The Forest Lover Read Online Free

following its inner perimeter. She sucked in her breath, and teetered a moment in disbelief. A womb?
    To put that most private thing on a building! Her sisters would be horrified. They never even whispered about women’s privacies. Only Wash Mary did, happily, with congratulations, when Emily had hidden her first soiled underpants in the laundry. She’d never told anyone Wash Mary’s reaction, held it as secret as a buried seed, and felt a part of her belonged to a different world.
    She entered the hut, and imagined Lulu there, her full skirt pulled up and wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl, beating the cedar filaments into fluff, her bare legs, still girlish, stretched out wide, a dark, wet smear between them, and the old women teaching her some truth of womanhood.
    She knelt. Slowly she ran her hands over the platform, its refined texture and fluted edge a pleasure to her fingertips. The same person who built a square coffin for his mother and hauled her up to the treetops might have crafted this. She stepped outside, hugging her sketch sack. The walls, hewn by a husband, the corners tightly slotted so no wind could chill, the paintings of children born and children to come, the man entering in his imagination a woman’s private place, the womb itself, in order to paint it—everything about the hut told the woman she was loved. How could she make a drawing speak of such things?
    Wanting to touch something intimately native, to have it seep into her pores to feed her art and her life, she placed her palm on the womb.

3: Lady Fern
    â€œI think it’s a menstrual hut,” Emily said, spreading out drawings and watercolors on a table in the Vancouver Ladies’ Art Club for Jessica to see before class. “That symbol may be a womb.”
    â€œOh, my God. And you went in?”
    â€œNot when anyone was there.”
    â€œThis girl. She let you draw her there?”
    â€œNo. I drew her in a bighouse. Putting her here is my imagination, but these of the village and canoes I did right as I found them.”
    â€œWhat about this?”
    â€œThe place of the dead? From memory. It was too morbid to sit and paint right there as if I were painting petunias.”
    â€œBut you liked it.”
    â€œYes.”
    She’d felt pleased with her drawing of Lulu coming out of the hut, but it was such a private place, the coffin trees too, and here she was, showing them like postcards. She quickly stuffed them back into her portfolio when she saw two women bringing in the tea service. “Don’t say anything,” she whispered. “These were only for you to see.”
    Emily wanted to pose Jessica on the platform. Slender, with red hair and a graceful bearing, she’d be elegant, but she knew from their days at art school in San Francisco that Jessica wanted to get the most out of each session, yet never practiced on her own. It exasperated her. She wouldn’t make Jessica give up the class time.
    She posed Edwina instead, seated, ankles crossed. “This week, try not to scratch so tightly,” she said as she adjusted the drape of Edwina’s skirt. “On her skirt, let your stroke run loose as the wind.” She doubted they could. Freedom was hard to achieve.
    The studio door banged against the wall. Emily turned just as Priscilla Hamilton, madam president, sashayed in, head high, handextended. Late, as usual. Everyone stopped working to twitter compliments on Priscilla’s huge, flamingo-pink feathered hat, such a hat as would frighten a goat.
    â€œI bought it in a wee shop on Regent Street where the Queen shops. I wore it to the Ascot races with a pretty little summer frock the same color. We were seated right near the Royal Enclosure. Shall I tell you what they wore?”
    Emily noticed Jessica’s head bent over her drawing, the only one working.
    â€œNo!” Emily bellowed. “A disrespect to ignore the model. Stop dithering and get back