She supposed she could pray. Dear God, send me a sign, clear enough that I can understand. Am I a landlady or an artist? If Barbeau was the sign, then why do I still feel like a wet rag? Please don’t let it all be for naught.
No. That was one prayer she’d just have to swallow. It was a disservice to God to put such strains on Him. He had bigger concerns on His mind right now.
• • •
“Read me Leaves of Grass,” Harold pleaded when he’d put away the rake.
He dropped in frequently to do odd jobs—cleaning out the furnace, painting the porch steps, building a bird feeder. She’d read it to him once, not that he couldn’t read it on his own. He just enjoyed the intimacy of being read to. Afterward he started asking for it at every visit.
“When I finish serving the boarders their lunch.”
Harold sat cross-legged on the floor and waited, reading it himself. After the boarders left he handed it to her and said, “Start with ‘Walt Whitman, an American.’ You know, Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”
They shared a cigarette while she began reading there and continued.
“I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers.”
She stopped to think, and looked at him, his eyes dewy, hugging himself, as if he were being filled to bursting. He was too different to be accepted by anyone but another living oddity. She had to pour her love somewhere, or it would dry up as her painting had. Maybe that’s what love was—walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other. The sheen in his eyes told her he absorbed it like a thirsty desert.
• • •
On the morning of November 12, 1918, Emily went down the outside stairs to light the coal furnace, unfolded the newspaper and read, “Armistice Signed, World War Ends.” She whooped through the hallway pounding on tenants’ doors. Soon she heard people outside beating on pots and pans. Lizzie rushed into her apartment, fell into her arms and wept. Emily heated water for tea and let down all the chairs from their pulleys. Tenants who hadn’t spoken to each other for months hugged and huddled around the newspaper, afraid to believe. Alice brought scones. At eleven o’ clock, to represent the official end of the war in Europe the day before, Mr. Pixley stood on a chair and read the newspaper:
“At 5:00 in the morning of November 11, the German delegation at Compiègne signed the armistice, by which the German army is to retreat and surrender its weapons and aircraft, the German navy is to be interned, and the Allied forces are to occupy the Rhineland. By 11:00 a.m., the 1,586th day of the war, all firing stopped.”
Emily imagined Megan’s fiancé climbing out of a trench to stand upright in unaccustomed safety, stunned by silence, marveling that he had survived. Were Fanny and Gibb celebrating? What about Héloïse and Madame Bagot? Or were they too numb?
At Sunday’s supper, Lizzie’s grace was simply a Bible verse. “To every thing there is a season. A time to kill, and a time to heal.” Lizzie looked up after the Amens. “With God’s forgiveness, I’ve found a greater need than missionary work,” she said softly. “After two months of training, I can work as a physical therapist’s aide at the veterans’ hospital. Maybe I can help those poor damaged men.”
Emily saw a yearning for approval in Lizzie’s expression she’d never seen before. She wanted to stand up and cheer, but such overwhelming endorsement might crush Lizzie’s empathetic leanings. “That’s a fine, upright thing to do,” she said, patted Lizzie’s wrist, and held on.
The whole city seemed to crave lightheartedness. There were rousing concerts in the park again. Alice planted tulip, hyacinth, and daffodil bulbs, not just vegetables, and as soon as they bloomed in the spring, Lizzie took pots of them to the veterans’ hospital.
Emily found a new way to earn money. The government offered land to returning soldiers to raise sheep. They’ll need sheep dogs, she reasoned. She could breed them. She bought two females, hired a male for breeding, dispensed with boarders, and rented full apartments. No more boarders eating in her studio. She set up easels, stretched canvases, ordered paint, and waited for it. Meanwhile, puppies upon puppies arrived. Harold was beside himself.
“Don’t get too attached,” she warned. “They’re for profit.”
She took him with her to the pet shop to advertise her first litter. Smelling of animal urine and feed, the shop was a riot of barks and peeps and screeches. Harold went from cage to cage imitating all the sounds. A baby Capuchin monkey with a wrinkled black Kewpie face and a gray spurt of fluff on top of her head reached her hand out of the cage toward him.
“Aw,” he said, and turned to Emily.
The monkey blinked her apple green eyes and squealed, “Woo.”
“You know how I’m a sucker for cowlicks,” she said, grinning at his, but thinking that another creature to feed other than for profit was self-indulgent extravagance.
Prudence be hanged. She’d been prudent for the whole war. She’d worn prudence like a hair shirt.
“Will you take a sheep dog pup for that monk?” she asked the proprietor, and the deal was struck.
They walked home with Woo on a leash. By the end of the afternoon Woo had unscrewed the salt shaker and sprayed a white rain over the kitchen end of the studio, leapt onto the bullfinch cage on the back porch, and terrorized Susie, huddled in the far corner of her cage, her tail wrapped tightly around her. Woo pinched Tantrum into knowing his place in the scheme of things. Eventually Harold got them to scuffle in play like two kittens, and Woo grew accustomed to the radius of chain in a monkey-proofed corner where the quieter discovery of curiosities close at hand sufficed.
• • •
Lizzie brought over a pan of hot biscuits the next morning, and immediately Woo jumped on her. Lizzie screamed, “Wild beast,” and jerked the biscuits away. One fell and Woo snatched it. “A monkey? Honestly, Millie, what next, an elephant?”
“Look. She likes it.” Woo ate the biscuit, and her little hands picked up the crumbs. “See? She’s a proper monk.”
“Fauvism and now Darwinism! This is carrying your modernisms too far.”
They laughed. The world, healing itself at last, like new skin after a burn, was too tender for hostility, even a shred.
33: Arbutus
One afternoon Harold arrived hugging to his chest a shoe box bound with yards of dirty string. “Please please come to the beach,” he said, his cowlick trembling with urgency. “Now.”
“As soon as I finish.” She gave the mixture in the bucket one last stir and then poured it into pans to harden into cakes of soap, two years’ worth at least, cheap.
He put the box on the mantel and sat on the floor to play with the animals. He loved Woo best, as strange and mysterious a creature as he was. Carefully, he took her tiny hand in his and played “this little piggy” with her thin fingers, speaking it to her softly. Watching all his movements, her eyes close together as if in a perpetual study of something curious, Woo gave Harold more rapt attention than he probably ever got from humans. As a result, he visited more, and in her secret self, Emily knew that was what she’d hoped for.
With Tantrum on one leash and Woo on another, they walked along the Dallas Road cliffs edged with graceful arbutus trees. On the beach, Harold began to gather driftwood. “We have to have a fire.”
“But it’s July!”
She knew she shouldn’t indulge him playing Indian. He screwed up his face and she realized that denying him might push him to some precipice.
“All right. We’ll have a fire.”
She lit a cigarette and sat leaning against a drift log, loving the slender trunks of arbutus trees, their paper-thin bark in russet and mauve, except where it had peeled away and revealed the tree’s raw, saffron and lime green core.
“Are you ready?” Harold shouted. “I’ve bee
n asking and asking.”
In a haze, she turned toward him and was instantly alerted by his air of seriousness, sitting cross-legged near the fire. “I’m sorry. Yes, I’m ready.”
With great ceremony he untied the string on the shoe box and wrapped it around his wrist. He pulled out a wrinkled paper and flattened it against his thigh. Woo grabbed for it, and Emily shortened her rope so she couldn’t reach.
Harold’s cheek twitched. He straightened his back and read.
“Harold Cook a Canadian. I write myself. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book was born September 14, 1885. My parents were Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook. Dead now. They were missionaries. I Harold Cook have one sister Ruth Cook. We lived in villages with Indians. Kispiox Kitwanga Kitsegukla Hagwelget. With Eagle, Bear, Raven who makes strong talk.”
His story at last. She braced herself. His blue eyes flecked with gold looked up to see if she was listening. For the three and a half years she’d known him he’d only told her scraps of his past and then his face would cloud over and he’d stop. What had boiled or melted inside to let him begin? The death of his parents? The loss of the Kispiox painting? The end of the war?
“I Harold Cook author of this book played with Gitksan boys but my sister Ruth Cook did not. They sent her back to Victoria to live with my aunt Mrs. Flora Cook. I played with boys around the totem poles racing games and hiding games and hunting games. Kitwanga and Kispiox we fished in the Skeena River. Kispiox and Kitsegukla we fished in lakes and heard loons. We climbed trees. We made fires. We made raven calls and owl whooings. We crawl in caves. In Kispiox Tuuns and Muldo and Haaydzims taught me to make bows and arrows for hunting.”
He read not like he talked, but like he walked, in fits and starts, conquering rattling fears with every breath. His account told of hunting squirrels with his Gitksan friends.
“He just stops he won’t move won’t run. Eyes all escaired. My arrow went in. I petted his fur but he doesn’t breathe. Haaydzims taught me how to skin it so I saved the fur and tail. I brought it to Mrs. Martha Cook hanging by its feet from a branch the Indian way. If you were there you could see how clean the arrow hole the Indian way. Mrs. Martha Cook screamed and Mr. Luke Cook whipped the Indian out of me.”
More trouble hid behind his strangeness than she’d imagined.
He described nightly prayers on bent knees around a Bible from which his father read verses exhorting against savagery and killing. Harold had kept the squirrel skin hidden under his bed and took it out at night to pet. When his mother discovered it by its smell, the screaming began again.
“So I am put on my knees and read to over and over Thou shalt not kill.”
He looked up at her, expectant, his leg trembling, his fractured heart bare.
“I want to hear more,” she whispered.
Harold searched for another scrap from the box and held it out for her to read. His jerky handwriting dipped down the page.
“No. You read,” she said.
He cleared his throat.
“Harold Cook a Canadian. Haste on with me. I Harold Cook author of this book was the only white boy at Lejac Indian Residential School. Boys brought there kicking from far away. Months of cryings little boys big boys for missing their mamas and fathers and grandparents and uncles and aunties. Mr. Luke Cook and Mrs. Martha Cook worked at the school. They taught Tsimshian boys English and praying. When Muldo and Tuuns say Tsimshian words Mr. Luke Cook beat them with his whip. They still speak Tsimshian so they were tooken gone somewhere. I don’t see them for days. When they come back they don’t speak anything. They have hurt marks all over. We had to count off in rows but they don’t know it so I tell Muldo to say seven and Tuuns to say eleven. Then Muldo call Tuuns eleven. He thought it was his new name. Mrs. Martha Cook cut their hair. They screamed and kicked her. She tied their arms and legs around chairs to cut their hair. Then they looked like me.”
Emily felt sick.
He turned over the paper, took a big breath that raised his chest. She passed him the cigarette and he inhaled, bolstering himself.
“Mrs. Martha Cook teach them Onward Christian Soldiers and A Mighty Fortress is Our God. When a bell rang we march in rows to the dining room. They had to sing it before they could lift a fork. When they didn’t sing it Mr. Luke Cook made me sing it first. Then they fed me and so then the boys sang. Mrs. Martha Cook fed them but they eat with their hands. They know Mrs. Martha Cook hated that.
“One day I didn’t sing it. Mr. Luke Cook told me to sing it. I didn’t sing it. He broke a chair and held up the leg of it. Sing it he said. I didn’t sing it. He beat me in my face with it. Blood sprayed.”
Harold’s forehead twisted with the memory. Fear of what he’d revealed shone in his eyes.
“Oh, Harold, no. Your own father?”
Harold hung his head and nodded.
“What a terrible thing. I’m so sorry.”
He was a crossover child, an embarrassment to his parents. Not normal. Not loved. Fragile. Rebellious. Brave. A messenger of wounds ignored. Covered up. Across the fire, his eyes possessed a haunted luster. In them she saw some part of herself. Lines squirmed across his forehead. Any second he would crack if she didn’t do something. She put Woo in his lap, gathered them both in her arms and cradled his head against her bosom, crooning the comfort sounds she’d heard Sophie use.
She knew now, rocking him. It all became plain to her. Her art did not touch the core, did not illuminate the pain of Harold’s friends and hundreds like them. She’d still been seeing with storybook eyes. Her paintings pictured only the glories of the villages, what Harold wanted to remember. That’s why he fed on them so, to save himself. But were they true?
She would go to the reserve. She would take her painting things. She would not quail to see what was there. She would see with Harold’s eyes. She would paint with the juice of his heart. All this time she’d been waiting for some sign when it was here all along. In Harold.
“Is it all right, what I wrote?” he said against her bosom.
“Yes, Harold. It’s brave and beautiful. It makes strong talk.”
34: Salmon
Emily smelled a rank stew of fish offal and human waste as she walked the plank path of the reserve. With people from Kitsilano Point living here now, more garbage lay strewn on the beach waiting for the tide. In all the years she’d been coming here, the conditions of the village hadn’t improved. Rusty buckets lying at doorways, rags flapping on bushes, barefoot children, lean, leprous dogs prowling for food—the picture was the same, only it struck her more profoundly now.
Sophie’s house leaned drunkenly on its rotting drift log foundation. Emily peeked inside. “Yoo-hoo. Sophie? Anybody here?”
No one answered. She knocked on Mrs. Johnson’s door.
“She’s probably fishing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “It’s the first day of the Salmon Moon.”
“Do you know where?”
She hesitated, considering. “The river beyond the graveyard. The dog salmon have come.”
“Thank you.”
The war’s end must have mellowed even the Queen of Grump.
Canoes and gas boats bobbed in the inlet. Emily greeted deaf old Charlie Dan, Margaret Dan’s father-in-law, and wondered if as a boy he had been beaten for speaking Squamish. Working in a line of people pulling in a net, Margaret Dan gave her a quick nod.
Sophie stood upstream on a boulder surrounded by shallows, gaff pole in hand, sleeves pushed up. Emily walked toward her. Pale fish with wide vertical stripes darted below the water’s surface or jumped out entirely. Less fortunate ones caught between rocks lay gashed, their entrails spilling.
On the bank, a girl coiled a rope of rushes into a spiral. Her dark hair shone iridescent—the ghost of Annie Marie. Emily looked for her twin. Nowhere.
“Hello,” Emily said. She noticed her crossed eyes. “You’re Emmie. Do you remember me—Emily?”
“Ye-es.” Her voice started low, then rose.
&n
bsp; “You have some big salmon here, Emmie.”
“Mama get them.”
“They’re fine-looking fish.”
Actually some of them looked bizarre, their upper lips hooked over the lower like a parrot’s beak, and long, pointed teeth stuck out their closed mouths.
The girl swished the rushes in the air to wave away flies. Emily felt an invisible cord connecting her to the child.
Sophie extended the long gaff pole out into the current and held still for a moment. Her arms had grown ropy, which made them interesting. She yanked the pole toward her, impaling a fish on the large barbed hook. In a quick movement she flung it backward onto the rocks, and saw her.
“Em’ly!” Her smile brimmed with gladness. “See? Emmie grew up strong.” She raised her voice triumphantly over the rushing water. “Emmie, this is Em’ly come to see us.”
Emily stepped onto the boulder to speak quietly. “Where’s Molly?”
“Died of life. A year ago.”
“Why didn’t you write me?”
Sophie shook her head slowly. “Some spirit made it happen. Some spirit doesn’t like me.” Bewilderment sagged her features.
“Spirit? A Catholic spirit or an animal spirit?”
A brief smile crossed Sophie’s face at the question. “Squamish believe in a lot of things.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
Sophie let a fighting salmon swim by.
“When Molly was sick, I didn’t sleep good. No storm that night. No wind. Nothing. Everything still. Then a big crack like a branch breaking off a tree in a storm, but no storm. In the morning, she was dead.”
“What’s that have to do with spirits?”
“So I go to the graveyard, and Ancestor was all broke and lying on the ground.”