Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “There are about forty thousand jobless men in this province alone, brother, all eager to do my chopping for me. That doesn’t mean I don’t care to do some myself.”

  Though he’s still an inch taller than Everett, and still has that shrewd, appraising cast to his face, there’s a new aristocratic airiness about his voice. Faintly English. The residue of good schooling, Everett guesses, and he’s proud of Harris for bettering himself. There have been moments over the years when Everett has missed him so acutely he’s thought he would suffocate of it. While he’s envisioned their reunion thousands of times, it’s usually involved fisticuffs and the gnashing of teeth. Never once has it gone like this, with a return to their old banter, a slip back into the deep groove of their ways.

  Harris turns back to his work and drops the maul, neatly cleaving another round. “I’d say you haven’t changed,” he says. “But you probably have, given how you’ve treated yourself. Your voice is slower. Rustier. There’s more earth to it.”

  “Is that why you sent your big retriever to fetch me? You wanted to hear my voice but were too busy playing logger to come find me yourself?”

  “Let’s be clear, brother: I asked Mr. Lomax to collect you after you requested my help,” Harris says sternly. “And after speaking with him, it became evident that he might be the only person who could fish you out. Providing you’re reasonable, which, knowing you, I hardly expect to be the case.”

  Everett bristles at his brother’s parental tone, that old self-appointed authority, always speaking for them both, always deciding which trees they’d cut, always the first to call for lights out in their cabin. “You know me best, Harris,” he says. “I’m everything but reasonable.”

  Harris stacks the wood he’s cut, hangs the maul, and asks Everett if he’s hungry. Everett nods, then realizes his mistake and confirms the fact aloud. They pass through a tall garden door into a grand room beneath a chandelier of a thousand shards of suspended crystal. Everett has never seen such opulence: walls of bookcases fronted with cut glass; a floor of green marble, smooth and lustrous as silk; the room’s trim and banisters all hewn from the finest and tightest-grained redwood. Everett is further astounded by Harris’s uncanny ability to avoid all of the furniture by memory, without the use of a cane or a guide.

  “Quite a spread you’ve put together,” Everett says. “Your mansion appears to be a fair deal straighter than that old log cabin we put up.”

  “I knew that if I built it modestly,” Harris says, “they’d call me a miser. And if I built it lavishly, they’d accuse me of showing off. So I chose the latter.”

  Amid the smell of old wood and leather, they sit in wing chairs near a fireplace full of embers that pulse orange behind a steel grille. The westerly windows overlook the property’s private wood of oak and beech—the few trees that Greenwood Timber has yet to cut down, it seems. Surely, Everett thinks, Harris will fell those closest to his house last.

  Servants present tea along with multi-tiered platters of cakes and dainties.

  “So, how’ve you been, brother?” Everett says, smiling under the preposterous weight of all that isn’t contained in his question, and the idea of summing up an eighteen-year absence from the one person you know foremost in life with a word such as fine.

  “Quite well,” Harris says, his jaw half-clenched at Everett’s old habit of making light of serious matters. “Considering. You?”

  “I haven’t managed to quit living quite yet, despite my better efforts,” Everett says. “I did eventually return to our old cabin, though a little later than promised, I admit. But it was gone. The woods, too. Any idea where they went?”

  “Oh, you did come! How kind of you! And here I thought that you’d chosen a life spent in the gutter over working alongside your invalid brother. Silly me,” Harris says tensely, taking a sip of the tea that a servant has placed in his hand.

  “I cursed you for years for what you did,” Everett says, struggling to retain his composure for the sake of Pod’s future.

  “And you don’t curse me anymore?”

  “No, I let all that go. I’ve got other things to worry about now.”

  “Well, you should be worried. This Lomax fellow has it in for you.”

  “I could give him the slip for good anytime I wanted. Except this child needs some stable and decent circumstances to grow up in—not like how we did. So I’m here to ask for my fair stake of what Mrs. Craig left us.”

  Harris rises from his chair and slowly paces the room with his teacup tinkling against its saucer. “You know, after the Armistice,” he begins, “I contacted the Department of Defence, pretending to be you. They informed me that I had indeed stepped off a ship in Halifax, but that was the last anyone had heard of me. Over the years, I often imagined you out there wandering, and then, after I’d given up hope, I imagined your bones lying somewhere nobody ever looks.”

  “I had some difficulties, Harris. The War wasn’t good to me. I was all mixed up in my head. I can see that now. It took me years to find a place to settle, and even then I knew it was better for me to keep away from people.”

  “Yes, Lomax informed me about your little syrup operation. A shame that you didn’t have the foresight to purchase the land first. Odd, isn’t it? How we both ended up relying on trees—in different capacities, mind you. But of course, Everett, you’re entitled to half of the Craig woodlot proceeds. I’ll have a cheque prepared immediately. I’ll also include the military pension they sent me over the years as well. It will be a tidy sum.”

  Everett is stunned by his brother’s frictionless generosity. He’d expected more fireworks, a return to their squabbling ways, more gristle, less meat. “All right, then. I suppose that settles it,” Everett says, slapping his thighs and rising from his seat. “We’ll be out of your hair before you know—”

  It’s then that Harris turns, cocks his arm, and hurls both his teacup and saucer twenty feet across the room and into a glass-lined bookcase, a hail of splinters pattering the floor. “ ‘Competition is most severe between allied forms which fill nearly the same space in the economy of nature,’ ” Harris says calmly, as though nothing had transpired, his barren eyes swung as wide as they’ll go. “That’s Darwin.”

  “Never met him,” Everett says, closing his fists, thinking that it’s just like his brother to wield his book-learning as a weapon. He feels that old magma of anger in his chest, the fighting spirit that bound them together for so long.

  “I don’t expect you would have,” Harris says. “They had a Braille edition of On the Origin of Species at Yale, a very rare book. And when I read that passage I thought it encapsulated our dealings quite well.”

  “I was trying to help you,” Everett says.

  “Retinitis pigmentosa,” Harris replies. “That’s the term for it, brother. Awful-sounding, isn’t it? A degenerative disorder. And though the doctors can name it, the cure still evades them.”

  “We didn’t need a name to tell us something was wrong.”

  “Well, I didn’t ask for your help,” Harris says, his temples pulsing visibly, the way they always have whenever he believes he’s been wronged.

  “I never said you did. But you needed it just the same.”

  “When you left for France, I was alone. Ashamed. Fumbling about in our little cabin, with the darkness closing in. I became the object of their pity.”

  “You deserved some of that pity. You’d have been helpless in those trenches, Harris. The Kaiser would’ve walked over and shot you himself.”

  “Look around you, brother!” Harris announces loudly. “See everything I’ve accomplished and tell me how helpless I am now. Do I still deserve your pity?”

  “A big house made of trees that other people cut down for you is nothing to me, Harris.” Everett is yelling himself now, and it feels good in his lungs. “Me and my girl took refuge in a town you built then abandoned up in the mountains—Firvale? It looked more like a place the devil takes a holiday than what you’d
call an accomplishment!”

  “Is everything all right, sir?” says an Irishman who enters the room, fixing a fierce stare on Everett. “I heard a crash.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, fine!” Harris yells. “Just catching up with my brother!” The Irishman’s presence seems to settle Harris, however, and he sits back down with a sham of a smile pasted to his face. “So what battlefield heroisms did I perform? A great many, it seems. They mailed me a bucket of medals.”

  “You weren’t brave,” Everett says. “You nearly shit yourself during the tiniest skirmish. You mostly carried stretchers and built things out of wood. When you came back, you couldn’t look at a human face without seeing the skull beneath it smashed. For years after you didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, and not at all without a bottle in you. That sugarbush was the only thing that kept you from sticking a cocked revolver in your ear and pulling the trigger.”

  “Yet now with this child in your arms,” Harris says, “things have changed…”

  “That’s right,” Everett says. “A person seldom knows they’re starved for something until they get a taste of it.”

  “Mr. Lomax claims that the baby is in fact R.J. Holt’s, born to his mistress is my guess, which is why they’ve so far neglected to involve the authorities. The word kidnapping wasn’t used, but the insinuation was there.”

  “That’s a lie. I found her left to die in the trees. Just like we were,” Everett says. “But at least we had each other,” he adds. “This child doesn’t have anyone except me. So Harris, you just cut me that cheque and I’ll make for—”

  “It’s not quite that simple, Everett,” Harris says. “Because if I just let you run off, Mr. Lomax will make things difficult for me.”

  “That’s why you sent for me, isn’t it?” Everett says. “Not because I asked for your help. He’s got your ass in the ringer, too.”

  “May I interrupt this charming reunion to make a humble suggestion?” says the Irishman, who appears to be some kind of assistant, though Everett is astounded that a subordinate would employ such sarcasm with his employer.

  “We’ll discuss this later, Mr. Feeney,” Harris says.

  “Given Mr. Lomax’s faltering loyalty to R.J. Holt and his own downtrodden state, what if you offered him a good sum of money for the child?” Feeney asks Everett, ignoring Harris completely. “To my eye, that man seems ground-down enough to take it.”

  “You think my pension and my inheritance together would be enough?” Everett asks.

  “You’ve both forgotten this book he’s after,” Harris says impatiently. “He seems to want it even more than he does the child.”

  “That’s the problem,” replies Everett. “I left the journal somewhere safe. But I told him I mailed it here. And even if I did have it, he’s not getting it. I believe the child’s mother wrote it, and it’s all the girl has left to tell her where she comes from.”

  “You’ve read this journal?” the Irishman persists.

  “As much as I was able,” Everett replies. “But I had it for some time.”

  “And has Lomax laid eyes on it?”

  “I can’t really say. I don’t expect so, seeing how it was the mother’s private diary and was bundled up with the child.”

  “Then why don’t we fabricate one ourselves?” the Irishman says. “You could describe to me what it looked like.”

  “Mr. Feeney is something of a writer,” Harris interjects. “But he won’t be involving himself in any of this. Now Everett, I really think—”

  “You’ll need to point out the proper journal,” the Irishman interrupts. “Do you remember it?”

  “Sure, I could give you a general sense,” Everett replies. “It was fine penmanship, though. With writing on every page. And Lomax needs it by tomorrow. You figure you could fill a whole journal in a night?”

  The Irishman shrugs. “It won’t be my finest literary achievement,” he says. “But I’ll see what I can manage.”

  SHOEBOXES

  AFTER THE CYCLONE has done its worst and moved on, the storm doors are left immobilized by the rubble that was hurled against them. It takes Temple, Gertie, and the dozen remaining farmhands the entire afternoon to chip their way up through the library’s thick floor planks with a dull hatchet and a ballpeen hammer. When they emerge from the cellar into the haze of a dim, dusky sun, it’s as if the whole prairie has been tucked under an old brown quilt. As far as Temple can see, the dust has drifted into long, smooth hummocks that swallow all sound, the way snow does. She nearly screams, just to test if she could hear herself at all.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, honey,” Gertie says as they tour the ruins of Temple’s barn and house, including her fences and pens, which are all splintered and strewn across the torn-up land like a child’s discarded toys. Farm tools and the carcasses of wind-bludgeoned birds have been flung everywhere. A tree she doesn’t recognize pokes up through the windshield of her truck, its roots turned upward in the breeze like a demonic bush. And the library itself is decimated, now resembling a bare, wooden barge foundering in a great ocean of dust. The only landmark that remains upright is the willow near the house. Although a large bough has cracked off and most of its leaves were stripped, the trunk appears intact.

  “I’m not sure this world wants us anymore,” Gertie says as they pick through the rubble for the few personal items they’ll bring on their long, dusty trek into Estevan. After they set out, they soon pass the shelterbelt of maple saplings that Temple and Everett planted together. Still too small for the wind to have gotten a proper hold of, they look likely to survive, which is a consolation, even if Everett will never return to see them.

  Over the ensuing weeks, Temple and Gertie sleep in the basement of the Knox Presbyterian Church. Temple spends her days haggling in the offices of insurance companies—a battle she’ll eventually lose, when the most senior adjuster finally concludes: “We covered you for a farm, not a halfway house, Miss Van Horne.”

  With no money to rebuild and nowhere to go, Temple falls into despair, and momentarily considers selling her land and taking a vacant position as a schoolteacher in Estevan. But when word gets out on the railway lines and among the hobo jungles that her farm was destroyed and she’s been left destitute, bedraggled men and women set out in the dark from all across the continent. Convicts, criminals, the unemployed: they come nightly from the direction of the tracks, and each leaves a shoebox on the back steps of the Knox Presbyterian Church. Every morning, Temple carries the shoeboxes into the basement and finds them stuffed with stolen watches, or silver cutlery, or old gold jewellery, or bloodstained bills, or mere handfuls of filthy nickels. Upon these shoeboxes is always scrawled the same words:

  FOR THE LADY WITH THE TABLE ON HER PORCH

  THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER

  AS LOMAX TURNS the journal in his hands, it’s as though the planets have been marshalled back into their rightful orbits, as though he’s smoked the purest opium ever to be extracted from a poppy by humankind, as though the lightning in his long-tortured spine has been cured and the Crash has ended and his family is back home in their little bungalow and the fog of sadness that’s trailed him since he was a boy has at long last been dispelled.

  Let the Greenwoods have the damned thing, Lomax had thought the second Everett offered him that big wad of cash along with Euphemia’s journal in exchange for the child. Harris has the means to support it. And Everett obviously cares for the baby more than Mr. Holt ever would. All he ever wanted it for was to serve as a trophy in the display cabinet of his legacy. So when Lomax returns to Saint John, he’ll simply tell Mr. Holt that Everett Greenwood wasn’t the right man after all, and that the baby was sickly and had died while in the custody of a different drifter who’d found it. But through my own cunning, sir, Lomax imagines himself saying, I still managed to recover Euphemia’s journal, which I’ve got right here…

  Of course, Mr. Holt will again grieve the loss of his child. But he said it h
imself: If at any point you are faced with the choice of which to recover, the child or the book, choose the book. And returning the journal to Mr. Holt will go a long way toward setting things right with his former employer, which Lomax needs to do if he ever expects to reside anywhere on the Eastern seaboard in peace.

  And the Greenwoods’ money will be more than enough for him to reclaim his house from the bank. No more mortgage. No more debt collection. And rather than wasting his energies shaking down deadbeats and tending Mr. Holt’s stable of girls, Lomax plans to seek training in a useful job, something productive, perhaps as a builder or tradesman.

  After striking his lucrative deal with the Greenwoods, Lomax left skid row for a fine suite with a view of the snow-topped mountains and Vancouver’s dazzling harbour, and now sits leafing the journal’s pages, which teem with Euphemia’s graceful penmanship. He flips to the back of the book, to what must be her final entry, likely written the day he last saw her, after he returned to the estate to check on her condition, just hours before she fled into the woods with her child. Yet surprisingly, he finds nothing but poetic observations about the weather and how stunning the leaves of the oak tree are. To his relief, and despite what that liar Blank had told him, Lomax finds no mention of either himself or Mr. Holt whatsoever. In fact, if he weren’t so pleased to have secured the book and solved all his financial woes in one brilliant stroke, Lomax would almost be disappointed that Euphemia never thought to write about him at all.

  His suite has grown damp, so Lomax proceeds to light a fire. And since he already has the matches out, he allows himself a celebratory ball of opium, his last—this he decides resolutely. Now that he won’t be stuffing himself into cramped train berths or pounding the pavement all day, he’ll have no more need for opium’s pain-dampening effects. The rich smoke sends him into a gorgeous stupor, and he slides through a series of blissful states, almost like rooms, each furnished with a new and singular pleasure.