Greenwood

by Michael Christie

  “She’ll never be alone like we were,” Harris says. “You have my word.”

  Originally, it was Feeney’s suggestion to let Everett and the baby hide out at their retreat, but after some convincing, Harris has warmed to the idea. He’s even agreed to give Everett his own plot of land on the island. And once this Japanese business is concluded and Harris liquidates his company, he looks forward to living together as neighbours.

  Yet, despite this restoration of their brotherly bond, a deep and frightful suspicion still clings to Harris: that nothing good can possibly endure. Not ever. And that the gruesome power that brought those two trains together, stole away his sight, scrambled his brother’s mind, and left Pod abandoned to die in the woods, isn’t quite finished with them yet.

  THE VALISE

  THE NEW SUN Wah is raided by Mountie constables early on a Saturday morning, when its withered guests are at their most somnolent. After the spike is roughly yanked from Lomax’s arm and he’s hoisted from his bunk and thrown to his feet—his first instance of uprightness in he can’t remember how long—he’s struck immediately in the mouth by an overzealous constable, a man more accustomed to drunken loggers and wild-eyed gold-rush casualties than docile dope fiends. Blood gouts onto his silk pajamas and two bottom teeth that were previously loose now roll about freely in his mouth like a pair of unlucky dice. The police collect the paraphernalia from beside the bunks, including Lomax’s hypodermic kit and tin of laudanum powder, and haul him and a few other emaciated men out into the drizzly alley.

  When they arrive at the stationhouse, through broken teeth Lomax manages to identify himself and explain the vital errand he’s performing here in Vancouver: running down a debt for Mr. R.J. Holt of New Brunswick. When he informs them that he was only frequenting such an establishment to find the fugitive, and that he’d like his money returned to him immediately, the constables laugh in his face.

  As they’re marching him to the train station to stick him on the first coach back to Saint John, Lomax notices that they’re passing his former hotel, and hurls himself to the wet pavement. If he must return home, penniless and defeated, to prostrate himself before Mr. Holt and beg for his life back, the journal is the one thing that could convince his employer that this whole botched expedition was ultimately in his best interests.

  As the constables begin striking Lomax to coax him to his feet, he makes a tearful plea that he won’t survive the transcontinental journey without his medicine, which the hotel is holding for him. After a short conversation, the police begrudgingly drag him inside. To his relief, the baggage desk produces his valise, and Lomax rummages to find both the journal and the slipcase buckled into the side pocket. To make room for his personal effects, Lomax takes the slipcase and journal and pushes them together. But when the two merge, the journal is left rattling around inside the larger slipcase, and by his estimation the book is a full inch narrower—a relatively tiny measurement, though it’s more than enough to throw Harvey Lomax into an inchoate fury. He curses Everett Greenwood’s everlasting soul and hurls what remains of his girth against the surrounding Mounties, who fight viciously to restrain him. He’s struck in the mouth again and a ribbon of blood unspools onto the hotel’s marble floor. Lomax grunts and bellows and strains to escape, until they drive a nightstick into his throat and five men ride him to the ground.

  That illiterate bum and that blind, snivelling fairy must have been scheming all along to keep the authentic journal for themselves, all so they could use it against Mr. Holt someday. Why else would they risk passing off a forgery?

  Lomax can’t possibly return to Saint John now, not empty-handed like this—and just then a word fits into his broken mouth like a key into a lock.

  “Kidnapped,” he says, spitting it through the gaps in his teeth.

  “What did you say?” the Sergeant barks.

  The men let off a little and Lomax sucks cold air over his bloody gums to numb them. “R.J. Holt’s infant daughter. Kidnapped.”

  After he’s uttered his magic word a second time, the constables seize his lapels and hoist him from the ground and bombard him with questions. Harvey Lomax informs them that while he doesn’t know where the cold-blooded fugitive Everett Greenwood has taken Mr. Holt’s precious little girl, he knows someone who does.

  AT THE TREELINE

  EVERETT FIRST SUSPECTED something was amiss when, earlier that evening, Harris’s voice didn’t crackle through the shortwave at the usual nine o’clock. At first, he told himself his brother had fallen asleep, or was occupied by the lumber shipments to Japan he’d been so worried about. But now, near midnight, sitting up sleepless in bed, hearing the faint chuff of a steamer’s boiler throb through the mist like the heartbeat of a whale, he’s certain that something is wrong.

  Fishing boats and logging tugs sometimes pass near Greenwood Island, but never this close. Luckily, the steamer’s crew mustn’t be able to locate the jetty where Feeney leaves their supplies, so Everett expects they’ll anchor in the bay and row to the pebbly beach east of the cabin. After a while, he spots armed men come stalking through the brush in the spectral glow of the full moon, at a slow pace that suggests the expectation—or worse, the intent—of trouble.

  Eight Mounties in crimson tunics, stetson hats, and blue breeches with yellow piping take up positions at the treeline, along with two more men in street clothes. They form a half-circle that sweeps around behind the woodshed that Everett built during his first days here. They squat low on their hams, level their carbine rifles at the cabin’s front door, and wait.

  Delicately, Everett nudges up his bedroom window, propping it open with the edge of a slim book he’d been trying to read to Pod, and pokes the barrel of his Browning through the crack. After observing them for a half hour, he picks out McSorley’s stocky silhouette approaching another man behind a tree, who Everett would bet his life is Lomax, though he looks even more gaunt and feeble than ever. Everett had watched the Irishman write furiously through the night to fabricate a suitably convincing journal, wearing through two pen nibs in the process, but it seems Lomax has detected their deceit in the end. Or maybe the book alone wasn’t enough to satisfy him. Maybe it never was.

  But the longer he sits, the more Everett becomes aware that the Mounties are all mere boys—with protruding ears and thin wrists, skittishly twisting their necks to check their flanks every few seconds—recalling to Everett the young faces he’d fired at across the trenches in Europe. He realizes that no matter what these boys intend, shooting them would not only endanger Pod, but would be no different than turning his gun on the flea-bitten children he saw in that orphanage back in Toronto. So he removes the Browning from the gap, rehangs it on the wall, and returns to check on Pod in bed. She is sleeping with her rear stuck in the air, working her tongue against some dreamy pabulum.

  He leaves her and creeps down the stairs, avoiding the windows, to fetch his boots, mackinaw, and a bottle of goat’s milk from the kitchen, into which he shakes a good dose of Quieting Syrup. When he returns upstairs, he goes to the second bedroom where the shortwave is kept. Softly, he depresses the microphone’s black button, and into the perforated metal receiver he whispers Pod’s true name, the same one he’d pencilled in the journal back in Temple’s library, the same one he was planning on giving her only after their cabin was built and her mother’s journal was recovered and their lives had begun anew. Except now that things aren’t about to work out the way Everett planned, she needs her true name more than ever. Drawn from that strange, unkillable tree under which he and Temple first rested and drank water together, the tree that wouldn’t die no matter how long the drought wore on. And even if Harris isn’t present in the radio static to hear Everett speak it, her road name has been left behind, and she is Pod no longer.

  HIS VOICE

  AN HOUR AFTER the constables leave his office, Harris remains at his desk, swirling a crystal tumbler of sake with a trembling hand. On the floorboards he hears the soft patter of the
Italian loafers he bought as a birthday gift for Feeney, who’s always known how to make the right amount of noise to avoid startling him.

  “I gather it was Lomax who brought them?” Feeney asks.

  Harris dips his chin. A slow nod.

  “He ferreted out our little forgery, I take it?”

  Another nod.

  “Took him long enough. I was beginning to suspect he was more brainless than we originally thought. But the police can search all they want. They’ll never find them.” Harris hears the creak of Feeney easing into the leather armchair.

  “Lomax told the police that my brother kidnapped R.J. Holt’s baby, and that he is now holding her for ransom,” Harris says.

  “So what did they say after you told them the truth?”

  Harris exhales. “I confirmed that my brother has a child. And that the child indeed isn’t his. Everything else is speculation.”

  “What does it matter if she isn’t? She was left for dead.”

  A pause.

  “Harris.”

  He takes a long drink.

  “You told them more than that.”

  Harris sets down his glass. “Liam, when Lomax first arrived at the house, he took me aside and threatened to tell the police about us right then and there.”

  Feeney scoffs. “Well, we know a little about him! I can spot a dope-head when I see one! That ghoul’s pupils are no bigger than periods on a page. And he’s got a right sluggardly walk. We’ll have him searched. We’ll crucify the fucker.”

  Harris smiles weakly. “Dope-head or not, he can still ruin us.”

  Feeney takes a slow breath. “So what did you say?”

  Harris resists a spiky urge to throw his tumbler of sake at the wall.

  “Harris?”

  “They’d charge us with indecency first. Then they’d seize the company. We’d never see each other again. Wealth is our only protection, Liam. Without my signature on their paycheques, they’ll eat us alive.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Legally speaking, my brother stole that infant,” Harris says. “And he’s unhinged to think that it’s his to keep. Perhaps more jail time will do him some good.”

  “You poor, fearful man,” Feeney says, and Harris can tell from the muffle of his voice that he’s brought his hands to his face. “And what about these conversations you two have been having on that wireless over there?”

  Just after Harris had given Lomax the exact location of his cabin on Greenwood Island and they’d raced off to apprehend Everett, his brother’s nightly salutation had come over the radio. Almost to punish himself, he left the set on, though he found himself unable to answer. Instead, he’d sat listening to Everett repeat: “Come in, Harris. Harris, come in.”

  “He made his own decisions, Liam,” Harris says. “He and I can’t go on rescuing each other forever.”

  “And your promise to let them live on the island?”

  When Harris had first agreed to that idea, Everett had whooped so loud that the radio crackled like a bomb had gone off.

  “Plans change,” Harris says, taking a belt of sake. “Everett knows that better than anyone.”

  “But there’s still time to fix this!” Feeney yells. “We must go to him. Straight away. Lomax didn’t leave that long ago. If we take the skiff, we can beat them there.”

  How, Harris wonders, could a poet possibly understand that to survive in a world as vicious as this one, you must be like a faller’s axe: sharp, brutal, purposeful, and relentless. Just as he told Feeney when they first met, Harris is a lumberman, through and through. And a lumberman is always capable of doing what needs to be done. Even if it means cutting off a diseased limb to save a tree. Even if it means letting go of one treasure in order to hold on to another.

  Harris rises to his feet, hoping to appear impassioned, loving, worthy of the great sacrifice he’s just made; instead, he feels his face twist into a sneer as he speaks: “I’d turn every tree on this Earth into matchwood if it would keep you from harm, Liam. And the same goes for people.”

  He hears Feeney clap his hands. “Fine. If you won’t go to him, I will.”

  “As your employer, Mr. Feeney, I forbid you to pilot any of my skiffs.”

  Feeney lets out a long breath. At last he says, “Then I believe I won’t be able to provide my descriptive services to you any longer, Mr. Greenwood.”

  Though Harris’s weakest self has always feared that these words of betrayal were coming—because nothing good can endure, not for him, not for Everett either—he can scarcely believe his ears. More than the words, it’s the curt, professional tone that Liam’s normally warm voice has assumed that wounds him most.

  “You said you’d never betray me,” he says quietly.

  “I haven’t,” Feeney replies. “But you beat me to it.”

  “Fine, then you’re fired,” Harris says, with equally professional chilliness, trying to get a rise out of him. “I’m afraid you’ve lost your knack for the accurate description of the world anyway.”

  Harris waits, expecting Feeney to retort with his most lacerating remark yet. Something spectacularly irreverent and clever. He allows him a few moments more, ample time to work up a proper response. At this moment Harris will gladly suffer any insult, as long as it will rekindle their exchange and inch them closer to reconciliation. But he hears only his birds, rustling in their cages.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself, then?” he says fiercely after an entire minute has passed. “Liam?”

  Harris feels his way around his desk, knocking some supply briefs, along with the crystal tumbler of sake, to the floor.

  “Are you still there?”

  He hadn’t heard him rise from the leather chair, nor had he heard footsteps on the floorboards, nor the clatter of the door’s hardware. He goes to the chair and feels the warmth he left in the leather seatback.

  “Oh, quit playing games, Liam. You know how I hate to be surprised.”

  Harris directs the concentrated power of his remaining senses out into the room, feeling its textures and hollows, its planes and curves. He hears many sounds—the hiss of the shortwave that he left on in the corner, the flitter of birds—but his describer is not among them.

  What he needs now, above all else, is his voice. Ever since he first heard Feeney read that unusual bit of Tennyson here in this very office, his voice has forever altered Harris’s very composition, reshaping him into a new being altogether, a new set of cells with a new animating force strung between them. But he may never hear that voice again. The thought opens a canyon in Harris’s stomach, and he cries out and overturns the armchair where Feeney was just sitting, staggering himself backwards in the process. He kicks to free himself from a cord that’s become entangled in his legs, while the electric lamp to which it is attached topples to the floor. When the bulbs smash, Harris Greenwood swears he can feel the light leave his skin.

  RIFLES

  LOMAX CAN’T PROPERLY reckon how long the crossing takes. It’s an unending churn on the strait’s black, head-high swells, and he sways nauseously with the boat’s every lurch.

  “The book and the child, Mr. Lomax,” Mr. Holt had said when they spoke over the telephone back at the stationhouse in Vancouver. “Bring them to me, and you have my word: all will be forgiven.” Mr. Holt had then contacted Detective McSorley and insisted that he and Lomax join forces. So they’ve struck a deal: if their raid succeeds, Lomax will return the baby and the journal to Mr. Holt, while McSorley will become the hero who captured the dangerous kidnapper and fugitive Everett Greenwood.

  The remote island where Everett has been hiding out for the past several months is beyond local police jurisdiction, so McSorley has enlisted some recently recruited Mounties to join them. Two of the Mounties grew up trapping prawn and crab in these treacherous waters and know well its channels and currents, even in the dark. Seafaring experience aside, the boys look like they’ve come directly from their high school graduation. Bu
t everyone in the West is too young, it seems to Lomax, a bunch of babies tussling over land that isn’t properly divvied up yet.

  When they reach the island there’s no wharf, so they anchor out in the bay and row in from there. Whitecaps ruffle in the dark as they make landfall and creep westward through thick brush of salal and blackberry bramble, under a moonlit sky that’s nearly erased by the island’s enormous, malevolent trees, an unholy chorus of wind singing in their branches. Lomax has never seen trees so large. And for a moment he’s walking through the ruins of an ancient city, amid its towers and monuments, its statues and cathedrals. With a shudder, he averts his eyes to his feet.

  Soon the cabin resolves in the moonlight, and McSorley directs the men into a loose perimeter. The father of one of the local boys was the lead carpenter of the crew that erected the cabin for Harris Greenwood, so they know that the structure has only one door, in the front, facing the direction of the sea.

  “What if he panics and hurts the kid?” McSorley asks Lomax, as they crouch behind one of the massive trunks.

  “Once he knows he’s cornered,” Lomax says, “he’ll likely turn himself in. And no harm will befall the girl.”

  “So why don’t we take him straight away?” McSorley says.

  “He was a soldier. And he’s a damaged man. He could react aggressively if we startle him. Best to wait out the night and reason with him in the morning. It’s an island. They’re not going anywhere.”

  As the men spread out and assume sentry positions, Lomax rests against a woodpile, squeezing the heavy rifle in his hands. It’s been six hours since his last spike of laudanum, and already he’s contracted a chill, his veins itching like they’ve been buffed with poison oak from the inside. Luckily, Lomax kept a small vial of powdered laudanum in the pocket of his pajamas, which he plans to take through his nose if his condition worsens.