Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [14]
“Indian flowers?”
She pointed to ferns and wild things I had brought in from the woods.
SOPHIE’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.”
SUSAN 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.”
D’SONOQUA
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