The Forest Lover

  “From me, of course.” He slapped his chest.

  “Is that all that happens at potlatches?”

  “No. There are proud speeches, feasting and drinking and drumming. Feathered bodies dancing, stepping lightly on the earth. Ravens that talk like men. Men that dance like ravens. Moving in a trance.” He squinted and leaned toward her, smelling of smoke and buckskin. “Wild things happen.”

  Her imagination soared. “I’d like to see one someday. Maybe to paint it.”

  He puffed out his cheeks. “C’est impossible. Not for white people. Or ladies. They’re against the law.”

  “But you. You’ve seen them.”

  “Business, ma beauté.”

  He leaned toward her, stroking the muskrat delicately for someone used to rough living. He seemed half native to her now, primitive, son of the seasons, a man who knows tribal secrets. She looked at him raptly, and a slow, knowing smile came over his face.

  “You don’t come here just to draw, non?”

  His eyes softened, gleamed, came close, roamed over her face. The pores of his cheeks were deep bronze. He placed his hand on the back of her head and kissed her lightly. He drew back to see her reaction, smiled wryly, and kissed her again, his beard soft, his lips pressing. She resisted. The firmness of his palm on the back of her head released, but she didn’t move away. They sat locked in looking, breathing together.

  This was wild. It surprised her, and didn’t.

  “Can you hear them? The drums?” he whispered.

  She listened, and felt her own heart beat.

  “Once you hear them, you’ll never forget.”

  He leaned her back and their kisses were longer. Fur caressed her arms. He trailed his finger down her neck to her collarbone. His eyes reflected points of light from the fire, a man of forest smells and animal instincts.

  Father’s voice rattled at her, in her. You’d better know what being a woman means, so you won’t be tempted. She jerked away, stood up, reached for her sketching stool and held it in front of her, its legs pointed toward him.

  He burst out laughing. “I see. You are merely a girl in a woman’s body.”

  She set it aside, feeling heat in her cheeks.

  He made a great show of putting his hands behind his back. “I will do nothing.” He patted the pelt beside him. She sat down again.

  “Now I tell you about the poles.”

  She hardly listened. Everything was stirring inside her. “. . . Trunks of cedars carved into animals to represent their clan. . . .” His voice seemed muted. She couldn’t grasp all he said. “. . . Or to tell history.” She watched his hands stroke the muskrat lightly, sensuously, yet that was so opposite to what Father had said about men. For Claude to stroke her face like that . . . She felt the drumming inside her.

  But he was true to his word.

  • • •

  She went home out-and-out mad. At Father. At herself too. After all these years, that awful day when she was fourteen still had a hold on her. Damn that man.

  Untamed. Like a wild Indian, Father had said as she’d sat on the bench in his big gardening shed. He claimed that’s why he did it, to tame her innocent wantonness. Emily, you’d better know what being a woman means, so you won’t be tempted. . . . A man pushes it, hard, and you have to take it in you. He pointed, palm up, right between her legs, and was about to touch below her bone—or so she’d thought. She’d shoved his hand away and clamped shut her legs, couldn’t bear to be there with him, and ran into the house. It had filled her with brutal images for years, spoiled what ought to be beautiful, and now, it still made her act like a silly, frightened girl.

  That night she slept fitfully. Images of Claude on the pelts and feathered bodies dancing in firelight slid through her dream. She dreamt of Father, too, in the gardening shed, thrusting a narrow trowel between her legs. Of Dede, hands on her hips, laying down the law. Ridiculous for you even to consider going north alone. Who do you think you are? I won’t allow it.

  But this wouldn’t be alone, she said back.

  She woke up swearing that she’d get over Father’s crudity once and for all. Where was her gumption? She fed Billy, gathered her drawing things, and they set out.

  How would Claude act after she behaved like a fool with the camp stool? How would she?

  7: Fox

  When she and Billy climbed down the slope to the cove, Claude had a fire going with skewered potatoes roasting on a rack above it, and had spread the otter pelt blanket and other furs.

  “How did you know I’d come back?”

  “You didn’t finish painting.” His mouth formed a teasing grin.

  She grinned back and held out her empty hands.

  “Oh-ho!” He wagged his head.

  She tied Billy to a tree again and sat on the pelts. “I came to ask about totem poles.”

  His bottom lip protruded in a pout.

  “I have a Squamish friend in North Vancouver,” Emily said. “She took me to the cemetery there and showed me a carved figure of a man. I want to know. Are the totem poles like that?”

  “How tall is it?”

  “I’d say ten or twelve feet.”

  He laughed. “See those cedars? Imagine them stripped of branches and carved all the way to the top. Creatures with eyes and beaks and teeth and wings stacked on top of each other staring at you out of the forest.” He spread his arms like wings and bent over her. “Comme ça.”

  “Aren’t they in villages?”

  “Most of them. Some villages have been abandoned, but the poles are still there. You can come upon one suddenly, or you can hear wind moaning—whooh, whooh—like a ghost, and then you know there’s one nearby, and so you creep around like a fox.” He hiked up his shoulders and stepped his hands forward, placing one on her knee. “But even if you know it’s there somewhere, it hits you when you see one. Right there.” His fingers tapped her chest under her collarbone, dangerously close. A vibration shot through her.

  “I want to see them.”

  “They might frighten you.”

  “I want to be frightened.”

  “Oh?” He leaned toward her.

  “I mean I want to see the whole coast, and go up the rivers too. To paint.”

  “Not possible. Not for a woman alone.”

  Yes, but here he was, wind-burned and capable, a man of earthly resources who faced raw wind with a laugh, who lived free, answering only to the pull of the tides. And there was his funny little boat. And what tied her here? Certainly not any heaps of money she’d earn from teaching children. She imagined embarking north with him. Just for the summer. A practical arrangement.

  “Not even possible for”—she worked to remember his words—“une dame courageuse?”

  He laughed at her pronunciation. His amusement made her feel pretty.

  “A fair-weather adventurer. Wait till you learn what rain really is. And mosquitoes with jaws as big as a crocodile’s.”

  He made quick little pinching motions up her arm and neck to her earlobe. Goose bumps rose on her skin.

  “I went to Hitats’uu alone.”

  “Alone you went?”

  “For a whole week. I loved it.”

  “What’s to love in a mean little row of bighouses?”

  “The whole place. And the people. They are what they are. No pretending. I loved how they all live together. How they make what they need. Fine things. Cedar mats, baskets, hammocks.” She thought of the platform in the menstrual hut, so carefully crafted it had made her ache with envy for such love. “Everything so full of feeling.”

  “Maybe it’s you who is full of feeling.” His eyes gleamed. “More than you know.”

  “They live by tradition and in harmony with nature too.”

  “Puh! You see with storybook eyes. You think they laugh at storms? Frostbite? Cougars? You think they smile at the place where they die?”

  He opened a potato for her and laid it on a tin plate. “ Attention. Hot.”

  “I me
an, like you do. Cooking and sleeping outdoors.”

  His bottom lip protruded in a droll way. “I have no choice.”

  “Whatever the reason, they have something we don’t.”

  “We?” He took a bite of potato.

  “The we that live in cities.”

  “And what might that be, ma philosophe?” He grinned, half indulgence, half mockery.

  “They know things about the workings of nature.”

  He pushed out his lips and scowled.

  “And how places can feed us back again.”

  “You’re sure of that now? After one week in a southern village, you know what they’re like in the north?”

  “I know what I saw.” She stroked the pelts in nervousness—the otter so sleek, the mink making her palm tingle.

  “Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl. You think those tribes are all alike? Gitksan, Nisga’a, Mamalilikala. All the same?”

  Those names, so full of mystery, vibrating in his accent. Maybe each one was different. All the more intriguing. “I want to find out. Everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “La Renarde Rouge. Is she big enough for two?”

  “And a four-legged rug?”

  “I could paint the villages where you trade.”

  “You can sleep in a tent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cook over a fire? Live in the rain?”

  “Yes. Yes!” Her splayed fingers moved through the muskrat.

  He scratched behind his ear as if considering.

  “Sleep in furs smelling of north woods and musk,” she said.

  He took a mink and stroked her cheek and throat with it. “It’s warmer when you’re bare against the fur.” His breath came close in quick bursts.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  His lips grazed her skin, kissing. Murmurs of pleasure in exotic words. A brief flutter of tongue-touchings. A tightness and a trembling, a light-headedness too.

  Her imagination sped ahead in confusion. She had to make him stop. Soon. In a minute. He pressed her shoulders, leaning her back, kissing, licking her neck. He shoves it, and you have to take it. The first time rips you open. Stop. Stop now. She pushed his chest a little, firm beneath the soft buckskin.

  “Vixen, you tease me.”

  He opened his arms, and she scrambled to her feet.

  “You go too soon.”

  She untied Billy’s leash and began to climb the slope.

  “You come tomorrow?” he called. “We talk about the north.”

  She had no breath to answer him.

  She dragged herself home in delirious misery. She was not herself. Going up the stoop, she held on to the railing, her legs rubbery.

  That night in her room she stared through the window at a moon like a shaving off a pearl, and buried her fingers in Billy’s shaggy coat. What did she really know about love? Not much. Rushing back to her out of the past, the only other man in her life was Mayo Paddon, the ship’s purser she’d met coming home from her first trip to Hitats’uu, acceptable to Dede and Lizzie because of his fine record of church attendance. Puh! He’d followed her to London, fawning, proposing six times, annoying her, interrupting her painting study. She hadn’t felt a thimbleful of desire, not like she had with her childhood dream boy who knew how to whistle like a killdeer. He had smelled like acorns and sweet hay when she’d nestled in his arms on a white horse as they galloped in the sky to rest in the cup of a crescent moon.

  Maybe Claude was right. Maybe she did see with storybook eyes. Dede told her more times than she could count how immature she was. Still, what if real love was even half as wonderful as that childhood fantasy? How could loving a place even come close? She felt wrapped tight as a bud. What if Father had exaggerated in that brutal telling? What if she’d confused his warning about sex with real love, and she would miss out for life and die a lonely old maid? She’d be a damned fool to let Father still have such power over her.

  Besides love, there was the northland. She had to find out—would he or wouldn’t he take her with him? In the joy of kissing, she’d felt momentarily free, but nothing was really free. She was prepared for that now, a give and take.

  • • •

  This time, she left Billy at home. She walked quickly and stopped at the top of the incline, stunned. The boats were gone. The tent intact, but no boats. He wasn’t there. Her lungs stung with cold brine. She’d said no and no, and now that she might say yes a little, he wasn’t there. She huddled against the tent to stay out of the wind and waited an hour. Two. She smoked four cigarettes, and watched the moving pattern of whitecaps. Wind lifted the feathers on the backs of black gulls and snapped the tent like a lightning crack.

  At dusk his boat chugged into the cove, towing the skiff full of crates. A cry rushed out of her throat. She flung herself toward the water’s edge.

  “Mademoiselle Courageuse!” he called, smiling with all his might as he climbed out of the skiff, dragged it on shore, and bent her head back kissing her, all in one smooth movement. He drew her into the tent. No stories this time. And no furs in the tent. They’d all been sold. Instead, there were stacks of blankets for northern villages. How much longer would he be here?

  He dropped to his knees and rubbed her hands warm, made a nest of blankets, rubbed some more, her arms, her thighs, briskly, his eyes deep and limpid.

  “Why didn’t you come inside the tent to stay warm?”

  “I wanted to see your boat the minute it came. And to show you I’m not afraid of cold up north.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Up north?”

  His eyes told her he knew she was different than she’d been the day before. He yanked off his moleskin shirt. She stared at his shoulders and chest shaped by years of rowing. His hands on her face, her neck, her shoulders urged her to lie back. His face, a tawny moon, came down to her. He whispered in French. She threaded her fingers through his hair. His lips parted hers. He cupped her breast. “Round and full,” he murmured. A quiver ran through her somewhere new, low, deep, and she was overcome by a moist presence. She felt his other hand under her skirt sliding between her knees.

  “Like a salmon swimming up river, no?”

  There will be thrust and tearing and blood. She clamped her legs shut.

  He stopped, waited, kissed her. “Comme ça. Doucement.” The words, his voice, gentle.

  She trusted, relaxed her legs, and opened herself. They rolled together as if at sea until something else stopped her. Not Father. Grimmer than Father. She pushed against Claude’s chest, his hair coarse under her palms.

  “Don’t tease me,” he said huskily.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.” Any second she would cry, right in front of him. She ducked out of the tent and scrambled up the incline. She looked back, hating herself for being wishy-washy.

  He stood at the tent opening, shirtless, hands on his hips, and shouted into the wind, “If you go now, mademoiselle, don’t come back!”

  • • •

  Dumbly, she watched sheets of rain slide down her window the next day. Like liquid glass, she thought. Water poured out of the eaves troughs. Sitting on her bed, she fed dog biscuits to Billy, one at a time, and looked into his loving brown eyes. He’d begun to worship her, but probably only for the treats.

  If you go now, mademoiselle, don’t come back. Mademoiselle—the word he’d said so playfully had turned ugly. He didn’t even say her name. Father might have clamped shut her body, yes, but not her heart. She couldn’t deny the sting of Claude’s last words.

  She tried to become absorbed in painting the cove and camp from her sketches, yet something stopped her each time, just as it had with him. That panic was ridiculous at her age. But now it wasn’t fear of the act of love. It was how the act might make her live, as Mother had, worshiping, a minion to a god, never having a single desire of her own that didn’t fit with Father’s plan. That was the grim thought that had stopped her.

  The day after Father’s brutal telli
ng, when Mother had told her to meet him at James Bay Bridge to walk the last stretch home from work with him, as she always had, she’d refused. She turned silent and grumpy for weeks until Mother demanded to know why.

  “He sits in church like some holy man. Why should he act as if he’s God, because he’s not, Mother. He’s not,” she’d said. She was too shocked and embarrassed to tell her why.

  “You’re a spoiled black crow, Emily. Pecking at him like a crow,” Mother had said, the words coming in shallow, tubercular breaths.

  “He’s not.” Whispered this time, because she knew the repetition was unnecessary.

  Mother’s hurt expression softened, as if she felt a double embarrassment that Emily knew that Father wasn’t God, and that she, his wife, had known it all along, yet lived as though he were. Mother had seen judgment in her eyes for what she saw, and hadn’t countered her. Right then, she’d said to herself that she, Emily Carr, would never live that way with any man. Never live in a house that pretended piety and concealed indecency. Would rather live in a teepee or a burned-out tree trunk than such a house. She’d screamed it to herself. They had stood like statues, face to face, two identical pairs of gray eyes looking at each other, both of them knowing that Mother was a woman in a way that she, Emily, would never be. Two women, both of them waiting for the other to speak, and neither did.

  Would going with Claude mean a life like that? Going where he wanted to go, when he wanted, for his trade, regardless of what she wanted to paint? Still, it would be better than being stuck here only imagining love and all the rest.

  Her pulse beat with urgency as the rain beat on the window. She waited for either one to let up. Neither one did. What would he do if she came back in this downpour? He’d have to take her into the tent. He’d see that she couldn’t be deterred by mere rain, that she was an able woman to travel north.

  She was stronger than Mother. She could still be herself, do what she hungered for. She would not be a shrinking violet, or a servant. Une dame courageuse. She heard the drums within her. She was ready, mind and body. She placed two dots of lavender toilet water on her throat, another between her breasts, and set out for the cove, in her cape, with an umbrella.