It was another month of waiting before a wire finally came through from the Department of Militia and Defence that after four years of service, Private Greenwood had been discharged on June 3, 1919. His troopship was due to arrive in Halifax the subsequent day, so a feast was planned three days hence, allowing Everett ample time to travel home by rail.
Harris had the community hall adorned with paper lanterns and ribbons, and readied a great cask of lager he’d purchased. When the day arrived and Private Greenwood hadn’t appeared on the morning train as expected, Harris was undeterred. At suppertime he went ahead and called for heaping plates of food to be set out, with the largest portion put on the plate his brother had preferred since they were boys. While we ate, Harris gave a long-winded speech, claiming that his brother “Can’t even read a watch,” and that his tardiness was further proof that Harris ought to hold the controlling share of their company. We laughed uneasily, while glancing at our own watches. When the last evening train had come and gone, and it became clear that his brother would not return, Harris took up the heavy plate of food he’d prepared and asked Baumgartner to lead him out to a nearby well, where he pitched it inside, the porcelain smashing to bits while it dropped to the water.
Harris wasn’t seen for days afterward, until a lumber crew from Kingston arrived by rail and descended upon the Craig woodlot. From the road we could hear Harris loudly instructing them to leave no tree standing, even demanding that they take up the logs that formed the cabin and drag those off to the mill as well. When the job was done, Harris left on the same train that carried his logs, and we never saw him again—except in the pages of our newspapers and periodicals, of course.
His brother did return, eventually, though not for another five years, by which time Greenwood Timber had already established itself out West as one of the Dominion’s leading lumber concerns. Though to claim that Everett had returned would be misleading. He was just as transformed as Harris had been, except in his case for the worse. Gone was the merry, easy-moving boy who’d made bows and arrows and hollered swears from the tops of the elm trees in the town square. His face had become all shadows and angles, his brow creased like old newspaper, and his once-happy eyes had hardened, as though they’d been screwed deeper into his head. It was clear from his general dishevelment that he’d become a drifter, the kind of malnourished man we often glimpsed on the margins of town, drinking out of rain barrels or carrying things off that no one was using.
Some of us speculated that he was too wounded in his mind by the butchery of war to dwell in regular civilization. The rest believed that his true nature had finally been revealed over there in Europe, and that he’d simply evolved into the sinister creature that he’d always been. Regardless, it was a pitiful sight to behold when we escorted him out to the decimated woodlot that his brother had sold off to a local land speculator. He walked among the stubble of stumps, each of them black with rot, his feet sinking into the old sawdust that still blanketed the ground like snow. He came to a rest on a stump near to where their log cabin had been and sat for about an hour, muttering to himself with a dulled, unfocused look, drinking from a flask he kept in his filthy coat, taking wild swings at insects whenever they dared to fly near him. To be honest, he appeared to be doomed, like the sort of man who’d already suffered more than his rightful share, and would only keep on suffering.
Still, we did what we could. We offered to billet him in our houses, just as we had when he and his brother were first orphaned. But Everett only balled his fists and snapped at us to leave him alone. Given that his combative streak seemed to be the only aspect of his character to survive the War, we didn’t press the issue. Each morning, we brought a bucket of food out to the gutted woodlot, along with a pint jar of cheap spirits to replenish Everett’s flask. We would set these on one of the stumps near to where he slept, upon the rectangular scar that the cabin had left in the grass. This was how it went for two weeks, until one morning Everett walked to the railway, hopped a boxcar, and disappeared for good.
Over time, at our teas, card games, and social events, talk would often turn to the Greenwood boys and what became of them. We’d imagine Everett living in prison all those years for what he’d done to that poor child, or off in some hobo jungle somewhere, among his fellow criminals, wandering on the fringes of civilized people. Next, we’d imagine Harris in his great timber mansion, the one way out in Vancouver we’d read about in our general-interest magazines, with its bowling alley, grand ballroom, and vast, manicured gardens. And we’d shake our heads at how it all turned out.
Despite the scandal and that shameful business with the Japanese, we always bought Greenwood lumber for our houses and to repair the church. And we’d boast to anyone who’d listen about where the great captain of industry had hailed from. But in the same breath, we were just as likely to whisper about his brother, the fugitive and felon who’d committed an unspeakable crime.
Yes, we saw the Greenwood family begin, which was a privileged thing to witness, if you consider it. And while the pettiest of us claim to have known that those two boys were cursed from the day we found them barefoot and cowering next to those burning rail cars, the rest of us know the truth. That just as easily, it could’ve been Everett who received the proper schooling and then lost his sight. And that just as easily, it could’ve been Harris sacrificing himself for his brother and turning out the ruined, wandering man. As far as those Greenwood boys were concerned, we know it could’ve gone either way.
THE DUST
THAT MORNING A smothering duster envelops Temple Van Horne’s farm, which sits five miles outside Estevan, Saskatchewan. So far this year these storms have scoured the lead paint from her barn, her house, and her library, leaving great swaths of raw pinewood white as a farmer’s bared ass. The dust has felled her fence posts, drowned her auxiliary roadway, derailed the local trains, and sifted through the cracks and doorframes of even her tightest-built structures, leaving a thin film on carpets, bedspreads, and window dressings. Now, sipping her morning coffee in the kitchen, through the porch door she watches her Jerseys wander blindly, their heads bent low to vacuum up the blowing dust in hopes that some scrap of green lies beneath. Last week Temple slaughtered her best cow for meat after it gave brown milk, and she worries she’ll eventually have to do the same with the others before they die languishing with mud bursting their bowels.
“How many times do I have to tell them that there isn’t any grass down there?” Temple asks Gertie, who’s preparing a vat of porridge for the farmhands, like she does every morning, always beating Temple to the kitchen even though she’s pushing seventy.
“Cows are dim creatures,” Gertie replies. “But if this drought keeps up the way it is, you’d be better off raising camels.”
By mid-morning the rowdy wind falters and the dust settles, revealing a wide, prairie sky of almost lavender blue. Temple pulls on her work trousers and walks outside among the taupe, skin-smooth drifts of dust to survey the damage. She carries her second coffee in a tin cup back through the wheat fields, her palm clamped over the rim to keep the dust out, to where she discovers her seed crops entirely buried.
The drought has worn on for three years now, and these dusters are becoming ever more fierce and frequent. She’s heard the local farmers grumble about the greedy Americans to the south who’ve plowed over their grassland with mechanized tractors. In their view, it’s a plague from elsewhere: Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas. But the truth is that it’s their dust too. If Temple thought anyone would listen, she’d point out that in a frenzy to harvest more wheat, they’d ripped up their buffalo grass with similar zeal. Ever since she was a girl, Temple has always consulted books when faced with a quandary, and in the drought’s early days, she studied soil chemistry and scientific irrigation. She learned to rotate her crops and let the land lie fallow and regenerate, and at the agricultural hall in Estevan she’d warned the others to do the same. Yet their ways were set, and they weren’t seeking advice from the local “Lady Farmer.” Initially at least, Temple’s techniques kept her soil black as slugs, moist as cake, except none of that matters now. The dust blew in anyway. Little did those old fools know: green things are all that keeps the land and sky from trading places.