Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “From the east? Before that?” She tugs down her kerchief. A rosebud of a mouth. A handsome nose. Eyes blue as fresh ink.

  “I’m in need of a meal and some work. I was told I could find that here.”

  “And what’s that you’ve got against you?” she asks.

  He looks down at Pod against his chest, her chubby legs swinging in lazy circles as she squints into the amber shimmer. “An infant, ma’am,” he admits.

  “It wouldn’t be a girl infant, would it?” she asks.

  “It would,” Everett says, impressed that the woman can gauge such a thing at a distance.

  Now her hands go to her hips and she turns her head and rests her chin on her shoulder for a long moment. Over the wind’s moan, Everett hears a curse escape her. She’s a hair taller than him, wearing a man’s box-toe boots, a broadcloth shirt, and canvas trousers. He lowers his gaze. He doesn’t know if it’s thirst or hunger, but already he’s drunk in the sight of her to the precipice of wooziness.

  “Unfortunately, I’ve already got more farmhands than I got farm,” she says. “As you can see, it isn’t exactly a boom year. Besides, it’s not my regular practice to take in infants.”

  “I understand that,” he says, too exhausted to argue. The thought of trudging back to the tracks nearly shatters him right there. “We’re sorry to bother you.” He turns and prepares to plunge back into the cloud.

  “The rails are that way,” she calls out, pointing in the other direction.

  “Thank you,” he says, turning his feet to correct his bearing.

  “The dust may get worse as the day wears on and the wind really finds its legs,” she says as he’s again about to start off. “You’d best keep the sun to your right. And go quickly before it shifts on you.”

  “I appreciate it,” he says.

  “And keep a rag over her face or she’ll develop a cough,” she adds after he’s taken his first step.

  Her interest in the child’s welfare is cause for some optimism, so Everett decides to risk a proposition. “Forgive me for mentioning it,” he says. “But it seems to me that your field could do with some trees for a windbreak. Maples are best. Five-foot spacing. Maybe a hundred trees. They’ll come up quick. And in just a few years they’ll do you some real good. I’d be happy to put them in for you along the lot line, if you’re interested. I know trees as well as anyone.”

  She nods. Holds his eyes. In the time she’s been standing there, the drifting dust has nearly buried both her boots.

  “You two are thirsty and hungry, I suppose?” she says.

  “We’ve missed some meals,” he says. At the mention of food his knees nearly buckle.

  She mutters under her breath again and glances around, almost as though she’s ensuring no one is observing them, then looks back at him. Her brow furrows, deep-creased like tilled soil—a field herself. “Just until we get some trees in,” she says, waving them onward, yet still walking twenty feet ahead. “Then you’re on your way.”

  After following her for a while, he sees a farm appear as if conjured from the dust. “Half of the men up there are either sick or consumptive,” the woman calls back while gesturing to the barn’s loft. “So you and your baby can take the spare room in the house. I don’t want your little one catching anything.”

  She escorts them into the house, where cloth is tied over all the doorknobs to prevent static shocks from the arid air. The large, linoleum-floored kitchen reminds Everett of the army: everything oversized, a colossus of a wood-fired range with six cookplates, a set of huge skillets, and great enamelled pans and roasters—all capable of tremendous output.

  She introduces him to the cook, an elderly woman named Gertie with a pinched mouth and a kind yet terse demeanour, who shows them to the spare bedroom. While Everett is unbinding Pod from his chest, Gertie fetches water from the cistern in the cellar and fills the basin. The water is unexpectedly sweet and clear, and before bathing Pod, Everett lets her drink, then gorges himself until his gut pouts over his buckle. While he floats Pod in the basin—her green eyes bright, her lashes jewelled with drops—Gertie returns and begins pinning bedsheets up over the windows.

  “There’s no need for all that,” Everett says. “She can sleep in broad daylight if need be.”

  “Miss Temple insisted,” Gertie says through the pins in her mouth. “It’s for the dust. You should wet the sheets before putting her down. Dr. Stone said some youngsters in Estevan have caught the dust cough so bad they’re snapping their own ribs. Normally, we don’t accept little ones here. But Miss Temple is making an exception in your case.”

  “We won’t be staying long,” he says.

  “You’re putting in some trees. That right?”

  “Yes,” he says, swirling Pod in the wash water, which has already gone a turbid grey with her grime.

  “And then you’ll move along,” she adds while she pins the last sheet, more as a statement than a question.

  “That’s right,” Everett says.

  “Good,” she says while briskly making her way to the kitchen. “The other men will get jealous with you bunking here in the house and not out in the barn. And a jealous man is a stupid man, in my experience.”

  After Pod’s bath, they’re called out onto the large porch that sits beside a wide-spreading willow, where a communal table is already seated with thirty or so men. Everett scans the table for the woman, Miss Temple, and can’t locate her. Gertie appears from the house with a large roasting pan of toasted cheese sandwiches and a kettle of creamed chicken stew. When the bell is rung, Everett goes to sit, and as he approaches the only available space on the bench, a large man puts up a muddy boot and blocks him.

  “Pardon me,” Everett says, yet the man begins to speak loudly and obliviously with his tablemates. Famished and eager not to invite trouble, Everett ignores the slight and sits on a nearby apple crate with Pod in his lap. He blows the stew cool before spoon-feeding it to her. After just a few mouthfuls, she spits up into the dust.

  “I don’t mean to be fussy,” Everett says to Gertie at the table. “But is there any goat’s milk around? This child can’t stomach cream or cheese.”

  Gertie puts down her spoon and purses her lips. “Our last goat died last month,” she says. “But we’ll see what we can drum up.”

  “I heard of choosy beggars,” the roughened man who took his seat grumbles into his cup. “But I ain’t never heard of no choosy beggar baby.” Everett keeps his eyes down while the others within earshot chortle.

  “This is the softest meal we have,” Gertie says when she returns, covertly handing Everett a small bowl of smooth porridge, aiming to conceal the special treatment that they’re receiving from the others.

  Everett sits at the crate again, this time facing away from the table, and watches Pod gleefully work the beige paste between the ridges of her gums like a ruminant. Though she seems to like it well enough, he still worries she ought to eat more than she does.

  THE GREAT LIBRARY OF ESTEVAN, SASKATCHEWAN

  ONE COULD CLAIM that it began the way all libraries must: with a single book. But in truth the idea passed to Temple Van Horne from her father, a Calvinist minister who was lured from the Netherlands to the Canadian prairie by a government parcel of land, a man who always kept a table on his porch. Each night after the fieldwork was done, Temple and her father would lay out four place settings—four starched napkins, four forks, four spoons, four plates, four glasses of water—then dish out four helpings of the same meal they were about to enjoy inside. “When you live near the railroad,” he’d say, “it’s a matter of decency. Nourishment—God distinguishes not the spiritual from the intellectual from the physical. We don’t either.”

  Temple’s Austrian mother resented the charitable practice, called it “spraying perfume on manure,” and made off with an itinerant water dowser the summer Temple turned ten. That Christmas, her mother wrote a series of letters begging to return home
, but her father burned them all.

  While strict, her father brimmed with ideas and inventions, and always seemed to be reading every book other than the Bible. At heart he was more farmer than preacher, and spoke blunt and plain to Temple on sexual matters—at the dinner table it was all bull semen and goat rutting and chicken sexing. Nakedness went unremarked in their household, both hers and his. And when she turned sixteen, he looked upon the nervous parade of young suitors—bloodless beanstalks droning lengthily on the subjects of wheat varieties and well-prepared picnics—more with the amusement of a livestock auctioneer than anything like protectiveness.

  Then, when Temple was eighteen, her father died of a stroke in their claw-foot tub, a mechanical engineering manual swollen to double its normal size floating barge-like over him. After that, Temple completed her training as a schoolteacher and spent the next three years in a one-room schoolhouse. Though she enjoyed the company of children, she disliked instructing them in anything but literacy. For the younger grades especially, it was mostly giving orders to sit and stand—up, down, up, down. She felt a perpetual sadness for them, showing up in the same rags each day, coughing and quarrelling and skinning their knees, destined to forget her lessons the second they quit school to go plow the same exhausted fields their parents had.

  Still, she persisted, and at twenty-one, Temple met a man named Jurgen Kohler, who was himself a wheat farmer as well as a part-time inventor. Humming with schemes and ideas, he was the first man she’d ever met who reminded her of her father. After a brief courtship, they married and moved into the house Temple had inherited. At first things were amiable, until a year passed and Jurgen began applying for patents related to a water pump he’d invented. After repeated denials, he took the habit of belittling Temple, under his breath at first, usually before bed or while preparing for the day’s farming—a vocation he’d come to believe was beneath him. He’d bemoan what he called her “schoolteacher’s view of the world,” as well as her penchant for reading fiction, calling it “soft-headed.” At twenty-five, Temple lost a child and her ovaries after an ectopic pregnancy ruptured her Fallopian tubes and nearly killed her. She returned from the hospital in Regina to find her husband had made off for the United States to seek his fortune as an inventor, without even taking the trouble to divorce her.

  Instead of leaving her devastated, the demise of her marriage taught her the folly of hitching her entire being to the horse of one man. She quit teaching, sold her father’s house, and purchased a two-hundred acre farm a hundred miles to the south, near the rail junction of Estevan. The house was well built and boasted good-sized rooms with sturdy timber bones, a bomb-proof cookstove, numerous outbuildings including a barn and a long-abandoned woodframe church, and a sweet, windmill-pumped well that to that day had never failed, even when most of the wells in the vicinity had come up dry during the drought.

  The day she took possession, Temple set her own table on the porch: turkey, potatoes, and dinner rolls, two heaped plates, with silverware and glasses of lemonade and napkins appliquéd by her grandmother, all perfectly arranged. The next morning, she found the food untouched—if you discounted the flies swarming the turkey and the wood-bugs mountaineering on the potatoes. Undeterred, the next night she fixed roast beef and lima beans and sat inside with the lights out, eating and reading by a match struck every now and then, so as not to spook them with a lamp. After weeks of wasting good food, one evening around nine she heard some shuffling outside. Then cutlery scraping. Then a few low voices. In the morning, she found the plates neatly stacked, each bone-white, licked clean.

  She set a table for four the next evening, and this time they came earlier, four bedraggled figures climbing the stairs that faced the direction of the railroad. She wanted to call out, “You can quit all your creeping around!” but knew she’d shame them if she spoke. When word got around, she heard some arguments out near the runoff ditch, though these soon settled themselves. After that, never did the same visitors come on consecutive nights, and she figured they’d established some code of conduct, a kind of schedule, and admired them for it. The men conversed quietly over the meals, and always removed their hats. There was only the occasional woman—a fact that troubled Temple, because in her experience women hungered just as regularly as men. One of the first who ever came was Gertie, who’d fallen destitute after losing her husband and three adult sons to the flu, and whom Temple hired immediately after she knocked at the door following her meal to help with washing up.

  When the Crash hit five years back, Temple had carpenters construct an even larger covered porch, extending out near the willow tree, and set a big table beneath it. Though No. 1 Northern wheat had dropped from $1.43 to sixty cents a bushel as the drought dragged on—two years, then three—her well held, and the farm remained profitable. Though Gertie thought it a bad idea, Temple began to allow guests to sleep in the hayloft in return for a morning’s labour in the field, and was pleased to see that the work did them almost as much good as the food. Even as a girl, she’d had a mind for the repair of broken things—including birds crushed against a window and prairie dogs maimed by her father’s horse-drawn thresher. She was an expert maker of splints and patches, poultices and bandages, which her father encouraged. And today, in her better moments, she feels she’s honouring his memory with this great unprofitable enterprise.

  Three years ago, while recalling her father’s words on nourishment, a vision seized her. That evening she lined the old church on her property with some makeshift plank shelves, but it took a full calendar year to collect enough books to fill the first one. Then she had the idea that those seeking a meal and shelter might bring one as payment—any book as good as any other. Thus it came to be that in an old church just outside Estevan, Saskatchewan, is housed one of the world’s great libraries. Its books were not bestowed or bequeathed—in fact, few were purchased. Most were stolen, found, begged for, borrowed, or brought from the world’s farthest corners by the world’s lowest people. Gathered by vagrants and vandals, convicts and parolees. Tramps, prostitutes, and husband-killers. Larcenists, bank robbers, and check-kiters, as well as decent men and women just down on their luck. Her collection is not catalogued. Its titles sit on shelves of rough-hewn lumber and stacked brick, balanced as precariously as the lives of those who acquired them. To make a withdrawal, a patron must simply bring another book in exchange, no questions asked. Books come to Temple with banknotes tucked inside, or locks of hair, bloodstains, theatre tickets, love notes, or hastily scrawled threats—all discoveries that flush her with a kind of archeological delight. Once a man brought a two-volume illustrated Dante’s Inferno, with a different wildflower pressed between every second page.

  As far as circulation goes, the Russians are popular (her patrons are well versed in the dialects of depravity, betrayal, madness). As is Homer, the bard of ill-fated homeward journeys. Books on canning and food preservation are equally popular. As are how-to manuals. Anything that allows for more to be done with less.

  Still, Temple has no illusions concerning her library’s impact. Her books won’t lift anyone from their low station. They won’t right wrongs or save wandering souls from perdition or fill grumbling stomachs. But they might let a few scraps of sunlight fall into some lean, desolate lives, and that’s something.

  Over the years, however, any babies she’s allowed on the farm have always brought trouble. People come looking for babies, usually dragging a whole mess along behind them. She was all set to turn the tramp and his infant away at the fence line, which perhaps would’ve been doing them a favour, given McSorley’s habit of appearing on her farm every month or so to see what fugitives she’s harbouring. But the man’s understated “We’ve missed some meals” made her reconsider. From her dealings with the needy, she knows it’s the ones who don’t complain who are the greatest cause for worry. It’s the quiet ones you find tucked away in a corner somewhere, eyes glazed over, starved, too proud to ask.

  If McSorley doe
s catch them here, bunking in the house no less, at best he’ll see her run out of Estevan for good; she doesn’t want to consider his worst. So her plan is to keep them just until the windbreak is in: a week, two at most. She’s had Gertie put some sheets up over their windows to discourage prying eyes. And besides, this Everett doesn’t appear to pose any imminent threat to the girl. Though if he does anything strange, she’ll be the first to call in McSorley herself. And if all goes well, once the pair is restored they’ll be on their way. If Temple’s father taught her anything, it’s that no one deserves to be hungry. Not even kidnappers. She’s hosted worse on her farm before. And there are likely even worse to come.

  FULL TITLE

  HARRIS GREENWOOD HAS never liked his mansion. Even though it’s built from some of the grandest trees that ever lifted from the soil, criss-crossed with beams hewn from Douglas fir, sequoia, and red cedar—trees already head-high when Napoleon drew his final breath. Built in Queen Anne style, with thirty-five rooms, including four parapets, parquet floors, two tiers of balconies, a private bowling alley, rosettes and mouldings of walnut, cherry, oak, and maple, all crafted by the finest Scottish woodcarvers, it’s expensive to maintain, overlarge for his needs, and easy to get lost in. Yet for the first time since its construction, Harris is grateful for its enormity. Because such a large domestic staff is required to run it, no one views it as odd for his describer to take up residence there following their homecoming from Asia.

  But Harris finds his return to his usual office routine strangely agonizing. Perhaps he’s depleted from the journey, or perhaps he caught some exotic bug on the steamer, but the morning hours inch by as he shifts in his seat and his mind wanders like an abandoned dog. His desk, once a sturdy lifeboat in the waters of his daily routine, now sits before him as inert and dispiriting as a gravestone.