Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [31]
Mother was crying a little when we came away.
“Is Joey dead, Mother?”
“No, the priests have taken him from Martha and sent him away to school.”
“Why couldn’t he stay with Martha and go to school like other Indian boys?”
“Joey is not an Indian; he is a white boy. Martha is not his mother.”
“But Joey’s mother did not want him; she gave him away to Martha and that made him her boy. He’s hers. It’s beastly of the priest to steal him from Martha.”
MARTHA CRIED till she had no more tears and then she died.
SALT WATER
At five o’clock that July morning the sea, sky, and beach of Skidegate were rosily smoothed into one. There was neither horizon, cloud, nor sound; of that pink, spread silence even I had become part, belonging as much to sky as earth, as much to sleeping as waking as I went stumbling over the Skidegate sands.
At the edge of the shrunken sea some Indians were waiting for me, a man and his young nephew and niece. They stood beside the little go-between canoe which was to carry us to a phantom gas boat floating far out in the Bay.
We were going to three old forsaken villages of the British Columbia Indians, going that I might sketch. We were to be away for five days.
“The morning is good,” I said to the Indian.
“Uh huh,” he nodded.
The boy and the girl shrank back shyly, grinning, whispering guttural comments upon my Ginger Pop, the little griffon dog who trotted by my side.
In obedience to a grunt and a pointing finger, I took my place in the canoe and was rowed out to the gas boat. She tipped peevishly as I boarded, circling a great round “O” upon the glassy water; I watched the “O” flatten back into smoothness. The man went to fetch the girl and boy, the food and blankets.
I had once before visited these three villages, Skedans, Tanoo and Cumshewa. The bitter-sweet of their overwhelming loneliness created a longing to return to them. The Indian had never thwarted the growth-force springing up so terrifically in them. He had but homed himself there awhile, making use of what he needed, leaving the rest as it always was. Civilization crept nearer and the Indian went to meet it, abandoning his old haunts. Then the rush of wild growth swooped and gobbled up all that was foreign to it. Rapidly it was obliterating every trace of man. Now only a few hand-hewn cedar planks and roof beams remained, moss-grown and sagging—a few totem poles, greyed and split.
We had been scarcely an hour on the sea when the rosiness turned to lead, grey mist wrapped us about and the sea puckered into sullen, green bulges.
The Indians went into the boat’s cabin. I preferred the open. Sitting upon a box, braced against the cabin wall, I felt very ill indeed. There was no deck rail, the waves grew bigger and bigger licking hungrily towards me. I put the dog in his travelling box and sent him below.
Soon we began digging into green valleys, and tearing up erupting hills. I could scarcely retain my grip on the box. It seemed as if my veins were filled with sea water rather than blood, and that my head was full of emptiness.
After seven hours of this misery our engine shut off outside Skedans Bay. The Indian tossed the anchor overboard. My heart seemed to go with it in its gurgling plop to find bottom, for mist had turned to rain and Skedans skulked dim and uninviting.
“Can the boat not go nearer?”
The Indian shook his head. “No can, water floor welly wicked, make boat bloke.” I knew that there were kelp beds and reefs which could rip the bottoms from boats down in Skedans Bay.
“Eat now?” asked the man.
“No, I want to land.”
The canoe sighed across our deck. The waves met her with an angry spank. The Indian juggled her through the kelp. Kelpie heads bobbed around us like drowning Aunt Sallies, flat brown streamers growing from their crowns and floating out on the waves like long tresses. The sea battered