SUMTHING THAT COULDNT BE MINE
THEY RISE WITHOUT words, the exchange that concluded the previous evening weighing upon them. They drink hot black tea and eat the steel-cut oats that Willow soaked overnight to save time, then it’s five more wordless hours of driving through a grey fog that clings to the road, down from the mountains and into Vancouver.
In the city, she parks in an alley behind his parole office with curtains drawn over her van’s windows, and sits smoking menthols, wearing her wig and sunglasses. When Everett comes back out, she drives him to the sea-level airport and stops in the unloading zone as he gathers up his penitentiary-issue duffle. Willow climbs out to stand amid the ruckus of cars—many of them are black sedans, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it? Her lungs burn from the toxicity of the exhaust as she watches her uncle flinch like a doe each time the white belly of a jet screams overhead.
“You sure you have enough money?” she asks, even though she doesn’t have any to spare him, but it seems the proper remark to spur things along.
He nods, once again unable to look at her. “I’m fine in that department.”
“Just remember to be back in time to check in with your parole officer next week. I’m not driving all the way out to Alberta again,” she says, somewhat jovially, trying to superficially lighten the mood enough for her to escape without another emotional incident.
He nods again. “I don’t imagine this will take very long.”
“I never asked—what’s so important in Saskatchewan?”
“A woman I knew. I mean, well”—now he actually blushes—“it’s partially that. But it’s more that she’s got a book of mine. One I left with her years ago for safe keeping.”
“You’re going to fly to Saskatchewan and potentially break your parole because you loaned her a book? Must be some woman.”
Everett nods. “She is. And the book is important,” he says. “Of particular interest to you, I expect. In fact, if I can retrieve it, I’d like to give it to you. As a keepsake.”
“I lost my taste for books some time ago,” Willow says. “These days the forest and the sky teach me all that I need to know.”
“Your father always had plenty of books around. Braille and otherwise. I’m sure those will go to you eventually.”
“You mean Harris Greenwood’s collection of relics full of square wisdom that nobody needs anymore? No thanks. I’ll pass. I mean, what’s a bookshelf’s purpose, other than to quietly remind one’s guests of one’s superior intellect?”
“Suppose I do find this particular relic I’m talking about. How can I get ahold of you?”
“I’ll be unreachable for a while, I expect,” she says. “I’m going to set up on Greenwood Island, and there’s no phone or mail delivery there, just a shortwave radio. So send it to my father. I visit him every decade or so. I’ll pick it up then.”
Now Everett lifts his chin and their eyes catch the way people’s do before they part ways. Already he appears different than when she picked him up yesterday, wearier, hurt somehow. He’s swallowing a great deal and his eyelashes are damp. Could their years of correspondence possibly mean so much to him? This was how it had been with Sage, who professed a sudden, syrupy love after just a few months together. Perhaps her uncle is simply deranged, Willow concludes as she cordially shakes his hand, then watches him disappear into the terminal, a mere speck of life in a churning sea of being. Cut from the same cloth as her inscrutable father.
After she merges her Westfalia, turtle-like, back into the hurling tumult of the midday rat race, she decides to terminate it—the flutter—if this time it somehow persists. Acid rain, rampant inflation, police firing on students, mindless conformity, looming economic collapse, overpopulation, suburbanization, species extinction, wanton deforestation—the last thing this world needs is another resource-sucking human showing up to ruin it further. Not to mention the fact that she’s quite likely under police investigation and there are still about three trillion or so trees left to defend. Those bags of sugar were just the beginning, and she doesn’t need a dependent to slow her down.
She lights a menthol and steers toward the harbour, where she’ll hire a barge to carry her van to Greenwood Island. As she smokes, a memory rises up, the first written exchange she’d had with her uncle, one of the handful of letters that she kept, stuffed in a shoebox somewhere in her van along with a few other trinkets from her childhood. She was six when she wrote it, and still possessed the child’s nerve to question why Everett couldn’t come to her birthday party and ride the pony her father had rented, why the judges and police wouldn’t let him.
I tok sumthing, was his near-illegible reply.
What something? she wrote back.
Sumthing that couldnt be mine.
Sure, he’d been kind to her, her strange, convict uncle. And there was a time when reading his letters was the only way for her to feel noticed as a child. But now that he’s rejoined the world and she’s felt the full brunt of his puzzling attachment and this fictional intimacy he believes they share, which comes complete with strange books he wants to give her and nicknames he’s invented for her without her knowledge, she doesn’t care if she never sees him again. In the end, it turns out that her mysterious uncle is just another Greenwood, needing her to be someone she isn’t.
THE CRY
THAT NIGHT, A sound reaches Everett Greenwood’s shack. Wheedling, incessant—impossible to ignore. Some nights, especially when it’s raining, he might hear the chuff of trains dragging coal to the scows at port in nearby Saint John, or the shriek of an animal either giving birth or facing death in these woods. But this sound hails from another world.
Twice he nearly takes up his kerosene lantern to go search out the sound’s source—to do what then, who knows—though mercifully, it drops off after an hour and he returns to sleep.
Just before sun-up, Everett sets out amid the last dregs of spring snow to prepare his taps, and he’s relieved not to hear it again. If he were questioned by some authority—some Mountie or judge—he could perhaps identify it. But another, more cowardly part of him maintains that it was nothing more than two maples rubbing in the wind, or a red fox caught in one of his rabbit snares.
It’s nearly April, and the maple woods are leafless and fresh with meltwater. Any day the sap will begin to run up from the deepest roots, and Everett’s taps must be set to bleed the trees of their sugar. He knows a wealthy man owns this forest, but he seldom visits his property, and only ever to hunt grouse and fox with his guests, their bugles blaring, their hunting vests clinking with rounds ten times the calibre required for small game. So it’s nothing for Everett to keep hidden.
He discovered these woods a decade ago after rolling off a train in a drunken stupor and waking up here. He spent years on the rails following his return from the War, a stretch of his life he prefers to forget; mostly he was drifting, blind drunk, robbing other hobos for pocket change, knocking at porch doors for food in exchange for splitting some firewood. During those years he’d often find himself standing on high railway trestles that swayed in the wind, daring himself to jump, imagining the relief he’d feel after his head came apart on the serrated rocks below.
But the solitary enterprise of his sugarbush has been his salvation, and he hasn’t touched a drop of liquor since finding it. Along with woodcutting and carpentry, Everett taught himself to tap syrup as a boy, and during the War he even fashioned some spiles from empty .50-calibre shell casings, hammering them into a few black maples during a cold snap near the Somme. Though the villagers had inhabited the place for thousands of years, their eyes flew wide when a thick, pungent sap came running. In Everett’s view, syrup is one of nature’s few gifts, a true benevolence, offered with no expectation of repayment.
Now he takes a deer path that runs along the belly of a wooded gulch, his boots sucking in intermittent stews of mud. He finds his first sugar maple, its silver-grey bark scarred by years of his tapping. He draws his auger an
d bores a fresh hole into its south side. The bark gives way and threads of blonde sapwood peel from the bit’s grooves. He takes a wooden mallet and knocks a steel spile into the hole—too deep or too shallow and he’ll miss the sap completely. He hesitates to admire his work before hanging a collection bucket and moving on.
He’s always preferred trees to people. Their habits and predilections are much easier to discern. And these trees are as good as they come: a thousand acres of the finest sugar maples that ever reared from the soil, with leaves that spread as wide as a giant’s hand, all running with a caramel-like sap so rich it requires minimal boiling. This year, after the sap runs dry, he’ll bottle his syrup, then exchange it in Saint John for oats, lard, sugar, flour, and a small roll of bills. A month’s work, at most. For the year’s remainder, he’ll laze by the brook, entertaining half-thoughts, watching seed pods and whirlers drift on the slow water. It’s lonely living at times, yet peaceful—and after a long life of toil and struggle, he feels deserving of such leisure.
He taps ten more trees then builds a small fire to fry breakfast: oatcakes dredged in last year’s syrup. He washes up then fords the brook and taps twenty more along its eastern bank. He’s just nearing the end of his circuit when he spies it: a bolt of brocade cloth, hung by a nail driven into his last maple, a grand, stately tree he’s tapped for years, one of his best producers, stout enough to take four spiles. As he approaches he notes the strained way the cloth hangs, and shoos away a greasy crow eyeing the bundle from a branch of the same tree. With a retch the bird settles on a slightly higher perch, unwilling to cede more ground than it must. Up close there’s a faint wriggle to the cloth, which could be from the breeze. Then a soft snuffle.
Just leave it, he thinks. The forest will take care of this itself.
Reluctantly he parts the folds and slides his leathery hand inside. There he finds warmth, breath.
He whispers: “Shit.”
HARVEY BENNETT LOMAX
ON THE MORNING of the big day, Harvey Lomax drives his employer over the frost-spangled streets of Saint John in his newest Packard Straight Eight. Because the rear seat is loaded with gifts, Mr. Holt has been forced to sit up front. For today’s occasion, he’s selected a pinstriped suit of modern cut—not the conservative tweed he normally wears—and has stuck a feather in his derby, plucked from a grouse he once shot in the woods that surround his country estate, the very place they’re headed. Despite Mr. Holt’s cheerful attire, after twenty years in his employ Lomax knows a sour mood when he sees one—something tense and roiling around the eyes—so he makes no chit-chat, and smokes his Parliaments in silence. Though they’re not long into the drive, his back begins to trouble him, a radiating numbness that prompts him to squirm and shift his gigantic frame behind the wheel.
“And how is your condition this morning, Mr. Lomax?” Mr. Holt asks, his stony eyes fixed straight ahead. “Those medicinal cigars my doctor prepared for you aren’t helping?”
“I haven’t sampled one yet, sir,” Lomax says, wincing as a swarm of fresh spasms begin to assault his spine. “I know what those medicines can do to a man. And I’d rather not go the route my father did.”
“Very stoic of you,” Mr. Holt replies. “But there’s no need to suffer.”
Harvey Lomax was a large baby, a massive toddler, and a downright mammoth child. One morning when he was eleven years old, he confessed to his father that he couldn’t get out of bed without lightning shooting through his back and forking out into his limbs. His father brought Harvey to a doctor, who tapped his joints with a tiny hammer and shined a light in his eyes, then claimed that other than his unusual height, there was no physiological cause for his discomfort. “Money well spent,” his father said bitterly, dragging Harvey roughly by the elbow back to their apartment.
But over the years, as Harvey grew ever bigger, the lightning sensation only worsened. Soon it was torturing him not just in the morning, but throughout the day. It became the kind of suffering that can’t possibly be described, the kind that drills into you a little deeper each day, the kind that makes you mean. He tried every remedy: heat and cold, balms and tinctures. And when all had failed, he learned to accept the fact that a body as large as his can’t possibly exist without a good dose of suffering, and that his lightning is just the tax he must pay in order to survive.
Yet size does have its advantages. When faced with his cabbage-sized hands and his hulking, nearly seven-foot frame, people veer from his path like sailboats from a freighter. And given the few vocational options available to men of his physiology, he’s been lucky to serve R.J. Holt personally for the past twenty years, handling his most sensitive matters. Whether it’s a tenant owing back rent on a Holt building, or a miner who’s snuck a raw diamond out of a Holt mine, or one of Mr. Holt’s girls acting indiscreet—it falls to Lomax to set things right. And at this function he has yet to fail.
“I’ve always wanted to be a father,” Mr. Holt muses gaily, after they’ve driven for an hour and the pavement has submitted to the gravel track that winds through the vast woodland surrounding his estate for fifty acres in every direction. “But my wife just isn’t up to the task. God knows we’ve tried. Of course yours doesn’t suffer from any such malady, does she, Mr. Lomax? What’s the latest count? Six?”
“Seven, sir,” Lomax says, clearing his throat. “The first was unplanned. And when we married, we hoped for just two more. But it turned out that Lavern and I have no trouble in the miracle-making department. If we as much as use the same soap we’re in the hospital nine months later.”
Holt offers a rare chuckle, which pleases Lomax, though speaking of his seven children also puts him in mind of the deep financial hole they’ve dug him into—a debt only recently consolidated into a sizeable mortgage on his house, a mortgage Mr. Holt has been generous enough to provide interest-free.
“Do you have any advice for me?” Mr. Holt asks. “One father to another?”
“Don’t have more,” Lomax says flatly. “And don’t spend money that isn’t yours.”
“Well put, well put,” Mr. Holt says, then he gets that fierce, faraway look that settles over him whenever he discusses his business affairs. “Yet I may soon share your financial woes, Mr. Lomax. If this Crash continues to have its way with my companies.”
Lomax knows it’s unlikely that the Crash poses any real threat to his employer. He inherited his vast fortune from his father, R.J. Sr., and despite Junior’s philandering preoccupations, he’s since grown the business and now owns half the province of New Brunswick: coal, steel, oil, both newspapers, banks, service stations, Automats, grocery stores, and shipping. It’s said that you can’t go for a Sunday stroll without inadvertently stuffing fifty cents into Holt’s pocket by the time you get home.
“And the child? You’re certain it’s well formed?” Mr. Holt asks.
“It is, sir,” Lomax confirms. “The mother is still recovering from some complications. But the little girl is as healthy as can be.”
“Good, good. Girl, boy—it doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to need someone to leave all this money to, aren’t I? If I manage to keep it?”
“You certainly will, sir.”
“And the mother?” Mr. Holt says some seconds later, in the lesser tone of afterthought. “She’s fully recovered, you said?”
Like many of Mr. Holt’s conquests, Euphemia Baxter began as his employee. After she caught his eye while cleaning one of his banks, he asked Lomax to install her in an apartment that he keeps for such purposes, and for six months he visited her regularly while his wife played bridge. Mr. Holt’s infatuation eventually flagged, as it always did, and he’d already moved on to another girl when Euphemia announced she was pregnant. Mr. Holt was unexpectedly pleased, both because of the prospect of an heir and because the pregnancy proved his theory correct: it was his wife’s defect that had so far prevented him from siring a child. Immediately a deal was struck, with Euphemia agreeing to receive a sum of money to carry the chil
d, which the Holts would then adopt. To avoid scandal, Mr. Holt suggested that Euphemia remain sequestered in her apartment until the birth. So over the course of her pregnancy, it fell to Lomax to bring her groceries, books from the library, and the ten-cent magazines she liked. Then, four weeks ago, mere days before the baby was due, Mr. Holt insisted that Lomax relocate her to his isolated country estate in preparation for the child’s arrival.
“She’s not entirely recovered, sir,” Lomax says. “There’s been bleeding and cramping, and she’s running a high blood pressure, but—”
“Dear Christ, Lomax,” Mr. Holt interrupts, waving his hand in front of his face to dispel the image. “Spare me the gory details.”
“She’s been resting for three weeks now. And she’s regained some of her spirit. The doctor said she’ll be fine as long as she stays in bed and doesn’t move around.”
“Good, good. You’ll see to it that she does, won’t you, Mr. Lomax?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“And when Mrs. Holt returns from her mother’s in Connecticut next week,” Mr. Holt goes on, “we’ll formalize the adoption papers and bring the child home with us to Saint John.”
Lomax parks the Packard on the cobblestones of the country house, which sits amid a picturesque expanse of trees, brooks, and knolls that Mr. Holt pays a game warden to keep well stocked with fox and grouse for him and his guests to shoot each summer.
Lomax stifles a groan as he lifts himself from the car, a cascade of low-grade voltage spilling through his back and running down into his thighs. He stifles a second groan when he stoops to gather the gifts from the rear seat.
“The cook isn’t up quite yet, sir,” Lomax says while examining the darkened main floor windows as they approach the house.
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