During those first years after he settled on his sugarbush, handsome women would visit Everett’s dreams—always more frequently in spring—their hair plastered with river water, their skin moonlit platinum. While these visions eventually subsided, already he knows that this time spent with Temple has left any return to a former state of dormancy unthinkable. Still, he can’t shake the nagging suspicion that it’s all some practical joke—the cruel sort he and Harris sprang upon each other as boys.
“Lucky for me,” Temple adds with a crooked smirk, “you’re the illiterate hermit I’ve been waiting for.”
“I suppose that makes you the helpless, farm-bound spinster of my dreams,” he says with mock sincerity, flipping her over to rise on his arms above her. But immediately she knocks out the joints of his elbows and he topples against her, clonking heads, and then they wrestle awhile, bumping an unlit hurricane lamp to the floor. Pod stirs at the ruckus, huffing in the improvised crib they’ve made of the galvanized woodbin nearby, the child nestled in amongst the clothes they shucked off hours previously.
“You never had any babies yourself?” he asks after they’ve collapsed, realizing too late that although he intended to rekindle their earlier banter, the levity of the moment is now lost.
“No, never,” she says sombrely. “I conceived one, but there was some trouble with it and I lost the ability. My husband ran off after that—he’d always rattled on about the truckload of precocious children we’d have, so I half expected it. But I’m happy he left. Family life was never for me. I’m more useful running this place than I am worrying over some snotty noses.”
They lay in silence for some minutes, Everett eager to apologize for the flippancy of his remark, yet unable to broach it without sounding like a sniveller.
“Everett, how did that child really come to you?” she asks, pushing her fingers through his hair.
As he prepares to reassert his story about being Pod’s uncle, her eyes latch upon his and a soft, lush feeling engulfs him. “I found her,” he says. “Hung to die on a tree.” After this initial tug, the story of his life on the woodlot unspools from him, in the same easy way the story of his upbringing had for Pod back on the freight train. He tells Temple about finding the maple forest after drifting for years, about how he quit drinking and constructed his shack.
“At first I saw the child as a hex put on me,” he goes on. “Except now my only concern is that she doesn’t come to harm. And that includes from me.”
“Was it you who beat that senator’s brother in Ontario?”
He nods. “Pod would be dead if I hadn’t. And that’s exactly why I need to pay someone decent to raise her. Trouble finds me wherever I go. Always has. I never had a good home, so what do I know about making one for her? She deserves a better start than I’d ever give her.”
“And how exactly will you finance this better start? With syrup? During the worst times anybody has ever seen?”
“That brother I mentioned?” he whispers. He knows he shouldn’t tell her, but he needs her to know that he’s not some illiterate dunce with foolish plans. “Is Harris Greenwood.”
Ashamed of his boast, he buries his face in the pillow.
She squints. “That barn over there was built with Greenwood lumber,” she says skeptically. “You aren’t pulling my leg, are you?”
He shakes his head.
“You’re planning to ask him for help. Why haven’t you already?”
He tells her that he hasn’t set eyes on his brother for eighteen years, and that while they aren’t brothers by blood, they are in every other way. “The woman who cared for us never let us in her house. Just kept us outside like a couple of dogs. She hated us, deep down.”
“You can’t say that, Everett. I’m sure she had her reasons. You can never be certain why people behave the way they do.”
“Still, she willed us that woodlot jointly when she died. Harris wanted to log it completely, but I refused. Then after the War he wrote and asked if I wanted to start a lumber company with him, beginning with his half of the woodlot, and I said yes. But I had trouble making it home and got caught up wandering. I did make it back, eventually, though not before he cut all the trees and sold off the property. I hated him for years for what he’d done. Except now, with Pod in the picture, my plan is to ask for my stake and use it to find her a good home.”
“Sounds like a fair proposition to me.”
“I doubt he’ll receive me kindly, though. He always had a temper. But now that your windbreak is in, Pod and I should start heading west in the morning, so I guess we’ll soon find out.”
“I’d like to say I need some more trees planted. Or that you ought to finish your lessons in the library. But yesterday I heard the mailman claim that McSorley is in Manitoba, chasing some Yankee wife-killer up from New York. He’ll come to Estevan next. But today is Friday, and he can’t possibly make it here until Monday at the earliest.” Temple takes his hand in hers. “So stay. One more day.”
After Everett agrees, Pod wakes, mewling and grunting. When he stands naked by the bed to re-swaddle her, he leaves his own image silhouetted on the sheet in tan-coloured dust, as though Temple has been lying with his ghost, and the sight of it spooks him.
Temple is asleep by the time he returns, making quick, unintelligible sounds, a series of hmmphs. He wishes he could wake her and ask what she’s hmmph-ing about, whether it’s related to all the books she’s read and all the unique thoughts she has that he can’t stand not knowing about. He rocks Pod while Temple fusses and kicks at the sheets in her sleep, a nocturnal restlessness he’d like to read as evidence of a greater one. A desire for something else, perhaps even somewhere else.
At daybreak Everett watches Temple rise and begin pinning up her hair at the mirror. He admires the way stray hairs slip from her hairpins no matter how tightly she gathers them. The way her shoulder blades draw together and nearly touch. All a great glory that she doesn’t seem to register.
“What were you dreaming of last night?” Everett asks.
“Oh, it’s the same every night since the drought: roaring rivers; clear streams; lakes as still as oil.”
“I dream of trees, mostly,” he says. “Trees I once knew. Trees I don’t know yet. Sometimes they’re aiding me, and sometimes they’re falling on me. Sometimes I’m planting them, and sometimes I’m cutting them down. But they’re always there. I think if you ever cut my head open, it’d be one big root ball in there, all tangled and grown together.”
After her hair is pinned, Temple pulls on some dusty trousers and a work shirt while Everett gives Pod her morning feed of goat’s milk, which Gertie has managed to get from the adjacent farm. When Pod is finished, he burps her over his shoulder and she gives a gummy smile.
“You run back to your room now before Gertie shows up to cook breakfast,” Temple says to Everett, returning Pod’s smile. “I’ll have her go to the lockbox and get your pay before the men are up. The last thing we need is them seeing you two getting more special treatment.”
A TELEGRAM