The Forest Lover (5 page)

“You may be on the threshold of finding out and just don't know it.”

Idly, she picked off a shred of wallpaper and took a deep breath. “Oh, those lifey smells of hay and horse and earth.” She dug her fingernails into the English ivy wallpaper and ripped off strips down to the bare wood. “A barn's a barn.”

“Millie! Reverend Strathmore wanted to buy this barn when you were gone. Dede didn't sell. She thought you might want to paint here again.”

She stopped. “I had no idea. How can she be so kind one day and mean-spirited the next?” She crumpled the torn strips into a ball. “I can't even remember when all this squabbling started.”

“Maybe the bites.” Alice stifled a giggle.

“You think so? I was probably only eight or nine.”

It was during one of those interminable Sunday evening scripture readings around the dining table. Father with his full beard and his eyes closed looked like Moses praying on the Mount. When her reading turn was over, after having to be told how to pronounce practically every third word, she'd stood up her Bible like a screen and went back to drawing. Lizzie elbowed her roughly in admonishment, so she'd slammed shut her Bible to hide the drawing, and bit Lizzie on the arm, just enough to shock her into silence. Dede, sitting across from her, let loose her swinging leg in a well-aimed wallop on her shin.

When Dede tucked her in bed, her duty instead of Mother's whose illness prevented it, she bit Dede too, clamping her teeth down hard. On her own bed across the room, Alice gasped and her eyes went wide. Dede hissed one of Lizzie's religious texts against wickedness. With that, the lines were drawn, and afterward Dede found a new use for the riding crop.

“You smiled a wicked smile when I bit Dede, as I recall.” She
showed Alice her sketch. “That's how the fifth sister should have grown.”

Alice's cheek twitched. “You like to be different. You thrive on it.”

“It always makes me an outsider.”

“Don't fool yourself. You live to be an outsider. You can't have it both ways.” Alice stood and picked up the teacup. “I miss you, Millie. They do too even though they don't show it. Will you do one thing for me?”

“What's that?”

“Paint a self-portrait, for our parlor. I want to see that one eyebrow permanently arched, permanently skeptical—the look of someone who doesn't suffer prudes easily.” She winked.

“Ugh! Portraits stink of pretense. People strangled in fancy high-necked dresses, trussed up like cooked poultry.” She held out the drawing of the five firs. “Take this instead.”

The next weekend, Emily stepped from the small ferry onto the North Vancouver dock half an hour across Burrard Inlet. A crudely painted placard advertised
Town Site Properties
with an arrow pointing right. Emily turned left onto a plank walkway toward some beached cedar canoes, which would surely be the Squamish Mission Reserve.

After walking for ten minutes, she began to breathe a soup of smells—sea salt, smoke from stovepipes, dead fish, and garbage scattered on the beach for the tide to carry out. Gulls picked over the refuse. There were no bighouses. Instead, a few rows of whitewashed clapboard cottages huddled around a church. From the walkway, paths threaded through new spring weeds to each front door. Hens strutted between the stalks. A woman digging with a stick in a potato patch stood up.

“Good morning,” Emily said. “Do you know Sophie Frank?”

The woman nodded. “Two more houses. Basketmaker Sophie.”

Behind mounds of bark and roots and firewood, the second house leaned slightly on its drift log foundation. Clothes strung on a line flapped above salal bushes and salmonberry. Emily glanced
back at the woman who made no attempt to hide her curiosity. Sophie's front door opened. Her little girl, barefoot, wearing a skirt much too large, skipped out, saw Emily, and froze. She whirled around and ran back in, her braids swinging.

In a moment Sophie appeared in the doorway smiling a welcome. “Come.”

“It wasn't hard to find, just like you said.”

The odor of fish grease leapt out at her. Two homemade wooden chairs, a plank table, dishes and pots in an open trunk, an enameled wash basin, a Royal Crown soap tin with Buckingham Palace on the lid, red Hudson's Bay blankets stacked on wooden boxes, two braided rag throw rugs in native designs, and a settee—not squalor, just sparseness. Remembering the boy's awe in her own house, Emily felt a touch of discomfort.

A hump of blankets on the floor practically hid the boy wrapped up in them. He watched her every move. Although only a faint warmth issued from the wood-burning stove in the center, she wanted to gather him up and put him next to it.

The girl kept her chin glued to her chest but managed to take surreptitious peeks at her. “What's your name?” Emily asked.

Instantly the girl flattened herself against the wall.

“This one's Annie Marie. Named after our Holy Mother.” Sophie gazed toward a paper image of the Virgin stuck on a nail.

“How nice. I like the Virgin Mary. She wasn't a blabberer.”

Sophie pushed out her lips and nodded in satisfaction.

“You have long beautiful braids, Annie Marie. Did your mother braid them for you?”

The girl raised her chin an inch in a nod.

“That one's Tommy.” Sophie tipped her head toward him and smiled with every muscle in her face. “Oldest one.”

“Hello, Tommy.” He only blinked. “Do you remember my bird who talks?” He opened his mouth to say something, and coughed.

Two more girls crept out of a second room.

“How many children do you have?”

“Three.” The word rang like a declaration of victory. “These are Margaret Dan's. Go home now, Shaula. Go home, Rosie. Tell your mother Em'ly came to visit Sophie.”

The girls raced out the door, giggling, nearly knocking over the oil lamp sitting on a chair.

Sophie lifted the cloth cover on a shallow basket cradle hanging from the ceiling. Emily peered at the small face, so wrinkled it took something right out of her.

“No worry. He grows fat by and by.” Sophie stroked his cheek, inviting Emily to do the same. Emily shifted her bundle of clothes to one arm and touched the baby's brown skin, so smooth and cool it sent a tingling up her fingers. Sophie set the cradle in motion. “Three live babies. Four dead ones. I show you.”

“Four! That's terrible, Sophie. How come?”

Sophie straightened and turned away.

Emily blenched. She shouldn't have asked. To lose even one! But four. And she appeared to be so young.

“I brought you some clothes.” Another bad response, she realized, too late. Sophie reached for the bundle. Her scowl kept Emily talking. “The ones that don't fit you can give away.”

Coolness filmed over Sophie's eyes. She let the bundle drop to the floor and spread out the clothes with her bare toe.

“I should have tried to find some children's clothes too.”

Sophie fingered the fabrics, rolled them up again, stood, shoved them to the edge of the floor with her foot. She pulled her shoulders back with an air of weariness and drew in a long loud breath. “They not for wearing. They for rug making.”

“Oh.”

A horrible moment. Silence.

“You want to see our church house?”

“Yes, I would like to.” What did she think—that all white women went around visiting churches? “I want to see everything.”

Sophie went into the other room and came back wearing a full plaid skirt with black velvet bands around the bottom, unlaced the baby, wrapped him in a woolen shawl, tied him across her back, and walked out the front door and down the path. Emily, Tommy, and Annie Marie followed. As soon as Sophie stepped onto the plank walkway, she turned and went back inside. When she came out, she had on shoes. “Nice ladies wear shoes to church,” she said.

Sophie turned left at the walkway, the opposite direction of
the church steeple. The heels slipped off her feet at each step, and when they approached the house where the woman had been digging, Sophie let the shoes smack the planks even louder. The woman came to the doorway.

“Hellooo, Miz Johnson,” Sophie said without a pause in her clomp-clomping on the planks.

Emily saw expectancy on the woman's face darken to disappointment as they passed.

After a moment, Sophie whispered, “She thinks she's better because she married a white man. But he's dead now.”

“Oh, that's too bad.”

“No, it's not too bad. She doesn't do anything. She doesn't make baskets. She doesn't have babies. She doesn't work at the cannery. She all the time talk about her poor Johnson dead at sea, and washes tablecloths and dries them on the salal bush so we see them and think she's a white lady. Her husband's ship sends her money. She doesn't make anything.”

Emily cleared her throat. “You're right. It's better to be making things.”

They continued on the walkway going away from the steeple, and then cut back to the second row of houses to head toward it. Curious. The circular detour could have been for no other reason than to walk by Mrs. Johnson's house.

“That's our schoolhouse. Frank and I learn to read and write there, and my babies too, by and by.” Sophie designated, openhanded, two buildings as if introducing them. “Schoolhouse. Church house. Mission Church of the Sacred Heart.”

“Handsome.”

A single white octagonal spire rose behind two cherry trees flocked in blossoms. It was a simple, plank Gothic, standing foursquare facing the beach, not particularly remarkable in its own right, but mightily impressive here.

Inside the church, the cooler musty air hung heavy with incense. Soft light from an oil lamp bathed the floor and pews in a golden glow. A chipped clamshell held holy water. Emily examined its carved wooden pedestal, a long-robed saint with almond-shaped eyes. Something about them seemed furtively animal.

Sophie dipped in her fingers, crossed herself, and turned toward Emily, waiting. Emily resisted. Rituals were for those who needed props in their religion, but Sophie's steady look signaled expectancy, and she didn't want to offend Sophie again. She dipped in the tip of one finger.

She felt calmness settle over Sophie sitting at the edge of a creaking pew. She sat beside her, and Annie Marie squirmed across her knees to be between them. Emily was overcome with longing to touch the dark sheen of Annie Marie's hair, but she held back.

She looked above Tommy's head in front of her and winced. Behind the altar hung a painting of the Sacred Heart, a pulpy mass of cadmium red extra deep shaded with Indian red, misshapen and dark, looking like a human organ entwined with a vine of thorns. It was a miracle of Christianity how that muddy-colored bloated tomato could inspire worship. She glanced sideways. Sophie gazed at it in adoration. How could she, after losing four children?

In niches on either side of the heart stood small wooden statues of Joseph and the Virgin holding baby Jesus. Candle flames trembled. A devilish thought tickled her. Lizzie was a staunch Episcopalian one week, Presbyterian the next, one religion not enough for her. The next time her sister pressed for a report on her church attendance, she'd say she'd been to an Indian Catholic church. That ought to frost her eyelashes for always being so nosy.

Once they stepped outside, Sophie took a beaten path through tall grass. “Now I show you my dead babies.”

Her matter-of-factness was baffling.

The cemetery sloped up from the beach to the woods behind. Sophie plucked some violet blue camas blossoms and held open the cedar strip gate. There were no coffin trees here. Instead, a tall white cross in the center of the cemetery cast a lean shadow over the graves placed helter-skelter, not in rows. Some graves only had wooden crosses nearly obscured by thickets. A few had headstones and some were surrounded by picket fences. Sophie danced her fingertips across the picket points. “Very Christian,” she whispered.

She turned toward a granite headstone. “That one for my friend Margaret Dan's baby. See his cross carved in? Bigger than him. But Margaret Dan only has three babies here.” They passed into the newer
section. “Casamin I show first. My first boy.” His grave was marked by a narrow wooden cross, unpainted, with only his name gouged in. Sophie squatted to brush away leaves.

“How did he die?”

“Every day I brought him to lie under the old Ancestor. Maybe that made God mad.”

She'd expected Sophie to name a sickness, not give a theory. “I'm so sorry. How can you bear it?”

Sophie rose and her chest expanded. “A baby for a while is better than no baby.” She barked out the words as though she were defending a principle.

Emily followed her to a sagging wire fence tangled with blackberry bushes in some places, broken and leaving gaps in others. “Whooh!” A wooden figure on the other side of the fence surprised her. Minimally carved, not clearly a man or a woman, but definitely human, chin lowered, shoulders square, he brooded over the graves outside the fence. Ten feet of austere sorrow. His surface had weathered to silvery gray, and a vertical crack split his torso.