Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  Copyright © 2018 Dania Tomlinson

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Tomlinson, Dania, author

    Our animal hearts / Dania Tomlinson.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385689854 (softcover). ISBN 9780385689861 (EPUB)

    I. Title.

  PS8639.O458O97 2018   C813′.6    C2017-905247-0

                      C2017-905248-9

  This book is a work of historical fiction. Apart from well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Ebook design adapted from printed cover and book design by Jennifer Griffiths

  Cover image: Kidsada Manchinda/Getty Images

  Interior images: (peach) The Annunciation to the Shepherds, Abraham de Bruyn; (sea monster) Design for a Plate with Thetis on a Shell in a Medallion Bordered by Sea Monsters, Adriaen Collaert; both Metropolitan Museum of Art; (peacock) H.M. van Dorp; (leopard) De Ruyter & Meijer; (wolf) Hermann van der Moolen, all Rijksmuseum.

  Published in Canada by Anchor Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.2

  a

  For anyone who calls the Okanagan home, in recognition that this land is ancestral and unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan people.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Winter 1941

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part Four

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgements

  Discover thou what is

  The strong creature from before the flood,

  Without flesh, without bone,

  Without vein, without blood,

  Without head, without feet,

  It will neither be older nor younger

  Than at the beginning;

  For fear of a denial,

  There are no rude wants

  With creatures.

  Great God! how the sea whitens

  When first it comes.

  THE MABINOGION

  PROLOGUE

  WINTER 1941

  This lake has no bottom. The monster glides through waterways beneath the mountains to get from lake to river to ocean and back again. Some say the lake monster used to be a man, an evil man, and this evil man committed the first murder. I don’t know how he ended up in the lake. That was never part of the story. What I do know is that evil never dissolves, only transforms, changes shape, drifts from one body to another. Maybe a mob held the evil man underwater until bubbles no longer slipped from his lips. Maybe, overcome with shame, the evil man filled his pockets with stones or held a boulder to his chest and walked along the lake bottom until he lost his way to the surface and sank into the black infinity.

  Other people claim the lake monster is a descendant of the biblical Leviathan, or the Kelpie, or the Loch Ness, or the Mizuchi dragon, and that the creature travelled to Winteridge underground, or was brought here from the green lakes of northern Wales or Japan or the Mediterranean Sea by an immigrant, its larval form hidden under a hat or sewn into a bodice or sucked at like a stone in the mouth of a child. And still there are some who claim that the lake monster was never a man or a descendant of some foreign monster, but has existed in this valley long before the settlers came with their books and relics and shrines, before the first people canoed from shore to shore to hunt the forests surrounding the lake, even before the lake itself, which arrived long ago in the form of ice or poured from a hole in the sky. They say the monster is the spirit of the lake, the very face of the deep.

  Now, so many years later, scientists poked and prodded and vaguely concluded that the lake monster is not a monster at all but a fish, perhaps a sturgeon. But back then we cast our own shadows onto the lake and each claimed the monster we saw there as our own. We called our monster by name. We called our monster by many names.

  These days I try to avoid the lake and all it brings.

  Morning sun pours crystalline onto the fresh snow blanketing the small garden and fruit trees in my backyard. I have taken the blue fish from its hiding place in the attic cabinet and set its jar on the windowsill above the kitchen sink because the world is far too still, too white today. The fish spins and spins, as blue as flame. I am washing dishes, recalling an old poem my mother would recite whenever it snowed. She claimed it was much prettier in Welsh. It went something like—

  Mountain snow, swift is the wolf, she haunts the edge of wilderness.

  Mountain snow, the stag is swimming and fish are in the deep.

  Mountain snow, white everywhere, yet there is no hiding evil, no matter where.

  I still find the words chilling.

  Right then, there is a knock at the back door—a single, ominous thud. The door whines as I open it. What I find makes me choke. I clutch my throat. An enormous buck lies at my doorstep, splayed on its side, hoofs twitching against the steps. The deer’s branching antlers are enormous and force his head upwards, neck arched back to reveal a pulsing throat. Blood spills from three parallel slices down his belly and melts the snow beneath him. Steam huffs from his nostrils. His eyes are black as beetles. I scan the yard for paw prints before I go to the kitchen for a knife to bring the buck relief. I know the deer is both an offering and a warning.

  She has found me once again.

  1

  Saint Francis came to us in a yellow biscuit tin. It was Christmas Eve. Frozen branches tapped against the windowpane like neglected ghosts. Wind wheezed through cracks in the walls and carried with it the yips of coyotes, making it sound as though the beasts were right in our kitchen instead of out in the orchard, tormenting the chickens and filling their dreams with teeth and bone. My father had made a fire and it steeped us in orange. Then again, some of my memories have this chemical effect: sepia. As a girl I would scrutinize old photographs and imagine myself into that kitchen or that field, or beneath that cold light. I would dream myself into the bodies and minds of those apparitions. Fantasy might replace memory, or meld with it, a double exposure. I remember things I could not have possibly
seen in a photograph, like how my mother, Llewelyna, pricked her finger while sewing pearl buttons onto her wedding dress. She brought that bead of blood up close to her face and held her breath, as if it were some kind of miracle, as if, were she to breathe, it might disappear. I can also see the very place my brother, Jacob, died. The poppies nearly black in the dark, my little brother belly-up and gaping at those billions of stars as chlorine gas itched his face, his eyes, his lungs. And so, sitting room steeped in sepia could be a cinematic effect. The room might have been bright with refracted light from the snow outside, or it could have been grey despite the flames. But I remember it as sepia. Orange pekoe. Warm.

  Llewelyna was seated on the yellow chesterfield, her red hair electric in the glow. She was bent towards the fire as if it whispered to her alone. The chesterfield’s claw feet were poised and shining. Jacob was cross-legged on the floor beside me. He hopped his toy soldiers along the hardwood like chess pieces. The soldiers were a gift from my father, who had just returned from one of his many trips overseas.

  My father spent most of his time in England and Wales, where he managed my grandfather’s coal mines. Even when my father was home, he often had business of some kind in the city, a day’s trip by boat from Winteridge, our small community huddled on the lakeshore in southern British Columbia. My clearest memories of my father are of him departing. The image of my father waving to Jacob and me from the lakeboat, his top hat arching above his head in steady sweeps, is so vivid in my mind that his short presence in my life can nearly be summed up in that one continuous moment of his perpetual leave-taking. I can distinguish his arrivals by the gifts he brought home for us.

  Jacob’s tin soldiers had tiny red coats and black trousers painted on them; some carried guns or swords or rode horseback. Hushed explosions and screams and murmured calls for help came from the battleground Jacob had built from kindling and newsprint. In my cupped palms I held six glass marbles; “handmade in Germany,” my father had said when I slipped them one by one from their velvet satchel. Until then, the marbles Jacob and I played with were clay and painted like Easter eggs. These new marbles were of another breed, far too intricate and precious to play with. I held my favourite up to the firelight. It was blue as the lake in the summer with pin-thin white and black tendrils swooping through it in a kind of dance, as if continuously falling through time and space.

  My father came in from the kitchen carrying the yellow biscuit tin and a crystal tumbler half-full of scotch, a rare treat for him. He was wearing his brown suit, the bow tie crooked at his neck. His moustache twirled up at the tips.

  “Here, Lew,” he said as he handed the yellow tin to my mother.

  My father was the only one allowed to call her Lew. Jacob and I were forced to stumble through her entire name. She told us to pronounce the Welsh double “l” by pressing our tongues against our teeth as if about to say “l,” but to say “shh” instead. “It is a voiceless sound,” she said. “Made in the throat.” I thought it sounded strangled. Even after our practised elocutions—“Shoe-wellen-nah”—she would complain that not even her own children could say her name right—would ever say it right. She wouldn’t have us erase her with our Mother this and Mama that either. She said it made her invisible, almost as bad as being called Mrs. Sparks. Most people in our town could not pronounce Llewelyna’s name. To her face they avoided it, but eventually, behind her back, they called her other things. Although she refused to return to Wales, she resented that Jacob and I were not Welsh but watered-down Canadian Brits.

  Llewelyna’s eyes narrowed at the yellow tin my father passed her. She set it on her lap. Tiny red flowers slinked up the sides of the tin. On the lid was a girl in a white pinafore and bonnet. She looked lost amongst the gaudy flowers. The paint was scratched along the top; one of the girl’s feet was missing.

  “But the drapes, and the gloves, and the…” Llewelyna motioned her arms in the air as if conjuring these items with her words.

  “You don’t give a damn about all that,” my father said. He winked at me. “But could just be old biscuits, for all you know.” He sat in his wingback chair and pulled at his bow tie until it came loose. Jacob and I climbed up onto the chesterfield on either side of Llewelyna and waited for her to open the lid. Her hands hovered. We stared at her long fingers until we looked up to find her smiling at our anticipation.

  “Maybe I’ll wait till tomorrow,” she teased.

  “No,” we squealed and jostled her shoulders. The tin bounced on her lap.

  “Stop!” my father said, his hand stretched out towards us, his eyes steady on the tin. “You’ll break it. Iris, Jacob, back on the floor.”

  Jacob and I slipped off the chesterfield. We sat with our hands in our laps and looked up at our father until he leaned back into his chair and smiled at us.

  “That’s better. Go on, Lew.” He watched her face carefully, the tumbler of scotch balanced on his knee. He had one hand up beneath his chin, a finger pressed against his moustache. I loved the way he looked at her when she wasn’t watching.

  Llewelyna snapped open the latch and pulled out some scrunched-up newsprint and folds of cotton and put them on the cushion beside her. “What in God’s green and blessed earth, Noah…” She smiled so broadly she revealed her crooked bottom teeth. Cross-legged on the floor, Jacob and I craned our necks to see what was in the tin.

  “It’s your peacock,” my father said. “Should hatch in a week.”

  Llewelyna picked a large pink egg out of the tin and held it out for Jacob and me to see. The shell had a thin crack I ran my finger along.

  “Don’t touch it,” my father said, “or the hens won’t take to it.” I removed my finger. He didn’t seem concerned about Llewelyna’s hands cradling it.

  “How fantastic,” she said, admiring the egg from all sides.

  “With luck it’ll be a cock. But there’s no way of knowing,” my father said.

  “I can hear him in there,” I whispered to Jacob.

  “You’re making that up,” Jacob said.

  “Listen.”

  Jacob’s red eyelashes fluttered. “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “You can’t hear that?” I said, incredulous.

  “Hear what?”

  “He’s singing ‘Georgie Porgie, puddin’ and pie’ in there.”

  * * *

  Llewelyna once told me that, as immigrants, we would never truly belong to this land unless we died here. And so, at seven years old, I would lie in the freshly churned soil of Llewelyna’s garden, sprawled amongst her beloved marigolds, with a halcyon smile on my face, and imagine I were dead. I watched blue carnations with the same crinkled edge as my dress sprout from my belly and my brains. This was back when the peach trees on my family’s orchard were just scraggly things, tied to wooden stilts to keep straight. This was before the trees grew taller than the house and filled our yard with dense, darting shadows. Before the peaches grew to the size of a man’s fist and, still unpicked, fell to the ground like grenades. This was before the peaches piled up at the feet of trees, before they grew out of their skins, were pecked at by birds, and carried away by ants. This was before the house filled with the swamp smell of rot and the footsteps of so many ghosts. This was before the fire.

  Jacob and I were barred from Llewelyna’s overgrown garden. The only one who roamed it freely was Saint Francis, her beloved peacock. Francis could not fly. Once he was full-grown his train of jewelled feathers was too heavy to carry into the sky. Llewelyna pointed this out to me at a very young age so I would understand the cost of such extravagant beauty. I had watched her then, green eyes flashing, her hair a fantastic orange, her nose delicate and small. Features foreign to my own. My round ears poked through my thin dark hair, I had a crooked, aquiline nose like my father and eyes the colour of puzzle-bark. The only attribute Llewelyna and I shared was our bow-tie lips and crooked teeth. Jacob, on the other hand, was a miniature of my mother: red curly hair, green eyes, and pale, freckled skin.
<
br />   It was difficult not to gape at Llewelyna. Her hair stood out, surely, but there was also something in the symmetry of her face, the slight angle of her eyebrows, the perfect dip of her nose, and the pull of her green eyes that made her magnetic. Men gawked shamelessly and women, confused by the attraction, struggled not to.

  Saint Francis followed Llewelyna everywhere. He waited for her on the shore, tail fanned, while she swam in the lake, and followed her down the road whenever she went to visit Henry, her only true friend in Winteridge. When my father was away she let Francis in the house and he would sleep nestled at the bottom of her bed. I scavenged for his feathers and kept them in the bottom drawer of my wardrobe like relics from another world. Sometimes at night I pulled the feathers out to let them glisten in the candlelight. They reminded me of Llewelyna’s stories about mermaids and monsters, dragons and saints.

  It was said that the real Saint Francis preached to the birds, and the birds spoke back to him, and so Llewelyna spoke to her peacock as if he were a person, and the bird apparently spoke back. Llewelyna claimed that the peacock embodied the spirit of her favourite saint. He told her things. Often he could foresee the future and shared his visions with her.

  Llewelyna said when Saint Francis, the man, had died, he was resurrected as birds. Not just one bird but all of them. I pictured the saint’s body like an eggshell, cracked into the tiniest of pieces until he was only a pile of dust. And then slowly from the pile, a dove emerged, itching at her puffed breast with her beak. Blue-and-red parrots shuffled out next and flapped the dust from their wings. An array of colourful birds followed: hummingbirds, finches, budgies, robins. Then, finally, all the colours of the world used up, the crow limped out, his caw-caw muffled by dust. This vision was confused a few days later when Llewelyna and I were sitting at the cliffs watching sparrows play in the air currents and I overheard her say to herself: “Birds are only fish dreaming.” Her eyes were bright and wide with the revelation.