HEARTWOOD
ONE IS SUBJECT to much talk nowadays concerning family trees and roots and bloodlines and such, as if a family were an eternal fact, a continuous branching upwards through time immemorial. But the truth is that all family lines, from the highest to the lowest, originate somewhere, on some particular day. Even the grandest trees must’ve once been seeds spun helpless on the wind, and then just meek saplings nosing up from the soil.
We know this for certain because on the night of April 29, 1908, a family took root before our eyes. We awoke to the apocalypse itself. The tremor flung the dishes from our cupboards and unhitched the frames from our walls. Two twenty-car passenger trains had collided head-on a mile east of our township. The westbound locomotive’s tender caught fire and the flames passed from one train to the other and hours went by before we could push our water wagons deep enough into the oily coal smoke to douse the blaze. The fire left a gruesome scene: skulls studded with black teeth; indistinguishably charred appendages intermixed with twists of contorted iron and torched garments. A proper accounting of the dead was impossible, but of the sixteen passengers thrown from the train’s windows on impact, the sole survivors were two young boys, both left barefoot by the tremendous force of the crash, one discovered tangled deep in the brush, the other floundering in a nearby brook. Both were near nine years of age, by our reckoning, and even after hours of hunting, we never found a single shoe.
Our town physician determined that it was their small statures that saved them, the way a squirrel can plunge from a tree and skitter off unharmed. Either that or, as was claimed by the more speculative among us, something evil and unkillable resided in them both. Still, that the boys escaped such a cataclysm seemed as much a miracle then as it does now.
We sent word of the two survivors to the CN Railway Company, who maintained they had no record of any children riding either train, so they bore no responsibility for any that happened to be found in the vicinity of the accident. While it was upsetting business to face the young victims of such tragedy, it was our rail junction—and our octogenarian switchman—who’d effectively orphaned them, so after our failed efforts to locate any surviving family, we appraised the boys as our responsibility and assumed their charge. Matters were handled differently in those days, and lost people circulated as unnoticed as slight gusts of wind.
Though the ordeal had rendered both boys mute, it was immediately clear that the mysterious pair shared no blood. One was slightly shorter, with dark, wavy hair and almond eyes that always avoided your own; and yet he had an easy, almost carefree way of moving about the world, despite what he’d suffered. The taller one had long fingers and thick, honey-coloured hair; that one would meet anyone’s gaze with a shrewdly appraising glare, as though even our rescue had been some kind of trick, a further continuation of the disaster that had befallen him. Yet despite their outward differences, we figured those two boys were better off kept together, and billeted them with several charitable homesteads in the area while we waited futilely for someone to claim them.
It’s well established that the recollections of youngsters are about as reliable as rainbows. This is especially true, we learned, of the recently orphaned. When after a week the boys finally spoke, the difficulty wasn’t that they’d forgotten their names, it was that they drummed up too many: a junk shop of surnames and given names all mumbled and jumbled together—Tommy, Mackenzie, Buck, Smith, Jacob, Finnegan, Seymour, Gordon, Aaron. Perhaps the impact had scrambled their heads, or perhaps their true names had become too painful to utter now that their families were dead, but our only remedy was to jot them all down on scraps of paper and pull two from a coffee can and get on with it. Concerning their pasts, the blonde one, for whom we pulled Harris, could recall only fragments: sheep, five or six sisters, an uncle, rain pattering a metal shed roof, a smoky hearth. The darker boy, for whom we pulled Everett, recalled slimy fish knives, a barking man with no hair at all, a sickly mother, a wireless that never worked.
Beneath the overpowering stink of burnt horsehair cushions and immolated flesh must have lingered the traces of their lost homes and families, still caught in the fibres of their sweaters and the linings of their nostrils. Yet each passing day must have left those traces a little weaker, further confused, less distinct. Soon their pasts withered away completely, and all that remained was haze and hearsay.
It was shortly after we named them that we began discovering their beds empty in the night. Our townspeople took up naphtha lanterns and tracked them into the woods. We found the boys cowering and clutching each other in the bedclothes we had given them beneath a wide-spreading tree, muttering in an unsettling shared tongue. When this was repeated over several nights, we were near ready to shove those boys back on an outbound train and be done with it. And given how things turned out, lately we can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake we didn’t.
It was Parson Brennan who took note that whenever the boys absconded, it was often to one particular woodlot, an otherwise vacant plot officially owned by Mrs. Fiona Craig. We still can’t say why this was. Perhaps they were drawn to the old trapper’s hut they discovered there, a rotted windowless shack once used, it was rumoured, to harbour runaway slaves from the United States. Or perhaps it was some comforting aspect of the woods themselves, which were thick with oak and maple, foxglove and trillium, elderberry and chokecherry.
Especially after they started taking to the woods, there was something otherworldly and haunted about the pair. So while many of us could’ve used some extra hands around our properties, none volunteered to take the boys on a permanent basis. As a last resort we proposed to Mrs. Craig that she allow their habitation in that hut on her woodlot. The township would provide her with a yearly sum to house and feed them until they came of age. And though the old widow had no offspring of her own, and wasn’t what you’d call the caretaking type, we were pleasantly surprised when she agreed.
MRS. FIONA CRAIG
SHE AND HER husband, James Craig, a lantern-jawed physician, arrived in Canada at the Halifax harbour in 1893. The transatlantic relocation had been wholly his idea. Fiona, a slight but attractive girl raised in Glasgow’s tenement slums, met James while he was there studying the spread of pulmonary consumption among the poor. As he often went unmasked, even when performing autopsies on the most wretched corpses, he contracted a case of his own shortly after their marriage. This was Fiona’s first taste of James’s foolhardiness, which would frustrate her to no end, especially after she’d struck the kind of marital gold unheard of among those of her low station.
When James took ill, his ears pricked to the beckoning New World, with its healthful air, economic opportunity, and abundant greenery. Fiona knew her husband was always romantic about woodlands—too much Burns and Wordsworth in his youth perhaps—and he even viewed his consumption as a kind of poetic affliction, a deepening of the senses. They would leave the bleak moors of Scotland, James decided, a land of too few trees and too many people, with its grimy smoke and vagrants and urchins spitting in the gutters, and establish a country practice in the wooded province of Ontario, near the city of Kingston. Eventually, James aimed to travel on the newly constructed railroad even farther west to British Columbia, where the marine air was said to be moist and sweet and the trees grew as high as clouds and could be chopped at for weeks before they’d so much as wobble.