* * *
Unlike the surrounding area, which was dominated by evergreens, Winteridge was thick with white birch trees that appeared to hover above the bay like ghosts. It seemed the natives considered the birch a bad omen. They had lived and travelled along the shores and connecting rivers of the lake long before the Ebers had settled in the hills and the birch trees grew in the bay. I didn’t know it then, but Henry later told me that Winteridge was built atop a burial ground. There had been a brutal plague: smallpox. Henry had another name back then, which he refused to tell me. He had watched many of his people die. Their spirits still misted the trees. It was not until Henry told me a story about these people in the trees that I began to see them out of the corners of my eyes—faces in the forest or shadows on the beach. Once, I saw a woman halfway up a tree tying a rope to a branch. The wooden beads in her hair chimed in the breeze. When I got closer to the tree she disappeared, but the rope still hung from the branch. Another time I heard the snap of a twig and glimpsed a man with long grey hair picking berries. In the next moment he was gone. Llewelyna called these spectres Lake People. She said they were experts at camouflage and knew the land better than anyone because they were part of it. Created from it. They could turn into birds, bears, fish, and even trees.
“But weren’t we also made from the earth?” I asked her once, thinking of Genesis.
Llewelyna bent to clutch a handful of dark soil from her garden and let it fall in clumps. “This earth,” she said. “They were made of this very earth.”
At night when coyotes yipped in our orchard, Llewelyna told Jacob and me it was the Lake People, transformed into coyotes and angry at us whites for stealing their land. My father would frown and shake his head at her in warning. In the morning one of our chickens would be ripped to shreds or a cat disembowelled on our doorstep. Llewelyna would nod at the evidence and look at us as if saying, See?
There was one coyote in particular Llewelyna was especially fond of. It was a silver runt that was always on its own, and seemed excluded from the pack. Although it was clearly not a wolf, for some reason unknown to me, Llewelyna tenderly called this coyote her she-wolf and left her bits of dinner at the edge of the orchard without my father knowing.
Llewelyna often told us the story of when, while she was pregnant with Jacob, she had gone for a long walk in the woods and got lost. It had been a scorching day and she had not brought any water along. Soon she came across an earth house. From outside it appeared to be only a hole in the ground with a log sticking out. An old woman emerged from inside the ground. She smiled down at Llewelyna’s melon-belly and, seeing her exhaustion, invited Llewelyna to follow her through the opening. Inside it was dark and cool, and the ground was carpeted with deerskin. When her eyes adjusted she saw blankets folded neatly on one side of the space and a few wooden tools. Earthen pots and bowls and a low table were at the other side. The woman brought Llewelyna a mug of water. They sat together in silence and watched the dust sparkle in the light from the hole in the roof. Once Llewelyna had revived, the old woman led her back to the outskirts of Winteridge.
This woman’s kindness had touched Llewelyna deeply, fascinated her. Later, once she had recovered from giving birth, she had wanted to repay the woman for her goodness and went back to find the earth house. It had been abandoned. The roof had collapsed. There was a bullet hole in a tree nearby.
Henry was the only native in Winteridge. He ran a library from his cottage in the forest. There was a worn path from behind the cannery through the woods to his front step. When settlers had first arrived in Winteridge, Henry helped them navigate the lake and forest. He would accept only tobacco and books as payment for his guidance. Henry had more books than anyone else in Winteridge, and so everyone borrowed books from him. Henry didn’t believe in money and would not accept it. Instead, borrowers brought things to barter—cured meat, an apple pie, a quilt. Henry survived better than most on the goods he received for lending out his books.
There were many rumours about Henry. Some said he was a halfling, and that his white father was responsible for the plague of smallpox that killed his people. Others said his tribe abandoned him for dealing too closely with white men. I heard once that Henry killed a man for his books. I thought this might be true, as many of his older books had the name Stewart Brewster written in the top right corner. One time Henry was late coming back from delivering some books to old Mr. McCarthy, who was sick with influenza, and I wandered in the woods surrounding his house and found a small graveyard hidden by the dangling branches of a willow. One of the gravestones had Brewster written on it.
I asked Henry why he was the only native. He shrugged. “There are others,” he said, but I had never seen any in Winteridge. Sometimes they glided past Winteridge in their low dugout canoes. They would watch the bay suspiciously and stay as far away from the shore as possible. I wondered then if Henry meant the Lake People who crowded the surrounding forests.
“You mean the ghosts in the trees?”
“You see them, do you?”
I nodded. “Are they angry?”
Henry smiled, but his eyes filled with sadness. “Not at you, little girl.” But I understood what his words meant: Yes, even you are part of their suffering.
* * *
I spent much of my childhood in Henry’s library while Miss Maggie taught Jacob and several other children from the town in the schoolhouse. Llewelyna said Henry could teach me more than that stiff old spinster. She claimed the schoolhouse was only built to meet legal demands, while the quality of education escaped government scrutiny. For a girl, such a rudimentary education would lead to nothing but entry into ladies’ schools.
While Henry dusted his books he told me stories about Coyote, the trickster, and the animal people, the first ones to inhabit the earth, long before Adam and Eve. Henry taught me the sacredness of water, air, and fire, and the purifying power of smoke. He read to me from Milton, and Kant, and Spinoza, his favourite philosopher. When we tired of books, Henry and I would leave the library for the forest. Orange pine needles covered the ground. I followed him along a path invisible to the eye. Henry was tall, the tallest man in Winteridge, and he said he still hadn’t stopped growing. He grew an inch or two every year. He had to duck under branches way over my head. We passed a bush with dark berries and Henry stopped, picked one off the bush, and popped it in his mouth.
“Saskatoons,” he said, and offered me one. The berry was sweet and gritty. We picked some for our pockets. Further along Henry ran his hand through tall grass. He knelt down and spread the grass open to reveal green spears of asparagus that we also collected. Later he showed me prickly pear cactus that survive even in the dead of winter and once peeled can be cooked on a fire and eaten.
“You need to know how to take care of yourself,” he said ominously.
“Is something bad going to happen?” I eyed one of the Lake People slipping under the bough of a nearby pine. She walked steadily towards us. Whenever I walked around with Henry, the Lake People loomed closer than usual. This woman’s eyes were on Henry hard, as if she wanted to embrace or kill him. Even from the corner of my vision I could see she had terrible boils all over her face and neck.
“Henry…”
“It’s okay. She won’t hurt us.”
I knew if I looked directly at the woman I would no longer be able to see her. This was the way of these ghosts. The woman stood before Henry, as if to prevent him from walking any further. From my downcast eyes I could only make out the woman’s feet, bare and covered in the same welts as her face. Henry did something unusual then: he took a clump of grass and sprinkled it with some curls of fresh tobacco from the packet he carried in his pocket. He held the grass between him and the woman and lit it with a match. He closed his eyes and hummed as the grass smouldered. I watched the smoke rise up to the sky. When the fire went out and the smoke stopped, the woman turned and walked back into the bushes.
“Who was that?” I asked.
Henry put the burnt grass on the ground and covered it with dirt. “My half-sister.”
“Is she dead?”
“In a sense, yes. In many others, no. Not at all. Not ever.”
“She seems angry.”
“She has reason to be.”
I remembered what Llewelyna said about us taking the land of the Lake People and thought perhaps the spirit was angry at Henry because he was with me. I didn’t admit this to Henry because I was afraid it might mean he would stop teaching me.
“What happened to her face?” I asked.
Henry brushed his hands off on his pants. “Smallpox.”
Jacob and I had received vaccinations for smallpox earlier that year. When the nurse pulled out the thick syringe, I fainted.
“What did you do with the grass?”
“Begged forgiveness.”
With that Henry leapt ahead of me up a steep embankment. We walked for a little while longer and then he stopped and pointed up. There was a small shelter hidden in one of the trees. Someone had hammered branches and strips of bark to the outside walls to camouflage it.
“This is a secret place. Only come here if you’re in trouble. It’s the perfect place to hide. Go on up,” he said. “I’m too heavy now—I’ll tear the tree down.”
I carefully climbed using branches and worn steps nailed to the bough. I lifted myself through a square hole in the floor of the shelter. Inside the tree fort was a can full of buttons, some pencils, and a children’s picture Bible. The walls were covered with words carved into the wood. The words were in a language I had never seen before, full of accents, backwards question marks, and upside-down e’s. Amongst these words there were also ink drawings of animals, fish, and trees. I peered through a set of eyeholes on the side of the shelter. Something flashed between trees: the silver-furred coyote, Llewelyna’s she-wolf. When I looked out for Henry, he was speaking with someone. I scurried down the ladder.
Henry said, “Iris, come meet an old friend of mine.”
The man extended his hand to me. He had skin as dark and smooth as leather. One of his ears was missing its lobe. I eyed him suspiciously and wondered if this was Coyote, who sometimes took the form of a man. “You can call me Frank,” he said. But I knew that, like Henry, this was not his real name. When we shook hands he slipped something into my palm and winked. I rolled the square object over and over in my palm as he and Henry continued their conversation in their own language. Once he left, I opened my hand and found a caramel.
After walking for a few hours through the forested hills surrounding Winteridge, Henry turned to me and held his finger to his mouth. He picked up two clumps of pine needles and passed one clump to me. “They must be dry, orange ones,” he whispered. He held the needles to his mouth and blew on them. I did the same.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Shh. You’ll see.” As we stood blowing on the pine needles, Henry looked into the trees around us, waiting. Then he stopped, ducked down towards me. “You see there?” I scanned the trees he pointed to and shook my head. “Look harder,” he said. “You have to practise looking. Learn to see.”
I focused my gaze on the trees until I could see the black eyes and nose of one, two, three does peeking at us from behind tree boughs, their ears extended, alert. Further off behind them, a buck nibbled at some grass, vines stuck in his antlers. Later Henry showed me how to call out groundhogs by cracking my knuckles.
3
Winteridge consisted of a strip of three small businesses along the water and the schoolhouse that Llewelyna liked to call the barn. The Pearl Hotel was a white Victorian two-storey building with purple curtains and a wraparound porch where visitors sucked on pipes and watched the hundred or so inhabitants of Winteridge pass by. Old Seamus Pearl was the widowed owner of the hotel. My father told me that he had moved from Ireland to the Okanagan during the gold rush, but never earned enough to buy his ticket home. He brewed beer in the cellar of the hotel and served it to the guests and the few Winteridge folk deemed respectable enough to share space with them. His young wife died in childbirth, leaving him with a daughter, Juliet. Motherless girls like Juliet fascinated me because they were often the main characters of Llewelyna’s stories and the books I read. I would spy on Juliet serving the men on the porch their morning tea and scones, or rubbing the windows of the hotel with vinegar, or transporting spent barley, still steaming, in a wheelbarrow to the Ebers’ ranch to sell it as pig feed.
Next to the Pearl Hotel was the Nickels’ dry goods store and post office. The Nickels’ shop had everything from lentils to wrenches to chicken feed. Jacob and I often went there with our allowance to purchase penny candies and squares of caramel and chocolate. Charlotte Nickel, a plump, rosy-cheeked woman, and her two daughters, Daphne and Teresa, worked the storefront, while Ronald and his father, Ernest, unloaded goods from the lakeboats. Ronald was a friend of my brother’s, they took swimming and diving lessons together in Kelowna, the nearest city. Ronald was tall, slim, and dark-haired like his father. Ronald and Teresa were twins but they looked nothing alike. Ronald was olive-skinned with high cheekbones and Teresa was plump and mousy-haired. Although the Nickel family worshipped Ronald, the only son, he was a humble, gentle boy and seemed unaffected by his family’s devotion, if not a little embarrassed. Teresa was always trying to tag along with Jacob and Ronald, and because I knew she was such a nuisance, I wanted to be nothing like her. I kept my distance from Jacob and Ronald and rarely tried to join them on their fishing outings to the river or swims in the lake.
Beside the Nickels’ store was the grey, windowless cannery. During the winters, when the orchard work slowed down, labourers sought jobs canning fruit from Mr. Shawcross. Mr. Shawcross was one of the first bachelors to arrive in Winteridge. He had greenish skin and small, squinting eyes like a rodent. I once came across him gnawing at chicken bones on the shore of the lake. He offered me an oily drumstick and I ran away. He was the only person in town my father didn’t take kindly to. “Not enough sunlight,” my father said once. “So much darkness isn’t good for a man’s soul.” Llewelyna grinned whenever my father spoke of souls.
“Ah, yes,” she said, clearly pleased. “His poor Neshama.” She ran a finger along my father’s jaw. “Nice to see the Kabbalist within hasn’t been snuffed entirely.” When Llewelyna was a girl in Wales, her mother had cleaned house for a rabbi from Swansea, and on warm days Llewelyna and her sister were permitted to sit with him in the shade of his garden and listen to his stories. Despite Llewelyna’s attempts to locate a spiritual core in my father that might connect him to his distant Jewish heritage, my father claimed he was an atheist. Although his father, my grandfather, had been raised Jewish, when he married my grandmother, a devout Catholic, he had to relinquish all of that nonsense, as my grandmother called it.
The schoolhouse was down the road from the other businesses in Winteridge. It was a one-room log cabin with a pot-belly stove that failed to warm the building in even the fall months. The country school had little more than a blackboard and some rickety old desks. The few books found in the schoolhouse were loaned by Henry’s library. Just a handful of children regularly attended the school; most families couldn’t afford to lose the workers. I was forced to attend the schoolhouse only when my grandmother was in town, which was very rare.
I had once asked Henry why he didn’t teach the children instead of silly Miss Maggie, the McCarthys’ eldest daughter. Henry burst into a laughter that brought tears.
“An Indian teaching a room of whites! Now there’s an idea,” he said.
Across the road from the schoolhouse and past a thick strip of forest, our bottomless lake unravelled, so enormous that many settlers imagined it was the ocean. From my bedroom window on the third floor of our house, I could see the wharf where rowboats bobbed, tied up to pillars, and where the lakeboat docked to load and unload its goods. When my family first arrived in Winteridge there was only the McCarthys’ apple orchard, which neighboured
our own land, and Ebers’ sprawling ranch way up in the hills. Our peach orchard was a small piece of forest back then, and I was only an infant in Llewelyna’s arms.
A treacherous dirt road descended from the hill that separated Winteridge from the rest of the valley. Every once in a while a motorcar would attempt the journey to Winteridge. We could hear the rumble of the engine long before it appeared. Often they never made it to town, the road being better suited to horses, but when the rare motorcar did, we would all come out cheering and watch it parade past. What roads there were, were often washed out by floods and mudslides, and so most in the valley depended on the lakeboat for transportation. Anywhere the lake could go, we could go too. That said, until I was eighteen I had been out of Winteridge only a couple of times. When I was eight my father took Jacob and me to Vernon, a dusty, hustling city at the north end of the lake, and bought us pretzels from a street vendor to eat while we waited for him outside the bank.
When my parents arrived in Winteridge, my father had asked Henry to help build our house, and Henry agreed only because he knew my father had access to literature otherwise impossible to find. Henry and my father shared a fascination with books. My father would bring boxes of books back with him from London to pay for Henry’s labour. While I crawled about and played with toys my father brought home for me, Llewelyna, pregnant with Jacob, would lounge on pillows in the rooms Henry built up around us. As he worked, Henry and Llewelyna exchanged stories—not stories they read in books, but stories they knew by heart.
Llewelyna dreamed up the design of our tall, narrow house and changed her mind every other day. From the outside, our home resembled a haphazard dollhouse, painted sea-foam green, with gaping windows and a long, narrow front porch that faced the lake. Inside, our house was a labyrinth. It had three floors, two staircases, three balconies, narrow passages, and even a few small, pointless, unfinished rooms. Our house was different from the neat, white-walled ranchers in the community, or the low-lying log cabins the Japanese pickers later built on the orchards.
Our Animal Hearts Page 3