Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  And sure enough, as the night’s hours grind past, he begins to sweat profusely and a thick film coats his eyeballs. Soon he feels as though an electrified knife has been plunged into the centre of his back, and spectral voices begin calling out softly from the shadows.

  “What’s that?” one of the local boys posted nearby asks him.

  “What was what?” Lomax says.

  “You were saying something,” the boy replies.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were,” the boy says. “You were talking about a woman and her baby.”

  “Shut up,” Lomax says and tugs his hat down over his sopping brow. Hungering for peace from the voices and respite from his burgeoning agony, Lomax dips a pinky into the laudanum and snorts just a dash of the ochre-coloured powder. A silver shiver pours through his sinuses and pools in his brainstem, and his insides become gentle with clarity and comfort. The stars, which before seemed faint and inconsequential, just barely visible through the towering canopy, now blaze like embers. A while later he vomits discreetly into a shrub, though the act is cleansing, beautiful.

  Somewhere around four in the morning, one of the local boys nudges Lomax and asks him to mind his post while he urinates. Lomax nods, then watches the boy buttonhook behind the woodshed. Suddenly, a loud metallic crack sounds from that direction and the boy screams out as though shot. At the commotion, the young Mountie ten feet away from Lomax starts to breathe heavily and swing his rifle around in a panic, his eyes as wild as a storm. When the injured boy begins to plead for his life in an anguished cry, Lomax watches the Mountie raise his rifle, which is nearly too heavy for him to lift. Then he aims the dark barrel in the general direction of the cabin, shuts his eyes, and fires.

  BULLETS

  THEY SEEM TO erupt from within every object in the room. They pop and ping through the windows and put to bits the porcelain jug of goat’s milk that Everett keeps on the night table for Willow. They claw through the room’s cedar-panelled walls and blow out the wall-mounted kerosene lamp. They chew up Willow’s crib and dismember the sawdust-stuffed rabbit that the Irishman had brought for her, sending the shreds of its corpse flying like confetti.

  “I’ve got a child in here!” Everett hollers into the hail of plaster chunks and wood splinters, scooping Willow from the bed and crashing to the floor, encasing her tiny body with his own. Still the room is alight with muzzle flashes, and the roar of gunfire and shattered crockery and the whipping stutter of ballistic perforation swallows his words.

  A man outside hollers for them to quit shooting.

  But nothing quits.

  The sound is a dozen thunderstorms happening in unison. Feathers escape pillows, pictures fly from nails, and suddenly he’s back in the War, pinned under the deafening barrage of German artillery. A bullet comes through the panelling behind him with a kind of whistle-pop sound, and instantly he wonders if he’s torn his shirt because his back feels slightly cool. But the coolness intensifies, and soon turns searing hot. He coughs, two hacks as dry as paper, then one sopping wet, and in an effort to unhitch his lung he bangs at his breast with his fist like an ape. After he recaptures some of his breath, he drags Willow—who is mute with terror and quivers against him—toward the bedroom door. As he reaches for the knob, he realizes that men who fire so freely on a cabin with a baby inside surely intend to never let them leave it.

  HER VOICE

  AFTER THE YOUNG Mountie unleashes his first shot, the others follow suit, all tumbling into a collective trigger-pulling mania. They evacuate the cartridges of their large-bore repeating rifles in the general direction of the timber-frame cabin, some mute with eyes clenched, others whooping like schoolboys in June—all despite Lomax’s shouts for them to stop. But they cannot hear him, and he watches the structure splinter and shatter from the barrage. In the chaos, a vision descends upon him: bullets hitting his own house back in Saint John with his seven children inside, cowering beneath their beds, trembling in their nightclothes, calling out for their father.

  The shots last for what seems an eternity, and the guns’ reports echo in Lomax’s eardrums long after the ammunition is spent and the muzzle flashes cease and the blackness rushes back in. Amid the stench of cordite, blue smoke hangs low at their knees, and hot brass casings pepper the earth. A few blades of window glass dangle and release to smash inside their frames.

  The gasping boys return to themselves and a strained silence descends. An irate McSorley, who’d been screaming the whole time for them to quit firing, reassumes control, saving his most berating words concerning their lack of discipline and general stupidity for later. He first orders them to search behind the woodshed where the boy had gone to relieve himself. They find him, unconscious from shock, pants caught around his ankles, his shin bent grotesquely in the grip of a jagged-jawed animal trap, his face as white as the dagger of bone that juts from his leg.

  While the Mounties work to free him, Lomax slips unnoticed to the cabin’s bullet-pocked front door and nudges it open. The last thing he needs is McSorley reading the authentic journal before he can get his hands on it. Inside, he treats himself to a generous snuff of laudanum to steady his nerve, while pleading to God that if anyone upstairs is hurt, let it not be the child. Let it be Everett Greenwood, a man who didn’t matter to anyone—not even to his own brother—before he stumbled upon that bundle of cloth hanging in those woods.

  On the wall at the bottom of the stairs is a splash of fresh blood. Lomax wonders if this is Euphemia’s blood. Except Euphemia isn’t here, he reminds himself. Though with so much laudanum burbling in his head, who can say for certain that she’s not? As he begins to climb the stairs to the second floor, he feels as though his weight has been doubled, like he’s carrying an identical copy of his own body draped unconscious across his shoulders. Suddenly, he’s back in the forest where he found Euphemia against that maple tree, and in the bark of the surrounding trees are captured thousands of contorting faces. People known to him and not. The faces of his father and his mother. The faces of his own children and the destitute families on his milk collection route. Those he’s chased down and those he’s beaten. The infirm. The broken. The dead. All of them tortured with anguish.

  Did you bring me my coat and shoes? a woman’s despairing voice asks.

  “Tomorrow,” Lomax answers softly, with no way of knowing for sure if he’s speaking aloud. “I’ll bring them tomorrow.”

  I can’t go through with this.

  “With what?”

  This.

  “Euphemia, this isn’t the sort of thing you can back out of,” Lomax says, reaching the top of the stairs to find a bedroom door shut before him.

  But I can’t let her go, she pleads. Isn’t that enough?

  “Don’t be foolish,” Lomax says, setting his shoulder and preparing to burst through the door. “There’s nothing you can’t let go.”

  THE TIME MACHINE

  DURING THE WAR, Everett had witnessed soldiers get shot and then immediately start to run, as fast as their legs could carry them, as though trying to beat death in a foot race. Others he saw quietly sit down, as though preparing for tea. Everett Greenwood’s response, however, is somewhere in between.

  When the shooting stops, he opens the bedroom door and slithers down the stairs with Willow clutched to his chest until he reaches the landing, where he rises and spurts a mouthful of blood on the wall. He takes a deep breath, then crashes through the crookedly constructed rear door, his arms sheltering the child as best he can, braced to charge or punch or die in the crack of the rifles that he knows await him.

  But not a soul is there to greet them.

  That is, of course, if you discount the trees.

  With the baby pinned against the half of his shirt that isn’t pasted to his side with blood, he blunders into the surrounding forest. He staggers west, along the seam where the burned section of the forest meets the old-growth, trying to minimize his footprints by stepping root to root and, where th
ere are no roots, keeping to areas springy with moss.

  Now that the shooting has stopped, Willow’s senses are returning and she’s beginning to whimper. So from the pocket of his mackinaw, he pulls the bottle of goat’s milk, into which he’d mixed some Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. She drains it greedily, without drawing a breath. When the drug takes effect, Willow snores rudely at his chest.

  While the sky is moonlit, the moon itself is hidden somewhere in the canopy, and his blood glistens black as oil in the stark silver light. When Everett draws a breath only half of his chest expands, which pulls his gait to the right, and he hopes he isn’t walking in circles. The bullet entered his back, slipping between the ribs on his left side, but it also came through the cabin’s cedar siding, so it lacked the power to exit him and now rattles around in his lung like a pick lost in the body of a guitar. While the wound won’t kill him soon, it’s a bleeder, and he feels several tributaries of warmth slip down his legs and pool in his boots. With each step comes an accompanying squelch.

  He passes an old logging camp and considers hiding in the rotten bunkhouse to rest, or perhaps die. But it could be hours before the Mounties find him, and though Everett is not cold, he can see the vapour of Willow’s breath and knows she wouldn’t last long on her own after he’d gone. He limps on, avoiding the predictability of deer paths, pushing through brush that rakes his eyes and tears at his clothes. He stops only to catch his ragged breath and to dump the blood from his boots. His blood smells earthy, metallic, like the stones he and Harris had used to sharpen axes when they were boys. Still, his sole thought is that he must keep walking—he’s already carried her so far; what’s a little farther?

  As his shock subsides, it’s as if doors open into whole rooms of pain, and the only way he can continue to move forward is with his eyelids half shut, peering through his eyelashes as though through a dream. Soon the baby becomes like a rock and his legs are planks that his hips can scarcely lift.

  His thoughts eddy and stray. Shapes dart at the fringes of his vision. For a good while he’s in Belgium, dragging a blood-soaked stretcher that contains the tatters of some doomed soul through the mud. Then he’s sprinting for a train with Blank, being chased by some thick-necked bulls outside of Oakland. Then he’s a child again, mute with fright, running with his brother at his side, their pockets jammed with raided carrots and onions, while the people of the township pelt them with small stones from their porches.

  It isn’t long before Everett smells the brine of the ocean and the kelpy beach where he and Willow have passed so many lazy afternoons, and the scent revives him. He limps farther and the brush opens to reveal the sucking rocks and sloping sandstone of the shore, and he rests for a moment near the jetty. Sitting on a fallen log and examining Willow’s sleeping face, it dawns on him that since that first night he heard her cry, she has remade him into a new kind of creature entirely. Not a good man. Nor one worthy of any respect or adulation. But one who values the life of another over his own. And this transformation has closed a wound that had long festered and seeped inside him.

  But there’s still one last transformation left for him to make.

  After he’s sure the jetty hasn’t been discovered by the Mounties, he limps over to the big cedar near the water and spots the insulated box hanging from it. The Irishman leaves their weekly supplies in this box—though he isn’t due to return with the skiff until the morning, if he’s returning at all. Because no doubt it was Harris who gave up their location here on the island, after Lomax threatened to expose his relationship with the Irishman, leaving him with no choice. But despite his betrayal, Everett still believes in his brother, and believes he’ll do the right thing in the end.

  He’d planned on someday bringing Willow to visit his old sugarbush on R.J. Holt’s land outside of Saint John, the place where this all began. He’d planned on showing her the tree he’d found her hanging from. I bet I can still find it, he whispers to her now, leaning close to her ear. I bet the nail is still there. While in truth, he knows there will be no such opportunity, and that he and Willow likely won’t meet again. The thought ruins something inside him that he knows will never be fixed.

  He limps over to the supply box and, as a hint of dawn fringes the horizon with pink, removes his woollen mackinaw, twisting as much blood from it as he can before using it to bundle Willow up. His drifting, blood-starved mind returns to Temple’s library, its rough shelves of encyclopedias and curious volumes originating from all corners of the world. During his days with Temple on her farm, she described to him a book called The Time Machine. The story centred on a mechanical box that could carry a person away from their own time and off into another one, and it put Everett in mind of the places he’s known that a person can enter and then emerge from into a different time altogether. A boxcar is one of them. So is a forest. So is a single tree. So is a library. So is a battlefield. And so is—though Everett will only realize this later, after occupying one for so long—a prison cell. And so is this supply box, he says, with his throat clenching like a fist. He brushes his lips against Willow’s sweet head and lifts the latch.

  TO THE TREE

  FOLLOWING THE FUGITIVE Everett Greenwood’s successful capture and arrest on Greenwood Island, Harvey Lomax returns to the New Sun Wah Hotel, which, after its proprietors submitted a generous political donation to city officials, has re-opened its doors. While the boy with the thick glasses is gone—some say he was deported, others say he was killed in a robbery—another has taken his place, one just as considerate and professional, a boy whom Lomax comes to adore and admire just as much as his predecessor.

  In the end, it isn’t the pull of the drug itself that sends Lomax crawling back into the opium dens, where he will abandon all hope of returning to his family and his brick bungalow in West Saint John. Instead it’s the inhumanity of what Everett Greenwood had done to the child, worse than any depravity Lomax had witnessed in all his decades of debt collection.

  “She wouldn’t stop crying, so I crushed her neck and buried her and the journal in the ground where you’ll never find them,” Everett told Lomax with unthinkable coldness after the Mounties spotted him early the next morning, out of his mind and stumbling through the woods bathed in blood with a bullet-punctured lung. It was an act that Lomax could not wholly absorb until weeks later, not until McSorley had gone over the cabin as well as every inch of Greenwood Island’s towering forests with a team of bloodhounds and found nothing: no child’s remains, no journal.

  Not that Lomax had put much faith in the innate goodness of his fellow human beings previously, but Everett’s grim disposal of the child convinces him that man is a vile, unknowable creature. A creature geared for nothing other than evil and mindless waste. And as far as Lomax is concerned, the only cure for this disease called humanity is best administered intravenously.

  Here, in the womb of the New Sun Wah, and later, after it’s shut down for good, in various dens just like it—a time interspersed by jail sentences after forays into petty theft when his money runs dry—the years will heap themselves upon him. He will learn that in the aftermath of the child’s death, R.J. Holt basked in the publicity that the tragedy afforded him, offering countless interviews in his own newspapers in which he fashioned himself as the Canadian Charles Lindbergh, which translated into a boon for his businesses. Lomax will also gather, from a fellow vagrant newly arrived from Saint John, that after Lomax had been absent for two years, Lavern consulted their parish priest, annulled their union, and has since remarried. Eventually, his children will forget their father entirely—all except his eldest, Harvey Jr., who will send countless letters to Vancouver homeless shelters, retaining a steadfast belief that some sinister bit of foul play has robbed him of his good and noble patriarch.

  But through all his days of poverty and squalor, Lomax will keep the journal’s slipcase in his possession until the day he dies—which will come two decades later when, alone in a skid row hotel, an unexpectedly potent
shot of heroin will still his heart. The slipcase will be the only artifact from his previous life that he has managed to hold on to. And while the journal that fits inside it will have long been buried, the deeds of Harvey Lomax will not. Despite laudanum’s—and then heroin’s—gradual erasure of his mind and body, over the years certain truths will visit him, the parts of the story he’d for so long managed to omit. And often, in his drug-clouded state, he will envision a gathering of his seven children—the children he abandoned, just as his father had abandoned him. Clothed in tatters, their teeth flecked with decay, the unruly crowd will assemble beside his mat, or his jail cot, or the patch of earth upon which he’s run aground for the night. They’ll be shoeless, crying, hungry. And he will count them.

  And then he will count them again.

  Not seven.

  Eight.

  Then he’ll search out the youngest among them, with emerald eyes like Euphemia’s. A girl. The same girl who Everett Greenwood buried somewhere on the island. The same girl who Euphemia hung from a nail she’d found driven into a tree after she could no longer carry her. And again and again, Lomax will return to the night he visited Euphemia just before she fled the Holt estate, when she told him that she’d changed her mind and had decided to keep the baby instead of giving it to Mr. Holt, and how she intended to tell Holt that it was Lomax’s child—even though they’d been together just once, during one of his visits to her apartment. And since Lomax could risk neither tearing apart his own family nor falling out of Mr. Holt’s favour, he loomed over her and threatened to take the child away and to never let her lay eyes on it again. The abandoned look she gave him in return is one that will haunt him forever.