“The subject never came up,” Feeney says, nibbling the bulb of Harris’s nose, delicately, the way a horse takes an apple. “You were too busy prattling on about your beloved timber company.”
Over the duration of the voyage, Harris finds that beneath his describer’s prickly honesty is a seam of doting sweetness. While growing up, Feeney tells him, he had an elder sister who was incapacitated in both mind and body, a girl he’d cared for himself, dressing her and feeding her each day. Feeney had honed the knives of his wit to defend her on the sidewalks of Cork, and her death of heart complications when he was twenty was what had prompted his move to Canada. Not that Harris requires any such defense; but there’s a bone-deep loyalty in Feeney that Harris values. He describes things as they are, not as Harris wants to hear them. And his poet’s eye gazes into the very essences of things, whether the observation conforms to popular opinion or not.
Despite the deal with the Japanese they’ve secured, Harris seldom considers his business affairs during the journey. His thoughts centre mostly on the threat of discovery by the steamer’s crew, and on the rare birds he wants to show Feeney, and the hidden places he wants them to escape to upon their return.
Still, Harris is no fool. He knows exactly what awaits them in Vancouver. Unlike the anonymous movie theatre, people will be watching at home. Baumgartner, who was even more ill-tempered than usual during the trip, and who’d had the gall to insist that Harris take two suites at the Imperial Hotel, might already suspect something. If word ever got out, both Harris and the company he built could be destroyed.
But who more than Harris is prepared for the ruthlessness of the world’s judgment? And who knows better that some force will eventually snatch away this sweet gift he’s been given so late in life, just as his sight was taken from him on the cusp of manhood by a pitiless disease, just as his brother was taken from him by his own selfishness and stupidity?
Even so, Harris is not afraid. The blind, by their very nature, already operate as outcasts. And ever since he was a boy, he’s excelled at both concealment and self-preservation. As orphans, he and Everett managed to protect themselves by building that crooked log cabin on Mrs. Craig’s woodlot, and Harris’s arrangement with Feeney will be no different. If life has taught him anything, it’s that you must be more secretive, more protective, and more pitiless than the next man. Either that or everything you are, everything you’ve built, and everyone you love, can be trampled in an instant.
THE SALT RHEUM
SICKNESS COMES TO their hay-packed boxcar as they fly westward out of the black heart of Ontario. Each time the baby slips into sleep, she fails to draw air through her rheum-clogged nose and snorts herself awake. This is followed by a series of hacks that loll out her tongue—an impossibly tiny thing that recalls to Everett a tinned oyster. He keeps her head tipped back to drain her airway, which does little good, and the whole ordeal is repeated endlessly. At last he gives up and they sit awake, her eyes slick with mucus and flashing in the dark like gemstones, as they clickety-clack past pole-straight evergreens interspersed with inky lakes, the child clutching pitifully at his shirt as though he’s fixing to drop her.
Everett has given her a temporary name: Pod. He avoided doing so thus far, the way a farmer leaves the pigs bound for his smokehouse anonymous. But Pod is still just a placeholder. A road name, a hobo moniker—something to be sloughed off the moment she settles into her real life, wherever that may be. He knows that trees often use birds and squirrels to spread their seeds, along with various flying contraptions like whirlers or cottony fluff that can blow great distances. Much of creation works this way: living things send versions of themselves out into the great puzzle of the future. And like a seed, this girl is in dire need of a hospitable place to land. And it’s his job to find it.
At sunup the next day the salt rheum has mostly dried up, though Pod still hums with a low fever, her skin unnaturally shiny. She refuses the biscuits he’s brought, even after he soaks them in water, and when she does sleep at last, she wakes to a thick green crust sealing her eyelids, which provokes a thrashing yowl. Everett holds his wetted shirtsleeve to her grimacing face until her eyelashes come unglued. By the afternoon her cough has worsened, and she burns to the touch and stops taking water. Everett turns down her sweaty creeper to cool her, and when she still refuses to drink, he plugs her nose, pries open her jaw, and pours water down her gullet as she gurgles and screams.
Fearing the hay dust is aggravating her condition, he climbs out of the boxcar and over to a lumber gondola so they can ride out in open air. They tuck in beneath the woollen blanket as Pod tracks the landscape’s scroll with woozy interest. They roar past frizzy fields, slow-winding rivers, fall-down barns, grown-over paddocks, chicken pens, and groves of every tree imaginable. When dark falls, Pod’s eyes brim with starlight, and the moon, white as a sliced radish, floods the whipping forest. For an instant, they spot a wolverine sharpening its claws on a stump, then two deer, ears perked, frozen as though caught at some criminal act rather than chewing clover in the middle of nowhere.
To distract the child Everett begins speaking freely, even if the practice is bound to turn him crazy. “Your name’s Pod,” he says. “Pod,” he repeats, patting her creeper, and she replies with a gurgling, lamb-like bleat that sounds nothing like the word whatsoever. “And this here’s a gondola car,” he says, pointing everywhere. “It’s attached to other cars, which are all pulled by a locomotive. Whole thing’s called a train.” Though Pod listens with gaping eyes fixed on his lips, his words make little lasting imprint on her understanding. Because when he asks her later to point to the gondola car, she merely grunts and soils her flannels. “How am I supposed to teach you the words for things if all I have to do it is some other damn words?” he says, tapping the nub of her nose with his fingertip.
After he runs dry of definitions, he stumbles into a telling of his own life. Speaking with a candour he’d only ever employed with Harris when they were boys, he begins with how they became brothers and how they started out as woodcutters, and carries on from there. At times Pod regards him knowingly, as though it’s a story she’s heard a thousand times before, and Everett grows convinced her head is already larded with knowledge, not just of his own life and history, but all things that ever happened to anyone. Still, the story soothes her, whether she knows it already or not, and soon her limpid eyes dip shut.
The next morning her fever has broken and she guzzles up most of their water. The train runs fast all day and never sidetracks to let others pass—it may be an express, carrying something like freshly slaughtered steers or urgent mail, which, Everett knows, could pose a problem if they run out of provisions before it gets where it’s going. The train climbs squat, rocky shelves of rusty-tinged granite, dashing west past cut-over forests, mines, and gravel quarries—land that men like his brother Harris have already despoiled to pave their personal roads to riches.
He and Pod nestle between the stacks of fragrant lumber until the sun drops and the sky over Lake Superior is shot through with fuchsia spokes of light. Everett removes his boots and hangs his feet from the car’s edge. Pod lies splayed on his belly, her warmth boring into him. As they near the outskirts of Port Arthur, a sensation of wide-open liberty overcomes him, as though he and Pod are themselves the breeze and the world is theirs alone to blow through. He wriggles his toes in the leaf-sweet wind like a boy.