Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  The pickers continued to work despite the cold. They wrapped their hands in cloth and their breath rose into the bare trees like spirits. To keep the men busy, Taras had them build a fence around the property and clear out rotten fruit and dead branches.

  The frost had come upon us so quickly that year, my mother’s flower garden froze mid-bloom. The purple asters were stiff as spurs and the sunflowers glittered with ice. The marigolds flaked off in gold coins. Mary’s vegetable garden also froze. We chipped the carrots out of the solid earth and let the late tomatoes sit in a bowl of water before we sliced or canned them.

  One morning I found a dead cat on our porch. Its mouth was open and its claws stretched out as if it were about to pounce. Then three horses died at the Ebers’ ranch. The ground was solid and so they had to wait until spring to bury the beasts. I wondered how Henry’s people survived the cold back when Winteridge was their winter village.

  For the very first time, the lake froze over. Months went by without any news from Jacob or my father because the lakeboats that brought our letters and our food, and delivered our goods, could no longer run. We were left to live off our scarce pantries. After a while, men were hired by the lakeboat company to break up the ice using saws and axes. Taras, Yuri, Viktor, and the other pickers joined the crew. It was dangerous work and several men fell through the ice. One died. Yuri said he could hear the hollow thud of the man punching and kicking the ice from below.

  When the lakeboats could finally run again, Taras received a letter my father had sent months prior. It said to lay off the workers for the winter. Most of the Japanese bachelors, using the money they had made that season, went back to Japan to find wives they would bring back with them in the spring. Other men found work on ranches in the valley. Only the Wasiks stayed on our orchard, but soon even Viktor and Yuri left for Vernon to work as ranch hands. Taras tinkered with various projects around the property and Mary tended to Llewelyna full-time. I busied myself with canning the cellared peaches. Mary taught me how and I enjoyed the work. Steam warmed the kitchen. We survived off those peach preserves. I traded them with neighbours for potatoes, rice, or salted pork and beef.

  Later that winter I received word that Jacob and my father were coming home in the spring. Inside the envelope was a sealed letter for Llewelyna. She often received mail from my father now. Usually she put the letter in her lap and waited until I left the room. I assumed she read them after I left. This time she opened the drawer by her bed and slipped the envelope in atop a pile of other unopened envelopes.

  “You’re not going to read it?”

  “Bring me some water, would you?” she said, twirling one of Saint Francis’s feathers between her fingers. The bird seemed to be losing more feathers than usual. His chest feathers were patchy; he had become worn and ravaged alongside Llewelyna.

  “Have you read any of them?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Please?”

  I poured some water from the basin into her glass and handed it to her. “You were wrong. They’re coming home,” I said.

  She took a drink and grimaced. “What is this? It’s bitter.”

  I went to the basin and poured myself a glass. “It tastes fine.”

  She put the glass on her bedside table. “Have Mary get me some water.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Her water is sweet. I’m not sure but—”

  “Llewelyna. They’re coming home.”

  “Who?”

  “Father and Jacob. They’ll be here in the spring.”

  Her mouth twitched in a smile she tried to hide.

  “They’re coming for my debut,” I said.

  “Debut?”

  “I’ll be sixteen in July.”

  She looked at me as if for the first time. “So you are.”

  A month or so later, I was waxing the floor in Llewelyna’s room and took a sip from her water glass. I wouldn’t usually have done such a thing, but the basin in her room was empty and my throat was parched. I spat the water back into her glass. It did taste sweet. That night I watched Mary in the kitchen from the darkness of the sitting room. She was preparing to bring up the small bowl of soup Llewelyna would sip and probably vomit up later if she managed to get any of it down in the first place. Mary looked over her shoulder before reaching up into the top cupboard for the yellow biscuit tin that had once held Saint Francis. As far as I knew, the tin contained only the seeds Llewelyna harvested from her garden. I watched Mary withdraw a glass bottle from the tin. I recognized the white pills the doctor had prescribed that first visit, so long ago now. Mary dropped a pill in Llewelyna’s glass of water before she put everything back in its place.

  She brought the medicine water to Llewelyna three times a day. I didn’t confront her; instead, I switched each glass Mary brought with a glass of sugar water. Over the next few weeks Llewelyna improved. Her terrible rash cleared and she began to eat.

  * * *

  That spring, despite Llewelyna’s curses and premonitions, my father and Jacob returned to Winteridge on the Rosamond. It was dawn and the air was still crisp with the memory of winter. The lakeboat came around the bend and a thick tongue of fog lolled out behind it. There was pink in the staunch siren’s cheeks. Her eyes were closed in sleep. I stood on the wharf shivering in my father’s old wool coat. Yuri and Viktor had accompanied me to the wharf to carry my father’s and Jacob’s luggage. They had arrived from Vernon only the week before. The hard winter work had thinned them out. Yuri had lost his childish softness. He was solid and strapping. Viktor’s muscles were more sinewy; his limbs seemed longer. He looked taller.

  The passengers disembarked in the fog and seemed to appear out of nothing. Jacob walked down the wharf with his shoulders back; the limp in his step was almost indistinguishable. He was fifteen and taller than my father now. He wore round wire-rimmed spectacles. His red hair no longer looked feminine and awkward like a wig. He had grown into it, learned a way to comb it down and tame it to make it his rather than something Llewelyna had thrust upon him. He still looked a lot like her but in a way that wasn’t so imposed. I breathed into my hands to warm them. I wondered if I had changed. It had been nearly two years since I had seen my father and brother.

  My father’s waxed moustache was stiff and his cheeks pink from the cold. When he embraced me I smelled the tea tree oil he rubbed behind his ears. “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “At home,” I said. Although Llewelyna had improved since I had begun switching out the water glasses, she still kept to her bed most days.

  “Oh?” His face changed. I realized he might not know a thing about her decline. Judging by the stack of unopened envelopes next to Llewelyna’s bed, she hadn’t written to him in a while.

  “Hello, Iris,” Jacob said and bowed slightly. His formal demeanour stunned me and made me aware of my hollow cheeks and unclean hair. I pulled Llewelyna’s scarf up higher on my neck.

  “She won’t believe how you’ve grown,” I said. But Jacob had already looked on past me to Yuri. They exchanged glances, as if to measure one another up. Before Jacob went off to school, Yuri was one of the only people he could stand to be around. Some evenings they sat in silence for hours on the back porch and played chess or cribbage.

  “Hi, Jacob,” Yuri said.

  “Yuri. Viktor. Nice to see you both.” The porters dropped the luggage off near us. Jacob looked down at his trunk and then up at Yuri. He straightened, stepped past the trunk, and walked down the wharf. Yuri watched him go before he reached down to lift the trunk.

  On our walk back to the house my father kept an arm around me. He pulled me close and kissed my head. I wanted to prepare him for Llewelyna but didn’t know how. “We’ve missed you,” was all I could muster.

  The house was cool and quiet when we arrived. Mary and I had cleaned it top to bottom. We had sparked fresh fires in the sitting room and Jacob’s room, and in the master bedroom where I imagined my father would sleep alone. The heat and dusting hadn
’t shaken the chill.

  My father took a breath and went up to see Llewelyna.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked Jacob.

  “Don’t we employ Mary to do that sort of thing?” Jacob’s voice was deep and low like my father’s and had acquired a lilt, a piece of England he carried with him.

  “She helps me with Llewelyna, but she isn’t a maid. This isn’t London.” In fact Mary helped me around the house much more than she ought to and much more than I cared to admit. She washed our clothes, bought our groceries, and often cooked and cleaned. I had asked her to stay home the day Jacob and my father arrived.

  “I’ll have mine with lemon,” Jacob said.

  “Lemon? We don’t have any lemon.”

  “Cream is fine, then.”

  I brought the tea to the table and sat down across from this stiff new stranger. Jacob fidgeted with his handkerchief and cufflinks—gestures I didn’t recognize. The glare from the window on the lens of his new spectacles made it impossible to tell where he was looking.

  “What’s the matter with Mother?”

  “Llewelyna,” I corrected him.

  “It’s perverse to call our own mother by her Christian name,” he said, and I could hear our grandmother’s shrill voice echo inside him.

  “She hasn’t been herself since you left.”

  “I don’t understand. The doctor said she just needed a little rest.”

  “And she’s been resting.”

  Jacob shook his head and poured cream into his tea.

  “How is school?” I asked.

  “I enjoy it.”

  “Have you made many friends?”

  “A slew. In fact, I’m rather impatient to return.” He sipped his tea.

  We sat in silence until Father came down the stairs. He looked sullen and worn. I poured him a cup of tea.

  “Was she awake?” I asked.

  “She woke for a moment.” He sat down with us and I passed him the teacup and saucer.

  “It’s quite early still,” I said. It was the blueberry of dawn. Birds had only just begun to sing in the peach trees.

  “How long has she been like this?” my father asked.

  I opened my mouth to speak but Jacob spoke for me. “Since we left, can you imagine?” I looked down into my tea.

  “But it’s been nearly two years,” my father said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The rare letters I sent my father were brief and vague; anything more would have been unfaithful to Llewelyna. I was still her confidante. And to betray her illness would be to betray my own. Her recovery was central to my own health. I hoped desperately she could beat whatever had come upon her. In fact, I half expected that with the arrival of my brother and father, she would be sitting at the table with a spread of breakfast awaiting us as she had done in the past, allowing only me to see her at her worst.

  “There are good days,” I said, raising my head to look at him. This was true. Some days Mary, Llewelyna, and I sat at the kitchen table and played bridge while Saint Francis pecked at crumbs on the floor. Before, when she could still walk, Yuri and I supported her between us and took her for walks through the orchard or to the lake. Once, in spring, I carried a kitchen chair into the garden so Llewelyna could tell me how to plant the geranium seeds I had purchased at the Nickels’ store. I even got her to paint a couple of times. But most days she stayed in bed with the Mabinogion, mumbling to Saint Francis in Welsh, or slept. “She’s getting better,” I said.

  “And the doctor, what does he say about it?”

  “She won’t see a doctor.”

  “Won’t see a doctor,” my father resounded, leaning back in his chair. “She could be dying and she wouldn’t see a doctor. You call Dr. Cross without telling her. Don’t give her the choice.”

  “Mary has been helping me care for her. We bathe her, feed her, what else can we do?”

  He started at that, as if remembering something. “Where is Mary? I need to speak to her.”

  “I told her to stay home today. I thought we’d appreciate some privacy.”

  “I am disappointed in you two. You’ve neglected her. She’s shrivelling away up there.”

  “Neglected her?” I stood as I said this. “I didn’t run from her. I didn’t—”

  “Iris,” my father said, lowering his voice so I would also. “I apologize.” He waved me to sit back down. “You’re right. I’ll call Dr. Cross. I’ll deal with this. Please, sit down.” I did. “I’m home now. She isn’t your burden.” I didn’t like the way he spoke of her as a chore, a weight. “I really must find Mary.” My father left the house and stomped through the grass to the Wasiks’ cottage.

  “Jacob?” asked a raspy voice from the top of the stairs. I scrambled to my feet and walked Llewelyna down the last flight. She had rouged her cheeks, spun her hair up with her ivory pin, and put on her blue silk dress. It sagged at her chest and revealed her bony sternum. “This can’t be my boy Jacob.” She brought her hand to his cheek. Jacob stood at attention, stiff and speechless as if afraid of being slapped. She moved his spectacles up and down his nose, and then jiggled them. “How sharp you look. How smart.” I found a certain satisfaction in seeing Jacob struck dumb by her presence. She fell on him with her full weight and hugged him. He nearly toppled over.

  When my father came back inside, Llewelyna was wearing Jacob’s spectacles and attempting to read out loud from the newspaper. We laughed at the ridiculous things she pretended it said. I caught my father looking at her in that old way.

  Mary and I were mystified by Llewelyna’s recovery, but I had seen her do this in the past. When I was little we would live in shambles while my father was away, cocooned until the night before he was due to arrive. Then Llewelyna would burst out in familiar magnificence. She would clean, cook, launder, and be dressed like a duchess by the time his lakeboat docked.

  Things returned to normal for a few weeks. I continued to switch out Llewelyna’s water glasses whenever I could. My father was the one slipping the pills in now, and he was much more secretive about it than Mary. Jacob obsessed over his schoolwork and bent over his books in my father’s airless study. Although the summer was still young and the lake ice cold, Yuri and Viktor had been swimming all spring. I invited Jacob down to the beach with us, but he refused.

  After I timed Yuri’s and Viktor’s laps, we sat on the wharf and passed around a customary cigarette. “Are you going to the festival tonight?” Viktor asked. Every year the McCarthys threw a solstice celebration on their orchard. There were often games during the day for the children, and a bonfire, music, and dancing for the adults at night. I hadn’t gone for years, having long outgrown the children’s games but been too young for the night festivities.

  “If I can convince Jacob to come,” I said.

  “He’s a real stick in the sand these days, isn’t he?” Viktor said.

  “He hasn’t said more than two words to me since he’s been home,” Yuri said.

  “A lover’s quarrel?” Viktor teased. “I hear he’s quite the kisser.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Shut up, Viktor.”

  “Calm down, hen. Everyone knows he—”

  “Viktor.”

  “He what?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  Later that night Viktor and Yuri arrived on our porch. “Evening, Mr. Sparks,” Viktor said. He looked sharp in a freshly starched collared shirt. His black hair was oiled to one side. Yuri smiled at me. His hair was slicked back in the same way. He was a pale reflection of Viktor. “We’re here to escort Iris to the festival, if she would still like to join us, that is. And Jacob, of course, if he likes.” Jacob heard the conversation from the sitting room and lowered his book.

  “Sounds like a wonderful idea,” my father said. “You are due for a little fun, Jacob. Get your head out of that book. What do you say?”

  “I’d really rather stay put.”

  “No, no. Come now, put that nonsense down,
” my father said.

  “Fine,” he said, and I was surprised to see Jacob close his book. “But I won’t take part in any of those ridiculous pagan games.”

  “Bobbing for apples is hardly pagan,” my father said.

  “It’s too late in the day for any of that,” Viktor said.

  “I’m not dancing either.”

  My father gave Viktor a wink. “You’re only afraid you might enjoy yourself.”

  Viktor gave me his arm and held me back to let Jacob and Yuri walk ahead of us. He pulled a flask from his pocket and took a drink before he offered it to me.

  Lanterns in the trees guided us towards a bonfire at the centre of the McCarthys’ orchard. My belly was warm from the whisky and my head floated, making the lit-up orchard dreamy and surreal. Viktor and I ducked beneath boughs and hopped over logs, giggling like children. He plucked an apple and handed it to me. I took a bite. The flesh was young and sour but I swallowed anyways. There were some people at the festival I had never seen. While most were work hands from the surrounding orchards, some were strangers from other villages on the lake. I scanned the crowd for Azami, but couldn’t find her or any of the Japanese pickers from the Kobas’ orchard.

  “Is Azami coming?” I whispered to Viktor.

  “She’s done with me,” he said.

  “Really—I mean, don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. Her father wants her to marry her second cousin. He’s here from Japan.”

  “And she said yes?”

  “Not yet. But their families are ten steps ahead.” Viktor took another swig from the flask. Some musicians took up instruments near the fire. One of them was Ronald Nickel. He nearly dropped his fiddle when he saw Jacob enter the glow of the fire. Jacob kept his head down and didn’t acknowledge him. Ronald caught me looking at him and smiled, placed the fiddle back under his chin, and joined in with the song. Some of the white pickers from our orchard sat at a table playing cards and drinking. One called out to Viktor and he went to join them.