The Forest Lover

by Susan Vreeland

  • • •

  First thing in the morning, with Billy leaning against her leg, she sat before Raven on the plank walkway in front of the houses. Raven’s disdainful eye with its lid curved down at the corner bored into her, firing her desire. On his lower beak, a human face looked back, frightened in a humorous way. She’d missed that the night before. She made tight reference drawings of the face and each of the stacked figures above. But if she were to give any of the raven’s detail in a painting of the whole house, she’d cut off the upper pole.

  How to accommodate a form so tall? Give its lower portion dominant placement in profile in the mid-ground with the row of houses at an angle? That way she could show a retreating line of poles suggesting what she’d cut off. Maybe a canoe prow in the lower foreground for size reference? She wasn’t sure if it was the best solution. Effective composition might come with exposure to the right examples, but where could she find any?

  She set to work using Indian red, Prussian blue, and black for the raven, burnt sienna blending with sepia umber for the pole’s raw cedar parts, bleached by the sun. It was adequate, but it lacked the drama of the real thing.

  “Billy, move.” She wanted the angle right from where he was lying. She nudged him out of the way. “To be a painter’s dog, you have to be flexible.”

  But I was comfortable, he said with a sigh and a whine.

  “Oh, don’t pout like a wilted petunia.”

  To depict a thing beyond objectivity—that’s what that beak challenged her to do. In it were all the croaks and squawks and clucks and rattles a raven could make. And through it, in the bighouse itself, all the stories and laughter and keening and baby gurgles and death rattles of generations. But how could a painting convey that?

  Sketching in watercolor, she laid in the main shapes. She squeezed her brush dry to lick up excess paint above the beak to lighten it where it reflected the sky. The eye had to be fierce. She darkened the heavy bone above it. It was still too tame compared to the strangeness and wildness of that glowering totem. She tried to be bolder and still be accurate, but how could she with watercolor? Those British academicians passing for artists, squeezing their brushes at the ferrules, had crippled her, made her work timid. If only she could talk with someone who knew how to make paintings express feelings.

  The beak creaked open and Chief Wakias came out. She’d have to show him her paintings. They weren’t perfect but they were all she had.

  “Good morning, Emily Carr.”

  “Good morning. It’s a fine morning. The best morning I’ve had for months.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m painting your magnificent Raven. He makes strong talk.”

  He pressed his lips together as he inspected her work. He turned to her. “You come for potlatch by and by.”

  Claude had said they were illegal. Lizzie called them wild drunken revels. Halliday considered them heathen. She knew they’d be exotic and fascinating. Being invited was what walking through Raven’s beak meant.

  “I would like that very much.”

  14: Cedar

  “Come in. The door’s unlocked,” Emily said when she heard Jessica’s customary Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony knock.

  Jessica waved a newspaper clipping at her. “Did you see this in the Province?”

  “I don’t get a paper. Times were better when everyone went ’round shouting things to each other.”

  “Then I suppose I’ll have to shout unless you read this for yourself.” Jessica smacked it down in front of her.

  Emily kept working on her drawing of Bear above Wolf from Alert Bay. What to do with the nostrils? She’d loved those curls of painted smoke coming out of them on the real totem. She put them in. “Kind of frilly, eh?” She held up the drawing at arm’s length. “What do you think? Nostril smoke or plain?”

  “Plain.”

  “Plain,” Joseph echoed from his cage.

  “Rats. What kind of cronies are you?”

  “The best.” Jessica shook her finger at the article. “You always complain that you aren’t getting to the gist of your subject. Well, in Paris . . . I’ll read it to you.

  “The current art movement in Paris aims not to reproduce subjects but to represent them through color. It seeks to penetrate the nature of things by bolder brushwork, to interpret by exaggeration, and to convey form with light and color rather than using them as mere decoration on a form. ‘The artist’s goal,’ says André Derain, ‘should be to make the strongest possible presentation of his emotional reaction to a subject by using bold color and strong linear patterns.’ ”

  Jessica passed her the clipping. “Isn’t that what you’ve been talking about—emotional reaction?”

  Emily practically choked. “Yes.”

  The nostril smoke—she did have an emotional reaction to it, but didn’t know how to express it other than to draw thin curls. She read the article again, and surveyed her Alert Bay watercolors on the walls, the work of a whole winter.

  “I’m not modern at all. I’m fussy and old-fashioned and I hate it. My colors don’t convey form. They only decorate the poles. My work doesn’t ‘penetrate the nature of things’ either. I don’t know how.” She tossed her pencil onto the table. “Oh-hh, Jessica. In England they were always talking about what they learned in Paris. I should have packed my bags that instant.”

  “Oh-hh, Jessica,” Joseph muttered.

  “But doesn’t this tell you what you’re always complaining about, that there’s more to art than what people know here?”

  “Yes, it’s a damned vacuum here.” She smacked the tabletop and pointed her index finger in the air. “I must be on the verge of a discovery if I can see what I’m not doing. Now I just need to figure out what to do.” She glanced at the article. “But what can you tell from words? There isn’t even a picture.”

  “So? Don’t you have to go see it face to face?”

  “Oh-hh. You don’t know what you’re asking.” She felt herself sinking. “I made a horrible mistake by studying in London instead of Paris.”

  Jessica sat down. “I’m sure you had plenty of good reasons.”

  “Bad reasons. Narrow reasons. Fear of foreignness. An impossible language. Unbearable loneliness. A big city.”

  “London’s no village, Emily.”

  “It didn’t seem so—” She flapped her hand, trying to think of a word. “Formidable.” She snickered at her French pronunciation. “A lot of good it did. I got just as qualmy in London as I would have in Paris—city soot and crowds rush-rushing all the time, everything all rackety-clackety.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, Em.” Jessica patted her hand. “I know you’re hungry to grow in a way I’ll never be.”

  “What a heap I’d give to go there now.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Everything. I’ve just put down roots. I feel a momentum building. The chief at Alert Bay welcomed me. He said he’d tell me how I can go to other islands. He smiled at my painting of his Raven house. Do you know what that means to me? If I go off to Paris now, for who knows how long until I get hold of this new art, he may not even remember me when I come back.”

  “And if you don’t go?”

  She looked at the wisp of steam coming out Bear’s nostrils. “If I don’t go, I’ll keep reproducing subjects superficially, like this says.” She tapped the newsprint with her fingernail.

  “I don’t get it. Hasn’t that been what you’ve wanted to do? Make a record of totems?”

  “Until I went to Alert Bay. Now I want something more personal, but I don’t know how to get it.” She sighed. “In order to escape the hold of the Old World to paint the New, I’m being yanked back to the Old.”

  “Then you’re going!”

  “No. You go and tell me about it. You can afford it.”

  Jessica’s mouth dropped. “But my family.”

  “Aha! See what an undertaking it is? What a risk, all on the basis of one puny paragraph?”


  “But think of all those artists in Paris discussing—”

  “And trying new things together, struggling together. Maybe being bonked on the head by what someone else was doing with paint.” She played with the edge of the paper. “May I keep this? It’ll come in handy when I go begging before the Keeper of the Treasury.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Queen Dede. She owns everything, and us three young ’uns too. Once I circumvented her rule and went right to the family solicitor for money. She whipped me till I fainted, screaming that I was getting too high and mighty.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “It’s not an aspect of family life a person can be proud of. The next day I dropped out of high school, packed up for art school in San Francisco, and ran smack into you.” She waved the clipping. “So, may I have this?”

  “Yes, if you let my girls take care of Joseph while you’re gone.”

  Emily smiled. “Not so fast, Jessica. I haven’t tortured myself with indecision nearly enough.”

  • • •

  “You like better water or sky?” Annie Marie asked as she offered Emily the cat’s cradle in Sophie’s house.

  Emily picked the taut strings. “The sky, I think. It can be so many colors.”

  “Water too,” Annie Marie said. “The ocean too.”

  Each time it was Annie Marie’s turn to hold out the string, she asked a question. “You like better. . .”—she tilted her head back—“painting or trees?”

  Emily smiled. “They are the same.”

  Here. But not in Paris. How could she leave the place she loved?

  Annie Marie wrinkled her nose. “Like dancing and singing?”

  “Like dancing and singing.”

  Margaret Dan called from the walk, “You coming, Sophie?” She came to the open doorway and leaned in. When she saw Emily, she straightened up. “Oh.” Her lips tightened. She turned and left.

  Emily felt as if smelly white scum had eked out her pores.

  “Her heart too small,” Sophie muttered.

  “Is that the problem with Mrs. Johnson too? She says we’re too different, you and I, to be friends.”

  “She wants to be the only one here ever loved by a white person.”

  “Jealous? Of you?”

  Sophie’s frown changed into a proud grin. “Yes.”

  While Sophie packed a basket of provisions, Annie Marie took off her shoes. “No. Keep to wearing them,” Sophie said.

  Annie Marie tugged off a sock, and Emily crouched in front of her. “I’d like you to wear them outside too. Then your feet won’t get hurt. Please.”

  Annie Marie scowled a moment at this new thought, tugged the sock back on, and let Emily tie the laces.

  They set out, Billy in tow. “With all these meadow grass smells, he’s in doggie heaven,” Emily said.

  “What’s this place name, Mama?” Annie asked, patting Billy’s head. She looked up at Emily. “Places have names.”

  “Ayulshun. Soft Under Feet,” Sophie said.

  Beyond some tall elderberry bushes lay another marshy meadow. “How about this?” Emily asked.

  “Ay-ayulshun. ’Nother Soft Under Feet.”

  Annie Marie giggled and hopped along like a chickadee. “You like better Ayulshun or Ay-ayulshun?” Without giving Emily a chance, she squealed, “They are the same.”

  Emily twirled Annie’s braid around her head like she’d seen Jimmy do, making her dance in a circle. If she went to Paris, she’d miss this precious age.

  They entered the forest through a grove of maples at Kakmakulth, and went to Huphapai, where a stream gurgled through the forest. Sophie examined the cedars, choosing. Billy did too, and lifted his leg.

  “Mama’s going to peel cedar bark.”

  “I didn’t think you used the bark for baskets,” Emily said.

  “I don’t. Cedar bark can be for diapers, soft things.”

  She realized that Sophie must be hoping for a baby.

  “Here, Mama. Here a big one.” Annie Marie ran around a tree in a circle to show how big it was.

  Sophie wrinkled her nose. “Oh, that’s too big.” She held her long skirt out wide. “When the trunk goes out like this, the bark’s too thick. Too tough. Small tree is more easy.”

  Annie Marie’s little chin quivered in a pout.

  “But it’s a good tree for basket roots.” Sophie’s cheeks rounded. “So big it has lots of long roots. It won’t be hurt if we take one.”

  “Dig a root, Mama. I love this tree.” She patted the trunk.

  Sophie poked the ground with a carved yew digging stick on the side of the tree by the stream where the ground was soft and muddy. She found a root and looked up to the tree’s upper reaches. “You Who Dwells Above, thank you for making this cedar to grow near this stream so the roots are straight. I need to take one from this good tree. I promise not to waste. I will use for a good basket.”

  Sophie waited, then knelt and loosened the dirt along both sides of the root, following it toward the stream where Billy lapped water. The water’s glints and gurgles were so inviting that Emily set one hand in the mud, leaned over, and cupped her other hand to drink.

  A breeze shifted the ends of foliage, like the tips of fingers moving. She sensed a presence under the tree’s canopy. God didn’t camp only in places where there was a steeple. But did God breathe only in BC forests and not in the woods in France? Fear and stubbornness made her want to say yes. Sophie and the tree seemed to inhale together, sharing the same breath. She breathed in too, wanting to inhale enough of its forest scent to last a year, at least.

  She and Annie Marie watched Sophie pull up a long unbranched taper. Was a root able to look up through itself and see its own grand tree? Maybe it just had to keep blindly sucking its nourishment from Mother Earth and sending its spirit up and up, never knowing if what it produced was beautiful. She hoped that wasn’t so.

  She leaned against a log and cuddled Billy. “I feel a spirit here.”

  She saw Sophie’s eyes widen minutely in surprise, as if she’d seen something startling in her white friend and couldn’t take it in at a single glance.

  “A spirit can come to a person alone in the forest,” Sophie said.

  “How?”

  “In the cry of Raven. Howl of Wolf. Wolf makes him a good hunter. Cormorant makes him a good fisherman or canoe maker. Gives him power. Ideas. Everybody has a power spirit. You just have to find it.”

  “Do you really believe a spirit can come to you from a bird?”

  Sophie squared her shoulders, pushed out her chest. “Yes.”

  “But Sophie, you’re a good Catholic.”

  “It’s not religion. It’s just Indian.”

  “You can have both?”

  “Have what you want.”

  Was it as easy as that?

  Sophie moved to a younger, smaller tree, and studied its slender trunk. She said a second prayer, waited, and made a horizontal cut about waist high. She gouged and pried right above the cut until she loosened a handhold of fibrous bark. She leaned backward, pulled and twisted until the bark hissed and peeled off in a long pointed strip.

  Annie Marie hopped. “Ooh, a good one, Mama.”

  Sophie looked at the two exposed surfaces—trunk and inner bark. “Like baby skin right after borning. First time in air.”

  The ivory surface dripped streams of clear sweet-smelling sap and darkened right before their eyes.

  “It’s magical,” Emily said.

  Sophie smiled and used a knife to separate the silvery gray outer bark from the inner bark. Once she started the split, she pulled them apart, and the inner and outer bark separated cleanly. Sophie’s lips formed an O of delight, and her eyes opened wider. “See? Easy.”

  “It’s like the tree gave of its spirit to you,” Emily said.

  Sophie folded the bark strip into a bundle and bound it with a cedar strip. “Sap side in, Annie. It goes red by and by.”

  Annie Marie wa
s preoccupied dusting off her shoes.

  “How does a person find his power spirit?” Emily asked, half to herself, musing over mysteries.

  Sophie thrust her chin forward, scrutinizing Emily. Downward furrows at the corners of her mouth plowed deep, as though she were struggling to make a complicated decision.

  “It’s all right, Sophie. You don’t have to tell. I was only thinking out loud.”

  Sophie untied and tied again the bundle of bark twice, her forehead more lined than usual. “I only tell you this. No one else.”

  “Oh, no, Sophie. I’d never talk about it.”

  “To find power, people go out alone. They fast. Pray. Be real quiet. Listen. Be still. Be ready.”

  “Go where?”

  “To lonely, wild places, hard places, sacred places.”

  “Why into the wilderness?”

  “You make risk so the spirits know you’re true. Then they speak. You need to prove yourself. Wanting hard helps too.”

  There was no denying her desire. Standing in front of Chief Wakias’s house, she had wanted with all her might to pour the spirit and drama of that Raven beak into her painting. As for risk and lonely, hard places, she could see Paris in no other way.

  “Forest spirits help you to make things, to create?”

  “The spirit goes in the tools. Everything has power. Loon, Owl, Raven, Wolf, Killerwhale.”

  The loping whales she’d seen with Alice were full of power. But how could Killerwhale teach her in Paris?

  “Only animals have spirit power?”

  “Thunder, Wind, Moon, everything. Everything!” Her cheeks and eyebrows lifted, her eyes brightened, alive with possibility.

  “Tree? Can a tree be a power spirit?”

  Sophie raised her shoulders. “It’s not good to talk about it. It might leave you or make you sick.”

  Yes. That she understood. If her own spirit of yearning left her, she would be sick. She picked up a fibrous piece of cedar bark that Sophie had discarded and held it to her nose. The tree had breathed through this. She could have this, the spirit of British Columbia, when, breathing city soot, she would crave the piquant smell of woods, or when, amid the clang of trains, she would long for its deep silent places. Hoping that cedar might be her power spirit, she put the bark in her pocket.