Greenwood

by Michael Christie

“Aw, if I left her tomorrow she’d forget me in a week,” he says, a burning sensation flaring upon his neck. “Two at the most.”

  “I doubt that. Some part of her would remember you.”

  “Then how’s a person supposed to know for certain, when a child can’t say it herself?”

  “Because it’s plain as day. That’s how.”

  “I never had a knack for living before she came to me. It was more like I was killing time until I was gone.”

  “She didn’t come to you, Everett. You rescued her! Why didn’t you just leave her in the forest?”

  “I nearly did,” he admits, though the words nauseate him. “And there were times afterwards…when I considered worse than that.”

  “Well, so what?” she says with a dismissive squint. “I entertain all kinds of notions that don’t matter, not like actions do. And why would you get the law turned on you and forfeit your home, all to just give her away?”

  Silence.

  “You’re going to keep her, aren’t you?”

  Silence again.

  “It’s possible I might,” Everett says, nearly inaudibly.

  “Might what?”

  Everett takes a deep breath then swallows. “Keep her.”

  “Well, good.”

  “But we’d need somewhere quiet,” he says. “A wooded place where trouble can’t find me the way it does when I’m in cities. With the money Gertie paid me today, and a bit more from my brother, we could get a fair start. I’d ask you along if I thought you’d ever leave this place.”

  “There isn’t much chance of that, Everett,” she says.

  “You already know this, but your farm is withering away. You shouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. We could find some land nobody’s using. A piece they forgot they owned. I’ll show you how to sugar trees. We’ll swim in rivers. Raise Pod as our own. You could keep a little library. We could even marry if we wanted to.”

  Temple lets out a long sigh. “Oh, that sounds fine, Everett. Truly. Except I tried that once, and matrimony is a grave I won’t be buried in again. Besides, this farm isn’t dead quite yet, and these dunces will run it into the ground without me. It’s a sturdy house,” she says. “I expect to be carried out of it.”

  “Then I’ll come back,” he says. “After things cool down.”

  “And what about McSorley?”

  “He’ll lose interest eventually. With the Crash, there’s no shortage of fugitives for him to hunt. We could claim the baby is ours.”

  Her face hardens. “I’m not looking for a child, Everett.” This she says in a tone normally reserved for loafing farmhands. “There are women who are mothers and there are those who aren’t.”

  “You wouldn’t need to lift a finger in her direction,” he says, almost pleading. “I’m practised at caring for her now. Someday she could be climbing those maple trees we planted out there on the lot line.”

  “This is no place for a child and that’s final,” Temple snaps, and Everett shuts his mouth.

  They lie for a while. Dust scrapes the window. Everett starts to speak a few times and fails. He scrubs his rough hand over his face.

  “Temple,” he says.

  “Umhmm,” she says, half asleep.

  “If you can’t go with us, and you can’t have us here, it looks like there isn’t much future between us.”

  “If you cut it that way, Everett, then I suppose not.”

  “Then how about I come back here and bother you. I mean, once I’ve raised her and all this is over. With no expectations or anything. Just to come and visit you. Maybe I’ll take you to a moving picture in town.”

  “I’d like that, Everett. I’ll be here, I imagine. Still setting the table out on that porch. Still shovelling out my damn house.” Then she gets a sad expression. “Except people don’t come back to a place like this if they don’t need to. And you don’t strike me as the type who’ll need to.”

  “Well, I will. I swear it.”

  She taps the pad of her index finger twice on his forehead. “It’s sweet of you to say. You won’t. But it’s real nice to hear it.”

  FLYING OFF ON YOU

  AT BREAKFAST ON Sunday morning, they roar up the access road, dragging corkscrews of dust behind them, fine as confectioner’s sugar. Temple is out back, beating the laundry with a broom handle before she takes it in, when she sights the three squad cars—and several private automobiles, owned by men from Estevan who’ve ridden along more to gawk than assist.

  They pull up to the barn and Detective McSorley bursts from the car, ordering his men to surround the structure and padlock its doors. The detective is nearly rabid when Temple reaches him, his tie flying horizontally in the stiff gusts, and there’s a gerbilish, insomniac cast to his eyes. “I’ve got it from a good source that a vagrant is keeping a baby here, Temple,” he says, pointing a thick finger at her face.

  “Oh horseshit, Detective. What source?” she says indignantly. “Looks to me like the Estevan rumour mill has kicked into full gear now that it’s nearly harvest time and there’s nothing to harvest but gossip.” She casts a quick glance back to the house to confirm that Everett isn’t visible.

  “I’ve had enough of your mouth,” McSorley snaps. “Some of your resident drunks took another dip in the water tower last night. But this time I had a man posted there. And when they were caught, to save their skins they swore that there’s a baby girl staying here, and has been for nearly three weeks. Living in the care of a tramp who goes by the name Everett.”

  She has to fight against taking a quick, gulping breath. How could this be? She hadn’t made the mistake again of paying her men on a Friday, and she doubts any of them have money left over from the previous payday. She glares at the filthy faces that peer down from the hayloft’s high outswing doors—but she’ll have to deal with them later. Right now, Everett and Pod need a head start.

  “Well, you heard wrong,” she barks. She’s always masked her deceits with outrage—it’s a trick her father taught her. “The only infant currently on these premises is standing right in front of me. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t harass my workers and spook my animals just because some old drunks thought they saw a baby. I’ll be lucky if my hens lay again after all this commotion.”

  McSorley brings his burning pop-eyes up close to hers. Humid, eggy breath. Spittle scumming his mouth’s corners. And in an instant, the reports of him throwing hobos under the wheels of running trains seem dead accurate. “Temple, you know I’m the only reason you’re still operating here? I took pity on you, living with no husband in this godforsaken place. But today I’m afraid my desire to shield you from the more judgmental citizens of Estevan has expired.”

  “I’ve got it,” she says, softening her tone, trying a bit of charm, anything to buy time. “The child those idiots saw was probably my sister’s. I’m caring for her daughter while she’s off looking for work.”

  His face relaxes, if only slightly. “That so. Well, I’ll still need to see her.”

  “You can’t.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “She’s at the doctor’s in Estevan. She’s got a cough. It’s the dust.”

  They lock eyes.

  “But you’re welcome to drop by and see her in a few days,” she adds warmly. “I’m sure she’ll have recovered by then. I could even get Gertie to fix a picnic basket for us.”

  McSorley’s cheeks flush with blood. “I would enjoy that picnic, Miss Temple,” he says, examining her skeptically. Then he removes his hat so that his oily hair whips about in a dozen black tentacles. He directs his gaze to the horizon, where a bank of cast-iron clouds tumble in the far distance. “But you’d be smart to get that baby home and keep her down in your storm cellar for the next while. Cyclones were reported in the Dakotas just over the border yesterday. Should be here by tomorrow. And your sister will never forgive you if you let that poor child of hers go flying off on you.”

  “I’ll do that, Detective,” Temple says
, taking his elbow to ease him in the direction of his automobile. “Straight away.”

  But McSorley slips himself free of her grip and turns back to his men. “You know what?” he says, replacing his hat with a grimace. “I think we’d better do charitable Miss Temple here a favour and make sure that little baby girl of her sister’s wasn’t misplaced somewhere here on the farm. Search the house first. Then the barn. Then that goddamned library.”

  INTO THE MOUNTAINS

  “I KNEW THIS was a poor idea,” Gertie says at the kitchen window, as she and Everett watch the cars slide to a halt at the barn. Everett gathers Pod up from her high chair without even wiping the porridge from her face. Outside, he sees Temple hurry over to approach a stocky policeman. “There,” Gertie says, “Miss Temple will handle Detective McSorley. Now you two cut around back and hide in the old storm cellar beneath the library.”

  Everett has just tied his boots when McSorley shakes loose from Temple’s grip and shouts some orders at his men, who start toward the house. Without stopping to grab his things or even his envelope of pay from the spare room, Everett bolts with Pod through the back door, dashing out into the dust-swirled field behind the house. He sprints in the direction of the railway until the farm disappears. Then he sets Pod down in a drainage ditch and crawls snake-wise back to the library near the property’s perimeter. The men are searching the barn now, so Everett rushes inside the library and finds the journal among the teetering shelves of books. He sets it on the table and takes up a blunt pencil. Inside the front cover, facing the first page, he frantically scrawls PROPERTY OF—the spelling of which he only guesses at. With that part done, he writes a name, first then last, as legibly as his unpractised hand can muster. It’s a name he invents during the very act of setting it down, a name he hasn’t a clue how to spell, though he writes it anyway. It’s the name he’ll give Pod after their circumstances become decent and permanent. A name, he imagines, befitting the fine woman she’ll someday become.

  When he’s finished he shoves the book back onto the shelf, memorizing its location for the day he returns. For a moment he considers scribbling a farewell message for Temple, but it could give them away. So instead he finds the Odyssey, the entirety of which they’d read together during those nights after tree planting, and opens it to the first page, leaving it there on the table, hoping it will be enough.

  “There you are,” Everett says when he returns to the drainage ditch, stepping on the head of a hoop snake that’s just two feet away from where Pod lies. He takes her up and gallops, lungs wheezing, to the rail junction at Estevan, then hops the first northbound train he sees, a passenger rig of about twenty coaches. With the crew lurking about, Everett ties Pod to his chest with his bootlaces, then climbs a ladder onto the car’s slick roof, where he lashes his belt to the service handles in case he nods off or the train banks sharply.

  They ride all day into Alberta, watching the treeless prairie submit to plateaus of grassland. To the right of the tracks bison stand flicking their tails, a hundred monoliths against the drought-yellowed grass.

  Though they’re hungry, the ride in open country hypnotizes Pod and keeps her from complaint. Falcons dogfight and turn high circles as the train passes over deep gorges upon steel trestles, and the cars arc before them, each one the nodule of a spine, a great iron dragon flying low over the land.

  They abandon the passenger train at Calgary, because even in late summer they’ll freeze in the Rockies riding topside. Everett traversed the mountains frequently in his hoboing days, and though he was mostly drunk, he recalls a slow climb between icy crags and granite faces, where big-horned sheep picked their way across blue glaciers. He finds some tin cans and fills them at a rain barrel, stuffs his pockets with some wild turnip he digs up near the tracks, then hops the second-to-last caboose of a long freight. The door is padlocked, so he crawls down through its cupola. Inside, he and Pod conceal themselves beneath the little table where the crew eats their meals. He feeds her raw, chewed-up turnip as the train wends up among the shoulders of cloud-draped mountains, its wheels shrieking on the frosty tracks. Darkness falls and stars blaze into the caboose’s windows. Everett gives Pod a piece of cedar kindling to chew when her gums start troubling her, as they’ve been doing more and more lately.

  In the high mountains the sky appears closer, though he knows it must be a trick of the mind. Five hours into the ride, the windows blacken with a wash of snowflakes. The temperature plummets and the train grows louder in the cold. From a footlocker Everett fishes out a coat, which he drapes over them, and a watch cap, which he pulls down over Pod’s head. He ignores the coal stove in the corner, which would invite detection.

  They ride for hours in the clawing cold, his body sore from shivers. Pod grows listless, her nose scarlet even after he blows on it, recalling the same catatonia in which he’d first found her. When her lips turn blue he gives in and lights the stove. After it catches, he adds three small lumps of coal and props Pod before the growing flicker. In a few minutes she perks up, just as a bang comes at the door.

  A PICNIC

  AS HE DOES every Friday when the weather is fair, Harris escapes his office at noon and has Feeney drive him to a greengrocer, where they purchase fruit along with some French cheese and bread. Next, they drive to a secluded beach that overlooks the inlet, where they lay out on a blanket for the afternoon. These recreations are much needed. After Harris trounced John D. Rockefeller in their arm wrestling contest (a life spent chopping wood had never proven a more valuable asset), they finalized the purchase agreement for the Port Alberni parcel. At Harris’s insistence, the deal included the small, nameless island that he’d set on fire after discovering log poachers there, and even before he officially secured the title, Harris ordered the construction of a cabin retreat on the island, as a surprise for Feeney.

  In a rush to fulfill the Japanese order, Greenwood Timber’s crews have been cutting in triple shifts, and though the autumn rains have begun, Harris has ordered them to fell trees seven days a week, in blowing winds and storms. Two of his experienced high-lead fallers have already perished, one by lightning, the other hung in his rigging. Despite these tragedies—or, more accurately, because of them—thousands of eighteen-foot spars bearing the G of Greenwood Timber’s imprint are being tugboated daily down to his Vancouver booming grounds, where they’re gang-sawed into sleepers, creosoted, and stickered to await shipment across the Pacific.

  The ten per cent fronted by the Imperial Railway Purchasing Group and the London firm’s financing are long spent, so to pay for the labour overages Harris has liquidated his margin accounts and major holdings, including his stocks: Home Oil, Okalta, and even General Electric, which had only just recovered after dumping 500 points in the Crash. But Rockefeller’s timber is fine and easily accessed, and given their currently roaring output, Harris is on track to fill the Japanese order on schedule.

  There on the beach Feeney reads Harris an entire gazette in his lilting, musical voice. When a cool wind rises off the water, it provides them a good excuse for a blanket draped over their bodies—one can’t be too careful—allowing them some discreet contact. After a while they arrange their lunch upon a giant fir stump, rumoured to have been felled by Captain Cook himself to replace the snapped mast of one of his ships. While they eat, Harris drags his fingers along the stump’s ridges, and over the course of their meal, he assesses the tree’s age to be 748 years, a span of time that included ten distinct periods of drought—indicated by thinner, denser rings—and he realizes with delight that he’s read the tree’s history as one would Braille. It may be the tender-heartedness that often afflicts him in Feeney’s company, but he almost finds himself pitying the tree, as one might a human being whose life was cut unnecessarily short. But he shakes his head and drives the silly notion from his mind.

  Following lunch, he and Feeney indulge in a nap beside the stump, until a deep voice wakes him: “My apologies for troubling you again during your recreations, M
r. Greenwood.”

  Harris feels Feeney tense beside him, while he inventories his body to ensure that none of his limbs were improperly draped over his companion.

  “You have disturbed Mr. Greenwood, sir,” Feeney says protectively. “And if you’d like to make a proper appointment, I suggest you speak with his secretary.”

  “I went by your offices this afternoon,” the man says politely, and now Harris places the voice: the con man who approached him at the soirée. “And your associate, Mr. Baumgartner, indicated I could find you here.”

  So he’s finally betrayed me, Harris thinks. Everyone he’s ever trusted has, eventually. Mort just took a bit longer than the rest.

  “It won’t take a minute, sir,” the man persists. “I’ve got your military discharge photograph here, Mr. Greenwood.” Harris feels a piece of thick paper pressed into his hand.

  “You’ll forgive me if I can’t confirm this as fact,” he says coolly, standing up to face the voice.

  The big man chuckles. “You’ll have to take my word for it. But I regret to inform you that the dark-haired infantryman pictured here looks nothing like you.”

  “If you’re here to show me an unbecoming photograph, sir, I’m afraid that you’ve wasted your gasoline.”

  “What did you do during the War, Mr. Greenwood?”

  Harris has yet to correct Feeney’s false belief in the popular rumour that he was blinded while serving overseas, and since this huckster seems harmless enough, Harris can stomach a few uncomfortable moments alone with him if it means saving himself the embarrassment.

  “Why don’t you go fetch some water from the automobile, Mr. Feeney?” Harris says.

  “Are you sure, Mr. Greenwood?” Feeney replies hesitantly.

  Harris nods, then listens to the crunch of pebbles as Feeney works his way down the beach to the parking lot. “Is he gone?” Harris says.