Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “I’ve no family, sir,” he says.

  “Then she’ll remain in Crown custody while you serve out your sentence, and you can properly demonstrate your parentage at the time of your release,” the judge says with naked disgust. He waves his gavel and the bailiff yanks Everett from his seat. He’s pulled down a dank hallway into a tiny cell, fetid with the odours of caged human. A tar floor, an iron cot, a tin bucket for his waste. He sits for three days, pinching bedbugs between finger and thumb, soaking the hardtack they give him to get it down, worrying about whether they’ll connect him to that man he left beaten back in Ontario.

  In Pod’s absence, Everett is but a shadow thrown upon the wall. To be deprived of her for even an hour is like a sickness, but for days? It’s a plague. He inquires after her whereabouts a hundred times daily.

  “You aren’t feeding her cow’s milk, are you?” he calls out when he thinks he hears her crying over the drunken slurs of the other prisoners.

  “Shut your yap!” the guards bark, kicking the bars with iron-toed boots.

  “She can’t stand cow’s milk. It makes her sick. She needs goat’s milk.”

  Soon, whenever he mentions the child the guards begin striking him with a long hickory pole that reaches deep into his cell, which drives his questions inward, but doesn’t halt them. Is she frightened? Does she look for me when she wakes and I’m not there? Is she sitting in her own waste? Bawling herself to sleep? Over the years on his sugarbush, Everett had grown accustomed to the taste of loneliness. He’d even come to prefer it, the way a taste for strong liquor can be acquired. Yet it’s one he can no longer stomach. After days with no mention of her whereabouts, Everett turns desperate and begs one of the ragged boys who wash the jail’s stone floor to bring a message to the judge.

  “You think he listens to me?” the freckled boy says, glancing sideways at the guards who’ll cuff him if he’s caught conspiring with prisoners.

  “Tell him to contact my brother,” Everett says. “He’s a prominent man: Harris Greenwood. The very same one who built Firvale. If the judge could get word to him, he could sort all this out.”

  Everett watches the boy’s eyes widen at the mere mention of such a mighty name. And for perhaps the first time in his entire life, the name Greenwood finally works in Everett’s favour.

  ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS THINGS THERE IS

  “AND HE HAS him incarcerated there?”

  “Cabled this morning,” Milner says.

  “And we trust him? This judge?” Harris asks while pacing his office, weaving expertly among his screeching birdcages. “He’s our man? He doesn’t harbour some grudge against us, does he? I can’t recall the particulars of the contract. Where was it, you said—Firvale?”

  Milner pulls the file and reads aloud for Harris’s benefit. An escarpment near the Rockies they’d leased for a song from the local municipality five years back. A two-year cut job. They’d built rough bunkhouses for workers and several proper homes for visiting mill managers and governmental dignitaries, along with some wells and roads. It was clear-cut logging, the sticks dragged down the valley and humped back to Vancouver by rail.

  “Turned a tidy profit on it,” Milner says. But they’ve done so many cut-and-run jobs of this sort, Harris still can’t place it.

  “And the judge indicated that my brother explicitly requested my help?” Harris says. In his deal with Lomax, Harris agreed to sound the alarm only if his brother tried to contact him, not merely if he learned of his whereabouts.

  “Yes, the judge indicated that the prisoner asked for your assistance specifically. But any criminal can claim what they like, Mr. Greenwood,” Milner says tersely.

  “It’s him,” Feeney says from the back of the room. “I know it. Why the hell else would he name you?”

  “Thank you, Milner,” Harris says. “That will be all.”

  Over a solitary lunch eaten at his desk, Harris’s mind slips back to the day of the feast he’d prepared to celebrate Everett’s return from Europe, and the plate he heaped high and set aside, the same one he dumped down a well when his brother didn’t come home. Harris had forgiven Everett for going to war in his stead, and was willing to view his actions as merely another episode of their great brotherly competition. He’d envisioned for them a great future—his education and entrepreneurial know-how combined with Everett’s felling experience and intuitive understanding of forests—Greenwood Timber would have made its first million in half the time it had taken Harris on his own. And yet Everett chose to stay away. So why would he turn to Harris now, after all this time?

  Harris pushes back his plate and shakes his head. While once he would have gladly offered up his own life to save his brother’s, with Feeney in the picture and this snake Lomax hovering and ready to strike, he has more than Everett to protect now. After the maid removes his tray, Harris picks up the phone and summons Feeney to his office. “I need you to fetch Mr. Lomax,” he says, “who I’m sure is out smoking in the garden.”

  “You aren’t really going to offer up your only brother to that ghoul?” Feeney says.

  “This isn’t offering him up, Liam. It’s a simple matter of putting two parties in contact. R.J. Holt wants something of his returned, and Mr. Lomax has assured me that Everett won’t be prosecuted as long as he complies.”

  “And you believe him?” Feeney asks.

  “Not completely. But I can’t afford to shirk my end of our bargain, not now. And may I remind you that Everett and I aren’t brothers by blood. It was an agreement, made by equally desperate parties.”

  “But it worked,” Feeney says. “Your agreement. You survived.”

  “Liam, Mr. Lomax will either make things very easy for us, or very difficult. But be certain: he’s going to do one or the other. If he learns Everett contacted me and I failed to inform him, we’re finished. What’s coming to my brother is already on its way; I’m only spurring it along.”

  Feeney says nothing, and Harris knows him well enough to register his silence as disapproval. Just then a sudden sense of intrusion comes over Harris, and for the first time he regrets ever mentioning his brother to Feeney at all. He’s been reckless with his personal history and has made too many of his most private thoughts known to his describer; he’s allowed Feeney too deep inside the high walls that have for so long guarded him against those who would ruin him. Harris decides he’ll be less liberal in the future.

  “I understand your position, Harris,” Feeney says, breaking his silence and putting a warm hand on his back. “But this Lomax reminds me of a tree that’s been sawn right through and still won’t fall. And while I’m more a sailor than a lumberman, I did my time in your camps, and one thing I learned there is that a tree that’s been cut through and still won’t drop is one of the most dangerous things there is.”

  GET YOUR THINGS

  THE NEXT DAY a pop-eyed man enters Everett’s cell and stands beside his cot. He’s thick, short, like a wolverine trained to rear upward and walk. McSorley, he calls himself—the railroad detective whom Temple had been so worried about.

  “You’ve come a long way, Greenwood,” he says. “But I knew you’d get pinched for something eventually.”

  “I don’t know who you think I am, sir. But I’m no vagrant.”

  “You’re right,” he sneers. “You’re worse than that.”

  “Me and my little girl are making our way west, not troubling anyone.”

  McSorley huffs though his broad nose. “Now she’s yours, is she?”

  The two men lock eyes. Everett says: “You heard me.”

  “I’m no expert,” the detective says, “but as far as I know the male species can’t conjure up one of those little bundles of joy on their own. So where’s her mother?”

  “Her mother’s deceased.”

  “You seem real broken up about it.”

  “Remind me how it’s your business?”

  “Now listen to me, you bum,” the detective hisses while baring his teeth, which a
re disturbingly identical to one another, as though they’ve all been cast from the same mould. “That child is yours as much as it’s mine. The judge said you don’t have papers for her, that right?”

  “Lost in a fire,” Everett says flatly.

  “Then you just tell me what hospital she was born in and we’ll have them do you up some new ones.”

  “I look like I can hire a doctor? She was born in our little shack, beside the woodstove, same as I was. Her mother didn’t survive the night.”

  The detective takes a furious stroll around the cell, readying another tack. “You recall that man you beat in an orchard back in Ontario? Near the tracks? Sure you do. Well, he’s the brother of a senator.”

  “We didn’t get off in Ontario,” Everett says with as much composure as he can manage. “We caught express freights clean through.”

  “Funny, because you were identified by a flophouse manager in Toronto, and we found a baby’s flannels and sleeper in the creek in that orchard, all of which doesn’t matter much. That man you beat will put the finger square on you when I bring you back east. Beard or no beard.”

  Everett says nothing. What he did to the man was unavoidable, though silently he curses the world for requiring him to harm one person to save another.

  “And when you go away for what you did, that little girl becomes a permanent ward of the state. When she does, she’ll be swiftly adopted by her father, R.J. Holt.”

  “I’m her father,” Everett says, crossing his arms. “And nothing you say changes it.”

  McSorley yanks his hat down over his meaty brow. “We’ll see about that, Greenwood. We leave tomorrow.”

  Everett stays up late, rehearsing his story, practising the expression of shock he’ll assume when the man from the orchard identifies him. But if it all falls apart and Everett loses Pod to R.J. Holt and faces more penitentiary time, he plans to dash his own head against the stone wall of his cell and put an end to it. Because after living free for so long, he won’t survive being imprisoned again.

  McSorley returns early the next morning, except this time he’s tight-lipped, almost chastened. With him is another man: enormous yet sickly, with sweat rimming the deep caverns of his eyes. Though Lomax is emaciated, and has an even more sinister and demonic air about him than when Everett first laid eyes on him at the rooming house in Toronto, he has Pod in his arms, wrapped in a soft blanket, and all other details drop away. Everett’s whole body sings at the sight of her.

  “Thank you for your time, Detective,” Lomax says, shaking McSorley’s hand, his voice croaky and underpowered. Given the detective’s evident disappointment, it’s clear to Everett that these two men have opposing aims, and that McSorley has been somehow bested—how, Everett cannot say.

  “Get your things,” Lomax says in a voice like ashes.

  Monster, apparition, rescuer, executioner—to Everett it doesn’t matter what this man is, because he has Pod in his arms and all the iron doors are swinging open.

  SENSIBLE

  AT THE SMALL train station near the jail, a private coach awaits. Its gleaming wooden shell, filigreed with gold leaf, clashes absurdly with the hardscrabble mountain surroundings. To dissuade Everett from running, Lomax insists on carrying the child aboard himself, though she writhes against him and her very presence unnerves him—the neat contours of her face uncomfortably reminiscent of Euphemia’s. Besides, Lomax has already handled his fair share of babies in his life, and he would rather not be put in mind of his own brood back home, now homeless and shacked up with Lavern’s mother. Though with both Everett and the baby in his custody, the Lomax family’s prospects are looking much improved.

  Once they find their seats, Lomax passes the child to Everett, who clutches her against him, murmuring in her ear.

  “Old R.J. has a fine coach here,” Everett says, after the baby has dropped to sleep but the train has yet to move. “Where’s it headed?”

  “It isn’t Mr. Holt’s,” Lomax says.

  “Whose is it, then? Yours?”

  “This is your brother’s personal coach. Cut from a single redwood. One tree, hollowed out like an Indian canoe. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Huh,” Everett says tonelessly. “Back in Toronto you claimed you were Holt’s man.”

  “I am. But Harris Greenwood and I currently share interests. Unlike you, your brother is sensible.”

  “And he told you where you could find me?”

  “After he learned of your imprisonment, and out of his great concern.”

  “Some brother.”

  “He has your well-being in mind, Everett. As do I. Remember, I’m the one who just told Detective McSorley that the child is rightly yours and that we were together in Toronto on the day that senator’s brother was beaten.”

  Everett shakes his head. “I figured you would’ve quit long ago,” he says.

  “I’m about as stubborn as you are, it seems. But we just need to settle one more matter before we can all go home—those of us who still have homes, at least. I’m talking about the journal.”

  “You and me aren’t settling anything.”

  Lomax exhales loudly. “Well, that’d be the kind of stance that allows me no choice other than to inform McSorley about my mixed-up dates, leaving you unaccounted for on the day that man was hurt.”

  Everett throws his eyes to the window, as though he’s calculating how much force it will take for him to break it. Lomax regrets giving him the baby, but if he rises, this time Lomax is sitting close enough in the small compartment to grab him.

  “You know what I can’t figure?” Lomax says after a while. “You did everything you could to try to rid yourself of her. And then you did everything you could to keep her. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “People never make sense.” Everett says. “You just learned that?”

  “Look, the police said you weren’t found with any journal,” Lomax says, knocking a Parliament from its package, then reaching across the rail car to offer it to Everett. “But if you hand it over, along with the child, of course, I won’t turn you back in to McSorley. There might even still be the possibility of a reward. So where is it?”

  “Oh, that’s right, I remember now,” Everett says brightly, ignoring the cigarette. “I sent it to the editors of the Globe.”

  A crimson rage geysers through Lomax as he drops the Parliament and lunges forward to clamp one of his immense hands around Everett’s windpipe, squeezing its rubbery cartilage with a firm yet even pressure, as though he’s juicing a lemon. Everett chokes and his molars clatter together, and his eyes bulge and burn like comets. Lomax can feel the clockwork surge of Everett’s pulse, and knows that if he squeezed just a little harder, he could bring the tips of his fingers together around Everett’s neck. “Mailed it to my brother from Toronto…” Everett manages to say with a metallic rasp, and Lomax lets up a little to reward him for telling the truth. “But I’ll get it for you if you take me to him.”

  Lomax takes one final squeeze before releasing Everett’s throat. “There, now that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day,” he says while straightening his rumpled jacket. “And I guess you’ve just answered your own question about where we’re headed,” he adds, as Everett coughs and retches with the child still asleep in his lap. “We’re going to visit your brother.”

  THE ECONOMY OF NATURE

  BY THE RHYTHMS of the axe-work, Everett recognizes him long before setting eyes on his face. Out behind the grand mansion, with its spreading east and west wings, its manicured gardens, and its spouting stone dryads and nymphs, Everett watches in amazement as the blind man grasps another round of fir without groping for it, then heaves it up onto the cutting stump. Next, he draws a calculated step back—the maul poised over his shoulder—and strikes the round, dead centre on the heartwood, sending two near-equal pieces jumping left and right. Harris was always good with an axe, and it cheers Everett to know that wealth hasn’t spoiled the talent, despite the fact that he’s cuttin
g firewood next to a rose garden.

  Everett would rather not approach Harris while he’s holding an implement that could cleave Everett’s head in two, but Lomax is keeping Pod in a bedroom on the second floor of the mansion, and though the longing to clutch her against him and bury his nose in her neck nearly kills him, Everett’s done his best to appear unbothered. He knows his position will weaken if Lomax gathers the true depth of his feelings. But Lomax has given him until tomorrow to produce the journal, and he needs his fair stake of their inheritance if he and Pod are to have any hope of escape. Everett tucks his shirt into his filthy trousers, combs his fingers through his hair, and walks closer, halting just out of Harris’s swing range.

  “I thought rich tycoons were supposed to be fat,” Everett says from behind him.

  Harris freezes mid-swing, then lowers the maul to rest upon his shoulder. Though his ropy body is still strong, Everett senses a subtle failing of his balance, a slight seismic tremor, as though the garden were a ship that had just come into its berth.

  “You know, after all this time, no one’s told me where they keep the damn food in this place,” Harris says, turning to reveal wide, vacant eyes, with the lower half of his face wavering somewhere between mirth and rage.

  Despite his brother’s sightless condition, Everett suddenly wishes that he were presenting himself in finer clothing and under less self-interested circumstances. “Don’t you have anyone to do your chopping for you?” Everett says, nosing some of the neatly quartered wood closer to Harris’s pile with the toe of his boot.