Did you bring me my coat and shoes? a woman’s despairing voice asks.
“Tomorrow,” Lomax answers softly, with no way of knowing for sure if he’s speaking aloud. “I’ll bring them tomorrow.”
I can’t go through with this.
“With what?”
This.
“Euphemia, this isn’t the sort of thing you can back out of,” Lomax says, reaching the top of the stairs to find a bedroom door shut before him.
But I can’t let her go, she pleads. Isn’t that enough?
“Don’t be foolish,” Lomax says, setting his shoulder and preparing to burst through the door. “There’s nothing you can’t let go.”
THE TIME MACHINE
DURING THE WAR, Everett had witnessed soldiers get shot and then immediately start to run, as fast as their legs could carry them, as though trying to beat death in a foot race. Others he saw quietly sit down, as though preparing for tea. Everett Greenwood’s response, however, is somewhere in between.
When the shooting stops, he opens the bedroom door and slithers down the stairs with Willow clutched to his chest until he reaches the landing, where he rises and spurts a mouthful of blood on the wall. He takes a deep breath, then crashes through the crookedly constructed rear door, his arms sheltering the child as best he can, braced to charge or punch or die in the crack of the rifles that he knows await him.
But not a soul is there to greet them.
That is, of course, if you discount the trees.
With the baby pinned against the half of his shirt that isn’t pasted to his side with blood, he blunders into the surrounding forest. He staggers west, along the seam where the burned section of the forest meets the old-growth, trying to minimize his footprints by stepping root to root and, where there are no roots, keeping to areas springy with moss.
Now that the shooting has stopped, Willow’s senses are returning and she’s beginning to whimper. So from the pocket of his mackinaw, he pulls the bottle of goat’s milk, into which he’d mixed some Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup. She drains it greedily, without drawing a breath. When the drug takes effect, Willow snores rudely at his chest.
While the sky is moonlit, the moon itself is hidden somewhere in the canopy, and his blood glistens black as oil in the stark silver light. When Everett draws a breath only half of his chest expands, which pulls his gait to the right, and he hopes he isn’t walking in circles. The bullet entered his back, slipping between the ribs on his left side, but it also came through the cabin’s cedar siding, so it lacked the power to exit him and now rattles around in his lung like a pick lost in the body of a guitar. While the wound won’t kill him soon, it’s a bleeder, and he feels several tributaries of warmth slip down his legs and pool in his boots. With each step comes an accompanying squelch.
He passes an old logging camp and considers hiding in the rotten bunkhouse to rest, or perhaps die. But it could be hours before the Mounties find him, and though Everett is not cold, he can see the vapour of Willow’s breath and knows she wouldn’t last long on her own after he’d gone. He limps on, avoiding the predictability of deer paths, pushing through brush that rakes his eyes and tears at his clothes. He stops only to catch his ragged breath and to dump the blood from his boots. His blood smells earthy, metallic, like the stones he and Harris had used to sharpen axes when they were boys. Still, his sole thought is that he must keep walking—he’s already carried her so far; what’s a little farther?
As his shock subsides, it’s as if doors open into whole rooms of pain, and the only way he can continue to move forward is with his eyelids half shut, peering through his eyelashes as though through a dream. Soon the baby becomes like a rock and his legs are planks that his hips can scarcely lift.
His thoughts eddy and stray. Shapes dart at the fringes of his vision. For a good while he’s in Belgium, dragging a blood-soaked stretcher that contains the tatters of some doomed soul through the mud. Then he’s sprinting for a train with Blank, being chased by some thick-necked bulls outside of Oakland. Then he’s a child again, mute with fright, running with his brother at his side, their pockets jammed with raided carrots and onions, while the people of the township pelt them with small stones from their porches.
It isn’t long before Everett smells the brine of the ocean and the kelpy beach where he and Willow have passed so many lazy afternoons, and the scent revives him. He limps farther and the brush opens to reveal the sucking rocks and sloping sandstone of the shore, and he rests for a moment near the jetty. Sitting on a fallen log and examining Willow’s sleeping face, it dawns on him that since that first night he heard her cry, she has remade him into a new kind of creature entirely. Not a good man. Nor one worthy of any respect or adulation. But one who values the life of another over his own. And this transformation has closed a wound that had long festered and seeped inside him.
But there’s still one last transformation left for him to make.
After he’s sure the jetty hasn’t been discovered by the Mounties, he limps over to the big cedar near the water and spots the insulated box hanging from it. The Irishman leaves their weekly supplies in this box—though he isn’t due to return with the skiff until the morning, if he’s returning at all. Because no doubt it was Harris who gave up their location here on the island, after Lomax threatened to expose his relationship with the Irishman, leaving him with no choice. But despite his betrayal, Everett still believes in his brother, and believes he’ll do the right thing in the end.
He’d planned on someday bringing Willow to visit his old sugarbush on R.J. Holt’s land outside of Saint John, the place where this all began. He’d planned on showing her the tree he’d found her hanging from. I bet I can still find it, he whispers to her now, leaning close to her ear. I bet the nail is still there. While in truth, he knows there will be no such opportunity, and that he and Willow likely won’t meet again. The thought ruins something inside him that he knows will never be fixed.
He limps over to the supply box and, as a hint of dawn fringes the horizon with pink, removes his woollen mackinaw, twisting as much blood from it as he can before using it to bundle Willow up. His drifting, blood-starved mind returns to Temple’s library, its rough shelves of encyclopedias and curious volumes originating from all corners of the world. During his days with Temple on her farm, she described to him a book called The Time Machine. The story centred on a mechanical box that could carry a person away from their own time and off into another one, and it put Everett in mind of the places he’s known that a person can enter and then emerge from into a different time altogether. A boxcar is one of them. So is a forest. So is a single tree. So is a library. So is a battlefield. And so is—though Everett will only realize this later, after occupying one for so long—a prison cell. And so is this supply box, he says, with his throat clenching like a fist. He brushes his lips against Willow’s sweet head and lifts the latch.
TO THE TREE
FOLLOWING THE FUGITIVE Everett Greenwood’s successful capture and arrest on Greenwood Island, Harvey Lomax returns to the New Sun Wah Hotel, which, after its proprietors submitted a generous political donation to city officials, has re-opened its doors. While the boy with the thick glasses is gone—some say he was deported, others say he was killed in a robbery—another has taken his place, one just as considerate and professional, a boy whom Lomax comes to adore and admire just as much as his predecessor.