is to buy frames for sixty paintings? I have no choice, so thanks for the apples, but let me work.”
At first there was Lizzie’s typical wincing expression, but when Emily glanced up again, her mouth had softened and she had set down her basket. “I thought I knew all there was to know about my sister and her dreams of being an artist. But I didn’t. I didn’t know how utterly consuming it is for you.”
An hour later, Emily was sanding slats under the maple when Alice and Lizzie marched toward her. Lord help me, she thought.
“We think you should go,” Lizzie said.
“Go where?”
“To Ottawa. To the exhibit.”
She let out a scoffing laugh. “I’m straightening out nails to re-use them and you think I should take a pleasure trip?”
“Yes, we do.” Alice handed her a piece of paper.
She read Alice’s shaky schoolmarm printing.
Cancellation of Note
I hereby declare Emily Carr free of debt from the mortgage loan entered into June 1, 1913, and I cancel the remaining balance of $3,138.80.
• • •
At the bottom, her signature, Alice Carr, in wiggly letters.
Emily had to sit down. “Why?”
“Getting the money back wouldn’t mean as much to me as not having the payment once a month would mean to you.”
“This isn’t just any old art exhibit,” Lizzie said. Her mouth, usually held in a tight line, was smiling prettily.
Emily shook her head in amazement. She felt her stony resentment over years of their carping criticism, with hardly a shred of validation, bust with a pop.
Lizzie’s smile disappeared into a firm look. “I’ll take care of the animals and the tenants. Now will you go?”
She gazed unfocused at utter strangers, women from another land, until Alice waved away a fly and Emily noticed the stub of her finger. “The curtains and now this. Are you sure?”
Their simultaneous energetic nods made her laugh.
“Will they know what’s in me by these Indian paintings nobody likes?”
Lizzie hesitated, as though she had that worry too.
“You won’t know unless you go,” Alice said.
Emily blew her nose. They were so utterly sincere. “I don’t know how to thank you. My own sisters and I don’t know how.”
“Thank us by leaving that fence alone!” Lizzie said.
• • •
For the next six months, she rode on sheer momentum, pored over her sketchbooks and watercolor studies from native sites, and painted new oils. She was at her easel by six every morning. It meant a return to painting totem p
oles, but the trees had been there hundreds of years. They’d wait a hundred more for her. Canvases stacked up so she could barely move around her studio.
“You live in an Indian village,” Harold said as he came in after working all morning building a shipping crate with spacers so the new paintings could dry en route. Bewildered by all that was still left to do, he turned slowly in circles and tipped over onto the floor, the task almost too much for him. “I can’t—”
“Yes you can, Harold. You’re doing fine. Any monkey can paint a picture,” she told him, “but it takes real genius to crate.”
His body jerked in uncontainable pride. “Swanaskxw.”
• • •
Watching a bleak winter sky from the train window, a wide, first class window, since Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery, had sent her the ticket, she ate peanut butter sandwiches and apples from home while her head swam with misgivings. The responsibility of being worthy of her sisters’ support was an entirely new feeling, one she imagined a man might have, the obligation to do well at the office or shop in order to fill the plates at home. She smiled, remembering how Alice and Lizzie had waved scarves at the dock as the ferry pulled way, and Harold did a few joy hops, waving madly with both arms. When the train climbed the Rockies, her anxiety eased in the thrill of their snowy peaks, but when it crossed the stubble of endless prairies, nervousness jiggled in the pit of her stomach.
She read a booklet Barbeau had sent her about the other exhibitors, some Group of Seven she’d never heard of, who held that the nation required a new artistic style born of the artist’s communion with Canada’s vast and varied landscape. These painters had tramped the wilderness together, shared artistic insights around campfires, defended each other against the press, as a brotherhood. All men. All younger. All easterners. All successful. Where did she fit in?