Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  “Do you attend the preparatory school in Vernon, son?” Mr. Bell asked.

  “No, sir,” said Jacob.

  “Why ever not?”

  “The country school is satisfactory for now,” my father said, a little defensively, I thought.

  “Satisfactory for country folk, but a young man looking to attend a British college, that’s another thing entirely.”

  “The boat ride to Vernon is hours in each direction and Jacob is too young to be away for such an extended period of time.”

  “Have you thought of a tutor?” Mrs. Bell asked. “Or perhaps employing a governess for Iris too?”

  “Henry tutors Iris.”

  “You mean the Indian?” Mrs. Bell asked, aghast.

  Mr. Bell laughed. “You are a rather eccentric family, aren’t you.”

  My father smiled politely. “Henry is our friend. He is very knowledgeable. He owns more books than anyone else in Winteridge.”

  “He can read?” Mrs. Bell said.

  “A literate Indian, imagine that.”

  “He’s read more than I have.” My father took a bite of his shepherd’s pie and swallowed. “A very learned man.”

  “And Iris, aren’t you lovely,” Mrs. Bell said, eager to change the conversation. “You’re a slight thing, though. How old are you?”

  “Eleven,” I said.

  “There is a ladies’ school in Toronto my cousin strongly recommends,” Mrs. Bell said to my father. “And if you would like to learn the piano, Iris, I would be happy to teach you.”

  My father looked at me expecting an enthusiasm I did not have. “Well, what an excellent idea.”

  “It is important for a young lady to have some talents,” Mr. Bell said, a lump of potato in his cheek.

  Llewelyna returned smelling of tobacco smoke.

  “Mrs. Bell has offered to teach Iris piano,” my father told her. “Isn’t that splendid?” Llewelyna smiled at me mawkishly and served herself sprouts.

  When Mrs. Bell went to collect dessert, I caught Llewelyna staring at the dove’s cage behind me. The dove cooed to her. Then Mrs. Bell passed china plates of trifle around the table and broke the spell.

  5

  I didn’t have many friends in Winteridge. I lived comfortably in my own head or in the stories Llewelyna and Henry told me. Jacob and I were the only children not sent to work, and this in itself distinguished our class, made us into an oddity. Not only children but adults too looked at us as though we snatched the bread from under their noses and then spat it out.

  During the planting and harvest seasons, the country school was empty except for Jacob and Ronald Nickel. After their lessons, Jacob and Ronald played in the woods until dinner, and so, for the most part, I was left to entertain myself. Once, as I walked through the forest to Henry’s tree fort in the woods, to do some reading Henry had assigned, I had the feeling I was being watched, followed. At first I thought it was a cougar and the hair rose on the back of my neck. A cougar had carried away the McCarthys’ youngest a few years before, while the family was gathering firewood. Sometimes I thought I saw that redheaded toddler amongst the trees and fantasized about her growing up alongside those giant cats like Mowgli and his wolves. Then I thought it might be the child’s ghost watching me. Or the silver-furred coyote. I had seen her the day before running through the peach trees towards our chicken coop.

  I took my next step careful and slow. I moved my eyes around without moving my head and practised looking, like Henry taught me. I saw, between two pine trees, the flash of a girl’s face. She had dark eyes and black hair, a Lake Person, a spirit. She darted behind the next tree. I followed slowly, then jumped into a run. When I got behind the tree I expected the girl to be gone, or transformed into a bird or a deer. Instead I found her panting with her back against the tree and her hair slick on her forehead. She looked down as if it might make her invisible. Her cotton dress was stained with grass and dirt.

  “Are you spying on me?” I asked. She looked up. I recognized her now. Her father was one of the first Japanese pickers to arrive in Winteridge. He worked on the McCarthys’ orchard. “What’s your name?” She didn’t respond. I pointed at her. “Your name?”

  Just then my hair was given a hard tug from behind. I turned around and found another girl, a little smaller than the first one, but with the same dark hair and light skin. She wore a pink ruffled dress, untouched by dirt. Two tight braids hung past her shoulders. The two girls spoke to one another in Japanese. The smaller one pulled the first girl’s arm, trying to get her to follow her out of the forest. The taller one shook her off and the little one fell, her pink dress soiled with dirt at last. The smaller one said something low and cutting to the first one and left with tears in her eyes.

  We watched her go.

  “Azami,” the taller one said. She gave a bow.

  “I’m Iris.” I mimicked the bow. “Who was that?”

  “Sister.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  She brought a cloth sack out from behind her back and opened it so I could see what was inside: a pine cone, a green bead, the porcelain handle of a teacup, a teaspoon, and some string.

  “What’s all this for?”

  Azami demonstrated by tying the teacup handle and teaspoon to the stick so they clinked together: a wind chime. We scoured the forest floor for other items to tie onto her chime. She gave me some of her string so I could make my own. When our chimes were complete, I took her to the tree fort and we hung the chimes from the roof.

  At first Azami and I communicated in half sentences. I opened the large book I had borrowed from Henry called South America and pointed to a picture of a parrot. “Bird,” I said. She repeated after me and then pointed to the same picture. “Tori,” she said. In these small ways we translated our worlds for one another. Sometimes Azami wrote on the wall and it looked more like stick figures dressed in a variety of different clothing than words. She asked if the other words on the walls were in my language and I shook my head and said it was Henry’s language and I didn’t know that either. Azami could already say many English words and learned much quicker than I did, so eventually we kept to English.

  Azami and I would meet every day after I had finished my lessons with Henry and she had completed her tasks on the McCarthys’ orchard. One afternoon she was late arriving. I sat on the floor attempting to read a book called The Water-Babies. I had found it under a board in the tree fort. The book was mildewed and the first page tore when I separated it from the next. To Brave Bear from Stewart, your friend in God was written on the following page. Along the borders of passages were words scribbled in the same language as the words on the walls of the tree fort. I set the book aside when I heard Azami scaling the tree’s ladder. Something jingled along behind her as she climbed. When she finally got to the top she looked afraid and out of breath. She set down her sack on the floor and lifted herself up through the entrance.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  She pulled a jar of water from her sack and poured a thin stream of it into each of her hands and splashed the water on her face. Then she carefully set out other items from her sack: little pieces of wood painted red, dark hair tied in a blue ribbon, rusty nails, a mirror, a rock, an apple, and a porcelain elephant the size of my thumb. I picked up the elephant; delicate vines and leaves were painted on its torso. I thought she wanted to make another wind chime.

  “Where did you get all this?” I asked.

  Azami snatched the elephant back. She glared at me and made a big deal of cleaning the elephant with the edge of her shirt and what was left of the water and then set the piece back with the others. I leaned against the wall and tried to feign boredom as I watched her set up the red pieces of wood and hammer at them with the rock.

  “What are you doing, Azami?” Her silence irritated me and I struggled to hide my annoyance.

  She reached for my hand and motioned for me to hold two pieces of wood together against the floor so s
he could nail a third piece to the joint. The wood split terribly—it was old and weathered—but she managed to get the nails to hold. When she was finished, the structure resembled the frame of a tiny house with a sloping roof.

  “What is it?”

  “Hokora,” she said finally, admiring it. “Shrine.” She collected the objects and assembled them inside the little house. It reminded me of Mrs. Bell’s cabinet of trinkets. “My father threw shrine away.”

  “Why?”

  “We have book now.”

  “Book?”

  “Bible,” she said, and gestured to the picture Bible in the corner as if the flick of her hand might flip it away. She reached into her sock and pulled out a knife and began to slice the apple she had brought. She ate a slice, handed me one, and arranged the rest of the slices on the bit of mirror inside the little house.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Offering,” she said. Sometimes the priest at church spoke of offerings: coins or goats or sometimes sons, but never fruit. “Food for the kami.”

  Through our patchy exchange I learned kami were the being-ness of all things: rocks and trees and even people. Azami put her hand on my chest and said, “Kami.” But kami are distinct spirits too. People who die become kami, not all of them good. The elephant had been her grandmother’s and the dark hair came from her younger brother who died on the boat to Canada. She told me the shrine was a place for sacred, special things.

  “You have something?” she asked, inviting me to put something into the shrine. I shook my head.

  There was a thump against the side of the tree fort, and then another. Azami launched up to the window and ducked. A rock came tumbling through the window, nearly grazing Azami’s head. She yelled out the window in Japanese, and I could see her sister run back through the woods towards the McCarthys’ orchard.

  For weeks Azami and I made wind chimes out of string, rocks, pieces of glass, beads, bones, buttons, and whatever else we could find. The chimes told us when the kami were near our fort. We hung the chimes from the ceiling and climbed up into the tree to tie them to the branches. With the slightest breeze the entire tree would jingle and ring. Each day Azami brought a fresh apple to offer the kami. The apple from the day before was always gone. The kami had steady appetites.

  I was always curious about how and why people came to be in Winteridge, especially the Japanese who had begun to arrive with such regularity you might think Winteridge was the last stop of a trans-Pacific railway. When Azami’s English allowed it, I asked her to tell me how she came to be here.

  Azami Lin Koba, my only friend in Winteridge, besides Henry, was the eldest of the Koba children. She grew up with the guilt of being the Kobas’ first disappointment—they had wanted a boy. And even after Azami’s younger brother, Wu, was born, her birth was a sign of the burdens to come—three more daughters. Azami’s family moved to Winteridge from Japan after Japan’s war with Russia in 1905. Japan had won, but the war reparations placed on Russia were so insignificant that the Japanese families who had sacrificed their fathers, brothers, and land—and as in the Kobas’ case, their fishing boats and their entire industry—went without repayment of any kind.

  Azami told me that during the war in Japan, bombs thundered everywhere, and like a distant storm, it was impossible to tell how far away they were and in what direction. Azami imagined their fishing boat bobbing amongst the battleships, its yellow sail flapping in the breeze. The Kobas’ boat was called The Namazu, named after a giant mythological catfish believed to cause earthquakes.

  One day Azami and Wu were collecting clams for their mother. Azami was a terrible clam digger, easily distracted by the flotsam that washed up on the beach. She saw something glinting on the distant shore and thought it might be a coin. Azami left Wu and ran to it. Instead of a coin, Azami found a man with ruddy cheeks, fuzzy eyebrows and hair coiled so tight it might be wool. He was nearly camouflaged with the mound of seaweed he sat against. The man looked dead or asleep, except his eyes stayed trained on Azami and under his gaze she turned to stone. The glinting that had first attracted her came from a charm on a long silver chain around his neck. The man pushed himself up. One of his legs bent at a nauseating angle. His face didn’t show the pain he must have felt. Azami knew he was a Russian. She knew he was the enemy. She should have run and screamed for Wu. But then the man smiled, and it seemed rude not to return the gesture. A string of drool hung from his lips like a spider’s thread. The Russian soldier took the necklace from around his neck and tossed it to Azami. Then he winked and ran into the surrounding forest with surprising speed considering his injuries.

  There were two charms on the necklace. One was a long, smooth square of metal with a few Russian letters and numbers engraved into it: a military tag. And the other was a ruby-red glass bead. From that day on Azami wore the necklace hidden under her clothes, flat against her chest. She said the necklace was good luck. In exchange for her silence, she understood the Russian soldier had passed his luck on to her.

  Mr. Koba’s family had run their fishing company for generations. It was all they knew. And so, without their boat, the Koba family was at a loss. Mr. Koba was disenchanted with Japan. When he learned of the opportunities across the ocean, in Canada, he packed up his four children and pregnant wife—another girl, certainly—and set off for Canada.

  The ocean liner was cramped and hot. Each night, Azami pressed her cheek against the cool steel floor and let the grumbling guts of the ship ease her into sleep. Her baby brother, Aio, was born in the belly of that beast. Her mother had lost a lot of blood. Azami took care of the cutting and the stitching with the help of an old herbalist who laid parcels of eucalyptus against her mother’s breastbone. Azami said Aio was the colour of ginger, the whites of his eyes as yellow as yolks. The Koba family celebrated the beautiful boy by opening the only bottle of sake they had brought along. Mr. Koba saw the birth of the boy as a sign he had made the right decision for his family, a fresh start.

  While her mother recovered, Azami carried Aio in a shawl wrapped around her chest. The infant was sickly and slept far too much. Azami woke him every couple of hours to feed him at her mother’s swollen breast, but the infant was uninterested in its milk.

  Somewhere on the outskirts of Vancouver, Aio died against Azami’s chest. As other families celebrated their arrival on Canadian soil and the end of the long, dreadful journey, the Kobas disembarked in the throes of mourning, their hearts in their throats and the body of Aio, shockingly small, wrapped in Azami’s shawl. They were not allowed to bring the body onto the train, and so Aio was buried in the rainforest just outside the train station. Azami’s mother, Lin Koba, was catatonic with grief, and Azami was left to care for her brother and sisters. From then on Mr. Koba remained stoic. His open joy had surely brought the disaster upon his family.

  For a while the Kobas lived in a squalid apartment in Vancouver. Lin sold udon noodles in a broth made from what Azami was sure was not cow or chicken, for there were only dogs and cats around. Mr. Koba knew enough English to get a job mopping the docks. This was not the life he had agreed to. This was not the land of milk and honey advertised in Japan.

  My father happened to be disembarking from England, and the story goes that my father had slipped while walking along the wet docks and would have fallen off the side had Mr. Koba not been there to catch his arm. My father insisted on buying Mr. Koba a drink to show his gratitude.

  Mr. Koba was the only non-white in the bar. He was stared at from all angles, but my father, with his charm and his good humour, softened the crowd until every man was jolly and drunk. My father told Mr. Koba about Winteridge and the McCarthys’ need of fruit pickers. A few weeks after my had father returned from that trip, Mr. Koba and his family followed him to Winteridge. Mr. McCarthy hadn’t expected a family of mostly women. My father hadn’t known as much. Mr. Koba claimed his eldest daughter could pick as good as any man. Azami and Wu joined their father in the trees. Azami dressed in her broth
er’s pants and shirtsleeves in a vague attempt to hide her femininity, while her younger sisters were put to work keeping house with Mrs. Koba.

  Before I met Azami, Llewelyna and I had seen Mrs. Koba and the younger daughters scrubbing laundry at the shore of the lake while we swam. This was back when the lake monster was only a rumour and hadn’t yet slipped into Llewelyna’s stories, becoming far too real to ignore. The water in the bay was white with starch. Lacy puffs of soap floated to us as we swam. Llewelyna was convinced Winteridge was an island we might swim around. She had told me about Kai, a man who had trained himself to hold his breath for nine days, and we were practising swimming underwater. We waved as we swam by the Kobas. Mrs. Koba and the girls only stared and bowed slightly before returning to their work.

  The Koba family was a precursor for the influx of Japanese on their way to town. My father seemed to draw a new Japanese bachelor to Winteridge with him each time he returned from the coast. Mr. Bell and Mr. Eber called my father a Jap lover. He was a man the other landowners in Winteridge wanted to hate, but couldn’t. Despite his wealth and his lineage, my father could relate to anyone no matter their background. Llewelyna said he could tame any beast, charm the stripes right off a tiger’s back. He said he couldn’t stand to see such a civilized, sophisticated people in the grease and grime of the port and, he added, there was plenty of work for them in Winteridge. Although my father’s orchard was nothing to speak of yet, he hired a few Japanese men to work in the yard. Llewelyna agreed as long as they stayed far from her garden.

  6

  The following summer, Llewelyna took me to the cliffs. The yellow balsamroots had blossomed as if overnight. The forest was thick with them. Llewelyna told me the wild flowers were shards of the first sun. We walked for an hour along the beach. Llewelyna walked in front. There were burrs in her hair. She wore the beaded evening slippers my father had recently purchased for her. She kept looking back and smiling at me. “Almost there,” she promised.