Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [2]
The name Klee Wyck is in itself interesting and a word of explanation is perhaps justifiable. It was the name which the Indians gave Miss Carr at Ucluelet. It meant “Laughing One” and was given to her not because she laughed a great deal—as she herself would say, there is not much of “giggle” in her. But her laughter in Ucluelet went out to meet the Indians, taking the place of words, forming a bond between them. They felt at once that the young girl staying in the missionaries’ house understood them and they accepted her.…
But you will think me a churlish porter if I any longer hold closed the door and exclude you from a gallery through which I have myself moved with delight.
Ira Dilworth
Vancouver, B.C.
October, 1941.
UCLUELET
The lady missionaries expected me. They sent an enormous Irishman in a tiny canoe to meet the steamer. We got to the Ucluelet wharf soon after dawn. Everything was big and cold and strange to me, a fifteen-year old school-girl. I was the only soul on the wharf. The Irishman did not have any trouble deciding which was I.
It was low tide, so there was a long, sickening ladder with slimy rungs to climb down to get to the canoe. The man’s big laugh and the tippiness of the canoe were even more frightening than the ladder. The paddle in his great arms rushed the canoe through the waves.
We came to Toxis, which was the Indian name for the Mission House. It stood just above high-tide water. The sea was in front of it and the forest behind.
The house was of wood, unpainted. There were no blinds or curtains. It looked, as we paddled up to it, as if it were stuffed with black. When the canoe stuck in the mud, the big Irishman picked me up in his arms and set me down on the doorstep.
The missionaries were at the door. Smells of cooking fish jumped out past them. People lived on fish at Ucluelet.
Both the missionaries were dignified, but the Greater Missionary had the most dignity: the Lesser Missionary was fussy. They had long pale faces. Their hair was licked from their foreheads back to buns on the scruffs of their necks. They had long noses straddled by spectacles, thin lips, mild eyes, and wore straight, dark dresses buttoned to the chin.
There was only two of everything in the kitchen, so I had to sit on a box, drink from a bowl and eat my food out of a tin pie-dish.
After breakfast came a long Presbyterian prayer. Outside the kitchen window, just a few feet away at the edge of the forest, stood a grand balsam pine tree. It was very tall and straight.
The sizzling of the Missionaries’ “trespasses” jumped me back from the pine tree to the Lord’s Prayer just in time to “Amen.” We got up from our knees to find the house full of Indians. They had come to look at me.
I felt so young and empty standing there before the Indians and the two grave Missionaries! The Chief, old Hipi, was held to be a reader of faces. He perched himself on the top of the Missionaries’ drug cupboard; his brown fists clutched the edge of it, his elbows taut and shoulders hunched. His crumpled shoes hung loose as if they dangled from strings and had no feet in them. The stare of his eyes searched me right through. Suddenly they were done; he lifted them above me to the window, uttered several terse sentences in Chinook, jumped off the cupboard and strode back to the village.
I was half afraid to ask the Missionary, “What did he say?”
“Not much. Only that you had no fear, that you were not stuck up, and that you knew how to laugh.”
TOXIS SAT UPON a long, slow lick of sand, but the beach of the Indian village was short and bit deep into the shoreline. Rocky points jutted out into the sea at either end of it.
Toxis and the village were a mile apart. The school house was half-way between the two and, like them, was pinched between sea and forest.
The school house called itself “church house” on Sundays, and looked as Presbyterian as it could under the circumstances.
It had a sharp roof,