Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [29]
Indian Village, Alert Bay
When Mrs. Green had tramped the kelp flat, Louisa and I sat on the trunk and she roped it and did up the clasps. Then we put the trunk on the boys’ little wagon and between us trundled it to the wharf. They came home then to write a letter to the store man at Prince Rupert. Louisa got the pen and ink, and her black head and her mother’s grey one bent over the kitchen table. They had the store catalogue: it was worn soft and black. Mrs. Green had been deciding all the year what to get with the money from the fish roe. Louisa’s tongue kept lolling out of the corner of her mouth as she worried over the words; she found them harder to write than to say in English. It seemed as if the lolling tongue made it easier to put them on the paper.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
Louisa shoved the paper across the table to me with a glad sigh, crushing up her scrawled sheet. They referred over and over to the catalogue, telling me what to write. “One plaid shawl with fringe, a piece of pink print, a yellow silk handkerchief, groceries” were all written down, but the old woman kept turning back the catalogue and Louisa kept turning it forward again and saying firmly, “That is all you need, Mother!” Still the old woman’s fingers kept stealthily slipping back the pages with longing.
I ended the letter and left room for something else on the list.
“Was there anything more that you wanted, Mrs. Green?”
“Yes, me like that!” she said with a defiant glance at Louisa.
It was a patent tobacco pipe with a little tin lid. Louisa looked shamed.
“What a fine pipe, Mrs. Green, you ought to have that,” I said.
“Me like little smoke,” said Mrs. Green, looking slyly at Louisa.
“So do I, Mrs. Green.”
“The missionary says ladies do not smoke,” said Louisa doubtfully.
That night, old Mother Green sat by the stove puffing happily on her old clay pipe. She leaned forward and poked my knee. “That lid good,” she said. “When me small, small girl me mamma tell me go fetch pipe often; I put in my mouth to keep the fire; that way me begin like smoke.” She had a longish face scribbled all over with wrinkles. When she talked English the big wrinkles round her eyes and mouth were seams deep and tight and little wrinkles, like stitches, crossed them.
THE CANDLE in my room gave just enough light to show off the darkness. Morning made clear the picture that was opposite my bed. It was of three very young infants. How they could stick up so straight with no support at that age was surprising. They had embroidered robes three times as long as themselves, and the most amazing expressions on their faces. Their six eyes were shut as tight as licked envelopes—the infants, clearly, had tremendous wills, and had determined never to open their eyes. Their little faces were like those of very old people; their fierce wrinkles seemed to catch and pinch my stare, so that I could not get it away. I stared and stared. Louisa found me staring.
I said, “Whose babies are those?”
“Mother’s tripples,” she replied grandly.
“You mean they were Mrs. Green’s babies?”
“Yes, the only tripples ever born on Queen Charlotte Islands.”
“Did they die?”
“One died and the other two never lived. We kept the dead ones till the live one died, then we pictured them all together.”
Whenever I saw that remarkable old woman, with her hoe and spade, starting off in her canoe to cultivate the potatoes she grew wherever she could find a pocket of earth on the little islands round about, I thought of the “tripples.” If they had lived and had inherited her strength and determination, they could have rocked the Queen Charlotte Islands.
ON SUNDAY, Louisa opened the chest in my room