He discovered these woods a decade ago after rolling off a train in a drunken stupor and waking up here. He spent years on the rails following his return from the War, a stretch of his life he prefers to forget; mostly he was drifting, blind drunk, robbing other hobos for pocket change, knocking at porch doors for food in exchange for splitting some firewood. During those years he’d often find himself standing on high railway trestles that swayed in the wind, daring himself to jump, imagining the relief he’d feel after his head came apart on the serrated rocks below.
But the solitary enterprise of his sugarbush has been his salvation, and he hasn’t touched a drop of liquor since finding it. Along with woodcutting and carpentry, Everett taught himself to tap syrup as a boy, and during the War he even fashioned some spiles from empty .50-calibre shell casings, hammering them into a few black maples during a cold snap near the Somme. Though the villagers had inhabited the place for thousands of years, their eyes flew wide when a thick, pungent sap came running. In Everett’s view, syrup is one of nature’s few gifts, a true benevolence, offered with no expectation of repayment.
Now he takes a deer path that runs along the belly of a wooded gulch, his boots sucking in intermittent stews of mud. He finds his first sugar maple, its silver-grey bark scarred by years of his tapping. He draws his auger and bores a fresh hole into its south side. The bark gives way and threads of blonde sapwood peel from the bit’s grooves. He takes a wooden mallet and knocks a steel spile into the hole—too deep or too shallow and he’ll miss the sap completely. He hesitates to admire his work before hanging a collection bucket and moving on.
He’s always preferred trees to people. Their habits and predilections are much easier to discern. And these trees are as good as they come: a thousand acres of the finest sugar maples that ever reared from the soil, with leaves that spread as wide as a giant’s hand, all running with a caramel-like sap so rich it requires minimal boiling. This year, after the sap runs dry, he’ll bottle his syrup, then exchange it in Saint John for oats, lard, sugar, flour, and a small roll of bills. A month’s work, at most. For the year’s remainder, he’ll laze by the brook, entertaining half-thoughts, watching seed pods and whirlers drift on the slow water. It’s lonely living at times, yet peaceful—and after a long life of toil and struggle, he feels deserving of such leisure.
He taps ten more trees then builds a small fire to fry breakfast: oatcakes dredged in last year’s syrup. He washes up then fords the brook and taps twenty more along its eastern bank. He’s just nearing the end of his circuit when he spies it: a bolt of brocade cloth, hung by a nail driven into his last maple, a grand, stately tree he’s tapped for years, one of his best producers, stout enough to take four spiles. As he approaches he notes the strained way the cloth hangs, and shoos away a greasy crow eyeing the bundle from a branch of the same tree. With a retch the bird settles on a slightly higher perch, unwilling to cede more ground than it must. Up close there’s a faint wriggle to the cloth, which could be from the breeze. Then a soft snuffle.
Just leave it, he thinks. The forest will take care of this itself.
Reluctantly he parts the folds and slides his leathery hand inside. There he finds warmth, breath.
He whispers: “Shit.”
HARVEY BENNETT LOMAX
ON THE MORNING of the big day, Harvey Lomax drives his employer over the frost-spangled streets of Saint John in his newest Packard Straight Eight. Because the rear seat is loaded with gifts, Mr. Holt has been forced to sit up front. For today’s occasion, he’s selected a pinstriped suit of modern cut—not the conservative tweed he normally wears—and has stuck a feather in his derby, plucked from a grouse he once shot in the woods that surround his country estate, the very place they’re headed. Despite Mr. Holt’s cheerful attire, after twenty years in his employ Lomax knows a sour mood when he sees one—something tense and roiling around the eyes—so he makes no chit-chat, and smokes his Parliaments in silence. Though they’re not long into the drive, his back begins to trouble him, a radiating numbness that prompts him to squirm and shift his gigantic frame behind the wheel.
“And how is your condition this morning, Mr. Lomax?” Mr. Holt asks, his stony eyes fixed straight ahead. “Those medicinal cigars my doctor prepared for you aren’t helping?”
“I haven’t sampled one yet, sir,” Lomax says, wincing as a swarm of fresh spasms begin to assault his spine. “I know what those medicines can do to a man. And I’d rather not go the route my father did.”
“Very stoic of you,” Mr. Holt replies. “But there’s no need to suffer.”
Harvey Lomax was a large baby, a massive toddler, and a downright mammoth child. One morning when he was eleven years old, he confessed to his father that he couldn’t get out of bed without lightning shooting through his back and forking out into his limbs. His father brought Harvey to a doctor, who tapped his joints with a tiny hammer and shined a light in his eyes, then claimed that other than his unusual height, there was no physiological cause for his discomfort. “Money well spent,” his father said bitterly, dragging Harvey roughly by the elbow back to their apartment.
But over the years, as Harvey grew ever bigger, the lightning sensation only worsened. Soon it was torturing him not just in the morning, but throughout the day. It became the kind of suffering that can’t possibly be described, the kind that drills into you a little deeper each day, the kind that makes you mean. He tried every remedy: heat and cold, balms and tinctures. And when all had failed, he learned to accept the fact that a body as large as his can’t possibly exist without a good dose of suffering, and that his lightning is just the tax he must pay in order to survive.
Yet size does have its advantages. When faced with his cabbage-sized hands and his hulking, nearly seven-foot frame, people veer from his path like sailboats from a freighter. And given the few vocational options available to men of his physiology, he’s been lucky to serve R.J. Holt personally for the past twenty years, handling his most sensitive matters. Whether it’s a tenant owing back rent on a Holt building, or a miner who’s snuck a raw diamond out of a Holt mine, or one of Mr. Holt’s girls acting indiscreet—it falls to Lomax to set things right. And at this function he has yet to fail.
“I’ve always wanted to be a father,” Mr. Holt muses gaily, after they’ve driven for an hour and the pavement has submitted to the gravel track that winds through the vast woodland surrounding his estate for fifty acres in every direction. “But my wife just isn’t up to the task. God knows we’ve tried. Of course yours doesn’t suffer from any such malady, does she, Mr. Lomax? What’s the latest count? Six?”
“Seven, sir,” Lomax says, clearing his throat. “The first was unplanned. And when we married, we hoped for just two more. But it turned out that Lavern and I have no trouble in the miracle-making department. If we as much as use the same soap we’re in the hospital nine months later.”
Holt offers a rare chuckle, which pleases Lomax, though speaking of his seven children also puts him in mind of the deep financial hole they’ve dug him into—a debt only recently consolidated into a sizeable mortgage on his house, a mortgage Mr. Holt has been generous enough to provide interest-free.