By the time he returns to himself, the fire is spent and the room is too warm. He dresses in the new worsted suit, wingtips, and pork-pie hat he’d purchased earlier for his journey home. With the Greenwoods’ cash in his pocket, he saunters down to the street, intending to find a meal, perhaps a bit of beef Wellington to restore his strength, and spots a suitably appealing restaurant. But before taking a table he detours to the rail station and purchases a first-class ticket to Saint John, scheduled for tomorrow morning. He then cables Lavern, informing her that his job has concluded successfully, and that he’ll be returning in three days with the means to change their lives forever. His throat thickens when he signs the salutation: Undying Love, HBL.
That bit done, he starts back toward the restaurant he’s selected. To save himself some time, he takes a shortcut through a narrow alley that edges Chinatown, which, it turns out, leads him past an opium den housed in a run-down hotel called the New Sun Wah. With his train ticket tucked snugly against his breast, his jacket pockets stuffed with cash, and his triumphant journey home to Saint John assured, he allows himself just a peek inside the door.
GREENWOOD ISLAND
HERE FOLLOW THE sweetest months of Everett’s trouble-plagued life. Which isn’t saying a great deal, but that doesn’t alter the fact that during the coming decades of his penitentiary sentence, Everett will often revisit the splendours of his winter spent with Pod on his brother’s small, forested island. And he’ll be able to wring just enough joy from these recollections to face the treeless isolation of incarceration without submitting to despair.
“Now that you’re broke again, you can’t go setting up a syrup operation in the dead of winter,” Harris said the day after Lomax, in exchange for Everett’s inheritance and the bogus journal, agreed to lay the matter of the child to rest, providing Everett kept Pod as his own in some secluded place and didn’t stir up trouble. “I’m not using my retreat quite yet,” Harris added, “so you’re welcome to hide out there until spring.”
“And if Lomax isn’t convinced by our little scam and does come sniffing around again,” the Irishman added, “then fat chance of him finding you there.”
The truth is that Everett is tired of running. And he knows Pod could use some time spent in one place, especially now that she’s not so little a baby anymore. When the Irishman delivers them to the island the next day, Everett is pleased to discover the cabin is nothing like Harris’s mansion. Though finely built, with neat, tight-fitting post-and-beam joinery, there is little ornament to it. Well concealed from the water, yet still boasting a view of the bay, Everett’s guess is that Harris uses it to hide away with the Irishman, which explains why they speak so freely with each other. But none of that is Everett’s business. He saw it in the War, men becoming sweethearts, and it never bothered him a whit.
Each Tuesday, the Irishman—who, before becoming his brother’s describer, was a tug pilot who hauled booms for Greenwood Timber—brings the week’s supplies in a nimble wood-hulled skiff. Everett places Pod in crude crib he’s built her so she doesn’t crawl to the woodstove and scald herself, then hikes to the small jetty to collect the supplies from inside the insulated box where Feeney leaves them. Fuel for the lanterns, tins of matches, coffee, cheese, apples, canned corn and peas, sacks of cabbage and potato, sides of ham, butter, maple syrup, flour, Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup for Pod’s teething, and a huge jug of goat’s milk. Everett has never seen such a bounty assembled in one place, and keeps a rough tally so he can reimburse his brother someday, after his time here is finished.
As winter rains wreath the island, wet plumes of fern and softly needled hemlock stroking the cabin’s walls, Everett and Pod sleep together in the same bed beneath the upper floor’s tall windows. Pod has grown burlier, and now kicks him like a mule in her sleep. Still, Everett wakes rested in a way previously unknown to him. Here on the island, there’s no chance of being beaten by railway detectives; of tramps rifling his things or stealing his boots; of Mounties finding and razing his shack; of artillery shells screaming down upon his bed or chlorine gas seeping under the door.
Each morning he wakes to Pod’s babbling and carries her downstairs to fix breakfast: wheat porridge splashed with goat’s milk or flapjacks drowned in a maple syrup so inferior to his own that it’s a different thing entirely. After strapping Pod into a chair with his belt, he sits with an enamelled coffee pot all to himself, watching her miss her mouth with her spoon, and often finds himself smiling for no reason at all.
By February, she’s pulling herself to standing at the coffee table. Everett sets anything valuable up high so she can’t topple it over, and crudely sews canvas patches on the knees of her creepers after her scooting around wears them through. She fears the roar of the gasoline washing machine, so he sets their clothes out in the rain to wash, and when he folds their clean laundry into the closet, the sight of her flannels and creepers stacked up all fresh and orderly fills him with an almost impossible serenity.
At supper one evening, they hear the breach of killer whales in the pass and hurriedly wash up before hiking to the shoreline. There they stand among the flesh-like madrones that lean over the sea. And when the black fins pass, twelve or so of them, their calves dawdling behind, it is close enough for Everett to smell the fermented pungency of their spume. He clutches Pod tight as she strains against him, eager to join the whales in the grey water.
Behind the cabin is a small shed, stocked with well-oiled tools and a stack of stickered fir planks that went unused during the construction. He goes about building a proper woodshed, setting its posts on flat stones he hauls from the beach. He works with Pod in her crib nearby, where she covers her ears at the harsh growl of the crosscut saw. After the day’s carpentry, he takes her for long walks in the misting rain before supper, and it’s then Everett discovers that while half the island is towering old-growth, the remaining half is newly burned, with shoots of bright green fireweed and thistle threading up between the charred stumps and limbs.
As spring approaches and the days lengthen, they pick over the island’s sandstone bays and watch the tide climb the rocks near the jetty. Blue herons step carefully in the shallows, their rapier beaks stabbing the water. From among the driftwood and afghans of seaweed, Everett chips off oysters for his supper. Pod jams their pearly shells in her mouth, rubbing them over her newest shard of tooth, another shell itself.
Often Everett is struck with the desire to communicate with his brother. Yet because he still cannot write with any fluency, he has the Irishman instruct him on the use of the shortwave radio that Harris installed in the cabin’s second bedroom so he could keep abreast with his affairs back in Vancouver. Each night at exactly nine, after Pod is asleep, Everett puts his lips to the set’s microphone, presses the black button, and begins to relate the details of his day: the grey ocean and the impossibly tall trees, the way Pod is afraid of her own reflection in the mirror, or the pungent breath of a killer whale. At first Harris makes no reply, and at times Everett just sits listening to the static hiss, imagining this is in fact his brother breathing.
Then, just as he’s describing at length the largest tree he’d found on the island so far, a mammoth Douglas fir so tall and thick it denies comprehension, Harris interrupts him to recite a poem. During the stiff but amiable conversation that follows, Pod wakes to the voice and crawls over to the fizzing radio, her eyes split quizzically wide at the sudden appearance of this stranger in the room. When the brothers sign off, she crawls around to the other side of the radio’s walnut enclosure to search out the source of the voice. She shrieks with delight when no one is there.
THE NEW SUN WAH
LOMAX SPENDS WEEKS in his curtained bunk, one of many that line the walls of the large room, a colossal roaring stove at its centre.
Hourly, a tall boy with thick glasses presents Lomax with a bamboo pipe, and after he smokes, the boy rubs his back muscles with smelly liniments, while Lomax curls into himself like a baby. When the b
oy brings meals Lomax waves them away. He takes only nips of liqueur, lychee nuts, ginger candies, and fragrant teas steeped with opium seedpods. For entertainment, he watches ghosts flit on the walls, and has become convinced that all he requires in this world can be provided by this miraculous boy with thick glasses. He knows exactly how Lomax wants his pipe layout arranged. Knows never to put milk in Lomax’s tea—which he hasn’t been able to stomach since his days of collecting on milk accounts. And most importantly: he knows just how tightly to pack the next bowl and exactly when to light the next match. He’s a priest. A brother. A father. And if there’s any relief to be found after Lomax’s long life of suffering and drudgery, it’s to be found here, in this boy’s ministrations.
When Lomax develops a nagging cough that worsens to the point of retching, the boy presents him with a gift: “Upon the house.” An eyedropper attached to a hypodermic needle with blue sealing wax. Lomax watches the boy cook the laudanum powder in a tin spoon over a coal oil lamp, caressing it with flame. When the boy sets the spike, Lomax watches his own blood bloom in the glass chamber like an orchid. The boy’s first squeeze of the dropper sends him swimming out from the filthy, tepid bath of normal experience and into the clean, invigorating ocean of infinity. And in this singular and breathtaking moment, Harvey Lomax knows he will never smoke opium again in his life.
The boy keeps Lomax’s wad of money in the house safe, and his laudanum locked in a tin box next to his bunk, away from the conniving of the withered wraiths that recline in the room’s other bunks. The boy changes Lomax’s sheets and holds the bedpan beneath him to save him the tedious trip to the lavatory. The boy was even kind enough to call Lomax’s previous hotel to ask them to pack up his effects, which included the slipcase and the journal. They’ll hold them until he needs them, which will be any day now, Lomax assures himself. Though his rail ticket to Saint John is long expired, he still has plenty of money and will buy another as soon as he’s restored. Never once has he wavered in his ultimate intention to return home. Often he imagines how his seven children will scramble and clamour for his attentions when he does. Perhaps his absence will make them all the more appreciative of his affections in the long term. While it’s painful to admit, his own father’s disappearance had taught him that he must make his own way in the world, rather than wait around for a path to be cut for him.
To spite his father, Lomax had lived his entire life putting the needs of others before his own. He’d supported his mother with milk collection, and then Lavern and his children with debt collection, and he realizes now that he’s held himself to an impossible standard. And these few lazy weeks of respite at the New Sun Wah are the least he deserves after a lifetime of stalwart dependability.
Often he wonders: At which point did my own father decide that he’d never go home? Lomax had hated him for so long that the hate had hardened, fossilized, and become the very structure of his self, like the steel that girders a tall building. But during his long search for the journal and the child, Lomax has gained a fuller understanding of his father’s decision to abandon his family. Maybe it’s a child’s notion that such decisions are consciously made at all, when in truth, we live at the mercy of the world. Financial crashes and train crashes. Earthquakes. Wildfires. Hurricanes and cyclones. Diseases and droughts. Gears turn. Levers lift. A boy squeezes the bulb of an eyedropper and releases a rubber strap with a whoosh, and everything changes forever.
TRAPS
AS CONTENT AS Everett is on Greenwood Island, not a day passes without a haunting from Temple. The topmost button of her calico dress that she keeps undone. The languid yet purposeful saunter that carries her about her farm. The efficiency with which she can dig a hole and drop in a tree. The way she drinks coffee, like it isn’t only saving her life but also her mortal soul. The way she hooked her hair around her ears when they made love, as if to better hear him pant. And it seems the gravest injustice that there could be so many beds in the world, yet still he and Temple can’t manage to share any one of them. Often he finds himself describing her to Pod as though they’d never met, as though Temple herself hadn’t held Pod during his lessons in her library while Everett bumbled his way through the Odyssey.
With spring around the corner, Everett has decided that he’s finished with sugaring and would prefer to live on the island indefinitely. During their regular radio conversation the previous evening, he put the idea to Harris, who agreed to give him a plot of land adjacent to the existing cabin. This summer, Everett intends to build his own cabin, similarly crafted, and when it’s done he’ll ask the Irishman to write a letter to Temple for him, inviting her to join him here. When she refuses, which of course she will, he and Pod will travel back to her farm, and when Temple refuses him still, Everett will reclaim the journal from her library and return here.
To earn money, Everett will do carpentry work with the tools he’s found, constructing simple furniture to sell in Vancouver. By the time Pod reaches school age, he’ll have the money to bring in tutors to educate her. Greenwood Island will be a fine place to raise her, and Harris and the Irishman will provide her with some companionship outside of his own. Besides, the burden of Pod’s care will only lighten as she develops. In fact, just that afternoon she stood under her own power without clutching at a chair for balance, and even took a few bowlegged staggers, her thighs so wide-set her rear end nearly dipped to the floor.
To celebrate her triumph he cooks flapjacks for supper, though the merriment of the occasion is spoiled when he goes to the woodshed to fetch some firewood and discovers the steaming carcass of a three-point buck: its windpipe torn out, tongue eaten, bowels pierced and stinking, blood only barely crusting the rims of its wounds. Everett burns the carcass, saving only the tenderloin, which he fries the next day with wild onions and nettle for Pod’s supper. With great gusto she eats the meat that he chews up for her, pink juice flowing in broad rivulets down her chin.
Aware that no eagle or bear is capable of such a surgical kill, Everett tells his brother about the incident that evening. Harris says it’s rumoured that cougars catch rides on stray log booms and strand themselves on islands like these, where they promptly eradicate the deer population, effectively starving themselves to death. Everett aims to acquire some goats this spring, to provide milk for Pod and keep her company as she grows, but a cougar would take them one by one. And with such a terror stalking about, he can’t leave Pod alone in the yard for a second—or even in the house with a window open, for that matter.
It’s then he remembers noticing a battery of leg traps in the woodshop’s rafters. They’re massive, built for grizzlies most likely, with snapping jaws wide enough for a grown man’s boot. He takes them down and sets them in a perimeter around the cabin, and on the second night he catches a mink, which the overpowered trap cleaves neatly in half. Though he’s loath to maim or kill a creature of a cougar’s magnificence, it’s only once the traps are set, and the Browning rifle he’d requested from the Irishman is hung high on brackets next to his bed where Pod can’t reach it, that he’s again able to rest easy.
SHORTWAVE
“WHY DIDN’T YOU give yourself more initials over the years?” his brother’s voice says, distant and tinny with radio crackle. “You fat cats love yourself some initials. How about ‘H.P. Greenwood’? Or ‘H.T. Greenwood’? That last one sounds extra-impressive.”
Harris laughs. “That may have helped, brother. A man in my position needs all the gravity he can get. Though I suspect it’s too late for more initials now.”
“Then maybe I’ll bequeath some to this little girl I’ve got here. To help her along a little. She deserves some respect after all this.”
“Have you decided on a proper name for her yet? You can’t go on calling her Pod forever.”
“I have one in mind, but I’m not quite settled on it. You’ll be the first to know when I am.”
Since they’ve begun conversing each evening, Harris has incorporated the ritual into his daily ro
utine. His first shipment of sleepers has finally reached Japan, and now that he’s received payment, Greenwood Timber is once again in the black. And after a long day at his desk, restoring his credit with the London firm, or ensuring that his cargo arrives on schedule, he’s grown to appreciate his brother’s voice nearly as much as Feeney’s.
It was arduous at first. But the words came eventually, each brother taking his turn like children with a new toy. Often Harris marvels at the uncanny familiarity of Everett’s voice—at times it’s as though it originates from inside his own mind rather than from the radio’s speaker. Mostly, they stick to pedestrian subjects and occasional reminiscences about their woodlot and its notable trees, their greatest fights and greatest meals.
“Remember how we used to climb those elm trees at the centre of town and swear our heads off?” Everett says.
“Or when you shot that terrier by accident with one of your arrows,” Harris adds. “So we skinned it to hide the evidence? But they caught us anyway?”
When talk inevitably turns to the beguiling Mrs. Craig and what her grand house looked like the night it burned, the brothers grow sombre, and there are long, empty gaps of static.
“Just promise you’ll take care of Pod if something happens to me,” Everett says to conclude one of those silences, on the last night the brothers will speak. “I don’t want her left all alone in the woods somewhere like we were.”
Harris has come to realize that the reason his brother didn’t join him after the War wasn’t because he preferred living without an invalid to attend to; it was because of his own suffering. Feeney has told Harris about “war shock,” the wound of the mind that soldiers can receive in battle, and Harris pities Everett for what his had cost him.
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