He nodded slowly, sitting back, but still tense. Finally he said, ‘I’d like to see the deeds. If it turns out that I now own the trees …’
‘I told you, the deeds are at the bank.’
‘Your secretary said you had photocopies.’
I hesitated, not sure I would be justified in refusing him. And then he said, ‘Tom said there’s a curse.’
‘A curse?’ I stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. ‘How do you mean, a curse?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, not really. It’s quite a time back. Eight years almost. We were chewing coca together in an Indian hut, not the leaves, but the powdered sort they call patu —’ He smiled, a sleepy, almost feline smile. ‘It was real potent stuff, like dust - took your breath away if you inhaled it before you’d got enough spittle worked in to make a masticating ball of it.…’
‘Where was this?’
‘In the Andes. Below the pass that leads to Cajamarca. Anyway, that’s what he said.’ And he added, ‘He hadn’t seen the deeds. Not then at any rate. He wasn’t much interested in trees. But he said his father had told him he’d put a curse on anybody who cut them.’
‘Why?’
‘He’d planted them, hadn’t he? Not all the trees, but the real good stuff in the valley bottom, the area Tom always refers to as High Stand. Planted them with his own hands.’
‘And this curse is in the deeds?’
‘I think so. I don’t know. I wasn’t that interested, you see, not at the time. I was still in my teens, and though I was engaged in forestry - we were doing a lot of planting for the Peruvian Government - BC seemed like a million miles away, and anyway the chances of my ever being involved with the curse seemed very remote, my father just divorced and full of energy again. Didn’t you feel that about him?’ Again that strange, almost secretive smile. ‘All that machismo, the adrenalin flowing —’ The smile became a laugh as he added, ‘And then suddenly you’d see it was all a sham. He was just a kid, nothing for real, the world a toy.’ The face became solemn, a sadness in the eyes, so that I had the impression he was fond of his father.
I picked up the intercom and asked my secretary to get me the file. ‘It’s very unusual,’ I said, ‘something as personal as that incorporated into a land deed.’
He nodded, his eyes fastening on the papers as soon as she brought them in, his expression intent, almost avid. I don’t think it was greed, more the excitement of getting to grips with something he wanted to be involved in.
There were three documents altogether, an original purchase of Indian land, a conveyance of that land to a logging company and a further conveyance from the company to Joshua Francis Halliday. The curse was appended to the last page of this final document. Below all the signatures and government seals, a slip of paper of a different shade and consistency had been gummed on. Even on the flat surface of the photocopy it showed as something added later. ‘I’ll read it out to you,’ I said, and he nodded, sitting hunched forward, his eyes fixed on the page I had opened out and laid flat on the desk before me. ‘It’s side-headed - To all who come after me and inherit or in any other way acquire this land: Know ye’ — his choice of words indicated his intention of making it as solemn a declaration as possible - ‘Know ye that when I bought this land, which I call Cascades, the logging company who sold it to me had ripped out all the big timber in the valley bottom alongside the Snakeskin River, above the gorge and beside the lake expansions in the flats, everything that could be got out easily. They said it was big stuff, western red cedar mainly and Douglas, like the Macmillan outfit keeps preserved close west of here on the Port Alberni road …’ I glanced across at Brian Halliday. ‘Where was he living when he wrote this?’
‘Vancouver Island probably. That’s where he died anyway. Near a place called Duncan just north of Victoria.’ His eyes gleamed brightly for a moment. ‘Nice country, good forest land. And he had a fishing boat.’ And he added almost dreamily, ‘I went there once, just to look at where he’d lived, and then I went on out to the west coast, a hell of a road, more of a trail really. Cathedral Grove.’ He nodded, as though confirming the name to himself. ‘That’s what the Macmillan Bloedel logging people call it. There’s trees there four, six hundred years old. Thuja plicata - that’s western red cedar -standing two hundred feet and more, one of the last remaining stands of primeval coastal forest, some of them with a bottom bole circumference of anything up to thirty feet or so. Cathedral Grove.’ He smiled, an almost dreamy expression. ‘I wonder what the Cascades trees run to now. Does it say when he planted them? Does it give a date? They’ll be getting quite a spectacle now, something worth seeing.’
I glanced back through the conveyance. But I could only find the date he had bought the land, and I twisted the deeds round so that he could see.
‘That’s over seventy years ago. They could be a hundred and fifty feet now. More maybe.’ He turned back to that last page, reading on, his lips moving. ‘You see, he says it here — he planted it all himself. Had Indians in, cleaned off the scrub, had seedlings brought up from Duncan and planted it up, the whole area that had been devastated by the loggers.’ He sat back, looking straight at me, eyes wide under the lank black hair. ‘One man marking out the future, ensuring a lasting monument to his life on earth.’ And he added, ‘My God! What a Herculean task — more than eight hundred acres, he reckons. That’s over three hundred hectares. A plantation like that, it must be unique. No wonder he put a curse on anyone daring to take a chainsaw to any of his trees.’ He suddenly laughed. ‘No, of course, it must have been back around the First World War. He wouldn’t have had an inkling then that thirty, forty years on chainsaws would make it possible for one man to fell a three-hundred-foot Redwood giant that had been growing five centuries and more in a matter of hours. But hours, days - it doesn’t matter. He saw the threat and did the only thing he thought might deter a future owner greedy for money …’ He was silent for a moment, his lips moving as he read. Then he sat back. ‘Have you read it? The curse, I mean.’ And when I shook my head, he passed the deed back to me. ‘I think,’ he murmured, ‘if I had read that and was thinking of felling High Stand, compartment by compartment, I think I’d have second thoughts. Either that or …’ He paused, shaking his head again and muttering something to himself.
I read the rest of it then: ‘However long I live there will come a time’ - this was the final paragraph - ‘when my physical presence will no longer be there to guarantee the safety of my trees. But you who read this Declaration be warned - I am the man who planted them, they are my family, and my spirit. As his ancestor is to the Indian, so will I be to my trees. They are my Totem. Let any man fell even one of them, other than in the interests of sound forestry, then with the first cut of the saw or swing of the axe my curse will be upon him? Finally, as if pointing an accusatory finger, he switched from the third to the first person: ‘Do that and I will never leave you, day or night, till your nerves are screaming and you are dead by your own hand, dead and damned for ever to rot in Hell? And it finished with these words: ‘This curse stands for all time, to be renewed with my last breath, and may the Good Lord help me to my purpose.’ No date was given.
‘He doesn’t rule out thinning, you see, or scrub clearance, or anything that will encourage the trees to achieve maximum growth. In the interests of sound forestry. That’s modern terminology, which shows how involved he was in the business of forestry.’
‘When did he die, do you know?’
He moved his head, a dismissive gesture, as though I had interrupted a train of thought. ‘Not certain. I think’ - He frowned. ‘It must have been 1947.I know he was seventy-four when he died and I seem to remember being told he was born in 1873, so I guess that’s when the curse begins to operate.’ He looked across at me, his eyes still blank, his brow furrowed. ‘I was just wondering - about Tom, what’s happened to him. You see, I found some sales agreements in his desk. They go back almost seven years. Clear fell agreeme
nts that provide for extraction and haulage down to a booming ground on the Halliday Arm. Also bills for towing. He was marketing the Cascades timber. Not High Stand, but the poorer, scrubbier stuff on the slopes above. That is, until the last of those agreements…’ He shook his head. ‘The amounts had been dwindling all the time, until this last one. It was for two hectares of western red cedar, and it gave the grid reference.’
He paused there, looking straight at me, waiting for it to sink in. ‘It may not sound all that important to you. Not very real, I mean, here in Sussex, in a solicitor’s office. But out there, so much of the west raped of its best timber - do you know anything about trees?’
I shook my head.
‘Let me just say one thing then: but for trees you and I wouldn’t be alive.’ He was leaning forward, a strange intensity in his manner and in his voice. ‘It was the trees, through their infinite numbers of leaves and needles, that converted our atmosphere from deadly carbon dioxide into the oxygen we breathe. Does that help you to understand? The curse, I mean - and Tom’s reaction to it when he realized what he’d done.’
‘You’re hinting at suicide, are you? You think your father might be dead.’
He shrugged. ‘What do you think — now you know about that curse? Put yourself in his place. How would you feel, having negotiated the sale of two hectares, and knowing all the time that your own father had sworn a curse on anybody who felled even a single tree? And he did know. He didn’t have to get the deeds out of the bank. The old man had told him, and hearing it direct like that, when he was little more than a kid himself — why do you think he told me about it if it wasn’t there always at the back of his mind? And he’d just been over there. Only a few days back he’d been looking at those trees.’ The intensity was back in his voice as he added, Trees are alive, you know. They have an aura, a very powerful feel about them. And a curse like that -‘
‘Yes, but I hardly think your father was the sort of man to take much note of a thing like that.’ I thought he was letting his imagination run away with him somewhat. ‘He was much too much of an extrovert, surely.’
‘Tom?’ He shook his head. ‘Nobody who needs a drug, even if it’s only drink or nicotine, can be totally extrovert. And just think of the effect on him as a youngster in his teens -he was the son of a late marriage so he must have been that sort of age at the time. And he wasn’t unimaginative. Quite the contrary in some ways. Then years later, with the mining income gone and all the timber on the slopes felled and cashed, nothing much left except High Stand… And then, after he had sold those two hectares, at some moment when he was real high, remembering that curse — well, he’d be capable of anything then, wouldn’t he? Or on the let-down maybe, in a fit of manic depression…’ He gave a little shrug, a gesture of finality. ‘Yes, I think he’s dead. I think he’s done what his father swore he’d cause any man to do who cut those trees.’
‘The cutting was done presumably by a logging company.’
‘But he signed the agreement. He caused it to be done.’ And then he switched my mind back to the Yukon. ‘I suppose the mine is finished?’ And when I gave him the figures for the last three years, he nodded as though that was what he had expected. ‘But you haven’t checked the mine itself. You haven’t had a mining consultant go over and have a look at it?’
I shook my head. ‘What are you suggesting - that somebody has been creaming off the best of the gold?’
‘Well, it’s happened before.’
‘You seem to forget your father had only just returned from the Yukon, a longer trip than usual, Miriam said.’
‘He’d been to Canada, yes. But he didn’t say anything about the Yukon or the mine. He could have been in BC organizing the sale of another two hectares of High Stand.’ He gave a rather helpless little shrug. ‘I’ve been down several gold mines, but all of them mines with ore bodies where you drill ahead and have a good idea what the reserves are. Ice Cold Creek is placer mining. You’re just shifting tons of river silt, screening, washing - yes, I guess it could peter out like that, no warning.’ The brown, remote eyes fixed on me again. ‘Is that where Miriam’s gone? Suddenly she wasn’t there any more, the house locked up.’
‘So how did you know about the silver?’ I asked.
‘I’m living there, aren’t I? And you, I suppose you have a key, too?’
I nodded.
‘And you’re one of the executors?’
‘Yes.’
He was back to the trees again. ‘Have you any idea of the value of that stand? For just those two hectares he was getting over three thousand dollars - that’s standing, no charges. Cash on the nail like Judas or any goddamned murderer. Anyway, that’s the figure given in the sale agreement, so they were paying something around five or six dollars a cube. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad, bearing in mind the market at the time and the problems of getting it to the water and then the long tow down to Seattle, but with near on a thousand acres it values High Stand at about six hundred thousand dollars. There’s men a lot less pressed than my father who’d do almost anything for a sum like that. I wonder …’ He put his hands over his eyes, his head bowed in thought. ‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘if that’s why he left those trees to me.’
‘Because you were pressing him for money?’
His head jerked up, his eyes suddenly blazing. ‘No. Because he knew I’d never cut them. Because the curse was on him and I belonged to the Men of the Trees. He knew that. He knew I wouldn’t sell them. Not now. Not ever.’ And then, his voice suddenly anxious, ‘He did leave them to me, you’re sure about that?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I drew up the codicil myself and he signed it that day he was here in this office, sitting where you’re sitting now.’
‘But the executors, they can still sell them to pay bills, if the estate’s in debt, I mean. That right?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘You’re one of them, and Miriam, she’s an executor, too, I suppose. Who else?’
‘His accountant in London,’ I said. Trevor Richardson.’
‘Not Martin. Not me. Just the three of you.’ I nodded and he got suddenly to his feet. ‘Okay. Well, just remember this — that curse, it’s real. And it applies to you, to anyone — you let them put a chainsaw into a single tree without there’s a silvicultural reason’ - his voice had risen, his dark eyes staring straight into mine — ‘and it doesn’t have to be the man who operates the saw, it’s whoever’s responsible… You sell High Stand to a saw mill company -‘ He leaned further forward, almost a crouch, the eyes strangely alight. ‘Do that and if it’s the only way to stop you I’ll kill you myself.’
He stared at me a moment, quite wildly and in absolute silence. Then abruptly he turned and left my office without another word.
I sat there thinking about him for some time, his Indian background, how dangerous he might be. Then, almost unconsciously, I picked up the deed and read again those words of Joshua Francis Halliday written all those years ago.
And then my secretary put the file back in the strong room and I went off to Brighton, only just making the court in time. Looking back on it, I suppose I should have made more of an effort. But there was an undercurrent of hostility between us, and though there are things he could have told me about his father if I had taken the time and the trouble to ask the right questions, it never occurred to me I would not have another opportunity until it was almost too late.
The week passed in a flash, a hectic rush of work, and still no news of Tom Halliday. The police had received negative reports from the RCMP in Canada. There was no indication that he had visited either the Yukon or British Columbia, and the emigration people had no record of his either leaving Britain or entering Canada. The only hope seemed to be that Miriam would pick up some information in Vancouver where presumably he had friends. My partner was still on holiday and when my secretary came in with the mail on Friday morning I was leaning back in my chair staring up at the clouds scudding low over the downs and thinking
what it would be like that night in the Channel. I had planned to sail over to the French coast and it looked now as though I would have a fast passage. ‘I thought you’d like to see this straight away — it looks a little personal.’ She put the flimsy sheets on the desk in front of me, her face deadpan, not a flicker of a smile as she added that my first appointment was already waiting for me.
I stared down at it, too surprised to say anything. It was on the notepaper of a hotel named the Sheffield, the address Whitehorse, Yukon: My dear Philip - I feel suddenly very lonely here and turn to you for reasons I’m not quite sure about, only that I know writing to you will somehow help. Silly, isn’t it - I don’t know your home address, or if you told me I’ve forgotten it, so I’ll send it to your office. But please don’t charge for the time it takes to read it! There’s no money. That was a shock - first Tom disappearing, then the bank phoning to say I couldn’t cash any cheques. It was a joint account, as you know. Tom was good that way. He always trusted me. God! ‘What a mess!… There were five pages of it, on thin airmail paper, the ink tending to run and her scrawl not easy to read. I folded it carefully and slipped it back into its envelope. If she had discovered anything new it would surely have been referred to in that first paragraph. I stuffed it in my pocket to read later and told my secretary to show the man in.
That evening I slipped my moorings and headed out through the harbour entrance as the sun set and the downs darkened to merge with a line of cloud coming in from the north-west. It was a downhill sail, no engine and everything very quiet as I slipped south at about 5 knots, the little boat rolling gently to the long swell coming in from the west. By dawn, if the wind held, I would be in France.
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