Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  “You fell.”

  “I won’t use the ladder, then.” I took a step down.

  He shook his head. “Please, before my father sees you.”

  It was too late. Taras was coming towards us, ruddy-faced. The cigarette out the side of his mouth was stiff and angled upwards. “Nee, nee, nee,” he said as he approached. Yuri took a step back and looked down at his feet. “All right now, little lady, back to the house.”

  “Taras, really, I’m fine—”

  “Not asking.” He began to turn away from me.

  “You’re not one to give orders,” I said.

  Taras swung back around. The workers near us watched from the trees. Taras took a few steps forward until our feet were nearly touching.

  “Listen here. Your father left me in charge. Your time playing is over. You understand?” I thought of Azami and stared back at him defiantly. I had never heard him speak so much English at once. “You understand?” His spit speckled my cheek.

  “I’ll walk her back to the house,” Yuri said, nudging his father away.

  Taras swatted Yuri’s hand and walked away.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.” Yuri kicked a rotten peach as we walked through the shade of the trees. I was too upset to speak the whole way back. “He didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just his way.” I started up the porch steps. “Iris,” he began. He opened and closed his mouth like a fish. I turned from him and went into the house. The screen door slammed behind me.

  The silence of the house made it enormous. A slight breeze fell against my shoulder and bristled my skin. Our peculiar house was a world with its own weather patterns, its own atmosphere. Outside it was summer; in the kitchen it was the dead of winter. I walked up to Llewelyna’s room. It became warmer with every level of the house I passed. The top floor was hot and airless. The lace curtains cut the sunlight into shapes that shrunk and stretched against her blanket. Llewelyna’s eyes were closed and she lay on her back. Saint Francis was in his usual spot at the foot of the bed. He lazily raised his small head at me and unravelled his feathers.

  “Llewelyna?” I said. Her eyelids fluttered open. “Do you need something? Tea? Toast?”

  “Your eyes. They’re red.”

  I looked away. “Do you need anything?”

  “Bring me the fish.” After some hesitation, I brought the fish out from behind my bookshelf and handed it to her. It radiated a blue glow against her white sheets.

  “I need water,” she said. Her glass by the bed was full.

  “You have plenty there beside—”

  “Not to drink,” she whispered mischievously, although there was no one to overhear. Mary was outside doing the washing.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to go for a swim.” The corners of her mouth turned up. She set the fish on her bedside table, atop the Mabinogion.

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Help me up, you.” She tossed the blanket off her body and pushed herself up with one arm. Her white nightgown blended with her skin. She had never been a voluptuous woman, but now she was angular and emptied out. Muscles that were once long and lean had dissolved. I couldn’t look at her without a sickening pull at the back of my throat. To see her as a body—a body that was wrinkling, melting away—made me nauseous and depressed. It inverted my universe, like discovering God was dead. She had always seemed so magical to me, so unreal. I gave her my arm and tried not to look at her. She ran her hand over my skin. Her palm was dry and cold.

  “You’re so brown.”

  “I’ve been working. Helping in the orchard.”

  “I know,” she said. “Don’t forget the fish.” I collected the jar in my dress pocket. When I pulled her up her legs buckled beneath her and she collapsed back into the bed. She looked out the window towards the lake and then tried again.

  “No use,” she said and fell back. She pulled the sheet up to her chin and closed her eyes. I knew this meant I was to leave. She had made me invisible again.

  I walked down to the wharf. It was early afternoon and already so hot even the breeze was warm. I dangled my bare feet in the water. The cold was sharp and full and cooled my entire body. The water in the well was never cold enough in the summer, and Llewelyna’s room was stifling. It was no wonder she craved the lake. Sitting on the wharf staring at my feet beneath the surface, I had an idea. I moved our tin bathtub into the sitting room, and then filled the well buckets with lake water and carried them back to the house. I repeated this until the tin tub was full.

  I sat Llewellyn up again in her bed. “I’ve a surprise for you,” I said. She looked at me wide-eyed and wrapped her arms around my neck, putting her weight on me as we walked down the stairs to the tin tub in the sitting room. It was terrifying how light she was.

  “I bathed yesterday,” she said, referring to the sponge and pail Mary had brought up to her.

  “This is not a bath. It’s a swim.”

  She dipped her finger in the tub, tasted it. “Lake water,” she grinned.

  I closed the curtains in the sitting room and helped Llewelyna lift her nightgown over her head. I tried to avert my gaze but her body was so shocking to me I couldn’t look away. Her ribcage and sternum nearly poked through her thin amphibian skin. Her breasts had shrunk and they sagged as she bent to take hold of the tub’s edge. Her stomach was a hollow. She nearly lost her balance.

  “Help me,” she said. I held her as she lifted her legs into the tub. Water splashed the floor as she sank down with a long exhale. She slipped her head beneath the surface; her hair licked the sides of the tub like flames. When she brought her head out of the water, her cheeks were pink and her freckles dark. She inhaled and lay back, her hair draped over the edge of the tub, dripping to the floor.

  “Thank you,” she said, before closing her eyes to make me disappear again.

  I went into the kitchen, restless and unsure of where to go. Above the stove a horsefly was caught between the yellow curtain and the windowpane. I reached for the window latch but stopped when I heard Llewelyna speaking.

  “A full set of teeth,” she said. I stepped towards the sitting room and stood still in the doorway. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to me or to herself. “I wouldn’t let you feed. Gave you goat’s milk instead. The most ridiculous-looking baby. Covered in dark hair too. Even in my belly I knew you would be ugly.” Llewelyna’s eyes remained closed as she spoke. “It was Gwyn’s idea to baptize you. She thought that might get the evil out. I just couldn’t let go.”

  Until the mention of Gwyn’s name, I had thought this might be one of Llewelyna’s stories. “Gwyn?”

  Llewelyna’s eyes snapped open. She took in the room as if she had been asleep.

  I hadn’t meant to interrupt her, but I was shocked. As far as I knew, I had never met Llewelyna’s twin, not even as a baby. Jacob and I were born in Canada. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She muttered something in Welsh.

  “When did I meet Gwyn?”

  “You didn’t.” She raised her foot out of the water and rotated her ankle in big, slow circles; water dripped from her foot and speckled the floor.

  “But you just said—”

  She turned away from me and towards the light beaming against the curtains. I knew she wanted me to leave. I was breaking another one of her rules. But I couldn’t.

  “Who, then?” I asked.

  “You’ll never understand what a mother will do, what sacrifices she’ll make.” She put her foot back into the water. Her emerald eyes opened and absorbed all the light in the room and directed it at me, through me. “I pray to God you never become a mother. You couldn’t bear it.” I looked away and hardened myself against her. I could never understand where her cruelty towards me came from. She kept her eyes trained on me. “Did you bite your tongue?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “When you fell from the tree. Did you bite it? I often bite my tongue when I have a fit.” The word
brimmed with bitterness. “You saw it too, didn’t you?”

  “Saw what?”

  “The end. All those bombs. All that fire. Death, death, death. Your father and brother are never coming back to us.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I left the house. I wanted to be far away from her.

  “You’re just like me, Iris,” she said. Her voice was clear, even from outside.

  14

  I walked down the road, past the cannery, and through the forest to Henry’s library. Although I had often briefly spoken with Henry when he visited with Llewelyna, Mary watching us disapprovingly, he rarely came to our house now, and we no longer met like we used to. The business with Taras and Mr. Bell’s gun changed something between us, or perhaps it was simply my guilt that kept me from him. The silver coyote watched me from behind a tree as I entered the library. All the books, neat upon their shelves, calmed me and gave me a sense of order. Some spines glistened with gold or silver and others had thick, dark letters. There was a ladder against one wall and a few footstools and chairs in the corners. The wood floors creaked with each step. I turned the corner to the next room and found Ronald Nickel at one of the shelves, holding a book. We spotted each other at the same moment, and both turned to avoid one another’s glance, like two negatively charged magnets. Then, as if changing his mind, Ronald turned back to me and nodded. His shoulders had grown full and round and his face had thinned out. I hadn’t spoken to him since the summer Jacob was bitten by the lake monster. After a while he had given up on visiting my brother.

  I nodded at the book he was holding. “What do you have there?”

  “A Study in Scarlet. Have you read it?”

  “Llewelyna read it to Jacob and me when we were little.” The mention of Jacob spread a flush up Ronald’s neck. He looked away and fiddled with his earlobe. “It’s good.” I smiled in an attempt to comfort him.

  Henry was sitting at his desk at the back of the library and looking over the ledger. I sat down across from him.

  “Has she begun reading again?” he asked.

  “Nothing but the Mabinogion. I didn’t come for books, though.”

  Ronald approached the desk holding Sherlock Holmes. “Some tobacco from the city.” He placed a paper bag on the table.

  Henry pinched the orange coils between his fingers and smelled them. “Wonderful,” he said, and wrote something in the ledger.

  I looked at the globe on Henry’s desk. As a little girl I would close my eyes and spin the globe. I would hold one finger gently against the surface and wherever my finger pointed when the globe stopped spinning would be where I would one day run away to: Lima, New Caledonia, Bavaria, Saxony, Kirin, Dongola. When I shared these names with Henry he would tell me what he knew of them, if anything, and reminded me the map was old and some of the places no longer existed.

  “Hope to see you soon, Iris,” Ronald said as he left the library.

  “I think he likes you.” Henry tucked the tobacco away. A book on his table was open to the title page. In the top corner was a familiar name, handwritten.

  “Stewart Brewster,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to ask. Who was he?”

  “A friend.” Henry looked down at the open book and ran his thumb over the name. “A priest, actually.”

  “A white man?” I went on with my questions carefully. Henry was closed about his past. These moments of openness were rare.

  “He wanted to learn our language.”

  “Did he teach you English?”

  “He taught me to read. Most of the other villages had already taken to his teachings about God. But we were nomadic. He had a hard time finding us.”

  “I thought your people lived here, in Winteridge.”

  “This was our winter village. Otherwise we travelled all around the lake and deep into the hills. We rarely stayed in one place for long. Stewart stumbled upon our village one winter. From then on he came every year. He brought me books, and so I taught him what I could.”

  “And that’s why your books have his name in them?”

  “That’s right. For a time I worked for him at the mission ranch in town, caring for the cattle, harvesting wheat, tobacco.” Henry stretched out his arm, palm up. “He gave me this so I would know when to pray.” I had seen the brown leather strap before. He wore the wristwatch backwards so its face was at his wrist. The hands of the clock did not move.

  “It needs a wind.”

  “I don’t wear it to tell the time.”

  “You wear it to remember to pray?”

  “I wear it to remember.”

  “Did you kill him? Stewart Brewster?”

  Henry was taken aback. “Are you here to examine me, Iris Sparks?”

  “I mean, I’m sure he deserved it if you did…”

  “Would you like to search my house? Am I under arrest?” Henry leaned back into his chair and crossed his arms.

  “No, of course not. I’m sorry.” I looked down. Shame soured my stomach. I couldn’t be certain how much Henry knew about the pistol. Surely he heard it fire, two years ago, when he found Yuri and me in the woods.

  “What about the grave in the backyard?” I asked hesitantly.

  “So you’ve been snooping around.”

  “I’ve walked past the graveyard a hundred times.” I had thought at first there were only four or five graves, each marked by deliberately placed stones and some larger rocks with names written in that same backwards language as the words in the tree fort, but once I learned to recognize the pattern of the stones, I realized the graves were everywhere, countless. They took up an enormous portion of the forest behind Henry’s library.

  “He died just like everyone else.”

  “From smallpox?”

  “I had taken him fishing one summer. He wanted to know our route. Then he became very ill. My people were settled here for the night, and so I brought him here for help.” Henry looked at me warily. “I’ve told you many of my people’s stories, Iris. Perhaps I’ve told you too much.” He tapped the face of the watch against the table. “There are some things you don’t get to know. You must remember these stories don’t belong to you.”

  My cheeks burned. I was reminded of when I was a little girl and Henry told me the name of his people in his own language and laughed when I tried to repeat it. “Language limits understanding,” he had said then. But he hadn’t tried to teach me how to say the word properly.

  Henry seemed to be reading my thoughts. I wanted to turn his gaze away. In the centre of his desk was a tin statuette of Saint Francis with a bird on his shoulder and a book under his arm. It was only about two inches tall. I recognized the saint from Llewelyna’s collection she kept on her windowsill. I picked it up and considered the saint’s sad face.

  “She gave that to me. To protect me,” Henry said. “I must admit I’d prefer Saint George the dragon slayer.”

  I smiled, relieved that his tone had lightened. “That’s Jacob’s favourite.” I put the statuette back down. “What do you need protection from?”

  “She said I would know when the time came.”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s gone completely mad.”

  Henry smiled. “Why do you say that?”

  “You know that she thinks our peacock is a saint. Speaks to him. Prays to him. Says he tells her things.”

  “Who are we to say it isn’t true.”

  “Henry—it isn’t true.”

  “How many people must experience something for that experience to be valid?”

  “But it cannot be true.”

  “It is true to her.” Henry began to pack his pipe with tobacco. “And don’t her premonitions, the things she sees or says the bird tells her, often come to pass?”

  “I don’t really know. She doesn’t tell me much about them. What about the fits?”

  Henry lit the pipe and took two puffs. “I once knew a man who had the same kind of tremblings as your mother. He said he could see things.”

  “What kinds of th
ings?”

  “The unseen. The invisible. The worlds within worlds. When his tremblings came more and more often, like your mother, he became too tired to leave his tent. It was at this time that he became the most wise. He was only half in the world, you see, and half someplace else. Soon he was more in this other place than where his body was. One day, we entered his tent and found him gone. Disappeared.”

  “You think Llewelyna will disappear?”

  “She says the Mabinogion keeps her here.”

  “Have you seen what she’s been doing? She’s writing over the words in Welsh.”

  “She’s revising. She knows the stories as oral tales, accumulating, growing, and losing layers like a wet stone rolling through sand. It is hard for her to see those stories written down like that, trapped on the page. If you write a story down, then you can preserve it. Keep it. Own it. If you don’t write it down, then it is forever free.”

  “And you think that is keeping her here?”

  “Seems to. Maybe she will stop when she gets the story right.”

  “But I thought the point was that it will never be right if it is written down.”

  Henry shrugged.

  “Has she told you about the world’s end?”

  He nodded.

  “And you believe her?”

  He looked back at the ledger and wrote something. “Nothing ends. Only shifts. Takes on a new shape. That new shape can resemble an ending.”

  “And the baby with teeth. Has she told you about that?”

  Henry looked up from the ledger he was scribbling in and seemed almost disappointed that I knew about it. “She’s mentioned her.”

  “Her? Do you know who she is?”

  “Sometimes profound guilt or grief can bear skin, grow teeth, take physical shape. I think that is who Neb is.”

  “That’s her name?”

  He shrugged again, realizing he’d revealed more than intended, and went back to writing in the ledger. “I believe I’ve heard her call it that.”

  “Henry, do you think my father knew about the fits? I mean, before the one in the church?”

  “Why do you ask?”