“Tell her thank you. I’ll sleep in the mission house.”
The auntie scowled when Rena translated.
Damn. She’d made a selfish mistake.
“Sure not a missionary wife?” Rena asked.
Good Lord. A missionary’s wife, like Dede and Lizzie’s praying ladies stirring tea with Lizzie’s sacred disciple spoons, or wearing out the parlor carpet on their knees. She never knew when or where she’d trip over one. The mere thought of the missionary families’ Sunday School sprawling into every room of the house, and Lizzie and Dede’s double fury when she refused to teach a class, prickled her skin. That she hadn’t come to Hitats’uu for a missionary purpose inflamed Dede’s provincial propriety screaming against her “degrading notion to live with heathen aborigines in a siwash village. And for what purpose? Some unfathomable, unnecessary search for the authentic BC. Rubbish. It’s right under our roof.”
Emily heard herself laugh, throaty, deep, and loud. “No. Not a missionary’s wife. That’s one thing I’m sure of.”
“Klee Wyck,” the auntie said. Others repeated it, grinning.
“What does that mean?” Emily asked.
“Laughing One,” Rena said. “You.”
Emily laughed again to please them.
2: Cedar
In the morning, with her sketch sack slung over her shoulder, she took a walk far down the beach in the mist. Breathing in sea tang, she felt like her mouth and throat were coated with brine. She looked back at the forest—more dense and tangled and full of mystery than the forested part of Beacon Hill Park at home. How could she ever paint it? No art school taught how to paint such immense, paralyzing magnificence.
She felt about to burst. She’d walked too far to make it back to the mission house. She hurried into the forest, hid behind a cedar trunk, lifted her long skirt and petticoat, and squatted. Dede would have been appalled. Well and good. Dede fancied herself above human urges.
Thunder cracked the sky and startled her. Rain worked its way through the canopy of boughs. The watercolors in her pad would be ruined. She went deeper into the forest for denser cover and saw a small wooden house painted with a curved symbol surrounded by figures of children frolicking. A hide hung at the entrance.
“Hello,” she called, but heard only the rippling of chickadees. She went in. In the middle of the packed earthen floor, a fire pit caught rain from the smoke hole. Against the back wall a cedar platform was finely chiseled in a herringbone pattern, the edge fluted vertically. Someone had taken great care. She passed her hand over the subtle texture. Only love could make of such a simple need an elegant thing.
Wash Mary had mentioned that Indian women came to such places during their time. An aroma seemed familiar—coppery, fishy, a smell like hers but blended with cedar, moist ashes, and rain. Maybe sacred rituals known only to Nootka women were performed here. How could she act the same with them after she’d intruded in their private place?
As soon as the rain stopped, she went back to the beach. Three small boys sidled toward her, giggling. One had scabs under his nose. None of them had shoes. There wasn’t anything that hit her so hard as a barefoot child in the cold. The smallest boy, trailing a rope of seaweed, wore only a shirt. “A-B-C-D-E,” he sang in rising notes, looking to see if she heard. The others laughed and poked him. He dropped the seaweed and ran.
“F-G,” she sang out, laughing at his brown fanny bouncing.
A menagerie of canoes hewn from cedar logs were beached along the tide line, each one with a tall, graceful prow painted imaginatively. A sardonic wolf face in black and white and red seemed all teeth and a human eye. A proud Thunderbird with blue and yellow wings spread across the side made the whole canoe into a bird about to take flight. A green sea serpent with red eyes and a long red tongue looked about to lick up waves.
She’d loved Indian canoes since childhood when she cheered at the tribal canoe races held every year in Victoria on the Queen’s birthday. She’d always flailed her arms and hopped with excitement at the race of the klootchmen—native women in print dresses, their ten spear-shaped paddles dipping in unison, driving the craft forward, as fierce as men. Dede had always smacked her bottom and said, “Stand still and act like a lady.”
Now, finally, she could paint them. She made a zigzag course toward the canoes, looking for the best angle, but stopped. There was Lulu on the ground leaning against a rock. Would Lulu guess that she’d been to the hut?
Lulu looked up and saw her. “You like our canoes?”
Relieved, she said, “They’re beautiful. This place is beautiful.”
Lulu nodded. “Right here, good place for looking and listening. Being real still here feed us back again.”
“Yes. Just what I need.” Emily sat next to her.
“In Victoria too—nice places?”
What would Lulu think of the new Provincial Parliament Building, all domes and arches plunked down on what was once forest? Every inch was stone. Not a scrap of wood on it. And what about carriages, rickshaws, bicycles, streetcars with clanging bells? Businessmen in top hats on horseback? Cattle herded through town to Goodacre’s foul-smelling slaughterhouse? Derelict hulks stuck in mud along the waterfront? Saloons on every block? Chinese opium dens?
“Different.”
“Does the Songhees lady wash your clothes now?”
“No. I do it myself. So do my sisters.”
“How many people you live with?”
“No one.”
“Not your family?”
“My sisters live in Victoria. I live in Vancouver. It’s sixty miles away from Victoria, on the mainland.”
Lulu scowled. “No one live with you?”
“A bird. He keeps me from being lonely,” she said to answer Lulu’s puzzlement, but how much could a bird do? The irony of it—she had four sisters, yet loneliness still gouged deep.
“I like the way you live, though. Many families together. Nobody lonely. Nobody an outsider.”
“Yes,” Lulu said, an exhalation more than speech. She was bending shreds of cedar bark to break their stiffness.
“That smells nice. What are you making?”
“Diapers for my sister’s baby. And for hisyuu. I pound it. It get real soft.”
“Hisyuu?”
“When we feel the call of the moon and go to a woman’s hut.”
Emily gulped. “You mean a little house where you just sit?”
“No. Not just sit. The old women teach us things.”
“You stay there the whole time?”
“We can’t do things some times.”
“Like what?”
“Fishing season we can’t step across streams or walk in the sea. Salmon get mad.”
Lulu’s solemn, unblinking eyes told her she believed in fish fury. A concept so curious, yet so appealing—fish and people interacting. Salmon in a quivering silver frenzy, leaping harum-scarum, tails flapping, eyes bulging, on the verge of speech.
“Our time to hear birds and breezes. Feel day and night. The blood go into hisyuu. We burn it there. Ashes go back into earth. Hishuk ts’awaak.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Everything is one.”
She mulled over the idea, and wrote it on her drawing pad.
“Your English is so much better now.”
“I learn at the cannery in Ucluelet. English, Chinese, Japanese. All words together at the cutting table.” Lulu giggled, and her hands flew in circles near her ears. “But Chinook everybody understand. We talk and talk.”
“What did you do on those call-of-the-moon days when you worked at the cannery?”
Maybe that was too personal. Lulu’s face clouded and she stopped bending the bark.
“Sometimes, I went to work. One time I stayed in the hut. When I went back to work, a Chinese girl was in my place. So I don’t work there more.”
“I’m sorry.”
Some dark thought pulled in Lulu’s lips. “What do Nuu’chah’nulth women in Victor
ia those times?”
Emily shook her head and said softly, “I don’t know.”
Anguish threaded Lulu’s voice. “I know it’s not Christian, the woman’s huts. I told you because you knew, no missionaries, and you came. No one here is Christian same as white people. When the missionaries go, no one does the Our Father prayer. Don’t tell the mission ladies.”
“No, Lulu. I won’t. It doesn’t matter.”
But something else did. She had to find that hut again.
• • •
In the afternoon she walked behind the village in the tangle of salal bushes edging the forest to search for it. Stalwart gray-brown trunks of Douglas-fir soared two hundred and fifty feet and crowded against white pines sending out their aroma on the breeze. Her favorite, sturdy western red cedar, sheltered the droopy-topped western hemlock whose feathery tips of branches hung like graceful dancers’ fingers. She inhaled deeply, hugging herself, wanting to fill her lungs with forest scents.
A crow cawed and landed on a large, square wooden box wedged between the boughs and trunk of a cedar. What was that doing there? Something man-made that high in a tree? She sidestepped through a salmonberry thicket to get a better look, and came into a soggy clearing smelling of algae and humus. Seven cedars without lower branches had boxes high against their trunks. Some had disintegrated and only a few planks remained in place.
Beneath one of them, a carved animal mask and paddle lay in the moss, neatly placed. Bones lay scattered on the ground—human bones grown green with algae. They must have fallen out of the boxes. Shock lashed through her. Slugs crawled over a green skull. She shuddered. How could they just leave it there? Seedlings had split the boxes, nourished by what remained in them. This must be a sacred place too, and here she was, her feet sinking into spongy moss right in the midst of ribs and thigh bones. How could something so repellent be sacred?
Wind whistled, or was it spirits? She thought of the handwritten paper she’d found in the mission house, Sermon for March 17, 1906. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The Nootka were not poor in spirit. Lulu running off the dogs was full of spirit. This place vibrated with spirits. She felt surrounded by them peering at her through the foliage, breathing down her neck.
Maybe she should leave and not tell anyone she’d seen this. Slowly, she backed away, but a powerful urge to paint here stopped her. Slowly, she sat on a moss-covered log. Other than dampness seeping through her skirt, nothing happened. Slowly, she opened her watercolor box. It creaked, too loud against the hush.
She reached into her sketch sack for her watercolor book. Rena’s bannock bread spilled out. Instantly four huge crows cawed and swooped down to fight over it. Others dove at her, flapping their wings against her face. She didn’t belong here. Crows must be protectors of this secret place.
They devoured the bread, belted out curses that she had no more, and disappeared back into the forest. Fine thanks she got.
They were only birds.
She opened her watercolor book and saw on the first page a woodland study she’d done months earlier in England. Her breath drained out in a thin stream. There was no backbone to that yew on the page. It was poor in spirit, without any earthly mystery, a ho-hum composition meaning nothing. Technique—interpretation—subject matter—all three had eluded her. She had fished five years and caught nothing.
She tore out the page. Strip by strip, she shredded the yew.
She stared at the shorn, tapering trunks before her, the grim boxes, the bones. She couldn’t paint them as she had painted trees in England, meek little puffs of greenery without connection to the people who lived among them. The algae-covered skull sucked in her stare. Did she dare use a lime green that bright? An unreal color, yet those bones were real. They’d belonged to a man or woman loved by people who had let her stay and paint, by people who went about their lives today not knowing what she was about to do. Her hand squeezed the brush.
The terrible sacred privacy of the place repelled her intent. Without painting a stroke, she retreated.
• • •
After a short walk she saw the roof of the hut above some high-bush cranberry. She listened for any noise, but heard only the croaking of frogs, so she crept around the bushes to study the symbol painted on the wall. Not quite oval. More pear-shaped, upside down, outlined in black with concentric bands in red following its inner perimeter. She sucked in her breath, and teetered a moment in disbelief. A womb?
To put that most private thing on a building! Her sisters would be horrified. They never even whispered about women’s privacies. Only Wash Mary did, happily, with congratulations, when Emily had hidden her first soiled underpants in the laundry. She’d never told anyone Wash Mary’s reaction, held it as secret as a buried seed, and felt a part of her belonged to a different world.
She entered the hut, and imagined Lulu there, her full skirt pulled up and wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl, beating the cedar filaments into fluff, her bare legs, still girlish, stretched out wide, a dark, wet smear between them, and the old women teaching her some truth of womanhood.
She knelt. Slowly she ran her hands over the platform, its refined texture and fluted edge a pleasure to her fingertips. The same person who built a square coffin for his mother and hauled her up to the treetops might have crafted this. She stepped outside, hugging her sketch sack. The walls, hewn by a husband, the corners tightly slotted so no wind could chill, the paintings of children born and children to come, the man entering in his imagination a woman’s private place, the womb itself, in order to paint it—everything about the hut told the woman she was loved. How could she make a drawing speak of such things?
Wanting to touch something intimately native, to have it seep into her pores to feed her art and her life, she placed her palm on the womb.
3: Lady Fern
“I think it’s a menstrual hut,” Emily said, spreading out drawings and watercolors on a table in the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club for Jessica to see before class. “That symbol may be a womb.”
“Oh, my God. And you went in?”
“Not when anyone was there.”
“This girl. She let you draw her there?”
“No. I drew her in a bighouse. Putting her here is my imagination, but these of the village and canoes I did right as I found them.”
“What about this?”
“The place of the dead? From memory. It was too morbid to sit and paint right there as if I were painting petunias.”
“But you liked it.”
“Yes.”
She’d felt pleased with her drawing of Lulu coming out of the hut, but it was such a private place, the coffin trees too, and here she was, showing them like postcards. She quickly stuffed them back into her portfolio when she saw two women bringing in the tea service. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “These were only for you to see.”
Emily wanted to pose Jessica on the platform. Slender, with red hair and a graceful bearing, she’d be elegant, but she knew from their days at art school in San Francisco that Jessica wanted to get the most out of each session, yet never practiced on her own. It exasperated her. She wouldn’t make Jessica give up the class time.
She posed Edwina instead, seated, ankles crossed. “This week, try not to scratch so tightly,” she said as she adjusted the drape of Edwina’s skirt. “On her skirt, let your stroke run loose as the wind.” She doubted they could. Freedom was hard to achieve.
The studio door banged against the wall. Emily turned just as Priscilla Hamilton, madam president, sashayed in, head high, hand extended. Late, as usual. Everyone stopped working to twitter compliments on Priscilla’s huge, flamingo-pink feathered hat, such a hat as would frighten a goat.
“I bought it in a wee shop on Regent Street where the Queen shops. I wore it to the Ascot races with a pretty little summer frock the same color. We were seated right near the Royal Enclosure. Shall I tell you what they wore?”
Emily noticed Jessica’s head bent over her d
rawing, the only one working.
“No!” Emily bellowed. “A disrespect to ignore the model. Stop dithering and get back to what we’re here for.”
She let them work on their own until mistakes began to appear. “You have to define the elbow, not let it slide down the arm and melt away,” she told Priscilla.
Priscilla’s head popped up. The flamingo on her head jiggled, as though it were about to flap skyward.
“You may gaze at my work all you want, but I do not care to hear your criticisms.”
“If I’m not mistaken, that’s what you hired me for.”
Emily turned to someone else. “Work the line from your forearm instead of your fingers. Working from your fingers makes your drawing too tight.”
“I happen to like tight work.”
Emily glimpsed Priscilla’s mouth twitch upward. Sweet Jesus! Was this some conspiracy? Hold your tongue, she told herself. These butterflies with sketch pads are paying your rent.
“Can you tell me please what’s wrong with this hand?”
All eyes shot across to Jessica Howard. Emily couldn’t control her smug smile. Jessica, the outsider, an American. Teacups clinked in saucers.
“Look at your own hand, Jessica. How long are the fingers in relation to the palm?”
Jessica examined her hand, then her drawing, and looked up bright-eyed. “I made the fingers too short, didn’t I?”
“You’ll get it eventually. It’s a matter of training your eye to measure one part against another.”
All afternoon she itched to get home to paint for herself, but Jessica asked to go with her to pick out a sketching site for the next outdoor lesson. She was the only person in Vancouver she could call a friend. Taking a walk with someone didn’t happen often. She said yes.
They followed the plank boardwalk of West Hastings Street past the packing houses and Klondike outfitters to get to the wharves. Emily rolled a cigarette from her tobacco tin and blew an agitated puff skyward.
“Dilettantes. What do they expect? Only the goo of praise?”