It was a bluff. Made to protect his job and his home and his family—but also to protect Euphemia. To keep her from squandering her life like he and Lavern had so early in their lives. Euphemia was smart, ambitious; he imagined she’d use Mr. Holt’s money to move to New York like she’d planned and leave her old life behind. He never thought his actions would drive her out into the woods that night with no coat or shoes, or that her child would then be snatched up by a demon in the form of a man.
And always, to conclude these visions, Lomax will beg forgiveness—for his infidelity, for his abandonment of his wife and children, for the undeserved fates that befell both Euphemia and her child. But forgiveness will be refused him. And his torments will be without end.
Preachers and politicians often contend that hardship knits us together. That some great calamity like the Crash brings out the best and most noble in us. Yet in his long, tortured, and grasping life, Harvey Bennett Lomax will have witnessed only the opposite. In his experience, the harder things get, the worse we treat one another. And the worst things we’ll ever do, we save for our families.
BIRDS
IN THE AFTERMATH of the cyclone, Temple lives for months in the basement of the Knox Presbyterian Church in Estevan. And after hundreds of shoeboxes filled with grubby bills and coins and jewellery and silver tableware have been delivered to its doorstep, brought from far and wide by the lowest people, Temple will have saved enough to rebuild her farm.
In the summer of 1935, she will return to her land for the first time since the cyclone to clear it of debris. Amid the ruins of her former life, buried under rubble and flung out into her wheat fields for miles around, she will discover thousands of flapped-open books, marooned and rotting in the dust. For years to come, farmers in the area will be pulling her books from their trees and their haystacks, from the eaves of their barns and the bottoms of their wells, forever digging them out from between the rows of their fields.
Throughout the following year, Temple will work with a crew of men and women who once stayed at her farm when they were down on their luck, and with their help she’ll frame a new house and barn, raising the tall timber bones with a team of borrowed horses. The crew will accept no pay for their labours, only meals, which Temple and Gertie will set out under the covered porch that they’ll rebuild first, out near the willow, which has already filled in the hole that the cyclone left in its canopy.
Long after the work is done and her farm is rebuilt, she’ll chance to run into Detective McSorley at the railway station in Estevan. It will be their first meeting since the cyclone, and he’ll take his hat in his hands and inform her that he’s truly sorry for all her trouble and all that she’s lost. The cyclone was most particularly cruel to Temple’s property, and the more judgmental citizens of Estevan will speak of this wanton destruction as a kind of proper comeuppance, given the sinful, unwholesome types she harboured. Thankfully, McSorley will spare her any such insinuations.
Just as they’re about to part ways, he’ll inquire: “I trust that baby of your sister’s recovered all right from her illness?”
Temple will search the detective’s face for any lingering traces of suspicion, but will find none. “She came through just fine,” she’ll reply, stifling a hot rush of sadness, a feeling that can sneak up on her at any moment of the day, as quick as a duster. “The child is living in the east now with my sister, who was able to secure a good job. Thanks for asking. So long, Detective.”
“Oh, I’m not a detective anymore, Miss Temple,” he’ll declare proudly, stretching his suspenders with his thumbs. “After that business out West, I’ve been promoted to a prominent position in the CN Railway Company.”
She’ll offer her best congratulations, and they’ll part ways with no need for further explanation of what that “business out West” was. By this point, everyone in Estevan will have been held rapt by the series of splashy headlines concerning the baby stolen from the nursery of wealthy New Brunswick industrialist R.J. Holt. They’ll have read in gory detail about how the kidnapper—a tramp who demanded a ransom so outrageous that even a millionaire couldn’t pay it—had gone berserk and done away with the child on a remote island somewhere on the coast of British Columbia; a crime he confessed to, but only after firing on brave Detective Art McSorley and his intrepid Mounties.
It’s the kind of knowledge that can split a person’s mind right in half if they even allow it in the door. What about that story Everett had told her, about finding the child hanging there in the woods? Could he have possibly invented it? A man so gentle, committing an act so gruesome—how could that be? But it’s the indisputable fact of Everett’s confession, which Temple will confirm on numerous occasions in numerous different newspapers, that will extinguish her doubts and seal off any compassion that might have remained for him. She’d thought that he couldn’t possibly be the worst person to ever seek refuge on her farm, and only now will she admit that she was wrong.
Over the years, the cyclone that destroyed her farm will often return to her in her daydreams. First she’ll see the gangrenous light fall across her property, then she’ll watch the coal-black funnel cut across her farm, swallowing her library and sucking its contents into the air. At times she’ll imagine that the cyclone had assembled an entirely new book up there in the sky, if only for a fleeting instant—pages of Dickens, Austen, Dante, Eliot, Tolstoy all mingling freely, forming the greatest book the world has ever known.
Whenever she retells the story of the cyclone, as she does at countless livestock auctions and over meals eaten with itinerant men at her newly reconstructed table on the porch, she will puzzle over how to properly describe the sound it made as it ate through her library. She’ll grapple with how one could possibly capture precisely the sound of ten thousand books drawn up into the air and scattered for hundreds of miles. And it won’t be until years later—long after the Depression ends and poor people stop riding the rails and Gertie dies of the flu on her ninetieth birthday. And long after the smooth hillocks of Everett’s shoulders and his thick, dark hair and his odd, earnest demeanour fade from Temple’s memory. And long after she’s able to again venture into that section of her field where they planted that windbreak of maples together, trees that have only thrived ever since. And long after the void he left in her life entirely heals over—only then will she arrive at a suitable answer: they sounded like birds.
BLACK CARS
SHE’S SUPPOSED TO be sleeping while her baby is off with the sitter for a few hours before the memorial. But instead Willow perches at the window of her childhood bedroom, watching black cars draw to a stop in the mansion’s curved driveway. Those who emerge are mostly timber men, straight from the toxin-spewing mills and the cancerous clear-cuts of North America, ranging from the greatest tycoons and mill managers to the lowliest swampers, choppers, tallymen, high-riggers, and chokers. Even the poor souls whose bodies Greenwood Timber’s saws and machines have mangled over the years have come—with their crutches, plastic limbs, and wheeled oxygen tanks—to pay their respects. From a pewter-coloured Bentley steps John P. Weyerhaeuser to meet the cool December drizzle, a man Willow recognizes, from the radical environmentalist pamphlets she’s distributed, as the son of deceased lumber king Frederick Weyerhaeuser. Earlier she spotted the pug-faced H.R. MacMillan of MacMillan Bloedel, her father’s fiercest rival, the very man whose million-dollar feller bunchers Willow ruined just nine months ago with three bags of sugar. A man who Harris would never have allowed in his neighbourhood, let alone in his mansion. Whether they’ve come to honour her father, gawk at his estate, secretly celebrate his passing, commemorate the fortunes he made them or the pittances he paid them, or simply to salute the great fugue of destructive insanity that was Harris Greenwood’s seventy-five-year existence, Willow can’t guess.
The funeral hasn’t even begun and already she’s exhausted to a depth that only a newborn can plunge you. She lies down and shuts her eyes, but the sleep she so desperately needs still
won’t come. Much to her surprise, the flutter of the future that she’d first detected while fetching her uncle Everett from prison persisted, and to terminate such a miracle at her age seemed to her the very definition of bad karma, so she kept it. Her son arrived last month, though it already seems an eternity ago. She left word for Sage, his likely father, with the Earth Now! Collective, but doesn’t expect to hear from him anytime soon. Willow still hasn’t named her child. If anyone asks, she says it’s because she can’t make up her mind. The truth is that she can think of no word that’s suitable as a name for her Earth child, her improbable gift—no sound utterable by the human mouth that can possibly contain his glittery eyes, his strange, feline yowl, and his disproportionately fat legs that make him look like he’s wearing tiny pants made of blubber.
She spent the entirety of her pregnancy hiding out from the Mounties on Greenwood Island, though she now realizes that she was being paranoid about the black sedan following her. The cops have better things to do than chase down small-time eco-vandals like her, and she’s since learned that three feller bunchers are nothing to a company like MacMillan Bloedel. Plus, there are thousands of Westfalias in Canada’s hippie capital of Vancouver, many of them driven by women who look identical to her.
When the birth was imminent, she brought a midwife over to help out, and everything went smoothly. In those first euphoric days, she was shocked by her son’s greed for her, the clutching and suckling and irrational, blue-faced screaming. Nobody told her how immediate and intense her longing to escape him would be, or how taxing an endeavour motherhood truly is. Given her history of miscarriages, she kept the pregnancy secret from her father, and was preparing to surprise him by showing up at the Shaughnessy mansion with his grandson as soon as her sleep routine had re-established itself. Then, three days ago, she received a distress signal over the cabin’s shortwave from Terrance Milner, her father’s accountant and house manager, requesting she come see him at once. When she arrived, Milner informed her in the mansion’s entranceway that her father had recently travelled to Northern California for his yearly visit to the redwoods to bird-watch (or, in his case, bird-listen). Following his usual hike through the trees, he had apparently instructed his guide to leave him, claiming that another guide was scheduled to pick him up. But no one was coming. After that, it seems her father wandered off, deeper and deeper into the sequoias. He was discovered a week later by some hikers in a remote section of the park. The autopsy found a large and inoperable cancerous mass in his brain, about which he had, with characteristic stoicism, said nothing. When Milner finished speaking, Willow sat down next to a rack of her father’s rubber overshoes, mired in a kind of floating numbness that hasn’t left her since, and wept softly with her oblivious child sleeping in her arms, trying not to wake him.
Milner made funeral arrangements and hired the babysitters, who came and whisked her son from her side for the first time in his life. And even the Marxist in Willow must admit there are certain undeniable advantages to wealth, because what a relief it was to get some time to herself.
Now she burns a bowl of indica in her one-hitter, blowing the smoke from the tiffany window that overlooks the drive. On the few occasions she returned to this house after Our Plundered Planet kicked off her environmental awakening, she saw it for what it truly was: a vile shrine to the gruesome violence that her bloodline had inflicted upon the planet, which included slaughtering thousands of ancient and defenseless creatures for no purpose other than gaudy decoration. Lying here now in her bedroom, where the branches of the pin oak still rub against the slate roof, the floor still creaks in front of the closet, and the pen-smeared desk where she wrote her uncle countless letters still sits beside the door, Willow feels as though she’s been thrust back in time.
With the reception set to begin at noon, she drags herself to the dusty mirror to appraise her outfit, which even she realizes can only be described as inappropriate: a batik-printed skirt and a faded blouse dotted with tree sap, long baked into the fabric by its monthly tumble in a laundromat dryer. “Clothes don’t signify grief,” she tells herself. “Grief does.” And she is grieving, isn’t she? Of course she is. Yet Harris had been such a puzzle of a father, forever occupied, forever out of reach, forever unknown. When she was a girl, this house was a place of empty silences and secrets, with its pianos that nobody played and books that nobody read. With its bronze busts and oil portraits of English frigates and Italian scenery. With its cages of exotic birds, its black mahogany cabinetry buffed to a high gloss, and its antique logging equipment hung everywhere like the weaponry of some noble war. And her father, with his routines and schedules: the same meals eaten at the same times each day, the same records of poetry on the same turntable in his study during the evenings. And the way he would scold her for even the smallest disturbance of these routines: her tendency to walk thumpingly on her heels, or her stomach’s habit of gurgling at the dining table.
She did her best to liven things up, though. She remembers roller-skating down the lanes of the mansion’s private bowling alley until Harris burst in to yell at her for marring the woodwork (marks which, she never failed to point out, he couldn’t even see). And once playing a trick on the house staff by hanging the freshly polished silver like ornaments from the garden’s perfectly manicured trees. Then there was the sign she pasted to the door of her bedroom that read KEEP OUT, ENCHANTED FOREST INSIDE, and the hundred branches she nailed directly to her walls to complete the effect, and the hundred holes left in the plaster after Harris had ordered the gardener to rip them all down.
Even if her clothes are passable, at a minimum her bodily grime needs to go, so she scrubs her armpits and neck at the washbasin, staining forever a white washcloth that she guiltily flings directly into the trash. She brushes, centre-parts, and braids her hair, then glides down the grand mahogany staircase whose steps she counted with her skips so many times as a girl, her hand skating down its spiralling redwood banister hewn from a single tree.
Downstairs, guests clot together in the great room, a cavern of thirty-foot-high oak ceilings, where many round tables are set out and draped with fine white tablecloths. Harris never wanted a formal funeral, but he hadn’t explicitly outlawed one, either. So with Willow’s approval, Milner arranged the catering and hired the string quartet—though Harris loathed music, and always maintained that it is nothing more than a perversion of the singular perfection of the human voice.
Huddled on silver platters are steamed lobsters flown three thousand miles from New Brunswick and piles of roasted meats heaped high, ninety per cent of which will surely go to waste. A six-foot Douglas fir, sculpted entirely of butter, stands near the bay window, while pomaded bartenders wait behind crystal decanters of fine Canadian whiskies and cases of sake ordered for the occasion. Many out-of-town guests are rooming here at the estate, and she’s heard that an entire floor of the Hotel Vancouver was required to accommodate the overflow. Counting journalists and gawkers, it’s nearly four hundred people in total, and while it cheers her to see the old mansion teem with life like it never did in her childhood, she’s pierced with the urge to throw them all out on their ears.
A tuxedoed server presses a glass into her hand and it shames her how easily she slips into the role of the tycoon’s daughter. But after so many grimy months spent in her father’s rustic cabin on Greenwood Island, washing the tar-like meconium from her son’s diapers at the hand-pumped well, what a relief it is to have people present her with food and wash her clothes and turn down her bed and soothe her child.
She stands near the fieldstone hearth, smoking a menthol and nipping her sake—the only alcohol her father could ever stomach—hoping to pass unnoticed. She scans the room for her uncle Everett, who Milner had tried to invite through his parole officer, though he had yet to reply. Despite the fact that Willow has heard nothing from her uncle since she dropped him off at the Vancouver airport nine months ago, she’s reread some of the letters they’d exchanged, and has c
ome to reconsider her harsh judgment of him. Surely it was disorienting to emerge like that into her custody after so long an incarceration, to pass between entire decades as though they were adjacent rooms. It was a troubled time for her, too: haywire estrogen levels and too much weed and too many pills—factors that surely contributed to her paranoid imagining of that mysterious black sedan that had seemed to follow her everywhere. But especially now, with Harris gone, she feels an acute desire to see her uncle again. Who cares about his invented stories of the time they shared together when she was a baby, and his odd nickname for her (Pod, was it?). He might be a little crazy, but he’s harmless. And she’s often wondered how his reunion with that woman in Saskatchewan went, and whether he found that book he was willing to risk violating his parole conditions to track down.
“Miss Greenwood!” calls out a short barrel of a man, leaning on a hand-carved cane and striding through the crowd toward her. Willow hears his knees click as he draws close. “Name’s Mort Baumgartner. I founded Greenwood Timber with your father and was there from the very beginning,” he says, as though this explains a great deal, before he expounds further upon her father’s merits as an employer.
A baby is a vulnerable thing, yet it can also provide a kind of armour, and suddenly she wishes for her child back in her arms, if only to have something substantial to put between herself and this man eyeing her clothes, appraising the gap between the father’s success and the daughter’s failure.
“We parted ways years ago on account of certain disagreements,” Baumgartner jabbers on, “but I’m here to offer my condolences on his passing. Harris was a hell of a lumberman. That’s why I was so surprised when I learned of the…circumstances. Despite his handicap, Harris Greenwood knew his way around a forest.”
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