Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  WHEN THEIR TRAIN slows for a curve and whistles for the next junction, Everett spies automobiles ahead, five or six, near the tracks at the interchange, including a handful of Mounties in blood-red tunics sheltering themselves from the slanting rain under the lamplit eaves of the station. Which means that he hurt the man in the orchard even worse than he thought.

  With the infant tucked into the crook of his elbow, Everett dips his chin and throws himself from the boxcar door and out into the sheets of eye-stinging rain. He takes a few strides on the wind-flattened meadow beside the tracks before tumbling into a ditch, going ass-over-head until he skids to a halt. Regaining his wits, he draws away the jute sacking to examine the child: eyes wide, a look of utter shock, one soon eclipsed by a slow-blooming grimace that commands her entire being—all while sucking a great quantity of air into her lungs.

  Then it starts.

  “I’m sorry, dammit,” Everett growls amid the passing train’s roar as he pushes into a copse of birch that runs alongside the track. He jogs and walks for half an hour, hugging the treeline, checking periodically for pursuing Mounties, the infant shrieking as though she’s on fire.

  When the rhythm of their march eventually settles her, he stops to get his bearings and rain funnels off his hat directly into her eye, pooling there, and she resumes wailing. Everett clears the water from her eye socket with a coal-black thumb. “Oh come on, you little bugger,” he says. “You were born wetter than this.”

  After her baptism the baby turns sulky, her eyes slitted like a cat left lonesome for weeks. And it’s only then Everett spots it: a dent, dead-centre at the apex of her fuzzy head. Horrified, he presses his thumb into the gruesome depression and finds no bone, just the throb of blood and squish of brain. He yanks back his hand and checks her pupils, but they’re aiming correct and she’s breathing fine. It must have happened when they tumbled in the grass. Everett curses and punches the bark of a nearby birch. In a scramble for something to soothe her, he opens his sack to find the jam jar smashed, purple paste slathering the bag’s lining and the journal, its rear cover now snapped in half. He takes the book, shielding its pages from the rain with his body, and wipes the gobs of jam on his trousers.

  After an hour’s walk the clouds disperse, and with no sign of Mounties or the yelps of bloodhounds, he risks crossing a hayfield to approach a farmhouse. He leaves the baby out near a half-toppled fence and proceeds to the porch. Everett hasn’t sought charity like this in years, and the shame of it already claws in his chest. A gangly farmer with a napkin tucked into sky-blue overalls appears, speaking French. They’ve ridden into Quebec, it seems, farther than he figured. When Everett communicates his willingness to work for a meal, the farmer wags his head and closes the door.

  Everett takes to the farm road, listening for automobiles. When one passes he lies prone in a ditch, ready to cover the infant’s mouth if need be. After more hours of walking his calves pound and he’s lightheaded with thirst. The baby is crying again, and this time her face is nearly blue, her screams growing more ragged by the minute. For all he knows she’s bleeding in her brain and is inches from the grave, so when he spots another farmhouse, this time he approaches with the baby hollering against him like an air raid siren. Hearing this, a woman ceases pinning sheets to a line strung between some cottonwoods next to the house and comes toward him.

  “This child needs a doctor,” Everett calls out. “I can’t quiet her. And I think I put a hole in her head.”

  Calmly, the woman takes the baby from his arms to inspect it. She’s wearing a cotton pinafore, neatly hand-sewn, her black hair drawn loosely back by a ribbon. He watches her kiss the fluffy down of the child’s indentation.

  “Is okay,” she declares in a thick Québécois accent. “The head isn’t fully make yet.”

  Relief washes over Everett. Already the woman’s presence and the gentler reverberations of her voice have calmed the baby, who is driving her nose into the woman’s chest and rubbing her eyes with the backs of her wrists.

  “See how she root,” the woman says. “Is just tired and hungry.” It shames him to watch, so Everett drops his eyes. The woman follows his gaze down to his naked foot, black with soil, then invites him inside.

  Her house is light-filled, well ordered, the airy kitchen’s bead-board walls recently whitewashed. A wooden crucifix stands sentinel over a sturdy maple table. She sets a copper kettle on the cookplate and carries the child to the icebox. She takes out a pitcher of buttermilk and pours some into a small jug, but when she tries to feed the baby, it gets a defiant look and screams some more and won’t suckle at the spout.

  “She likes goat’s milk?” Everett offers. “She only had it the once, but she was pleased by it. You keep any goats here?”

  The woman nods, fetches a bottle of goat’s milk, and refills the jug, which the child soon slurps at greedily.

  When the kettle boils, the woman sets a galvanized tub on the table and adds the hot water. She peels away the jute sacking to reveal the baby has fouled itself, except the woman seems unbothered.

  “This why she cry,” she says, pointing to the red welts in the seams where her legs attach to her impossibly tiny body. In the tub, the woman buoys the child with one hand and scrubs with the other. Afterwards, she applies yellow suet between the baby’s legs. “Should keep the rash down,” she says. Then she swaddles her in a dishtowel, carries her into the adjacent bedroom, and shuts the door.

  Alone in the kitchen, Everett examines the entranceway and finds no little shoes, just two pairs of shiny black loafers—one man’s and one woman’s—probably only worn to church. The woman is near Everett’s age. There’d be a child by now if there could be.

  After some minutes, the woman tiptoes from the bedroom, latching the door softly behind her while putting a single finger to her lips. She prepares him a cottage cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. The bread is seeded and soft, the curds salty and rich. Everett eats in silence and has to restrain himself from dispatching the sandwich in a single bite. Soon there’s clomping on the porch and a man enters, wiping his hands with an oilcloth. He’s tanned, with thick eyebrows and a lethal-looking nose, and wears the same overalls as the farmer who’d shooed Everett away. The couple speak to each other in low voices, the woman pointing with unmasked glee to the next room as the man nods seriously, with neither displeasure nor excitement.

  The man shakes Everett’s hand and joins him at the table. He pinches his nose between finger and thumb and offers a lengthy grace before eating in silence, occasionally refilling his and Everett’s glasses with milk.

  “I appreciate the meal, sir,” Everett says afterwards. “I’m eager to work if you have anything that needs doing.”

  The woman translates and the man returns from the cellar with a pair of old toe-capped boots. Everett pushes his filthy feet inside, which knock around a little, but they’ll do, and the two spend the afternoon slopping hogs and shovelling out stalls. With good food in him the work passes easily. The farm boasts thirty head of dairy cattle, goats, hogs, mules, a coop of chickens. Everett spots some sugar maples edging the pasture, over-tapped for their size, the collection buckets all hung too high, yet he holds his tongue regarding the error for fear of appearing ungrateful.

  At day’s end they find the woman in the porch swing, its brass chains creaking in time with the French tune she trills for the baby, which is wrapped in her lap, clutching a sock critter the woman must have stitched, and suckling from a bottle with a red rubber nipple. “From the neighbours,” the woman says of the bottle. The men remove their sweat-stained hats and sit listening to her sing, as the maddening aroma of home cooking seeps through the window. After a while they retire inside and hitch their clothes over the stove to dry. Everett accepts the clean trousers and shirt the man offers, and it’s while he’s changing out on the covered porch that he notices it. Mounted low, beneath their coats. A single wooden peg. Set just two feet off the floor, eye-level for a small child.

 
Everett returns inside to find the smiling woman setting out plates of hamburger steaks, boiled vegetables, and drop biscuits. Again the man prays, this time for longer. The woman touches her penny-brown forehead to the child’s ear and murmurs along. So this is a home, is all Everett thinks during the incomprehensible recitation.

  After dinner the woman keeps the baby at her hip while she washes up one-handed, and the man invites Everett to a checkerboard. They play silently until the man speaks without lifting his eyes from the pieces: “Bap-tize?” he says, miming a sprinkling motion over his own bald spot.

  “Surely is,” Everett assures him while throwing the game on purpose. Afterwards, the man guides Everett upstairs to a spare room, where a nightshirt is laid out beside an old shaving kit. Everett changes and beds down, full-bellied and content, though he’s unused to the sensation of the rag-stuffed mattress, which is like being swallowed by a huge, mushy mouth.

  But how the baby gurgles and coos whenever the woman picks her up! And what a bountiful farm this is. The man is a trifle severe, though what does an orphan like Everett know of the ways of fathers? After an early bath and a shave tomorrow morning, he decides, he’ll make this transaction easier for everyone and sneak off in the direction of the tracks.

  ALL FREIGHTS

  LOMAX RETURNS HOME from Mr. Holt’s mansion to find Lavern asleep in the living room with the radio on. He carries her to bed, sleeps fitfully beside her, then wakes early the next morning, packs his valise, and leaves a note on the kitchen table. He’s performing a crucial errand for Mr. Holt, he writes, one that could remedy all their financial woes if he succeeds. And he’ll be back before the twins’ birthday in a week.

  He boards a first-class passenger coach bound for Montreal, a private compartment with emerald walls of crushed velvet. Normally, Mr. Holt is tight-fisted with respect to expenses, but he’s offered a generous stipend as well as his personal railway and hotel account for Lomax to charge to.

  He’ll search Montreal first, check the rooming houses, ask around about a single man with a baby, and then improvise from there. If he’d been thinking straight, Lomax would have left at first mention of the hermit’s transient past, but Howard Blank’s shenanigans have cost him valuable time.

  Though it’s only mid-afternoon, Lomax is already exhausted and his spine is crackling with a low-wattage pain that makes it difficult to sit, so he has the porter make up his berth. He’d intended to leave the box of medicinal cigars at home, but after he learns that his cramped berth was built for a man of half his size, he’s happy to note that the box found its way into his valise after all. Lomax lights up and smokes a whole cigar, blowing its sweet beige haze from the compartment window, and soon phosphorescent beetles of relief scamper through his body.

  He settles into the train’s gentle rocking, the unfathomable softness of the sheets cool against his skin. He closes his eyes and slips into a memory of Euphemia: Three months pregnant, she is poised over her roll-top desk, her short hair tucked behind her ears, writing in her journal with that deep-diving focus that comes to her so easily. When finally she hears him enter her apartment to bring her several bags of books and groceries, she looks up and smiles, a bright flash like sunlight hitting water.

  “More grist for the mill,” she says breezily, coming over to clear some space on the cluttered counters for what he’s brought. Her belly is plump and rounded, forcing her back from the counter, just slightly.

  After Lomax sets his delivery down, she takes up a short stack of library books, lifts them to her nose, and inhales deeply.

  “Is there any better smell than this?” she asks. “And why do you think library books smell so completely different than the ones we own? Do they use a different paper for them? Or is it because so many people have touched them? Or maybe it’s the smell of all the library books on the shelves combined? Or is there some other reason?”

  Lomax says he doesn’t know because he’s never had a reason to think about something like that before, which makes her laugh. She’s always finding an odd delight in the things he says—but there’s never any meanness to it, so it doesn’t bother him. In fact, there’s very little that doesn’t invite her curiosity, especially if it involves something written down: odd phrasing on a food package he’s brought; a poorly worded funeral notice in one of Mr. Holt’s newspapers; an advertisement with curiously inserted quotation marks. There’s always something to trigger her rippling laugh.

  “Why don’t you stick around for a while?” she says as he’s preparing to go. “I’ll put on some coffee. I’m going batty just sitting around here all day with no one to talk to.”

  “Another time,” he says.

  “Why don’t you ever want to stay anymore?”

  “You know why,” he says curtly, then tips his hat and leaves, locking the door behind him.

  He opens his eyes to find the blue glim of morning filling the small window of his berth. With the cigar’s help, he’s managed to sleep straight through to the next day. He climbs down from the bed with no lightning sensation whatsoever in his spine, feeling better rested than he has in years. He dresses, and over breakfast he questions the train’s porters and stewards about any single men travelling with an infant. Afterwards, he goes to the front of the train and asks the fireman and brakeman about a hobo with a baby. Both shake their heads. Next he checks the car’s outside baggage area; tucked among the suitcases in the raw, rushing wind, he finds an old Indian man, crouched down with a worn bowler pulled low over his ears.

  “I’ve got a question for you, fella. Earn you a nickel.”

  “Shoot,” the man yells warily over the engine’s roar.

  “Say you were hopping trains, and you had a baby in tow.”

  “Hey, what’s the big idea. I don’t have no baby—”

  “Just listen,” Lomax interrupts. “Say you did have a baby with you—nobody’s saying you do—but you didn’t have much money, so you were train-hopping. Where would you ride? Would it be right here?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t ride no passenger coach.”

  No wonder this man is destitute, Lomax groans inwardly; his mind is about as flexible as glass. “No, I’m not being clear,” Lomax adds with belittling clarity. “I’m saying if you were riding this train. Where would you be?”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t ride this train.” Fed up, Lomax grips the handle and prepares to throw the door shut. “I’d ride freight,” the man says. “Boxcar, if I could find one open. Safer. Less chance of getting pinched by the bulls or dropping the little one into the rails. Plus, wood planks are much warmer for a child than an iron floor.”

  “And where would you go exactly?” Lomax says, grinning, hunching down to tuck a dollar into the band of the man’s filthy bowler. “Riding one of those freights?”

  “Toronto,” he says, as though the answer is obvious. “All freights run through Toronto. Spur lines radiate out from there.”

  LIAM FEENEY

  NORMALLY, HARRIS WOULD delegate such a task to his subordinates. After all, Milner excels at identifying fools, and Baumgartner, layabouts, while together they boast an exemplary record of fishing industrious employees from the teeming sea of human incompetence, a sea rising daily since the Crash. But for such a unique position, it’s imperative that Harris performs today’s interviews himself, without distraction or interference.

  So far, however, the applicants have been uniformly lacklustre: dim-witted, uninspired, charmless. Yet he retains high hopes for the final man, recommended by one of his regional mill managers: an Irish poet of some repute who’d come over to log the great Canadian forests. Along with his literary aptitude, he’s touted as one of the finest tugboat pilots anywhere.

  A minute before the man’s arrival, Harris knocks over a drinking glass and clips his elbow on a bookshelf that has been there for years, blunders he attributes to too much tea at lunch, or perhaps to the disorienting absence of his bird collection—he had Milner temporarily move the cages into the boa
rdroom so they wouldn’t hamper the interviews.

  Usually, Harris avoids face-to-face meetings with strangers. Over the telephone or through the telegraph, people rely on neither facial expressions nor gestures. They fill silences and choose their words carefully. They describe. To Harris, meeting a stranger in person is akin to opening a zoo cage at random. One must be ready for a tiger or a peacock. A rabbit or a wolverine. And it’s often too late in the game before you figure out which you’re dealing with.

  At the appointed time, Milner escorts Liam Feeney in. They shake hands across Harris’s desk. Feeney’s grip is cool, the pads of his fingers thick as felt. He smells of fir pitch, skid grease, the sea, and perhaps—or is Harris’s nose off?—a touch of French cologne.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Greenwood, sir,” Feeney says. Other than his Irish accent—knife-sharp ts and ls that unfurl like a carpet from the back of the tongue—nothing seems overwhelmingly poetic about his voice. Yet it’s a clean register with the resonance of an instrument that Harris can’t place, a voice that could fill an entire theatre with a whisper.

  Because one of the other applicants may have moved it, Harris resists gesturing to the chair while asking Mr. Feeney to take a seat. Straight away Harris leaps into an account of his impending journey to Tokyo, where he’ll be negotiating a contract to supply sleepers to the largest railway company in Japan.

  “This involves sea travel, naturally,” Harris says. “Does that suit you, Mr. Feeney?”

  “Sea travel is my specialty, sir.”

  “I will also be bringing along my assistant, Mr. Baumgartner,” Harris goes on. “Who, in addition to being the best faller on the West Coast, is good for a crude appraisal. ‘The sky is grey’; ‘These trees are straight’; ‘The sun is out’—that kind of thing. But what I require is a keener sensibility. Someone who recognizes subtlety, humanity, beauty”—this last word wrong-foots him and a near-cough momentarily stops his airway—“with an eye for detail. Do you figure yourself to embody these traits, Mr. Feeney?”