Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  We applauded this bit of self-sufficiency—that is, until they shot and skinned the town alderman’s prize terrier. It was then decided that the boys required something more productive to fill their days. They were too uncouth to cut it as domestics, so we had them slingshot pigeons from the stone sills of town hall. Next, they harrowed our fields, dug up stumps, and caught nuisance squirrels by the grey plumes of their tails.

  The boys were enterprising—Harris especially so, often demanding exorbitant payments for even the smallest tasks—and both took handily to manual labour. Some said they must have been born of good working stock from Germany, England, Ireland, France—or even Yankees. But the jobs were all of limited duration, and afterwards the two would relapse into delinquent pastimes: hunting foxes, kicking beehives, and hooking the fish in our private brooks. We called an emergency town meeting and agreed to procure for them a set of steel files and a whetstone, the expense justified as an investment in our township’s collective well-being and security. These implements appeared outside their shack the following day.

  THE GREEN WOOD BOYS

  THROUGHOUT THE WINTER of 1910, we brought them our dullest plow blades and knives and axes and saws. When those edges were freshened, we brought our longest-abandoned implements: bucksaws, picks, awls, hatchets, adzes, froes, files, and barking irons—all dull as marbles and gone tangerine with rust. Which the boys returned as sharp as scalpels, edges bright and silver with mineral oil. When there was nothing left to sharpen, they mended axe-handles and taught themselves to shoe horses and rebind tack. And when that was all done, for hours they’d straighten used nails with hammers on flat rocks, in a race to be the first one to complete a whole bucket.

  Their thieving and troublemaking were curtailed thereafter, and with all those saws and axes about, the boys couldn’t avoid familiarizing themselves with their usage. When Taisto Maki, a Finlander and the town’s finest woodcutter, was crushed by a great white pine he was felling, his widow allowed the boys to keep his tools, given they’d cared for them so well in the past. Though they were only eleven at the time and lacked the brute strength for proper logging, they managed to buck up the plentiful windfall littering their woodlot, which they’d sell by the cord out beside the road. It was then Harris’s entrepreneurial streak truly emerged, as he hollered out to our wagons and haggled over prices like he was born doing it.

  Over time they refined their axe strokes—more hips than arms—and soon knew exactly where a whorled grain would prove troublesome, and how to let the maul’s weight do the work for you. Still, none of us had the heart to mention to the boys that they were supposed to first dry the green wood for a minimum of a year—and ideally, two or three. And because we suspected that the funds we paid to Mrs. Craig weren’t entirely making their way into the boys’ stomachs, our townspeople were charitable enough to purchase the green wood at full-cord price, then season it ourselves so our stovepipes wouldn’t plug with creosote and burn our houses down.

  So this is how it came to be that instead of what we’d previously called them—either “those poor boys” or “those goddamned boys,” depending on what they’d done that week—the pair came to be known as “the green wood boys.”

  As years passed, the name settled upon them and rooted them in place. With it, they seemed less like ghosts or demons and more and more like regular boys. It became difficult for us to say whether they hadn’t always carried the Greenwood name, even since before the train crash. Some swore that despite their differences of physiology, those two even grew to look more alike, so much so that many of us forgot that they’d each been thrown from separate trains. It entered popular remembrance that the poor brothers had been found clutching each other, barefooted but dressed in matching outfits, the name Greenwood stitched into the labels of their coats.

  With their woodcutting earnings the boys bought coloured pencils, maple candies, and some proper clothes, which they ruined immediately with pine pitch. Most of the spoils, however, went toward presents for Mrs. Craig, including some fine perfume and a smart beaver hat, which they left on her porch. It was rumoured that she never brought the gifts inside, and that it was never long before some tramp came from the railway and carted them off.

  NUMBERS AND LETTERS

  OVER TIME WE watched the ligatures of brotherhood thicken between those boys. We heard it claimed that they shared everything: even a trifle like a boiled duck egg they took great pains to split dead even with their sharpest jackknife. Yet despite this mutual reliance, all wasn’t peaceable. As it goes with siblings, their relations were part love, part rivalry, with wrathful annoyance making up the remainder. Scripture reminds us that brother has always warred with brother: Cain with Abel; Isaac with Ismael; Esau with Jacob. While it’s said that God gave trees their towering height in order for them to compete for the sun’s attentions, it seemed to us that brothers came up in a similar competition, elbowing and bickering with each other for the same patch of light.

  Though Harris remained taller than Everett, the boys were of near-equal strength, wits, and fleetness of foot—this verified by the unending games of push-over, boxing, and sprints they engaged in daily. In a contest to raise the highest welt, they pelted each other mercilessly with crabapples, and with Mrs. Craig holed up in her house, there was no authority present to settle their disputes or drive them apart.

  “Mrs. Craig prefers me,” we once overheard Harris proclaim with a sigh, carrying on another of his one-sided conversations as the boys sat eating the boiled peanuts Everett had lifted at the annual fall fair. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Everett. But it’s a plain fact. Last week she brought a nice pastry she’d baked out to the shack—you were off cutting wood or something—and she pecked me on the cheek while I ate it.”

  “She didn’t give you no peck you damn liar,” Everett declared, except in a joyful tone, as though the sheer preposterousness of the lie delighted him.

  “What’d you say?” Harris muttered, his face bright crimson. Though he always spoke for the pair and for this reason seemed older, Harris was easily wounded, and lived constantly on the verge of either tears or an angry outburst. Most infuriating to him of all was his brother’s habit of viewing him as ridiculous, and the world as one enormous, inconsequential joke.

  “Which part bothers you more?” Everett replied nonchalantly, still grinning. “Me calling you a liar? Or that Mrs. Craig wouldn’t kiss a filthy rat’s ass like you ’cause her lips would rot clean off afterwards?”

  Harris reared back, hurled a handful of peanuts into his brother’s face, and tackled him. After that the pair wrestled around in the grass for a while, the scrum quelling Harris’s rage. “Well, if I were a clumsy little dwarf like you,” he grumbled when they were done and he was straightening the collar of his torn shirt, “I wouldn’t expect no pastry either.”

  By age twelve, the woodcutting had already piled muscles under their pitch-stained shirts, and their young bodies grew ropy like the boughs of white pine they cut daily. Their bloody skirmishes could last days: a series of ambushes, counter-ambushes, and retributions that would make a Trojan proud. Soon they were loosening teeth, nearly tearing the other’s ears off, and tugging out whole handfuls of hair. It was as though the brotherly bond they’d forged had pooled the ownership of their bodies, including the God-given right of self-destruction.

  “Those boys are going to kill each other,” we’d say, but no one had the gumption to do much about it except the parson, who left a songbook of old spirituals at their door, hoping Christ’s more peaceful teachings would sedate them. Since neither could read, however, the songbook’s pages were used as fire starter.

  Though the boys were clearly simple-minded, the school principal suggested his institution may be of some benefit. They could attend on a trial basis, and perhaps gather the basic accounting and literacy skills required to properly run their woodcutting business as adults. And, we suggested, a bit of schoolhouse discipline might well keep them from maiming
each other permanently. So a few of us, along with the town constable, ventured to their shack to inform them of their mandatory enrolment. Harris met us at the door with that same appraising, suspicious look he’d worn when we first found him.

  The principal asked whether they’d attended school as youngsters, before they were orphaned, and Harris claimed they had no recollection. “We’re too busy working for any school anyway,” he said, cluing in to the purpose of our visit. “Are you gentlemen certain you’re well stocked for the winter? The rumour is that it’s going to be a cold one, and we’ve got some nice—”

  “Don’t you boys want to learn to read?” the constable interrupted.

  “No,” Harris said flatly, and made to shut the door.

  “Aw, come now,” the constable said, stopping it with his boot. “What about your brother? You don’t speak for him. Doesn’t he want to learn to read?”

  Harris turned to his brother. “Everett, do you want to be cooped up in some musty old school all day so you can learn to read?”

  Everett, while taking a spoonful of the rabbit stew that always bubbled on their stove, just shrugged his shoulders.

  “My brother says he doesn’t want to go to any damn school,” Harris said. “And if you keep coming around here, he’ll bury a hatchet in your back.”

  We couldn’t send them to an orphan home or the town jail, which left us no choice but to inform them that it was Mrs. Craig’s personal desire for them to get their numbers and letters, and if they attended school regularly she’d agreed to consider taking them into her house as her sons. Which was, admittedly, false, yet it was all to their benefit, and we were pleased when the boys took our bait and agreed.

  As a surname for enrolment purposes, we wrote Greenwood for want of another, thereby rendering it official. Little did we know it would be a name we’d be glimpsing on lumber packets and in shameful newspaper headlines for years to come.

  Looking back, we ought to have forced the Greenwood boys to walk to school on Whalen Road with the other children, rather than allowing them to trek through the forest. Because when they emerged from those trees into that play yard, with their tattered clothes and pitch-stained hands, how could they not have enshrined themselves as outcasts?

  “You don’t look like no brothers,” some of our rougher boys said to them that first morning.

  “We’re brothers. Because we say we are,” Harris declared as Everett balled his fists.

  If the Greenwood boys fought face-to-face at home, at school it was only back-to-back. Everett, who quickly cast off his good-natured disposition, was especially brutal and efficient in battle, and the brothers won five separate fistfights on their first day alone.

  In the classroom, however, they fared less well. They’d been in the forest too long and couldn’t sit still. Their eyes strayed to the greenery in the windows, and they’d be paddled daily for various infractions, which always just made Everett laugh and Harris purple with fury, no matter how hard Ms. Miller swung. She’d call in the principal, who, at double her size, still couldn’t squeeze a single tear from either of them.

  While they were already miles behind, academically speaking, the boys gleaned what they could from the curriculum, and both made modest progress. But after just six months, Ms. Miller and the school principal had reached their limit and could withstand no more disruptive squabbles with the other students.

  And so it was suggested that if only one of the Greenwood boys attended school, the benefits to their fledgling business could be reaped all the same. And though Harris was the more temperamentally volatile of the two, he was also more outspoken and entrepreneurial—not to mention slightly less dangerous—so we selected him to do the learning. Since that day we’ve often argued over how Everett was just as clever as his brother, and was perhaps the more level-headed and studious of the two; and we can’t help wondering what would’ve transpired had it been him we’d chosen to remain.

  But we picked who we picked. And the following Monday morning Everett Greenwood was expelled, and made a much-relieved return to the quiet, leafy labours of the woodlot.

  THE LOG CABIN

  WITHOUT HIS BROTHER to distract him, Harris Greenwood turned his combative spirit to his schoolbooks, and managed to complete his grade eight by age fourteen. When Harris finally rejoined his brother at woodcutting, he was no longer just their spokesman—he was their leader. He decided which trees they’d take and where they’d drag them to be chopped, a responsibility the easygoing Everett relinquished gladly.

  When the lot’s windfall was exhausted, Harris decided they were strong enough to fell trees themselves. After some close calls, the boys learned to fashion proper back cuts rather than hacking straight through, and soon they could drop a tree right between a man’s eyes. Their thirty acres were a good mix of hardwoods and white pine, and they could fell, de-limb, buck, and split a tree in a single day. It was said that Everett could tell red oak from black oak or birch from poplar just by the music of their leaves, and that Harris could gauge a cord of wood with just a passing glance at some standing trees. Before long they had enough money to buy a horse team and sledge to skid logs out to the road during winter.

  “Behold, the mighty woodcutters!” the town’s working men jibed when the two passed by, axes flung over their shoulders.

  “BEST FIREWOOD IN THE WORLD” announced their new sign, carefully painted and meticulously lettered by Harris, and it wasn’t far from the truth. At five dollars a cord, the Greenwoods couldn’t be beat, and buying from the boys was no longer an act of charity. Their wood was always well split and bone-dry, and it burned hotter than coal and came in full cords, not like the three-quarter bundles that the Bonnevilles had passed off on us for years.

  As their business grew, Harris, still the taller of the two, tired of clocking his skull against the low rafters of the trapper’s shack. Given that Mrs. Craig wasn’t about to allow them into her house anytime soon, the boys set about constructing a proper dwelling. Everett made sketches while Harris selected the finest corner of the woodlot, with a view of the creek. They felled trees and made a clearing, limbing the pine logs, peeling their bark with a drawknife, squaring and notching them, then capping them with tar. They used horses to drag and pulley the dressed logs into place, then chinked the gaps with creek mud and hemp. After the roof was on, they began constructing some crude furniture. They still bickered occasionally but no longer came to blows, and anyone who watched them while they worked would say that it was as if they were in a shared trance, and that they moved as though they were two hands of the same body.

  The finished log cabin was a primitive structure, crooked as a politician’s ledgers. So crooked, in fact, that chairs and tables wobbled no matter where you put them in the room. On the happy occasion of the cabin’s completion, the boys managed to coax Mrs. Craig—who’d recently been ailing, we’d noticed, coughing constantly into her lace hankies—out to inspect it. The man delivering their woodstove that day claimed that though the Greenwood boys had dressed up in ties to receive their guardian after preparing her a fine meal, standing there on their porch with their bushy hair slicked with skid grease and combed flat, their chests puffed like a couple of conquering generals, the old widow wouldn’t even set a foot inside.

  “You could’ve done with some more windows,” she said with a pursed expression, electing to address them from the porch. “Too dingy for me in there. I’m afraid you’ll have to eat that supper yourselves.”

  A CONDITION

  WHEN THE GREENWOOD boys neared sixteen, Fiona Craig’s health took a malign turn. Her cough began doubling her over the counter at the general store, and her ankles swelled unnaturally beneath her fine hosiery—though she always sent Doc Kane away with choice words whenever he inquired after her well-being during her increasingly rare trips into town.

  Soon she stopped coming altogether. And after her accounts with the general store and the hairdressers went unsettled for weeks, we decided to petiti
on the boys to check in on their guardian. Everett and Harris insisted they knocked on every window and every door of her house for a full hour before giving up. Her firm rule prohibiting their entry was still about the only one that those delinquents had left unbroken.

  A few of us accompanied Doc Kane to the house the next day. We forced the door and found her corpse in the parlour, gruesomely bloated and half putrefied, her flesh blue as the April sky. Consumption, Doc Kane concluded after examining the body. Likely caught from her husband, a disease that’d eaten at her over time, until her lungs had degenerated into nothing more than liquid sloshing around in her chest. “This poor woman drowned in herself,” Doc Kane said. “And didn’t once complain about it.”

  It was a pitiful, painful death, and we couldn’t bear to inform the boys that she’d suffered the way she must’ve. We also concealed from them a certain speculation ventured by the most generous of us: that the reason Mrs. Craig kept them at arm’s length for all those years wasn’t that they displeased her; it was to protect them from contracting the affliction that had consumed her husband and, eventually, herself. Even if this notion were true, it wouldn’t have put food on those boys’ table, or replaced the many losses they’d already suffered. The woman was gone now. And it’s common wisdom that we’re all better off not dwelling upon the sacrifices of those who came before us. Thankfully, given there were no official surviving kin, Doc Kane could remain tight-lipped about Mrs. Craig’s cause of death and we could just get on with things.

  But the boys tore at their hair and collapsed in pitiful heaps when they learned the news. Never before had we witnessed such anguish take root in anyone. It was rumoured that, apart from the time Mrs. Craig slapped them both on the first day they met, she’d never allowed them to touch her while she was alive, not even once. Which meant that not until the old widow was dead did those two boys get to feel her skin, while lifting her into the ornate coffin they’d constructed themselves from some red oak they’d felled, which they carried out of her house and loaded onto their lumber wagon for transport into town. Watching those boys mourn a woman who never cared for them with any enthusiasm was a sorrowful sight for us all. What she was to them we’ll never know: perhaps goddess, monster, mother, and guardian all forged into one impossible figure.