A noisy puff of exasperation escaped Emily’s mouth. Sophie’s reasoning was illogical, but anything she said would undermine Sophie’s slender hold on the cause she’d invented, or accepted. She wondered what it meant when one lost his ancestor—or when a whole community did. She felt trapped by the rigors of native belief.
Emily looked back at the child, her brown legs stretched out beyond the wet hem of her dress, poking bark strands into the coil, absorbed. “She’s pretty. I bet you looked like her when you were a little girl. She reminds me of Annie Marie.”
“Me too,” Sophie said. “She’ll be good at making baskets by and by, but not as good as Annie.”
The thought of it—Sophie teaching each girl, the sorrow of starting over, yet the hopefulness.
If she had taken Molly, the original Emmie, to live with her as Sophie had offered, would she be alive now? She couldn’t have taught her basket making, but she would have gone to Alice’s kindergarten, then to school. They would have had happy times, Alice and Lizzie too. Both houses would have been filled with laughter and singing.
But who was she to think that she, Emily Carr, white Canadian, would have been the superior, cleaner, more alert mother, able to prevent what happened? The wrongness of her own thinking slapped her in the face.
“Did you get another Billy dog?” Sophie asked.
“I got two girl dogs to have puppies to sell. They’re nice but they’re not like Billy, not like an old friend. It’s a business.”
“Business? You don’t paint?”
“A little. But I need to paint deeper. Otherwise I fail.”
“Fail?” The word cut the air. “You go with me to the graveyard.”
Emily’s eyes stung and she shrank inside. “I’m sorry.”
Years of effort had left Sophie spent. The whites of her eyes were threaded with red, the plum-colored pupils veiled by a misty white film.
Young men wading in the river laid rocks in a row. They were about the age Tommy would be now. How proud Sophie would have been to see her son among them.
“What are they doing?” Emily asked.
“Making a tide wall. When the tide goes out, the fish can’t go back out. Easy to catch.”
“Easy? They don’t have a chance!”
They were tragic creatures, the instinct to leave something behind making them thrash upstream against all odds to unleash their eggs or sperm in one grand moment of fulfillment. She understood that urge. But then, spent with the effort, they died.
“Is Jimmy fishing?”
“No. He’s loading wood on ships. A strike is why. Twenty-seven cents an hour. Indian pay. Some days he works eighteen hours. Some days he waits all day and nothing.” Sophie poised her gaff and yanked it into another salmon.
“Mama, look!” Emmie ran toward them holding out her coil.
“That’s good, Emmie. You’re getting better. Don’t forget to count.” Sophie stepped onto the bank. “Enough fish. We’ll get more tomorrow and Emmie will learn how to smoke them.”
They put the fish into Sophie’s big basket and Emmie’s smaller one. Sophie placed the woven cedar tumpline across her forehead to support the basket against the small of her back. Emmie did the same with hers, a miniature of her mother.
On the way home, they picked pink swamp roses to scatter on the children’s graves. Emmie lingered at the gate, amused by a spider in a web, but Sophie padded softly to Tommy’s new headstone. Emily followed. Brilliant white in the sun, the stone had shiny flecks that caught the light like tiny fish scales. In loving memory, Tommy Frank 1902–1908. Sophie knelt and traced the cross with her fingertips.
“I was so happy when I had the money. When the graveman saw I had it, he said the price was more. When I had it again, he said he want to do stones for white people first. I only tell you this. Not Margaret Dan.” She patted the stone, sat back on her heels, and let some rose petals fall. “No matter. Now Tommy has a Christian headstone and so now I sleep more easy.”
It did matter. As much as Harold’s friends being prohibited from speaking their language mattered. But if Sophie slept easier, she had to keep her lips fastened with a safety pin.
They paused at Annie Marie’s grave, half hidden by a vine snaking across it. Emily pulled it off and scattered her petals.
“Now I show you Molly’s grave,” Sophie said. “Next to get a stone.”
Molly’s rough wooden cross bore the inscription, Molly Frank 1913–1919. Sophie set down her basket next to it and scattered the rest of her petals. Emily regarded each thing before her—those pathetic dates scratched unevenly, the cross tilted, shriveled lady ferns from Sophie’s last visit, fish heads with hooked snouts and jagged teeth spilling out of Sophie’s basket, the swamp petals. This was what she should paint if she wanted to paint the truth of native life.
Her hand went to the watercolor pad in her canvas sack, but she could not bring it out. She could not make a painting of Sophie’s pain.
“Now that Jimmy is working, it won’t be so hard to buy the other stones.” Emily hated herself for saying an improbability so cheerfully.
“No. He uses his money for drink. One time I took it for headstones and he beat me. Now I get it by myself.”
“Oh, Sophie, no!” It was hard to believe. Jimmy had been so kind to her with Billy.
“Don’t think bad, Em’ly. It’s just the way.”
Emily placed her palm on the earth of Molly’s grave. “It’s a hard thing being a woman.”
“Christian woman,” Sophie corrected.
“Squamish Christian woman,” Emily said.
They walked past the sunken spot where the ancestor figure used to be, now only a few decayed scraps of wood.
“See? Ancestor’s all broke and gone.” Sophie walked to the fence and gazed beyond the graves at the sea. “Other Indian babies sometimes live. White women’s babies almost always do. I must be bad.”
“No, Sophie. You’re not bad.”
Sophie turned to her with hard, wet eyes. “Then tell me why my babies die.”
It would be cruel to say they died because she didn’t take them to a white doctor. She imagined Sophie praying to God or Ancestor or Jesus or Mother Mary, or some private spirit, alternating in confusion or desperation, making the rounds, fearing Raven or God or that Kak-woman, stealer of children.
“I can’t, Sophie.”
As they walked back along the beach, Emmie splashed through ivory foam. “Mama, how does the water know how far to come?”
“It just knows, like trees know when to stop reaching up. A spirit tells each wave. Each tree. Everything.”
Sophie studied the ground as they walked.
“What are you looking for?” Emily asked.
“Nice shells. To tell me of sins, so at confession I’ll tell Father John every one. If I forget one, I go to hell, he says.” She brushed off sand from a shell. “Then I can’t see my babies.”
“Sarah told me once they go to the sunset.”
“She meant heaven. Bad people go to hell.” A flicker of playfulness passed her lips. “Father John says.”
“Has Father John or the church given you any comfort?”
Sophie squeezed one eye closed and left the other open, as if in hard concentration. “Sometimes.”
“Do you know about Dzunukwa?” Emily asked. “A Kwakiutl story woman who lives in the woods and steals children?”
“Like Kaklaitl?”
“Yes, but sometimes she brings treasures too. Good and bad, all part of one thing.”
“That’s just an Indian story.”
She had to be careful. “Maybe church is like that. Good and bad.”
Sophie shrugged, watching Emmie slap her feet down in shallow water.
“You talk about spirit. I think we all go where spirits gather,” Emily said. “Good or bad, with or without church. Your own spirit in you will naturally lead you to your babies.”
Hope lifted Sophie’s cheeks. “What about yours?”
&
nbsp; “I’m not sure I’ve found one yet. I keep searching. I hope it’s a cedar tree. For a while I thought Killerwhale was my spirit, because I saw whales just as I was deciding to paint all the totem poles. Later I thought so because he dives deep and is gone a long time, but I saw one dead on a beach and it stank, just like any other dead animal.”
“Like salmon,” Sophie said. “Dying to give birth.”
35: Woo
Emily opened the window to the back yard and saw Harold reeling from side to side, stacking driftwood he’d gathered. His voluntary acts of devotion always moved her. His damaged ankle and foot made him stumble and he fell over the handle of the wheelbarrow, upsetting it and spilling the driftwood over him.
“Thank you, Harold. That’s thoughtful of you. Come inside.”
He fed the breeding griffons, smaller and cheaper to feed than sheep dogs, and then he came upstairs. He looked at the drawing she was working on.
“It’s only an imaginary forest. It doesn’t have any life.” She propped up her old drawing of Lulu and the menstrual hut against a stack of books. Maybe thinking of Lulu saying, All is one, might help her to understand forests.
Harold ran through Joseph’s repertoire and took Woo off her short chain in her monkey-proof corner for his ritual wiggling of her toes. He promised to watch so she wouldn’t get into things.
“Today I am forty years old,” he announced.
“Happy birthday, Harold. I didn’t know.” He seemed without age to her. She put a bowl of custard before him. “We’ll have to imagine this as a cake.”
“How old are you?”
The question caught her. She’d tried not to notice the onset of tiredness. She glanced at her drawing of Lulu, who probably had children of her own now. “Let’s see. It’s 1925. Fifty-few, I suppose. Sometimes I feel like an old drift log buffeted about and driven ashore to dry up and rot. I look thick as a log too.”
Harold tipped his head, puzzling over that. “I think you look like an Indian.” His eyes had all the sincerity of a child.
He was right. Added weight had given her an Indian body.
“Why, thank you. I don’t know when I’ve had a finer compliment.”
He smiled in a satisfied way and sucked custard from his spoon.
That was the outer vessel. She still had to work on the inner. “What do you think being an Indian means?” she asked.
“It means you live free. Dance when you want to. Eat and sleep when you want to.”
“There was a time when I thought that too, but they’re anything but free. Going to jail for potlatching isn’t being free. Being beaten for speaking their language isn’t either. What else does it mean?”
“It means you see spirits in birds, trees, wind, animals.”
“How?”
“The look of things. Muldo said he sees eyes in the forest.”
In the forest sketch she was working on, she saw an opening between trees, and drew in it an almond-shaped totem eye with a large black disk as a pupil, lurking. In another place whorls of foliage could be a raven’s head if she added a beady eye and shaped the greenery into a beak. She held it up. “Like that?”
Custard plopped off his spoon. “Yes.”
She finished the drawing and propped it next to Lulu’s.
“ ‘Walt Whitman, an American’?” he asked.
She opened to a passage they both liked, and read.
“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they’re so placid and self contained.
I stand and look at them long and long . . .
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.”
The buzzer startled them. Emily opened the door.
A thin man wearing a rose-colored homespun jacket and wool scarf stood in the doorway, smiling. “I hope you remember me. Marius Barbeau?” He turned his felt hat in his hands. “I visited you—”
“At the turn of the century.” Time cut sharp since Harold had made her think about birthdays.
He laughed. “Not that long ago!”
“Well then, during the war.”
He didn’t look older. His long hair was still brown, bushy above his ears, his ruddy skin textured like an overripe grapefruit. He still had that irrepressible smile. And here she was, in her hair net and waistless homemade dress. Old Mrs. Saggy Socks.
“I bought some paintings,” he said.
“Yes, you did.” The euphoria sparked again, the hope she’d tried to keep alive by ignoring calendars. Don’t be fooled the second time, she warned herself. “And so you came again to stir up some hope I’ve packed up and basemented.”
“The time wasn’t ripe before. There weren’t any exhibitions during the war. When the Parliament Building burned, the legislature met in the museum. The museum staff barely held on. Have you been painting?”
She let him in. “This is Harold Cook,” she said. “Mr. Barbeau. He works for a museum in Ottawa.”
“For the National Museum now.”
“And that’s Woo,” she added. “Mr. Barbeau has been to the Skeena, Harold.” Harold raised his head and fastened a stare on Barbeau. “He’s the man who bought the paintings of Kispiox and Kitsegukla.” Harold drew in like a snail. “Harold grew up at Kispiox. At the mission.”
“Cook?” Barbeau said. “Luke Cook? Was he your father?”
Harold nodded and snapped his head down toward Woo.
“He had quite a reputation among the Tsimshian.”
Harold started “this little piggy” roughly with Woo’s toes.
Barbeau’s gaze roamed the walls, enthusiasm spreading across his face. “Just as I remembered them.” His eyebrows lifted. “What’s this? Not aboriginal pottery?”
“No. I made them.”
“The designs are—”
“Modeled after Squamish baskets and ethnographic diagrams.” She steeled herself for criticism for appropriating the designs.
“They’re lively and ingenious. A Dzunukwa feast dish! I can’t understand why I didn’t notice them before. The power of your paintings, I suppose. Do you sell them?”
“Not anymore. I’ve stopped making them.”
“Why?”
“A question of impurity of purpose. Using native designs. Pots are different than paintings. Painting is for understanding something. Pots were just for income.”
“Tremendous! Paintings and pottery, both from native themes.”
“And rugs. For me.” She pointed to his feet. Eagle from two perspectives, his head split and laid flat. “I learned rug braiding from a Squamish friend.”
“Do you have more?”
“Yes.”
“And more paintings?”
“I only paint for myself. Sundays. Some Sundays. For a couple hours.” She caught a hint of reprimand in his expression. “There’s too much pain in exhibiting. Victoria’s an artistic backwater half a century behind the rest of the world.”
“Yes. I quite agree. Antiquated ideas about art. If I might say so, you’re not painting for the people of Victoria.”
“It’s taken me years to realize that.”
“I don’t believe you have. You’d be painting if you understood that.” He lowered his voice. “May I see more? I’ve thought about them all this time.”
“Then what took you so long?”
He drew back his chin.
“Forgive me.” She waved away her comment. “The basement’s bulging with them.” She took the key from the fork-and-spoon drawer. “They’re not all native subjects. I haven’t been back north.”
“But you must go. Before it’s all gone.”
Harold’s head popped up, his eyes blazing. He started to ask Barbeau something, but stopped himself.
Barbeau followed her downstairs to the back porch. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Pixley’s underwear hanging on the line. Rats!
In a few minutes Harold came down and helped her uncover and dust off canvases. He struggled up the stairs with a large one, a potlatch welcome f
igure, and set it right in front of Barbeau. “It’s better to see them outside,” Harold said.
One by one he brought up dozens of paintings. He propped the ones from the Queen Charlotte Islands against bushes and between sword ferns so greenery surrounded them like forest, sparkling in after-a-rain brilliance. He leaned the Skeena ones on the brick pottery kiln. All the ones with houses—Tanu, Alert Bay, Mimkwamlis, Guyasdoms—he lined up along the fence to make a panorama of one big healthy village, a mythical place alive with eyes and eyes and eyes.
“Ah! This is how they’d look in a gallery,” Barbeau said.
She winked at Harold and he winked back and did a few uncontrollable hops, his face purple as a pansy from his exertions. “Ever noticed how there’s always laundry hanging in the villages?” she asked.
Barbeau chuckled and looked at each painting from a distance and up close, fanning himself with his hat.
“What I want to convey is the character of the animal, whether it’s menacing or dignified or sprightly or shy, and the character of the man carving it too. I want to go beneath bark or fur or scales to understand the essence of the natural form as the carver did.”
“You do, you do. Your interpretations are penetrating.”
He chose Kispiox: Totem of the Bear and the Moon, and two others. Harold’s smile vanished. His eyes took on a look of injured confusion.
What was she to do? She was pulled in both directions. Barbeau talked but his words were a blur of sound. Harold sat cross-legged in front of each of the three paintings in turn, yanking up tufts of grass, and murmuring, “I look at them long and long.”
Barbeau regarded him curiously for a moment, then turned to Emily. “With your permission, I’d like to bring your work to the attention of Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery in Ottawa.”
“What have you been waiting for?”
“For this nationalist movement to build momentum.”
“And is it?”
“Yes, now that the war’s over and our men have seen a larger world. The country is beginning to recognize and shape its full identity, unique in the world, and landscape plays a big part in that. Your art makes a fine contribution.”