“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.