‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Yes, you did.’
I screamed and seized the Russian doll from the mantelpiece. I threw it at her. Tiny dolls flew in every direction. They all missed her head. They splintered on the wall behind. I screamed again and picked up the music box. But I was frightened of the bad feelings writhing through me. I let the box fall to the floor. It broke with a deep twang.
‘Look what you have done.’ She was calm. ‘You take everything from me, Theodore. Take, take, take. Are you quite finished?’
I nodded.
‘Get a shoebox from my closet,’ she said. ‘Take the shoes out first. Then dump everything from the cage into the box.’ It was good that she gave exact instructions. I needed them, I couldn’t think. My brain was lit up with shame and excitement both. Poor Snowball. But I had found a deep and secret thing.
I carried the shoebox in one careful hand. Mommy held the other. She pulled me along, not unkindly. ‘Quickly now,’ she said. Out the front door, down the street.
‘You didn’t lock it,’ I said. ‘What if someone goes into the house? What if they steal things?’
‘Let them,’ she said. ‘Only you and I matter.’
What about Daddy? I thought, but did not say.
When we reached the gate to the woods I pulled back. ‘I don’t want to go in there.’ I started to cry again. ‘I’m afraid of the trees.’ I remembered what had happened with the little wooden cat. What would I be asked to leave behind, today? Maybe Mommy would have to stay and I would be forced to return alone. That was the worst idea.
‘You don’t need to be afraid, Teddy,’ she said. ‘You are more frightening than anything that lives in these woods. Besides, you will feel better out of the heat.’ She squeezed my hand. In her other hand she held her gardening trowel, the one with the pink handle.
We followed the path, which was a leopard skin of light and shade. She was right, I did feel better here, under the cool trees. I was still sorry, though. The mouse had been so little and I knew that we owe kindness to little things. So I cried again.
We reached a glade lined with boulders and silver trees like bolts of water or light. I knew, as soon as I stepped into that circle, that something would happen here. This was a place of transformation, where the wall between worlds was thin. I could feel it.
Mommy dug a hole with her pink trowel in a patch of sunshine, and we buried what was left of the mouse. The bones were picked clean; they shone almost translucent against the young grass. As the rich earth fell on top of the shoebox, covering it, something happened. I saw that what had been just a mouse was changed. Its remains became precious and powerful. It was part of death and of the earth now. It had become a god.
She sat and patted the earth beside her. I remember the scent of sap and her hands as she cradled my face. It must have been spring. ‘You think I am hard on you,’ she said. ‘You don’t like it that I have rules, and remind you of the reality of things. That I take care of your health, and don’t let you keep pets or eat hot dogs like American boys, that we cannot afford doctors and I sew up your cuts myself. And I do all this anyway, despite your complaints. I take care of your health because it is my duty. As I care for your body I must also tend your mind. We have discovered today that you have a sickness, there.
‘You are probably promising yourself that you will never do such a thing again. You are thinking that you gave in just this once … And maybe that will prove true. But I do not think so. Yours is an old sickness, which has been in our family for a long time. My father – your grandfather – had it. I hoped that it had died with him. Maybe I thought that I could atone for it. A new world, a new life. I became a nurse because I wanted to save people’s lives.’
‘What is it? The sickness.’
She looked at me and the beam of her attention was like a warm sea. ‘It makes you want to hurt living things,’ she said. ‘I saw that, the night that I followed Father to the old place, the tombs under the iliz. I saw what he kept there …’ Mommy put her hand over her mouth. She breathed hard into her palm.
‘What is iliz?’ It sounded bad, like the name of a demon.
‘It means church,’ she said. ‘Iliz,’ she said again softly, as though her tongue were remembering. I had never before heard her speak anything but English. I understood then that there was another, shadowy her, made of the past – like a ghost and a living person bound together.
‘Did you like it there?’ I asked. ‘Do you miss it?’
She shook her head, impatient. ‘“Like”, “miss” – these are soft words. Such places just are. It does not matter what you feel about them.
‘In this country, all the people are afraid of death. But death is what we are. It is at the centre of things. That was the way in Locronan. In the iliz the ankou was carved on the altar. We left milk by the graves for him to drink, with one of his many faces. The cemetery was the heart of the village. It was there we came to talk, to court and argue. There were no playgrounds or parks for children. Instead, we played hide and seek among the gravestones. Life was conducted amid
