Harris smiles weakly. “Dope-head or not, he can still ruin us.”
Feeney takes a slow breath. “So what did you say?”
Harris resists a spiky urge to throw his tumbler of sake at the wall.
“Harris?”
“They’d charge us with indecency first. Then they’d seize the company. We’d never see each other again. Wealth is our only protection, Liam. Without my signature on their paycheques, they’ll eat us alive.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Legally speaking, my brother stole that infant,” Harris says. “And he’s unhinged to think that it’s his to keep. Perhaps more jail time will do him some good.”
“You poor, fearful man,” Feeney says, and Harris can tell from the muffle of his voice that he’s brought his hands to his face. “And what about these conversations you two have been having on that wireless over there?”
Just after Harris had given Lomax the exact location of his cabin on Greenwood Island and they’d raced off to apprehend Everett, his brother’s nightly salutation had come over the radio. Almost to punish himself, he left the set on, though he found himself unable to answer. Instead, he’d sat listening to Everett repeat: “Come in, Harris. Harris, come in.”
“He made his own decisions, Liam,” Harris says. “He and I can’t go on rescuing each other forever.”
“And your promise to let them live on the island?”
When Harris had first agreed to that idea, Everett had whooped so loud that the radio crackled like a bomb had gone off.
“Plans change,” Harris says, taking a belt of sake. “Everett knows that better than anyone.”
“But there’s still time to fix this!” Feeney yells. “We must go to him. Straight away. Lomax didn’t leave that long ago. If we take the skiff, we can beat them there.”
How, Harris wonders, could a poet possibly understand that to survive in a world as vicious as this one, you must be like a faller’s axe: sharp, brutal, purposeful, and relentless. Just as he told Feeney when they first met, Harris is a lumberman, through and through. And a lumberman is always capable of doing what needs to be done. Even if it means cutting off a diseased limb to save a tree. Even if it means letting go of one treasure in order to hold on to another.
Harris rises to his feet, hoping to appear impassioned, loving, worthy of the great sacrifice he’s just made; instead, he feels his face twist into a sneer as he speaks: “I’d turn every tree on this Earth into matchwood if it would keep you from harm, Liam. And the same goes for people.”
He hears Feeney clap his hands. “Fine. If you won’t go to him, I will.”
“As your employer, Mr. Feeney, I forbid you to pilot any of my skiffs.”
Feeney lets out a long breath. At last he says, “Then I believe I won’t be able to provide my descriptive services to you any longer, Mr. Greenwood.”
Though Harris’s weakest self has always feared that these words of betrayal were coming—because nothing good can endure, not for him, not for Everett either—he can scarcely believe his ears. More than the words, it’s the curt, professional tone that Liam’s normally warm voice has assumed that wounds him most.
“You said you’d never betray me,” he says quietly.
“I haven’t,” Feeney replies. “But you beat me to it.”
“Fine, then you’re fired,” Harris says, with equally professional chilliness, trying to get a rise out of him. “I’m afraid you’ve lost your knack for the accurate description of the world anyway.”
Harris waits, expecting Feeney to retort with his most lacerating remark yet. Something spectacularly irreverent and clever. He allows him a few moments more, ample time to work up a proper response. At this moment Harris will gladly suffer any insult, as long as it will rekindle their exchange and inch them closer to reconciliation. But he hears only his birds, rustling in their cages.
“Well, what do you have to say for yourself, then?” he says fiercely after an entire minute has passed. “Liam?”
Harris feels his way around his desk, knocking some supply briefs, along with the crystal tumbler of sake, to the floor.
“Are you still there?”
He hadn’t heard him rise from the leather chair, nor had he heard footsteps on the floorboards, nor the clatter of the door’s hardware. He goes to the chair and feels the warmth he left in the leather seatback.
“Oh, quit playing games, Liam. You know how I hate to be surprised.”
Harris directs the concentrated power of his remaining senses out into the room, feeling its textures and hollows, its planes and curves. He hears many sounds—the hiss of the shortwave that he left on in the corner, the flitter of birds—but his describer is not among them.
What he needs now, above all else, is his voice. Ever since he first heard Feeney read that unusual bit of Tennyson here in this very office, his voice has forever altered Harris’s very composition, reshaping him into a new being altogether, a new set of cells with a new animating force strung between them. But he may never hear that voice again. The thought opens a canyon in Harris’s stomach, and he cries out and overturns the armchair where Feeney was just sitting, staggering himself backwards in the process. He kicks to free himself from a cord that’s become entangled in his legs, while the electric lamp to which it is attached topples to the floor. When the bulbs smash, Harris Greenwood swears he can feel the light leave his skin.
RIFLES
LOMAX CAN’T PROPERLY reckon how long the crossing takes. It’s an unending churn on the strait’s black, head-high swells, and he sways nauseously with the boat’s every lurch.
“The book and the child, Mr. Lomax,” Mr. Holt had said when they spoke over the telephone back at the stationhouse in Vancouver. “Bring them to me, and you have my word: all will be forgiven.” Mr. Holt had then contacted Detective McSorley and insisted that he and Lomax join forces. So they’ve struck a deal: if their raid succeeds, Lomax will return the baby and the journal to Mr. Holt, while McSorley will become the hero who captured the dangerous kidnapper and fugitive Everett Greenwood.
The remote island where Everett has been hiding out for the past several months is beyond local police jurisdiction, so McSorley has enlisted some recently recruited Mounties to join them. Two of the Mounties grew up trapping prawn and crab in these treacherous waters and know well its channels and currents, even in the dark. Seafaring experience aside, the boys look like they’ve come directly from their high school graduation. But everyone in the West is too young, it seems to Lomax, a bunch of babies tussling over land that isn’t properly divvied up yet.
When they reach the island there’s no wharf, so they anchor out in the bay and row in from there. Whitecaps ruffle in the dark as they make landfall and creep westward through thick brush of salal and blackberry bramble, under a moonlit sky that’s nearly erased by the island’s enormous, malevolent trees, an unholy chorus of wind singing in their branches. Lomax has never seen trees so large. And for a moment he’s walking through the ruins of an ancient city, amid its towers and monuments, its statues and cathedrals. With a shudder, he averts his eyes to his feet.