“If it worked,” he says, standing beside her and clasping her hand, “along with unimaginable wealth, you’d also gain a controlling interest in Holtcorp, which has been rudderless for years. Of course we expect the board will put up a fight, but even they will agree that a strong leadership presence could only enhance the company’s long-term stability. Plus, your educational qualifications are stellar, and your name alone will lend Holtcorp’s many eco-entertainment assets an added air of authenticity. You could do so much more than pay off your debt, Jake. Greenwood Island would be yours to do with as you please. Perhaps you could even save it.”
“From what?” she asks suspiciously. She doubts Knut alerted management to the fungus in his final rant, or that they would have believed him if he had. In the days since his banishment, Jake has been covertly applying an antifungal solution she prepared to the afflicted trees each afternoon during her tours, even though there’s been little sign of improvement.
“From further exploitation,” Silas says. “From the Pilgrims. From the Withering. From people like me. You could make things more equitable for everyone. Set up a proper laboratory. You could do research again. I know how much this place matters to you, Jake. Just think how much more it will mean to you once it’s yours.”
“But what if this plan fails and we’re denied our claim? I doubt Holtcorp will keep me on here after I’ve made a gambit like that. I’ll be banished.”
“I do this for a living, Jake,” Silas says, taking both her hands in his and fixing her with wide, imploring eyes. “And, like you, I’m good at what I do.”
“I’ll consider it,” she says, dropping his hands and heading for the door.
“What’s to consider?” he says, following her. “Do you know how much of the world Holtcorp controls? Its last valuation was two trillion. That’s tourism, security and firefighting services, solar, mining, desalination, resource development, and even asthma medication. You don’t need to play the noble, selfless scientist anymore. Not with wealth like that on the table.”
Freedom from her crushing debt. A possible cure for the fungus. A viable future for the child she might be carrying. A laboratory. “I said I’ll think about it. In the meantime, I’m holding on to this.” Jake dashes back to pluck the journal, still in its slipcase, from the coffee table.
“I’m not sure my firm will like that,” Silas says tersely.
“Well, I need to read it again before I make my final decision.”
A pained grimace comes over him, and in an instant she realizes just how valuable the paperbook actually is. Then he raises his palms in surrender. “Fine, take it,” he says with forced mirth. “More than anyone, I know better than to pressure you. The last time I did you moved to Utrecht and blocked my number.”
“I have one last question,” she says from the Villa’s doorway. “Why are you doing this? The research. The time investment. For money?”
“Yes—well, partly. There’ll be some for my firm, I admit it. But there’ll be an ocean for you. And you can well understand that making a company like Holtcorp happy is good for us, long term.”
“And here I thought you were trying to help me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Jake. Life is getting crueller with each passing day. Not even Canada is the oasis it once was. And if this Cathedral ever goes under, you’ll be cast out there to retch on dust in some treeless, sunbaked snakepit along with everyone else. And I don’t want to see that. We can’t change the world anymore, but if we’re smart, maybe we can preserve the best of it. And who better than you to do the preserving? So let me know. I’m booked in here all week. My door is always open.”
THE TREE ENTERTAINMENT BUSINESS
MIDWAY THROUGH DINNER the next day, Jake is summoned from the dining yurt to Davidoff’s office, where in a stern, exasperated tone he goes over the raft of online complaints about her that he’s received from Pilgrims over the past month. “It’s alleged that you’ve been deliberately ignoring certain sections of old-growth during your tours and that you’ve been delivering muddled and unenthusiastic speeches about the Cathedral’s natural features.
“And,” he continues, shaking his head and closing his dim eyes, “last night, you were observed by our security staff exiting one of the Villas after hours. Number Twelve of all places.”
My great-grandfather Harris Greenwood built that cabin so I can go there whenever I please, she wants to yell, but instead says: “I’m sorry, sir. I was meeting with a Holtcorp representative, and I forgot to clear it with—”
“I know it was that lawyer from Corporate who asked you over there, Jake, so I’m not going to punish you. But from now on, if he wants to meet with you he needs to schedule a private like everyone else. Is that clear?”
She nods and prepares to get up.
“But that’s not all,” he says with a grave expression, motioning for her to stay seated. “You’ve now officially dropped below a three-leaf online approval rating. So I’m going to need a very good reason for why I shouldn’t fire you.”
Jake feels her eyes pinch shut. “I’ve been having some family trouble, sir.”
Davidoff’s squat face takes on an unexpectedly sympathetic look. “Jake, with the exception of our young, trust-funded Forest Guides, all the Cathedral’s employees have us transfer a large portion of their paycheques home to families living in the various slums of the world—all except you and Knut. So I’m sorry, but the fact is you don’t have any people out there. Look, I know that you and the German were close. Honestly, I didn’t want to banish him, but he punched his own ticket with that stunt of his. Still, his leaving has nothing to do with why you of all people have been giving substandard tours. So I’m going to need a better explanation, or you can start thinking about joining him.”
For a moment, she indulges in imagining herself sitting behind Davidoff’s desk in his web-backed chair. First, she’ll shut the Cathedral down and send the Pilgrims home, let all the hiking paths grow over and allow the forest to regenerate properly. Then she’ll claim Villa Twelve for herself and her child. As Greenwood Island’s steward, she’ll renew her commitment to the study and protection of trees. No more mandatory selfies or inane Pilgrim questions. No more being grateful to Holtcorp for her job and her dismal staff cabin. She’ll be her own person again, with real, attainable hopes and dreams, just like a Pilgrim. And, most important of all, she’ll establish a lab in this very office and hire Knut back, along with the world’s brightest minds in dendrology, and together they’ll discover a cure for the Withering that will save the trees not only here, but everywhere.
“Remember that unusual browning I told you I noticed in some of the Douglas firs?” she says, feeling emboldened by her fantasy. “The ones you let me sign out research equipment to study? Well, it’s a fungus. One I’ve never seen before. And there are more affected trees now. Five in total. Including the island’s largest tree. This is the section I’ve been avoiding during my tours, for fear of the Pilgrims noticing.”
Davidoff holds her eyes as his face blanches. “And this could be Withering-related?” he says. “Potentially?”
“Given the current epidemiology, yes, I believe it is.”
He furrows his brow and massages his thick cheeks with his hands. “What do you propose we do?”
“I’ve already tried an anti-fungal preparation, and it didn’t make a dent. Our only option is to cut the diseased trees down and burn them. Immediately. That’s exactly what Knut was attempting to do—and he was right. It’s the only action we can take to stop the fungus and prevent, or at least slow, its spread across the entire island.”
Davidoff laughs. Then he sits there blinking at her, looking horrified once more. “The Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral is in the tree entertainment business, Jake. Can you imagine what Corporate would say? The chainsaws roaring at breakfast? Cathedral staff willingly cutting down and burning ancient trees just because some needles have browned and some bark has chipped off? All whi
le Pilgrims take videos? With their phones? The publicity would be a disaster. We’d have to empty the resort—we’re talking millions in lost revenue. Corporate would crucify us.”
“If we don’t,” she says, “there will be nothing left within five years.”
Her boss sits silent for a moment, staring at the pens on his desk. “You know,” he begins in a confidential tone, his voice husky with emotion. “I have two little girls. Nine and five. Back in Oklahoma. There, the dust comes in through the window casings and under the doors, no matter what my wife does to keep it out. Both my daughters wheeze so bad from asthma they need daily steroid injections—injections that cost me half of what I earn here. We can’t afford visas for them to come to Canada, even though I’ve been in the country for years. And make no mistake: if we tell Corporate about this fungus, Jake, you and I will lose our jobs, and I don’t know what will happen to my daughters then. So what we’re going to do is keep this between us, and we’re going to ride this out. Like you said, these things spread slowly. Five years is a long time. Who knows if the Cathedral will even be around by then? Either you agree to keep this a secret, or I’m banishing you right now. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear, sir,” she says, before Davidoff dismisses her.
As Jake starts back to her cabin through the forested dark, her thoughts circle what is now her only option: to claim Greenwood Island for herself, with Silas’s help. But she can’t keep herself from recalling Euphemia’s numerous mentions of a mysterious visitor, a large, hulking man she refers to only as “HBL”. She was fond of him, this man, who visited her throughout her pregnancy, and brought her paperbooks and the special pickles she was craving, and was the only one who ever encouraged her to become a writer.
So how can Silas be so sure that R.J. Holt is her great-grandfather, Jake wonders, when this HBL could also be? It’s as she’s flipping through the journal once more that she realizes Silas had read Euphemia’s entries as a lawyer, searching only for seams of opportunity and lines of attack, too blinded by self-interest to detect the complexities and undercurrents present in her words. Still, Jake has no choice now but to go through with it—whether she believes she’s related to R.J. Holt or not.
Just after she’s made her decision, she’s surprised by the faint ache she feels at the thought of shedding her father’s name, this curious word she’s worn so uncomfortably her whole life, with so little connection to those who’d borne it before her. A name that to her fellow Cathedral employees has been nothing more than a symbol of her family’s fall from grace. But she’ll grit her teeth and cast it off and declare herself a Holt, and take command of this island and its trees. Though in the back of her mind she knows they can’t possibly belong to anyone. Not really.
BRUSH CLEARANCE
THERE IS NOTHING more quieting than an ancient tree.
It commands reverence, the way a tightrope walker stills an audience far below; the way a church soothes even the non-believers who venture within it. And here at the foot of God’s Middle Finger, Jake Greenwood removes the Husqvarna chainsaw from its orange plastic case, reverently, as she imagines her mother might have once produced her viola, or her father one of his more refined woodworking tools. She handled her share of chainsaws during her research days, taking core samples in northern Sweden, felling fire-scorched black spruce in Northern Ontario, though she’s never before brought down a gargantuan tree like this, especially not on her own.
At the Maintenance Shed that morning, Jake was relieved to discover that she was still cleared by Davidoff to sign out equipment. After she signed her name and selected the Husqvarna and some other tree-falling supplies, in the box labelled “Purpose of Use” she wrote: BRUSH CLEARANCE.
Two hundred and thirty feet tall and thirteen feet wide at its base, God’s Middle Finger is a tree that her great-grandfather Harris Greenwood would have sent a small army of men to bring down. If they were logging it by hand, they would have first sunk springboards into its trunk to support them before they whacked at it for days with their sharp, double-bitted axes. But today, through the miracles of modern engineering, it’s a job that Jake and the Husqvarna can perform in thirty minutes, tops. Whether this is progress, she cannot say.
It’s Sunday, her day off, and the only day there aren’t any Pilgrims tromping through the old-growth groves. Sundays are also when the Cathedral’s groundskeeping crews start up dozens of leaf blowers to clear away the carpet of fir needles that have fallen throughout the week on the resort, and with all those engines roaring, hopefully the Rangers won’t hear what Jake is up to out in the forest. Still, she needs to be quick.
When her period came late last night, she was half relieved and half desolated to learn that there would be no new Greenwood to inflict upon this ruined world. That it would be just the holy trinity of Jake, the trees, and her debt, forever, as it’s always been. Perhaps her debt will be the closest she’ll ever get to having a family, the only entity that cares about her whereabouts and sticks with her through everything. But if there’s to be any hope for the future at all, she can’t cower and protect her security and her job like Davidoff suggested; nor can she wait the years that Silas’s scheme would take to play out in court. Knut was right: something must be done. Even if it’s just to buy the Cathedral’s trees a little more time before the Withering takes them.
So once again, Jake chooses trees above all else.
The wide-spreading roots of God’s Middle Finger support its mammoth trunk like the buttresses of a castle wall, so Jake needs to get herself above them, to where the trunk is narrower, if she’s going to have any chance of making her cut. Wearing her father’s unused work gloves, which seem fitting for such a task, she takes out a hammer and bangs in several iron spikes, four feet off the ground, to create numerous footholds for herself around the tree. With each strike, hundreds of wood-boring beetles and carpenter ants scurry from the cavities that the woodpeckers have drilled into the tree. While God’s Middle Finger has fought bravely to close its wounds, building up bark tissue around its many intrusions, the fungus has worked quickly and has eaten through the cambium and gnawed fatally deep into the layers of the tree’s heartwood. Now, all the cellulose and lignin it has stored over the centuries will be devoured from the inside, and though the tree may stand for a while longer, it can’t possibly survive.
When she gets her feet set on two of the spikes, she starts the saw, which catches on her second pull and roars like a jaguar, sending a tide of numbness up her arms that chatters her molars. She guns the engine and brings the long bar near the tree. Just before she lets the blur of the chain bite into the lichenous bark, she nearly yells out an apology. The scientist in her knows that the very moment she cuts into it, the doomed tree will begin transferring its chemical wealth into the soil for its neighbours to absorb. All its precious pesticides and antifungal compounds, all its nitrogen and phosphorous—donated by way of the fungal network that the forest shares, offered up as a kind of family inheritance, a final act of charity in the purest sense of the word.
This tree is older than the language I’m thinking in, she says to herself as she watches the saw split the bark, which is a foot thick. Still, she manages to detach a section about the size of a picnic table, revealing wood that is wet and black with fungus and teeming with bugs. She revs the saw and presses the chain into the trunk, plunging it in as deep as it will go. A blizzard of sawdust flies up into her face as the motor screams. It takes all her strength to keep the heavy machine from leaping out of her hands. After making two similar cuts, she kills the saw, then uses her sledgehammer to knock away from the trunk a piece of wood the size and shape of a small canoe. She leans back from the tree to admire her work, realizing that the tree appears to have cracked a massive grin. “You’ve always been a joker, haven’t you,” she says, marvelling at the hundreds of intricate rings of heartwood now made visible inside it.
But if she cuts any farther into the grin, the wood could give way and
pinch the chain, and the saw could kick back and kill her. So she steps gingerly on the spikes around to the back of the tree, then restarts the saw and makes her felling cut, leaving only a hinge of wood between this cut and the grin at the front. Into the new cut she hammers a plastic felling wedge. And after driving in a few more wedges, each one bigger than the last, she glances up to see the tree’s needled crown shiver, twenty storeys above the forest floor—four-hundred tons of wood balanced precariously above her, all of which grew from a nearly weightless seed.
“Come on, honey,” she says. “You’re sick. And it’s time to lie down.”
She hammers in her last and largest felling wedge; immediately there is a shattering crack, and the tree shudders all over like a dog that’s just climbed out of a lake. With agonizing slowness, it begins to tilt forward toward the grin, and she hears long wood fibres pulling then snapping like guitar strings through the trunk’s length with a series of shrill screeches. She jumps to the ground and backpedals as the great tree begins to crash faster and faster through the branches of its neighbours. It hits the earth with the force of a comet strike, and the ground rumbles beneath her boots and she nearly loses her footing. A blast of air flings the cap from her head and swirls her hair into her eyes. After the tree comes to its final rest, the forest rains needles and branches for a whole minute.
When the cascade stops, a silence like nothing she’s ever experienced replaces it. It’s as though the fallen tree has swallowed all sound, and she’s overcome by the feeling that something of great significance has just transpired, that an entire era has come to an end. After the feeling passes, she climbs atop the fresh stump to catch her breath. She still has four smaller trees to take down and already it hurts to lift her arms. The stump is large enough that she can lie at its centre with limbs spread like a starfish and still not touch its outer rings.
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