Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “He is,” the man replies.

  “Actually, I didn’t serve in the War, Mr.…?”

  “Lomax, sir. Harvey Lomax.”

  “It was a common misunderstanding during those frantic times,” Harris says. “I was blind as a bat when my brother enlisted, and he was errantly entered under my name.”

  “Well, sir, I’m pleased to tell you that I stood before your brother, the man pictured in this photograph, four months ago in a rooming house in Toronto.”

  “That may be so, Mr. Lomax,” Harris says, struggling to perform neutrality, though his heart kicks against his breastbone. “But he and I went our separate ways long ago. And you’ll understand that I’m not exactly the sentimental sort. So this miraculous resurrection holds no interest for me. Good day to you, Mr. Lomax.”

  “You know,” Lomax persists, as though he hasn’t heard a thing Harris has said, “I intended to speak with you further at your party. Unfortunately, you and your assistant were off in the bathroom for much of the festivities.”

  There’s a long, searing silence, during which Harris has trouble breathing. It’s as though he’s sucked in an entire lungful of sawdust, and now lacks the air to expel it. “I wasn’t feeling well,” he says after forcing his lungs into motion. “I ate a bad clam.” He gropes for the stump and sits himself down upon it as casually as he can manage.

  “Of course, of course,” Lomax says. “But what happened in the lavatory at your soirée doesn’t concern me nearly as much as your brother’s whereabouts, Mr. Greenwood, I can assure you of that. Has he contacted you recently?” Lomax sits on the stump beside him, and up close he has an odd, exotic smell, and a deep, resonant voice that seems to be angling down from a great height, even while sitting.

  “No, he has not,” Harris says. “And I don’t expect he will.”

  “The thing is, sir,” Lomax says, “I’ve secured records confirming that you’ve accepted medals and a pension for your distinguished military service with the 116th Battalion of the Canadian infantry.”

  “I’ve accepted nothing, Mr. Lomax. They sent me my brother’s medals and pension in error, both of which I’ve held for him in trust.”

  “So he could come to claim them?”

  You idiot, Harris thinks. “Yes, well, I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Sir, I’m here only because I believe that we can be of mutual benefit to one another. My employer, R.J. Holt of New Brunswick, has an interest in locating your brother, who’s taken something of his. And we’d like your help in finding him.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We suspect your brother is making his way west, possibly to you. So all I need is for you to let me know if, and from where, he contacts you. You do that, and your lavatory habits will remain forever unremarked.”

  “Alive or dead, I highly doubt my brother wants anything to do with me, Mr. Lomax. But if you hold to your word, regardless of whether I hear from him or not, you have yourself a deal.”

  “That settles it,” Lomax says, rising to his feet and shaking Harris’s hand. “I’ll drop by your offices next week.”

  “For what purpose will you drop by my offices, Mr. Lomax?” Harris asks. “We’ve reached an understanding. You provide me with your details and I’ll alert you if my brother contacts me.”

  “Oh, sure,” Lomax says. “Still, I’ll nip by your offices next week, just to see how things are progressing. Good afternoon, Mr. Greenwood.”

  After he’s gone, Harris remains seated on the wide stump for some time, his eyes stinging in the pungent sea breeze. It will be hours before he can draw an easy breath.

  STORM CELLAR

  THE DAY AFTER Detective McSorley and his men search her farm and scare Everett and his child off, Temple wakes early. Normally a fountain of idle chatter, Gertie is silent while she prepares the percolator as though it’s a holy sacrament. Yesterday Gertie tearfully confessed that one of the men had spotted her fetching Everett’s envelope of pay from the lockbox before handing it to him. Gertie hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but after McSorley left, she discovered the lockbox had been jimmied open. The group of men who did it took no more than what was owed them on payday, but they did it because they resented Everett receiving his money early. They then walked into Estevan to drink cheap whiskey and swim in the water tower. But the damage was done, and while the money was lawfully theirs and they were right to expect equal treatment, Temple still banned them for life for disobeying her.

  After McSorley unsuccessfully searched the farm, he begrudgingly accepted that the child reported on her farm was in fact her sister’s. The detective was, however, correct about one thing: the coming weather. Over breakfast the sun only manages the faintest bruise of orange behind the tide of dust gathering in the south. By ten o’clock, the butterflies and grasshoppers are fidgety, clacking suicidally against the windowpanes of the house as if trying to shatter the glass to seek refuge inside. By noon, the oddly chilly wind is forceful enough to flutter Temple’s eyelids against her eyeballs. It seems to blow from every point on the compass—not in gusts, but steadily, as though from a fan. The sky purples throughout the afternoon, and by the time her farmhands are on the porch for supper, a lacerating dust is throwing buckets and feed sacks against the siding of the house, while out in the distance an inverted mountain, black as coal, races directly at them like a highballing train.

  The temperature plummets and an eerie, greenish light falls as Temple and her men leave their plates where they are and rush to unhitch the livestock so they don’t strangle. With that done, Temple and any men who haven’t already run off make for the storm cellar beneath the library. She watches the windmill pump detach from its housing above her well near the willow and take to the sky as though lifted by invisible wires. As they pull closed the storm doors, she’s wracked by the sudden fear that she’s locking Everett and Pod out, even though she knows they’ve already escaped west. If only she could rescue at least some of her library’s most valuable books—those handsome volumes of Dante with the wildflowers pressed between every second page, or that copy of the Odyssey that Everett had risked leaving out for her to find in the library—but there’s too little time.

  Shut in the storm cellar, Temple feels the very atmosphere convulse. She’ll learn later that by the time the cyclone reaches Estevan proper it measures a full country mile wide, dragging its helical blade like a plow over a fifty-mile stretch of earth before it will finally dissipate. The devouring wind takes grackles, chickens, prairie dogs, cows, crows, and jackrabbits—creatures domestic or wild, it doesn’t matter—into the air, and batters them against the other things wheeling there. Telegraph lines snap, automobiles roll and crumple, rail cars rise from their tracks and twirl lazy circles like wingless airplanes. Granaries become dervishes of boards and nails, and most of the area’s trees are yanked from the ground as easily as one pulls a ripe carrot.

  She hears her house go first: a crackling bedlam of shattered timber and glass thrown in a hundred-foot radius. When the vortex approaches the church, she feels the air pressure drop and hears the glass explode inward above her, a million shards of shrapnel thrown across the library’s dusty floor. When the roaring cone touches down on the library, she hears the roof removed with a tremendous screech of pulled nails and an almighty sucking whoosh. Then comes the uncanny sound that Temple Van Horne will surely never forget, not in all of her life: ten thousand books drawn up into the sky, all at once.

  A RETREAT

  BEFORE WAKING HIM, Harris gently blindfolds Feeney with a silk necktie. He then spends nearly an hour clumsily aiding his describer with his dressing, and after that they’re driven to the harbour where they board Harris’s schooner, crewed by men he’s hired just for the day, men of no association with Greenwood Timber whatsoever.

  As per Harris’s instructions, the ship cuts across the inlet, passes Port Browning, then bears north. Gulls squawk and salt spray dampens their faces. “Tell me what I’m looking at,” Feen
ey says midway through the voyage in a pitch-perfect imitation of Harris. And Harris proceeds to conjure the picturesque seascape of his imagination in his best Irish lilt.

  After some hours they drop anchor and are rowed to the small jetty in a sheltered bay, which Harris knows is invisible from the inlet.

  “What do you see?” Harris says, removing Feeney’s silk blindfold when they step from the rowboat.

  “A forested island. Green and lush as any I’ve laid eyes on. Where Douglas firs poke their delicately needled fingers into the clouds.”

  “Rockefeller hadn’t even bothered to name this place before he sold it to us,” Harris says as they leave the jetty with their bags and supplies while the rowboat departs. “Before the English conquered it, the local Heiltsuk called it Qanekelak, which I’m told means “shapeshifter” in their language. I considered naming it after you, though that would draw undue attention. So I’ve gone with my second choice: Greenwood Island.”

  “Inventive,” Feeney says, before they set out upon a deer path no wider than their shoulders.

  “Well, look at this,” Feeney says, after he’s led for a half hour.

  “Describe it to me, Liam,” Harris replies.

  “Amid a glade of fir, cypress, and cedar, upon a low rise,” Feeney narrates as they come to a stop, “sits a cabin, overlooking the sea, its rough-milled siding still pink and unsilvered by the sun.”

  “Built by the finest carpenters on the coast,” Harris adds, “using the timber they brought down to clear the site.” His original plan had been to have the cabin ready by year’s end, but after Lomax’s ambush on the beach, he paid through the teeth to spur the construction along. He requested a modest yet elegant structure of an unadorned, rugged design—the diametrical opposite of his mansion—one intended to merge with the forest rather than to dominate it.

  “It’s ours. A place we can live as ourselves,” Harris says, coaxing Feeney inside. “While the ocean is visible from the upper floor, the cabin is entirely hidden from the sea. So we won’t be troubled here. By anyone.”

  Returning to his office after Lomax confronted him, Harris had immediately fired Baumgartner with no severance for sending him their way—in what was no doubt a malicious ploy to undermine his and Feeney’s relationship. Harris has since related to Feeney the details of the encounter, including the report that Everett lives, which Harris’s skeptical nature still won’t let him fully believe. He’s also assured Feeney that even if his brother is indeed alive, the great unlikelihood of him contacting Harris after so long seems a reasonable risk to take in order to secure their safety.

  But for the past month, Lomax has appeared each morning at the Greenwood Timber offices, not to request a meeting or threaten Harris in any way, but to sit in the waiting room for hours reading gazettes, taking breaks to smoke his odd-smelling cigarettes in the yard, though the waiting room is outfitted with ashtrays. Still, Harris only needs to put up with this man a little while longer—just until the sleepers are all cut and the creosoting is complete and the Japanese deal is done.

  As the pair steps into the cabin for the first time, Harris again asks Feeney to narrate. To his delight, Feeney exhibits a particular admiration for the custom-built, literature-filled shelves that line the high walls, and that night, after a dinner of salmon fillets that Feeney roasts on fragrant cedar planks, he reads for hours to Harris, who drinks in his voice like milk.

  Later, in bed, with any possibility of being discovered as remote as it’s ever been, their solitude so complete that Harris nearly weeps with relief, they lie listening to the soft creaks and pops of the fresh-cut timber beams as they cure in the heat of the stove. “Most people believe that wood dies when it’s cut,” Harris says. “But it doesn’t. A wooden house is a living thing. Moving moisture through its capillaries. Breathing and twisting, expanding and contracting. Like a body.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate it if this body of yours would knock it off and let us get some sleep,” Feeney says, his head buried beneath his pillow. “Because the quiet of this place is what I love most.”

  The following morning they hike through the burned section to where Harris knows the tallest trees on the island congregate. Feeney halts at the foot of the grandest one, a titanic Douglas fir, over two hundred feet tall and wrapped with foot-thick bark, and they hold hands in silence as they examine it for some minutes, their necks canted.

  “It’s magnificent,” Feeney says after a while. “I know of no better way to describe it.”

  “I tried to burn this forest down once,” Harris says. “It was stupid of me. But it survived. And I’m happy it did.”

  “Good thing you’re so ineffectual,” Feeney quips.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it, Liam,” he says as they continue to gaze upward, Harris doing his best to imagine the latticework of high branches, “how one only needs to purchase the land on which such a thing is rooted, before one is permitted to destroy it forever? And, strangest of all, there exists no power to stop you.”

  Feeney scoffs. “Where I’m from, ancient trees are considered apartment buildings for spirits,” he says. “So I expect there may indeed be a power to stop you, Harris. It just isn’t awake yet.”

  Harris turns and holds Feeney’s elbows. “Once we ship the sleepers and this business with Japan pays out, I’m going to sell the company. I’m weary of men dying in my employ. And I’ve lost the stomach for cutting trees like this one. After I sell, we could reside here full time. It would be our place to begin anew. To be free from men like Lomax. Would that suit you?”

  “For the record, I detest this idea of you giving up your brother,” Feeney says reluctantly, though Harris can tell the idea of living here together has charmed him. “So why not tell Lomax to piss off right now?”

  Harris shakes his head. “If he exposed us, we’d be arrested for indecency. Greenwood Timber’s stock would be worthless overnight. There’d be nothing left for me to sell. What would we do then? Chop firewood? Do you know what becomes of men like us without the armour of wealth, Liam?”

  “I’m not afraid of being broke. As a poet it’s my natural state. And living here, we wouldn’t need much.”

  “No, we must see this Japanese business through. I’ll sail the remaining lumber over there myself if I must.”

  “Fine, fine. But I admit it, I do like it here,” Feeney says. “Besides, I’ve always dreamed of being hidden away like some priceless treasure.”

  “Good, then it’s settled,” Harris says.

  “There’s just one thing that bothers me about the cabin,” Feeney says forebodingly as they start the hike back.

  Harris’s stomach plummets. He’s thought of everything, hasn’t he?

  “It only has the one door,” he says. “And great treasures like myself always need more than one exit. No matter how protected we are.”

  So that afternoon Feeney uses the tools left behind by the carpenters to cut a small, second door at the rear of the cabin, right next to the kitchen. He isn’t much of a craftsman—this Harris surmises by running his hands over the crooked and splintered opening he’s hacked into the wall—but Harris leaves this unmentioned. It’s nearly midnight when Feeney finally gets the door to hang without sticking in the jamb, and Harris pops a bottle of sake to celebrate. While they drink, an eagle swoops so close to the cabin’s window they can hear it rend the air like fabric.

  FIRVALE

  WITH SHACKLED WRISTS, Everett is ushered from his holding cell into a closet-sized courtroom, where an ancient judge presides. He shuffles documents and raises his bloodhound face, seeming to regard Everett not so much as a man, but as some unfortunate aspect of the decor. A Mountie tells of Everett’s capture, how after he was thrown off a train in the high mountains, he broke into a prominent Firvale house, looted it, and burned up most of its furniture.

  “Is this account accurate, Mr. Bowater?” the judge asks.

  When the constables pulled him and Pod from the house this morning and
carted them down the mountain to this gold-rush town set in the crotch of two rivers, Everett claimed he was an itinerant farm labourer named Saul Bowater from Calgary. When fabricating a name, Everett knows to bend toward the eccentric—less chance that some other tramp’s used it previously.

  “We were half-frozen, sir,” Everett says. “It wasn’t stealing. I needed a fire to warm my child.”

  “Oh, burning up good furnishings is by all means theft,” the judge says smugly. “Wouldn’t you agree, sir? In that it unlawfully restricts the owner’s proper right of use in perpetuity?”

  While Everett believes there’s a distinction to be made, he knows better than to argue with a jerkwater magistrate with points to prove. “I wasn’t exactly seeing it that way, sir.”

  “But would it be correct to submit that you had a good and understandable reason to be burning this furniture, in that that you lack the funds for proper accommodation?” the judge says now, with what seems to be genuine kindness.

  “I suppose that’s true, sir.”

  “Let the record show that the accused admits to vagrancy,” the judge proclaims.

  “Now hold on,” Everett says. “I’m no vagrant. I’m just hard up.” There was a time when he was practised at this chess game of details, this weaving of the right words, but he’s too weary for it, and his mind keeps straying to Pod, who they’ve taken from him—to where, he doesn’t know.

  “Bah,” the judge says. “You’ve never done an honest day’s work in your life. Guilty of theft, trespassing, and vagrancy.” He raises his gavel.

  “What will become of my daughter, sir?”

  “Have you any family to care for her while you’re incarcerated?” replies the judge, setting down his gavel to rub his flesh-hooded eyes.

  Everett’s mind flashes to Harris. Back in the logging camp where Everett was arrested, the surrounding slopes were entirely stripped, leaving only a black peppering of stumps arranged like seats in a coliseum. Upon some stray logs Everett saw the stencil of the Greenwood Timber Company, which had built both the sawmill and the house he was arrested in. And for a despairing moment, he considers invoking his brother’s name to the judge. It’s certainly not how he’d imagined approaching Harris after so long—with a plea from jail—and Everett knows it would be a mistake.