Our Animal Hearts

by Dania Tomlinson

  At the police station a Mountie comes to help me at the front desk. His belt is cinched tight and a gold button is missing from his red jacket, so I can see his white undershirt. When I ask about the Kobas, he tells me they have been taken to an internment camp in the mountains. “It’s for their own safety,” he says. The Mountie refuses to tell me where exactly. When I ask about the broken door he claims there was an altercation when they came to collect the Kobas. After further questioning, the Mountie says that officials intercepted letters sent to the Kobas from Vancouver, written in Japanese.

  “Of course,” I say. “They have family there, children.”

  “Did you know fishermen on the coast have been communicating with flashlights to Jap submarines?”

  “That sounds a little far-fetched.”

  “Ma’am, we found explosives in the Kobas’ cellar.”

  “Stumping powder, surely, for clearing land.”

  Fed up with me now, the Mountie puffs his cheeks and slowly releases his breath. It smells of eggs.

  “What harm could they possibly cause, anyway?” I ask.

  The officer leans in close, as if the secretary rat-a-tatting on the typewriter at the far side of the room might care to overhear. “We’ve got word the Japs are planning an attack on our irrigation system. Do you have any idea what kind of damage that would cause?”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense. The Kobas depend on that system more than most. Why would they bomb their own home?”

  The Mountie crosses his arms, finally satisfied with my line of questioning. “This is not their home,” he says. We exchange steady looks and I am pleased that he is the first to look away. I can tell, beneath everything, he too is pained by it all. This war has stirred up so much hate. “Listen,” he says. “We’ll be sure to fix the door for them. Just holding on to the property for now.”

  I know this is a lie. There are already rumours about Japanese homes and ships and belongings being auctioned off for the bottom dollar on the coast, and so I counter his lie with one of my own:

  “The Kobas’ land, I believe, is still in my father’s name.” I recall what Llewelyna said about us never belonging to the land, and that our claim to it is forever false. Even still, I am quite confident that my father was never able to legally sell the land to the Kobas. The Mountie leaves the front desk to check some paperwork and returns apologizing for the intrusion on my property. He promises the damage will be corrected immediately and the place will be protected from vandals.

  When I return home there are more dead animals on the back steps. I don’t bother digging graves for them. I bury the dead in snow. My door was left wide open, and inside the house I have the sense that someone has entered. I am not alone.

  29

  The jaguar has stalked the yard for months now. I share with her whatever I can spare from the pantry to keep her from killing the animals: canned peaches, tuna fish, pickles. I leave the food in a saucer on the back porch.

  Every day I find more animals have infiltrated my house. It started with spiders and flies. A silk web bloomed against the window and I marvelled at the lacework. The red-bellied spider perched at the centre, attuned to the strum of her instrument. I aired out the house one morning while I had a bath, and emerged to find a couple of chickadees and a wren nibbling at some crackers I had left on the counter. A grey cat licked at an empty can of condensed milk next to the teapot. Soon sparrow nests appeared in the eaves of the house, and now the cries of their hungry young are everywhere.

  Coyotes howl in the yard and scamper through the house. Sometimes I walk into a room and find paw prints on the wood floor. Mice have made nests in the backs of all the drawers. At first I attempted to keep the pests out. I chased after birds and rodents. I destroyed spiderwebs with a broom and stomped at coyotes, only to have the animals overtake the house again.

  And if these creatures are not kami or ghosts, perhaps they are manifestations of my own mind. What if I have created these animals somehow? Then I recall Llewelyna in her final days and I realize it doesn’t matter. I am losing time.

  Outside, the white snow piles upon itself, collapses, and then finally begins to melt. In the garden, the potatoes blossom. Day by day their purple star-flowers flood the yard.

  By spring the house is so crowded with animals, it is difficult to move. Ghosts swarm. The howl of coyotes and the hoot of owls and the buzz of insects are a new kind of silence. I feel myself fading, slowly disappearing into the chaos. The taste of lemon is ever present at the back of my throat. Over the past few days the jaguar’s food has gone untouched, and I know she has returned to Winteridge.

  Llewelyna said once: we’re all just beasts with our animal hearts aglow. I know this to be true. We are beasts, crude and cruel, but aglow, nonetheless, aflame with something so brilliant it cannot be seen. It cannot be known or ever understood.

  I glance out the window to find Saint Francis pecking at the potato flowers. I rush out onto the porch to scare him away. Although he is an aged, wild bird now, he has lost none of his splendour. He launches up into the sky, his blue tail of many eyes streaming behind like the all-seeing face of God. I know now it is time to go home.

  I buy a ticket to Vernon and persuade the lakeboat captain to let me off at Winteridge. I recognize the captain with the missing fingers from when he was a young man and I first saw Winteridge burned to the ground, and I think he might recognize me also. I have dressed in my best coat and in its pocket I carry my fish.

  Once the white birch of the bay come into view, I pay the captain to bring me to shore in a rowboat. The other passengers look on from the anchored lakeboat in disbelief. The captain says he will return at four o’clock to collect me. I explain that I have made other arrangements and will not need a ride back.

  The trees are thick in Winteridge. No one lives here anymore. At least not to the city’s knowledge. It is a ghost town, but it has always been a ghost town. As the lakeboat pulls away, I see the Lake People in the trees, congregated in tight circles, weaving, picking, and collecting in peace. My shoes are soft-soled and I make very little sound on the rocks. The Lake People have grown brave in their solitude. They do not even turn to watch me.

  Henry told me once that each story is a continuum of where another left off, and I believe this is true, but I also think that the stories we tell are not chronological but overlapping, interacting with and forever altering one another. I believe the Lake People are simultaneously the ghosts of the past and the future, spectres from a parallel world that could have been, that could be, that still is.

  I am pleased to see the forest has taken back the town. The dining room of the Pearl Hotel is exposed to the road. The four walls have collapsed around a pile of charred wood, which I imagine was once the dining table. All that remains is a cut-glass bowl atop the rubble. It collects milky water.

  The fire dissolved our house and the Wasiks’ cabin and left nothing but grey foundations. I look for some item, some piece to collect, and find nothing. A family of mice has made their home in the debris.

  I walk through our peach orchard, now a field studded with charred stumps. I imagine the flame spreading quickly from branch to branch, peaches bursting. Henry claimed fire and smoke were sacred entities, used to purify, to cure, and to communicate with the spirit world. I thought of Winteridge turned to smoke, refined by fire. New ghosts mingle with those that existed here long ago. This land is anything but empty. It is brimming, fuller than ever before. The fire only burned down walls. Now, it seems, the land has gone back to the way it was before settlers arrived here.

  A single tree remains on our orchard. As I approach it, I picture an impossible lone peach dangling low from one of its branches. I crave the sweet flesh of that tender heart. The grass is long, and as I step through it I hear the jaguar behind me. There is the rattle of a snake. I imagine the little Satan sifting through the grass, hoping to sink its teeth into my heel. But the rattle multiplies; it is only crickets. The tree is lush
. Its greedy roots have stolen life from the other withered trees around it. I realize it is not a peach tree at all, but the maple tree where Llewelyna would spread out her blanket and lie with Jacob and me, telling stories. There is a slight breeze, and frog-wings spin from the maple’s branches. This makes me think of Jacob and my heart breaks for him anew, just a boy who died so long ago.

  I walk up into the surrounding forest. New growth and fireweed are thick where the forest must have burned brightest. I pick some of the purple flowers and set them in my hair. The deeper I go, the cooler and greener and fuller the forest becomes. It begins to rain. I cannot feel the drops yet but I can hear their music in the trees. Coyotes yip in the hills. How strange to hear them this early in the day. As I near the tree fort I find the jewelled trail of the orphan thief, the little magpie. Her pines have grown even more dazzling, their branches heavy with the items she stole from homes. Some items were taken after the fire: Llewelyna’s singed slippers and a charred pearl necklace. Now the orphan thief’s collected treasures are all that remain of Winteridge. They are a hanging gallery. A museum. I think of her miniature Winteridge made of Mrs. Bell’s figurines safe inside the tree fort, untouched by fire, the only version of the town that remains.

  I understand now that all this time, the orphan thief has been trying to show what’s been taken from her, to demonstrate the extent of her loss. But this loss can never be met, can never be filled with gold and emerald and silk. And so her collection can only grow. There is no end.

  From a distance, the tree fort appears the same. There are what look like stores of food all around the trunk of the tree: a box of potatoes, a bundle of asparagus. The orphan thief tends a small cook fire with her bare hands. She remains unchanged, ageless, though her hair has turned silver. She stands as I approach. The tips of her fingers are blackened. We are not alone. From behind the tree, a boy aims a slingshot with a jagged rock at me. His face is firm. The orphan thief whistles and with that signal seven other children reveal themselves from the trees or lean out of the windows of the tree fort above. They have dirty faces and shining, keen eyes. Their hair has been cropped short, close to the scalp. These children are not ghosts but runaways. In front of them I feel as though I am nothing but a spectre from a terrible dream they have only just woken from.

  Coyotes come out of the bushes and curl their lips back at me. I put my hands up in surrender and point to my pocket. When I pull out the fish, burning blue, the orphan thief’s eyes spark.

  “This belongs to you,” I say and walk right up to her. “I’m sorry I have kept it for so long. It was never meant for me. I realize that now.” I place the fish at her feet and turn to leave. I hear her unscrew the lid and swallow the fish.

  Once I have left the clearing I am struck on the back of the head by something. Some of the children giggle. I look down and find a large pine cone. The orphan thief smiles before she recedes back into the forest. Azami’s necklace with the Russian military tag and the red bead are tangled around the pine cone’s scales.

  30

  At the shore, Saint Francis pecks at a dead fish. Rain pocks the still lake. Coyotes yip in the distance and the jaguar is behind me, licking her teeth. The sun has dipped into the mountains and in this crowded world I am alone. Out in the distance the lake spirals, turns white, and I know it is Naitaka. I let my heavy, rain-soaked coat fall from my shoulders. Beneath it I wear only an old nightgown. It collects in a pool of pink silk at my feet. I step out of my shoes. The stones are cold and hard against my heels. I put Azami’s necklace over my head, clutch the pulsing red bead in my fist, and step into the cool waters of our bottomless lake.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is a work of fiction; however, the Okanagan landscape I have attempted to portray is a real and very meaningful place to me and to many others. Although I have lived in the Okanagan all of my life and am constantly moved and inspired by the lake and the land, I recognize that as a descendant of settlers, I am a guest of the Syilx/Okanagan people to whom this land belongs, and to whom I am grateful.

  Our Animal Hearts has been my companion through university, marriage, motherhood, and into my nine-to-five adulthood. While some passages were written only months ago, other sections were put to paper when I was only nineteen. Since I have been plucking away at this story for ten years or so, it feels a little strange to release it, no longer able to tinker and revise. Like Llewelyna’s copy of the Mabinogion, this novel would be puddles of ink if handwritten.

  There are far too many people and books and influences to acknowledge—regardless, I will try to name some. First of all, I want to extend my gratitude to Zoe Maslow, my brilliant editor at Doubleday Canada, who so eloquently intuited what I was trying to accomplish in this novel and provided pivotal feedback that encouraged and challenged me, and to Martha Webb, my wise, patient, and steadfast agent, who was the first to take a chance on me and this book. I am also grateful to Jennifer Griffiths for her stunning artwork, to Shaun Oakey for his keen eye, and to the entire team at Doubleday Canada—thank you for championing my debut.

  I have many people at the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia in the Okanagan to thank, such as Lee Henderson, Adam Lewis Schroeder, and Anne Fleming, who read very early versions of this novel and pushed me forward, and especially Michael V. Smith, who has been a mentor and friend, and guided me through challenging terrain. I am grateful to my accommodating colleagues in the AIC, to Allison Hargreaves for her conversation, and to members of my MFA writing workshops, thesis committee, and the creative writing faculty at UBC Okanagan.

  My friends and family have been ridiculously supportive during this long venture, particularly my mom, Linda Christie. Her wisdom and bizarre insight during our many long, meandering talks about this book have often buoyed me. One of the central inspirations for Our Animal Hearts is my Welsh-Canadian grandma, Aerona Wilson, née Griffiths (1921–2010). Despite our closeness she remains a mystery to me, and this fact will forever spur my imagination.

  This novel is for my daughter, Wren, whom I love ferociously, and for my husband, Brad, who has never lost heart. Without you, nothing.