Everett flips the bed, pulls the book free, then pins the baby to his ribs and kicks the rear door from its flimsy leather hinges. With the book stuffed down his trousers and the child against him, he scrambles through the alley. From a window the little man is yelling for the constables, and Everett dashes through a junkyard and then some private lots. After a while he rests in some rose bushes, where he vomits steak and lager foam onto their roots. When he’s done, he hears men hollering some blocks over. Frantically, he tries the doors of several automobiles until one flings open. Though he’s never driven a car before, he sets the child on the rear seat and manages to depress the start pedal and the ignition button, and the engine catches. Driving without lights, fighting the steering, he bumps over curbs and rebounds off fences.
No doubt Blank was fixing to make some deal with R.J. Holt, so Everett certainly can’t return home to his shack now. Probably never again. Men will be waiting. There’ll be questions. And Everett would sooner steer this automobile over a sea cliff than be caged again in a prison.
When he reaches the rail yard near the port, he kills the engine and checks behind him to find the rear seat empty. For a moment, he fantasizes that the baby has opened the door, crawled out, and latched onto some other poor sap whose life needs ruining. But she’s only toppled to the car’s floor, and is now fast asleep. In the car’s trunk he finds a good, thick-napped trapper’s blanket as well as a couple of four-quart jars of blackberry preserve, one of which he empties and fills with water from a hand pump behind a filling station. After bundling the baby in the blanket, he pushes the automobile into some brush to conceal it from the road and scales the wire fence before scampering out over the gleaming tracks.
He hides behind a wintergreen shrub as stars pinprick through the blackening sky. Soon a passenger rig grinds through the yard, hooting and rumbling. It’s slow enough to hop, except Everett never rides passengers. While they’re faster than freights, they involve more cat-and-mouse with the crew. He’s always preferred boxcars—more space, though riskier, on account of the miscreants you can get penned up alongside. And now, after the Crash, they’ll be more crowded than ever.
When a freight passes, a goliath of cinder and smoke, its brakes pealing and hissing, he sprints with the baby jouncing against him, letting two coal hoppers go by before he lunges for a boxcar with its door ajar. The whistle blasts and the child bleats in fright. His final pull up into the door nearly unsockets his arms. Inside, the car is vacant, except for a pile of hay that seems halfway fresh and a bale of feed sacks. He drags the door shut, leaving a crack for air, then tucks himself and the infant into the hay. The train accelerates after clearing the yard and he’s grateful for the rail’s seams, the ceaseless bum-bump, bum-bump, bum-bump that jiggles the child’s cheeks and mesmerizes her into sleep.
As a blur of hill and forest whips past the door’s crack, the scent of evergreen fills the car. Everett had vowed to never jump another freight for the rest of his life. But despite his best efforts, this cursed creature has steered him back into the restless, scrounging life he thought he’d given up.
Before long the boxcar falls into absolute blackness. What is the dark to a baby like this? he muses. And though it always vexes him to think of his brother, he finds himself remembering how Harris’s sight began to fail when he was sixteen, like a great, black wedge pounded between him and the world. He recalls Harris setting his water glass down directly into his soup, or holding the newspaper upside down, or gashing his fingers with a hatchet while chopping the kindling they sold. Over the years, Everett has spotted what he’s sure is the G of his brother’s company stencilled on towering packets of lumber riding the rails from the west, and has always felt a guarded pride at what he went on to accomplish. Yet even though the occasional fond memory can creep past his defenses, his outrage at his brother’s betrayal has not given an inch over the years. And it isn’t about to start any time soon.
THIS ISLAND, BURNING
THREE THOUSAND MILES to the west, just off the opposite edge of the continent, on a small and nameless forested island set like a green jewel in the sea near Vancouver, a cream-coloured Bentley carries Harris Greenwood along a rutted logging road between cloud-grazing spires of Douglas fir, none of which stab less than a hundred feet into the sky. Though it’s clear and midday, Harris knows that the trees gather darkness about them, plunging the island into permanent shadow. While he’s lived sightless for the last eighteen years, he still orients his face toward windows, to taste the air and to feel scraps of warm light waltz over his cheeks. Fragrances of red cedar and kelp sweep crosswise through the car as its undercarriage grinds and bangs against the rocks and roots that surface between the ruts of the road—a road that, to Harris’s fury, he did not construct.
“I won’t have my pocket picked by a gang of tree poachers,” Harris mutters. “How long have we leased cutting rights to this island?”
“About five years or so, sir,” Baumgartner replies.
“And how much have we bled out to Mr. John D. Rockefeller for the honour? All told?”
“I’d have to consult Milner, but I’d say five grand or so. Give or take.”
“Yet the poachers who built this road believe they can cut my sticks while I still hold the rights to them and I won’t notice?” Harris says. “Maybe they figure I won’t see them?”
“Here’s their camp,” Baumgartner says, drawing the car to a halt. Probably the finest lumberman that Harris has ever known, Mort Baumgartner has stood by his side since the beginning. He and Harris met while studying forestry at Yale, and though Harris has never actually laid eyes on him, they’d once embraced—after signing a lucrative contract with the Royal Air Force for aircraft-grade Sitka spruce—and Harris took his measure then. Short, strong, and stumpy, with a bad knee and a musky, woodsy odour that persists even after a week of supply chain meetings in Vancouver.
Harris pops his door without waiting for Baumgartner to open it, and finds the ground springy with moss, the forest pleasantly silent. “What am I looking at?” he says. “Are they MacMillan’s?”
“It’s like one of our setups from the old days, sir,” Baumgartner answers. “Stables for oxen. Canvas shelters for the men. A cook-shack floating in the bay. Double-bitted falling axes, crosscut saws, Gilchrist jacks, and a donkey engine for dragging sticks into the water. They’re just creaming off the high-value trees—some of the stumps here are as wide as supper tables. But there isn’t a soul about. They must be floating a boom to the mainland today. And they are too ragtag to be MacMillan’s men. Locals probably. We’ll radio the Mounties from the schooner and make sure they confiscate their gear and run them off before another tree drops.”
Harris shakes his head. “No need to overreact,” he says, tracing the Bentley’s roofline with his fingers around to where he unhitches the trunk. He feels for the slick crocodile leather of his briefcase, and from it he pulls a jar he’d had prepared, which he carries out into the trees.
Harris Greenwood is six feet tall, with wavy hair the colour of wet sand. Despite his visual limitations, he possesses a ropy, woodcutter’s physique, thanks to his stubborn insistence on chopping all the firewood required for his sprawling mansion. Now, as always when he’s walking in a forest, he feels his jaw loosen, his muscles slacken, his unease dissipate, and soon his rigid stride gives over to an easy stroll. In the city, corners may strike like cobras and hard shoulders may thump him aside, but trees he can sense long before he reaches them, from the aura of quiet they emit and the way the ground rises up before them. In his boyhood, Harris and his brother, Everett, lived alone on a woodlot, selling windfall firewood and fending for themselves, and even after all these years forests remain the landscape of his most inner self.