To earn money, Everett will do carpentry work with the tools he’s found, constructing simple furniture to sell in Vancouver. By the time Pod reaches school age, he’ll have the money to bring in tutors to educate her. Greenwood Island will be a fine place to raise her, and Harris and the Irishman will provide her with some companionship outside of his own. Besides, the burden of Pod’s care will only lighten as she develops. In fact, just that afternoon she stood under her own power without clutching at a chair for balance, and even took a few bowlegged staggers, her thighs so wide-set her rear end nearly dipped to the floor.
To celebrate her triumph he cooks flapjacks for supper, though the merriment of the occasion is spoiled when he goes to the woodshed to fetch some firewood and discovers the steaming carcass of a three-point buck: its windpipe torn out, tongue eaten, bowels pierced and stinking, blood only barely crusting the rims of its wounds. Everett burns the carcass, saving only the tenderloin, which he fries the next day with wild onions and nettle for Pod’s supper. With great gusto she eats the meat that he chews up for her, pink juice flowing in broad rivulets down her chin.
Aware that no eagle or bear is capable of such a surgical kill, Everett tells his brother about the incident that evening. Harris says it’s rumoured that cougars catch rides on stray log booms and strand themselves on islands like these, where they promptly eradicate the deer population, effectively starving themselves to death. Everett aims to acquire some goats this spring, to provide milk for Pod and keep her company as she grows, but a cougar would take them one by one. And with such a terror stalking about, he can’t leave Pod alone in the yard for a second—or even in the house with a window open, for that matter.
It’s then he remembers noticing a battery of leg traps in the woodshop’s rafters. They’re massive, built for grizzlies most likely, with snapping jaws wide enough for a grown man’s boot. He takes them down and sets them in a perimeter around the cabin, and on the second night he catches a mink, which the overpowered trap cleaves neatly in half. Though he’s loath to maim or kill a creature of a cougar’s magnificence, it’s only once the traps are set, and the Browning rifle he’d requested from the Irishman is hung high on brackets next to his bed where Pod can’t reach it, that he’s again able to rest easy.
SHORTWAVE
“WHY DIDN’T YOU give yourself more initials over the years?” his brother’s voice says, distant and tinny with radio crackle. “You fat cats love yourself some initials. How about ‘H.P. Greenwood’? Or ‘H.T. Greenwood’? That last one sounds extra-impressive.”
Harris laughs. “That may have helped, brother. A man in my position needs all the gravity he can get. Though I suspect it’s too late for more initials now.”
“Then maybe I’ll bequeath some to this little girl I’ve got here. To help her along a little. She deserves some respect after all this.”
“Have you decided on a proper name for her yet? You can’t go on calling her Pod forever.”
“I have one in mind, but I’m not quite settled on it. You’ll be the first to know when I am.”
Since they’ve begun conversing each evening, Harris has incorporated the ritual into his daily routine. His first shipment of sleepers has finally reached Japan, and now that he’s received payment, Greenwood Timber is once again in the black. And after a long day at his desk, restoring his credit with the London firm, or ensuring that his cargo arrives on schedule, he’s grown to appreciate his brother’s voice nearly as much as Feeney’s.
It was arduous at first. But the words came eventually, each brother taking his turn like children with a new toy. Often Harris marvels at the uncanny familiarity of Everett’s voice—at times it’s as though it originates from inside his own mind rather than from the radio’s speaker. Mostly, they stick to pedestrian subjects and occasional reminiscences about their woodlot and its notable trees, their greatest fights and greatest meals.
“Remember how we used to climb those elm trees at the centre of town and swear our heads off?” Everett says.
“Or when you shot that terrier by accident with one of your arrows,” Harris adds. “So we skinned it to hide the evidence? But they caught us anyway?”
When talk inevitably turns to the beguiling Mrs. Craig and what her grand house looked like the night it burned, the brothers grow sombre, and there are long, empty gaps of static.
“Just promise you’ll take care of Pod if something happens to me,” Everett says to conclude one of those silences, on the last night the brothers will speak. “I don’t want her left all alone in the woods somewhere like we were.”
Harris has come to realize that the reason his brother didn’t join him after the War wasn’t because he preferred living without an invalid to attend to; it was because of his own suffering. Feeney has told Harris about “war shock,” the wound of the mind that soldiers can receive in battle, and Harris pities Everett for what his had cost him.
“She’ll never be alone like we were,” Harris says. “You have my word.”
Originally, it was Feeney’s suggestion to let Everett and the baby hide out at their retreat, but after some convincing, Harris has warmed to the idea. He’s even agreed to give Everett his own plot of land on the island. And once this Japanese business is concluded and Harris liquidates his company, he looks forward to living together as neighbours.
Yet, despite this restoration of their brotherly bond, a deep and frightful suspicion still clings to Harris: that nothing good can possibly endure. Not ever. And that the gruesome power that brought those two trains together, stole away his sight, scrambled his brother’s mind, and left Pod abandoned to die in the woods, isn’t quite finished with them yet.
THE VALISE
THE NEW SUN Wah is raided by Mountie constables early on a Saturday morning, when its withered guests are at their most somnolent. After the spike is roughly yanked from Lomax’s arm and he’s hoisted from his bunk and thrown to his feet—his first instance of uprightness in he can’t remember how long—he’s struck immediately in the mouth by an overzealous constable, a man more accustomed to drunken loggers and wild-eyed gold-rush casualties than docile dope fiends. Blood gouts onto his silk pajamas and two bottom teeth that were previously loose now roll about freely in his mouth like a pair of unlucky dice. The police collect the paraphernalia from beside the bunks, including Lomax’s hypodermic kit and tin of laudanum powder, and haul him and a few other emaciated men out into the drizzly alley.
When they arrive at the stationhouse, through broken teeth Lomax manages to identify himself and explain the vital errand he’s performing here in Vancouver: running down a debt for Mr. R.J. Holt of New Brunswick. When he informs them that he was only frequenting such an establishment to find the fugitive, and that he’d like his money returned to him immediately, the constables laugh in his face.
As they’re marching him to the train station to stick him on the first coach back to Saint John, Lomax notices that they’re passing his former hotel, and hurls himself to the wet pavement. If he must return home, penniless and defeated, to prostrate himself before Mr. Holt and beg for his life back, the journal is the one thing that could convince his employer that this whole botched expedition was ultimately in his best interests.