Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “How much can you get for those?” Jake asks.

  “Not too much,” the child says protectively, clutching the bottles to its chest, as though worried that Jake is having second thoughts and may snatch them back.

  “Don’t worry, they’re yours,” Jake says, then glances at the bucket of bleached compost sitting nearby, which one of the ragged boys is now prodding with a coat hanger. “Maybe you can buy something to eat?”

  “We are lucky,” the child proclaims proudly. “The bleach does not soak all the way down. And the Greenwoods throw out many good things, Miss. They are very generous.”

  “You’re right, they throw out many things,” Jake says, and for a moment she recalls Silas speaking of the downtrodden masses who’ll butcher your family and loot your home without first asking you for a handout. “But I wouldn’t exactly call them generous.”

  “You are generous and you are one,” the child says, pointing to the Cathedral’s stylized logo on Jake’s Leafskin jacket.

  Jake touches the silkscreened logo with her fingers and smiles. “Not anymore. Still, you’re right. I was a Greenwood once,” she says. “But do you have anyone here? A family? Or if not here, then somewhere?”

  “No, Miss,” the child says with downcast eyes, then points to the other beggars with a brightened expression. “But I have them.”

  In an instant, Jake pictures herself enfolding this child in her arms and carrying it away from this squalid wharf—though the sudden desperation of the urge also frightens her. Because what child could possibly want Jake to rescue it? And how could she ever hope to care for another human being properly? She’s broke. With no family support-network and no partner. She drinks too much. And once she declares bankruptcy, her life will downshift into a whole new gear of squalor.

  The child’s life with Jake would be a painful and low existence: hunger, dust, and discomfort, maybe even rib retch. In truth, she’d be a terrible guardian, and would probably leave the child worse off than it is now.

  And yet. If she did take the child in, maybe they could track down Knut. He of all people would know whether there’s an arboretum somewhere, a sanctuary where at least some of the Earth’s great tree species have been preserved—probably funded by some tech magnate with a God complex, no doubt, but still. There, Jake could watch the child marvel at the banyan, the eucalyptus, the oak, the monkey puzzle, and the sequoia. And over time, after they’d put together the shards of the child’s own story as best they could—including how the child had ended up here on this wharf, eating bleached food and picking through refuse—Jake would tell the child the story of the Greenwoods, at least what little of it she knows. She’d speak of her great-grandfather the lumber tycoon. Her great-uncle the kidnapper. Her grandmother, who’d given away a fortune on principle. Her father, who’d built beautiful things for the richest people in the land. And when the child was old enough, Jake could even let it read Euphemia’s journal, which would be like their family album, the text that bound them together.

  And someday, when things got a little better and they had saved up some money, Jake would return with the child to this wharf to show it where they first met. And from here they’d hire passage to Greenwood Island, if it hadn’t yet been swallowed by the rising sea, and they’d stay in the cabin Harris built. And even if the Withering had already killed off all the island’s Douglas firs, Jake would teach the child about them anyway.

  If history were itself a book, this era would surely be the last chapter, wouldn’t it? Or have all ages believed this? That life can’t possibly go on and that these are the end times? At the height of the Great Depression, Euphemia wrote about a society that couldn’t possibly continue. Still, things did go on. And on. And on. Years piling on years. Layers upon layers. Light and dark. Sapwood over heartwood.

  “Would you like me to buy you something to eat?” Jake asks.

  “Yes, Miss,” the child replies skeptically. “But please, I need to be back soon for the next barge.”

  Jake agrees and takes the child’s soot-blackened hand in hers, which is still dusted with lemony fir pollen, and they start out from the wharf to make their way into the city. What if a family isn’t a tree at all? Jake thinks as they walk in silence. What if it’s more like a forest? A collection of individuals pooling their resources through intertwined roots, sheltering one another from wind and weather and drought—just like Greenwood Island’s trees have done for centuries. And even if Euphemia Baxter isn’t Jake’s great-grandmother, and Harris Greenwood isn’t her great-grandfather, and even though she’s never even laid eyes on her father Liam or her grandmother Willow—they’re all Greenwoods. And they’re all with her, embedded in her cellular structure; if not a part of her family tree, then part of her family forest. And no one knows better than a dendrologist that it’s the forests that matter.

  What are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason? And like all stories, families are not born, they’re invented, pieced together from love and lies and nothing else. And through these messy means, so too might this poor, destitute child become—for good and for ill—a Greenwood.

  THE SECRET & PRIVATE THINKINGS & DOINGS OF EUPHEMIA BAXTER

  TODAY, DURING MY WALK, I saw a man in the trees.

  The doctor advised against leaving my bed, but I felt strong enough & I left you sleeping in your crib & ventured alone into the maple forest that surrounds the estate. The woods were locked with frost & the spring air was frigid & because RJ won’t allow me a jacket or shoes, I borrowed the housekeeper’s. It was my first outing as a mother & even the ground felt altered beneath my feet, a little more wondrous, yet also a little less forgiving. But the forest seemed to welcome me & I was soon filled with cheer.

  If the man in the trees hadn’t been tapping a nail into one of the maples, I would never have noticed him. He was bearded & looked destitute & almost half-tree himself. But I saw goodness in the careful way he hung a bucket from the nail & in the gentle pace with which he moved. He didn’t appear much of a talker, so I left him undisturbed.

  RJ would be furious if he knew someone was living on his property, so of course I’ll say nothing. He’s visiting tomorrow & will meet you for the first time. I must remember to hide this journal before he arrives. To him, its very existence is an affront. He mistrusts books. & private journals he mistrusts even more.

  Though it embarrasses me to say it, I want to be a writer like Virginia Woolf. What would that sort of rapture feel like? To have words overtake you? To have them run in your veins like quicksilver, faster than your own blood? Unlike RJ, HBL likes my writing. Often he tells me that I can do whatever I set my mind to & I hope he’s right. I’ve asked him to bring me shoes & a coat tonight when he visits & he said he would. He’s an anguished soul, but he’s also kind. He’s like me, in many hidden ways. A person with more burdens than choices, with more love than places to put it.

  For so long I’ve felt as though my life were a seed that the soil of the world refuses. The Crash is to blame, at least partially anyway. Everything is fraying & falling apart. It’s all everyone at the bank used to talk about. None know why the Crash happened, just that it suffocates & disfigures. & though people are prepared to work, there is no work. & even here, so near to the ocean, the sky occasionally clouds with dust. I worry that the green & growing things have abandoned us for good & that the dust is all that we deserve.

  In my time, I have worked & worked & worked & still I’ve got nowhere. Even when I was a girl, hope was something I’ve always been short on.

  But somehow, you’ve afforded me some. Perhaps because a world with you in it feels fundamentally richer. Though it’s you who will face the bleakness of the future, not me. A future that’s no longer better than the past. So I suppose this is also an apology.

  Still, there’s a cherry tree in full blossom outside my window & I talk to it. During your birth, I counted the blossoms while the doctor wore that wo
rried expression & I was losing blood & felt my body creeping towards death. & now every time the wind blows through its blossoms I see you in the shimmer.

  After I left the man in the trees, I decided something: I’m going to keep you.

  I thought I couldn’t. But that has changed.

  I don’t care how little money I have. I don’t care how bleak things look. I don’t care who your father is. I don’t even care that I’m your mother. I do not want you because you are mine. I want you because I am yours.

  RJ will be livid & I will certainly lose my apartment & my job & maybe worse. But HBL will help me. I can be stubborn when I make up my mind. Just ask your grandparents, if they are still alive when you read this.

  You are sleeping now. You’ve sapped my energies, though this is to be expected. What are our energies for, except to be sapped? I’ve rolled you in a bolt of brocade cloth that I bought in a charity shop. & though I always hated needlework, tonight I will suffer some hours on your behalf & stitch you a blanket from the cloth myself. You should have at least one thing that RJ hasn’t bought.

  I must lay down my pen for now. I am still light-headed & sore from your birth & from walking & can sit no longer. I promise to take the pen up again tomorrow & finish these thoughts, if they can be finished. My only hope is that this journal will explain things. & that you, when you are old enough, will read this & perhaps grasp my truest, guiding intentions. That my principal aim is to be worthy of you. As soon as I’m ready, we’re going to leave this place. Together. If they attempt to stop us, we will flee into the forest. It will be a long walk from here into town. But I am strong & you give me courage & a forest has always been the best place for a person to escape into.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY THANKS TO Bill Clegg, whose belief in this book was the scaffolding that made its construction possible.

  My deep gratitude to Alexis Washam and Jillian Buckley at Hogarth for their insight and their dedication. And a special thanks to Anita Chong at McClelland & Stewart, who has been my champion for so long and who helped me tell this story, ring by ring, branch by branch, and leaf by leaf.

  Thanks also to Jared Bland, Joe Lee, Ruta Liormonas, Melanie Little, Jennifer Griffiths, Shaun Oakey, Francis Geffard, Simon Toop, David Kambhu, Marion Duvert, Henry Rabinowitz, Griffin Irvine, Lilly Sandberg, Molly Slight, Henry Rosenbloom, Marika Webb-Pullman, Alexander MacLeod, Benji Wagner, Alex Craig, Arnie Bell, Jackie Bowers, Naomi Brown, and Claire and Martha Christie.

  Greenwood owes its inspiration to many other books. Here are some of them: The Tree by John Fowles; The Wretched of Canada: Letters to R.B. Bennett, 1930–1935, edited by Linda M. Grayson and Michael Bliss; The Great Depression by Pierre Berton; The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan; Hard Times by Studs Terkel; You Can’t Win by Jack Black; Beggars of Life by Jim Tully; Riding Toward Everywhere by William T. Vollmann; H.R.: A Biography of H.R. MacMillan by Ken Drushka; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans; Cabbagetown by Hugh Garner; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey; The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben; Tree: A Life Story by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady; Unchopping a Tree by W.S. Merwin; The Wars by Timothy Findley; How to Live in the New America by William Kaysing; Woodsmen of the West by Martin Allerdale Grainger; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; The Journal of Private Fraser by Donald Fraser, edited by Reginald H. Roy; The Soul of a Tree by George Nakashima.

  Much of this big novel was written in a little cabin on Galiano Island, and I would like to thank the people of this community for supporting me throughout. I’d also like to record my debt of gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts for their financial support.

  Thanks to my parents, who each left this world too early, and whose unsung sacrifices I’m only beginning to fathom. And to Jason Christie, the greatest brother and table tennis opponent I could ever ask for.

  And lastly, thanks to Lake and August, whose lives have regenerated my own. And to Cedar Bowers, for what it would require an entire forest’s worth of paper to describe.