Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  By the time the train arrives in Toronto, both the bottle of buttermilk and the egg sandwiches that the woman packed back in Quebec are gone. Everett collects the baby, leaves the boxcar, and trudges through a sprawling stockyard of steaming cattle into the city. The first two rooming houses he approaches declare full occupancy, though he suspects that the cinder burns on his coat, his raccoon mask of coal soot, and the odd, wriggling bulge at his stomach aren’t helping matters. Everett ventures into a more run-down area of the city, where sun-heated trash cans stand putrefying on the sidewalks and custard-yellow undergarments flap in alleys. A trolley bangs over a puzzle-board of tracks and the baby shudders at the noise. A nightpan is dumped from above and a torrent of filth misses them narrowly.

  To his eyes, the Crash has hit Toronto even harder than Saint John. It’s as though an artillery shell has gone off, loaded not with gunpowder but despair and squalor. On benches and stoops, atop overcoats, waxed cardboard, and crosshatched sticks, people sleep. They wake with bird droppings blotching their coats, pavement pock-marking their cheeks, newsprint blackening their skin. Everett spots a woman no older than twenty run aground in a park—either unconscious or never to be conscious again—a dark stain blooming in her crotch, a fresh flower in the buttonhole of her lapel.

  Finally, the clerk of a decrepit rooming house allows Everett to sign a fake name to the register. “No booze, no girls, no children,” the man says, pointing to the sign behind him that must indicate the same. He guides Everett up to a large communal room, where a grid of thirty mattresses is arrayed on the floor. At the washbasins filthy men cup water-filled hands to their faces, making loud sputtering noises. When the clerk exits, Everett turns his back to the others at the corner basin and unwraps the baby before scrubbing her with the woman’s lavender soap.

  That evening, the baby nestles against him as shadowy shapes sweep in to fill every mattress, the room roiling with their animal stench and nocturnal emissions. Deep in the night, a man drags a girl to the adjacent mattress, jostling and hissing at her for an hour. Momentarily, the child wakes to the scene and Everett stops her ears with his palms until the man groans and tells the girl to leave.

  Later, Everett wakes with the baby’s fingernail fish-hooked painfully in his nostril. Most of the lodgers are already off begging, working, or some combination of the two. After the week’s deposit on the rooming house and this morning’s pint of goat’s milk, the woman’s silver dollars are nearly spent. Out on the street he hears a man calling from a truck with an electric megaphone: “The Holt coke mill requires fifty men in Fredericton! A buck thirty-five a day! That includes free rail transport!”

  “I can’t go working for that nasty old Holt, now can I?” Everett says to the child. “Seeing how he hung you out in the cold like that?”

  After a morning spent hunting for work, Everett feeds the baby on a park bench where a number of unemployed men have gathered to share loose newspaper pages and scavenged cigarettes. Before long, a man riding on an inoperable Model T being pulled by a piebald mare calls from the road: “Seeking work?” None of the reclining men stir, and though Everett knows this disinterest is perhaps an ill omen, he approaches the wagon.

  “I am,” he says. “But I’ve got an infant that needs minding.”

  “That’s fine,” the man says. “I know a woman, though I expect she’ll charge half the daily rate I’ll give you.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. What’s the job? Freighting?” he says, gesturing at the wagon hitched to the horse-drawn car, which is constructed mostly of salvage wood banged together crudely with threepenny nails.

  The man shrugs. He’s portly, oily-faced, with mossy teeth and sludgy lips. His eyes are cloudy and small, and look like they’ve been spooned out, fried in bacon grease, then shoved back in. “There ain’t never no one job,” he says. “Not during hard times. We’ll do a touch of everything. Some hauling. A little tinkering. Tear-downs. Buildups. Bit of pick and shovel work. Mostly moving some shit from somewhere to somewhere else. That suit you?”

  Everett hops up beside the man, who introduces himself as Sinclair Monahan. He drives the buggy to a three-storey red-brick tenement, where out front a thin Mediterranean woman of about forty kneels on a patch of grass, spoon-feeding two toddlers.

  “What I call her?” the woman, Mrs. Papadopoulos, asks Everett when they’ve settled the terms of the baby’s care.

  “Call her anything you like,” Everett says, climbing back onto the wagon. “Won’t bother her.”

  “Yessir, these hard times will make a saint spit on the cross,” says Everett’s boss as they set off, his loose suspenders slipping from his round shoulders as he speaks. Everett ascertains early that the hardships of the age will be his primary oratorical subject. Not that he minds the chatter. He prefers someone else doing the talking, and Monahan’s back is strong and he’s smart with his horse and knows the city.

  From behind a boathouse they load some planed boards into the wagon bed and cart them to a nearby lumberyard. Next, they haul three claw-foot tubs out of a condemned hotel, each heavy enough to flood Everett’s head with sparks when they lift them. By mid-morning, the clouds have burned off; the two sop their brows with their shirtsleeves and the draft horse lathers under its collar as it drags the tubs to the salvage yard. Apart from the work he did on the Frenchman’s farm, Everett has been stuck playing nursemaid for too long, and he’s cheered by this job’s physicality. While it’s not yet clear whether they’re stealing, repossessing, or donating these things they’re hauling, Everett knows not to ask.

  “During hard times nothing is nobody’s,” Monahan says, as if reading his mind while sharing his onion sandwich with Everett as he drives. “Not really. Not forever.”

  After lunch, Monahan pilots the buggy to a foreclosed orphanage down near the western lakeshore. “Happy days are here again,” he sings while they’re carting out dozens of children’s cots from a warren of dingy rooms. “Don’t carry them too close,” he says as they bump through the hallways. “Not unless you’re fixing to open yourself a lice hotel.”

  Peering from the building’s shadowy nooks are youngsters with flea bites spangling their faces, their bodies stunted by hunger. In the yard, a girl skips rope with an electrical cord; her dress is moth-eaten and there are at least four fresh-looking holes punched in her belt. Everett has always avoided children, but since finding the baby, he’s been noticing when their coats are ripped at the armpits, or when their pants are more patch than pant, or when their rickets are so bad they’re chewing their palms for the texture of meat.

  “My stepsister works in city records,” Monahan says during the ride home. “She says people aren’t getting married since the Crash. No new licenses. Even fewer birth certificates. The future’s only going to be dust and scarcity from here on out, and don’t people know it. I’ve no idea why anyone would procreate during times like these, no offence.”

  “None taken,” Everett says.

  “And who can blame them? See those banks over there? Empty. Every one. Not an ounce of bullion to be found. No sir, I bury my money. Got a fine spot for it. You’ll bury yours, too, if you’re smart.”

  When the day is through, Monahan returns Everett to Mrs. Papadopoulos and the baby doesn’t cry when he takes her up. During her bath in the washbasin later, he checks her milky body for chigger bites or bruises and finds neither. After supper, with the money he earned he buys himself a work shirt and some copper-riveted trousers, as well as a new creeper in blue, because pink will soil too easily, and two more flannels so he doesn’t have to wash daily. After working with Monahan for a week, Everett purchases some horsehide gloves and a suitcase that he keeps packed in case the Mounties come knocking and they need to skip town in a hurry.

  Each day, Monahan’s jobs grow more and more obviously illegal. They cut a crude tap into a city gas line, then hook it up to the cookstove of an old drunk with a lacework of busted capillaries in his nose. They wire around the electricity
meter for a Negro family of ten, all with grey teeth that look like things pulled from a fire, the little girls in flour-sack dresses, their shack so small they must sleep in shifts because there isn’t floor enough for all of them to lie down at once.

  In the park after quitting time, and after the baby’s had its goat’s milk and Everett eats his ham sandwich and his apple, he heeds Monahan’s advice and wraps both his savings and the journal up in an oilcloth and buries them at the root of a wide-spreading magnolia. Back at the rooming house, other lodgers have noticed the child but keep it to themselves, given that she never cries or fusses. After she’s asleep, Everett scrubs her flannels in the sink and hangs them to dry from a line over the alley before lying down beside her, the bed surprisingly warmed, the baby like a fresh loaf of bread that never cools.

  Though the child has grown on him, he doubts he can maintain this caretaking much longer, and his new plan is to sock away enough money to pay Mrs. Papadopoulos to accept her outright. After he works a little more, he’ll purchase new spiles and buckets, then go hunt out another sugarbush somewhere on the city’s outskirts and start over. If there’s anything that the Dominion of Canada has, it’s an endless supply of trees that nobody’s using—that is, if his brother doesn’t cut them all down first.

  Everett works another week until Monahan gives him Sunday off while his carthorse is being shod. He considers taking the baby to a moving picture, then worries the phantasmal screen will frighten her. Instead he cuts over to a duck pond in a nearby park, where he tears some of the last blossoms from a cherry tree and brushes them along her cheek. Her eyes track the swallows darting through the canopy, and she points at the ducks that patrol the pond and squeals.

  Who knows, once she’s living with Mrs. Papadopoulos and he’s established his new sugarbush, there might even be some money left over for her education. He could be her benefactor of sorts. Like in some old story. Money was never much use to Everett anyway. And since she seems to like natural things so much, perhaps he’ll visit occasionally and take her to this park to smell the blossoms and chase around the ducks. She may even grow into a person of value, of refinement and intelligence and dignity. Just the kind he isn’t.

  THE LEAST OF WHAT YOU’LL LOSE

  LOMAX CIRCUMNAVIGATES HIS room, bedevilled by a restless agitation, the muscles in his back tugging like a ship’s rigging in a storm, as the breakers of a headache crash against the shore of his skull. He’s been checking in with the Mountie who eats his lunch at the same counter each day, and, thankfully, the vagrant with the baby has yet to be captured. But in yesterday’s cable, Mr. Holt remarked upon Lomax’s mounting hotel bill, suggesting he move to a less extravagant room in the same hotel. Another sign of his displeasure with Lomax’s failure to locate the child or the journal, especially after he’d been so confident the matter could be resolved quickly.

  Your house will be the least of what you’ll lose, his employer had said. And Lomax shudders now to contemplate what his threat actually portends. If Mr. Holt called in the mortgage on Lomax’s bungalow, his whole family would be tossed out and condemned to the poor-house—an outcome nearly too catastrophic to contemplate.

  And now Lavern has requested more grocery money, and Lomax is nearing the end of his stipend and can’t possibly ask Mr. Holt for another. Lomax feels a sudden constriction in his chest and worries that he might weep. He hasn’t done that since his father left. But over the course of his long, pain-ridden life, he’s learned that if one were to give over to weeping, there’d be only tears. Seas of them. And seas of tears will neither complete his task nor secure his family’s safety. Instead he draws a hot bath, which does nothing to ease his back or quell his mental agitation. Angrily, he dresses and leaves his hotel to patrol the sidewalks, eyeing faces, watching for single men with babies, the same mind-numbing task that’s occupied him now for weeks. When the lightning in his spine stalls him out front of a Chinese laundry, he locks eyes with a skinny man clearing the sidewalk of litter with a wood-tined rake. The man flicks his head toward the alley, and in some deep region of his mind, Lomax registers his meaning. He follows him around the corner, where the man holds out his palm. When Lomax passes him some money, the man fetches a small, butcher-wrapped package from the hollow of a nearby drain.

  Lomax can’t suffer the miserable march back to his hotel without some relief, so he ducks into another alley, this one next to a flophouse he’s already checked countless times. Not without some shame, Lomax twists the tobacco from the tip of one of his Parliaments and crams into the hole a kernel of the oily opium he’s just bought, an operation learned while watching his father during his rare visits home. Lomax lights it and inhales lily, licorice, and creosote, his every capillary extending its arms for the restoring smoke. He fights against exhalation for as long as possible, while divine chimes peal in his ears and his spine sluices with gratification. This opium is twice as potent as the doctor’s cigars, leading Lomax to wonder whether the drug’s power will only grow the farther west he ventures—which might then be the sole consolation of this so-far disastrous expedition. He finishes the cigarette, his entire body softened like butter in a pan, and the urge to recline overcomes him. He spies some relatively puffy bales of trash and curls into them, his blood purring.

  An uncountable duration of time passes before the softened sensation crests and begins to fade. As it does, Lomax opens his eyes to a curious sight: a white cotton bird soaring against the alley’s cloudy sky. Dangling from a wash line in the foul breeze, puffing, contracting, nearly breathing. And despite his initial bewilderment, Harvey Lomax recognizes this bit of cloth for exactly what it is. He ought to. As the father of seven, he’s been changing flannels for what seems like his entire life. And while he’s spotted numerous flannels hung from laundry lines throughout the city, none were outside the window of a skid-row flophouse.

  THE RAILWAY COMMAND GROUP

  AS THE TRANSPACIFIC steamer Empress of Australia departs from Victoria, Harris takes great care in unpacking his dressing case, arranging his effects, and memorizing his stateroom’s unfamiliar contours. When everything is to his satisfaction, he dons his finest silk jacket and dismisses Baumgartner, who seems surprised and even perhaps a little affronted as he goes off in search of a bridge game. Harris then summons Feeney to accompany him to the steamer’s topmost deck, where he leans at the rail and takes several salty draughts into his lungs. “All right, poet,” he says. “What am I looking at?”

  “The Olympic Peninsula, sir,” Feeney replies. “A wall of hemlock, cedar, and the odd madrone. And there’s a fine stand of second-growth fir, all good and straight, but too young to cut. Beneath them is a rocky shore, graded well to drag the logs into the water.”

  “Oh, come on, man!” Harris says. “If I want a logger’s take I’d have asked Baumgartner up here with me.”

  Because of Feeney’s quip about Greenwood Timber’s habit of paying its oxen better than its men, Harris made a point to offer him an initial salary double that of Baumgartner’s. “I’ll never publish another poem again in my life,” Feeney said after they inked the agreement. Yet now Harris worries that he’s overestimated the man’s value.

  Feeney laughs. “Fine, keep your knickers on!” he says. “I must say I’ve never been paid to be a poet. Which is a tremendous sacrilege in itself, I might add. But I’ll have a go.”

  Harris waits in anticipation, and overtop of the steamer’s great chuffing he hears his describer draw a breath. “Fog seeps between the brindle stalks,” Feeney begins, “and the sun, hooded with seaborne mist, burns among the striving arms of branches…”

  In Harris’s mind a vivid panorama assembles, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of relaxation. Of goodness, rightness, and exactness. For the remainder of their voyage to Japan, Harris has Feeney conjure more of these seascape descriptions—“my postcards,” Feeney calls them—at set intervals throughout the day. Though the poet’s usage is at times a touch overblown, Harris enjoys himself a
ll the same.

  It’s six days to Yokohama, then another day to Tokyo, during which they’re driven below deck by a sleet-smattering gale. They pass the time with readings of Wordsworth and Yeats—both Feeney’s suggestions. Harris prefers poetry above all else, for how it sets like concrete in his mind, as opposed to the short-acting fireworks of the novel, long, agonizing yarns concerning people and families he’ll never know.

  From the Tokyo wharf, they’re escorted by a profusely apologetic government agent to what he says are merely their temporary accommodations while their proper accommodations are readied. Feeney describes the guesthouse as a low-lying house that sits next to a bog. A curious supper of sea creatures is served along with much bell-ringing and burning of acrid incense.

  Harris wakes in the middle of the night to the stirring of the paper walls by the breeze. He can hear Baumgartner’s grizzly bear–like snoring somewhere nearby, but also Feeney’s soft inhalations in the room immediately adjacent. With some shock and revulsion, Harris realizes that they’re all separated, essentially, by nothing.

  There once was a pair of swampers employed at one of his logging camps who were discovered one morning naked and whiskeyed-up in each other’s arms beneath an overturned skiff. The other loggers beat them with the butts of their axes and trampled their naked flesh with spiked boots. With some glee, Baumgartner had informed Harris that the bodies were dumped out in the cuts, while the Mounties were told that the men had gotten drunk and wandered off. Though the event revolted him, Harris knew better than to interfere with logging camp justice.

  But here in Japan, Harris reminds himself, this thin sheet of paper is defined as a wall, legally speaking. And no one could possibly deem it indecent for one man to hear another man breathing in his sleep through a wall. Relieved, Harris puts his pillow over his head and rolls over.