Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  When he’s sure the man is gone, Harris is left huffing, and reaches for his sake to allay his rage—only to discover it replaced by a flute of champagne, which he doesn’t care for but gulps anyway. If only that deplorable grifter were right! If only Everett had joined him after the War, as he’d promised, and hadn’t gone off wandering. What they could’ve accomplished! If his brother were here now, together they’d turn out the lot of these vampires and leeches, because that’s what they are, here to suck the blood of all he’s built.

  As the waiters have been silently refilling his champagne, Harris has lost count of his drinks. His face is clammy, his armpits damp, and there is a numbness to his cheeks that provokes him to rub them with his palms. He hears scattered laughter, and without Feeney, there’s no way of knowing if it’s at his own expense. And where is Liam? How long has it been? No doubt he’s chatting up John D. Rockefeller—what a noble sacrifice!

  When the band breaks, the voice of a woman is revealed some seats to his right, prattling on about a newly proposed Dominion Forest Service. Harris encountered the term ecology at Yale and liked the idea—the conservation of exceptional forests for the purposes of science and recreation. Still, he wonders how it could be implemented without strangling industry. The current fashion is to create reserves, preserves, national parks, like Roosevelt has done in the U.S. It’s as if the man won’t rest until the world is one big sandbox for mankind to play in. No, better to cut them now, Harris thinks. Get some use out of them. Start the regrow sooner than later.

  “Yes, yes, trees are lovely,” Harris hears himself mutter.

  “Pardon me, sir?” a woman says. “I didn’t catch that. Can you speak up?”

  “You think trees are sacred,” he says. “That they love you. That they grow for your enjoyment. But those who really know trees know they’re also ruthless. They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed. And they’d gladly crush or poison every single one of us if it gave them any advantage.”

  “I daresay that’s a rather bleak view of the world,” a woman says, whether it’s the same woman as before he’s not sure.

  “Madam, I have no view of the world,” Harris pronounces, reusing Feeney’s line of indignity while hoisting a fresh glass of champagne, the taste for which he’s now fully acquired—like the crabapples he and Everett once hurled at each other on their woodlot. “And what can be more bleak than nothing?” he says.

  The woman wonders aloud who invited him as a hand brushes his lapel.

  “Everything all right?” Feeney says.

  “Where were you?” Harris replies, his voice ragged, not his own. “You know I hate dining alone. A vile con man approached me and I had to send him packing.”

  “Poor baby,” Feeney says. “But I found our Rockefeller. In a cloud of cigar smoke on the balcony.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “I was arranging a chat between you two later this evening. Following the entertainment.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you enjoyed that,” Harris says. “And get me some more of this champagne, will you? I’ve acquired a taste for it.”

  “I doubt that’s a good idea,” Feeney says, pressing a glass into Harris’s hand, in which he’s disappointed to discover seltzer.

  “Then escort me to the men’s room,” Harris says amid a sudden wave of nausea brought on by the lingering taste of clams. “That’s an order.” Harris rises from his chair, dragging Feeney behind him, roughly bumping guests as they go. In the stall of the water closet, the nausea dissipates and Harris finds that alcohol has dampened his anxieties concerning their discovery, so he seeks out his describer’s lips and presses them to his own. Feeney tastes of cucumber and tea and cedar shavings.

  “I won’t be in any shape to meet Rockefeller later,” Harris declares while washing up at the basin following their intimacies. “So I’m going to proposition him now.”

  “Harris, you need to quit this idiocy. Or you and your childish behaviour will derail everything.”

  “That wasn’t a request, Liam. And I can still manage quite capably without you,” Harris says, fumbling around until he exits the lavatory, brushing his open hand along the hotel’s velvet walls for both direction and balance. He can hear Feeney trailing at his heels, quietly urging him to reconsider. In the dining area, Harris commands a waiter to escort him to the balcony.

  “Mr. Rockefeller,” Harris bellows affably when the cool, cigar-tinged night air touches his face.

  “Mr. Greenwood! There you are,” says a warm and resonant voice with an East Coast accent that reminds Harris of his years at Yale. They shake hands, and while Rockefeller’s hand is soft and uncallused, he counters Harris’s strong squeeze with an equally strong one of his own.

  “We were just discussing the deal you’ve cut with those yellow howler monkeys,” Rockefeller says, with the slight slur of a man standing on the doorstep of inebriation but yet to step inside. As he speaks, Rockefeller pats Harris on the back of his jacket.

  “I sell wood to anyone,” Harris declares with a grin. “Regardless of their zoological heritage.”

  “Well said, well said.” Rockefeller pats him again, this time on the neck, as if he were a trusted retriever, and Harris nearly bats the hand away. “But respectfully, Mr. Greenwood, we’re of the opinion that we ought not be aiding these Japs. They’ve invaded Manchuria. And rumours are circulating back at the Capitol that the United States is next.”

  “You’ve ceased all your Japanese oil shipments, then, I presume?” Harris says, pausing to let the barb sink deeper, then smiling to mitigate it. “They need a railroad, Mr. Rockefeller. And I’m providing them the lumber to construct one. What they do with it isn’t my concern. I’ve already cut half of the sleepers, and all I need is a bit more acreage to supply the remainder.”

  “I already know this, Mr. Greenwood. And as I informed your agent, I will lease you cutting rights, nothing more. Though this time around it seems like there could be some competition from your colleague, Mr. MacMillan. Of course, I will gladly accept bids from you both.”

  “That won’t do,” Harris says. “I’m seeking full title.”

  “Mr. Greenwood, it seems to me that this charming nation of yours is just one gigantic set of woods. So why don’t you muster up some initiative and go and purchase some other portion of it?”

  Ever since his boyhood days of haggling over the price of firewood by the side of McLaren Road, Harris has felt most himself during a negotiation. So he drains his glass and directs his eyes to where he suspects Rockefeller’s are. “Sir, I’ve paid you a tidy sum in leases over the years, and I’ve been happy to do it. But this time, I need to purchase your Port Alberni escarpment, including its attached islands. Full title.”

  “And as I said, that land is not something I’d care to sell, Mr. Greenwood. These aren’t the old days. They aren’t manufacturing any more islands any time soon, the last I checked.”

  “This is a mere morsel to a man of your holdings, Mr. Rockefeller. You won’t miss it for a second.”

  “It’s a fine party, Mr. Greenwood,” Rockefeller says. “But I’ve been subject to your sales pitch for long enough. Good evening.”

  Harris turns and braces himself at the balcony railing as the men snicker at his expense, just as they had at Yale. How they shook his hand publicly and spurned him privately, more for being a backwater Canadian than for his blindness. To men like Rockefeller, this country—the greatest storehouse of natural materials the world has ever known, first stolen from the Natives, then sold off bit by bit to foreign interests like him—has always been just a place for them to tear things out of. And for a dizzy, drunken moment, Harris pities the trees. Especially for the trusting way they declare themselves to the world with their grand upward reach. At least gold and oil have the common sense to hide.

  Still, without more trees to cut, Greenwood Timber will fail, and Harris and Feeney will be left as unprotected as those two swampers found e
mbracing at his lumber camp. A sudden and renewed ferocity circulates through him, and with it a memory of Feeney mentioning that Rockefeller had been a competitive rower in college.

  “Sir, these are trees you’ve never seen,” Harris calls out in the direction of the cigar smoke. “Growing in a part of the world you’ll never visit.”

  “Greenwood, are you deaf in addition to blind?” Rockefeller asks. “Or simply dim-witted enough to think that just because you’ve thrown a party, you’ll set the terms here?”

  Harris ignores the insult and closes the gap between them, cuffing the solid bicep beneath Rockefeller’s silk jacket. “Oh, come on, John!” Harris says with tense joviality. “Even though I cut the wood that made the railway you rode here on, and the mansion you live in, and the books your nannies read to your children, and the stocks of the guns that won your wars, and every stick of furniture you ever sat upon, I’ll still never be your equal, will I? So how about you arm wrestle this helpless, backwoods invalid, and prove your superiority right here in front of everyone? If I win, you sell me that Port Alberni parcel, with its attached islands, at reasonable terms. And if you do, I’ll cancel my deal with the dreaded Japs and you and your nation will be safe once more. What do you say, sport?”

  HER BEDROOM

  TWO BLUE EYES, another nose, another mouth, an array of pearly teeth, all hovering there above him, inches from his own. “It’s been years since I’ve been watched up close like this,” Everett whispers.

  Temple laughs and he worries for a moment she’s pegged him as simple. “Well, it’s about time someone got near you,” she whispers back, lowering herself down against him, her breath electric against his neck. “You’ve been on your own too long.”

  During those first years after he settled on his sugarbush, handsome women would visit Everett’s dreams—always more frequently in spring—their hair plastered with river water, their skin moonlit platinum. While these visions eventually subsided, already he knows that this time spent with Temple has left any return to a former state of dormancy unthinkable. Still, he can’t shake the nagging suspicion that it’s all some practical joke—the cruel sort he and Harris sprang upon each other as boys.

  “Lucky for me,” Temple adds with a crooked smirk, “you’re the illiterate hermit I’ve been waiting for.”

  “I suppose that makes you the helpless, farm-bound spinster of my dreams,” he says with mock sincerity, flipping her over to rise on his arms above her. But immediately she knocks out the joints of his elbows and he topples against her, clonking heads, and then they wrestle awhile, bumping an unlit hurricane lamp to the floor. Pod stirs at the ruckus, huffing in the improvised crib they’ve made of the galvanized woodbin nearby, the child nestled in amongst the clothes they shucked off hours previously.

  “You never had any babies yourself?” he asks after they’ve collapsed, realizing too late that although he intended to rekindle their earlier banter, the levity of the moment is now lost.

  “No, never,” she says sombrely. “I conceived one, but there was some trouble with it and I lost the ability. My husband ran off after that—he’d always rattled on about the truckload of precocious children we’d have, so I half expected it. But I’m happy he left. Family life was never for me. I’m more useful running this place than I am worrying over some snotty noses.”

  They lay in silence for some minutes, Everett eager to apologize for the flippancy of his remark, yet unable to broach it without sounding like a sniveller.

  “Everett, how did that child really come to you?” she asks, pushing her fingers through his hair.

  As he prepares to reassert his story about being Pod’s uncle, her eyes latch upon his and a soft, lush feeling engulfs him. “I found her,” he says. “Hung to die on a tree.” After this initial tug, the story of his life on the woodlot unspools from him, in the same easy way the story of his upbringing had for Pod back on the freight train. He tells Temple about finding the maple forest after drifting for years, about how he quit drinking and constructed his shack.

  “At first I saw the child as a hex put on me,” he goes on. “Except now my only concern is that she doesn’t come to harm. And that includes from me.”

  “Was it you who beat that senator’s brother in Ontario?”

  He nods. “Pod would be dead if I hadn’t. And that’s exactly why I need to pay someone decent to raise her. Trouble finds me wherever I go. Always has. I never had a good home, so what do I know about making one for her? She deserves a better start than I’d ever give her.”

  “And how exactly will you finance this better start? With syrup? During the worst times anybody has ever seen?”

  “That brother I mentioned?” he whispers. He knows he shouldn’t tell her, but he needs her to know that he’s not some illiterate dunce with foolish plans. “Is Harris Greenwood.”

  Ashamed of his boast, he buries his face in the pillow.

  She squints. “That barn over there was built with Greenwood lumber,” she says skeptically. “You aren’t pulling my leg, are you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “You’re planning to ask him for help. Why haven’t you already?”

  He tells her that he hasn’t set eyes on his brother for eighteen years, and that while they aren’t brothers by blood, they are in every other way. “The woman who cared for us never let us in her house. Just kept us outside like a couple of dogs. She hated us, deep down.”

  “You can’t say that, Everett. I’m sure she had her reasons. You can never be certain why people behave the way they do.”

  “Still, she willed us that woodlot jointly when she died. Harris wanted to log it completely, but I refused. Then after the War he wrote and asked if I wanted to start a lumber company with him, beginning with his half of the woodlot, and I said yes. But I had trouble making it home and got caught up wandering. I did make it back, eventually, though not before he cut all the trees and sold off the property. I hated him for years for what he’d done. Except now, with Pod in the picture, my plan is to ask for my stake and use it to find her a good home.”

  “Sounds like a fair proposition to me.”

  “I doubt he’ll receive me kindly, though. He always had a temper. But now that your windbreak is in, Pod and I should start heading west in the morning, so I guess we’ll soon find out.”

  “I’d like to say I need some more trees planted. Or that you ought to finish your lessons in the library. But yesterday I heard the mailman claim that McSorley is in Manitoba, chasing some Yankee wife-killer up from New York. He’ll come to Estevan next. But today is Friday, and he can’t possibly make it here until Monday at the earliest.” Temple takes his hand in hers. “So stay. One more day.”

  After Everett agrees, Pod wakes, mewling and grunting. When he stands naked by the bed to re-swaddle her, he leaves his own image silhouetted on the sheet in tan-coloured dust, as though Temple has been lying with his ghost, and the sight of it spooks him.

  Temple is asleep by the time he returns, making quick, unintelligible sounds, a series of hmmphs. He wishes he could wake her and ask what she’s hmmph-ing about, whether it’s related to all the books she’s read and all the unique thoughts she has that he can’t stand not knowing about. He rocks Pod while Temple fusses and kicks at the sheets in her sleep, a nocturnal restlessness he’d like to read as evidence of a greater one. A desire for something else, perhaps even somewhere else.

  At daybreak Everett watches Temple rise and begin pinning up her hair at the mirror. He admires the way stray hairs slip from her hairpins no matter how tightly she gathers them. The way her shoulder blades draw together and nearly touch. All a great glory that she doesn’t seem to register.

  “What were you dreaming of last night?” Everett asks.

  “Oh, it’s the same every night since the drought: roaring rivers; clear streams; lakes as still as oil.”

  “I dream of trees, mostly,” he says. “Trees I once knew. Trees I don’t know yet. Sometimes they’re aidi
ng me, and sometimes they’re falling on me. Sometimes I’m planting them, and sometimes I’m cutting them down. But they’re always there. I think if you ever cut my head open, it’d be one big root ball in there, all tangled and grown together.”

  After her hair is pinned, Temple pulls on some dusty trousers and a work shirt while Everett gives Pod her morning feed of goat’s milk, which Gertie has managed to get from the adjacent farm. When Pod is finished, he burps her over his shoulder and she gives a gummy smile.

  “You run back to your room now before Gertie shows up to cook breakfast,” Temple says to Everett, returning Pod’s smile. “I’ll have her go to the lockbox and get your pay before the men are up. The last thing we need is them seeing you two getting more special treatment.”

  A TELEGRAM

  HARRIS OLD BOY STOP HAD ROARING TIME IN CANADAS WILD STOP EVEN ENJOYED OUR CONTEST TO CONCLUDE EVE STOP YOU CRAZY CANUCKS STRONGER THAN YOU LOOK STOP AS PER OUR WAGER WILLING TO VEND PARCEL AT PRICE DISCUSSED STOP CONTACT SECRETARY TO FIX PAPERS STOP YRS JD ROCKEFELLER

  KEEP HER

  “TEMPLE?”

  “Yes?” she replies, her voice half-there beside him.

  “Do you think—?”

  A long pause.

  “Yes, Everett?”

  He coughs, unable to say it. It’s Saturday, their last night together. He spent the afternoon lying low in the library, examining the journal, though he still can’t read it properly, and mulling over an idea. He hears the wind slur through the willow outside Temple’s bedroom and it’s an encouraging sound.

  “Do you think a baby can love a person?” he says finally. “Even if they don’t have the word for it yet?”

  Temple flips onto her side in the bed to regard him, their legs braided together. “Of course that little girl loves you, Everett.”