Opposite Contraries (19 page)

Father was a good bread and butter provider. Both were of the best. The baker baked him special loaves, four in one cottage loaf shaped two storeys high. It looked wonderful on the table and was bigger than the breadboard. The butter came from New Zealand in sixty-pound kegs and had the most delicious flavour. We had our own cows and Mother made butter, lovely butter worked in a churning big wooden bowl with a beautiful shell print on top of each pat. But that we used for cooking, because Father fancied the New Zealand butter. People came to our house and raved about the Carr’s grand homemade bread and butter, and we children pinched each other and giggled.

In meat, Father did his family well too. The butcher knew Father and saved him all the best and most expensive cuts. Father said a joint under twenty pounds was not worth eating. His favourite was saddle of mutton, and we had one nearly every Saturday, roasted in front of an open fire in a tin oven on legs having a round pan to catch the drippings, and a clock thing that wound up and kept the joint turning and turning continually in front of the fire. There was a door in the tin oven, and Mother opened it and ladled the fat from the pan over the joint to baste it. The cooking of the saddle of mutton was quite a ritual. Mother or one of my big sisters had to attend to it personally. It was not left to the China boy, because Father would not tolerate Chinese cooking. And Father’s stomach meant a great deal to him. What he had must be the best and it must be perfectly cooked. He sat at the head of the table — his end was distinctly “head”— and carved expertly the saddle of mutton and fat home-grown fowl, home-grown veal, home-cured pork. Father was fond of beefsteak too. It must be a perfect steak, perfectly cooked and perfectly served, that was lying on a great pewter hot-water dish. There
was a little door in the rim through which you filled the dish with boiling water and placed the steak broiled over coals.

There was also a pewter hot-water plate for Father to eat off. These vessels had come round the Horn with Father. If they were not filled with water absolutely boiling, Mother heard about it. If the steak was not tender, the butcher, Mr. Goodacre, heard about it, and the family there on each side of the table looked into our plates not daring to speak ourselves and wishing Father wouldn’t. Mother at the bottom of the table served the vegetables and pudding and pound tea and looked hurt when the stomaching God at the other end of the table raved. Only if things were exactly right did Father eat in silence. If they were superlatively right, he complimented his own growing or his butcher. Never his womenfolk.

There was a certain set of table mats made of straw or reeds, and when Father had been particularly naughty, it was my delight to put the whole mat family on the table when I was old enough to set table. These mats enraged him. He would seize and hurl them into the fireplace. We all looked into our plates hard and kicked each other under the table.

I don’t know when Father’s gout started, but as we grew bigger the gout got stronger and took a harder hold on Father’s temper. And that wore Mother. And by and by she was too ill to get up at all. She had mothered Father’s nine children and roasted his saddle of mutton and heated his pewter dishes and nursed his gout and dragged herself after him on Sunday rounds to visit every apple tree and primrose root and watched and warned us children, “It is nearly time for Father to be home. Are all the gates shut?” She wore out, and the doctor came every day and the bishop very often, and my oldest sister took on the hot dishes and saddle of mutton, and my next sister cleared out by
marriage, and we four young ones began to see. Each had taken their turn at Father-hero-worship and had outgrown it. We revered Father; he was an honourable, very much respected citizen, but the glamour of almightiness wore off more or less according [to] the disposition of each growing child.

All the while Mother was slowly, slowly slipping away. Father grew more and more silent except when he was storming [at] one or the other of us. He missed Mother being about, although his daughters attended to his steaks and saddles of mutton. After he had tended his grapevine and his garden, he went upstairs and sat by Mother’s bedside for a short while in a comfortable chair, saying little. He gave her everything that could be bought in the way of medical care, a good funeral, the best cemetery plot that could be bought. There he sat night after night, reading his paper, very stern and quiet. Sometimes he talked of his approaching three score years and ten. He had bad spells of gout, and a year after Mother died, he closed out his wholesale business. His desk and office clock were set up in the little room that had been our playroom, and he spent his time sitting at it and pottering in his garden. But he was never quite the same after Mother went. His death took place two years after hers. In his stern selfish way, he had allowed her to be the hub about which his life turned.

An old woman of sixty-eight, I dreamed that I was young and beautiful. I was dressed in blue, everything about me was lovely:
clothes, figure, youngness, and I was good. I had just come back from a journey and I had two trunks full of dainty clothes. I came into a cheap little wooden building which was a Roman Catholic chapel. I went into a little side room of this chapel, a room partitioned off from the chapel, but the partition did not rise to the ceiling. I took a little dish of communion bread to the young priest there. I carried the wine cup to him too. The young priest and I were both very reverent in our hearts over these things. Then I came out and passed through the chapel. The pews were full. I passed through and went up somewhere to my room where my trunks stood. I looked through the trays for a pair of gloves to wear, for I was going down to serve in the chapel. A girl came to me there. She said rather sadly, “Oh! You have served the priest. There were five of us who used to do it.” And then somehow I was aware of a lovely voice in my throat. I wanted to sing. I thought I could sing in the service and I wondered about having my voice trained. All through the dream, I was very conscious of the delight of youth and beauty, of a lovely radiant personality and a beautiful voice in my throat, and I rejoiced in them.

I lay for a long time enjoying the aftertaste of my dream, neither awake nor asleep, neither here nor there. I returned to my old woman’s body, tired, but resting easily in a comfortable bed.

I fell in love with a thoroughness that was terrible. It was spring. In our kitchen was a small coffin-shaped stone. It was used for
sharpening knives on, and sometimes, though forbidden by Edith, it could be used as a hammer. I had taken it up on the roof to tack up the grapevine and left it there.

“You’d better retrieve the stone before Edith misses it,” said Alice. I ran up the ladder, the smell of Father’s old grapevine young and sweet from spring, the exquisite joy of millions and millions of little mute white bells blowing on the cherry tree just below me. The birds’ goodnight calls filled me with such joy, I paused on top of the ladder to sing a little, feeling closer to the vine and the blossoms and birds than I was to my own flesh. Then I picked up the stone and ran down the ladder. A young man stood there. I already liked him. When he took me in his arms and kissed me, my joy boiled over. Love rushed from nowhere and settled down hard and exacting. Soon I found the man was a flirt. I meant nothing to him more than a part of all the young loveliness of spring. Then I was deeply mortified and tried with dogged brutality to hound love out of my life, but its roots had struck deep, and it was to take fifteen years for the fierceness of that particular love to drive off all lesser loves. Silly, but love is unreasonable.

One day, in answer to a gentle knock, I found a little Indian mother. There was a fat baby on her back, lashed to it by a gay plaid shawl. She had a full skirt of loud plaid material, a bright
yellow silk handkerchief about her head. A little girl hung onto the mother’s skirt and a heavy boy dawdled behind.

“Baskets?” She undid a very large bundle tied at the four corners and exhibited some beautiful baskets of her own make.

“Haho chuckiman”—(No money).

“Warm skirt just same.”

“Haho warm skirt, next month maybe. Catch um Victoria.” The basket I wanted was about 18" wide and 24" long, stoutly woven from cedar root and inlaid with designs in cherry bark and split cedar. It was square cornered with handles and a firm, beautifully fitted cover. I brought the woman into the studio to rest. We had a cup of tea and some bread and jam. Then the woman put the smaller baskets into her cloth, lashed the child tighter to her and got up to go.

“Take the basket. I will come to North Vancouver and get it when I get back from Victoria with my clothes.”

“Just same bymby.”

“How can I find you in the village?”

“Me Sophie Frank. Everybody know me.”

This understanding trust, when I knew how often my race fooled her.

That was the start of a deep friendship. Something that touched the very core of life.

Sophie was the mother of 21 children, only six of whom I knew — she had already given birth and buried the others when I knew her — the three she brought with her on her first visit to my studio and three later infants. One was named for me. I saw Sophie part with these six, one by one. When life hit me hard, I
went across the bay and sat a spell with Sophie. Her bare little house was clean. It faced the sea, and you could hear the lap or dash of waves on the beach at Sophie’s door. Inside that door there was always calm, even after there were no more babies to roll round the floor as Sophie squatted there basket-making. I know that Sophie felt the same thing for me as I for her. She was a Catholic. I was glad the priest told her I was just like a Catholic and that she could love me. She was a little sad when she found that I did not belong to her church. So afterward we went to see her graves and the little Indian church, and I dipped my fingers into the little shell that held holy water and I crossed myself. I cannot feel if not according to my own faith that it was a mockery. It was gratifying to little Sophie.

When I left Vancouver, Sophie cried bitterly. She said, “I love you like my own sister. I love you more because she forgets me sometimes. You will not forget.” I felt it a tremendous thing to be accepted by an Indian like this. I kissed her goodbye. “If you want, send word and I will come.” She did, and I went.

After Sophie had buried twenty children, she broke and took to drink. Frank, her husband, had the habit for years. Coming from Victoria to see her, I found her drunk. The shock of having me see her sobered her. Her shame and crying were bitter.

Even the disgust of the vile-smelling liquor and Sophie dishevelled and wrecked couldn’t shake my love for Sophie, and I love her still.

Although she has passed on now, it was just all comprehensive love. Perhaps to me it needs neither defence or explanation. The people in the village called me “Sophie’s Emily.” She herself called me “My Emily,” and so I was. She is dead now, and the
memory of her folded together with the little handful of things particularly mine.

Sophie had a friend called Susan who lived in the next house to hers. She too was a mother Indian. She wove a new papoose cradle every year and almost as regularly ordered a little coffin from the undertaker. I suppose the trouble was tubercular. Between the carrying out of a coffin and the weaving of a new basket, Sophie and Susan took their baskets, all tied up in cloths with knotted corners over their arms, and any remnants of their families still living came to Vancouver on the ferry, selling baskets door to door. They had a standing invitation to a cup of tea in the studio, and many a tea party we had. Nothing escaped their notice although their eyes never roved. They sat quite immobile, talked little, ate greatly. Susan was not so fine as Sophie, and according to Sophie’s standards occasionally erred. Then she received a smart slap on the hand from Sophie. Sophie always wanted to be “nice.” Often, if I asked why, she replied, “Nice ladies don’t.”

“Sophie, you passed my house yesterday. Why did you not come in for a cup of tea?”

“I came last week.”

“That did not matter.”

“Nice ladies don’t come too often.”

Sophie and I respected each other’s “being nice.” Our friendship was based on honesty and trust. We never pretended to each other. Many veils, of necessity, fell between us, veils of race and creed and civilization and language. Each stood [on] her side, sensing the woman on the other. We were the same age. Sophie was very jealous. If I went to see other women in the village, she got angry. “But Sophie,” I said. “I like to know
all the Indian women.” She had refused to introduce me to Chief Joe Capilano’s wife.

“You are my first,” she said fiercely.

“You were my first Indian friend, Sophie. You will always always be the biggest.”

The first day Susan came with Sophie, she said, “This woman got Injun flowers?” Indian flowers.

Uh-huh. She pointed to the wild ferns and little cedar trees in my window boxes.