Sophie

Sophie knocked gently on my Vancouver studio door.

“Baskets. I got baskets.”

They were beautiful, made by her own people, West Coast Indian baskets. She had big ones in a cloth tied at the four corners and little ones in a flour-sack.

She had a baby slung on her back in a shawl, a girl child clinging to her skirts, and a heavy-faced boy plodding behind her.

“I have no money for baskets.”

“Money no matter,” said Sophie. “Old clo’, waum skirt–good fo’ basket.”

I wanted the big round one. Its price was eight dollars.

“Next month I am going to Victoria. I will bring back some clothes and get your basket.”

I asked her in to rest a while and gave the youngsters bread and jam. When she tied up her baskets she left the one I coveted on the floor.

“Take it away,” I said. “It will be a month before I can go to Victoria. Then I will bring clothes back with me and come to get the basket.”

“You keep now. Bymby pay,” said Sophie.

“Where do you live?”

“North Vancouver Mission.”

“What is your name?”

“Me Sophie Frank. Everybody know me.”

Sophie’s house was bare but clean. It had three rooms. Later when it got cold Sophie’s Frank would cut out all the partition walls. Sophie said, “Thlee loom, thlee stobe. One loom, one stobe.” The floor of the house was clean scrubbed. It was chair, table and bed for the family. There was one chair; the coal-oil lamp sat on that. Sophie pushed the babies into corners, spread my old clothes on the floor to appraise them, and was satisfied. So, having tested each other’s trade-straightness, we began a long, long friendship–forty years. I have seen Sophie glad, sad, sick and drunk. I have asked her why she did this or that thing–Indian ways that I did not understand–her answer was invariably “Nice ladies always do.” That was Sophie’s ideal–being nice.

Every year Sophie had a new baby. Almost every year she buried one. Her little graves were dotted all over the cemetery. I never knew more than three of her twenty-one children to be alive at one time. By the time she was in her early fifties every child was dead and Sophie had cried her eyes dry. Then she took to drink.

“I got a new baby. I got a new baby.”

Sophie, seated on the floor of her house, saw me coming through the open door and waved the papoose cradle. Two little girls rolled round on the floor; the new baby was near her in a basket-cradle. Sophie took off the cloth tented over the basket and exhibited the baby, a lean poor thing.

Sophie herself was small and spare. Her black hair sprang thick and strong on each side of the clean, straight parting and hung in twin braids across her shoulders. Her eyes were sad and heavy-lidded. Between prominent, rounded cheekbones her nose lay rather flat, broadening and snubby at the tip. Her wide upper lip pouted. It was sharp-edged, puckering over a row of poor teeth–the soothing pucker of lips trying to ease an aching tooth or to hush a crying child. She had a soft little body, a back straight as honesty itself, and the small hands and feet of an Indian.

Sophie’s English was good enough, but when Frank, her husband, was there she became dumb as a plate.

“Why won’t you talk before Frank, Sophie?”

“Frank he learn school English. Me, no. Frank laugh my English words.”

When we were alone she chattered to me like a sparrow.

In May, when the village was white with cherry blossom and the blue water of Burrard Inlet crept almost to Sophie’s door just a streak of grey sand and a plank walk between–and when Vancouver city was more beautiful to look at across the water than to be in; it was then I loved to take the ferry to the North Shore and go to Sophie’s.

Behind the village stood mountains topped by the grand old “Lions”, twin peaks, very white and blue. The nearer mountains were every shade of young foliage, tender grey-green, getting greener and greener till, when they were close, you saw that the village grass outgreened them all. Hens strutted their broods, papooses and pups and kittens rolled everywhere–it was good indeed to spend a day on the Reserve in spring.

Sophie and I went to see her babies’ graves first. Sophie took her best plaid skirt, the one that had three rows of velvet ribbon round the hem, from a nail on the wall, and bound a yellow silk handkerchief round her head. No matter what the weather, she always wore her great shawl, clamping it down with her arms, the fringe trickling over her fingers. Sophie wore her shoes when she walked with me, if she remembered. Across the water we could see the city. The Indian Reserve was a different world–no hurry, no business.

We walked over the twisty, up-and-down road to the cemetery. Casamin, Tommy, George, Rosie, Maria, Mary, Emily, and all the rest were there under a tangle of vines. We rambled, seeking out Sophie’s graves. Some had little wooden crosses, some had stones. Two babies lay outside the cemetery fence: they had not faced life long enough for baptism.

“See! Me got stone for Rosie now.”

“It looks very nice. It must have cost lots of money, Sophie.”

“Grave man make cheap for me. He say, ‘You got lots, lots stone from me, Sophie. Maybe bymby you get some more died baby, then you want more stone. So I make cheap for you.'”

Sophie’s kitchen was crammed with excited women. They had come to see Sophie’s brand-new twins. Sophie was on a mattress beside the cook stove. The twin girls were in small basket papoose cradles, woven by Sophie herself. The babies were wrapped in cotton wool which made their dark little faces look darker; they were laced into their baskets and stuck up at the edge of Sophie’s mattress beside the kitchen stove. Their brown, wrinkled faces were like potatoes baked in their jackets, their hands no bigger than brown spiders.

They were thrilling, those very, very tiny babies. Everybody was excited over them. I sat down on the floor close to Sophie.

“Sophie, if the baby was a girl it was to have my name. There are two babies and I have only one name. What are we going to do about it?”

“The biggest and the best is yours,” said Sophie.

My Em’ly lived three months. Sophie’s Maria lived three weeks. I bought Em’ly’s tombstone. Sophie bought Maria’s.

Sophie’s “mad” rampaged inside her like a lion roaring in the breast of a dove.

“Look see,” she said, holding a red and yellow handkerchief, caught together at the corners and chinking with broken glass and bits of plaster of Paris. “Bad boy bloke my grave flower! Cost five dollar one, and now boy all bloke fo’ me. Bad, bad boy! You come talk me fo’ p’liceman?”

At the City Hall she spread the handkerchief on the table and held half a plaster of Paris lily and a dove’s tail up to the eyes of the law, while I talked.

“My mad fo’ boy bloke my plitty glave flower,” she said, forgetting, in her fury, to be shy of the “English words”.

The big man of the law was kind. He said, “It’s too bad, Sophie. What do you want me to do about it?”

“You make boy buy more this plitty kind for my glave.”

“The boy has no money but I can make his old grandmother pay a little every week.”

Sophie looked long at the broken pieces and shook her head.

“That ole, ole woman got no money.” Sophie’s anger was dying, soothed by sympathy like a child, the woman in her tender towards old Granny. “My bloke no matter for ole woman,” said Sophie, gathering up the pieces. “You scold boy big, Policeman? No make glanny pay.”

“I sure will, Sophie.”

There was a black skirt spread over the top of the packing case in the centre of Sophie’s room. On it stood the small white coffin. A lighted candle was at the head, another at the foot. The little dead girl in the coffin held a doll in her arms. It had hardly been out of them since I had taken it to her a week before. The glassy eyes of the doll stared out of the coffin, up past the closed eyelids of the child.

Though Sophie had been through this nineteen times before, the twentieth time was no easier. Her two friends, Susan and Sara, were there by the coffin, crying for her.

The outer door opened and a half dozen women came in, their shawls drawn low across their foreheads, their faces grim. They stepped over to the coffin and looked in. Then they sat around it on the floor and began to cry, first with baby whimpers, softly, then louder, louder still–with violence and strong howling: torrents of tears burst from their eyes and rolled down their cheeks. Sophie and Sara and Susan did it too. It sounded horrible–like tortured dogs.

Suddenly they stopped. Sophie went to the bucket and got water in a tin basin. She took a towel in her hand and went to each of the guests in turn holding the basin while they washed their faces and dried them on the towel. Then the women all went out except Sophie, Sara and Susan. This crying had gone on at intervals for three days–ever since the child had died. Sophie was worn out. There had been, too, all the long weeks of Rosie’s tubercular dying to go through.

“Sophie, couldn’t you lie down and rest?”

She shook her head. “Nobody sleep in Injun house till dead people go to cemet’ry.”

The beds had all been taken away.

“When is the funeral?”

“I dunno. Pliest go Vancouver. He not come two more day.”

She laid her hand on the corner of the little coffin.

“See! Coffin-man think box fo’ Injun baby no matter.”

The seams of the cheap little coffin had burst.

As Sophie and I were coming down the village street we met an Indian woman whom I did not know. She nodded to Sophie, looked at me and half paused. Sophie’s mouth was set, her bare feet pattered quick, hurrying me past the woman.

“Go church house now?” she asked me.

The Catholic church had twin towers. Wide steps led up to the front door which was always open. Inside it was bright, in a misty way, and still except for the wind and sea-echoes. The windows were gay coloured glass; when you knelt the wooden footstools and pews creaked. Hush lurked in every corner. Always a few candles burned. Everything but those flickers of flame was stone-still.

When we came out of the church we sat on the steps for a little. I said, “Who was that woman we met, Sophie?”

“Mrs. Chief Joe Capilano.”

“Oh! I would like to know Mrs. Chief Joe Capilano. Why did you hurry by so quick? She wanted to stop.” “I don’ want you know Mrs. Chief Joe.”

“You fliend for me, not fliend for her.”

“My heart has room for more than one friend, Sophie.”

“You fliend for me, I not want Mrs. Chief Joe get you.”

“You are always my first and best friend, Sophie.” She hung her head, her mouth obstinate. We went to Sara’s house.

Sara was Sophie’s aunt, a wizened bit of a woman whose eyes, nose, mouth and wrinkles were all twisted to the perpetual expressing of pain. Once she had had a merry heart, but pain had trampled out the merriness. She lay on a bed draped with hangings of clean, white rags dangling from poles. The wall behind her bed, too, was padded heavily with newspaper to keep draughts off her “Lumatiz”.

“Hello, Sara. How are you?”

“Em’ly! Sophie’s Em’ly!”

The pain wrinkles scuttled off to make way for Sara’s smile, but hurried back to twist for her pain.

“I dunno what for I got Lumatiz, Em’ly. I dunno. I dunno.”

Everything perplexed poor Sara. Her merry heart and tortured body were always at odds. She drew a humped wrist across her nose and said, “I dunno, I dunno”, after each remark.

“Goodbye, Sophie’s Em’ly; come some more soon. I like that you come. I dunno why I got pain, lots pain. I dunno–I dunno.”

I said to Sophie, “You see! the others know I am your big friend. They call me ‘Sophie’s Em’ly’.”

She was happy.

Susan lived on one side of Sophie’s house and Mrs. Johnson, the Indian widow of a white man, on the other. The widow’s house was beyond words clean. The cookstove was a mirror, the floor white as a sheet from scrubbing. Mrs. Johnson’s hands were clever and busy. The row of hard kitchen chairs had each its own antimacassar and cushion. The crocheted bedspread and embroidered pillowslips, all the work of Mrs. Johnson’s hands, were smoothed taut. Mrs. Johnson’s husband had been a sea captain. She had loved him deeply and remained a widow though she had had many offers of marriage after he died. Once the Indian agent came, and said:

“Mrs. Johnson, there is a good man who has a farm and money in the bank. He is shy, so he sent me to ask if you will marry him.”

“Tell that good man, `Thank you’, Mr. Agent, but tell him, too, that Mrs. Johnson only got love for her dead Johnson.”

Sophie’s other neighbour, Susan, produced and buried babies almost as fast as Sophie herself. The two women laughed for each other and cried for each other. With babies on their backs and baskets on their arms they crossed over on the ferry to Vancouver and sold their baskets from door to door. When they came to my studio they rested and drank tea with me. My parrot, sheep dog, the white rats and the totem pole pictures all interested them. “An’ you got Injun flower, too,” said Susan.

“Indian flowers?”

She pointed to ferns and wild things I had brought in from the woods. Sophie’s house was shut up. There was a chain and padlock on the gate. I went to Susan.

“Where is Sophie?”

“Sophie in sick house. Got sick eye.”

I went to the hospital. The little Indian ward had four beds. I took ice cream and the nurse divided it into four portions.

A homesick little Indian girl cried in the bed in one corner, an old woman grumbled in another. In a third there was a young mother with a baby, and in the fourth bed was Sophie.

There were flowers. The room was bright. It seemed to me that the four brown faces on the four white pillows should be happier and far more comfortable here than lying on mattresses on the hard floors in the village, with all the family muddle going on about them.

“How nice it is here, Sophie.”

“Not much good of hospital, Em’ly.”

“Oh! What is the matter with it?”

“Bad bed.”

“What is wrong with the beds?”

“Move, move, all time shake. ‘Spose me move, bed move too.”

She rolled herself to show how the springs worked. “Me ole-fashion, Em’ly. Me like kitchen floor fo’ sick.”

Susan and Sophie were in my kitchen, rocking their sorrows back and forth and alternately wagging their heads and giggling with shut eyes at some small joke.

“You go live Victoria now, Em’ly,” wailed Sophie, “and we never see those babies, never!”

Neither woman had a baby on her back these days. But each had a little new grave in the cemetery. I had told them about a friend’s twin babies. I went to the telephone.

“Mrs. Dingle, you said I might bring Sophie to see the twins?”

“Surely, any time,” came the ready reply.

“Come, Sophie and Susan, we can go and see the babies now.”

The mothers of all those little cemetery mounds stood looking and looking at the thriving white babies, kicking and sprawling on their bed. The women said, “Oh my!–Oh my!” over and over.

Susan’s hand crept from beneath her shawl to touch a baby’s leg. Sophie’s hand shot out and slapped Susan’s.

The mother of the babies said, “It’s all right, Susan; you may touch my baby.”

Sophie’s eyes burned Susan for daring to do what she so longed to do herself. She folded her hands resolutely under her shawl and whispered to me,

“Nice ladies don’ touch, Em’ly.”