(To Be Continued): Continued

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Layers”

Two days and two nights the tiny ship sailed into the great lake. Just after sunset on the third day the ship came within sight of an island rising out of the lake.

The island was shaped like a large puff pastry, and was dense with sturdy pines, many of which had survived generations in that inhospitable place. Jagged rocks were piled up all around the circumference of the island, and the wind was driving waves against these boulders, creating loud and frequently spectacular explosions of cold water that rose high into the night sky and were scattered like luminous fragments of colored glass.

The Captain gave the order for his crew to drop anchor. My heart was once again loaded into a round tub of a rowboat and lowered into the heaving water. A dozen of the stoutest crew members manned the oars and wrestled the boat through the waves. My heart, frozen and lacquered with ice, was now a surprisingly heavy and awkward burden.

A weathered dock jutted almost imperceptibly out into the lake at the bottom of a trail that emerged from the trees. The mice maneuvered their rowboat into a position alongside this dock.

A trio of young women came down the trail through the woods, their way lit by a swaying lantern. No words were exchanged as my heart was transferred from the rowboat to a wheelbarrow. As the women began to push the wheelbarrow back up the trail, the little boat was already straining back out into the mist of the lake.

The trail zigzagged through the trees, purposely digressive and worn over centuries at sharp, almost forty-five degree angles designed to ease the steep incline. The growth of old trees obscured the fact that the island jutted out of the lake to such an extent that its exact center was a strenuous climb from anywhere around the island’s perimeter. The trees also hid from view a large chalet-style cabin that had been constructed on a stone foundation at the top of the island.

A sort of tribe had occupied this cabin for many generations. They were quiet, purposeful people, small of stature and somehow not entirely human. Though possessed of keen senses, every member of this strange tribe was mute. All of them, everyone that had ever occupied the island, was descended (in a manner of speaking) from a man who had settled there long, long ago, this after having traveled a great distance by boat, accompanied by three giant mastiffs.

This man had fancied himself an alchemist. Once established on the island, however, all of his attempts at alchemy had been failures. Undaunted, and gifted with a prodigious and magical imagination, he had nonetheless succeeded in time in conjuring, out of the raw materials at hand, companions for himself. In the laboratory where he had hoped to turn base materials into gold he had learned instead to produce breathing beings. And having failed at alchemy in a literal sense, this founder of the island, and the generations that followed him, became in time recyclers of human hearts. They were surgeons and they were artisans.

The first heart had arrived on the island in the middle of the 19th century, on a cool June night when the moon was full and the sky was so clear that the moonlight had made of the calm lake’s surface a glimmering jewel box. The original heart made its journey alone in a boat.

Perhaps its arrival in that place was purely happenstance, and it is entirely possible that had not the moon been so bright that night, the heart would have drifted right past the island and continued on its solitary journey north. As it was, though, the heart had glowed like a luminous garnet floating far out in the lake, and some of the island’s residents had spied the mysterious object and rowed out to investigate. Puzzled and amazed by their discovery, they had towed the boat ashore and lugged the heart up the trail.

The founder had known immediately that what he was looking at was a human heart, badly damaged if not entirely broken. Without hesitation he had determined that they would repair this heart, and after much trial and error he and his assistants succeeded in restoring it to perfect working condition.

Having mastered the most difficult task of all, they were faced with the question of what to do with the heart. For a time they kept it in a jar in their laboratory, where it pumped and gurgled and provided continual astonishment. The old alchemist was troubled by its presence, though; he felt certain that the result of their hard work was destined to find its way south, back to the human world, where he knew good hearts were always in great demand.

Eventually, as is so often the case, birds provided the solution. A charm of finches that often spent summers on the island had established a sort of telepathic communication with some of the mute residents, and when the finches flew south in advance of the first snow they carried with them the story of the repaired human heart. In the land beyond the lake the word traveled through all the animals of the forest, and finally was passed along to an ancient Guild of heart deliverymen. Though the members of this Guild hated being called fairies, they were in fact, at least technically speaking, fairies.

The Potentate of the Guild of Heart Deliverers worked closely with a network of animals and angels (this sort of thing, of course, is always difficult to understand and explain), and had been providing heart transplants centuries before human medical science had ever dreamt of such a thing. Before connecting with the island laboratory, however, the Guild had always had to work with whatever raw materials (often damaged) they could get their hands on, even as they were diligent in attempting, as often as possible, to replace bad hearts with hearts possessed of genuine goodness.

Once a relationship –however unusual, mysterious, and informal– was established between the Guild of Heart Deliverers and the old alchemist, hearts began to arrive at the island on a regular, if unpredictable, basis. Some were transported by geese; others, like my own, were ferried by boat.

These days each of the hearts is boiled in a mixture of fish oil, cedar berries, and quicksilver, jostled for days in a contraption that resembles a giant rock tumbler, and then outfitted with all new plumbing.

Twice a year –once in the early spring and again in the late autumn (usually as a harbinger of the first snows)– a flock of sub-angels arrives at the island. These creatures are grimy and ungainly, seemingly part geese, part human. They are, though, celestial beings, but crippled, still tormented by mortal dreams and aspirations, and as the lowest order of angels they are assigned a majority of the grunt work.

The repaired hearts are fed to these angels, who fly them back south and implant them in the chests of their intended recipients as they sleep.

The ragged angels will be making their semi-annual trek to the island in a few weeks. I’m holding out hope that I’ll be one of the truly rare and lucky recipients and will get my own heart back. Bigger, I hope, and better.