Klee Wyck (5 page)

“You are always my first and best friend, Sophie.” She hung her head, her mouth obstinate. We went to Sara’s house.

Sara was Sophie’s aunt, a wizened bit of a woman whose eyes, nose, mouth and wrinkles were all twisted to the perpetual expressing of pain. Once she had had a merry heart, but pain had trampled out the merriness. She lay on a bed draped with hangings of clean, white rags dangling from poles. The wall behind her bed, too, was padded heavily with newspaper to keep draughts off her “Lumatiz.”

“Hello, Sara. How are you?”

“Em’ly! Sophie’s Em’ly!”

The pain wrinkles scuttled off to make way for Sara’s smile, but hurried back to twist for her pain.

“I dunno what for I got Lumatiz, Em’ly. I dunno. I dunno.”

Everything perplexed poor Sara. Her merry heart and tortured body were always at odds. She drew a humped wrist across her nose and said, “I dunno, I dunno,” after each remark.

“Goodbye, Sophie’s Em’ly; come some more soon. I like that you come. I dunno why I got pain, lots pain. I dunno—I dunno.”

I said to Sophie, “You see! the others know I am your big friend. They call me ‘Sophie’s Em’ly.’”

She was happy.

S
USAN LIVED
on one side of Sophie’s house and Mrs. Johnson, the Indian widow of a white man, on the other. The widow’s house was beyond words clean. The cook-stove was a mirror, the floor white as a sheet from scrubbing. Mrs. Johnson’s hands were clever and busy. The row of hard kitchen chairs had each its own
antimacassar
and cushion. The crocheted bedspread and embroidered pillow-slips, all the work of Mrs. Johnson’s hands, were smoothed taut. Mrs. Johnson’s husband had been a sea captain. She had loved him deeply and remained a widow though she had had many offers of marriage after he died. Once the Indian Agent came, and said:

“Mrs. Johnson, there is a good man who has a farm and money in the bank. He is shy, so he sent me to ask if you will marry him.”

“Tell that good man, ‘Thank you,’ Mr. Agent, but tell him, too, that Mrs. Johnson only got love for her dead Johnson.”

Sophie’s other neighbour, Susan, produced and buried babies almost as fast as Sophie herself. The two women laughed for each other and cried for each other. With babies on their backs and baskets on their arms they crossed over on the ferry to Vancouver and sold their baskets from door to door. When they came to my studio they rested and drank tea with me. My
parrot
, sheep dog, the white rats and the totem pole pictures all interested them. “An’ you got Injun flower, too,” said Susan.

“Indian flowers?”

She pointed to ferns and wild things I had brought in from the woods.

S
OPHIE’S HOUSE
was shut up. There was a chain and padlock on the gate. I went to Susan.

“Where is Sophie?”

“Sophie in sick house. Got sick eye.”

I went to the hospital. The little Indian ward had four beds. I took ice cream and the nurse divided it into four portions.

A homesick little Indian girl cried in the bed in one corner, an old woman grumbled in another. In a third there was a young mother with a baby, and in the fourth bed was Sophie.

There were flowers. The room was bright. It seemed to me that the four brown faces on the four white pillows should be happier and far more comfortable here than lying on mattresses on the hard floors in the village, with all the family muddle going on about them.

“How nice it is here, Sophie.”

“Not much good of hospital, Em’ly.”

“Oh! What is the matter with it?”

“Bad bed.”

“What is wrong with the beds?”

“Move, move, all time shake. ’Spose me move, bed move too.”

She rolled herself to show me how the springs worked. “Me ole’-fashion, Em’ly. Me like kitchen floor fo’ sick.”

S
USAN AND SOPHIE
were in my kitchen, rocking their sorrows back and forth and alternately wagging their heads and giggling with shut eyes at some small joke.

“You go live Victoria now, Em’ly,” wailed Sophie, “and we never see those babies, never!”

Neither woman had a baby on her back these days. But each had a little new grave in the cemetery. I had told them about a friend’s twin babies. I went to the telephone.

“Mrs. Dingle, you said I might bring Sophie to see the twins?”

“Surely, any time,” came the ready reply.

“Come, Sophie and Susan, we can go and see the babies now.”

The mothers of all those little cemetery mounds stood looking and looking at the thriving white babies, kicking and sprawling on their bed. The women said, “Oh my!— Oh my!” over and over.

Susan’s hand crept from beneath her shawl to touch a baby’s leg. Sophie’s hand shot out and slapped Susan’s.

The mother of the babies said, “It’s all right, Susan; you may touch my baby.” Sophie’s eyes burned Susan for daring to do what she so longed to do herself. She folded her hands resolutely under her shawl and whispered to me,

“Nice ladies don’ touch, Em’ly.”

I was sketching in a remote Indian village when I first saw her. The village was one of those that the Indians use only for a few months in each year; the rest of the time it stands empty and desolate. I went there in one of its empty times, in a drizzling dusk.

When the Indian agent dumped me on the beach in front of the village, he said “There is not a soul here. I will come back for you in two days.” Then he went away. I had a small
Griffon dog
with me, and also a little Indian girl, who, when she saw the boat go away, clung to my sleeve and wailed, “I’m ’fraid.”

We went up to the old deserted Mission House. At the sound of the key in the rusty lock, rats scuttled away. The stove was broken, the wood wet. I had forgotten to bring candles. We spread our blankets on the floor, and spent a poor night. Perhaps my lack of sleep played its part in the shock that I got, when I saw her for the first time.

Water was in the air, half mist, half rain. The stinging nettles, higher than my head, left their nervy smart on my ears and forehead, as I beat my way through them, trying all the while to keep my feet on the plank walk which they hid. Big yellow slugs crawled on the walk and slimed it. My feet slipped, and I shot headlong to her very base, for she had no feet. The nettles that were above my head reached only to her knee.

It was not the fall alone that jerked the “Oh’s” out of me, for the great wooden image towering above me was indeed terrifying.

The nettle-bed ended a few yards beyond her, and then a rocky bluff jutted out, with waves battering it below. I scrambled up and went out on the bluff, so that I could see the creature above the nettles. The forest was behind her, the sea in front.

Her head and trunk were carved out of, or rather into, the bole of a great red cedar. She seemed to be part of the tree itself, as if she had grown there at its heart, and the carver had only chipped away the outer wood so that you could see her. Her arms were spliced and socketed to the trunk, and were flung wide in a circling, compelling movement. Her breasts were two eagle heads, fiercely carved. That much, and the column of her great neck, and her strong chin, I had seen when I slithered to the ground beneath her. Now I saw her face.

The eyes were two rounds of black, set in wider rounds of white, and placed in deep sockets under wide, black eyebrows. Their fixed stare bored into me as if the very life of the old cedar looked out, and it seemed that the voice of the tree itself might have burst from that great round cavity, with projecting lips, that was her mouth. Her ears were round, and stuck out to catch all sounds. The salt air had not dimmed the heavy red of her trunk and arms and thighs. Her hands were black, with blunt finger-tips painted a dazzling white. I stood looking at her for a long, long time.

The rain stopped, and white mist came up from the sea, gradually paling her back into the forest. It was as if she belonged there, and the mist were carrying her home. Presently the mist took the forest too, and, wrapping them both together, hid them away.

“Who is that image?” I asked the little Indian girl, when I got back to the house.

She knew which one I meant, but to gain time, she said, “What image?”

“The terrible one, out there on the bluff.” The girl had been to
Mission School
, and fear of the old, fear of the new, struggled in her eyes. “I dunno,” she lied.

I never went to that village again, but the fierce wooden image often came to me, both in my waking and in my sleeping.

Several years passed, and I was once more sketching in an Indian village. There were Indians in this village, and in a mild backward way it was “going modern.” That is, the Indians had pushed the forest back a little to let the sun touch the new buildings that were replacing the old community houses. Small houses, primitive enough to a white man’s thinking, pushed here and there between the old. Where some of the big community houses had been torn down, for the sake of the lumber, the great corner posts and massive roof-beams of the old structure were often left, standing naked against the sky, and the new little house was built inside, on the spot where the old one had been.

It was in one of these empty skeletons that I found her again. She had once been a supporting post for the great centre beam. Her pole-mate, representing the Raven, stood opposite her, but the beam that had rested on their heads was gone. The two poles faced in, and one judged the great size of the house by the distance between them. The corner posts were still in place, and the earth floor, once beaten to the hardness of rock by naked feet, was carpeted now with rich lush grass.

I knew her by the stuck-out ears, shouting mouth, and deep eye-sockets. These sockets had no eye-balls, but were empty holes, filled with stare. The stare, though not so fierce as that of the former image, was more intense. The whole figure expressed power, weight, domination, rather than ferocity. Her feet were planted heavily on the head of the squatting bear, carved beneath them. A man could have sat on either huge shoulder. She was unpainted, weather-worn, sun-cracked, and the arms and hands seemed to hang loosely. The fingers were thrust into the carven mouths of two human heads, held crowns down. From behind, the sun made unfathomable shadows in eye, cheek and mouth. Horror tumbled out of them.

I saw Indian Tom on the beach, and went to him.

“Who is she?”

The Indian’s eyes, coming slowly from across the sea, followed my pointing finger. Resentment showed in his face, greeny-brown and wrinkled like a baked apple,— resentment that white folks should pry into matters wholly Indian.

“Who is that big carved woman?” I repeated.

“D’Sonoqua.” No white tongue could have fondled the name as he did.

“Who is D’Sonoqua?”

“She is the wild woman of the woods.”

“What does she do?”

“She steals children.”

“To eat them?”

“No, she carries them to her caves; that,” pointing to a purple scar on the mountain across the bay, “is one of her caves. When she cries ‘OO-oo-oo-oeo,’ Indian mothers are too frightened to move. They stand like trees, and the children go with D’Sonoqua.”

“Then she is bad?”

“Sometimes bad … sometimes good,” Tom replied, glancing furtively at those stuck-out ears. Then he got up and walked away.

I went back, and, sitting in front of the image, gave stare for stare. But her stare so overpowered mine, that I could scarcely wrench my eyes away from the clutch of those empty sockets. The power that I felt was not in the thing itself, but in some tremendous force behind it, that the carver had believed in.

A shadow passed across her hands and their gruesome holdings. A little bird, with its beak full of nesting material, flew into the cavity of her mouth, right in the pathway of that terrible OO-oo-oo-oeo. Then my eye caught something that I had missed—a tabby cat asleep between her feet.

This was D’Sonoqua, and she was a supernatural being, who belonged to these Indians.

“Of course,” I said to myself, “I do not believe in supernatural beings. Still—who understands the mysteries behind the forest? What would one do if one did meet a supernatural being?” Half of me wished that I could meet her, and half of me hoped I would not.

Chug—chug—the little boat had come into the bay to take me to another village, more lonely and deserted than this. Who knew what I should see there? But soon supernatural
beings went clean out of my mind, because I was wholly absorbed in being naturally seasick.

W
HEN YOU HAVE BEEN
tossed and wracked and chilled, any wharf looks good, even a rickety one, with its crooked legs stockinged in barnacles. Our boat nosed under its clammy darkness, and I crawled up the straight slimy ladder, wondering which was worse, natural seasickness, or supernatural “creeps.” The trees crowded to the very edge of the water, and the outer ones, hanging over it, shadowed the shoreline into a velvet smudge. D’Sonoqua might walk in places like this. I sat for a long time on the damp, dusky beach, waiting for the stage. One by one dots of light popped from the scattered cabins, and made the dark seem darker. Finally the stage came.

We drove through the forest over a long straight road, with black pine trees marching on both sides. When we came to the wharf the little gas mail-boat was waiting for us. Smell and blurred light oozed thickly out of the engine room, and except for one lantern on the wharf everything else was dark. Clutching my little dog, I sat on the mail sacks which had been tossed on to the deck.

The ropes were loosed, and we slid out into the oily black water. The moon that had gone with us through the forest was away now. Black pine-covered mountains jagged up on both sides of the inlet like teeth. Every gasp of the engine shook us like a great sob. There was no rail round the deck, and the edge of the boat lay level with the black slithering horror below. It was like being swallowed again and again by some terrible monster, but never going down. As we slid through the water, hour after hour, I found myself listening for the OO-oo-oo-oeo.