Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “Who, us farm-bound spinsters?” she says. “We tend toward tales of escape. Adventure. Exotic locales. Egypt. Siam. I’ve read about Paris so much I no longer feel the need to go there.”

  “I was in northern France during the War. But I never saw Paris.”

  “Many of the folks here were once soldiers. What did you do there?”

  “I wasn’t much of an infantryman, so I did carpentry, mostly. Tables for the radios and planks to keep the soldiers up out of the mud. Otherwise, I carried stretchers. I probably carried a thousand men, most of them halfway between living and dying.”

  Her lips tighten over her teeth. “That must have been painful,” she says. “To see all those people torn up like that.” And her statement’s naked simplicity unlocks something in Everett’s chest. How easily she’s linked what he witnessed in the War with the disquiet that afflicted him afterwards, like a blade that’d entered him through his eyes and broken off inside his head. Sights that, in the last days of the War, rendered him unable to speak or sleep for more than a few hours at a time, which landed him in a special hospital for soldiers suffering the same condition. It was what prevented him, after he was sent home, from joining Harris on their woodlot like he promised, and kept him drinking and roaming all those years afterward. But Everett can’t express any of this now, so he directs his attention again to the incomprehensible book before him.

  Pod starts whimpering beneath the table, opening and closing her tiny hands like a crab, and Temple stoops to take her up. Everett likes how she holds her, bouncing easefully on the balls of her feet.

  “You know, I could help you,” Temple says. “With your reading, I mean. Maybe not this one.” She points at The History of Seed Crushing in Great Britain. “But I was a schoolteacher before I bought this place, and teaching people to read was the only part of the job I didn’t mind.”

  “Oh, there isn’t much hope for me,” he says.

  “I’ve instructed greater fools than thee,” she says in a haughty voice, and carries Pod over to the shelves, right near to where he stuffed the journal. His stomach drops, though thankfully, she selects a different book. “Here,” she says, sitting beside him, and suddenly he’s shamefully aware that his ratty clothes haven’t been washed in weeks.

  “Try this,” she says, pointing to the first line, a crescent of soil lodged permanently under the nail of her index finger. “It’s called the Odyssey.”

  He has no choice but to try, and while the black type is easier to identify than the unruly handwriting of the journal, the words themselves are convoluted and meaning refuses him. Letters scatter from his eyes like roaches from a lamp. He trips and stumbles with his tongue for a while until he gets too embarrassed and says he’s all worn out, and they walk back together to the house before turning in for the night.

  In bed that evening, Everett decides against returning to the library for the journal. If this railway detective turns up, Everett will have better luck claiming that Pod is lawfully his without the journal there to connect her to R.J. Holt. While Everett hates being separated from the book, he doubts any tramp will unwittingly pull it from the shelves, especially since it’s such a slight volume with nothing written on the spine.

  On account of the iron-hard, sunbaked soil, the tree planting progresses more slowly than planned over the following week, and they average just six or seven trees daily. Each evening, Temple meets him in the library for his reading and writing lessons, though after swinging the pick all day it pains him to clutch a pencil. She sits close while he forms crude letters, and listens patiently to him crawling through the Odyssey. Luckily, literacy isn’t quite as difficult as he recalled. Mostly, it all hinges on learning the pranks that letters play—the way c’s can act like s’s, the way e’s can be there or not—and gradually he improves, if only slightly. And there are moments when what he reads nearly pleases him.

  After two weeks the windbreak is nearly finished, and Temple asks him to keep out of sight during the days, in case McSorley comes around. They continue to meet in the library after the sun sets, sitting incrementally closer together on the pew. He talks more about the War, and she talks about the books she’s read and how she wishes her father were alive to help catalogue her library. When the day comes for them to drop the hundredth tree into the ground, they drive back to the house in a shared silence, as though from a funeral. That night, she invites him into her bed.

  VANCOUVER

  SOMEWHERE UPON THE limitless Canadian prairie, Harvey Lomax’s first-class dining car rides into a crenellated tower of coal-black dust, thousands of feet high. The dust cloaks the train and the dining car goes dark. Though it’s lunch, the waiter brings candles so they can see their food, and Lomax dampens his handkerchief and wipes his face while a fuzzy film of dust collects on the surface of his soup. The well-heeled gentleman adjacent to him abandons his bowl. Lomax, however, stirs the dust in and spoons it up.

  Arriving days later in Vancouver, a place he’s never been, he’s awed by its forested mountains and gleaming ocean surrounds. With the two hundred dollars he earned with that swindle back at the hotel in Toronto nearly spent on his ticket, meals, and enough opium for the journey, he stops at a bank near the rail station and attempts to draw funds from his general account, which the clerk informs him is empty. Given his lean predicament, he takes accommodations with the loggers in a squalid hotel on skid row, and vows to further limit his opium intake (unlike his father, his self-control remains resolute), striding bravely past the city’s numerous opium dens. To keep his back from slowing him down, he smokes a conservative, maintenance amount, three times daily, and never more.

  He rides the streetcar south to the Greenwood Timber offices, which are housed in Harris Greenwood’s mansion. At the door he announces himself as an agent of R.J. Holt of New Brunswick, and asks a secretary named Milner to arrange a meeting with his boss.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Greenwood is too busy planning his soirée,” Mr. Milner says. “Is this in reference to Mr. Holt’s attendance? Many captains of industry will be there. I hope Mr. Holt still plans to attend?”

  “He certainly does,” Lomax says. “And I’ll be there as his assistant,” he adds, and is soon leaving the mansion with an embossed invitation.

  Back at his squalid hotel, Lomax assesses his wardrobe, which has become degraded over his journey: his suit coat is rumpled and pitted with cigarette burns, his shirt collars are yellowed, his hat crushed. He cables Lavern, both to alert her to his location and to assure her that he’s closer than ever to completing his mission. He also asks her to liquidate an old account they’d set aside for Harvey Jr.’s education, just some money her father left her when he died. Her reply comes over the wire within a half hour:

  CABLING MONEY YOU REQSTD STOP BALIF CAME TO HOUSE YESTDAY STOP HOLT EVICTNG US HRVEY STOP STAY WITH MY MOTHER NOW STOP COME HOME PLSE STOP LAVRN

  Lomax clenches his teeth until they squeak. Holt had threatened “further discipline” if he didn’t return, yet some secret part of Lomax never believed he’d actually follow through with it, not after all the loyal years he’d pledged and all the debts he’d collected on Holt’s behalf—and especially given what Lomax knows about his sordid affairs. Now it appears that Mr. Holt has discarded him with as much thought as he’d give to one of his girls. Which means there’s nothing left for Lomax to do but find the child and the journal before McSorley does, then use them as bargaining chips to save his house.

  With the money from Lavern in hand, Lomax locates a tailor. During his tuxedo fitting, the tailor convinces Lomax to buy a jacket two sizes smaller than he normally would. Perhaps there’s a different sizing scheme on the West Coast, or perhaps he’s lost some weight after these months on the road without Lavern’s home-cooked meals.

  That Friday evening Lomax arrives at the Hotel Vancouver, where rabble-rousers have assembled out front, hollering about the Crash and the inhumane conditions in Greenwood Timber’s lumber camps as though the rich peopl
e stepping from their shining cars could possibly care. Brandishing his invitation, Lomax pushes through the fray and enters an opulent ballroom, where jewels glimmer against women’s clavicles and sails of mauve silk flow across the high ceiling. After spotting a man he’s certain is Harris Greenwood, Lomax drinks tonic water at the room’s periphery, waiting for the chance to approach his table. When his assistant makes off, the seat beside Harris becomes vacant. Though the tycoon appears to be in a foul mood, raving to his tablemates about topics Lomax can’t make out, he doubts he’ll be presented with a better opportunity.

  “Sorry to disturb you during your meal, Mr. Greenwood,” Lomax says, leaning down to speak into the man’s ear. “I’m here concerning a matter related to your brother.”

  “How dare you ambush me with this nonsense while I’m eating,” Harris says drunkenly, rearing back and casting his vacant eyes in Lomax’s direction. “My brother is deceased, sir.”

  “I suspect this may come as a surprise, but I’m happy to report that you’re mistaken.”

  “Oh, really! Then where is he?” the tycoon barks, swinging his head around for effect. “Is he here? Sitting right across from me at this table, perhaps?”

  “No, sir,” Lomax says, trying to calm him down. “I’m unsure of his current whereabouts. Though I have a fairly good idea that he’s headed—”

  Harris Greenwood interrupts to suggest that Lomax is running some kind of confidence scam, and then threatens to have him ousted from the party, so Lomax takes his leave. After nearly two decades in R.J. Holt’s employ, he should have known better than to approach a half-pissed industrialist at full froth. Now he’s gone and squandered the best card that he’d held in his already abysmal hand.

  As he makes his way through the crowd, Lomax spots Mr. Holt himself, dressed to the nines, having already attached himself to a waitress half his age. The nearer Lomax gets to him, the more a maelstrom brews in his gut and flows upward, filling his mouth with a taste like dirty pennies. Lomax pictures his seven children clambering over one another in Lavern’s mother’s tiny apartment—he is just a few feet from Holt’s back now—then those bruises he saw on Euphemia’s wrists and neck and never said anything about—and the jagged urge to pulverize this man beyond recognition becomes nearly irresistible. But this isn’t some lowlife who Lomax is tasked with collecting on. He can’t just pummel him until he signs back over the deed to Lomax’s house. Like the other tycoons here, Holt owns stores and apartments and banks and coal mines and steel mills and factories and forests and lakes, and that gives him power. And if Lomax is ever going to have a chance of protecting himself from that power, he’s going to need that journal.

  Lomax drags himself to the restroom and locks himself in a stall. To dispel the foul taste in his mouth, he burns some opium in a soup spoon he snatched from a table, drawing deep from a pirouette of lifting smoke. This method’s output is more unpredictable than when taken via cigarette, and he bobs down into the sea of himself for a while—how long he doesn’t know.

  When slowly he surfaces from his inner ocean, Lomax becomes aware of a pair of voices in the adjacent stall. Male registers, employing soft tones normally reserved for women or children. Lomax has encountered his share of such men in his time doing debt collection. Once, he collected money from a father who’d abandoned his five toddlers and beauty-queen wife to go dress up in her underwear and cavort with another man. Usually Lomax pegs them early: the light-footed way they stand, the hungry way they seek out the eyes of others, how their gaze always seems to linger too long. Yet any fool could decipher the soft sighs that emanate from the next stall over.

  When the men finish their seamy business, they exit their stall and stop at the sink to wash up. It’s then Lomax goes on tiptoe to peer over the top of his own stall, which allows him as much of an eyeful of the pair as he’s going to need.

  THE SOIRÉE

  IN SHIRTSLEEVES, SILK top hat, mother-of-pearl cufflinks, and bone-white spats, Harris Greenwood waits nervously upon a plush lounge chair in the Lieutenant Governor’s suite of the Hotel Vancouver, nipping at a tumbler of sake, alert to the fading din of voices from West Georgia Street below. There’d been demonstrators outside, some former employees who’d since degenerated into ungrateful riff-raff, shouting at his guests’ Packard limousines as they pulled to the curb. But the police quickly got a handle on things—he heard the clunks of their truncheons and the animal growls of the men as the disturbance was quashed.

  “How do I look, Liam?” Harris asks pre-emptively, after catching Feeney’s sea-spray scent nearby.

  “Like sawdust royalty,” Feeney says a few feet to his right, before guiding Harris by the arm to the elevator. They descend in silence, and the doors open to the fray of the ballroom, where the band’s sonic fervour and the warm crush of guests swallow him whole. Harris can feel the shuffle-step vibrations of dancers through the floor. Usually, he finds jazz intolerable—most music, actually. It intrudes on his mind and directs his thoughts in ways he expects it doesn’t for those with sight. And yet, perhaps because Feeney is at his side, he finds some amusement in the intricately thumping rhythms, the brightness of the horns, the drowsy wandering of the clarinet, and nearly forgets the fact that it’s all costing him a tidy fortune.

  The soirée had been Feeney’s idea. There’d been a recent trade exposition in San Francisco, and the captains of industry in attendance were quite glad to be diverted to the backwater outpost of Vancouver for a spree of on-the-house revelry. The newly constructed Hotel Vancouver’s financers had gone belly up during the Crash, leaving the building unfinished, so Harris paid a hefty special consideration fee to host it here. But such a party would have been unthinkable without Feeney: Harris couldn’t possibly face its social demands without his trusted describer at his side.

  Feeney leads him to the bar, where they sit on high stools and listen to gravel-throated men guffaw in unison. Feeney hands him a fresh sake, of which Harris has ordered a case from Osaka and has already burned through half. He knows he shouldn’t have more, as he’s already beginning to experience something of a “little hell,” but he brings it to his lips anyway.

  “Go ahead, describe my party to me,” Harris says, spinning around before leaning back against the bar, his tongue limber with drink.

  “Diamond-drenched women in close-cut silk saunter past,” Feeney says, hamming it up. “Clasped to the arms of ugly old industrialists richer than Olympus. Already your guests seem to have aligned themselves according to what feature of Mother Earth they’ve committed themselves to destroying. Gold men in the corner. Oil near the exits. Railway executives and coal magnates colluding near the bar. I see Sir James Dunn of Algoma Steel. William H. Wright of Lakeshore Gold is positively maroon-faced. The king of the grain elevators, C.D. Howe, is sucking down a canapé as though it caused him harm. And the lecherous R.J. Holt of Holt Industries looks like he could fuck an ottoman.”

  “Any sign of Rockefeller?”

  “Not yet. The word is he was an accomplished rower in his day, and is still quite handsome. If rich industrialists are your fancy,” Feeney remarks, digging a covert elbow between Harris’s ribs.

  “How about conversation?” Harris asks. “I can’t make anything out in all this racket. What’s in the air?”

  “Well,” Feeney exhales. “Mostly the talk is of Roosevelt. The creeping rot of socialism. Japan’s sabre-rattling. The worries in Europe. Balloons moored to buildings. Chesty movie starlets. Oh, and I heard a rousing speech endorsing those draconian work camps that Prime Minister Bennett has enacted as an antidote to the Crash.”

  “I should be giving the speeches,” Harris grumbles. “I’m the one paying for all this hot air.”

  Since the Crash, the skittish Canadian banks have been reluctant to lend venture capital, especially not to financially imperilled lumbermen, so Harris was forced to secure purchase financing for John Rockefeller’s Port Alberni parcel from a London firm. Now all he needs to do is convince the
American to sell—a gambit that he and Feeney have planned for later.

  When the dinner bell is rung the pair take their seats to the chime of crystal glasses and the slurp of consommé. Harris has tucked himself and Feeney away from the powerful tables, mostly because Harris disdains dinner conversation at formal affairs, the smear of unrecognizable voices coming pell-mell as he is invariably trapped beside some self-interested boor.

  “I’m off to hunt the elusive Rockefeller,” Feeney says after their salads. And before Harris can protest, he’s gone.

  “Clams for monsieur,” a waiter says from somewhere to his left, and Harris proceeds to chase the little flaccid lumps around the buttery skating rink of his plate, while everywhere glasses clash and laughter brays, a kind of auditory miasma that only amplifies his unease. He hadn’t planned to spend even a portion of the evening alone, and in Feeney’s absence, his tie feels as though it’s been tightened. Harris keeps his eyes low to avoid projecting the impression to those at his table that he’d care to converse.

  Then the deep voice of a man materializes through the din. “Sorry to disturb you during your meal, Mr. Greenwood,” a stranger says from where Feeney had just been sitting. The man goes on to suggest that Everett is somehow miraculously alive. But Harris has dealt with such fraudsters before. Once, a woman claiming to be his daughter turned up at his mansion and demanded that Harris buy her a new washing machine.

  “And let me guess, all you need is a tidy sum of money and you’ll deliver him to me, is that correct?” Harris booms out. “I can assure you that I’m not some gullible War widow easily duped by promises of resurrection.” Now he begins to yell: “So beat it before I have my assistants throw you out, face-first!”

  “My apologies, Mr. Greenwood,” the deep-voiced man says with perplexing calm in the face of such a threat. “Perhaps another time.”