Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  The scans, the rehab, the catheters; the wheelchairs, lifts, and ramps. Not to mention the pain medication they’ll offer him like candy. He’ll be hooked all over again, with no reason to ever get clean. Paying out of pocket, his injury will cost him everything he has, and then some. And what kind of life will he find for himself at the bottom of such a pit of debt? Unable to properly swing his hammer or push his skill-saw through a piece of lumber? Unable to pilot his van to the next job or install a ceiling or finish a counter-top? There are states he’s always feared more profoundly than death: abandonment, helplessness, dependence on others. But it’s uselessness that terrifies him most of all.

  Liam hooks his arm behind his seat and finds his cooler, from which he grabs as many Red Bulls as he can stuff into the pockets of his Carhartts. Next, he pops open the door and uses the seat belt like a rappelling line to lower himself down to the frosty driveway that he thought he’d left forever.

  It’s dawn by the time he reaches the house, after a long, gruelling crawl through the leaf mulch, now frozen in rigid mounds. Orange filaments of light angle through the surrounding trees. He slithers onto the floor of the entryway and shoves the front door shut behind him. He puts his frostbitten cheek to the relatively warm porcelain tile. This time around he can better recognize the appeal of the house’s minimalist decor. The austere polished concrete. The white walls. The lack of books and clutter. It’s a liberation from things, and from history. The person who lives here is afraid of the past, Liam thinks. Join the club.

  He remembers meeting with the owner at his office in midtown Manhattan to plan the project. The man was a descendant of the Rockefeller family but worked for Holtcorp. For their meeting, he’d worn carpenter’s jeans and a work shirt, and seemed vaguely embarrassed for needing Liam’s help with the renovation at all. He made a point of offering Liam a Budweiser, and as they both drank he mentioned that Holtcorp had recently acquired Greenwood Island. “Any relation?” he asked, to which Liam simply shook his head.

  Mercifully, Willow didn’t live long enough to see her beloved island sold to a corporation. His mother once claimed that they’d lived there on the island when Liam was a newborn. But she’d already given it away well before his memory kicked in, so let them have it. These corporations will own everything in the end anyway.

  Liam begins his crawl back down the wide stairs to the sunken living room. After descending six steps, he’s forced to flip himself belly-up on the intermediate landing to rest his arms. He lets his eyes wander along the huge fir beams that support the vaulted ceiling high above. He can tell, even from here, that they aren’t square—not deadly, anyway. Over his years as a woodworker, Liam has learned that even the finest-built, most expensive houses have their flaws and deficiencies, and this one is no different.

  This is the carpenter’s painful truth: nothing is true.

  By true he means level, plumb, perfect. Every room you’ve ever entered has been off by at least a sixteenth of an inch—more probably an eighth. Guaranteed. We think we live in boxes until we look closer and find we’re in fact living in irregular shapes, in big, misshapen accidents.

  Which makes carpenters the high priests of living with mistakes. And while sloppiness is the most grievous insult you could throw at another carpenter, true perfection is maddeningly unattainable, which is why it’s never spoken of. Because even after you cut a piece of wood and lay it straight, it lives on after you’re finished, soaking up moisture, twisting, bowing, and warping into unintended forms. Our lives are no different.

  He shuts his eyes and feels a long-stifled sob finally escape him. He’s left behind more than his fair share of mistakes, that’s for certain. The night he dragged the replica Stradivarius viola that he built for Meena behind his van; the homes he flooded and ruined with his leaky skylights; all the years he squandered, high as a satellite on Oxycontin; all the parts of his story he’s left out, all the things he refuses to think about. But while he’ll never be able to atone for all his mistakes, there might still be a few left for him to repair. And there might still be parts of the story left for him to tell. So let the memories come, he thinks. What does it matter now?

  MAPLES

  HOLDING HIS MOTHER’S hand, Liam exits the parking garage where they’ve left their Westfalia and walks through downtown Vancouver in a misting, invisible rain. It’s the first time in his young life he’s seen Willow in regular clothes—a black skirt and a plain green blouse—and he feels an odd pride to be walking beside a mother who doesn’t have twigs in her hair or look like she lives in a van. When they reach the provincial courthouse, she chain-smokes three menthols out front before they go inside.

  While Willow attends her hearing, Liam waits in the hall, staring wide-eyed at the holstered gun of the policeman sitting across from him. Two months earlier, while Liam sat in the van, Willow disabled some expensive MacMillan Bloedel logging machinery up near Clayoquot Sound. But as they were fleeing the cut block, a group of Mounties riding ATVs pulled the Westfalia over and found Willow’s enormous bags of white sugar stashed beneath the seats.

  “I’m going to need to go away for a while, honey,” she says, after the hearing is over and they’ve made their way back past the court building’s metal detectors. “Just three months.” Next, she drives to a phone booth and spends an hour there, calling friends and acquaintances, growling with frustration, and occasionally whacking the receiver against its cradle. When she returns to the van, she informs Liam that he’s going to spend the summer with his great-aunt and great-uncle on their farm in Estevan, Saskatchewan.

  “I’ve never even met them,” he protests, which of course she ignores. While she’s always spoken fondly of Temple and Everett, she’s never managed to find the time in her busy sabotage schedule to make the drive out to visit them. But it isn’t their unfamiliarity that makes Liam uneasy; it’s more that he can count the number of times he’s slept indoors on two hands, and he’s anxious about the expectations of staying in a proper home.

  “You think I want this?” his mother snaps after he’s kept complaining throughout the day. “Maybe you’d rather go to a foster home instead?”

  Liam shuts his mouth, crosses his arms, gives her his blackest look, and refuses to help her pack.

  At daybreak the following morning, she drives the van east from Vancouver and up into the mountains. All through the trip she’s jumpy and quick to snap at him, sipping white wine from a Thermos and smoking her menthols non-stop. She grinds the van’s tired gears on the drastically pitched slopes as everything inside the van slides to the back where Liam sits. He spends the entirety of the two-day drive whittling in silence, a further punishment for her terrorizing threat of putting him in foster care the day before.

  “Can you promise me one thing?” Willow says, stopping the van as they approach the farm around dinnertime the following day. “This is probably never going to happen, and I’m almost certain that I’m wrong. But if Everett ever comes near you…like, I don’t know, if he touches you, or does anything that makes you feel uncomfortable—you go ahead and tell your Aunt Temple. Okay?”

  “Whatever,” Liam says, breaking his monumental streak of silence by uttering this powerful new word that he picked up from some teenagers at a convenience store when Willow stopped to gas up.

  When they pull up to the farmhouse, Temple and Everett are both reading at a wooden table on the enormous covered porch. On first inspection, even without his mother’s cryptic warning, Liam finds his great-uncle off-putting: the cords in Everett’s neck are root-like, and his voice is a metal bucket of gravel dragged across the floor. He also walks with a creepy limp, stinks like sawdust, and leaves a trail of it behind him wherever he goes. But his partner, Temple—Willow scolds Liam when he asks his great-aunt: “Why aren’t you married?”—is kind and smells like detergent and has an easy, welcoming way about her. If the pair were trees, she’d be a tall, silvery birch, and Everett a crooked old oak.

  That first night
at the farm, Temple reads to Liam from an antique book pulled from a shelf that spans their entire living room, while Everett mutely cooks dinner and Willow organizes Liam’s things in his new room. After they eat, Liam has three slices of rhubarb pie and then plays checkers with Everett in mutual silence, as Willow and Temple sit up late out on the porch, drinking wine and speaking in low voices.

  Temple gently rouses Liam at dawn the next morning and informs him that since he’ll be staying on the farm, he’ll need to learn how to slop the pigs and feed the chickens and goats.

  “Fine,” he says, rubbing his eyes, worried she may dump him in the nearest orphanage if he doesn’t comply.

  “This used to be a proper farm, one where hungry people with nowhere else to go could come and work,” she says, handing him a pitchfork. “But ever since we paid it off with that inheritance from your grandfather, Everett and I decided that our efforts would be better spent elsewhere.” Temple goes on to say that she volunteers as a book buyer at the public library in Estevan, and Everett makes furniture that he sells, the proceeds of which they donate to charity. “There are still hungry people out there,” Temple says, “but they’re hungry for different things now. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t the faintest idea what it is they need.”

  When the chores, which Liam enjoys slightly more than expected, are completed, Everett has lunch waiting for them: egg salad sandwiches on real wheat bread and soup with actual chicken in it. Already, Liam has started to secretly pretend that Temple is his true and rightful mother, and that her farm is his true and rightful home.

  “Remember that stuff I said about Everett?” Willow tells Liam that afternoon, while he’s helping her pack the van before she returns to Vancouver. “You should forget it. Temple and I straightened it all out. It was just a big misunderstanding. You have nothing to worry about. Okay?”

  “I never believed you anyway,” he says.

  Liam doesn’t cry when his mother drives off, perhaps because after less than a full day on the farm, he’s already flushed with the guilty hope that she’ll never come back, that she’ll simply forget about him and leave him behind, just like she does everyone else.

  Through the hot and dusty days of June, after his morning chores are complete, Liam spends hours exploring the farmhouse and the barn. He gives the goats and chickens funny names and chases them around the wheat fields. He spits fat globs into the black void of the well and climbs almost to the very top of the big weeping willow near the porch, the one that’s like a great, green room when you go inside it; the one with the swing that Everett has hung for him, though Liam is nearly twelve and has outgrown swings. Nightly, Liam listens to the radio while his great-uncle cooks dinner and Temple sets the table. She refers to Everett as either “the Help,” “the House Carpenter,” or “the Resident Arborist,” depending on what is to be done that day. And sometimes Everett gets her back by calling the farm “this God-forsaken, treeless patch of dust,” which initially strikes Liam as a betrayal, except Everett’s eyes glint when he says it, so Liam isn’t sure.

  He loves the predictability of farm life: waking up each day in the same place to eat the same food at the same table with the same people who say mostly the same things. The only ritual he doesn’t appreciate is when each night, just before they’re about to turn in, Everett always asks Temple, “You think I can stay here awhile?” and she replies, “Just until we get these trees in,” as though Everett is some drifter just passing through. Liam knows it’s just another of their jokes, but he despises it anyway. The farm is the one permanent thing he’s found in his life, and the thought of Everett leaving or it all coming apart threatens everything he’s come to cherish.

  By July, Liam has befriended a local boy named Orin, who is Liam’s age and lives up the road near the abandoned railroad tracks. When Liam invites him over to climb the willow tree and spit down into the well, Orin claims his parents won’t allow it.

  “Why not?” Liam asks, recalling his mother once mentioning that some kids don’t do certain things because they hold strange religious beliefs, not with respect to Nature, but about a magical person they called God.

  Orin glances around, leans in close, and squints. “Everyone knows your uncle was in prison. And that’s why no one in Estevan will hire him.” Then he drops his voice to a harsh whisper, an expression of half wonderment and half horror on his face: “People say he killed a baby.”

  Later in bed, Liam mulls this over. While he’s gruff, his great-uncle doesn’t seem capable of harming a baby, or even an adult for that matter. Everett spends his days in his woodshop out behind the barn, building desks and beds and cribs and tables and chairs, as well as sets of intricate chess pieces made of fine maple, all of which Temple drives into town in her pickup on the first Monday of the month to sell because Everett doesn’t have a driver’s licence. Willow herself had admitted before she left that she’d been wrong about him. But how, Liam wonders, could a whole town believe something if it isn’t true?

  Beginning the next day, Liam spies on Everett as he turns wood on his lathe, watching for signs of violence or insanity. While Everett never gets frustrated by a mistake and never makes any quick movements, he curses quietly and constantly. There’s an odd tenderness to his curses, as though they are the one power that can coax the pieces of wood into agreement.

  To Liam, the woodshop—with its forest-like stillness—is a quiet realm of exactitude, discipline, and possibility. His great-uncle isn’t destroying trees at all; he’s transforming them, into useful things that will endure. And once Liam is brave enough to alert Everett to his presence, he sits in the wood shavings beneath the table saw like a boy-sized gerbil, watching his great-uncle work. When he finally builds up the nerve, he pesters Everett to teach him how to operate the fearsome tools.

  Everett shakes his head. “Your mother forbid it.”

  “She’s not even here.”

  “She won’t have you cutting up wood. And her wishes go around here, at least with respect to you.”

  “Well, she’s a bitch,” Liam says, the words slipping out like he’s dropped someone’s gold watch down the well. He sets his feet firmly on the floor and waits to taste his great-uncle’s murderous fury—in fact, he nearly craves it.

  But Everett’s eyes only soften. He returns to his lathe and resets the guide that braces his chisel. “It’s not simple, you know, raising a child. Your mother is doing what she believes is right. And there isn’t just one way to do it. You’ll come around to that someday.”

  Suddenly, Liam’s cheeks are wet and he can feel his heartbeat in his ears. “I don’t want to live in a van anymore,” he says. “I want a normal life. And I want to live in a normal place. With normal food.”

  Everett turns back to regard him and places his hand on Liam’s head. “There aren’t any normal lives, son. That’s the lie that hurts us most.”

  The following Monday, while Everett and Temple are away in Estevan for the day, buying animal feed and books, selling Everett’s furniture, and taking in their monthly movie at the theatre there, Liam sneaks into the woodshop. He flips the table saw’s switch and watches the naked blade roar and disappear into a fearsome blur like an airplane propeller. He swallows hard and sets a knotty board on the table and starts gliding it into the saw. He’s only cut a foot into the wood when it pinches the blade and there’s a loud bang and the board jumps from the table and strikes his chin with the force of a baseball bat.

  When they return that night, Everett and Temple leave unmentioned the swollen yellow bruises on Liam’s face—his jaw will click for weeks afterward—and following supper they all sit on the porch to watch the wide prairie horizon churn with skyborne vapour and light. Temple reads from the Odyssey as they sip their drinks: Everett a seltzer, Temple a white wine mixed with Sprite, and Liam the root beer they brought back from town.

  While Temple is constantly reading aloud from her many books, never does she tell Liam any of her own stories. Forever unmention
ed is the cyclone that he knows destroyed the farm around the time Willow was born. Or why exactly Everett went to prison (Liam has found letters tucked away in his woodshop that Willow had written to him there as a girl). Or anything concerning Liam’s grandfather, Harris Greenwood, and his fallen timber empire or the inheritance he’d left them. Throughout that summer, whenever Liam questions her about these omissions, Temple’s stock reply is to select a new book from her shelves and say: “How about this one?” And it’s from her, perhaps, that Liam first learns the necessary power of willed forgetting.

  When his mother returns in early September, she’s speaking a mile a minute and overflowing with so much pent-up energy after her three-month incarceration that she scarcely notices Liam at all.

  “Miss me?” she says while distractedly ruffling his hair as they all sit down to the great meal that Everett has set out on the porch to mark her return.

  “Not really,” Liam murmurs, too quietly for her to hear.

  “To Liam,” Temple says, raising her glass when the meal is assembled. “Who’s been an invigorating presence for two old crustaceans over these past three months. And who might be the best worker this farm has ever seen.” Liam raises his glass and feels his chest bulge with pride. And for a moment he’s able to forget the brutal, unalterable fact that, like a prisoner slated for execution, he’s leaving the farm behind tomorrow.

  Early the next morning, while Willow is packing up their things for the drive back to British Columbia, Liam sneaks into the woodshop and steals one of Everett’s ballpeen hammers. He goes out to the driveway and whacks a deep dent in the Westfalia’s side panel, then knocks an even bigger one in the hood of Temple’s weathered pickup truck. When Everett emerges in his long underwear from the house with a shocked look, Liam is certain that after what he’s done, they will never let him come back. In truth, he’d rather they didn’t. Already he knows that leaving this place once will crush something inside him forever, and he couldn’t possibly survive a repetition. Or maybe he’ll get off easy and Orin’s rumours will be true, and his grizzled uncle will kill Liam right where he stands.