“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” the Irishman says. “Normally I detest such ceremonies. But I thought those crusty old arseholes could do with a bit of verse in their lives. I’m happy you enjoyed it, though.” He rubs his hands together briskly, as though warming them. “Well, I should be off.” He turns and starts for the door.
“You knew him well, my father?”
“I worked for him for a time,” he says, pausing at the door without turning around. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to be—”
“He fired you?”
“No, he did not,” he snaps, his voice rising then coming under his control again. He turns to face her. “I resigned, then moved back to Dublin. I adore Canada, particularly its natural wonders, but living so far from home proved wearisome for me in the end.”
“In what capacity did you work for him, then? I’ve never heard of you before.”
He reaches down and picks up his alligator case. “I assisted him for a time with certain negotiations. Mostly I was his describer and his reader. I read him business briefs, correspondences, newspapers—things like that.”
And with that a realization snaps like a deadbolt in Willow’s mind. “Now I know why your voice is so familiar,” she says, pointing to the collection of records set on the shelf beneath her father’s turntable, records she was never allowed to touch under penalty of a two-hour lecture. “Those are your recordings.”
The man sighs, as though her realization has disappointed him profoundly. “It gave your father great joy to be read to, and a friend of mine in Dublin produces music,” he says wearily. “So each year my friend helped me record an album of poetry for your father for his birthday, just a smattering of verses he liked best.” A melancholy expression overtakes him. “He was very kind to me, your father.”
“Well, that must’ve been nice,” she quips. “Because he enjoyed listening to your voice more than he did mine.”
“It wasn’t easy for him, you know,” the man continues, and the more he speaks, the more his eyes seem to fill with hurt. “This world is designed to pit us against one another. Brother against brother. Mother against son. Father against daughter. Friend against friend. But it was especially unkind to your father.”
“Maybe he deserved it? You ever think about that? Maybe he brought it on himself.”
The man shakes his head. “He knew he couldn’t be an ideal guardian for you. That it just wasn’t in him. But he did the best he could.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to the trees he cut down.”
The man drops his case to the wooden floor with a neat bang. “Oh, would you quit your whining about the goddamned trees!” he snarls, the restraint he’d so far been practising now completely cast aside. “You aren’t the only person in the world who ever lost anything, my dear. For a while I was close to something. Something wonderful. And then I couldn’t be close to it ever again. I doubt you’ve lived long enough to know what that means.”
“I’ve lost plenty,” she says, feeling her face grow hot. “Believe me.”
He fixes a hard glare upon her, and for a moment she’s afraid he might jump across the desk and strangle her. “It’s a crime to burden the young with the sorrows of the old,” he says, and she feels an odd sense of secret history, as though he’s speaking about many things at once. And for a moment she’s a child again, wandering this cavernous mansion, picking over the fragments of her father’s story, like she’d been given a jigsaw puzzle with pieces already missing long before the box was opened.
“But you should know that many people sacrificed for you to be here in this study today, Willow,” he adds with an irritated sneer. “And you’d be best fucking served to remember it.”
“I enjoyed your poem, sir,” she says, undaunted. “And I appreciate the book of poetry. But I’ll remember Harris as who he was, not as the self-sacrificing saint that some ex-employee claims him to be, thank you very much.”
For nearly an entire minute they face one another in deadlocked silence across her father’s desk, while the black shadows of trees darken the windows and stuffed birds observe them with their glass eyes.
And though she expects the Irishman to commence scolding her anew, he assumes an unexpected calm. “Before I go, I’d like to tell you a little story, Willow. And I’d like it even better if you didn’t interrupt me while I do. You see, you and I took a boat ride once. Just the two of us. You were quite little, so of course you wouldn’t remember it. But there was nowhere to put you in the boat, so you rode alongside me in an insulated box, sort of a cooler used to transport food—we didn’t have car seats or anything like that in those days. It wasn’t much for me to do, to take you on this ride; I was a capable seaman then, and you seemed to enjoy yourself quite a lot. After our ride I brought you here to your father’s estate, and left you with his housekeeper. I think it’s fair to speculate that Harris was surprised to see you that night. He wasn’t exactly ready for you to be living with him here in his house. Still, he did the right thing and accepted you anyway. So please, Willow, before you judge him too harshly, just remember that his bit was much more than merely taking you for a boat ride. His bit was to care for you every day of your life. A duty he performed to the best of his ability, despite all he’d already lost. So know this: your father loved you with everything he had. He just didn’t have much left.”
BEQUEATHMENT
WILLOW STAYS ON at the Shaughnessy mansion for a week after the funeral, helping Milner tie up loose ends, dreading her return to the overcrowded Earth Now! Collective house in Vancouver, the only place left for her to go now that the mansion will likely be sold and Greenwood Island will be auctioned off to a competing timber company, and she’ll never be able to return to either place again.
The prospect of an inheritance has rarely occurred to her over the years, since Harris made it so explicitly clear that he’d written her out of his will. And even when the idea did briefly infiltrate her thoughts—usually on nights after she ran out of money and her belly was cramping from the half-rotten food that she and the Earth Now! Collective had pulled from a Dumpster, nights when she would’ve mowed down a handful of old-growth redwoods for just a few days lost in the impossible whiteness of clean sheets in a four-star hotel room—she saw zero chance of her father ever changing his mind. So she is baffled when she’s summoned by Milner, who’s been named executor of the Greenwood estate, to a meeting the next morning with her father’s attorneys in downtown Vancouver.
As she nurses her son in Harris’s limousine, she examines his pinched face for flickers of the Greenwood bloodline, for Everett’s wild hair or Harris’s crisply handsome cheekbones, but finds no trace. He still retains that generic, gelatinous quality of the newly birthed, and could as well be anyone’s child. What does it matter, she reminds herself, as she rides an elevator up to an office on the fortieth floor of a tall, mirrored building. The “family line” is all just capitalist, colonialist brainwashing anyway, designed to sequester power in the hands of the few. A single child has no fewer than sixteen different great-grandparents, each with their own separate family traits and stories, and yet we idiotically focus on the single surname that survives. Are not the other fifteen equally important? And what is her son really, but a bundle of flesh and cells and tissue animated by the same sacred energy that impels trees to stretch upward for the sun? No, her son is not hers alone. He descends from many bloodlines. Or, more precisely, he descends from the one, great bloodline: born of the Earth and the cosmos and all the wondrous green things that allow us life.
“Despite your father’s setbacks,” the lead lawyer says to commence the meeting, “he was still in a strong financial position when he died. And it is my duty to inform you that he named you the majority beneficiary of his estate. It’s a substantial bequeathment that includes the Shaughnessy mansion as well as his sizeable art collection, his Indian relics, his remaining sawmills, pulp and paper interests, and lumber operations, his schooner, as well as his holdings, securities
, and their related dividends.”
Though she hears the words and tracks their surface meaning, it’s as though she’s been blasted by a great, deafening noise, broadcasted at a frequency that only she can hear. With her child sleeping in her arms, she averts her gaze to the window: the sky over the ocean is dolloped with cloud, and the great trees of Stanley Park shimmy far below in an otherwise imperceptible breeze.
“Ms. Greenwood?” says the gruff second lawyer who sits next to Milner.
“Does this include,” she manages to get out. “The island?”
The second lawyer flips open a manila folder and scans the documents inside. “That’s correct, Greenwood Island in its entirety.”
She knows she ought to look at them, but she can’t bring herself to do so. She lifts her swaddled child to her nose and breathes in his scent. She and her son will have the means to live together on the island, free and untroubled among its tall trees, for the rest of their days, never needing to worry about money again. She’ll beachcomb and garden while he climbs the trees like a monkey and builds forts from windfall branches. And perhaps she’ll even invite a few other likeminded people from the Earth Now! Collective to join them. They’ll establish a self-sufficient community, far away from the world’s soul-killing inhumanity, from its Nixons and Kissingers, from its cancers and robotized, brain-dead conformists.
The lead lawyer clears his throat roughly. “The second, and lesser, beneficiary who’s been named is your uncle, Everett Greenwood. I trust this doesn’t come as a surprise, despite the fact that the two were estranged,” he says, clearing his throat again. “There is one slight anomaly, however, which I’d like to draw to your attention. It seems your father left another individual a not insignificant share, smaller than yours or your uncle’s, certainly, yet a sizeable one regardless. A man named Liam Feeney.”
Hearing this name it’s as though she’s ripped from a dream. “Is he Irish?” she says. “This man?”
The lead lawyer turns to the other lawyer, who nods. “We have a Dublin address, so probably, yes. But this amendment is unusual, made late in your father’s life, possibly under the duress of his illness. So it’s our recommendation that you dispute it.”
In an instant, so much about her childhood and her father’s life comes smashing into focus. The silences. The brooding depressions. The self-enforced solitude. The anti-social veneer. The iron-clad routines. Why did he never confide in her? Did he judge her too antagonistic or too flighty to entrust with the truth? She could’ve helped him, or at least eased his burden. Perhaps she could have even reached out to Liam Feeney on his behalf. And suddenly an image comes over her: Harris in his study, listening to Feeney’s voice each night for all those hours over all those years—not to escape his daughter, but to be close to the one person denied him.
She remembers Harris once fetching her from the Vancouver lockup in his chauffeured Bentley, after she was taken into custody for occupying the offices of a mining company that was poisoning a vital watershed with heavy metals. During the ride home he told her, to her surprise, that he’d like to see the old-growth and the watersheds preserved, too. “But we rarely get what we want in life,” he said. “There isn’t enough room for it all to fit.” At the time, she was convinced he was talking about his blindness, or the Inquiry, or the necessity of environmental destruction in the name of industry and prosperity. Now she’s certain he wasn’t.
“Please give this man whatever my father wished,” Willow says.
The lawyers shift in their seats and shoot glances at one another, reluctant to press the issue, no doubt questioning her sanity.
“Certainly,” the lead lawyer says, scribbling a note on his yellow pad. “Well then, barring any unknown claimants, cousins, or other offspring, this process will be predominantly cut and dry. You’ll hear from us shortly.”
As Willow is whisked back to the mansion in a limousine that she’ll soon own, she finally decides upon a name for her son: Liam New Dawn. The invented surname will free him from the freight of the tainted Greenwood legacy and provide him with a fresh beginning—something she never had. And the given name is a small gesture she can offer Mr. Feeney on her father’s behalf. Even if he’ll never know he’d received it, it’s still worth giving.
She spends the remainder of the afternoon packing up her Westfalia before they return to live permanently on Greenwood Island. She boxes up the poetry records that Mr. Feeney made for her father, as well as the book of Wordsworth he gave her, along with a few other books of Harris’s that Liam might like when he’s older. She’s nearly giddy at the thought of what a wonderful, forest-defending, nature-attuned soul her son will become after he grows up on that island. Though why is it, she wonders casually as she stacks the boxes in her van, that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today? There’s a Chinese proverb Willow has always loved: The best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. And the second-best time is always now.
And the same goes for saving the ecosystem.
She could use her father’s money to start an environmental foundation, but she’s no paper-pusher, and if his tragic life has taught her anything, it’s that a person must live in accordance with their deepest-held principles, or else suffer a kind of death of the soul. Who might Harris have become if he was able to be who he truly was? Would he have been the man she’d only glimpsed during their rare visits to Greenwood Island, relaxed and contented? Would he have joyfully waltzed her around the room, like that blind father she once saw on television, laughing while shouldering lamps to the ground and bumping into furniture?
So who, then, will she become if she also fails to live according to her deepest self? And it’s at this precise moment that she decides upon another path—a more difficult one, admittedly, yet also the path of connectedness, of principle and authenticity. One that will lead her and Liam away from the traps of capitalism and all that’s easy and predictable in life, while bringing them closer to the land and its forests and rivers and its wild, incalculable treasures.
But to do that, she must sacrifice even what she most loves. Not only must she give away all the wealth that her poor, lonely father destroyed himself to amass and preserve; she’ll also have to surrender Greenwood Island itself to a forest protection group. Because what kind of hypocrite would she be if she kept it? Who is she to deserve her own private island? What makes her entitled to such unlimited comfort and peace and abundance of resources while others starve and suffer?
It’s the only way.
If she was dedicated to the environment before, she’ll be twice as dedicated now. No more bunking with the Earth Now! Collective during the winter months: Willow and Liam will live year-round in her Westfalia. They’ll be rootless, self-reliant, free. She’ll do more solo direct actions—nothing radical or violent, just more bags of sugar dumped into more gas tanks. She’ll protest, blockade, obstruct. She’ll teach Liam to be strong, to live symbiotically with nature. He’ll learn to be a warrior. A defender of the Earth. Together they’ll consume as few resources as possible, and work toward repairing a tiny portion of the harm that Harris has inflicted upon the forests of the Earth. And someday, her son will thank her for it.
Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees, she thinks, as she pilots her Westfalia through the iron gates of her father’s mansion for the last time, with Liam strapped into the passenger seat beside her. If only we had centuries. Maybe then there’d be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.
A SPINE
WHAT ELSE COULD it be, he thinks—with its gently curving trunk of bone, its limbs and branches and tributaries of nerve tissue, its flexibility and delicacy and elegant perfection—other than a kind of tree, buried in our backs, standing us up?
And if all thi
s is true, then it would be reasonable for Liam Greenwood to finally admit that plunging from a height of twenty-seven feet and five-eighths of an inch to a polished concrete floor has cut his own tree down, felled it, severing its trunk just above his tailbone. And it will never stand him upright again.
NOTHING IS TRUE
HE WAKES.
Then he wakes a second time, unaware of having blacked out.
He straightens himself up in the driver’s seat of his van as best he can manage. It’s still dark, but the radiance of morning is brewing somewhere out there behind the house and beneath the sea. His pain has ceased; even the vise cranking in his lower back has ceded its grip. Liam checks his gas gauge: an eighth of a tank left. It was stupid to let himself black out with the engine running, but there’s still more than enough gas to get him to help. Instinctively, he tries to reach the brake pedal with his right foot, but though the pain has passed, his lower half feels even farther gone, lost in a kind of emptiness. In frustration, he extends the baseball bat down near his useless legs to depress the brake pedal, then nudges the gearshift into drive, while becoming suddenly aware that even the prickling sensation in his hamstrings has disappeared completely.
If he’d cracked his pelvis or broken his tailbone, wouldn’t some sensation have returned to his legs by now? Shouldn’t he be able to move them, even slightly? Liam returns the van to park, drops the baseball bat, yanks the key from the ignition, and flings it onto the passenger seat. No, he thinks. He’s been deluding himself. His legs haven’t come back because they are no longer his own. And won’t be ever again.
Where is he planning to drive to, anyway? A private hospital? Ever since moving to Brooklyn he’s been working in the U.S. illegally. His clients are happy to pay cash, and though he carried contractor’s insurance for a time, it was pricey, and once the adjusters discovered he was working without a visa he’d be denied a claim anyway, so he’d let it lapse.
Greenwood Page 37