Klee Wyck Read Online Free PDF

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.”
    S OPHIE’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.
    I N 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 gray-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