Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  She rests and drinks some water, then crawls over to the stump’s edge, removes her gloves, and touches just a few of its 1,200 rings, which are already weeping a rich sap, thick as tar. She begins at this year’s growth, the cambium, and counts backward to the ring that grew the year she first arrived at the Cathedral, which is not even an inch from edge. Next, she finds the year the Great Withering began. Then the year she earned her Ph.D. Then she indexes back an inch to the year her mother died. Then her father. Next, she finds her own birth year. Then, at least according to Silas’s researchers, the year her grandmother Willow and Everett Greenwood both died. Then Harris Greenwood. She passes over the drought of the thirties, easily identified by five rings thinner and darker than the others surrounding them, until she arrives at the charred ring of the great fire on Greenwood Island, which was also the year Willow was born and the same year Euphemia Baxter wrote the last entry in her journal. Here Jake stops. She hasn’t even moved eight inches from the edge, and there are still about six feet left before she reaches the centre.

  Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten per cent of its tissue—the outermost rings, its sapwood—can be called alive. All the rings of inner heartwood are essentially dead, just lignin-reinforced cellulose built up year after year, stacked layer upon layer, through droughts and storms, diseases and stresses, everything that the tree has lived through preserved and recorded within its own body. Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors. And since the journal came to her, Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that came before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.

  She’s always secretly believed that everything we do is somewhere recorded—whether this record could ever be read does not really matter. Just that it is kept is enough. And here, perhaps, in this stump, she’s found it.

  While preparing to cut down the next diseased tree, she spots a fir sapling growing on the north side of the stump, a seedling that is quite probably the child of the giant she just felled. Jake scoops up the tiny tree in a handful of dirt and re-plants it in the most opportune spot: dead centre in the patch of sunlight that is now reaching the forest floor for the first time in almost a thousand years, all thanks to the gaping hole that God’s Middle Finger has left in the canopy. And for a moment Jake stands perfectly still, envisioning the towering juggernaut of timber that the seedling might become, in a mere five hundred years or so.

  “Good luck,” she says.

  HBL

  WITH HER FOREST Guide uniform furry with sawdust, Jake arrives at the door of Villa Twelve. When her knocks go answered, she tries the door and finds it unlocked. Inside, she hears Silas humming in the shower, and waits for him on the sofa. At rest, she realizes she’s still shaking, the chainsaw’s vibration caught somehow in her joints and nerves. She’d cut down the remaining four trees and left them where they fell, because the Cathedral staff will surely limb and burn them the second they’re discovered, mainly to protect the Pilgrims from being traumatized by the sight. Still, the fire will eradicate the fungus. That’s the hope, anyway. But she heard voices calling out from the forest as she was leaving, which means the Rangers must have heard her chainsaw or felt the tremors of the trees coming down. No doubt they’re already scouring the Cathedral for the cause of the disturbance, and once they find the stumps and the chainsaw she left behind, a quick check of the logbook will tell them she’s responsible. She doesn’t have much time.

  Jake goes to the kitchen island and pours herself a hefty bourbon. After weeks of restraint during her pregnancy scare, the drink slips easily down her throat. She spots Silas’s phone resting on the counter and nearly picks it up. She’d like to call Knut and inform him that she’s completed the job he started and the island’s trees now have at least a sliver of a chance, but she has no idea where he’s gone.

  “Tell the truth, Silas,” she announces tipsily when he finally steps from the bathroom in a forest-green Cathedral-branded bathrobe. “They’re going to do genetic tests, aren’t they?”

  His eyes widen momentarily. “Once we make our filing,” he says, after his shock passes, “you’ll likely attend a kinship hearing. A mere formality. But sure, a genetic test could be ordered by the judge. However, old R.J. wasn’t quite prescient enough to set aside any genetic samples. So there will be nothing for them to compare yours to. And I can assure you that the last thing our legal team will allow is any kind of excessive or intrusive testing of your genetic material.”

  “I’m not a Holt, Silas,” she says before taking another long drink. “Anyone who has actually read the journal could tell you that.”

  “I don’t really care if you are a Holt, or a Greenwood, or the prime minister’s cousin, Jake. This is not a criminal court we’ll be facing. All we need to do is prove that you are plausibly a descendant of R.J. Holt, and it’ll be enough. Just some useful ambiguity is sufficient, and I expect our magnificent journal will create exactly that. These days, a real, authentic paperbook can convince people of almost anything.”

  “If R.J. was such a serial sleazeball,” she continues, “why haven’t you discovered other ‘accidents’? Why weren’t there children with his wife? No doubt they tried. Men like that love an heir. And besides, Euphemia had visitors other than him.”

  “I thought scientists are supposed to reserve judgment,” he says, nudging the bottle of bourbon out of her reach. “And yes, Euphemia mentions other visitors, including this HBL. But let’s not cherry-pick facts and rush to any hasty conclusions. Why are you covered in sawdust?”

  “I cut down some diseased trees,” she says before draining her glass and stretching for the bottle to pour herself another. “It needed to be done.”

  His forehead crinkles, but he remains unfazed. “I’m sure you were right to do that. You’re the expert. Now look, I’m not here to pressure you. If you’re not quite ready to go through with it, just return the journal to me, and you can contact us as soon as you’d like to proceed. You did bring it, didn’t you?” Silas gives her a frozen, faintly panicked smile, like someone posing for a photo he doesn’t want to be in. He holds out his soft hand for the journal, as if she owes it to him, as if it could ever mean more to him and his firm than it does to Jake.

  The bourbon has hit Jake hard and things are already happening too fast. Davidoff knows that Jake has visited Silas here at Villa Twelve once before, so the Rangers could burst in at any minute. But at least she’s found a way to save Euphemia’s journal from vultures like Silas. She takes another belt while holding his eyes. “I burned the journal,” she says coldly. “This morning.”

  A muscle twitches repeatedly somewhere just beyond his mouth, and two red patches appear on his neck. “You did what?”

  “It was mine to burn.”

  “Including the”—he walks over to the sofa and begins pacing around it—“slipcase?”

  She nods. Then she laughs nervously, a single burst, a noise she realizes might come across as insane.

  For a man who specializes in adaptation, in poise, in adjusting his beliefs to the shifting circumstances of a shifting world, Silas is rattled. “Okay, you burned it. You burned it?” He rubs his face with both hands. Then he shouts, “Like completely burned it?”

  “To a crisp,” she says.

  “All right,” he says, tying and retying his robe while he paces. “That’s okay. Of course it’s not fucking okay!” he shouts again. “But it happened. We do have scans on file, all verified by notaries, but this still seriously damages our case, Jake. Just the optics are awful. And personally, this hurts because we have a history and I went out on a limb and entrusted the journal to you. I don’t know how my firm will react when I tell them. I might not be able to shield you from further litigation, and frankly, I’m not sure I want to.”

  “The i
nscription said Proportee of Willo Greenwud, Silas—that will show up in all your scans. That means it was mine, legally. And if your firm has a problem with that, they can sue me. I’ve got tons of money,” she says sarcastically, setting down her empty glass.

  At this, Silas seems to collect himself, and begins to speak with the false, parental empathy she always loathed: “Jake, you’ve had a long day and too much to drink. All of this can be worked out tomorrow.” He goes to the kitchen and picks up his phone from the counter. “Here, I’ll have them make up the Villa’s guest room.” As he thumbs the screen, she creeps up behind him and sees him call up the button that summons the Rangers in case of an emergency.

  She bats the phone from his grip and it clatters to the tile floor. Then she stomps on it with the heel of her boot and makes for the door. And for the final time, Jake Greenwood abandons Silas for the trees.

  CATHEDRAL PROPERTY

  THEY FIND HER at dawn the next morning, tucked behind a decomposing nurse log, among the lesser stands of the once-burned trees that surround the staff cabins. Her face is pasted with dropped cedar needles that smell of grapefruit when crushed against her cheekbone.

  Jake’s dehydrated skull pounds with each tug and jostle as the Rangers lift her from the ground and lead her through the Cathedral, past trunks garlanded with moss, over thick black roots that surface from the ground like eels. Each of the five Rangers carries a small, snub-nosed machine gun that appears all the more terrifying for its diminutive size. At her staff cabin they stand sentry by the door while she removes her Forest Guide uniform and hangs it in her locker for the last time. Then she digs into the locker’s deepest recesses to unearth a garbage bag that contains the tattered pants and shirt she wore when she first arrived on Greenwood Island, dusty, starving, and broke. When she’s dressed she begins to pack Knut’s paperbooks, tucking the first-edition Muir and Linnaeus into her father’s cardboard box, along with the woodworking tools and the records of poetry that he left her.

  But the lead Ranger enters and speaks just as she’s about to lift the box. “This one is Greenwood Property,” he says, his accent from somewhere Jake can’t place. “You must leave it.”

  “No, no—‘Liam Greenwood’,” Jake says, running her finger along the words, trying to keep her tone under control. “It’s my father’s name, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the Cathedral.”

  With the barrel of his gun he points to the word Greenwood and says, “Cathedral property. You are allowed only what is yours.”

  It’s then Jake realizes that like so many of the Rangers—mostly war-ravaged souls flown in from the various dusty hellscapes around the world—this man likely can’t read, and can only recognize the G because he’s seen it so many times here at the Cathedral.

  Jake knows better than to embarrass him or make a scene, especially after what she’s done, so she clenches her jaw and kisses the box goodbye. Knut can get more books, and her father’s tools and strange records never held much significance for her anyway. She draws her hair back then pulls on her Leafskin jacket.

  “Also Cathedral property,” the Ranger says, now pointing at her coat with his gun.

  “The wind will cut right through me out on the open water,” she pleads. “Please, sir. It’s the only coat I have.”

  The Ranger glances at his comrades standing outside the door, none of whom are listening closely. He tightens his lips in what seems like a flash of pity and nods affirmatively. “Go,” he says.

  Outside they parade her past the row of staff cabins, then past the dining yurt, while being careful to avoid the Villas. Soon they reach the trailhead, where a small group of eager Pilgrims have already assembled to look at their phones and await their morning tours.

  Just as they reach the wharf, Jake spies a yellow paste floating on the surface of the waterfront hot tubs. At first she assumes it’s algae, a common flare-up at the Cathedral, brought in from other oceans on the bathing suits of their jet-setting guests. But Jake also notices a thin, yellow tint to the air. She’s dragged aboard the supply barge, which soon pulls back from the wharf, and it isn’t until she’s out on the bay that she can glimpse the thick, lemony haze, caught in the highest branches of the Cathedral’s trees, like a great yellow curtain drawn around their crowns. The trees are masting, she realizes—releasing their pollen together—more furiously than she’s ever seen before, and six months out of season. Most tree species only ever reproduce so vigorously when conditions are dire, when they’re stressed by disease or after they’ve been licked by wildfire or emaciated by drought. Whether they perform this reproductive gambit because they believe things will get better after the threat subsides, or they believe they have nothing left to lose now that everything has gone to hell, no researcher has been able to say for sure. But Jake can’t help but admire their optimism.

  She brushes off some of the fine powder that has clung to her coat and rubs it into her hands. After exchanging their genetic material through the wind-blown pollen, the trees will set their seed cones, which will eventually open and send seedpods whirling on single propellers to the forest floor—at the exact time they shouldn’t. Even under the best conditions, a minuscule percentage of Douglas fir seeds ever reach adulthood. And at the wrong time of year, the seeds will find the soil muddy and inhospitable. They’ll rot long before any can germinate. And after all that’s gone amiss for Jake in recent months, only now does her composure shatter at the thought of these trees expending their last reserves to release millions of propellers to the wind out of utter desperation. Tears prickle her face. She lowers herself to the deck so the crew of the barge won’t see her weep.

  THE GREENWOODS

  AN HOUR AFTER Greenwood Island recedes from view and the subsonic hum of the resort’s desalinator can no longer be heard from the barge, Jake stops sobbing. She’s dedicated her life to the study of the world’s great trees: the eucalyptus, the banyan, the English oak, the baobab, the Lebanese cedar, the yakusugi of Japan, the sequoia of northern California, the Amazonian mahogany—but it is the coastal Douglas fir of the Pacific Northwest that remains dearest to her. And since the day she first arrived at the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, she’s believed that she couldn’t possibly survive without its forest, or the island that—at least for now—sustains it. Yet of course she can. People can adapt to anything, as long as it is necessary. And though she’s been turned out of her Eden, she’s leaving with a story. Only a partial story, it’s true, but as far as she can tell, that’s the only type there is.

  Jake finds a secluded nook formed by the crates that the barge carries, tucking herself behind some bins of recycling and compost stacked head-high. She picks at the lining of her Leafskin coat with her fingertips, and from the hole she’s made she pulls the battered paperbook, nestled inside its slipcase. She removes the journal and sits leafing through its coal-blackened pages in the bracing sea air, hearing Euphemia’s voice, feeling the faint imprint her pen left in the paper a hundred years ago, like inverted Braille. Leafing. Why this expression, always? We make them human, Knut wrote. With our verbs.

  As she so often does, Jake lands on the journal’s final entry, the one in which Euphemia addresses her newborn child directly for the first time, and describes her decision to keep her, despite the Great Depression, her impoverished circumstances, and her previous agreement to give her up. And though Jake now knows that Euphemia may have inexplicably taken her own life soon after, the passage still offers Jake a tenuous strength with which to face her new life on the Mainland.

  After a few more hours, the barge nears Vancouver, and Jake lifts her eyes from the journal to behold the city. She remembers the excitement of first seeing this landscape after arriving from Delhi—this convergence of mountains and trees and ocean that charged her with such energy she couldn’t sleep for days. But so many of its great trees are gone now, replaced with climate-controlled towers of glass and steel. Even Stanley Park’s ancient cedars and firs have succumbed, just a few o
f them left to stand like green sentries beside the high-end housing developments that crowd the shoreline.

  The barge chugs into a ramshackle service wharf where other ships of industry are moored. The air is dusty and pungent and toxic, and already Jake yearns for the island’s soothing, coniferous scent. The barge captain approaches her and says that since they’re short on crew, they’ll pay her a small sum to help unload the cargo. Now that she’s lost her job, she’ll soon be defaulting on her student loans, so it would be good to have some cash in her pocket.

  Jake and some other crewmembers take up some plastic bins of recycling and carry them down the gangplank to the landing. For her next load, she’s about to pick up a large bucket of rank-smelling compost when the captain tells her to wait, before he quickly douses its contents with a jug of bleach.

  “Why do they do that? Add the bleach?” Jake asks one of the crew as they’re walking back up to the ship to fetch another load.

  The man grimaces at a large group of beggars, all children, huddled near the base of the ramp. “To keep those ones out of it,” he says warily.

  A half hour later the unloading is done and Jake receives her paltry payment. She pulls two empty wine bottles—perhaps one of them was the very bottle she shared with Corbyn, or the one she watched Silas drink—from the recycling bins, which are placed to await pick-up in a chain-link enclosure where the beggars can’t get them. Jake walks over to the group of children and shoves the bottles into one of the scuzzy plastic bags that dangle at their sides.

  “Thank you, Miss,” a child says in a raspy, dust-scoured voice, removing the bottles from the bag to carefully appraise their value. With the rags wrapped over the child’s face, Jake can’t accurately discern its gender or ethnicity. Indonesian perhaps, maybe Pakistani. The child’s exposed forehead is the same faint brown as her own.