And all the gaps begin to fill.
WILLOW GREENWOOD
NOTHING—SHE DECIDES, AS she shows her driver’s license and signs the visitors’ register at the discharge desk of the Edmonton Correctional Institution—bothers her more than this word: GREENWOOD.
The mere sight of it is enough to pollute her with shame. How could such a natural construction (what two more pleasant words are there, really?) have become a shorthand for rapacious greed, treasonous betrayal, and serial Earth rape? And how could this colonial stain, this symbol of all that is clutching and parasitic and short-sighted about the human species, possibly have attached itself to her?
After signing in, Willow is escorted into a waiting area, where outdated magazines blanket a Formica coffee table and a water cooler gurgles nearby like a giant blue stomach. While outside the prison aspen leaves tremble in the sun and bearberries hum sweetly on bushes, there is neither a plant nor a scrap of natural light in this windowless crypt. A prison is the opposite of a forest, she concludes. Designed to sink the spirits and deaden the senses, to disconnect a human being from all that is crucial to life. If there is a fate worse than incarceration, she can’t imagine it.
She sits chain-smoking menthols, shivering in the air conditioning, her dress stuck to her like cling wrap, the sweat from her sunbaked journey pooling in the cavities made by her collarbones. And because there was quite likely dairy in the muffin she bought in desperation at that gas station, her stomach churns.
She drove her Westfalia, alone, for fourteen hours east from Vancouver to get here, over mountains that her father’s now-dissolved company clear-cut decades ago to amass his grotesque fortune. After reaching Alberta’s rolling grasslands, she passed cancerous oil derricks and freight trains that stretched across the entire horizon, dragging off the spoils of cut-and-run capitalism: wood and oil, factory-farmed grain, and coal. She’s heard it said that Greenwood Timber has brought down more North American old-growth than “wind, woodpeckers, and God—put together,” a joke repeated by every cigar-chewing captain of industry and every snivelling member of Parliament who ever came calling to her father’s Shaughnessy mansion.
While Willow knows that the cops bustling past the waiting area are merely incarcerators, and not investigators, she’s still careful to avoid eye contact. Two weeks ago, deep in the forested interior of British Columbia, she poured ten-kilo bags of white sugar into the gas tanks of three MacMillan Bloedel feller bunchers, permanently crippling the million-dollar machines responsible for murdering thousands of hectares of old-growth Douglas fir that had grown peacefully for millennia. It was her first direct action, her first attempt at sending a palpable message to the timber conglomerates and slowing the desecration of irreplaceable life—and it was like drinking a glass of pure adrenaline. Yet afterwards, while fleeing the cutblock, she passed a timber crew’s truck on the logging road. She’d removed her license plates before entering the forest, of course, but the road was narrow and her van passed close enough for the loggers to get a good look at her face and make a few obscene gestures in her direction. After returning to Vancouver, she immediately painted her yellow Westfalia a sky blue and bought a blonde wig and some large sunglasses. Still, she was certain that a black sedan had been following her during her usual supply run over the past few days. Perhaps it was Sage, the lover she broke it off with a few months back when he got needy. More likely it was RCMP investigators waiting for her to return to the Earth Now! Collective’s house in Kitsilano, where she’s been living for the past five years. Since joining the collective, Willow has written manifestos, done sit-ins, organized protests, and set blockades—all worthy forms of resistance, sure—but the group balked when she first suggested ratcheting things up to direct action. Sometimes she thinks the Earth Now! members would rather be shouting a clever slogan on the news than actually saving a living tree. But if she goes home now, she’ll risk exposing the others to police scrutiny—and everybody knows cops are in the pocket of industry, and would love any opportunity to break up the collective—so she’s been staying in her van ever since. Besides, Willow has never felt at ease in groups, with their quibbles and egos and petty dramas. And the best sacrifices, she believes, are always made in solitude, with not a camera in sight.
While a maximum-security federal penitentiary is the last place she wants to be right now, the deal she brokered with her father was too good to pass up. They hadn’t communicated for a year when she found his cryptic message waiting in the post office box she keeps in Vancouver. And though they pre-arranged to meet in the remote corner of Stanley Park where Willow planned to hide out until the heat dissipated, when his black Mercedes pulled up alongside her van, she was certain the Mounties had tracked her down.
“You’re not an easy person to find,” Harris said as his driver assisted him out of the car, an infantilizing act she once saw him fire a man outright for.
“Hard to find is how I like it,” Willow said, watching Harris orient himself to her voice and start toward her. Her father was born at the turn of the century, though he claims his exact birthday is a mystery to him (his way of avoiding parties, she’s long suspected), and despite his blindness, he’s always stayed physically strong—due to his insistence on cutting the firewood for the estate himself, even after the mansion’s baseboard electric heaters were installed and the fireplaces all bricked over. But his balance looked off, and his once-sandy hair had gone a duller, snowier white. After Greenwood Timber was dissolved, for years Harris did nothing more than track his land holdings and investments from his home office. And when he officially retired three years ago, he began spending half his time in San Francisco, where each morning he would take a taxi into the redwoods along with a guide to listen for birdcalls that he’d note down in a little book. But given this rapid physical diminishment, it was clear her father was not made for idle time.
Then, when he got close, he did the unthinkable: he reached out and embraced her. “You smell like a bunkhouse at one of my lumber camps,” he said after releasing her.
“And you smell like a retirement home,” Willow said, still perplexed by the gesture. “To what do I owe this honour, Harris?” Throughout her childhood, he had forbidden her to use the words dad and father, though naturally there was a phase in her teens when she made a point of sneering, “Anything you say, Daddy!” But he seemed to be making an effort at civility, so she decided to spare him her venom.
“Your uncle is due to be released in two days,” he said, exercising his long-standing distaste for small talk. “And given your unique relationship, I thought you might like to retrieve him.” She could almost detect a trace of jealousy in his voice, as if Harris wasn’t the one who’d engineered—and financed—their “unique relationship” in the first place.
When Willow was six, Harris promised her a quarter for every letter she wrote her uncle, Everett Greenwood, and even left a stack of pre-stamped envelopes in her desk drawer. Eager to buy her own Arabian jumper like the other girls at her private school, she wrote a letter every day, sometimes several. For ten years they corresponded from their respective penitentiaries: Everett from his maximum-security cell, and Willow from her father’s mansion. Initially, his letters came in a childish script, rife with grammatical errors and misspellings that she could identify even then. But over the years she watched his writing improve, like a slide projection drawn into focus, and in some sense they became literate in tandem.
Willow believed from a young age that even if her father’s sight were restored by some miracle, he still wouldn’t see her, not how a daughter needs her father to. Strangely, it was through her correspondence with her uncle that, along with enough money to buy her first thoroughbred Arabian, she gathered the kind of recognition she’d long thirsted for. Often reaching thirty single-spaced pages, and penned in a claustrophobic block print, Everett’s letters never delved into prison life. Instead, he discussed such riveting subjects as the proper method for tapping maple syrup, or ol
d movies he’d watched, or his readings of Homer, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Marcus Aurelius, or the pulpy novels of the prison library, from which he gleaned an overabundance of meaning. Willow treated her uncle more like a diary-by-correspondence than a real, living pen pal. She confessed her regret at not having a mother to braid her hair (her mother had been a wash-woman at one of Harris’s lumber camps and had died at Willow’s birth), and detailed her rare trips with her father to Greenwood Island, as well as her deep longing for a horse. When eventually, at sixteen, Willow’s life cluttered with friends and equestrian classes and boys, she ceased writing altogether. Everett sent three more unanswered letters before stopping as well.
It wasn’t until much later that she clued in to the oddity of paying a six-year-old to write to her incarcerated uncle, especially one serving out a thirty-eight-year sentence for some offence never spoken of. Any of her questions concerning the details of Everett’s crime would always erect a rampart of silence across the dinner table, or send Harris fleeing to his study, where he’d latch the oak door behind him, locking himself in with his Braille editions and LPs of recorded poetry. In her twenties, Willow asked a law student friend to look Everett up, and discovered that the particulars of his conviction were sealed by the Crown—a circumstance, her friend suggested, that implied an offence concerning a child or children. Willow left the matter alone after that. She’d always imagined the Greenwood family as a house built of secrets, layers upon layers of them, secrets encased in more secrets, and she’d long had the suspicion that to examine them too closely would be to pull the whole edifice down around her.
Her final conclusion was that Harris was too emotionally stunted to correspond with Everett himself, so he’d outsourced the task to her, which was typical of her father: he was adept at paying people to do his dirty work.
“Pick him up yourself,” Willow told him. “He’s your brother.”
Her father shut his sightless eyes for a moment and took a steadying breath, like a seasick man trying to overcome a resurgent bout of nausea. “I expect he’d prefer your company to mine,” he said in a muted voice.
“Well, I just stocked up for the rest of the summer. And I’m quite busy hugging trees right now, can’t you tell?”
“Ah yes, you and your trees,” Harris said, swivelling his neck, as though he could actually see the intricately needled cedars and firs intermingling high above them. “You’ve come to know them even more intimately than I ever did. Then why the self-deprivation? What you need to do is finish your degree. Get into government. Policy-making, Willow. I know that’s a dirty word to you, but it’s only if you get your hands on the real levers of power that you can create some actual change.”
How, Willow wondered, could anyone possibly believe in old-fashioned political change in an era like this? An era when the president of the United States is a lying ghoul, the rain melts your skin, the food is laced with poison, wars are eternal, and the world’s oldest living beings are being felled to make Popsicle sticks. “This whole sick system is in its death throes, Harris. And in my opinion, those holding the levers of power ought to be the first to get dragged down with it.”
“Oh, people said the same thing back in the thirties,” Harris said, waving his hand dismissively. “And they’ll be saying it forty years from now, mark my words. Time goes in cycles. Everything comes back again, eventually. You learn that at my age.”
Willow felt his dismissal harden her voice: “What you’ve destroyed will never come back, Daddy.”
Such a brazen insult would normally have jump-started one of his rages, and plunged their relationship into the ice water of another multi-year silence. But instead his lips pursed and his cheeks reddened, and if it hadn’t been Harris Greenwood standing before her, Willow might have thought he looked hurt. He turned away without another word, and she stood watching him scuttle to his car. The combination of his unexpected restraint and his geriatric gait prompted in her an odd sensation of pity.
“What’s it worth to you, Harris?” she called out.
Her father stopped and turned back toward her with narrowed eyes and a devilish half-smile. “Name your price.” Negotiation had always been his native tongue, the only language that ever truly reached him.
“The deed to Greenwood Island,” Willow said.
Harris laughed soundlessly; then, after he realized her sincerity, crumpled his grey eyebrows. When Willow was a girl, and only after a scorched-earth campaign of dogged lobbying, Harris would sometimes agree to take her on two-week retreats to the remote cabin on his private island—just the two of them, that was the deal, no assistants or employees. They took daily walks through the old-growth, Willow craning her neck in wonder and Harris listening carefully for birds. In the evenings they discussed botany and books and the war in Europe, and then listened to his poetry records before bed. Away from his office, Harris was a changed man. He never scolded her for chewing too loudly or lectured her on the critical importance of industry, and even made the occasional joke. Those trips were everything to her then: her only escape from the slow suffocation of their mirthless home; the only time she ever saw her father approach some form of contentedness.
Then came the Inquiry. She was eleven at the time, but she still remembers conclaves of slick-haired lawyers in the house at all hours, her father yelling into telephones with his eyes pinched shut. In the end, a special committee convicted him of collusion with the enemy for selling vast quantities of timber to the Japanese just before the Second World War broke out. Not only were many of his assets seized and divvied up among his bitterest competitors; he was—and here was his greatest defeat of all—entirely cut out of the enormous reconstruction profits to be had in post-war Europe. It was then he truly disappeared: as though to complement the loss of his vision, he lost his ability to be seen, to occupy space in the world. He became the phantom haunting their house, and they never set foot on Greenwood Island together again. If it hadn’t been for her horse and the letters from her uncle, Willow would have perished of loneliness.
“I’m impressed by your audacity, Willow, though I must admit that the island still holds some sentimental value for me,” Harris said. “It was one of the only bits of land those wretched cowards allowed me to keep. And it was quite a chore to acquire in the first place, you know. I had to arm-wrestle John D. Rockefeller to buy it!” The story was new to her, and she didn’t know if he was joking or if his mind was declining as rapidly as his body.
“So while I can’t give it to you,” Harris continued, “how about I let you stay there for as long as you like?”
It was wishful thinking to expect to bargain land away from Harris Greenwood, especially old-growth forestland. And because she’d been such a thoroughly uncooperative and disrespectful daughter, a wellspring of frustration and disappointment, he’d informed her years ago that he’d entirely written her out of his will. This small concession was better than nothing. And besides, the island would be the perfect place for her to hide out from the cops.
“Fine,” Willow had said, walking over to take her father’s hand and shake it.
It wasn’t until hours later, as Willow was preparing her simple dinner over the van’s propane stove, that she realized she’d just witnessed a legitimate miracle: she and her father had agreed on something.
IT’S GOOD TO MEET YOU
SHE HAS ALWAYS pictured her uncle as a wizened, tottering thing with an ankle-length beard. Who else but Rip Van Winkle could be expected to walk away from a thirty-eight-year prison sentence? Yet the figure who emerges two hours later from the holding cell, a mint-green chamber bounded by riveted, buzzing doors, is a surprise. Despite a mild limp that seems to originate somewhere on his left side, Everett is tall and solid like her father. He wears cheap, elastic-waisted pants, prison-issue Velcroed shoes, and an impeccably white T-shirt, still creased from its package. His angular face is handsome, if that isn’t odd to say, and his hair, an intermixed grey and black like iro
n ore, has been close-cropped to his neck—a style nobody wears anymore except cops and squares.
“It’s good to meet you, Willow,” he says, with his eyes glued to the floor.
Willow knows that given their years of correspondence, she ought to hug him, yet despite her father’s recent spasm of sentimentality, the Greenwoods aren’t huggers. So she shakes his hand, perfunctorily, as though she’s just sold him a used car. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
After some parole instructions from the discharge clerk, they collect his duffle and walk out into the sunshine. Willow exults in her liberation, though she can’t even fathom the ecstasy her uncle must be feeling at this moment. Still, his gaze remains fixed on the pavement a few steps ahead of him as they head toward the parking lot.
“This is some vehicle,” Everett says after they reach her Westfalia, examining the van’s roof-embedded tent. “Can you set up a camp in there?”
Willow nods proudly. “I call it my getaway van. It keeps me close to nature.”
“I could’ve used one of these in my time,” he says wistfully.
“Well, it leaks exhaust, so you have to drive with the windows open to keep from getting woozy, but it’s been good to me.” As they climb inside, she tells Everett about how she bought the van with money she earned tree planting the land that her father clear-cut in the twenties, and how she hasn’t accepted a cent of his death-trip fortune since she dropped out of college. She describes the month-long solo camping trips she takes each summer, bouncing from national parks to secret plots of land, swimming holes, and hidden hot springs. “It’s just me, a few sacks of rice, soybeans, and chickpeas, my sleeping bag, and the great North American forests as my own personal rec room.”
Greenwood Page 8