Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  Given how she’d treated them, it came to our great surprise when a lawyer based in Kingston contacted us after the funeral. He’d drawn up a will by correspondence with Mrs. Craig, which named Everett and Harris Greenwood as her sole beneficiaries, providing they obey her one condition, outlined in a sealed envelope to be distributed to the boys. From the will we also learned that Mrs. Craig had indeed been siphoning off a small fraction of the stipend we’d provided for her care of the boys, to pay down a sizeable mortgage on the wooded property that her physician husband had incurred in secret, after thousands of losing hands of poker played with the loggers and labourers he treated.

  Her final wishes further improved our opinion of Mrs. Craig, and the more tender-hearted among us imagined both of those boys living respectably on that property in perpetuity, running their modest business on the woodlot, every summer painting the old house a blinding white—a house that was of ample size for two sets of families, given they were familiar enough. We even dared to picture some little Greenwoods crawling over the roots of the trees they’d spared, with tire-swings hanging from their branches.

  But the day after we delivered Mrs. Craig’s envelope, we watched the Greenwood boys set about fulfilling her condition. They piled cords of their finest ash firewood up around the walls of the house that James Craig had constructed for his wife in the Land of the Trees. By day’s end, the wall of wood stood as high as the second-floor windows.

  They lit it at sundown. The fire burned for weeks.

  RECRUITMENT

  SOON AFTER THE churning embers of the Craig house died out, we saw a change in Harris Greenwood. He began to attend to his personal grooming: shaving his face diligently each morning and slicking his honey-coloured hair back with Brilliantine. He could be heard chastising his brother for failing to do the same, often marching him to the barber whenever he became too scruffy. It was during one of these visits that our town barber overheard Harris first propose his plan.

  “Now that the woodlot’s ours, Everett, we need to think bigger than thirty acres. Bigger than this township even,” Harris said. “We’re wasting good trees cutting them for firewood and you know it. It makes me sick to consider all the money we’ve put up the chimney already. So my plan is to bring in a crew from Kingston to cut down the entirety at once, then we’ll have it milled for prime lumber and make a killing.”

  “Where will we live afterwards?” Everett said with genuine confusion, as though he’d never once considered dwelling anywhere other than among those trees. It was around that time Everett had started tapping the woodlot’s sugar maples and selling his syrup by the roadside with their firewood.

  “With the funds we generate, we’ll buy another forested parcel,” Harris replied. “A better one. With a proper house on it, not some crooked cabin. Then we’ll do it all over again.”

  “We don’t know anything about milling, Harris.”

  “You mean you don’t know anything about milling.”

  “Why can’t we just keep things as they are?” Everett asked. “We’ve got some good trees there. We could cut the pines, leave the maples, and make a good living selling syrup. We’ll build a new house, a finer one, right on the ashes of Mrs. Craig’s. We ought to be grateful for what she left us.”

  “Grateful?” Harris snorts. “For a rotten shack and a few buckets of food? We could lose this land any day and you know it. Some distant relative could come out of the woodwork and take it from us tomorrow.”

  Everett seemed to consider this as the barber snipped at his knotted mop. “You’ve always spoken for us, Harris. And you’ve done a better job of it than I ever could,” he began. “But I still have as much a say in this as you. So you can log your half of the woodlot,” he said, eyes locked with his brother’s in the mirror, “you just leave mine the way it is.”

  “We need the whole parcel for the numbers to work,” Harris said, shaking his head. “Otherwise, the transport fees will eat up our profits.”

  “Well, that’s final,” Everett said, shutting his eyes and crossing his arms beneath the barber’s canvas smock.

  “You’ve always been simple, Everett,” Harris said, pulling on his coat before nearly bowling over another patron as he stormed out.

  After that argument, Harris Greenwood was occasionally seen moping around the slapdash recruiting station that’d been set up in the old bank. Outside of school, it was the first time we’d sighted either of the brothers in town on their own.

  By 1915, many of our eldest sons were already off fighting in the War, and few enough had been killed or maimed that there was still an enthusiasm for the effort. Eye-grabbing posters were pasted up in places young men frequented. Catchy wartime songs commanded the wireless. And even boys who for whatever reason weren’t enlisted still sported military haircuts. Our meekest farmers and frailest clerks had been climbing over one another to board the transport ships for England, and from there to Belgium and France. Many viewed the War as the ideal proving ground for manly aspirations, and though he wasn’t yet of age, Harris Greenwood may have heard a similar calling. Or perhaps, we can’t avoid speculating now, those posters and jingles were the first occasion that anyone had ever wanted that poor orphan for anything, and the allure of it was impossible to resist.

  When he finally accumulated the nerve to enter the recruiting station, he cut a convincing figure on first inspection—a well-built man who appeared years beyond his age. But it was his local infamy that worked against him that day. The induction officer recognized Harris immediately—he’d once lost a fight with Everett on the schoolyard, though the officer was three years his senior—and knew the Greenwood boys to be approximately sixteen.

  So, as far as we were concerned, the matter of Harris’s enlistment had been settled.

  AN OATH

  I, Harris Greenwood, do make Oath, that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, His Heirs and Successors, and that I will as in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity, against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and of all the Generals and Officers set over me. So help me God.

  A FOUL SWING

  IN THE END, Harris travelled in the Greenwood lumber wagon to nearby Kingston to enlist. In larger cities, the recruiters focused principally on weeding out underaged boys from the ranks of enlistees by using height and weight as indicators—measures in which the naturally tall and work-built Harris well exceeded his peers. We later read that the medical officer had described the recruit as follows in his enlistment papers: A single man of no religious affiliation who labours in an unnamed township outside Kingston as a woodcutter, and with straight, blonde hair stands six-foot-one inches, and has a chest of 38-inch girth.

  Although they hadn’t come to blows in years, after Harris returned home with the signed Articles of War clutched in his hand, there commenced a great fistfight inside the Greenwood cabin that lasted for hours and could be heard all the way from McLaren Road. Much of the crude furniture the boys had built together was put to splinters that night, and each of the structure’s few windows needed re-glazing.

  It came to our understanding that Everett had no desire to take up a rifle and preferred to remain on the woodlot forever; and though he could perhaps run the business himself, it would be a dreary proposition to do so alone. Seeing how those two had never been apart, it must’ve seemed to Everett that his entire world was about to collapse in on him.

  Still, once the dust settled, a banged-up Harris Greenwood completed his basic training at Lethbridge, Alberta, over the following month. “He was studious, disciplined, and exact,” one of our sons recounted after bunking with Harris at the camp. He excelled at mapmaking, gunnery, horsemanship, and artillery calculations, and at roll call his uniform was always painstakingly put together. We were surprised to hear that the formerly incorrigible Harris flourished within the military s
tructure.

  It was just a week after he returned from training to await his deployment in two months’ time that Harris split his big toe clean in half with a foul swing from his axe. Initially, we chalked up the uncharacteristic misstep to the weight of his grief over Mrs. Craig, or to nerves attributable to the approaching combat or his inevitable separation from his brother.

  That is, until a week later, when Harris drove their freight wagon into Ross Smith’s plow, breaking the leg of the farmer’s best mule—a debt that the boys would have to chop wood for three weeks to pay down.

  Surreptitiously, Everett went to Doc Kane and informed him that his brother had been behaving peculiarly, walking into walls and eating up all the food on one side of his plate, leaving the other side untouched. A few of us who knew the boys accompanied Doc to their cabin, where, after Everett’s not-so-gentle urging, Harris submitted to an examination. When it was established that his eyesight was degenerating—the boy spoke of it as a kind of black lace settling over him—some eyeglasses were duly fabricated. Yet they were expensive, and their effects would last only a few weeks before a pair of thicker gauge were required. Soon, instead of lace, Harris described a black aperture closing upon his vision—a porthole shrinking incrementally in diameter each day. With Harris’s deployment soon approaching, a medical discharge was suggested by Doc Kane.

  “They won’t believe me,” Harris was overheard sobbing outside the doc’s office. “I wouldn’t believe me either. Some sucker goes blind the week before he ships to Europe? Would you?”

  And he was correct. We’re sorry to admit today that we didn’t believe him, not wholeheartedly. At the time there were plenty of stories circulating about men claiming all sorts of phantom ailments to avoid combat. One man in an adjacent county claimed to be Jesus Christ himself. And after conscription was instituted, this brand of cowardice became rampant.

  Even Doc Kane himself confirmed that Harris’s particular case of partial vision loss could indeed be a matter of malingering, especially since the boys had always been so blatantly obstinate with respect to authority. Either that or it could be a figment of mental exhaustion, brought on by all the tragedy those two had already endured. And according to the doc, since the blindness wasn’t yet complete, there was no scientific means of testing for sure.

  PRIVATE GREENWOOD

  ON DECEMBER 18, 1915, the 116th Canadian Infantry Battalion embarked on the R.M.S. Missanabie from the Quebec City harbour. The majority of the battalion’s soldiers were mere eighteen-year-olds fresh from Ontario’s lumber camps and factory floors, all eager to test their mettle in the battlefields of Europe.

  Among them was a private enlisted under the name Harris Greenwood, who would go on to serve under Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Sharpe, beneath whom he would win numerous honours and medals in his four years of combat service for bravery, mainly as a stretcher bearer. This starry performance was a surprise since, at first, many of his fellow soldiers wondered at Private Greenwood’s apparent lack of knowledge related to military drills, procedure, or protocol. In addition to the sorry state in which he kept his uniform and equipment, it was commonly remarked among those in his regiment that it often seemed as though Private Greenwood had never been to basic training at all.

  NO RETURN

  THE DAY BEFORE his regiment’s troopship was due to sail from Quebec City, Harris came staggering through the snow into town around noon, still in his bedclothes, his hands grasping blindly before him and hollering: “Where’s Everett? Where’s my brother?” He grabbed everyone he came across, tearing at their lapels, pulling them close so his dim eyes could gather an approximation of their faces.

  When we informed Harris that the other boys in his regiment had departed by rail that morning, he let out a guttural cry and attacked the tavern with the dung shovel kept outside for the horses hitched there. After it took three grown men lying atop him in a snowbank to subdue the boy, Harris claimed that he’d woken that morning to find himself lashed to his own bedframe with a riding saddle. It was three hours before he managed to spin the heavy saddle around and work its buckles loose. When he did, he searched the cabin and found his uniform and service equipment gone. We have since all agreed that if Harris could’ve got his hands on his brother Everett that afternoon, he would have finally killed him.

  We were reluctant to notify the Department of Militia and Defence of the switch, however, because even after all their missteps and delinquencies, we still felt some responsibility for those boys and didn’t want to see either in a military prison. Besides, the Greenwood boys had taken an oath to provide the Dominion with a soldier, and they’d made good on that oath, and we saw no harm done.

  After his brother went overseas in his stead, we seldom saw Harris Greenwood. Living alone with his vision failing, he was unable to cut more than a few cords for himself that winter, and to survive he was forced to sell off the stockpile they’d built up over the years. A few of us went out to his place that spring and found him almost fully blind, grubby, and half-starved. We took pity on him, passed the hat in church, and enrolled him in a newly established academy for the deaf and blind in Montreal. The headmaster there, a Mr. Gilles Thibault, had studied at Yale, and immediately took a liking to Harris’s shrewd intellect, entrepreneurial ambitions, and uncanny strength. We’ve heard that Mr. Thibault installed Harris prominently on the school’s rowing team, and that the boy’s powerful arms and iron grip drove them deep into the national finals, trouncing many of Montreal’s upper-crust schools by multiple boat lengths. Mr. Thibault arranged lessons for Harris in Latin, Greek, mathematics, and ancient history. By this point, Harris could only read with the aid of the thickest eyeglasses available, and only with the book held three inches from his face. Like an actor fighting to remain on stage as the curtains close and the lights are snuffed out, Harris feverishly gleaned all he could on every subject, especially forestry. In fact, it was with Mr. Thibault’s recommendation that Harris applied to Yale’s newly established forestry school, where a special oral entrance exam was devised which included questions on physiology, trigonometry, and botany. Harris trounced the exam and was the first Canadian to gain admittance to the esteemed program, and from all accounts he excelled there. He studied scientific log extraction and forest product management—activities he’d performed all his life, now on a much grander scale. Despite his disability, he was a popular fixture in the university’s botanical laboratories and its legendary Peabody herbarium, where we’ve heard he passed his days opening each one of their thousands of specimen drawers, learning each tree by running its pressed leaves against his fingertips.

  We can’t claim this for certain, but many of us speculate that it must’ve been during his time there in Connecticut, probably all alone in his single dormitory room, when both of Harris Greenwood’s retinas finally detached—like a pair of mussels that have lost their grip on a rock—and the world he’d known was gone for good.

  COULD’VE GONE EITHER WAY

  HARRIS RETURNED FROM Yale three years later, a new man. He’d traded his logger’s garb for a tweed suit and a well-formed hat. He brought another man back with him, a short, sturdy fellow who drove Harris’s automobile and helped him get around. “Meet my second in command, Mort Baumgartner,” Harris proudly declared, shaking each of our hands with his strong grip. What exactly he was in command of wasn’t initially clear.

  Still, we held a celebration at the community hall to mark our native son’s return. Harris claimed he’d written to his brother many times over the years, but Everett could still neither read nor write, so no replies were received. At the dinner, Harris toasted our generosity, and loudly proclaimed to have forgiven his brother for his trickery. He then expressed his intention to found a logging company with him as a full partner, upon Everett’s return. The coming post-war boom was predicted to spike the price of commodities like metal, chemicals, coal, as well as timber, and it was common knowledge that lumber concerns worth any salt were poised to make a
killing.

  While they awaited the ceasefire, Harris and Baumgartner stayed three months in the crooked log cabin, travelling extensively throughout the region, cruising for timber, making maps, hatching plans, and tagging half of the Craig woodlot for logging. Then, just prior to demobilization, we learned from a local boy who was serving overseas as a medical orderly that a Private Greenwood had been admitted to the No. 5 Canadian General Hospital at Liverpool.

  “Was he hurt?” Harris asked when we informed him, his hands clawing at the armchair he was sitting in.

  We told him there was no mention of physical injury, and that he was awaiting transfer back to Canada. Harris then asked us to see to it that a letter he’d written for Everett be delivered immediately to the hospital, and that the orderly from our township read it to him personally and confirm that Private Greenwood had understood it. We did as instructed, though prior to sending the letter we steamed open the envelope—not out of nosiness, but rather to ensure it didn’t contain some kind of murderous challenge or lingering grudge—and found an earnest proposition for the terms of their partnership, along with a stilted apology for Harris’s stubbornness about cutting the entire woodlot, and a modified proposal to cut just half as Everett had suggested. It ended with a request for Everett to return home immediately following his discharge.