Harris stacks the wood he’s cut, hangs the maul, and asks Everett if he’s hungry. Everett nods, then realizes his mistake and confirms the fact aloud. They pass through a tall garden door into a grand room beneath a chandelier of a thousand shards of suspended crystal. Everett has never seen such opulence: walls of bookcases fronted with cut glass; a floor of green marble, smooth and lustrous as silk; the room’s trim and banisters all hewn from the finest and tightest-grained redwood. Everett is further astounded by Harris’s uncanny ability to avoid all of the furniture by memory, without the use of a cane or a guide.
“Quite a spread you’ve put together,” Everett says. “Your mansion appears to be a fair deal straighter than that old log cabin we put up.”
“I knew that if I built it modestly,” Harris says, “they’d call me a miser. And if I built it lavishly, they’d accuse me of showing off. So I chose the latter.”
Amid the smell of old wood and leather, they sit in wing chairs near a fireplace full of embers that pulse orange behind a steel grille. The westerly windows overlook the property’s private wood of oak and beech—the few trees that Greenwood Timber has yet to cut down, it seems. Surely, Everett thinks, Harris will fell those closest to his house last.
Servants present tea along with multi-tiered platters of cakes and dainties.
“So, how’ve you been, brother?” Everett says, smiling under the preposterous weight of all that isn’t contained in his question, and the idea of summing up an eighteen-year absence from the one person you know foremost in life with a word such as fine.
“Quite well,” Harris says, his jaw half-clenched at Everett’s old habit of making light of serious matters. “Considering. You?”
“I haven’t managed to quit living quite yet, despite my better efforts,” Everett says. “I did eventually return to our old cabin, though a little later than promised, I admit. But it was gone. The woods, too. Any idea where they went?”
“Oh, you did come! How kind of you! And here I thought that you’d chosen a life spent in the gutter over working alongside your invalid brother. Silly me,” Harris says tensely, taking a sip of the tea that a servant has placed in his hand.
“I cursed you for years for what you did,” Everett says, struggling to retain his composure for the sake of Pod’s future.
“And you don’t curse me anymore?”
“No, I let all that go. I’ve got other things to worry about now.”
“Well, you should be worried. This Lomax fellow has it in for you.”
“I could give him the slip for good anytime I wanted. Except this child needs some stable and decent circumstances to grow up in—not like how we did. So I’m here to ask for my fair stake of what Mrs. Craig left us.”
Harris rises from his chair and slowly paces the room with his teacup tinkling against its saucer. “You know, after the Armistice,” he begins, “I contacted the Department of Defence, pretending to be you. They informed me that I had indeed stepped off a ship in Halifax, but that was the last anyone had heard of me. Over the years, I often imagined you out there wandering, and then, after I’d given up hope, I imagined your bones lying somewhere nobody ever looks.”
“I had some difficulties, Harris. The War wasn’t good to me. I was all mixed up in my head. I can see that now. It took me years to find a place to settle, and even then I knew it was better for me to keep away from people.”
“Yes, Lomax informed me about your little syrup operation. A shame that you didn’t have the foresight to purchase the land first. Odd, isn’t it? How we both ended up relying on trees—in different capacities, mind you. But of course, Everett, you’re entitled to half of the Craig woodlot proceeds. I’ll have a cheque prepared immediately. I’ll also include the military pension they sent me over the years as well. It will be a tidy sum.”
Everett is stunned by his brother’s frictionless generosity. He’d expected more fireworks, a return to their squabbling ways, more gristle, less meat. “All right, then. I suppose that settles it,” Everett says, slapping his thighs and rising from his seat. “We’ll be out of your hair before you know—”
It’s then that Harris turns, cocks his arm, and hurls both his teacup and saucer twenty feet across the room and into a glass-lined bookcase, a hail of splinters pattering the floor. “ ‘Competition is most severe between allied forms which fill nearly the same space in the economy of nature,’ ” Harris says calmly, as though nothing had transpired, his barren eyes swung as wide as they’ll go. “That’s Darwin.”
“Never met him,” Everett says, closing his fists, thinking that it’s just like his brother to wield his book-learning as a weapon. He feels that old magma of anger in his chest, the fighting spirit that bound them together for so long.
“I don’t expect you would have,” Harris says. “They had a Braille edition of On the Origin of Species at Yale, a very rare book. And when I read that passage I thought it encapsulated our dealings quite well.”
“I was trying to help you,” Everett says.
“Retinitis pigmentosa,” Harris replies. “That’s the term for it, brother. Awful-sounding, isn’t it? A degenerative disorder. And though the doctors can name it, the cure still evades them.”
“We didn’t need a name to tell us something was wrong.”
“Well, I didn’t ask for your help,” Harris says, his temples pulsing visibly, the way they always have whenever he believes he’s been wronged.
“I never said you did. But you needed it just the same.”
“When you left for France, I was alone. Ashamed. Fumbling about in our little cabin, with the darkness closing in. I became the object of their pity.”
“You deserved some of that pity. You’d have been helpless in those trenches, Harris. The Kaiser would’ve walked over and shot you himself.”
“Look around you, brother!” Harris announces loudly. “See everything I’ve accomplished and tell me how helpless I am now. Do I still deserve your pity?”
“A big house made of trees that other people cut down for you is nothing to me, Harris.” Everett is yelling himself now, and it feels good in his lungs. “Me and my girl took refuge in a town you built then abandoned up in the mountains—Firvale? It looked more like a place the devil takes a holiday than what you’d call an accomplishment!”
“Is everything all right, sir?” says an Irishman who enters the room, fixing a fierce stare on Everett. “I heard a crash.”
“Oh, I’m fine, fine!” Harris yells. “Just catching up with my brother!” The Irishman’s presence seems to settle Harris, however, and he sits back down with a sham of a smile pasted to his face. “So what battlefield heroisms did I perform? A great many, it seems. They mailed me a bucket of medals.”
“You weren’t brave,” Everett says. “You nearly shit yourself during the tiniest skirmish. You mostly carried stretchers and built things out of wood. When you came back, you couldn’t look at a human face without seeing the skull beneath it smashed. For years after you didn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time, and not at all without a bottle in you. That sugarbush was the only thing that kept you from sticking a cocked revolver in your ear and pulling the trigger.”