The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  “So what’d you do?”

  “It flew away, but the foot fell into my hand.” A muscle in Alice’s chin quivered.

  “At least it wasn’t a child.”

  Alice’s right hand slid over her damaged left one. “That’s not the point. That bird was damaged. Any other bird could see that. Imperfect creatures are shunned.” Her voice rose, shrill but soft. “She’ll probably never get a mate.” Her eyes, moist now, asked for understanding.

  Emily put her hand over Alice’s. She’d never guessed. Even nearing forty, Alice was hoping for love. The mutilation of her finger made that hope less likely. To Alice, one small spot of ugliness was enough to kill her chance of marriage.

  She felt choked with love and sadness. Of all the sisters, Alice was the pretty one—her eyes golden brown as a hazelnut, her face colored like a damask rose and crowned by luxuriant auburn hair. She knew that lemon yellow was Alice’s favorite color, that Lily of the Valley was her preferred talcum powder, even that Alice slept on her right side, but this, Alice’s hope and disappointment still so raw, she had not known.

  What could she say? She had her own lost hope, had tried to bury it, and all that was left was a shadowy loneliness that made her wonder things at night. Did Claude ever think of her? Camping alone night after night, did he ever feel the bite of solitude? Did he ever roast a potato on the fire and remember how naturally he’d said, “Attention. Hot,” as though they’d known each other for years? Did he wish he’d stayed in camp just one more night to give her another chance?

  She stood behind Alice and rubbed her neck and shoulders. “We start this life and we’ve got, most of us, all that we need. Then circumstance or accident robs us—a finger or a toe or a friend or a dream—and we go on, and maybe we even learn something. Loss or no loss, we go on.”

  Alice waved off Emily’s hands and shook out her shoulders. “Lizzie’s the preacher in the family. The role doesn’t suit you.”

  “We go on. I think I learned that from Sophie.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “A Squamish woman I took those clothes to. You talk about loss? Sophie’s lost six children. Six, and she still breathes.”

  Alice winced. “She mustn’t have taken care of them.”

  “It’s not that, because it happens to many native women. They die of white diseases, Alice. They die because they live exposed to the elements.”

  “Don’t be taken in.”

  “She’s solid, like a cedar.”

  “You don’t see them realistically.”

  “I see them as people, imperfect as we all are, but real.”

  “You see them as figures out of Longfellow. You see everything that way.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Your ideal Indian. There’s a lot you miss, Millie. Your romanticism blinds you. None of your paintings show them dirty or drunk or lying on the street.”

  “What good would that do, for them? Don’t they already have enough people seeing them that way? I refuse to join that horde. I may not understand things about them, but what I see, I love.”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “I know. You drummed it into me in bed at night when we were girls. ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water . . .’ ” Alice put on a mock-serious face, extended her arm, palm down, and moved it left to right.

  Grinning, Emily made a tent of her hands. ‘. . . Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.’ ”

  “ ‘Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis . . .’ ” Alice gazed up to her fingers encircling an imaginary moon above her head.

  They burst into laughter. “See, Alice? Seeing with storybook eyes is good for something.”

  • • •

  They left Skagway hoping to escape the rain, and arrived in Sitka harbor nestled in the V of mountains.

  “A spanking fine day, eh?” Emily said. “That sky! Pure cerulean blue.”

  Along the dock, fishing boats and canoes rocked against pilings reeking of creosote. Emily breathed in and exhaled in a big, satisfying puff. “Take a gulp of adventure.”

  Kerchiefed Tlingit women squatted along the road and leaned against warehouses to sell their goods—bowls of berries, carved spoons, beaded skin bags and mittens, animal-teeth necklaces, rattles made of deer hooves.

  “Did you see these, Millie?” Alice stopped at a display of miniature wooden canoes painted in red and turquoise and black. “How darling. How much?”

  “Two dollar.” The woman looked at Alice’s feet.

  “Too much. I like, but too much. Maybe I come back.” Alice lingered. “Maybe I not find anything else and I come back.”

  Emily cringed and stole a glance at the seller, whose wide bronze face showed no reaction even while she leaned toward the seller next to her and said in perfect English, “It’s the ones with shiny shoes that bargain most.”

  Mortified, Emily pulled Alice away.

  A young man sat on a blanket behind a single flat, open-backed drum, about twenty inches across. Deerskin, his sign said. He held it toward her as she crouched to get a closer view. It was painted with an eagle shown from two perspectives, the bird’s body and head in profile with one fierce eye, and the wings spread equally to the sides, as if seen from the front. He handed her a drum mallet. When she struck it on the bird’s chest, a deep boom resonated, the vibration traveling up her arm.

  “Did you make this?” Emily asked.

  “My father.”

  “Tell him it’s very fine.” She reached for her money. “Tell him I will feel honored to own it.”

  His pleased look stayed with her as she and Alice walked across town to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Michael, a blue-gray clapboard with an onion dome and cupola. The dim interior smelled of incense and melting wax. She examined a row of ornate icons depicting The Last Supper—sad faces and downcast eyes painted flatly on yellowed ivory above torsos draped in tarnished silver. Positively medieval.

  “It’s like we stepped into Poland or Russia,” Alice said.

  “Sophie would love it. ‘Very Christian,’ she’d say, and kiss her fingertip and dare to touch a disciple’s foot.”

  Alice gave her a wry look. “Do I detect a note of judgment?”

  “No. Just sympathy.”

  A mass was in progress. The parishioners were mostly Tlingits, but they sang in some ancient Slavic tongue.

  “What could those sounds possibly mean to them?” Emily whispered. “Their songs should imitate wind or ravens.”

  “Sh.”

  She held the drum by its back crosspieces, raised the mallet, and struck the stretched hide at the eagle’s chest. A deep resonant tone went out in waves. Heads turned toward her. Alice grabbed the mallet and hurried her outside.

  “You’re incorrigible, Millie. It’s embarrassing being with you.”

  Emily laughed. “Just imagine what those people are going to remember right before they fall asleep tonight.”

  • • •

  They checked into a hotel, sent for their bags from the steamer office, and Emily asked if there was a native community nearby. The proprietor directed them out Katlian Street along Sitka Channel to the Tlingit village.

  Rockweed and alkaline tidal deposits gave off a potent smell. Clouds scudded swiftly, letting bright sunlight through one minute, leaving cold shade the next. They stopped at the edge of the village and peered through tall rice grass that caught the sunlight like polished swords. There weren’t any traditional bighouses like Hitats’uu’s. The place was more like Sophie’s reserve, with separate houses. One had a cormorant painted under the gable. Only one.

  “It’s so dreary and poor,” Alice said.

  “There aren’t any totem poles.” She couldn’t understand it. Claude said there would be poles everywhere in the north.

  “What do you think those red flannel rags hanging on that rack are for?”

  “They’re salmon filets. Very thin. I’ve seen them at Hitats’uu and at Sophie’s reserve.”

  The sun came ou
t and shone right through them, illuminating them like red-orange flames and showing striations in the flesh.

  Beyond fishnets strung on willows, she saw beached canoes and dories. “Maybe those canoes have creatures painted on them,” Emily said. “Come on, a little closer.”

  “No. It stinks here,” Alice said.

  A woman stepped out of a doorway, sauntering in their direction with a slow, hip-rolling gait.

  “Let’s leave,” Alice said and retreated.

  Emily followed. Had Claude only told her stories she wanted to hear? She shook her head slowly. “I can’t understand why there aren’t any totem poles.”

  • • •

  Morning fog was lifting as they walked beyond the town in the direction opposite the Tlingit village. While Emily stopped to sketch a wooden ore sluice, Alice strolled ahead. In a few minutes she hurried back and tugged Emily’s arm.

  “Stop what you’re doing. There’s something here you’ll think is worth the whole trip.”

  Around a bend and hidden by spruce trees, a totem pole stood right there, not twenty feet from them.

  “Whooh! God Almighty!”

  A bear, a man holding a fish, a bird, and other creatures she couldn’t identify sat atop one another, all painted in shiny red, bright turquoise, white, gray, and black.

  “I knew there had to be,” Emily said, looking up its length.

  “Gaudy, eh?” Alice said.

  “Granted, but the inventiveness.”

  “Lizzie would call them graven images.”

  Alice pointed to a sign announcing Totem Pole Walk, explaining that Haida and Tlingit poles had been removed from their villages on islands and the mainland, repaired, repainted, and moved to this government park.

  They entered an alley of spruce with poles at regular intervals. The next was more strange than the first. The bottom creature, whatever it was, had black eyes, but not like the eyes on Claude’s boat. These eyes had lids, like human eyes.

  “It’s grotesque,” Alice said.

  “Maybe the notions of ugliness and beauty we’re used to don’t apply here. Maybe we have to grow a little.”

  Alice cleared her throat and tipped her head. “Over there.”

  A middle-aged white man was sitting before an easel. Emily and Alice exchanged glances and walked toward him.

  He touched the brim of his felt hat. “Afternoon.”

  Alice returned a greeting. His canvas was nearly finished, a composition of three poles, but only one stood in front of him.

  “That’s fine draftsmanship,” Emily said.

  “My sister is an artist too,” Alice said.

  He nodded an acknowledgment. “Ted Richardson, from Minneapolis.”

  “Do you always paint Indian things?” Alice asked.

  It sounded like criticism. Alice’s crisp way could be taken wrong. She probably only meant to keep him talking for her sake.

  “Poles mostly. There’s a big market for native motifs. I’ve been coming here every summer for twenty years.”

  “Here? This same park?” Emily asked.

  “Not here always. Sometimes to the interior, or to islands.”

  “How do you know where to go?” Emily asked.

  “Indians will guide anybody for a price. Money talks. The old ways are fading. They know what gold is. One chief sold his father’s pole for gold. They won’t last, these old poles.”

  “Where are there more?” Emily asked.

  “Up the Nass and Skeena Rivers, you’ll find Tsimshian bands. Haida are mainly on the Queen Charlotte Islands. And Tlingit in Alaska.”

  “What’s that on top?” Alice asked, pointing to the actual pole he was painting. “Is that a derby?”

  “Yes. To signify a white man. It’s a shame pole. A chief found a Boston man starving, brought him home, and his daughter nursed him. The man repaid him by teaching him how to gamble. He won all the Indian’s furs, then took off with the daughter.”

  Good Lord! Emily hoped Claude didn’t do things like that.

  “That’s awful,” Alice said. “They don’t worship these carvings, then?”

  “No. They just represent powerful ancestors that they identify with.”

  “Where do you sell your work?” Emily asked.

  “A gallery in New York takes as much as I can turn out.”

  Outside of England and San Francisco, she didn’t know anyone who made a living by painting. What’s more, he was painting totem poles!

  “Are you working here tomorrow? Could I join you?”

  “Yes. My pleasure.”

  Safely out of hearing, Alice asked, “Was his painting good?”

  “Good composition.”

  “He wasn’t painting what was in front of him, though. He moved them all together.”

  “But he arranged those three poles nicely—the dominant one up close showing only the two lowest figures on it, the two other poles farther away to show their height.”

  Alice shook her hands. “But on the real pole the man wearing a derby wasn’t standing on the bear. He was way at the top. That might mean something.”

  It pleased her that Alice cared. “Hm. Maybe changing it is going too far.”

  • • •

  She brought lunch for Ted the next morning in case he might be tempted to go back into town in the middle of the day.

  “Which one do you want to paint?” he asked.

  “All of them.” She grinned. “I want to stay here the rest of the summer.”

  A slight scowl wormed its way across his forehead.

  “But I can’t, so tell me everything you know in one fell swoop, and then we’ll paint.”

  He turned to the first pole. “You can tell the difference between Tlingit and Haida. This one is a Tlingit house post, which means it was in or on a house, so it’s not as tall. Each figure is separated from the ones above and below it by a groove, and the forms are rounded.” They walked past another and stopped. “Here the forms are intertwined without a horizontal groove.”

  A beaver’s stretched tongue lay on the forehead of a bird beneath it, and some creature’s legs were coming out a bear’s ear.

  “Ingenious. Haida?”

  “Yes. You’ve got it. Haida poles are more massive, taller. More sharply edged, and unpainted.”

  She saw that the animals were stretched or compressed. The carvers had divided space in proportion to the tapering width, not according to the relative size of the real animal. A beaver could be as large as a whale, a bear smaller than a raven. A beak could be larger than the bird’s body, or the angle of a wolf’s eyes could be slanted to look wicked. Carvers must have chuckled at the liberties they took. But they were taking liberties with the animals’ forms, in the first act of creation. That was different from the liberties Ted had taken in reordering them on the pole.

  “Do you know what all the animals are?” she asked.

  “Yes. You’ll catch on to traditional characteristics the more you see. Two teeth for a beaver. Hooked beak for an eagle. Straight beak for a raven. Short snout and round ears for a bear.”

  She was swept away by their depictive power and ingenuity. The more she learned about them, the less bizarre they seemed.

  “Each one seems greater than the last one.”

  “Chiefs competed to build their reputations by the impressiveness of their poles.” He cast a sideways glance at her. “Competition thrives here.”

  If only Sophie could see them. They’d make her feel proud and strong.

  “Of course, you can’t get a true picture from these poles in the park,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “The colors are inaccurate. That’s white man’s bright manufactured paint. Tlingit colors were more subtle to begin with, and they were allowed to weather naturally.”

  “How did they make their paint?”

  “They ground minerals into powder and mixed it with chewed salmon eggs as a binding medium. Black is made by burning red ochre from an iron-rich sp
ring near Ketchikan. The rust red is from a cinnabar deposit at Yakutat Cave. The turquoise from the clay of Kruzof Island. The greenish copper from Copper River.”

  She imagined Tlingit families loving the pole-to-come enough to travel great distances in canoes to get the minerals, transporting the powders in painted skin pouches cradled in hands that knew their worth. The thought made her inexpressibly happy.

  Ted scratched his bushy sideburn. “Which one do you want to paint?”

  “Why not that diving killer whale? I like the way it’s balanced on its nose.”

  They moved their equipment in front of it and Ted identified the forms—the bottom, most important figure first, a stocky eagle. Above it a whale dove. The dorsal fin, shaped like a tongue, was an added extension of wood sticking out of its back. Above its tail a wolf crouched, then a frog, then a man with a cormorant on his head. She liked that mix of human and animal.

  The pole had a subtle interior upward line connecting and defining the main shapes. Ted hadn’t told her that. He hadn’t seen it. On his painting of the day before, he’d broken the line to place the figures in a different order. She felt the violation for a different reason than Alice had. For the carver’s sake, she would paint this pole exactly as she saw it.

  She watched Ted dab his brushes in Chinese red, turquoise green, Payne’s gray, straight from the tube. Maybe that was why his figures seemed flat. But what did she know? She’d never painted with oils. In England, lady painters had to paint in watercolor. Instruction in oils was reserved for men.

  After a while, she felt him studying her work. “I wish I’d painted that,” he said.

  “Really? Thank you!”

  He gave her a long, analytical look that showed he knew he had by accident touched and opened her in a powerful way. Abruptly he packed up his paints.

  “You’re not going, are you? There are six hours of daylight left!”

  He folded up his easel.

  “Where can I find more authentic poles?”

  He didn’t answer. He knew, but didn’t want to tell her. She felt cheated. He snapped closed his campstool and walked briskly down the alley of trees and totem poles.