The Forest Lover (13 page)

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.

She was stunned a moment, and then ran after him. “What's wrong?”

He kept on walking, faster now, facing straight ahead. “Nothing. You should be proud.”

She dropped back, letting him go. Had her painting made him leave? She returned to study it. Yes. It had promise. She had promise. She could do this. She wanted to leap and shout.

A raven uttered a commanding
kraaak,
swooped over her head with an eerie
kloo klak,
and wheeled back into the forest. Strong talk. Approval, she hoped.

• • •

Other than wisps of vapor floating up the valleys, no rain or fog hid the forest and coastal villages on the trip home. Emily gripped the ship's railing and couldn't look away from the parade of poles slipping past, even to eat the apple and sandwich Alice was feeding her.

“Too bad we can't stop close to shore long enough to have a decent look.”

“Whales a'starboard!” a crewman shouted.

A fin broke the water, then a huge black body with white markings. Then two others, blowing out mist in breathy gushes.

“There's more over there,” Emily shouted.

“Where?” Alice cried.

Emily stood behind her to get the right angle and pointed. Alice gasped. They arced again in a slow, rhythmic gallop. First their rounded backs and fins broke the water, then their flanks, showing only part of their bulk at any one time. A moment later they flashed their flukes and dove, deep and long, all of them, and were gone.

“And God created great whales,” Alice said in awe.

“Mysterious things humble a person, don't they?”

She thought of the weird beauty of the whale totem. There were hundreds of poles just as mysterious that few people had ever seen, would probably never see. But paintings of them—that was something different. It was something she could do.

She'd have to plunge into dark waters. Only part of the idea
would be visible at any one time—a fluke, a flank, a fin—but the whole of it unfathomable. She felt the whales below pulling her, the forest nudging her, the totems tightening their grip on her.

“I'm going to teach the children about Alaska next year,” Alice said.

“You know, your life is fuller than you think. You have a mission, to teach all the ‘difficult' children the public school can't.” She linked her arm around Alice's. “Now I have one too.”

“I know. I knew when you didn't come back until midnight.”

“But it was still light. I was still painting.”

“That didn't mean I didn't worry.”

“I'm sorry.” She waited until Alice nodded her forgiveness. “Other than Hitats'uu, I haven't found anything mysterious enough and true enough to help me say what I feel, but yesterday changed that.”

“So, tell me. Your mission.”

“To preserve the totem poles in paintings. That art is vanishing, Ted said. In another generation, it might all be gone. There needs to be a record of them, in their own village settings, before they rot back into the forest, or before the missionaries burn them down in some righteous Christian frenzy.”

“Millie!”

“The poles are reminders of past glories, of healthy communities before Indian mothers wept or turned hard when baby after baby died. It's something I can do. To counter that sadness.”

“You think Dede's going to let you? Not in a hundred years is she going to release a dime from our trust fund for you to traipse through heathen villages painting their idols.”

“Then I'll have to earn those dimes myself.”

“Won't it be awfully hard to get to those places?”

Impossible for a woman alone, Claude had said. She gazed out to sea. “Easy things don't interest me.”

Emily set the chicken she'd roasted on Sophie's table. “Where's Annie Marie?” she asked.

Sophie gestured toward the other room. “Sleeping.”

Emily poked her head in the doorway and saw Annie Marie curled onto her side, thumb in her mouth, the shoes and socks she'd bought for her on her feet. “She wears them to bed?”

“ ‘Em'ly's shoes,' she say. She won't take them off inside, won't wear them outside. ‘Get dirty,' she say.”

Emily chuckled as she sat cross-legged on the floor next to Sophie and held up a purplish black strand from a pile. “What's this?”

“Horsetail root bark.”

Sophie wound a cedar root coil with cherry root and stitched it to the coil below it with an awl. Her fingers flew, tugged, twisted the strands. The basket was a flared rectangle decorated with a long horizontal shape worked in horsetail root stretching upward at each end with bumps along the top.

“What's the design?”

“Canoe.”

“Ah.” The bumps were heads. No bodies. Just heads. Seven of them peeping out of the canoe like peas in an open pod. Under it was a band of peaked waves. “Why is the middle head bigger?”

“That's Annie Marie.”

Sophie's children, all seven of them living and dead, embarking over the waves to the unknown.

Sophie looked at the place where the basket cradle had hung and her eyes filled with tears. Emily lay her hand on Sophie's wrist. Sophie dropped the awl in Emily's lap, went into the other room, and came back with the drawing of Tommy under the Ancestor.

“Little baby I didn't even get to know, but Tommy's still in my heart so he stay on the wall.” She hung it again opposite the Virgin Mary.

“That's good, Sophie.”

Sophie sat beside her again and held the unfinished basket in her lap but couldn't seem to begin work on it again.

“I remember when he taught me the three-pebble game on the beach,” Emily said. “He was so happy when I finally threw the stones quick enough so they all landed, plop, at the same time. He squealed and jumped in the shallow water so much he got us both wet.”

Sophie smiled in a far-off, misty way. Maybe she'd said too much. Emily gave her back the awl. “Is that made of stone?” she asked, trying to bring her back.

“Bone. Bone of an ancestor.”

“A human bone?”

“No. An animal ancestor.”

How could Sophie believe that and the Bible?

“This was my grandmother's awl. It has wise stories.”

“Does everything you use have a story?”

“Most everything. You don't have a story for every color?”

“There's a feeling for every color. Red for passion. Yellow for happiness. And green, oh, green—the glory and spirit of growing things.”

“Stories come from feelings. In the old time, all the grandmothers told stories.”

“Why don't they anymore?”

“Nobody listens. No bighouses, so not a lot of people around one fire. Now the church priest tells stories.”

“That's not the same, is it?

“No. Singing not the same either. My grandmother said at the first mass the
nipniit
told everyone not to sing anymore the old songs. They go to hell.”

“Did she stop?”

“No.” A sad smile streaked across her face. “She sang when she felt a hurt inside or a heat.”

“Sometimes it's important to do what you feel, no matter what.”

“When I was little, she sang to my baby brother because he was sick. He couldn't sleep because crows kept to cawing in the salal bushes so I threw a stick at them. They cawed more loud and flew into a tree. She took me there and said to the crows she was sorry her granddaughter did that. Now that she knows better she won't throw things at crows again.”

“Did you?”

“I hope not, but I loved my brother. In the story time before humans, Crow was the basket maker. Now he helps basket makers.”

“Does Crow help you?”

Sophie tipped her head. “Hm. Yes. Like this. My grandmother told me her grandmother saw a crow. He cawed at her all day. She asked him why he kept to cawing that way. Crow said once he could make lots of sounds, like Raven, but he lazy. He only made one. Then he want to make different sounds. He tried. Nothing. Only that
ugly one. So now I make each basket different. That's how Crow helps me.”

Her fingers started to move again, as if by their own will, holding the coils together, poking in the binding strand. She pulled it taut with her teeth.

“Do other basket makers make each basket different?”

“No.” She rolled down her bottom lip, and screwed up her nose. “Same ones over and over. Puts a person to sleep. Me, this is only one with a canoe. Now you tell me a story. Tell me about Alaska.”

“I thought you'd never ask.” Emily shifted to stretch her legs. Out spilled everything about Sitka and the totem poles. “Each pole is different, you'll be glad to know. I wish you could see them, you and Jimmy.”

Sophie straightened her back. Had she blundered?

“I want to paint the poles, all of them, before they disappear. They make strong talk. There should be a record.”

Sophie's expression darkened, and Emily felt an invisible wall rise between them.

“What? Is it wrong to do it?”

Sophie shrugged and pursed her lips into a tight wound.

“Sophie, it's something I can do. Do you understand? Like when your brother was sick and you threw a stick at the crows. To help him.”

Sophie's hands stopped working.

“Would it make any difference between us if I painted in other villages?”

“We used to have totem posts,” she said sharply. “In the old days before I was born. Inside houses. Long time ago a logjam made the river flood. All the houses and posts washed away. The church wasn't washed away, so people here don't make them more.”

“Because of that?”

“What do you think? Of course because of that.”

“Will it be hard to find them all?”

“Yes.” The word shot out.

“Impossible?”

“Maybe.”

“A fur trader told me that it's impossible for a woman to travel alone to native villages in the north.”

Sophie yanked a binding strand roughly.

“My sister Lizzie, the missionary one, says some villages don't want white visitors. Is that true?”

“Yes. Frank's brother, he knows. He went north to work for white man logging job. He knows.” She scowled and pulled in her lips into a wrinkled wound.

“What's wrong? Do you think I shouldn't do it?”

Sophie gave her an irritated look. “You just said it's important to do what you feel. So do it.”

“But do
you
think I should do it?”

Sophie held the cherry root strand between her teeth, making her wait. Mrs. Johnson's words,
Don't expect so much,
rattled in Emily's mind.

“How much you want to give up?”

She felt reckless with words. “Whatever it takes.”

“Then I think
you
can do anything.”

That wasn't as specific as she wanted, but at least it was something.

She noticed a picture next to the Virgin Mary, Moses and the tablets of stone with the words
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
printed below it. “Is that picture new?”

“Father John gave me it when I told him about you.”

“About me?”

Sophie smiled in that abashed way of hers, turned the basket to do the corner, and held it with her feet. “You aren't Catholic. At mass he said anybody had other gods go to hell. He said that mean anybody not Catholic, so I don't sleep for nights. I told him you love my babies and you're a good white woman. He said that don't matter. I said you paint the Holy Spirit. Then he said maybe it's all right.” Sophie's face glowed with triumph.

“Paint the Holy Spirit? I've just been talking about painting animal ancestors. Is that why you wouldn't answer when I asked if I should do it? Because totems aren't the Holy Spirit?”