Knowing he can no longer keep his employer in the dark, Lomax trudges back through the woods and drives to Mr. Holt’s mansion in the city, where he finds him in his drawing room, drinking brandy and frowning at the financial papers. When Lomax tells him about a baby found in the woods by a hermit who has now very likely skipped town, Mr. Holt leaps to his feet.
“And you think this baby could be my child?”
“It could, sir. It was found on your property the morning after Euphemia went missing.”
“And the journal? Does he have it?”
“That has yet to be determined. But it’s been reported he does.”
Now Mr. Holt reaches up to rest both of his fine-smelling hands squarely on Lomax’s shoulders. “If you return them to me—my child and this journal—then the entirety of your mortgage on that nice little brick bungalow of yours will be wiped clean, Mr. Lomax. You have my word. Every penny.
“But if you fail to do so,” Mr. Holt adds, brushing some invisible lint from Lomax’s shoulder, “and this louse makes off with both my daughter and the material sufficient to ruin me with, then your house will be the least of what you’ll lose. In fact, you’d be better off not returning to Saint John at all.”
To shore up his employer’s confidence, Lomax describes his plan to check train stations and flophouses down the line. The task will be made easier because he’ll be seeking a single derelict with a child, surely an unusual sight. “After I locate him,” Lomax says, “I’ll offer a reasonable sum in exchange for the child and the journal. No need for theatrics. And certainly no need to involve the Mounties in such a sensitive matter.”
Just as Lomax is preparing to leave, Mr. Holt turns to him with a frosty smile and says, “Mr. Lomax? If at any point you are faced with the choice of which to recover, the child or the book, choose the book. Is that clear?”
As the father of seven, Lomax knows that while a child’s memory is an impermanent, malleable thing, paper is another story.
“Perfectly clear, sir,” he says.
NO BUSINESS
SINCE HE’S STUCK with the baby—at least until he can find a semi-respectable place to rid himself of her—Everett has vowed not to speak to her directly. He applied a similar rule on his sugarbush: no talking to trees. He’d seen it in the War, men talking to things that couldn’t answer back: guns, trucks, trenches, mud, even their boots—and it was always their first step down into the root cellar of madness. In Europe, with his brother—who’d always been their spokesman—absent from his side for the first time in his life, Everett found conversing with his fellow soldiers arduous, and managed to avoid them by taking odd jobs. When his superiors discovered he’d been a woodcutter, he was tasked with replacing the rotting trench planks that kept the men raised above the fetid mud. Everett preferred this to regular soldiering, though it felt bizarre to work with wood in such a wasted, treeless landscape, with planks brought in from Scandinavia, or even Canada, because there wasn’t a single living tree around for fifty miles.
After his carpentry was done, Everett volunteered as a stretcher-bearer, for which his youthful footspeed served him well. As bullets tore through the air, he’d dash out into the corpse-strewn patch that lay between them and the enemy to drag the wounded back, travois-style. After a year his regiment was transferred to the Somme. Then Vimy. Then Arleux-Fresnoy. Then Passchendaele. Each battle more gruesome and barbaric than the last. From mud as thick as suet, he pulled stray limbs dangling skeins of yellow fat and grey skin. He watched a man’s head get cut clean from his neck by a blade of shrapnel the size of a garbage can lid. He saw severed hands in the mud, stiff and contorted like great alabaster spiders. It was as though the horrors he witnessed were being stored in a reservoir inside him, rising a little each day, until the reservoir was full and its poison began to seep into his bloodstream. In the War’s last days, he was hospitalized for a bout of tremors and confusion that left him unable to tie his boots, and then he was shipped home.
Tonight, however, Everett sleeps untroubled and wakes in the boxcar at dawn, the baby curled in the hay beside him. They ride in silence until the train sidetracks around noon to let an express pass and an old tramp joins them in the car. He’s starved and skinny, red crescents hanging below his eyes like wounds, and given his frailty Everett pays him little mind and allows himself a nap. But he wakes later to find the man gone and his right foot naked as a whelp. Though his other boot remains, its laces have been sliced through and half yanked out.
“What kind of weasel steals one boot?” Everett demands of the sleeping baby, cursing himself for breaking his rule against speaking to her.
Everett sits grumbling about his misfortune until her eyelids crack open. Immediately, the corners of her mouth bend downward and she starts up again. He unfastens her sleeper to find a foul paste rimming her flannels, accompanied by a staggering stench. With held breath, he peels the fabric back. He’s never examined the female region so directly: that simultaneous absence and presence. Everett dampens a jute sack and wipes her clean as she squalls ferociously, nostrils flaring, tiny ribs heaving. With no spare flannels, he wraps her in a feed sack after shaking out the weevils, then scoops out some blackberry jam with his finger and pushes it into her mouth. Luckily, she shuts up, smacking her lips and pumping her legs like a bullfrog.
Later, when the freight grinds to a hard stop in a stretch of orchard land, he looks ahead and sees the spout of a water tower lowering to the locomotive’s boiler. Any hobo knows there’s always a water source near a tower, so he leaves the sleeping baby in the straw and hops down to the trackside gravel. Nearby he finds a small, purling creek that wanders through rows of white-blossomed apple trees. He submerges the soiled sleeper and flannel in the water, dragging them over the pebbly bottom, filth tumbling downstream in clots. He pins down the baby’s garments with rocks to let the creek do its work, then walks upstream to replenish the jar with water.
“You have no business on my land,” a voice declares suddenly from behind him. Everett whirls around to find a hefty man of about fifty, a wide straw hat over sunburned ears, a pair of thick pruning shears in his hands, the kind used for lopping large branches.
“Just washing up, sir,” Everett says amiably, cursing the creek’s babble for disguising the man’s steps.
“Well, you’re washed, so get moving.”
“I’ll be doing that shortly. There aren’t any local statutes against cleanliness, are there?”
“No, but there are plenty against you getting back on that train over there,” the man says, pointing to the tracks with his sharp shears.
“You got it wrong, sir. I came from the road,” Everett says, taking the opportunity to check the train: the tower’s spout is retracted but the cars remain still. “I’ve been hitching rides. Seeking work.”
“Which way’s the road, then?” the man asks.
Everett scans around for what he knows is an incriminating duration. “Over there,” he says, pointing beyond the man’s left shoulder.
“Then you won’t mind walking over there, will you?” he replies.
Everett hears the distant crunch-rasp of the fireman’s shovel, and the locomotive whistles fiercely. Fireflies of cinder and bone-white steam lift from its stack. Almost imperceptibly slow, the wheel gearing starts to move. “Okay, okay, you’re right, sir,” Everett says, putting up his palms. “I came on that freight. But there’s something I need to retrieve from it first. Then I’ll be on my way.”