Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  To distract the child Everett begins speaking freely, even if the practice is bound to turn him crazy. “Your name’s Pod,” he says. “Pod,” he repeats, patting her creeper, and she replies with a gurgling, lamb-like bleat that sounds nothing like the word whatsoever. “And this here’s a gondola car,” he says, pointing everywhere. “It’s attached to other cars, which are all pulled by a locomotive. Whole thing’s called a train.” Though Pod listens with gaping eyes fixed on his lips, his words make little lasting imprint on her understanding. Because when he asks her later to point to the gondola car, she merely grunts and soils her flannels. “How am I supposed to teach you the words for things if all I have to do it is some other damn words?” he says, tapping the nub of her nose with his fingertip.

  After he runs dry of definitions, he stumbles into a telling of his own life. Speaking with a candour he’d only ever employed with Harris when they were boys, he begins with how they became brothers and how they started out as woodcutters, and carries on from there. At times Pod regards him knowingly, as though it’s a story she’s heard a thousand times before, and Everett grows convinced her head is already larded with knowledge, not just of his own life and history, but all things that ever happened to anyone. Still, the story soothes her, whether she knows it already or not, and soon her limpid eyes dip shut.

  The next morning her fever has broken and she guzzles up most of their water. The train runs fast all day and never sidetracks to let others pass—it may be an express, carrying something like freshly slaughtered steers or urgent mail, which, Everett knows, could pose a problem if they run out of provisions before it gets where it’s going. The train climbs squat, rocky shelves of rusty-tinged granite, dashing west past cut-over forests, mines, and gravel quarries—land that men like his brother Harris have already despoiled to pave their personal roads to riches.

  He and Pod nestle between the stacks of fragrant lumber until the sun drops and the sky over Lake Superior is shot through with fuchsia spokes of light. Everett removes his boots and hangs his feet from the car’s edge. Pod lies splayed on his belly, her warmth boring into him. As they near the outskirts of Port Arthur, a sensation of wide-open liberty overcomes him, as though he and Pod are themselves the breeze and the world is theirs alone to blow through. He wriggles his toes in the leaf-sweet wind like a boy.

  HEARTWOOD

  ONE IS SUBJECT to much talk nowadays concerning family trees and roots and bloodlines and such, as if a family were an eternal fact, a continuous branching upwards through time immemorial. But the truth is that all family lines, from the highest to the lowest, originate somewhere, on some particular day. Even the grandest trees must’ve once been seeds spun helpless on the wind, and then just meek saplings nosing up from the soil.

  We know this for certain because on the night of April 29, 1908, a family took root before our eyes. We awoke to the apocalypse itself. The tremor flung the dishes from our cupboards and unhitched the frames from our walls. Two twenty-car passenger trains had collided head-on a mile east of our township. The westbound locomotive’s tender caught fire and the flames passed from one train to the other and hours went by before we could push our water wagons deep enough into the oily coal smoke to douse the blaze. The fire left a gruesome scene: skulls studded with black teeth; indistinguishably charred appendages intermixed with twists of contorted iron and torched garments. A proper accounting of the dead was impossible, but of the sixteen passengers thrown from the train’s windows on impact, the sole survivors were two young boys, both left barefoot by the tremendous force of the crash, one discovered tangled deep in the brush, the other floundering in a nearby brook. Both were near nine years of age, by our reckoning, and even after hours of hunting, we never found a single shoe.

  Our town physician determined that it was their small statures that saved them, the way a squirrel can plunge from a tree and skitter off unharmed. Either that or, as was claimed by the more speculative among us, something evil and unkillable resided in them both. Still, that the boys escaped such a cataclysm seemed as much a miracle then as it does now.

  We sent word of the two survivors to the CN Railway Company, who maintained they had no record of any children riding either train, so they bore no responsibility for any that happened to be found in the vicinity of the accident. While it was upsetting business to face the young victims of such tragedy, it was our rail junction—and our octogenarian switchman—who’d effectively orphaned them, so after our failed efforts to locate any surviving family, we appraised the boys as our responsibility and assumed their charge. Matters were handled differently in those days, and lost people circulated as unnoticed as slight gusts of wind.

  Though the ordeal had rendered both boys mute, it was immediately clear that the mysterious pair shared no blood. One was slightly shorter, with dark, wavy hair and almond eyes that always avoided your own; and yet he had an easy, almost carefree way of moving about the world, despite what he’d suffered. The taller one had long fingers and thick, honey-coloured hair; that one would meet anyone’s gaze with a shrewdly appraising glare, as though even our rescue had been some kind of trick, a further continuation of the disaster that had befallen him. Yet despite their outward differences, we figured those two boys were better off kept together, and billeted them with several charitable homesteads in the area while we waited futilely for someone to claim them.

  It’s well established that the recollections of youngsters are about as reliable as rainbows. This is especially true, we learned, of the recently orphaned. When after a week the boys finally spoke, the difficulty wasn’t that they’d forgotten their names, it was that they drummed up too many: a junk shop of surnames and given names all mumbled and jumbled together—Tommy, Mackenzie, Buck, Smith, Jacob, Finnegan, Seymour, Gordon, Aaron. Perhaps the impact had scrambled their heads, or perhaps their true names had become too painful to utter now that their families were dead, but our only remedy was to jot them all down on scraps of paper and pull two from a coffee can and get on with it. Concerning their pasts, the blonde one, for whom we pulled Harris, could recall only fragments: sheep, five or six sisters, an uncle, rain pattering a metal shed roof, a smoky hearth. The darker boy, for whom we pulled Everett, recalled slimy fish knives, a barking man with no hair at all, a sickly mother, a wireless that never worked.

  Beneath the overpowering stink of burnt horsehair cushions and immolated flesh must have lingered the traces of their lost homes and families, still caught in the fibres of their sweaters and the linings of their nostrils. Yet each passing day must have left those traces a little weaker, further confused, less distinct. Soon their pasts withered away completely, and all that remained was haze and hearsay.

  It was shortly after we named them that we began discovering their beds empty in the night. Our townspeople took up naphtha lanterns and tracked them into the woods. We found the boys cowering and clutching each other in the bedclothes we had given them beneath a wide-spreading tree, muttering in an unsettling shared tongue. When this was repeated over several nights, we were near ready to shove those boys back on an outbound train and be done with it. And given how things turned out, lately we can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake we didn’t.

  It was Parson Brennan who took note that whenever the boys absconded, it was often to one particular woodlot, an otherwise vacant plot officially owned by Mrs. Fiona Craig. We still can’t say why this was. Perhaps they were drawn to the old trapper’s hut they discovered there, a rotted windowless shack once used, it was rumoured, to harbour runaway slaves from the United States. Or perhaps it was some comforting aspect of the woods themselves, which were thick with oak and maple, foxglove and trillium, elderberry and chokecherry.

  Especially after they started taking to the woods, there was something otherworldly and haunted about the pair. So while many of us could’ve used some extra hands around our properties, none volunteered to take the boys on a permanent basis. As a last resort we proposed to Mrs. Craig that she
allow their habitation in that hut on her woodlot. The township would provide her with a yearly sum to house and feed them until they came of age. And though the old widow had no offspring of her own, and wasn’t what you’d call the caretaking type, we were pleasantly surprised when she agreed.

  MRS. FIONA CRAIG

  SHE AND HER husband, James Craig, a lantern-jawed physician, arrived in Canada at the Halifax harbour in 1893. The transatlantic relocation had been wholly his idea. Fiona, a slight but attractive girl raised in Glasgow’s tenement slums, met James while he was there studying the spread of pulmonary consumption among the poor. As he often went unmasked, even when performing autopsies on the most wretched corpses, he contracted a case of his own shortly after their marriage. This was Fiona’s first taste of James’s foolhardiness, which would frustrate her to no end, especially after she’d struck the kind of marital gold unheard of among those of her low station.

  When James took ill, his ears pricked to the beckoning New World, with its healthful air, economic opportunity, and abundant greenery. Fiona knew her husband was always romantic about woodlands—too much Burns and Wordsworth in his youth perhaps—and he even viewed his consumption as a kind of poetic affliction, a deepening of the senses. They would leave the bleak moors of Scotland, James decided, a land of too few trees and too many people, with its grimy smoke and vagrants and urchins spitting in the gutters, and establish a country practice in the wooded province of Ontario, near the city of Kingston. Eventually, James aimed to travel on the newly constructed railroad even farther west to British Columbia, where the marine air was said to be moist and sweet and the trees grew as high as clouds and could be chopped at for weeks before they’d so much as wobble.

  When the couple arrived in “the Land of the Trees,” they found the thirty thickly wooded acres they’d petitioned from the Canadian Land Registry already occupied by a band of roving Mohawk, who’d been displaced from their traditional trapping grounds by a local lumber concern. Despite his compassionate ways, James Craig bought a rifle and raised a local militia to drive the band from his property, a brutal yet necessary act that many of us had once performed ourselves. Some of the Mohawk refused to vacate and grew so uppity there wasn’t much to be done except shoot them as examples and burn their women and children out.

  A well-appointed house was constructed in the fire-cleared section. There, James accepted as his clientele the local lumberjacks and axemen who’d also been lured by the Dominion’s great woods, fleeing famine or, for many, their own spotty pasts. Irish, Norwegians, Finns, Germans, Danes, Swedes, Frenchman, and fellow Scots of low birth—they were degenerates all, in Fiona Craig’s vocal estimation, outcasts well beneath her husband and the bucolic life she’d envisioned for herself. Fiona kept to her chambers whenever the men frequented her husband’s office.

  The restorative country air did little for James’s health, however, and when his condition turned and the bloody sputum and sweats beset him, he shed half his weight in a fortnight. In just a month he lay dead in their marital bed at the age of thirty. The shock of her husband’s departure left Mrs. Craig unstable. She’d been duped, that was her view—by whom she wouldn’t tell Parson Brennan when she described to him the feeling—by false promises of prosperity and a new life. Many said she resented this forested continent itself for the trickery. In the end, Fiona Craig was left shrill and embittered with the Devil’s rage.

  James had provided a good-sized nest egg, it was rumoured, allowing her to maintain the ways of a woman of means. She kept the house to herself and surprisingly took no boarders. She had the house painted a blinding white, the kind of white that tarnishes after just a year. With her nearest neighbour four miles distant, she rarely attended church and was seldom seen in town, though whenever she was, she’d always be well turned out: corsets, bustles, and frilly dresses she must’ve sewn herself or mail-ordered. She’d purchase odd items at the general store, like needles and thread, noxious chemicals, and bolts of French lace. All requested with a belittling shriek that some of the less generous among us compared to that of a diseased eagle. Our children feared her as a witch, and told stories of the dead doctor’s ghost and the cursed fortune that Fiona kept buried somewhere on her woodlot.

  While none of us figured her a kind woman, when she agreed to harbour those two orphans our opinion of her improved, if only slightly. Many of us were convinced that she’d soften on those poor wretches over time, that they’d be a remedy for her loneliness and strange ways. And after they’d suffered a few miserable weeks out in that dreary hut, she’d take them into one of the many bedrooms of her big white house, and given the chance, perhaps would even come to love them as her own.

  But on the day we brought them to her porch, she slapped Everett, the cheerful, dark-haired one, for slouching, then did the same to Harris, the skeptical, blonde one, for posing too many questions. Then she made them both swear against ever entering her house for as long as they lived, even if she invited them inside herself. In retrospect, it’s clear to us now that we overestimated the pliability of Mrs. Craig’s heart.

  THOSE BOYS

  AFTER THEY TOOK up residence on the Craig woodlot, mere days passed before the plunder of our vegetable plots began in earnest. Turnips, peas, carrots, and lettuces vanished as soon as they ripened. We’d leave our shotguns racked and wait up late to hurl handfuls of stones at the two shadowy figures fleeing into the woods. Small stones, mind you. This was charity then: small stones. It’s a notion that’s not understood anymore, charity. If we’d fed those boys outright, they’d conclude that the world owed them something, which, as we all know, it doesn’t. So we made inquiries with Mrs. Craig to ensure she was providing for them as she was required, and she insisted she was, though we had no means of verifying it. Despite her assurances, and our stones, those boys continued to raid our gardens and trespass on our land with impunity. They stole apples and chickens and eggs and women’s undergarments from our laundry lines. They even kidnapped one of old Gord Campbell’s prized lambs, dragging it bleating back to their hut, and were fixing to roast it when we had some of our older boys lead an expedition to rescue the creature and put a modest licking on the pair.

  Many blamed Mrs. Craig, contending that the only mind she ever paid those boys was to rouse them at dawn by kicking their shack’s flimsy walls before leaving outside their door a bucket of the daily provisions that our contract required her to furnish. It was widely held that Mrs. Craig could scarcely stand the sight of them, and only took them in to sock money away for more finery, or her own private castle in Scotland.

  Still, no one had the fortitude to discipline the boys as they ought to have been. Instead, when we heard that their hut was leaking and their clothes were rain-rotten, we left a roll of good tarpaper by their door. Then it was a bushel of apples when they looked scurvy. When we heard coughing from the direction of the woods, we’d leave jars of fish oil and some old blankets, and some fresh cream cooling in the shafts of our wells for them to find and pilfer.

  Throughout that first year, the boys would often come knocking on our doors so that Harris, who’d by then assumed the role of spokesman for the pair, could ask odd questions, such as “What time is it?” or “How high are the clouds?” And while some of us suspected the true purpose of this was to assess our houses as potential targets for robbery, the more sympathetic among us figured it was so they could sample the smell of a legitimate home—of baking things and detergents, fruit and coffee—if only fleetingly.

  Whenever the boys came into town, it was always an event. In light of the frequency with which things fell into Everett’s pockets, shopkeepers either followed them around or shooed them off. Harris would always stride a few steps in front of his brother upon the plank sidewalk, Everett merrily trailing just behind with his bemused smile and easy gait. In their Sunday best our children would follow the two primitives just to watch them scale the tall elms that our township’s founders had planted in the square, jumping branc
h to branch like a couple of howler monkeys, rising so high the limbs could scarcely support them. Some Sundays all you’d see of those two boys were the soles of their boots, and it was up there that they often practised their swearing.

  “Peckerwood!” Harris would yell at the top of his lungs.

  “Pisswidget!” Everett would yell in reply. And this scatological one-upmanship would play out for nearly half an hour, the two almost tumbling to the ground from the riot of their laughter that shook the elm’s uppermost leaves.

  Bedding our own youngsters down in the evening, we’d remind them: “At least you aren’t out there on that dark woodlot by yourselves with the bears and the wolves to sing you to sleep,” and they’d hold us tighter and sit up straighter at the table the next day and take to their chores with greater zeal.

  Over the boys’ second summer on the woodlot, Everett managed to construct a pair of four-foot bows from windfall alder, along with arrows he fashioned from dogwood shoots and fletched with jay feathers. The boys soon became proficient at shooting hares, which kept running in the dirt even after they were skewered through the ribs. They learned to scrape and tan the hides, and, it was rumoured by our children, slept in each other’s arms beneath a heap of rabbit pelts.