Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  Jacob and I set the bucket at the edge of the yard. We had siphoned gasoline from the Bells’ new automobile and now we poured it all over the shrine. Jacob lit the match and dropped it in the bucket. We had to jump back from the rush of flame. The shrine sizzled and sparked. A burning piece of wood shot out from the bucket and landed in the grass. Before I could act, the flame spread, snaked through the grass towards the pile of fallen trees and brush. Over the pound of our feet and hearts, we could hear shouts and screams from the Kobas’ house. I was too afraid to look back. Something nipped at my heels.

  The next morning I sat at the top of the stairs and listened to my father and Llewelyna talk quietly over their morning tea.

  “Imbeciles. And you were upset I gave Phillip Bell a hard time. It’s his kind that’d do such a thing. He’d surely have joined those bigots rioting in Vancouver if he had the chance.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Phillip would never do something so barbaric.”

  “Or those McCarthy boys. Perhaps Mr. McCarthy set them to it. He’s probably upset the Kobas left his orchard.”

  “It was no mystery to Old McCarthy the Kobas would be leaving. Jon Koba has been clearing that land for the past few months.”

  “Whoever did it will burn for such hate.”

  My eyes widened. Cursed by my own mother? Hollow with shame, I returned to my bed. When Llewelyna came to wake me, I pretended to be sick until my sickness became real. I lay in bed and retched all day into a bread bowl that Llewelyna emptied for me. I sat up only when I heard Jacob arrive home from his lessons. He ran up the stairs and stormed into my bedroom, jumped on top of me, his hands on my throat.

  “I’ll kill you,” he said.

  I thumped my fists against his back. I couldn’t speak.

  “I’ll do it!” He tightened his grip around my neck. His face was flush with anger. I croaked. He loosened his grasp and fell backwards. His head dropped into his hands. “You promised,” he said. “I should have known better than to trust you, you snake.”

  I coughed until I caught my breath. “What are you talking about?”

  “Jesse McCarthy. You told him.”

  “Told him what?”

  “He called me a queer.” Jacob’s eyes were glassy and brimmed with red. His cheek looked bruised and had a cut on it.

  “I didn’t tell anyone anything.”

  He looked at me carefully. “You didn’t?”

  I shook my head and fondled my neck. “Who did that to you?”

  “Why would he say that, then?”

  I shrugged. “Who hit you?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “Jesse McCarthy is an ignoramus,” I said.

  Jacob grinned at the word. Once he was convinced I hadn’t told his secrets, he told me everyone in town was talking about the fire. It had spread to the Kobas’ row of saplings. Thankfully the crackling woke them and they were able to put the fire out before it reached the house.

  Jacob wriggled his nose. “It smells in here.”

  I knelt before the bread bowl and I retched again.

  8

  I sat on the wharf and watched the Jesus bugs dance along the surface of the water while Jacob swam. He had never believed me when I told him what I had seen in the water the day Llewelyna and I went to the cliffs. The wharf extended along the shore and then out towards the drop-off where the water was well over our heads. Past the wharf were a dozen or so pillars that stuck out of the water like matchsticks. A few rowboats and canoes were tied to them. On the other side of the wharf, the lakeboat was docked. Ronald and his father were unloading dry goods while a group of orchard hands waited to load crates of last season’s apples. Ronald kept turning towards us, shaking his dark hair out of his face to watch us. Outside of school, Jacob had stayed away from Ronald since the incident with Jesse McCarthy, but Jacob was showing off for him now, speaking too loud and twirling and splashing obnoxiously in the water. It was late spring and the water was high. I reached out and touched the glassy surface of the lake. The clouds in the reflected sky whirled.

  “Did you see that?” Jacob said, treading water. He pointed to the thick lake weed beneath him and gave a false shriek.

  “Jacob…”

  “Honest. I saw something.” He laughed. “It’s your monster, the addanc. Or is it Leviathan?”

  “Naitaka,” I said. “Henry says—”

  “Henry’s an Indian.”

  “So?” I said.

  Jacob dunked beneath the surface. He swam through a school of minnows that scattered, darted in all directions at his approach. When he came to the surface he shook his head like a dog. I stood to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to help Llewelyna make dinner.”

  “It’s only three o’clock.”

  I shrugged.

  “Stay for a bit. Wait for me.”

  “I have to go.” I began walking up the path to the road.

  “Iris!” Jacob yelled from the water. “Iris, don’t.”

  I kept walking.

  “Iris.” This time my name was sputtered. “Help!”

  I turned. Jacob had disappeared from the surface. I walked back down the wharf hesitantly, expecting him to launch out of the water at any moment and laugh at the terrified look on my face. The surface was calm and Jacob was nowhere in sight. Ronald and I looked at one another for a moment before he slipped off his shoes and dove into the lake.

  Ronald surfaced and called to the other men on the dock. “He’s drowning!” he yelled, and dipped below again. Mr. Nickel and a man who had been loading apples onto the lakeboat jumped into the water. Mr. Nickel’s bowler hat floated on the surface. I was furious one of Jacob’s pranks had caused such a stir. The hat would be ruined.

  When they surfaced without Jacob again and again, I got chills.

  “He’s stuck in the lake weed,” someone called, and a few other men jumped into the water. I was immobilized. I stood on the wharf and watched Mr. Nickel’s hat. I wondered how long it would float there. Then I saw the shadowed figure of the lake monster. I couldn’t catch my breath to say the words. A crowd had gathered on the wharf by now. I felt a hand on my back; a woman pulled me to her. She smelled of sweet bread. It was Mrs. Nickel. She held a paper bag in front of my mouth.

  “Breathe into it, dear. Catch your breath.” I tried to focus on the paper bag as it expanded and shrivelled with each breath. The men were still diving into the water. It had been too long. I pushed the bag away. My index finger ticked against my wrist: sixty seconds, eighty seconds, one hundred seconds. The hat sank.

  “Iris.” My father was beside me in his suit. “Where’s your brother?”

  I pointed to the water. I watched his eyes fill out as he took in the scene. The four or five men in the water yelled frantically, sputtering and gasping for air. My father handed me his top hat, took off his coat and shoes and was about to dive in when Mr. Nickel brought up my brother by the arm. Jacob’s face was ashen. He was bleeding from somewhere. The water around him was rusty.

  “Give him to me!” my father said. He crouched down and reached his arms towards Mr. Nickel. Out behind the men the shadows of the lake monster retreated.

  “Iris, move,” my father said. He laid Jacob on the wharf. He and Mr. Nickel bent over my brother’s limp body. Ronald tore off his shirt and tied a sleeve above a large wound on Jacob’s calf. My father knelt by Jacob’s head and Mr. Nickel began pumping Jacob’s chest and breathing into his mouth. Ronald sobbed openly. I realized I was crying too.

  “Oh, Jesus. Jesus, help us. O Holy Father,” my father said beneath his breath. They were Llewelyna’s words. I had never heard my father pray. I couldn’t look at Jacob’s green face. His ribs would surely collapse beneath Mr. Nickel’s huge hands that still pumped steadily at his chest. I heard bones crack. Finally, there was a gurgling sound. Water poured from Jacob’s mouth as if he were a fountain.

  “Back away, everyone. Back away,” Mr. Nickel said.


  My father sat Jacob up and he spat up more water. “Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus Christ. Thank you, Mary.” I wondered if anyone else could hear my father’s mutterings. Ronald was at Jacob’s feet, holding his blue toes as if he meant to kiss them. When Jacob caught his breath he looked up at me in a way I knew meant he had seen the monster too. He then looked down at his leg and the bloody rag tied around it. The crowd was quiet.

  It took Jacob weeks to recover. He had several broken ribs and it was hard for him to breathe. His leg wound was slow to heal. Ronald came to our house every day, but Jacob refused to see him. He brought Jacob gifts: broth, biscuits, a book. Ronald sat with my father at the kitchen table as I served them tea. Ronald would eye me carefully, unsure of how much I knew. After Ronald left, my father would remark on what a superb young man he was, what an excellent friend. My father was convinced Ronald was keen on me. He hinted that we would make a good pair.

  I was coming back from Henry’s with some new books for Jacob when I saw Azami, standing in the middle of our orchard with her hands behind her back. She was looking for me from behind her cover of trees. She was dressed in her brother’s pants and a loose shirt. Her hair was tucked up into a cap. I couldn’t guess her intentions. A cold stone of sweat rolled down my back. Azami jumped between trees and bushes to stay hidden from the windows of the house. She approached our front porch and pulled a brown paper bag from behind her back. She was looking around for a place to put it when Llewelyna stepped outside with a cup of tea. Azami dropped the paper bag on the stairs and ran away. Llewelyna, startled, spilled hot tea on her hands. She cursed in Welsh. I held my breath as she bent to pick up the paper bag. I imagined it would be a warning of some kind, a dead animal Azami had taken her revenge on. Llewelyna’s expression was hard to read as she looked into the bag. She folded over the top edge and went back in the house.

  When I got home Llewelyna was in the kitchen preparing soup for Jacob.

  “Your friend was here,” she said, smiling into the steam from the pot.

  “Azami?”

  “She was dressed like a boy. I wonder why.”

  I shrugged.

  “She brought you something.”

  “She did?”

  Llewelyna gestured to the windowsill, where my blue marble shone in the sunlight as if it were made of only water.

  * * *

  I entered Jacob’s room one morning and sat on the bed next to him as he pretended to sleep. “You saw it, didn’t you,” I said. He rolled away from me. “The monster. Did you see its face?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Iris.”

  “Does it really have the head of a horse?”

  “Get out.”

  Although it had seemed for a time that Jacob was getting better, his wound became infected and he and Llewelyna took the lakeboat to a hospital in the city. My father asked me again and again what had happened that day, as if the story might evolve over time into something he could better understand, pieces that might fit together more easily.

  “There were these shadows in the water. Long and dark like a serpent,” I said.

  “Be serious, Iris. Your mother has been filling you with her stories. She must stop all that. You’re getting too old.” He was smoking one of Llewelyna’s cigarettes at the kitchen table.

  “Jacob saw it too.”

  “He told me he couldn’t remember what happened.”

  “Something bit him and tangled him in the seaweed, on purpose.”

  “Nonsense,” my father said, leaving the table for his office.

  That night my father came into my bedroom and stood in the darkness with a dim lantern. Another cigarette burned at the corner of his mouth.

  “You scared me,” I said.

  His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and his silk vest was unbuttoned. He pulled a book from behind his back, knelt down by my bed, and positioned the lantern beneath the book. There was an illustration of a long, grey, scaly creature. I ran my fingers over the drawing and traced the word sturgeon.

  “There are a multitude of these in the lake,” he said. He looked so satisfied with his discovery I couldn’t tell him that this creature was merely a fish and what haunted our lake was a monster, a demon. The next morning the picture was pinned to the door of his study. The pin went right through the fish’s head.

  One afternoon, while my father and I were sitting on the porch reading to ward off worry, the Kobas’ rugged horse carriage turned up our drive. As far as I knew, my father and Jon Koba hadn’t spoken since the fire, a few months before. My father stood in greeting, and he and Jon Koba exchanged nods before setting off to walk through the orchard. Azami and her three sisters were dressed in identical red dresses with wide white collars. Their hair was pinned back into bulbous pompadours that shaded their eyes from the noon sun.

  Azami’s sisters embraced their Canadian names and introduced themselves as Molly, the one who had followed Azami and me around before; Dorothy; and Florence. The girls looked down at my dirty fingernails and unbrushed hair, and exchanged looks. My father would usually have encouraged me to keep better care of myself, but my brother’s incident had distracted him.

  “We have brought some fish and rice,” Molly said, gesturing to a steaming lidded basket.

  “Thank you.”

  The Koba sisters looked around the porch, their gazes sliding over my father’s empty scotch glass, his abandoned book, his pocket watch on the armrest of his chair, ticking audibly. One of Llewelyna’s tin saints, Saint Laura, the scalded one, was set on the railing of the porch. I hadn’t noticed it until Florence, the youngest, considered it seriously. Azami’s eyes remained fixed on mine.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Azami said. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “He saw the lake kami?”

  Dorothy rolled her eyes. Molly took hold of Azami’s elbow and squeezed, her eyes narrowed in warning. Azami pulled free.

  “Yes, the lake monster.”

  “Now that he has seen the kami, it may follow him.”

  “Amy, enough.” Molly said.

  “Amy?” I smirked.

  “No,” Azami said. Not turning to meet Molly’s hard looks. “Did you get the marble?”

  I nodded, smiling.

  Florence was holding the saint now, turning it over and over in her hands.

  “That’s not a toy,” I said. Florence looked up, froze. “Saint Laura of Cordoba was boiled alive in pitch.”

  Florence carefully set the saint back on the railing. Azami and I exchanged satisfied smiles.

  When Jon Koba and my father returned, they were sombre. They left enough distance between them as they walked, three men could have strolled comfortably between them. My father was holding an envelope. He swatted it against his palm. Jon Koba reached across to shake my father’s hand, and turned to the carriage. Azami and her sisters curtseyed and followed after him. We watched the carriage rattle down the road.

  “Stubborn as mules,” my father said.

  I had never heard him speak unkindly of Mr. Koba. “What is it?

  “He can’t own the land, not legally. And there’s not a thing I can do.” He opened the envelope to reveal a thick stack of banknotes. “This is tenfold what we agreed on for the lease.” My father stuffed the envelope into his shirt pocket. “That damn fire has ruined everything. He doesn’t trust me.”

  I woke the next morning to Azami throwing meaty green walnuts at my window. I looked down and found her squatted low in the grass. The sky was still purple. Azami saw me and turned to walk away. She gestured for me to follow her.

  We walked wordlessly to the lake. Her hand was cold in mine, the bones as fine and angular as a bird’s, her grip tight. It seemed she thought I might flee or turn back if she didn’t pull me along. At the shore, we hopscotched onto some boulders and perched on them, running our hands through the velvety water.

  “I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “For what
I did to your books. It was wrong.”

  Shame burned in my belly and climbed my throat. Azami poured salt from a paper bag into her hands and told me to place my hands beneath hers. She released the salt into my hands, and then I poured it back into hers. We repeated this until all the salt had slipped into the lake. Then she cupped lake water in her hands and poured that from one hand to the other and then into my hands.

  “We call this harae,” Azami said. “Purification from bad luck, disease, and—what do you call it? Guilt? Now, wash your face with that water in your hands.”

  Sunlight crept up the white birch trees around us and turned the far side of the lake into diamonds and the pool of water in my hands to gold. The Ebers’ rooster yodelled, and this cathedral of mountains and lake valley made the sound majestic.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. Azami worried over the water dripping from my cupped hands. “Azami.” She glanced up at me and then back down to my hands. “The shrine is gone.”

  Her eyes shot up to mine. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I’m so sorry.” All the water had leaked from my hands now.

  “There are kami in there. My grandmother— My baby brother—”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t bear the grief in her face. “I don’t know where it is,” I lied. “It disappeared from the tree fort.”

  Azami clenched her hands into fists and slammed them against the still lake.

  “Maybe someone stole it,” I said.

  “No, not someone,” she said. I watched her nervously. She looked up at me, her pupils tiny in the glare of the rising sun. “Molly. She followed me that once. She won’t leave me alone.”

  “Did she know you had the shrine?” I asked.

  Azami nodded. “She saw me rescue it.”

  I felt relieved to have Azami’s anger misdirected at Molly, but my guilt continued to burn despite the cleansing ritual.