While Everett believes there’s a distinction to be made, he knows better than to argue with a jerkwater magistrate with points to prove. “I wasn’t exactly seeing it that way, sir.”
“But would it be correct to submit that you had a good and understandable reason to be burning this furniture, in that that you lack the funds for proper accommodation?” the judge says now, with what seems to be genuine kindness.
“I suppose that’s true, sir.”
“Let the record show that the accused admits to vagrancy,” the judge proclaims.
“Now hold on,” Everett says. “I’m no vagrant. I’m just hard up.” There was a time when he was practised at this chess game of details, this weaving of the right words, but he’s too weary for it, and his mind keeps straying to Pod, who they’ve taken from him—to where, he doesn’t know.
“Bah,” the judge says. “You’ve never done an honest day’s work in your life. Guilty of theft, trespassing, and vagrancy.” He raises his gavel.
“What will become of my daughter, sir?”
“Have you any family to care for her while you’re incarcerated?” replies the judge, setting down his gavel to rub his flesh-hooded eyes.
Everett’s mind flashes to Harris. Back in the logging camp where Everett was arrested, the surrounding slopes were entirely stripped, leaving only a black peppering of stumps arranged like seats in a coliseum. Upon some stray logs Everett saw the stencil of the Greenwood Timber Company, which had built both the sawmill and the house he was arrested in. And for a despairing moment, he considers invoking his brother’s name to the judge. It’s certainly not how he’d imagined approaching Harris after so long—with a plea from jail—and Everett knows it would be a mistake.
“I’ve no family, sir,” he says.
“Then she’ll remain in Crown custody while you serve out your sentence, and you can properly demonstrate your parentage at the time of your release,” the judge says with naked disgust. He waves his gavel and the bailiff yanks Everett from his seat. He’s pulled down a dank hallway into a tiny cell, fetid with the odours of caged human. A tar floor, an iron cot, a tin bucket for his waste. He sits for three days, pinching bedbugs between finger and thumb, soaking the hardtack they give him to get it down, worrying about whether they’ll connect him to that man he left beaten back in Ontario.
In Pod’s absence, Everett is but a shadow thrown upon the wall. To be deprived of her for even an hour is like a sickness, but for days? It’s a plague. He inquires after her whereabouts a hundred times daily.
“You aren’t feeding her cow’s milk, are you?” he calls out when he thinks he hears her crying over the drunken slurs of the other prisoners.
“Shut your yap!” the guards bark, kicking the bars with iron-toed boots.
“She can’t stand cow’s milk. It makes her sick. She needs goat’s milk.”
Soon, whenever he mentions the child the guards begin striking him with a long hickory pole that reaches deep into his cell, which drives his questions inward, but doesn’t halt them. Is she frightened? Does she look for me when she wakes and I’m not there? Is she sitting in her own waste? Bawling herself to sleep? Over the years on his sugarbush, Everett had grown accustomed to the taste of loneliness. He’d even come to prefer it, the way a taste for strong liquor can be acquired. Yet it’s one he can no longer stomach. After days with no mention of her whereabouts, Everett turns desperate and begs one of the ragged boys who wash the jail’s stone floor to bring a message to the judge.
“You think he listens to me?” the freckled boy says, glancing sideways at the guards who’ll cuff him if he’s caught conspiring with prisoners.
“Tell him to contact my brother,” Everett says. “He’s a prominent man: Harris Greenwood. The very same one who built Firvale. If the judge could get word to him, he could sort all this out.”
Everett watches the boy’s eyes widen at the mere mention of such a mighty name. And for perhaps the first time in his entire life, the name Greenwood finally works in Everett’s favour.
ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS THINGS THERE IS
“AND HE HAS him incarcerated there?”
“Cabled this morning,” Milner says.
“And we trust him? This judge?” Harris asks while pacing his office, weaving expertly among his screeching birdcages. “He’s our man? He doesn’t harbour some grudge against us, does he? I can’t recall the particulars of the contract. Where was it, you said—Firvale?”
Milner pulls the file and reads aloud for Harris’s benefit. An escarpment near the Rockies they’d leased for a song from the local municipality five years back. A two-year cut job. They’d built rough bunkhouses for workers and several proper homes for visiting mill managers and governmental dignitaries, along with some wells and roads. It was clear-cut logging, the sticks dragged down the valley and humped back to Vancouver by rail.
“Turned a tidy profit on it,” Milner says. But they’ve done so many cut-and-run jobs of this sort, Harris still can’t place it.
“And the judge indicated that my brother explicitly requested my help?” Harris says. In his deal with Lomax, Harris agreed to sound the alarm only if his brother tried to contact him, not merely if he learned of his whereabouts.
“Yes, the judge indicated that the prisoner asked for your assistance specifically. But any criminal can claim what they like, Mr. Greenwood,” Milner says tersely.
“It’s him,” Feeney says from the back of the room. “I know it. Why the hell else would he name you?”
“Thank you, Milner,” Harris says. “That will be all.”
Over a solitary lunch eaten at his desk, Harris’s mind slips back to the day of the feast he’d prepared to celebrate Everett’s return from Europe, and the plate he heaped high and set aside, the same one he dumped down a well when his brother didn’t come home. Harris had forgiven Everett for going to war in his stead, and was willing to view his actions as merely another episode of their great brotherly competition. He’d envisioned for them a great future—his education and entrepreneurial know-how combined with Everett’s felling experience and intuitive understanding of forests—Greenwood Timber would have made its first million in half the time it had taken Harris on his own. And yet Everett chose to stay away. So why would he turn to Harris now, after all this time?
Harris pushes back his plate and shakes his head. While once he would have gladly offered up his own life to save his brother’s, with Feeney in the picture and this snake Lomax hovering and ready to strike, he has more than Everett to protect now. After the maid removes his tray, Harris picks up the phone and summons Feeney to his office. “I need you to fetch Mr. Lomax,” he says, “who I’m sure is out smoking in the garden.”
“You aren’t really going to offer up your only brother to that ghoul?” Feeney says.
“This isn’t offering him up, Liam. It’s a simple matter of putting two parties in contact. R.J. Holt wants something of his returned, and Mr. Lomax has assured me that Everett won’t be prosecuted as long as he complies.”