Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “You give me a name,” Lomax says evenly, “and you’ve got yourself twenty dollars.”

  After miraculously summoning the name Everett Greenwood to his lips, Blank tries to chisel off another fifty by feeding Lomax some story about the hermit being the brother of the West Coast lumber tycoon Harris Greenwood, but Lomax cuts him off. One thing the years of debt collection have taught him: in their minds, these lowlifes are all inches from royalty.

  “But I’ll pay a hundred if you get both the child and the book to me by tomorrow afternoon,” Lomax adds.

  After Blank agrees to the deal, adding that he expects to have them both in his possession by this evening, Lomax retreats to his study and sits for a while with his head in his hands. He ought to telephone Mr. Holt immediately with an update, yet he knows better than to get his hopes up needlessly. Mr. Holt was devastated when Lomax informed him of the loss of his daughter this morning. So what if this turns out to be a scam? Lomax would never be forgiven.

  All that day, while awaiting Blank’s call, Lomax’s eyes stray to the cigar box that sits on his desk, but he refuses to surrender to the temptation. His self-discipline is the only thing that’s set him apart from men like his father and this Blank character and all the other addicts and lowlifes that he runs down to make his living. So Lomax sits on his thick-knuckled hands, and waits.

  THE HOUSE AGAIN

  THRUMMING WITH BAVARIAN pilsner, Everett is back out front of the dingy yellow house, whacking its tin door with an open palm.

  “I’m sorry, but I need her back,” he says when the little man comes to the door in the same filthy bedclothes, the child nowhere in view.

  “I thought you didn’t want her?” he says angrily.

  “Still don’t, but I can’t leave her with you,” Everett replies. Even to his own ears, his inebriated voice is distant and faint, a sailor calling out from a trawler foundering at sea. “Not without speaking with your wife. And even then I don’t know.”

  “And what about the money Blank promised me for holding on to the baby and the book until he collects them?”

  “Blank?”

  “Ten even. And a jug of wine.”

  “Well, that’s between you two,” Everett says through gritted teeth. Now the infant’s wail commences from somewhere deep within the house, though the chilling sound seems to originate right up close, like an icicle shoved in Everett’s ear. The shock disables something in his brain, and already he’s shoving the man aside and clomping down the hallway.

  “You’re that hermit who sugars trees,” the man hisses while tailing Everett into the back room with the aggressive air of a terrier. “Blank said. Your name is Green-something or other. Greenland. Greenleaf.”

  Everett tracks the sound to the rear of the house, and finds her tangled in a mess of stinking blankets upon a wrought-iron bed. He lifts the screaming baby to his chest, her face purple, her eyelids clenched as tight as clamshells. She gains an octave and Everett itches to leave except he’s forgetting something. He whaps his ear with his fist. How can anyone reason things out in such pandemonium?

  “Where’s the book?” Everett demands, the baby now wriggling in his grip like a landed trout. The man says nothing so Everett boxes him on the side of the head. The swing surprises Everett just as much as it does its target. Not since finding his sugarbush has he struck another man. But the beer made the act easier, as did the baby’s shrieking.

  “I trashed it,” the man says with shifty eyes, so Everett cuffs him again. “It’s under the mattress,” he says finally, cowering on the floor.

  Everett flips the bed, pulls the book free, then pins the baby to his ribs and kicks the rear door from its flimsy leather hinges. With the book stuffed down his trousers and the child against him, he scrambles through the alley. From a window the little man is yelling for the constables, and Everett dashes through a junkyard and then some private lots. After a while he rests in some rose bushes, where he vomits steak and lager foam onto their roots. When he’s done, he hears men hollering some blocks over. Frantically, he tries the doors of several automobiles until one flings open. Though he’s never driven a car before, he sets the child on the rear seat and manages to depress the start pedal and the ignition button, and the engine catches. Driving without lights, fighting the steering, he bumps over curbs and rebounds off fences.

  No doubt Blank was fixing to make some deal with R.J. Holt, so Everett certainly can’t return home to his shack now. Probably never again. Men will be waiting. There’ll be questions. And Everett would sooner steer this automobile over a sea cliff than be caged again in a prison.

  When he reaches the rail yard near the port, he kills the engine and checks behind him to find the rear seat empty. For a moment, he fantasizes that the baby has opened the door, crawled out, and latched onto some other poor sap whose life needs ruining. But she’s only toppled to the car’s floor, and is now fast asleep. In the car’s trunk he finds a good, thick-napped trapper’s blanket as well as a couple of four-quart jars of blackberry preserve, one of which he empties and fills with water from a hand pump behind a filling station. After bundling the baby in the blanket, he pushes the automobile into some brush to conceal it from the road and scales the wire fence before scampering out over the gleaming tracks.

  He hides behind a wintergreen shrub as stars pinprick through the blackening sky. Soon a passenger rig grinds through the yard, hooting and rumbling. It’s slow enough to hop, except Everett never rides passengers. While they’re faster than freights, they involve more cat-and-mouse with the crew. He’s always preferred boxcars—more space, though riskier, on account of the miscreants you can get penned up alongside. And now, after the Crash, they’ll be more crowded than ever.

  When a freight passes, a goliath of cinder and smoke, its brakes pealing and hissing, he sprints with the baby jouncing against him, letting two coal hoppers go by before he lunges for a boxcar with its door ajar. The whistle blasts and the child bleats in fright. His final pull up into the door nearly unsockets his arms. Inside, the car is vacant, except for a pile of hay that seems halfway fresh and a bale of feed sacks. He drags the door shut, leaving a crack for air, then tucks himself and the infant into the hay. The train accelerates after clearing the yard and he’s grateful for the rail’s seams, the ceaseless bum-bump, bum-bump, bum-bump that jiggles the child’s cheeks and mesmerizes her into sleep.

  As a blur of hill and forest whips past the door’s crack, the scent of evergreen fills the car. Everett had vowed to never jump another freight for the rest of his life. But despite his best efforts, this cursed creature has steered him back into the restless, scrounging life he thought he’d given up.

  Before long the boxcar falls into absolute blackness. What is the dark to a baby like this? he muses. And though it always vexes him to think of his brother, he finds himself remembering how Harris’s sight began to fail when he was sixteen, like a great, black wedge pounded between him and the world. He recalls Harris setting his water glass down directly into his soup, or holding the newspaper upside down, or gashing his fingers with a hatchet while chopping the kindling they sold. Over the years, Everett has spotted what he’s sure is the G of his brother’s company stencilled on towering packets of lumber riding the rails from the west, and has always felt a guarded pride at what he went on to accomplish. Yet even though the occasional fond memory can creep past his defenses, his outrage at his brother’s betrayal has not given an inch over the years. And it isn’t about to start any time soon.

  THIS ISLAND, BURNING

  THREE THOUSAND MILES to the west, just off the opposite edge of the continent, on a small and nameless forested island set like a green jewel in the sea near Vancouver, a cream-coloured Bentley carries Harris Greenwood along a rutted logging road between cloud-grazing spires of Douglas fir, none of which stab less than a hundred feet into the sky. Though it’s clear and midday, Harris knows that the trees gather darkness about them, plunging the island into permanent shadow. Whil
e he’s lived sightless for the last eighteen years, he still orients his face toward windows, to taste the air and to feel scraps of warm light waltz over his cheeks. Fragrances of red cedar and kelp sweep crosswise through the car as its undercarriage grinds and bangs against the rocks and roots that surface between the ruts of the road—a road that, to Harris’s fury, he did not construct.

  “I won’t have my pocket picked by a gang of tree poachers,” Harris mutters. “How long have we leased cutting rights to this island?”

  “About five years or so, sir,” Baumgartner replies.

  “And how much have we bled out to Mr. John D. Rockefeller for the honour? All told?”

  “I’d have to consult Milner, but I’d say five grand or so. Give or take.”

  “Yet the poachers who built this road believe they can cut my sticks while I still hold the rights to them and I won’t notice?” Harris says. “Maybe they figure I won’t see them?”

  “Here’s their camp,” Baumgartner says, drawing the car to a halt. Probably the finest lumberman that Harris has ever known, Mort Baumgartner has stood by his side since the beginning. He and Harris met while studying forestry at Yale, and though Harris has never actually laid eyes on him, they’d once embraced—after signing a lucrative contract with the Royal Air Force for aircraft-grade Sitka spruce—and Harris took his measure then. Short, strong, and stumpy, with a bad knee and a musky, woodsy odour that persists even after a week of supply chain meetings in Vancouver.

  Harris pops his door without waiting for Baumgartner to open it, and finds the ground springy with moss, the forest pleasantly silent. “What am I looking at?” he says. “Are they MacMillan’s?”

  “It’s like one of our setups from the old days, sir,” Baumgartner answers. “Stables for oxen. Canvas shelters for the men. A cook-shack floating in the bay. Double-bitted falling axes, crosscut saws, Gilchrist jacks, and a donkey engine for dragging sticks into the water. They’re just creaming off the high-value trees—some of the stumps here are as wide as supper tables. But there isn’t a soul about. They must be floating a boom to the mainland today. And they are too ragtag to be MacMillan’s men. Locals probably. We’ll radio the Mounties from the schooner and make sure they confiscate their gear and run them off before another tree drops.”

  Harris shakes his head. “No need to overreact,” he says, tracing the Bentley’s roofline with his fingers around to where he unhitches the trunk. He feels for the slick crocodile leather of his briefcase, and from it he pulls a jar he’d had prepared, which he carries out into the trees.

  Harris Greenwood is six feet tall, with wavy hair the colour of wet sand. Despite his visual limitations, he possesses a ropy, woodcutter’s physique, thanks to his stubborn insistence on chopping all the firewood required for his sprawling mansion. Now, as always when he’s walking in a forest, he feels his jaw loosen, his muscles slacken, his unease dissipate, and soon his rigid stride gives over to an easy stroll. In the city, corners may strike like cobras and hard shoulders may thump him aside, but trees he can sense long before he reaches them, from the aura of quiet they emit and the way the ground rises up before them. In his boyhood, Harris and his brother, Everett, lived alone on a woodlot, selling windfall firewood and fending for themselves, and even after all these years forests remain the landscape of his most inner self.

  Last night, Harris dreamed his sight had been restored, though the faces of those he encountered were blank as eggshells, all except for the single face he still knows by heart: his dead brother Everett’s. During the last days of the War, Harris wrote to Everett, who was nearing the end of his deployment in France, and offered him a large stake in the then-fledgling Greenwood Timber Company. Though Everett agreed, after he shipped back to Canada he didn’t return home as he’d promised. Harris was livid. He was convinced that his brother’s time overseas had accustomed him to life without the burden of having to care for a blind invalid who could no longer pull his weight in the forest. And though Everett was always the least ambitious of the pair, it was clear to Harris that he now saw better prospects for himself alone. But Harris proved him wrong—him and anyone who’d ever doubted him.

  Despite the betrayal, during the years of his company’s post-war success, Harris hired a barrister to track his brother’s whereabouts. He learned that Everett had been convicted of various offences since his return, including vagrancy, public inebriation, and petty larceny, and had done time in prisons across North America. When the frequent charges and misdemeanours halted abruptly a decade or so ago, it was the barrister’s assessment that this did not signal that Everett had mended his ways, but instead indicated that Harris’s wayward, illiterate, criminal brother had finally met his end. Harris viewed this outcome as a kind of mercy. It’s always better for a diseased tree to be felled quickly, rather than to dwindle slowly with rot and decay.

  Now Harris reaches a massive cedar—this he knows from its velvety bark and tea-sweet smell. “You asked why I insisted we bring the Bentley today,” he calls back to his assistant, unscrewing the jar. “It’s because we’ll need something that can get us back to the boat at a good clip.” Harris douses the bark with coal oil and its fumes invade his nose. He then lobs the empty jar into the woods, where it thuds against a pillow of moss and does not break.

  “If we’re lucky, we might roast a few of the poaching bastards in the process,” Baumgartner says cruelly.

  “At the very least, I hope they’re in the mood for a swim,” Harris says, fishing a strike-anywhere from his coat pocket.

  “Makes no difference to me, sir, but it’s been a dry winter, and this island’s a tinderbox,” Baumgartner says. “That’ll be ten thousand acres of virgin stand put to ashes.”

  Over his career, Harris Greenwood has overseen the clearance of over five hundred million acres of old-growth forest. Some of the thickest, tallest, most glorious trees this planet ever nurtured have toppled at his command. But in just three months his lease to this island will expire, which will likely trigger a bidding war, no doubt to be won by Harris’s better-moneyed rival, H.R. MacMillan’s timber syndicate. And though this waste of timber will pain him, the thought of either poachers or MacMillan logging these trees is too much for him to accept.

  With a flick the match gasps. As the flame passes from warm to hot in his hand, Harris inventories all that was required to birth such a forest: whole oceans of rain and centuries of sunlight. The same sunlight that glinted upon the helmets of the Romans. The same winds that carried the first explorers to this continent. Here are trees taller than twenty-storey buildings; trees that had already attained immensity when the first printing press rolled. Baudelaire called them “living pillars of eternity” and Harris agrees. Yet ask anyone who’s spent a life among them, and they’ll tell you that while trees are unimpeachably impressive, they’re also just weeds on poles.

  “They’ll grow back,” Harris says, tossing the match. A bulge of heat presses against him as Baumgartner seizes his hand and pulls him toward the car. After an even bumpier ride back to the small jetty, the crew quickly loads the Bentley onto his schooner and they lift anchor.

  Out on the bay, Harris reclines on the deck in his ladderback chair amid the half-wondrous, half-ghastly smell of an entire forest ablaze. He detects notes of charred moss and boiling pitch, the perfume of torched wood. Then comes the sound of fist-sized fir cones roasting like cobs of corn and the screeches of deer blundering about in the smoke, just audible over the growing crack and rumble of fire. Soon a powder-fine ash dusts his skin and he imagines the curtain of flame drawing around the island, the great dirigible of smoke and cinder wafting upward, and he wonders what it looks like. Baumgartner does his best, but like most loggers, words to him are crude tools. If only Harris had someone to properly describe this island, burning. He’s sure there’d be some beauty in it.

  It’s something to consider. A brand-new position. A fresh pair of eyes. A describer. He’s still mulling the notion over as his schooner pull
s from the bay and the fire’s deep rumble dissolves into the more general roar of the ocean.

  THE HERMIT

  “HE GOT SPOOKED and ran off with the baby,” Howard Blank says the following afternoon, at the lunch counter that Lomax frequents despite its diluted ketchup and dish-pit coffee, which he always takes black. “But I did manage to secure the journal, like I promised,” Blank adds, waggling his eyebrows. “Which I’ll gladly return for a partial reward.”

  Though he’s disappointed about the child eluding him, some relief settles over Lomax as Blank—a cretin with a half-demolished face that’s already put him off his clubhouse sandwich—digs through his satchel to produce a hard-backed journal. As Lomax takes it in his hands, a dose of contentment spills across his chest.

  But just as quickly the contentment drains away as he flips through the journal’s pages, only to find a mere handful of entries, penned in a crude, mannish script, very unlike the precise penmanship that graces Euphemia’s slipcase. Lomax frowns and with an open hand he clubs Blank to the restaurant’s sawdusted floor and walks out.

  Near dusk, Lomax drives to the Holt estate and spends hours limping through the surrounding woods. After the long car ride, he feels as though the marrow of his spine has been siphoned out and replaced with acid, so he allows himself a few good-sized puffs of a cigar, just to his ease his search. The relief is immediate. In the secluded area that Blank had described to him that afternoon, Lomax discovers a tin bucket hung by a nail, overflowing with a golden sap that drizzles onto the forest floor, yielding a thick sludge that nearly tugs the loafer from his foot.

  After examining the adjacent trees for some minutes, he finds a big one with only a nail and no bucket, and figures Euphemia must have made it here just as her muscles became too starved of blood to carry her child any further. He tries to imagine how difficult it was for her to decide to bundle her baby up with the journal and leave it here, hung up high to protect it from scavenging animals, while she crawled back to the estate for help.