Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  The last time Liam visits, he pulls up at eleven in the morning to find his great-uncle on the porch, where he sits in all seasons except the brutal prairie winter, with a pair of bifocals on the tip of his nose, a book in his lap, and a bottle of rye beside him like a trusted dog.

  “You’re still here,” Liam says as he walks up to the house.

  Everett glances around with eyes as cloudy as milk, as though confirming the fact for himself. “Seems like it.”

  “I thought you hated this place,” Liam says, removing his baseball cap and joining Everett on the bench.

  “Oh, I do,” says Everett, who still smells of linseed oil and sharpened chisels. “Except I’m too old to go anywhere else.”

  “Well, I always liked it here. It was a good place for me to come as a kid.”

  “I plan on leaving it to your mother,” Everett says, and Liam has to stifle a cough. After witnessing what Temple’s death had done to Everett, Liam doesn’t have the heart to tell him about Willow. “So I guess it will come to you, eventually. Can’t say the land is worth much, though. Don’t tell Temple, but this ground was never good for growing anything in the first place. You want a drink?”

  Liam doesn’t, because drinking hard liquor makes him crave oxys, but he says, “Sure.”

  Everett finds another glass, pours two fingers of rye, then adds water to it from a pewter pitcher. “The well here’s still wet,” he says. “Which is a minor miracle.”

  “I always loved this water,” Liam says, taking a sip. “It never changes. You been in the woodshop much lately?”

  Everett holds up his hands and makes two quaking fists. “I’m no good for joinery or chess pieces anymore. I’m building big, ugly picnic tables now. Just some old two-by-fours and some red paint. I give them to parks and public schools in Estevan. I think they might already have all the picnic tables they need and probably just burn them all somewhere behind city hall. Still, they’re kind to accept them. It gives me something to do.

  “But maybe I’ll come out to New York and be your helper,” he continues. “You sure those people pay good money for these weathered old boards? You aren’t conning them somehow? And also: do you think they might be in the market for some picnic tables?”

  Liam laughs and shakes his head. “People like old wood. It comforts them, I guess. Still, I like my work. It fills the days.”

  “Living is just a whole bunch of work,” Everett says, nodding his head. “The trick is finding some that you don’t hate.”

  Liam takes another drink and feels the cheap rye flare in his mouth.

  “And how’s your mother?” Everett asks. “I haven’t heard from her in a while.”

  According to her wishes, Liam had Willow cremated, and dispersed her ashes in one of her favourite faerie farms, deep in central British Columbia.

  “She’s good,” Liam says, nodding his head. “Off in some forest somewhere saving the world. Don’t ask me which one.”

  “You never know where that one is, do you?” Everett says, shaking his head as he takes a drink.

  After their glasses are empty, Liam spends a few hours filling his van with boards pulled from a perimeter fence. All that afternoon, he helps Everett build a picnic table from start to finish, then cooks him dinner and leaves by daybreak the next morning.

  Three months later, a lawyer in Estevan calls Liam and tells him that Everett has died of heart failure and left Willow the farm. “So it goes to you,” the lawyer says. When Liam returns to the property a week later, he finds a fine maple coffin—its joinery and intricately carved decoration as flawless as the one they’d built for Temple years ago—stretched across the table in Everett’s woodshop. Liam buries Everett among the maples out near the lot line, where Temple’s grave is, though it was never marked.

  How his great-uncle had managed to fashion so beautiful a piece of woodwork with his gnarled, tremulous hands is still a mystery to Liam. But envisioning the coffin’s fine craftsmanship now recalls to him the viola he made for Meena and then destroyed. His one genuinely beautiful thing.

  Two, actually.

  Two beautiful things.

  Liam has made two beautiful things in his life.

  And with this admission rushes in what he’s long ignored, what he’s been willing himself to push out of his thoughts. Because so close to the end of his life, Liam Greenwood is finally ready to fill in the gaps, to undo the knots, to make things true and clear—even if it’s only for a short time.

  JACINDA GREENWOOD

  ON THE DAY of her birth, he’s working with his phone set to silent, a particulate mask strapped over his face and hearing protection clamped tight over his ears. He’s sanding a slab of expensive Douglas fir that he’ll install in some Brooklyn yoga studio or some corporate office in Manhattan, the drone of his orbital sander nearly erasing the oddly similar drone of guilt in his head.

  A week later, Liam still hasn’t replied to Meena’s initial text, sent to announce their child’s existence, when he receives another of her texts, this one telling him that she’s selected a name: Jacinda, after a kind girl Meena once knew in school. She also surprises Liam by revealing that she’s given their child Greenwood as a surname. Meena says she has a few male cousins already carrying the Bhattacharya name forward, and she found it too tragic and unfair that Liam’s surname should die off completely. Even when performing a musical piece, Liam thinks, Meena has always hated endings.

  Despite his efforts to banish his daughter’s very existence from his mind through constant toil and a strict regimen of deliberate forgetting, Meena often texts him pictures documenting Jacinda’s early years. A little black-haired girl grabbing at her feet or smearing paint or chasing pigeons, images that Liam always views with half-averted eyes, the way one might glance at an eclipse. He keeps the photos on his phone, though he never prints them out. And now that his phone has been smashed, those photos are gone.

  She must be three by now.

  Which means she’s already lived a thousand days without him. A thousand days he could have come home with his hands full of splinters, but not too many to prevent him from picking her up and swinging her high enough to brush the ceiling. A thousand mornings his daughter has woken and he hasn’t been there to witness those thick lashes open like wildflowers; a thousand nights he’s failed to read her a story and then watch them close once more.

  Liam remembers George Nakashima once writing about how in a traditional Japanese family, a paulownia tree is planted immediately after the birth of a daughter. It’s a species that grows rapidly, and by the time the girl has matured and is ready to leave home, the tree is likewise ready to be harvested for its wood. The handsome, fine-grained boards that it yields are shaped into an ornate chest, inside which the grown girl will store her kimono. For this reason, the paulownia is known as the empress tree, and the most shameful mistake he’s made in all his life, Liam now admits bitterly, is that he never planted one for Jacinda.

  He pulls a three-inch woodscrew from the pocket of his Carhartts and begins to scratch some letters into the concrete floor beside him. When was the last time he’d written anything that wasn’t with his thumbs on his phone, something that wasn’t spelling-assisted? He takes great care to get the words down right and arranged in the correct order.

  To reduce the chance of making a mistake, he keeps it brief:

  EVERYTHING I OWN TO JACINDA GREENWOOD. WITH LOVE, YOUR FATHER

  He takes his time, retracing the words again and again with the screw’s tip to carve them deep and ensure their legibility. He wishes everything meant more than it does: his meagre cash savings, a plot of worthless farmland in Saskatchewan, a stack of poetry records, his arsenal of tools, and his work van, all of which must total something in the neighbourhood of fifty grand.

  In one of Meena’s most recent texts, she mentioned that Jacinda is bright, and can already identify letters and animals, and that she loves trees most of all. So perhaps she’ll use his money for her educatio
n—which is no empress tree, but it’s something.

  I’m not ready to die, he first thinks, then whispers aloud, then shouts, the words reverberating in the sparsely decorated room without a scrap of carpet to dampen them. The sound makes him feel minuscule, no bigger and no more consequential than the screw clutched in his fist. And after that, a series of doors begin to close in his head. Never will he know the stories that Temple and his mother whispered about on the porch. Never again will he taste the bitterness of oxycodone or watch fresh wood shavings fly from a lathe or smell a rhubarb pie baking. Never will he ride with his mother in her van, or walk with her through the tall trees. Never will he hear Meena play her viola while she’s wearing pajamas in the kitchen. Never will he feel his daughter’s warmth against his chest. And never will the story be told in full.

  Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built. And there is something to that. It’s not enough. But it’s what he’ll take with him.

  Through the ensuing dim and delirious hours, he consoles himself with hazy imaginings of people sitting with their coffees at his counters to talk and complain about those they love. People leaning against his bars to drink beer after beer, confiding desperately into one another’s ears. A little black-haired girl with thick lashes sitting at one of his tables, eating a piece of carrot cake as her mother looks on, the girl’s muddy shoes swinging beneath her as she talks about trees.

  PROPORTEE OF WILLO GREENWUD

  ON THIS FOGGY Monday morning, Jake’s group of Pilgrims consists of a Dubai-based solar panel tycoon, a celebrity chef hailing from what remains of Las Vegas, two teenage girls from China, thin as sheaves of grass, and the entire Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. Jake is already halfway through her tour, but they have yet to ask a single question, and their eyes have been glued to their phones with greater fixation than usual. Jake doesn’t blame them: even she can tell that her speeches so far have been flat and uninspiring, perhaps because she stayed up late again last night. But if she doesn’t turn things around, and quickly, the Pilgrims will give her poor ratings, and if her average dips below three leaves out of five, Davidoff will have no choice but to fire her.

  “You’re currently standing among the highest concentration of biomass anywhere on the planet,” Jake says with renewed enthusiasm, desperate to win them back. “Each tree is its own symphony of cellular perfection, one of the most magnificent and elegant creatures that has ever graced the biosphere. Deserving of all the mythology and the faerie tales and the holy buildings. Not to mention all that godawful poetry,” she says, relieved to see her joke momentarily pry their eyes from their phones. A few of them even smile. “Over time,” she goes on, “the lateral roots of these Douglas firs fuse together. And this is how these trees share resources and chemical weapons among their neighbours. There are no individuals in a forest. In fact, it behaves more like a family.”

  That last bit about family appears to genuinely move them (particularly the hockey players). Eager to keep the momentum going, Jake leads the group into a nearby riparian area, while carefully avoiding the boundary where the true old-growth ends and the lesser trees of the once-burned half of the island begins. Here she expounds upon the importance of water to all life, which invites a few questions that Jake answers easily. When the celebrity chef claims he’s hypoglycemic and needs to eat or he’ll pass out, Jake coaxes the Pilgrims to the picnic area where their catered lunches await. As they dig into their handmade clay bowls of artisanal pork and beans, Jake wolfs down a granola bar and uses the lull in activity to pull the paperbook from her pack. She is calmed instantly by the familiar purple-stained cracks in its cover and the fine dust that continues to shake from its binding, even after weeks of her constant handling.

  Though the journal’s cursive script was initially difficult for Jake to decipher, she finally made her way through to the end after two weeks of trying. And once she got the hang of the looping hand and the antiquated punctuation, Jake’s immediate second and third readings required mere days each. And now, after her tenth time through, she can read it with such fluency that it’s almost as if she’d written it herself.

  Contrary to what the misspelled inscription suggests, the journal’s entries weren’t written by her grandmother Willow Greenwood, but by an unnamed pregnant woman during the Great Depression. The woman was being kept by a rich man she refers to only as “RJ,” who had agreed to adopt her baby once it was born. Though she wrote mostly about simple things—the walks that she took among the snowy maples, the fine meals that the cook prepared for her—woven into her descriptions are moving observations on many subjects, mostly concerning her fears. Her fear that the economy will never recover from the Crash, and that people are too short-sighted and selfish to survive. Her fear that the Dust Bowl will make its way to where she is, and harm her baby once it’s born. Her fear of RJ and how he’ll ruin her life if she somehow displeases him. Her fear of wasting her intellectual gifts at a meaningless, underpaid janitorial job. But despite all her fears, Jake hears hopeful whispers in the spaces between her words. Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.

  Like the author of the journal, Jake knows what it means to struggle and to be afraid: she fears her ever-ballooning student debt, her plummeting Forest Guide approval rating, and the fact that her period is late. Her stomach has been cramping lately, even though she’s been careful to avoid dairy—especially the dining yurt’s infamous Creamy Potato Stew. Yesterday, she asked one of the younger female Forest Guides what she knew about the Cathedral-supplied IUDs, only to learn that they stop emitting hormones around year four: the exact vintage of Jake’s. So she should probably admit that her night with Corbyn Gallant was more consequential than intended and add an unwanted pregnancy to her heap of worries. Except she can’t risk getting tested by the Holtcorp doctor, because a positive result will mean her temporary banishment from the island, at least until she has her child. Then she’ll have to somehow scrounge up the money to pay someone to care for her baby when she returns to work, which will set her debt-repayment plan back years. And that’s assuming they’ll hold her job for her and not give it to the next eager Forest Guide recruit waiting in line.

  Her last remaining hope is that Silas is right, and she is legally entitled to lay claim to Greenwood Island. But whether his scheme works or not, at least she’s had the chance to read the journal, along with the index card outlining her family history that Silas’s researchers prepared. She keeps both of these in the cardboard box of her father’s inexplicable heirlooms, along with his unlabelled poetry records, his woodworking tools, and his work gloves. Prior to Silas’s visit, the idea of studying one’s family history always seemed to Jake like the favoured pastime of narcissists, people seeking to either establish or shore up their own self-perceived greatness. She’d grown so accustomed to living with no family wisdom to consult, no stories to recount, no memories to share, no legacy to carry on. She’d spent an entire life in this drifting state, floating as a seed does. But only now is she starting to understand how good it can feel to be rooted.

  “What about those trees over there?” says one of the hockey players as Jake leads them past the old-growth after lunch. “They look huge.”

  “Oh,” Jake says briskly. “Well, those tre
es are equally significant as the stands I showed you earlier.”

  In the month since she first spotted the two firs with browned needles, Jake has made several after-hours attempts to study them, only to be turned back by a patrol of Rangers each time. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that she finally managed to reach the afflicted firs, set her rainfall meters, and take a series of soil samples from around the trees. And since her findings indicated that the rainfall has been adequate and the surrounding soil is rich with nutrients, the only potential cause left to consider is something biotic. But she found no evidence of bacterial pathogens or fungal infestations in the tissue. Still, she’s been avoiding the trees during her tours, just in case one of the more observant Pilgrims spots the browning and sounds the alarm.

  “Excuse me, we’re here to see the big, beautiful trees?” one of the Chinese girls interrupts with painful politeness, pointing at God’s Middle Finger. “And those trees are biggest?”

  “We want them,” her companion adds, nodding solemnly.

  “Sure,” Jake says. “Of course.”

  Jake escorts the group along the bark-mulched trail, her eyes cast downward, watching her thighs alternately rise and fall inside her Cathedral-issue shorts. She brings them to a halt, and when the time comes for her canned speech, she’s forced to lift her gaze. “This 230-foot titan was already 150 feet tall when Shakespeare sat down and dipped his quill to begin writing Hamlet,” she says with all the enthusiasm she can muster, as the other half of her mind examines the diseased trees. While the needle-browning hasn’t changed, it’s immediately clear that the soggy bark has spread, and now afflicts five trees in total. Even God’s Middle Finger appears compromised. She notes several places where the colossal tree’s bark has pulled away, revealing something growing on the tree’s nutrient-rich cambium, its tissue as slick and deep black as a dog’s gums. And higher up, pileated woodpeckers have punched numerous holes in the softened bark, around which beetles and ants are swarming. The tree is being plundered, Jake realizes with horror, like a thousand-year-old museum with all its precious antiquities flying out the door.