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Menagerie
By
Kristy Tate
Everyone talks to
animals. Some do it every day. But very few stop to listen for a reply. Lizbet
Wood does. And this is just one of the things that set her apart. But she
really doesn’t understand how different she is until violence shatters her
solitary existence.
While Lizbet seeks to
understand why mother sought refuge on a deserted island in the Pacific
Northwest, she comes face to face with the dangers her mother tried, but failed
to escape. When her mother is gravely injured, Lizbet is forced from the island
and thrust into a world even more complex and threatening than she could have
ever imagined. A world where the animals have no say…or do they?
Copyright,
September 2016
CHAPTER ONE
Animism (from
Latin anima, "breath, spirit, life") is the worldview
that non-human entities—such as animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess
a spiritual essence.
From
Declan’s Research
The
birds heralded the storm, as they always did. They liked to be the bearers of
scuttlebutt. Although, as Lizbet had learned long ago, not all birds were
created equal, and some species were much more reliable than others. Not that
they lied, very few creatures had the ability or cunning, but rather in their
haste to be the first in the know, some blurted out misconceptions and
half-truths.
Not
that Lizbet had much familiarity with liars—or people, in general—but she’d
read of several, as Rose, her mother, had accumulated an impressive library
over the years. Not that Lizbet was in any position to know what was and was
not impressive library-wise, or any otherwise, since Lizbet herself had never
been off the island she and Rose called home.
The
howling wind drowned out the calls of birds, and the chatter of squirrels and
chipmunks. Opossum, skunks, and fox sought shelter in the forest’s thickets.
Rats and mice scurried to find hidey-holes. Lizbet fetched an armful of wood
from the shed to stoke the fire while her mother gathered candles.
Wind
rustled the tarp protecting the woodpile. The pine trees, used to standing
straight and tall, moaned as the wind whipped through their canopy, and bent
them in directions they didn’t wish to go.
“A
man approaches,” Wordsworth whined, terror tainting his words.
Lizbet
looked over the German Shepherd’s furry head to the storm-tossed sea. The
Sound, normally a tranquil gray-blue slate, roiled as if shaken by an invisible
hand. Lizbet couldn’t see anyone, but her heart quickened. “Are you sure?” She
saw nothing but a curtain of rain, an angry sky, and churning tide. The gulls,
who generally swooped above the bay, had wisely found shelter. The otters, too,
had disappeared, and for once the noisy, boisterous sea lions, were silent.
The
dog nodded. “He’s lost, but hopeful.”
“Hopeful?
Of what?”
Wordsworth
shook his head. When another flash of lightening lit the sky, his ears
flattened and his tail drooped and he cowered as the thunder boomed.
“Come,”
Lizbet said, “let’s go inside. Only an idiot would be out on the water today.”
“He’s
no longer on the water,” Wordsworth whined. “His
boat has landed.”
Lizbet
peered into the storm, saw nothing more than before, and added another log to
her collection. Their cottage was made of stone, but the adjacent shed which
housed the woodpile, gardening tools, and bird seed, was constructed of
recycled wood. Wind blew through the slats and rattled the shake roof. The
cottage would be warm and dry in a way the shed never could.
Wordsworth
whimpered again. Lizbet knew he longed for the comforts of the house as much as
she did, but she also understood he had an important job to do, and he would
never back away from protecting her and her mother from strangers.
“There’s
no one there,” Lizbet said, stomping toward the cottage. She climbed the steps
and pulled open the Dutch door. The warm comforting scent of the crackling fire
mingled with the aroma of ginger cookies welcomed her in.
Rose
stood at a large pine table, stacking the cookies onto a plate. Lizbet stared
at the number of cookies, knowing that she and her mother would never be able
to eat so many. Her mother was waif-thin with flyaway blond hair as
insubstantial as her slender frame.
“There’s
a man in the cove,” Lizbet said, wondering if her mother already knew, and if
so, why she hadn’t warned her.
Rose
kept her gaze focused on the cookies and blushed the color of her namesake. She
was as fair as Lizbet was dark. We are as night and day, her mother
would say, Together, we are all we need.
“Are
you expecting someone?” Lizbet demanded.
“No,
not really, but I…” Rose’s voice trailed away.
Lizbet
clomped through the kitchen to the living room, weaving through the stacks of
books to the fireplace. She dropped her logs onto the hearth, placed her hands
on her hips, and marched back into the kitchen. She hated surprises, but she
was also curious.
“Who
is this man?” Not Leonard, the postman—her mother would never blush for the
potato-shaped letter carrier. Besides, Leonard would never venture to the
island in a storm. He only came every other Tuesday. Today was Saturday.
“You
don’t need to worry about him,” Rose said without meeting Lizbet’s eye.
“Why
is he coming? Will he bring books?”
Rose
laughed, but it sounded strange—strained and nervous. Lizbet decided that she
already disliked this man. She plucked a cookie off the plate.
Rose
looked up sharply, an expectant look on her face.
Lizbet
contemplated her cookie, suddenly suspicious. Her mother studied and
experimented with herbs and she’d taught Lizbet a variety of recipes.
Dandelions to lighten the mood, lavender to soothe worries, chamomile to bring
sleep, basil to stimulate energy, and gingerroot to make one forget. Lizbet
sniffed the cookie and touched it with her tongue.
Her
mother watched.
Lizbet
smiled, took a big bite and left the kitchen. In the privacy of her own room,
she went to the window and pulled it open. A cold breeze flew in, ruffling the
drapes, and blowing about the papers on her desk. Ignoring the wind, Lizbet
stuck her head outside and spat the cookie out into the storm. She slammed the
window closed.
“What
are you doing?” Rose asked.
Lizbet
started. She hadn’t heard her mother come in. Wrapping her arms around herself,
Lizbet said, “I was looking for the man.”
Rose’s
lips lifted into a smile. “Please don’t worry about him. Here, I’ve brought you
some tea.” She set down a steaming mug on Lizbet’s bedside table. “Gingerroot,
your favorite.”
“Thanks.”
“Want
to come and read by the fire?” Rose asked.
Lizbet
glanced back at the storm on the other side of the window. An idea tickled in
the back of her mind. “In a second,” she said. After plopping down on her bed,
Lizbet sipped from the mug, but she didn’t swallow. Instead, she let the tea
warm her tongue.
Rose
lifted her own mug to her lips and watched Lizbet.
Lizbet
set the mug back down and met her mother’s gaze. After an awkward moment, Rose
lifted her shoulder in a halfhearted shrug and headed down the hall.
Lizbet
bounced from the bed, closed the door, and spat the tea back into the mug. She
poured the entire cup out the window and climbed back onto her bed. She lay
perfectly still, waiting for her mom to re-enter the room. She didn’t have to
wait long.
A
few moments later, her bedroom door creaked open. With her eyes firmly closed,
Lizbet practiced her corpse pose and didn’t even flinch as she heard her mother
steal into the room. Rose tucked a quilt around Lizbet’s shoulders before
creeping back out and closing the door with a whisper click.
Lizbet
peeked open an eye and met Wordsworth’s steady, brown-eyed gaze. “Who is he?”
“I
don’t know,” the dog whimpered, “but he
isn’t scared.”
“How
can you tell?” Lizbet asked.
“The
smell. All emotions have a smell.”
“My
mom—what’s her smell?”
Wordsworth
jumped up on the bed beside Lizbet and nestled against her. “She loves
you.”
“I
know. But I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”
Wordsworth
whimpered again and snuggled closer. “You have to let me out so I can
meet this man.”
“I
can’t. If I do, she’ll know I’m awake. You’re on your own.”
Wordsworth
blew out a breath, stood, shook himself, and jumped down. He went to the door
to bark and whine. It didn’t do any good. Her mother ignored him, which told
Lizbet two things. One: the potion Rose had given Lizbet must have been so
strong that Rose didn’t worry about Wordsworth waking her. Two: Rose didn’t
want to be interrupted.
Lizbet
sat up as a thought assaulted her.
Wordsworth,
as if reading her mind, jumped back up beside her and gazed into her eyes.
“This
man is my father!” Lizbet blurted out.
“You
cannot know this,” Wordsworth whimpered.
“She
loves him enough to drug me just to spend time with him! Of course he’s my
father!”
Wordsworth
moaned a disagreement.
Lizbet
had a lot of questions—mostly because she lived a solitary life with her mother
on an uninhabited island in the Puget Sound. She had faith that all of her
questions would eventually be answered, but the biggest questions in her heart
and mind all centered around her father.
Lizbet
kicked off the quilt and crawled off the bed.
Wordsworth
placed his nose against her thigh, stopping her. “There must be a good
reason your mother doesn’t want you to meet this man.”
“She
never said she didn’t want me to meet him.”
Wordsworth
snorted. “If she had wanted you to meet him, she wouldn’t have given
you the ginger root tea.”
Suddenly
Lizbet hated her mother. “She can’t keep me from my own father.”
Wordsworth
parked his butt against the door like a giant hairy roadblock. “You do not
know he is your father.”
“Of
course he is. Who else could he be? Now move.” She grabbed Wordsworth’s collar
to pull him away. His fur bunched up around his collar, but he wouldn’t budge.
Lizbet
tried the doorknob, but since Wordsworth outweighed her by nearly fifty pounds
the door wouldn’t open. Lizbet flounced to the window.
“Where
are you going?” Wordsworth asked, his ears poking
toward the ceiling.
“To
meet my dad.” Lizbet threw open the window. The wind spat rain in her face and
carried a breath of bone-chilling cold into the room.
Wordsworth
stood and shook himself, but didn’t move away from the door.
Lizbet
had one leg thrown over the sill, and her exposed foot was already soaking from
the storm.
“You’ll
look like a drowned cat if you go outside,” Wordsworth
said.
She
sent him a dirty look. He gazed back at her. She clambered out the window. The
rain hit her like hundreds of shards of ice. The cold stung her face and
pierced her clothes. She ran around to the side of the house so she could look
in the windows.
Inside,
sitting side by side on the sofa amongst the towers of books, snuggled together
in front of the fire was her mom and a man. Lizbet knew she’d never seen him
before—not that she could remember, at least—but there was something in her
that recognized him. She felt as drawn to him as a bird to a worm.
But
as she watched him laughing with her mother, Lizbet had another realization.
She knew that even if she introduced herself to this man, because of the
cookies on the platter, in time, he would never remember her. She’d only be a
vague recollection—a face he couldn’t place.
Lizbet
never drank gingerroot tea again.
CHAPTER TWO
“If
you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of
compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow
men.”
―Francis
of Assisi
From
Declan’s Research
In
mid-April, when the crocuses began to lift their heads from the ground and the
daffodils unfurled toward the bleak but not yet warm sun, a pod of gray whales
splashed past the western side of the island. Lizbet loved this time of year
when the plants and animals roused themselves from winter’s frozen grasp. The
garden, still crusty with ice, yielded beneath Lizbet’s hoe as she worked
compost into the soil. Lizbet longed to be out in the dinghy to hear of the
whales’ southern adventures, but Rose kept her in the garden.
Lizbet
slid her mother a glance. Beneath the enormous straw hat Rose always wore, a
worry line etched between her eyebrows, and her lips pulled into a thin,
straight line. Tension radiated from her, and Lizbet felt powerless against it.
Lizbet
tried restating her argument. “I know a man came last night. What I don’t know
is why you insist on lying about it.”
“This
is not up for discussion,” Rose said.
“How
can—” her words faded away when she caught sight of Wordsworth flicking his
ears, something he did when stressed. He sat at the garden’s edge, his ears
pricked, his eyes vigilant, despite the cataracts clouding his vision.
Tennyson,
an orange tabby, perched in the branches of the maple tree, twitching his tail
and complaining about the birds swooping around him.
“A
man comes,” Wordsworth whimpered.
Lizbet
braced against her hoe and glanced out at the tranquil bay. Wispy clouds
trailed across the robin’s egg blue sky. She couldn’t see an approaching boat.
She moved to the furthest edge of the garden, out of her mother’s earshot. “Is
it him again?” she whispered to Wordsworth.
“No.
Someone else.”
“The
postman?”
“No.”
Lizbet
resumed hoeing when she caught her mother’s gaze on her. She’d learned long ago
that her mother couldn’t hear or understand the animals the way she did. At
first, this had bothered her. For years, she had believed her mother to be
all-knowing and all-powerful, but in time, Lizbet had grown to love that she
had an ability her mother not only didn’t share but also discounted as a
childish whim akin to make-believe friends and monsters beneath the bed.
“The whales dislike him. His boat
is loud and he’s disrupting their path.”
Lizbet
frowned against the sun.
“Tired
already?” Rose called out without looking up from her work.
“No,
I thought I heard an engine.”
Rose’s
head jerked over her shoulder and her spine stiffened. She cocked her head,
listening.
Gulls
cried out as they wheeled overhead. “A
man, a man, a man.”
“I
don’t hear anything,” Rose said slowly, resuming her hoeing.
“A large boat, yet manned alone,”
Wordsworth said.
“Not quite,” Tennyson said, twitching his
whiskers as he lounged in a nearby apple tree. The tree’s pink blossoms offset
his orange fur and Lizbet wondered if the cat knew this. He was so vain she
thought he might. “He brings a creature.”
Creature
was Tennyson’s word for dog.
Wordsworth’s
ears pricked up. “I cannot smell him.”
“Nor I, but the albatross spotted him,” Tennyson
said. “He’s wolfish.”
Wordsworth
began to pace along the garden’s edge.
Rose
lifted her face to the sun. Lizbet saw the questions in her mother’s sapphire eyes,
but she didn’t know the answers. She wasn’t even sure of the questions.
“There’s
something I need to tell you, pet,” Rose began, drawing near. “Not just one
thing, actually…” She paused and twisted her lips. “Things I should have told
you a long time ago.”
Lizbet,
Of course knew that her mother had secrets. The many books she’d read told her
that very few lived in isolation the way that she and her mother did. There had
to be a world beyond the island, a place peopled with more than friendly
postmen and the occasional visitor.
An
engine roared. A big beautiful boat slid into the cove. Sunlight sparkled off
its shiny chrome and glass. This boat was bigger than anything Lizbet had ever
seen.
“How?”
Rose whispered, dropping her hoe. “He’s found me.”
“Who
is it, Mama?” Lizbet asked.
Rose
quickly bent and retrieved her hoe, but this time she carried it like a weapon.
“No questions, love. I need you to run and hide.”
“Hide?
Where? Why?”
Rose
shook her hoe at Lizbet. “I said no questions! Go to the woods. There’s the old
shack where Daugherty brewed her ale, go there.” Rose sucked in a deep breath.
“No one can trespass in the woods,” she muttered beneath her breath.
Lizbet’s
memories of Daugherty were vague, but she knew the shack. “But what about you?”
Rose
gripped her hoe like a sword. “I’ll join you soon. Now go.”
Lizbet
picked up her shovel for no other reason than her mom had a hoe and ran into
the woods. Wordsworth loped beside her.
“Who
is he?” Lizbet asked the birds flying above her.
“A big man,”
a swallow answered.
“A wolf creature,”
a robin put in.
“Hide in my tree,”
a squirrel called out as Lizbet ran past. “It’s
hollow inside. He’ll never find you.”
“Thank
you, but no,” Lizbet said, her pace slowing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hide
from this man and his large boat. A wicked part of her wanted him to find her
and take her to the cities where people and buildings resided. She had read of
cars, trucks, and helicopters but never seen one. Occasionally, an airplane
would fly overhead, so she knew—sort of—what a plane looked like from a great
distance. But all other vehicles were nothing more than what her imagination
could conjure up. She had a bicycle, a rusted contraption, but had never seen a
motorcycle. There was so very much that she’d never seen, and this man, this
stranger, may have seen everything. Maybe he could show her—introduce her to
this word beyond the island. Her thoughts ticked over places she’d like to
visit: London, Paris, Rome, New York, and Sherwood Forest.
“This man is not your friend,”
Wordsworth warned her.
A friend.
Lizbet ached for a friend, but even as she did so, a wave of guilt washed over her
because she knew her mother should be enough. Her mother worked hard to keep them
safe, to provide food and warmth, to supply the books for Lizbet’s
entertainment and education. Lizbet knew her mother had sacrificed her own
life—a life with John —to keep Lizbet sheltered from the world and its evil men
and cunning women.
But what if I don’t want to be
sheltered? The thought was so astounding it halted her. Lizbet
froze on the path to Daugherty’s shack.
Wordsworth
pressed his nose to the back of her leg, urging her to go on.
I don’t want to be here anymore,
Lizbet thought.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,”
a friendly squirrel chattered.
“No!”
Lizbet found her voice.
“Go! Go! Go!”
The crows swooped around her.
“No!
I don’t think so.”
“Not safe! Not safe! Not safe!”
the crows contended.
Slowly,
Lizbet began picking her way toward the shack because she knew and trusted the
crows. They were much more clever than most of the animals and were almost
never wrong. Although, unlike Wordsworth, they were self-serving.
“Why
don’t you think it’s safe?” Lizbet asked the crows.
“A gun! A gun! A gun!”
the birds responded.
“He
has a gun?” Lizbet halted again. She’d read about guns. They were mostly used
and possessed by villains and soldiers, and as far as she knew, there weren’t
any wars being waged on the island...which could only mean that this man meant them
harm. “I have to warn my mom!”
“Go to Daugherty’s shack as your
mom asked,” Wordsworth said. “I will protect your mom.”
Lizbet
brushed past him, heading for her mother. Moments later, her knees buckled as a
blinding pain slammed onto the top of her head.
