Greenville
The cannery boss said, “Try Sam; he has a gas boat and comes from Greenville. That’s Sam over there–the Indian in the striped shirt.”
I came close to where Sam was forking salmon from the scow on to the cannery chutes.
“Sam, I want to go to Greenville. Could you take me there on Sunday?”
“Uh huh.”
“What time Sunday?”
“Eight o’clock.”
On Sunday morning I sat on the wharf from eight o’clock till noon. Sam’s gas boat was down below. There was a yellow tarpaulin tented across her middle. Four bare feet stuck out at one end and two black heads at the other.
From stir to start it took the Indians four hours. Sam and his son sauntered up and down getting things as if time did not exist. Round noon the gas boat’s impudent sputter ticked out across the wide face of the Naas River.
The Indian and his son were silent travellers.
I had a small griffon dog who sat at my feet quivering and alert. I felt like an open piano that any of the elements could strum on.
The great Naas swept grandly along. The nameless little river that Greenville was on emptied into the Naas. When our boat turned from the great into the little river she had no more ambition. Her engine died after a few puffs. Then we drifted a short way and nosed alongside a crude plank landing. This was Greenville.
It was between lights, neither day nor dark.
Five or six shadows came limping down the bank to the landing–Indian dogs–gaunt forsaken creatures. They knew when they heard the engine it meant man. The dogs looked queer.
“What is the matter with the dogs?”
“Porkpine,” grunted the Indian.
The creatures’ faces were swollen into wrong shapes. Porcupine quills festered in the swellings.
“Why don’t the Indians take their dogs with them and not leave them to starve or hunt porcupine?”
“Cannery Boss say no can.”
When I went towards the dogs, they backed away growling.
“Him hiyu fierce,” warned the Indian.
In the dusk with the bedding and bundles on their shoulders the two Indians looked monstrous moving up the bank ahead of me.
I held my dog tight because of the fierceness of those skulking shadow–dogs following us.
Greenville was a large village, low and flat. Its stagnant swamps and ditches were glory places for the mosquitoes to breed in. Only the hum of the miserable creatures stirred the heavy murk that beaded our foreheads with sweat as we pushed our way through it.
Half-built, unpainted houses, old before ever they were finished, sat hunched irregularly along the grass-grown way. Planks on spindly trestles bridged the scummed sloughs. Emptiness glared from windows and shouted up dead chimneys, weighted emptiness, that crushed the breath back into your lungs and chilled the heart in your sweating body.
Stumbling over stones and hummocks I hurried after the men who were anxious to place me and be gone down the Naas to the cannery again.
I asked the Indian, “Is there no one in this village?”
“One ole man, one woman, and one baby stop. Everybody go cannery,”
“Where can I stay?”
“Teacher’s house good for you.”
“Where is the teacher?”
“Teacher gone too.”
We were away from the village street now and making our way through bracken breast high. The school house was among it crouched on the edge of the woods. It was school house and living quarters combined. Trees pressed it close; undergrowth surged up over its windows.
The Indian unlocked the door, pushed us in and slammed the door to violently, as if something terrible were behind us.
“What was it you shut out, Sam?”
“Mosquito.”
In here the hum of the mosquitoes had stopped, as every other thing had stopped in the murky grey of this dreadful place, clock, calendar, even the air–the match the Indian struck refused to live.
We felt our way through the long school room to a room behind that was darker still. It had a drawn blind and every crevice was sealed. The air in it felt as solid as the table and the stove. You chewed rather than breathed it. It tasted of coal-oil after we lit the lamp.
I opened a door into the shed. The pungent smell of cut stove-wood that came in was good.
The Indians were leaving me.
“Stop! The old man and the woman, where are they? Show me.”
Before I went I opened all the doors. Mosquitoes were better than this strangling deadness, and I never could come back alone and open the door of the big dark room. Then I ran through the bracken and caught up with the Indians.
They led me to the farthest house in the village. It was cut off from the school house by space filled with desperate loneliness.
The old man was on the floor; he looked like a shrivelled old bird there on his mattress, caged about with mosquito netting. He had lumbago. His wife and grandchild were there too.
The womanliness of the old squaw stayed with me when I came back. All night long I was glad of that woman in Greenville.
It was dark when I got back to the school and the air was oozing sluggishly through the room.
I felt like a thief taking possession of another’s things without leave. The school teacher had left everything shipshape. Everything told the type of woman she was.
Soon I made smoke roll round inside the stove and a tiny flame wavered. I turned forward the almanac sheets and set the clock ticking. When the kettle sang things had begun to live.
The night was long and black. As dawn came I watched things slowly poke out of the black. Each thing was a surprise.
The nights afterwards in this place were not bad like the first one, because I then had my bearings. All my senses had touched the objects around me. But it was lying in that smothering darkness and not knowing what was near me–what I might touch if I reached out a hand–that made the first night so horrible.
When I opened the school house door in the morning the village dogs were in the bracken watching. They went frantic over the biscuits I threw to them. A black one came crouching. She let me pull the porcupine quills out of her face. When the others saw her fear dry up, they came closer too. It was people they wanted even more than food. Wherever I went about the village they followed me.
In the swampy places and ditches of Greenville skunk cabbages grew–gold and brimming with rank smell–hypocrites of loveliness peeping from the lush green of their great leaves. The smell of them was sickening.
I looked through the blindless windows of the Indian houses. Half-eaten meals littered the tables. Because the tide had been right to go, bedding had been stripped from the springs, food left about, water left unemptied to rust the kettles. Indians slip in and out of their places like animals. Tides and seasons are the things that rule their lives: domestic arrangements are mere incidentals.
The houses looked as if they had been shaken out of a dice box on to the land and stayed just where they lit. The elements dominated them from the start. As soon as a few boards were put together the family moved in, and the house went on building around them until some new interest came along. Then the Indian dropped his tools. If you asked when he was going to finish building his house he said, “Nodder day–me too busy now,” and after a long pull on his pipe he would probably lie round in the sun for days doing nothing.
I went often to the last house in the village to gossip with the woman. She was not as old as you thought at first, but very weatherbeaten. She was a friendly soul, but she spoke no English. We conversed like this,–one would point at something, the other clap her hands and laugh, or moan and shake her head as was right. Our eyebrows worked too and our shoulders and heads. A great deal of fun and information passed back and forth between us.
Ginger Pop, my griffon, was a joy to Granny. With a chuckle that wobbled the fat all over her, she would plant her finger on the snub of her own broad nose and wrinkle it back towards her forehead in imitation of the dog’s snub, and laugh till the tears poured out of her eyes. All the while the black eyes of her solemn grandchild stared.
Granny also enjoyed my duck “pantalettes” that came below my skirts to the soles of my shoes, my duplicate pairs of gloves, and the cheese-cloth veil with a glass window in front. This was my mosquito armour. Hers consisted of pair upon pair of heavy wool stockings handknitted, and worn layer upon layer till they were deeper than the probes of the mosquitoes, and her legs looked like barrels.
The old man and I had a few Chinook words in common. I went sometimes to the darkened shed where he was building a boat. He kept a smudge and the air was stifling. Tears and sweat ran down our faces. He wiped his face with the bandanna floating under his hat brim to protect his neck and blew at the mosquitoes and rubbed his lumbago. Suddenly his eye would catch the comic face of Ginger Pop and he too would throw down his tools and give himself up to mirth at the pup’s expense. When he laughed, that was the time to ask him things.
“I am sorry that there are no totem poles in Greenville. I like totem poles,” I said.
“Halo totem stick kopa Greenville.”
“Old village with totem poles stop up the Naas?”
“Uh huh.”
“I would like to see them.”
“Uh huh.”
“Will you take me in your boat?”
“Uh huh, Halo tillicum kopet.”
“I want to see the poles, not people. You take me tomorrow?”
“Uh huh.”
So we went to Gittex and Angedar, two old village sites on the Naas River. His old boat crept through the side-wash meanderings of the Naas. Suddenly we came out on to its turbulent waters and shot across them: and there, tipping drunkenly over the top of dense growth, were the totem poles of Gittex. They looked like mere sticks in the vast sea of green that had swallowed the old village. Once they, too, had been forest trees, till the Indian mutilated and turned them into bare poles. Then he enriched the shorn things with carvings. He wanted some way of showing people things that were in his mind, things about the creatures and about himself and their relation to each other.
He cut forms to fit the thoughts that the birds and animals and fish suggested to him, and to these he added something of himself. When they were all linked together they made very strong talk for the people. He grafted this new language on to the great cedar trunks and called them totem poles and stuck them up in the villages with great ceremony. Then the cedar and the creatures and the man all talked together through the totem poles to the people. The carver did even more–he let his imaginings rise above the objects that he saw and pictured supernatural beings too.
The creatures that had flesh and blood like themselves the Indians understood. They accepted them as their ancestors but the supernatural things they feared and tried to propitiate.
Every clan took a creature for its particular crest. Individuals had private crests too, which they earned for themselves often by privation and torture and fasting. These totem creatures were believed to help specially those who were of their crest.
When you looked at a man’s pole, his crests told you who he was, whom he might marry and whom he might not marry–for people of the same crest were forbidden to marry each other.
You knew also by the totem what sort of man he was or at least what he should be because men tried to be like the creature of their crest, fierce, or brave, or wise, or strong.
Then the missionaries came and took the Indians away from their old villages and the totem poles and put them into new places where life was easier, where they bought things from a store instead of taking them from nature.
Greenville, which the Indians called “Lakalzap”, was one of these new villages. They took no totem poles with them to hamper their progress in new ways; the poles were left standing in the old places. But now there was no one to listen to their talk any more. By and by they would rot and topple to the earth, unless white men came and carried them away to museums. There they would be labelled as exhibits, dumb before the crowds who gaped and laughed and said, “This is the distorted foolishness of an uncivilized people.” And the poor poles could not talk back because the white man did not understand their language.
At Gittex there was a wooden bear on top of such a high pole that he was able still to look over the top of the woods. He was a joke of a bear–every bit of him was merry. He had one paw up against his face, he bent forward and his feet clung to the pole. I tried to circle about so that I could see his face but the monstrous tangle was impossible to break through.
I did beat my way to the base of another pole only to find myself drowned under an avalanche of growth sweeping down the valley. The dog and I were alone in it–just nothings in the overwhelming immensity.
My Indian had gone out to mid-river. It seemed an awful thing to shatter that silence with a shout, but I was hungry and I dared not raise my veil till I got far out on the Naas. Mosquitoes would have filled my mouth.
After seven days the Indians came back with their boat and took me down the Naas again.
I left the old man and woman leisurely busy, the woman at her wash-tub and the man in his stifling boathouse. Each gave me a passing grin and a nod when I said goodbye; comings and goings are as ordinary to Indians as breathing.
I let the clock run down. Flapped the leaves of the calendar back, and shut the Greenville school house tight.
The dogs followed to the edge of the water, their stomachs and hearts sore at seeing us go. Perhaps in a way dogs are more domestic and more responsive than Indians.
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