Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [19]
“My child?”
His feet followed the women’s pointing fingers. Racing up the bank, his bulk filled the doorway of the hut. The stare enveloped him, Millie swayed towards him. Her arms fell down. The heavy plaits of her hair swung forward. Brittle with long watching, the stare had snapped.
GREENVILLE
The cannery boss said, “Try Sam; he has a gas boat and comes from Greenville. That’s Sam over there—the Indian in the striped shirt.”
I came close to where Sam was forking salmon from the scow on to the cannery chutes.
“Sam, I want to go to Greenville. Could you take me there on Sunday?”
“Uh huh.”
“What time Sunday?”
“Eight o’clock.”
On Sunday morning I sat on the wharf from eight o’clock till noon. Sam’s gas boat was down below. There was a yellow tarpaulin tented across her middle. Four bare feet stuck out at one end and two black heads at the other.
From stir to start it took the Indians four hours. Sam and his son sauntered up and down getting things as if time did not exist. Round noon the gas boat’s impudent sputter ticked out across the wide face of the Naas River.
The Indian and his son were silent travellers.
I held my dog tight because of the fierceness of those skulking shadow-dogs following us.
Greenville was a large village, low and flat. Its stagnant swamps and ditches were glory places for the mosquitoes to breed in. Only the hum of the miserable creatures stirred the heavy murk that beaded our foreheads with sweat as we pushed our way through it.
Half-built, unpainted houses, old before ever they were finished, sat hunched irregularly along the grass-grown way. Planks on spindly trestles bridged the scummed sloughs. Emptiness glared from windows and shouted up dead chimneys, weighted emptiness, that crushed the breath back into your lungs and chilled the heart in your sweating body.
Stumbling over stones and hummocks I hurried after the men who were anxious to place me and be gone down the Naas to the cannery again.
I asked the Indian, “Is there no one in this village?”
“One ole man, one woman, and one baby stop. Everybody go cannery.”
“Where can I stay?”
“Teacher’s house good for you.”
“Where is the teacher?”
“Teacher gone too.”
WE WERE AWAY from the village street now and making our way through bracken breast high. The schoolhouse was among it crouched on the edge of the woods. It was schoolhouse and living quarters combined. Trees pressed it close; undergrowth surged up over its windows.
The Indian unlocked the door, pushed us in and slammed the door to violently, as if something terrible were behind us.
“What was it you shut out, Sam?”
“Mosquitoe.”
In here the hum of the mosquitoes had stopped, as every other thing had stopped in the murky grey of this dreadful place, clock, calendar, even the air—the match the Indian struck refused to live.
We felt our way through the long school room to a room behind that was darker still. It had a drawn blind and every crevice was sealed. The air in it felt as solid as the table and the stove. You chewed rather than breathed it. It tasted of coal-oil after we lit the lamp.
I opened a door into the shed. The pungent smell of cut stove-wood that came in was good.
The Indians were leaving me.
“Stop! The old man and the woman, where are they? Show me.”
Before I went I opened all the doors. Mosquitoes were better than this strangling deadness, and I never could come back alone and open the door of the big dark room. Then I ran through the bracken and caught up with the Indians.
They led me to the farthest house in the village. It was cut off from the schoolhouse by space filled with desperate loneliness.
THE OLD MAN was on the floor; he looked like a shrivelled old bird there on his mattress, caged about with mosquito netting. He had lumbago. His wife and grandchild were there too.
The womanliness of the old squaw stayed by me when I came back. All night long I was glad of that woman in Greenville.
It was dark when I got back to the school and the air was oozing sluggishly through the room.
I felt like a thief taking possession