Klee Wyck - Emily Carr [4]
“Klatawa” (Chinook for “Go”) she shouted, and I went. Later, the old wife called to me across the bay, but I would not heed her call.
“Why did you not reply when old Mrs. Wynook called you?” the Missionary asked.
“She was angry and drove me away.”
“She was calling, ‘Klee Wyck, come back, come back,’ when I heard her.”
“What does ‘Klee Wyck’ mean?”
“I do not know.”
The mission house door creaked open and something looking like a bundle of tired rags tumbled onto the floor and groaned.
“Why, Mrs. Wynook,” exclaimed the Missionary, “I thought you could not walk!”
The tired old woman leaned forward and began to stroke my skirt.
“What does Klee Wyck mean, Mrs. Wynook?” asked the Missionary.
Mrs. Wynook put her thumbs into the corners of her mouth and stretched them upwards. She pointed at me; there was a long, guttural jabber in Chinook between her and the
Missionary. Finally the Missionary said, “Klee Wyck is the Indians’ name for you. It means ‘Laughing One.’”
The old woman tried to make the Missionary believe that her husband thought it was I, not the cat, who had toppled the boxes and woke him, but the Missionary, scenting a lie, asked for “straight talk.” Then Mrs. Wynook told how the old Indians thought the spirit of a person got caught in a picture of him, trapped there so that, after the person died, it had to stay in the picture.
“They have such silly notions,” said the Missionary.
“Tell her that I will not make any more pictures of the old people,” I said. It must have hurt the Indians dreadfully to have the things they had always believed trampled on and torn from their hugging. Down deep we all hug something. The great forest hugs its silence. The sea and the air hug the spilled cries of sea-birds. The forest hugs only silence; its birds and even its beasts are mute.
WHEN NIGHT CAME DOWN upon Ucluelet the Indian people folded themselves into their houses and slept.
At the mission house candles were lit. After eating fish, and praying aloud, the Missionaries creaked up the bare stair, each carrying her own tin candlestick. I had a cot at the foot of their wide wooden bed and scrambled quickly into it. Blindless and carpetless, it was a bleak bedroom even in summer.
The Missionaries folded their clothes, paired their shoes, and put on stout nightgowns. Then, one on each side of the bed, they sank to their knees on the splintery floor and prayed some more, this time silent, private prayers. The buns now dangled in long plaits down their backs and each bowed head was silhouetted against a sputtering candle that sat on an upturned apple-box, one on either side of the bed, apple-boxes heaped with devotional books.
The room was deathly still. Outside, the black forest was still, too, but with a vibrant stillness tense with life. From my bed I could look one storey higher into the balsam pine. Because of his closeness to me, the pine towered above his fellows, his top tapering to heaven like the hands of the praying Missionaries.
EVERY DAY might have been a Sunday in the Indian village. At Toxis only the seventh day was the Sabbath. Then the Missionaries changed their “undies” and put lace jabots across the fronts of their “ovies,” took an hour longer in bed in the morning, doubled their doses of coffee and prayers, and conducted service in the school house which had shifted its job to church as the cow’s horn turned itself into a church bell for the day.
The Indian women with handkerchiefs on their heads, plaid shawls round their shoulders