Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  Jake snaps back her drink and retrieves the paperbook from the box, flipping to the inside front cover, where she finds facing the first page a splash of crudely pencilled words, scrawled in a child’s block print:

  PROPORTEE OF WILLO GREENWUD

  Despite her reservations about Silas’s true motivations, and her general bafflement with the book’s cryptic entries, Jake’s heart takes a little skip at the sight of her grandmother’s name, however misspelled it may be. And while drinking herself toward a welcome oblivion throughout the evening, she wonders about Willow Greenwood, about who she was and what impelled her to give her fortune away. She wonders about her father and if he also drank, and whether that’s what made him “troubled.” If he did, Jake already forgives him. Maybe she drinks because of his genes. Or because of his absence. Or maybe his genes created his absence, which created her drinking. Or maybe he felt just as unwelcome in the world as she does now, and drinking was the only thing that allowed him any reprieve. Or maybe her roots are all too tangled, and there’s no single story to be told about any of it.

  Deep in the night, just after she’s dragged her Cathedral-issue comforter over her body and is preparing to pass out, she lifts the paperbook one last time and fans its grimy, hand-inked pages. How intimately a book is related to the tree and its rings, she thinks. The layers of time, preserved, for all to examine.

  TWENTY-SEVEN AND FIVE-EIGHTHS

  IT’S DAY. MURMURS of leafy light on the vaulted walls.

  Why am I sleeping during the day? Without a blanket? he wonders as everything around him blurs and ripples. But he hasn’t been sleeping. He’s suffered something. An unconsciousness. For what duration he doesn’t know. Also, his legs are oddly numb and feel as heavy as sandbags. And the most basic facts seem to flit just beyond his reach—even his own name he can only brush with the tips of his fingers.

  Laid out on his back, he swivels his head to the side, feels the cool floor against his face. The floor is concrete, buffed to a gleaming, wet-looking finish. Three tiers of scaffolding rise high into the air beside him. That’s what I fell from, he thinks. Though he remembers nothing about the fall, somehow he knows its height precisely. He’d measured the vaulted ceiling himself and never forgets a measurement: twenty-seven feet and five-eighths of an inch.

  He lifts his ringing head, which feels like a bowling ball, and manages to prop himself up on his elbows to look around. The room is cavernous, spare, modern. A living room. Strewn with polygons of austere acrylic furniture. A fieldstone hearth. Arctic-white walls. Old-growth fir beamwork held together by vintage cast-iron fasteners. Custom floor-to-ceiling windows that frame a cliffside view of the ocean, the water like raw denim, flat as slate.

  This is not my house, he thinks. It’s a rich person’s house. A weekend house. Used only a few weeks a year. Summers, most likely. And since he knows the exact height of the ceiling and has a tool belt strapped around his waist, he assumes he’s a carpenter, here doing a renovation. And though some deep, essential part of his brain orders him to quit slacking off and get back to work, his head is still too foggy and his legs are still too heavy for him to move. He’ll need to get checked out before he can work again.

  He scans the end tables of the living room for a telephone he can use to call an ambulance but finds nothing. When he notices a cellphone poking out from a pouch in his tool belt he fishes it out, only to find its glass webbed with cracks, the screen beneath as black as a pupil. He presses the buttons but nothing happens, so in frustration he side-arms the aluminum carcass across the room. But the aggressive motion torques something deep inside his hips and suddenly it’s as if someone is holding an acetylene torch to his tailbone. He hears himself scream.

  A flock of details rushes in with the pain, like birds returning to roost in his mind’s branches. His name is Liam. He’s Canadian though he’s working in the United States—this he can confirm by the air: warmer with a faint toxicity, like plastic burnt long ago. It’s November. He’s renovating a house in Darien, Connecticut. He’s thirty-four years old and despite his mother’s best efforts, he’s still a Greenwood.

  SUPPLIES

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Brown Rice

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Chickpeas

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Soybeans

  5 Cans Krylon Spray-Paint, Chestnut Brown

  1 Pair 36″ Bolt Cutters

  4 Twenty-Five-Pound Bags White Sugar

  2 Cartons Menthol Cigarettes

  THE HALLOWEEN TREE

  LIAM IS TEN years old again and curled in the passenger seat of his mother’s sky-blue Westfalia. Willow is driving them south from Vancouver, down the Pacific coast, and riffing on deforestation and acid rain and silent springs and thalidomide and the coming environmental Armageddon as she smokes menthols and shifts with her free hand, steering with a knobby knee. Liam doesn’t go to school (he tried a few weeks of it in Ucluelet, where they lived for six months while his mother blockaded a logging operation there, and hated every second), so she’s got him some old grade four workbooks from a thrift store to do in the van. But reading exhausts him, so instead he sits listening to the van’s diesel chortle, whittling a stick into a lethal point and occasionally checking for pursuing police cars in the side-view mirror.

  It’s a Sunday, the only day that loggers are known to take off, which means it’s also when Willow performs her “direct actions.” Early this morning, Liam watched from the van as his mother took the bolt cutters and snipped a thick lock from a gate intended to keep trespassers out of an old-growth forest lot. While Liam’s guts clenched with anxiety, she drove them into the trees and parked beside some feller bunchers, monstrous logging machines that have always reminded him of yellow dinosaurs. Then Willow gathered up two of the twenty-five-pound bags of white sugar that she keeps hidden under the van’s seats and proceeded to funnel them into the gas tanks of the machines. After that, while Liam begged his mother to come back to the van before the Mounties or the loggers showed up, she spent an hour in the surrounding forest, carefully spray-painting over the markings that the loggers had put on the high-value trees they intended to take down. Liam often has nightmares about the feller bunchers, machines that are somehow powerful enough to devour whole forests. That his mother is insane enough to attack them seems like a heresy that will eventually invite a great disaster down upon them both.

  But that’s all behind them now. The Mounties didn’t come. And since tomorrow is his tenth birthday, Willow is driving him to a beach in Oregon like he’s asked so he can try surfing. He’d have preferred California, but Willow has a protest to attend in Vancouver in three days. “So this is the best we can do,” she said, tousling his hair.

  As a boy, Liam is asthmatic, watchful, and always clutching at his hippie mother’s batik-printed skirts whenever strangers are around. Originally, she named him Liam New Dawn, but he’ll change it to Liam Greenwood, her legal surname, the day he turns eighteen.

  “And here I was trying to give you a fresh start,” she’ll say woundedly when he tells her, after all the paperwork’s filed. “Why degrade yourself with a name like that?”

  Willow had him late in life, at forty—unplanned is a word he’s overheard her use—and she never entirely embraced the project of motherhood. With an embarrassing (for him, anyway) jungle in her armpits and a restless fever to pack her Westfalia and go, she’s a Rorschach test of a mother, a shape-shifting cloud drifting across his boyhood horizon. She changes her mind with a swiftness and conviction that terrifies him. A trusted brand commits some ecological sin and she’ll swear off their products forever. A lover contradicts her in some pot-warped argument about the military industrial complex and they’ll never so much as gas up the Westfalia in his city again. For as long as he can remember, Liam has known that his survival depends upon preventing a similar reversal of feeling about him. So he strains to please her: he repeats her phrases, wears the tattered clothes she finds in thrift shops, and marvels at the same sunsets a
nd the same trees.

  But mostly the shape Willow assumes is that of a wandering monk, fuelled by weed and chickpeas and the soymilk that she presses herself. Her true religion is Nature, trees especially. Her belief in green beings is as pure and fervent as any self-immolating Buddhist’s. This is why Liam fears her environmentalism above all else—he knows that it’s the thing that could someday steal her from him completely.

  After hours of driving, they park at a forested pull-off near a river in central Washington to camp for the night. Willow simmers brown rice on the van’s propane burner while reading Swallows and Amazons aloud, a book she loved as a girl despite it being “terminally bourgeois.” Later, Liam lies sleepless in the Westfalia’s rooftop tent, nauseous with worry that the State Patrol will knock on the van’s fogged-up windows with their chrome flashlights, find the weed and the bags of sugar, then drag his mother to jail and whisk him off to some American orphanage where the kids all carry switchblades. Willow’s worries, however, assume a wider focus. She makes flashlit notes about her newest ploys to halt the ongoing genocide of the great heritage forests of the Pacific Northwest while drinking her fancy tea.

  Outwardly, his mother is ecologically devout, but Liam knows her secrets. Her weed and mushrooms are kept mostly in the open, but she has caches of opulence squirreled around the Westfalia. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 tucked into a slit in the mouldering seats. Bags of fine English teas buried deep in the glove box. Little do her fellow eco-warriors know that his mother was raised rich: an estate; a live-in gardener; equestrian classes; private schools; tartan uniforms—the works. Her father, Harris Greenwood, founded Greenwood Timber in 1919 and amassed a fortune in the manner fortunes were amassed in Canada in those days: by chewing up the natural world and selling the spoils at great profit. Though he died when Liam was a baby, Harris is a person Liam has admired from an early age, if only secretly. At least he built real, tangible things, rather than Willow’s goal of “building awareness”—a phrase that Liam has never understood.

  Despite their strained relationship, Harris left his entire fortune to Willow when he died: a mountain of cash, a mansion in Vancouver’s exclusive Shaughnessy neighbourhood, and a private island—all of which his mother then proceeded to donate to an environmental group concerned with global forest protection. Willow often re-enacts this selfless gesture for Liam in the Westfalia over tin bowls of her lightly sea-salted chickpeas: “Will that be all?”—gulp—“Ms. Greenwood?” she’ll say, impersonating the shell-shocked bank manager who drew up the drafts. “Yes, that’s it,” she’ll reply, playing the character of herself with a bland smile, before she bursts into manic laughter.

  When Liam wakes the next morning, he finds a birthday present wrapped in newsprint on the table in the van. For a moment he pretends it’s from his father, who went by the name Sage and who hailed from Oceanside, California, and was some kind of surfer poet who trolled the Oregon coast, converting women like Willow to a religion he’d invented while listening to the album Pet Sounds. But Sage was left in the Westfalia’s dust long before Liam was born, and Liam has never met him.

  Liam takes the gift in his hands. Because money is always tight, he knows not to get his hopes up. To finance their lean existence, they harvest wild chanterelles once yearly. In late summer, they hike to Willow’s secret spots—her “faerie farms”—hidden in the deepest old-growth woods. Liam is always amazed whenever they come upon hundreds of chanterelles, entire orchestras of miniature yellow trumpets poking up amongst the roots of the trees. How Willow remembers their location each year, with neither map nor compass, baffles him. They fill five baskets each, then thread the mushrooms on fishing lines hung around the van to cure. Afterwards, she fries some in butter and serves them on a bed of brown rice, but Liam always picks his off. Chanterelles taste too much like the forest, too much like how his mother smells—of faint peach and nuts and dirt. When the curing is done, Willow drives to high-end French restaurants in Seattle, Vancouver, and San Francisco and sells them by the bagful at cut rates to the elated chefs who meet them in the alley during their cigarette breaks. But after they buy food and replenish Willow’s sabotage supplies, there’s never much left over.

  Liam tears the paper back to reveal a dream catcher, identical to the one he got last year, woven by Willow with colourful threads crisscrossing a few thin boughs of cypress. Noting his limited enthusiasm, Willow launches into a familiar tirade on modern toys and comic books, “Which were invented by media corporations and plastic death merchants.” Liam mumbles his thanks and sets about packing the van. Before they set off, he claims he has to pee and sneaks off into the trees, where he viciously stomps the dream catcher to bits upon the mossy forest floor.

  It’s his first betrayal. His first rebellion. One she doesn’t even notice. Though she talks constantly of Liam’s bright future and worries aloud about whether there’ll be any unspoiled woodland left for him to enjoy as an adult, he counts weeks between the times that she actually focuses her green eyes on his face or listens to what he says. For this reason, every Halloween (a holiday she actually observes, dragging him to the same party at the Earth Now! Collective house in Vancouver each year) Liam has dressed up as a tree—a Douglas fir, in fact, her favourite species, wrapping himself in grey cardboard bark and branches, adorning himself with pinecones carved from her wine corks and with construction-paper needles that he’s painstakingly cut out himself. He wears the costume in the hopes that his mother will finally see him. It’s never worked.

  And so that year, Liam decides to start dressing up as a lumberjack.

  LIVE AUTHENTICALLY

  TO HIS RELIEF, a noise rescues him from the quicksand of memory: his air compressor, set near the scaffolding ten feet to his right, roaring to replenish its tank pressure. It’s his machine—this Liam confirms by its unique patina of dents and scuffs. But why is it here? he thinks. Did I bring it? Yes. He and his helper Alvarez carried it from his van to the house this morning. Then where’s Alvarez? Hadn’t they raised the scaffolding together? Put rubber booties on its feet to protect the floor’s finish?

  When the compressor shuts off, Liam’s eyes follow the scaffolding up to the patches of exposed insulation high above him. He and Alvarez had been tearing out the teak tongue-and-groove ceiling—just imagine the jokes carpenters make—and replacing it with Liam’s signature reclaimed boards, despite the fact that the teak was flawless and only ten years old. Once every spring Liam places a small ad in The New Yorker—one of the strange, ill-designed ones near the back:

  GREENWOOD CONTRACTING:

  RECLAIMED WOOD. CUSTOM WORK.

  LIVE AUTHENTICALLY.

  Eight meaningless words that are enough to keep his phone buzzing as constantly as a pair of barber’s clippers. Who knew that the Olympian-rich crave the A-word as desperately as they do, that they want their houses to look like spaceships on the outside and Depression-era factories inside. Regardless of their reasons, Liam happily obliges them, and reclaimed wood has become his bread and butter. He’s strapped on his tool belt for 406 consecutive days, no days off, and sleeps on a thin foam mattress in his contractor’s van (his home since losing his house in Fort Greene in the lead-up to the housing market crash), which he parks near his current job site. Perhaps it was his rootless upbringing in Willow’s Westfalia, but Liam is most content in this itinerant state, living one step ahead of his past. And carpentry—with its endless measuring and hammering and cutting and sanding and moving on to the next job—leaves little opportunity for his memories to intrude upon him, which is just how he prefers it.

  The reclaimed boards piled against the nearby wall are sun-silvered and scribbled with the marks and checks of age, and Liam remembers pulling them from the old barn at his great-aunt Temple’s farm outside of Estevan, Saskatchewan, where he spent a summer as a boy. Temple and her partner had no offspring, so Liam inherited their worthless land after they died. Because he couldn’t sell it and he isn’t the farming type, Liam has bee
n pulling its structures apart over the years, board by board: the house and its miles and miles of fences, which were all rebuilt in 1935 after a cyclone razed the property during the Dust Bowl. Liam will invoice the owner of this house—a distant descendant of the Rockefellers—twenty grand for such premium material, and the guy won’t bat an eye.

  Except Liam won’t be billing anyone if he doesn’t get himself fixed up and finish the job. Mercifully, the burning in his tailbone is gone and much of the fog from hitting his head has cleared, though his legs are still unresponsive. But he takes the prickling sensation in his hamstrings as a sign that the damage isn’t permanent. Probably a cracked tailbone or at worst a broken pelvis that’s pinching nerves—two injuries he’s witnessed other guys suffer on the job.

  He rests on his back for a moment and tries to assemble a plan. The radiant heat that would normally warm the concrete floor has been set to a minimal temperature for the off-season. And this house sits upon a fifty-acre headland of oceanfront property, perched on a cliff that’s three miles from the main road, so the mail is likely delivered to a rural box somewhere. Which all means that nobody will be turning up here to save him anytime soon—probably not until spring. Liam lifts his head again to examine the room, and the large heap of off-cuts jumbled next to his DeWalt mitre saw tugs at his memory: Alvarez wasn’t looking well today, his eyes livid with wormy pink veins. All his cuts were off by a good eighth of an inch, sometimes more. He was wasting good wood—wood Liam drove to fucking Saskatchewan to get—so he sent Alvarez to the van for the rest of the day.