When the Crash hit five years back, Temple had carpenters construct an even larger covered porch, extending out near the willow tree, and set a big table beneath it. Though No. 1 Northern wheat had dropped from $1.43 to sixty cents a bushel as the drought dragged on—two years, then three—her well held, and the farm remained profitable. Though Gertie thought it a bad idea, Temple began to allow guests to sleep in the hayloft in return for a morning’s labour in the field, and was pleased to see that the work did them almost as much good as the food. Even as a girl, she’d had a mind for the repair of broken things—including birds crushed against a window and prairie dogs maimed by her father’s horse-drawn thresher. She was an expert maker of splints and patches, poultices and bandages, which her father encouraged. And today, in her better moments, she feels she’s honouring his memory with this great unprofitable enterprise.
Three years ago, while recalling her father’s words on nourishment, a vision seized her. That evening she lined the old church on her property with some makeshift plank shelves, but it took a full calendar year to collect enough books to fill the first one. Then she had the idea that those seeking a meal and shelter might bring one as payment—any book as good as any other. Thus it came to be that in an old church just outside Estevan, Saskatchewan, is housed one of the world’s great libraries. Its books were not bestowed or bequeathed—in fact, few were purchased. Most were stolen, found, begged for, borrowed, or brought from the world’s farthest corners by the world’s lowest people. Gathered by vagrants and vandals, convicts and parolees. Tramps, prostitutes, and husband-killers. Larcenists, bank robbers, and check-kiters, as well as decent men and women just down on their luck. Her collection is not catalogued. Its titles sit on shelves of rough-hewn lumber and stacked brick, balanced as precariously as the lives of those who acquired them. To make a withdrawal, a patron must simply bring another book in exchange, no questions asked. Books come to Temple with banknotes tucked inside, or locks of hair, bloodstains, theatre tickets, love notes, or hastily scrawled threats—all discoveries that flush her with a kind of archeological delight. Once a man brought a two-volume illustrated Dante’s Inferno, with a different wildflower pressed between every second page.
As far as circulation goes, the Russians are popular (her patrons are well versed in the dialects of depravity, betrayal, madness). As is Homer, the bard of ill-fated homeward journeys. Books on canning and food preservation are equally popular. As are how-to manuals. Anything that allows for more to be done with less.
Still, Temple has no illusions concerning her library’s impact. Her books won’t lift anyone from their low station. They won’t right wrongs or save wandering souls from perdition or fill grumbling stomachs. But they might let a few scraps of sunlight fall into some lean, desolate lives, and that’s something.
Over the years, however, any babies she’s allowed on the farm have always brought trouble. People come looking for babies, usually dragging a whole mess along behind them. She was all set to turn the tramp and his infant away at the fence line, which perhaps would’ve been doing them a favour, given McSorley’s habit of appearing on her farm every month or so to see what fugitives she’s harbouring. But the man’s understated “We’ve missed some meals” made her reconsider. From her dealings with the needy, she knows it’s the ones who don’t complain who are the greatest cause for worry. It’s the quiet ones you find tucked away in a corner somewhere, eyes glazed over, starved, too proud to ask.
If McSorley does catch them here, bunking in the house no less, at best he’ll see her run out of Estevan for good; she doesn’t want to consider his worst. So her plan is to keep them just until the windbreak is in: a week, two at most. She’s had Gertie put some sheets up over their windows to discourage prying eyes. And besides, this Everett doesn’t appear to pose any imminent threat to the girl. Though if he does anything strange, she’ll be the first to call in McSorley herself. And if all goes well, once the pair is restored they’ll be on their way. If Temple’s father taught her anything, it’s that no one deserves to be hungry. Not even kidnappers. She’s hosted worse on her farm before. And there are likely even worse to come.
FULL TITLE
HARRIS GREENWOOD HAS never liked his mansion. Even though it’s built from some of the grandest trees that ever lifted from the soil, criss-crossed with beams hewn from Douglas fir, sequoia, and red cedar—trees already head-high when Napoleon drew his final breath. Built in Queen Anne style, with thirty-five rooms, including four parapets, parquet floors, two tiers of balconies, a private bowling alley, rosettes and mouldings of walnut, cherry, oak, and maple, all crafted by the finest Scottish woodcarvers, it’s expensive to maintain, overlarge for his needs, and easy to get lost in. Yet for the first time since its construction, Harris is grateful for its enormity. Because such a large domestic staff is required to run it, no one views it as odd for his describer to take up residence there following their homecoming from Asia.
But Harris finds his return to his usual office routine strangely agonizing. Perhaps he’s depleted from the journey, or perhaps he caught some exotic bug on the steamer, but the morning hours inch by as he shifts in his seat and his mind wanders like an abandoned dog. His desk, once a sturdy lifeboat in the waters of his daily routine, now sits before him as inert and dispiriting as a gravestone.
By the afternoon, Harris can barely follow Milner’s supply chain reports or Baumgartner’s briefs on the Chemainus mill dispute he brutally halted by hiring local thugs to disperse the complaining workers. And by suppertime, his desk is cluttered with unanswered correspondence and unread land leases and documents in want of signature.
The truth is that he’d much rather be reclining on the divan in his room, as Feeney recites Keats in his cello-like voice, before they dine together on the veranda and discuss some bit of esoteric news they’ve alighted upon in the papers. To prevent suspicion, Harris has ordered Feeney to resist visiting his room after hours, the way he had so freely on the ship, and has decided to limit his presence in the Greenwood Timber Company offices unless it’s deemed necessary.
To ease the drudgery, Harris arranges a visit to one of his remote mills—along with his describer, naturally. Baumgartner would normally accompany Harris on such a trip, but Harris makes a calculated risk in requesting that he remain in Vancouver to assess their inventory for the big Japanese order personally. Thankfully, with no burr of suspicion in his voice, Baumgartner agrees.
Harris and Feeney sail the schooner to Victoria, then unload the Bentley and drive north. After a numbing ride over miles of corduroy logging roads, they arrive at the first mill near sundown. Harris is thrilled to be back among the frenzied activity of a logging outpost in late summer, with its sawdust and sap and chock-chock of bucker’s axes. He delights in the shrieks of whistles, the rattles of hooked boom chains dragging his logs from the water, the floorboards torn to splinters by his fallers’ spikes, and the ringing gang saws he can feel in the roots of his teeth. They make camp in a nearby valley, and with no prying eyes about, Feeney visits Harris’s tent, though he’s always careful to leave before first light.