I peered through my eyelashes and watched Llewelyna and Jacob. Their eyes closed tight and their foreheads touching. Llewelyna twisted Jacob’s red curls behind his ear but they kept bouncing back.
“The rogue took hold of the maiden’s wrist before she could run away. His long fingernails scratched her skin. He looked her dead in the eye and told her she would give birth to a bastard daughter. The maiden knew his words to be a threat. Whatever the rogue said always came true. This was why he was exiled. The town decided that his words were not prophecies but curses.
“The maiden was so angry at the rogue that as he turned to leave she chased after him. The maiden was a fast runner, and just as she was about to catch up to him, the rogue transformed into a hare and fled, and so the maiden became a greyhound to match his speed. When the rogue arrived at the fast-moving river he became a fish, and she an otter, and the chase continued underwater. Right as the maiden was about to snatch him up with her paw, the rogue became a songbird and launched into the sky. The maiden became a hawk and swooped after him. The rogue dropped from the sky and fell into a wheat field and transformed into a piece of grain. And so the maiden became a hen and swiftly swallowed the grain.
“Nine months later the maiden gave birth to the rogue, who had transformed into a baby girl. Although the maiden knew the baby was really the rogue, she could not kill the infant. It was too beautiful. And so the maiden put the baby in a potato sack, tied it up tight and gave the infant to the sea.”
Jacob had fallen asleep. His breathing was steady and deep. Llewelyna kissed him on his damp forehead. The end of the story was so chilling I didn’t want Llewelyna to know I was still awake to hear it. It seemed like something I shouldn’t have heard. Although I feigned sleep, no kiss was planted on my forehead.
When the rain finally stopped a few days later, I wandered to the McCarthys’ orchard to spy on Azami. She glided through the trees dressed in her brother Wu’s old clothes. Her long dark hair was tucked up under a small-brimmed cap. Unlike the robotic movements of Wu and the other male pickers, Azami made picking apples look like a dance.
The first few times I spied on her I was happy to remain anonymous in the surrounding forest. Azami never seemed to look down before she jumped from the ladder. She was the only one who didn’t stand at attention when Mr. McCarthy came out to give some instructions to the work crew. Azami didn’t exchange a single word with the other pickers. Instead, she remained invisible in the trees.
On one of these occasions, Azami caught me spying on her. She was in a far corner of the orchard, off on her own. I thought this far from the others we might be able to talk. I waved. I thought she would be happy to see me, but she was angry I was there. She glared at me. Perhaps out of embarrassment or disappointment, I plucked some hard green apples from a bin and threw them at her, one after the other, as hard as I could.
“Stop it!” she said under her breath, no more than a whisper. She took a hand from the ladder to block an apple from hitting her head. The ladder tottered. I kept throwing the apples at her, relentless. The apples thumped to the ground and rolled along the base of the tree. She scrambled to grasp the sides of the ladder to steady it. Then there was a holler and I slipped back into the trees in time to see Mr. Koba storm towards Azami. He lifted one of the green apples and held it close to her mouth as if offering a bite.
“What is this?” he said. Azami turned her cheek to him. He said something else I couldn’t hear, but I know I could have if I were nearer. Mr. Koba insisted on speaking English even when alone with his family. If Azami uttered a word in Japanese her father made her gargle boiling water and salt one hundred times. I wondered what my father would think if he knew this ruthless side of his Japanese hero. Mr. Koba was tremendously kind to the townspeople—in fact, I knew if I were to come out from behind the tree to reveal myself to him, the stern look on his face would wash away. “Who is this pretty girl?” he said whenever I came out to the back porch to say goodnight when he and my father smoked out there together.
I kept hidden because part of me wanted to see Azami shamed.
Mr. Koba yanked Azami down the ladder and she fell to her knees in the grass. When he pulled her up to her feet, his grasp was far too tight around her arm. She kept her face downcast, away from his. He took one of the fallen apples and held it to her face again. She gave him the opposite cheek.
“What is wrong with you?” he said. Azami turned to face him. Her mouth puckered as though she sucked at something sour. I thought she might point me out and share the blame, but her eyes were cool and steady on him, defiant. If I could have escaped without being seen, I would have then. I had seen enough. Azami and Mr. Koba stayed like that for a moment, locked in one another’s anger. Then Mr. Koba jolted up and dragged Azami to the house, cursing in Japanese under his breath, forgetting, for a moment, his own rules.
As I ran home, the weight of what I had done caught like a pebble at the back of my throat. I thought if only I could bring her something, a gift, she might forgive me. The next morning I went back to the orchard, armed with one of Llewelyna’s cigarettes tucked behind my ear. Azami had said back in Japan she smoked all the time, but since arriving in Canada her father banned cigarettes because it looked bad—unfeminine. It must have been terribly confusing, being pushed to be both more and less of a woman at the same time.
I couldn’t find Azami in any of the trees. Mr. Koba and Wu used a long saw with two handles to gnaw off some dead branches. The grating only increased my anxiety for Azami. As I walked past the McCarthys’ cookhouse, I saw Mrs. Koba plucking a hen on the steps, the orange feathers scattered at her feet. The younger Koba girls were hanging up starched sheets at the side of the pick shack. One of them saw me and whispered to the others. They followed me with their eyes. I circled the orchard one more time before I went to the barn. There I found Azami stirring a barrel of milk with a paddle. She was standing on an upturned bucket, the barrel too high for her to reach otherwise. It smelled terrible—sour milk and rancid pig feed. Azami saw me out the corner of her eye and splashed me with the milk. My hand had been extended to her, the cigarette perched between my two fingers now drenched in milk. She glanced down at it for a moment before turning back to churning the milk. A grease stain ran down the skirt of my blue silk dress.
“My father bought this in England,” I said. Even to me my voice was high-pitched and whiny. Still Azami did not acknowledge me. “See? You’ve ruined it.” Although this was true—the dress was new, expensive, and surely ruined—I wasn’t one to care for dresses. I twisted the cigarette between my fingers until the copper strands sprinkled the hay at my feet. Still Azami would not look up. I spat at her and ran out of the barn all the way to the tree fort. I didn’t mind that I was covered in butter or that the dress was ruined. What drove me to madness was that Azami wouldn’t look at me. She wore a hardened, stone face, like she had when Mr. Koba admonished her about the apples I had thrown. I knew then it wasn’t so much the apples Mr. Koba had been mad about as Azami’s defiance. It wrung out our rage.
In the tree fort I picked up Azami’s shrine, with the carefully set orange peel and mirror, and dropped it through the hole in the floor. It crashed against the exposed roots below. For all Azami’s talk of its sacredness, the shrine split so easily against the ground it hardly made a sound. I wanted to make Azami hurt, I wanted to make her feel something.
Now that it was done, the forest was dreadfully quiet. Even the birds shuttered at my actions. I knew Azami considered her shrine a holy thing, like the Eucharist or Llewelyna’s tin saints she lined up on her windowsill. To see it now in so many feeble pieces made me feel like a devil. I scrambled down the ladder and checked to make sure none of the contents had been broken. And then, as if removing the shrine might make it whole again, at least in Azami’s mind, I gathered the pieces in my skirt and laid them out in the bottom drawer of my wardrobe until I could decide what to do with them.
To keep myself from thinking any mo
re of the shrine and what I had done, I left our house and ran to the river, where I knew Jacob and Ronald liked to fish. I found them sitting atop a log, fishing rods stretched out over the water. I approached from behind and was about to jump out and scare them, but something in the way they spoke to one another, as if even in these thick woods they might need to whisper, keep secret from the eavesdropping trees, invited me to hold back and spy. I circled around them to see if I could read their lips. They were speaking too close for boys. Ronald was my age, only one year over Jacob’s twelve, but his height and build made him look much older. Ronald leaned in and whispered something in Jacob’s ear; his hand was on Jacob’s thigh. Jacob smiled and touched Ronald’s cheek. They stayed like that for a moment, locked in a gesture I had only seen between Llewelyna and my father. This tenderness between the boys startled me. A twig snapped beneath my feet and Jacob’s eyes shot up to find me hiding in the trees. His hand dropped into his lap.
As I made my way back to the house, I was reminded of another moment I had witnessed between Jacob and Ronald the summer previous, when they had competed in swimming and diving competitions at the annual regatta in the city. I had never been to the event before and was impressed by all the white suits and dresses, sunhats and parasols. Sailboats studded the lake like teeth. Neither Jacob nor Ronald had done very well in the swimming competitions. Jacob was too slow and Ronald’s breaststroke was awkward; he never seemed to catch his stride. After the canoe races the divers lined up on the city dock below the diving platform. It had to be twenty feet high. My father, Llewelyna, and I had found seats in the bleachers facing the platform and the lineup of nervous boys awaiting their turn to dive. Jacob and Ronald wore one-piece swimsuits with narrow straps that did little to cover their chests. The suits exposed their upper thighs and were so tight the boys’ protruding groins were painfully obvious. I was shocked to see them so exposed. As if reading my discomfort, my father explained that the costumes improved their speed. Out of the water the boys looked vulnerable and skinless.
I loved the silence before each dive, as the crowd eagerly watched the diver climb the endless ladder. At the top of the diving platform Ronald straightened. Being so much taller than his peers, Ronald usually slouched. His new height and flattened hair made him look like a stranger to me. He stood there for a moment, looking stoically over the bleachers towards the mountains on the other side of the lake. He lifted onto his toes and his thigh muscles were sculpted and smooth as a horse’s. He lifted his arms ahead of him, swept them down, and with that leverage made three giant bounds to the edge of the platform. Then he was airborne. He seemed to hang there, his chest pushed out, his legs straight but bent slightly back at the hips, his arms outstretched at his sides like a sparrow. Then he pulled in his knees, spun backwards, and unravelled moments before the surface of the lake. I was so taken aback by his grace I had forgotten to join the applause until Llewelyna elbowed me to do so.
Jacob’s dive was a disaster. Compared to Ronald he looked bony and pale and very boyish up on the platform. On his final step he tripped and could do no better than gather his limbs together before his stomach struck the surface of the lake like a bomb. The crowd gasped. My father stood to better see. And this is when the moment occurred. Ronald stretched his arm out over the edge of the dock and easily pulled Jacob out of the water. Jacob waved off the concerns of the crowd with one hand, but his other hand remained locked with Ronald’s for seconds too long as they walked away from the dive area and disappeared. They didn’t return in time for Ronald to claim his blue ribbon, and so Teresa had gone up to receive it on his behalf, curtseying maniacally in her white doll’s dress, tears of pride streaming down her cheeks.
Jacob knew I had seen what I had that day at the river, but he ignored me, and so I continued to spy on him and Ronald. They met in the same place every day. Sometimes they would fish, other times they would hike further into the hills and hunt snakes. They had huddled conversations I craned desperately to hear. One day, while they sat leaning against a tree, their homework abandoned at their feet, Ronald took Jacob’s face and kissed him square on the mouth. My eyes burned, and I had to look away. I ran, not caring if they heard me, back through the forest to the tree fort.
Inside I found a bucket full of fish guts. All the books I had left there, precious books of Henry’s—the picture Bible, a dictionary, the old red book called The Water-Babies, and Peter Pan— floated atop the guts in the bucket. They were swollen and reeked. I knew, even then, that I deserved this. I would have to tell Henry I had left the books I had borrowed from him in the tree fort during a storm.
Soon after the last time I had gone to spy on Azami in the McCarthys’ orchard, the Kobas moved to their own slice of land up in the hills. The government wouldn’t sign the land over to the Kobas because they were Japanese, so my father bought the land and leased it to them illegally. “It doesn’t make sense,” my father said. “We’re strangers here too.”
For decades the Kobas’ orchard would be the only Japanese-run orchard in the community. Instead of relying on only one crop, the Kobas grew peaches, pears, apples, and plums and had a substantial vegetable garden. Soon the Kobas’ orchard rivalled both the McCarthys’ and my family’s orchards.
That evening at dinner Jacob and I ignored each other. My father had recently returned from overseas. We were listening to the new record he had brought home for Llewelyna from Wales. The choir of male voices crowded the room. Llewelyna pushed her steak around her plate until my father reached across and forked it onto his.
“I purchased some pit ponies from just outside your hometown, Lew,” he said.
“You went to Holyhead?” she asked, her fork poised above her empty plate, her eyes too full of white.
“No, but I was on Anglesey.”
“Anglesey, the Mother of Wales, Ynys Dywyl,” she said under her breath.
“What does that mean?” Jacob asked. I kicked him under the table. It was all too obvious we were meant to be invisible at this moment.
“The Dark Island,” she said ominously, without taking her eyes off my father. My father was eating too eagerly, head down, as if ignorant to Llewelyna’s eyes narrowed at him as though he were grazing prey. He took a long drink of milk and there was a slice of silence. Even the choir hushed. My father wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“If you want to go for a visit, Lew, just say the word.”
The choir breathed back to life. Llewelyna squished a potato with her fork. “Don’t be a damn fool.”
“You must miss it, the old lighthouse, the woods, the olive groves.”
“Stop.”
“The ocean, Lew.”
Llewelyna looked down at the red smear on her plate where the steak used to be.
“I’m sure your sister—”
“Noah.” Llewelyna’s fork slammed against her plate. Jacob and I sat stiffly in our chairs, afraid to move.
My father looked from Jacob to me. He smiled weakly and nodded for us to continue eating and pretend all was fine. I had never met Llewelyna’s sister, Gwyn. All I knew of her was she was a housemaid and allergic to hazelnuts. Llewelyna told me this once when I broke out in hives after eating a piece of hazelnut pie. Because of this shared trait I always felt a vague connection to Gwyn. But Gwyn was a subject that pursed Llewelyna’s lips together and made the skin on her neck flush. And with my father’s brief mention of her, I watched those familiar splotches rise up Llewelyna’s neck to her jawbone.
I imagined the choir voices were angels speaking tongues. The music reminded me of the hymns we mumbled at church. When the song finished the record kept spinning, and amplified the itchy silence.
“So, you’ve found yourself another Welsh pony to suffocate with dust,” Llewelyna said.
“Lew…” my father warned.
“Better dan wee lads n’ ladies, I suppose,” she continued, dabbing the corners of her mouth with her napkin.
“That’s enough.” He stood from the table. �
��I’ve lost my appetite.”
“I’d have worries if ya didn’t.” Llewelyna leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, and glared after him as he left the room. Jacob and I looked down at our plates. Lumps of gristle filled out our cheeks like a pair of chipmunks.
That night I knocked on Jacob’s door.
“What do you want?”
“I need to speak to you,” I whispered.
He shuffled across the room and opened the door a crack. He peered left and right before he let me in. I stood in the middle of his room. I had always imagined his room to be a mess, like mine. But it was neat and tidy, as if staged. His desk was clear, with only a pencil and a piece of blank paper upon it. A small bookshelf held a few of the books my father had brought him from London, Treasure Island, The Jungle Book, The War of the Worlds, and the like. They looked untouched, unread. His bed was made and there was only a crease in it where he must have been laying before I knocked.
“I said, what do you want?” He sat on the bed and looked up at me.
“I would like you to help me with something.” I told Jacob about Azami and the marble and the books. I told him I wanted to return Azami’s shrine to her in the bucket, burning.
“What makes you think I’ll help you?”
“I saw you.”
“Saw what?”
“You know.”
“I don’t,” he said. We stared at one another for a moment. “I have some matches,” he said finally.
That night we carried Azami’s shrine through the woods in the stinking bucket. It took us a long time to find the Kobas’ new home. The plot of land was enormous. There was a stack of fallen trees and a row of freshly planted saplings. At the edge of the land was a cabin with small glowing windows. I couldn’t imagine Azami and her siblings and her newly arrived cousins all sharing such a small space.
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