Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  Whenever Liam requires a carpenter’s helper, he places an ad in a free weekly and contacts the guy who sends him the most crudely written email. He hires drunks, ex-cons, addicts, headcases. Most last only a few weeks, until they get money in their pockets and disappear. This practice of charitable hiring is at least partially attributable to some hippie do-gooderness inherited from Willow—or from Temple, who once ran a kind of soup kitchen out of her farm. Sometimes he wonders if it’s also his attempt to atone for his own wasted years. Whether he’s benefitting these hard-luck cases or simply offering them more money to destroy themselves with, Liam isn’t sure. But he prefers the company of those for whom life hasn’t been a cakewalk. They say more interesting things—and seldom comment upon the scorched mess he’s made of his own life.

  Alvarez has been with him for six months and he’s a good worker. He’s a gambler, though. Does it on his phone, which is even worse than in a casino because it’s always with you, beckoning from your pocket. Some paydays Alvarez has already lost his week’s wages in the van before Liam drops him off at his mother’s house in Queens. Which means he’s in the van right now, waiting for Liam to finish work and drive him home. So all Liam needs to do is crawl out of the house and down the driveway to his van. Liam even has another phone in his glove box, a prepaid one that he uses whenever he goes to Canada. That settles it. While he fears that crawling could cause the burning to return and knows moving around could make his injury worse, he has no other choice.

  Liam sucks in a ragged breath, flips himself onto his stomach, and slithers a few feet on his elbows, the claw of his titanium hammer—a gift from Meena during the early days of their relationship—screeching against the concrete, his steel-toe boots like barbells laced to his feet. Already breathing hard, he shucks the tool belt from his waist to ease his progress, and a few strings of brad nails spill out across the floor. He vows to pick them up once his legs come back, because no matter how sloppy his life has become, he’s always left his work sites immaculate.

  Since the house is embedded in a low cliff that overlooks the Atlantic, the living room is sunken, so he’ll need to ascend two flights of shallow concrete stairs, a dozen steps in total. His arms are already weak from nailing reclaimed boards to the ceiling all day, so he barely climbs six steps before he’s sweating and gasping for water. The pipes will surely be dry, and if he ventures down into the basement to flip the water main he may never climb back out. Of course Liam has a few flats of Red Bull in his van. He drinks nine or ten daily because he despises black coffee and his stomach can’t digest lactose—Willow was the same, with her homemade soymilk and goat cheese crumbled over kale salads. The fact that Liam escaped five years of wanton drug use only to be left with an unquenchable thirst for these ridiculous caffeine-loaded sugar bombs seems half blessing and half curse, depending on the day. His old Narcotics Anonymous group was rife with such secondary addictions: most of them were pack-a-day smokers, or at the very least they drank coffee like air-traffic controllers. There was a tacit agreement among them that these lesser vices didn’t require kicking, because people like them would never really exist free of need.

  Liam manages to climb the last six stairs on his elbows, and after much struggle he flops onto the front landing of the house. He rises onto one hand, arching his back, and strains for the handle before dragging the heavy plate glass door open. The late fall air is frosty, almost viscous, and it’s later than he thought, the frail sun sinking below a tidy congregation of rare elm and magnolia that some top-dollar arborist planted around the house.

  He drags himself out along the brick path, his bare elbows digging into the freezing pavement. When he reaches the rust-coloured octagonal paving stones of the driveway proper, he can see his white contractor’s van parked about a hundred yards in the distance, near the maintenance shed. Liam calls out for Alvarez but none of the van’s doors come open. Maybe he’s sleeping. Or, more likely, gambling on his phone with his headphones in.

  The sight of how much farther he needs to crawl with only his arms to propel him forces Liam to lay his face on the cold ground for a moment in despair. In his spent shoulders and buzzing spine, the years of toil, labour, and hard living are finally settling upon him. He’s never been so exhausted in his life. While he rests, he senses a curious wetness in his pants—a ticklish trickle. He spins onto his back, reaches down, and slips a juddering hand under his tool belt, behind the fly of his Carhartts, and his fingers emerge slick, pungent with the sour reek of urine. He hasn’t wet himself since his days of chasing a dozen oxycodone with an eight-pack of Lucky Lager.

  He needs to keep moving or else he’ll start remembering again, so he flips back over and continues his excruciating commando crawl through the half-frozen leaf mulch. He’s always treated his past like an enormous trailer that he’s towing behind him, one that will overrun and crush him if he ever dares come to a stop. But even though he’s crawling as fast as he can, he can feel his mind begin to sputter and slow, and soon he has no other choice but to get run over.

  JOURNEYMAN

  WHEN LIAM TURNS sixteen, Willow treats him to a rare dinner at an actual restaurant. “It’s time we get serious about your career plans,” she says, while he regards her skeptically over the steak he’s ordered just to disgust her. “You don’t want me dragging you around forever, do you?”

  His mother has always hoped he’ll be an artist, a nature poet, or a hippie mystic like the wide-eyed men she entangles herself with. Or better yet, a fire-breathing academic: a Marxist sociology professor or a bearded tree biologist, or, best of all, a mad-dog environmental lawyer, dedicating his life to pro bono skirmishes with lumber conglomerates and Big Oil. But Liam has never cared about politics. Or art. Or immaterial thought. From an early age he admired working people, especially those who live by their own labours like his grandfather Harris and his great-aunt Temple. Liam has considered logging, just to piss Willow off, except he knows the feller bunchers do all the work now, and a whole forest can be levelled without anyone so much as touching a piece of bark with their hands. So when Liam informs her of his plan to apprentice with a journeyman carpenter and take classes to earn his ticket at the local community college, Willow’s face falls and she asks for the cheque.

  “I just don’t know why you feel the need to assume this working-class identity,” his mother says two months later, while he’s studying provincial building codes by flashlight in the van after they bed down.

  “I need to work, Willow,” he says exhaustedly. “What part of that is an assumed identity?”

  “There are many kinds of work, you know,” she says. “What I do is work. Important work. Maybe the most important work there is.”

  “If you count ruining other people’s livelihoods as work,” he replies, flicking off the flashlight, “then sure, you work plenty.”

  At eighteen Liam earns his ticket, leases a half-ton truck, and starts his own skylight installation business, which immediately booms. Within a year he’s putting in skylights all over British Columbia. He expands, hires guys twice his age, buys trucks and fills them with lockboxes of the finest German power tools. At twenty-two he buys a five-bedroom house in a Vancouver suburb called Langley and riddles its roof with skylights, while out back he installs a barbecue as big as a grown man’s coffin.

  Luckily for Liam, very few contractors do skylights because the insurance is a killer. The truth is that all skylights leak, eventually. Liam does five hundred rushed jobs in a two-year period, leaving a trail of leaky—or soon to leak—installations littered across the province. But if nothing else, Willow taught him how to excise himself from complication, how to drive off and never look back. When Liam tears his rotator cuff and won’t let himself take any days off to let it heal properly, one of the injury-addled old-timers on his crew offers him oxycodone.

  Perhaps it’s another dark inheritance from Willow, but there has always been this screaming greed in his neuroreceptors, this proclivity for chemic
al rapture, and, worse, repetition of that rapture. First came the sugary corporate sodas that his mother outlawed, which he’d steal from service stations when they stopped to fill up and sip secretly while she drove; then her weed, which she offered freely once he turned the ripe old age of thirteen; then, for a short time, cigarettes and booze, both of which she denounced, though she used them copiously herself. Nothing, however, could compare to the glorious melt of an oxy in his stomach, its warmth spreading through him, leaving him soothed and forgiven and secure in a way he’d never been before. It’s like falling in love. Or how love is advertised to feel but never actually delivers. Liam is soon taking a few pills daily and working eighty-hour weeks without any discomfort at all.

  But when the insurance adjustors finally catch up with him and repossess his house, his fleet of trucks, and every tool he owns, Liam tips into a spiralling, unbounded addiction that burns through his remaining savings like a wildfire. Dopesick and broke following a short jail stint for possession, Liam moves back into the Westfalia. By this point, Willow is in her early sixties and has settled into more benign forms of activism: printing pamphlets at Kinko’s and leading email-writing campaigns. She drives Liam to one of her faerie farms, and for the first week of his detox he’s completely mute with shame. Fortunately, she leaves unmentioned her previous warnings about the perils of free-market capitalism as well as his unwise choice of career.

  To keep his mind occupied, she plays him some old records she has of a man reading poetry. “These were your grandfather’s,” she says with an uncharacteristic solemnity. “I’ve had them for years, but I never put them on for you as a kid because I thought you wouldn’t like them.” Though the poetry is mostly unintelligible to him, the lilting rhythms of the man’s voice soothe his shredded nerves, and in time Liam’s minute-to-minute existence grows nearly tolerable. After a month of Willow’s nettle tea, her chickpeas, her soymilk, her sandalwood incense, her bland hippie wisdom, her poetry records, and, most restorative of all, many evenings spent among the trees, Liam is himself again. When he’s strong enough, they go chanterelle picking and earn enough money to buy him a pair of steel-toes and a good tape measure, and he signs on to a condo construction crew in Vancouver, building foundations. It’s belittling work, the lowest circle of hell as far as carpentry goes: wallowing in muck five days a week, hammering together forms that will only be ripped down after the concrete has set, his fingers and toes permanently pruned like those of a kid who never leaves the bath. All to erect glass towers of a thousand designer closets, not one of which Liam could ever afford.

  Still, his mother’s furtive taste for luxury has left a lasting impression, and the guys on his crew jeer when Liam returns with his daily ten-dollar brie baguette purchased from a chic downtown bistro. That is until the owner of the bistro takes a liking to Liam and hires him to fabricate a reclaimed wood counter. In a panic, Liam hurries to the public library after work, where he pores over every book on fine woodworking in their collection. The best of them is written by George Nakashima, a master woodworker raised in the forests around Spokane, where Liam himself spent some time as a boy. Liam decides to simply rip off Nakashima’s designs and throws himself into the job, beginning by illegally dragging an old-growth piece of windfall fir out of Stanley Park with Willow’s van. It’s from Nakashima that Liam first gets the idea to “book match” his boards, by taking two successive slabs sawn from the same log, and then attaching the nearly identical pieces side by side, in mirror image, creating the almost uncanny effect of the spread pages of an open book.

  After he’s joined the live-edged planks with butterfly keys and applied numerous applications of tung oil and two coats of polyurethane, the wood’s unique figuring, burl, and honey-tinged grain pulse with life, like a solar system that has been frozen for centuries within the wood and is only now being revealed. It’s a piece of delicate yet bomb-proof beauty, and the bistro owner claims that the installation doubles his business. Certain design bigwigs view Liam’s work on their computers, and a month later he’s got his own apartment and has quit foundations to do fine woodworking full time. He remodels restaurants, craft breweries, and cafés, outfitting them with reclaimed lumber: old, forgotten wood previously left to languish. He dumps his earnings into an account he can’t access without his mother’s co-sign, and quells any chance of relapse through incessant toil.

  Soon after, he’s flown to New York by a group of investors to redo a popular café in Park Slope. While he works, he overhears the café’s young patrons lament their student debts, their failing indie bands, their useless Ph.D.s, their unpaid internships, and at twenty-eight Liam already feels ancient, like some mythical Canadian forest creature that has errantly wandered into a metropolis. The café’s employees—with their old-time canvas aprons, linen work shirts, perfectly distressed boots, and beards aromatic with organic detangler—look as though they’ve stepped from the pages of a Steinbeck novel. Still, Liam doesn’t judge them. Times are hard. Not hard like they were in the 1930s, when his aunt Temple ran a soup kitchen on her farm, but hard differently, even in a wealthy place like New York. And during hard times, people crave the consolations of other hard times, whether those of the past or of an imagined ruined future, to ease the pains of the present they’re stuck with. He’s no expert, but in his opinion these young people have been left to pick over the table scraps of Willow’s generation, and if Liam didn’t have a trade and hadn’t been born a Greenwood with tree sap running in his veins, he’d be just as lost as them.

  When the café is finished, he’s contracted to build several book-matched conference tables for various corporate offices in Manhattan, including Holtcorp, Shell, and Weyerhaeuser—companies that Willow warred against all her life. It isn’t until he’s been living in New York for two years, and he’s renovating yet another Brooklyn craft brewery with some expensive old-growth redwood, that he meets Meena Bhattacharya, who’s helping the owner, her long-time friend, make decor decisions. Though they’ve been introduced, Liam buries his nose in his work whenever he sees Meena, who is lovely in a hundred ways previously unknown to him.

  “Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?” she asks Liam one day while he’s bent over his table saw, preparing to make a finicky cut. “What if you touch the blade? You won’t make any more beautiful things without fingers.”

  “This thing eats gloves for breakfast,” Liam says, pointing at the saw blade. “And gloves can make you careless, so it’s better to work without them. Also, I like to be close to the wood.”

  The next day she asks him to meet her for coffee after work, and they sit in a busy café cramped together at a counter that Liam once built, though he’s too shy to mention it. It’s the first time he’s properly sat down—other than to shit, drive, or fly—in months. “I’m happy to see that your hands are still intact,” she says, prompting him to examine hers, which are similarly callused and corded with sinew. He learns that she’s the first-chair viola of the Los Angeles Symphony, and has been booked for a six-month stint of performances at Lincoln Center. She’s clever, funny, and outspoken, though all her political views seem perfectly reasonable, or at the very least grounded in fact. She grew up as an only child of aspirational parents in a suburb of Delhi. “I chose the electric guitar, and my parents chose the cello,” she says dryly. “My mother actually called the viola a compromise.”

  The next weekend, Liam takes Meena to the Museum of Natural History to see the cross-section of a giant sequoia that was cut from a forest where he and Willow often camped. During the subway ride he tells Meena about his mother for the first time, making her activism sound more idealistic than fanatical, and her distracted parenting more eccentric than hurtful. But at the museum, he’s disappointed to discover that the sequoia has been varnished over, so they can’t smell the rich tannins in the naturally rot-resistant redwood that he’d been describing. Meena is impressed nonetheless, and afterwards invites him back to her apartment for the first time.

&n
bsp; Each weekend over the following months, Liam and Meena take drives upstate to fetch reclaimed materials for his jobs. They pay farmers for weather-beaten planks or beams, then load them into the van while the farmers regard them like they’re escaped mental patients. At first, she’s game enough to take up a nail-puller and help bring down some old fences and stables, but after she gouges her thumb sufficiently to require a tetanus shot and nearly has to cancel a performance, she’s content to perch on a fence rail and watch him work.

  “I’m not a big fan of the term ‘reclaimed wood,’ ” Meena says one Saturday as they’re headed back to the city.

  “Here we go,” Liam says, reaching over to squeeze her knee to show he’s only kidding.

  “It begs the question: reclaimed from what? Or, more specifically, from who? The answer is from people who are using it wrong. Poor people. People with no taste. People who don’t deserve it.”

  People like me, Liam thinks but doesn’t say.

  “Why is it that the rich always want to buy back the few things they’ve allowed the poor to have? Is it to remind them that nothing is theirs, not truly?”

  Yet despite Meena’s strong opinions, she couldn’t be more different than Willow: she’s disciplined, rooted, slow-moving, thoughtful, and chemically conservative—a single glass of white wine the most reckless inebriation she’ll ever submit to. Liam loves how, immediately upon entering his van, she always plugs her phone into his stereo and floods his ears with music. Despite her classical training, she can’t bear to hear orchestral pieces on her personal time. Her great love is sixties soul, which she belts out while shimmying in the seat beside him. “Be My Baby,” “Baby Love,” “Baby I Need Your Loving.” For someone who claims to be delaying motherhood until her career is established, he teases, it’s an unsettling amount of babies.