“I just can’t bear it,” he said into my neck, his voice muffled by my hair. He was crying. “You understand, don’t you? To see her like this again, I can’t. I just need some time.” He peeled away. His eyes were red and puffy, his cheeks wet. He kissed me on the head and wiped his face on his sleeve before he left. That word again rang in my ears.
* * *
Mary was hired to care for Llewelyna, who no longer had the strength to refuse her services. I couldn’t tell whether this last seizure had been so much more intense than the ones before or if it was grief that weakened her. My grandmother had told me to expect the priest every Monday morning after his initial visit, but he never came back. Instead, Henry came to visit every week with a paper bag of what must have been tobacco for Llewelyna. During his visits the house would fill with the smell of sweet smoke. I walked up the stairs once to find Mary standing at Llewelyna’s door—it was slightly ajar—and peeking in through the crack. When she saw me watching her she straightened and shuffled past me and down the stairs. I took over her spot at the door. Through the crack I could see Henry holding a jar of smouldering leaves and herbs. Smoke rose from it in ribbons. He positioned the jar under Llewelyna’s face. She closed her eyes and waved the smoke against her face as if it were water. Henry put the jar by Llewelyna’s bedside, where it continued to fill the room with its creamy smoke.
Taras despised Henry’s visits. He’d glare pointedly at Henry whenever he walked up our drive. Mary told me that Henry shouldn’t take it personally. Taras didn’t trust Indians; thought them sneaky devils. Some bandit Indians had run off with four of the horses from the orchard Taras had worked on in Vernon. He had chased them into the hills until nightfall, shooting at their shadows until they dissolved into darkness. Taras still claimed Henry had Mr. Bell’s gun hidden away somewhere, and that we all underestimated what a man of his size and breed was capable of. I told Mary that Henry was my family’s closest friend, and if she and Taras thought anything had changed now that my father was gone, I would be happy to send my father a letter and ask him as much. That seemed to silence her for a time.
Against Mary’s wishes, I helped her with the washing and the chicken coop. I liked to be awake in the blue light of dawn with the rest of the work hands. Every morning I rubbed the fuzz of sleep from my eyes, threw on my father’s coat, and slipped through the orchard to the coop. The rooster yodelled at my arrival, as if in warning. Hens clucked at my feet, awaiting the handfuls of seed I offered. I had to nudge the sitting hens off their eggs. Before I set the eggs in my basket, I liked to hold those warm globes in my palms and marvel at the possibility, the vulnerability, pulsing inside. After my chores I would slink through the orchard and spy on the pickers. They balanced on the ladders like industrious acrobats.
The absence of Noah and Jacob allowed Llewelyna to slip deeper into her own world. She read voraciously. When she wasn’t reading, she slept, only to rest her tired eyes, she said. A blood vessel in one of her eyes never healed from the seizure, and that eye remained bright red, flooded, the emerald iris still absurdly lucent.
Some nights I woke to Llewelyna stumbling around in the room above, or mumbling in her sleep. One night I went up the stairs to her bedroom and cracked open the door. I could hardly make out her inky shape in the darkness. She was rummaging through boxes in her closet.
“Mum?” I asked. The forbidden name fell from my lips like a stone, like a small hope I had sucked dry. I had once imagined the word might unlock an intimacy, a tenderness she still had for me.
She startled at my voice, the forbidden word. “Neb?” she asked the darkness.
“What are you doing?”
“Ba ba bach,” she said so tenderly I hardly recognized her voice. “Babi bach gwael.”
I took a step into the room. “Are you looking for something?”
“That photograph of you,” she said and continued to rummage. “It’s here somewhere, it is.”
I approached her. “What photograph? The one at the waterfront?” One summer we had our portraits taken at the photographer’s booth in the city during the regatta.
“The only one I have, cariad.” When we were very small Llewelyna sometimes called Jacob cariad, a Welsh term of endearment, but she had never used this pet name for me. She stopped rummaging for a moment. Despite the darkness I could feel her eyes on me. “You forgive me, don’t you?” she asked.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness of the room enough that I could light a candle. Even in the fluttering light her face sank, darkened, as if she had expected someone else.
“Ah, yes. It’s you, of course,” she said. “Back to bed you go, Iris.”
* * *
My father’s letters to me were sparse, and often summed up in the front cover of some book he sent along. Inside The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he simply wrote: “And the eighth is you!” The illustration of Nebuchadnezzar’s wife brushing her hair in the hanging gardens of Babylon reminded me of Llewelyna. At first, I was so angry at my father I hadn’t even bothered to write to him, but as Llewelyna became more ill, I wrote him false little notes about the weather, or the orchard, so he might think everything was okay. I didn’t want him to know about Llewelyna’s decline; I was afraid he would never return to us.
He hadn’t sent Llewelyna anything until now. I passed her the book. It was wrapped in butcher’s paper. “It’s from Father,” I said, although this was already painfully clear to her. She traced the postage stamp briefly before she tore the paper open. The book was dark olive green. Llewelyna looked at the cover with both wonder and confusion.
“What is it?” I asked.
She opened the cover and flipped through the first few pages. “How did he…?” She closed the book and looked at the back of it for too long, for even I could see it was blank. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who is this Lady Charlotte Guest?” She fanned through the pages again.
“Is that the author?”
“These are old Welsh stories. But she writes in English. And the title—Mabinogion. It isn’t even a word.”
I remembered the branches of the Mabinogi that she had often referred to before, and thought again of our maple. “Is it like the Mabinogi tree?” I asked.
“You foolish girl. Mabinogi means story. It isn’t a tree.”
I reddened at my mistake. “Did he write something in it?” I asked.
She turned to the first pages of the book. They were blank. “Why would he do that?” She gave me a hard look then, and for a moment I thought she might throw the book right at me. Instead, she placed it gently on my lap. The green book had a chimera on the cover: a red dragon with a lion’s head.
“Can you read it to me?” she asked. “My eyes are so tired today.”
The first story was called “Pwyll Prince of Dyved.” I recognized the name; he was married to Princess Rhiannon, the heroine of some of the faery tales Llewelyna told Jacob and me when we were children. But this particular story wasn’t one I had ever heard. Llewelyna had her eyes closed, and as I read she interrupted every now and then with a groan or a bitter laugh. “Ah, Charlotte, it’s all wrong. The story just doesn’t work in English,” she kept saying. “This Guest woman is a complete fool.” And yet she insisted I continue reading.
In the story, Rhiannon bears Prince Pwyll an heir, but the infant disappears one night while six of Rhiannon’s handmaidens are meant to be watching him. Instead of admitting his disappearance, the handmaidens kill a litter of puppies and spread their blood on Rhiannon’s face and leave their bones beside her bed. When Rhiannon wakes, the handmaidens claim that despite their attempts to restrain her, Rhiannon ate her infant son in her sleep. The nobles want Prince Pwyll to put his wife away for such a crime, but he begs their mercy. Instead, Rhiannon’s penance is to sit on a horse-block in the town square and tell the story of how she ate her own son, over and over again to passersby.
Meanwhile, her lost son is discovered and raised by a good family. As the boy grows,
his adoptive father recognizes the child’s unmistakable resemblance to Pwyll and decides to present the boy to the prince. Overjoyed with the discovery of his lost son and his wife’s proved innocence, Prince Pwyll shows the boy to Rhiannon at the horse-block.
At this point in the story, Llewelyna sat up and stared at me as I read: “ ‘ “I declare to Heaven,” said Rhiannon, “that if this be true, there indeed is an end to my trouble.” ’ ” I flipped the page. “ ‘ “Lady,” said Pendaran—’ ”
“Stop,” Llewelyna said. “Give me that.” She reached for the book. Her eyes scanned the page. She threw the book to the floor. “Complete and utter rubbish.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That’s not at all how the story ends.” She leaned back into her pillows and her stare was so direct I had to look away. “Rhiannon doesn’t accept the child. When they bring her her son, she denies him and only repeats the story of eating her baby. She recalls the snap of tendons and the taste of iron in the infant’s blood. Then the next day she attacks another child, and is hanged by the neck for her crime.”
This story wasn’t particularly darker than some of the other stories Llewelyna had told me about mothers and their infants, or ferocious black knights or monsters or dragons, or the one about the deathless boy caught in a fish weir. But there was something unbearable about the way she watched me so directly as she spoke. It made the story feel like a kind of warning to me personally.
13
Winteridge had made a few decisions about my family. Llewelyna was mad, a witch or devil, and my father had abandoned us because of his shame. When I walked into the Nickels’ store for supplies, everyone turned quiet as if I had interrupted them, and then they watched me sympathetically. Mrs. Nickel puckered her lips when she spoke to me, as if I were a toddler. I started asking Mary to do the shopping for me instead.
Llewelyna continued to sleep in the spare room on the top floor. She needed the still air, the white sheets, the blank. The only colour in the room was the fire of Llewelyna’s hair and Saint Francis’s plume at her feet. Although she threw the Mabinogion aside that first time, she spent the cold days and nights with it in her lap, the gold nib of her pen scratching away at the pages as if there was something just beneath the surface she might unearth. She never asked me to read from it again. Instead she kept the book and its stories to herself and faded into that faraway world. Llewelyna’s other books collected dust beside her bed. She even turned Henry away a few times, saying she had work to do. He visited less and less often, to Mary’s and Taras’s satisfaction.
Once, while she was asleep, I picked the Mabinogion up off the bed beside her. It felt much too heavy for its size. Llewelyna groaned in her sleep and then quieted. I opened the book—I wanted to know what she was writing inside. Her scrawl was more neat and delicate than I could have imagined. She was scribbling over the text in Welsh. I thought she must be translating the stories back into their original language, fixing the flaws in the tales she found along the way.
Llewelyna turned in her sleep and I placed the book back down on the bed where I had found it. She reached for it immediately and opened her eyes.
“Do you need anything?” I asked. Just then Mary entered the room and began to sweep beneath the bed.
“Water.” Llewelyna’s empty glass was rimmed with lip prints.
“I’ll see to that,” Mary said.
“It’s okay, I—”
“Don’t worry yourself.” Mary took the glass from me. She went all the way down to the kitchen to fill the glass even though there was a water basin full of water right in Llewelyna’s room.
Every once in a while Llewelyna asked to see the fish. I would pull it out from its hiding place and climb into bed beside her. We would marvel at the blue fish’s luminescent scales. They shone like young flame even in the dim evening. One night, Llewelyna held the fish up towards the starlight coming through her window and told me that fish were the wisest of all creatures because they were the very first to be created, water being made before land. She quoted Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” She went on to say that some fish, this one for example, had lived since the beginning of time. And if you were to eat one of these ancient fish, its wisdom would be born inside of you. I took the fish from her then, and was careful to hide it in a new place each week. Even as the long, dark nights of winter approached, Azami could rarely get time away from working on her family’s orchard, and we hardly ever saw one another. We no longer performed the harae together. Since the seizure in the church, I didn’t like to leave Llewelyna’s side for too long. I missed Azami’s friendship, but whenever I saw her, my guilt about the fire and her shrine blossomed into an unbearable ache. Not only that, ever since I destroyed the shrine I had a creeping feeling that something was watching me, stalking me. Sometimes I could feel its breath on the back of my neck. I thought that admitting to Azami what I had done might make it go away.
We met one afternoon on the shore by the boulders. Azami’s face went very stiff when I told her I had destroyed the shrine. Of course I couldn’t tell her about the fire. That was something I could never admit to anyone. Azami’s face shifted from fury to urgency. The sun had moved out from behind the shade of trees and she had to peer through it at me.
“Where?” she said. She was gripping my wrists now. Shaking them. “Where is the shrine?”
“I’m sorry. It’s gone.”
“I must know where it was destroyed. And how.”
I panicked. “In the lake. I threw it in the lake.”
“Show me where.”
I told Azami I had thrown the shrine off the side of the cliff, where Llewelyna had jumped off so very long ago. I thought this would dissuade her, but it didn’t. She tugged my arm towards the cliffs as if it were my leash. She was walking so fast. Her grip on me was brutal. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough for how cold it was and my skin prickled beneath her touch. I had the strange sensation that my legs were not connected to my hips. I lost command of them and stumbled after her. Then my vision became blurry. I couldn’t tell near from far. My mouth filled with the sting of lemon. I fell.
In that in-between world I saw the jaguar again, the rosettes on her coat as clear as coins. I ran my fingers through her silken fur. It smelled of pine needles.
When I returned, Azami had my head in her lap. Her breath blossomed in a white plume. Her eyes were wide and fearful.
“What happened?” I asked. The sweat on my forehead was already beginning to cool and I began to shiver.
Azami explained how my body had gone stiff, my eyes open but vacant. She tried to show me with her own arms the velocity of my trembling, but said she couldn’t imitate it, it was too fast. As I listened to her, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the jaguar. It had followed me from my seizure dream and now wandered through the surrounding forest behind Azami.
“What is it?” she asked. She clutched my chin in her hands to steady my gaze, but my eyes still followed the cat.
“A jaguar,” I said.
Azami jumped, turned around. I could tell by her reaction she couldn’t see it. “A kami?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen it before. You don’t see it?”
“They decide who sees them,” Azami said. Then: “It makes sense.”
“It does?”
She shaded her eyes from the setting sun and looked out towards the lake. “You destroyed the shrine. It makes sense she would stalk you.” We had arrived at the cliff, and from the top we could see all the way to where the lake met the purple mountains to the south.
The jaguar stayed by my side for a few days before she wandered back into the woods, but I could still feel her amber eyes on me, tracking my every move.
I decided to build Azami a new shrine. I thought rebuilding it might satisfy the kami and make the jaguar leave me alone. With little explanation, Henry agreed
to help me, and we built the little stick house in a matter of hours.
“Aren’t you a little old for doll houses?” he said as he held one side down and I hammered away.
“It’s not a toy. It’s a shrine for Azami. I broke her other one.”
“Her other one. You people are funny. You think all you need to do is build a house and God will already live inside.”
I walked to the Kobas’ orchard with the carefully built shrine in a wagon, covered with a potato sack. The forest floor was firm, but it hadn’t yet snowed. Azami was digging for potatoes with Molly. Molly was the first to spot me in the woods. She stood to stare as if her gaze itself could propel me away. I gestured for Azami to come to me and lifted the potato sack to give Azami a glance at the shrine. I had painted it red, just like the other one. Henry had carved ornate designs on the wood, birds, bears, and coyotes. It was a much more beautiful shrine than the one Azami had before. But she looked unimpressed. I could tell her anger had hardened against me. Only my seizure had protected me from its full force before.
“A shrine isn’t like your cross,” she said. “It isn’t some symbol you can make of sticks. A shrine is a space apart from the ordinary world. Not about the thing itself but what it made inside.”
She walked back to Molly, who squatted down again to dig when Azami returned to her side. I left the shrine in the grass and walked away. My confession had broken something, and I wished that I had never admitted the truth. My sins could not be undone. From then on Azami and I did our best to avoid one another, and it was easy to do in the winter. Our bustling summer town grew cold and stiff during those dark months. We each isolated ourselves in our homes and only went outside in the meagre daylight hours to work or go about our errands.
My father wrote that Jacob was thriving at boarding school in London. I offered him no news in exchange, and the less I responded, the more seldom his letters and books came.
Our Animal Hearts Page 13