Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “On my good days, sir.”

  Was that flippancy? “Your primary role will be to provide me with descriptions,” Harris hears himself continue. “To be my eyes. In English, I can negotiate the stripes off a zebra. But with this Japanese nonsense to contend with, I’ll be lost. Translators only scratch the surface. I need someone to watch faces, track mannerisms, read situations.”

  “I’ve always been an observer, sir, since I was a boy. It’s the poet’s curse.”

  Was there a smirk to how he said that? More flippancy? Harris needs to get him talking. “Have you much experience with the blind, Mr. Feeney?”

  “Not much, sir. Only the few relations who temporarily drank themselves there, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s fine, I don’t need a nanny,” Harris says, comforted by the man’s witticism. “You’ll see I’m quite independent,” he says, resisting the temptation to mention his insistence on cutting his own firewood and shaving his own face. “So perhaps a bit more about me,” Harris soldiers on. “I’m a lumberman, through and through. I’ve no family. Neither wife nor children. No time for such frivolities. I live for my work. And my work is trees,” he says, before summarizing further a few more of his accomplishments.

  When he’s done, Feeney makes no remark and Harris dangles over the abyss of silence, regretting bitterly the absence of his bird collection. And why is he telling this man all of this? As though he’s the one applying for a position, and not vice versa? He’s already offered up more personal detail to this stranger than he has to Baumgartner over their many years together. All this about a lack of a wife and being a “lumberman, through and through.” Nonsense.

  “You’ve family yourself?” Harris asks, clutching at the cliff’s edge.

  “Not to speak of, sir. An auntie back in Cork. A sister who passed before I left. That’s the sum of it.”

  “Good, good.” Why would his not having a family be good? “And so what would draw an Irish poet to the woods of Canada?”

  “My homeland wasn’t agreeable to me, sir: too small-minded and cloistered. And working in the forest puts you closer to the heart of things. The money beats poetry, besides,” Feeney says tightly, and this time Harris can hear the smirk.

  “Too true,” Harris says knowingly—why is he addressing him as a fellow poet? What does Harris know of their finances? “You know, in my time studying forestry at Yale, it was said that I had a ‘facile pen.’ And despite my obvious limitations, I did deep readings of the classics. Does this surprise you?”

  “Not in the slightest. You seem a classical type of fella.”

  Harris risks a gesture to his bookshelf: “I’ve accumulated a good collection of literature, though I find Braille cumbersome, slower-paced than the nimble mind. I prefer the music of the human voice.”

  “Who doesn’t, sir.”

  “Much information is contained in the voice, Mr. Feeney; more than the vulgar import of words. There’s tone, a person’s background, and emotion.” Another pause and Harris has no inkling whether his remarks have landed. Is he being pedantic? Of course a poet knows the subtleties of voice!

  “Along with a describer,” Harris continues, “I require a man who can breathe life into language. One who can hold my interest. Have you done much public reading as a poet, Mr. Feeney?”

  “Here and there,” he says noncommittally.

  This settles it. Harris has grown sufficiently chaffed by the glibness of his tone, the lack of snap to his responses. “Here and there?” Harris retorts. “I asked if you’ve performed many public readings, Mr. Feeney.”

  “That’s right, sir, you did. And following that, I replied ‘here and there.’ Glad we’re all caught up.”

  Another toe-curling pause. Harris recalls how Everett, as a boy, met the world with a similar glibness, and how it always infuriated him. Now he draws a deep, volcanic breath. “I advise you to be careful, Mr. Feeney. Perhaps because you’re an artist you think you’re somehow my intellectual superior? That I’m playing the role of the crude industrialist, and you, the noble, carefree poet? In my experience, artists often elect to ignore the ironclad fact that without the aid of my lumber they’d be freezing in the dark with nothing to read but the anguish on their children’s hypothermic faces. Shakespeare himself would’ve been a shivering loon writing on the walls of a damp cave with his own urine if it weren’t for men like me.”

  Now he’s certain that Feeney snickers, which half enrages him, half invites his own laughter. He is being over-dramatic, isn’t he? ‘His own urine’?

  “Or perhaps you suspect a blind man is incapable of running an outfit like mine?” Harris asks menacingly, leaning forward, his hands pressed to his desk.

  “Outfit, sir?” Feeney says. “Three million in annual revenue hardly qualifies you as an outfit. I’d say you’re doing just fine.”

  Harris is so unaccustomed to being addressed with such frankness, he’s nearly enjoying it. “Those are pre-Crash numbers,” he says, resting back in his chair and shoving his thumbs into his armpits. “But it seems you do know a little about me after all.”

  “Only the important bits, sir.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, that you lost your sight in the War, and were decorated for your trouble.”

  “Outright rumour and exaggeration. Anything else?”

  Another pause.

  “I require honesty from my employees, Mr. Feeney.”

  “That you pay your oxen better than your men. Regardless of their honesty. Sir.”

  Harris considers firing him at once, and having Baumgartner turf him to the sidewalk on his ear. Yet it was a well-constructed jab. True in a sense. And it took panache.

  “I’ve yet to hear an ox complain,” Harris says. “Even so, I assure you, if you perform your duties to my satisfaction, you’ll be well rewarded, much better than for hauling booms to my mills. Now does that interest you?”

  “It does,” Feeney says, chastened by the almighty dollar.

  “That settles it, then,” Harris says, clapping his hands. “But before I tender my final decision, I’d like you to select a volume from my bookshelf and read a verse of your choosing.”

  He hears Feeney rise and shuffle about. For a moment Harris fears he’s leaving the office, until there’s a leathery sigh from the chair and the sound of leafing pages. Then, without preamble, Feeney commences.

  Harris identifies the verse instantly: some Tennyson, a fine and unusual choice of Tennyson. But more than the words it’s the voice—a sweet, exalting instrument—that ensnares him. It’s a mere cousin to the man’s speaking voice, though an elevation of it. The clean tone of a stringed instrument—a cello, yes, that’s it—yet more expressive, sopping with life, his vowels and consonants fitting together as neat as a joined wooden box.

  Baumgartner often checks prospective lumbermen like livestock before he hires them, examining their teeth and gauging the tint of their eyes beside a sheet of white cardstock. And while Harris knows that the blind often pass their hands over a person’s features to gather a sense of them, he’s never performed such an imposition on anyone. It’s always seemed like such a vulgar act. A groping admission of his enfeeblement. Yet for the first time in his life, Harris wishes he could feel the face of Liam Feeney, this man whom he’s picked to be his describer, this bearer of a voice more arresting than anything he’s ever encountered.

  “You’re hired,” Harris says brusquely after Feeney’s reading is done. “So don’t you ever speak to me like that again.”

  A CAKE OF SOAP

  HE’S HEARD IT claimed that maple syrup’s minerals will grow a person’s hair twice as quick, and Everett believes it. In the lavatory early the next morning, he undoes years of such growth with the woman’s shears, pulling away handfuls of beard like the pelts of small critters, tossing them from the dawn-lit window for the jays to nest with. After he shaves close with a straight blade, he shears his hair tight to his neck, as it was in the 116th Canadian Infantry
Battalion, then draws a bath. It’s been a good decade since he’s bathed anywhere but a creek, and the experience is serene, especially with his troubles so nearing their conclusion. Without a baby to hinder him, the freights will have him back in Saint John in two days, where he’ll gather up his buckets and other sugaring implements and go find a place to start over. Perhaps he’ll even chisel a few bucks from the couple for a rail ticket so he can ride home like an upstanding citizen.

  He scrubs his body then brushes out his toenails, and has just laid a washcloth over his face and shut his eyes when a hard thump sounds on the door downstairs. The husband speaks French with other men. Two of them. Then the woman speaks. After this conversation the door closes and the couple whisper awhile. Then whisper and yell. Then yell outright. Before long the woman is gasping and crying, and the man shouts a final command that puts ripples in Everett’s bathwater. Lastly, the woman clatters about the kitchen, speaking only through the rough treatment of dishes.

  Everett returns to his room to find his clothes boiled and folded on the bedspread. He dresses and slips downstairs to discover his rucksack packed near the door beside the toe-capped boots the man gave him. The man stands rod-straight in the hallway, brow hardened. Beside him is his wife. “The neighbours,” she says. “The same I got the bottle from. They say the Mounties search for a man with…a baby.”

  The man in the orchard must have recounted Everett’s claim about his child being on the train. Either that or the Mounties pulled the soiled flannel and sleeper from the creek and pieced it together. “Now wait a minute,” Everett begins, “That doesn’t mean we can’t—”

  “You go now,” the man says firmly, stepping forward.

  “I packed things,” the woman says. “Some food. And new flannels I stitch for…for her.” She disappears into the bedroom while Everett laces his boots, and returns with the sleeping baby, its cheek mushed against her bicep, releasing a long dangle of drool that sparkles in the morning light. The woman passes the child over with her face averted, as though it’s some gruesome accident that’s best not looked at.

  “I appreciate your hospitality,” Everett says in the doorway. “And I’m sorry for any trouble I brought here.”

  The man purses his lips and nods.

  “Wait,” the woman says, extending her palm; in it is a cake of homemade Castile soap, scented with lavender. Years later, Everett will recall this cake of soap—along with the low-set coat peg—as among the most sorrowful sights he’s witnessed. That peg. That soap, there in the woman’s open palm.

  He sneaks from the house and clambers back through the field, avoiding the road until he reaches the birch woods. The going is faster in daylight and he listens close for hounds, but hears only birdsong spilling through the trees and the sift of wind over grass. After a brief wait at the rail junction they catch an empty freight—until they’re promptly ditched by an apologetic brakeman. They hole up to wait in an abandoned telegraph relay station, Everett nibbling at the jerked hog that the woman packed, along with two egg sandwiches and five silver dollars balled up in a pair of fresh socks, as the baby slobbers over the sock creature that the woman sewed. When the infant gets hungry, he feeds her some milk from the nippled bottle—not goat’s milk but buttermilk, which the woman must have packed by accident in her hurry. But this time the baby is hungry enough to accept it, though it isn’t long before she’s thrown into a bout of explosive flatulence that startles her and makes her cry. “No wonder you prefer goat’s milk,” Everett says, smiling at the rudeness of it.

  Near suppertime they jump another freight without detection. The car is half-filled with crates of flapping hens, the air swirling with motes of down, and the sulphurous stench of excrement is unpleasant, though tolerable. Everett fixes the door shut from the inside with some chicken wire so that no tramps join them. But the baby cowers whenever the hens flap and squawk, and when Everett goes to offer her the sock puppet for comfort, he realizes that in the rush to jump the train he’d forgotten it back where they’d waited.

  “It’s gone, little one,” he says, patting the warm melon of her head. “Your puppet. Those people. That home. All of it. Gone.”

  She wails for hours.

  THE CITY

  ON MR. HOLT’S dime, Harvey Lomax takes a suite on the fifteenth floor of the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, high above the wide, cobalt-blue lake. It’s luxuriously outfitted, including a sitting room and a private lavatory with a clamshell tub. Typically, Lomax wouldn’t dream of incurring such an expense, but Mr. Holt has assured him that he can’t be expected to conduct his important search while sleeping in cramped, unwholesome quarters.

  Lomax knows he’ll give himself away if he’s wearing his usual tailored three-piece, so he purchases some worker’s dungarees and a canvas shirt from a street vendor. He pulls them on, then takes a fistful of earth from the lily bed out front of his hotel and rubs the soil over his face and clothes, drawing curious glances from the valets. Properly disguised, Lomax makes enquiries at flophouses, especially those near the rail yards. To each clerk he slips a dollar bill with the name of his hotel written on it, instructing them to keep an eye out for a derelict with a baby. “Most are running away from them,” one remarks skeptically. “Not carting them along.”

  “That you, Everett?” Lomax says to a pram-pushing, dark-haired man of the correct height. Of all the identification gambits he’s employed while collecting debts over the years, this is the most effective by a mile. Yet the man doesn’t flinch, and on closer inspection, Lomax sees that his pram is full of empty tin cans and machine parts.

  That night, Lomax cables Mr. Holt and regretfully informs him that his first day in Toronto has been unfruitful. His employer’s reply is swift:

  IVE PUT MY TRUST IN YOU MR LOMAX STOP DONT LET ME DOWN STOP RJ

  Each day, Lomax completes a circuit of hotels, flophouses, and taverns. The hours of pounding the pavement are murder on his back, and by day’s end the lightning coils and snaps, nearly doubling him over on the street. To make it back to his hotel, he’s forced to smoke up the last of the cigars, judiciously, taking only a few puffs at a time. Once they’re gone, he’s too ashamed to ask Mr. Holt to send more. So he knuckles down, buys a pair of good loafers, and soldiers on. But the city grows ever more gloomy around him: iron-clad clouds drag their grey bellies across the roofs of brick tenements; a cripple pulls himself around upon a scrap of automobile tire; a woman thrusts her head into a trash can and screams. The city is a maze of sorts, he realizes, where souls wander and collapse, damned either by something they’ve done or by something they’re unable to do.

  Each night, before soaking his ravaged muscles in the clamshell tub, he dutifully cables Holt with the same disappointing report. And although he notes a compounding curtness to his employer’s replies, Lomax assures himself that with some persistence, his break will come. At the end of his first week, while Lomax is eating at a lunch counter, a Mountie who’d been schoolmates with Lavern takes the stool beside him. The Mountie mentions in passing that the brother of a senator was recently attacked by a tramp in an apple orchard in Ontario, and that the tramp claimed to have an infant in his care. “CN Rail detectives are rounding up vagrants all down the line,” the Mountie says, “raiding hobo jungles, checking dive-hotel registers. A hundred bums have been dragged in. So far no baby’s been found.”

  Lomax hurries back to his suite, where he paces the carpet. If Greenwood, the baby, or the journal are taken into custody by railroad detectives, it will be disastrous for his employer. But if the beating took place in Ontario, then that means Greenwood was indeed on his way west. So Lomax cables Mr. Holt, delicately offering up the news as a positive development, and he’s relieved when Holt seems pleased. Lomax vows to triple his efforts to find Greenwood before the Mounties do.

  After dinner that evening, a bellhop brings another telegram to his door:

  BEEN OVR A WEEK STOP TWINS BDAY COME AND GONE STOP HARVEY JR HAS CROUPE STOP ANCLE LOST TWO TE
ETH STOP NO COINS TO PUT UNDER PILLOW STOP OUR GEN ACCNT NEAR EMPTY STOP LOVE LAVERN

  After reading it, Lomax sends the infuriating card spinning from the high window of his suite, watching it flutter to the street like a crippled dove. It’s unlike Lavern to be impatient, and this is the last thing he needs with Mr. Holt breathing down his neck for results. And besides, he knows very well there is plenty of money kicking around the house for groceries, as well as coins to put under Angie’s pillow. Lavern should be grateful that their children know their father at all, not to mention the fact that they eat to their hearts’ content and needn’t work like Lomax did as a boy. Still, to keep the peace, he telephones down to the hotel operator and wires his wife a hundred dollars of Mr. Holt’s stipend money, as well as cabling to say that he loves her and he’ll likely be back home in the next few weeks. Though he’s beginning to suspect that this matter may draw him farther from his beloved home than he’s ever been.

  THE CITY

  EVEN IN THE dark, Everett knows from its particular bouquet of greenery—beech and balsam and huckleberry with a hint of white pine—that his freight train is passing near Kingston, and the woodlot where he and his brother spent their boyhood with Mrs. Craig. And it surprises him that after all this time, he can call to mind every shade of green contained in that forest. How the stream tasted of copper and of the trees it ran through. And he wonders if Harris can still picture it himself, or if the remembrance withered away after he lost his sight, like a plant shut away in a closet. Harris’s mind has probably become too clogged by greed for him to call up the chestnut that overhung the log cabin they built, the one that dropped its conkers on their tin roof, which always made them bust up laughing.