Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  With an ashen, slack expression, Everett limps over to Liam, who is fixed in place with fright, and rests his big, callused hands on both of Liam’s shoulders.

  His great-uncle shakes his head. “I don’t care about the truck, son,” he says. Then he lifts his gaze to the impossibly wide prairie sky, which is a tepid blue, laced with just hints of cloud. He sniffs a few times, then clears his throat, as though he’s trying to free up the tangled words. “Temple didn’t manage to wake up this morning.”

  Liam feels the ballpeen hammer slip from his fingers. He lets Everett’s heavy hands weigh him down to the swirling dust and comes to rest on his knees beside the tire of Temple’s truck, his mind blank, his ears ringing. Eventually, Everett turns away, his wizened face a stone mask, and limps off to his woodshop, latching the door behind him.

  Some time later, Willow emerges from the house with reddened eyes and the back of her wrist pressed to her lips. When she tries to approach Liam, he leaps up and runs into the barn, where he furiously begins slopping the pigs and feeding the chickens and goats.

  He’s still working when his mother comes to him a while later. “It was kidney failure,” she says from the rail of the pen. “She’s been sick with it for a while, Liam. She told me the night we first arrived here. But it was good you had this summer together.”

  “You should’ve told me,” he says, then bangs a gate shut and begins forking straw into the trough.

  “Look,” she says, her tone sharp. “That was her choice, not mine. She didn’t want to worry you. You’re not entitled to every scrap of information around here. That’s not how it works. So you can quit this rebellious teenager crap right now, because I need you back on my team. Because now that I’m out it’s just you and me again, whether you like it or not.” She pauses for her point to sink in, as if he doesn’t know it. “We’ll stick around until the funeral,” she adds. “Then we’re gone. If we don’t get some chanterelles picked this fall, we’ll be Dumpster diving all winter.”

  After lunch, some neighbouring farmers come and carry Temple’s body down into the storm cellar so it will stay cool in the September heat. Everett stays in his workshop all that day. In the evening Liam hears him in the kitchen, quietly phoning up a man in Estevan, who delivers a case of rye whiskey to the house a few hours later.

  In all the time Liam has been on the farm, he has never once seen his great-uncle drink, but in the days after Temple’s death, it’s all Everett does. It doesn’t make him unpredictable and loopy like it does Willow; instead, it seems to seal his lips and amplify his weariness. When he’s drunk, it’s as though his very structural integrity has been removed. He stoops and his limp worsens. He starts drinking when he wakes and doesn’t quit until he pisses himself and passes out on a bedroll laid on the floor of his woodshop.

  Occasionally Liam eavesdrops from beneath the porch while Willow sits with Everett as they drink rye and smoke her weed late into the night. But they speak little, and when they do, it’s only about the lack of rain, or the coming of rain, or how the few trees on the property are doing—never about Temple or anything of importance, which is, he’s come to learn, perhaps their most distinguishing family trait.

  “Get up, son,” Everett says to Liam early one morning after a week has passed. “There’s something I need to do, and I can’t do it myself.”

  He coaxes Liam out to the shed, where they fetch some axes and a two-man bucksaw, and then they load them into Temple’s dented truck. Clumsily, the old man drives, further denting it by clipping fence posts and running aground in drainage ditches, out to where a long line of mature maples were planted to provide shelter on the edge of the wheat field.

  “Temple and I put these in together,” he says, tossing the saws from the truck to the foot of the first tree. “She never let me put taps in them. She worried it might do them harm. She wasn’t sentimental about many things. Except these trees.”

  Over the next few hours, the two swing their axes and bring down three of the stoutest maples. Then they buck the trunks into long segments which they load into the truck. Everett spends the entire afternoon chainsawing the maple segments into crude boards. And for the first time, he ignores Willow’s wishes and teaches Liam how to properly operate the woodshop’s tools. All day Everett and Liam saw and dress the boards until they are the finest, clearest, and straightest maple planks that Liam has ever seen.

  It isn’t until his great-uncle is putting on the final touches—hand-carving a delicate wreath of leaves and ornate blossoms into the lid—that Liam realizes what they’ve built.

  CLEAR

  WOOD IS TIME captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record. This is why, Liam believes, carpenters like himself will never go out of business. Because people will always keep wood close: in our houses and on our floors, ceilings, and walls; in our trusted canes and our finest musical instruments; in our heirloom tables and old rocking chairs; and, most tellingly, in the very capsules that ease our journey into the ground.

  When carpenters call a piece of wood clear, they mean it is free of knots and wanes and blemishes. And during his many years of fussing over wood, cutting it to exact lengths and lovingly fitting it together just right, all before buffing it to a soul-warming shine, Liam Greenwood has often thought that people like clear wood best because they need to see time stacked together. Years pressed against years, all orderly and clean. Free from obstruction or blemish. The way our own lives never are.

  GROUND ZERO

  WITH NEARLY FLESHLESS fingertips, he’s clawed his way back down into the sunken living room, back to the foot of the scaffolding that he and Alvarez put up what seems like a lifetime ago. Judging by the light, it’s already mid-morning, and Alvarez would be here by now if he were returning to work today. Though Liam hadn’t really expected he would, that spark of possibility is now extinguished for good.

  If there must be a story told about this whole mess, he’d rather it be that Liam Greenwood died while working, and not frozen to death in his van like some vagrant. But he needs to put things in order first, before he’s incapable of doing so. Though his personal life has always been a constant chaos, he’s never once left a job site in such a sorry state, and he isn’t about to start now. He drags himself over to the tool belt he’d removed yesterday so he could crawl to his van, stuffs the brad nails that spilled out back into its pouch, then re-buckles it around his waist. Next, he goes to his air compressor, switches it off, and bleeds the tank of pressure with a deafening hiss. Then he puts his jig saw back in its case and goes about collecting the offcuts of reclaimed boards that came from Temple’s farm, the ones that Alvarez had been wasting. Next, Liam sets about arranging the boards themselves in a neat stack, while reflecting on the unfairness of how few pieces of wood get reclaimed, and how many end up rotting out in a field somewhere. He attempts to sweep as much sawdust as possible with his hands onto the drop cloth, which he then folds up neatly like a present. There’s no hope of taking down the scaffolding or packing up his mitre saw, so he comes to rest on the concrete floor, in the exact spot where he fell, marked by the chip his titanium hammer made when it struck the ground.

  Chasing his breath, he examines the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows and the way they frame the seal-grey Atlantic like a painting, like it’s part of the decor itself—the owner’s own private ocean. He wonders how long death will take and how it will feel. And then whether it will feel like anything at all. Whether feel is a word that could possibly apply. Willow always believed that during our last moments, our spirit dissipates and we become part of the great Greenness. That we live on in some kind of chlorophyll energy field, at one with the trees, the soil, and the rain.

  Yet in truth, death came to her cruel and quick.

  His mind returns him to the day he was flown to Vancouver from Brooklyn, hired to do a touch-up job on an expensive installation he’d built for the University of British Columbia’s forestry department. Since he’s in town, he arranges to meet Willow l
ater that day at the gates of Stanley Park. It’s been years since he visited, and when she first steps from her Westfalia, he worries that her environmental fervour has finally consumed her to the point that she’s stopped eating altogether for fear of harming plant life. Her once voluminous hair is now flat and thin, and her once relentlessly robust body is withered and frail.

  “You’ve looked better, Willow,” Liam says. “You want me to drive?”

  “It’s okay,” she says, her skull like a hard-edged sculpture that her skin can barely hide. “I can drive this old beast with my eyes closed.”

  Willow steers her van, which Liam still knows with the intimacy of a childhood home, deep into the park, back to the site where it appears she’s been camping secretly for some time. The day is breezy with a grey sky, and the smaller trees that camouflage her campsite wave in small circles. To get some food in her, Liam insists on cooking her favourite chickpea and tahini dish, which she takes outside to eat in the company of the trees, because, she claims, the van’s persistent musty odour and close confines make it difficult for her to get the food down. When Liam comments on the dwindling state of her food supply, she remarks, “I wasn’t able to get any chanterelles this year. Just didn’t have the energy for it. So things have been a little tighter than usual.”

  It isn’t until later that night that she tells him about her treatments: how she’s been driving herself to chemotherapy each day and then camping out in this downtown park, which is a relatively short drive from the hospital. Along with the crush of pity, he can’t help but feel a scorch of anger.

  “When were you planning on telling me?” he says, his head lowered and his hands in his hair.

  “Soon, I suppose,” she says weakly. “I didn’t want to bother you. You’re so busy. I know how well you’re doing out there.”

  His mother has always tried to leave as light an imprint upon the ecosystem as she possibly could, and to his great annoyance, this has also included him. Despite her protestations for him to return to New York, he cancels his carpentry job at the university, buys a sleeping bag, and moves into her van. When he picks her up from her treatments each afternoon, there’s a strong toxicity to her breath, like she’s spent the entire morning huffing spar varnish, the thick, noxious finish he puts only on his outdoor wooden installations.

  He stays with his mother for three weeks, camping like they used to, falling into their old harmony. He buys groceries at the food co-op she still belongs to, makes her tea, keeps track of her medications, and helps her remove the bits of fluff that accumulate in her eyes after her eyelashes fall out. He watches her wither and hears her moan and cough through the night up there in the rooftop tent that she loves so much. And soon she grows so feeble he has to break the childproofing off her lighter so she can light her menthols and her weed.

  When she’s too sapped to talk, he plays for her the same records that she played for him when he was detoxing: the man reading poetry in a soothing Irish accent. While Liam still doesn’t really comprehend the antiquated words he recites, his mother coughs less frequently and with less discomfort whenever the records are spinning on the turntable. So he plays them constantly at a low volume, even though after the tenth time he’s flipped the record, the mere sound of the man’s voice has begun to rub against his nerves like 40-grit sandpaper.

  SUPPLIES

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Brown Rice

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Chickpeas

  1 Ten-Pound Sack Organic Soybeans

  200 ml Nystatin Solution

  Dexamethasone 4 mg

  Senokot 8.6 mg

  Soflax 100 mg

  Metoclopramide 10 mg

  Diltiazem 180 mg

  Tarceva 150 mg

  Morphine Sulphate 5 mg

  WHAT THEY DID

  ONCE, NEAR THE end—and ignoring her oncologist’s warnings—Liam and Willow get drunk on chardonnay in her Westfalia, in an ancient forest in the middle of a shining city of glass and steel. To mark the occasion, Liam digs his fingers into the slit in the driver’s seat, pulls out her secret bottle of Chanel No. 5, and spritzes the van.

  “Not too much,” Willow says, before she closes her eyes and draws the citrusy scent deep into her tumour-constricted lungs.

  The perfume seems to perk her up, however, and they sit drinking and chatting into the evening: about his work in Brooklyn (he leaves out the meeting-room tables he’s done for Holtcorp, Shell, and Weyerhaeuser), and about the various environmental causes that she’s still managing to champion, even in her diminished state.

  “I don’t suppose you’re in the market for a Westfallia?” she says with a thin smile, after she grows tired and he’s lifting her impossibly light body up into the rooftop tent.

  Liam shakes his head. “Actually, I hate this thing.”

  She laughs softly, though he can tell the remark wounds her. “I know you think I’ve been selfish in my life,” she says, as Liam wraps her in three quilts. “But I made a choice just after you were born. A choice to take the difficult path. I wanted to give you a different kind of upbringing, a real one, not like the one I had.”

  “My upbringing was great, Willow. But it was different, all right,” he says, snapping off the flashlight. “Mission accomplished.”

  She closes her eyes and takes a long painful breath. “I was trying to teach you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To look upon Nature with reverence.”

  What is Nature, exactly, Willow? he wants to ask. Is one of my reclaimed wood tables Nature? How about me, am I Nature? How come you never looked upon me with any reverence? How come trees are the only part of Nature that you ever cared about?

  Instead he kisses her forehead and says, “I try to look upon everything with reverence, Willow. And it was you who taught me that.”

  “You know,” she says, “sometimes I’ve looked at the things you’ve made, on the computer at the library.”

  Liam can’t believe his ears. “Remember when I first got my carpentry ticket, and you called me a ‘certified forest killer’?”

  “I never loved the idea of you wasting defenseless trees,” she says, shaking her head. “But this reclaimed work you do makes sense to me. You’ve made some truly wondrous things, Liam. So yes, you do look upon things with reverence, and it makes me proud.”

  He sits up for hours in the van beneath her bunk, finishing the wine while listening to her cough—a low, grinding churn that comes on like a thunderstorm and leaves her gasping. He regrets that he can’t offer her a morphine pill after she’s been drinking—lately morphine seems to be the only thing that can keep the cough from waking her. Though he’d rather handle the morphine as little as possible, especially while he’s drunk.

  The drunker he gets, the clearer it becomes to him that his mother has lived her life fleeing a brokenness, one passed down to her by the broken people who came before her, and that she’s passed some of this same brokenness down to him, like coals pulled from one fire and used to start another. And that he would do the same to his own child, if he ever had one.

  “Can you promise me one thing?” she says later, her breath coming in gulping, tortured gasps. “That you’ll visit Everett, if you can. I worry about him out there all on his own.”

  After Liam makes his promise, he sits vigil while she coughs and rants incoherently in a half-somnolent state—sending free-associative dispatches from inside the chemical swamp of cancer medication and booze and weed that floods her brain. It’s all nonsense to Liam, just more of her New Age philosophy and conspiratorial ranting, until suddenly, sometime near dawn, just as he’s dozing off himself, her burning green eyes appear above him in the entrance to the rooftop tent. “People can save you, Liam,” she says with startling clarity. “Always remember that. They do it all the time. Except it’s usually in ways we’ll never understand. But that doesn’t change what they did.”

  The next morning, when Liam returns from the co-op and the pharmacy with t
heir supplies, he discovers his mother’s body stretched out up there in the tent, her long grey hair tied back with a thin bough of cedar. A tree-swirled breeze sweeps crosswise through the mesh screens of the walls. A quiet green caress, passing her from one forest she’d loved to another.

  Liam sits for a long time in the driver’s seat of his mother’s van, watching the trees, wondering if they can somehow perceive what they’ve just lost.

  YOU’RE STILL HERE

  HOURS SLIP BY in the sunken living room. Another night comes, spilling its shadows across the concrete floor. Then a new day replaces it. Liam watches the yolky sun seep in and then drain out again as though someone pulled a plug.

  When a roaring thirst comes upon him, he opens the last of the Red Bulls that he brought back from the van. The taste is chemically comforting, like it’s the pure distillation of all those coveted unnatural products that Willow denied him as a boy. The bombardment of sugar and caffeine restores his senses enough for him to know that with his last Red Bull now gone, he hasn’t much longer to wait.

  He recalls how Everett’s life had likewise devolved into a waiting game after Temple’s death. He drank steadily, though not as pitifully as he had in the weeks after she died. Liam honoured his promise to Willow and visited him intermittently over the years. Because upstate New York is full of broken-down structures perfect for his purposes, Liam never actually needed to go all the way to Saskatchewan for reclaimed wood; but it was a good excuse. He’d pay his great-uncle a small amount for carting away his fence boards, and though he’d never say it, Everett seemed to appreciate the company.