When it opens, Everett finds that Howard Blank is just as ugly as he was ten years before. Blank also served in the War, though it wasn’t until after demobilization that they met, in a hobo jungle somewhere outside of Oakland. Blank had caught a squib round in the barrel of his Ross rifle during training exercises in England, and when he imprudently squeezed the trigger a second time, the gun exploded pressed tight to his cheek. He returned from the War without firing a single shot that wasn’t at his own face, and the shame of it left him nasty.
“Greenwood. Pee-wee Morton said he heard you’d settled down somewhere,” Blank says with a mystified expression. “Sugaring near the old Holt place. That true?”
Everett says it is.
“He also said that you turned into the kind of man that parents tell stories about to scare their children. He wasn’t kidding.”
“I sell Pee-wee a jug of syrup from time to time,” Everett says, tugging at his tangled beard for effect.
On closer inspection, Everett notices that the years have been kind to Blank’s scars, smoothed them, his bad side now more like the texture of a cucumber than the cauliflower it once was.
“Well, come on,” Blank says, cuffing Everett’s shoulder and pulling him inside. “In the old days you’d come knocking for one of two reasons: to bum money for whiskey, or to bum whiskey. So which is it?”
“Neither,” Everett says, before sitting in a ramshackle chair worn shiny in places like a mangy deer.
“Good, because I only stock seltzer these days. So if you’ve a problem with that you get out right now.”
“I’m all done with drinking too,” Everett says, impressed that Blank has likewise managed to correct his doomed trajectory. Everett can recall mere scraps of the booze-flamed weeks he’d lodged in this house that Blank inherited from his father, an Anglican minister. Mostly, they drank and quarrelled to avoid the subject of the War.
When Blank returns with two green jars, he spies the fleshy bulb of the child’s head at Everett’s neckline. “What you got there?” he asks.
As they sip, Everett relates how the little curse came to him, and how he’d walked in to Saint John to be rid of it.
“You see anybody in the forest who could’ve left it?”
Everett shakes his head.
“Some seamstress with a flock of kids already and empty cupboards,” Blank says. “Take it to the nuns. They’re looking for lambs to corrupt.”
“Just tried. They don’t accept them from men,” Everett says impatiently. With the weather warming, the sap will run any day now, and if he doesn’t empty his collection buckets, they’ll overflow to the ground. The first sap is always the sweetest, and just a short delay will mean half his year’s income forfeited. By the time the maple branches nose with green buds, the caramel flavour will be spoiled completely. “Can you help me find a place for it?” Everett says. “I don’t care where. But I need to be rid of it by tonight.”
“I ain’t taking it, that’s for sure,” Blank says. “How about that brother of yours? The lumber millionaire out West? Maybe he could?” This Blank relates with a glint of mockery, recalling to Everett’s mind how cruel he so often was, how vindictive he could be with your private details.
Though he regrets much of his past, he regrets most of all that time he let slip that his estranged brother is Harris Greenwood, the Harris Greenwood, and that the sole person he’d shared this confidence with in his entire life was Howard Blank. “We haven’t spoke for eighteen years.”
“Brothers are brothers.”
Everett shakes his head. “Not after what he did. Not anymore.”
“What kind is it?” Blank asks.
“What do you mean what kind—”
“A boy or a girl, you lunk!”
Everett shrugs. “Don’t know.”
“He don’t damnwell know!” Blank declares to the dingy pine ceiling.
“It’s no business of mine.”
“Well, if I’m going to help you, I need to know what we’re dealing with,” Blank says, extending his hands. “Come to Uncle Howie, little nipper.”
Everett extracts the child from his coat and hands it off.
“Looks like a girl to me,” Blank says, picking apart the cloth with his fingers. “But hooey!” he says, waving a hand at his nose. “She’s made a real mess of herself. You need to bathe them, you know? Change their flannels?”
Everett shakes his head. “Not my concern.”
“You’d best make it your concern. She’ll be a lot harder to get rid of in this condition.” Blank starts unwinding the brocade cloth, and from its folds he pulls a book. “How about this?” he says, setting the child down and flipping open the hard-backed cover. “An operator’s manual?”
“What’s it say?” asks Everett, sidling up beside him.
“Still an ignorant son of a bitch, huh?” says Blank, thumbing the pages. “Remember when we’d bum a few bucks for a meal and I’d have to read you some greasy dive’s menu?” Everett does—and also remembers Blank once trying to charge him a dime for this service, an offer for which Everett blackened both his eyes.
Blank moves his lips while examining the words. “It’s a diary, judging by the entries. Woman’s penmanship.”
“Will you just hurry up and say what it says?”
“She’s trying to be clever, using plenty of two-dollar words.” Blank taps his temple proudly with his index finger. “But I know most of them.”
“You think the mother wrote it?” Everett asks.
“Looks that way.”
“Any addresses? Maybe I could return the child to her.”
“Nope, but hold on…there’s a name here.”
Everett follows Blank’s index finger down the page, which to him is nothing more than a soup of curlicues and sticks.
“R.J.,” Blank says with wonder, as though invoking a bit of scripture. “You figure it could be R.J. Holt? That’s his estate you’re squatting on,” he says, nodding excitedly at the baby.
“I don’t care if it is,” Everett says. “Whoever had it doesn’t want it anymore. And neither do I.”
Blank slaps the book shut and takes a long, thoughtful belt of seltzer. Everett can hear the carbonation sizzle in Blank’s mouth as he makes some kind of calculation.
“Now see here, we need to consider this whole thing from multiple angles,” he says with a shrewd look. “Maybe I could take her in, seeing how she’s so abandoned and everything.”
Everett’s mind flashes to the time he and Blank beat a pair of wine-heads who owed them a dollar over some dice toss, kicking them until they wet themselves. Which makes Blank about as suitable to care for a child as Everett is.
“You said yourself you don’t want her,” Everett says, rising to his feet. “I’m going to just find the busiest corner in Saint John, plunk her down, then run like hell.”
“Whoa now, you can’t do that! This poor little lamb? What if a cart horse stepped on her?” Blank says. “They’d blame you.”
“I’d never know. I’ll be back on my sugarbush. Happy as a clam.”