The man points the shears at Everett’s one naked foot. “You’re going to have to get a boot somewhere else.”
“It isn’t just my boot,” he pleads. “Everything I own is on that boxcar. My bedroll, my life savings, snapshots of my family. I’ll just grab them and jump off. You can watch me the whole way.”
Agonizingly, the train gathers momentum and whistles again. Soon it will be about as fast as a man of Everett’s age could ever hope to sprint. His mind flashes to the infant, stark naked, wrapped in a rough jute sack, about to be ferried off into a lonesome Hell of dehydration and death.
“You don’t belong on that train,” the man barks. “And I’m tired of you hobos shitting in our creek.”
“I’ll be straight with you,” Everett pleads. “I’ve got a child over there. A baby. If you don’t let me go, she’ll ride off alone.”
“Oh pigshit,” the man snaps. “By the time I count to three you’d better make for that road,” he says, edging in Everett’s direction, pruning shears raised. “One…”
Everett feels the old poison in his bloodstream—the brutality he’d cultivated protecting himself and his brother on the schoolyard, which had further concentrated inside him while watching all those boys butchered for no reason during the War.
“Two…”
He rotates away from the shears, angling the man into the sun. When a full squint eclipses the man’s face, Everett lunges the tip of his elbow into it. The man staggers, gore zipping from his nostrils, then drops to the creek bed as Everett breaks for the train.
While he runs there’s no cover, and the sun is high and his footfalls stamp noisily on the trackside gravel and the train’s crew will surely spot him. At full sprint and barely keeping pace, Everett manages to reach what he guesses is the correct boxcar and attaches himself to its iron rung just as he can run no farther. He throws his chest onto the car’s wooden planks, still only half hoping to find the baby waiting for him inside.
A DESCRIBER
THE GREENWOOD TIMBER Company operates out of the east wing of Harris Greenwood’s sprawling private mansion in the exclusive Shaughnessy neighbourhood of Vancouver. Harris knows that the local business community finds it eccentric that he doesn’t purchase a floor of offices in a ritzy building downtown, but he prefers to keep his company and his personal life enmeshed, and he deflects any inquiries concerning the arrangement with a rehearsed joke: “Why would I pay for a view?”
At seven a.m. Harris sits at his desk and readies his mind for the day’s tasks, itemizing the mill managers, timber buyers, and high-profile accounts he’ll converse with today. His office is both his war room and his sanctuary, a place as familiar to him as the crooked log cabin that he and Everett built together as boys. While he’s at his desk, in the midst of his steadying routine, he never falters, never bumps walls or topples shelves, never ends up calling for help like a child lost in the woods.
Harris summons Terrance Milner, his long-time clerk and accountant, a trustworthy man and steadfast wizard with figures, who proceeds to read him documents that require his signature. Long ago Harris had Baumgartner bolt an inkwell to his desk—a foot forward, a foot to the right—and Harris feels a predictable trill of gratification as he pokes his pen into the well, which is exactly where he expects it.
Beyond his desk hang the cages of three dozen exotic birds—his one enduring pleasure, excluding his routine. Milner sends off for catalogues and Harris places orders by telegram with cranky British dealers, who ship the birds back on his returning freighters. Diamond doves. Cinnamon-wing budgerigars. Bengalese finches. African silver-bills. Any client unfortunate enough to speak with Harris Greenwood during morning hours seldom hears him over the squawks and twitters of his collection. For many years, this birdsong has been enough to dispel the fits of lethargy and low mood that can sometimes seize him. Yet his current collection has afforded him decreasing pleasure in recent weeks, and to counteract this Harris makes a mental note to place a new order soon.
After he signs the day’s meagre stack of shipping manifests and correspondences, he’s left crestfallen by the relative emptiness of his desk. Here, purchase orders were once stacked neck-high—it seemed the whole world needed rebuilding after the War: public buildings, houses, railways, bridges. He logged his first thousand hectares by the time he was twenty-five, and earned his first million by twenty-seven. Many claimed that blindness gave him an advantage, made him shrewd and impossible to swindle, and his nose for timber became legendary.
But since the Crash has choked off all North American railway development and mining starts, including residential and commercial construction, Greenwood Timber has begun bleeding like a bowshot deer: fifty thousand dollars monthly in operating overages, mostly due to a rapidly depreciating overstock—clear beams and boards rotting and twisting in the weather—as well as to rising labour costs, paid to men who threaten to strike every other week as though they’re a bunch of wheedling toddlers. And it doesn’t help that the Soviets are using what amounts to forced labour. Their prime lumber is just as good as his own: full-dimension, unlike the inch-and-a-half by three-and-a-half sticks that most producers pass off as two-by-fours.
Without newsprint and paper, Greenwood Timber would already be dead in the water. He supplies all the Canadian periodicals, and half the major U.S. book imprints. But soon he’ll be forced to pulp trees that would have once served as the bones of palaces, which to a lumberman is akin to grinding up prize tenderloin for breakfast links. All so people can do pointless crosswords and read inane dime-store paperbacks.
Harris pushes through his low mood by busying himself with telegrams, letter dictations, and telephone calls, before taking his usual pheasant lunch at his desk while Milner reads him the Globe, which has declared that despite the Crash, the economy’s fundamentals remain sound. Harris, however, needs further convincing.
“A tree will tell you everything you need to know about the variations of prosperity,” Harris muses to Milner through a mouthful of pheasant. “Dark, thin rings indicate dry years. Thick rings, bountiful wet ones. And the lumberman in me suspects it may be thin rings for a while yet.”
If he was smart he would have shifted to steel long ago and been done with logging altogether. Timber is a brutish business, and requires brutes to harvest it. He attended Chicago’s world’s fair last year, and never heard the word lumber spoken once—it was all alloy, glass, and plastic. Steel-girded buildings that will survive any fire or flood. While Harris had a brief opportunity years ago to buy some Bessemer steel mills from R.J. Holt of New Brunswick, he’d deemed the numbers too risky and backed out. But any man with a head on his shoulders could predict lumber’s inevitable decline. “The future ain’t made of no wood,” he once heard a pole-jack from one of his lumber gangs declare, words that have wormed into him ever since.
At two o’clock Baumgartner knocks and Harris orders him in.
“We’ve received a report that a rain came and only half of that island you set on fire was burned,” Baumgartner declares. “And you’ll be happy to know there were no corpses to get rid of, either.”