– Harvey Lomax
“Are you thick?” the clerk sneers, scooping Everett’s nickel into his vest pocket. “No children allowed.”
“Fine, fine, we’re already gone anyway,” Everett says. “But I paid up for a week. So I’ll have that back.”
“If you could damn well read you’d know what this says, wouldn’t you?” the clerk says, pointing with his glasses to the sign behind him.
Everett keeps his eyes trained on the man. “I can read it fine. It says you’d be wise to return my money and mind your business.”
“No—” the clerk snarls, banging out the syllables with his fist. “Chil–dren!”
“I didn’t have a damn child!” Everett yells back. “It was an infant that didn’t cause anybody a stitch of trouble!”
The clerk’s eyes narrow. “Infants are children, you son of a bitch.”
“Now, if your sign said No Infants, that’d be a different story,” Everett says. “But it doesn’t, does it?”
The clerk starts groping beneath the desk, probably for a club or a pistol. Everett feels the old poison in his blood cry out to slug him, but that would only land him back in a penitentiary and maroon the baby in that dingy room, so he makes his exit. He cuts through a lightless graveyard to ensure Lomax isn’t trailing him and returns to find the child asleep, the room stagnant with her breath.
Everett sticks to his savings plan and works into mid-June, always careful to wear his hat low when he’s out on the freight wagon because he knows Lomax is still hunting him. But the added cost of the new room combined with the child-minding means Everett is socking away just two bits for a full day’s labour. And maybe it’s the rattling windows, or the lack of snoring drunks, but the baby combats sleep in their new lodgings as one would drowning. After many nights of this, Monahan gives him a rum-soaked rag for her to suckle before bed, which does the trick, though she’s sluggish in the morning, so Everett quits the practice. When he waters down her goat’s milk to pinch pennies, she stops taking the nippled bottle altogether, and cries until she vomits across her blankets.
“Quit your snivelling!” he yells at her contorted face. “I’m doing my best!” Half-mad with sleeplessness, he carts her out into the cool night air for a walk, letting her wail in his arms, Lomax be damned.
“No mistaking that sound,” a woman in tight satin slacks and high heels says from under an awning as he passes. Her short curls are lacquered to her cheeks and pencil lines are drawn where her eyebrows once grew.
“She won’t take the bottle anymore,” Everett confesses.
The woman steps closer to scrutinize the child. Her eyelashes appear to be dipped in crude oil. “Feed her myself for a dollar,” she says.
It takes a moment for Everett to grasp her proposal. “Will that settle her?”
“No guarantees,” she says. “It might. They all give up sometime, in my experience. Better sooner than later.”
Everett agrees and follows her up some stairs to a bare-walled room, where the only traces of domesticity are a chair, a table, and a naked light bulb dangling above an old bedroll. Beside a basin on the floor is a large rubber-bulbed syringe. The woman perches in the chair and takes the infant in her arms, cooing to it softly. She scoops a hand into her brassiere to free her breast, which is large and under-painted with blue veinwork. Everett’s face grows hot.
“You going to just stand there and gawk?” she says, folding her plum-coloured nipple in half and pressing it into the child’s tiny mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he says meekly, turning away. “How will I know you’re feeding her?”
“I grew six babies this way,” she says. “It’s impossible for me not to. But if you’re watching, that’ll be double.”
Everett goes into the hall and waits uncomfortably, until the woman emerges and passes him the infant, now comatose, her breath sweet as honey. That night she sleeps more soundly than ever, and wakes as cheerful as a puppy.
For the next several weeks, even though Everett and Monahan work into the evening hours, his wages still can’t cover the child-minding, the private room, and a nightly feeding from the streetwalker. “How am I going to be your benefactor if I don’t have anything to benefit you with?” he asks the baby over their dinner of boiled oats.
By the first of August, Everett is forced to dig up what’s left of his savings. And although he promised the child that their days on the rails were over, and it pains him not to thank Monahan for taking him on, Everett walks to the rail yard with a pack of meagre provisions and a woollen blanket draped over his shoulders. His only comfort is the notion that despite Harvey Lomax’s threat—I won’t let you go. Not ever—he will eventually relent. Because if there’s anything that Everett Greenwood has always excelled at, it’s his ability to go deeper into the gutter than anyone else will go.
PERHAPS A RELATION?
AT THE REFERENCE desk of the Archives of Canada, Lomax requests the military records of Everett Greenwood. The librarian—who regards him as if he were something recently dredged up from a grave—tells him to wait while she pulls the file. He picks a secluded carrel and stuffs himself into its tiny armchair, which constricts his wide hips painfully.
After Greenwood gave him the slip at the flophouse, Lomax staked out Toronto’s rail yard for a week but came up empty. But how could he possibly admit to Mr. Holt that he’d been just ten feet from Everett Greenwood and yet failed to capture him? So Lomax has kept the encounter to himself. And with no other developments to report, a week ago he halted his daily check-ins with Mr. Holt completely. Now a small stack of unopened telegrams from his employer awaits him back in his hotel room. (Along with some from Lavern, who likely wants more money he doesn’t have.)
No doubt Greenwood has fled Toronto and has again taken to the rails. But Lomax can’t just go traipsing around the country hunting him, especially not with Mr. Holt’s stipend nearly exhausted. Which means if he doesn’t drum up something soon, Mr. Holt will ruin him. So it’s a testament to Lomax’s desperation that he’s travelled to Ottawa to confirm Howard Blank’s claim that he and Greenwood had both fought in the Great War.
To settle his jangled nerves, as well as to render the cramped armchair more tolerable, he smokes an opium-laced Parliament, hoping that none of his fellow scholars have travelled widely enough to place its odour. To mitigate the stresses of his hunt, Lomax secured a small brick of the drug from a Chinese bathhouse, and has been smoking a measured amount daily. He has yet to experience any of opium’s negative effects, and feels only a warm and predictable relief from the lightning in his back. Even still, he remains steadfast in his conviction to cease the practice the second he returns home to Saint John.
He must have drifted off because he wakes with a start to find the librarian standing over him. “No Everett Greenwood ever served in the Queen’s Own Rifles,” she says dispassionately. “Although I did pull a Harris Greenwood. From Kingston?” she adds, brandishing a manila file. “Perhaps a relation?”
Snatching the file from her hand, Lomax dimly recalls Blank’s outlandish assertion that Everett was related to the famously blind West Coast lumber tycoon. Though military terms are foreign to Lomax—Mr. Holt had a knack for securing draft exceptions for his friends—it appears Harris Greenwood enlisted voluntarily through the Kingston detachment and returned from Europe in 1919, after earning the Mons Star and the Canadian General Service Medal. The file states he was uninjured, with no record of his being blinded in combat. Then, paper-clipped to the rear of the folder, Lomax finds Harris Greenwood’s service photograph: a soldier with dark hair standing with chin raised and helmet clutched against his ribs—the very likeness of the man who escaped him back at the flophouse.
Lomax pockets the photograph and hops a train back to Toronto the next day, elated by this fresh development which he can use to appease Mr. Holt—only to discover that the lock to his suite now refuses his key. He rides the elevator down to the concierge, who politely informs him that his
hotel account has been frozen at the request of Mr. Holt. “We require a cash deposit if you intend to remain with us this evening, sir,” the man adds. Lomax hands over the remaining bills in his wallet and is given a new key.
Back in his room, he tears open the topmost of Holt’s telegrams.
AS WARNED YR EXPENSE ACCNTS FROZEN STOP DETECT MCSORLEY OF CN POLICE NOW HNDLING SRCH STOP RETRN TO ST JHN IMMED TO AVOID FURTH DISCIPLN
Since Holt Steel built much of the CN railroad, Mr. Holt sits on its board of directors, and in the past he’s used a railroad detective named Art McSorley to run down any fugitives who’ve bolted from Saint John. Lomax knows McSorley to be a cunning, brutal man, and if he gets his hands on the baby and the journal first, it will be irrefutable proof of Lomax’s total incompetence. What Mr. Holt means by “FURTH DISCIPLN” isn’t clear, but it could involve some sort of harm being visited upon Lomax’s family. In Lomax’s experience, if Mr. Holt becomes sufficiently enraged, there’s no cruelty that is beneath him. So for the first time in his career, Lomax decides to disobey his employer. He won’t return to Saint John as instructed. Instead he’ll go to Vancouver, find Harris Greenwood, and wait for Everett to show up there. Detective McSorley surely has no idea about Everett’s powerful brother, and in Lomax’s experience it’s always easier to greet a fugitive at the place they’re headed than to catch them along the way. If Lomax can secure the child and the journal and return them to Mr. Holt before Detective McSorley, he might still be able to hold on to his job and his home.
But trips require money, so the next morning Lomax tramps downstairs and informs the concierge that he’s just returned from breakfast to find his room disturbed. When the man accompanies him back upstairs, they discover the dresser overturned and large, fist-sized holes driven into the plaster walls. Areas of the bathroom tile are shattered and a wide chip has been knocked from the sink.
“We are very sorry for this, Mr. Lomax!” the concierge says in shock. “Is anything missing?”
“Yes,” Lomax replies, after he checks the empty billfold tucked in the bedside drawer.
“What exactly, sir? I’ll prepare a report. Of course our hotel will reimburse you for your lost articles.”
“Four hundred dollars,” Lomax replies. “Cash.”
After completing the hotel’s forms and writing up an account of the incident, Lomax receives his money from the cashier’s desk that afternoon, and immediately wires two hundred to Lavern back in Saint John. The remaining sum is more than sufficient for a first-class berth to Vancouver.
JUDGMENT
FOR GOOD LUCK on their return voyage, Harris Greenwood secures for Feeney and himself the two very same cabins on the very same steamer, the Empress of Australia. During the daytime, the passage is pleasant: trade winds soft from the southwest, the flat ocean a deep blue-green that Feeney describes as “normally only found upon an artist’s palette.” In the evenings, however, the sea roughens, and Harris and his describer dine in the first-class lounge beside a baby grand bolted to the floor, while the maître d’ spritzes their crisp white tablecloth with water to keep their plates from skating around. They eat mostly in silence, like children sharing a conspiracy, as Harris takes great pains to discuss only business matters and to avoid smiling or laughing altogether. When Feeney reveals that a cabin boy gave him an odd look up on the observation deck during their third day at sea, Harris insists they henceforth take meals separately.
Still, Feeney sneaks across the hall into Harris’s cabin to perform a nightly poetry reading, his delicious cello-like voice sweetening the air as they recline in leather chairs. When the reading is over, Feeney dims the lamp and they lie parallel in the narrow, sea-lolled bunk, Harris riveted in place with fright. At Yale, he occasionally saved up his scholarship per diems to go off campus and visit one of many brothels with his fellow students. But never did he enjoy himself the way his classmates professed to. For the act’s duration, he worried that they’d passed a lesser woman off to him, some homely crone that any sighted patron would flatly refuse, and as a result, he was often unable to properly conclude these engagements.
But after many minutes of fighting to remind himself that no eyes are upon them—not God’s, not Baumgartner’s, not the loggers who’d stomped those two swampers to death—Harris draws Feeney against him. Eventually, he even allows himself to run his hands over Feeney’s shape to discover that, other than his curiously hairy calves and small paunch, his body is like his face: lithe and smooth-muscled as a seal.
At first, Harris sought to keep the incidents at the movie theatre walled off within him, as he had the “little hell” he’d always sensed was there. He could have easily blamed the indiscretion on the sake, the cultural disorientation, the stresses of deal making, or the eels and urchins they’d been eating. Yet how can he possibly discredit this unimpeachable joy he’s found in his describer’s company? So much like the joy his bird collection offered him in dribs and drabs over the years, except in this case compounded a hundredfold.
“You failed to mention in your interview, Mr. Feeney, that your teeth are quite crooked,” Harris says after they’ve been kissing for an hour, an act that he’s still not able to perform without an undertow of nausea.
“The subject never came up,” Feeney says, nibbling the bulb of Harris’s nose, delicately, the way a horse takes an apple. “You were too busy prattling on about your beloved timber company.”
Over the duration of the voyage, Harris finds that beneath his describer’s prickly honesty is a seam of doting sweetness. While growing up, Feeney tells him, he had an elder sister who was incapacitated in both mind and body, a girl he’d cared for himself, dressing her and feeding her each day. Feeney had honed the knives of his wit to defend her on the sidewalks of Cork, and her death of heart complications when he was twenty was what had prompted his move to Canada. Not that Harris requires any such defense; but there’s a bone-deep loyalty in Feeney that Harris values. He describes things as they are, not as Harris wants to hear them. And his poet’s eye gazes into the very essences of things, whether the observation conforms to popular opinion or not.
Despite the deal with the Japanese they’ve secured, Harris seldom considers his business affairs during the journey. His thoughts centre mostly on the threat of discovery by the steamer’s crew, and on the rare birds he wants to show Feeney, and the hidden places he wants them to escape to upon their return.
Still, Harris is no fool. He knows exactly what awaits them in Vancouver. Unlike the anonymous movie theatre, people will be watching at home. Baumgartner, who was even more ill-tempered than usual during the trip, and who’d had the gall to insist that Harris take two suites at the Imperial Hotel, might already suspect something. If word ever got out, both Harris and the company he built could be destroyed.
But who more than Harris is prepared for the ruthlessness of the world’s judgment? And who knows better that some force will eventually snatch away this sweet gift he’s been given so late in life, just as his sight was taken from him on the cusp of manhood by a pitiless disease, just as his brother was taken from him by his own selfishness and stupidity?
Even so, Harris is not afraid. The blind, by their very nature, already operate as outcasts. And ever since he was a boy, he’s excelled at both concealment and self-preservation. As orphans, he and Everett managed to protect themselves by building that crooked log cabin on Mrs. Craig’s woodlot, and Harris’s arrangement with Feeney will be no different. If life has taught him anything, it’s that you must be more secretive, more protective, and more pitiless than the next man. Either that or everything you are, everything you’ve built, and everyone you love, can be trampled in an instant.
THE SALT RHEUM
SICKNESS COMES TO their hay-packed boxcar as they fly westward out of the black heart of Ontario. Each time the baby slips into sleep, she fails to draw air through her rheum-clogged nose and snorts herself awake. This is followed by a series of hacks that loll out her tongue—an
impossibly tiny thing that recalls to Everett a tinned oyster. He keeps her head tipped back to drain her airway, which does little good, and the whole ordeal is repeated endlessly. At last he gives up and they sit awake, her eyes slick with mucus and flashing in the dark like gemstones, as they clickety-clack past pole-straight evergreens interspersed with inky lakes, the child clutching pitifully at his shirt as though he’s fixing to drop her.
Everett has given her a temporary name: Pod. He avoided doing so thus far, the way a farmer leaves the pigs bound for his smokehouse anonymous. But Pod is still just a placeholder. A road name, a hobo moniker—something to be sloughed off the moment she settles into her real life, wherever that may be. He knows that trees often use birds and squirrels to spread their seeds, along with various flying contraptions like whirlers or cottony fluff that can blow great distances. Much of creation works this way: living things send versions of themselves out into the great puzzle of the future. And like a seed, this girl is in dire need of a hospitable place to land. And it’s his job to find it.
At sunup the next day the salt rheum has mostly dried up, though Pod still hums with a low fever, her skin unnaturally shiny. She refuses the biscuits he’s brought, even after he soaks them in water, and when she does sleep at last, she wakes to a thick green crust sealing her eyelids, which provokes a thrashing yowl. Everett holds his wetted shirtsleeve to her grimacing face until her eyelashes come unglued. By the afternoon her cough has worsened, and she burns to the touch and stops taking water. Everett turns down her sweaty creeper to cool her, and when she still refuses to drink, he plugs her nose, pries open her jaw, and pours water down her gullet as she gurgles and screams.
Fearing the hay dust is aggravating her condition, he climbs out of the boxcar and over to a lumber gondola so they can ride out in open air. They tuck in beneath the woollen blanket as Pod tracks the landscape’s scroll with woozy interest. They roar past frizzy fields, slow-winding rivers, fall-down barns, grown-over paddocks, chicken pens, and groves of every tree imaginable. When dark falls, Pod’s eyes brim with starlight, and the moon, white as a sliced radish, floods the whipping forest. For an instant, they spot a wolverine sharpening its claws on a stump, then two deer, ears perked, frozen as though caught at some criminal act rather than chewing clover in the middle of nowhere.
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