“You’ve family yourself?” Harris asks, clutching at the cliff’s edge.
“Not to speak of, sir. An auntie back in Cork. A sister who passed before I left. That’s the sum of it.”
“Good, good.” Why would his not having a family be good? “And so what would draw an Irish poet to the woods of Canada?”
“My homeland wasn’t agreeable to me, sir: too small-minded and cloistered. And working in the forest puts you closer to the heart of things. The money beats poetry, besides,” Feeney says tightly, and this time Harris can hear the smirk.
“Too true,” Harris says knowingly—why is he addressing him as a fellow poet? What does Harris know of their finances? “You know, in my time studying forestry at Yale, it was said that I had a ‘facile pen.’ And despite my obvious limitations, I did deep readings of the classics. Does this surprise you?”
“Not in the slightest. You seem a classical type of fella.”
Harris risks a gesture to his bookshelf: “I’ve accumulated a good collection of literature, though I find Braille cumbersome, slower-paced than the nimble mind. I prefer the music of the human voice.”
“Who doesn’t, sir.”
“Much information is contained in the voice, Mr. Feeney; more than the vulgar import of words. There’s tone, a person’s background, and emotion.” Another pause and Harris has no inkling whether his remarks have landed. Is he being pedantic? Of course a poet knows the subtleties of voice!
“Along with a describer,” Harris continues, “I require a man who can breathe life into language. One who can hold my interest. Have you done much public reading as a poet, Mr. Feeney?”
“Here and there,” he says noncommittally.
This settles it. Harris has grown sufficiently chaffed by the glibness of his tone, the lack of snap to his responses. “Here and there?” Harris retorts. “I asked if you’ve performed many public readings, Mr. Feeney.”
“That’s right, sir, you did. And following that, I replied ‘here and there.’ Glad we’re all caught up.”
Another toe-curling pause. Harris recalls how Everett, as a boy, met the world with a similar glibness, and how it always infuriated him. Now he draws a deep, volcanic breath. “I advise you to be careful, Mr. Feeney. Perhaps because you’re an artist you think you’re somehow my intellectual superior? That I’m playing the role of the crude industrialist, and you, the noble, carefree poet? In my experience, artists often elect to ignore the ironclad fact that without the aid of my lumber they’d be freezing in the dark with nothing to read but the anguish on their children’s hypothermic faces. Shakespeare himself would’ve been a shivering loon writing on the walls of a damp cave with his own urine if it weren’t for men like me.”
Now he’s certain that Feeney snickers, which half enrages him, half invites his own laughter. He is being over-dramatic, isn’t he? ‘His own urine’?
“Or perhaps you suspect a blind man is incapable of running an outfit like mine?” Harris asks menacingly, leaning forward, his hands pressed to his desk.
“Outfit, sir?” Feeney says. “Three million in annual revenue hardly qualifies you as an outfit. I’d say you’re doing just fine.”
Harris is so unaccustomed to being addressed with such frankness, he’s nearly enjoying it. “Those are pre-Crash numbers,” he says, resting back in his chair and shoving his thumbs into his armpits. “But it seems you do know a little about me after all.”
“Only the important bits, sir.”
“Such as?”
“Well, that you lost your sight in the War, and were decorated for your trouble.”
“Outright rumour and exaggeration. Anything else?”
Another pause.
“I require honesty from my employees, Mr. Feeney.”
“That you pay your oxen better than your men. Regardless of their honesty. Sir.”
Harris considers firing him at once, and having Baumgartner turf him to the sidewalk on his ear. Yet it was a well-constructed jab. True in a sense. And it took panache.
“I’ve yet to hear an ox complain,” Harris says. “Even so, I assure you, if you perform your duties to my satisfaction, you’ll be well rewarded, much better than for hauling booms to my mills. Now does that interest you?”
“It does,” Feeney says, chastened by the almighty dollar.
“That settles it, then,” Harris says, clapping his hands. “But before I tender my final decision, I’d like you to select a volume from my bookshelf and read a verse of your choosing.”
He hears Feeney rise and shuffle about. For a moment Harris fears he’s leaving the office, until there’s a leathery sigh from the chair and the sound of leafing pages. Then, without preamble, Feeney commences.
Harris identifies the verse instantly: some Tennyson, a fine and unusual choice of Tennyson. But more than the words it’s the voice—a sweet, exalting instrument—that ensnares him. It’s a mere cousin to the man’s speaking voice, though an elevation of it. The clean tone of a stringed instrument—a cello, yes, that’s it—yet more expressive, sopping with life, his vowels and consonants fitting together as neat as a joined wooden box.
Baumgartner often checks prospective lumbermen like livestock before he hires them, examining their teeth and gauging the tint of their eyes beside a sheet of white cardstock. And while Harris knows that the blind often pass their hands over a person’s features to gather a sense of them, he’s never performed such an imposition on anyone. It’s always seemed like such a vulgar act. A groping admission of his enfeeblement. Yet for the first time in his life, Harris wishes he could feel the face of Liam Feeney, this man whom he’s picked to be his describer, this bearer of a voice more arresting than anything he’s ever encountered.
“You’re hired,” Harris says brusquely after Feeney’s reading is done. “So don’t you ever speak to me like that again.”
A CAKE OF SOAP
HE’S HEARD IT claimed that maple syrup’s minerals will grow a person’s hair twice as quick, and Everett believes it. In the lavatory early the next morning, he undoes years of such growth with the woman’s shears, pulling away handfuls of beard like the pelts of small critters, tossing them from the dawn-lit window for the jays to nest with. After he shaves close with a straight blade, he shears his hair tight to his neck, as it was in the 116th Canadian Infantry Battalion, then draws a bath. It’s been a good decade since he’s bathed anywhere but a creek, and the experience is serene, especially with his troubles so nearing their conclusion. Without a baby to hinder him, the freights will have him back in Saint John in two days, where he’ll gather up his buckets and other sugaring implements and go find a place to start over. Perhaps he’ll even chisel a few bucks from the couple for a rail ticket so he can ride home like an upstanding citizen.
He scrubs his body then brushes out his toenails, and has just laid a washcloth over his face and shut his eyes when a hard thump sounds on the door downstairs. The husband speaks French with other men. Two of them. Then the woman speaks. After this conversation the door closes and the couple whisper awhile. Then whisper and yell. Then yell outright. Before long the woman is gasping and crying, and the man shouts a final command that puts ripples in Everett’s bathwater. Lastly, the woman clatters about the kitchen, speaking only through the rough treatment of dishes.