Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  After Harris learned his brother had been read the letter and that he’d accepted the proposal and intended to return home, he borrowed funds from our local bank to finance a great feast to be held in Everett’s honour. Harris and Baumgartner doubled their efforts in the weeks following, and managed to secure a preferred rate with the Canadian National Railway to have their timber transported to the mills in Kingston once it was cut.

  It was another month of waiting before a wire finally came through from the Department of Militia and Defence that after four years of service, Private Greenwood had been discharged on June 3, 1919. His troopship was due to arrive in Halifax the subsequent day, so a feast was planned three days hence, allowing Everett ample time to travel home by rail.

  Harris had the community hall adorned with paper lanterns and ribbons, and readied a great cask of lager he’d purchased. When the day arrived and Private Greenwood hadn’t appeared on the morning train as expected, Harris was undeterred. At suppertime he went ahead and called for heaping plates of food to be set out, with the largest portion put on the plate his brother had preferred since they were boys. While we ate, Harris gave a long-winded speech, claiming that his brother “Can’t even read a watch,” and that his tardiness was further proof that Harris ought to hold the controlling share of their company. We laughed uneasily, while glancing at our own watches. When the last evening train had come and gone, and it became clear that his brother would not return, Harris took up the heavy plate of food he’d prepared and asked Baumgartner to lead him out to a nearby well, where he pitched it inside, the porcelain smashing to bits while it dropped to the water.

  Harris wasn’t seen for days afterward, until a lumber crew from Kingston arrived by rail and descended upon the Craig woodlot. From the road we could hear Harris loudly instructing them to leave no tree standing, even demanding that they take up the logs that formed the cabin and drag those off to the mill as well. When the job was done, Harris left on the same train that carried his logs, and we never saw him again—except in the pages of our newspapers and periodicals, of course.

  His brother did return, eventually, though not for another five years, by which time Greenwood Timber had already established itself out West as one of the Dominion’s leading lumber concerns. Though to claim that Everett had returned would be misleading. He was just as transformed as Harris had been, except in his case for the worse. Gone was the merry, easy-moving boy who’d made bows and arrows and hollered swears from the tops of the elm trees in the town square. His face had become all shadows and angles, his brow creased like old newspaper, and his once-happy eyes had hardened, as though they’d been screwed deeper into his head. It was clear from his general dishevelment that he’d become a drifter, the kind of malnourished man we often glimpsed on the margins of town, drinking out of rain barrels or carrying things off that no one was using.

  Some of us speculated that he was too wounded in his mind by the butchery of war to dwell in regular civilization. The rest believed that his true nature had finally been revealed over there in Europe, and that he’d simply evolved into the sinister creature that he’d always been. Regardless, it was a pitiful sight to behold when we escorted him out to the decimated woodlot that his brother had sold off to a local land speculator. He walked among the stubble of stumps, each of them black with rot, his feet sinking into the old sawdust that still blanketed the ground like snow. He came to a rest on a stump near to where their log cabin had been and sat for about an hour, muttering to himself with a dulled, unfocused look, drinking from a flask he kept in his filthy coat, taking wild swings at insects whenever they dared to fly near him. To be honest, he appeared to be doomed, like the sort of man who’d already suffered more than his rightful share, and would only keep on suffering.

  Still, we did what we could. We offered to billet him in our houses, just as we had when he and his brother were first orphaned. But Everett only balled his fists and snapped at us to leave him alone. Given that his combative streak seemed to be the only aspect of his character to survive the War, we didn’t press the issue. Each morning, we brought a bucket of food out to the gutted woodlot, along with a pint jar of cheap spirits to replenish Everett’s flask. We would set these on one of the stumps near to where he slept, upon the rectangular scar that the cabin had left in the grass. This was how it went for two weeks, until one morning Everett walked to the railway, hopped a boxcar, and disappeared for good.

  Over time, at our teas, card games, and social events, talk would often turn to the Greenwood boys and what became of them. We’d imagine Everett living in prison all those years for what he’d done to that poor child, or off in some hobo jungle somewhere, among his fellow criminals, wandering on the fringes of civilized people. Next, we’d imagine Harris in his great timber mansion, the one way out in Vancouver we’d read about in our general-interest magazines, with its bowling alley, grand ballroom, and vast, manicured gardens. And we’d shake our heads at how it all turned out.

  Despite the scandal and that shameful business with the Japanese, we always bought Greenwood lumber for our houses and to repair the church. And we’d boast to anyone who’d listen about where the great captain of industry had hailed from. But in the same breath, we were just as likely to whisper about his brother, the fugitive and felon who’d committed an unspeakable crime.

  Yes, we saw the Greenwood family begin, which was a privileged thing to witness, if you consider it. And while the pettiest of us claim to have known that those two boys were cursed from the day we found them barefoot and cowering next to those burning rail cars, the rest of us know the truth. That just as easily, it could’ve been Everett who received the proper schooling and then lost his sight. And that just as easily, it could’ve been Harris sacrificing himself for his brother and turning out the ruined, wandering man. As far as those Greenwood boys were concerned, we know it could’ve gone either way.

  THE DUST

  THAT MORNING A smothering duster envelops Temple Van Horne’s farm, which sits five miles outside Estevan, Saskatchewan. So far this year these storms have scoured the lead paint from her barn, her house, and her library, leaving great swaths of raw pinewood white as a farmer’s bared ass. The dust has felled her fence posts, drowned her auxiliary roadway, derailed the local trains, and sifted through the cracks and doorframes of even her tightest-built structures, leaving a thin film on carpets, bedspreads, and window dressings. Now, sipping her morning coffee in the kitchen, through the porch door she watches her Jerseys wander blindly, their heads bent low to vacuum up the blowing dust in hopes that some scrap of green lies beneath. Last week Temple slaughtered her best cow for meat after it gave brown milk, and she worries she’ll eventually have to do the same with the others before they die languishing with mud bursting their bowels.

  “How many times do I have to tell them that there isn’t any grass down there?” Temple asks Gertie, who’s preparing a vat of porridge for the farmhands, like she does every morning, always beating Temple to the kitchen even though she’s pushing seventy.

  “Cows are dim creatures,” Gertie replies. “But if this drought keeps up the way it is, you’d be better off raising camels.”

  By mid-morning the rowdy wind falters and the dust settles, revealing a wide, prairie sky of almost lavender blue. Temple pulls on her work trousers and walks outside among the taupe, skin-smooth drifts of dust to survey the damage. She carries her second coffee in a tin cup back through the wheat fields, her palm clamped over the rim to keep the dust out, to where she discovers her seed crops entirely buried.

  The drought has worn on for three years now, and these dusters are becoming ever more fierce and frequent. She’s heard the local farmers grumble about the greedy Americans to the south who’ve plowed over their grassland with mechanized tractors. In their view, it’s a plague from elsewhere: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas. But the truth is that it’s their dust too. If Temple thought anyone would listen, she’d point out that in a frenzy to harvest m
ore wheat, they’d ripped up their buffalo grass with similar zeal. Ever since she was a girl, Temple has always consulted books when faced with a quandary, and in the drought’s early days, she studied soil chemistry and scientific irrigation. She learned to rotate her crops and let the land lie fallow and regenerate, and at the agricultural hall in Estevan she’d warned the others to do the same. Yet their ways were set, and they weren’t seeking advice from the local “Lady Farmer.” Initially at least, Temple’s techniques kept her soil black as slugs, moist as cake, except none of that matters now. The dust blew in anyway. Little did those old fools know: green things are all that keeps the land and sky from trading places.

  With an index finger pressed to one nostril, Temple flings a tarblack ribbon onto the timber-and-wire fencing that marks the edge of her property near the rail line. Next, she hunkers low and scoops a fistful of dust, stands, then opens her fingers slow and watches the slight breeze chew it to nothing, while impossible budgetary figures likewise dissolve in her head. Even if a rain does come, the soil is baked to such a crust that the water will just run off. With her seed plants lost, she’ll have to buy seed for next year, which will exhaust her reserve fund. She can’t bear to hock the books in her library (some of the rarest volumes are worth good money) or to halt the free meals she provides to the vagrants she takes in, so her only option will be to sell some horses—that’s if she can find a buyer who can still afford hay and oats.

  She’s heard people speak of farming as a peaceful endeavour, yet from the very outset Temple has warred with her land. She’s plowed it up, cut it down, and beat it flat again. It’s taught her things she’d never speak in polite conversation. Like the fact that Mother Nature’s true aim is to convert us people back into the dust we came from, just as quick as possible.

  Temple circles back past the library housed in the old church, then cuts over to the barn, where she finds a CN railroad detective conversing with a group of her men. Art McSorley is short, heavy-set and heavy-jawed, with pop-eyes like a strangled trout, a tin tie-clasp, oiled hair, and trousers hiked high over his solid belly, the resultant bulge bringing to mind the prow of a ship. He polices the entire continent-spanning CN line, and it’s said he’s more inclined to pitch you into the iron wheels of a running train and call it an accident than he is to book you for trespassing upon it. It’s also claimed that McSorley reports a dozen such accidents yearly.

  “What should I time you boys with? A stopwatch? Or a calendar?” Temple calls out, clapping to disperse her men, who make a show of jumping up, though they continue to linger nearby, aiming to catch the gist of the detective’s visit and whether it concerns them personally.

  “Some drunkards took a dip in the Estevan water tower over the weekend, Miss Van Horne,” McSorley says disappointedly, his face like a fallen cake. “I was just checking if any of your boys here are still damp.”

  “I don’t quite see how a water tower in little old Estevan is a concern of yours, Detective,” Temple says when she reaches him.

  “That tower serves the CN line, Miss. And any disturbance that happens within a mile of those tracks anywhere in this entire Dominion immediately becomes my business.”

  “Then maybe you can explain to me why it is that whenever anyone gets drunk in Estevan, you think they did so at my request?”

  “Come on, Temple, people are saying they befouled it.”

  “Befouled it? With their unclean souls?” she says breathlessly. “Goodness me, Detective!”

  He leans in. “Shat in it, Miss,” he says, fidgeting with his hat.

  “And how are you so sure it was my men?” Temple asks, though she feels a twirl of worry in her stomach. Currently, she has thirty farmhands housed in the loft of her barn, eating her food, playing cards, twiddling their thumbs. Little wonder they’re getting up to trouble. No place is more maddening than a wheat farm during a drought. “It could’ve been kids,” Temple adds. “Or cows, for God’s sake.”

  “Cows don’t climb ladders,” McSorley says. “And they were some of your transients, all right. The water has an oily film to it this morning.”

  Though her farm sits on the town’s outskirts, the general populace of Estevan isn’t particularly thrilled about Temple’s meals for the poor or the library that she offers to those she takes in. What interest do those bloodsuckers have in some old books anyhow? she’s heard them wonder aloud at town meetings.

  “Some old bitty’s earring goes missing some morning,” Temple says, “and by ten o’clock you’re convinced one of my men nabbed it.”

  “It’s just the sort you attract,” he says. “Most of them are career criminals. Fugitives. Parasites too lazy to scratch. The good folks of Estevan were pleased when you bought this place originally, Miss Temple, but nobody imagined you’d set up a soup kitchen.”

  “This isn’t a soup kitchen, Detective. It’s a farm. And like any farmer, I’ll hire who I please. And I’ll feed who I please, too.” Temple is careful to avoid the motherly role with her men. They do their work during the week, and the weekends are theirs to squander, drink, and gamble away as they see fit. Normally, Gertie distributes their pay on Monday mornings—that way they have some days to get used to having money in their pockets before the temptation of a day off strikes. This past Friday, however, Temple paid them early while Gertie was up in Regina visiting her sister. She realizes now her mistake. Especially if this water tower story is true. She turns to scan the dusty faces of her men, who are performing odd jobs just within earshot. Once McSorley’s gone she’ll have each of them account for their whereabouts Saturday night, and anyone who returned with damp underclothing will be banned for a year. But the detective can’t know this. Give him a little, and he’s the type that’ll push and push and keep pushing until she’s off riding the rails herself.

  “I’ll look into it, Detective,” she says.

  “I thank you for that,” he says, replacing his hat. “And Temple? I’d be even more inclined to ignore this disruption if you’d keep an eye out for me. A short while back, a vagrant got off a freight train in Ontario and beat a man in his own orchard, a senator’s brother in fact. Now a beating is its own thing, but the unusual part here is that the tramp claimed to have an infant with him. And there’s a powerful man who has a keen interest in the identity of that infant, especially if it’s a little girl.”

  “I don’t take in children, Detective. You know that. So no, he hasn’t been here. And besides, we’re a long way from Ontario.”

  “Well, the word is he’s making his way west, seeking work, like the rest of these bums. And since you’re about the only person hiring for a thousand miles, I thought I’d mention it. So if a man and a baby do turn up at your table, drop me a line. It’ll go a long way toward repairing your good standing with both the CN Railway company and the fine citizenry of Estevan. Because if things get any worse,” McSorley says, turning his eyes to the dust-choked wasteland that was once her field, “you’re going to need somebody to come and dig you out.”

  TEMPLE

  “YOU PICKED A dying world to show up into,” Everett tells Pod, as dusty sails peel off the stricken prairie hardpan and fly up to scrape their eyes. Though they also have the dust to thank for their rescue: the express train they’d been trapped on for three days had halted this morning only after they’d passed into Saskatchewan and the locomotive boiler’s air intake became clogged.

  His thighs trembling from exhaustion and hunger, Everett stumbles some miles to the rust-red grain elevator at Pasqua, just as he’d been instructed by the group of tramps he’d met under a trestle after leaving the train. Noting the baby and seeing their ravenous condition, the tramps had spoken of a wheat farm owned by a woman offering free lodging and meals in exchange for a bit of fieldwork.

  In the early afternoon, they hop a southbound freight on the third track from the road. It’s a local, creeping slow under long, feathery clouds that bounce light like hammered copper. Everett chews up the dandelion greens t
hat he pulled near the tracks and feeds the sludgy paste to Pod with his fingers, who accepts it, if unenthusiastically.

  With the baby tied upright to his front, Everett jumps off at the Estevan water tower and veers south. Since he related to Pod the story of his boyhood back on the train, she’s been babbling gibberish almost non-stop, and as he walks, she makes a series of long puffing sounds, almost like her own impersonation of a steam boiler.

  The August sun gnaws his skin, and sweat slicks his neck as an exhausted darkness teases the edges of his vision. After a few hours of walking they come across an irrigation ditch, where a snapping wind kicks up more dust that pastes his mouth and cakes his eyeballs; Pod begins to cry and thrash her head to avoid it. While he’d like to tell her that things will get better, that soon they’ll find her a decent home, or at very least a mouthful of water, he can’t credibly bring the words to his lips. Then a figure wiring a fence to some timber posts materializes through the haze.

  “That’s far enough,” the woman calls out when she sights him.

  Everett stops. Pod pumps her legs impatiently for him to keep walking.

  The woman pockets her pliers and saunters in his direction before pausing twenty feet away. Through sun-fired dust he makes out her work-built shoulders, her clothes pasted against her by the coursing wind. Her auburn hair is pinned up and she has a kerchief tied over nose and mouth.

  “Came in on the ten o’clock?” she calls out, visoring her eyes with her hand. Given her directness and the rooted manner in which she stands upon the ground, Everett is certain she owns it. And anyone living this close to the line can probably set a watch by the whistles.