The Forest Lover (7 page)

She surveyed her recent work. Were they any good, or did she only like them because of the associations? Art couldn't just be personal. Her old flop fears crawled up her spine. The Ancestor was a strong composition, though Tommy under it might be too precious. She'd try it without him. She wanted to draw Annie Marie too, sometime. Annie, so curious when she watched her from behind. She probably had never seen anyone draw before. The Ladies' Art Club prima donnas never watched her draw. Annie watched, and then drew in the dirt. It was natural that children imitated what they liked in adults.

She rolled and lit another cigarette, and discovered the first one still burning in the ashtray. She pushed it aside and wrote out an advertisement:
Emily Carr, Classes in Drawing and Painting, Children Only.
570
Granville Street. First class free.
She'd never teach adults again. Ingrates. But children, that was a different kettle of fish. Jessica would enroll her daughters, and they had friends. She might even have a ripping good time of it.

• • •

At the top of the incline above the cove, Emily dug her fingers into the shaggy black and white coat of the dog's neck. He'd behaved himself well coming here, their first walk together. His lumbering gait had made her take long strides, swing her arms, breathe deep, feel plucky.

She saw a long plank placed across the muskeg, and on the far end, the drawing that had blown away on her previous visit, weighted on four corners with stones. “Besides you, pooch, that plank's the best thing that's happened today.”

She stepped carefully down the slope, the dog close to her on a leash, and crossed the muskeg on the plank, squeezing her toes to keep her balance, and urging him across.

“Good boy!” She chucked him under the chin. “You'll be good with the children, won't you? You'll keep them together on our drawing outings just like they were sheep.”

With his mauve tongue on the back of her hand, he seemed to promise that he would. He was a business necessity, she'd tell Dede in case she rapped her knuckles with the bank book.

She picked up the drawing. It wasn't so bad after all.

“Mademoiselle!”
The man smiled as he came out of his tent.

“Emily. My name is Emily.”

“
Une dame courageuse
to climb down that steep hill.” He waved a rag in a flourish and executed a low bow. “Claude Serreau, fur trader. One of the last, and best. From Poitiers, where all the good ones came from. You may call me Claude du Bois, considering where I live.” His lips poked out of his beard in a funny grin and he gesticulated toward the woods behind his camp. “You came to draw again?”

“Yes, and to find out what a potlatch is.”

“Sh.” He put his finger to his lips and looked around at the trees. “The woods can hear.” He raised his bushy eyebrows in mock fear.

Amusing to see a rugged outdoorsman act so queerly.

“Where are the ladies you promised?”

“They'll never come.”

“Phuff? Disappeared into thin air?”

“Transformed into an old English sheep dog. His name's Billy. I just bought him. I went into a pet store for a goldfish. Came out with him.”

“
Mon Dieu.
He looks like a rug. Any eyes?” Claude lifted the shaggy hair on Billy's head. “
Ah, bon. Les voilà.
What? No tail? What's he good for?”

For filling her emptiness, she thought. “For loving,” she said.

His mouth dropped. “What? You choose a dog instead of a man?”

“Dogs don't go off in rowboats when you're talking to them.”

“I went to the sawmill to get a plank for you to come across the bog, but when I came back you were gone!”

“I—I didn't know.”

“So, now I tell you about the potlatches.”

He drew her toward the opening of the tent, his fingers pressing her wrist. He hummed a tune as he built a fire. She gazed at the back of his creased neck.

He laid out a blanket of pelts, burnished brown and creamy fur. “Sea otter. Almost hunted out now. Very rare.”

Billy sniffed them. She pulled him away and tied his leash to a tree out of range. He seemed content to take a snooze. Sprawled on the ground, he did look rather rug-like. She opened her campstool to sit near the pelts.

“Non, non.”
He gestured, openhanded, toward the pelts. “For you. Not for anybody else. Even me.” He arranged thick, sleek beaver pelts at the opening to his tent. “The big fur trade is over, but there's still some fine pieces if you know where to find them.” He swept his hand over the fur and invited her to do the same. She bent down at the tent opening to touch them.

“Oh, my! Something in me loves to feel the liveness in things like grass and moss and feathers and fur.”

He brought out more. “Feel these. Muskrat and mink.”

His brown eyes fixed on her as she stroked the fur. She could dig down with her fingers like roots in the mink, or just thread them through the longer filaments. The sensation melted her. He piled them at the entrance to the tent to make a backrest. She nestled herself into them.

“
Ah, bon. C'est bien?
Now the fire crackles. No one can hear us. Now I tell you. Potlatches.
Grandes fêtes
lasting days. One chief invites other villages to witness the raising of a pole. He gives away hundreds of things. Dried salmon, Hudson's Bay blankets, basins, tools, English dishes.” He waved his arms in circles outward. “Cloth, oil, sacks of grain, sugar. Even sometimes a sewing machine or a canoe.”

“Why?”

“To show that he can afford to. To shame the other chiefs who did not give as much at their potlatches. Good business for me,
oui?
”

“Where do they get these t00ls and English dishes?”

“From me, of course.” He slapped his chest.

“Is that all that happens at potlatches?”

“No. There are proud speeches, feasting and drinking and drumming. Feathered bodies dancing, stepping lightly on the earth. Ravens that talk like men. Men that dance like ravens. Moving in a trance.” He squinted and leaned toward her, smelling of smoke and buckskin. “Wild things happen.”

Her imagination soared. “I'd like to see one someday. Maybe to paint it.”

He puffed out his cheeks. “
C'est impossible.
Not for white people. Or ladies. They're against the law.”

“But you. You've seen them.”

“Business,
ma beauté.
”

He leaned toward her, stroking the muskrat delicately for someone used to rough living. He seemed half native to her now, primitive, son of the seasons, a man who knows tribal secrets. She looked at him raptly, and a slow, knowing smile came over his face.

“You don't come here just to draw,
non?
”

His eyes softened, gleamed, came close, roamed over her face. The pores of his cheeks were deep bronze. He placed his hand on the back of her head and kissed her lightly. He drew back to see her reaction, smiled wryly, and kissed her again, his beard soft, his lips
pressing. She resisted. The firmness of his palm on the back of her head released, but she didn't move away. They sat locked in looking, breathing together.

This
was wild. It surprised her, and didn't.

“Can you hear them? The drums?” he whispered.

She listened, and felt her own heart beat.

“Once you hear them, you'll never forget.”

He leaned her back and their kisses were longer. Fur caressed her arms. He trailed his finger down her neck to her collarbone. His eyes reflected points of light from the fire, a man of forest smells and animal instincts.

Father's voice rattled at her, in her.
You'd better know what being a woman means, so you won't be tempted.
She jerked away, stood up, reached for her sketching stool and held it in front of her, its legs pointed toward him.

He burst out laughing. “I see. You are merely a girl in a woman's body.”

She set it aside, feeling heat in her cheeks.

He made a great show of putting his hands behind his back. “I will do nothing.” He patted the pelt beside him. She sat down again.

“Now I tell you about the poles.”

She hardly listened. Everything was stirring inside her. “. . . Trunks of cedars carved into animals to represent their clan. . . .” His voice seemed muted. She couldn't grasp all he said. “. . . Or to tell history.” She watched his hands stroke the muskrat lightly, sensuously, yet that was so opposite to what Father had said about men. For Claude to stroke her face like that . . . She felt the drumming inside her.

But he was true to his word.

• • •

She went home out-and-out mad. At Father. At herself too. After all these years, that awful day when she was fourteen still had a hold on her. Damn that man.

Untamed. Like a wild Indian, Father had said as she'd sat on the bench in his big gardening shed. He claimed that's why he did it, to tame her innocent wantonness.
Emily, you'd better know what being a woman means, so you won't be tempted. . . . A man pushes it, hard, and you have to take it in you.
He pointed, palm up, right between her legs,
and was about to touch below her bone—or so she'd thought. She'd shoved his hand away and clamped shut her legs, couldn't bear to be there with him, and ran into the house. It had filled her with brutal images for years, spoiled what ought to be beautiful, and now, it still made her act like a silly, frightened girl.

That night she slept fitfully. Images of Claude on the pelts and feathered bodies dancing in firelight slid through her dream. She dreamt of Father, too, in the gardening shed, thrusting a narrow trowel between her legs. Of Dede, hands on her hips, laying down the law.
Ridiculous for you even to consider going north alone. Who do you think you are? I won't allow it.

But this wouldn't be alone,
she said back.

She woke up swearing that she'd get over Father's crudity once and for all. Where was her gumption? She fed Billy, gathered her drawing things, and they set out.

How would Claude act after she behaved like a fool with the camp stool? How would she?

When she and Billy climbed down the slope to the cove, Claude had a fire going with skewered potatoes roasting on a rack above it, and had spread the otter pelt blanket and other furs.

“How did you know I'd come back?”

“You didn't finish painting.” His mouth formed a teasing grin.

She grinned back and held out her empty hands.

“Oh-ho!” He wagged his head.

She tied Billy to a tree again and sat on the pelts. “I came to ask about totem poles.”

His bottom lip protruded in a pout.

“I have a Squamish friend in North Vancouver,” Emily said. “She took me to the cemetery there and showed me a carved figure of a man. I want to know. Are the totem poles like that?”

“How tall is it?”

“I'd say ten or twelve feet.”

He laughed. “See those cedars? Imagine them stripped of branches and carved all the way to the top. Creatures with eyes and beaks and
teeth and wings stacked on top of each other staring at you out of the forest.” He spread his arms like wings and bent over her.
“Comme ça.”

“Aren't they in villages?”

“Most of them. Some villages have been abandoned, but the poles are still there. You can come upon one suddenly, or you can hear wind moaning—whooh, whooh—like a ghost, and then you know there's one nearby, and so you creep around like a fox.” He hiked up his shoulders and stepped his hands forward, placing one on her knee. “But even if you know it's there somewhere, it hits you when you see one. Right there.” His fingers tapped her chest under her collarbone, dangerously close. A vibration shot through her.

“I want to see them.”

“They might frighten you.”

“I want to be frightened.”

“Oh?” He leaned toward her.

“I mean I want to see the whole coast, and go up the rivers too. To paint.”

“Not possible. Not for a woman alone.”

Yes, but here he was, wind-burned and capable, a man of earthly resources who faced raw wind with a laugh, who lived free, answering only to the pull of the tides. And there was his funny little boat. And what tied her here? Certainly not any heaps of money she'd earn from teaching children. She imagined embarking north with him. Just for the summer. A practical arrangement.

“Not even possible for”—she worked to remember his words—
“une dame courageuse?”

He laughed at her pronunciation. His amusement made her feel pretty.

“A fair-weather adventurer. Wait till you learn what rain really is. And mosquitoes with jaws as big as a crocodile's.”

He made quick little pinching motions up her arm and neck to her earlobe. Goose bumps rose on her skin.