“Now Everett, you’re just lucky you came to me when you did,” Blank says warmly, clapping a hand on Everett’s shoulder. “Even after the Crash, I know plenty of good folks who are looking for a healthy tyke still wet behind the ears.”
TO THE TREE
BEFORE SUNRISE THE next morning, Lomax drives out to Mr. Holt’s country estate to check on the search party. The game warden meets his car in the driveway with a pale, stricken expression. He’s carrying an electric torch and wearing an oilskin slicker though it isn’t raining.
“We discovered something in the trees,” the warden says. “We were waiting for you to confirm it before we woke Mr. Holt.”
Lomax follows him into the woods, a white moon singing in the dark branches. While they walk, the trunks of the trees seem to draw closer and closer together, like a herd of grazing animals facing a predator.
Soon the warden swings his light across the trees to illuminate what appears to be the form of a woman kneeling against a big maple, her arms outstretched to embrace its trunk, as though she’s begging it for help. Lomax kneels beside her, in an almost identical posture, he realizes, the thawing ground dampening the knees of his trousers. She’s shoeless, wearing only a nightdress. And when he draws back her pageboy haircut, he finds that animals have already been at her face. Her nose half gone. Cheeks chewed at. Eyes out. Flown away. Perhaps stashed somewhere in this same maple, watching him now. When Lomax drops his gaze, he sees rivulets of army ants marching down her arms, which are as pale as cod—and empty. The baby and the journal are nowhere in sight.
“Any sign of her child?” Lomax asks, fighting to ignore the hot bolts in his spine that will only worsen the longer he kneels.
“No. But there’s a good amount of blood soaked into the ground around her,” the warden says grimly. “And it appears she was crawling before she ended up at this tree. Some of our foxes must have done that to her and then carried the child off.”
While the warden speaks, Lomax fits the story together in his mind: After having second thoughts about giving up her baby, Euphemia had fled the estate late the previous night. And as she ran, her bleeding returned. When she grew too weak to go on, she crawled up against this maple to gather her strength and bled out with her child against her breast.
Oh, what a curse it is to live in these wretched times, Lomax thinks, as a blade of abject sadness pierces the thick armour he’s built up over the years working as Holt’s collector. He feels a sudden fatherly urge to comb Euphemia’s hair, to retrieve the fugitive parts of her face and reassemble them somehow. All that vivacity and intelligence—where has it gone? Into the tree? With a zap of fright, Lomax suddenly perceives this maple as a living being. A reaching, petrified soul. A witness perhaps. More alive than Euphemia or her child ever will be again.
He groans while lifting himself to his feet, feeling a shard of regret for having deliberately left his cigars at home—a few puffs would have rendered all this so much easier.
“I want the child’s remains found,” Lomax says.
“There’ll be nothing to find,” the warden says, shaking his head. “The teeth of an adult fox can grind bones. Especially small ones.”
“I don’t care, keep searching,” Lomax says. “And if she dropped anything while she was crawling, I want it found, too. Also, do me a favour and don’t tell Mr. Holt. I’ll speak to him myself once I fetch the child’s gifts from inside the house. We don’t want to make this any worse than it needs to be.”
“What a way to go,” the warden says as he escorts Lomax back through the green-black woods to the house. “All alone like that.”
Though Lomax agrees that this forest is indeed a lonely place, for a moment he’s heartened that at least Euphemia and her child had a sturdy tree to die against. He hopes it gave them some comfort.
THE HOUSE
FROM A GROVE of stick-thin poplar, Everett scans the butter-yellow, one-storey woodframe with its cedar-shake roof gone punky, the head beam already sagging, a rotten droop to the whole affair like a scolded dog. Inside, a shape swims to and fro behind dingy chintz curtains.
“You got that child with you?” says a man’s voice from behind a rattling storm door as Everett approaches.
“I do. An infant. Just a few weeks old,” Everett says, guessing.
“Doesn’t have fleas or a cough or nothing, does it?” the man says through the screen, with skeptical grooves carved into the forehead of an owlish face.
“She’s fit as a fiddle as far as I can tell. Got a good solid wail to her, too.”
The man opens the door and invites Everett inside. He’s short, nearly a dwarf, his stubble is flaked with snuff, and he’s wearing shabby pinstriped bedclothes. Everett draws the child from his coat and cradles it awkwardly in his arms as the man regards her dozing face.
“Look at that,” he says admiringly, and his joy reassures Everett. After he’d refused Blank’s offer to take the baby himself, Blank had contacted a couple he knew who’d recently lost a child while the woman was birthing it and had been wounded by the process, making another impossible.
“Go on, give it here,” the little man says, extending his arms.
As Everett goes to pass her over, one of the infant’s raccoon-like hands pops free and yanks at his beard. He can’t avoid feeling stung by this final reproachful gesture, after all he’s done for her. Immediately, the man presses the child tight to his chest as though they’re old pals.
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” Everett says, removing his hat. The floor is threaded with animal hair and peppered with grit, almost filthier than that of his shack. Hadn’t Blank claimed the couple was well off?
The man mumbles something affirmative that Everett can’t make out. Though he’s greatly relieved to be rid of the baby, he isn’t quite ready to make his exit. “Your wife ought to sew her some new suits,” Everett says. “I don’t think she cares for the wool one she’s got. It’s itching.”
“Mmmhmm,” the man says, kissing her downy head. “I’ll take real good care of her. Clothes and food and such.”
“I imagine you will,” Everett says noncommittally. Then he points upward with his hat. “And your roof leaks something awful. You should fix it before this place comes down on you.”
The man’s eyes get hard. “Plenty of suggestions from a man who can’t be bothered to keep his own child.”
Everett sets his jaw and breathes hot through his nose. This is why he avoids people. “Just care for her properly,” he grumbles, stifling his anger by turning to go.
“Sure, I’ll care for her just fine,” the man says.
“What about your wife?” Everett says, turning back. “You keep saying ‘I’?”
“She’ll care for her, too,” he says flatly. “Hey, wait, where’s the book? Blank said the baby had a book with it.”
“I nearly forgot,” Everett says, pulling the journal from his coat and pressing it into the man’s free hand. “If an airplane wrote my name in the sky I wouldn’t know,” he says, intending to lighten matters. “But I imagine this will be important to her someday. It may tell her about her kin or maybe her momma.”