Soon the cabin resolves in the moonlight, and McSorley directs the men into a loose perimeter. The father of one of the local boys was the lead carpenter of the crew that erected the cabin for Harris Greenwood, so they know that the structure has only one door, in the front, facing the direction of the sea.
“What if he panics and hurts the kid?” McSorley asks Lomax, as they crouch behind one of the massive trunks.
“Once he knows he’s cornered,” Lomax says, “he’ll likely turn himself in. And no harm will befall the girl.”
“So why don’t we take him straight away?” McSorley says.
“He was a soldier. And he’s a damaged man. He could react aggressively if we startle him. Best to wait out the night and reason with him in the morning. It’s an island. They’re not going anywhere.”
As the men spread out and assume sentry positions, Lomax rests against a woodpile, squeezing the heavy rifle in his hands. It’s been six hours since his last spike of laudanum, and already he’s contracted a chill, his veins itching like they’ve been buffed with poison oak from the inside. Luckily, Lomax kept a small vial of powdered laudanum in the pocket of his pajamas, which he plans to take through his nose if his condition worsens.
And sure enough, as the night’s hours grind past, he begins to sweat profusely and a thick film coats his eyeballs. Soon he feels as though an electrified knife has been plunged into the centre of his back, and spectral voices begin calling out softly from the shadows.
“What’s that?” one of the local boys posted nearby asks him.
“What was what?” Lomax says.
“You were saying something,” the boy replies.
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were,” the boy says. “You were talking about a woman and her baby.”
“Shut up,” Lomax says and tugs his hat down over his sopping brow. Hungering for peace from the voices and respite from his burgeoning agony, Lomax dips a pinky into the laudanum and snorts just a dash of the ochre-coloured powder. A silver shiver pours through his sinuses and pools in his brainstem, and his insides become gentle with clarity and comfort. The stars, which before seemed faint and inconsequential, just barely visible through the towering canopy, now blaze like embers. A while later he vomits discreetly into a shrub, though the act is cleansing, beautiful.
Somewhere around four in the morning, one of the local boys nudges Lomax and asks him to mind his post while he urinates. Lomax nods, then watches the boy buttonhook behind the woodshed. Suddenly, a loud metallic crack sounds from that direction and the boy screams out as though shot. At the commotion, the young Mountie ten feet away from Lomax starts to breathe heavily and swing his rifle around in a panic, his eyes as wild as a storm. When the injured boy begins to plead for his life in an anguished cry, Lomax watches the Mountie raise his rifle, which is nearly too heavy for him to lift. Then he aims the dark barrel in the general direction of the cabin, shuts his eyes, and fires.
BULLETS
THEY SEEM TO erupt from within every object in the room. They pop and ping through the windows and put to bits the porcelain jug of goat’s milk that Everett keeps on the night table for Willow. They claw through the room’s cedar-panelled walls and blow out the wall-mounted kerosene lamp. They chew up Willow’s crib and dismember the sawdust-stuffed rabbit that the Irishman had brought for her, sending the shreds of its corpse flying like confetti.
“I’ve got a child in here!” Everett hollers into the hail of plaster chunks and wood splinters, scooping Willow from the bed and crashing to the floor, encasing her tiny body with his own. Still the room is alight with muzzle flashes, and the roar of gunfire and shattered crockery and the whipping stutter of ballistic perforation swallows his words.
A man outside hollers for them to quit shooting.
But nothing quits.
The sound is a dozen thunderstorms happening in unison. Feathers escape pillows, pictures fly from nails, and suddenly he’s back in the War, pinned under the deafening barrage of German artillery. A bullet comes through the panelling behind him with a kind of whistle-pop sound, and instantly he wonders if he’s torn his shirt because his back feels slightly cool. But the coolness intensifies, and soon turns searing hot. He coughs, two hacks as dry as paper, then one sopping wet, and in an effort to unhitch his lung he bangs at his breast with his fist like an ape. After he recaptures some of his breath, he drags Willow—who is mute with terror and quivers against him—toward the bedroom door. As he reaches for the knob, he realizes that men who fire so freely on a cabin with a baby inside surely intend to never let them leave it.
HER VOICE
AFTER THE YOUNG Mountie unleashes his first shot, the others follow suit, all tumbling into a collective trigger-pulling mania. They evacuate the cartridges of their large-bore repeating rifles in the general direction of the timber-frame cabin, some mute with eyes clenched, others whooping like schoolboys in June—all despite Lomax’s shouts for them to stop. But they cannot hear him, and he watches the structure splinter and shatter from the barrage. In the chaos, a vision descends upon him: bullets hitting his own house back in Saint John with his seven children inside, cowering beneath their beds, trembling in their nightclothes, calling out for their father.
The shots last for what seems an eternity, and the guns’ reports echo in Lomax’s eardrums long after the ammunition is spent and the muzzle flashes cease and the blackness rushes back in. Amid the stench of cordite, blue smoke hangs low at their knees, and hot brass casings pepper the earth. A few blades of window glass dangle and release to smash inside their frames.
The gasping boys return to themselves and a strained silence descends. An irate McSorley, who’d been screaming the whole time for them to quit firing, reassumes control, saving his most berating words concerning their lack of discipline and general stupidity for later. He first orders them to search behind the woodshed where the boy had gone to relieve himself. They find him, unconscious from shock, pants caught around his ankles, his shin bent grotesquely in the grip of a jagged-jawed animal trap, his face as white as the dagger of bone that juts from his leg.
While the Mounties work to free him, Lomax slips unnoticed to the cabin’s bullet-pocked front door and nudges it open. The last thing he needs is McSorley reading the authentic journal before he can get his hands on it. Inside, he treats himself to a generous snuff of laudanum to steady his nerve, while pleading to God that if anyone upstairs is hurt, let it not be the child. Let it be Everett Greenwood, a man who didn’t matter to anyone—not even to his own brother—before he stumbled upon that bundle of cloth hanging in those woods.
On the wall at the bottom of the stairs is a splash of fresh blood. Lomax wonders if this is Euphemia’s blood. Except Euphemia isn’t here, he reminds himself. Though with so much laudanum burbling in his head, who can say for certain that she’s not? As he begins to climb the stairs to the second floor, he feels as though his weight has been doubled, like he’s carrying an identical copy of his own body draped unconscious across his shoulders. Suddenly, he’s back in the forest where he found Euphemia against that maple tree, and in the bark of the surrounding trees are captured thousands of contorting faces. People known to him and not. The faces of his father and his mother. The faces of his own children and the destitute families on his milk collection route. Those he’s chased down and those he’s beaten. The infirm. The broken. The dead. All of them tortured with anguish.