Lomax finds more buckets hanging not far away, and follows their trail to a well-hidden clapboard shack that skulks amid some hawthorn bushes, walled in by a copse of ash. Outside the shack a goat lies dead in its pen, its protruding tongue as pink as candy floss. Inside, Lomax discovers little human imprint: a hefty woodstove—cold; some greasy cooking utensils. An archaic flintlock rifle. Rabbit snares. Sacks of cornmeal. No journal.
Despite its poverty, Lomax feels a stitch of envy at the hermit’s spare existence. Often, on days when his fatherly duties are particularly taxing, he’s imagined himself disappearing into just such a quiet, wooded place, free from both debt and responsibility. No wonder Greenwood is scrambling to rid himself of the infant. Anyone living this well has no need to spoil it with parenthood. Still, the absence of clothing and money suggests he’s left for good. Surely he’s running by instinct, too ignorant to grasp that he hasn’t done anything illegal.
Knowing he can no longer keep his employer in the dark, Lomax trudges back through the woods and drives to Mr. Holt’s mansion in the city, where he finds him in his drawing room, drinking brandy and frowning at the financial papers. When Lomax tells him about a baby found in the woods by a hermit who has now very likely skipped town, Mr. Holt leaps to his feet.
“And you think this baby could be my child?”
“It could, sir. It was found on your property the morning after Euphemia went missing.”
“And the journal? Does he have it?”
“That has yet to be determined. But it’s been reported he does.”
Now Mr. Holt reaches up to rest both of his fine-smelling hands squarely on Lomax’s shoulders. “If you return them to me—my child and this journal—then the entirety of your mortgage on that nice little brick bungalow of yours will be wiped clean, Mr. Lomax. You have my word. Every penny.
“But if you fail to do so,” Mr. Holt adds, brushing some invisible lint from Lomax’s shoulder, “and this louse makes off with both my daughter and the material sufficient to ruin me with, then your house will be the least of what you’ll lose. In fact, you’d be better off not returning to Saint John at all.”
To shore up his employer’s confidence, Lomax describes his plan to check train stations and flophouses down the line. The task will be made easier because he’ll be seeking a single derelict with a child, surely an unusual sight. “After I locate him,” Lomax says, “I’ll offer a reasonable sum in exchange for the child and the journal. No need for theatrics. And certainly no need to involve the Mounties in such a sensitive matter.”
Just as Lomax is preparing to leave, Mr. Holt turns to him with a frosty smile and says, “Mr. Lomax? If at any point you are faced with the choice of which to recover, the child or the book, choose the book. Is that clear?”
As the father of seven, Lomax knows that while a child’s memory is an impermanent, malleable thing, paper is another story.
“Perfectly clear, sir,” he says.
NO BUSINESS
SINCE HE’S STUCK with the baby—at least until he can find a semi-respectable place to rid himself of her—Everett has vowed not to speak to her directly. He applied a similar rule on his sugarbush: no talking to trees. He’d seen it in the War, men talking to things that couldn’t answer back: guns, trucks, trenches, mud, even their boots—and it was always their first step down into the root cellar of madness. In Europe, with his brother—who’d always been their spokesman—absent from his side for the first time in his life, Everett found conversing with his fellow soldiers arduous, and managed to avoid them by taking odd jobs. When his superiors discovered he’d been a woodcutter, he was tasked with replacing the rotting trench planks that kept the men raised above the fetid mud. Everett preferred this to regular soldiering, though it felt bizarre to work with wood in such a wasted, treeless landscape, with planks brought in from Scandinavia, or even Canada, because there wasn’t a single living tree around for fifty miles.
After his carpentry was done, Everett volunteered as a stretcher-bearer, for which his youthful footspeed served him well. As bullets tore through the air, he’d dash out into the corpse-strewn patch that lay between them and the enemy to drag the wounded back, travois-style. After a year his regiment was transferred to the Somme. Then Vimy. Then Arleux-Fresnoy. Then Passchendaele. Each battle more gruesome and barbaric than the last. From mud as thick as suet, he pulled stray limbs dangling skeins of yellow fat and grey skin. He watched a man’s head get cut clean from his neck by a blade of shrapnel the size of a garbage can lid. He saw severed hands in the mud, stiff and contorted like great alabaster spiders. It was as though the horrors he witnessed were being stored in a reservoir inside him, rising a little each day, until the reservoir was full and its poison began to seep into his bloodstream. In the War’s last days, he was hospitalized for a bout of tremors and confusion that left him unable to tie his boots, and then he was shipped home.
Tonight, however, Everett sleeps untroubled and wakes in the boxcar at dawn, the baby curled in the hay beside him. They ride in silence until the train sidetracks around noon to let an express pass and an old tramp joins them in the car. He’s starved and skinny, red crescents hanging below his eyes like wounds, and given his frailty Everett pays him little mind and allows himself a nap. But he wakes later to find the man gone and his right foot naked as a whelp. Though his other boot remains, its laces have been sliced through and half yanked out.
“What kind of weasel steals one boot?” Everett demands of the sleeping baby, cursing himself for breaking his rule against speaking to her.
Everett sits grumbling about his misfortune until her eyelids crack open. Immediately, the corners of her mouth bend downward and she starts up again. He unfastens her sleeper to find a foul paste rimming her flannels, accompanied by a staggering stench. With held breath, he peels the fabric back. He’s never examined the female region so directly: that simultaneous absence and presence. Everett dampens a jute sack and wipes her clean as she squalls ferociously, nostrils flaring, tiny ribs heaving. With no spare flannels, he wraps her in a feed sack after shaking out the weevils, then scoops out some blackberry jam with his finger and pushes it into her mouth. Luckily, she shuts up, smacking her lips and pumping her legs like a bullfrog.
Later, when the freight grinds to a hard stop in a stretch of orchard land, he looks ahead and sees the spout of a water tower lowering to the locomotive’s boiler. Any hobo knows there’s always a water source near a tower, so he leaves the sleeping baby in the straw and hops down to the trackside gravel. Nearby he finds a small, purling creek that wanders through rows of white-blossomed apple trees. He submerges the soiled sleeper and flannel in the water, dragging them over the pebbly bottom, filth tumbling downstream in clots. He pins down the baby’s garments with rocks to let the creek do its work, then walks upstream to replenish the jar with water.
“You have no business on my land,” a voice declares suddenly from behind him. Everett whirls around to find a hefty man of about fifty, a wide straw hat over sunburned ears, a pair of thick pruning shears in his hands, the kind used for lopping large branches.
“Just washing up, sir,” Everett says amiably, cursing the creek’s babble for disguising the man’s steps.
“Well, you’re washed, so get moving.”
“I’ll be doing that shortly. There aren’t any local statutes against cleanliness, are there?”
“No, but there are plenty against you getting back on that train over there,” the man says, pointing to the tracks with his sharp shears.
“You got it wrong, sir. I came from the road,” Everett says, taking the opportunity to check the train: the tower’s spout is retracted but the cars remain still. “I’ve been hitching rides. Seeking work.”
“Which way’s the road, then?” the man asks.
Everett scans around for what he knows is an incriminating duration. “Over there,” he says, pointing beyond the man’s left shoulder.
“Then you won’t mind walking over ther
e, will you?” he replies.
Everett hears the distant crunch-rasp of the fireman’s shovel, and the locomotive whistles fiercely. Fireflies of cinder and bone-white steam lift from its stack. Almost imperceptibly slow, the wheel gearing starts to move. “Okay, okay, you’re right, sir,” Everett says, putting up his palms. “I came on that freight. But there’s something I need to retrieve from it first. Then I’ll be on my way.”
The man points the shears at Everett’s one naked foot. “You’re going to have to get a boot somewhere else.”
“It isn’t just my boot,” he pleads. “Everything I own is on that boxcar. My bedroll, my life savings, snapshots of my family. I’ll just grab them and jump off. You can watch me the whole way.”
Agonizingly, the train gathers momentum and whistles again. Soon it will be about as fast as a man of Everett’s age could ever hope to sprint. His mind flashes to the infant, stark naked, wrapped in a rough jute sack, about to be ferried off into a lonesome Hell of dehydration and death.
“You don’t belong on that train,” the man barks. “And I’m tired of you hobos shitting in our creek.”
“I’ll be straight with you,” Everett pleads. “I’ve got a child over there. A baby. If you don’t let me go, she’ll ride off alone.”
“Oh pigshit,” the man snaps. “By the time I count to three you’d better make for that road,” he says, edging in Everett’s direction, pruning shears raised. “One…”
Everett feels the old poison in his bloodstream—the brutality he’d cultivated protecting himself and his brother on the schoolyard, which had further concentrated inside him while watching all those boys butchered for no reason during the War.
“Two…”
He rotates away from the shears, angling the man into the sun. When a full squint eclipses the man’s face, Everett lunges the tip of his elbow into it. The man staggers, gore zipping from his nostrils, then drops to the creek bed as Everett breaks for the train.
While he runs there’s no cover, and the sun is high and his footfalls stamp noisily on the trackside gravel and the train’s crew will surely spot him. At full sprint and barely keeping pace, Everett manages to reach what he guesses is the correct boxcar and attaches himself to its iron rung just as he can run no farther. He throws his chest onto the car’s wooden planks, still only half hoping to find the baby waiting for him inside.
A DESCRIBER
THE GREENWOOD TIMBER Company operates out of the east wing of Harris Greenwood’s sprawling private mansion in the exclusive Shaughnessy neighbourhood of Vancouver. Harris knows that the local business community finds it eccentric that he doesn’t purchase a floor of offices in a ritzy building downtown, but he prefers to keep his company and his personal life enmeshed, and he deflects any inquiries concerning the arrangement with a rehearsed joke: “Why would I pay for a view?”
At seven a.m. Harris sits at his desk and readies his mind for the day’s tasks, itemizing the mill managers, timber buyers, and high-profile accounts he’ll converse with today. His office is both his war room and his sanctuary, a place as familiar to him as the crooked log cabin that he and Everett built together as boys. While he’s at his desk, in the midst of his steadying routine, he never falters, never bumps walls or topples shelves, never ends up calling for help like a child lost in the woods.
Harris summons Terrance Milner, his long-time clerk and accountant, a trustworthy man and steadfast wizard with figures, who proceeds to read him documents that require his signature. Long ago Harris had Baumgartner bolt an inkwell to his desk—a foot forward, a foot to the right—and Harris feels a predictable trill of gratification as he pokes his pen into the well, which is exactly where he expects it.
Beyond his desk hang the cages of three dozen exotic birds—his one enduring pleasure, excluding his routine. Milner sends off for catalogues and Harris places orders by telegram with cranky British dealers, who ship the birds back on his returning freighters. Diamond doves. Cinnamon-wing budgerigars. Bengalese finches. African silver-bills. Any client unfortunate enough to speak with Harris Greenwood during morning hours seldom hears him over the squawks and twitters of his collection. For many years, this birdsong has been enough to dispel the fits of lethargy and low mood that can sometimes seize him. Yet his current collection has afforded him decreasing pleasure in recent weeks, and to counteract this Harris makes a mental note to place a new order soon.
After he signs the day’s meagre stack of shipping manifests and correspondences, he’s left crestfallen by the relative emptiness of his desk. Here, purchase orders were once stacked neck-high—it seemed the whole world needed rebuilding after the War: public buildings, houses, railways, bridges. He logged his first thousand hectares by the time he was twenty-five, and earned his first million by twenty-seven. Many claimed that blindness gave him an advantage, made him shrewd and impossible to swindle, and his nose for timber became legendary.
But since the Crash has choked off all North American railway development and mining starts, including residential and commercial construction, Greenwood Timber has begun bleeding like a bowshot deer: fifty thousand dollars monthly in operating overages, mostly due to a rapidly depreciating overstock—clear beams and boards rotting and twisting in the weather—as well as to rising labour costs, paid to men who threaten to strike every other week as though they’re a bunch of wheedling toddlers. And it doesn’t help that the Soviets are using what amounts to forced labour. Their prime lumber is just as good as his own: full-dimension, unlike the inch-and-a-half by three-and-a-half sticks that most producers pass off as two-by-fours.
Without newsprint and paper, Greenwood Timber would already be dead in the water. He supplies all the Canadian periodicals, and half the major U.S. book imprints. But soon he’ll be forced to pulp trees that would have once served as the bones of palaces, which to a lumberman is akin to grinding up prize tenderloin for breakfast links. All so people can do pointless crosswords and read inane dime-store paperbacks.
Harris pushes through his low mood by busying himself with telegrams, letter dictations, and telephone calls, before taking his usual pheasant lunch at his desk while Milner reads him the Globe, which has declared that despite the Crash, the economy’s fundamentals remain sound. Harris, however, needs further convincing.
“A tree will tell you everything you need to know about the variations of prosperity,” Harris muses to Milner through a mouthful of pheasant. “Dark, thin rings indicate dry years. Thick rings, bountiful wet ones. And the lumberman in me suspects it may be thin rings for a while yet.”
If he was smart he would have shifted to steel long ago and been done with logging altogether. Timber is a brutish business, and requires brutes to harvest it. He attended Chicago’s world’s fair last year, and never heard the word lumber spoken once—it was all alloy, glass, and plastic. Steel-girded buildings that will survive any fire or flood. While Harris had a brief opportunity years ago to buy some Bessemer steel mills from R.J. Holt of New Brunswick, he’d deemed the numbers too risky and backed out. But any man with a head on his shoulders could predict lumber’s inevitable decline. “The future ain’t made of no wood,” he once heard a pole-jack from one of his lumber gangs declare, words that have wormed into him ever since.
At two o’clock Baumgartner knocks and Harris orders him in.
“We’ve received a report that a rain came and only half of that island you set on fire was burned,” Baumgartner declares. “And you’ll be happy to know there were no corpses to get rid of, either.”
This pleases Harris. Both the rain and the lack of casualties. After his rage at the poachers had subsided, he regretted the squander of good timber. And now the island’s plucky knack for survival has charmed him even further.
Harris works through supper, opting again to dine at his desk, his napkin tucked uncomfortably behind the silk Windsor knot that he refuses to loosen until he quits for the day. Just as Harris is clearing his desk and preparing to retire to his room, a te
lephone call comes from a sales agent who’s received a cable from Japan’s largest railway company.
“The word is they’re sniffing around for lumber for a massive project,” the agent says. “They’re considering Douglas fir sleepers, and need nearly a million of them. This could be considerable, sir. Like the old days.”
“Have they mentioned the Russians? Are they at the table?” Harris demands, bolting to his feet.
“They hate the Russians,” the agent says. “They wouldn’t buy a cord of Russian firewood if their hands were frozen to their dicks.”
“And the Americans?”
“The Yanks don’t have any good timber stock left. Especially not Doug fir in these quantities. They already hacked all theirs down.”
Even before he hangs up, Harris’s mind blazes with calculations. He’ll travel to Japan himself to negotiate the deal, yet already he can sense the enormous emptiness of the ocean, the disorienting absence of his routine, and the humiliating confusions of a foreign land: unfamiliar accommodations, unfamiliar food, unfamiliar architecture, unfamiliar voices warbling in an unfamiliar tongue. He won’t be able to bring his birdcages, so what if his low moods and lethargy afflict him in Japan and he can’t overcome them? Once again the idea of a visual assistant returns to him. Someone to illuminate his dealings, energize his spirit, brighten his days with well-chosen words of observation, and brighten his nights with readings of the finest literature. A describer. At this juncture of his long, solitary life, Harris Greenwood is weary of darkness.
THE COAT PEG
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