Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  Llewelyna gave her weekly confession to the peacock. “Who more pure and thus better connected to God than his blameless animals?” she would say. Her Catholicism blended with the stories she brought with her from North Wales, where beautiful women turned into horses or owls or disappeared into pools of water. Llewelyna claimed that long, long, long ago, a fisherman fell in love with a water nymph, and ours was the last of their bloodline.

  Llewelyna found in Saint Francis a loyalty she thought humans, especially her children, were incapable of. She never considered the fact that his attachment to her was only natural since she refused to find Francis a peahen. The shrill of his desperate mating calls gave me headaches. When Francis’s feathers grew too long, Llewelyna would trim some off and tie them into our hair. She told me peacocks were mythological beings. In North Wales the faeries used peacock feathers to cast spells on their human lovers.

  My mother both terrified and fascinated me. As a small girl I often hid in the lilac bushes that enclosed her garden to spy on her. Sometimes she brought her easel outside with a pitcher of lemonade and sat all afternoon painting Francis rustling amongst the flowers. Other days she cut back the relentless poppies and deadheaded carnations, the pink flowers she said first blossomed from Mother Mary’s tears the day Jesus carried the cross. One summer she called the garden her room. I helped her drag the yellow chesterfield outside. Francis would perch on the armrest and fan his tail while she sprawled in the shade like a house cat and smoked cigarettes and read. I flipped the cushions to hide the burn holes from my father.

  On very rare occasions Llewelyna invited Jacob and me into her garden. She waved us in as if we had never been so emphatically excluded in the first place. While Jacob played with his tin soldiers in the soil, I posed on the chesterfield for one of her paintings with Saint Francis settled beside me like an ornamental cushion. His tail feathers tickled my cheek. Llewelyna gazed at me over her canvas, her eyes hard on my ear, my arm, my knee, my lips. It was a strange kind of attention. My body transformed into curves and shades. When she painted my face she looked at my eyes so seriously I had to turn away.

  “Irie, look up,” she said, her hand motioning as if to lift a veil up over her own face. “It’s the eyes hold the magic, innit.”

  Her eyes were so severe, so focused, seeing the details, the skin, and yet somehow seeing nothing at all. I looked above her head and followed the bough of the maple tree up towards my bedroom window, where leaves and the maple-keys Jacob called frog-wings chimed against the glass.

  “Irie, look here.” Her finger pointed to her nose. “If I can’t paint your eyes right den you’re nothin’ but a husk.” Llewelyna’s Welsh accent would come out unexpectedly and at the strangest of times. Often it would be when she was telling a bedtime story, or distracted by a book she was reading, but sometimes it was mid-sentence. My father, if he was there, would look up at her and grin, remembering her again as the woman he had met on the other side of the world.

  One summer, while Jacob and my father were in the city at the northern end of the lake, I peered through the lilacs and watched Llewelyna knead the earth. Bees droned around my face and ants trickled across my bare feet. The leftover summer heat had softened the geraniums and dahlias; their heavy blossoms slumped on stiff necks. A sticky, sweet smell wafted up from the orchard and swirled with the balm percolating in her garden. Francis strutted along the garden path making soft clucking sounds, gwlaw, gwlaw. Llewelyna said when Francis made this sound it meant a storm was on its way. Gwlaw is Welsh for rain. As secondary proof, she would point to her marigolds. She claimed the blossoms closed ever so slightly when the weather changed. Sometimes Saint Francis approached Llewelyna and fanned his train of feathers about his tiny body in a show of trembling brilliance that made even the garden appear drab and grey.

  I remember Llewelyna humming. She was always humming. I could never recognize the tune, but it made me think of the green forests, rivers, and lakes she told me about on the Isle of Anglesey. She was kneeling at the base of a rose bush, wearing a canary-yellow chemise that didn’t quite cover her thighs and dipped low at her chest. The dry heat made her batty. Her knees pushed into the soil, staining the lace along the hem. A nest of red curls sat atop her head. Loose strands twisted and twirled down her back. With a flick of her wrist she pushed a ringlet over her shoulder. I mimicked that gesture with a tangle of my own brown hair. She refused to wear the special gloves my father had purchased her for gardening. Her fingernails were always lined with dirt, her hands chapped and callused. Llewelyna clawed at the stubborn weeds. Their roots snapped like tendons.

  Suddenly she stood up, rigid in front of her rose bush. At first I thought she had seen me, and I leaned back into the lilacs to hide. I felt a raindrop on my cheek and wondered if she had felt one too, if this might explain her stillness as she waited to confirm the sensation as rain. Then Llewelyna’s head lolled back and forth and her eyes slowly open and closed.

  “Iris? Are you there?” she called. “Iris?” She reached out for balance as if blind, and found none. She fell backwards, right into the rose bush. I jumped out of the lilacs and into the garden. Francis squawked, flapped his wings in warning. I leapt past him and stood at her feet. Her arms were stiff. Hands in fists. She thrashed. I tried to pull her out of the rose bush, and thorns pierced my arms and legs. I called her name but she didn’t respond even though her eyes were wide open. Her entire body convulsed. Speckles of blood and rain made patterns along her cheeks and bare arms and legs like constellations. I tried to hold her feet still but they jerked out of my grasp.

  It seemed like hours before her body finally went still. I shook her awake. She sat up and blinked twice. Rose petals were stuck to her glistening skin.

  “Iris?” she asked again.

  That night I stood on a chair with a wet cloth and dabbed the scratches on her arms and neck. I watched her in the mirror as she observed herself, bloodshot eyes unblinking as if afraid to look away. “We must keep this a secret,” she said, speaking to me but still watching her own eyes suspiciously. I nodded, excited to be a part of her strange world. “When your father comes home this weekend”—she licked her finger and rubbed a speck of blood off her cheek—“I’d like you to tell him we’re having a grand time, just you and me.” She smiled at me in the mirror then. I absorbed her warmth like a cactus clings to a single drop of water.

  2

  Our bay remained unsettled much longer than most spots on the lake. We called it Winteridge, but this was just one of the many names given to this strip of land on the steep hillside. A name first used by the European fur traders who settled the land as if it were empty. As if it belonged to them already. “Winteridge” was a name understood only when grey ice crept up the shore and slid beneath the doors of barns and homes, stealing breath from cattle and small children. During the hot, dry summers, the name was the only thing that provided relief from the heat, like peppermint beneath the tongue.

  A few weeks after her fall in the garden, Llewelyna, Jacob, and I lay in the yard and gazed up into the branches of the maple tree. Frog-wings spiralled down on us and sunlight turned the broad leaves into paper lanterns, like the ones the Japanese pickers later hung around the pick shacks on the McCarthys’ apple orchard. Even the birds were lazy in the heat, their usual chatter low and dull. Llewelyna had spread her duvet in the shade of the tree. Jacob lay with his head on her stomach and I lay beside her. Saint Francis fanned his tail and strutted back and forth in the grass, glaring at Jacob and me, envious of our proximity to Llewelyna.

  The maple tree in our yard dwarfed our three-storey house and was our only offering of shade. The peach trees were no taller than my father, who, in the beginning, spent his days tending to the orchard in shirtsleeves, often with a book under his arm. I would watch his top hat bob between the rows. Having grown up on an estate just outside London, my father was not a natural orchardist. He learned everything he knew from books. My father never thought of our time in
Winteridge as permanent. He saw Winteridge as a place he could escape away from as easily as he escaped to it. He wanted Jacob and me to experience the deep West, to grow up a little wild, but to return eventually to England. We were meant to bring our extravagances and our bigness back to a motherland we didn’t know, attend private school, university, marry reputable Brits, and settle down. He never imagined he might lose Llewelyna and me to this land.

  The branches of the maple tree twisted up into the sky. In winter the tree looked spindly and dead, but in spring it grew lush and full of birds, bugs, and other secret lives. The lacework of spiders glimmered or returned to shadow and disappeared as sunlight moved through branches. Cool droplets of sap we would have to lick or scratch off sprinkled our arms and bare legs.

  Jacob pointed out a troop of ants spiralling down the trunk of the tree. Their tiny army trickled onto the duvet. We covered our mouths to keep from laughing and stayed completely still as the ants tickled up and down our limbs as if we were merely part of their landscape. The ants scurried over the inside of Llewelyna’s wrist, manoeuvring over a puckered scar, and down the other side. Once the ants had disappeared into the grass, Llewelyna rolled onto her side, making Jacob readjust himself on his stomach so all of us were facing one another. She looked at us in turn, grinned, and closed her eyes. The silence was filled with only the babble of birds.

  If I had known then that she was about to open her mouth and in her next breath invent a monster that would haunt us the rest of our lives, I would have asked her to stop. I would have asked if she had thought out the consequences of her words, which were never merely words but, as in Genesis, had the power to create. What would have happened if, when God spoke the earth into being, there was someone there to ask him, “Are you certain? Have you thought it all through?” But like God, Llewelyna was reckless with words.

  “I remember it like this,” she said. Llewelyna often began her stories this way. As a girl her Nain had told her many old Welsh tales, and these retellings were Llewelyna’s attempts to recall exactly how they went. She called some of the stories branches of the Mabinogi, and back then I imagined the Mabinogi was a tree not unlike our maple, with four long, unfurling branches and broad leaves as large as my head.

  “There once was a girl who was seduced by a fish.”

  “What kind of fish?” Jacob was a stickler for details.

  “A carp,” she said. “Now, close your eyes, you.”

  Llewelyna always had us all close our eyes when she told stories. I squinted to watch her eyelids tremble as she spoke. It was like peeking backstage during a play.

  “Every day the beautiful girl walked through a dark wood to bathe in a clear pond. In the privacy of the grove, the girl would take off her gown and undergarments and swim completely naked. Her beauty attracted the attention of the water spirits.”

  “Like Kelpie, the water horse?”

  “No, not this time.”

  “Hush, Jacob,” I said and pinched him.

  “Ow, Iris.”

  “Must I stop?”

  “No, don’t stop.”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  “Where was I?”

  “The naked girl.”

  “Right. The girl’s beauty attracted the attention of the water spirits and the jealousy of the queen nymph. The spirits would spy on the girl from between the reeds and when she was gone they spoke of her beauty and perfection, ignoring the queen nymph. Soon the queen nymph had had enough. She commanded her friend the pwca—”

  “Puka?”

  I elbowed Jacob.

  “I just want to know.”

  “A pwca is a shape-shifter,” she said.

  “Like Taliesin?”

  “No. A pwca is a creature that takes many forms, one of them being human. And Taliesin is a man that takes an animal form.”

  “But how is that different?”

  Llewelyna’s eyes were open now, and I was afraid Jacob had broken the spell of the story and we would never find out what happened.

  “Taliesin has the heart of a man. A pwca has the heart of an animal,” I said, wanting to show Llewelyna my keen insight of this otherworld.

  “Don’t be a fool, Iris. A heart is a heart.” She tapped Jacob’s nose with the tip of her finger. “It’s a good question, my sweet. The difference is a mystery, really. Can I continue with the story?”

  Jacob nodded, and we all closed our eyes again.

  “The queen nymph commanded the pwca to seduce the girl. The girl was charmed by the golden carp and watched it whirl through the water. It disappeared for a moment and then a man with yellow hair appeared at the other end of the pond. She fell under his spell. His skin shimmered like scales, and if the girl had looked a little closer, she would have found gills behind his ears, for a pwca can never shift entirely. There is always something leftover. Months later, the girl became round and pregnant and she no longer attracted the attention of the water spirits. But you see, the girl was already engaged to marry. Her beloved was to return to ask her family’s permission to wed. The girl was ashamed and mortified by the pregnancy. She tried everything to rid herself of the child: special herbs and jagged devices. Every day when she went to the pond to bathe she cursed her unborn child and begged God to take it away. She slammed her fists against her swollen belly and wept. The queen nymph took pity on the girl and released a spell to rid the girl of the child before her beloved arrived.

  “And so, one hot day while the girl swam in the pond, her swollen belly bobbing above the water, she began to have labour pains. It was too early. The child hadn’t fully developed. She stood and a tar-like liquid oozed down her legs. The pond turned murky, then black. The girl watched her swollen belly shrink. Something long and snake-like twisted out from between her legs, but she couldn’t make out its precise form through the dark water. The water spirits and the queen nymph hid in the reeds. The girl began to walk backwards towards the shore. The creature rose to the surface. It had the head of a horse and the body of a snake.”

  I pictured Leviathan from the picture Bible I read in Henry’s library.

  “An addanc,” Jacob whispered forebodingly.

  “It was a creature deformed by jealousy and betrayal, unloved and unwanted by even its own mother. The girl screamed and turned to run but the water slowed her down. She could hear the creature splash towards her. When the girl was almost at the shore she tripped and fell to her knees. The creature sank its teeth into her wrist. The girl pried at its teeth. It was useless. She picked up a stone and slammed it against the monster’s skull. It let out a horrible groan and let go. When she was finally free of it she ran up the shore. Blood trailed down her legs and from her wrist. When she turned back to look at the black lake, the monster was staring up at her, gnashing its teeth and whispering her name.”

  Jacob sat up, eyes wide as a gutted fish. Llewelyna’s stories often turned dark. They not only fed our imaginations and filled our nightmares, but the creatures in her stories emerged into our day-to-day world. It was often difficult for me to distinguish between what was real and what was imaginary, and if such categories still hold when the truth of either is equal. Llewelyna’s monster became that sound in the night, the creature coiled beneath my bed. It became that eerie sense of being watched while we walked through the forest. It slithered between trees.

  “And then what happened?” Jacob asked. Llewelyna opened her trembling eyes as if returning from another place. It was the same look she gave when I interrupted her reading.

  “The girl avoided the haunted pond. Only her sister knew what had happened but the sister promised not to tell. The girl’s true love never found out about her strange pregnancy. He took the girl far from her village to a new land. Sometimes at night the girl dreams of the monster’s empty eyes. But when she wakes in the morning and sees her love beside her and her children playing in the grass”—at this point Llewelyna touched my brother on the cheek and then turned to me and pressed her thumb to my chin�
�“she forgets the creature.”

  “But…” Jacob began.

  Llewelyna twisted her mass of tangled hair into a neat, miraculous little bun that resembled a snail shell.

  “What about the village?” he asked. “What about all the people the monster must have killed by now?”

  Llewelyna froze—her narrow arm poised above her head, index finger and thumb pinching the long bone pin my father had brought back from one of his trips. She forced a smile. “I don’t know, Jacob.” She slid the pin through her bun and shooed us off the duvet. I was angry with Jacob for asking questions and forcing her to leave our quiet spot in the shade. He didn’t understand Llewelyna’s unspoken rules, though I followed them desperately. First: never question her stories. Second: never ask for a story. Third: never interrupt.

  “Go on now and get a treat from the Nickels’ shop.” She gave us each a coin. “Hurry now, before it turns.” Llewelyna said these coins were faery money, and if we waited too long to spend them they would turn into fungus. She flicked the duvet, scattering a world of leaves and ants and releasing duck feathers that were still floating to the ground when she reached the house with Saint Francis trailing behind her.

  Although years later Henry told me it was impossible, and that the age-old demon he called Naitaka—a name he whittled down from something much greater just so I could pronounce it—had haunted the lake long before my family had arrived in Winteridge, for a long time I still believed that with Llewelyna’s words, the lake monster was born.