The bucolic spirit of the tour comes to an end, however, when a ten-foot circular blade is thrown from a gang saw, leaving a man riven in half from forehead to vitals. It’s such a grisly scene that Feeney refuses to describe it, though a millwright later informs Harris that after completing the cut, the bloodied blade ran like a banshee into the forest and lodged itself in a tree a mile distant. Men in Harris’s employ die with some regularity—he signs their notices and pays a paltry severance to the family, which there usually isn’t. Yet to be so near this particular death disquiets him. With Feeney now at his side, Harris is newly alert to the brutality of logging and the general frailty of life. And after a ramshackle service held near the log skids, Harris cancels a final excursion to hunt rare woodland birds for his collection and hastens their return to Vancouver the following day.
When they arrive at the Greenwood mansion, Milner and Baumgartner immediately request an emergency meeting.
“We’ve taken stock while you’ve been on your little gallivant, sir,” Baumgartner says. “And things don’t look good for the Japan deal.”
“Oh, we’ll find the trees, we always do,” Harris says confidently.
“I doubt you’ve forgotten, Mr. Greenwood, but we’re contractually obliged to provide the Japanese High Command with seventy million feet of Douglas fir railway sleepers, all slathered in creosote,” Milner says in his schoolmarmish tone. “And with many of our land leases expiring imminently, even if we use up all of our existing overstock, we don’t have the trees to cut them.”
Harris now realizes that his trip had been imprudent, and perhaps even reckless. He can’t help noticing a shift in tone among his senior employees, a heightened air of secrecy and wariness, as though they’re managing him more than obeying. Again, the memory of those dead swampers pops into his mind.
I’m the one signing the cheques here, Harris reminds himself. And if either Milner or Baumgartner dares to challenge him, he’ll run them out of the province, not to mention his company. That said, they know his affairs better than anyone, and if this Japanese deal falls through, he’ll be finished. And, perhaps most importantly of all, so will his arrangement with Feeney.
So Harris needs trees. It’s not like he’s never faced this predicament before. The eastern Canadian stock is long exhausted—which is why he broke West in the first place—so his only hope is local timber. When he inquires about some parcels of MacMillan’s that could suit their needs, Milner reminds him that ever since Harris undercut MacMillan for a lucrative railway trestle contract in central B.C., their rival will neither sell nor lease them a single acre, and neither will any member of his syndicate.
“Why not buy full title on the Port Alberni parcel from Rockefeller?” Feeney interjects from the office’s margins after the discussion has stalled.
“Mr. Greenwood hired you to be his eyes, chum, not his mouth,” Baumgartner snaps.
“That’s enough, the both of you,” Harris says, leery of appearing overprotective.
Perhaps Liam has a point, Harris thinks. Traditionally, Greenwood Timber never seeks full title. Instead, he’s always preferred to lease cutting rights from the Crown or private landholders. That way, after he logs the land to his heart’s content, ownership of the ugly slash and stumpage reverts to them. Yet with the stock of accessible old-growth shrinking, firms are holding tight to what they’ve got and electing not to lease cutting rights at all. With MacMillan’s syndicate united against him, a tract the size Harris needs could only be had from a foreign concern—John D. Rockefeller’s Port Alberni parcel being the best bet. In addition, Harris realizes, the parcel could include that little secluded island he’d half-burned, a place he’s been daydreaming about bringing Feeney someday, where they could perhaps build a little cabin retreat if it all works out.
So what if he bought it outright? After all, Harris began his company by clear-cutting the Craig woodlot that he and Everett inherited, then selling off the land at a tidy profit. When Greenwood Timber was in its infancy, Harris often acted as his own purchasing agent, talking the crustiest of landholders out of their family plots. Except he can’t propose a sale of this magnitude by telegram. Not to a man like Rockefeller. And he can’t possibly travel to New York—a frail, blind Canadian cuts a pitiful figure in that world. Besides, Harris can neither shoot pheasant nor play bridge nor gossip about New York society. He wouldn’t even get a meeting.
“We’re finished if we can’t get our hands on more trees,” Harris says exhaustedly into Feeney’s neck later that evening, after his describer has brazenly broken their rule against nocturnal visitation and snuck into his bed for the first time.
“I have an idea,” Feeney replies. “But you’re sure to dislike it.”
“Well, come on,” Harris says, kissing his neck, “out with it.”
“Remind me again how you feel about parties?”
SAPLINGS
THE MORNING FOLLOWING Everett and the baby’s arrival, Temple asks one of her men to take the tractor and fetch a hundred maple saplings from Fritz Schelling, whose hog farm borders some of the last glades in the area that haven’t been razed for cropland. She’d prefer to select out the saplings herself, but a few years back Schelling had proposed marriage without so much as speaking three words to her previously, and since her refusal he turns the colour of ripe rhubarb whenever he’s in her vicinity.
Normally, her men jump at an errand that alters the day’s predictability, but each man she asks drags his feet and claims he can’t drive the tractor. Word of McSorley’s interest in the baby has surely spread, and Temple knows that her men certainly don’t want anything around here that will intensify his scrutiny. And Gertie has reminded her of how much they disapprove of anyone enjoying preferred treatment, like staying in the house or having special meals prepared. So it seems a pact has been made among them to complicate matters for the new man until he moves on.
It isn’t until after Temple threatens to cut dessert for a week that the youngest farmhand agrees and returns with the saplings by noon. Temple offers to have Gertie mind the baby while they work, but Everett declines. “Pod’s used to watching me lug things around,” he says. “And she might learn something.”
They take Temple’s pickup, slung low with seven jute-wrapped maples, out toward the lot line, where a dusty wind blares from the south. They drive with the windows cranked tight, the child propped in Everett’s lap as he calls out the few landmarks visible in the haze. Whenever she starts to fuss, he bangs her tiny feet together like little cymbals.
“I tried a caragana shelterbelt out here years back,” Temple says, aware that it makes no difference to him what she tried. “Wasted some good saplings. I still don’t know why they didn’t take.”
“There’s no surefire way to know if one will,” he says. “You can put a tree in the ground with all the care in the world, and still some switch gets flipped and it dies on you. In my opinion, the tree decides whether it’s worth the effort of going on living or not, and there’s no way you can convince it otherwise. They’re finicky things. But we’ll do our best with yours.”