“I am. But Harris Greenwood and I currently share interests. Unlike you, your brother is sensible.”
“And he told you where you could find me?”
“After he learned of your imprisonment, and out of his great concern.”
“Some brother.”
“He has your well-being in mind, Everett. As do I. Remember, I’m the one who just told Detective McSorley that the child is rightly yours and that we were together in Toronto on the day that senator’s brother was beaten.”
Everett shakes his head. “I figured you would’ve quit long ago,” he says.
“I’m about as stubborn as you are, it seems. But we just need to settle one more matter before we can all go home—those of us who still have homes, at least. I’m talking about the journal.”
“You and me aren’t settling anything.”
Lomax exhales loudly. “Well, that’d be the kind of stance that allows me no choice other than to inform McSorley about my mixed-up dates, leaving you unaccounted for on the day that man was hurt.”
Everett throws his eyes to the window, as though he’s calculating how much force it will take for him to break it. Lomax regrets giving him the baby, but if he rises, this time Lomax is sitting close enough in the small compartment to grab him.
“You know what I can’t figure?” Lomax says after a while. “You did everything you could to try to rid yourself of her. And then you did everything you could to keep her. It doesn’t make sense.”
“People never make sense.” Everett says. “You just learned that?”
“Look, the police said you weren’t found with any journal,” Lomax says, knocking a Parliament from its package, then reaching across the rail car to offer it to Everett. “But if you hand it over, along with the child, of course, I won’t turn you back in to McSorley. There might even still be the possibility of a reward. So where is it?”
“Oh, that’s right, I remember now,” Everett says brightly, ignoring the cigarette. “I sent it to the editors of the Globe.”
A crimson rage geysers through Lomax as he drops the Parliament and lunges forward to clamp one of his immense hands around Everett’s windpipe, squeezing its rubbery cartilage with a firm yet even pressure, as though he’s juicing a lemon. Everett chokes and his molars clatter together, and his eyes bulge and burn like comets. Lomax can feel the clockwork surge of Everett’s pulse, and knows that if he squeezed just a little harder, he could bring the tips of his fingers together around Everett’s neck. “Mailed it to my brother from Toronto…” Everett manages to say with a metallic rasp, and Lomax lets up a little to reward him for telling the truth. “But I’ll get it for you if you take me to him.”
Lomax takes one final squeeze before releasing Everett’s throat. “There, now that’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day,” he says while straightening his rumpled jacket. “And I guess you’ve just answered your own question about where we’re headed,” he adds, as Everett coughs and retches with the child still asleep in his lap. “We’re going to visit your brother.”
THE ECONOMY OF NATURE
BY THE RHYTHMS of the axe-work, Everett recognizes him long before setting eyes on his face. Out behind the grand mansion, with its spreading east and west wings, its manicured gardens, and its spouting stone dryads and nymphs, Everett watches in amazement as the blind man grasps another round of fir without groping for it, then heaves it up onto the cutting stump. Next, he draws a calculated step back—the maul poised over his shoulder—and strikes the round, dead centre on the heartwood, sending two near-equal pieces jumping left and right. Harris was always good with an axe, and it cheers Everett to know that wealth hasn’t spoiled the talent, despite the fact that he’s cutting firewood next to a rose garden.
Everett would rather not approach Harris while he’s holding an implement that could cleave Everett’s head in two, but Lomax is keeping Pod in a bedroom on the second floor of the mansion, and though the longing to clutch her against him and bury his nose in her neck nearly kills him, Everett’s done his best to appear unbothered. He knows his position will weaken if Lomax gathers the true depth of his feelings. But Lomax has given him until tomorrow to produce the journal, and he needs his fair stake of their inheritance if he and Pod are to have any hope of escape. Everett tucks his shirt into his filthy trousers, combs his fingers through his hair, and walks closer, halting just out of Harris’s swing range.
“I thought rich tycoons were supposed to be fat,” Everett says from behind him.
Harris freezes mid-swing, then lowers the maul to rest upon his shoulder. Though his ropy body is still strong, Everett senses a subtle failing of his balance, a slight seismic tremor, as though the garden were a ship that had just come into its berth.
“You know, after all this time, no one’s told me where they keep the damn food in this place,” Harris says, turning to reveal wide, vacant eyes, with the lower half of his face wavering somewhere between mirth and rage.
Despite his brother’s sightless condition, Everett suddenly wishes that he were presenting himself in finer clothing and under less self-interested circumstances. “Don’t you have anyone to do your chopping for you?” Everett says, nosing some of the neatly quartered wood closer to Harris’s pile with the toe of his boot.
“There are about forty thousand jobless men in this province alone, brother, all eager to do my chopping for me. That doesn’t mean I don’t care to do some myself.”
Though he’s still an inch taller than Everett, and still has that shrewd, appraising cast to his face, there’s a new aristocratic airiness about his voice. Faintly English. The residue of good schooling, Everett guesses, and he’s proud of Harris for bettering himself. There have been moments over the years when Everett has missed him so acutely he’s thought he would suffocate of it. While he’s envisioned their reunion thousands of times, it’s usually involved fisticuffs and the gnashing of teeth. Never once has it gone like this, with a return to their old banter, a slip back into the deep groove of their ways.
Harris turns back to his work and drops the maul, neatly cleaving another round. “I’d say you haven’t changed,” he says. “But you probably have, given how you’ve treated yourself. Your voice is slower. Rustier. There’s more earth to it.”
“Is that why you sent your big retriever to fetch me? You wanted to hear my voice but were too busy playing logger to come find me yourself?”
“Let’s be clear, brother: I asked Mr. Lomax to collect you after you requested my help,” Harris says sternly. “And after speaking with him, it became evident that he might be the only person who could fish you out. Providing you’re reasonable, which, knowing you, I hardly expect to be the case.”
Everett bristles at his brother’s parental tone, that old self-appointed authority, always speaking for them both, always deciding which trees they’d cut, always the first to call for lights out in their cabin. “You know me best, Harris,” he says. “I’m everything but reasonable.”