Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “We’ll be quiet,” Mr. Holt says, his eyes flickering as he brandishes a bouquet of purple daffodils. “Let’s go greet the future, shall we?” He throws open the door and strides to the master bedroom near the back.

  As they approach the door, Mr. Holt removes his hat and tightens his tie. “Euphemia, darling, it’s R.J.,” he says in a softened voice, his ear pressed against the wood while rapping it with his chunky class ring.

  Silence.

  “She and the child may be sleeping, sir,” Lomax says softly.

  “Oh, there’s no harm in just a peek,” Mr. Holt says, delicately trying the knob, which is locked. He raps again.

  After the tenth unanswered rap, Mr. Holt’s good mood fouls, like a boy who’s run joyfully out into a field with his new balloon and immediately let go of its string. “Where’s the damned key?” he asks, examining the lock.

  “The locks in this place are old, sir; every door has a different one.”

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Mr. Holt shouts. “What do I keep an ogre like you around for? Certainly not for conversation, I can assure you of that.”

  Lomax sets down the gifts and aligns his shoulder so that it will connect squarely with the door. He takes a short, awkward run and strikes the oak panel, which is sturdier than expected, and a screeching noise sounds out as the jamb pulls away from the frame. Exploding into the room, Lomax feels an awful ripping sensation run up his spine, and immediately collapses, nearly vomiting from the lightning that’s now crackling up his vertebrae and forking into his brainstem.

  “They’re gone,” he hears Mr. Holt say.

  On all fours, Lomax forces his eyes into focus. The bed where he last saw Euphemia nursing the child is now empty. Beside it, the French doors that face the back woods yawn open.

  “Women can behave curiously after a birth, sir,” Lomax manages to say while rising with tremendous difficulty to his knees. “They do odd things. Lavern saw ghosts. But Euphemia is likely just out for a walk in the woods.”

  “In the snow? With a newborn?” Holt yells. “This isn’t one of your twenty worthless whelps, Mr. Lomax! This is my only child she’s stolen!” In a rage Mr. Holt demands an immediate search of the grounds, and Lomax limps for the telephone.

  While they await the search party, which Lomax raised by claiming that one of Mr. Holt’s guests has gone missing, Lomax hobbles to the servants’ quarters to question the cook and the maid, who both haven’t seen Euphemia since early the previous evening. It’s just shy of noon by the time the groundskeepers and groomsmen arrive from Mr. Holt’s mansion in Saint John, as well as a handful of trusted men from the Holt steel mill. After the party is assembled, the game warden leads them into the woods carrying a silver bugle. They search throughout the afternoon, and much to Mr. Holt’s annoyance, Lomax’s injury prevents him from joining them for any duration. Just as the dark starts to filter into the trees, Mr. Holt approaches Lomax on the second-floor terrace that overlooks the property.

  “You visited Euphemia last night, did you not?” Mr. Holt says.

  “I did, sir,” Lomax replies. “Around seven. To check on her condition.”

  “Did she mention any second thoughts about our agreement?”

  Lomax feels his heartbeat stutter to a stop. “No, sir. Nothing like that,” he says tightly. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” Mr. Holt says, nodding. “But it turned out to be clever thinking on our part, didn’t it? Bringing her here?”

  “It did, sir,” Lomax replies, his heart kicking into gear once again. When Mr. Holt first insisted that Euphemia give birth at his estate, Lomax knew that it wasn’t just for its privacy—it was because Mr. Holt had calculated that if she did reconsider their arrangement, there would be nowhere for her to go.

  “And she can’t possibly get far in her weakened condition, sir,” Lomax adds. “Especially not with a child weighing in her arms. I expect we’ll locate her shortly. She’ll come through this just fine.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure,” Mr. Holt says. “And has there been any sign of her book?”

  “Book, sir?”

  “That journal she was always writing in,” he says with bald disgust. “It wasn’t in her room—I searched it myself. Have you seen it?”

  “No sir,” Lomax says. “She must have taken it with her.”

  At this, something in Holt shifts: his eyes lower and he acquires an unsettled expression, as though he’s reading some chilling passage written in the grain of the terrace’s woodwork. “I’m not sure you understand, Mr. Lomax,” he says in a hesitant, shrivelled voice, “that while writing in that book of hers, Euphemia could have recorded certain…acts. Intimate acts, if you gather my meaning, that we engaged in—quite willingly, I should add. But it could be very damaging for me if the journal made its way into the wrong hands.”

  Lomax now recalls the bruises that have occasionally appeared on Mr. Holt’s girls, including Euphemia—especially during the early days of his infatuations with them. Faint rainbows edging out from under the cuffs of their long-sleeved dresses, or nosing up their necks from under the otter-trimmed collars of the coats he’s bought them. But since none of the girls has ever complained, Lomax has known better than to ask.

  “We’ll find her, sir,” Lomax vows. “And the book.”

  “Of course we will, Mr. Lomax,” Mr. Holt says darkly as he stares out into the fast-blackening trees, a trio of bats hurtling through their branches.

  THE BUNDLE

  IT KEEPS SILENT while Everett lugs it back through the woods. The faint tremble ceases as he walks—a development he finds encouraging. Maybe the quandary of what he’ll do next has already been solved for him, and all he’ll need to do now is dig a hole.

  He reaches his shack and feels a great relief when he sets the bundle down on the floorboards near the stove. Not that it’s heavy—his arms had flown upward when he pulled it from the tree, like when you lift a plank that appears to be solid walnut yet is in fact only cheap veneer—but holding it made him uneasy.

  He didn’t take up the bundle out of pity. He did it because if he let the forest take care of the child, as he’d planned, and its remains were discovered hanging from one of Everett’s nails, the Mounties would search the woods, and it would just be a matter of time before they found his shack. He’d done time for vagrancy during his tramping years, so it would be nothing for them to pin the child’s fate on him. And even if they didn’t, he’d certainly be turned out from his home, and the good life he’d assembled here would be lost forever.

  Everett builds a fire with some hot-burning ash logs and soon the stove splashes red with heat, which pulses outward in slow-rolling waves. For a moment he considers the small amount of effort that would be required to swing open the stove’s door, ease the bundle down upon the seething embers, and shut it again. Though he’d mostly served as a stretcher-bearer in the War, he’d fired upon his share of Krauts, many of them mere boys. And during his subsequent hoboing years he’d left numerous souls stabbed and beaten all over the interwoven rail lines of North America. So what difference would this little pile of ashes make in the grand scheme of things?

  But after deeper consideration, Everett worries the act could haunt him. Perhaps even worse than what he witnessed in France, which to this day can infect his dreams with visions of the shredded creatures he carted in his stretcher, their viscera dangling out and dragging in the mud, their tortured voices screaming for their mothers, as though they might appear with their sewing kits and stitch them back into something human.

  Everett leaves the bundle near the stove and beds down. Just as he begins to doze, the child starts wailing like a stepped-on cat. The cry, up close this time, pumps blood into his temples and rattles his skull. He knows what might make it quit: songs and rhymes about birds and stars and fairies and celestial things. Yet all he knows are infantry marching songs, bawdy blues tunes, and filthy limericks. When the cries intensify, Everett fetches the beeswax he rubs on his hands
after they crack in winter and pushes two dollops into his ears. Still the racket is audible, so he heads out into the frozen dark in just his red drop-bottoms to milk his remaining goat, an old, taupe-and-white nanny he acquired for a few pints of half-fermented syrup. Even though her last kid died of dysentery during the winter and her milk has dwindled since, she manages a cupful, and he scratches her twitchy ear in gratitude.

  Inside, he dumps the milk into an old teapot and presses its chipped spout to the infant’s tiny mouth. “This better do,” he says while purposefully looking the other direction, his voice hoarse after years of disuse. “Because there isn’t anything else, other than syrup, and that I need.”

  The baby quiets as it suckles and chokes with clenched eyes, and Everett permits himself a momentary examination: nostrils whorled like seashells, skin the tint of an unripe strawberry—a creature specifically designed to elicit sympathy, he realizes, before briskly averting his gaze. When the teapot empties, he re-bundles the child and dumps it back near the stove, vowing never to regard it directly again. Pity is the barbed hook that children catch you with, so it’s pity he’ll guard himself against until he rids himself of this curse.

  Tomorrow morning, he decides. He’ll take it into Saint John and leave it somewhere for someone else to find. Or maybe, with some luck, the child won’t survive the night. Or even better, he’ll wake to it vanished—just the solitude of his sugarbush and its velvety maples cloaking him once again. Stranger things have happened. It’s his experience that such curses can dissipate as unaccountably as they arrive.

  THE SLIPCASE

  HARVEY LOMAX’S BRICK bungalow in West Saint John is where he’s most untroubled, most serene, most himself. Since Lavern’s father first helped the newlyweds with the down payment—this after the accidental conception of Harvey Jr.—the house has been more than a dwelling. It’s Lomax’s oasis of meaning in an increasingly meaningless world, a monument to his steadfast dedication to his family. And it remains his only possession that he’d protect with his life.

  Tonight, after they get seven mouths fed and seven bodies bathed and tucked into seven beds, Lavern retreats to her radio serials, and Lomax to his study to smoke Parliaments in his favourite chair, the thickly cushioned one that offers his tortured spine a modicum of relief. Mere strangers when they married, Harvey and Lavern have forged a sturdy domestic alliance over the years, like two factory workers who’ve toiled elbow-to-elbow on the same assembly line for so long they no longer require words to communicate.

  Throughout the evening Lomax checks in with the game warden by telephone, and so far the search has turned up nothing. When Lomax calls Mr. Holt with an update, he sounds inebriated, and orders Lomax to search Euphemia’s apartment immediately. But since battering down that oak door earlier, the lightning strikes to the apex of his spine have been unrelenting, and he can barely take a breath without a wince. Desperate to carry out his employer’s wishes, Lomax pulls from his desk the box of opium-laced cigars that Mr. Holt’s doctor gave him. While they aren’t exactly legal, the doctor didn’t mind making a special preparation for such a valued employee. Lomax rips away the paper seal, takes a cigar, and runs it under his nose: scents of orchid, clove, manure. And beneath that a vivid memory of his childhood: the strange pipe of his father’s that he kept hidden in the coal scuttle.

  Also a large man, Walter Lomax was a drinker, an opium smoker, and a part-time magician with pockets full of marked cards and a wandering eye for women. “Our vaunted guest,” his wife would proclaim when he’d skulk home for Sunday dinner and slump in his armchair, tie loosened, guzzling water like a prizefighter in his corner.

  When he finally left them for good when Harvey was twelve, to make ends meet the boy was forced to take a job collecting on milk accounts for the Holt Dairy Company. As the youngest collector, the most hopeless cases in the foulest neighborhoods fell to him. Most collectors went in for intimidation, threats—overt or implied. Some squeezed the woman a little if her man wasn’t around. But Harvey didn’t need to. Even at twelve, already he struck an intimidating figure, and after his first month he’d recovered more than the firm’s best collector. Soon he was drawing a dollar a week in commission, money that kept him and his mother from destitution. Then, twenty years ago, Lomax was recruited by Mr. Holt himself. Violence is a language Lomax learned to speak early, from the drumming cadence of his father’s fists, and he quickly discovered the thrill to be had in roughing up a thief or a cheat—someone who’d gleefully shirked his responsibilities in a way Lomax would never dream of. Life had already dealt him so much pain; why shouldn’t he redistribute some back out into the world, if the situation warranted? And while the frequent violence has exacerbated his condition, the job has allowed him to provide for his family and prove that he’s cut from a markedly different cloth than his deadbeat father.

  So what harm could one measly cigar possibly do? Lomax thinks now as he snips off the end then lights it, taking only a modest puff. As the smoke spreads languidly through the fleshy closets of his lungs, he feels nothing—no euphoria, no life-altering rush—so he takes another puff of equal measure. Wary of overdoing it, he places the extinguished cigar back in the box and sits in his chair, waiting. Slowly, almost at the speed of a sunrise, he feels a balmy relief come over him, a bright sensation that hums sweetly through the length of his spine like water through a pipe.

  Feeling more limber than he has in years, Lomax drives to the low-rent apartment near the docks that Mr. Holt provides for Euphemia. He uses the landlord key to let himself inside, and just as he expected, she isn’t there. Though her mind is meticulously well ordered, she has always kept her place a terrific mess: a blizzard of fruit flies rear upward from food-ridden plates in the basin; jewellery dazzles in heaps around the dressing mirror; books lie splayed open on every surface, some stacked a dozen high, nested face-down like Ukrainian dolls. He touches the silk dresses and nightgowns that dangle in her wardrobe, and on a nearby shelf he spots framed photographs of her family, headed by a proud, coal dust–blackened man standing rod-straight beside a grinning, middle school–aged Euphemia, gap-toothed and already lovely. Lomax momentarily entertains the notion of his eldest daughter, Hattie, moving to the big city with even bigger aspirations, only to end up as the bruised plaything of a rich tycoon—a thought that upheaves his stomach. Then, tucked inside Euphemia’s flip-top desk, he finds the slipcase she keeps her journal in. Upon its spine is written:

  THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER

  But the slipcase is empty.

  Perhaps she somehow managed to make it back here to the apartment to collect the journal and has already skipped town? But she was always sentimental about her family, so why leave her photographs? Suddenly, the irrefutable absence of the journal, coupled with Mr. Holt’s inevitable disappointment at Lomax’s failure to find it, launches him into a frenzy. He yanks out drawers, flips the mattress, drags boxes from the closet, and tips over the desk, toppling a sewing kit and spraying needles and notions across the floor. Ignoring the clawing jolts in his back brought on by his savage actions, he pulls back a few loose pieces of wall panelling with hooked hands in case she’s tucked the journal in behind.

  Breathing hard, with blue sparks crackling behind his eyes and nearly unable to stand, he eventually finds his hat, takes up the empty slipcase, then locks the apartment door and limps to his car. There he opens his glove box and pulls from it the half-smoked cigar he’d brought along just in case his back acted up. But after imagining his father’s meaty face sucking on his opium pipe, Lomax pitches the cigar to the pavement and drives off.

  While tossing in bed that night, he worries that if the wrong person gets hold of the journal and blackmails Mr. Holt, it will be all Lomax’s fault, given that the affair’s concealment was his responsibility. And so he reassures himself that the search party will locate Euphemia and her baby by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, and that she quite likely has the journal with her. It
will be a chilly second night for them to spend in the woods, yet not fatally so. Mr. Holt will be furious with her for running, though his relief at recovering his child will win the day. And before the dust settles, Lomax will take the journal, unite it with its slipcase, then promptly dump them both in a roaring fireplace where they belong. And this whole irritating matter will be put to rest.

  BLANK

  AT FIRST LIGHT, Everett scoops the child into his wool coat, cinching his belt overtop to suspend it against him, before setting out for Saint John. The baby fusses some, then goes slack after a half-mile’s walk through the trees. He makes this trip as seldom as possible, and never overnight. The city always disturbs him: automobiles backfiring like German artillery; hard-browed loggers coming to blows outside taverns at midday; over-pruned trees living stunted lives on the boulevards. Usually, after trading his syrup at the general store, he’ll see a moving picture. Many times he’s sworn off the extravagance, yet during each visit to town he becomes fatigued by people, by their gawking and talking, and the shadowy theatre is a welcome relief, a place where people are his to examine, not the other way around.

  As he walks up Broad Street, everywhere he looks seems as good a place as any to abandon the child: the crook of the dogwood near City Hall, an old crone’s washbucket, a well-swept doorstep, the front seat of a polished silver automobile. But there are too many people about. Though literacy escapes him, he scans the dailies on a newsstand for images of a missing baby and finds nothing. Nobody wants this child, you dolt, he thinks. It was hung in the forest to die.

  Everett walks to the Catholic Charities on Waterloo Street, where a long queue of derelicts snakes out front and down the block. It’s there the nuns tell him that they don’t accept orphans from men. After that, he can’t just leave it on the street with so many onlookers, especially men who may recognize him. So with no other options, he veers crosstown, dodging some destitute boys hawking cigarettes rolled with aspirin and greasy napkins of roasted peas, and knocks on the door of a man familiar to him from his tramping days.