We applauded this bit of self-sufficiency—that is, until they shot and skinned the town alderman’s prize terrier. It was then decided that the boys required something more productive to fill their days. They were too uncouth to cut it as domestics, so we had them slingshot pigeons from the stone sills of town hall. Next, they harrowed our fields, dug up stumps, and caught nuisance squirrels by the grey plumes of their tails.
The boys were enterprising—Harris especially so, often demanding exorbitant payments for even the smallest tasks—and both took handily to manual labour. Some said they must have been born of good working stock from Germany, England, Ireland, France—or even Yankees. But the jobs were all of limited duration, and afterwards the two would relapse into delinquent pastimes: hunting foxes, kicking beehives, and hooking the fish in our private brooks. We called an emergency town meeting and agreed to procure for them a set of steel files and a whetstone, the expense justified as an investment in our township’s collective well-being and security. These implements appeared outside their shack the following day.
THE GREEN WOOD BOYS
THROUGHOUT THE WINTER of 1910, we brought them our dullest plow blades and knives and axes and saws. When those edges were freshened, we brought our longest-abandoned implements: bucksaws, picks, awls, hatchets, adzes, froes, files, and barking irons—all dull as marbles and gone tangerine with rust. Which the boys returned as sharp as scalpels, edges bright and silver with mineral oil. When there was nothing left to sharpen, they mended axe-handles and taught themselves to shoe horses and rebind tack. And when that was all done, for hours they’d straighten used nails with hammers on flat rocks, in a race to be the first one to complete a whole bucket.
Their thieving and troublemaking were curtailed thereafter, and with all those saws and axes about, the boys couldn’t avoid familiarizing themselves with their usage. When Taisto Maki, a Finlander and the town’s finest woodcutter, was crushed by a great white pine he was felling, his widow allowed the boys to keep his tools, given they’d cared for them so well in the past. Though they were only eleven at the time and lacked the brute strength for proper logging, they managed to buck up the plentiful windfall littering their woodlot, which they’d sell by the cord out beside the road. It was then Harris’s entrepreneurial streak truly emerged, as he hollered out to our wagons and haggled over prices like he was born doing it.
Over time they refined their axe strokes—more hips than arms—and soon knew exactly where a whorled grain would prove troublesome, and how to let the maul’s weight do the work for you. Still, none of us had the heart to mention to the boys that they were supposed to first dry the green wood for a minimum of a year—and ideally, two or three. And because we suspected that the funds we paid to Mrs. Craig weren’t entirely making their way into the boys’ stomachs, our townspeople were charitable enough to purchase the green wood at full-cord price, then season it ourselves so our stovepipes wouldn’t plug with creosote and burn our houses down.
So this is how it came to be that instead of what we’d previously called them—either “those poor boys” or “those goddamned boys,” depending on what they’d done that week—the pair came to be known as “the green wood boys.”
As years passed, the name settled upon them and rooted them in place. With it, they seemed less like ghosts or demons and more and more like regular boys. It became difficult for us to say whether they hadn’t always carried the Greenwood name, even since before the train crash. Some swore that despite their differences of physiology, those two even grew to look more alike, so much so that many of us forgot that they’d each been thrown from separate trains. It entered popular remembrance that the poor brothers had been found clutching each other, barefooted but dressed in matching outfits, the name Greenwood stitched into the labels of their coats.
With their woodcutting earnings the boys bought coloured pencils, maple candies, and some proper clothes, which they ruined immediately with pine pitch. Most of the spoils, however, went toward presents for Mrs. Craig, including some fine perfume and a smart beaver hat, which they left on her porch. It was rumoured that she never brought the gifts inside, and that it was never long before some tramp came from the railway and carted them off.
NUMBERS AND LETTERS
OVER TIME WE watched the ligatures of brotherhood thicken between those boys. We heard it claimed that they shared everything: even a trifle like a boiled duck egg they took great pains to split dead even with their sharpest jackknife. Yet despite this mutual reliance, all wasn’t peaceable. As it goes with siblings, their relations were part love, part rivalry, with wrathful annoyance making up the remainder. Scripture reminds us that brother has always warred with brother: Cain with Abel; Isaac with Ismael; Esau with Jacob. While it’s said that God gave trees their towering height in order for them to compete for the sun’s attentions, it seemed to us that brothers came up in a similar competition, elbowing and bickering with each other for the same patch of light.
Though Harris remained taller than Everett, the boys were of near-equal strength, wits, and fleetness of foot—this verified by the unending games of push-over, boxing, and sprints they engaged in daily. In a contest to raise the highest welt, they pelted each other mercilessly with crabapples, and with Mrs. Craig holed up in her house, there was no authority present to settle their disputes or drive them apart.
“Mrs. Craig prefers me,” we once overheard Harris proclaim with a sigh, carrying on another of his one-sided conversations as the boys sat eating the boiled peanuts Everett had lifted at the annual fall fair. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Everett. But it’s a plain fact. Last week she brought a nice pastry she’d baked out to the shack—you were off cutting wood or something—and she pecked me on the cheek while I ate it.”
“She didn’t give you no peck you damn liar,” Everett declared, except in a joyful tone, as though the sheer preposterousness of the lie delighted him.
“What’d you say?” Harris muttered, his face bright crimson. Though he always spoke for the pair and for this reason seemed older, Harris was easily wounded, and lived constantly on the verge of either tears or an angry outburst. Most infuriating to him of all was his brother’s habit of viewing him as ridiculous, and the world as one enormous, inconsequential joke.
“Which part bothers you more?” Everett replied nonchalantly, still grinning. “Me calling you a liar? Or that Mrs. Craig wouldn’t kiss a filthy rat’s ass like you ’cause her lips would rot clean off afterwards?”
Harris reared back, hurled a handful of peanuts into his brother’s face, and tackled him. After that the pair wrestled around in the grass for a while, the scrum quelling Harris’s rage. “Well, if I were a clumsy little dwarf like you,” he grumbled when they were done and he was straightening the collar of his torn shirt, “I wouldn’t expect no pastry either.”
By age twelve, the woodcutting had already piled muscles under their pitch-stained shirts, and their young bodies grew ropy like the boughs of white pine they cut daily. Their bloody skirmishes could last days: a series of ambushes, counter-ambushes, and retributions that would make a Trojan proud. Soon they were loosening teeth, nearly tearing the other’s ears off, and tugging out whole handfuls of hair. It was as though the brotherly bond they’d forged had pooled the ownership of their bodies, including the God-given right of self-destruction.