Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  When it opens, Everett finds that Howard Blank is just as ugly as he was ten years before. Blank also served in the War, though it wasn’t until after demobilization that they met, in a hobo jungle somewhere outside of Oakland. Blank had caught a squib round in the barrel of his Ross rifle during training exercises in England, and when he imprudently squeezed the trigger a second time, the gun exploded pressed tight to his cheek. He returned from the War without firing a single shot that wasn’t at his own face, and the shame of it left him nasty.

  “Greenwood. Pee-wee Morton said he heard you’d settled down somewhere,” Blank says with a mystified expression. “Sugaring near the old Holt place. That true?”

  Everett says it is.

  “He also said that you turned into the kind of man that parents tell stories about to scare their children. He wasn’t kidding.”

  “I sell Pee-wee a jug of syrup from time to time,” Everett says, tugging at his tangled beard for effect.

  On closer inspection, Everett notices that the years have been kind to Blank’s scars, smoothed them, his bad side now more like the texture of a cucumber than the cauliflower it once was.

  “Well, come on,” Blank says, cuffing Everett’s shoulder and pulling him inside. “In the old days you’d come knocking for one of two reasons: to bum money for whiskey, or to bum whiskey. So which is it?”

  “Neither,” Everett says, before sitting in a ramshackle chair worn shiny in places like a mangy deer.

  “Good, because I only stock seltzer these days. So if you’ve a problem with that you get out right now.”

  “I’m all done with drinking too,” Everett says, impressed that Blank has likewise managed to correct his doomed trajectory. Everett can recall mere scraps of the booze-flamed weeks he’d lodged in this house that Blank inherited from his father, an Anglican minister. Mostly, they drank and quarrelled to avoid the subject of the War.

  When Blank returns with two green jars, he spies the fleshy bulb of the child’s head at Everett’s neckline. “What you got there?” he asks.

  As they sip, Everett relates how the little curse came to him, and how he’d walked in to Saint John to be rid of it.

  “You see anybody in the forest who could’ve left it?”

  Everett shakes his head.

  “Some seamstress with a flock of kids already and empty cupboards,” Blank says. “Take it to the nuns. They’re looking for lambs to corrupt.”

  “Just tried. They don’t accept them from men,” Everett says impatiently. With the weather warming, the sap will run any day now, and if he doesn’t empty his collection buckets, they’ll overflow to the ground. The first sap is always the sweetest, and just a short delay will mean half his year’s income forfeited. By the time the maple branches nose with green buds, the caramel flavour will be spoiled completely. “Can you help me find a place for it?” Everett says. “I don’t care where. But I need to be rid of it by tonight.”

  “I ain’t taking it, that’s for sure,” Blank says. “How about that brother of yours? The lumber millionaire out West? Maybe he could?” This Blank relates with a glint of mockery, recalling to Everett’s mind how cruel he so often was, how vindictive he could be with your private details.

  Though he regrets much of his past, he regrets most of all that time he let slip that his estranged brother is Harris Greenwood, the Harris Greenwood, and that the sole person he’d shared this confidence with in his entire life was Howard Blank. “We haven’t spoke for eighteen years.”

  “Brothers are brothers.”

  Everett shakes his head. “Not after what he did. Not anymore.”

  “What kind is it?” Blank asks.

  “What do you mean what kind—”

  “A boy or a girl, you lunk!”

  Everett shrugs. “Don’t know.”

  “He don’t damnwell know!” Blank declares to the dingy pine ceiling.

  “It’s no business of mine.”

  “Well, if I’m going to help you, I need to know what we’re dealing with,” Blank says, extending his hands. “Come to Uncle Howie, little nipper.”

  Everett extracts the child from his coat and hands it off.

  “Looks like a girl to me,” Blank says, picking apart the cloth with his fingers. “But hooey!” he says, waving a hand at his nose. “She’s made a real mess of herself. You need to bathe them, you know? Change their flannels?”

  Everett shakes his head. “Not my concern.”

  “You’d best make it your concern. She’ll be a lot harder to get rid of in this condition.” Blank starts unwinding the brocade cloth, and from its folds he pulls a book. “How about this?” he says, setting the child down and flipping open the hard-backed cover. “An operator’s manual?”

  “What’s it say?” asks Everett, sidling up beside him.

  “Still an ignorant son of a bitch, huh?” says Blank, thumbing the pages. “Remember when we’d bum a few bucks for a meal and I’d have to read you some greasy dive’s menu?” Everett does—and also remembers Blank once trying to charge him a dime for this service, an offer for which Everett blackened both his eyes.

  Blank moves his lips while examining the words. “It’s a diary, judging by the entries. Woman’s penmanship.”

  “Will you just hurry up and say what it says?”

  “She’s trying to be clever, using plenty of two-dollar words.” Blank taps his temple proudly with his index finger. “But I know most of them.”

  “You think the mother wrote it?” Everett asks.

  “Looks that way.”

  “Any addresses? Maybe I could return the child to her.”

  “Nope, but hold on…there’s a name here.”

  Everett follows Blank’s index finger down the page, which to him is nothing more than a soup of curlicues and sticks.

  “R.J.,” Blank says with wonder, as though invoking a bit of scripture. “You figure it could be R.J. Holt? That’s his estate you’re squatting on,” he says, nodding excitedly at the baby.

  “I don’t care if it is,” Everett says. “Whoever had it doesn’t want it anymore. And neither do I.”

  Blank slaps the book shut and takes a long, thoughtful belt of seltzer. Everett can hear the carbonation sizzle in Blank’s mouth as he makes some kind of calculation.

  “Now see here, we need to consider this whole thing from multiple angles,” he says with a shrewd look. “Maybe I could take her in, seeing how she’s so abandoned and everything.”

  Everett’s mind flashes to the time he and Blank beat a pair of wine-heads who owed them a dollar over some dice toss, kicking them until they wet themselves. Which makes Blank about as suitable to care for a child as Everett is.

  “You said yourself you don’t want her,” Everett says, rising to his feet. “I’m going to just find the busiest corner in Saint John, plunk her down, then run like hell.”

  “Whoa now, you can’t do that! This poor little lamb? What if a cart horse stepped on her?” Blank says. “They’d blame you.”

  “I’d never know. I’ll be back on my sugarbush. Happy as a clam.”

  “Now Everett, you’re just lucky you came to me when you did,” Blank says warmly, clapping a hand on Everett’s shoulder. “Even after the Crash, I know plenty of good folks who are looking for a healthy tyke still wet behind the ears.”

  TO THE TREE

  BEFORE SUNRISE THE next morning, Lomax drives out to Mr. Holt’s country estate to check on the search party. The game warden meets his car in the driveway with a pale, stricken expression. He’s carrying an electric torch and wearing an oilskin slicker though it isn’t raining.

  “We discovered something in the trees,” the warden says. “We were waiting for you to confirm it before we woke Mr. Holt.”

  Lomax follows him into the woods, a white moon singing in the dark branches. While they walk, the trunks of the trees seem to draw closer and closer together, like a herd of grazing animals facing a predator.

  Soon the warden swings his ligh
t across the trees to illuminate what appears to be the form of a woman kneeling against a big maple, her arms outstretched to embrace its trunk, as though she’s begging it for help. Lomax kneels beside her, in an almost identical posture, he realizes, the thawing ground dampening the knees of his trousers. She’s shoeless, wearing only a nightdress. And when he draws back her pageboy haircut, he finds that animals have already been at her face. Her nose half gone. Cheeks chewed at. Eyes out. Flown away. Perhaps stashed somewhere in this same maple, watching him now. When Lomax drops his gaze, he sees rivulets of army ants marching down her arms, which are as pale as cod—and empty. The baby and the journal are nowhere in sight.

  “Any sign of her child?” Lomax asks, fighting to ignore the hot bolts in his spine that will only worsen the longer he kneels.

  “No. But there’s a good amount of blood soaked into the ground around her,” the warden says grimly. “And it appears she was crawling before she ended up at this tree. Some of our foxes must have done that to her and then carried the child off.”

  While the warden speaks, Lomax fits the story together in his mind: After having second thoughts about giving up her baby, Euphemia had fled the estate late the previous night. And as she ran, her bleeding returned. When she grew too weak to go on, she crawled up against this maple to gather her strength and bled out with her child against her breast.

  Oh, what a curse it is to live in these wretched times, Lomax thinks, as a blade of abject sadness pierces the thick armour he’s built up over the years working as Holt’s collector. He feels a sudden fatherly urge to comb Euphemia’s hair, to retrieve the fugitive parts of her face and reassemble them somehow. All that vivacity and intelligence—where has it gone? Into the tree? With a zap of fright, Lomax suddenly perceives this maple as a living being. A reaching, petrified soul. A witness perhaps. More alive than Euphemia or her child ever will be again.

  He groans while lifting himself to his feet, feeling a shard of regret for having deliberately left his cigars at home—a few puffs would have rendered all this so much easier.

  “I want the child’s remains found,” Lomax says.

  “There’ll be nothing to find,” the warden says, shaking his head. “The teeth of an adult fox can grind bones. Especially small ones.”

  “I don’t care, keep searching,” Lomax says. “And if she dropped anything while she was crawling, I want it found, too. Also, do me a favour and don’t tell Mr. Holt. I’ll speak to him myself once I fetch the child’s gifts from inside the house. We don’t want to make this any worse than it needs to be.”

  “What a way to go,” the warden says as he escorts Lomax back through the green-black woods to the house. “All alone like that.”

  Though Lomax agrees that this forest is indeed a lonely place, for a moment he’s heartened that at least Euphemia and her child had a sturdy tree to die against. He hopes it gave them some comfort.

  THE HOUSE

  FROM A GROVE of stick-thin poplar, Everett scans the butter-yellow, one-storey woodframe with its cedar-shake roof gone punky, the head beam already sagging, a rotten droop to the whole affair like a scolded dog. Inside, a shape swims to and fro behind dingy chintz curtains.

  “You got that child with you?” says a man’s voice from behind a rattling storm door as Everett approaches.

  “I do. An infant. Just a few weeks old,” Everett says, guessing.

  “Doesn’t have fleas or a cough or nothing, does it?” the man says through the screen, with skeptical grooves carved into the forehead of an owlish face.

  “She’s fit as a fiddle as far as I can tell. Got a good solid wail to her, too.”

  The man opens the door and invites Everett inside. He’s short, nearly a dwarf, his stubble is flaked with snuff, and he’s wearing shabby pinstriped bedclothes. Everett draws the child from his coat and cradles it awkwardly in his arms as the man regards her dozing face.

  “Look at that,” he says admiringly, and his joy reassures Everett. After he’d refused Blank’s offer to take the baby himself, Blank had contacted a couple he knew who’d recently lost a child while the woman was birthing it and had been wounded by the process, making another impossible.

  “Go on, give it here,” the little man says, extending his arms.

  As Everett goes to pass her over, one of the infant’s raccoon-like hands pops free and yanks at his beard. He can’t avoid feeling stung by this final reproachful gesture, after all he’s done for her. Immediately, the man presses the child tight to his chest as though they’re old pals.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” Everett says, removing his hat. The floor is threaded with animal hair and peppered with grit, almost filthier than that of his shack. Hadn’t Blank claimed the couple was well off?

  The man mumbles something affirmative that Everett can’t make out. Though he’s greatly relieved to be rid of the baby, he isn’t quite ready to make his exit. “Your wife ought to sew her some new suits,” Everett says. “I don’t think she cares for the wool one she’s got. It’s itching.”

  “Mmmhmm,” the man says, kissing her downy head. “I’ll take real good care of her. Clothes and food and such.”

  “I imagine you will,” Everett says noncommittally. Then he points upward with his hat. “And your roof leaks something awful. You should fix it before this place comes down on you.”

  The man’s eyes get hard. “Plenty of suggestions from a man who can’t be bothered to keep his own child.”

  Everett sets his jaw and breathes hot through his nose. This is why he avoids people. “Just care for her properly,” he grumbles, stifling his anger by turning to go.

  “Sure, I’ll care for her just fine,” the man says.

  “What about your wife?” Everett says, turning back. “You keep saying ‘I’?”

  “She’ll care for her, too,” he says flatly. “Hey, wait, where’s the book? Blank said the baby had a book with it.”

  “I nearly forgot,” Everett says, pulling the journal from his coat and pressing it into the man’s free hand. “If an airplane wrote my name in the sky I wouldn’t know,” he says, intending to lighten matters. “But I imagine this will be important to her someday. It may tell her about her kin or maybe her momma.”

  “Every child needs a keepsake,” the man says, snatching the book from Everett.

  Everett avoids taking one last look before he slips from the house.

  He can’t set out for home in the dark so he wanders downtown and into an opulent restaurant beneath a hotel. Seated at a chestnut-panelled booth, he orders a steak and a Bavarian beer to celebrate his regained freedom. The beer is served in a fluted glass that towers over his table and embarrasses him. He accidentally orders another when he tries to wave down the waiter to ask where the outhouse is located. After ten years of teetotalling, the beer hits him fast. He sits watching the waiter lay out the twinkling silver cutlery as though the various forks and spoons are the most precious artifacts in the world.

  But his meal is disturbed by thoughts of the little man and his house, which is even more dismal in retrospect. The powder of dried mud in the hall. The wallpaper dappled with mildew. The precariously saggy beams. And the man himself: callous, unkind. Why wasn’t his wife there? Especially in the evening? Was she still in the hospital? You’d think there’d be some excitement, securing a new child and all? And what if, Everett muses while sawing his bleeding steak, the little man didn’t intend to keep her at all? What if his true aim was to get the child for Blank, who’d then sell her back to Holt himself?

  Pity is a sentiment long lost to Everett Greenwood. Extinguished by those ruined men he carried during the War, by his brother’s betrayal, by the scrabbling nature of life—like a bright coin dropped into a black lake.

  But here it is again, back from the muddy bottom, shining in his palm.

  A CALLER

  AT FIRST, LOMAX pegs the caller for a crank, telephoning him at home on his day off, forcing Lavern to rouse him from a nap on the da
venport in the living room.

  A baby, says the caller, who identifies himself as Howard Blank. Maybe a month old. Discovered in the woods by some illiterate hermit.

  “What baby?” Lomax says, trying not to telegraph his shock. He squashes the receiver closer to his mouth so Lavern won’t overhear.

  “Don’t worry, I’m already fixing to return her to Mr. Holt personally,” the man says with false mournfulness. “For the reward.”

  “Under no circumstances will you contact my employer,” Lomax growls. “And Mr. Holt has offered no reward for anything of the sort, Mr. Blank,” he adds. “But tell me: Who found it again?”

  “Like I said, a hermit,” Blank answers. “I used to run with him after the War until we parted ways. A disturbed bastard. He taps maple trees for a living. He lives in a squatter’s shack on Mr. Holt’s estate. Just yesterday he found the child hanging from one of his nails.” Blank then goes on to describe an area a mere mile from where Euphemia’s corpse was discovered. Lomax had occasionally walked those woods before, and he dimly recalls seeing nails driven into some of the maples, which he’d thought nothing of at the time. “And now that he’s come to Saint John to sell the poor child into slavery, I’ve arranged to relieve him of it.”

  “The hermit wasn’t, by chance, also in possession of an object?” Lomax asks. “Perhaps discovered along with the child?”

  “A journal,” Blank declares proudly. “Wrapped in her blankets. It even mentions Mr. R.J. Holt in there. Seems like personal matters. That’s how I knew to call you, sir. You once collected a Holt debt from me—which I gladly paid, if you’ll recall—so I just knew you’d be concerned about someone sullying your employer’s good reputation. I might even remember the hermit’s name, if I had a proper meal.”