Klee Wyck (4 page)

Tanoo, Skedans and Cumshewa lie fairly close to each other on the map, yet each is quite unlike the others when you come to it. All have the West Coast wetness but Cumshewa seems always to drip, always to be blurred with mist, its foliage always to hang wet-heavy. Cumshewa rain soaked my paper, Cumshewa rain trickled among my paints.

Only one house was left in the village of Cumshewa, a large, low and desolately forsaken house that had a carefully padlocked door and gaping hole in the wall.

We spent a miserable night in this old house. Louisa’s cat and the missionary’s daughter always looked and acted alike when it rained. All our bones were pierced with chill. The rain spat great drops through the smoke-hole into our fire. In comfortless, damp blankets we got through the night.

In the morning Jimmy made so hot a fire that the rain splatters hissed when they dropped into it. I went out to work on the leaky beach and Jimmy rigged up a sort of shelter over my work so that the trickles ran down my neck instead of down my picture, but if I had possessed the arms and legs of a centipede they would not have been enough to hold my things together, to defy the elements’ meanness towards my canopy, materials and temper.

Through the hole in the side of the house I could hear the fretful mewings of the missionary’s daughter and the cat. Indian people and the elements give and take like brothers, accommodating themselves to each others’ ways without complaint. My Indians never said to me, “Hurry and get this over so that we may go home and be more comfortable.” Indians are comfortable everywhere.

Not far from the house sat a great wooden raven mounted on a rather low pole; his wings were flattened to his sides. A few feet from him stuck up an empty pole. His mate had sat there but she had rotted away long ago, leaving him moss-grown, dilapidated and alone to watch dead Indian bones, for these two great birds had been set, one on either side of the doorway of a big house that had been full of dead Indians who had died during a small-pox epidemic.

Bursting growth had hidden house and bones long ago. Rain turned their dust into mud; these strong young trees were richer perhaps for that Indian dust. They grew up round the dilapidated old raven, sheltering him from the tearing winds now that he was old and rotting because the rain seeped through the moss that grew upon his back and in the hollows of his eye-sockets. The
Cumshewa
totem poles were dark and colourless, the wood toneless from pouring rain.

When Jimmie, Louisa, the cat and the missionary’s daughter saw me squeeze back into the house through the hole and heard me say, “Done,” they all jumped up. Curling the
cat into her hat, Louisa set about packing; Jimmie went to prepare his boat. The cat was peeved. She preferred Louisa’s hat near the fire to the outside rain. Even the missionary’s daughter showed animation as she rolled up blankets.

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain. Our boat headed for the sea. As we rounded the point Cumshewa was suddenly like something that had not quite happened.

Sophie knocked gently on my Vancouver
studio
door.

“Baskets. I got baskets.”

They were beautiful, made by
her own people
, West Coast Indian baskets. She had big ones in a cloth tied at the four corners and little ones in a flour-sack.

She had a baby slung on her back in a shawl, a girl child clinging to her skirts, and a heavy-faced boy plodding behind her.

“I have no money for baskets.”

“Money no matter,” said Sophie. “Old clo’, ‘waum’ skirt—good fo’ basket.”

I wanted the big round one. Its price was eight dollars.

“Next month I am going to Victoria. I will bring back some clothes and get your basket.”

I asked her in to rest a while and gave the youngsters bread and jam. When she tied up her baskets she left the one I coveted on the floor.

“Take it away,” I said. “It will be a month before I can go to Victoria. Then I will bring clothes back with me and come to get the basket.”

“You keep now. Bymby pay,” said Sophie.

“Where do you live?”

“North Vancouver Mission.”

“What is your name?”

“Me Sophie Frank. Everybody know me.”

S
OPHIE’S HOUSE
was bare but clean. It had three rooms. Later when it got cold Sophie’s Frank would cut out all the partition walls. Sophie said, “Thlee ’loom, thlee stobe. One ’loom, one stobe.” The floor of the house was clean scrubbed. It was chair, table and bed for the family. There was one chair; the coal-oil lamp sat on that. Sophie pushed the babies into corners, spread my old clothes on the floor to appraise them, and was satisfied. So, having tested each other’s trade-straightness, we began a long, long friendship—forty years. I have seen Sophie glad, sad, sick and drunk. I have asked her why she did this or that thing—Indian ways that I did not understand—her answer was invariably “Nice ladies always do.” That was Sophie’s ideal—being nice.

Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one. Her little graves were dotted all over the cemetery. I never knew more than three of her twenty-one children to be alive at one time. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry. Then she took to drink.

“I got a new baby. I got a new baby.”

Sophie, seated on the floor of her house, saw me coming through the open door and waved the papoose cradle. Two little girls rolled round on the floor; the new baby was near her in a basket-cradle. Sophie took off the cloth tented over the basket and exhibited the baby, a lean, poor thing.

Sophie herself was small and spare. Her black hair sprang thick and strong on each side of the clean, straight parting and hung in twin braids across her shoulders. Her eyes were sad and heavy-lidded. Between prominent, rounded cheekbones her nose lay rather flat, broadening and snubby at the tip. Her wide upper lip pouted. It was sharp-edged, puckering over a row of poor teeth—the soothing pucker of lips trying to ease an aching tooth or to hush a crying child. She had a soft little body, a back straight as honesty itself, and the small hands and feet of an Indian.

Sophie’s English was good enough, but when Frank, her husband, was there she became dumb as a plate.

“Why won’t you talk before Frank, Sophie?”

“Frank he learn school English. Me, no. Frank laugh my English words.”

When we were alone she chattered to me like a sparrow.

I
N MAY
, when the village was white with cherry blossom and the blue water of
Burrard Inlet
crept almost to Sophie’s door—just a streak of grey sand and a plank walk between —and when Vancouver city was more beautiful to look at across the water than to be in, —it was then I loved to take the ferry to the North Shore and go to Sophie’s.

Behind the village stood mountains topped by the grand old
“Lions,” twin peaks
, very white and blue. The nearer mountains were every shade of young foliage, tender gray-green, getting greener and greener till, when they were close, you saw that the village grass outgreened them all. Hens strutted their broods, papooses and pups and kittens rolled everywhere—it was good indeed to spend a day on the Reserve in spring.

Sophie and I went to see her babies’ graves first. Sophie took her best plaid skirt, the one that had three rows of velvet ribbon round the hem, from a nail on the wall, and bound a yellow silk handkerchief round her head. No matter what the weather, she always wore her great shawl, clamping it down with her arms, the fringe trickling over her fingers. Sophie wore her shoes when she walked with me, if she remembered.

Across the water we could see the city. The Indian Reserve was a different world—no hurry, no business.

We walked over the twisty, up-and-down road to the cemetery. Casamin, Tommy, George, Rosie, Maria, Mary, Emily, and all the rest were there under a tangle of vines. We rambled, seeking out Sophie’s graves.

Some had little wooden crosses, some had stones. Two babies lay outside the cemetery fence: they had not faced life long enough for baptism.

“See! Me got stone for Rosie now.”

“It looks very nice. It must have cost lots of money, Sophie.”

“Grave man make cheap for me. He say, ‘You got lots, lots stone from me, Sophie. Maybe bymby you get some more died baby, then you want more stone. So I make cheap for you.’”

S
OPHIE’S KITCHEN
was crammed with excited women. They had come to see Sophie’s brand-new twins. Sophie was on a mattress beside the cook stove. The twin girls were in small basket papoose cradles, woven by Sophie herself. The babies were wrapped in cotton wool which made their dark little faces look darker; they were laced into their baskets and stuck up at the edge of Sophie’s mattress beside the kitchen stove. Their brown, wrinkled faces were like potatoes baked in their jackets, their hands no bigger than brown spiders.

They were thrilling, those very, very tiny babies. Everybody was excited over them. I sat down on the floor close to Sophie.

“Sophie, if the baby was a girl it was to have my name. There are two babies and I have only one name. What are we going to do about it?”

“The biggest and the best is yours,” said Sophie.

My Em’ly lived three months. Sophie’s Maria lived three weeks. I bought Em’ly’s tombstone. Sophie bought Maria’s.

S
OPHIE’S “MAD”
rampaged inside her like a lion roaring in the breast of a dove.

“Look see,” she said, holding a red and yellow handkerchief, caught together at the corners and chinking with broken glass and bits of plaster of Paris. “Bad boy bloke my grave flower! Cost five dollar one, and now boy all bloke fo’ me. Bad, bad boy! You come talk me fo’ p’liceman?”

At the City Hall she spread the handkerchief on the table and held half a plaster of Paris lily and a dove’s tail up to the eyes of the law, while I talked.

“My mad fo’ boy bloke my plitty glave flower,” she said, forgetting, in her fury, to be shy of the “English words.”

The big man of the law was kind. He said, “It’s too bad, Sophie. What do you want me to do about it?”

“You make boy buy more this plitty kind for my glave.”

“The boy has no money but I can make his old grandmother pay a little every week.” Sophie looked long at the broken pieces and shook her head.

“That ole, ole woman got no money.” Sophie’s anger was dying, soothed by sympathy like a child, the woman in her tender towards old Granny. “My bloke no matter for ole woman,” said Sophie, gathering up the pieces. “You scold boy big, Policeman? No make glanny pay.”

“I sure will, Sophie.”

T
HERE WAS A BLACK SKIRT
spread over the top of the packing case in the centre of Sophie’s room. On it stood the small white coffin. A lighted candle was at the head, another at the foot. The little dead girl in the coffin held a doll in her arms. It had hardly been out of them since I had taken it to her a week before. The glassy eyes of the doll stared out of the coffin, up past the closed eyelids of the child.

Though Sophie had been through this nineteen times before, the twentieth time was no easier. Her two friends, Susan and Sara, were there by the coffin, crying for her.

The outer door opened and half a dozen women came in, their shawls drawn low across their foreheads, their faces grim. They stepped over to the coffin and looked in. Then they sat round it on the floor and began to cry, first with baby whimpers, softly, then louder, louder still—with violence and strong howling: torrents of tears burst from their eyes and rolled down their cheeks. Sophie and Sara and Susan did it too. It sounded horrible—like tortured dogs.

Suddenly they stopped. Sophie went to the bucket and got water in a tin basin. She took a towel in her hand and went to each of the guests in turn holding the basin while they washed their faces and dried them on the towel. Then the women all went out except Sophie, Sara and Susan. This crying had gone on at intervals for three days—ever since the child had died. Sophie was worn out. There had been, too, all the long weeks of Rosie’s tubercular dying to go through.

“Sophie, couldn’t you lie down and rest?”

She shook her head. “Nobody sleep in Injun house till dead people go to cemet’ry.”

The beds had all been taken away.

“When is the funeral?”

“I dunno. Pliest go Vancouver. He not come two more day. ’Spose I got lots money he come quick. No hully up, except fo’ money.”

She laid her hand on the corner of the little coffin.

“See! Coffin-man think box fo’ Injun baby no matter.”

The seams of the cheap little coffin had burst.

A
S SOPHIE AND I
were coming down the village street we met an Indian woman whom I did not know. She nodded to Sophie, looked at me and half paused.

Sophie’s mouth was set, her bare feet pattered quick, hurrying me past the woman.

“Go church house now?” she asked me.

The Catholic church had twin towers. Wide steps led up to the front door which was always open. Inside it was bright, in a misty way, and still except for wind and sea-echoes. The windows were gay coloured glass; when you knelt the wooden footstools and pews creaked. Hush lurked in every corner. The smell of the church seemed fusty after the fresh sea air outside, the paper flowers artificial.

The rope of the bell dangled dead in the entrance. It was a new rope and smelt of tar. Paper flowers stood stiffly before the Virgin. Always a few candles burned. Everything but those flickers of flame was stone-still.

When we came out of the church we sat on the steps for a little. I said, “Who was that woman we met, Sophie?”

“Mrs. Chief Joe Capilano.”

“Oh! I would like to know Mrs. Chief Joe Capilano. Why did you hurry by so quick? She wanted to stop.”

“I don’ want you know Mrs. Chief Joe.”

“Why?”

“You fliend for me, not fliend for her.”

“My heart has room for more than one friend, Sophie.”

“You fliend for me, I not want Mrs. Chief Joe get you.”