Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  Joan and Ida Eber followed Juliet Pearl up the drive at a distance. Juliet must have heard their footfalls, but chose to ignore them and did not wait up. Ida Eber walked with the same limp she had as a little girl. She was born with one leg three inches shorter than the other, and often wore a shoe with a wedge of wood nailed to the sole. The runt, they called her. Now she had a rose-coloured stain all up her neck. Joan later claimed it was a birthmark, but I couldn’t remember seeing it on Ida’s neck before. It was puckered like the burn I got as a little girl when a drop of hot oil landed on my arm. Her sister Joan was tall and haughty. She wore a constant scowl, a hardened look I understood must have come with living with the seven Eber brothers, crude boys that couldn’t be trusted to fill a bucket with water.

  When I had ridden up the Ebers’ drive the day before, their vast land had felt desolate with the sons off at war. The eldest Eber boy had been eaten up by the war already. Mr. Eber was tending a burning mound of waste. The smell was putrid. I could feel him staring at me but knew not to make eye contact.

  I came across what remained of one of the Ebers’ hounds. It had been torn apart by hungry coyotes and left to rot. Ida and Joan were on the front porch pinching the ends off wooded beans and scrubbing nubby old potatoes. A little grubby boy was seated at their feet, dressed in only a long shirt. There were rumours about this boy, for Mrs. Eber was far too old to have birthed such a young child. She had to have been nearing fifty when she gave birth to Ida, her last. The little boy opened and closed the wings of a dead bird, a house finch. I noticed then he had mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown, like Ida. Joan and Ida hardly lifted their gazes to acknowledge me. Like their father, it seemed the sisters despised my presence. I was an outsider and unwelcome on their land. A trespasser.

  I hadn’t thought they were interested in my proposition and was surprised to see them walk up our drive the next day. I hadn’t expected Mrs. Bell to show up either. She looked incredibly small and bird-boned in Mr. Bell’s overalls. Her thin hair was in two narrow braids tucked behind her ears, so unlike the pompadour she had worn before. The girlish hairstyle made her look old and thin.

  After we toured the orchard I offered the women the black tea and sourdough I had Mary prepare for us. Teresa and Daphne Nickel joined us a little later in the day. The Nickels’ store had slowed, and there weren’t enough customers to warrant Teresa and Daphne working the storefront. I had always found Teresa an ignorant, melodramatic sort. She talked endlessly about Ronald, her twin brother. If I didn’t like Ronald so much myself, I might have revealed his and Jacob’s secret romance to Teresa just to silence her.

  On that first day, I taught the women how to safely operate the ladders, how to wear the pick sacks, and the best way to pluck the ripened fruit without bruising its tender skin, just as Yuri had once taught me. Mary watched us from the windows of our house where she cared for Llewelyna, or sometimes from the wash tub outside where she scrubbed at our clothes.

  Every morning we sat at the pickers’ table as the sun turned the edges of the trees gold and read the latest news from the front. Teresa bought the newspaper from the lakeboat captain, who brought copies from the city and charged tenfold for them. We would also share with one another our most recent letters. We kept these letters in breast pockets and waistbands, as if their contact to our skin might bring our men closer to us.

  Though I couldn’t share Viktor’s illicit, stolen words with the women, I often read them Yuri’s humdrum letters. His way of evading any emotion or detail about the war became a kind of game. The women laughed as they counted the number of times Yuri mentioned food, the absence of food, or the weather. When Yuri began writing me overwrought love poems, it was only natural that I read them out to the women, too.

  “ ‘Your cheeks soft as peaches, your lips like rosebuds.’ ” I said the words indulgently while Teresa wrapped her arms around herself and turned from us so it looked as though she were kissing someone. “ ‘Your hair like crow feathers, and your eyes like fire.’ ” I was being remade by these elements in Yuri’s imagination, like Blodeuwedd, built from broom, oak, and meadowsweet. And with every new iteration, I disappeared a little.

  Teresa claimed she had the ability to see and feel the war through Ronald. “I felt it in my bones. I saw it all in my mind’s eye,” she said one day. I busied myself with setting the dirtied teacups on the tray so no one would see my eyes rolling. “Like your mother, Iris. Like how she saw your father’s death before it even happened. I can see things too.”

  I let the stack of saucers clang to the tray. “How do you know about that?”

  “Ah, now you should know you can’t keep a secret in a town like this.”

  “Did your mother tell you that?”

  “My lips are sealed.” Teresa made a motion as if to button her lips. I knew she was just a fraud looking for attention, a girl so ordinary she had to invent and lie to make herself feel important, and still her ignorance irritated me. She didn’t understand that foresight was a burden that wore you down and could make you lose yourself.

  One evening that summer, I fell asleep on our back porch after a long, hot day of picking and woke to the sound of someone running through the orchard. There was the jingle of silver. Once my eyes adjusted to the dark I could make out countless shadows moving amongst the trees. For a moment I saw the shapes of coyotes. I thought I heard one howl. Then the moon came out from behind a cloud and the shadows dissolved. It was only the trees remaking themselves in the dark.

  Since my fall by the lake, my seizures came only while I was asleep. I would know one had occurred by a few telltale signs the next day: bloodshot eyes, stiff arms and legs, and a sore, bleeding tongue. Even more than the physical markings, I knew I had had a seizure by the dream I always woke from. Like the forest Llewelyna walked through during a seizure, I was often in a long, unfamiliar hallway trailing after the jaguar. Then, once I returned from the dream, I would find the jaguar had followed me out. Sometimes she would stay for a few hours; other times she would stay for days. Even once the jaguar disappeared, I still felt as though I was being watched, even in the most private of moments.

  Llewelyna’s seizures were frequent and getting worse: longer and more intense. She often complained of pests in the house, mice scurrying across her bedspread, a squirrel climbing along the curtain rod, sometimes invisible fruit flies clouded her vision and she would wave a hand in front of her face to clear them. She couldn’t understand why Mary and I couldn’t keep the house free of the creatures. Admittedly, the house was difficult to keep clean at that time. A mysterious layer of coarse animal hair coated the chesterfield, and dirt crusted the floor. I found nibbled bits of food in Llewelyna’s wardrobe and along the stairs. She once claimed to have a coyote beneath her bed, and later said she had found a fawn asleep in the tin bathtub that morning. Of course Mary and I thought these were only hallucinations, but then I came across a muddy paw print on the wood floor. After days of her complaining about a robin trapped in her closet, the bird finally materialized, and Mary and I madly raced about and finally caught the bird with a lampshade and a newspaper.

  It was around this time that Mrs. Bell’s greyhound was attacked. She arrived home from picking one day to find King Edward VII torn to shreds. It was a terrible mess. We helped her bury the dog in the forest. Mrs. Nickel had claimed she had seen a cougar stalking the perimeter of their yard a few days before, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it was my jaguar that killed her greyhound.

  After an especially brutal seizure, Llewelyna slept for an entire week. When she finally woke, Mary fetched me from the orchard and said, “She’s asking for you.”

  The door to her room whined as I pushed it open. She was propped upright and her eyes were closed. Saint Francis sat at her chest and pecked at crumbs in her hair. He squawked when I brushed him away. Llewelyna opened her eyes. She stared at me blankly.

  “Mary said you asked for me,” I said.

  Her eyes narr
owed. She shook her head. “No. I asked for my daughter. Not you.”

  When I told Mary what Llewelyna had said, she suggested putting her back on the bromide. At last, I complied.

  19

  Most of the women got along quite well and our days were filled with chatter. Since the death of King Edward VII, Mrs. Bell claimed to have seen a little Indian girl climb a maple tree in her backyard. She crawled along the limbs to get in and out of the Bells’ yard. Mrs. Bell threatened to call the mounted police. She said things had gone missing from her house, jewellery, a few figurines from her cabinet, and her collection of butterflies. I grinned at the obvious work of the orphan thief.

  Mrs. Bell and Teresa spoke so much and with such velocity that I often had to escape the sounds of their voices to cool the gears in my ears. Juliet was the only other one who also seemed irritated by the racket and, after a brief exchange of looks, we would escape, saying we had to chop firewood, or collect the rubbish and branches beneath the trees at the far side of the orchard, or help Mary prepare lunch.

  Juliet’s silence always urged me to speak. I revealed things to her I had never told another soul. One day we shared a pair of Llewelyna’s leather gloves my father had once bought her, and carried a long, poky branch between us, and I found myself telling her about Yuri’s proposal, and my growing distaste for him. I had to stop before I told her about Viktor’s letters. Juliet didn’t comment on what I had said. Instead she offered a piece of her own story in return. In this way we quickly became friends.

  Mary left platters of bread and cheese on the porch for us to snack on while we worked in the trees. She looked at me with sullen eyes that shifted every time I tried to make eye contact. I asked her several times to join us for lunch at least, but she claimed there was simply too much work to be done in the house, and someone had to care for Llewelyna. Finally she admitted:

  “Taras hates it. He thinks you women are stealing his men’s jobs.”

  “But his men aren’t here.”

  She shrugged. “He won’t have it.”

  Taras’s health had declined significantly. I only saw him when he stomped past the orchard on his way to the outhouse, cursing us women beneath his breath like a madman. The women would freeze on the ladders or hide in the trees whenever he passed, afraid to move. Once he had returned safely back inside his house we would snicker and mock his awkward gait, or inhale dramatically as if we had been holding our breath to keep from breathing in his stench.

  Some nights I woke to Taras and Mary fighting. Taras’s voice boomed in the stillness while Mary’s words, if she said anything at all, remained inaudible. Often when they argued I heard things fall to the ground. Pots and pans slammed against the walls, glass shattered. They didn’t own many things, and I thought they must only have a couple of dishes left. During these episodes, I would sit at the window and watch the dim windows of the Wasiks’ house, seeing nothing but the dance of shadows, afraid and unsure what to do.

  One night I was jolted from sleep by a gunshot. I walked through the halls of our house, running my fingers along the walls to remind my body of its dimensions until my eyes got used to the dark. Once I was outside, the sky was clear and cloudless. Stars twinkled innocently. The Wasiks’ house was dark and the orchard was so quiet that I thought I must have imagined the shot. The only sound was the beating of my heart in my throat and the chirp of crickets in the bushes by the lake. Just as I was about to return to the house, a shadow sped out from behind the workhouse and disappeared into the orchard. I pushed my body up against the side of the workhouse and slid along the building. Right when I was at the corner, Taras lurched out of the darkness and raised a pistol at me. I closed my eyes as the shot rang out. It echoed into the hills. I opened my eyes to see if I was dead or alive. Taras wasn’t looking at me. His gun was aimed into the orchard.

  “Coyote,” he said, and cursed in Ukrainian as he walked past me. I remained stiff against the house and caught my breath. My thighs were sticky with urine.

  “Did you hit him?”

  “Dunno.”

  Despite my fear, I followed Taras through the forest. I worried over Llewelyna’s silver coyote, her she-wolf. Had he hit her? Moonlight bounced off the gunmetal as he swung the pistol at his side with each step. It was then that I recognized Mr. Bell’s gun from all those years before. Under the trees the darkness was thick, more pronounced. For a moment I lost sight of Taras. I froze and listened. I heard the crunch of leaves and followed the noise. Taras was bent down at the bough of a tree. He ran his finger along a dark splotch. Blood. I backed away slowly and ran to the house.

  The next morning, I went back to where Taras and I had trailed after the coyote. I couldn’t see any blood or other evidence of what had occurred in the night. Later, while the women went down to the lake for their afternoon swim, I saw the orphan thief slip out the window of Mrs. Bell’s kitchen holding a few of her treasured sugar spoons. She was wearing a necklace strung with Mrs. Bell’s butterfly collection, the kaleidoscopic wings more brilliant than any gemstone. I ran after her. She didn’t turn around, but she slowed every now and then, as though she had intended that I follow her.

  The orphan thief was leading me to Henry’s tree fort. I hadn’t been inside since I had interrupted Viktor and Azami’s lovemaking three years before. As we got closer to the fort, the surrounding trees became more and more ornamented with the orphan thief’s scavenged things—rings were glued with sap to bark, silverware hung from threads, pearl necklaces draped from branches. Llewelyna’s gold scarf was wrapped around a trunk, and her ruby earring punctured a broad leaf.

  A sound was coming from up in the tree fort. I slowly climbed the ladder and carefully peeked above the floor, but the orphan thief was not inside. I found Llewelyna’s jewelery box against a wall. It was left open and the dancing girl turned around and around to mechanical music. There were new chimes hanging from the ceiling. The strings were invisible, and so the charms and trinkets seemed to float mid-air. The deer statuette from Mrs. Bell’s china cabinet clinked gently against her emerald brooch and silverware. In a corner I found Mrs. Bell’s little house figurines lined up amongst some moss, bark, and stones. I realized the display resembled Winteridge in miniature: the schoolhouse, the Nickels’ shop, the homes, Henry’s library, the orchards, it was all there—a little map of the town. I carefully thumbed a house painted green, meant to resemble my own home. The peach trees were made of green snips of cedar and rolled bits of marigold petals.

  In the opposite corner of the tree fort was a square of buckskin mottled with holes, a stone bowl full of ash, and a long brown feather. The collection reminded me of Azami’s shrine, her precious, meaning-filled items. I knew the orphan thief was trying to show me something, but I didn’t understand why she collected these stolen items. What did Mrs. Bell’s trinkets and Llewelyna’s jewellery mean to the orphan thief? What use did she have for them besides decoration? And why the miniature town? I wondered if the very act of stealing was the point the orphan thief was trying to make. Had I taken something from her? I considered this, and although it was beginning to come clear, I wasn’t ready to acknowledge my part in her suffering, my own bit of thievery.

  The next morning, when Mary didn’t arrive to nurse Llewelyna, I went to check in at the Wasiks’, thinking she might be ill. She answered her door with a blackened eye she attempted to hide by bowing her head obviously. She walked with a limp. I tried to persuade her to gather her things immediately and come stay in the house. Mary refused and gestured for me to keep my voice down.

  “You have no business prying,” she said. Her voice was so stern I hardly recognized it. She closed the door on me.

  While the women worked in the trees and Mary stayed home and nursed Taras, I kept to the house and took care of Llewelyna. I was outside at the well filling a bucket for her bath when the officer who had come looking for Taras before appeared again on our porch. I approached him from behind as he knocked at our door. Water from my buc
ket sloshed onto the porch. He turned, clearly startled.

  “Iris Sparks, is that right?” he said kindly, his hat in his hands. He was holding the clipboard again. I invited him inside and we sat at the kitchen table.

  “You have quite the operation here,” he said. “I’ve never seen so many hardworking women in trousers.” He laughed.

  “They pick as well as the men, I assure you. We sell every week at markets in the city, and in the fall we hope to send preserves overseas to the soldiers.” I leaned forward, tired of his small talk. “What are you here for, if I might ask?”

  “We’re still looking for this”—he glanced down at the clipboard—“Taras Wasik character. One of your neighbours says he worked for your father. Is that true? Strange your mother didn’t mention it.”

  I stared at the crystal vase in the centre of the table where I had placed some of the purple asters and marigolds that still thrived in Llewelyna’s wild garden. I hadn’t changed the water for a few days. A beetle struggled to crawl up the glass and out of the water, his little legs spinning.

  “What will you do with this man once you find him?” I asked.

  “He’ll be held safely, just until the war is over.”

  The fact that Taras had had Mr. Bell’s gun all this time terrified me. That night, the moment before I had closed my eyes, Taras had aimed the gun right at me. He had lied about Henry snooping around Mr. Bell’s shack and stood by as the mob ransacked Henry’s bookstore. He had wanted Henry destroyed. And how did he get the gun, anyway? Taras couldn’t be trusted and I could no longer bear him spending his sons’ money on alcohol. He scared the women and took his misery out on Mary. I looked up at the soldier. One of his eyes turned outward, as if he were looking at two things at once. I wondered if this was why he couldn’t join the forces overseas. I leaned in.

  “He’s in the workhouse. That cottage down there.”

  “Taras Wasik?”