Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “He got lost,” she says firmly, unwilling to stoke the wildfire of rumour concerning his possible suicide. “Could happen to anyone.”

  “I heard they found quite a tumour in his head. Size of a softball, someone said. He must have known. Did he tell you?”

  Willow considers the last time she saw her father, in Stanley Park, when he convinced her to fetch Everett from prison. She remembers his wobbly gait, his whitened hair, and how at the time she’d attributed all this to his recent retirement. Though his uncharacteristic sentimentality and the embrace he offered her can now be explained by the fact that he knew he was fading. Then why didn’t he just fucking tell me? she almost yells in Baumgartner’s face. Instead, she says, “In his way, yes.”

  “At least he had the chance to meet his grandchild,” the man goes on. “I have fourteen myself, and it cheers me to know that the Baumgartner line will surely continue.”

  “Yes,” Willow says, though of course Harris never met her son, and the thought nearly undoes her. He’d contacted her twice over the shortwave radio while she was living on Greenwood Island. “I detest talking on this contraption,” Harris had said. “But I’m happy you’re finding the retreat suitable. Is there anything you need?” Never once, however, did he mention his health or suggest a visit. If she’d known he was sick, she could have helped him. And she would have told him about her pregnancy. They may even have managed to say some things they needed to say. Instead he chose secrecy. Instead he chose solitude and stoicism. Instead he died alone, in the trees. And she hates how much sense it makes.

  “Well, that child of yours stands to inherit a fortune,” Baumgartner says, raising his glass with an ugly grin. “As do you.”

  Willow shakes her head and sips her drink without returning his toast. “My father wrote me out of his will long ago, Mr. Baumgartner. And I’d prefer not to talk about it, if you don’t mind. I’m a little brittle today.”

  To her relief, he lets the subject drop, and the two fall into a full-mouthed silence after accepting canapés and salmon cakes—fancy bites her father would have sneered at. “Just mix it all up in a bowl and give it to me,” he’d declare whenever the chef got too fussy. “What do I care how it looks?”

  With the memorial set to begin shortly, Willow collects her baby and nurses him in a staff water closet. The child, with its mouthful of aureole, grunts like a football lineman. Then she and the baby rejoin the crowd on the grounds behind the mansion, standing among the rose gardens and statues and the retaining walls overgrown with ivy. Nearby are the sacred Haida totem poles that her father had stolen from the Native lands he’d logged and kept as the centrepieces of his collection of plundered curiosities. As a girl, she’d often escape into the greenery back here, and today it’s as though her very childhood is being invaded.

  One after another, men approach the carved podium to speak. The premier of British Columbia. The minister of Forestry. Baumgartner relays a tiresome anecdote about some mill machinery that Harris fixed with only a box of paperclips. Milner extols Harris’s powers of estimation concerning the board-foot yield of a forest. “Sight unseen,” he adds, which commands a good chortle. Of course her father’s conviction for the treasonous act of selling timber to the Japanese before the Second World War goes completely unmentioned. If Willow can only get her hands on another sake, perhaps she’ll gather the courage to go up to the podium and correct this narrative oversight herself.

  Though they haven’t cashed a Greenwood Timber paycheque in years, the workingmen in attendance appear lost and distraught, like whipped dogs, unsure of who’ll feed or beat them now that their master is gone. While none of the workers brave the podium, the speeches from the managers drone on. They recount Harris’s great character traits: his pithy honesty and his insatiable industriousness. Upon an easel behind them is a giant blown-up photograph of her father as a young man, standing before a mountain of cut logs that fill the entire frame—there must be a thousand rounds, each one twice the size of his head. Behold the conqueror of trees! Willow nearly calls out. Both visually and spiritually blind to the massacre in his wake! Again she wonders how he could have encountered beings of such unimpeachable grace and beauty and felt the urge (not to mention the right!) to destroy them. How brave, she murmurs into the tiny cockle of her son’s ear. Your grandfather hired men to cut down defenseless giants, and paid them like rats to do it.

  The old saying goes that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But in Willow’s experience, the opposite is more likely true. An apple is nothing but a seed’s escape vehicle, just one of the ingenious ways they hitch rides—in the bellies of animals, or by taking to the wind—all to get as far away from their parents as they possibly can. So is it any wonder the daughters of dentists open candy stores, the sons of accountants become gambling addicts, the children of couch potatoes run marathons? She’s always believed that most people’s lives are lived as one great refutation of the ones that came before them.

  As the service wraps up at last, Willow notices a man, near the front, with an air of untouchability about him, as though the others have made an unspoken pact to shun him. Though the day is chilly, he’s dressed in a fine linen suit that looks European in cut—not one of those brown Dacron jobs popular among the lumbermen. A grey sadness hovers over him, and his eyes are hollow, like a place where an owl might find refuge. While guests begin filing back to the house to tuck into their lobster, the well-dressed man slips to the podium and, without any introduction, commences reading from a small book pulled from his jacket pocket. His musical, Irish-accented voice cuts like a scalpel through the general murmur and the guests turn to face him. It’s a poem he’s reading, she realizes, something old and lyrical about trees and time. And strangely, the sound of his voice is familiar to her, powerfully so, though his face is one she doesn’t recognize in the slightest. And just as he’s building steam, his reading gaining in passion and exactness, Mort Baumgartner canes his way to the front and sets a thick hand on the man’s shoulder. When the man doesn’t stop, Mort leans in close to whisper something in his ear. The man closes his hollow eyes and vents a long, slow breath. Then he returns the book to the pocket of his jacket, steps away from the podium, and vanishes into the crowd.

  WHO DO WE HAVE HERE?

  THE CONVOY OF limousines arrives later that afternoon to take the mourners to Mountain View Cemetery. Willow rides on the leather seats with her sleeping child draped in her arms, craving a menthol, staring out the window. In a shell-shocked state, she watches the power lines cross and uncross, racing one another through their world above the street.

  The drizzle is gone, and as people begin to assemble at the graveside, the sky clears to a smudged, milky blue just as the sun begins its slow tumble into the ocean. To bury Harris Greenwood in such a serene and lushly treed place strikes Willow as both a poignant homage and a laughable irony. His mahogany coffin sits suspended across two plain sawhorses. And before it is lowered into the hole, a saw blade the size of a wagon wheel is placed atop the lid, along with a few boughs of fresh-cut Douglas fir. At the sight of his coffin and the saw blade and the branches sinking into the earth like the root ball of a tree about to be planted, true sorrow punctures Willow for the first time. A hot glob of longing for her father rises in her throat, and she fights to choke it down. Not a longing that he’ll return to the world—it wouldn’t do anyone much good if he did, including him—but a great incurable regret that an understanding couldn’t have been brokered between them before his exit. If he’d only reached out to her, maybe they could have forged some kind of agreement. Because if anything certain could be said of Harris it would be this: he was always good at negotiating agreements.

  The lumbermen take turns shovelling soil black as cake over her father’s coffin, while Willow half expects the ground to spit him back out. If it’s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary violence, she muses while watching them work, then surely her own country was born of a cru
el, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip out the Earth’s most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheap to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again—that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

  With the burial done, her head is churning with a mix of grief, bewilderment, and relief when Terrance Milner approaches to console her. And once the floodgates open, hand after conciliatory hand wags in her direction. It seems they all want to touch her—on the shoulder, the elbow, the back. They want to taste her sadness, to pity her baby, to ask how she’s “holding up,” as though the bereaved are poorly constructed buildings facing a windstorm. Already she’s frantic to escape them, to break into a run and fly across the cemetery to the limousine—then to her Westfalia and on to a remote forest where none of these people could ever find her. That is, until a figure limps in her direction from the very end of the line.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says, this time with his back held straight and with no difficulty meeting her eyes. “It took the accountant’s letter some time to find me on the farm. But I came right away when I heard.”

  He’s grown a beard that hits his chest—also an intermixed black and grey, the same as his hair—though his lined face is still recognizable beneath it. There’s a woman at his side with shoulder-length, steel-coloured hair, and the weather-burnished skin of someone who’s spent more days outside than in.

  “May I introduce Temple Van Horne,” Everett says. “My personal driver.”

  Temple whacks Everett’s shoulder lightly with the back of her wrist while shaking her head. She holds out her hand to Willow. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says, squeezing Willow’s fingers gently. Then Temple turns her attention to the sleeping baby in Willow’s arms. “That’s a fine child you’ve got there. A boy?”

  “He is,” Willow says, shooting a quick glance at Everett, who has yet to acknowledge her son, probably because men of that generation never much concerned themselves with babies.

  “I’m going to take a walk and let you two catch up,” Temple says after they exchange a few more pleasantries about the funeral service and the improved weather.

  “That must be who you were in such a hurry to get to,” Willow says, as they both watch Temple work her way down the cemetery path, pausing occasionally to examine half-rotten flowers or to read gravestone inscriptions.

  “We’re still figuring it out,” Everett says. “But I had my probation transferred to Saskatchewan. And she’s letting me stay at her place while I help out with farm work, for now anyway.” He grins nervously. “Unfortunately,” he goes on, “the book I was hoping to recover for you. The one I mentioned? It seems that a cyclone intervened.”

  “It’s fine, Everett. I’ve got plenty to read. Still, I’m happy to know that you found yourself a new life after losing so much time. And how was your first airplane ride?”

  “I didn’t care for it much,” he says. “I made it, though. Faster than the train, too, which was nice. I’m lucky Temple was kind enough to drive me all the way back here.” He removes his hat and holds it in his hands. “And I’m real sorry for your loss, Willow.”

  “It’s your loss, too,” she says, touching his shoulder. “Harris would be happy to know you came, even if he couldn’t say it. Now I have my own confession to make: he paid me a quarter for every letter I sent you while you were in prison. I always thought it was because he was too self-absorbed to write you himself. Yet lately I’ve been thinking that it was very important to him for us to know one another.”

  “He telephoned me at the farm a few months ago,” Everett says, fidgeting with his hat. “He didn’t say he was dying, but I think he knew. We didn’t talk about much. Just some things from our childhood. The wood we chopped together. The old log cabin we built. I appreciated it, though. I knew how hard it was for him.” Everett casts his gaze across the treed cemetery. “And before we hung up, I told him I forgave him. He didn’t say anything back, but I know he heard me. He did some selfish things in his time, that’s for sure, but he redeemed himself and then some by taking such proper care of you, Willow. And I’m very sorry he’s gone.”

  It’s the way he says it—an unvarnished expression of sorrow, with no agenda or requirement for her to perform grief in any particular way—that impels her to fall into his arms, pressing her child against his beard and his shabby sports coat. Half-smothered, her nameless baby lets out an anguished cry and Willow draws back.

  “Who do we have here?” Everett asks.

  Willow wipes at her eyes with her sleeve. “He’s a month old today,” she says, unhitching her son from the wraparound carrier. “He doesn’t have a name quite yet.”

  “You should ask Temple. She’s read a whole bunch of books and she’s really good with names,” he says. “You know, if you ever want to visit, you two are always welcome at her place. Just show up anytime and we’ll be happy to have you.”

  “That’s generous of you,” Willow says, then holds her baby out by his armpits, gravity stretching his wriggling body much longer than you’d expect, like a cat. “Do you want to meet him?”

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” Everett says, smoothing his cheap work pants with his palms. “I think he’s better off with you.”

  Perhaps it’s because her father never had the opportunity to hold her child, or because she wants to atone for how she berated Everett in her Westfalia when he innocently called her Pod, or because she wants to prove to her uncle that everyone deserves forgiveness in this world—but it’s suddenly unspeakably important to her for Everett to hold her son.

  “Please,” Willow says. “I’ve been carrying him all day. And I’m dying for a cigarette.”

  “I’m sure we could find someone else—”

  “I’m going to drop him…” she says with teasing menace, while pretending to loosen her grip on his drool-soggy creeper.

  Everett’s eyes widen and he reaches out and grasps the baby’s armpits, then draws his small body awkwardly against his chest. Willow lights a menthol and watches her son squirm in her uncle’s arms. Against the forest of his beard, the baby looks like an impossibly tiny organism, barely anything at all. And when he begins to fuss and grunt a little, Everett commences a jiggling bounce on his toes.

  “It’s been a while,” he says.

  After a few seconds spent scowling defiantly up at Everett’s bushy eyebrows and his brambly, bearded face, the baby finally settles, if begrudgingly.

  “Don’t worry,” Willow says. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  THE READER

  WHEN YOU GROW up as the daughter of a blind man, you become adept at both stealth and stealth’s opposite. From an early age, Willow mastered not only how to sneak like a prowler, but also how to reassure with sound—to produce the ideal quantity of it to avoid startling or embarrassing her father without belittling him. Perhaps this explains why, despite witnessing the burial of his coffin earlier this afternoon, she finds herself whistling and scraping her feet on the hallway’s floorboards as she approaches his study, just as she has always done.

  It was never a room she entered without good reason. Her father would blockade himself behind its heavy oak door for days or even weeks at a time. Inside, everything is just as she remembers it: the old-fashioned inkwell bolted to his desk, the coal-black telephone; no photographs or pictures, just his stuffed birds and his record player and his classics of literature lining the walls. She runs her hand over the leather writing surface of his desk, feeling the faint imprint of the thousands of documents he signed, the millions of trees condemned to death by the mere stroke of his pen.

  She can almost see her father canted back in his chair, eyes shut, one of his LPs of poetry turning on the mantle. If ever he suspected anything in his office had been moved or disturbed, he’d launch into a rage, first directed at the housekeepers, and then at Willow. One time, he ordered her into his study to berate her for stepp
ing on one of his precious poetry records, snapping it in half. She remembers sneaking around behind him so that he scolded an empty chair for five minutes, and how comedic it all was, and how deliciously pathetic he seemed, and yet how wicked she felt afterwards.

  Now Willow leans back in her father’s chair, testing its springs, soaking up its sensations, as if it might have something secret to tell her about her father, and shuts her eyes. Though the heroic sitter took her baby after dinner so Willow could nap before yet another memorial service later this evening, she finds she can’t sleep without his gentle huffing against her, or the pasty ticking of saliva in his mouth. Still, the chair is a sanctuary, its cool leather a welcome antidote to her overheated attic room, and her wakefulness starts to slip.

  “Ms. Greenwood?” a man’s voice sounds out sometime later.

  Willow pushes herself upright to discover the well-dressed Irishman from earlier standing on the other side of the desk. “Sorry, I must have nodded off,” she confesses groggily, as though the fact isn’t already plain to him.

  “I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” he says, and again his voice is uncannily familiar to her ear, “but my cab is waiting, and there’s something I’d like to give you.” He’s wearing a wool topcoat and his alligator case waits near the door. From his pocket he produces a small book, which he places on the desk in front of her.

  “Is this what you read at the service?” she asks, picking it up.

  He nods. “Wordsworth. One of your father’s favourites. He kept a copy with him always.” Despite his brisk, cheerful tone, there’s a heaviness about him, as though he’s just dragged an anchor across the floor in order to stand before her.

  “That was a fine reading you gave earlier,” she says. “I was sorry you didn’t continue.”