by Alan Russell
We shook hands, and he asked me to sit. Then he directed his cell phone towards me and asked, “Do you mind if I tape our conversation?”
“No,” I said, “but I should warn you that I might break out into song. I like to do that when I’m being recorded.”
Bull didn’t smile, merely announced his name, and then mine, and the date and time the recording was taking place. Then he looked at me expectantly. I had half a mind to lean over and thank the Academy, but now and again I do show restraint.
“Do you record most of your conversations?” I asked.
“Some of them.”
“Did you record your talk with the Green Man?”
He acted surprised. “What do you mean?”
“Isn’t the question self-explanatory?”
If it was, he didn’t answer it.
“I’ll clarify,” I said. “I understand the Green Man visited here. I heard it wasn’t too long before his death. Is that true?”
Dozier picked up a pen on his desk, looked at it. “I would prefer not discussing that subject.”
“Ah,” I said. “Something you have in common with the conservationists. They don’t want to talk about the Green Man’s visit here either. It’s sort of the same relationship you have with your daughter . . . ”
He looked at me, and I corrected myself. “Your stepdaughter. Neither one of you is keen on having anyone aware of your relationship.”
“Let’s say for argument,” he said, “that the Green Man did visit here.”
Interesting, I thought, that he prefers talking about a controversial dead man to discussing his own familial circumstances.
“When did this hypothetical visit take place?”
“Let’s say the last week of August.”
“How did arrangements for . . . this mythical meeting . . . occur?”
“They didn’t. It was unexpected. Unannounced. He just showed up.”
Dozier had put a quit to the fantasy guising, and I was only too happy to follow suit. “What did he want?”
“Our tree-planting expertise.”
“I would have thought him expert enough.”
“Not on a massive scale. Last year about five million redwood seedings were planted in Humboldt county, many by our company. He was quite interested in large-scale planting operations.”
“Did you oblige his curiosity?”
“We gave him a tour.”
“What did he think?”
“He was impressed.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“He was very impressed.”
“Did you personally give him the tour?”
“Yes.”
“And how long did it last?”
“Half a day.”
“Is that the only time you saw him?”
Dozier hesitated. His eyes moved slightly, rested for a moment on his phone that was recording the two of us. “He only visited here that one time.”
“And did you record that conversation?”
“At first.”
“But you stopped?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“When I realized he wasn’t a Trojan horse, wasn’t a plant, I didn’t see the need. He was sincere, and that surprised me.”
“Did he tell you why he was interested in your operation?”
“Yes. Apparently he had a dream for something called the Green Belt . . . ”
“I’m familiar with his impossible dream,” I said, “with his forest circling the world.”
I was surprised when Dozier came to his defense. “Not so impossible,” he said. “In this country alone, close to three billion seedlings are planted every year, most by the timber industry.”
“Trying to do better than Mother Nature?”
“In some ways succeeding. Our trees grow faster, and larger. We develop healthy woods, and tend to our tree gardens carefully, because we know they are our lifeblood. We are quite aware that as we sow, so shall we reap.”
“You didn’t sow the old growth. And what you call reaping, others call raping.”
“There is a higher percentage of redwoods preserved than any other commercially harvested species,” Dozier said, “and there are more redwoods around today than when man first started harvesting them.”
“Most of them young redwoods,” I said, “second and third growth. While the remaining old growth is being swept away at a rate of three percent a year.”
Dozier shook his head sadly. “Figures lie, and liars figure,” he said. “I would have thought that your profession would have made you skeptical of statistics, Mr. Winter.”
“It’s done even better than that,” I said. “It’s made me suspicious of everything.”
“Then you shouldn’t get caught up in their big lie. Redwoods don’t automatically become as old as the hills, nor do most grow to be thirty-story giants. The Green Man was smart enough not to be fixated on old growth. He knew that having an abundance of trees is more important than having a few groves with antique pedigrees.”
Dozier stopped talking, cleared his throat.
“Go on,” I said.
“I’m finished.”
“Did Shepard tell you that? About the relative importance of old growth?”
Dozier exhaled, then nodded.
“I don’t get it.”
“What?”
“Why you’re not broadcasting his sentiments from the rafters. Why you’re not harpooning the whole Yes on 150 campaign with those revelations.”
“We had plans . . . ”
Another statement started, then stopped again.
“But they were curtailed when he died?”
He nodded.
“You must regret having discontinued your recording that time he visited.”
Dozier gave me a studied look, then offered a slight tilt to his head. I suddenly realized how many head nods I’d been getting. He’d been all too aware of our conversation being recorded, and had been unwilling to commit himself verbally. As if thinking those same thoughts, he reached over and turned off his phone and its recording app. That made me wonder what had really prompted him to stop recording his conversation with Shepard.
“Without proof,” he said, “we knew it wouldn’t be in our best interests to reveal Shepard’s change of mind.”
“And he just decided all of this out of the blue? Came to this conversion in front of you?”
“As I told you, he was impressed with our tree-planting operation. He knew we were good stewards and didn’t think it a crime that we were protecting our own interests. He also didn’t think that caring for trees and getting a return on investment were mutually exclusive endeavors. Would that other environmentalists were so pragmatic.”
“Did you press him to speak out? Did he plan to make some sort of announcement?”
“At this point, such speculation would be moot. It was quite evident, however, that he was more concerned with the Green Belt than he was with old growth.”
“How did you react when you heard that Shepard had died in River Grove?”
“Naturally, I was disappointed. And suspicious.”
“Suspicious of whom?”
“The environmentalists. I know they were afraid of having one of their own offer a voice of reason. That might have helped stop their agenda of destroying an industry, and putting more lumber workers out of their jobs.”
The figures I had read suggested that the mills were doing a good enough job of laying off workers through automating and shipping the jobs overseas, but I didn’t want to cloud the issue.
“Do you think some renegade greens killed him?”
“I wouldn’t rule out that possibility. I had our investigators look over the death site very carefully. I personally oversaw the operation.”
“When did you go out there?”
“Right after they found him.”
Dozier looked at his watch, a gold Rolex. The gesture and the timepiece were a reminder to me how precious his
time was. “Have we concluded?”
“No,” I said. “I still have some more questions about trees.”
The topic didn’t appear to bother him. Until I clarified. “Family trees.”
Dozier looked decidedly uneasy.
“Your stepdaughter has been in the area quite a bit lately because of your wife’s illness.”
Dozier nodded.
“Where do you live?”
“On the outskirts of town.”
“Does Ashe ever stay in your house?”
“She has not availed herself of that opportunity.”
“How often does she see your wife?”
“I really couldn’t tell you. We have a tacit understanding. I work Monday through Friday, from eight o’clock in the morning until five-thirty in the afternoon. If she visits during those hours, she’s reasonably sure of not seeing me.”
“Does your wife tell you when Ashe is in town?”
“She doesn’t have to. If I come home, and Anne’s upset, I know her daughter has visited.”
“Why the ill feelings between you two?”
“She was spoiled. She thought I stole Anne’s love. Before I married her mother, Ashe announced that she couldn’t tolerate living with me, and that if we went ahead with our plans she would go to boarding school. I said she was welcome to make herself an exile, and she did.”
“What happened to Ashe’s father?”
“He died in a car accident when she was six.”
“You and Ashe both love the same woman,” I said. “That’s something in common.”
“There’s something else we have in common,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“We hate each other.”
19
WHEN VOICED VEHEMENTLY, there’s no stronger four-letter word than hate. Dozier hadn’t qualified the emotion, had given it a profane emphasis. But he didn’t allow me to pursue it further. Our talk was interrupted by his secretary, who reminded him of another appointment. I tried to wangle a few extra minutes, but he tapped at the crystal of his Rolex.
I got on the road and was trying to think, but my stomach was sending a lot of interference to my brain. The billboards weren’t helping. Like Oscar Wilde, I can resist everything but temptation. One in particular intrigued me. The Samoa Cookhouse was advertised as the last logging camp cookhouse in existence. That piqued my historical interest. The heaping displays of food played to a more primal need. I had a Paul Bunyan appetite and a gleam in my eye that probably would have set Babe to running.
Cookhouses were once a part of every logging camp. The appetites of loggers were legendary, with many of the lumberjacks selecting where they worked not on the basis of pay but on the victuals they were served.
The Samoa Cookhouse was an unprepossessing structure. It almost looked like a military barracks, and not a compound from a recent war but one from around the time of the war to end all wars. The restaurant was situated on a rise, with is parking lot overlooking the Louisiana-Pacific lumber mill. The cookhouse itself bore the ubiquitous L-P logo, but the restaurant was only leased from the mother company, which meant it no longer had to feed hungry loggers three times a day. Now its obligation was to the public. I wondered which was worse.
I arrived just as the cookhouse opened. The room was lined with picnic tables that were covered with red-and-white-checkered oilcloth. I was directed to a table which soon filled up. No one stayed a stranger long, what with all the passing around of food and the companionship of satisfied stomachs.
The cookhouse wasn’t the kind of dining establishment where you mentioned the C words, like cholesterol, or carbohydrates, or calories. The service was casual but efficient, more like your Aunt Betty passing you food, and plenty of it, than a manikin telling you her name was Monique and the special of the day was ahi served with a sauce of papaya and lime and sprinkled with macadamia nut shavings. In short order I was offered salad, and soup, and homemade bread. Then the real eating began. I was told the cookhouse changed its menu every day, but today there was ham, and fried chicken, and all the fixings. I didn’t aspire to gluttony but succeeded in spite of myself. When I thought I couldn’t eat any more, they offered their homemade pie. And I found I could eat a little more.
The kitchen wasn’t separated from the dining area, and the diners got to rubberneck the preparation and the platters of food coming out. Antique cooking utensils lined the wall, ladles and skillets and cutlery. The dining room chairs were anything but uniform; I counted four versions of four legs, and the wooden floors, though well varnished, looked like they had seen hordes of calk boots walking through. The napkins were housed in Farmer Brothers coffee cans, and the flatware was about as consistent as in most households, mismatched but serviceable.
I got the feeling things hadn’t changed much at the cookhouse for the better part of a century, felt I had taken part in a lumberjack tradition. For the amount and quality of food serviced, the bill was ridiculously low. I loosened a notch on my belt, leaned back, and gave a contented sigh. My waitress kept coming back and offering me more food, which was my incentive to leave. Nothing like being killed by kindness.
Before waddling outside, I wandered through the restaurant’s logging relics room. The minimuseum featured a collection of tools dating back to the age of muscle, the likes of which I had never seen, including drag saws and branding hammers, pry bars and chain binders, timber augers and splitting mills. The contest of man versus tree was more even in the old days, the payment for wood made with flesh, and blood, and sweat, and tears. Tall trees, and the men who dared to challenge them, had once been the stuff of tall tales. But it wasn’t that way anymore.
One of the display cases featured climbing gear and pictures of the brave toppers hundreds of feet in the air, supported only by their climbing belts. The equipment didn’t look too different from Teller’s old harness, the one Doc had been using. I had seen in Teller’s expression an almost fatherly pride when I had told him about Doc’s climbing. I suspected Teller’s tree climbing tutelage was much more than that, a stage that allowed him to show Doc how to pull himself up by his own bootstraps.
I walked outside and was confronted by the effluent rising from the smokestacks of the L-P mill. The spewing towers were constant backdrops to the immense Samoa operation. The mill could handle everything Bunyan could, and more, but it wasn’t the grist of legends.
A full stomach doesn’t necessarily make you think better, but with one you feel a lot more confident about taking on the world. When I got to my truck, I didn’t call dial-a-prayer, but did dial up a minister.
The Reverend Reginald Sawyer wasn’t glad to hear from me. He told me that I had upset his wife, said that, “like her sex,” she was delicate and nervous. I thought the notion of women as the weaker sex had gone out with the Victorians. Sawyer did everything but assert that she suffered from the vapors. He resisted the idea of a face to face until I hinted that perhaps his wife could answer my questions. Reluctantly, he invited me over.
Sawyer was waiting for me in the vestry. He had chosen a table away from the door, away from prying ears. Directly behind him was the mosaic. Whether by coincidence or not, Sawyer had positioned himself in the same seat as Christ. That, or he purposely had his back to him.
He was scribbling when I came in, put his pen down as I took a seat. “I won’t waste much of your time,” I said.
Sawyer looked grateful for that. He appeared subdued. In my presence he hadn’t talked much about man’s dominion over old growth. The only thing that had gotten him excited was the Green Man, and even then I had had to push him.
“You vied against Shepard when he was alive,” I said. “You thought him an enemy of your faith.”
Without fervor, he gave me an imperceptible nod.
“Then how come, when he died, you were concerned enough to offer a plot and a headstone?”
“Christian charity.”
“Why?”
“Love your enemy. Forgive tr
espassers. Turn the other cheek. There are many examples in the Good Book.”
“How come you’re so selective when it comes to practicing those examples?”
“I’m not perfect.”
“You didn’t like Shepard while he lived. You said he corrupted youths. You said he led them into evil practices. Why would you care about his burial arrangements?”
Sawyer didn’t say anything at first, just looked off into space. “Maybe it was time to bury the ax.”
“That’s not what you’re known for, Reverend. You’re known for brandishing that ax.”
“In the heat of an issue, rhetoric sometimes escalates.”
“Sometimes, it’s more than rhetoric that escalates.”
He didn’t comment.
“Shepard’s death didn’t change how you felt about him. You’re not the type to bury the ax, or bury Shepard either. From your reputation, that’s out of character for you.”
“I hope my reputation is only that of a man of God,” said Sawyer.
“Since the Green Man is now dead, who’s the new enemy?”
Sawyer looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“It’s easier to square off against a person than it is an issue. The Third Day gained renown when you attacked the Green Man. You personified the evil.”
“He did that himself. I only asserted God-given truths.”
“Strange how those assertions benefited some very powerful interests.”
“It was mankind that they benefited.”
“What about nature?”
“You speak like a pantheist. Worshiping nature is an affront to God.”
“Why did God make the forests then? Because on the third day he was bored silly? Because it seemed like a good thing at the time?”
“He provided us resources for man’s use.”
“Then is it so wrong to want to leave some ancient vestiges of his handiwork?”