Thankfully, none of the Pilgrims notice, and after concluding her speech, Jake hastily sends them back up the trail and takes a quick tissue sample from the afflicted area of God’s Middle Finger. With a sick, sinking feeling, she rejoins the Pilgrims a minute later, and as they set off for the Villas, she strains to dispel the swirling globs of panic that now hinder her every breath.
She stops to pour water over her neck, scrubbing her sweaty face with her hand, watching a duo of ravens dogfight through the branches above. She’s reminded of a story Knut once told her of a region in northern Minnesota that was particularly hard hit by the Withering, where people woke late one night to the sound of hundreds of blunt objects striking the shingles of their roofs. When they ran outside, they saw that it was birds, of every size and species imaginable, falling from the sky like hail. It was later discovered that they’d been flying for months straight, and had flown themselves to death, searching in vain for somewhere to nest.
THEIR EQUAL
IT TAKES JAKE an hour of examining the latest samples under a microscope before she sees it. And even then, she isn’t exactly sure what it is she’s seeing: a haze of ghostly filaments that have woven between the xylem cells she took from God’s Middle Finger, replacing the lignin that normally gives them their structure. On closer inspection, and only after she strategically stains the tissue, she identifies the filaments as the fruiting bodies of a new species of fungus, one that’s flourishing between the cell walls. Whatever it is, the fungus is aggressive, and if the tree can’t make enough tannins to fight it off and the fungus manages to penetrate through the sapwood and into the heartwood, God’s Middle Finger won’t stand a chance.
Jake leans back in her chair and emits a pained sigh as despair courses through her body. What she’s dreaded for so long has finally occurred: the island’s local microclimate, which has shielded the Cathedral’s trees from the Great Withering, has shifted enough that the trees have become stressed and can no longer properly defend themselves against intruders. And if this follows the same epidemiology of other fungal blights brought about by the Withering, the fungus will spread, and all the island’s ancient trees, some of which have survived for a thousand springs and a thousand autumns, will perish.
If there were ever a time for bourbon, it would be now; but instead Jake brews a pot of mint tea and buries her head under a pile of blankets on the ratty loveseat that commands most of her staff cabin’s floor space. Sometime later there’s a knock at the door. When she opens it, Knut is standing there with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps dangling from his fist.
“You’ve been so busy lately, Jacinda,” he says as she invites him inside. “I’ve missed our evening conversations. You’re the only sane person on this island, you know.”
“Sorry, I quit drinking. And I haven’t really felt up to socializing lately,” she says, giving him a hug. “But I think you’re going to need one.”
After she pours Knut a glass of schnapps and herself a mug of lukewarm tea, she points to the microscope. “That slide is a sample of tissue I took from the trunk of God’s Middle Finger this afternoon.”
Knut grooms his mustache with his fingers and bends to the eyepiece with his other wrinkled lid pinched shut. While he looks, Jake relates the story of how she first noticed the browned needles and the soggy bark during one of her tours, and how she’s sorry that she kept it from him for so long. “But now I need your help,” she says in a tight, hopeless voice.
After another minute at the lens, Knut grimaces, straightens up, and drains his glass. “We will do something,” he says, his eyes fiery with conviction. “Tonight. Before it’s too late. Even though it may already be too late.”
“We’ll tell Davidoff,” she suggests, attempting to steer his usually rash thinking toward reason. “Management will launch an official investigation. They could shut the Cathedral down and let us do more tests.”
“Those Corporate snakes are only interested in protecting their investment, Jake,” Knut says with a sneer. “And Davidoff couldn’t even keep a Christmas tree alive past Boxing Day, let alone some of the most significant life forms remaining on this planet. No, these poor, sick trees must be brought down and then burned. Immediately. It’s the only hope to halt the spread of the fungus. And we need to do it ourselves.”
“Now?” Jake says. “Knut, the Rangers will hear our chainsaws.”
“We can do it together,” Knut says, putting his hands on her shoulders.
She feels her gaze sink downward. “I can’t lose this job,” she says, her voice wavering. “I’m too deep in debt. And I think I might be pregnant. So can we just press pause until we understand it a little better? We’ll do more experiments. Perhaps there’s an antifungal treatment we can prepare.” She doesn’t say that she’s terrified of getting banished to the Mainland, even with Knut at her side. He’s been at the Cathedral from the very beginning, and has no idea what it’s like out there: the dust, the firestorms, the squalor, the children choking with rib retch.
He hesitates, gears turning somewhere behind his eyes; then he reaches out to touch her chin, nodding solemnly. “You have a lot going on right now, Jake. I can understand that. We’ll do some more research. And when we’re done, we’ll decide on a proper course of action.”
After this is agreed, they sit on the loveseat and visit for a while longer. But their conversation is stilted, and Knut’s mind is elsewhere. Oddly, he hugs her a second time before he leaves, which is something he never does.
The next day, over lunch, she learns from the housekeepers that immediately after Knut left her cabin last night he snuck over to the Maintenance Shed where he forced the door, triggering the alarm. From the shed he took a long, tree-felling chainsaw and marched out with it into the dark forest like some knight off to vanquish a dragon. But a squad of Rangers rushed him before he even reached the old-growth. As they dragged him past the Pilgrims’ Villas, Knut unleashed his greatest jeremiad, a scathing critique of the Cathedral and its inherent absurdity and perversion, all while referring to himself as a “Tree Barista,” an incident that two Pilgrims recorded on their phones and posted widely.
Davidoff’s justice was swift and severe. The wharf workers say that Knut wept and tore at his hair when he was informed of his banishment. The Rangers dumped him along with all the recycling and compost bins on the very next Mainland-bound supply barge. They wouldn’t even let him take his collection of paperbooks, including his beloved first editions of Linnaeus and Muir, which Jake narrowly managed to rescue from his cabin before they were confiscated and burned along with the rest of his belongings.
Now it’s early Monday morning, and as she lies awake, listening to the groggy pre-dawn chatter of red crossbills and juncos, she fights to halt her alarm clock’s advancing digits with her mind. She isn’t sure she can stand another numbing day of Forest Guiding—especially now that she’s facing a possible pregnancy, and all the Cathedral’s trees are quite likely dying, and her only friend is gone.
When her alarm sounds, Jake rises and shuffles sluggishly to the locker where she keeps her uniform. Inside, she finds a note taped to the interior of the door. Knut must have put it there the night of his visit, while she went to the bathroom to check yet again if she’d got her period:
They stand. They reach. They climb. They thirst. They drop their leaves. They fall. You see, Jake? We make them human. With our verbs. But really, we shouldn’t. Because they’re our betters. Our kings and queens. (We gave them crowns, didn’t we?) And they are the closest things we have to gods.
You, however, Jacinda Greenwood, are their equal. – Knut
CONSANGUINITY
FOUR DAYS LATER, Jake hears from one of the maintenance guys that “her lawyer friend” has returned to the Cathedral. Silas invites her for drinks that evening at Villa Twelve, the very same Villa where she’d spent the night with Corbyn Gallant. Again, Jake dons her Pilgrim disguise and sneaks to the Villas through the cover of the trees.
Though the name Harris Greenwood remains foreign to her ear, Jake allows herself a twinge of pride as she again examines the fineness of the cabin’s woodwork, with its beautiful, honey-coloured fir beams, its great shelf of paperbooks, and its sense of oneness with the forest.
“Sorry I didn’t book you for another private this time,” Silas says. “But I figured it would be better if we spoke without the wonders of nature to distract us.”
He pours her some wine as thick as blackberry juice at the kitchen island, then brings it over to the coffee table. She can almost feel a magnetic pull between the edge of the glass and her lips, but leaves it untouched. Instead she sits on the sofa and extracts the battered journal from her pack and sets it on the coffee table.
“So you did manage to have a look at it?” Silas asks.
“I read it,” she says, nodding her head noncommittally, reluctant to let on how much the book has already come to mean to her, the depth to which it has taken root. “But I doubt you have. Because it definitely wasn’t written by my grandmother.”
Silas gives a wriggling smile, and she’s reminded of how he always hated to be told he’d made a mistake. “I never made any such claim!” he declares, joking unconvincingly. “Though now that you’ve familiarized yourself with it, I’ll tell you how the journal came to us. My firm specializes in intestate litigation—unresolved estates and unclaimed inheritances that have languished in trust accounts for years. For this purpose, we routinely acquire rare paperbooks from private collections: journals, ledgers, diaries, that kind of thing. This particular one came to us in the sixties—way before my time—from a rare book collector in North Dakota, who bought it from a farmer who claimed he found it one day out in his wheat field. Apparently, the book was discovered spread open in the dirt, just lying there, as though some fieldworker had been reading it and set it down for a moment. In fact, the collector who initially acquired it considered the journal a lost work of fiction—a precursor to The Bell Jar. After my firm purchased it, the journal sat in our collection for decades. Even though it was digitized in the 2000s, the phonetic spelling of your grandmother’s name inside the front cover didn’t trigger any of our search algorithms, which are primed for names of interest like Greenwood or Holt. It wasn’t until last year that an articling student of mine, who was conducting an inventory of our holdings, discovered this reference to your grandmother. Although the inscription was clearly added after the journal was completed, a deeper analysis of the text gave us good indication that the entries were made in Saint John, New Brunswick, which led us to speculate that the “RJ” named in the paperbook could in fact be R.J. Holt, the founder of Holtcorp. Our investigation stalled there, however, without concrete evidence to tie the file to any living person.
“That is, until the book was united with this,” he says, reaching into a carbon-fibre briefcase that looks bombproof and producing a slim, clothbound box, open on one side, into which he snugly slides the journal. “And then things got interesting.”
He holds up its spine for Jake to see:
THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER
Jake feels a galloping thrill at finally learning the woman’s name.
“This slipcase is the missing piece of the puzzle that I spoke about last time,” he continues. “We succeeded in borrowing it from an amateur researcher named Harvey Lomax III, who for years has been trying to track down information about his grandfather, Harvey Lomax Sr., a man who was once employed as R.J. Holt’s driver until he inexplicably went missing sometime in 1935. Harvey III made it his life’s project to locate his grandfather, a search which eventually led him to an archivist who’d collected artifacts from the Vancouver skid row hotels that were being bought up and gentrified during the great condo boom of the early 2000s.”
“Is that who owns the journal now?” Jake asks, already eager to get the journal safely back into her hands. “This Harvey Lomax III?”
“The slipcase, yes. The book, however, remains the property of our firm. Though we’ve reached an understanding with Mr. Lomax that if certain eventualities occur, he’ll be fairly compensated for providing this important piece of the puzzle.”
“Those ‘eventualities’ of yours still seem like a long shot to me,” Jake says skeptically, “even with the slipcase.”
“Well, here’s where it gets really interesting: Officially, in the spring of 1935, around the same time Harvey Lomax Sr. went missing, R.J. Holt’s infant daughter was kidnapped from his estate by your great-uncle, Everett Greenwood, a known vagrant and criminal who claimed to be a veteran of the First World War, although there’s zero record of his service. After an unsuccessful plot to milk Holt for the ransom money, and with the authorities closing in—this was all established in court—Everett holed up with the child right here on his brother Harris’s private island, in this very cabin. And after a firefight with Mountie officers—hence the bullets—he was captured, and subsequently admitted to disposing of the infant somewhere in this forest, a crime for which he would serve a thirty-eight-year prison sentence.”
“Charming,” Jake says. “No wonder the Cathedral never puts the island’s history on its brochures. But you said ‘officially.’ What about unofficially?”
“On closer examination, the whole story gets iffy. R.J. Holt was a known philanderer, and we can find no confirmation he ever had a child with his lawful wife. After further digging, my people found that a woman named Euphemia Baxter did work as a cleaner in one of Holt’s banks. We believe that Ms. Baxter had an affair with Holt, and that once she became pregnant, they made a deal for him to adopt her child. Yet there are no hospital records of the birth, and shortly after, Ms. Baxter’s body was found in the woods near the Holt estate. The cause of death was listed as suicide, except there was no formal investigation—because of Holt’s far-reaching influence, is our guess.”
Tears blur Jake’s eyes. For some reason, the news of Euphemia’s possible suicide hits her like an axe. She’d seemed so hopeful while writing her final journal entry. So alive and dedicated to her future.
“Coincidentally,” Silas goes on, oblivious to the story’s emotional impact on Jake, “she died the very same year that your grandmother, Willow Greenwood, was born to your great-grandfather Harris and an unnamed washwoman at one of his remote logging camps. Given his rumoured, and quite probable, homosexuality, I had my team pull Willow Greenwood’s birth certificate, and they discovered it contains many characteristics of a forgery, including a different typeface and paper stock than all others printed in British Columbia during that year. Leading us to suspect that the child was not Harris Greenwood’s at all, but the Holt infant your great-uncle Everett kidnapped and confessed to having disposed of in the woods. We believe that the child was adopted secretly by Harris Greenwood, who, to keep up appearances, claimed it was born to a washwoman who’d died during labour while in his employ.”
“Then why the hell would Everett Greenwood say he killed the child and spend forty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit?”
“Our only theory is that because Everett was reportedly illiterate and seriously shell-shocked, his wealthy brother—who was, by all accounts, as shrewd as he was ruthless—wanted a child to carry on his legacy, and duped his simple-minded brother into fetching him one.”
“What you’re saying is that my noble Greenwood ancestors were hobos, forest-destroyers, eco-terrori
sts, slave traders, and kidnappers—but not child murderers. That’s great, Silas. I feel so much better now that I have a ‘story to tell,’ as you put it.”
“It all matters more than you think, Jake. If this theory proves true, and your grandmother Willow Greenwood was the biological daughter of R.J. Holt—whether she arose from a lawful relationship or not—it means we could reasonably establish your own consanguinity with the Holt family tree. You see, R.J. Holt was predeceased by his spouse and siblings, and was survived by no immediate family. A genealogical search conducted at the time of his death found no viable heirs, and his intestate estate has since been held in a trust controlled by the province of New Brunswick.”
“So?” she says with mounting impatience.
“So all we have to do is file a legal challenge attesting your ancestral relationship to the decedent,” he says. “We’ll need to prove this connection to a judge, of course, but with the journal and slipcase united and entered together as evidence, we’ll have a more than robust case. Once you are established as the estate’s beneficiary, a number of related dividends and trusts, which have been accruing interest in Crown accounts for years, would flow to you. Your debt will be a thing of the past, Jake. You’ll be free.”
Suddenly, her great-grandfather’s cabin feels oppressively small and a slight pain has begun to pulse behind her eyes. “I’m still getting used to the idea of even having a family,” she says, rising from the sofa. “And now you’re hitting me with all this. It’s a bit much, Silas. I need to go for a walk to clear my head.”
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