Vanessa finds many of the books in Father’s library dull. Father once gave her one he said was good for girls, but it was all about people who wouldn’t call each other by their first names and never thought about anything except getting married (the process of which seemed alarmingly complicated). Father was amused at her report and gave her The Call of the Wild, which she’s read eight times. There are dogs on the island, but not massive and ferocious and strong, like in the book. She learned so much from it; all about sleds, and competitions, and outdoor fires, and wolves. Sometimes she dreams of herself alone in the cold, striding through snowy emptiness with bristling, savage wolves at her side.
Today, Vanessa picks out a book called Cubist Picasso and flips through the pictures. The first few pages are torn out, and the rest are only images. Father says he doesn’t know what Cubist or Picasso are. She likes the strange pictures showing things that don’t exist, grown people with eyes on one side of their head like defectives. Lindy Aaron once let her touch a painting, even though she wasn’t supposed to, and it felt rough and thick under her fingers. These images look like they would feel that way, but under her skin is just paper.
After a while, Vanessa tires of lying around, and goes outside. Farms and gardens spread green in ragged patterns under the hazy sun, and the Saul orchards are a faint, dark line on the horizon. Since Father is a wanderer, he receives regular tribute from every island family of the freshest, most delicious food that the fields, gardens, and sea have to offer; Vanessa’s family thus only needs a small vegetable garden, and creamy grasses sweep and lean in the wind around their home.
A dog is trotting around, brown and thin. Vanessa calls to her, and the dog lopes over happily. It’s Reed, one of the Josephs’ dogs. Reed puts her big head on Vanessa’s breastbone and grunts, and wriggles around like she is trying to bore through her rib cage. Vanessa scratches her ears, and the warmth from Reed’s forehead spreads through her. Vanessa wishes she were a dog; all she’d ever have to do is run around and eat things. Although so many litters of puppies are drowned that she would need luck to make it to doghood.
Dinner is mutton and potatoes. Vanessa dislikes mutton, although Mother always tells her to be thankful for any meat they have. Her attempts to be thankful have failed; the mutton tastes like dirt. Father eats it with gusto, closing his teeth over the fibers and chewing lustily. Looking around, she sees chewing mouths, closing on flesh and turning it into slime, and she clenches her jaw against the turn of her stomach. She nibbles at a potato with butter and some burnt, crunchy mutton skin. Eventually Father notices and says, “Vanessa.” Forcing the mutton down, Vanessa barely chews, pretending she is a dog. Dogs don’t chew, they just swallow.
“Would you like something to help you sleep tonight?” asks Mother. Father frowns. He thinks the sleeping draft is unnecessary and is always disappointed when Vanessa takes it. Vanessa nods at Mother, careful not to look at him. Her evening glass of milk has a bitter, acrid undertaste.
That night, Vanessa barely awakens. When she does, the wind is making everything move rhythmically and tree branches are slamming into the walls. It’s almost summer, she thinks, and then darkness overtakes her once more.
Chapter Two
Vanessa
The church is halfway underground. Mother says that when she was a child, it was mostly on top of the ground, but it’s been sinking ever since.
When the ancestors came to the island, they built a massive stone church before they even built their own houses. What they didn’t know was that such a heavy building would sink down into the mud during the summer rains. The enormous church slowly disappeared below the surface, its parishioners unconsciously hunching their shoulders lower and lower as the light filtering through the windows became obliterated, like a black blind drawing upward. Undaunted, the builders added more stones, and the church, in response, kept sinking. Every ten years or so, when the roof is almost level with the ground, all the men on the island gather to build stone walls on top of it, and the roof becomes the new floor. Vanessa asked Mother why they couldn’t just use wood, but Mother said it was tradition, and it would be disrespectful to the ancestors to change it. All the eligible stones on the island are long mortared into vanished church walls. The wanderers have to bring new ones in slowly from the wastelands; if they tried to bring them all at once, it would sink the ferry.
Vanessa can’t help but think that if she were in charge, she would build it just a little bit differently, so it might last longer. But she suspects that when she is a woman, she will see no problem with the current method of church building. She’s never seen an adult express anything but enthusiasm for the process of building up and then sinking the church.
The stones the wanderers bring in are beautiful and multicolored, and Vanessa finds the texture pleasing, the way they stick out from the clay walls. She likes to run her hands over the smoothest rocks, the same way she likes to rub a perfectly round pebble that she keeps in her pocket. One stone has the fossil of a small eel imprinted on it, and all the children enjoy staring at the graceful patterns of its bones.
It’s disappointing to go down the long set of stairs into the dim building. The windows are carefully constructed from larger fragments of glass, which makes them appear fractured, like someone smashed them and then sealed them up again. Currently they are half buried in black mud. Sunlight hovers faintly near the ceiling, spreading in delicate veils. Vanessa always watches the windows carefully, even if she’s listening to the sermon. Letty swears that once a huge animal, like a big worm but with teeth, swam up against a pane until its white belly was flat against it, writhing and biting until it wriggled away. There are many legends of enormous underground creatures, bigger than the church itself; they glide through summer mud, curling around children in a soft, muscular embrace and then swallowing them whole.
The pews are polished wood, the smoothest to be found on the island. Although they are worn with the imprints of hundreds of buttocks, Vanessa still slides around uncomfortably; she can never find a place to settle. Pastor Saul is at his lectern, framed by the massive stone wall behind him.
As usual, he is speaking of the ancestors. “They came from a land where the family had been divided, where father and daughter were set asunder, where sons abandoned their mothers to die alone. Our forefathers had a vision, a vision that could not be satisfied in a world of flame, war, and ignorance. The fire and pestilence that spread across the land were second only to the fire and pestilence of thought and deed hovering like a black smoke.”